Authors:Yu Guo, Shengfeng He, Yuxu Lu, Haonan An, Yihang Tao, Huilin Zhu, Jingxian Liu, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
Maritime object detection is essential for navigation safety, surveillance, and autonomous operations, yet constrained by two key challenges: the scarcity of annotated maritime data and poor generalization across various maritime attributes (e.g., object category, viewpoint, location, and imaging environment). % In particular, models trained on existing datasets often underperform in underrepresented scenarios such as open-sea environments. To address these challenges, we propose Neptune-X, a data-centric generative-selection framework that enhances training effectiveness by leveraging synthetic data generation with task-aware sample selection. From the generation perspective, we develop X-to-Maritime, a multi-modality-conditioned generative model that synthesizes diverse and realistic maritime scenes. A key component is the Bidirectional Object-Water Attention module, which captures boundary interactions between objects and their aquatic surroundings to improve visual fidelity. To further improve downstream tasking performance, we propose Attribute-correlated Active Sampling, which dynamically selects synthetic samples based on their task relevance. To support robust benchmarking, we construct the Maritime Generation Dataset, the first dataset tailored for generative maritime learning, encompassing a wide range of semantic conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach sets a new benchmark in maritime scene synthesis, significantly improving detection accuracy, particularly in challenging and previously underrepresented settings.The code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/Neptune-X.
Authors:Ruichao Hou, Xingyuan Li, Tongwei Ren, Dongming Zhou, Gangshan Wu, Jinde Cao
Abstract:
RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to identify prominent objects by integrating complementary information from RGB and thermal modalities. However, learning the precise boundaries and complete objects remains challenging due to the intrinsic insufficient feature fusion and the extrinsic limitations of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid prompt-driven segment anything model (HyPSAM), which leverages the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the segment anything model (SAM) for RGB-T SOD. Specifically, we first propose a dynamic fusion network (DFNet) that generates high-quality initial saliency maps as visual prompts. DFNet employs dynamic convolution and multi-branch decoding to facilitate adaptive cross-modality interaction, overcoming the limitations of fixed-parameter kernels and enhancing multi-modal feature representation. Moreover, we propose a plug-and-play refinement network (P2RNet), which serves as a general optimization strategy to guide SAM in refining saliency maps by using hybrid prompts. The text prompt ensures reliable modality input, while the mask and box prompts enable precise salient object localization. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, HyPSAM has remarkable versatility, seamlessly integrating with different RGB-T SOD methods to achieve significant performance gains, thereby highlighting the potential of prompt engineering in this field. The code and results of our method are available at: https://github.com/milotic233/HyPSAM.
Authors:Binhua Huang, Ni Wang, Wendong Yao, Soumyabrata Dev
Abstract:
Running a large open-vocabulary (Open-vocab) detector on every video frame is accurate but expensive. We introduce a training-free pipeline that invokes OWLv2 only on fixed-interval keyframes and propagates detections to intermediate frames using compressed-domain motion vectors (MV). A simple 3x3 grid aggregation of motion vectors provides translation and uniform-scale updates, augmented with an area-growth check and an optional single-class switch. The method requires no labels, no fine-tuning, and uses the same prompt list for all open-vocabulary methods. On ILSVRC2015-VID (validation dataset), our approach (MVP) attains mAP@0.5=0.609 and mAP@[0.5:0.95]=0.316. At loose intersection-over-union (IoU) thresholds it remains close to framewise OWLv2-Large (0.747/0.721 at 0.2/0.3 versus 0.784/0.780), reflecting that coarse localization is largely preserved. Under the same keyframe schedule, MVP outperforms tracker-based propagation (MOSSE, KCF, CSRT) at mAP@0.5. A supervised reference (YOLOv12x) reaches 0.631 at mAP@0.5 but requires labeled training, whereas our method remains label-free and open-vocabulary. These results indicate that compressed-domain propagation is a practical way to reduce detector invocations while keeping strong zero-shot coverage in videos. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/microa/MVP.
Authors:Lingzhao Kong, Jiacheng Lin, Siyu Li, Kai Luo, Zhiyong Li, Kailun Yang
Abstract:
Collaborative perception aims to extend sensing coverage and improve perception accuracy by sharing information among multiple agents. However, due to differences in viewpoints and spatial positions, agents often acquire heterogeneous observations. Existing intermediate fusion methods primarily focus on aligning similar features, often overlooking the perceptual diversity among agents. To address this limitation, we propose CoBEVMoE, a novel collaborative perception framework that operates in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) space and incorporates a Dynamic Mixture-of-Experts (DMoE) architecture. In DMoE, each expert is dynamically generated based on the input features of a specific agent, enabling it to extract distinctive and reliable cues while attending to shared semantics. This design allows the fusion process to explicitly model both feature similarity and heterogeneity across agents. Furthermore, we introduce a Dynamic Expert Metric Loss (DEML) to enhance inter-expert diversity and improve the discriminability of the fused representation. Extensive experiments on the OPV2V and DAIR-V2X-C datasets demonstrate that CoBEVMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, it improves the IoU for Camera-based BEV segmentation by +1.5% on OPV2V and the AP@50 for LiDAR-based 3D object detection by +3.0% on DAIR-V2X-C, verifying the effectiveness of expert-based heterogeneous feature modeling in multi-agent collaborative perception. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/godk0509/CoBEVMoE.
Authors:Leiyu Wang, Biao Jin, Feng Huang, Liqiong Chen, Zhengyong Wang, Xiaohai He, Honggang Chen
Abstract:
Oriented object detection for multi-spectral imagery faces significant challenges due to differences both within and between modalities. Although existing methods have improved detection accuracy through complex network architectures, their high computational complexity and memory consumption severely restrict their performance. Motivated by the success of large kernel convolutions in remote sensing, we propose MO R-CNN, a lightweight framework for multi-spectral oriented detection featuring heterogeneous feature extraction network (HFEN), single modality supervision (SMS), and condition-based multimodal label fusion (CMLF). HFEN leverages inter-modal differences to adaptively align, merge, and enhance multi-modal features. SMS constrains multi-scale features and enables the model to learn from multiple modalities. CMLF fuses multimodal labels based on specific rules, providing the model with a more robust and consistent supervisory signal. Experiments on the DroneVehicle, VEDAI and OGSOD datasets prove the superiority of our method. The source code is available at:https://github.com/Iwill-github/MORCNN.
Authors:Joe Barrow
Abstract:
This paper introduces CommonForms, a web-scale dataset for form field detection. It casts the problem of form field detection as object detection: given an image of a page, predict the location and type (Text Input, Choice Button, Signature) of form fields. The dataset is constructed by filtering Common Crawl to find PDFs that have fillable elements. Starting with 8 million documents, the filtering process is used to arrive at a final dataset of roughly 55k documents that have over 450k pages. Analysis shows that the dataset contains a diverse mixture of languages and domains; one third of the pages are non-English, and among the 14 classified domains, no domain makes up more than 25% of the dataset. In addition, this paper presents a family of form field detectors, FFDNet-Small and FFDNet-Large, which attain a very high average precision on the CommonForms test set. Each model cost less than $500 to train. Ablation results show that high-resolution inputs are crucial for high-quality form field detection, and that the cleaning process improves data efficiency over using all PDFs that have fillable fields in Common Crawl. A qualitative analysis shows that they outperform a popular, commercially available PDF reader that can prepare forms. Unlike the most popular commercially available solutions, FFDNet can predict checkboxes in addition to text and signature fields. This is, to our knowledge, the first large scale dataset released for form field detection, as well as the first open source models. The dataset, models, and code will be released at https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms
Authors:Huaiyu Chen, Fahed Hassanat, Robert Laganiere, Martin Bouchard
Abstract:
Frequency-modulated continuous wave radars have gained increasing popularity in the automotive industry. Its robustness against adverse weather conditions makes it a suitable choice for radar object detection in advanced driver assistance systems. These real-time embedded systems have requirements for the compactness and efficiency of the model, which have been largely overlooked in previous work. In this work, we propose mRadNet, a novel radar object detection model with compactness in mind. mRadNet employs a U-net style architecture with MetaFormer blocks, in which separable convolution and attention token mixers are used to capture both local and global features effectively. More efficient token embedding and merging strategies are introduced to further facilitate the lightweight design. The performance of mRadNet is validated on the CRUW dataset, improving state-of-the-art performance with the least number of parameters and FLOPs.
Authors:Katharina Eckstein, Constantin Ulrich, Michael Baumgartner, Jessica Kächele, Dimitrios Bounias, Tassilo Wald, Ralf Floca, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
Abstract:
Large-scale pre-training holds the promise to advance 3D medical object detection, a crucial component of accurate computer-aided diagnosis. Yet, it remains underexplored compared to segmentation, where pre-training has already demonstrated significant benefits. Existing pre-training approaches for 3D object detection rely on 2D medical data or natural image pre-training, failing to fully leverage 3D volumetric information. In this work, we present the first systematic study of how existing pre-training methods can be integrated into state-of-the-art detection architectures, covering both CNNs and Transformers. Our results show that pre-training consistently improves detection performance across various tasks and datasets. Notably, reconstruction-based self-supervised pre-training outperforms supervised pre-training, while contrastive pre-training provides no clear benefit for 3D medical object detection. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnDetection-finetuning.
Authors:Yang Li, Tingfa Xu, Shuyan Bai, Peifu Liu, Jianan Li
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify objects that blend seamlessly into natural scenes. Although RGB-based methods have advanced, their performance remains limited under challenging conditions. Multispectral imagery, providing rich spectral information, offers a promising alternative for enhanced foreground-background discrimination. However, existing COD benchmark datasets are exclusively RGB-based, lacking essential support for multispectral approaches, which has impeded progress in this area. To address this gap, we introduce MCOD, the first challenging benchmark dataset specifically designed for multispectral camouflaged object detection. MCOD features three key advantages: (i) Comprehensive challenge attributes: It captures real-world difficulties such as small object sizes and extreme lighting conditions commonly encountered in COD tasks. (ii) Diverse real-world scenarios: The dataset spans a wide range of natural environments to better reflect practical applications. (iii) High-quality pixel-level annotations: Each image is manually annotated with precise object masks and corresponding challenge attribute labels. We benchmark eleven representative COD methods on MCOD, observing a consistent performance drop due to increased task difficulty. Notably, integrating multispectral modalities substantially alleviates this degradation, highlighting the value of spectral information in enhancing detection robustness. We anticipate MCOD will provide a strong foundation for future research in multispectral camouflaged object detection. The dataset is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yl2900260-bit/MCOD.
Authors:Fangyuan Mao, Shuo Wang, Jilin Mei, Chen Min, Shun Lu, Fuyang Liu, Yu Hu
Abstract:
The demand for joint RGB-visible and infrared perception is growing rapidly, particularly to achieve robust performance under diverse weather conditions. Although pre-trained models for RGB-visible and infrared data excel in their respective domains, they often underperform in multimodal scenarios, such as autonomous vehicles equipped with both sensors. To address this challenge, we propose a biologically inspired UNified foundation model for Infrared and Visible modalities (UNIV), featuring two key innovations. First, we introduce Patch-wise Cross-modality Contrastive Learning (PCCL), an attention-guided distillation framework that mimics retinal horizontal cells' lateral inhibition, which enables effective cross-modal feature alignment while remaining compatible with any transformer-based architecture. Second, our dual-knowledge preservation mechanism emulates the retina's bipolar cell signal routing - combining LoRA adapters (2% added parameters) with synchronous distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting, thereby replicating the retina's photopic (cone-driven) and scotopic (rod-driven) functionality. To support cross-modal learning, we introduce the MVIP dataset, the most comprehensive visible-infrared benchmark to date. It contains 98,992 precisely aligned image pairs spanning diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate UNIV's superior performance on infrared tasks (+1.7 mIoU in semantic segmentation and +0.7 mAP in object detection) while maintaining 99%+ of the baseline performance on visible RGB tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/fangyuanmao/UNIV.
Authors:Shilong Bao, Qianqian Xu, Feiran Li, Boyu Han, Zhiyong Yang, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
Abstract:
This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored issue in Salient Object Detection (SOD): the size-invariant property for evaluation protocols, particularly in scenarios when multiple salient objects of significantly different sizes appear within a single image. We first present a novel perspective to expose the inherent size sensitivity of existing widely used SOD metrics. Through careful theoretical derivations, we show that the evaluation outcome of an image under current SOD metrics can be essentially decomposed into a sum of several separable terms, with the contribution of each term being directly proportional to its corresponding region size. Consequently, the prediction errors would be dominated by the larger regions, while smaller yet potentially more semantically important objects are often overlooked, leading to biased performance assessments and practical degradation. To address this challenge, a generic Size-Invariant Evaluation (SIEva) framework is proposed. The core idea is to evaluate each separable component individually and then aggregate the results, thereby effectively mitigating the impact of size imbalance across objects. Building upon this, we further develop a dedicated optimization framework (SIOpt), which adheres to the size-invariant principle and significantly enhances the detection of salient objects across a broad range of sizes. Notably, SIOpt is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of SOD backbones. Theoretically, we also present generalization analysis of SOD methods and provide evidence supporting the validity of our new evaluation protocols. Finally, comprehensive experiments speak to the efficacy of our proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/Ferry-Li/SI-SOD.
Authors:Uriel Garcilazo-Cruz, Joseph O. Okeme, Rodrigo A. Vargas--Hernández
Abstract:
The lack of flexible annotation tools has hindered the deployment of AI models in some scientific areas. Most existing image annotation software requires users to upload a precollected dataset, which limits support for on-demand pipelines and introduces unnecessary steps to acquire images. This constraint is particularly problematic in laboratory environments, where real-time data acquisition from instruments such as microscopes is increasingly common. In this work, we introduce \texttt{LivePixel}, a Python-based graphical user interface that integrates with imaging systems, such as webcams, microscopes, and others, to enable real-time image annotation. LivePyxel is designed to be easy to use through a simple interface that allows users to precisely delimit areas for annotation using tools commonly found in commercial graphics editing software. Of particular interest is the availability of Bézier splines and binary masks, and the software's capacity to work with non-destructive layers that enable high-performance editing. LivePyxel also integrates a wide compatibility across video devices, and it's optimized for object detection operations via the use of OpenCV in combination with high-performance libraries designed to handle matrix and linear algebra operations via Numpy effectively. LivePyxel facilitates seamless data collection and labeling, accelerating the development of AI models in experimental workflows. LivePyxel freely available at https://github.com/UGarCil/LivePyxel
Authors:Ondřej Valach, Ivan Gruber
Abstract:
Tram-human interaction safety is an important challenge, given that trams frequently operate in densely populated areas, where collisions can range from minor injuries to fatal outcomes. This paper addresses the issue from the perspective of designing a solution leveraging digital image processing, deep learning, and artificial intelligence to improve the safety of pedestrians, drivers, cyclists, pets, and tram passengers. We present RailSafeNet, a real-time framework that fuses semantic segmentation, object detection and a rule-based Distance Assessor to highlight track intrusions. Using only monocular video, the system identifies rails, localises nearby objects and classifies their risk by comparing projected distances with the standard 1435mm rail gauge. Experiments on the diverse RailSem19 dataset show that a class-filtered SegFormer B3 model achieves 65% intersection-over-union (IoU), while a fine-tuned YOLOv8 attains 75.6% mean average precision (mAP) calculated at an intersection over union (IoU) threshold of 0.50. RailSafeNet therefore delivers accurate, annotation-light scene understanding that can warn drivers before dangerous situations escalate. Code available at https://github.com/oValach/RailSafeNet.
Authors:Zhenni Yu, Li Zhao, Guobao Xiao, Xiaoqin Zhang
Abstract:
This paper introduces a new Segment Anything Model (SAM) that leverages reverse parameter configuration and test-time training to enhance its performance on Camouflaged Object Detection (COD), named SAM-TTT. While most existing SAM-based COD models primarily focus on enhancing SAM by extracting favorable features and amplifying its advantageous parameters, a crucial gap is identified: insufficient attention to adverse parameters that impair SAM's semantic understanding in downstream tasks. To tackle this issue, the Reverse SAM Parameter Configuration Module is proposed to effectively mitigate the influence of adverse parameters in a train-free manner by configuring SAM's parameters. Building on this foundation, the T-Visioner Module is unveiled to strengthen advantageous parameters by integrating Test-Time Training layers, originally developed for language tasks, into vision tasks. Test-Time Training layers represent a new class of sequence modeling layers characterized by linear complexity and an expressive hidden state. By integrating two modules, SAM-TTT simultaneously suppresses adverse parameters while reinforcing advantageous ones, significantly improving SAM's semantic understanding in COD task. Our experimental results on various COD benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, setting a new benchmark in the field. The code will be available at https://github.com/guobaoxiao/SAM-TTT.
Authors:Dezhen Wang, Haixiang Zhao, Xiang Shen, Sheng Miao
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment objects that blend into their surroundings. However, most existing studies overlook the semantic differences among textual prompts of different targets as well as fine-grained frequency features. In this work, we propose a novel Semantic and Frequency Guided Network (SFGNet), which incorporates semantic prompts and frequency-domain features to capture camouflaged objects and improve boundary perception. We further design Multi-Band Fourier Module(MBFM) to enhance the ability of the network in handling complex backgrounds and blurred boundaries. In addition, we design an Interactive Structure Enhancement Block (ISEB) to ensure structural integrity and boundary details in the predictions. Extensive experiments conducted on three COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. The core code of the model is available at the following link: https://github.com/winter794444/SFGNetICASSP2026.
Authors:Aryan Kashyap Naveen, Bhuvanesh Singla, Raajan Wankhade, Shreesha M, Ramu S, Ram Mohana Reddy Guddeti
Abstract:
The burgeoning of online education has created an urgent need for robust and scalable systems to ensure academic integrity during remote examinations. Traditional human proctoring is often not feasible at scale, while existing automated solutions can be intrusive or fail to detect a wide range of cheating behaviors. This paper introduces AutoOEP (Automated Online Exam Proctoring), a comprehensive, multi-modal framework that leverages computer vision and machine learning to provide effective, automated proctoring. The system utilizes a dual-camera setup to capture both a frontal view of the examinee and a side view of the workspace, minimizing blind spots. Our approach integrates several parallel analyses: the Face Module performs continuous identity verification using ArcFace, along with head pose estimation, gaze tracking, and mouth movement analysis to detect suspicious cues. Concurrently, the Hand Module employs a fine-tuned YOLOv11 model for detecting prohibited items (e.g., mobile phones, notes) and tracks hand proximity to these objects. Features from these modules are aggregated and fed into a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network that analyzes temporal patterns to calculate a real-time cheating probability score. We evaluate AutoOEP on a custom-collected dataset simulating diverse exam conditions. Our system achieves an accuracy of 90.7% in classifying suspicious activities. The object detection component obtains a mean Average Precision (mAP@.5) of 0.57 for prohibited items, and the entire framework processes video streams at approximately 2.4 frames per second without a GPU. The results demonstrate that AutoOEP is an effective and resource-efficient solution for automated proctoring, significantly reducing the need for human intervention and enhancing the integrity of online assessments. The code is public and can be accessed at https://github.com/05kashyap/AutoOEP.
Authors:Christian Fane
Abstract:
Diminished reality (DR) refers to the digital removal of real-world objects by compositing background content in their place. This thesis presents a real-time, inpainting-based DR system designed to enable privacy control in shared-space mixed reality (MR) meetings. The system allows a primary headset user to selectively remove personal or sensitive items from their environment, ensuring that those objects are no longer visible to other participants. Removal is achieved through semantic segmentation and precise object selection, followed by real-time inpainting from the viewpoint of a secondary observer, implemented using a mobile ZED 2i depth camera. The solution is designed to be portable and robust, requiring neither a fixed secondary viewpoint nor prior 3D scanning of the environment. The system utilises YOLOv11 for object detection and a modified Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Transformer (DSTT) model for high-quality video inpainting. At 720p resolution, the pipeline sustains frame rates exceeding 20 fps, demonstrating the feasibility of real-time diminished reality for practical privacy-preserving MR applications.
Authors:Yuiko Uchida, Ren Togo, Keisuke Maeda, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama
Abstract:
This paper presents Objectness SIMilarity (OSIM), a novel evaluation metric for 3D scenes that explicitly focuses on "objects," which are fundamental units of human visual perception. Existing metrics assess overall image quality, leading to discrepancies with human perception. Inspired by neuropsychological insights, we hypothesize that human recognition of 3D scenes fundamentally involves attention to individual objects. OSIM enables object-centric evaluations by leveraging an object detection model and its feature representations to quantify the "objectness" of each object in the scene. Our user study demonstrates that OSIM aligns more closely with human perception compared to existing metrics. We also analyze the characteristics of OSIM using various approaches. Moreover, we re-evaluate recent 3D reconstruction and generation models under a standardized experimental setup to clarify advancements in this field. The code is available at https://github.com/Objectness-Similarity/OSIM.
Authors:Jifeng Shen, Haibo Zhan, Xin Zuo, Heng Fan, Xiaohui Yuan, Jun Li, Wankou Yang
Abstract:
Current multispectral object detection methods often retain extraneous background or noise during feature fusion, limiting perceptual performance. To address this, we propose an innovative feature fusion framework based on cross-modal feature contrastive and screening strategy, diverging from conventional approaches. The proposed method adaptively enhances salient structures by fusing object-aware complementary cross-modal features while suppressing shared background interference. Our solution centers on two novel, specially designed modules: the Mutual Feature Refinement Module (MFRM) and the Differential Feature Feedback Module (DFFM). The MFRM enhances intra- and inter-modal feature representations by modeling their relationships, thereby improving cross-modal alignment and discriminative power. Inspired by feedback differential amplifiers, the DFFM dynamically computes inter-modal differential features as guidance signals and feeds them back to the MFRM, enabling adaptive fusion of complementary information while suppressing common-mode noise across modalities. To enable robust feature learning, the MFRM and DFFM are integrated into a unified framework, which is formally formulated as an Iterative Relation-Map Differential Guided Feature Fusion mechanism, termed IRDFusion. IRDFusion enables high-quality cross-modal fusion by progressively amplifying salient relational signals through iterative feedback, while suppressing feature noise, leading to significant performance gains. In extensive experiments on FLIR, LLVIP and M$^3$FD datasets, IRDFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse challenging scenarios, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness. Code will be available at https://github.com/61s61min/IRDFusion.git.
Authors:Yuelin Guo, Haoyu He, Zhiyuan Chen, Zitong Huang, Renhao Lu, Lu Shi, Zejun Wang, Weizhe Zhang
Abstract:
Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted significant attention in recent years, as it does not require box-level annotations. State-of-the-art methods generally adopt a multi-module network, which employs WSDDN as the multiple instance detection network module and multiple instance refinement modules to refine performance. However, these approaches suffer from three key limitations. First, existing methods tend to generate pseudo GT boxes that either focus only on discriminative parts, failing to capture the whole object, or cover the entire object but fail to distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. Second, the foundational WSDDN architecture lacks a crucial background class representation for each proposal and exhibits a large semantic gap between its branches. Third, prior methods discard ignored proposals during optimization, leading to slow convergence. To address these challenges, we first design a heatmap-guided proposal selector (HGPS) algorithm, which utilizes dual thresholds on heatmaps to pre-select proposals, enabling pseudo GT boxes to both capture the full object extent and distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. We then present a weakly supervised basic detection network (WSBDN), which augments each proposal with a background class representation and uses heatmaps for pre-supervision to bridge the semantic gap between matrices. At last, we introduce a negative certainty supervision loss on ignored proposals to accelerate convergence. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We achieve mAP/mCorLoc scores of 58.5%/81.8% on VOC 2007 and 55.6%/80.5% on VOC 2012, performing favorably against the state-of-the-art WSOD methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyl2565309278/DTH-CP.
Authors:Saad Lahlali, Alexandre Fournier Montgieux, Nicolas Granger, Hervé Le Borgne, Quoc Cuong Pham
Abstract:
Annotating 3D data remains a costly bottleneck for 3D object detection, motivating the development of weakly supervised annotation methods that rely on more accessible 2D box annotations. However, relying solely on 2D boxes introduces projection ambiguities since a single 2D box can correspond to multiple valid 3D poses. Furthermore, partial object visibility under a single viewpoint setting makes accurate 3D box estimation difficult. We propose MVAT, a novel framework that leverages temporal multi-view present in sequential data to address these challenges. Our approach aggregates object-centric point clouds across time to build 3D object representations as dense and complete as possible. A Teacher-Student distillation paradigm is employed: The Teacher network learns from single viewpoints but targets are derived from temporally aggregated static objects. Then the Teacher generates high quality pseudo-labels that the Student learns to predict from a single viewpoint for both static and moving objects. The whole framework incorporates a multi-view 2D projection loss to enforce consistency between predicted 3D boxes and all available 2D annotations. Experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo Open datasets demonstrate that MVAT achieves state-of-the-art performance for weakly supervised 3D object detection, significantly narrowing the gap with fully supervised methods without requiring any 3D box annotations. % \footnote{Code available upon acceptance} Our code is available in our public repository (\href{https://github.com/CEA-LIST/MVAT}{code}).
Authors:Shuolong Chen, Xingxing Li, Liu Yuan
Abstract:
The bioinspired event camera, distinguished by its exceptional temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, has been extensively studied in recent years for motion estimation, robotic perception, and object detection. In ego-motion estimation, the visual-inertial setup is commonly adopted due to complementary characteristics between sensors (e.g., scale perception and low drift). For optimal event-based visual-inertial fusion, accurate spatiotemporal (extrinsic and temporal) calibration is required. In this work, we present eKalibr-Inertial, an accurate spatiotemporal calibrator for event-based visual-inertial systems, utilizing the widely used circle grid board. Building upon the grid pattern recognition and tracking methods in eKalibr and eKalibr-Stereo, the proposed method starts with a rigorous and efficient initialization, where all parameters in the estimator would be accurately recovered. Subsequently, a continuous-time-based batch optimization is conducted to refine the initialized parameters toward better states. The results of extensive real-world experiments show that eKalibr-Inertial can achieve accurate event-based visual-inertial spatiotemporal calibration. The implementation of eKalibr-Inertial is open-sourced at (https://github.com/Unsigned-Long/eKalibr) to benefit the research community.
Authors:Ashen Rodrigo, Isuru Munasinghe, Asanka Perera
Abstract:
Timely and accurate detection of defects and contaminants in solar panels is critical for maintaining the efficiency and reliability of photovoltaic systems. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art object detection models: YOLOv3, Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, EfficientDet, and Swin Transformer, for identifying physical and electrical defects as well as surface contaminants such as dust, dirt, and bird droppings on solar panels. A custom dataset, annotated in the COCO format and specifically designed for solar panel defect and contamination detection, was developed alongside a user interface to train and evaluate the models. The performance of each model is assessed and compared based on mean Average Precision (mAP), precision, recall, and inference speed. The results demonstrate the trade-offs between detection accuracy and computational efficiency, highlighting the relative strengths and limitations of each model. These findings provide valuable guidance for selecting appropriate detection approaches in practical solar panel monitoring and maintenance scenarios. The dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/IsuruMunasinghe98/solar-panel-inspection-dataset.
Authors:Hulin Li, Qiliang Ren, Jun Li, Hanbing Wei, Zheng Liu, Linfang Fan
Abstract:
Fast and accurate object perception in low-light traffic scenes has attracted increasing attention. However, due to severe illumination degradation and the lack of reliable visual cues, existing perception models and methods struggle to quickly adapt to and accurately predict in low-light environments. Moreover, there is the absence of available large-scale benchmark specifically focused on low-light traffic scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a physically grounded illumination degradation method tailored to real-world low-light settings and construct Dark-traffic, the largest densely annotated dataset to date for low-light traffic scenes, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, and optical flow estimation. We further propose the Separable Learning Vision Model (SLVM), a biologically inspired framework designed to enhance perception under adverse lighting. SLVM integrates four key components: a light-adaptive pupillary mechanism for illumination-sensitive feature extraction, a feature-level separable learning strategy for efficient representation, task-specific decoupled branches for multi-task separable learning, and a spatial misalignment-aware fusion module for precise multi-feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLVM achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational overhead. Notably, it outperforms RT-DETR by 11.2 percentage points in detection, YOLOv12 by 6.1 percentage points in instance segmentation, and reduces endpoint error (EPE) of baseline by 12.37% on Dark-traffic. On the LIS benchmark, the end-to-end trained SLVM surpasses Swin Transformer+EnlightenGAN and ConvNeXt-T+EnlightenGAN by an average of 11 percentage points across key metrics, and exceeds Mask RCNN (with light enhancement) by 3.1 percentage points. The Dark-traffic dataset and complete code is released at https://github.com/alanli1997/slvm.
Authors:Safouane El Ghazouali, Umberto Michelucci
Abstract:
AI models rely on annotated data to learn pattern and perform prediction. Annotation is usually a labor-intensive step that require associating labels ranging from a simple classification label to more complex tasks such as object detection, oriented bounding box estimation, and instance segmentation. Traditional tools often require extensive manual input, limiting scalability for large datasets. To address this, we introduce VisioFirm, an open-source web application designed to streamline image labeling through AI-assisted automation. VisioFirm integrates state-of-the-art foundation models into an interface with a filtering pipeline to reduce human-in-the-loop efforts. This hybrid approach employs CLIP combined with pre-trained detectors like Ultralytics models for common classes and zero-shot models such as Grounding DINO for custom labels, generating initial annotations with low-confidence thresholding to maximize recall. Through this framework, when tested on COCO-type of classes, initial prediction have been proven to be mostly correct though the users can refine these via interactive tools supporting bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and polygons. Additionally, VisioFirm has on-the-fly segmentation powered by Segment Anything accelerated through WebGPU for browser-side efficiency. The tool supports multiple export formats (YOLO, COCO, Pascal VOC, CSV) and operates offline after model caching, enhancing accessibility. VisioFirm demonstrates up to 90\% reduction in manual effort through benchmarks on diverse datasets, while maintaining high annotation accuracy via clustering of connected CLIP-based disambiguate components and IoU-graph for redundant detection suppression. VisioFirm can be accessed from \href{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}.
Authors:Nan Yang, Yang Wang, Zhanwen Liu, Yuchao Dai, Yang Liu, Xiangmo Zhao
Abstract:
Existing RGB-Event detection methods process the low-information regions of both modalities (background in images and non-event regions in event data) uniformly during feature extraction and fusion, resulting in high computational costs and suboptimal performance. To mitigate the computational redundancy during feature extraction, researchers have respectively proposed token sparsification methods for the image and event modalities. However, these methods employ a fixed number or threshold for token selection, hindering the retention of informative tokens for samples with varying complexity. To achieve a better balance between accuracy and efficiency, we propose FocusMamba, which performs adaptive collaborative sparsification of multimodal features and efficiently integrates complementary information. Specifically, an Event-Guided Multimodal Sparsification (EGMS) strategy is designed to identify and adaptively discard low-information regions within each modality by leveraging scene content changes perceived by the event camera. Based on the sparsification results, a Cross-Modality Focus Fusion (CMFF) module is proposed to effectively capture and integrate complementary features from both modalities. Experiments on the DSEC-Det and PKU-DAVIS-SOD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in both accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/Zizzzzzzz/FocusMamba.
Authors:Harsh Muriki, Hong Ray Teo, Ved Sengupta, Ai-Ping Hu
Abstract:
The small scale of urban farms and the commercial availability of low-cost robots (such as the FarmBot) that automate simple tending tasks enable an accessible platform for plant phenotyping. We have used a FarmBot with a custom camera end-effector to estimate strawberry plant flower pose (for robotic pollination) from acquired 3D point cloud models. We describe a novel algorithm that translates individual occupancy grids along orthogonal axes of a point cloud to obtain 2D images corresponding to the six viewpoints. For each image, 2D object detection models for flowers are used to identify 2D bounding boxes which can be converted into the 3D space to extract flower point clouds. Pose estimation is performed by fitting three shapes (superellipsoids, paraboloids and planes) to the flower point clouds and compared with manually labeled ground truth. Our method successfully finds approximately 80% of flowers scanned using our customized FarmBot platform and has a mean flower pose error of 7.7 degrees, which is sufficient for robotic pollination and rivals previous results. All code will be made available at https://github.com/harshmuriki/flowerPose.git.
Authors:Liu Qifeng, Zhao Dawei, Dong Yabo, Xiao Liang, Wang Juan, Min Chen, Li Fuyang, Jiang Weizhong, Lu Dongming, Nie Yiming
Abstract:
3D object detection from point clouds plays a critical role in autonomous driving. Currently, the primary methods for point cloud processing are voxel-based and pillarbased approaches. Voxel-based methods offer high accuracy through fine-grained spatial segmentation but suffer from slower inference speeds. Pillar-based methods enhance inference speed but still fall short of voxel-based methods in accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a novel point cloud processing method, PointSlice, which slices point clouds along the horizontal plane and includes a dedicated detection network. The main contributions of PointSlice are: (1) A new point cloud processing technique that converts 3D point clouds into multiple sets of 2D (x-y) data slices. The model only learns 2D data distributions, treating the 3D point cloud as separate batches of 2D data, which reduces the number of model parameters and enhances inference speed; (2) The introduction of a Slice Interaction Network (SIN). To maintain vertical relationships across slices, we incorporate SIN into the 2D backbone network, which improves the model's 3D object perception capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointSlice achieves high detection accuracy and inference speed. On the Waymo dataset, PointSlice is 1.13x faster and has 0.79x fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art voxel-based method (SAFDNet), with only a 1.2 mAPH accuracy reduction. On the nuScenes dataset, we achieve a state-of-the-art detection result of 66.74 mAP. On the Argoverse 2 dataset, PointSlice is 1.10x faster, with 0.66x fewer parameters and a 1.0 mAP accuracy reduction. The code will be available at https://github.com/qifeng22/PointSlice2.
Authors:Yuqi Xiong, Wuzhen Shi, Yang Wen, Ruhan Liu
Abstract:
In view of the problems that existing salient object detection (SOD) methods are prone to losing details, blurring edges, and insufficient fusion of single-modal information in complex scenes, this paper proposes a dynamic uncertainty propagation and multimodal collaborative reasoning network (DUP-MCRNet). Firstly, a dynamic uncertainty graph convolution module (DUGC) is designed to propagate uncertainty between layers through a sparse graph constructed based on spatial semantic distance, and combined with channel adaptive interaction, it effectively improves the detection accuracy of small structures and edge regions. Secondly, a multimodal collaborative fusion strategy (MCF) is proposed, which uses learnable modality gating weights to weightedly fuse the attention maps of RGB, depth, and edge features. It can dynamically adjust the importance of each modality according to different scenes, effectively suppress redundant or interfering information, and strengthen the semantic complementarity and consistency between cross-modalities, thereby improving the ability to identify salient regions under occlusion, weak texture or background interference. Finally, the detection performance at the pixel level and region level is optimized through multi-scale BCE and IoU loss, cross-scale consistency constraints, and uncertainty-guided supervision mechanisms. Extensive experiments show that DUP-MCRNet outperforms various SOD methods on most common benchmark datasets, especially in terms of edge clarity and robustness to complex backgrounds. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YukiBear426/DUP-MCRNet.
Authors:Qiyao Xu, Qiming Wu, Xiaowei Li
Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving light field salient object detection (LF SOD). However, most existing models tend to neglect the extraction of prompt information under this task. Meanwhile, traditional models ignore the analysis of frequency-domain information, which leads to small objects being overwhelmed by noise. In this paper, we put forward a novel model called self-prompting light field segment anything model (SPLF-SAM), equipped with unified multi-scale feature embedding block (UMFEB) and a multi-scale adaptive filtering adapter (MAFA). UMFEB is capable of identifying multiple objects of varying sizes, while MAFA, by learning frequency features, effectively prevents small objects from being overwhelmed by noise. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of our method over ten state-of-the-art (SOTA) LF SOD methods. Our code will be available at https://github.com/XucherCH/splfsam.
Authors:Toghrul Karimov, Hassan Imani, Allan Kazakov
Abstract:
Post-training quantization (PTQ) is crucial for deploying efficient object detection models, like YOLO, on resource-constrained devices. However, the impact of reduced precision on model robustness to real-world input degradations such as noise, blur, and compression artifacts is a significant concern. This paper presents a comprehensive empirical study evaluating the robustness of YOLO models (nano to extra-large scales) across multiple precision formats: FP32, FP16 (TensorRT), Dynamic UINT8 (ONNX), and Static INT8 (TensorRT). We introduce and evaluate a degradation-aware calibration strategy for Static INT8 PTQ, where the TensorRT calibration process is exposed to a mix of clean and synthetically degraded images. Models were benchmarked on the COCO dataset under seven distinct degradation conditions (including various types and levels of noise, blur, low contrast, and JPEG compression) and a mixed-degradation scenario. Results indicate that while Static INT8 TensorRT engines offer substantial speedups (~1.5-3.3x) with a moderate accuracy drop (~3-7% mAP50-95) on clean data, the proposed degradation-aware calibration did not yield consistent, broad improvements in robustness over standard clean-data calibration across most models and degradations. A notable exception was observed for larger model scales under specific noise conditions, suggesting model capacity may influence the efficacy of this calibration approach. These findings highlight the challenges in enhancing PTQ robustness and provide insights for deploying quantized detectors in uncontrolled environments. All code and evaluation tables are available at https://github.com/AllanK24/QRID.
Authors:Hassan Abid, Khan Muhammad, Muhammad Haris Khan
Abstract:
Effective waste sorting is critical for sustainable recycling, yet AI research in this domain continues to lag behind commercial systems due to limited datasets and reliance on legacy object detectors. In this work, we advance AI-driven waste detection by establishing strong baselines and introducing an ensemble-based semi-supervised learning framework. We first benchmark state-of-the-art Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) models on the real-world ZeroWaste dataset, demonstrating that while class-only prompts perform poorly, LLM-optimized prompts significantly enhance zero-shot accuracy. Next, to address domain-specific limitations, we fine-tune modern transformer-based detectors, achieving a new baseline of 51.6 mAP. We then propose a soft pseudo-labeling strategy that fuses ensemble predictions using spatial and consensus-aware weighting, enabling robust semi-supervised training. Applied to the unlabeled ZeroWaste-s subset, our pseudo-annotations achieve performance gains that surpass fully supervised training, underscoring the effectiveness of scalable annotation pipelines. Our work contributes to the research community by establishing rigorous baselines, introducing a robust ensemble-based pseudo-labeling pipeline, generating high-quality annotations for the unlabeled ZeroWaste-s subset, and systematically evaluating OVOD models under real-world waste sorting conditions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/h-abid97/robust-waste-detection.
Authors:Weiqi Yan, Lvhai Chen, Shengchuan Zhang, Yan Zhang, Liujuan Cao
Abstract:
The difficulty of pixel-level annotation has significantly hindered the development of the Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) field. To save on annotation costs, previous works leverage the semi-supervised COD framework that relies on a small number of labeled data and a large volume of unlabeled data. We argue that there is still significant room for improvement in the effective utilization of unlabeled data. To this end, we introduce a Semi-supervised Camouflaged Object Detection by Utilizing Text and Adaptive Data Selection (SCOUT). It includes an Adaptive Data Augment and Selection (ADAS) module and a Text Fusion Module (TFM). The ADSA module selects valuable data for annotation through an adversarial augment and sampling strategy. The TFM module further leverages the selected valuable data by combining camouflage-related knowledge and text-visual interaction. To adapt to this work, we build a new dataset, namely RefTextCOD. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method surpasses previous semi-supervised methods in the COD field and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Heartfirey/SCOUT.
Authors:Zhaoyi Yan, Binghui Chen, Yunfan Liu, Qixiang Ye
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large-scale teacher model to a lightweight one, significantly reducing computational and storage requirements. However, the inherent learning capacity gap between the teacher and student often hinders the sufficient transfer of knowledge, motivating numerous studies to address this challenge. Inspired by the progressive approximation principle in the Stone-Weierstrass theorem, we propose Expandable Residual Approximation (ERA), a novel KD method that decomposes the approximation of residual knowledge into multiple steps, reducing the difficulty of mimicking the teacher's representation through a divide-and-conquer approach. Specifically, ERA employs a Multi-Branched Residual Network (MBRNet) to implement this residual knowledge decomposition. Additionally, a Teacher Weight Integration (TWI) strategy is introduced to mitigate the capacity disparity by reusing the teacher's head weights. Extensive experiments show that ERA improves the Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet classification benchmark by 1.41% and the AP on the MS COCO object detection benchmark by 1.40, as well as achieving leading performance across computer vision tasks. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Zhaoyi-Yan/ERA.
Authors:Olga Matykina, Dmitry Yudin
Abstract:
Three-dimensional object detection is essential for autonomous driving and robotics, relying on effective fusion of multimodal data from cameras and radar. This work proposes RCDINO, a multimodal transformer-based model that enhances visual backbone features by fusing them with semantically rich representations from the pretrained DINOv2 foundation model. This approach enriches visual representations and improves the model's detection performance while preserving compatibility with the baseline architecture. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that RCDINO achieves state-of-the-art performance among radar-camera models, with 56.4 NDS and 48.1 mAP. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/OlgaMatykina/RCDINO.
Authors:Wutao Liu, YiDan Wang, Pan Gao
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) poses a significant challenge in computer vision due to the high similarity between objects and their backgrounds. Existing approaches often rely on heavy training and large computational resources. While foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offer strong generalization, they still struggle to handle COD tasks without fine-tuning and require high-quality prompts to yield good performance. However, generating such prompts manually is costly and inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{First RAG, Second SEG (RAG-SEG)}, a training-free paradigm that decouples COD into two stages: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for generating coarse masks as prompts, followed by SAM-based segmentation (SEG) for refinement. RAG-SEG constructs a compact retrieval database via unsupervised clustering, enabling fast and effective feature retrieval. During inference, the retrieved features produce pseudo-labels that guide precise mask generation using SAM2. Our method eliminates the need for conventional training while maintaining competitive performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark COD datasets demonstrate that RAG-SEG performs on par with or surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Notably, all experiments are conducted on a \textbf{personal laptop}, highlighting the computational efficiency and practicality of our approach. We present further analysis in the Appendix, covering limitations, salient object detection extension, and possible improvements. \textcolor{blue} {Code: https://github.com/Lwt-diamond/RAG-SEG.}
Authors:Suhang Hu, Wei Hu, Yuhang Su, Fan Zhang
Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with complex image annotation tasks, such as emotion classification and context-driven object detection, which demand sophisticated reasoning. Standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) focuses solely on annotation outcomes, ignoring underlying rationales, while Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT) produces inconsistent Chains of Thought (CoTs) due to the absence of high-quality, verified CoTs during pre-training. We introduce RISE (Reason-Inspire-Strengthen-Expertise), a two-stage framework to overcome these limitations. In the Reason stage (RISE-CoT), a reinforcement learning-driven "annotation-reasoning-annotation" closed-loop generates visually grounded, logically consistent CoTs by verifying their ability to reconstruct original annotations without direct leakage. The Inspire and Strengthen stage (RISE-R1) leverages a high-quality CoT subset, filtered by RISE-CoT rewards, for supervised fine-tuning, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning to produce interpretable reasoning and accurate annotations, achieving Expertise in complex visual tasks. Evaluated on complex and simple image annotation tasks, RISE-trained Qwen2-VL-2B outperforms SFT and Visual-RFT, achieving robust performance and enhanced explainability. RISE offers a self-supervised solution for advancing VLM reasoning without requiring manually annotated CoTs.Code and resources are available at: https://github.com/HSH55/RISE.
Authors:Liang Lv, Di Wang, Jing Zhang, Lefei Zhang
Abstract:
Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (S4) has advanced remote sensing (RS) analysis by leveraging unlabeled data through pseudo-labeling and consistency learning. However, existing S4 studies often rely on small-scale datasets and models, limiting their practical applicability. To address this, we propose S5, the first scalable framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation in RS, which unlocks the potential of vast unlabeled Earth observation data typically underutilized due to costly pixel-level annotations. Built upon existing large-scale RS datasets, S5 introduces a data selection strategy that integrates entropy-based filtering and diversity expansion, resulting in the RS4P-1M dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically scales S4 methods by pre-training RS foundation models (RSFMs) of varying sizes on this extensive corpus, significantly boosting their performance on land cover segmentation and object detection tasks. Furthermore, during fine-tuning, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based multi-dataset fine-tuning approach, which enables efficient adaptation to multiple RS benchmarks with fewer parameters. This approach improves the generalization and versatility of RSFMs across diverse RS benchmarks. The resulting RSFMs achieve state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks, underscoring the viability of scaling semi-supervised learning for RS applications. All datasets, code, and models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/S5
Authors:Quan Chen, Xiong Yang, Rongfeng Lu, Qianyu Zhang, Yu Liu, Xiaofei Zhou, Bolun Zheng
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) in complex environments remains a challenging research topic. Most existing methods perform well in natural scenes with negligible noise, and tend to leverage multi-modal information (e.g., depth and infrared) to enhance accuracy. However, few studies are concerned with the damage of weather noise on SOD performance due to the lack of dataset with pixel-wise annotations. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel Weather-eXtended Salient Object Detection (WXSOD) dataset. It consists of 14,945 RGB images with diverse weather noise, along with the corresponding ground truth annotations and weather labels. To verify algorithm generalization, WXSOD contains two test sets, i.e., a synthesized test set and a real test set. The former is generated by adding weather noise to clean images, while the latter contains real-world weather noise. Based on WXSOD, we propose an efficient baseline, termed Weather-aware Feature Aggregation Network (WFANet), which adopts a fully supervised two-branch architecture. Specifically, the weather prediction branch mines weather-related deep features, while the saliency detection branch fuses semantic features extracted from the backbone with weather features for SOD. Comprehensive comparisons against 17 SOD methods shows that our WFANet achieves superior performance on WXSOD. The code and benchmark results will be made publicly available at https://github.com/C-water/WXSOD
Authors:Seungju Yoo, Hyuk Kwon, Joong-Won Hwang, Kibok Lee
Abstract:
Recent advances in computer vision have made training object detectors more efficient and effective; however, assessing their performance in real-world applications still relies on costly manual annotation. To address this limitation, we develop an automated model evaluation (AutoEval) framework for object detection. We propose Prediction Consistency and Reliability (PCR), which leverages the multiple candidate bounding boxes that conventional detectors generate before non-maximum suppression (NMS). PCR estimates detection performance without ground-truth labels by jointly measuring 1) the spatial consistency between boxes before and after NMS, and 2) the reliability of the retained boxes via the confidence scores of overlapping boxes. For a more realistic and scalable evaluation, we construct a meta-dataset by applying image corruptions of varying severity. Experimental results demonstrate that PCR yields more accurate performance estimates than existing AutoEval methods, and the proposed meta-dataset covers a wider range of detection performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YonseiML/autoeval-det.
Authors:Yuanbin Fu, Liang Li, Xiaojie Guo
Abstract:
Edge detection serves as a critical foundation for numerous computer vision applications, including object detection, semantic segmentation, and image editing, by extracting essential structural cues that define object boundaries and salient edges. To be viable for broad deployment across devices with varying computational capacities, edge detectors shall balance high accuracy with low computational complexity. While deep learning has evidently improved accuracy, they often suffer from high computational costs, limiting their applicability on resource-constrained devices. This paper addresses the challenge of achieving that balance: \textit{i.e.}, {how to efficiently capture discriminative features without relying on large-size and sophisticated models}. We propose PEdger++, a collaborative learning framework designed to reduce computational costs and model sizes while improving edge detection accuracy. The core principle of our PEdger++ is that cross-information derived from heterogeneous architectures, diverse training moments, and multiple parameter samplings, is beneficial to enhance learning from an ensemble perspective. Extensive experimental results on the BSDS500, NYUD and Multicue datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both quantitatively and qualitatively, showing clear improvements over existing methods. We also provide multiple versions of the model with varying computational requirements, highlighting PEdger++'s adaptability with respect to different resource constraints. Codes are accessible at https://github.com/ForawardStar/EdgeDetectionviaPEdgerPlus/.
Authors:Zhanwen Liu, Yujing Sun, Yang Wang, Nan Yang, Shengbo Eben Li, Xiangmo Zhao
Abstract:
The dynamic range limitation of conventional RGB cameras reduces global contrast and causes loss of high-frequency details such as textures and edges in complex traffic environments (e.g., nighttime driving, tunnels), hindering discriminative feature extraction and degrading frame-based object detection. To address this, we integrate a bio-inspired event camera with an RGB camera to provide high dynamic range information and propose a motion cue fusion network (MCFNet), which achieves optimal spatiotemporal alignment and adaptive cross-modal feature fusion under challenging lighting. Specifically, an event correction module (ECM) temporally aligns asynchronous event streams with image frames via optical-flow-based warping, jointly optimized with the detection network to learn task-aware event representations. The event dynamic upsampling module (EDUM) enhances spatial resolution of event frames to match image structures, ensuring precise spatiotemporal alignment. The cross-modal mamba fusion module (CMM) uses adaptive feature fusion with a novel interlaced scanning mechanism, effectively integrating complementary information for robust detection. Experiments conducted on the DSEC-Det and PKU-DAVIS-SOD datasets demonstrate that MCFNet significantly outperforms existing methods in various poor lighting and fast moving traffic scenarios. Notably, on the DSEC-Det dataset, MCFNet achieves a remarkable improvement, surpassing the best existing methods by 7.4% in mAP50 and 1.7% in mAP metrics, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Charm11492/MCFNet.
Authors:Kang Ni, Minrui Zou, Yuxuan Li, Xiang Li, Kehua Guo, Ming-Ming Cheng, Yimian Dai
Abstract:
One of the primary challenges in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection lies in the pervasive influence of coherent noise. As a common practice, most existing methods, whether handcrafted approaches or deep learning-based methods, employ the analysis or enhancement of object spatial-domain characteristics to achieve implicit denoising. In this paper, we propose DenoDet V2, which explores a completely novel and different perspective to deconstruct and modulate the features in the transform domain via a carefully designed attention architecture. Compared to DenoDet V1, DenoDet V2 is a major advancement that exploits the complementary nature of amplitude and phase information through a band-wise mutual modulation mechanism, which enables a reciprocal enhancement between phase and amplitude spectra. Extensive experiments on various SAR datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DenoDet V2. Notably, DenoDet V2 achieves a significant 0.8\% improvement on SARDet-100K dataset compared to DenoDet V1, while reducing the model complexity by half. The code is available at https://github.com/GrokCV/GrokSAR.
Authors:Bin Ren, Xiaoshui Huang, Mengyuan Liu, Hong Liu, Fabio Poiesi, Nicu Sebe, Guofeng Mei
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently been widely applied to 3D point cloud understanding, with masked autoencoding as the predominant pre-training paradigm. However, the challenge of learning dense and informative semantic features from point clouds via standard ViTs remains underexplored. We propose MaskClu, a novel unsupervised pre-training method for ViTs on 3D point clouds that integrates masked point modeling with clustering-based learning. MaskClu is designed to reconstruct both cluster assignments and cluster centers from masked point clouds, thus encouraging the model to capture dense semantic information. Additionally, we introduce a global contrastive learning mechanism that enhances instance-level feature learning by contrasting different masked views of the same point cloud. By jointly optimizing these complementary objectives, i.e., dense semantic reconstruction, and instance-level contrastive learning. MaskClu enables ViTs to learn richer and more semantically meaningful representations from 3D point clouds. We validate the effectiveness of our method via multiple 3D tasks, including part segmentation, semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification, where MaskClu sets new competitive results. The code and models will be released at:https://github.com/Amazingren/maskclu.
Authors:Christophe EL Zeinaty, Wassim Hamidouche, Glenn Herrou, Daniel Menard
Abstract:
Object detection (OD) has become vital for numerous computer vision applications, but deploying it on resource-constrained IoT devices presents a significant challenge. These devices, often powered by energy-efficient microcontrollers, struggle to handle the computational load of deep learning-based OD models. This issue is compounded by the rapid proliferation of IoT devices, predicted to surpass 150 billion by 2030. TinyML offers a compelling solution by enabling OD on ultra-low-power devices, paving the way for efficient and real-time processing at the edge. Although numerous survey papers have been published on this topic, they often overlook the optimization challenges associated with deploying OD models in TinyML environments. To address this gap, this survey paper provides a detailed analysis of key optimization techniques for deploying OD models on resource-constrained devices. These techniques include quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, and neural architecture search. Furthermore, we explore both theoretical approaches and practical implementations, bridging the gap between academic research and real-world edge artificial intelligence deployment. Finally, we compare the key performance indicators (KPIs) of existing OD implementations on microcontroller devices, highlighting the achieved maturity level of these solutions in terms of both prediction accuracy and efficiency. We also provide a public repository to continually track developments in this fast-evolving field: https://github.com/christophezei/Optimizing-Object-Detection-Models-for-TinyML-A-Comprehensive-Survey.
Authors:Anqi Xiao, Weichen Yu, Hongyuan Yu
Abstract:
Automatic data augmentation (AutoDA) plays an important role in enhancing the generalization of neural networks. However, mainstream AutoDA methods often encounter two challenges: either the search process is excessively time-consuming, hindering practical application, or the performance is suboptimal due to insufficient policy adaptation during training. To address these issues, we propose Sample-aware RandAugment (SRA), an asymmetric, search-free AutoDA method that dynamically adjusts augmentation policies while maintaining straightforward implementation. SRA incorporates a heuristic scoring module that evaluates the complexity of the original training data, enabling the application of tailored augmentations for each sample. Additionally, an asymmetric augmentation strategy is employed to maximize the potential of this scoring module. In multiple experimental settings, SRA narrows the performance gap between search-based and search-free AutoDA methods, achieving a state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy of 78.31\% on ImageNet with ResNet-50. Notably, SRA demonstrates good compatibility with existing augmentation pipelines and solid generalization across new tasks, without requiring hyperparameter tuning. The pretrained models leveraging SRA also enhance recognition in downstream object detection tasks. SRA represents a promising step towards simpler, more effective, and practical AutoDA designs applicable to a variety of future tasks. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ainieli/Sample-awareRandAugment}{https://github.com/ainieli/Sample-awareRandAugment
Authors:Yu-Huan Wu, Wei Liu, Zi-Xuan Zhu, Zizhou Wang, Yong Liu, Liangli Zhen
Abstract:
Recent salient object detection (SOD) models predominantly rely on heavyweight backbones, incurring substantial computational cost and hindering their practical application in various real-world settings, particularly on edge devices. This paper presents GAPNet, a lightweight network built on the granularity-aware paradigm for both image and video SOD. We assign saliency maps of different granularities to supervise the multi-scale decoder side-outputs: coarse object locations for high-level outputs and fine-grained object boundaries for low-level outputs. Specifically, our decoder is built with granularity-aware connections which fuse high-level features of low granularity and low-level features of high granularity, respectively. To support these connections, we design granular pyramid convolution (GPC) and cross-scale attention (CSA) modules for efficient fusion of low-scale and high-scale features, respectively. On top of the encoder, a self-attention module is built to learn global information, enabling accurate object localization with negligible computational cost. Unlike traditional U-Net-based approaches, our proposed method optimizes feature utilization and semantic interpretation while applying appropriate supervision at each processing stage. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance among lightweight image and video SOD models. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/GAPNet.
Authors:Yunpeng Shi, Lei Chen, Xiaolu Shen, Yanju Guo
Abstract:
In the domain of computer vision, multi-scale feature extraction is vital for tasks such as salient object detection. However, achieving this capability in lightweight networks remains challenging due to the trade-off between efficiency and performance. This paper proposes a novel lightweight multi-scale feature extraction layer, termed the LMF layer, which employs depthwise separable dilated convolutions in a fully connected structure. By integrating multiple LMF layers, we develop LMFNet, a lightweight network tailored for salient object detection. Our approach significantly reduces the number of parameters while maintaining competitive performance. Here, we show that LMFNet achieves state-of-the-art or comparable results on five benchmark datasets with only 0.81M parameters, outperforming several traditional and lightweight models in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. Our work not only addresses the challenge of multi-scale learning in lightweight networks but also demonstrates the potential for broader applications in image processing tasks. The related code files are available at https://github.com/Shi-Yun-peng/LMFNet
Authors:Jiayuan Wang, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Katsuya Suto, Ning Zhang
Abstract:
Autonomous driving systems rely on panoptic driving perception that requires both precision and real-time performance. In this work, we propose RMT-PPAD, a real-time, transformer-based multi-task model that jointly performs object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation. We introduce a lightweight module, a gate control with an adapter to adaptively fuse shared and task-specific features, effectively alleviating negative transfer between tasks. Additionally, we design an adaptive segmentation decoder to learn the weights over multi-scale features automatically during the training stage. This avoids the manual design of task-specific structures for different segmentation tasks. We also identify and resolve the inconsistency between training and testing labels in lane line segmentation. This allows fairer evaluation. Experiments on the BDD100K dataset demonstrate that RMT-PPAD achieves state-of-the-art results with mAP50 of 84.9% and Recall of 95.4% for object detection, mIoU of 92.6% for drivable area segmentation, and IoU of 56.8% and accuracy of 84.7% for lane line segmentation. The inference speed reaches 32.6 FPS. Moreover, we introduce real-world scenarios to evaluate RMT-PPAD performance in practice. The results show that RMT-PPAD consistently delivers stable performance. The source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/JiayuanWang-JW/RMT-PPAD.
Authors:Chao Hao, Zitong Yu, Xin Liu, Yuhao Wang, Weicheng Xie, Jingang Shi, Huanjing Yue, Jingyu Yang
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) and camouflaged object detection (COD) are two closely related but distinct computer vision tasks. Although both are class-agnostic segmentation tasks that map from RGB space to binary space, the former aims to identify the most salient objects in the image, while the latter focuses on detecting perfectly camouflaged objects that blend into the background in the image. These two tasks exhibit strong contradictory attributes. Previous works have mostly believed that joint learning of these two tasks would confuse the network, reducing its performance on both tasks. However, here we present an opposite perspective: with the correct approach to learning, the network can simultaneously possess the capability to find both salient and camouflaged objects, allowing both tasks to benefit from joint learning. We propose SCJoint, a joint learning scheme for SOD and COD tasks, assuming that the decoding processes of SOD and COD have different distribution characteristics. The key to our method is to learn the respective means and variances of the decoding processes for both tasks by inserting a minimal amount of task-specific learnable parameters within a fully shared network structure, thereby decoupling the contradictory attributes of the two tasks at a minimal cost. Furthermore, we propose a saliency-based sampling strategy (SBSS) to sample the training set of the SOD task to balance the training set sizes of the two tasks. In addition, SBSS improves the training set quality and shortens the training time. Based on the proposed SCJoint and SBSS, we train a powerful generalist network, named JoNet, which has the ability to simultaneously capture both ``salient" and ``camouflaged". Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitive performance and effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/linuxsino/JoNet.
Authors:Noreen Anwar, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Wassim Bouachir
Abstract:
Transformer-based object detectors often struggle with occlusions, fine-grained localization, and computational inefficiency caused by fixed queries and dense attention. We propose DAMM, Dual-stream Attention with Multi-Modal queries, a novel framework introducing both query adaptation and structured cross-attention for improved accuracy and efficiency. DAMM capitalizes on three types of queries: appearance-based queries from vision-language models, positional queries using polygonal embeddings, and random learned queries for general scene coverage. Furthermore, a dual-stream cross-attention module separately refines semantic and spatial features, boosting localization precision in cluttered scenes. We evaluated DAMM on four challenging benchmarks, and it achieved state-of-the-art performance in average precision (AP) and recall, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-modal query adaptation and dual-stream attention. Source code is at: \href{https://github.com/DET-LIP/DAMM}{GitHub}.
Authors:Xinyu Xiong, Zihuang Wu, Lei Zhang, Lei Lu, Ming Li, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
Recent studies have highlighted the potential of adapting the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for various downstream tasks. However, constructing a more powerful and generalizable encoder to further enhance performance remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose SAM2-UNeXT, an advanced framework that builds upon the core principles of SAM2-UNet while extending the representational capacity of SAM2 through the integration of an auxiliary DINOv2 encoder. By incorporating a dual-resolution strategy and a dense glue layer, our approach enables more accurate segmentation with a simple architecture, relaxing the need for complex decoder designs. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmarks, including dichotomous image segmentation, camouflaged object detection, marine animal segmentation, and remote sensing saliency detection, demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/WZH0120/SAM2-UNeXT.
Authors:Zachary Yahn, Selim Furkan Tekin, Fatih Ilhan, Sihao Hu, Tiansheng Huang, Yichang Xu, Margaret Loper, Ling Liu
Abstract:
Adversarial perturbations are useful tools for exposing vulnerabilities in neural networks. Existing adversarial perturbation methods for object detection are either limited to attacking CNN-based detectors or weak against transformer-based detectors. This paper presents an Attention-Focused Offensive Gradient (AFOG) attack against object detection transformers. By design, AFOG is neural-architecture agnostic and effective for attacking both large transformer-based object detectors and conventional CNN-based detectors with a unified adversarial attention framework. This paper makes three original contributions. First, AFOG utilizes a learnable attention mechanism that focuses perturbations on vulnerable image regions in multi-box detection tasks, increasing performance over non-attention baselines by up to 30.6%. Second, AFOG's attack loss is formulated by integrating two types of feature loss through learnable attention updates with iterative injection of adversarial perturbations. Finally, AFOG is an efficient and stealthy adversarial perturbation method. It probes the weak spots of detection transformers by adding strategically generated and visually imperceptible perturbations which can cause well-trained object detection models to fail. Extensive experiments conducted with twelve large detection transformers on COCO demonstrate the efficacy of AFOG. Our empirical results also show that AFOG outperforms existing attacks on transformer-based and CNN-based object detectors by up to 83% with superior speed and imperceptibility. Code is available at https://github.com/zacharyyahn/AFOG.
Authors:Jae-Young Kang, Hoonhee Cho, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract:
3D object detection is essential for autonomous systems, enabling precise localization and dimension estimation. While LiDAR and RGB cameras are widely used, their fixed frame rates create perception gaps in high-speed scenarios. Event cameras, with their asynchronous nature and high temporal resolution, offer a solution by capturing motion continuously. The recent approach, which integrates event cameras with conventional sensors for continuous-time detection, struggles in fast-motion scenarios due to its dependency on synchronized sensors. We propose a novel stereo 3D object detection framework that relies solely on event cameras, eliminating the need for conventional 3D sensors. To compensate for the lack of semantic and geometric information in event data, we introduce a dual filter mechanism that extracts both. Additionally, we enhance regression by aligning bounding boxes with object-centric information. Experiments show that our method outperforms prior approaches in dynamic environments, demonstrating the potential of event cameras for robust, continuous-time 3D perception. The code is available at https://github.com/mickeykang16/Ev-Stereo3D.
Authors:Tom Fischer, Xiaojie Zhang, Eddy Ilg
Abstract:
Recognizing objects in images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Although detecting objects in 2D images is common, many applications require determining their pose in 3D space. Traditional category-level methods rely on RGB-D inputs, which may not always be available, or employ two-stage approaches that use separate models and representations for detection and pose estimation. For the first time, we introduce a unified model that integrates detection and pose estimation into a single framework for RGB images by leveraging neural mesh models with learned features and multi-model RANSAC. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for RGB category-level pose estimation on REAL275, improving on the current state-of-the-art by 22.9% averaged across all scale-agnostic metrics. Finally, we demonstrate that our unified method exhibits greater robustness compared to single-stage baselines. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Fischer-Tom/unified-detection-and-pose-estimation.
Authors:Xin Li, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract:
Existing video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) methods primarily rely on spatial appearance features to perceive motion cues for breaking camouflage. However, the high similarity between foreground and background in VCOD results in limited discriminability of spatial appearance features (e.g., color and texture), restricting detection accuracy and completeness. Recent studies demonstrate that frequency features can not only enhance feature representation to compensate for appearance limitations but also perceive motion through dynamic variations in frequency energy. Furthermore, the emerging state space model called Mamba, enables efficient perception of motion cues in frame sequences due to its linear-time long-sequence modeling capability. Motivated by this, we propose a novel visual camouflage Mamba (Vcamba) based on spatio-frequency motion perception that integrates frequency and spatial features for efficient and accurate VCOD. Specifically, we propose a receptive field visual state space (RFVSS) module to extract multi-scale spatial features after sequence modeling. For frequency learning, we introduce an adaptive frequency component enhancement (AFE) module with a novel frequency-domain sequential scanning strategy to maintain semantic consistency. Then we propose a space-based long-range motion perception (SLMP) module and a frequency-based long-range motion perception (FLMP) module to model spatio-temporal and frequency-temporal sequences in spatial and frequency phase domains. Finally, the space and frequency motion fusion module (SFMF) integrates dual-domain features for unified motion representation. Experimental results show that our Vcamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods across 6 evaluation metrics on 2 datasets with lower computation cost, confirming the superiority of Vcamba. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BoydeLi/Vcamba.
Authors:Xihang Hu, Fuming Sun, Jiazhe Liu, Feilong Xu, Xiaoli Zhang
Abstract:
Semi-supervised Camouflaged Object Detection (SSCOD) aims to reduce reliance on costly pixel-level annotations by leveraging limited annotated data and abundant unlabeled data. However, existing SSCOD methods based on Teacher-Student frameworks suffer from severe prediction bias and error propagation under scarce supervision, while their multi-network architectures incur high computational overhead and limited scalability. To overcome these limitations, we propose ST-SAM, a highly annotation-efficient yet concise framework that breaks away from conventional SSCOD constraints. Specifically, ST-SAM employs Self-Training strategy that dynamically filters and expands high-confidence pseudo-labels to enhance a single-model architecture, thereby fundamentally circumventing inter-model prediction bias. Furthermore, by transforming pseudo-labels into hybrid prompts containing domain-specific knowledge, ST-SAM effectively harnesses the Segment Anything Model's potential for specialized tasks to mitigate error accumulation in self-training. Experiments on COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that ST-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 1\% labeled data, outperforming existing SSCOD methods and even matching fully supervised methods. Remarkably, ST-SAM requires training only a single network, without relying on specific models or loss functions. This work establishes a new paradigm for annotation-efficient SSCOD. Codes will be available at https://github.com/hu-xh/ST-SAM.
Authors:Hossein Mirzaei, Zeinab Taghavi, Sepehr Rezaee, Masoud Hadi, Moein Madadi, Mackenzie W. Mathis
Abstract:
Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable success across numerous tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to Trojan (backdoor) attacks, raising serious concerns about their safety in real-world mission-critical applications. A common countermeasure is trigger inversion -- reconstructing malicious "shortcut" patterns (triggers) inserted by an adversary during training. Current trigger-inversion methods typically search the full pixel space under specific assumptions but offer no assurances that the estimated trigger is more than an adversarial perturbation that flips the model output. Here, we propose a data-free, zero-shot trigger-inversion strategy that restricts the search space while avoiding strong assumptions on trigger appearance. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion-based generator guided by the target classifier; through iterative generation, we produce candidate triggers that align with the internal representations the model relies on for malicious behavior. Empirical evaluations, both quantitative and qualitative, show that our approach reconstructs triggers that effectively distinguish clean versus Trojaned models. DISTIL surpasses alternative methods by high margins, achieving up to 7.1% higher accuracy on the BackdoorBench dataset and a 9.4% improvement on trojaned object detection model scanning, offering a promising new direction for reliable backdoor defense without reliance on extensive data or strong prior assumptions about triggers. The code is available at https://github.com/AdaptiveMotorControlLab/DISTIL.
Authors:Jiahao He, Daerji Suolang, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract:
Applying salient object detection (SOD) to RGB-D videos is an emerging task called RGB-D VSOD and has recently gained increasing interest, due to considerable performance gains of incorporating motion and depth and that RGB-D videos can be easily captured now in daily life. Existing RGB-D VSOD models have different attempts to derive motion cues, in which extracting motion information explicitly from optical flow appears to be a more effective and promising alternative. Despite this, there remains a key issue that how to effectively utilize optical flow and depth to assist the RGB modality in SOD. Previous methods always treat optical flow and depth equally with respect to model designs, without explicitly considering their unequal contributions in individual scenarios, limiting the potential of motion and depth. To address this issue and unleash the power of motion and depth, we propose a novel selective cross-modal fusion framework (SMFNet) for RGB-D VSOD, incorporating a pixel-level selective fusion strategy (PSF) that achieves optimal fusion of optical flow and depth based on their actual contributions. Besides, we propose a multi-dimensional selective attention module (MSAM) to integrate the fused features derived from PSF with the remaining RGB modality at multiple dimensions, effectively enhancing feature representation to generate refined features. We conduct comprehensive evaluation of SMFNet against 19 state-of-the-art models on both RDVS and DVisal datasets, making the evaluation the most comprehensive RGB-D VSOD benchmark up to date, and it also demonstrates the superiority of SMFNet over other models. Meanwhile, evaluation on five video benchmark datasets incorporating synthetic depth validates the efficacy of SMFNet as well. Our code and benchmark results are made publicly available at https://github.com/Jia-hao999/SMFNet.
Authors:Jicheng Yuan, Manh Nguyen Duc, Qian Liu, Manfred Hauswirth, Danh Le Phuoc
Abstract:
Vision-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) 3D object detection has advanced significantly in autonomous driving by offering cost-effectiveness and rich contextual information. However, existing methods often construct BEV representations by collapsing extracted object features, neglecting intrinsic environmental contexts, such as roads and pavements. This hinders detectors from comprehensively perceiving the characteristics of the physical world. To alleviate this, we introduce a multi-task learning framework, Collaborative Perceiver (CoP), that leverages spatial occupancy as auxiliary information to mine consistent structural and conceptual similarities shared between 3D object detection and occupancy prediction tasks, bridging gaps in spatial representations and feature refinement. To this end, we first propose a pipeline to generate dense occupancy ground truths incorporating local density information (LDO) for reconstructing detailed environmental information. Next, we employ a voxel-height-guided sampling (VHS) strategy to distill fine-grained local features according to distinct object properties. Furthermore, we develop a global-local collaborative feature fusion (CFF) module that seamlessly integrates complementary knowledge between both tasks, thus composing more robust BEV representations. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that CoP outperforms existing vision-based frameworks, achieving 49.5\% mAP and 59.2\% NDS on the test set. Code and supplementary materials are available at this link https://github.com/jichengyuan/Collaborative-Perceiver.
Authors:Christopher Indris, Raiyan Rahman, Goetz Bramesfeld, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
Aerial wildlife tracking is critical for conservation efforts and relies on detecting small objects on the ground below the aircraft. It presents technical challenges: crewed aircraft are expensive, risky and disruptive; autonomous drones have limited computational capacity for onboard AI systems. Since the objects of interest may appear only a few pixels wide, small object detection is an inherently challenging computer vision subfield compounded by computational efficiency needs. This paper applies a patching augmentation to datasets to study model performance under various settings. A comparative study of three common yet architecturally diverse object detectors is conducted using the data, varying the patching method's hyperparameters against detection accuracy. Each model achieved at least 93\% mAP@IoU=0.5 on at least one patching configuration. Statistical analyses provide an in-depth commentary on the effects of various factors. Analysis also shows that faster, simpler models are about as effective as models that require more computational power for this task and perform well given limited patch scales, encouraging UAV deployment. Datasets and models will be made available via https://github.com/chrisindris/Moose.
Authors:Kangcheng Bin, Chen Chen, Ting Hu, Jiahao Qi, Ping Zhong
Abstract:
Multimodal fusion has become a key enabler for UAV-based object detection, as each modality provides complementary cues for robust feature extraction. However, due to significant differences in resolution, field of view, and sensing characteristics across modalities, accurate registration is a prerequisite before fusion. Despite its importance, there is currently no publicly available benchmark specifically designed for multimodal registration in UAV-based aerial scenarios, which severely limits the development and evaluation of advanced registration methods under real-world conditions. To bridge this gap, we present ATR-UMMIM, the first benchmark dataset specifically tailored for multimodal image registration in UAV-based applications. This dataset includes 7,969 triplets of raw visible, infrared, and precisely registered visible images captured covers diverse scenarios including flight altitudes from 80m to 300m, camera angles from 0° to 75°, and all-day, all-year temporal variations under rich weather and illumination conditions. To ensure high registration quality, we design a semi-automated annotation pipeline to introduce reliable pixel-level ground truth to each triplet. In addition, each triplet is annotated with six imaging condition attributes, enabling benchmarking of registration robustness under real-world deployment settings. To further support downstream tasks, we provide object-level annotations on all registered images, covering 11 object categories with 77,753 visible and 78,409 infrared bounding boxes. We believe ATR-UMMIM will serve as a foundational benchmark for advancing multimodal registration, fusion, and perception in real-world UAV scenarios. The datatset can be download from https://github.com/supercpy/ATR-UMMIM
Authors:Yanyin Guo, Runxuan An, Junwei Li, Zhiyuan Zhang
Abstract:
Traditional ship detection methods primarily rely on single-modal approaches, such as visible or infrared images, which limit their application in complex scenarios involving varying lighting conditions and heavy fog. To address this issue, we explore the advantages of short-wave infrared (SWIR) and long-wave infrared (LWIR) in ship detection and propose a novel single-stage image fusion detection algorithm called LSFDNet. This algorithm leverages feature interaction between the image fusion and object detection subtask networks, achieving remarkable detection performance and generating visually impressive fused images. To further improve the saliency of objects in the fused images and improve the performance of the downstream detection task, we introduce the Multi-Level Cross-Fusion (MLCF) module. This module combines object-sensitive fused features from the detection task and aggregates features across multiple modalities, scales, and tasks to obtain more semantically rich fused features. Moreover, we utilize the position prior from the detection task in the Object Enhancement (OE) loss function, further increasing the retention of object semantics in the fused images. The detection task also utilizes preliminary fused features from the fusion task to complement SWIR and LWIR features, thereby enhancing detection performance. Additionally, we have established a Nearshore Ship Long-Short Wave Registration (NSLSR) dataset to train effective SWIR and LWIR image fusion and detection networks, bridging a gap in this field. We validated the superiority of our proposed single-stage fusion detection algorithm on two datasets. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yanyin-Guo/LSFDNet
Authors:Drandreb Earl O. Juanico, Rowel O. Atienza, Jeffrey Kenneth Go
Abstract:
We propose Reverse Contrast Attention (RCA), a plug-in method that enhances object localization in vision-language transformers without retraining. RCA reweights final-layer attention by suppressing extremes and amplifying mid-level activations to let semantically relevant but subdued tokens guide predictions. We evaluate it on Open Vocabulary Referring Object Detection (OV-RefOD), introducing FitAP, a confidence-free average precision metric based on IoU and box area. RCA improves FitAP in 11 out of 15 open-source VLMs, with gains up to $+26.6\%$. Effectiveness aligns with attention sharpness and fusion timing; while late-fusion models benefit consistently, models like $\texttt{DeepSeek-VL2}$ also improve, pointing to capacity and disentanglement as key factors. RCA offers both interpretability and performance gains for multimodal transformers. Codes and dataset are available from https://github.com/earl-juanico/rca
Authors:Guiping Cao, Xiangyuan Lan, Wenjian Huang, Jianguo Zhang, Dongmei Jiang, Yaowei Wang
Abstract:
Popular transformer detectors have achieved promising performance through query-based learning using attention mechanisms. However, the roles of existing decoder query types (e.g., content query and positional query) are still underexplored. These queries are generally predefined with a fixed number (fixed-query), which limits their flexibility. We find that the learning of these fixed-query is impaired by Recurrent Opposing inTeractions (ROT) between two attention operations: Self-Attention (query-to-query) and Cross-Attention (query-to-encoder), thereby degrading decoder efficiency. Furthermore, "query ambiguity" arises when shared-weight decoder layers are processed with both one-to-one and one-to-many label assignments during training, violating DETR's one-to-one matching principle. To address these challenges, we propose DS-Det, a more efficient detector capable of detecting a flexible number of objects in images. Specifically, we reformulate and introduce a new unified Single-Query paradigm for decoder modeling, transforming the fixed-query into flexible. Furthermore, we propose a simplified decoder framework through attention disentangled learning: locating boxes with Cross-Attention (one-to-many process), deduplicating predictions with Self-Attention (one-to-one process), addressing "query ambiguity" and "ROT" issues directly, and enhancing decoder efficiency. We further introduce a unified PoCoo loss that leverages box size priors to prioritize query learning on hard samples such as small objects. Extensive experiments across five different backbone models on COCO2017 and WiderPerson datasets demonstrate the general effectiveness and superiority of DS-Det. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Med-Process/DS-Det/.
Authors:Muhammad Ibrahim, Naveed Akhtar, Haitian Wang, Saeed Anwar, Ajmal Mian
Abstract:
Fusion of LiDAR and RGB data has the potential to enhance outdoor 3D object detection accuracy. To address real-world challenges in outdoor 3D object detection, fusion of LiDAR and RGB input has started gaining traction. However, effective integration of these modalities for precise object detection task still remains a largely open problem. To address that, we propose a MultiStream Detection (MuStD) network, that meticulously extracts task-relevant information from both data modalities. The network follows a three-stream structure. Its LiDAR-PillarNet stream extracts sparse 2D pillar features from the LiDAR input while the LiDAR-Height Compression stream computes Bird's-Eye View features. An additional 3D Multimodal stream combines RGB and LiDAR features using UV mapping and polar coordinate indexing. Eventually, the features containing comprehensive spatial, textural and geometric information are carefully fused and fed to a detection head for 3D object detection. Our extensive evaluation on the challenging KITTI Object Detection Benchmark using public testing server at https://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_object_detail.php?&result=d162ec699d6992040e34314d19ab7f5c217075e0 establishes the efficacy of our method by achieving new state-of-the-art or highly competitive results in different categories while remaining among the most efficient methods. Our code will be released through MuStD GitHub repository at https://github.com/IbrahimUWA/MuStD.git
Authors:Zhihao Luo, Luojun Lin, Zheng Lin
Abstract:
Due to the high cost of collection and labeling, there are relatively few datasets for camouflaged object detection (COD). In particular, for certain specialized categories, the available image dataset is insufficiently populated. Synthetic datasets can be utilized to alleviate the problem of limited data to some extent. However, directly training with synthetic datasets compared to real datasets can lead to a degradation in model performance. To tackle this problem, in this work, we investigate a new task, namely Syn-to-Real Camouflaged Object Detection (S2R-COD). In order to improve the model performance in real world scenarios, a set of annotated synthetic camouflaged images and a limited number of unannotated real images must be utilized. We propose the Cycling Syn-to-Real Domain Adaptation Framework (CSRDA), a method based on the student-teacher model. Specially, CSRDA propagates class information from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain through pseudo labeling combined with consistency regularization. Considering that narrowing the intra-domain gap can improve the quality of pseudo labeling, CSRDA utilizes a recurrent learning framework to build an evolving real domain for bridging the source and target domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, mitigating the problem of limited data and handcraft annotations in COD. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Muscape/S2R-COD.
Authors:Frauke Wilm, Luis Carlos Rivera Monroy, Mathias Ãttl, Lukas Mürdter, Leonid Mill, Andreas Maier
Abstract:
Accurate detection of Plasmodium falciparum in Giemsa-stained blood smears is an essential component of reliable malaria diagnosis, especially in developing countries. Deep learning-based object detection methods have demonstrated strong potential for automated Malaria diagnosis, but their adoption is limited by the scarcity of datasets with detailed instance-level annotations. In this work, we present an enhanced version of the publicly available NIH malaria dataset, with detailed bounding box annotations in COCO format to support object detection training. We validated the revised annotations by training a Faster R-CNN model to detect infected and non-infected red blood cells, as well as white blood cells. Cross-validation on the original dataset yielded F1 scores of up to 0.88 for infected cell detection. These results underscore the importance of annotation volume and consistency, and demonstrate that automated annotation refinement combined with targeted manual correction can produce training data of sufficient quality for robust detection performance. The updated annotations set is publicly available via GitHub: https://github.com/MIRA-Vision-Microscopy/malaria-thin-smear-coco.
Authors:Runmin Zhang, Zhu Yu, Si-Yuan Cao, Lingyu Zhu, Guangyi Zhang, Xiaokai Bai, Hui-Liang Shen
Abstract:
This work presents SGCDet, a novel multi-view indoor 3D object detection framework based on adaptive 3D volume construction. Unlike previous approaches that restrict the receptive field of voxels to fixed locations on images, we introduce a geometry and context aware aggregation module to integrate geometric and contextual information within adaptive regions in each image and dynamically adjust the contributions from different views, enhancing the representation capability of voxel features. Furthermore, we propose a sparse volume construction strategy that adaptively identifies and selects voxels with high occupancy probabilities for feature refinement, minimizing redundant computation in free space. Benefiting from the above designs, our framework achieves effective and efficient volume construction in an adaptive way. Better still, our network can be supervised using only 3D bounding boxes, eliminating the dependence on ground-truth scene geometry. Experimental results demonstrate that SGCDet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNet, ScanNet200 and ARKitScenes datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/RM-Zhang/SGCDet.
Authors:Jincheng Li, Chunyu Xie, Ji Ao, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin
Abstract:
Large multimodal models (LMMs) have garnered wide-spread attention and interest within the artificial intelligence research and industrial communities, owing to their remarkable capability in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and in-context learning, among others. While LMMs have demonstrated promising results in tackling multimodal tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and visual grounding, the object detection capabilities of LMMs exhibit a significant gap compared to specialist detectors. To bridge the gap, we depart from the conventional methods of integrating heavy detectors with LMMs and propose LMM-Det, a simple yet effective approach that leverages a Large Multimodal Model for vanilla object Detection without relying on specialized detection modules. Specifically, we conduct a comprehensive exploratory analysis when a large multimodal model meets with object detection, revealing that the recall rate degrades significantly compared with specialist detection models. To mitigate this, we propose to increase the recall rate by introducing data distribution adjustment and inference optimization tailored for object detection. We re-organize the instruction conversations to enhance the object detection capabilities of large multimodal models. We claim that a large multimodal model possesses detection capability without any extra detection modules. Extensive experiments support our claim and show the effectiveness of the versatile LMM-Det. The datasets, models, and codes are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/LMM-Det.
Authors:Xinyao Liu, Diping Song
Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate significant potential in the field of medical diagnosis. However, they face critical challenges in specialized domains such as ophthalmology, particularly the fragmentation of annotation granularity and inconsistencies in clinical reasoning logic, which hinder precise cross-modal understanding. This paper introduces FundusExpert, an ophthalmology-specific MLLM with integrated positioning-diagnosis reasoning capabilities, along with FundusGen, a dataset constructed through the intelligent Fundus-Engine system. Fundus-Engine automates localization and leverages MLLM-based semantic expansion to integrate global disease classification, local object detection, and fine-grained feature analysis within a single fundus image. Additionally, by constructing a clinically aligned cognitive chain, it guides the model to generate interpretable reasoning paths. FundusExpert, fine-tuned with instruction data from FundusGen, achieves the best performance in ophthalmic question-answering tasks, surpassing the average accuracy of the 40B MedRegA by 26.6%. It also excels in zero-shot report generation tasks, achieving a clinical consistency of 77.0%, significantly outperforming GPT-4o's 47.6%. Furthermore, we reveal a scaling law between data quality and model capability ($L \propto N^{0.068}$), demonstrating that the cognitive alignment annotations in FundusGen enhance data utilization efficiency. By integrating region-level localization with diagnostic reasoning chains, our work develops a scalable, clinically-aligned MLLM and explores a pathway toward bridging the visual-language gap in specific MLLMs. Our project can be found at https://github.com/MeteorElf/FundusExpert.
Authors:Jorgen Cani, Christos Diou, Spyridon Evangelatos, Vasileios Argyriou, Panagiotis Radoglou-Grammatikis, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Iraklis Varlamis, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos
Abstract:
Automated X-ray inspection is crucial for efficient and unobtrusive security screening in various public settings. However, challenges such as object occlusion, variations in the physical properties of items, diversity in X-ray scanning devices, and limited training data hinder accurate and reliable detection of illicit items. Despite the large body of research in the field, reported experimental evaluations are often incomplete, with frequently conflicting outcomes. To shed light on the research landscape and facilitate further research, a systematic, detailed, and thorough comparative evaluation of recent Deep Learning (DL)-based methods for X-ray object detection is conducted. For this, a comprehensive evaluation framework is developed, composed of: a) Six recent, large-scale, and widely used public datasets for X-ray illicit item detection (OPIXray, CLCXray, SIXray, EDS, HiXray, and PIDray), b) Ten different state-of-the-art object detection schemes covering all main categories in the literature, including generic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), custom CNN, generic transformer, and hybrid CNN-transformer architectures, and c) Various detection (mAP50 and mAP50:95) and time/computational-complexity (inference time (ms), parameter size (M), and computational load (GFLOPS)) metrics. A thorough analysis of the results leads to critical observations and insights, emphasizing key aspects such as: a) Overall behavior of the object detection schemes, b) Object-level detection performance, c) Dataset-specific observations, and d) Time efficiency and computational complexity analysis. To support reproducibility of the reported experimental results, the evaluation code and model weights are made publicly available at https://github.com/jgenc/xray-comparative-evaluation.
Authors:Changhao Li, Xinrui Chen, Ji Wang, Kang Zhao, Jianfei Chen
Abstract:
Quantization is a key technique to reduce network size and computational complexity by representing the network parameters with a lower precision. Traditional quantization methods rely on access to original training data, which is often restricted due to privacy concerns or security challenges. Zero-shot Quantization (ZSQ) addresses this by using synthetic data generated from pre-trained models, eliminating the need for real training data. Recently, ZSQ has been extended to object detection. However, existing methods use unlabeled task-agnostic synthetic images that lack the specific information required for object detection, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel task-specific ZSQ framework for object detection networks, which consists of two main stages. First, we introduce a bounding box and category sampling strategy to synthesize a task-specific calibration set from the pre-trained network, reconstructing object locations, sizes, and category distributions without any prior knowledge. Second, we integrate task-specific training into the knowledge distillation process to restore the performance of quantized detection networks. Extensive experiments conducted on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the efficiency and state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/DFQ-Dojo/dfq-toolkit .
Authors:Meng Lou, Yunxiang Fu, Yizhou Yu
Abstract:
Transformers and Mamba, initially invented for natural language processing, have inspired backbone architectures for visual recognition. Recent studies integrated Local Attention Transformers with Mamba to capture both local details and global contexts. Despite competitive performance, these methods are limited to simple stacking of Transformer and Mamba layers without any interaction mechanism between them. Thus, deep integration between Transformer and Mamba layers remains an open problem. We address this problem by proposing A2Mamba, a powerful Transformer-Mamba hybrid network architecture, featuring a new token mixer termed Multi-scale Attention-augmented State Space Model (MASS), where multi-scale attention maps are integrated into an attention-augmented SSM (A2SSM). A key step of A2SSM performs a variant of cross-attention by spatially aggregating the SSM's hidden states using the multi-scale attention maps, which enhances spatial dependencies pertaining to a two-dimensional space while improving the dynamic modeling capabilities of SSMs. Our A2Mamba outperforms all previous ConvNet-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based architectures in visual recognition tasks. For instance, A2Mamba-L achieves an impressive 86.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. In semantic segmentation, A2Mamba-B exceeds CAFormer-S36 by 2.5% in mIoU, while exhibiting higher efficiency. In object detection and instance segmentation with Cascade Mask R-CNN, A2Mamba-S surpasses MambaVision-B by 1.2%/0.9% in AP^b/AP^m, while having 40% less parameters. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/A2Mamba.
Authors:Xingshu Chen, Sicheng Yu, Chong Cheng, Hao Wang, Ting Tian
Abstract:
This paper investigates the problem of object detection with a focus on improving both the localization accuracy of bounding boxes and explicitly modeling prediction uncertainty. Conventional detectors rely on deterministic bounding box regression, ignoring uncertainty in predictions and limiting model robustness. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware enhancement framework for DETR-based object detectors. We model bounding boxes as multivariate Gaussian distributions and incorporate the Gromov-Wasserstein distance into the loss function to better align the predicted and ground-truth distributions. Building on this, we derive a Bayes Risk formulation to filter high-risk information and improve detection reliability. We also propose a simple algorithm to quantify localization uncertainty via confidence intervals. Experiments on the COCO benchmark show that our method can be effectively integrated into existing DETR variants, enhancing their performance. We further extend our framework to leukocyte detection tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results on the LISC and WBCDD datasets. These results confirm the scalability of our framework across both general and domain-specific detection tasks. Code page: https://github.com/ParadiseforAndaChen/An-Uncertainty-aware-DETR-Enhancement-Framework-for-Object-Detection.
Authors:Jifeng Shen, Haibo Zhan, Shaohua Dong, Xin Zuo, Wankou Yang, Haibin Ling
Abstract:
Modern multispectral feature fusion for object detection faces two critical limitations: (1) Excessive preference for local complementary features over cross-modal shared semantics adversely affects generalization performance; and (2) The trade-off between the receptive field size and computational complexity present critical bottlenecks for scalable feature modeling. Addressing these issues, a novel Multispectral State-Space Feature Fusion framework, dubbed MS2Fusion, is proposed based on the state space model (SSM), achieving efficient and effective fusion through a dual-path parametric interaction mechanism. More specifically, the first cross-parameter interaction branch inherits the advantage of cross-attention in mining complementary information with cross-modal hidden state decoding in SSM. The second shared-parameter branch explores cross-modal alignment with joint embedding to obtain cross-modal similar semantic features and structures through parameter sharing in SSM. Finally, these two paths are jointly optimized with SSM for fusing multispectral features in a unified framework, allowing our MS2Fusion to enjoy both functional complementarity and shared semantic space. In our extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks including FLIR, M3FD and LLVIP, our MS2Fusion significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art multispectral object detection methods, evidencing its superiority. Moreover, MS2Fusion is general and applicable to other multispectral perception tasks. We show that, even without specific design, MS2Fusion achieves state-of-the-art results on RGB-T semantic segmentation and RGBT salient object detection, showing its generality. The source code will be available at https://github.com/61s61min/MS2Fusion.git.
Authors:Xiaojian Lin, Wenxin Zhang, Yuchu Jiang, Wangyu Wu, Yiran Guo, Kangxu Wang, Zongzheng Zhang, Guijin Wang, Lei Jin, Hao Zhao
Abstract:
Hierarchical feature representations play a pivotal role in computer vision, particularly in object detection for autonomous driving. Multi-level semantic understanding is crucial for accurately identifying pedestrians, vehicles, and traffic signs in dynamic environments. However, existing architectures, such as YOLO and DETR, struggle to maintain feature consistency across different scales while balancing detection precision and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Butter, a novel object detection framework designed to enhance hierarchical feature representations for improving detection robustness. Specifically, Butter introduces two key innovations: Frequency-Adaptive Feature Consistency Enhancement (FAFCE) Component, which refines multi-scale feature consistency by leveraging adaptive frequency filtering to enhance structural and boundary precision, and Progressive Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network (PHFFNet) Module, which progressively integrates multi-level features to mitigate semantic gaps and strengthen hierarchical feature learning. Through extensive experiments on BDD100K, KITTI, and Cityscapes, Butter demonstrates superior feature representation capabilities, leading to notable improvements in detection accuracy while reducing model complexity. By focusing on hierarchical feature refinement and integration, Butter provides an advanced approach to object detection that achieves a balance between accuracy, deployability, and computational efficiency in real-time autonomous driving scenarios. Our model and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/Aveiro-Lin/Butter, facilitating further research and validation within the autonomous driving community.
Authors:Atharv Goel, Mehar Khurana
Abstract:
Modern 3D object detection datasets are constrained by narrow class taxonomies and costly manual annotations, limiting their ability to scale to open-world settings. In contrast, 2D vision-language models trained on web-scale image-text pairs exhibit rich semantic understanding and support open-vocabulary detection via natural language prompts. In this work, we leverage the maturity and category diversity of 2D foundation models to perform open-vocabulary 3D object detection without any human-annotated 3D labels.
Our pipeline uses a 2D vision-language detector to generate text-conditioned proposals, which are segmented with SAM and back-projected into 3D using camera geometry and either LiDAR or monocular pseudo-depth. We introduce a geometric inflation strategy based on DBSCAN clustering and Rotating Calipers to infer 3D bounding boxes without training. To simulate adverse real-world conditions, we construct Pseudo-nuScenes, a fog-augmented, RGB-only variant of the nuScenes dataset.
Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive localization performance across multiple settings, including LiDAR-based and purely RGB-D inputs, all while remaining training-free and open-vocabulary. Our results highlight the untapped potential of 2D foundation models for scalable 3D perception. We open-source our code and resources at https://github.com/atharv0goel/open-world-3D-det.
Authors:Yang Zhou, Junjie Li, CongYang Ou, Dawei Yan, Haokui Zhang, Xizhe Xue
Abstract:
Due to its extensive applications, aerial image object detection has long been a hot topic in computer vision. In recent years, advancements in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technology have further propelled this field to new heights, giving rise to a broader range of application requirements. However, traditional UAV aerial object detection methods primarily focus on detecting predefined categories, which significantly limits their applicability. The advent of cross-modal text-image alignment (e.g., CLIP) has overcome this limitation, enabling open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD), which can identify previously unseen objects through natural language descriptions. This breakthrough significantly enhances the intelligence and autonomy of UAVs in aerial scene understanding. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of OVOD in the context of UAV aerial scenes. We begin by aligning the core principles of OVOD with the unique characteristics of UAV vision, setting the stage for a specialized discussion. Building on this foundation, we construct a systematic taxonomy that categorizes existing OVOD methods for aerial imagery and provides a comprehensive overview of the relevant datasets. This structured review enables us to critically dissect the key challenges and open problems at the intersection of these fields. Finally, based on this analysis, we outline promising future research directions and application prospects. This survey aims to provide a clear road map and a valuable reference for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering innovation in this rapidly evolving domain. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/zhouyang2002/OVOD-in-UVA-imagery
Authors:Peijun Wang, Jinhua Zhao
Abstract:
Small object detection remains a challenging problem in the field of object detection. To address this challenge, we propose an enhanced YOLOv8-based model, SOD-YOLO. This model integrates an ASF mechanism in the neck to enhance multi-scale feature fusion, adds a Small Object Detection Layer (named P2) to provide higher-resolution feature maps for better small object detection, and employs Soft-NMS to refine confidence scores and retain true positives. Experimental results demonstrate that SOD-YOLO significantly improves detection performance, achieving a 36.1% increase in mAP$_{50:95}$ and 20.6% increase in mAP$_{50}$ on the VisDrone2019-DET dataset compared to the baseline model. These enhancements make SOD-YOLO a practical and efficient solution for small object detection in UAV imagery. Our source code, hyper-parameters, and model weights are available at https://github.com/iamwangxiaobai/SOD-YOLO.
Authors:Linwei Chen, Lin Gu, Ying Fu
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have significantly advanced computer vision, demonstrating strong performance across various tasks. However, the attention mechanism in ViTs makes each layer function as a low-pass filter, and the stacked-layer architecture in existing transformers suffers from frequency vanishing. This leads to the loss of critical details and textures. We propose a novel, circuit-theory-inspired strategy called Frequency-Dynamic Attention Modulation (FDAM), which can be easily plugged into ViTs. FDAM directly modulates the overall frequency response of ViTs and consists of two techniques: Attention Inversion (AttInv) and Frequency Dynamic Scaling (FreqScale). Since circuit theory uses low-pass filters as fundamental elements, we introduce AttInv, a method that generates complementary high-pass filtering by inverting the low-pass filter in the attention matrix, and dynamically combining the two. We further design FreqScale to weight different frequency components for fine-grained adjustments to the target response function. Through feature similarity analysis and effective rank evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach avoids representation collapse, leading to consistent performance improvements across various models, including SegFormer, DeiT, and MaskDINO. These improvements are evident in tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Additionally, we apply our method to remote sensing detection, achieving state-of-the-art results in single-scale settings. The code is available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDAM.
Authors:Shiyi Mu, Zichong Gu, Hanqi Lyu, Yilin Gao, Shugong Xu
Abstract:
3D detection technology is widely used in the field of autonomous driving, with its application scenarios gradually expanding from enclosed highways to open conventional roads. For rare anomaly categories that appear on the road, 3D detection models trained on closed sets often misdetect or fail to detect anomaly objects. To address this risk, it is necessary to enhance the generalization ability of 3D detection models for targets of arbitrary shapes and to possess the capability to filter out anomalies. The generalization of 3D detection is limited by two factors: the coupled training of 2D and 3D, and the insufficient diversity in the scale distribution of training samples. This paper proposes a Stereo-based 3D Anomaly object Detection (S3AD) algorithm, which decouples the training strategy of 3D and 2D to release the generalization ability for arbitrary 3D foreground detection, and proposes an anomaly scoring algorithm based on foreground confidence prediction, achieving target-level anomaly scoring. In order to further verify and enhance the generalization of anomaly detection, we use a 3D rendering method to synthesize two augmented reality binocular stereo 3D detection datasets which named KITTI-AR. KITTI-AR extends upon KITTI by adding 97 new categories, totaling 6k pairs of stereo images. The KITTI-AR-ExD subset includes 39 common categories as extra training data to address the sparse sample distribution issue. Additionally, 58 rare categories form the KITTI-AR-OoD subset, which are not used in training to simulate zero-shot scenarios in real-world settings, solely for evaluating 3D anomaly detection. Finally, the performance of the algorithm and the dataset is verified in the experiments. (Code and dataset can be obtained at https://github.com/shiyi-mu/S3AD-Code).
Authors:Yuqiang Lin, Sam Lockyer, Mingxuan Sui, Li Gan, Florian Stanek, Markus Zarbock, Wenbin Li, Adrian Evans, Nic Zhang
Abstract:
The multi-camera vehicle tracking (MCVT) framework holds significant potential for smart city applications, including anomaly detection, traffic density estimation, and suspect vehicle tracking. However, current publicly available datasets exhibit limitations, such as overly simplistic scenarios, low-resolution footage, and insufficiently diverse conditions, creating a considerable gap between academic research and real-world scenario. To fill this gap, we introduce RoundaboutHD, a comprehensive, high-resolution multi-camera vehicle tracking benchmark dataset specifically designed to represent real-world roundabout scenarios. RoundaboutHD provides a total of 40 minutes of labelled video footage captured by four non-overlapping, high-resolution (4K resolution, 15 fps) cameras. In total, 512 unique vehicle identities are annotated across different camera views, offering rich cross-camera association data. RoundaboutHD offers temporal consistency video footage and enhanced challenges, including increased occlusions and nonlinear movement inside the roundabout. In addition to the full MCVT dataset, several subsets are also available for object detection, single camera tracking, and image-based vehicle re-identification (ReID) tasks. Vehicle model information and camera modelling/ geometry information are also included to support further analysis. We provide baseline results for vehicle detection, single-camera tracking, image-based vehicle re-identification, and multi-camera tracking. The dataset and the evaluation code are publicly available at: https://github.com/siri-rouser/RoundaboutHD.git
Authors:Antonella Barisic Kulas, Andreja Jurasovic, Stjepan Bogdan
Abstract:
Thermal imaging from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) holds significant potential for applications in search and rescue, wildlife monitoring, and emergency response, especially under low-light or obscured conditions. However, the scarcity of large-scale, diverse thermal aerial datasets limits the advancement of deep learning models in this domain, primarily due to the high cost and logistical challenges of collecting thermal data. In this work, we introduce a novel procedural pipeline for generating synthetic thermal images from an aerial perspective. Our method integrates arbitrary object classes into existing thermal backgrounds by providing control over the position, scale, and orientation of the new objects, while aligning them with the viewpoints of the background. We enhance existing thermal datasets by introducing new object categories, specifically adding a drone class in urban environments to the HIT-UAV dataset and an animal category to the MONET dataset. In evaluating these datasets for object detection task, we showcase strong performance across both new and existing classes, validating the successful expansion into new applications. Through comparative analysis, we show that thermal detectors outperform their visible-light-trained counterparts and highlight the importance of replicating aerial viewing angles. Project page: https://github.com/larics/thermal_aerial_synthetic.
Authors:Xiang Xu, Lingdong Kong, Song Wang, Chuanwei Zhou, Qingshan Liu
Abstract:
LiDAR representation learning aims to extract rich structural and semantic information from large-scale, readily available datasets, reducing reliance on costly human annotations. However, existing LiDAR representation strategies often overlook the inherent spatiotemporal cues in LiDAR sequences, limiting their effectiveness. In this work, we propose LiMA, a novel long-term image-to-LiDAR Memory Aggregation framework that explicitly captures longer range temporal correlations to enhance LiDAR representation learning. LiMA comprises three key components: 1) a Cross-View Aggregation module that aligns and fuses overlapping regions across neighboring camera views, constructing a more unified and redundancy-free memory bank; 2) a Long-Term Feature Propagation mechanism that efficiently aligns and integrates multi-frame image features, reinforcing temporal coherence during LiDAR representation learning; and 3) a Cross-Sequence Memory Alignment strategy that enforces consistency across driving sequences, improving generalization to unseen environments. LiMA maintains high pretraining efficiency and incurs no additional computational overhead during downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on mainstream LiDAR-based perception benchmarks demonstrate that LiMA significantly improves both LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. We hope this work inspires more effective pretraining paradigms for autonomous driving. The code has be made publicly accessible for future research.
Authors:Linshen Liu, Boyan Su, Junyue Jiang, Guanlin Wu, Cong Guo, Ceyu Xu, Hao Frank Yang
Abstract:
This paper presents Edge-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) Collaborative Computing (EMC2), an optimal computing system designed for autonomous vehicles (AVs) that simultaneously achieves low-latency and high-accuracy 3D object detection. Unlike conventional approaches, EMC2 incorporates a scenario-aware MoE architecture specifically optimized for edge platforms. By effectively fusing LiDAR and camera data, the system leverages the complementary strengths of sparse 3D point clouds and dense 2D images to generate robust multimodal representations. To enable this, EMC2 employs an adaptive multimodal data bridge that performs multi-scale preprocessing on sensor inputs, followed by a scenario-aware routing mechanism that dynamically dispatches features to dedicated expert models based on object visibility and distance. In addition, EMC2 integrates joint hardware-software optimizations, including hardware resource utilization optimization and computational graph simplification, to ensure efficient and real-time inference on resource-constrained edge devices. Experiments on open-source benchmarks clearly show the EMC2 advancements as an end-to-end system. On the KITTI dataset, it achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.58% and a 159.06% inference speedup compared to 15 baseline methods on Jetson platforms, with similar performance gains on the nuScenes dataset, highlighting its capability to advance reliable, real-time 3D object detection tasks for AVs. The official implementation is available at https://github.com/LinshenLiu622/EMC2.
Authors:Mingxin Liu, Peiyuan Zhang, Yuan Liu, Wei Zhang, Yue Zhou, Ning Liao, Ziyang Gong, Junwei Luo, Zhirui Wang, Yi Yu, Xue Yang
Abstract:
The growing demand for oriented object detection (OOD) across various domains has driven significant research in this area. However, the high cost of dataset annotation remains a major concern. Current mainstream OOD algorithms can be mainly categorized into three types: (1) fully supervised methods using complete oriented bounding box (OBB) annotations, (2) semi-supervised methods using partial OBB annotations, and (3) weakly supervised methods using weak annotations such as horizontal boxes or points. However, these algorithms inevitably increase the cost of models in terms of annotation speed or annotation cost. To address this issue, we propose:(1) the first Partial Weakly-Supervised Oriented Object Detection (PWOOD) framework based on partially weak annotations (horizontal boxes or single points), which can efficiently leverage large amounts of unlabeled data, significantly outperforming weakly supervised algorithms trained with partially weak annotations, also offers a lower cost solution; (2) Orientation-and-Scale-aware Student (OS-Student) model capable of learning orientation and scale information with only a small amount of orientation-agnostic or scale-agnostic weak annotations; and (3) Class-Agnostic Pseudo-Label Filtering strategy (CPF) to reduce the model's sensitivity to static filtering thresholds. Comprehensive experiments on DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0 and DIOR datasets demonstrate that our PWOOD framework performs comparably to, or even surpasses, traditional semi-supervised algorithms.
Authors:Dimitrios Bouzoulas, Eerik Alamikkotervo, Risto Ojala
Abstract:
Pedestrian detection in RGB images is a key task in pedestrian safety, as the most common sensor in autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems is the RGB camera. A challenge in RGB pedestrian detection, that does not appear to have large public datasets, is low-light conditions. As a solution, in this research, we propose an automated infrared-RGB labeling pipeline. The proposed pipeline consists of 1) Infrared detection, where a fine-tuned model for infrared pedestrian detection is used 2) Label transfer process from the infrared detections to their RGB counterparts 3) Training object detection models using the generated labels for low-light RGB pedestrian detection. The research was performed using the KAIST dataset. For the evaluation, object detection models were trained on the generated autolabels and ground truth labels. When compared on a previously unseen image sequence, the results showed that the models trained on generated labels outperformed the ones trained on ground-truth labels in 6 out of 9 cases for the mAP@50 and mAP@50-95 metrics. The source code for this research is available at https://github.com/BouzoulasDimitrios/IR-RGB-Automated-LowLight-Pedestrian-Labeling
Authors:Zhuo Su, Li Liu, Matthias Müller, Jiehua Zhang, Diana Wofk, Ming-Ming Cheng, Matti Pietikäinen
Abstract:
This paper addresses the challenge of deploying salient object detection (SOD) on resource-constrained devices with real-time performance. While recent advances in deep neural networks have improved SOD, existing top-leading models are computationally expensive. We propose an efficient network design that combines traditional wisdom on SOD and the representation power of modern CNNs. Like biologically-inspired classical SOD methods relying on computing contrast cues to determine saliency of image regions, our model leverages Pixel Difference Convolutions (PDCs) to encode the feature contrasts. Differently, PDCs are incorporated in a CNN architecture so that the valuable contrast cues are extracted from rich feature maps. For efficiency, we introduce a difference convolution reparameterization (DCR) strategy that embeds PDCs into standard convolutions, eliminating computation and parameters at inference. Additionally, we introduce SpatioTemporal Difference Convolution (STDC) for video SOD, enhancing the standard 3D convolution with spatiotemporal contrast capture. Our models, SDNet for image SOD and STDNet for video SOD, achieve significant improvements in efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. On a Jetson Orin device, our models with $<$ 1M parameters operate at 46 FPS and 150 FPS on streamed images and videos, surpassing the second-best lightweight models in our experiments by more than $2\times$ and $3\times$ in speed with superior accuracy. Code will be available at https://github.com/hellozhuo/stdnet.git.
Authors:Wei Li, Jiaman Tang, Yang Li, Beihao Xia, Ligang Tan, Hongmao Qin
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object detection has been widely used in traffic management, agriculture, emergency rescue, etc. However, it faces significant challenges, including occlusions, small object sizes, and irregular shapes. These challenges highlight the necessity for a robust and efficient multimodal UAV object detection method. Mamba has demonstrated considerable potential in multimodal image fusion. Leveraging this, we propose UAVD-Mamba, a multimodal UAV object detection framework based on Mamba architectures. To improve geometric adaptability, we propose the Deformable Token Mamba Block (DTMB) to generate deformable tokens by incorporating adaptive patches from deformable convolutions alongside normal patches from normal convolutions, which serve as the inputs to the Mamba Block. To optimize the multimodal feature complementarity, we design two separate DTMBs for the RGB and infrared (IR) modalities, with the outputs from both DTMBs integrated into the Mamba Block for feature extraction and into the Fusion Mamba Block for feature fusion. Additionally, to improve multiscale object detection, especially for small objects, we stack four DTMBs at different scales to produce multiscale feature representations, which are then sent to the Detection Neck for Mamba (DNM). The DNM module, inspired by the YOLO series, includes modifications to the SPPF and C3K2 of YOLOv11 to better handle the multiscale features. In particular, we employ cross-enhanced spatial attention before the DTMB and cross-channel attention after the Fusion Mamba Block to extract more discriminative features. Experimental results on the DroneVehicle dataset show that our method outperforms the baseline OAFA method by 3.6% in the mAP metric. Codes will be released at https://github.com/GreatPlum-hnu/UAVD-Mamba.git.
Authors:Xiao Zhang, Fei Wei, Yong Wang, Wenda Zhao, Feiyi Li, Xiangxiang Chu
Abstract:
Zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA) presents substantial challenges due to the lack of images in the target domain. Previous approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to tackle this challenge, exploiting their zero-shot learning capabilities. However, these methods primarily address domain distribution shifts and overlook the misalignment between the detection task and VLMs, which rely on manually crafted prompts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the unified prompt and representation enhancement (UPRE) framework, which jointly optimizes both textual prompts and visual representations. Specifically, our approach introduces a multi-view domain prompt that combines linguistic domain priors with detection-specific knowledge, and a visual representation enhancement module that produces domain style variations. Furthermore, we introduce multi-level enhancement strategies, including relative domain distance and positive-negative separation, which align multi-modal representations at the image level and capture diverse visual representations at the instance level, respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in ZSDA detection scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/UPRE.
Authors:Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Yuang Ai, Ran He
Abstract:
As the core operator of Transformers, Softmax Attention exhibits excellent global modeling capabilities. However, its quadratic complexity limits its applicability to vision tasks. In contrast, Linear Attention shares a similar formulation with Softmax Attention while achieving linear complexity, enabling efficient global information modeling. Nevertheless, Linear Attention suffers from a significant performance degradation compared to standard Softmax Attention. In this paper, we analyze the underlying causes of this issue based on the formulation of Linear Attention. We find that, unlike Softmax Attention, Linear Attention entirely disregards the magnitude information of the Query. This prevents the attention score distribution from dynamically adapting as the Query scales. As a result, despite its structural similarity to Softmax Attention, Linear Attention exhibits a significantly different attention score distribution. Based on this observation, we propose Magnitude-Aware Linear Attention (MALA), which modifies the computation of Linear Attention to fully incorporate the Query's magnitude. This adjustment allows MALA to generate an attention score distribution that closely resembles Softmax Attention while exhibiting a more well-balanced structure. We evaluate the effectiveness of MALA on multiple tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, natural language processing, speech recognition, and image generation. Our MALA achieves strong results on all of these tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/qhfan/MALA
Authors:Yongjian Wu, Yang Zhou, Jiya Saiyin, Bingzheng Wei, Yan Xu
Abstract:
We propose VisTex-OVLM, a novel image prompted object detection method that introduces visual textualization -- a process that projects a few visual exemplars into the text feature space to enhance Object-level Vision-Language Models' (OVLMs) capability in detecting rare categories that are difficult to describe textually and nearly absent from their pre-training data, while preserving their pre-trained object-text alignment. Specifically, VisTex-OVLM leverages multi-scale textualizing blocks and a multi-stage fusion strategy to integrate visual information from visual exemplars, generating textualized visual tokens that effectively guide OVLMs alongside text prompts. Unlike previous methods, our method maintains the original architecture of OVLM, maintaining its generalization capabilities while enhancing performance in few-shot settings. VisTex-OVLM demonstrates superior performance across open-set datasets which have minimal overlap with OVLM's pre-training data and achieves state-of-the-art results on few-shot benchmarks PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO. The code will be released at https://github.com/WitGotFlg/VisTex-OVLM.
Authors:Nuo Chen, Chao Xiao, Yimian Dai, Shiman He, Miao Li, Wei An
Abstract:
Small object detection (SOD) in anti-UAV task is a challenging problem due to the small size of UAVs and complex backgrounds. Traditional frame-based cameras struggle to detect small objects in complex environments due to their low frame rates, limited dynamic range, and data redundancy. Event cameras, with microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range, provide a more effective solution for SOD. However, existing event-based object detection datasets are limited in scale, feature large targets size, and lack diverse backgrounds, making them unsuitable for SOD benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a Event-based Small object detection (EVSOD) dataset (namely EV-UAV), the first large-scale, highly diverse benchmark for anti-UAV tasks. It includes 147 sequences with over 2.3 million event-level annotations, featuring extremely small targets (averaging 6.8 $\times$ 5.4 pixels) and diverse scenarios such as urban clutter and extreme lighting conditions. Furthermore, based on the observation that small moving targets form continuous curves in spatiotemporal event point clouds, we propose Event based Sparse Segmentation Network (EV-SpSegNet), a novel baseline for event segmentation in point cloud space, along with a Spatiotemporal Correlation (STC) loss that leverages motion continuity to guide the network in retaining target events. Extensive experiments on the EV-UAV dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method and provide a benchmark for future research in EVSOD. The dataset and code are at https://github.com/ChenYichen9527/Ev-UAV.
Authors:Mingqian Ji, Jian Yang, Shanshan Zhang
Abstract:
Current multi-view 3D object detection methods typically transfer 2D features into 3D space using depth estimation or 3D position encoder, but in a fully data-driven and implicit manner, which limits the detection performance. Inspired by the success of radiance fields on 3D reconstruction, we assume they can be used to enhance the detector's ability of 3D geometry estimation. However, we observe a decline in detection performance, when we directly use them for 3D rendering as an auxiliary task. From our analysis, we find the performance drop is caused by the strong responses on the background when rendering the whole scene. To address this problem, we propose object-centric radiance fields, focusing on modeling foreground objects while discarding background noises. Specifically, we employ Object-centric Radiance Fields (OcRF) to enhance 3D voxel features via an auxiliary task of rendering foreground objects. We further use opacity - the side-product of rendering- to enhance the 2D foreground BEV features via Height-aware Opacity-based Attention (HOA), where attention maps at different height levels are generated separately via multiple networks in parallel. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes validation and test datasets demonstrate that our OcRFDet achieves superior performance, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods with 57.2$\%$ mAP and 64.8$\%$ NDS on the nuScenes test benchmark. Code will be available at https://github.com/Mingqj/OcRFDet.
Authors:Senkang Hu, Yihang Tao, Guowen Xu, Xinyuan Qian, Yiqin Deng, Xianhao Chen, Sam Tak Wu Kwong, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
Collaborative Perception (CP) has been shown to be a promising technique for multi-agent autonomous driving and multi-agent robotic systems, where multiple agents share their perception information to enhance the overall perception performance and expand the perception range. However, in CP, an ego agent needs to receive messages from its collaborators, which makes it vulnerable to attacks from malicious agents. To address this critical issue, we propose a unified, probability-agnostic, and adaptive framework, namely, CP-uniGuard, which is a tailored defense mechanism for CP deployed by each agent to accurately detect and eliminate malicious agents in its collaboration network. Our key idea is to enable CP to reach a consensus rather than a conflict against an ego agent's perception results. Based on this idea, we first develop a probability-agnostic sample consensus (PASAC) method to effectively sample a subset of the collaborators and verify the consensus without prior probabilities of malicious agents. Furthermore, we define collaborative consistency loss (CCLoss) for object detection task and bird's eye view (BEV) segmentation task to capture the discrepancy between an ego agent and its collaborators, which is used as a verification criterion for consensus. In addition, we propose online adaptive threshold via dual sliding windows to dynamically adjust the threshold for consensus verification and ensure the reliability of the systems in dynamic environments. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Code will be released at https://github.com/CP-Security/CP-uniGuard.
Authors:Noora Sassali, Roel Pieters
Abstract:
Pointing gestures are a common interaction method used in Human-Robot Collaboration for various tasks, ranging from selecting targets to guiding industrial processes. This study introduces a method for localizing pointed targets within a planar workspace. The approach employs pose estimation, and a simple geometric model based on shoulder-wrist extension to extract gesturing data from an RGB-D stream. The study proposes a rigorous methodology and comprehensive analysis for evaluating pointing gestures and target selection in typical robotic tasks. In addition to evaluating tool accuracy, the tool is integrated into a proof-of-concept robotic system, which includes object detection, speech transcription, and speech synthesis to demonstrate the integration of multiple modalities in a collaborative application. Finally, a discussion over tool limitations and performance is provided to understand its role in multimodal robotic systems. All developments are available at: https://github.com/NMKsas/gesture_pointer.git.
Authors:Justin Reinman, Sunwoong Choi
Abstract:
CERBERUS is a synthetic benchmark designed to help train and evaluate AI models for detecting cracks and other defects in infrastructure. It includes a crack image generator and realistic 3D inspection scenarios built in Unity. The benchmark features two types of setups: a simple Fly-By wall inspection and a more complex Underpass scene with lighting and geometry challenges. We tested a popular object detection model (YOLO) using different combinations of synthetic and real crack data. Results show that combining synthetic and real data improves performance on real-world images. CERBERUS provides a flexible, repeatable way to test defect detection systems and supports future research in automated infrastructure inspection. CERBERUS is publicly available at https://github.com/justinreinman/Cerberus-Defect-Generator.
Authors:Haiping Yang, Huaxing Liu, Wei Wu, Zuohui Chen, Ning Wu
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in diverse applications such as land surveying, material transport, and environmental monitoring. Following missions like data collection or inspection, UAVs must land safely at docking stations for storage or recharging, which is an essential requirement for ensuring operational continuity. However, accurate landing remains challenging due to factors like GPS signal interference. To address this issue, we propose a deviation warning system for UAV landings, powered by a novel vision-based model called AeroLite-MDNet. This model integrates a multiscale fusion module for robust cross-scale object detection and incorporates a segmentation branch for efficient orientation estimation. We introduce a new evaluation metric, Average Warning Delay (AWD), to quantify the system's sensitivity to landing deviations. Furthermore, we contribute a new dataset, UAVLandData, which captures real-world landing deviation scenarios to support training and evaluation. Experimental results show that our system achieves an AWD of 0.7 seconds with a deviation detection accuracy of 98.6\%, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing UAV landing reliability. Code will be available at https://github.com/ITTTTTI/Maskyolo.git
Authors:Lei Hao, Lina Xu, Chang Liu, Yanni Dong
Abstract:
Effective deep feature extraction via feature-level fusion is crucial for multimodal object detection. However, previous studies often involve complex training processes that integrate modality-specific features by stacking multiple feature-level fusion units, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose a new fusion detection baseline that uses a single feature-level fusion unit to enable high-performance detection, thereby simplifying the training process. Based on this approach, we propose a lightweight attention-guided self-modulation feature fusion network (LASFNet), which introduces a novel attention-guided self-modulation feature fusion (ASFF) module that adaptively adjusts the responses of fusion features at both global and local levels based on attention information from different modalities, thereby promoting comprehensive and enriched feature generation. Additionally, a lightweight feature attention transformation module (FATM) is designed at the neck of LASFNet to enhance the focus on fused features and minimize information loss. Extensive experiments on three representative datasets demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves a favorable efficiency-accuracy trade-off, reducing the number of parameters and computational cost by as much as 90% and 85%, respectively, while improving detection accuracy (mAP) by 1%-3%. The code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/leileilei2000/LASFNet.
Authors:Mauricio Byrd Victorica, György Dán, Henrik Sandberg
Abstract:
State-of-the-art convolutional neural network models for object detection and image classification are vulnerable to physically realizable adversarial perturbations, such as patch attacks. Existing defenses have focused, implicitly or explicitly, on single-patch attacks, leaving their sensitivity to the number of patches as an open question or rendering them computationally infeasible or inefficient against attacks consisting of multiple patches in the worst cases. In this work, we propose SpaNN, an attack detector whose computational complexity is independent of the expected number of adversarial patches. The key novelty of the proposed detector is that it builds an ensemble of binarized feature maps by applying a set of saliency thresholds to the neural activations of the first convolutional layer of the victim model. It then performs clustering on the ensemble and uses the cluster features as the input to a classifier for attack detection. Contrary to existing detectors, SpaNN does not rely on a fixed saliency threshold for identifying adversarial regions, which makes it robust against white box adversarial attacks. We evaluate SpaNN on four widely used data sets for object detection and classification, and our results show that SpaNN outperforms state-of-the-art defenses by up to 11 and 27 percentage points in the case of object detection and the case of image classification, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/gerkbyrd/SpaNN.
Authors:Mengqi Lei, Siqi Li, Yihong Wu, Han Hu, You Zhou, Xinhu Zheng, Guiguang Ding, Shaoyi Du, Zongze Wu, Yue Gao
Abstract:
The YOLO series models reign supreme in real-time object detection due to their superior accuracy and computational efficiency. However, both the convolutional architectures of YOLO11 and earlier versions and the area-based self-attention mechanism introduced in YOLOv12 are limited to local information aggregation and pairwise correlation modeling, lacking the capability to capture global multi-to-multi high-order correlations, which limits detection performance in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose YOLOv13, an accurate and lightweight object detector. To address the above-mentioned challenges, we propose a Hypergraph-based Adaptive Correlation Enhancement (HyperACE) mechanism that adaptively exploits latent high-order correlations and overcomes the limitation of previous methods that are restricted to pairwise correlation modeling based on hypergraph computation, achieving efficient global cross-location and cross-scale feature fusion and enhancement. Subsequently, we propose a Full-Pipeline Aggregation-and-Distribution (FullPAD) paradigm based on HyperACE, which effectively achieves fine-grained information flow and representation synergy within the entire network by distributing correlation-enhanced features to the full pipeline. Finally, we propose to leverage depthwise separable convolutions to replace vanilla large-kernel convolutions, and design a series of blocks that significantly reduce parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the widely used MS COCO benchmark, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Specifically, our YOLOv13-N improves mAP by 3.0\% over YOLO11-N and by 1.5\% over YOLOv12-N. The code and models of our YOLOv13 model are available at: https://github.com/iMoonLab/yolov13.
Authors:Mihir Godbole, Xiangbo Gao, Zhengzhong Tu
Abstract:
Understanding the short-term motion of vulnerable road users (VRUs) like pedestrians and cyclists is critical for safe autonomous driving, especially in urban scenarios with ambiguous or high-risk behaviors. While vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled open-vocabulary perception, their utility for fine-grained intent reasoning remains underexplored. Notably, no existing benchmark evaluates multi-class intent prediction in safety-critical situations, To address this gap, we introduce DRAMA-X, a fine-grained benchmark constructed from the DRAMA dataset via an automated annotation pipeline. DRAMA-X contains 5,686 accident-prone frames labeled with object bounding boxes, a nine-class directional intent taxonomy, binary risk scores, expert-generated action suggestions for the ego vehicle, and descriptive motion summaries. These annotations enable a structured evaluation of four interrelated tasks central to autonomous decision-making: object detection, intent prediction, risk assessment, and action suggestion. As a reference baseline, we propose SGG-Intent, a lightweight, training-free framework that mirrors the ego vehicle's reasoning pipeline. It sequentially generates a scene graph from visual input using VLM-backed detectors, infers intent, assesses risk, and recommends an action using a compositional reasoning stage powered by a large language model. We evaluate a range of recent VLMs, comparing performance across all four DRAMA-X tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that scene-graph-based reasoning enhances intent prediction and risk assessment, especially when contextual cues are explicitly modeled.
Authors:Zhongchen Zhao, Chaodong Xiao, Hui Lin, Qi Xie, Lei Zhang, Deyu Meng
Abstract:
Global dependency modeling and spatial position modeling are two core issues of the foundational architecture design in current deep learning frameworks. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision, leveraging the powerful global dependency modeling capability of the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, Mamba2 has demonstrated its significant potential in natural language processing tasks by explicitly modeling the spatial adjacency prior through the structured mask. In this paper, we propose Polyline Path Masked Attention (PPMA) that integrates the self-attention mechanism of ViTs with an enhanced structured mask of Mamba2, harnessing the complementary strengths of both architectures. Specifically, we first ameliorate the traditional structured mask of Mamba2 by introducing a 2D polyline path scanning strategy and derive its corresponding structured mask, polyline path mask, which better preserves the adjacency relationships among image tokens. Notably, we conduct a thorough theoretical analysis on the structural characteristics of the proposed polyline path mask and design an efficient algorithm for the computation of the polyline path mask. Next, we embed the polyline path mask into the self-attention mechanism of ViTs, enabling explicit modeling of spatial adjacency prior. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation, demonstrate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches based on both state-space models and Transformers. For example, our proposed PPMA-T/S/B models achieve 48.7%/51.1%/52.3% mIoU on the ADE20K semantic segmentation task, surpassing RMT-T/S/B by 0.7%/1.3%/0.3%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/zhongchenzhao/PPMA.
Authors:Fatmah AlHindaassi, Mohammed Talha Alam, Fakhri Karray
Abstract:
Adverse weather conditions, particularly fog, pose a significant challenge to autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, and other safety-critical applications by severely degrading visual information. We introduce ADAM-Dehaze, an adaptive, density-aware dehazing framework that jointly optimizes image restoration and object detection under varying fog intensities. A lightweight Haze Density Estimation Network (HDEN) classifies each input as light, medium, or heavy fog. Based on this score, the system dynamically routes the image through one of three CORUN branches: Light, Medium, or Complex, each tailored to its haze regime. A novel adaptive loss balances physical-model coherence and perceptual fidelity, ensuring both accurate defogging and preservation of fine details. On Cityscapes and the real-world RTTS benchmark, ADAM-Dehaze improves PSNR by up to 2.1 dB, reduces FADE by 30 percent, and increases object detection mAP by up to 13 points, while cutting inference time by 20 percent. These results highlight the importance of intensity-specific processing and seamless integration with downstream vision tasks. Code available at: https://github.com/talha-alam/ADAM-Dehaze.
Authors:Dahang Wan, Rongsheng Lu, Yang Fang, Xianli Lang, Shuangbao Shu, Jingjing Chen, Siyuan Shen, Ting Xu, Zecong Ye
Abstract:
Multispectral object detection, which integrates information from multiple bands, can enhance detection accuracy and environmental adaptability, holding great application potential across various fields. Although existing methods have made progress in cross-modal interaction, low-light conditions, and model lightweight, there are still challenges like the lack of a unified single-stage framework, difficulty in balancing performance and fusion strategy, and unreasonable modality weight allocation. To address these, based on the YOLOv11 framework, we present YOLOv11-RGBT, a new comprehensive multimodal object detection framework. We designed six multispectral fusion modes and successfully applied them to models from YOLOv3 to YOLOv12 and RT-DETR. After reevaluating the importance of the two modalities, we proposed a P3 mid-fusion strategy and multispectral controllable fine-tuning (MCF) strategy for multispectral models. These improvements optimize feature fusion, reduce redundancy and mismatches, and boost overall model performance. Experiments show our framework excels on three major open-source multispectral object detection datasets, like LLVIP and FLIR. Particularly, the multispectral controllable fine-tuning strategy significantly enhanced model adaptability and robustness. On the FLIR dataset, it consistently improved YOLOv11 models' mAP by 3.41%-5.65%, reaching a maximum of 47.61%, verifying the framework and strategies' effectiveness. The code is available at: https://github.com/wandahangFY/YOLOv11-RGBT.
Authors:Md. Adnanul Islam, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Md. Asaduzzaman Shuvo, Shahanur Rahman Bappy, Md Asiful Islam, Swakkhar Shatabda
Abstract:
Mosquito-borne diseases pose a major global health risk, requiring early detection and proactive control of breeding sites to prevent outbreaks. In this paper, we present VisText-Mosquito, a multimodal dataset that integrates visual and textual data to support automated detection, segmentation, and reasoning for mosquito breeding site analysis. The dataset includes 1,828 annotated images for object detection, 142 images for water surface segmentation, and natural language reasoning texts linked to each image. The YOLOv9s model achieves the highest precision of 0.92926 and mAP@50 of 0.92891 for object detection, while YOLOv11n-Seg reaches a segmentation precision of 0.91587 and mAP@50 of 0.79795. For reasoning generation, we tested a range of large vision-language models (LVLMs) in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our fine-tuned Mosquito-LLaMA3-8B model achieved the best results, with a final loss of 0.0028, a BLEU score of 54.7, BERTScore of 0.91, and ROUGE-L of 0.85. This dataset and model framework emphasize the theme "Prevention is Better than Cure", showcasing how AI-based detection can proactively address mosquito-borne disease risks. The dataset and implementation code are publicly available at GitHub: https://github.com/adnanul-islam-jisun/VisText-Mosquito
Authors:Worasit Sangjan, Piyush Pandey, Norman B. Best, Jacob D. Washburn
Abstract:
Accurate identification of individual plants from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images is essential for advancing high-throughput phenotyping and supporting data-driven decision-making in plant breeding. This study presents MatchPlant, a modular, graphical user interface-supported, open-source Python pipeline for UAV-based single-plant detection and geospatial trait extraction. MatchPlant enables end-to-end workflows by integrating UAV image processing, user-guided annotation, Convolutional Neural Network model training for object detection, forward projection of bounding boxes onto an orthomosaic, and shapefile generation for spatial phenotypic analysis. In an early-season maize case study, MatchPlant achieved reliable detection performance (validation AP: 89.6%, test AP: 85.9%) and effectively projected bounding boxes, covering 89.8% of manually annotated boxes with 87.5% of projections achieving an Intersection over Union (IoU) greater than 0.5. Trait values extracted from predicted bounding instances showed high agreement with manual annotations (r = 0.87-0.97, IoU >= 0.4). Detection outputs were reused across time points to extract plant height and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index with minimal additional annotation, facilitating efficient temporal phenotyping. By combining modular design, reproducibility, and geospatial precision, MatchPlant offers a scalable framework for UAV-based plant-level analysis with broad applicability in agricultural and environmental monitoring.
Authors:Hongyu Chen, Jiping Liu, Yong Wang, Jun Zhu, Dejun Feng, Yakun Xie
Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has shown promise in effectively alleviating the performance degradation caused by domain gaps between source and target domains, and it can potentially be generalized to UAV object detection in adverse scenes. However, existing UDA studies are based on natural images or clear UAV imagery, and research focused on UAV imagery in adverse conditions is still in its infancy. Moreover, due to the unique perspective of UAVs and the interference from adverse conditions, these methods often fail to accurately align features and are influenced by limited or noisy pseudo-labels. To address this, we propose the first benchmark for UAV object detection in adverse scenes, the Statistical Feedback-Driven Threshold and Mask Adjustment Teacher-Student Framework (SF-TMAT). Specifically, SF-TMAT introduces a design called Dynamic Step Feedback Mask Adjustment Autoencoder (DSFMA), which dynamically adjusts the mask ratio and reconstructs feature maps by integrating training progress and loss feedback. This approach dynamically adjusts the learning focus at different training stages to meet the model's needs for learning features at varying levels of granularity. Additionally, we propose a unique Variance Feedback Smoothing Threshold (VFST) strategy, which statistically computes the mean confidence of each class and dynamically adjusts the selection threshold by incorporating a variance penalty term. This strategy improves the quality of pseudo-labels and uncovers potentially valid labels, thus mitigating domain bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalization capability of the proposed SF-TMAT in UAV object detection under adverse scene conditions. The Code is released at https://github.com/ChenHuyoo .
Authors:Xinyuan Liu, Hang Xu, Yike Ma, Yucheng Zhang, Feng Dai
Abstract:
Recent remote sensing tech advancements drive imagery growth, making oriented object detection rapid development, yet hindered by labor-intensive annotation for high-density scenes. Oriented object detection with point supervision offers a cost-effective solution for densely packed scenes in remote sensing, yet existing methods suffer from inadequate sample assignment and instance confusion due to rigid rule-based designs. To address this, we propose SSP (Semantic-decoupled Spatial Partition), a unified framework that synergizes rule-driven prior injection and data-driven label purification. Specifically, SSP introduces two core innovations: 1) Pixel-level Spatial Partition-based Sample Assignment, which compactly estimates the upper and lower bounds of object scales and mines high-quality positive samples and hard negative samples through spatial partitioning of pixel maps. 2) Semantic Spatial Partition-based Box Extraction, which derives instances from spatial partitions modulated by semantic maps and reliably converts them into bounding boxes to form pseudo-labels for supervising the learning of downstream detectors. Experiments on DOTA-v1.0 and others demonstrate SSP\' s superiority: it achieves 45.78% mAP under point supervision, outperforming SOTA method PointOBB-v2 by 4.10%. Furthermore, when integrated with ORCNN and ReDet architectures, the SSP framework achieves mAP values of 47.86% and 48.50%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/antxinyuan/ssp.
Authors:Tianpei Zhang, Jufeng Zhao, Yiming Zhu, Guangmang Cui, Yuhan Lyu
Abstract:
The infrared and visible images fusion (IVIF) is receiving increasing attention from both the research community and industry due to its excellent results in downstream applications. Existing deep learning approaches often utilize convolutional neural networks to extract image features. However, the inherently capacity of convolution operations to capture global context can lead to information loss, thereby restricting fusion performance. To address this limitation, we propose an end-to-end fusion network named the Frequency-Spatial Attention Transformer Fusion Network (FSATFusion). The FSATFusion contains a frequency-spatial attention Transformer (FSAT) module designed to effectively capture discriminate features from source images. This FSAT module includes a frequency-spatial attention mechanism (FSAM) capable of extracting significant features from feature maps. Additionally, we propose an improved Transformer module (ITM) to enhance the ability to extract global context information of vanilla Transformer. We conducted both qualitative and quantitative comparative experiments, demonstrating the superior fusion quality and efficiency of FSATFusion compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our network was tested on two additional tasks without any modifications, to verify the excellent generalization capability of FSATFusion. Finally, the object detection experiment demonstrated the superiority of FSATFusion in downstream visual tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lmmh058/FSATFusion.
Authors:Tong Wang, Guanzhou Chen, Xiaodong Zhang, Chenxi Liu, Jiaqi Wang, Xiaoliang Tan, Wenchao Guo, Qingyuan Yang, Kaiqi Zhang
Abstract:
Remote sensing image interpretation plays a critical role in environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster assessment. However, acquiring high-quality labeled data is often costly and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we proposes a multi-modal self-supervised learning framework that leverages high-resolution RGB images, multi-spectral data, and digital surface models (DSM) for pre-training. By designing an information-aware adaptive masking strategy, cross-modal masking mechanism, and multi-task self-supervised objectives, the framework effectively captures both the correlations across different modalities and the unique feature structures within each modality. We evaluated the proposed method on multiple downstream tasks, covering typical remote sensing applications such as scene classification, semantic segmentation, change detection, object detection, and depth estimation. Experiments are conducted on 15 remote sensing datasets, encompassing 26 tasks. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing pretraining approaches in most tasks. Specifically, on the Potsdam and Vaihingen semantic segmentation tasks, our method achieved mIoU scores of 78.30\% and 76.50\%, with only 50\% train-set. For the US3D depth estimation task, the RMSE error is reduced to 0.182, and for the binary change detection task in SECOND dataset, our method achieved mIoU scores of 47.51\%, surpassing the second CS-MAE by 3 percentage points. Our pretrain code, checkpoints, and HR-Pairs dataset can be found in https://github.com/CVEO/MSSDF.
Authors:Chengchao Shen, Dawei Liu, Jianxin Wang
Abstract:
Contrastive learning for single object centric images has achieved remarkable progress on unsupervised representation, but suffering inferior performance on the widespread images with multiple objects. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method, Multiple Object Stitching (MOS), to refine the unsupervised representation for multi-object images. Specifically, we construct the multi-object images by stitching the single object centric ones, where the objects in the synthesized multi-object images are predetermined. Hence, compared to the existing contrastive methods, our method provides additional object correspondences between multi-object images without human annotations. In this manner, our method pays more attention to the representations of each object in multi-object image, thus providing more detailed representations for complicated downstream tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Experimental results on ImageNet, CIFAR and COCO datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the leading unsupervised representation performance on both single object centric images and multi-object ones. The source code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/MultipleObjectStitching.
Authors:Mellon M. Zhang, Glen Chou, Saibal Mukhopadhyay
Abstract:
Accurate and efficient object detection is essential for autonomous vehicles, where real-time perception requires low latency and high throughput. LiDAR sensors provide robust depth information, but conventional methods process full 360° scans in a single pass, introducing significant delay. Streaming approaches address this by sequentially processing partial scans in the native polar coordinate system, yet they rely on translation-invariant convolutions that are misaligned with polar geometry -- resulting in degraded performance or requiring complex distortion mitigation. Recent Mamba-based state space models (SSMs) have shown promise for LiDAR perception, but only in the full-scan setting, relying on geometric serialization and positional embeddings that are memory-intensive and ill-suited to streaming. We propose Polar Hierarchical Mamba (PHiM), a novel SSM architecture designed for polar-coordinate streaming LiDAR. PHiM uses local bidirectional Mamba blocks for intra-sector spatial encoding and a global forward Mamba for inter-sector temporal modeling, replacing convolutions and positional encodings with distortion-aware, dimensionally-decomposed operations. PHiM sets a new state-of-the-art among streaming detectors on the Waymo Open Dataset, outperforming the previous best by 10\% and matching full-scan baselines at twice the throughput. Code will be available at https://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mamba .
Authors:Minghao Zou, Qingtian Zeng, Yongping Miao, Shangkun Liu, Zilong Wang, Hantao Liu, Wei Zhou
Abstract:
Visual parsing of images and videos is critical for a wide range of real-world applications. However, progress in this field is constrained by limitations of existing datasets: (1) insufficient annotation granularity, which impedes fine-grained scene understanding and high-level reasoning; (2) limited coverage of domains, particularly a lack of datasets tailored for educational scenarios; and (3) lack of explicit procedural guidance, with minimal logical rules and insufficient representation of structured task process. To address these gaps, we introduce PhysLab, the first video dataset that captures students conducting complex physics experiments. The dataset includes four representative experiments that feature diverse scientific instruments and rich human-object interaction (HOI) patterns. PhysLab comprises 620 long-form videos and provides multilevel annotations that support a variety of vision tasks, including action recognition, object detection, HOI analysis, etc. We establish strong baselines and perform extensive evaluations to highlight key challenges in the parsing of procedural educational videos. We expect PhysLab to serve as a valuable resource for advancing fine-grained visual parsing, facilitating intelligent classroom systems, and fostering closer integration between computer vision and educational technologies. The dataset and the evaluation toolkit are publicly available at https://github.com/ZMH-SDUST/PhysLab.
Authors:Boyong He, Yuxiang Ji, Zhuoyue Tan, Liaoni Wu
Abstract:
Object detectors often suffer a decrease in performance due to the large domain gap between the training data (source domain) and real-world data (target domain). Diffusion-based generative models have shown remarkable abilities in generating high-quality and diverse images, suggesting their potential for extracting valuable feature from various domains. To effectively leverage the cross-domain feature representation of diffusion models, in this paper, we train a detector with frozen-weight diffusion model on the source domain, then employ it as a teacher model to generate pseudo labels on the unlabeled target domain, which are used to guide the supervised learning of the student model on the target domain. We refer to this approach as Diffusion Domain Teacher (DDT). By employing this straightforward yet potent framework, we significantly improve cross-domain object detection performance without compromising the inference speed. Our method achieves an average mAP improvement of 21.2% compared to the baseline on 6 datasets from three common cross-domain detection benchmarks (Cross-Camera, Syn2Real, Real2Artistic}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by an average of 5.7% mAP. Furthermore, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently brings improvements even in more powerful and complex models, highlighting broadly applicable and effective domain adaptation capability of our DDT. The code is available at https://github.com/heboyong/Diffusion-Domain-Teacher.
Authors:Shuai Liu, Mingyue Cui, Boyang Li, Quanmin Liang, Tinghe Hong, Kai Huang, Yunxiao Shan, Kai Huang
Abstract:
Fully sparse 3D detectors have recently gained significant attention due to their efficiency in long-range detection. However, sparse 3D detectors extract features only from non-empty voxels, which impairs long-range interactions and causes the center feature missing. The former weakens the feature extraction capability, while the latter hinders network optimization. To address these challenges, we introduce the Fully Sparse Hybrid Network (FSHNet). FSHNet incorporates a proposed SlotFormer block to enhance the long-range feature extraction capability of existing sparse encoders. The SlotFormer divides sparse voxels using a slot partition approach, which, compared to traditional window partition, provides a larger receptive field. Additionally, we propose a dynamic sparse label assignment strategy to deeply optimize the network by providing more high-quality positive samples. To further enhance performance, we introduce a sparse upsampling module to refine downsampled voxels, preserving fine-grained details crucial for detecting small objects. Extensive experiments on the Waymo, nuScenes, and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FSHNet. The code is available at https://github.com/Say2L/FSHNet.
Authors:Weiqing Xiao, Hao Huang, Chonghao Zhong, Yujie Lin, Nan Wang, Xiaoxue Chen, Zhaoxi Chen, Saining Zhang, Shuocheng Yang, Pierre Merriaux, Lei Lei, Hao Zhao
Abstract:
We present SA-Radar (Simulate Any Radar), a radar simulation approach that enables controllable and efficient generation of radar cubes conditioned on customizable radar attributes. Unlike prior generative or physics-based simulators, SA-Radar integrates both paradigms through a waveform-parameterized attribute embedding. We design ICFAR-Net, a 3D U-Net conditioned on radar attributes encoded via waveform parameters, which captures signal variations induced by different radar configurations. This formulation bypasses the need for detailed radar hardware specifications and allows efficient simulation of range-azimuth-Doppler (RAD) tensors across diverse sensor settings. We further construct a mixed real-simulated dataset with attribute annotations to robustly train the network. Extensive evaluations on multiple downstream tasks-including 2D/3D object detection and radar semantic segmentation-demonstrate that SA-Radar's simulated data is both realistic and effective, consistently improving model performance when used standalone or in combination with real data. Our framework also supports simulation in novel sensor viewpoints and edited scenes, showcasing its potential as a general-purpose radar data engine for autonomous driving applications. Code and additional materials are available at https://zhuxing0.github.io/projects/SA-Radar.
Authors:Shufan Qing, Anzhen Li, Qiandi Wang, Yuefeng Niu, Mingchen Feng, Guoliang Hu, Jinqiao Wu, Fengtao Nan, Yingchun Fan
Abstract:
Existing semantic SLAM in dynamic environments mainly identify dynamic regions through object detection or semantic segmentation methods. However, in certain highly dynamic scenarios, the detection boxes or segmentation masks cannot fully cover dynamic regions. Therefore, this paper proposes a robust and efficient GeneA-SLAM2 system that leverages depth variance constraints to handle dynamic scenes. Our method extracts dynamic pixels via depth variance and creates precise depth masks to guide the removal of dynamic objects. Simultaneously, an autoencoder is used to reconstruct keypoints, improving the genetic resampling keypoint algorithm to obtain more uniformly distributed keypoints and enhance the accuracy of pose estimation. Our system was evaluated on multiple highly dynamic sequences. The results demonstrate that GeneA-SLAM2 maintains high accuracy in dynamic scenes compared to current methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/qingshufan/GeneA-SLAM2.
Authors:Salwa K. Al Khatib, Ahmed ElHagry, Shitong Shao, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract:
Training large neural networks on large-scale datasets requires substantial computational resources, particularly for dense prediction tasks such as object detection. Although dataset distillation (DD) has been proposed to alleviate these demands by synthesizing compact datasets from larger ones, most existing work focuses solely on image classification, leaving the more complex detection setting largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce OD3, a novel optimization-free data distillation framework specifically designed for object detection. Our approach involves two stages: first, a candidate selection process in which object instances are iteratively placed in synthesized images based on their suitable locations, and second, a candidate screening process using a pre-trained observer model to remove low-confidence objects. We perform our data synthesis framework on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC, two popular detection datasets, with compression ratios ranging from 0.25% to 5%. Compared to the prior solely existing dataset distillation method on detection and conventional core set selection methods, OD3 delivers superior accuracy, establishes new state-of-the-art results, surpassing prior best method by more than 14% on COCO mAP50 at a compression ratio of 1.0%. Code and condensed datasets are available at: https://github.com/VILA-Lab/OD3.
Authors:Qiang Wang, Xiang Song, Yuhang He, Jizhou Han, Chenhao Ding, Xinyuan Gao, Yihong Gong
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) often underperform in real-world, dynamic settings where data distributions change over time. Domain Incremental Learning (DIL) offers a solution by enabling continual model adaptation, with Parameter-Isolation DIL (PIDIL) emerging as a promising paradigm to reduce knowledge conflicts. However, existing PIDIL methods struggle with parameter selection accuracy, especially as the number of domains and corresponding classes grows. To address this, we propose SOYO, a lightweight framework that improves domain selection in PIDIL. SOYO introduces a Gaussian Mixture Compressor (GMC) and Domain Feature Resampler (DFR) to store and balance prior domain data efficiently, while a Multi-level Domain Feature Fusion Network (MDFN) enhances domain feature extraction. Our framework supports multiple Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods and is validated across tasks such as image classification, object detection, and speech enhancement. Experimental results on six benchmarks demonstrate SOYO's consistent superiority over existing baselines, showcasing its robustness and adaptability in complex, evolving environments. The codes will be released in https://github.com/qwangcv/SOYO.
Authors:Guiping Cao, Wenjian Huang, Xiangyuan Lan, Jianguo Zhang, Dongmei Jiang, Yaowei Wang
Abstract:
Small Object Detection (SOD) poses significant challenges due to limited information and the model's low class prediction score. While Transformer-based detectors have shown promising performance, their potential for SOD remains largely unexplored. In typical DETR-like frameworks, the CNN backbone network, specialized in aggregating local information, struggles to capture the necessary contextual information for SOD. The multiple attention layers in the Transformer Encoder face difficulties in effectively attending to small objects and can also lead to blurring of features. Furthermore, the model's lower class prediction score of small objects compared to large objects further increases the difficulty of SOD. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-DINO. This approach incorporates the deep MLP network to aggregate initial feature representations with both short and long range information for SOD. Then, a new Cross Coding Twice Module (CCTM) is applied to integrate these initial representations to the Transformer Encoder feature, enhancing the details of small objects. Additionally, we introduce a new kind of soft label named Category-Size (CS), integrating the Category and Size of objects. By treating CS as new ground truth, we propose a new loss function called Boost Loss to improve the class prediction score of the model. Extensive experimental results on COCO, WiderPerson, VisDrone, AI-TOD, and SODA-D datasets demonstrate that Cross-DINO efficiently improves the performance of DETR-like models on SOD. Specifically, our model achieves 36.4% APs on COCO for SOD with only 45M parameters, outperforming the DINO by +4.4% APS (36.4% vs. 32.0%) with fewer parameters and FLOPs, under 12 epochs training setting. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/Med-Process/Cross-DINO.
Authors:Carina Newen, Luca Hinkamp, Maria Ntonti, Emmanuel Müller
Abstract:
From uncertainty quantification to real-world object detection, we recognize the importance of machine learning algorithms, particularly in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving or medical diagnostics. In machine learning, ambiguous data plays an important role in various machine learning domains. Optical illusions present a compelling area of study in this context, as they offer insight into the limitations of both human and machine perception. Despite this relevance, optical illusion datasets remain scarce. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset of optical illusions featuring intermingled animal pairs designed to evoke perceptual ambiguity. We identify generalizable visual concepts, particularly gaze direction and eye cues, as subtle yet impactful features that significantly influence model accuracy. By confronting models with perceptual ambiguity, our findings underscore the importance of concepts in visual learning and provide a foundation for studying bias and alignment between human and machine vision. To make this dataset useful for general purposes, we generate optical illusions systematically with different concepts discussed in our bias mitigation section. The dataset is accessible in Kaggle via https://kaggle.com/datasets/693bf7c6dd2cb45c8a863f9177350c8f9849a9508e9d50526e2ffcc5559a8333. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/KDD-OpenSource/Ambivision.git.
Authors:Thalles Silva, Helio Pedrini, AdÃn RamÃrez Rivera
Abstract:
We present Self-Organizing Visual Prototypes (SOP), a new training technique for unsupervised visual feature learning. Unlike existing prototypical self-supervised learning (SSL) methods that rely on a single prototype to encode all relevant features of a hidden cluster in the data, we propose the SOP strategy. In this strategy, a prototype is represented by many semantically similar representations, or support embeddings (SEs), each containing a complementary set of features that together better characterize their region in space and maximize training performance. We reaffirm the feasibility of non-parametric SSL by introducing novel non-parametric adaptations of two loss functions that implement the SOP strategy. Notably, we introduce the SOP Masked Image Modeling (SOP-MIM) task, where masked representations are reconstructed from the perspective of multiple non-parametric local SEs. We comprehensively evaluate the representations learned using the SOP strategy on a range of benchmarks, including retrieval, linear evaluation, fine-tuning, and object detection. Our pre-trained encoders achieve state-of-the-art performance on many retrieval benchmarks and demonstrate increasing performance gains with more complex encoders.
Authors:Weichao Pan, Bohan Xu, Xu Wang, Chengze Lv, Shuoyang Wang, Zhenke Duan, Zhen Tian
Abstract:
Fire detection in dynamic environments faces continuous challenges, including the interference of illumination changes, many false detections or missed detections, and it is difficult to achieve both efficiency and accuracy. To address the problem of feature extraction limitation and information loss in the existing YOLO-based models, this study propose You Only Look Once for Fire Detection with Attention-guided Inverted Residual and Dual-pooling Downscale Fusion (YOLO-FireAD) with two core innovations: (1) Attention-guided Inverted Residual Block (AIR) integrates hybrid channel-spatial attention with inverted residuals to adaptively enhance fire features and suppress environmental noise; (2) Dual Pool Downscale Fusion Block (DPDF) preserves multi-scale fire patterns through learnable fusion of max-average pooling outputs, mitigating small-fire detection failures. Extensive evaluation on two public datasets shows the efficient performance of our model. Our proposed model keeps the sum amount of parameters (1.45M, 51.8% lower than YOLOv8n) (4.6G, 43.2% lower than YOLOv8n), and mAP75 is higher than the mainstream real-time object detection models YOLOv8n, YOL-Ov9t, YOLOv10n, YOLO11n, YOLOv12n and other YOLOv8 variants 1.3-5.5%. For more details, please visit our repository: https://github.com/JEFfersusu/YOLO-FireAD
Authors:Guiping Cao, Tao Wang, Wenjian Huang, Xiangyuan Lan, Jianguo Zhang, Dongmei Jiang
Abstract:
Open-Ended object Detection (OED) is a novel and challenging task that detects objects and generates their category names in a free-form manner, without requiring additional vocabularies during inference. However, the existing OED models, such as GenerateU, require large-scale datasets for training, suffer from slow convergence, and exhibit limited performance. To address these issues, we present a novel and efficient Open-Det framework, consisting of four collaborative parts. Specifically, Open-Det accelerates model training in both the bounding box and object name generation process by reconstructing the Object Detector and the Object Name Generator. To bridge the semantic gap between Vision and Language modalities, we propose a Vision-Language Aligner with V-to-L and L-to-V alignment mechanisms, incorporating with the Prompts Distiller to transfer knowledge from the VLM into VL-prompts, enabling accurate object name generation for the LLM. In addition, we design a Masked Alignment Loss to eliminate contradictory supervision and introduce a Joint Loss to enhance classification, resulting in more efficient training. Compared to GenerateU, Open-Det, using only 1.5% of the training data (0.077M vs. 5.077M), 20.8% of the training epochs (31 vs. 149), and fewer GPU resources (4 V100 vs. 16 A100), achieves even higher performance (+1.0% in APr). The source codes are available at: https://github.com/Med-Process/Open-Det.
Authors:Peter Robicheaux, Matvei Popov, Anish Madan, Isaac Robinson, Joseph Nelson, Deva Ramanan, Neehar Peri
Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) trained on internet-scale data achieve remarkable zero-shot detection performance on common objects like car, truck, and pedestrian. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution classes, tasks and imaging modalities not typically found in their pre-training. Rather than simply re-training VLMs on more visual data, we argue that one should align VLMs to new concepts with annotation instructions containing a few visual examples and rich textual descriptions. To this end, we introduce Roboflow100-VL, a large-scale collection of 100 multi-modal object detection datasets with diverse concepts not commonly found in VLM pre-training. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on our benchmark in zero-shot, few-shot, semi-supervised, and fully-supervised settings, allowing for comparison across data regimes. Notably, we find that VLMs like GroundingDINO and Qwen2.5-VL achieve less than 2% zero-shot accuracy on challenging medical imaging datasets within Roboflow100-VL, demonstrating the need for few-shot concept alignment. Lastly, we discuss our recent CVPR 2025 Foundational FSOD competition and share insights from the community. Notably, the winning team significantly outperforms our baseline by 16.8 mAP! Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/roboflow/rf100-vl/ and https://universe.roboflow.com/rf100-vl/
Authors:Yan Ma, Linge Du, Xuyang Shen, Shaoxiang Chen, Pengfei Li, Qibing Ren, Lizhuang Ma, Yuchao Dai, Pengfei Liu, Junjie Yan
Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, the use of RL beyond reasoning tasks remains largely unexplored, especially for perceptionintensive tasks like object detection and grounding. We propose V-Triune, a Visual Triple Unified Reinforcement Learning system that enables VLMs to jointly learn visual reasoning and perception tasks within a single training pipeline. V-Triune comprises triple complementary components: Sample-Level Data Formatting (to unify diverse task inputs), Verifier-Level Reward Computation (to deliver custom rewards via specialized verifiers) , and Source-Level Metric Monitoring (to diagnose problems at the data-source level). We further introduce a novel Dynamic IoU reward, which provides adaptive, progressive, and definite feedback for perception tasks handled by V-Triune. Our approach is instantiated within off-the-shelf RL training framework using open-source 7B and 32B backbone models. The resulting model, dubbed Orsta (One RL to See Them All), demonstrates consistent improvements across both reasoning and perception tasks. This broad capability is significantly shaped by its training on a diverse dataset, constructed around four representative visual reasoning tasks (Math, Puzzle, Chart, and Science) and four visual perception tasks (Grounding, Detection, Counting, and OCR). Subsequently, Orsta achieves substantial gains on MEGA-Bench Core, with improvements ranging from +2.1 to an impressive +14.1 across its various 7B and 32B model variants, with performance benefits extending to a wide range of downstream tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness and scalability of our unified RL approach for VLMs. The V-Triune system, along with the Orsta models, is publicly available at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI.
Authors:Shashank Agnihotri, David Schader, Jonas Jakubassa, Nico Sharei, Simon Kral, Mehmet Ege Kaçar, Ruben Weber, Margret Keuper
Abstract:
Reliability and generalization in deep learning are predominantly studied in the context of image classification. Yet, real-world applications in safety-critical domains involve a broader set of semantic tasks, such as semantic segmentation and object detection, which come with a diverse set of dedicated model architectures. To facilitate research towards robust model design in segmentation and detection, our primary objective is to provide benchmarking tools regarding robustness to distribution shifts and adversarial manipulations. We propose the benchmarking tools SEMSEGBENCH and DETECBENCH, along with the most extensive evaluation to date on the reliability and generalization of semantic segmentation and object detection models. In particular, we benchmark 76 segmentation models across four datasets and 61 object detectors across two datasets, evaluating their performance under diverse adversarial attacks and common corruptions. Our findings reveal systematic weaknesses in state-of-the-art models and uncover key trends based on architecture, backbone, and model capacity. SEMSEGBENCH and DETECBENCH are open-sourced in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/shashankskagnihotri/benchmarking_reliability_generalization) along with our complete set of total 6139 evaluations. We anticipate the collected data to foster and encourage future research towards improved model reliability beyond classification.
Authors:Yuanhao Huang, Yilong Ren, Jinlei Wang, Lujia Huo, Xuesong Bai, Jinchuan Zhang, Haiyan Yu
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles are typical complex intelligent systems with artificial intelligence at their core. However, perception methods based on deep learning are extremely vulnerable to adversarial samples, resulting in security accidents. How to generate effective adversarial examples in the physical world and evaluate object detection systems is a huge challenge. In this study, we propose a unified joint adversarial training framework for both 2D and 3D domains, which simultaneously optimizes texture maps in 2D image and 3D mesh spaces to better address intra-class diversity and real-world environmental variations. The framework includes a novel realistic enhanced adversarial module, with time-space and relighting mapping pipeline that adjusts illumination consistency between adversarial patches and target garments under varied viewpoints. Building upon this, we develop a realism enhancement mechanism that incorporates non-rigid deformation modeling and texture remapping to ensure alignment with the human body's non-rigid surfaces in 3D scenes. Extensive experiment results in digital and physical environments demonstrate that the adversarial textures generated by our method can effectively mislead the target detection model. Specifically, our method achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) of 70.13% on YOLOv12 in physical scenarios, significantly outperforming existing methods such as T-SEA (21.65%) and AdvTexture (19.70%). Moreover, the proposed method maintains stable ASR across multiple viewpoints and distances, with an average attack success rate exceeding 90% under both frontal and oblique views at a distance of 4 meters. This confirms the method's strong robustness and transferability under multi-angle attacks, varying lighting conditions, and real-world distances. The demo video and code can be obtained at https://github.com/Huangyh98/AdvReal.git.
Authors:Iuliia Kotseruba, John K. Tsotsos
Abstract:
Generalization of deep-learning-based (DL) computer vision algorithms to various image perturbations is hard to establish and remains an active area of research. The majority of past analyses focused on the images already captured, whereas effects of the image formation pipeline and environment are less studied. In this paper, we address this issue by analyzing the impact of capture conditions, such as camera parameters and lighting, on DL model performance on 3 vision tasks -- image classification, object detection, and visual question answering (VQA). To this end, we assess capture bias in common vision datasets and create a new benchmark, SNAP (for $\textbf{S}$hutter speed, ISO se$\textbf{N}$sitivity, and $\textbf{AP}$erture), consisting of images of objects taken under controlled lighting conditions and with densely sampled camera settings. We then evaluate a large number of DL vision models and show the effects of capture conditions on each selected vision task. Lastly, we conduct an experiment to establish a human baseline for the VQA task. Our results show that computer vision datasets are significantly biased, the models trained on this data do not reach human accuracy even on the well-exposed images, and are susceptible to both major exposure changes and minute variations of camera settings. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/ykotseruba/SNAP
Authors:Seongmin Hwang, Daeyoung Han, Moongu Jeon
Abstract:
Multispectral object detection aims to leverage complementary information from visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) modalities to enable robust performance under diverse environmental conditions. Our key insight, derived from wavelet analysis and empirical observations, is that IR images contain structurally rich high-frequency information critical for object detection, making an infrared-centric approach highly effective. To capitalize on this finding, we propose Infrared-Centric Fusion (IC-Fusion), a lightweight and modality-aware sensor fusion method that prioritizes infrared features while effectively integrating complementary RGB semantic context. IC-Fusion adopts a compact RGB backbone and designs a novel fusion module comprising a Multi-Scale Feature Distillation (MSFD) block to enhance RGB features and a three-stage fusion block with a Cross-Modal Channel Shuffle Gate (CCSG), a Cross-Modal Large Kernel Gate (CLKG), and a Channel Shuffle Projection (CSP) to facilitate effective cross-modal interaction. Experiments on the FLIR and LLVIP benchmarks demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of our IR-centric fusion strategy, further validating its benefits. Our code is available at https://github.com/smin-hwang/IC-Fusion.
Authors:Hongjun Choi, Eun Som Jeon, Ankita Shukla, Pavan Turaga
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a valuable technique for compressing large deep learning models into smaller, edge-suitable networks. However, conventional KD frameworks rely on pre-trained high-capacity teacher networks, which introduce significant challenges such as increased memory/storage requirements, additional training costs, and ambiguity in selecting an appropriate teacher for a given student model. Although a teacher-free distillation (self-distillation) has emerged as a promising alternative, many existing approaches still rely on architectural modifications or complex training procedures, which limit their generality and efficiency.
To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework based on teacher-free distillation that operates using a single student network without any auxiliary components, architectural modifications, or additional learnable parameters. Our approach is built on a simple yet highly effective augmentation, called intra-class patch swap augmentation. This augmentation simulates a teacher-student dynamic within a single model by generating pairs of intra-class samples with varying confidence levels, and then applying instance-to-instance distillation to align their predictive distributions. Our method is conceptually simple, model-agnostic, and easy to implement, requiring only a single augmentation function. Extensive experiments across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection show that our method consistently outperforms both existing self-distillation baselines and conventional teacher-based KD approaches. These results suggest that the success of self-distillation could hinge on the design of the augmentation itself. Our codes are available at https://github.com/hchoi71/Intra-class-Patch-Swap.
Authors:Xiao Wang, Yu Jin, Lan Chen, Bo Jiang, Lin Zhu, Yonghong Tian, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Event-based Vision Sensors (EVS) have demonstrated significant advantages over traditional RGB frame-based cameras in low-light conditions, high-speed motion capture, and low latency. Consequently, object detection based on EVS has attracted increasing attention from researchers. Current event stream object detection algorithms are typically built upon Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformers, which either capture limited local features using convolutional filters or incur high computational costs due to the utilization of self-attention. Recently proposed vision heat conduction backbone networks have shown a good balance between efficiency and accuracy; however, these models are not specifically designed for event stream data. They exhibit weak capability in modeling object contour information and fail to exploit the benefits of multi-scale features. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel dynamic graph induced contour-aware heat conduction network for event stream based object detection, termed CvHeat-DET. The proposed model effectively leverages the clear contour information inherent in event streams to predict the thermal diffusivity coefficients within the heat conduction model, and integrates hierarchical structural graph features to enhance feature learning across multiple scales. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets for event stream-based object detection fully validated the effectiveness of the proposed model. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvDET.
Authors:Hulin Li
Abstract:
Multi-head detectors typically employ a features-fused-pyramid-neck for multi-scale detection and are widely adopted in the industry. However, this approach faces feature misalignment when representations from different hierarchical levels of the feature pyramid are forcibly fused point-to-point. To address this issue, we designed an independent hierarchy pyramid (IHP) architecture to evaluate the effectiveness of the features-unfused-pyramid-neck for multi-head detectors. Subsequently, we introduced soft nearest neighbor interpolation (SNI) with a weight downscaling factor to mitigate the impact of feature fusion at different hierarchies while preserving key textures. Furthermore, we present a features adaptive selection method for down sampling in extended spatial windows (ESD) to retain spatial features and enhance lightweight convolutional techniques (GSConvE). These advancements culminate in our secondary features alignment solution (SA) for real-time detection, achieving state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC and MS COCO. Code will be released at https://github.com/AlanLi1997/rethinking-fpn. This paper has been accepted by ECCV2024 and published on Springer Nature.
Authors:Chao Wang, Wei Lu, Xiang Li, Jian Yang, Lei Luo
Abstract:
Single-source remote sensing object detection using optical or SAR images struggles in complex environments. Optical images offer rich textural details but are often affected by low-light, cloud-obscured, or low-resolution conditions, reducing the detection performance. SAR images are robust to weather, but suffer from speckle noise and limited semantic expressiveness. Optical and SAR images provide complementary advantages, and fusing them can significantly improve the detection accuracy. However, progress in this field is hindered by the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we propose the first comprehensive dataset for optical-SAR fusion object detection, named Multi-resolution, Multi-polarization, Multi-scene, Multi-source SAR dataset (M4-SAR). It contains 112,184 precisely aligned image pairs and nearly one million labeled instances with arbitrary orientations, spanning six key categories. To enable standardized evaluation, we develop a unified benchmarking toolkit that integrates six state-of-the-art multi-source fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose E2E-OSDet, a novel end-to-end multi-source fusion detection framework that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies and establishes a robust baseline for future studies. Extensive experiments on M4-SAR demonstrate that fusing optical and SAR data can improve $mAP$ by 5.7\% over single-source inputs, with particularly significant gains in complex environments. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/wchao0601/M4-SAR.
Authors:Jianlin Sun, Xiaolin Fang, Juwei Guan, Dongdong Gui, Teqi Wang, Tongxin Zhu
Abstract:
The core challenge in Camouflage Object Detection (COD) lies in the indistinguishable similarity between targets and backgrounds in terms of color, texture, and shape. This causes existing methods to either lose edge details (such as hair-like fine structures) due to over-reliance on global semantic information or be disturbed by similar backgrounds (such as vegetation patterns) when relying solely on local features. We propose DRRNet, a four-stage architecture characterized by a "context-detail-fusion-refinement" pipeline to address these issues. Specifically, we introduce an Omni-Context Feature Extraction Module to capture global camouflage patterns and a Local Detail Extraction Module to supplement microstructural information for the full-scene context module. We then design a module for forming dual representations of scene understanding and structural awareness, which fuses panoramic features and local features across various scales. In the decoder, we also introduce a reverse refinement module that leverages spatial edge priors and frequency-domain noise suppression to perform a two-stage inverse refinement of the output. By applying two successive rounds of inverse refinement, the model effectively suppresses background interference and enhances the continuity of object boundaries. Experimental results demonstrate that DRRNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jerrySunning/DRRNet.
Authors:Xiao Ni, Carsten Kuehnel, Xiaoyi Jiang
Abstract:
Rapid advances in deep learning for computer vision have driven the adoption of RGB camera-based adaptive traffic light systems to improve traffic safety and pedestrian comfort. However, these systems often overlook the needs of people with mobility restrictions. Moreover, the use of RGB cameras presents significant challenges, including limited detection performance under adverse weather or low-visibility conditions, as well as heightened privacy concerns. To address these issues, we propose a fully automated, thermal detector-based traffic light system that dynamically adjusts signal durations for individuals with walking impairments or mobility burden and triggers the auditory signal for visually impaired individuals, thereby advancing towards barrier-free intersection for all users. To this end, we build the thermal dataset for people with mobility restrictions (TD4PWMR), designed to capture diverse pedestrian scenarios, particularly focusing on individuals with mobility aids or mobility burden under varying environmental conditions, such as different lighting, weather, and crowded urban settings. While thermal imaging offers advantages in terms of privacy and robustness to adverse conditions, it also introduces inherent hurdles for object detection due to its lack of color and fine texture details and generally lower resolution of thermal images. To overcome these limitations, we develop YOLO-Thermal, a novel variant of the YOLO architecture that integrates advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms for enhanced detection accuracy and robustness in thermal imaging. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed thermal detector outperforms existing detectors, while the proposed traffic light system effectively enhances barrier-free intersection. The source codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/leon2014dresden/YOLO-THERMAL.
Authors:Kamil Jeziorek, Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract:
Event cameras offer significant advantages over traditional frame-based sensors. These include microsecond temporal resolution, robustness under varying lighting conditions and low power consumption. Nevertheless, the effective processing of their sparse, asynchronous event streams remains challenging. Existing approaches to this problem can be categorised into two distinct groups. The first group involves the direct processing of event data with neural models, such as Spiking Neural Networks or Graph Convolutional Neural Networks. However, this approach is often accompanied by a compromise in terms of qualitative performance. The second group involves the conversion of events into dense representations with handcrafted aggregation functions, which can boost accuracy at the cost of temporal fidelity. This paper introduces a novel Self-Supervised Event Representation (SSER) method leveraging Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks to achieve precise per-pixel encoding of event timestamps and polarities without temporal discretisation. The recurrent layers are trained in a self-supervised manner to maximise the fidelity of event-time encoding. The inference is performed with event representations generated asynchronously, thus ensuring compatibility with high-throughput sensors. The experimental validation demonstrates that SSER outperforms aggregation-based baselines, achieving improvements of 2.4% mAP and 0.6% on the Gen1 and 1 Mpx object detection datasets. Furthermore, the paper presents the first hardware implementation of recurrent representation for event data on a System-on-Chip FPGA, achieving sub-microsecond latency and power consumption between 1-2 W, suitable for real-time, power-efficient applications. Code is available at https://github.com/vision-agh/RecRepEvent.
Authors:Hongda Qin, Xiao Lu, Zhiyong Wei, Yihong Cao, Kailun Yang, Ningjiang Chen
Abstract:
Generalizing an object detector trained on a single domain to multiple unseen domains is a challenging task. Existing methods typically introduce image or feature augmentation to diversify the source domain to raise the robustness of the detector. Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based augmentation techniques have been proven to be effective, but they require that the detector's backbone has the same structure as the image encoder of VLM, limiting the detector framework selection. To address this problem, we propose Language-Driven Dual Style Mixing (LDDS) for single-domain generalization, which diversifies the source domain by fully utilizing the semantic information of the VLM. Specifically, we first construct prompts to transfer style semantics embedded in the VLM to an image translation network. This facilitates the generation of style diversified images with explicit semantic information. Then, we propose image-level style mixing between the diversified images and source domain images. This effectively mines the semantic information for image augmentation without relying on specific augmentation selections. Finally, we propose feature-level style mixing in a double-pipeline manner, allowing feature augmentation to be model-agnostic and can work seamlessly with the mainstream detector frameworks, including the one-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across various benchmark datasets, including real to cartoon and normal to adverse weather tasks. The source code and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/qinhongda8/LDDS.
Authors:Morui Zhu, Yongqi Zhu, Yihao Zhu, Qi Chen, Deyuan Qu, Song Fu, Qing Yang
Abstract:
We introduce M$^3$CAD, a novel benchmark designed to advance research in generic cooperative autonomous driving. M$^3$CAD comprises 204 sequences with 30k frames, spanning a diverse range of cooperative driving scenarios. Each sequence includes multiple vehicles and sensing modalities, e.g., LiDAR point clouds, RGB images, and GPS/IMU, supporting a variety of autonomous driving tasks, including object detection and tracking, mapping, motion forecasting, occupancy prediction, and path planning. This rich multimodal setup enables M$^3$CAD to support both single-vehicle and multi-vehicle autonomous driving research, significantly broadening the scope of research in the field. To our knowledge, M$^3$CAD is the most comprehensive benchmark specifically tailored for cooperative multi-task autonomous driving research. We evaluate the state-of-the-art end-to-end solution on M$^3$CAD to establish baseline performance. To foster cooperative autonomous driving research, we also propose E2EC, a simple yet effective framework for cooperative driving solution that leverages inter-vehicle shared information for improved path planning. We release M$^3$CAD, along with our baseline models and evaluation results, to support the development of robust cooperative autonomous driving systems. All resources will be made publicly available on https://github.com/zhumorui/M3CAD
Authors:Zhangchi Hu, Peixi Wu, Jie Chen, Huyue Zhu, Yijun Wang, Yansong Peng, Hebei Li, Xiaoyan Sun
Abstract:
Tiny object detection plays a vital role in drone surveillance, remote sensing, and autonomous systems, enabling the identification of small targets across vast landscapes. However, existing methods suffer from inefficient feature leverage and high computational costs due to redundant feature processing and rigid query allocation. To address these challenges, we propose Dome-DETR, a novel framework with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection. To reduce feature redundancies, we introduce a lightweight Density-Focal Extractor (DeFE) to produce clustered compact foreground masks. Leveraging these masks, we incorporate Masked Window Attention Sparsification (MWAS) to focus computational resources on the most informative regions via sparse attention. Besides, we propose Progressive Adaptive Query Initialization (PAQI), which adaptively modulates query density across spatial areas for better query allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dome-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance (+3.3 AP on AI-TOD-V2 and +2.5 AP on VisDrone) while maintaining low computational complexity and a compact model size. Code is available at https://github.com/RicePasteM/Dome-DETR.
Authors:Ho-Joong Kim, Yearang Lee, Jung-Ho Hong, Seong-Whan Lee
Abstract:
In this paper, we examine a key limitation in query-based detectors for temporal action detection (TAD), which arises from their direct adaptation of originally designed architectures for object detection. Despite the effectiveness of the existing models, they struggle to fully address the unique challenges of TAD, such as the redundancy in multi-scale features and the limited ability to capture sufficient temporal context. To address these issues, we propose a multi-dilated gated encoder and central-adjacent region integrated decoder for temporal action detection transformer (DiGIT). Our approach replaces the existing encoder that consists of multi-scale deformable attention and feedforward network with our multi-dilated gated encoder. Our proposed encoder reduces the redundant information caused by multi-level features while maintaining the ability to capture fine-grained and long-range temporal information. Furthermore, we introduce a central-adjacent region integrated decoder that leverages a more comprehensive sampling strategy for deformable cross-attention to capture the essential information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiGIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14, ActivityNet v1.3, and HACS-Segment. Code is available at: https://github.com/Dotori-HJ/DiGIT
Authors:Chunyu Xie, Bin Wang, Fanjing Kong, Jincheng Li, Dawei Liang, Gengshen Zhang, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin
Abstract:
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification but struggles with fine-grained understanding due to its focus on coarse-grained short captions. To address this, we propose Fine-Grained CLIP (FG-CLIP), which enhances fine-grained understanding through three key innovations. First, we leverage large multimodal models to generate 1.6 billion long caption-image pairs for capturing global-level semantic details. Second, a high-quality dataset is constructed with 12 million images and 40 million region-specific bounding boxes aligned with detailed captions to ensure precise, context-rich representations. Third, 10 million hard fine-grained negative samples are incorporated to improve the model's ability to distinguish subtle semantic differences. We construct a comprehensive dataset, termed FineHARD, by integrating high-quality region-specific annotations with hard fine-grained negative samples. Corresponding training methods are meticulously designed for these data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FG-CLIP outperforms the original CLIP and other state-of-the-art methods across various downstream tasks, including fine-grained understanding, open-vocabulary object detection, image-text retrieval, and general multimodal benchmarks. These results highlight FG-CLIP's effectiveness in capturing fine-grained image details and improving overall model performance. The data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/FG-CLIP.
Authors:Junjie Wang, Bin Chen, Yulin Li, Bin Kang, Yichi Chen, Zhuotao Tian
Abstract:
Dense visual prediction tasks have been constrained by their reliance on predefined categories, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where visual concepts are unbounded. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown promise in open-vocabulary tasks, their direct application to dense prediction often leads to suboptimal performance due to limitations in local feature representation. In this work, we present our observation that CLIP's image tokens struggle to effectively aggregate information from spatially or semantically related regions, resulting in features that lack local discriminability and spatial consistency. To address this issue, we propose DeCLIP, a novel framework that enhances CLIP by decoupling the self-attention module to obtain ``content'' and ``context'' features respectively. The ``content'' features are aligned with image crop representations to improve local discriminability, while ``context'' features learn to retain the spatial correlations under the guidance of vision foundation models, such as DINO. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeCLIP significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks, including object detection and semantic segmentation. Code is available at \textcolor{magenta}{https://github.com/xiaomoguhz/DeCLIP}.
Authors:Pau Amargant, Peter Hönig, Markus Vincze
Abstract:
The verification of successful grasps is a crucial aspect of robot manipulation, particularly when handling deformable objects. Traditional methods relying on force and tactile sensors often struggle with deformable and non-rigid objects. In this work, we present a vision-based approach for grasp verification to determine whether the robotic gripper has successfully grasped an object. Our method employs a two-stage architecture; first YOLO-based object detection model to detect and locate the robot's gripper and then a ResNet-based classifier determines the presence of an object. To address the limitations of real-world data capture, we introduce HSR-GraspSynth, a synthetic dataset designed to simulate diverse grasping scenarios. Furthermore, we explore the use of Visual Question Answering capabilities as a zero-shot baseline to which we compare our model. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high accuracy in real-world environments, with potential for integration into grasping pipelines. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/pauamargant/HSR-GraspSynth .
Authors:Wenqi Guo, Mohamed Shehata, Shan Du
Abstract:
Camouflaged object segmentation presents unique challenges compared to traditional segmentation tasks, primarily due to the high similarity in patterns and colors between camouflaged objects and their backgrounds. Effective solutions to this problem have significant implications in critical areas such as pest control, defect detection, and lesion segmentation in medical imaging. Prior research has predominantly emphasized supervised or unsupervised pre-training methods, leaving zero-shot approaches significantly underdeveloped. Existing zero-shot techniques commonly utilize the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in automatic mode or rely on vision-language models to generate cues for segmentation; however, their performances remain unsatisfactory, due to the similarity of the camouflaged object and the background. This work studies how to avoid training by integrating large pre-trained models like SAM-2 and Owl-v2 with temporal information into a modular pipeline. Evaluated on the MoCA-Mask dataset, our approach achieves outstanding performance improvements, significantly outperforming existing zero-shot methods by raising the F-measure ($F_β^w$) from 0.296 to 0.628. Our approach also surpasses supervised methods, increasing the F-measure from 0.476 to 0.628. Additionally, evaluation on the MoCA-Filter dataset demonstrates an increase in the success rate from 0.628 to 0.697 when compared with FlowSAM, a supervised transfer method. A thorough ablation study further validates the individual contributions of each component. Besides our main contributions, we also highlight inconsistencies in previous work regarding metrics and settings. Code can be found in https://github.com/weathon/vcos.
Authors:Muyi Bao, Shuchang Lyu, Zhaoyang Xu, Huiyu Zhou, Jinchang Ren, Shiming Xiang, Xiangtai Li, Guangliang Cheng
Abstract:
Deep learning has profoundly transformed remote sensing, yet prevailing architectures like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) remain constrained by critical trade-offs: CNNs suffer from limited receptive fields, while ViTs grapple with quadratic computational complexity, hindering their scalability for high-resolution remote sensing data. State Space Models (SSMs), particularly the recently proposed Mamba architecture, have emerged as a paradigm-shifting solution, combining linear computational scaling with global context modeling. This survey presents a comprehensive review of Mamba-based methodologies in remote sensing, systematically analyzing about 120 Mamba-based remote sensing studies to construct a holistic taxonomy of innovations and applications. Our contributions are structured across five dimensions: (i) foundational principles of vision Mamba architectures, (ii) micro-architectural advancements such as adaptive scan strategies and hybrid SSM formulations, (iii) macro-architectural integrations, including CNN-Transformer-Mamba hybrids and frequency-domain adaptations, (iv) rigorous benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods in multiple application tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, change detection, etc. and (v) critical analysis of unresolved challenges with actionable future directions. By bridging the gap between SSM theory and remote sensing practice, this survey establishes Mamba as a transformative framework for remote sensing analysis. To our knowledge, this paper is the first systematic review of Mamba architectures in remote sensing. Our work provides a structured foundation for advancing research in remote sensing systems through SSM-based methods. We curate an open-source repository (https://github.com/BaoBao0926/Awesome-Mamba-in-Remote-Sensing) to foster community-driven advancements.
Authors:Jorgen Cani, Christos Diou, Spyridon Evangelatos, Panagiotis Radoglou-Grammatikis, Vasileios Argyriou, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Iraklis Varlamis, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos
Abstract:
In the field of X-ray security applications, even the smallest details can significantly impact outcomes. Objects that are heavily occluded or intentionally concealed pose a great challenge for detection, whether by human observation or through advanced technological applications. While certain Deep Learning (DL) architectures demonstrate strong performance in processing local information, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), others excel in handling distant information, e.g., transformers. In X-ray security imaging the literature has been dominated by the use of CNN-based methods, while the integration of the two aforementioned leading architectures has not been sufficiently explored. In this paper, various hybrid CNN-transformer architectures are evaluated against a common CNN object detection baseline, namely YOLOv8. In particular, a CNN (HGNetV2) and a hybrid CNN-transformer (Next-ViT-S) backbone are combined with different CNN/transformer detection heads (YOLOv8 and RT-DETR). The resulting architectures are comparatively evaluated on three challenging public X-ray inspection datasets, namely EDS, HiXray, and PIDray. Interestingly, while the YOLOv8 detector with its default backbone (CSP-DarkNet53) is generally shown to be advantageous on the HiXray and PIDray datasets, when a domain distribution shift is incorporated in the X-ray images (as happens in the EDS datasets), hybrid CNN-transformer architectures exhibit increased robustness. Detailed comparative evaluation results, including object-level detection performance and object-size error analysis, demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of each architectural combination and suggest guidelines for future research. The source code and network weights of the models employed in this study are available at https://github.com/jgenc/xray-comparative-evaluation.
Authors:Marc Glocker, Peter Hönig, Matthias Hirschmanner, Markus Vincze
Abstract:
We present an embodied robotic system with an LLM-driven agent-orchestration architecture for autonomous household object management. The system integrates memory-augmented task planning, enabling robots to execute high-level user commands while tracking past actions. It employs three specialized agents: a routing agent, a task planning agent, and a knowledge base agent, each powered by task-specific LLMs. By leveraging in-context learning, our system avoids the need for explicit model training. RAG enables the system to retrieve context from past interactions, enhancing long-term object tracking. A combination of Grounded SAM and LLaMa3.2-Vision provides robust object detection, facilitating semantic scene understanding for task planning. Evaluation across three household scenarios demonstrates high task planning accuracy and an improvement in memory recall due to RAG. Specifically, Qwen2.5 yields best performance for specialized agents, while LLaMA3.1 excels in routing tasks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/marc1198/chat-hsr.
Authors:Loc Phuc Truong Nguyen, Hung Truong Thanh Nguyen, Hung Cao
Abstract:
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques for interpreting object detection models remain in an early stage, with no established standards for systematic evaluation. This absence of consensus hinders both the comparative analysis of methods and the informed selection of suitable approaches. To address this gap, we introduce the Object Detection Explainable AI Evaluation (ODExAI), a comprehensive framework designed to assess XAI methods in object detection based on three core dimensions: localization accuracy, faithfulness to model behavior, and computational complexity. We benchmark a set of XAI methods across two widely used object detectors (YOLOX and Faster R-CNN) and standard datasets (MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC). Empirical results demonstrate that region-based methods (e.g., D-CLOSE) achieve strong localization (PG = 88.49%) and high model faithfulness (OA = 0.863), though with substantial computational overhead (Time = 71.42s). On the other hand, CAM-based methods (e.g., G-CAME) achieve superior localization (PG = 96.13%) and significantly lower runtime (Time = 0.54s), but at the expense of reduced faithfulness (OA = 0.549). These findings demonstrate critical trade-offs among existing XAI approaches and reinforce the need for task-specific evaluation when deploying them in object detection pipelines. Our implementation and evaluation benchmarks are publicly available at: https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/odexai.
Authors:Ryo Yamaki, Shintaro Shiba, Guillermo Gallego, Yoshimitsu Aoki
Abstract:
Event cameras provide rich signals that are suitable for motion estimation since they respond to changes in the scene. As any visual changes in the scene produce event data, it is paramount to classify the data into different motions (i.e., motion segmentation), which is useful for various tasks such as object detection and visual servoing. We propose an iterative motion segmentation method, by classifying events into background (e.g., dominant motion hypothesis) and foreground (independent motion residuals), thus extending the Contrast Maximization framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully classifies event clusters both for public and self-recorded datasets, producing sharp, motion-compensated edge-like images. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on moving object detection benchmarks with an improvement of over 30%, and demonstrates its possibility of applying to more complex and noisy real-world scenes. We hope this work broadens the sensitivity of Contrast Maximization with respect to both motion parameters and input events, thus contributing to theoretical advancements in event-based motion segmentation estimation. https://github.com/aoki-media-lab/event_based_segmentation_vcmax
Authors:Jiahao Zhang, Bowen Wang, Hong Liu, Liangzhi Li, Yuta Nakashima, Hajime Nagahara
Abstract:
Large-scale models trained on extensive datasets have become the standard due to their strong generalizability across diverse tasks. In-context learning (ICL), widely used in natural language processing, leverages these models by providing task-specific prompts without modifying their parameters. This paradigm is increasingly being adapted for computer vision, where models receive an input-output image pair, known as an in-context pair, alongside a query image to illustrate the desired output. However, the success of visual ICL largely hinges on the quality of these prompts. To address this, we propose Enhanced Instruct Me More (E-InMeMo), a novel approach that incorporates learnable perturbations into in-context pairs to optimize prompting. Through extensive experiments on standard vision tasks, E-InMeMo demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it improves mIoU scores by 7.99 for foreground segmentation and by 17.04 for single object detection when compared to the baseline without learnable prompts. These results highlight E-InMeMo as a lightweight yet effective strategy for enhancing visual ICL. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Jackieam/E-InMeMo
Authors:Yinqi Li, Hong Chang, Ruibing Hou, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Abstract:
Diffusion models have shown remarkable progress in various generative tasks such as image and video generation. This paper studies the problem of leveraging pretrained diffusion models for performing discriminative tasks. Specifically, we extend the discriminative capability of pretrained frozen generative diffusion models from the classification task to the more complex object detection task, by "inverting" a pretrained layout-to-image diffusion model. To this end, a gradient-based discrete optimization approach for replacing the heavy prediction enumeration process, and a prior distribution model for making more accurate use of the Bayes' rule, are proposed respectively. Empirical results show that this method is on par with basic discriminative object detection baselines on COCO dataset. In addition, our method can greatly speed up the previous diffusion-based method for classification without sacrificing accuracy. Code and models are available at https://github.com/LiYinqi/DIVE .
Authors:Manjunath D, Aniruddh Sikdar, Prajwal Gurunath, Sumanth Udupa, Suresh Sundaram
Abstract:
Domain-adaptive thermal object detection plays a key role in facilitating visible (RGB)-to-thermal (IR) adaptation by reducing the need for co-registered image pairs and minimizing reliance on large annotated IR datasets. However, inherent limitations of IR images, such as the lack of color and texture cues, pose challenges for RGB-trained models, leading to increased false positives and poor-quality pseudo-labels. To address this, we propose Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation (SAGA), a novel strategy for mitigating color bias and bridging the domain gap by extracting object-level features relevant to IR images. Additionally, to validate the proposed SAGA for drone imagery, we introduce the IndraEye, a multi-sensor (RGB-IR) dataset designed for diverse applications. The dataset contains 5,612 images with 145,666 instances, captured from diverse angles, altitudes, backgrounds, and times of day, offering valuable opportunities for multimodal learning, domain adaptation for object detection and segmentation, and exploration of sensor-specific strengths and weaknesses. IndraEye aims to enhance the development of more robust and accurate aerial perception systems, especially in challenging environments. Experimental results show that SAGA significantly improves RGB-to-IR adaptation for autonomous driving and IndraEye dataset, achieving consistent performance gains of +0.4% to +7.6% (mAP) when integrated with state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/airliisc/IndraEye.
Authors:Tajamul Ashraf, Rajes Manna, Partha Sarathi Purkayastha, Tavaheed Tariq, Janibul Bashir
Abstract:
We focus on the Source Free Object Detection (SFOD) problem, when source data is unavailable during adaptation, and the model must adapt to the unlabeled target domain. In medical imaging, several approaches have leveraged a semi-supervised student-teacher architecture to bridge domain discrepancy. Context imbalance in labeled training data and significant domain shifts between domains can lead to biased teacher models that produce inaccurate pseudolabels, degrading the student model's performance and causing a mode collapse. Class imbalance, particularly when one class significantly outnumbers another, leads to contextual bias. To tackle the problem of context bias and the significant performance drop of the student model in the SFOD setting, we introduce Grounded Teacher (GT) as a standard framework. In this study, we model contextual relationships using a dedicated relational context module and leverage it to mitigate inherent biases in the model. This approach enables us to apply augmentations to closely related classes, across and within domains, enhancing the performance of underrepresented classes while keeping the effect on dominant classes minimal. We further improve the quality of predictions by implementing an expert foundational branch to supervise the student model. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating context bias under the SFOD setting through experiments on three medical datasets supported by comprehensive ablation studies. All relevant resources, including preprocessed data, trained model weights, and code, are publicly available at this https://github.com/Tajamul21/Grounded_Teacher.
Authors:Jie Wang, Nana Yu, Zihao Zhang, Yahong Han
Abstract:
Existing co-salient object detection (CoSOD) methods generally employ a three-stage architecture (i.e., encoding, consensus extraction & dispersion, and prediction) along with a typical full fine-tuning paradigm. Although they yield certain benefits, they exhibit two notable limitations: 1) This architecture relies on encoded features to facilitate consensus extraction, but the meticulously extracted consensus does not provide timely guidance to the encoding stage. 2) This paradigm involves globally updating all parameters of the model, which is parameter-inefficient and hinders the effective representation of knowledge within the foundation model for this task. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an interaction-effective and parameter-efficient concise architecture for the CoSOD task, addressing two key limitations. It introduces, for the first time, a parameter-efficient prompt tuning paradigm and seamlessly embeds consensus into the prompts to formulate task-specific Visual Consensus Prompts (VCP). Our VCP aims to induce the frozen foundation model to perform better on CoSOD tasks by formulating task-specific visual consensus prompts with minimized tunable parameters. Concretely, the primary insight of the purposeful Consensus Prompt Generator (CPG) is to enforce limited tunable parameters to focus on co-salient representations and generate consensus prompts. The formulated Consensus Prompt Disperser (CPD) leverages consensus prompts to form task-specific visual consensus prompts, thereby arousing the powerful potential of pre-trained models in addressing CoSOD tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our concise VCP outperforms 13 cutting-edge full fine-tuning models, achieving the new state of the art (with 6.8% improvement in F_m metrics on the most challenging CoCA dataset). Source code has been available at https://github.com/WJ-CV/VCP.
Authors:Yushen He, Lei Zhao, Tianchen Deng, Zipeng Fang, Weidong Chen
Abstract:
Service mobile robots are often required to avoid dynamic objects while performing their tasks, but they usually have only limited computational resources. So we present a lightweight multi-modal framework for 3D object detection and trajectory prediction. Our system synergistically integrates LiDAR and camera inputs to achieve real-time perception of pedestrians, vehicles, and riders in 3D space. The framework proposes two novel modules: 1) a Cross-Modal Deformable Transformer (CMDT) for object detection with high accuracy and acceptable amount of computation, and 2) a Reference Trajectory-based Multi-Class Transformer (RTMCT) for efficient and diverse trajectory prediction of mult-class objects with flexible trajectory lengths. Evaluations on the CODa benchmark demonstrate superior performance over existing methods across detection (+2.03% in mAP) and trajectory prediction (-0.408m in minADE5 of pedestrians) metrics. Remarkably, the system exhibits exceptional deployability - when implemented on a wheelchair robot with an entry-level NVIDIA 3060 GPU, it achieves real-time inference at 13.2 fps. To facilitate reproducibility and practical deployment, we release the related code of the method at https://github.com/TossherO/3D_Perception and its ROS inference version at https://github.com/TossherO/ros_packages.
Authors:Shashank Shriram, Srinivasa Perisetla, Aryan Keskar, Harsha Krishnaswamy, Tonko Emil Westerhof Bossen, Andreas Møgelmose, Ross Greer
Abstract:
Detecting anomalous hazards in visual data, particularly in video streams, is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. Existing models often struggle with unpredictable, out-of-label hazards due to their reliance on predefined object categories. In this paper, we propose a multimodal approach that integrates vision-language reasoning with zero-shot object detection to improve hazard identification and explanation. Our pipeline consists of a Vision-Language Model (VLM), a Large Language Model (LLM), in order to detect hazardous objects within a traffic scene. We refine object detection by incorporating OpenAI's CLIP model to match predicted hazards with bounding box annotations, improving localization accuracy. To assess model performance, we create a ground truth dataset by denoising and extending the foundational COOOL (Challenge-of-Out-of-Label) anomaly detection benchmark dataset with complete natural language descriptions for hazard annotations. We define a means of hazard detection and labeling evaluation on the extended dataset using cosine similarity. This evaluation considers the semantic similarity between the predicted hazard description and the annotated ground truth for each video. Additionally, we release a set of tools for structuring and managing large-scale hazard detection datasets. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of current vision-language-based approaches, offering insights into future improvements in autonomous hazard detection systems. Our models, scripts, and data can be found at https://github.com/mi3labucm/COOOLER.git
Authors:Huaxiang Zhang, Hao Zhang, Aoran Mei, Zhongxue Gan, Guo-Niu Zhu
Abstract:
Detection Transformer-based methods have achieved significant advancements in general object detection. However, challenges remain in effectively detecting small objects. One key difficulty is that existing encoders struggle to efficiently fuse low-level features. Additionally, the query selection strategies are not effectively tailored for small objects. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient model, Small Object Detection Transformer (SO-DETR). The model comprises three key components: a dual-domain hybrid encoder, an enhanced query selection mechanism, and a knowledge distillation strategy. The dual-domain hybrid encoder integrates spatial and frequency domains to fuse multi-scale features effectively. This approach enhances the representation of high-resolution features while maintaining relatively low computational overhead. The enhanced query selection mechanism optimizes query initialization by dynamically selecting high-scoring anchor boxes using expanded IoU, thereby improving the allocation of query resources. Furthermore, by incorporating a lightweight backbone network and implementing a knowledge distillation strategy, we develop an efficient detector for small objects. Experimental results on the VisDrone-2019-DET and UAVVaste datasets demonstrate that SO-DETR outperforms existing methods with similar computational demands. The project page is available at https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/SO_DETR.
Authors:Hyejin Lee, Seokjun Hong, Jeonghoon Song, Haechan Cho, Zhixiong Jin, Byeonghun Kim, Joobin Jin, Jaegyun Im, Byeongjoon Noh, Hwasoo Yeo
Abstract:
Reliable traffic data are essential for understanding urban mobility and developing effective traffic management strategies. This study introduces the DRone-derived Intelligence For Traffic analysis (DRIFT) dataset, a large-scale urban traffic dataset collected systematically from synchronized drone videos at approximately 250 meters altitude, covering nine interconnected intersections in Daejeon, South Korea. DRIFT provides high-resolution vehicle trajectories that include directional information, processed through video synchronization and orthomap alignment, resulting in a comprehensive dataset of 81,699 vehicle trajectories. Through our DRIFT dataset, researchers can simultaneously analyze traffic at multiple scales - from individual vehicle maneuvers like lane-changes and safety metrics such as time-to-collision to aggregate network flow dynamics across interconnected urban intersections. The DRIFT dataset is structured to enable immediate use without additional preprocessing, complemented by open-source models for object detection and trajectory extraction, as well as associated analytical tools. DRIFT is expected to significantly contribute to academic research and practical applications, such as traffic flow analysis and simulation studies. The dataset and related resources are publicly accessible at https://github.com/AIxMobility/The-DRIFT.
Authors:Yao Yuan, Pan Gao, Qun Dai, Jie Qin, Wei Xiang
Abstract:
Recently, salient object detection (SOD) methods have achieved impressive performance. However, salient regions predicted by existing methods usually contain unsaturated regions and shadows, which limits the model for reliable fine-grained predictions. To address this, we introduce the uncertainty guidance learning approach to SOD, intended to enhance the model's perception of uncertain regions. Specifically, we design a novel Uncertainty Guided Refinement Attention Network (UGRAN), which incorporates three important components, i.e., the Multilevel Interaction Attention (MIA) module, the Scale Spatial-Consistent Attention (SSCA) module, and the Uncertainty Refinement Attention (URA) module. Unlike conventional methods dedicated to enhancing features, the proposed MIA facilitates the interaction and perception of multilevel features, leveraging the complementary characteristics among multilevel features. Then, through the proposed SSCA, the salient information across diverse scales within the aggregated features can be integrated more comprehensively and integrally. In the subsequent steps, we utilize the uncertainty map generated from the saliency prediction map to enhance the model's perception capability of uncertain regions, generating a highly-saturated fine-grained saliency prediction map. Additionally, we devise an adaptive dynamic partition (ADP) mechanism to minimize the computational overhead of the URA module and improve the utilization of uncertainty guidance. Experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed UGRAN over the state-of-the-art methodologies. Codes will be released at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/UGRAN.
Authors:Yongchao Feng, Yajie Liu, Shuai Yang, Wenrui Cai, Jinqing Zhang, Qiqi Zhan, Ziyue Huang, Hongxi Yan, Qiao Wan, Chenguang Liu, Junzhe Wang, Jiahui Lv, Ziqi Liu, Tengyuan Shi, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: \textit{zero prediction}, \textit{visual fine-tuning}, and \textit{text prompt}, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.
Authors:Yunfei Long, Abhinav Kumar, Xiaoming Liu, Daniel Morris
Abstract:
Radar hits reflect from points on both the boundary and internal to object outlines. This results in a complex distribution of radar hits that depends on factors including object category, size, and orientation. Current radar-camera fusion methods implicitly account for this with a black-box neural network. In this paper, we explicitly utilize a radar hit distribution model to assist fusion. First, we build a model to predict radar hit distributions conditioned on object properties obtained from a monocular detector. Second, we use the predicted distribution as a kernel to match actual measured radar points in the neighborhood of the monocular detections, generating matching scores at nearby positions. Finally, a fusion stage combines context with the kernel detector to refine the matching scores. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art radar-camera detection performance on nuScenes. Our source code is available at https://github.com/longyunf/riccardo.
Authors:Erin Carson, Xinye Chen
Abstract:
Motivated by the growing demand for low-precision arithmetic in computational science, we exploit lower-precision emulation in Python -- widely regarded as the dominant programming language for numerical analysis and machine learning. Low-precision training has revolutionized deep learning by enabling more efficient computation and reduced memory and energy consumption while maintaining model fidelity. To better enable numerical experimentation with and exploration of low precision computation, we developed the Pychop library, which supports customizable floating-point formats and a comprehensive set of rounding modes in Python, allowing users to benefit from fast, low-precision emulation in numerous applications. Pychop also introduces interfaces for both PyTorch and JAX, enabling efficient low-precision emulation on GPUs for neural network training and inference with unparalleled flexibility.
In this paper, we offer a comprehensive exposition of the design, implementation, validation, and practical application of Pychop, establishing it as a foundational tool for advancing efficient mixed-precision algorithms. Furthermore, we present empirical results on low-precision emulation for image classification and object detection using published datasets, illustrating the sensitivity of the use of low precision and offering valuable insights into its impact. Pychop enables in-depth investigations into the effects of numerical precision, facilitates the development of novel hardware accelerators, and integrates seamlessly into existing deep learning workflows. Software and experimental code are publicly available at https://github.com/inEXASCALE/pychop.
Authors:Haozhan Shen, Peng Liu, Jingcheng Li, Chunxin Fang, Yibo Ma, Jiajia Liao, Qiaoli Shen, Zilun Zhang, Kangjia Zhao, Qianqian Zhang, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
Abstract:
Recently DeepSeek R1 has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a simple yet effective design. The core of R1 lies in its rule-based reward formulation, which leverages tasks with deterministic ground-truth answers to enable precise and stable reward computation. In the visual domain, we similarly observe that a wide range of visual understanding tasks are inherently equipped with well-defined ground-truth annotations. This property makes them naturally compatible with rule-based reward mechanisms. Motivated by this observation, we investigate the extension of R1-style reinforcement learning to Vision-Language Models (VLMs), aiming to enhance their visual reasoning capabilities. To this end, we develop VLM-R1, a dedicated framework designed to harness RL for improving VLMs' performance on general vision-language tasks. Using this framework, we further explore the feasibility of applying RL to visual domain. Experimental results indicate that the RL-based model not only delivers competitive performance on visual understanding tasks but also surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in generalization ability. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies that uncover a series of noteworthy insights, including the presence of reward hacking in object detection, the emergence of the "OD aha moment", the impact of training data quality, and the scaling behavior of RL across different model sizes. Through these analyses, we aim to deepen the understanding of how reinforcement learning enhances the capabilities of vision-language models, and we hope our findings and open-source contributions will support continued progress in the vision-language RL community. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VLM-R1
Authors:Hicham Talaoubrid, Anissa Mokraoui, Ismail Ben Ayed, Axel Prouvost, Sonimith Hang, Monit Korn, Rémi Harvey
Abstract:
This paper investigates the application of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to small models for cross-domain few-shot object detection in aerial images. Originally designed for large-scale models, LoRA helps mitigate overfitting, making it a promising approach for resource-constrained settings. We integrate LoRA into DiffusionDet, and evaluate its performance on the DOTA and DIOR datasets. Our results show that LoRA applied after an initial fine-tuning slightly improves performance in low-shot settings (e.g., 1-shot and 5-shot), while full fine-tuning remains more effective in higher-shot configurations. These findings highlight LoRA's potential for efficient adaptation in aerial object detection, encouraging further research into parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for few-shot learning. Our code is available here: https://github.com/HichTala/LoRA-DiffusionDet.
Authors:Tianyang Wu, Lipeng Wan, Yuhang Wang, Qiang Wan, Xuguang Lan
Abstract:
Significant progress has been made in AI for games, including board games, MOBA, and RTS games. However, complex agents are typically developed in an embedded manner, directly accessing game state information, unlike human players who rely on noisy visual data, leading to unfair competition. Developing complex non-embedded agents remains challenging, especially in card-based RTS games with complex features and large state spaces. We propose a non-embedded offline reinforcement learning training strategy using visual inputs to achieve real-time autonomous gameplay in the RTS game Clash Royale. Due to the lack of a object detection dataset for this game, we designed an efficient generative object detection dataset for training. We extract features using state-of-the-art object detection and optical character recognition models. Our method enables real-time image acquisition, perception feature fusion, decision-making, and control on mobile devices, successfully defeating built-in AI opponents. All code is open-sourced at https://github.com/wty-yy/katacr.
Authors:Zhenxing Ming, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Stewart Worrall
Abstract:
3D semantic occupancy prediction aims to forecast detailed geometric and semantic information of the surrounding environment for autonomous vehicles (AVs) using onboard surround-view cameras. Existing methods primarily focus on intricate inner structure module designs to improve model performance, such as efficient feature sampling and aggregation processes or intermediate feature representation formats. In this paper, we explore multitask learning by introducing an additional 3D supervision signal by incorporating an additional 3D object detection auxiliary branch. This extra 3D supervision signal enhances the model's overall performance by strengthening the capability of the intermediate features to capture small dynamic objects in the scene, and these small dynamic objects often include vulnerable road users, i.e. bicycles, motorcycles, and pedestrians, whose detection is crucial for ensuring driving safety in autonomous vehicles. Extensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes datasets, including challenging rainy and nighttime scenarios, showcase that our approach attains state-of-the-art results, achieving an IoU score of 31.73% and a mIoU score of 20.91% and excels at detecting vulnerable road users (VRU). The code will be made available at:https://github.com/DanielMing123/Inverse++
Authors:Jiancheng Pan, Yanxing Liu, Xiao He, Long Peng, Jiahao Li, Yuze Sun, Xiaomeng Huang
Abstract:
Foundation models pretrained on extensive datasets, such as GroundingDINO and LAE-DINO, have performed remarkably in the cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) task. Through rigorous few-shot training, we found that the integration of image-based data augmentation techniques and grid-based sub-domain search strategy significantly enhances the performance of these foundation models. Building upon GroundingDINO, we employed several widely used image augmentation methods and established optimization objectives to effectively navigate the expansive domain space in search of optimal sub-domains. This approach facilitates efficient few-shot object detection and introduces an approach to solving the CD-FSOD problem by efficiently searching for the optimal parameter configuration from the foundation model. Our findings substantially advance the practical deployment of vision-language models in data-scarce environments, offering critical insights into optimizing their cross-domain generalization capabilities without labor-intensive retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/jaychempan/ETS.
Authors:Shuolong Chen, Xingxing Li, Liu Yuan
Abstract:
The bioinspired event camera, distinguished by its exceptional temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, has been extensively studied in recent years for motion estimation, robotic perception, and object detection. In ego-motion estimation, the stereo event camera setup is commonly adopted due to its direct scale perception and depth recovery. For optimal stereo visual fusion, accurate spatiotemporal (extrinsic and temporal) calibration is required. Considering that few stereo visual calibrators orienting to event cameras exist, based on our previous work eKalibr (an event camera intrinsic calibrator), we propose eKalibr-Stereo for accurate spatiotemporal calibration of event-based stereo visual systems. To improve the continuity of grid pattern tracking, building upon the grid pattern recognition method in eKalibr, an additional motion prior-based tracking module is designed in eKalibr-Stereo to track incomplete grid patterns. Based on tracked grid patterns, a two-step initialization procedure is performed to recover initial guesses of piece-wise B-splines and spatiotemporal parameters, followed by a continuous-time batch bundle adjustment to refine the initialized states to optimal ones. The results of extensive real-world experiments show that eKalibr-Stereo can achieve accurate event-based stereo spatiotemporal calibration. The implementation of eKalibr-Stereo is open-sourced at (https://github.com/Unsigned-Long/eKalibr) to benefit the research community.
Authors:Arash Sajjadi, Mark Eramian
Abstract:
TGraphX presents a novel paradigm in deep learning by unifying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with graph neural networks (GNNs) to enhance visual reasoning tasks. Traditional CNNs excel at extracting rich spatial features from images but lack the inherent capability to model inter-object relationships. Conversely, conventional GNNs typically rely on flattened node features, thereby discarding vital spatial details. TGraphX overcomes these limitations by employing CNNs to generate multi-dimensional node features (e.g., (3*128*128) tensors) that preserve local spatial semantics. These spatially aware nodes participate in a graph where message passing is performed using 1*1 convolutions, which fuse adjacent features while maintaining their structure. Furthermore, a deep CNN aggregator with residual connections is used to robustly refine the fused messages, ensuring stable gradient flow and end-to-end trainability. Our approach not only bridges the gap between spatial feature extraction and relational reasoning but also demonstrates significant improvements in object detection refinement and ensemble reasoning.
Authors:Zeyang Zheng, Arman Hosseini, Dong Chen, Omid Shoghli, Arsalan Heydarian
Abstract:
The increasing adoption of electric scooters (e-scooters) in urban areas has coincided with a rise in traffic accidents and injuries, largely due to their small wheels, lack of suspension, and sensitivity to uneven surfaces. While deep learning-based object detection has been widely used to improve automobile safety, its application for e-scooter obstacle detection remains unexplored. This study introduces a novel ground obstacle detection system for e-scooters, integrating an RGB camera, and a depth camera to enhance real-time road hazard detection. Additionally, the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measures linear vertical acceleration to identify surface vibrations, guiding the selection of six obstacle categories: tree branches, manhole covers, potholes, pine cones, non-directional cracks, and truncated domes. All sensors, including the RGB camera, depth camera, and IMU, are integrated within the Intel RealSense Camera D435i. A deep learning model powered by YOLO detects road hazards and utilizes depth data to estimate obstacle proximity. Evaluated on the seven hours of naturalistic riding dataset, the system achieves a high mean average precision (mAP) of 0.827 and demonstrates excellent real-time performance. This approach provides an effective solution to enhance e-scooter safety through advanced computer vision and data fusion. The dataset is accessible at https://zenodo.org/records/14583718, and the project code is hosted on https://github.com/Zeyang-Zheng/Real-Time-Roadway-Obstacle-Detection-for-Electric-Scooters.
Authors:Andrei Dumitriu, Florin Tatui, Florin Miron, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Radu Timofte
Abstract:
Rip currents are the leading cause of fatal accidents and injuries on many beaches worldwide, emphasizing the importance of automatically detecting these hazardous surface water currents. In this paper, we address a novel task: rip current instance segmentation. We introduce a comprehensive dataset containing $2,466$ images with newly created polygonal annotations for instance segmentation, used for training and validation. Additionally, we present a novel dataset comprising $17$ drone videos (comprising about $24K$ frames) captured at $30 FPS$, annotated with both polygons for instance segmentation and bounding boxes for object detection, employed for testing purposes. We train various versions of YOLOv8 for instance segmentation on static images and assess their performance on the test dataset (videos). The best results were achieved by the YOLOv8-nano model (runnable on a portable device), with an mAP50 of $88.94%$ on the validation dataset and $81.21%$ macro average on the test dataset. The results provide a baseline for future research in rip current segmentation. Our work contributes to the existing literature by introducing a detailed, annotated dataset, and training a deep learning model for instance segmentation of rip currents. The code, training details and the annotated dataset are made publicly available at https://github.com/Irikos/rip_currents.
Authors:Xiaofeng Han, Shunpeng Chen, Zenghuang Fu, Zhe Feng, Lue Fan, Dong An, Changwei Wang, Li Guo, Weiliang Meng, Xiaopeng Zhang, Rongtao Xu, Shibiao Xu
Abstract:
Robot vision has greatly benefited from advancements in multimodal fusion techniques and vision-language models (VLMs). We systematically review the applications of multimodal fusion in key robotic vision tasks, including semantic scene understanding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), 3D object detection, navigation and localization, and robot manipulation. We compare VLMs based on large language models (LLMs) with traditional multimodal fusion methods, analyzing their advantages, limitations, and synergies. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of commonly used datasets, evaluating their applicability and challenges in real-world robotic scenarios. Furthermore, we identify critical research challenges such as cross-modal alignment, efficient fusion strategies, real-time deployment, and domain adaptation, and propose future research directions, including self-supervised learning for robust multimodal representations, transformer-based fusion architectures, and scalable multimodal frameworks. Through a comprehensive review, comparative analysis, and forward-looking discussion, we provide a valuable reference for advancing multimodal perception and interaction in robotic vision. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-Han-Res/MF-RV.
Authors:Peifu Liu, Huiyan Bai, Tingfa Xu, Jihui Wang, Huan Chen, Jianan Li
Abstract:
The objective of hyperspectral remote sensing image salient object detection (HRSI-SOD) is to identify objects or regions that exhibit distinct spectrum contrasts with the background. This area holds significant promise for practical applications; however, progress has been limited by a notable scarcity of dedicated datasets and methodologies. To bridge this gap and stimulate further research, we introduce the first HRSI-SOD dataset, termed HRSSD, which includes 704 hyperspectral images and 5327 pixel-level annotated salient objects. The HRSSD dataset poses substantial challenges for salient object detection algorithms due to large scale variation, diverse foreground-background relations, and multi-salient objects. Additionally, we propose an innovative and efficient baseline model for HRSI-SOD, termed the Deep Spectral Saliency Network (DSSN). The core of DSSN is the Cross-level Saliency Assessment Block, which performs pixel-wise attention and evaluates the contributions of multi-scale similarity maps at each spatial location, effectively reducing erroneous responses in cluttered regions and emphasizes salient regions across scales. Additionally, the High-resolution Fusion Module combines bottom-up fusion strategy and learned spatial upsampling to leverage the strengths of multi-scale saliency maps, ensuring accurate localization of small objects. Experiments on the HRSSD dataset robustly validate the superiority of DSSN, underscoring the critical need for specialized datasets and methodologies in this domain. Further evaluations on the HSOD-BIT and HS-SOD datasets demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed method. The dataset and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/laprf/HRSSD.
Authors:Ilir Tahiraj, Markus Edinger, Dominik Kulmer, Markus Lienkamp
Abstract:
In autonomous systems, sensor calibration is essential for safe and efficient navigation in dynamic environments. Accurate calibration is a prerequisite for reliable perception and planning tasks such as object detection and obstacle avoidance. Many existing LiDAR calibration methods require overlapping fields of view, while others use external sensing devices or postulate a feature-rich environment. In addition, Sensor-to-Vehicle calibration is not supported by the vast majority of calibration algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel target-based technique for extrinsic Sensor-to-Sensor and Sensor-to-Vehicle calibration of multi-LiDAR systems called CaLiV. This algorithm works for non-overlapping fields of view and does not require any external sensing devices. First, we apply motion to produce field of view overlaps and utilize a simple Unscented Kalman Filter to obtain vehicle poses. Then, we use the Gaussian mixture model-based registration framework GMMCalib to align the point clouds in a common calibration frame. Finally, we reduce the task of recovering the sensor extrinsics to a minimization problem. We show that both translational and rotational Sensor-to-Sensor errors can be solved accurately by our method. In addition, all Sensor-to-Vehicle rotation angles can also be calibrated with high accuracy. We validate the simulation results in real-world experiments. The code is open-source and available on https://github.com/TUMFTM/CaLiV.
Authors:Wanjing Zhang, Chenxing Wang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection is essential for autonomous driving systems. However, LiDAR point clouds may appear to have sparsity, uneven distribution, and incomplete structures, significantly limiting the detection performance. In road driving environments, target objects referring to vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists are well-suited for enhancing representation through the complete template guidance, considering their grid and topological structures. Therefore, this paper presents an intrinsic-feature-guided 3D object detection method based on a template-assisted feature enhancement module, which extracts intrinsic features from relatively generalized templates and provides rich structural information for foreground objects. Furthermore, a proposal-level contrastive learning mechanism is designed to enhance the feature differences between foreground and background objects. The proposed modules can act as plug-and-play components and improve the performance of multiple existing methods. Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed method achieves the highly competitive detection results. Code will be available at https://github.com/zhangwanjingjj/IfgNet.git.
Authors:Chenyang Li, Wenxuan Liu, Guoqiang Gong, Xiaobo Ding, Xian Zhong
Abstract:
Underwater object detection is critical for oceanic research and industrial safety inspections. However, the complex optical environment and the limited resources of underwater equipment pose significant challenges to achieving high accuracy and low power consumption. To address these issues, we propose Spiking Underwater YOLO (SU-YOLO), a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) model. Leveraging the lightweight and energy-efficient properties of SNNs, SU-YOLO incorporates a novel spike-based underwater image denoising method based solely on integer addition, which enhances the quality of feature maps with minimal computational overhead. In addition, we introduce Separated Batch Normalization (SeBN), a technique that normalizes feature maps independently across multiple time steps and is optimized for integration with residual structures to capture the temporal dynamics of SNNs more effectively. The redesigned spiking residual blocks integrate the Cross Stage Partial Network (CSPNet) with the YOLO architecture to mitigate spike degradation and enhance the model's feature extraction capabilities. Experimental results on URPC2019 underwater dataset demonstrate that SU-YOLO achieves mAP of 78.8% with 6.97M parameters and an energy consumption of 2.98 mJ, surpassing mainstream SNN models in both detection accuracy and computational efficiency. These results underscore the potential of SNNs for engineering applications. The code is available in https://github.com/lwxfight/snn-underwater.
Authors:Karim Radouane, Hanane Azzag, Mustapha lebbah
Abstract:
We propose a unified framework that integrates object detection (OD) and visual grounding (VG) for remote sensing (RS) imagery. To support conventional OD and establish an intuitive prior for VG task, we fine-tune an open-set object detector using referring expression data, framing it as a partially supervised OD task. In the first stage, we construct a graph representation of each image, comprising object queries, class embeddings, and proposal locations. Then, our task-aware architecture processes this graph to perform the VG task. The model consists of: (i) a multi-branch network that integrates spatial, visual, and categorical features to generate task-aware proposals, and (ii) an object reasoning network that assigns probabilities across proposals, followed by a soft selection mechanism for final referring object localization. Our model demonstrates superior performance on the OPT-RSVG and DIOR-RSVG datasets, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods while retaining classical OD capabilities. The code will be available in our repository: \url{https://github.com/rd20karim/MB-ORES}.
Authors:Hongxiang Jiang, Jihao Yin, Qixiong Wang, Jiaqi Feng, Guo Chen
Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive results in various visual tasks. However, in remote sensing (RS), high resolution and small proportion of objects pose challenges to existing MLLMs, which struggle with object-centric tasks, particularly in precise localization and fine-grained attribute description for each object. These RS MLLMs have not yet surpassed classical visual perception models, as they only provide coarse image understanding, leading to limited gains in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we establish EagleVision, an MLLM tailored for remote sensing that excels in object detection and attribute comprehension. Equipped with the Attribute Disentangle module, EagleVision learns disentanglement vision tokens to express distinct attributes. To support object-level visual-language alignment, we construct EVAttrs-95K, the first large-scale object attribute understanding dataset in RS for instruction tuning, along with a novel evaluation benchmark, EVBench. EagleVision achieves state-of-the-art performance on both fine-grained object detection and object attribute understanding tasks, highlighting the mutual promotion between detection and understanding capabilities in MLLMs. The code, model, data, and demo will be available at https://github.com/XiangTodayEatsWhat/EagleVision.
Authors:Marc-Antoine Lavoie, Anas Mahmoud, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
The current state-of-the-art methods in domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) use Mean Teacher self-labelling, where a teacher model, directly derived as an exponential moving average of the student model, is used to generate labels on the target domain which are then used to improve both models in a positive loop. This couples learning and generating labels on the target domain, and other recent works also leverage the generated labels to add additional domain alignment losses. We believe this coupling is brittle and excessively constrained: there is no guarantee that a student trained only on source data can generate accurate target domain labels and initiate the positive feedback loop, and much better target domain labels can likely be generated by using a large pretrained network that has been exposed to much more data. Vision foundational models are exactly such models, and they have shown impressive task generalization capabilities even when frozen. We want to leverage these models for DAOD and introduce DINO Teacher, which consists of two components. First, we train a new labeller on source data only using a large frozen DINOv2 backbone and show it generates more accurate labels than Mean Teacher. Next, we align the student's source and target image patch features with those from a DINO encoder, driving source and target representations closer to the generalizable DINO representation. We obtain state-of-the-art performance on multiple DAOD datasets. Code available at https://github.com/TRAILab/DINO_Teacher
Authors:Pengyu Chen, Sicheng Wang, Cuizhen Wang, Senrong Wang, Beiao Huang, Lu Huang, Zhe Zang
Abstract:
Precise detection of rooftops from historical aerial imagery is essential for analyzing long-term urban development and human settlement patterns. Nonetheless, black-and-white analog photographs present considerable challenges for modern object detection frameworks due to their limited spatial resolution, absence of color information, and archival degradation. To address these challenges, this research introduces a two-stage image enhancement pipeline based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): image colorization utilizing DeOldify, followed by super-resolution enhancement with Real-ESRGAN. The enhanced images were subsequently employed to train and evaluate rooftop detection models, including Faster R-CNN, DETReg, and YOLOv11n. The results demonstrate that the combination of colorization with super-resolution significantly enhances detection performance, with YOLOv11n achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) exceeding 85\%. This signifies an enhancement of approximately 40\% over the original black-and-white images and 20\% over images enhanced solely through colorization. The proposed method effectively bridges the gap between archival imagery and contemporary deep learning techniques, facilitating more reliable extraction of building footprints from historical aerial photographs. Code and resources for reproducing our results are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Pengyu-gis/Historical-Aerial-Photos}{github.com/Pengyu-gis/Historical-Aerial-Photos}.
Authors:Ziyue Huang, Hongxi Yan, Qiqi Zhan, Shuai Yang, Mingming Zhang, Chenkai Zhang, YiMing Lei, Zeming Liu, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of remote sensing foundation models, particularly vision and multimodal models, has significantly enhanced the capabilities of intelligent geospatial data interpretation. These models combine various data modalities, such as optical, radar, and LiDAR imagery, with textual and geographic information, enabling more comprehensive analysis and understanding of remote sensing data. The integration of multiple modalities allows for improved performance in tasks like object detection, land cover classification, and change detection, which are often challenged by the complex and heterogeneous nature of remote sensing data. However, despite these advancements, several challenges remain. The diversity in data types, the need for large-scale annotated datasets, and the complexity of multimodal fusion techniques pose significant obstacles to the effective deployment of these models. Moreover, the computational demands of training and fine-tuning multimodal models require significant resources, further complicating their practical application in remote sensing image interpretation tasks. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in vision and multimodal foundation models for remote sensing, focusing on their architecture, training methods, datasets and application scenarios. We discuss the key challenges these models face, such as data alignment, cross-modal transfer learning, and scalability, while also identifying emerging research directions aimed at overcoming these limitations. Our goal is to provide a clear understanding of the current landscape of remote sensing foundation models and inspire future research that can push the boundaries of what these models can achieve in real-world applications. The list of resources collected by the paper can be found in the https://github.com/IRIP-BUAA/A-Review-for-remote-sensing-vision-language-models.
Authors:Taufiq Ahmed, Abhishek Kumar, Constantino Ãlvarez Casado, Anlan Zhang, Tuomo Hänninen, Lauri Loven, Miguel Bordallo López, Sasu Tarkoma
Abstract:
Object detection models often struggle with class imbalance, where rare categories appear significantly less frequently than common ones. Existing sampling-based rebalancing strategies, such as Repeat Factor Sampling (RFS) and Instance-Aware Repeat Factor Sampling (IRFS), mitigate this issue by adjusting sample frequencies based on image and instance counts. However, these methods are based on linear adjustments, which limit their effectiveness in long-tailed distributions. This work introduces Exponentially Weighted Instance-Aware Repeat Factor Sampling (E-IRFS), an extension of IRFS that applies exponential scaling to better differentiate between rare and frequent classes. E-IRFS adjusts sampling probabilities using an exponential function applied to the geometric mean of image and instance frequencies, ensuring a more adaptive rebalancing strategy. We evaluate E-IRFS on a dataset derived from the Fireman-UAV-RGBT Dataset and four additional public datasets, using YOLOv11 object detection models to identify fire, smoke, people and lakes in emergency scenarios. The results show that E-IRFS improves detection performance by 22\% over the baseline and outperforms RFS and IRFS, particularly for rare categories. The analysis also highlights that E-IRFS has a stronger effect on lightweight models with limited capacity, as these models rely more on data sampling strategies to address class imbalance. The findings demonstrate that E-IRFS improves rare object detection in resource-constrained environments, making it a suitable solution for real-time applications such as UAV-based emergency monitoring. The code is available at: https://github.com/futurians/E-IRFS.
Authors:Yun Zhu, Le Hui, Hang Yang, Jianjun Qian, Jin Xie, Jian Yang
Abstract:
Both indoor and outdoor scene perceptions are essential for embodied intelligence. However, current sparse supervised 3D object detection methods focus solely on outdoor scenes without considering indoor settings. To this end, we propose a unified sparse supervised 3D object detection method for both indoor and outdoor scenes through learning class prototypes to effectively utilize unlabeled objects. Specifically, we first propose a prototype-based object mining module that converts the unlabeled object mining into a matching problem between class prototypes and unlabeled features. By using optimal transport matching results, we assign prototype labels to high-confidence features, thereby achieving the mining of unlabeled objects. We then present a multi-label cooperative refinement module to effectively recover missed detections through pseudo label quality control and prototype label cooperation. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under the one object per scene sparse supervised setting across indoor and outdoor datasets. With only one labeled object per scene, our method achieves about 78%, 90%, and 96% performance compared to the fully supervised detector on ScanNet V2, SUN RGB-D, and KITTI, respectively, highlighting the scalability of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/zyrant/CPDet3D.
Authors:Ilias Stogiannidis, Steven McDonagh, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools, excelling in tasks that integrate visual and textual comprehension, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, existing benchmarks for VLMs include spatial components, which often fail to isolate spatial reasoning from related tasks such as object detection or semantic comprehension. In this paper, we address these deficiencies with a multi-faceted approach towards understanding spatial reasoning. Informed by the diverse and multi-dimensional nature of human spatial reasoning abilities, we present a detailed analysis that first delineates the core elements of spatial reasoning: spatial relations, orientation and navigation, mental rotation, and spatial visualization, and then assesses the performance of these models in both synthetic and real-world images, bridging controlled and naturalistic contexts. We analyze 13 state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models, uncovering pivotal insights into their spatial reasoning performance. Our results reveal profound shortcomings in current VLMs, with average accuracy across the 13 models approximating random chance, highlighting spatial reasoning as a persistent obstacle. This work not only exposes the pressing need to advance spatial reasoning within VLMs but also establishes a solid platform for future exploration. Code available on GitHub (https://github.com/stogiannidis/srbench) and dataset available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/stogiannidis/srbench).
Authors:Jan Kohút, Martin DoÄekal, Michal HradiÅ¡, Marek VaÅ¡ko
Abstract:
Manual digitization of bibliographic metadata is time consuming and labor intensive, especially for historical and real-world archives with highly variable formatting across documents. Despite advances in machine learning, the absence of dedicated datasets for metadata extraction hinders automation. To address this gap, we introduce BiblioPage, a dataset of scanned title pages annotated with structured bibliographic metadata. The dataset consists of approximately 2,000 monograph title pages collected from 14 Czech libraries, spanning a wide range of publication periods, typographic styles, and layout structures. Each title page is annotated with 16 bibliographic attributes, including title, contributors, and publication metadata, along with precise positional information in the form of bounding boxes. To extract structured information from this dataset, we valuated object detection models such as YOLO and DETR combined with transformer-based OCR, achieving a maximum mAP of 52 and an F1 score of 59. Additionally, we assess the performance of various visual large language models, including LlamA 3.2-Vision and GPT-4o, with the best model reaching an F1 score of 67. BiblioPage serves as a real-world benchmark for bibliographic metadata extraction, contributing to document understanding, document question answering, and document information extraction. Dataset and evaluation scripts are availible at: https://github.com/DCGM/biblio-dataset
Authors:Sara Al-Emadi, Yin Yang, Ferda Ofli
Abstract:
Object detectors have achieved remarkable performance in many applications; however, these deep learning models are typically designed under the i.i.d. assumption, meaning they are trained and evaluated on data sampled from the same (source) distribution. In real-world deployment, however, target distributions often differ from source data, leading to substantial performance degradation. Domain Generalisation (DG) seeks to bridge this gap by enabling models to generalise to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data without access to target distributions during training, enhancing robustness to unseen conditions. In this work, we examine the generalisability and robustness of state-of-the-art object detectors under real-world distribution shifts, focusing particularly on spatial domain shifts. Despite the need, a standardised benchmark dataset specifically designed for assessing object detection under realistic DG scenarios is currently lacking. To address this, we introduce Real-World Distribution Shifts (RWDS), a suite of three novel DG benchmarking datasets that focus on humanitarian and climate change applications. These datasets enable the investigation of domain shifts across (i) climate zones and (ii) various disasters and geographic regions. To our knowledge, these are the first DG benchmarking datasets tailored for object detection in real-world, high-impact contexts. We aim for these datasets to serve as valuable resources for evaluating the robustness and generalisation of future object detection models. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/RWGAI/RWDS.
Authors:Linwei Chen, Lin Gu, Liang Li, Chenggang Yan, Ying Fu
Abstract:
While Dynamic Convolution (DY-Conv) has shown promising performance by enabling adaptive weight selection through multiple parallel weights combined with an attention mechanism, the frequency response of these weights tends to exhibit high similarity, resulting in high parameter costs but limited adaptability. In this work, we introduce Frequency Dynamic Convolution (FDConv), a novel approach that mitigates these limitations by learning a fixed parameter budget in the Fourier domain. FDConv divides this budget into frequency-based groups with disjoint Fourier indices, enabling the construction of frequency-diverse weights without increasing the parameter cost. To further enhance adaptability, we propose Kernel Spatial Modulation (KSM) and Frequency Band Modulation (FBM). KSM dynamically adjusts the frequency response of each filter at the spatial level, while FBM decomposes weights into distinct frequency bands in the frequency domain and modulates them dynamically based on local content. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, and classification validate the effectiveness of FDConv. We demonstrate that when applied to ResNet-50, FDConv achieves superior performance with a modest increase of +3.6M parameters, outperforming previous methods that require substantial increases in parameter budgets (e.g., CondConv +90M, KW +76.5M). Moreover, FDConv seamlessly integrates into a variety of architectures, including ConvNeXt, Swin-Transformer, offering a flexible and efficient solution for modern vision tasks. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FDConv.
Authors:Zhichao Sun, Huazhang Hu, Yidong Ma, Gang Liu, Nemo Chen, Xu Tang, Yao Hu, Yongchao Xu
Abstract:
With the exponential growth of data, traditional object detection methods are increasingly struggling to handle vast vocabulary object detection tasks effectively. We analyze two key limitations of classification-based detectors: positive gradient dilution, where rare positive categories receive insufficient learning signals, and hard negative gradient dilution, where discriminative gradients are overwhelmed by numerous easy negatives. To address these challenges, we propose CQ-DINO, a category query-based object detection framework that reformulates classification as a contrastive task between object queries and learnable category queries. Our method introduces image-guided query selection, which reduces the negative space by adaptively retrieving top-K relevant categories per image via cross-attention, thereby rebalancing gradient distributions and facilitating implicit hard example mining. Furthermore, CQ-DINO flexibly integrates explicit hierarchical category relationships in structured datasets (e.g., V3Det) or learns implicit category correlations via self-attention in generic datasets (e.g., COCO). Experiments demonstrate that CQ-DINO achieves superior performance on the challenging V3Det benchmark (surpassing previous methods by 2.1% AP) while maintaining competitiveness in COCO. Our work provides a scalable solution for real-world detection systems requiring wide category coverage. The code is publicly at https://github.com/RedAIGC/CQ-DINO.
Authors:Pablo Garcia-Fernandez, Lorenzo Vaquero, Mingxuan Liu, Feng Xue, Daniel Cores, Nicu Sebe, Manuel Mucientes, Elisa Ricci
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OvOD) is set to revolutionize security screening by enabling systems to recognize any item in X-ray scans. However, developing effective OvOD models for X-ray imaging presents unique challenges due to data scarcity and the modality gap that prevents direct adoption of RGB-based solutions. To overcome these limitations, we propose RAXO, a training-free framework that repurposes off-the-shelf RGB OvOD detectors for robust X-ray detection. RAXO builds high-quality X-ray class descriptors using a dual-source retrieval strategy. It gathers relevant RGB images from the web and enriches them via a novel X-ray material transfer mechanism, eliminating the need for labeled databases. These visual descriptors replace text-based classification in OvOD, leveraging intra-modal feature distances for robust detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAXO consistently improves OvOD performance, providing an average mAP increase of up to 17.0 points over base detectors. To further support research in this emerging field, we also introduce DET-COMPASS, a new benchmark featuring bounding box annotations for over 300 object categories, enabling large-scale evaluation of OvOD in X-ray. Code and dataset available at: https://github.com/PAGF188/RAXO.
Authors:Peihao Wu, Yongxiang Yao, Wenfei Zhang, Dong Wei, Yi Wan, Yansheng Li, Yongjun Zhang
Abstract:
Multimodal remote sensing image (MRSI) matching is pivotal for cross-modal fusion, localization, and object detection, but it faces severe challenges due to geometric, radiometric, and viewpoint discrepancies across imaging modalities. Existing unimodal datasets lack scale and diversity, limiting deep learning solutions. This paper proposes MapGlue, a universal MRSI matching framework, and MapData, a large-scale multimodal dataset addressing these gaps. Our contributions are twofold. MapData, a globally diverse dataset spanning 233 sampling points, offers original images (7,000x5,000 to 20,000x15,000 pixels). After rigorous cleaning, it provides 121,781 aligned electronic map-visible image pairs (512x512 pixels) with hybrid manual-automated ground truth, addressing the scarcity of scalable multimodal benchmarks. MapGlue integrates semantic context with a dual graph-guided mechanism to extract cross-modal invariant features. This structure enables global-to-local interaction, enhancing descriptor robustness against modality-specific distortions. Extensive evaluations on MapData and five public datasets demonstrate MapGlue's superiority in matching accuracy under complex conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Notably, MapGlue generalizes effectively to unseen modalities without retraining, highlighting its adaptability. This work addresses longstanding challenges in MRSI matching by combining scalable dataset construction with a robust, semantics-driven framework. Furthermore, MapGlue shows strong generalization capabilities on other modality matching tasks for which it was not specifically trained. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/PeihaoWu/MapGlue.
Authors:Wanshu Fan, Yue Wang, Cong Wang, Yunzhe Zhang, Wei Wang, Dongsheng Zhou
Abstract:
Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) plays a pivotal role in enhancing the accuracy and reliability of measurement systems, which are integral to various vision-based instrumentation and measurement applications. These systems often require clear and detailed images for precise object detection and recognition. However, images captured by visual measurement tools frequently suffer from degradation, including blurring and loss of detail, which can impede measurement accuracy.As a potential remedy, we in this paper propose a Semantic-Guided Global-Local Collaborative Network (SGGLC-Net) for lightweight SISR. Our SGGLC-Net leverages semantic priors extracted from a pre-trained model to guide the super-resolution process, enhancing image detail quality effectively. Specifically,we propose a Semantic Guidance Module that seamlessly integrates the semantic priors into the super-resolution network, enabling the network to more adeptly capture and utilize semantic priors, thereby enhancing image details. To further explore both local and non-local interactions for improved detail rendition,we propose a Global-Local Collaborative Module, which features three Global and Local Detail Enhancement Modules, as well as a Hybrid Attention Mechanism to work together to efficiently learn more useful features. Our extensive experiments show that SGGLC-Net achieves competitive PSNR and SSIM values across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating higher performance with the multi-adds reduction of 12.81G compared to state-of-the-art lightweight super-resolution approaches. These improvements underscore the potential of our approach to enhance the precision and effectiveness of visual measurement systems. Codes are at https://github.com/fanamber831/SGGLC-Net.
Authors:Zechuan Li, Hongshan Yu, Yihao Ding, Jinhao Qiao, Basim Azam, Naveed Akhtar
Abstract:
We propose GO-N3RDet, a scene-geometry optimized multi-view 3D object detector enhanced by neural radiance fields. The key to accurate 3D object detection is in effective voxel representation. However, due to occlusion and lack of 3D information, constructing 3D features from multi-view 2D images is challenging. Addressing that, we introduce a unique 3D positional information embedded voxel optimization mechanism to fuse multi-view features. To prioritize neural field reconstruction in object regions, we also devise a double importance sampling scheme for the NeRF branch of our detector. We additionally propose an opacity optimization module for precise voxel opacity prediction by enforcing multi-view consistency constraints. Moreover, to further improve voxel density consistency across multiple perspectives, we incorporate ray distance as a weighting factor to minimize cumulative ray errors. Our unique modules synergetically form an end-to-end neural model that establishes new state-of-the-art in NeRF-based multi-view 3D detection, verified with extensive experiments on ScanNet and ARKITScenes. Code will be available at https://github.com/ZechuanLi/GO-N3RDet.
Authors:Yang Li, Soumya Snigdha Kundu, Maxence Boels, Toktam Mahmoodi, Sebastien Ourselin, Tom Vercauteren, Prokar Dasgupta, Jonathan Shapey, Alejandro Granados
Abstract:
Object detection shows promise for medical and surgical applications such as cell counting and tool tracking. However, its faces multiple real-world edge deployment challenges including limited high-quality annotated data, data sharing restrictions, and computational constraints. In this work, we introduce UltraFlwr, a framework for federated medical and surgical object detection. By leveraging Federated Learning (FL), UltraFlwr enables decentralized model training across multiple sites without sharing raw data. To further enhance UltraFlwr's efficiency, we propose YOLO-PA, a set of novel Partial Aggregation (PA) strategies specifically designed for YOLO models in FL. YOLO-PA significantly reduces communication overhead by up to 83% per round while maintaining performance comparable to Full Aggregation (FA) strategies. Our extensive experiments on BCCD and m2cai16-tool-locations datasets demonstrate that YOLO-PA not only provides better client models compared to client-wise centralized training and FA strategies, but also facilitates efficient training and deployment across resource-constrained edge devices. Further, we also establish one of the first benchmarks in federated medical and surgical object detection. This paper advances the feasibility of training and deploying detection models on the edge, making federated object detection more practical for time-critical and resource-constrained medical and surgical applications. UltraFlwr is publicly available at https://github.com/KCL-BMEIS/UltraFlwr.
Authors:Wei Lu, Si-Bao Chen, Hui-Dong Li, Qing-Ling Shu, Chris H. Q. Ding, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) often suffers from degradations such as low spatial resolution, sensor noise, motion blur, and adverse illumination. These factors diminish feature distinctiveness, leading to ambiguous object representations and inadequate foreground-background separation. Existing RSOD methods exhibit limitations in robust detection of low-quality objects. To address these pressing challenges, we introduce LEGNet, a lightweight backbone network featuring a novel Edge-Gaussian Aggregation (EGA) module specifically engineered to enhance feature representation derived from low-quality remote sensing images. EGA module integrates: (a) orientation-aware Scharr filters to sharpen crucial edge details often lost in low-contrast or blurred objects, and (b) Gaussian-prior-based feature refinement to suppress noise and regularize ambiguous feature responses, enhancing foreground saliency under challenging conditions. EGA module alleviates prevalent problems in reduced contrast, structural discontinuities, and ambiguous feature responses prevalent in degraded images, effectively improving model robustness while maintaining computational efficiency. Comprehensive evaluations across five benchmarks (DOTA-v1.0, v1.5, DIOR-R, FAIR1M-v1.0, and VisDrone2019) demonstrate that LEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in detecting low-quality objects. The code is available at https://github.com/lwCVer/LEGNet.
Authors:Kang Yang, Tianci Bu, Lantao Li, Chunxu Li, Yongcai Wang, Deying Li
Abstract:
Collaborative perception in multi-agent system enhances overall perceptual capabilities by facilitating the exchange of complementary information among agents. Current mainstream collaborative perception methods rely on discretized feature maps to conduct fusion, which however, lacks flexibility in extracting and transmitting the informative features and can hardly focus on the informative features during fusion. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel Anchor-Centric paradigm for Collaborative Object detection (ACCO). It avoids grid precision issues and allows more flexible and efficient anchor-centric communication and fusion. ACCO is composed by three main components: (1) Anchor featuring block (AFB) that targets to generate anchor proposals and projects prepared anchor queries to image features. (2) Anchor confidence generator (ACG) is designed to minimize communication by selecting only the features in the confident anchors to transmit. (3) A local-global fusion module, in which local fusion is anchor alignment-based fusion (LAAF) and global fusion is conducted by spatial-aware cross-attention (SACA). LAAF and SACA run in multi-layers, so agents conduct anchor-centric fusion iteratively to adjust the anchor proposals. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to evaluate ACCO on OPV2V and Dair-V2X datasets, which demonstrate ACCO's superiority in reducing the communication volume, and in improving the perception range and detection performances. Code can be found at: \href{https://github.com/sidiangongyuan/ACCO}{https://github.com/sidiangongyuan/ACCO}.
Authors:Barza Nisar, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) on 3D point clouds has the potential to learn feature representations that can transfer to diverse sensors and multiple downstream perception tasks. However, recent SSL approaches fail to define pretext tasks that retain geometric information such as object pose and scale, which can be detrimental to the performance of downstream localization and geometry-sensitive 3D scene understanding tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. We propose PSA-SSL, a novel extension to point cloud SSL that learns object pose and size-aware (PSA) features. Our approach defines a self-supervised bounding box regression pretext task, which retains object pose and size information. Furthermore, we incorporate LiDAR beam pattern augmentation on input point clouds, which encourages learning sensor-agnostic features. Our experiments demonstrate that with a single pretrained model, our light-weight yet effective extensions achieve significant improvements on 3D semantic segmentation with limited labels across popular autonomous driving datasets (Waymo, nuScenes, SemanticKITTI). Moreover, our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art SSL methods on 3D semantic segmentation (using up to 10 times less labels), as well as on 3D object detection. Our code will be released on https://github.com/TRAILab/PSA-SSL.
Authors:Zhuoqun Su, Huimin Lu, Shuaifeng Jiao, Junhao Xiao, Yaonan Wang, Xieyuanli Chen
Abstract:
Multimodal 3D object detectors leverage the strengths of both geometry-aware LiDAR point clouds and semantically rich RGB images to enhance detection performance. However, the inherent heterogeneity between these modalities, including unbalanced convergence and modal misalignment, poses significant challenges. Meanwhile, the large size of the detection-oriented feature also constrains existing fusion strategies to capture long-range dependencies for the 3D detection tasks. In this work, we introduce a fast yet effective multimodal 3D object detector, incorporating our proposed Instance-level Contrastive Distillation (ICD) framework and Cross Linear Attention Fusion Module (CLFM). ICD aligns instance-level image features with LiDAR representations through object-aware contrastive distillation, ensuring fine-grained cross-modal consistency. Meanwhile, CLFM presents an efficient and scalable fusion strategy that enhances cross-modal global interactions within sizable multimodal BEV features. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Notably, our 3D object detector outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while achieving superior efficiency. The implementation of our method has been released as open-source at: https://github.com/nubot-nudt/ICD-Fusion.
Authors:Boyu Chen, Ameenat L. Solebo, Daqian Shi, Jinge Wu, Paul Taylor
Abstract:
Anterior Segment Optical Coherence Tomography (AS-OCT) is an emerging imaging technique with great potential for diagnosing anterior uveitis, a vision-threatening ocular inflammatory condition. A hallmark of this condition is the presence of inflammatory cells in the eye's anterior chamber, and detecting these cells using AS-OCT images has attracted research interest. While recent efforts aim to replace manual cell detection with automated computer vision approaches, detecting extremely small (minuscule) objects in high-resolution images, such as AS-OCT, poses substantial challenges: (1) each cell appears as a minuscule particle, representing less than 0.005\% of the image, making the detection difficult, and (2) OCT imaging introduces pixel-level noise that can be mistaken for cells, leading to false positive detections. To overcome these challenges, we propose a minuscule cell detection framework through a progressive field-of-view focusing strategy. This strategy systematically refines the detection scope from the whole image to a target region where cells are likely to be present, and further to minuscule regions potentially containing individual cells. Our framework consists of two modules. First, a Field-of-Focus module uses a vision foundation model to segment the target region. Subsequently, a Fine-grained Object Detection module introduces a specialized Minuscule Region Proposal followed by a Spatial Attention Network to distinguish individual cells from noise within the segmented region. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods for cell detection, providing enhanced efficacy for clinical applications. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/joeybyc/MCD.
Authors:Tianyi Zhao, Boyang Liu, Yanglei Gao, Yiming Sun, Maoxun Yuan, Xingxing Wei
Abstract:
Multi-Modal Object Detection (MMOD), due to its stronger adaptability to various complex environments, has been widely applied in various applications. Extensive research is dedicated to the RGB-IR object detection, primarily focusing on how to integrate complementary features from RGB-IR modalities. However, they neglect the mono-modality insufficient learning problem, which arises from decreased feature extraction capability in multi-modal joint learning. This leads to a prevalent but unreasonable phenomenon\textemdash Fusion Degradation, which hinders the performance improvement of the MMOD model. Motivated by this, in this paper, we introduce linear probing evaluation to the multi-modal detectors and rethink the multi-modal object detection task from the mono-modality learning perspective. Therefore, we construct a novel framework called M$^2$D-LIF, which consists of the Mono-Modality Distillation (M$^2$D) method and the Local Illumination-aware Fusion (LIF) module. The M$^2$D-LIF framework facilitates the sufficient learning of mono-modality during multi-modal joint training and explores a lightweight yet effective feature fusion manner to achieve superior object detection performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three MMOD datasets demonstrate that our M$^2$D-LIF effectively mitigates the Fusion Degradation phenomenon and outperforms the previous SOTA detectors. The codes are available at https://github.com/Zhao-Tian-yi/M2D-LIF.
Authors:Kelu Yao, Nuo Xu, Rong Yang, Yingying Xu, Zhuoyan Gao, Titinunt Kitrungrotsakul, Yi Ren, Pu Zhang, Jin Wang, Ning Wei, Chao Li
Abstract:
This paper introduces a holistic vision-language foundation model tailored for remote sensing, named Falcon. Falcon offers a unified, prompt-based paradigm that effectively executes comprehensive and complex remote sensing tasks. Falcon demonstrates powerful understanding and reasoning abilities at the image, region, and pixel levels. Specifically, given simple natural language instructions and remote sensing images, Falcon can produce impressive results in text form across 14 distinct tasks, i.e., image classification, object detection, segmentation, image captioning, and etc. To facilitate Falcon's training and empower its representation capacity to encode rich spatial and semantic information, we developed Falcon_SFT, a large-scale, multi-task, instruction-tuning dataset in the field of remote sensing. The Falcon_SFT dataset consists of approximately 78 million high-quality data samples, covering 5.6 million multi-spatial resolution and multi-view remote sensing images with diverse instructions. It features hierarchical annotations and undergoes manual sampling verification to ensure high data quality and reliability. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted, which verify that Falcon achieves remarkable performance over 67 datasets and 14 tasks, despite having only 0.7B parameters. We release the complete dataset, code, and model weights at https://github.com/TianHuiLab/Falcon, hoping to help further develop the open-source community.
Authors:Ming Deng, Sijin Sun, Zihao Li, Xiaochuan Hu, Xing Wu
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is challenging due to the strong similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings, which complicates identification. Existing methods mainly rely on spatial local features, failing to capture global information, while Transformers increase computational costs. To address this, the Frequency-Assisted Mamba-Like Linear Attention Network (FMNet) is proposed, which leverages frequency-domain learning to efficiently capture global features and mitigate ambiguity between objects and the background. FMNet introduces the Multi-Scale Frequency-Assisted Mamba-Like Linear Attention (MFM) module, integrating frequency and spatial features through a multi-scale structure to handle scale variations while reducing computational complexity. Additionally, the Pyramidal Frequency Attention Extraction (PFAE) module and the Frequency Reverse Decoder (FRD) enhance semantics and reconstruct features. Experimental results demonstrate that FMNet outperforms existing methods on multiple COD datasets, showcasing its advantages in both performance and efficiency. Code available at https://github.com/Chranos/FMNet.
Authors:Yuwen Du, Anning Hu, Zichen Chao, Yifan Lu, Junhao Ge, Genjia Liu, Weitao Wu, Lanjun Wang, Siheng Chen
Abstract:
Roadside Collaborative Perception refers to a system where multiple roadside units collaborate to pool their perceptual data, assisting vehicles in enhancing their environmental awareness. Existing roadside perception methods concentrate on model design but overlook data issues like calibration errors, sparse information, and multi-view consistency, leading to poor performance on recent published datasets. To significantly enhance roadside collaborative perception and address critical data issues, we present the first simulation framework RoCo-Sim for road-side collaborative perception. RoCo-Sim is capable of generating diverse, multi-view consistent simulated roadside data through dynamic foreground editing and full-scene style transfer of a single image. RoCo-Sim consists of four components: (1) Camera Extrinsic Optimization ensures accurate 3D to 2D projection for roadside cameras; (2) A novel Multi-View Occlusion-Aware Sampler (MOAS) determines the placement of diverse digital assets within 3D space; (3) DepthSAM innovatively models foreground-background relationships from single-frame fixed-view images, ensuring multi-view consistency of foreground; and (4) Scalable Post-Processing Toolkit generates more realistic and enriched scenes through style transfer and other enhancements. RoCo-Sim significantly improves roadside 3D object detection, outperforming SOTA methods by 83.74 on Rcooper-Intersection and 83.12 on TUMTraf-V2X for AP70. RoCo-Sim fills a critical gap in roadside perception simulation. Code and pre-trained models will be released soon: https://github.com/duyuwen-duen/RoCo-Sim
Authors:Fengxiang Wang, Hongzhen Wang, Yulin Wang, Di Wang, Mingshuo Chen, Haiyan Zhao, Yangang Sun, Shuo Wang, Long Lan, Wenjing Yang, Jing Zhang
Abstract:
Recent advances in self-supervised learning for Vision Transformers (ViTs) have fueled breakthroughs in remote sensing (RS) foundation models. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention poses a significant barrier to scalability, particularly for large models and high-resolution images. While the linear-complexity Mamba architecture offers a promising alternative, existing RS applications of Mamba remain limited to supervised tasks on small, domain-specific datasets. To address these challenges, we propose RoMA, a framework that enables scalable self-supervised pretraining of Mamba-based RS foundation models using large-scale, diverse, unlabeled data. RoMA enhances scalability for high-resolution images through a tailored auto-regressive learning strategy, incorporating two key innovations: 1) a rotation-aware pretraining mechanism combining adaptive cropping with angular embeddings to handle sparsely distributed objects with arbitrary orientations, and 2) multi-scale token prediction objectives that address the extreme variations in object scales inherent to RS imagery. Systematic empirical studies validate that Mamba adheres to RS data and parameter scaling laws, with performance scaling reliably as model and data size increase. Furthermore, experiments across scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate that RoMA-pretrained Mamba models consistently outperform ViT-based counterparts in both accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code and pretrained models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/RoMA.
Authors:Qing Jiang, Lin Wu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren, Yuda Xiong, Yihao Chen, Qin Liu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
Humans are undoubtedly the most important participants in computer vision, and the ability to detect any individual given a natural language description, a task we define as referring to any person, holds substantial practical value. However, we find that existing models generally fail to achieve real-world usability, and current benchmarks are limited by their focus on one-to-one referring, that hinder progress in this area. In this work, we revisit this task from three critical perspectives: task definition, dataset design, and model architecture. We first identify five aspects of referable entities and three distinctive characteristics of this task. Next, we introduce HumanRef, a novel dataset designed to tackle these challenges and better reflect real-world applications. From a model design perspective, we integrate a multimodal large language model with an object detection framework, constructing a robust referring model named RexSeek. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art models, which perform well on commonly used benchmarks like RefCOCO/+/g, struggle with HumanRef due to their inability to detect multiple individuals. In contrast, RexSeek not only excels in human referring but also generalizes effectively to common object referring, making it broadly applicable across various perception tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/RexSeek
Authors:Qiming Xia, Wenkai Lin, Haoen Xiang, Xun Huang, Siheng Chen, Zhen Dong, Cheng Wang, Chenglu Wen
Abstract:
Unsupervised 3D object detection serves as an important solution for offline 3D object annotation. However, due to the data sparsity and limited views, the clustering-based label fitting in unsupervised object detection often generates low-quality pseudo-labels. Multi-agent collaborative dataset, which involves the sharing of complementary observations among agents, holds the potential to break through this bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised method that learns to Detect Objects from Multi-Agent LiDAR scans, termed DOtA, without using labels from external. DOtA first uses the internally shared ego-pose and ego-shape of collaborative agents to initialize the detector, leveraging the generalization performance of neural networks to infer preliminary labels. Subsequently,DOtA uses the complementary observations between agents to perform multi-scale encoding on preliminary labels, then decodes high-quality and low-quality labels. These labels are further used as prompts to guide a correct feature learning process, thereby enhancing the performance of the unsupervised object detection task. Extensive experiments on the V2V4Real and OPV2V datasets show that our DOtA outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D object detection methods. Additionally, we also validate the effectiveness of the DOtA labels under various collaborative perception frameworks.The code is available at https://github.com/xmuqimingxia/DOtA.
Authors:Lizhen Xu, Xiuxiu Bai, Xiaojun Jia, Jianwu Fang, Shanmin Pang
Abstract:
Query-based methods with dense features have demonstrated remarkable success in 3D object detection tasks. However, the computational demands of these models, particularly with large image sizes and multiple transformer layers, pose significant challenges for efficient running on edge devices. Existing pruning and distillation methods either need retraining or are designed for ViT models, which are hard to migrate to 3D detectors. To address this issue, we propose a zero-shot runtime pruning method for transformer decoders in 3D object detection models. The method, termed tgGBC (trim keys gradually Guided By Classification scores), systematically trims keys in transformer modules based on their importance. We expand the classification score to multiply it with the attention map to get the importance score of each key and then prune certain keys after each transformer layer according to their importance scores. Our method achieves a 1.99x speedup in the transformer decoder of the latest ToC3D model, with only a minimal performance loss of less than 1%. Interestingly, for certain models, our method even enhances their performance. Moreover, we deploy 3D detectors with tgGBC on an edge device, further validating the effectiveness of our method. The code can be found at https://github.com/iseri27/tg_gbc.
Authors:Ao Wang, Lihao Liu, Hui Chen, Zijia Lin, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
Abstract:
Object detection and segmentation are widely employed in computer vision applications, yet conventional models like YOLO series, while efficient and accurate, are limited by predefined categories, hindering adaptability in open scenarios. Recent open-set methods leverage text prompts, visual cues, or prompt-free paradigm to overcome this, but often compromise between performance and efficiency due to high computational demands or deployment complexity. In this work, we introduce YOLOE, which integrates detection and segmentation across diverse open prompt mechanisms within a single highly efficient model, achieving real-time seeing anything. For text prompts, we propose Re-parameterizable Region-Text Alignment (RepRTA) strategy. It refines pretrained textual embeddings via a re-parameterizable lightweight auxiliary network and enhances visual-textual alignment with zero inference and transferring overhead. For visual prompts, we present Semantic-Activated Visual Prompt Encoder (SAVPE). It employs decoupled semantic and activation branches to bring improved visual embedding and accuracy with minimal complexity. For prompt-free scenario, we introduce Lazy Region-Prompt Contrast (LRPC) strategy. It utilizes a built-in large vocabulary and specialized embedding to identify all objects, avoiding costly language model dependency. Extensive experiments show YOLOE's exceptional zero-shot performance and transferability with high inference efficiency and low training cost. Notably, on LVIS, with 3$\times$ less training cost and 1.4$\times$ inference speedup, YOLOE-v8-S surpasses YOLO-Worldv2-S by 3.5 AP. When transferring to COCO, YOLOE-v8-L achieves 0.6 AP$^b$ and 0.4 AP$^m$ gains over closed-set YOLOv8-L with nearly 4$\times$ less training time. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/yoloe.
Authors:Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Kong
Abstract:
Sensor fusion of camera, LiDAR, and 4-dimensional (4D) Radar has brought a significant performance improvement in autonomous driving (AD). However, there still exist fundamental challenges: deeply coupled fusion methods assume continuous sensor availability, making them vulnerable to sensor degradation and failure, whereas sensor-wise cross-attention fusion methods struggle with computational cost and unified feature representation. This paper presents availability-aware sensor fusion (ASF), a novel method that employs unified canonical projection (UCP) to enable consistency in all sensor features for fusion and cross-attention across sensors along patches (CASAP) to enhance robustness of sensor fusion against sensor degradation and failure. As a result, the proposed ASF shows a superior object detection performance to the existing state-of-the-art fusion methods under various weather and sensor degradation (or failure) conditions; Extensive experiments on the K-Radar dataset demonstrate that ASF achieves improvements of 9.7% in AP BEV (87.2%) and 20.1% in AP 3D (73.6%) in object detection at IoU=0.5, while requiring a low computational cost. The code will be available at https://github.com/kaist-avelab/K-Radar.
Authors:Shijia Zhao, Qiming Xia, Xusheng Guo, Pufan Zou, Maoji Zheng, Hai Wu, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
Recently, sparsely-supervised 3D object detection has gained great attention, achieving performance close to fully-supervised 3D objectors while requiring only a few annotated instances. Nevertheless, these methods suffer challenges when accurate labels are extremely absent. In this paper, we propose a boosting strategy, termed SP3D, explicitly utilizing the cross-modal semantic prompts generated from Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to boost the 3D detector with robust feature discrimination capability under sparse annotation settings. Specifically, we first develop a Confident Points Semantic Transfer (CPST) module that generates accurate cross-modal semantic prompts through boundary-constrained center cluster selection. Based on these accurate semantic prompts, which we treat as seed points, we introduce a Dynamic Cluster Pseudo-label Generation (DCPG) module to yield pseudo-supervision signals from the geometry shape of multi-scale neighbor points. Additionally, we design a Distribution Shape score (DS score) that chooses high-quality supervision signals for the initial training of the 3D detector. Experiments on the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) have validated that SP3D can enhance the performance of sparsely supervised detectors by a large margin under meager labeling conditions. Moreover, we verified SP3D in the zero-shot setting, where its performance exceeded that of the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xmuqimingxia/SP3D.
Authors:YingLiang Ma, Sandra Howell, Aldo Rinaldi, Tarv Dhanjal, Kawal S. Rhode
Abstract:
Objective: Interventional devices, catheters and insertable imaging devices such as transesophageal echo (TOE) probes are routinely used in minimally invasive cardiovascular procedures. Detecting their positions and orientations in X-ray fluoroscopic images is important for many clinical applications. Method: In this paper, a novel attention mechanism was designed to guide a convolution neural network (CNN) model to the areas of wires in X-ray images, as nearly all interventional devices and catheters used in cardiovascular procedures contain wires. The attention mechanism includes multi-scale Gaussian derivative filters and a dot-product-based attention layer. By utilizing the proposed attention mechanism, a lightweight foundation model can be created to detect multiple objects simultaneously with higher precision and real-time speed. Results: The proposed model was trained and tested on a total of 12,438 X-ray images. An accuracy of 0.88 was achieved for detecting an echo probe and 0.87 for detecting an artificial valve at 58 FPS. The accuracy was measured by intersection-over-union (IoU). We also achieved a 99.8% success rate in detecting a 10-electrode catheter and a 97.8% success rate in detecting an ablation catheter. Conclusion: Our detection foundation model can simultaneously detect and identify both interventional devices and flexible catheters in real-time X-ray fluoroscopic images. Significance: The proposed model employs a novel attention mechanism to achieve high-performance object detection, making it suitable for various clinical applications and robotic-assisted surgeries. Codes are available at https://github.com/YingLiangMa/AttWire.
Authors:Zhao Yang, Zezhong Qian, Xiaofan Li, Weixiang Xu, Gongpeng Zhao, Ruohong Yu, Lingsi Zhu, Longjun Liu
Abstract:
Accurate and high-fidelity driving scene reconstruction demands the effective utilization of comprehensive scene information as conditional inputs. Existing methods predominantly rely on 3D bounding boxes and BEV road maps for foreground and background control, which fail to capture the full complexity of driving scenes and adequately integrate multimodal information. In this work, we present DualDiff, a dual-branch conditional diffusion model designed to enhance driving scene generation across multiple views and video sequences. Specifically, we introduce Occupancy Ray-shape Sampling (ORS) as a conditional input, offering rich foreground and background semantics alongside 3D spatial geometry to precisely control the generation of both elements. To improve the synthesis of fine-grained foreground objects, particularly complex and distant ones, we propose a Foreground-Aware Mask (FGM) denoising loss function. Additionally, we develop the Semantic Fusion Attention (SFA) mechanism to dynamically prioritize relevant information and suppress noise, enabling more effective multimodal fusion. Finally, to ensure high-quality image-to-video generation, we introduce the Reward-Guided Diffusion (RGD) framework, which maintains global consistency and semantic coherence in generated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DualDiff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple datasets. On the NuScenes dataset, DualDiff reduces the FID score by 4.09% compared to the best baseline. In downstream tasks, such as BEV segmentation, our method improves vehicle mIoU by 4.50% and road mIoU by 1.70%, while in BEV 3D object detection, the foreground mAP increases by 1.46%. Code will be made available at https://github.com/yangzhaojason/DualDiff.
Authors:Wenqi Guo, Yiyang Du, Shan Du
Abstract:
Gas leakage poses a significant hazard that requires prevention. Traditionally, human inspection has been used for detection, a slow and labour-intensive process. Recent research has applied machine learning techniques to this problem, yet there remains a shortage of high-quality, publicly available datasets. This paper introduces a synthetic dataset, SimGas, featuring diverse backgrounds, interfering foreground objects, diverse leak locations, and precise segmentation ground truth. We propose a zero-shot method that combines background subtraction, zero-shot object detection, filtering, and segmentation to leverage this dataset. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods based solely on background subtraction and zero-shot object detection with segmentation, reaching an IoU of 69%. We also present an analysis of various prompt configurations and threshold settings to provide deeper insights into the performance of our method. Finally, we qualitatively (because of the lack of ground truth) tested our performance on GasVid and reached decent results on the real-world dataset. The dataset, code, and full qualitative results are available at https://github.com/weathon/Lang-Gas.
Authors:Boyong He, Yuxiang Ji, Qianwen Ye, Zhuoyue Tan, Liaoni Wu
Abstract:
Domain generalization (DG) for object detection aims to enhance detectors' performance in unseen scenarios. This task remains challenging due to complex variations in real-world applications. Recently, diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in diverse scene generation, which inspires us to explore their potential for improving DG tasks. Instead of generating images, our method extracts multi-step intermediate features during the diffusion process to obtain domain-invariant features for generalized detection. Furthermore, we propose an efficient knowledge transfer framework that enables detectors to inherit the generalization capabilities of diffusion models through feature and object-level alignment, without increasing inference time. We conduct extensive experiments on six challenging DG benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements of 14.0% mAP over existing DG approaches across different domains and corruption types. Notably, our method even outperforms most domain adaptation methods without accessing any target domain data. Moreover, the diffusion-guided detectors show consistent improvements of 15.9% mAP on average compared to the baseline. Our work aims to present an effective approach for domain-generalized detection and provide potential insights for robust visual recognition in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/heboyong/Generalized-Diffusion-Detector.
Authors:Chenxu Dang, Zaipeng Duan, Pei An, Xinmin Zhang, Xuzhong Hu, Jie Ma
Abstract:
Recent top-performing temporal 3D detectors based on Lidars have increasingly adopted region-based paradigms. They first generate coarse proposals, followed by encoding and fusing regional features. However, indiscriminate sampling and fusion often overlook the varying contributions of individual points and lead to exponentially increased complexity as the number of input frames grows. Moreover, arbitrary result-level concatenation limits the global information extraction. In this paper, we propose a Focal Token Acquring-and-Scaling Transformer (FASTer), which dynamically selects focal tokens and condenses token sequences in an adaptive and lightweight manner. Emphasizing the contribution of individual tokens, we propose a simple but effective Adaptive Scaling mechanism to capture geometric contexts while sifting out focal points. Adaptively storing and processing only focal points in historical frames dramatically reduces the overall complexity. Furthermore, a novel Grouped Hierarchical Fusion strategy is proposed, progressively performing sequence scaling and Intra-Group Fusion operations to facilitate the exchange of global spatial and temporal information. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that our FASTer significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art detectors in both performance and efficiency while also exhibiting improved flexibility and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/MSunDYY/FASTer.git.
Authors:Ziyu Liu, Zeyi Sun, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuhang Cao, Haodong Duan, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Abstract:
Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in Large Reasoning Models like OpenAI o1 learns from feedback on its answers, which is especially useful in applications when fine-tuning data is scarce. Recent open-source work like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is one key direction in reproducing o1. While the R1-style model has demonstrated success in language models, its application in multi-modal domains remains under-explored. This work introduces Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT), which further extends the application areas of RFT on visual tasks. Specifically, Visual-RFT first uses Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multiple responses containing reasoning tokens and final answers for each input, and then uses our proposed visual perception verifiable reward functions to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We design different verifiable reward functions for different perception tasks, such as the Intersection over Union (IoU) reward for object detection. Experimental results on fine-grained image classification, few-shot object detection, reasoning grounding, as well as open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced generalization ability of Visual-RFT compared with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). For example, Visual-RFT improves accuracy by $24.3\%$ over the baseline in one-shot fine-grained image classification with around 100 samples. In few-shot object detection, Visual-RFT also exceeds the baseline by $21.9$ on COCO's two-shot setting and $15.4$ on LVIS. Our Visual-RFT represents a paradigm shift in fine-tuning LVLMs, offering a data-efficient, reward-driven approach that enhances reasoning and adaptability for domain-specific tasks.
Authors:Fei Teng, Buyin Deng, Boyuan Zheng, Kai Luo, Kunyu Peng, Jiaming Zhang, Kailun Yang
Abstract:
Field of Parallax (FoP)}, a spatial field that distills the common features from different LF representations to provide flexible and consistent support for multi-task learning. FoP is built upon three core features--projection difference, adjacency divergence, and contextual consistency--which are essential for cross-task adaptability. To implement FoP, we design a two-step angular adapter: the first step captures angular-specific differences, while the second step consolidates contextual consistency to ensure robust representation. Leveraging the FoP-based representation, we introduce the LFX framework, the first to handle arbitrary LF representations seamlessly, unifying LF multi-task vision. We evaluated LFX across three different tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art results, compared with previous task-specific architectures: 84.74% in mIoU for semantic segmentation on UrbanLF, 0.84% in AP for object detection on PKU, and 0.030 in MAE and 0.026 in MAE for salient object detection on Duftv2 and PKU, respectively. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/warriordby/LFX.
Authors:Meng Lou, Yizhou Yu
Abstract:
Top-down attention plays a crucial role in the human vision system, wherein the brain initially obtains a rough overview of a scene to discover salient cues (i.e., overview first), followed by a more careful finer-grained examination (i.e., look closely next). However, modern ConvNets remain confined to a pyramid structure that successively downsamples the feature map for receptive field expansion, neglecting this crucial biomimetic principle. We present OverLoCK, the first pure ConvNet backbone architecture that explicitly incorporates a top-down attention mechanism. Unlike pyramid backbone networks, our design features a branched architecture with three synergistic sub-networks: 1) a Base-Net that encodes low/mid-level features; 2) a lightweight Overview-Net that generates dynamic top-down attention through coarse global context modeling (i.e., overview first); and 3) a robust Focus-Net that performs finer-grained perception guided by top-down attention (i.e., look closely next). To fully unleash the power of top-down attention, we further propose a novel context-mixing dynamic convolution (ContMix) that effectively models long-range dependencies while preserving inherent local inductive biases even when the input resolution increases, addressing critical limitations in existing convolutions. Our OverLoCK exhibits a notable performance improvement over existing methods. For instance, OverLoCK-T achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 84.2%, significantly surpassing ConvNeXt-B while using only around one-third of the FLOPs/parameters. On object detection, our OverLoCK-S clearly surpasses MogaNet-B by 1% in AP^b. On semantic segmentation, our OverLoCK-T remarkably improves UniRepLKNet-T by 1.7% in mIoU. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/OverLoCK.
Authors:Hoonhee Cho, Jae-young Kang, Youngho Kim, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract:
Detecting 3D objects in point clouds plays a crucial role in autonomous driving systems. Recently, advanced multi-modal methods incorporating camera information have achieved notable performance. For a safe and effective autonomous driving system, algorithms that excel not only in accuracy but also in speed and low latency are essential. However, existing algorithms fail to meet these requirements due to the latency and bandwidth limitations of fixed frame rate sensors, e.g., LiDAR and camera. To address this limitation, we introduce asynchronous event cameras into 3D object detection for the first time. We leverage their high temporal resolution and low bandwidth to enable high-speed 3D object detection. Our method enables detection even during inter-frame intervals when synchronized data is unavailable, by retrieving previous 3D information through the event camera. Furthermore, we introduce the first event-based 3D object detection dataset, DSEC-3DOD, which includes ground-truth 3D bounding boxes at 100 FPS, establishing the first benchmark for event-based 3D detectors. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mickeykang16/Ev3DOD.
Authors:Anh-Khoa Nguyen Vu, Quoc-Truong Truong, Vinh-Tiep Nguyen, Thanh Duc Ngo, Thanh-Toan Do, Tam V. Nguyen
Abstract:
Recent few-shot object detection (FSOD) methods have focused on augmenting synthetic samples for novel classes, show promising results to the rise of diffusion models. However, the diversity of such datasets is often limited in representativeness because they lack awareness of typical and hard samples, especially in the context of foreground and background relationships. To tackle this issue, we propose a Multi-Perspective Data Augmentation (MPAD) framework. In terms of foreground-foreground relationships, we propose in-context learning for object synthesis (ICOS) with bounding box adjustments to enhance the detail and spatial information of synthetic samples. Inspired by the large margin principle, support samples play a vital role in defining class boundaries. Therefore, we design a Harmonic Prompt Aggregation Scheduler (HPAS) to mix prompt embeddings at each time step of the generation process in diffusion models, producing hard novel samples. For foreground-background relationships, we introduce a Background Proposal method (BAP) to sample typical and hard backgrounds. Extensive experiments on multiple FSOD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our framework significantly outperforms traditional methods, achieving an average increase of $17.5\%$ in nAP50 over the baseline on PASCAL VOC. Code is available at https://github.com/nvakhoa/MPAD.
Authors:Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro, Andrew Tao
Abstract:
The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contrastive loss (e.g. CLIP). A key problem with most off-the-shelf ViTs, particularly CLIP, is that these models are inflexibly low resolution. Most run at $224 \times 224$px, while the "high-resolution" versions are around $378-448$px, but still inflexible. We introduce a novel method to coherently and cheaply upsample the feature maps of low-resolution vision encoders while picking up on fine-grained details that would otherwise be lost due to resolution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on core perception tasks as well as within agglomerative model training using RADIO as a way of providing richer targets for distillation. Code available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FeatSharp .
Authors:Zhe Huang, Shuo Wang, Yongcai Wang, Lei Wang
Abstract:
Collaborative 3D object detection holds significant importance in the field of autonomous driving, as it greatly enhances the perception capabilities of each individual agent by facilitating information exchange among multiple agents. However, in practice, due to pose estimation errors and time delays, the fusion of information across agents often results in feature representations with spatial and temporal noise, leading to detection errors. Diffusion models naturally have the ability to denoise noisy samples to the ideal data, which motivates us to explore the use of diffusion models to address the noise problem between multi-agent systems. In this work, we propose CoDiff, a novel robust collaborative perception framework that leverages the potential of diffusion models to generate more comprehensive and clearer feature representations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply diffusion models to multi-agent collaborative perception. Specifically, we project high-dimensional feature map into the latent space of a powerful pre-trained autoencoder. Within this space, individual agent information serves as a condition to guide the diffusion model's sampling. This process denoises coarse feature maps and progressively refines the fused features. Experimental study on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed framework CoDiff consistently outperforms existing relevant methods in terms of the collaborative object detection performance, and exhibits highly desired robustness when the pose and delay information of agents is with high-level noise. The code is released at https://github.com/HuangZhe885/CoDiff
Authors:Tanzhe Li, Caoshuo Li, Jiayi Lyu, Hongjuan Pei, Baochang Zhang, Taisong Jin, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
State space models (SSMs) have recently garnered significant attention in computer vision. However, due to the unique characteristics of image data, adapting SSMs from natural language processing to computer vision has not outperformed the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Existing vision SSMs primarily leverage manually designed scans to flatten image patches into sequences locally or globally. This approach disrupts the original semantic spatial adjacency of the image and lacks flexibility, making it difficult to capture complex image structures. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Adaptive Scan (DAS), a data-driven method that adaptively allocates scanning orders and regions. This enables more flexible modeling capabilities while maintaining linear computational complexity and global modeling capacity. Based on DAS, we further propose the vision backbone DAMamba, which significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art vision Mamba models in vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Notably, it surpasses some of the latest state-of-the-art CNNs and ViTs. Code will be available at https://github.com/ltzovo/DAMamba.
Authors:Wenxuan Guo, Xiuwei Xu, Ziwei Wang, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-level convolution architecture for 3D visual grounding. Conventional methods are difficult to meet the requirements of real-time inference due to the two-stage or point-based architecture. Inspired by the success of multi-level fully sparse convolutional architecture in 3D object detection, we aim to build a new 3D visual grounding framework following this technical route. However, as in 3D visual grounding task the 3D scene representation should be deeply interacted with text features, sparse convolution-based architecture is inefficient for this interaction due to the large amount of voxel features. To this end, we propose text-guided pruning (TGP) and completion-based addition (CBA) to deeply fuse 3D scene representation and text features in an efficient way by gradual region pruning and target completion. Specifically, TGP iteratively sparsifies the 3D scene representation and thus efficiently interacts the voxel features with text features by cross-attention. To mitigate the affect of pruning on delicate geometric information, CBA adaptively fixes the over-pruned region by voxel completion with negligible computational overhead. Compared with previous single-stage methods, our method achieves top inference speed and surpasses previous fastest method by 100\% FPS. Our method also achieves state-of-the-art accuracy even compared with two-stage methods, with $+1.13$ lead of Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, and $+2.6$ and $+3.2$ leads on NR3D and SR3D respectively. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/GWxuan/TSP3D}{https://github.com/GWxuan/TSP3D}.
Authors:Yi Yu, Xue Yang, Yansheng Li, Zhenjun Han, Feipeng Da, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Accurately estimating the orientation of visual objects with compact rotated bounding boxes (RBoxes) has become a prominent demand, which challenges existing object detection paradigms that only use horizontal bounding boxes (HBoxes). To equip the detectors with orientation awareness, supervised regression/classification modules have been introduced at the high cost of rotation annotation. Meanwhile, some existing datasets with oriented objects are already annotated with horizontal boxes or even single points. It becomes attractive yet remains open for effectively utilizing weaker single point and horizontal annotations to train an oriented object detector (OOD). We develop Wholly-WOOD, a weakly-supervised OOD framework, capable of wholly leveraging various labeling forms (Points, HBoxes, RBoxes, and their combination) in a unified fashion. By only using HBox for training, our Wholly-WOOD achieves performance very close to that of the RBox-trained counterpart on remote sensing and other areas, significantly reducing the tedious efforts on labor-intensive annotation for oriented objects. The source codes are available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/whollywood (PyTorch-based) and https://github.com/VisionXLab/whollywood-jittor (Jittor-based).
Authors:Ziyue Yang, Kehan Wang, Yuhang Ming, Yong Peng, Han Yang, Qiong Chen, Wanzeng Kong
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD), the task of identifying objects concealed within their environments, has seen rapid growth due to its wide range of practical applications. A key step toward developing trustworthy COD systems is the estimation and effective utilization of uncertainty. In this work, we propose a human-machine collaboration framework for classifying the presence of camouflaged objects, leveraging the complementary strengths of computer vision (CV) models and noninvasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Our approach introduces a multiview backbone to estimate uncertainty in CV model predictions, utilizes this uncertainty during training to improve efficiency, and defers low-confidence cases to human evaluation via RSVP-based BCIs during testing for more reliable decision-making. We evaluated the framework in the CAMO dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results with an average improvement of 4.56\% in balanced accuracy (BA) and 3.66\% in the F1 score compared to existing methods. For the best-performing participants, the improvements reached 7.6\% in BA and 6.66\% in the F1 score. Analysis of the training process revealed a strong correlation between our confidence measures and precision, while an ablation study confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed training policy and the human-machine collaboration strategy. In general, this work reduces human cognitive load, improves system reliability, and provides a strong foundation for advancements in real-world COD applications and human-computer interaction. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/ziyuey/Uncertainty-aware-human-machine-collaboration-in-camouflaged-object-identification.
Authors:Zhiming Ma, Xiayang Xiao, Sihao Dong, Peidong Wang, HaiPeng Wang, Qingyun Pan
Abstract:
As a powerful all-weather Earth observation tool, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing enables critical military reconnaissance, maritime surveillance, and infrastructure monitoring. Although Vision language models (VLMs) have made remarkable progress in natural language processing and image understanding, their applications remain limited in professional domains due to insufficient domain expertise. This paper innovatively proposes the first large-scale multimodal dialogue dataset for SAR images, named SARChat-2M, which contains approximately 2 million high-quality image-text pairs, encompasses diverse scenarios with detailed target annotations. This dataset not only supports several key tasks such as visual understanding and object detection tasks, but also has unique innovative aspects: this study develop a visual-language dataset and benchmark for the SAR domain, enabling and evaluating VLMs' capabilities in SAR image interpretation, which provides a paradigmatic framework for constructing multimodal datasets across various remote sensing vertical domains. Through experiments on 16 mainstream VLMs, the effectiveness of the dataset has been fully verified. The project will be released at https://github.com/JimmyMa99/SARChat.
Authors:Mingyu Xing, Lechao Cheng, Shengeng Tang, Yaxiong Wang, Zhun Zhong, Meng Wang
Abstract:
We introduce \textbf{Knowledge Swapping}, a novel task designed to selectively regulate knowledge of a pretrained model by enabling the forgetting of user\-specified information, retaining essential knowledge, and acquiring new knowledge simultaneously. By delving into the analysis of knock-on feature hierarchy, we find that incremental learning typically progresses from low\-level representations to higher\-level semantics, whereas forgetting tends to occur in the opposite direction\-starting from high-level semantics and moving down to low-level features. Building upon this, we propose to benchmark the knowledge swapping task with the strategy of \textit{Learning Before Forgetting}. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks like image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/xingmingyu123456/KnowledgeSwapping}{https://github.com/xingmingyu123456/KnowledgeSwapping}.
Authors:Dongsu Song, Daehwa Ko, Jay Hoon Jung
Abstract:
It is well known that query-based attacks tend to have relatively higher success rates in adversarial black-box attacks. While research on black-box attacks is actively being conducted, relatively few studies have focused on pixel attacks that target only a limited number of pixels. In image classification, query-based pixel attacks often rely on patches, which heavily depend on randomness and neglect the fact that scattered pixels are more suitable for adversarial attacks. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, query-based pixel attacks have not been explored in the field of object detection. To address these issues, we propose a novel pixel-based black-box attack called Remember and Forget Pixel Attack using Reinforcement Learning(RFPAR), consisting of two main components: the Remember and Forget processes. RFPAR mitigates randomness and avoids patch dependency by leveraging rewards generated through a one-step RL algorithm to perturb pixels. RFPAR effectively creates perturbed images that minimize the confidence scores while adhering to limited pixel constraints. Furthermore, we advance our proposed attack beyond image classification to object detection, where RFPAR reduces the confidence scores of detected objects to avoid detection. Experiments on the ImageNet-1K dataset for classification show that RFPAR outperformed state-of-the-art query-based pixel attacks. For object detection, using the MSCOCO dataset with YOLOv8 and DDQ, RFPAR demonstrates comparable mAP reduction to state-of-the-art query-based attack while requiring fewer query. Further experiments on the Argoverse dataset using YOLOv8 confirm that RFPAR effectively removed objects on a larger scale dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/KAU-QuantumAILab/RFPAR.
Authors:Yuhui Zeng, Haoxiang Wu, Wenjie Nie, Xiawu Zheng, Guangyao Chen, Yunhang Shen, Jun Peng, Yonghong Tian, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Current object detectors excel at entity localization and classification, yet exhibit inherent limitations in event recognition capabilities. This deficiency arises from their architecture's emphasis on discrete object identification rather than modeling the compositional reasoning, inter-object correlations, and contextual semantics essential for comprehensive event understanding. To address this challenge, we present a novel framework that expands the capability of standard object detectors beyond mere object recognition to complex event understanding through LLM-guided symbolic reasoning. Our key innovation lies in bridging the semantic gap between object detection and event understanding without requiring expensive task-specific training. The proposed plug-and-play framework interfaces with any open-vocabulary detector while extending their inherent capabilities across architectures. At its core, our approach combines (i) a symbolic regression mechanism exploring relationship patterns among detected entities and (ii) a LLM-guided strategically guiding the search toward meaningful expressions. These discovered symbolic rules transform low-level visual perception into interpretable event understanding, providing a transparent reasoning path from objects to events with strong transferability across domains.We compared our training-free framework against specialized event recognition systems across diverse application domains. Experiments demonstrate that our framework enhances multiple object detector architectures to recognize complex events such as illegal fishing activities (75% AUROC, +8.36% improvement), construction safety violations (+15.77%), and abnormal crowd behaviors (+23.16%). Code is available at \href{https://github.com/MAC-AutoML/SymbolicDet}{here}.
Authors:Qirui Wu, Shizhou Zhang, De Cheng, Yinghui Xing, Di Xu, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract:
Catastrophic forgetting is a critical chanllenge for incremental object detection (IOD). Most existing methods treat the detector monolithically, relying on instance replay or knowledge distillation without analyzing component-specific forgetting. Through dissection of Faster R-CNN, we reveal a key insight: Catastrophic forgetting is predominantly localized to the RoI Head classifier, while regressors retain robustness across incremental stages. This finding challenges conventional assumptions, motivating us to develop a framework termed NSGP-RePRE. Regional Prototype Replay (RePRE) mitigates classifier forgetting via replay of two types of prototypes: coarse prototypes represent class-wise semantic centers of RoI features, while fine-grained prototypes model intra-class variations. Null Space Gradient Projection (NSGP) is further introduced to eliminate prototype-feature misalignment by updating the feature extractor in directions orthogonal to subspace of old inputs via gradient projection, aligning RePRE with incremental learning dynamics. Our simple yet effective design allows NSGP-RePRE to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Pascal VOC and MS COCO datasets under various settings. Our work not only advances IOD methodology but also provide pivotal insights for catastrophic forgetting mitigation in IOD. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/fanrena/NSGP-RePRE}{https://github.com/fanrena/NSGP-RePRE} .
Authors:Zhiqiang Yang, Qiu Guan, Zhongwen Yu, Xinli Xu, Haixia Long, Sheng Lian, Haigen Hu, Ying Tang
Abstract:
Due to the effective multi-scale feature fusion capabilities of the Path Aggregation FPN (PAFPN), it has become a widely adopted component in YOLO-based detectors. However, PAFPN struggles to integrate high-level semantic cues with low-level spatial details, limiting its performance in real-world applications, especially with significant scale variations. In this paper, we propose MHAF-YOLO, a novel detection framework featuring a versatile neck design called the Multi-Branch Auxiliary FPN (MAFPN), which consists of two key modules: the Superficial Assisted Fusion (SAF) and Advanced Assisted Fusion (AAF). The SAF bridges the backbone and the neck by fusing shallow features, effectively transferring crucial low-level spatial information with high fidelity. Meanwhile, the AAF integrates multi-scale feature information at deeper neck layers, delivering richer gradient information to the output layer and further enhancing the model learning capacity. To complement MAFPN, we introduce the Global Heterogeneous Flexible Kernel Selection (GHFKS) mechanism and the Reparameterized Heterogeneous Multi-Scale (RepHMS) module to enhance feature fusion. RepHMS is globally integrated into the network, utilizing GHFKS to select larger convolutional kernels for various feature layers, expanding the vertical receptive field and capturing contextual information across spatial hierarchies. Locally, it optimizes convolution by processing both large and small kernels within the same layer, broadening the lateral receptive field and preserving crucial details for detecting smaller targets. The source code of this work is available at: https://github.com/yang-0201/MHAF-YOLO.
Authors:Yi Yu, Botao Ren, Peiyuan Zhang, Mingxin Liu, Junwei Luo, Shaofeng Zhang, Feipeng Da, Junchi Yan, Xue Yang
Abstract:
With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection (OOD), recent research involving weakly-supervised detectors for learning OOD from point annotations has gained great attention. In this paper, we rethink this challenging task setting with the layout among instances and present Point2RBox-v2. At the core are three principles: 1) Gaussian overlap loss. It learns an upper bound for each instance by treating objects as 2D Gaussian distributions and minimizing their overlap. 2) Voronoi watershed loss. It learns a lower bound for each instance through watershed on Voronoi tessellation. 3) Consistency loss. It learns the size/rotation variation between two output sets with respect to an input image and its augmented view. Supplemented by a few devised techniques, e.g. edge loss and copy-paste, the detector is further enhanced. To our best knowledge, Point2RBox-v2 is the first approach to explore the spatial layout among instances for learning point-supervised OOD. Our solution is elegant and lightweight, yet it is expected to give a competitive performance especially in densely packed scenes: 62.61%/86.15%/34.71% on DOTA/HRSC/FAIR1M. Code is available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/point2rbox-v2.
Authors:Hsin-Cheng Lu, Chung-Yi Lin, Winston H. Hsu
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, 3D object detection is essential for accurately identifying and tracking objects. Despite the continuous development of various technologies for this task, a significant drawback is observed in most of them-they experience substantial performance degradation when detecting objects in unseen domains. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the generalization ability for 3D object detection on a single domain. We primarily focus on generalizing from a single source domain to target domains with distinct sensor configurations and scene distributions. To learn sparsity-invariant features from a single source domain, we selectively subsample the source data to a specific beam, using confidence scores determined by the current detector to identify the density that holds utmost importance for the detector. Subsequently, we employ the teacher-student framework to align the Bird's Eye View (BEV) features for different point clouds densities. We also utilize feature content alignment (FCA) and graph-based embedding relationship alignment (GERA) to instruct the detector to be domain-agnostic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits superior generalization capabilities compared to other baselines. Furthermore, our approach even outperforms certain domain adaptation methods that can access to the target domain data.
Authors:Jue Gong, Jingkai Wang, Zheng Chen, Xing Liu, Hong Gu, Yulun Zhang, Xiaokang Yang
Abstract:
Human body restoration, as a specific application of image restoration, is widely applied in practice and plays a vital role across diverse fields. However, thorough research remains difficult, particularly due to the lack of benchmark datasets. In this study, we propose a high-quality dataset automated cropping and filtering (HQ-ACF) pipeline. This pipeline leverages existing object detection datasets and other unlabeled images to automatically crop and filter high-quality human images. Using this pipeline, we constructed a person-based restoration with sophisticated objects and natural activities (\emph{PERSONA}) dataset, which includes training, validation, and test sets. The dataset significantly surpasses other human-related datasets in both quality and content richness. Finally, we propose \emph{OSDHuman}, a novel one-step diffusion model for human body restoration. Specifically, we propose a high-fidelity image embedder (HFIE) as the prompt generator to better guide the model with low-quality human image information, effectively avoiding misleading prompts. Experimental results show that OSDHuman outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics. The dataset and code will at https://github.com/gobunu/OSDHuman.
Authors:Saarthak Kapse, Robin Betz, Srinivasan Sivanandan
Abstract:
State Space Models (SSMs) with selective scan (Mamba) have been adapted into efficient vision models. Mamba, unlike Vision Transformers, achieves linear complexity for token interactions through a recurrent hidden state process. This sequential processing is enhanced by a parallel scan algorithm, which reduces the computational time of recurrent steps from $L$ sequential steps to $log(L)$ parallel steps with respect to the number of input tokens ($L$). In this work, we propose Fast Vision Mamba (FastVim), that further reduces the computational time of the SSM block by reducing the number of recurrent steps in Vision Mamba models while still retaining model performance. By alternately pooling tokens along image dimensions across Mamba blocks, we obtain a 2$\times$ reduction in the number of parallel steps in SSM block. Our model offers up to $72.5\%$ speedup in inference speed compared to baseline Vision Mamba models on high resolution (2048$\times$2048) images. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with dramatically improved throughput in a range of tasks such as image classification, cell perturbation prediction, segmentation, and object detection. Code is made available at https://github.com/insitro/FastVim
Authors:David Oro, Carles Fernández, Xavier Martorell, Javier Hernando
Abstract:
In the context of object detection, sliding-window classifiers and single-shot Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) meta-architectures typically yield multiple overlapping candidate windows with similar high scores around the true location of a particular object. Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) is the process of selecting a single representative candidate within this cluster of detections, so as to obtain a unique detection per object appearing on a given picture. In this paper, we present a highly scalable NMS algorithm for embedded GPU architectures that is designed from scratch to handle workloads featuring thousands of simultaneous detections on a given picture. Our kernels are directly applicable to other sequential NMS algorithms such as FeatureNMS, Soft-NMS or AdaptiveNMS that share the inner workings of the classic greedy NMS method. The obtained performance results show that our parallel NMS algorithm is capable of clustering 1024 simultaneous detected objects per frame in roughly 1 ms on both NVIDIA Tegra X1 and NVIDIA Tegra X2 on-die GPUs, while taking 2 ms on NVIDIA Tegra K1. Furthermore, our proposed parallel greedy NMS algorithm yields a 14x-40x speed up when compared to state-of-the-art NMS methods that require learning a CNN from annotated data.
Authors:Jihyeok Kim, Seongwoo Moon, Sungwon Nah, David Hyunchul Shim
Abstract:
This paper proposes novel methods to enhance the performance of monocular 3D object detection models by leveraging the generalized feature extraction capabilities of a vision foundation model. Unlike traditional CNN-based approaches, which often suffer from inaccurate depth estimation and rely on multi-stage object detection pipelines, this study employs a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based foundation model as the backbone, which excels at capturing global features for depth estimation. It integrates a detection transformer (DETR) architecture to improve both depth estimation and object detection performance in a one-stage manner. Specifically, a hierarchical feature fusion block is introduced to extract richer visual features from the foundation model, further enhancing feature extraction capabilities. Depth estimation accuracy is further improved by incorporating a relative depth estimation model trained on large-scale data and fine-tuning it through transfer learning. Additionally, the use of queries in the transformer's decoder, which consider reference points and the dimensions of 2D bounding boxes, enhances recognition performance. The proposed model outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, as demonstrated through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the KITTI 3D benchmark and a custom dataset collected from high-elevation racing environments. Code is available at https://github.com/JihyeokKim/MonoDINO-DETR.
Authors:Bidossessi Emmanuel Agossou, Marius Pedersen, Kiran Raja, Anuja Vats, PÃ¥l Anders Floor
Abstract:
Pathology detection in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) using deep learning has been explored in the recent past. However, deep learning models can be influenced by the color quality of the dataset used to train them, impacting detection, segmentation and classification tasks. In this work, we evaluate the impact of color correction on pathology detection using two prominent object detection models: Retinanet and YOLOv5. We first generate two color corrected versions of a popular WCE dataset (i.e., SEE-AI dataset) using two different color correction functions. We then evaluate the performance of the Retinanet and YOLOv5 on the original and color corrected versions of the dataset. The results reveal that color correction makes the models generate larger bounding boxes and larger intersection areas with the ground truth annotations. Furthermore, color correction leads to an increased number of false positives for certain pathologies. However, these effects do not translate into a consistent improvement in performance metrics such as F1-scores, IoU, and AP50. The code is available at https://github.com/agossouema2011/WCE2024. Keywords: Wireless Capsule Endoscopy, Color correction, Retinanet, YOLOv5, Detection
Authors:Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Kong
Abstract:
Recently, 4D Radar has emerged as a crucial sensor for 3D object detection in autonomous vehicles, offering both stable perception in adverse weather and high-density point clouds for object shape recognition. However, processing such high-density data demands substantial computational resources and energy consumption. We propose SpikingRTNH, the first spiking neural network (SNN) for 3D object detection using 4D Radar data. By replacing conventional ReLU activation functions with leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neurons, SpikingRTNH achieves significant energy efficiency gains. Furthermore, inspired by human cognitive processes, we introduce biological top-down inference (BTI), which processes point clouds sequentially from higher to lower densities. This approach effectively utilizes points with lower noise and higher importance for detection. Experiments on K-Radar dataset demonstrate that SpikingRTNH with BTI significantly reduces energy consumption by 78% while achieving comparable detection performance to its ANN counterpart (51.1% AP 3D, 57.0% AP BEV). These results establish the viability of SNNs for energy-efficient 4D Radar-based object detection in autonomous driving systems. All codes are available at https://github.com/kaist-avelab/k-radar.
Authors:Lei Cheng, Siyang Cao
Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in environment perception capabilities for autonomous driving and intelligent robotics, cameras and LiDARs remain notoriously unreliable in low-light conditions and adverse weather, which limits their effectiveness. Radar serves as a reliable and low-cost sensor that can effectively complement these limitations. However, radar-based object detection has been underexplored due to the inherent weaknesses of radar data, such as low resolution, high noise, and lack of visual information. In this paper, we present TransRAD, a novel 3D radar object detection model designed to address these challenges by leveraging the Retentive Vision Transformer (RMT) to more effectively learn features from information-dense radar Range-Azimuth-Doppler (RAD) data. Our approach leverages the Retentive Manhattan Self-Attention (MaSA) mechanism provided by RMT to incorporate explicit spatial priors, thereby enabling more accurate alignment with the spatial saliency characteristics of radar targets in RAD data and achieving precise 3D radar detection across Range-Azimuth-Doppler dimensions. Furthermore, we propose Location-Aware NMS to effectively mitigate the common issue of duplicate bounding boxes in deep radar object detection. The experimental results demonstrate that TransRAD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both 2D and 3D radar detection tasks, achieving higher accuracy, faster inference speed, and reduced computational complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/radar-lab/TransRAD
Authors:Zengran Wang, Yanan Zhang, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang
Abstract:
To address the annotation burden in LiDAR-based 3D object detection, active learning (AL) methods offer a promising solution. However, traditional active learning approaches solely rely on a small amount of labeled data to train an initial model for data selection, overlooking the potential of leveraging the abundance of unlabeled data. Recently, attempts to integrate semi-supervised learning (SSL) into AL with the goal of leveraging unlabeled data have faced challenges in effectively resolving the conflict between the two paradigms, resulting in less satisfactory performance. To tackle this conflict, we propose a Synergistic Semi-Supervised Active Learning framework, dubbed as S-SSAL. Specifically, from the perspective of SSL, we propose a Collaborative PseudoScene Pre-training (CPSP) method that effectively learns from unlabeled data without introducing adverse effects. From the perspective of AL, we design a Collaborative Active Learning (CAL) method, which complements the uncertainty and diversity methods by model cascading. This allows us to fully exploit the potential of the CPSP pre-trained model. Extensive experiments conducted on KITTI and Waymo demonstrate the effectiveness of our S-SSAL framework. Notably, on the KITTI dataset, utilizing only 2% labeled data, S-SSAL can achieve performance comparable to models trained on the full dataset. The code has been released at https://github.com/LandDreamer/S_SSAL.
Authors:Chuanyang Zheng
Abstract:
We present a new family of mobile hybrid vision networks, called iFormer, with a focus on optimizing latency and accuracy on mobile applications. iFormer effectively integrates the fast local representation capacity of convolution with the efficient global modeling ability of self-attention. The local interactions are derived from transforming a standard convolutional network, \textit{i.e.}, ConvNeXt, to design a more lightweight mobile network. Our newly introduced mobile modulation attention removes memory-intensive operations in MHA and employs an efficient modulation mechanism to boost dynamic global representational capacity. We conduct comprehensive experiments demonstrating that iFormer outperforms existing lightweight networks across various tasks. Notably, iFormer achieves an impressive Top-1 accuracy of 80.4\% on ImageNet-1k with a latency of only 1.10 ms on an iPhone 13, surpassing the recently proposed MobileNetV4 under similar latency constraints. Additionally, our method shows significant improvements in downstream tasks, including COCO object detection, instance segmentation, and ADE20k semantic segmentation, while still maintaining low latency on mobile devices for high-resolution inputs in these scenarios.
Authors:Peiyuan Zhang, Junwei Luo, Xue Yang, Yi Yu, Qingyun Li, Yue Zhou, Xiaosong Jia, Xudong Lu, Jingdong Chen, Xiang Li, Junchi Yan, Yansheng Li
Abstract:
With the growing demand for oriented object detection (OOD), recent studies on point-supervised OOD have attracted significant interest. In this paper, we propose PointOBB-v3, a stronger single point-supervised OOD framework. Compared to existing methods, it generates pseudo rotated boxes without additional priors and incorporates support for the end-to-end paradigm. PointOBB-v3 functions by integrating three unique image views: the original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Based on the views, a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module are constructed. In the first module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss and a Scale-Sensitive Feature Fusion (SSFF) module are introduced to improve the model's ability to estimate object scale. To achieve precise angle predictions, the second module employs symmetry-based self-supervised learning. Additionally, we introduce an end-to-end version that eliminates the pseudo-label generation process by integrating a detector branch and introduces an Instance-Aware Weighting (IAW) strategy to focus on high-quality predictions. We conducted extensive experiments on the DIOR-R, DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0, FAIR1M, STAR, and RSAR datasets. Across all these datasets, our method achieves an average improvement in accuracy of 3.56% in comparison to previous state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/ZpyWHU/PointOBB-v3.
Authors:Junyu Xia, Jiesong Bai, Yihang Dong
Abstract:
Low-light image enhancement (LLE) aims to improve the visual quality of images captured in poorly lit conditions, which often suffer from low brightness, low contrast, noise, and color distortions. These issues hinder the performance of computer vision tasks such as object detection, facial recognition, and autonomous driving.Traditional enhancement techniques, such as multi-scale fusion and histogram equalization, fail to preserve fine details and often struggle with maintaining the natural appearance of enhanced images under complex lighting conditions. Although the Retinex theory provides a foundation for image decomposition, it often amplifies noise, leading to suboptimal image quality. In this paper, we propose the Dual Light Enhance Network (DLEN), a novel architecture that incorporates two distinct attention mechanisms, considering both spatial and frequency domains. Our model introduces a learnable wavelet transform module in the illumination estimation phase, preserving high- and low-frequency components to enhance edge and texture details. Additionally, we design a dual-branch structure that leverages the power of the Transformer architecture to enhance both the illumination and structural components of the image.Through extensive experiments, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks.Code is available here: https://github.com/LaLaLoXX/DLEN
Authors:Konrad Lis, Tomasz Kryjak, Marek Gorgon
Abstract:
This paper presents LiFT, a lightweight, fully quantized 3D object detection algorithm for LiDAR data, optimized for real-time inference on FPGA platforms. Through an in-depth analysis of FPGA-specific limitations, we identify a set of FPGA-induced constraints that shape the algorithm's design. These include a computational complexity limit of 30 GMACs (billion multiply-accumulate operations), INT8 quantization for weights and activations, 2D cell-based processing instead of 3D voxels, and minimal use of skip connections. To meet these constraints while maximizing performance, LiFT combines novel mechanisms with state-of-the-art techniques such as reparameterizable convolutions and fully sparse architecture. Key innovations include the Dual-bound Pillar Feature Net, which boosts performance without increasing complexity, and an efficient scheme for INT8 quantization of input features. With a computational cost of just 20.73 GMACs, LiFT stands out as one of the few algorithms targeting minimal-complexity 3D object detection. Among comparable methods, LiFT ranks first, achieving an mAP of 51.84% and an NDS of 61.01% on the challenging NuScenes validation dataset. The code will be available at https://github.com/vision-agh/lift.
Authors:Ruixuan Zhang, Beichen Wang, Juexiao Zhang, Zilin Bian, Chen Feng, Kaan Ozbay
Abstract:
The increasing availability of traffic videos functioning on a 24/7/365 time scale has the great potential of increasing the spatio-temporal coverage of traffic accidents, which will help improve traffic safety. However, analyzing footage from hundreds, if not thousands, of traffic cameras in a 24/7/365 working protocol remains an extremely challenging task, as current vision-based approaches primarily focus on extracting raw information, such as vehicle trajectories or individual object detection, but require laborious post-processing to derive actionable insights. We propose SeeUnsafe, a new framework that integrates Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) agents to transform video-based traffic accident analysis from a traditional extraction-then-explanation workflow to a more interactive, conversational approach. This shift significantly enhances processing throughput by automating complex tasks like video classification and visual grounding, while improving adaptability by enabling seamless adjustments to diverse traffic scenarios and user-defined queries. Our framework employs a severity-based aggregation strategy to handle videos of various lengths and a novel multimodal prompt to generate structured responses for review and evaluation and enable fine-grained visual grounding. We introduce IMS (Information Matching Score), a new MLLM-based metric for aligning structured responses with ground truth. We conduct extensive experiments on the Toyota Woven Traffic Safety dataset, demonstrating that SeeUnsafe effectively performs accident-aware video classification and visual grounding by leveraging off-the-shelf MLLMs. Source code will be available at \url{https://github.com/ai4ce/SeeUnsafe}.
Authors:Qingyun Li, Yushi Chen, Xinya Shu, Dong Chen, Xin He, Yi Yu, Xue Yang
Abstract:
The multimodal language models (MLMs) based on generative pre-trained Transformer are considered powerful candidates for unifying various domains and tasks. MLMs developed for remote sensing (RS) have demonstrated outstanding performance in multiple tasks, such as visual question answering and visual grounding. In addition to visual grounding that detects specific objects corresponded to given instruction, aerial detection, which detects all objects of multiple categories, is also a valuable and challenging task for RS foundation models. However, aerial detection has not been explored by existing RS MLMs because the autoregressive prediction mechanism of MLMs differs significantly from the detection outputs. In this paper, we present a simple baseline for applying MLMs to aerial detection for the first time, named LMMRotate. Specifically, we first introduce a normalization method to transform detection outputs into textual outputs to be compatible with the MLM framework. Then, we propose a evaluation method, which ensures a fair comparison between MLMs and conventional object detection models. We construct the baseline by fine-tuning open-source general-purpose MLMs and achieve impressive detection performance comparable to conventional detector. We hope that this baseline will serve as a reference for future MLM development, enabling more comprehensive capabilities for understanding RS images. Code is available at https://github.com/Li-Qingyun/mllm-mmrotate.
Authors:Hongbo Zhao, Fei Zhu, Bolin Ni, Feng Zhu, Gaofeng Meng, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
For privacy and security concerns, the need to erase unwanted information from pre-trained vision models is becoming evident nowadays. In real-world scenarios, erasure requests originate at any time from both users and model owners, and these requests usually form a sequence. Therefore, under such a setting, selective information is expected to be continuously removed from a pre-trained model while maintaining the rest. We define this problem as continual forgetting and identify three key challenges. (i) For unwanted knowledge, efficient and effective deleting is crucial. (ii) For remaining knowledge, the impact brought by the forgetting procedure should be minimal. (iii) In real-world scenarios, the training samples may be scarce or partially missing during the process of forgetting. To address them, we first propose Group Sparse LoRA (GS-LoRA). Specifically, towards (i), we introduce LoRA modules to fine-tune the FFN layers in Transformer blocks for each forgetting task independently, and towards (ii), a simple group sparse regularization is adopted, enabling automatic selection of specific LoRA groups and zeroing out the others. To further extend GS-LoRA to more practical scenarios, we incorporate prototype information as additional supervision and introduce a more practical approach, GS-LoRA++. For each forgotten class, we move the logits away from its original prototype. For the remaining classes, we pull the logits closer to their respective prototypes. We conduct extensive experiments on face recognition, object detection and image classification and demonstrate that our method manages to forget specific classes with minimal impact on other classes. Codes have been released on https://github.com/bjzhb666/GS-LoRA.
Authors:Jan Skvrna, Lukas Neumann
Abstract:
Inferring object 3D position and orientation from a single RGB camera is a foundational task in computer vision with many important applications. Traditionally, 3D object detection methods are trained in a fully-supervised setup, requiring LiDAR and vast amounts of human annotations, which are laborious, costly, and do not scale well with the ever-increasing amounts of data being captured.
We present a novel method to train a 3D object detector from a single RGB camera without domain-specific human annotations, making orders of magnitude more data available for training. The method uses newly proposed Local Object Motion Model to disentangle object movement source between subsequent frames, is approximately 700 times faster than previous work and compensates camera focal length differences to aggregate multiple datasets.
The method is evaluated on three public datasets, where despite using no human labels, it outperforms prior work by a significant margin. It also shows its versatility as a pre-training tool for fully-supervised training and shows that combining pseudo-labels from multiple datasets can achieve comparable accuracy to using human labels from a single dataset. The source code and model are available at https://github.com/jskvrna/MonoSOWA.
Authors:Yunzhi Zhuge, Hongyu Gu, Lu Zhang, Jinqing Qi, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
In this paper, we address the challenges in unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) by proposing an efficient algorithm, termed MTNet, which concurrently exploits motion and temporal cues. Unlike previous methods that focus solely on integrating appearance with motion or on modeling temporal relations, our method combines both aspects by integrating them within a unified framework. MTNet is devised by effectively merging appearance and motion features during the feature extraction process within encoders, promoting a more complementary representation. To capture the intricate long-range contextual dynamics and information embedded within videos, a temporal transformer module is introduced, facilitating efficacious inter-frame interactions throughout a video clip. Furthermore, we employ a cascade of decoders all feature levels across all feature levels to optimally exploit the derived features, aiming to generate increasingly precise segmentation masks. As a result, MTNet provides a strong and compact framework that explores both temporal and cross-modality knowledge to robustly localize and track the primary object accurately in various challenging scenarios efficiently. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks conclusively show that our method not only attains state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised video object segmentation but also delivers competitive results in video salient object detection. These findings highlight the method's robust versatility and its adeptness in adapting to a range of segmentation tasks. Source code is available on https://github.com/hy0523/MTNet.
Authors:Zhaokai Wang, Xizhou Zhu, Xue Yang, Gen Luo, Hao Li, Changyao Tian, Wenhan Dou, Junqi Ge, Lewei Lu, Yu Qiao, Jifeng Dai
Abstract:
Image pyramids are widely adopted in top-performing methods to obtain multi-scale features for precise visual perception and understanding. However, current image pyramids use the same large-scale model to process multiple resolutions of images, leading to significant computational cost. To address this challenge, we propose a novel network architecture, called Parameter-Inverted Image Pyramid Networks (PIIP). Specifically, PIIP uses pretrained models (ViTs or CNNs) as branches to process multi-scale images, where images of higher resolutions are processed by smaller network branches to balance computational cost and performance. To integrate information from different spatial scales, we further propose a novel cross-branch feature interaction mechanism. To validate PIIP, we apply it to various perception models and a representative multimodal large language model called LLaVA, and conduct extensive experiments on various tasks such as object detection, segmentation, image classification and multimodal understanding. PIIP achieves superior performance compared to single-branch and existing multi-resolution approaches with lower computational cost. When applied to InternViT-6B, a large-scale vision foundation model, PIIP can improve its performance by 1%-2% on detection and segmentation with only 40%-60% of the original computation, finally achieving 60.0 box AP on MS COCO and 59.7 mIoU on ADE20K. For multimodal understanding, our PIIP-LLaVA achieves 73.0% accuracy on TextVQA and 74.5% on MMBench with only 2.8M training data. Our code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PIIP.
Authors:Varun Biyyala, Bharat Chanderprakash Kathuria, Jialu Li, Youshan Zhang
Abstract:
Video editing models have advanced significantly, but evaluating their performance remains challenging. Traditional metrics, such as CLIP text and image scores, often fall short: text scores are limited by inadequate training data and hierarchical dependencies, while image scores fail to assess temporal consistency. We present SST-EM (Semantic, Spatial, and Temporal Evaluation Metric), a novel evaluation framework that leverages modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Object Detection, and Temporal Consistency checks. SST-EM comprises four components: (1) semantic extraction from frames using a VLM, (2) primary object tracking with Object Detection, (3) focused object refinement via an LLM agent, and (4) temporal consistency assessment using a Vision Transformer (ViT). These components are integrated into a unified metric with weights derived from human evaluations and regression analysis. The name SST-EM reflects its focus on Semantic, Spatial, and Temporal aspects of video evaluation. SST-EM provides a comprehensive evaluation of semantic fidelity and temporal smoothness in video editing. The source code is available in the \textbf{\href{https://github.com/custommetrics-sst/SST_CustomEvaluationMetrics.git}{GitHub Repository}}.
Authors:Daniel Steininger, Julia Simon, Andreas Trondl, Markus Murschitz
Abstract:
Timber represents an increasingly valuable and versatile resource. However, forestry operations such as harvesting, handling and measuring logs still require substantial human labor in remote environments posing significant safety risks. Progressively automating these tasks has the potential of increasing their efficiency as well as safety, but requires an accurate detection of individual logs as well as live trees and their context. Although initial approaches have been proposed for this challenging application domain, specialized data and algorithms are still too scarce to develop robust solutions. To mitigate this gap, we introduce the TimberVision dataset, consisting of more than 2k annotated RGB images containing a total of 51k trunk components including cut and lateral surfaces, thereby surpassing any existing dataset in this domain in terms of both quantity and detail by a large margin. Based on this data, we conduct a series of ablation experiments for oriented object detection and instance segmentation and evaluate the influence of multiple scene parameters on model performance. We introduce a generic framework to fuse the components detected by our models for both tasks into unified trunk representations. Furthermore, we automatically derive geometric properties and apply multi-object tracking to further enhance robustness. Our detection and tracking approach provides highly descriptive and accurate trunk representations solely from RGB image data, even under challenging environmental conditions. Our solution is suitable for a wide range of application scenarios and can be readily combined with other sensor modalities.
Authors:Zhimeng Xin, Tianxu Wu, Shiming Chen, Shuo Ye, Zijing Xie, Yixiong Zou, Xinge You, Yufei Guo
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) primarily relies on semantic or instance segmentation methods. While these methods have made significant advancements in identifying the contours of camouflaged objects, they may be inefficient or cost-effective for tasks that only require the specific location of the object. Object detection algorithms offer an optimized solution for Realistic Camouflaged Object Detection (RCOD) in such cases. However, detecting camouflaged objects remains a formidable challenge due to the high degree of similarity between the features of the objects and their backgrounds. Unlike segmentation methods that perform pixel-wise comparisons to differentiate between foreground and background, object detectors omit this analysis, further aggravating the challenge. To solve this problem, we propose a camouflage-aware feature refinement (CAFR) strategy. Since camouflaged objects are not rare categories, CAFR fully utilizes a clear perception of the current object within the prior knowledge of large models to assist detectors in deeply understanding the distinctions between background and foreground. Specifically, in CAFR, we introduce the Adaptive Gradient Propagation (AGP) module that fine-tunes all feature extractor layers in large detection models to fully refine class-specific features from camouflaged contexts. We then design the Sparse Feature Refinement (SFR) module that optimizes the transformer-based feature extractor to focus primarily on capturing class-specific features in camouflaged scenarios. To facilitate the assessment of RCOD tasks, we manually annotate the labels required for detection on three existing segmentation COD datasets, creating a new benchmark for RCOD tasks. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zhimengXin/RCOD.
Authors:Yiheng Li, Yang Yang, Zhen Lei
Abstract:
Fusing multi-modality inputs from different sensors is an effective way to improve the performance of 3D object detection. However, current methods overlook two important conflicts: point-pixel misalignment and sub-task suppression. The former means a pixel feature from the opaque object is projected to multiple point features of the same ray in the world space, and the latter means the classification prediction and bounding box regression may cause mutual suppression. In this paper, we propose a novel method named Conflict Resolution Network (CoreNet) to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first propose a dual-stream transformation module to tackle point-pixel misalignment. It consists of ray-based and point-based 2D-to-BEV transformations. Both of them achieve approximately unique mapping from the image space to the world space. Moreover, we introduce a task-specific predictor to tackle sub-task suppression. It uses the dual-branch structure which adopts class-specific query and Bbox-specific query to corresponding sub-tasks. Each task-specific query is constructed of task-specific feature and general feature, which allows the heads to adaptively select information of interest based on different sub-tasks. Experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CoreNet, by achieving 75.6\% NDS and 73.3\% mAP on the nuScenes test set without test-time augmentation and model ensemble techniques. The ample ablation study also demonstrates the effectiveness of each component. The code is released on https://github.com/liyih/CoreNet.
Authors:Zhifan Song, Yuan Zhang, Abd Al Rahman M. Abu Ebayyeh
Abstract:
Detecting small targets in drone imagery is challenging due to low resolution, complex backgrounds, and dynamic scenes. We propose EDNet, a novel edge-target detection framework built on an enhanced YOLOv10 architecture, optimized for real-time applications without post-processing. EDNet incorporates an XSmall detection head and a Cross Concat strategy to improve feature fusion and multi-scale context awareness for detecting tiny targets in diverse environments. Our unique C2f-FCA block employs Faster Context Attention to enhance feature extraction while reducing computational complexity. The WIoU loss function is employed for improved bounding box regression. With seven model sizes ranging from Tiny to XL, EDNet accommodates various deployment environments, enabling local real-time inference and ensuring data privacy. Notably, EDNet achieves up to a 5.6% gain in mAP@50 with significantly fewer parameters. On an iPhone 12, EDNet variants operate at speeds ranging from 16 to 55 FPS, providing a scalable and efficient solution for edge-based object detection in challenging drone imagery. The source code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/zsniko/EDNet.
Authors:Haoran Zhu, Zhenyuan Dong, Kristi Topollai, Anna Choromanska
Abstract:
As opposed to human drivers, current autonomous driving systems still require vast amounts of labeled data to train. Recently, world models have been proposed to simultaneously enhance autonomous driving capabilities by improving the way these systems understand complex real-world environments and reduce their data demands via self-supervised pre-training. In this paper, we present AD-L-JEPA (aka Autonomous Driving with LiDAR data via a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a novel self-supervised pre-training framework for autonomous driving with LiDAR data that, as opposed to existing methods, is neither generative nor contrastive. Our method learns spatial world models with a joint embedding predictive architecture. Instead of explicitly generating masked unknown regions, our self-supervised world models predict Bird's Eye View (BEV) embeddings to represent the diverse nature of autonomous driving scenes. Our approach furthermore eliminates the need to manually create positive and negative pairs, as is the case in contrastive learning. AD-L-JEPA leads to simpler implementation and enhanced learned representations. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate high-quality of embeddings learned with AD-L-JEPA. We furthermore evaluate the accuracy and label efficiency of AD-L-JEPA on popular downstream tasks such as LiDAR 3D object detection and associated transfer learning. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that AD-L-JEPA is a plausible approach for self-supervised pre-training in autonomous driving applications and is the best available approach outperforming SOTA, including most recently proposed Occupancy-MAE [1] and ALSO [2]. The source code of AD-L-JEPA is available at https://github.com/HaoranZhuExplorer/AD-L-JEPA-Release.
Authors:Seyed Amir Bidaki, Amir Mohammadkhah, Kiyan Rezaee, Faeze Hassani, Sadegh Eskandari, Maziar Salahi, Mohammad M. Ghassemi
Abstract:
Online Continual Learning (OCL) is a critical area in machine learning, focusing on enabling models to adapt to evolving data streams in real-time while addressing challenges such as catastrophic forgetting and the stability-plasticity trade-off. This study conducts the first comprehensive Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on OCL, analyzing 81 approaches, extracting over 1,000 features (specific tasks addressed by these approaches), and identifying more than 500 components (sub-models within approaches, including algorithms and tools). We also review 83 datasets spanning applications like image classification, object detection, and multimodal vision-language tasks. Our findings highlight key challenges, including reducing computational overhead, developing domain-agnostic solutions, and improving scalability in resource-constrained environments. Furthermore, we identify promising directions for future research, such as leveraging self-supervised learning for multimodal and sequential data, designing adaptive memory mechanisms that integrate sparse retrieval and generative replay, and creating efficient frameworks for real-world applications with noisy or evolving task boundaries. By providing a rigorous and structured synthesis of the current state of OCL, this review offers a valuable resource for advancing this field and addressing its critical challenges and opportunities. The complete SLR methodology steps and extracted data are publicly available through the provided link: https://github.com/kiyan-rezaee/ Systematic-Literature-Review-on-Online-Continual-Learning
Authors:Xin Zhang, Xue Yang, Yuxuan Li, Jian Yang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Xiang Li
Abstract:
Rotated object detection has made significant progress in the optical remote sensing. However, advancements in the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) field are laggard behind, primarily due to the absence of a large-scale dataset. Annotating such a dataset is inefficient and costly. A promising solution is to employ a weakly supervised model (e.g., trained with available horizontal boxes only) to generate pseudo-rotated boxes for reference before manual calibration. Unfortunately, the existing weakly supervised models exhibit limited accuracy in predicting the object's angle. Previous works attempt to enhance angle prediction by using angle resolvers that decouple angles into cosine and sine encodings. In this work, we first reevaluate these resolvers from a unified perspective of dimension mapping and expose that they share the same shortcomings: these methods overlook the unit cycle constraint inherent in these encodings, easily leading to prediction biases. To address this issue, we propose the Unit Cycle Resolver, which incorporates a unit circle constraint loss to improve angle prediction accuracy. Our approach can effectively improve the performance of existing state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods and even surpasses fully supervised models on existing optical benchmarks (i.e., DOTA-v1.0 dataset). With the aid of UCR, we further annotate and introduce RSAR, the largest multi-class rotated SAR object detection dataset to date. Extensive experiments on both RSAR and optical datasets demonstrate that our UCR enhances angle prediction accuracy. Our dataset and code can be found at: https://github.com/zhasion/RSAR.
Authors:Xinbin Yuan, Zhaohui Zheng, Yuxuan Li, Xialei Liu, Li Liu, Xiang Li, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
While witnessed with rapid development, remote sensing object detection remains challenging for detecting high aspect ratio objects. This paper shows that large strip convolutions are good feature representation learners for remote sensing object detection and can detect objects of various aspect ratios well. Based on large strip convolutions, we build a new network architecture called Strip R-CNN, which is simple, efficient, and powerful. Unlike recent remote sensing object detectors that leverage large-kernel convolutions with square shapes, our Strip R-CNN takes advantage of sequential orthogonal large strip convolutions in our backbone network StripNet to capture spatial information. In addition, we improve the localization capability of remote-sensing object detectors by decoupling the detection heads and equipping the localization branch with strip convolutions in our strip head. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks, for example DOTA, FAIR1M, HRSC2016, and DIOR, show that our Strip R-CNN can greatly improve previous work. In particular, our 30M model achieves 82.75% mAP on DOTA-v1.0, setting a new state-of-the-art record. Our code will be made publicly available.Code is available at https://github.com/YXB-NKU/Strip-R-CNN.
Authors:Sichao Wang, Ming Yuan, Chuang Zhang, Qing Xu, Lei He, Jianqiang Wang
Abstract:
In V2X collaborative perception, the domain gaps between heterogeneous nodes pose a significant challenge for effective information fusion. Pose errors arising from latency and GPS localization noise further exacerbate the issue by leading to feature misalignment. To overcome these challenges, we propose V2X-DGPE, a high-accuracy and robust V2X feature-level collaborative perception framework. V2X-DGPE employs a Knowledge Distillation Framework and a Feature Compensation Module to learn domain-invariant representations from multi-source data, effectively reducing the feature distribution gap between vehicles and roadside infrastructure. Historical information is utilized to provide the model with a more comprehensive understanding of the current scene. Furthermore, a Collaborative Fusion Module leverages a heterogeneous self-attention mechanism to extract and integrate heterogeneous representations from vehicles and infrastructure. To address pose errors, V2X-DGPE introduces a deformable attention mechanism, enabling the model to adaptively focus on critical parts of the input features by dynamically offsetting sampling points. Extensive experiments on the real-world DAIR-V2X dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance. The code is available at https://github.com/wangsch10/V2X-DGPE.
Authors:Liye Jia, Runwei Guan, Haocheng Zhao, Qiuchi Zhao, Ka Lok Man, Jeremy Smith, Limin Yu, Yutao Yue
Abstract:
3D object detection is crucial for Autonomous Driving (AD) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). However, most 3D detectors prioritize detection accuracy, often overlooking network inference speed in practical applications. In this paper, we propose RadarNeXt, a real-time and reliable 3D object detector based on the 4D mmWave radar point clouds. It leverages the re-parameterizable neural networks to catch multi-scale features, reduce memory cost and accelerate the inference. Moreover, to highlight the irregular foreground features of radar point clouds and suppress background clutter, we propose a Multi-path Deformable Foreground Enhancement Network (MDFEN), ensuring detection accuracy while minimizing the sacrifice of speed and excessive number of parameters. Experimental results on View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet datasets validate the exceptional performance and efficiency of RadarNeXt, achieving 50.48 and 32.30 mAPs with the variant using our proposed MDFEN. Notably, our RadarNeXt variants achieve inference speeds of over 67.10 FPS on the RTX A4000 GPU and 28.40 FPS on the Jetson AGX Orin. This research demonstrates that RadarNeXt brings a novel and effective paradigm for 3D perception based on 4D mmWave radar.
Authors:Juntao Zhang, Shaogeng Liu, Kun Bian, You Zhou, Pei Zhang, Jianning Liu, Jun Zhou, Bingyan Liu
Abstract:
Mamba is an efficient State Space Model (SSM) with linear computational complexity. Although SSMs are not suitable for handling non-causal data, Vision Mamba (ViM) methods still demonstrate good performance in tasks such as image classification and object detection. Recent studies have shown that there is a rich theoretical connection between state space models and attention variants. We propose a novel separable self attention method, for the first time introducing some excellent design concepts of Mamba into separable self-attention. To ensure a fair comparison with ViMs, we introduce VMINet, a simple yet powerful prototype architecture, constructed solely by stacking our novel attention modules with the most basic down-sampling layers. Notably, VMINet differs significantly from the conventional Transformer architecture. Our experiments demonstrate that VMINet has achieved competitive results on image classification and high-resolution dense prediction tasks.Code is available at: https://github.com/yws-wxs/VMINet.
Authors:Huaxiang Zhang, Kai Liu, Zhongxue Gan, Guo-Niu Zhu
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicle object detection (UAV-OD) has been widely used in various scenarios. However, most existing UAV-OD algorithms rely on manually designed components, which require extensive tuning. End-to-end models that do not depend on such manually designed components are mainly designed for natural images, which are less effective for UAV imagery. To address such challenges, this paper proposes an efficient detection transformer (DETR) framework tailored for UAV imagery, i.e., UAV-DETR. The framework includes a multi-scale feature fusion with frequency enhancement module, which captures both spatial and frequency information at different scales. In addition, a frequency-focused down-sampling module is presented to retain critical spatial details during down-sampling. A semantic alignment and calibration module is developed to align and fuse features from different fusion paths. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach across various UAV imagery datasets. On the VisDrone dataset, our method improves AP by 3.1\% and $\text{AP}_{50}$ by 4.2\% over the baseline. Similar enhancements are observed on the UAVVaste dataset. The project page: https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/UAV-DETR
Authors:Kang Yi, Haoran Tang, Yumeng Li, Jing Xu, Jun Zhang
Abstract:
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD), aiming to highlight prominent regions of a given scene by jointly modeling RGB and depth information, is one of the challenging pixel-level prediction tasks. Recently, the dual-attention mechanism has been devoted to this area due to its ability to strengthen the detection process. However, most existing methods directly fuse attentional cross-modality features under a manual-mandatory fusion paradigm without considering the inherent discrepancy between the RGB and depth, which may lead to a reduction in performance. Moreover, the long-range dependencies derived from global and local information make it difficult to leverage a unified efficient fusion strategy. Hence, in this paper, we propose the GL-DMNet, a novel dual mutual learning network with global-local awareness. Specifically, we present a position mutual fusion module and a channel mutual fusion module to exploit the interdependencies among different modalities in spatial and channel dimensions. Besides, we adopt an efficient decoder based on cascade transformer-infused reconstruction to integrate multi-level fusion features jointly. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed GL-DMNet performs better than 24 RGB-D SOD methods, achieving an average improvement of ~3% across four evaluation metrics compared to the second-best model (S3Net). Codes and results are available at https://github.com/kingkung2016/GL-DMNet.
Authors:Yoshitomo Matsubara, Matteo Mendula, Marco Levorato
Abstract:
Split computing ($\neq$ split learning) is a promising approach to deep learning models for resource-constrained edge computing systems, where weak sensor (mobile) devices are wirelessly connected to stronger edge servers through channels with limited communication capacity. State-of-theart work on split computing presents methods for single tasks such as image classification, object detection, or semantic segmentation. The application of existing methods to multitask problems degrades model accuracy and/or significantly increase runtime latency. In this study, we propose Ladon, the first multi-task-head supervised compression model for multi-task split computing. Experimental results show that the multi-task supervised compression model either outperformed or rivaled strong lightweight baseline models in terms of predictive performance for ILSVRC 2012, COCO 2017, and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets while learning compressed representations at its early layers. Furthermore, our models reduced end-to-end latency (by up to 95.4%) and energy consumption of mobile devices (by up to 88.2%) in multi-task split computing scenarios.
Authors:Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Peixiang Huang, Ziying Song, Zhi-Xin Yang
Abstract:
Accurate multi-view 3D object detection is essential for applications such as autonomous driving. Researchers have consistently aimed to leverage LiDAR's precise spatial information to enhance camera-based detectors through methods like depth supervision and bird-eye-view (BEV) feature distillation. However, existing approaches often face challenges due to the inherent differences between LiDAR and camera data representations. In this paper, we introduce the TiGDistill-BEV, a novel approach that effectively bridges this gap by leveraging the strengths of both sensors. Our method distills knowledge from diverse modalities(e.g., LiDAR) as the teacher model to a camera-based student detector, utilizing the Target Inner-Geometry learning scheme to enhance camera-based BEV detectors through both depth and BEV features by leveraging diverse modalities. Specially, we propose two key modules: an inner-depth supervision module to learn the low-level relative depth relations within objects which equips detectors with a deeper understanding of object-level spatial structures, and an inner-feature BEV distillation module to transfer high-level semantics of different key points within foreground targets. To further alleviate the domain gap, we incorporate both inter-channel and inter-keypoint distillation to model feature similarity. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that TiGDistill-BEV significantly boosts camera-based only detectors achieving a state-of-the-art with 62.8% NDS and surpassing previous methods by a significant margin. The codes is available at: https://github.com/Public-BOTs/TiGDistill-BEV.git.
Authors:Yuxuan Li, Xiang Li, Yunheng Li, Yicheng Zhang, Yimian Dai, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng, Jian Yang
Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of remote sensing technology, high-resolution multi-modal imagery is now more widely accessible. Conventional Object detection models are trained on a single dataset, often restricted to a specific imaging modality and annotation format. However, such an approach overlooks the valuable shared knowledge across multi-modalities and limits the model's applicability in more versatile scenarios. This paper introduces a new task called Multi-Modal Datasets and Multi-Task Object Detection (M2Det) for remote sensing, designed to accurately detect horizontal or oriented objects from any sensor modality. This task poses challenges due to 1) the trade-offs involved in managing multi-modal modelling and 2) the complexities of multi-task optimization. To address these, we establish a benchmark dataset and propose a unified model, SM3Det (Single Model for Multi-Modal datasets and Multi-Task object Detection). SM3Det leverages a grid-level sparse MoE backbone to enable joint knowledge learning while preserving distinct feature representations for different modalities. Furthermore, it integrates a consistency and synchronization optimization strategy using dynamic learning rate adjustment, allowing it to effectively handle varying levels of learning difficulty across modalities and tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate SM3Det's effectiveness and generalizability, consistently outperforming specialized models on individual datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/SM3Det.
Authors:Lihao Liu, Juexiao Feng, Hui Chen, Ao Wang, Lin Song, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
Abstract:
Traditional object detection models are constrained by the limitations of closed-set datasets, detecting only categories encountered during training. While multimodal models have extended category recognition by aligning text and image modalities, they introduce significant inference overhead due to cross-modality fusion and still remain restricted by predefined vocabulary, leaving them ineffective at handling unknown objects in open-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce Universal Open-World Object Detection (Uni-OWD), a new paradigm that unifies open-vocabulary and open-world object detection tasks. To address the challenges of this setting, we propose YOLO-UniOW, a novel model that advances the boundaries of efficiency, versatility, and performance. YOLO-UniOW incorporates Adaptive Decision Learning to replace computationally expensive cross-modality fusion with lightweight alignment in the CLIP latent space, achieving efficient detection without compromising generalization. Additionally, we design a Wildcard Learning strategy that detects out-of-distribution objects as "unknown" while enabling dynamic vocabulary expansion without the need for incremental learning. This design empowers YOLO-UniOW to seamlessly adapt to new categories in open-world environments. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of YOLO-UniOW, achieving achieving 34.6 AP and 30.0 APr on LVIS with an inference speed of 69.6 FPS. The model also sets benchmarks on M-OWODB, S-OWODB, and nuScenes datasets, showcasing its unmatched performance in open-world object detection. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/YOLO-UniOW.
Authors:Phi Vu Tran
Abstract:
While modern visual recognition systems have made significant advancements, many continue to struggle with the open problem of learning from few exemplars. This paper focuses on the task of object detection in the setting where object classes follow a natural long-tailed distribution. Existing methods for long-tailed detection resort to external ImageNet labels to augment the low-shot training instances. However, such dependency on a large labeled database has limited utility in practical scenarios. We propose a versatile and scalable approach to leverage optional unlabeled images, which are easy to collect without the burden of human annotations. Our SimLTD framework is straightforward and intuitive, and consists of three simple steps: (1) pre-training on abundant head classes; (2) transfer learning on scarce tail classes; and (3) fine-tuning on a sampled set of both head and tail classes. Our approach can be viewed as an improved head-to-tail model transfer paradigm without the added complexities of meta-learning or knowledge distillation, as was required in past research. By harnessing supplementary unlabeled images, without extra image labels, SimLTD establishes new record results on the challenging LVIS v1 benchmark across both supervised and semi-supervised settings.
Authors:Di Wu, Feng Yang, Benlian Xu, Pan Liao, Wenhui Zhao, Dingwen Zhang
Abstract:
The application of vision-based multi-view environmental perception system has been increasingly recognized in autonomous driving technology, especially the BEV-based models. Current state-of-the-art solutions primarily encode image features from each camera view into the BEV space through explicit or implicit depth prediction. However, these methods often overlook the structured correlations among different parts of objects in 3D space and the fact that different categories of objects often occupy distinct local height ranges. For example, trucks appear at higher elevations, whereas traffic cones are near the ground. In this work, we propose a novel approach that decouples feature sampling in the \textbf{BEV} grid queries paradigm into \textbf{H}orizontal feature aggregation and \textbf{V}ertical adaptive height-aware reference point sampling (HV-BEV), aiming to improve both the aggregation of objects' complete information and awareness of diverse objects' height distribution. Specifically, a set of relevant neighboring points is dynamically constructed for each 3D reference point on the ground-aligned horizontal plane, enhancing the association of the same instance across different BEV grids, especially when the instance spans multiple image views around the vehicle. Additionally, instead of relying on uniform sampling within a fixed height range, we introduce a height-aware module that incorporates historical information, enabling the reference points to adaptively focus on the varying heights at which objects appear in different scenes. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, demonstrating its superior performance over the baseline across the nuScenes dataset. Moreover, our best-performing model achieves a remarkable 50.5\% mAP and 59.8\% NDS on the nuScenes testing set. The code is available at https://github.com/Uddd821/HV-BEV.
Authors:Pham Phuc, Son Vuong, Khang Nguyen, Tuan Dang
Abstract:
Deep learning-based object detection has become ubiquitous in the last decade due to its high accuracy in many real-world applications. With this growing trend, these models are interested in being attacked by adversaries, with most of the results being on classifiers, which do not match the context of practical object detection. In this work, we propose a novel method to fool object detectors, expose the vulnerability of state-of-the-art detectors, and promote later works to build more robust detectors to adversarial examples. Our method aims to generate adversarial images by perturbing object confidence scores during training, which is crucial in predicting confidence for each class in the testing phase. Herein, we provide a more intuitive technique to embed additive noises based on detected objects' masks and the training loss with distortion control over the original image by leveraging the gradient of iterative images. To verify the proposed method, we perform adversarial attacks against different object detectors, including the most recent state-of-the-art models like YOLOv8, Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, and Swin Transformer. We also evaluate our technique on MS COCO 2017 and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets and analyze the trade-off between success attack rate and image distortion. Our experiments show that the achievable success attack rate is up to $100$\% and up to $98$\% when performing white-box and black-box attacks, respectively. The source code and relevant documentation for this work are available at the following link: https://github.com/anonymous20210106/attack_detector
Authors:Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Guokai Shi, Jingxuan Xu, Huan Chen, Jianan Li
Abstract:
Hyperspectral salient object detection (HSOD) aims to extract targets or regions with significantly different spectra from hyperspectral images. While existing deep learning-based methods can achieve good detection results, they generally necessitate pixel-level annotations, which are notably challenging to acquire for hyperspectral images. To address this issue, we introduce point supervision into HSOD, and incorporate Spectral Saliency, derived from conventional HSOD methods, as a pivotal spectral representation within the framework. This integration leads to the development of a novel Spectrum-oriented Point-supervised Saliency Detector (SPSD). Specifically, we propose a novel pipeline, specifically designed for HSIs, to generate pseudo-labels, effectively mitigating the performance decline associated with point supervision strategy. Additionally, Spectral Saliency is employed to counteract information loss during model supervision and saliency refinement, thereby maintaining the structural integrity and edge accuracy of the detected objects. Furthermore, we introduce a Spectrum-transformed Spatial Gate to focus more precisely on salient regions while reducing feature redundancy. We have carried out comprehensive experiments on both HSOD-BIT and HS-SOD datasets to validate the efficacy of our proposed method, using mean absolute error (MAE), E-measure, F-measure, Area Under Curve, and Cross Correlation as evaluation metrics. For instance, on the HSOD-BIT dataset, our SPSD achieves a MAE of 0.031 and an F-measure of 0.878. Thorough ablation studies have substantiated the effectiveness of each individual module and provided insights into the model's working mechanism. Further evaluations on RGB-thermal salient object detection datasets highlight the versatility of our approach.
Authors:Yitong Chen, Wenhao Yao, Lingchen Meng, Sihong Wu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Enabling models to recognize vast open-world categories has been a longstanding pursuit in object detection. By leveraging the generalization capabilities of vision-language models, current open-world detectors can recognize a broader range of vocabularies, despite being trained on limited categories. However, when the scale of the category vocabularies during training expands to a real-world level, previous classifiers aligned with coarse class names significantly reduce the recognition performance of these detectors. In this paper, we introduce Prova, a multi-modal prototype classifier for vast-vocabulary object detection. Prova extracts comprehensive multi-modal prototypes as initialization of alignment classifiers to tackle the vast-vocabulary object recognition failure problem. On V3Det, this simple method greatly enhances the performance among one-stage, two-stage, and DETR-based detectors with only additional projection layers in both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. In particular, Prova improves Faster R-CNN, FCOS, and DINO by 3.3, 6.2, and 2.9 AP respectively in the supervised setting of V3Det. For the open-vocabulary setting, Prova achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with 32.8 base AP and 11.0 novel AP, which is of 2.6 and 4.3 gain over the previous methods.
Authors:Yi Liu, Chengxin Li, Xiaohui Dong, Lei Li, Dingwen Zhang, Shoukun Xu, Jungong Han
Abstract:
Achieving joint learning of Salient Object Detection (SOD) and Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is extremely challenging due to their distinct object characteristics, i.e., saliency and camouflage. The only preliminary research treats them as two contradictory tasks, training models on large-scale labeled data alternately for each task and assessing them independently. However, such task-specific mechanisms fail to meet real-world demands for addressing unknown tasks effectively. To address this issue, in this paper, we pioneer a task-agnostic framework to unify SOD and COD. To this end, inspired by the agreeable nature of binary segmentation for SOD and COD, we propose a Contrastive Distillation Paradigm (CDP) to distil the foreground from the background, facilitating the identification of salient and camouflaged objects amidst their surroundings. To probe into the contribution of our CDP, we design a simple yet effective contextual decoder involving the interval-layer and global context, which achieves an inference speed of 67 fps. Besides the supervised setting, our CDP can be seamlessly integrated into unsupervised settings, eliminating the reliance on extensive human annotations. Experiments on public SOD and COD datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework in both supervised and unsupervised settings, compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available on https://github.com/liuyi1989/Seamless-Detection.
Authors:Yaming Zhang, Chenqiang Gao, Fangcen Liu, Junjie Guo, Lan Wang, Xinggan Peng, Deyu Meng
Abstract:
Existing infrared and visible (IR-VIS) methods inherit the general representations of Pre-trained Visual Models (PVMs) to facilitate complementary learning. However, our analysis indicates that under the full fine-tuning paradigm, the feature space becomes highly constrained and low-ranked, which has been proven to seriously impair generalization. One solution is freezing parameters to preserve pre-trained knowledge and thus maintain diversity of the feature space. To this end, we propose IV-tuning, to parameter-efficiently harness PVMs for various IR-VIS downstream tasks, including salient object detection, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Compared with the full fine-tuning baselines and existing IR-VIS methods, IV-tuning facilitates the learning of complementary information between infrared and visible modalities with less than 3% of the backbone parameters, and effectively alleviates the overfitting problem. The code is available in https://github.com/Yummy198913/IV-tuning.
Authors:Mikael Yeghiazaryan, Sai Abhishek Siddhartha Namburu, Emily Kim, Stanislav Panev, Celso de Melo, Fernando De la Torre, Jessica K. Hodgins
Abstract:
Detecting vehicles in aerial images is difficult due to complex backgrounds, small object sizes, shadows, and occlusions. Although recent deep learning advancements have improved object detection, these models remain susceptible to adversarial attacks (AAs), challenging their reliability. Traditional AA strategies often ignore practical implementation constraints. Our work proposes realistic and practical constraints on texture (lowering resolution, limiting modified areas, and color ranges) and analyzes the impact of shape modifications on attack performance. We conducted extensive experiments with three object detector architectures, demonstrating the performance-practicality trade-off: more practical modifications tend to be less effective, and vice versa. We release both code and data to support reproducibility at https://github.com/humansensinglab/texture-shape-adversarial-attacks.
Authors:Ziqing Wang, Yuetong Fang, Jiahang Cao, Hongwei Ren, Renjing Xu
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are seen as an energy-efficient alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), but the performance gap remains a challenge. While this gap is narrowing through ANN-to-SNN conversion, substantial computational resources are still needed, and the energy efficiency of converted SNNs cannot be ensured. To address this, we present a unified training-free conversion framework that significantly enhances both the performance and efficiency of converted SNNs. Inspired by the biological nervous system, we propose a novel Adaptive-Firing Neuron Model (AdaFire), which dynamically adjusts firing patterns across different layers to substantially reduce the Unevenness Error - the primary source of error of converted SNNs within limited inference timesteps. We further introduce two efficiency-enhancing techniques: the Sensitivity Spike Compression (SSC) technique for reducing spike operations, and the Input-aware Adaptive Timesteps (IAT) technique for decreasing latency. These methods collectively enable our approach to achieve state-of-the-art performance while delivering significant energy savings of up to 70.1%, 60.3%, and 43.1% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, respectively. Extensive experiments across 2D, 3D, event-driven classification tasks, object detection, and segmentation tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various domains. The code is available at: https://github.com/bic-L/burst-ann2snn.
Authors:Bowen Dong, Zitong Huang, Guanglei Yang, Lei Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo
Abstract:
Open-world (OW) recognition and detection models show strong zero- and few-shot adaptation abilities, inspiring their use as initializations in continual learning methods to improve performance. Despite promising results on seen classes, such OW abilities on unseen classes are largely degenerated due to catastrophic forgetting. To tackle this challenge, we propose an open-world continual object detection task, requiring detectors to generalize to old, new, and unseen categories in continual learning scenarios. Based on this task, we present a challenging yet practical OW-COD benchmark to assess detection abilities. The goal is to motivate OW detectors to simultaneously preserve learned classes, adapt to new classes, and maintain open-world capabilities under few-shot adaptations. To mitigate forgetting in unseen categories, we propose MR-GDINO, a strong, efficient and scalable baseline via memory and retrieval mechanisms within a highly scalable memory pool. Experimental results show that existing continual detectors suffer from severe forgetting for both seen and unseen categories. In contrast, MR-GDINO largely mitigates forgetting with only 0.1% activated extra parameters, achieving state-of-the-art performance for old, new, and unseen categories.
Authors:Yonghao He, Hu Su, Haiyong Yu, Cong Yang, Wei Sui, Cong Wang, Song Liu
Abstract:
Open-set object detection (OSOD) is highly desirable for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments. However, existing OSOD methods often fail to meet the requirements of robotic applications due to their high computational burden and complex deployment. To address this issue, this paper proposes a light-weight framework called Decoupled OSOD (DOSOD), which is a practical and highly efficient solution to support real-time OSOD tasks in robotic systems. Specifically, DOSOD builds upon the YOLO-World pipeline by integrating a vision-language model (VLM) with a detector. A Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) adaptor is developed to transform text embeddings extracted by the VLM into a joint space, within which the detector learns the region representations of class-agnostic proposals. Cross-modality features are directly aligned in the joint space, avoiding the complex feature interactions and thereby improving computational efficiency. DOSOD operates like a traditional closed-set detector during the testing phase, effectively bridging the gap between closed-set and open-set detection. Compared to the baseline YOLO-World, the proposed DOSOD significantly enhances real-time performance while maintaining comparable accuracy. The slight DOSOD-S model achieves a Fixed AP of $26.7\%$, compared to $26.2\%$ for YOLO-World-v1-S and $22.7\%$ for YOLO-World-v2-S, using similar backbones on the LVIS minival dataset. Meanwhile, the FPS of DOSOD-S is $57.1\%$ higher than YOLO-World-v1-S and $29.6\%$ higher than YOLO-World-v2-S. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the DOSOD model facilitates the deployment of edge devices. The codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/D-Robotics-AI-Lab/DOSOD.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Keke Chen, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Alignment-free RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) salient object detection (SOD) aims to achieve robust performance in complex scenes by directly leveraging the complementary information from unaligned visible-thermal image pairs, without requiring manual alignment. However, the labor-intensive process of collecting and annotating image pairs limits the scale of existing benchmarks, hindering the advancement of alignment-free RGB-T SOD. In this paper, we construct a large-scale and high-diversity unaligned RGB-T SOD dataset named UVT20K, comprising 20,000 image pairs, 407 scenes, and 1256 object categories. All samples are collected from real-world scenarios with various challenges, such as low illumination, image clutter, complex salient objects, and so on. To support the exploration for further research, each sample in UVT20K is annotated with a comprehensive set of ground truths, including saliency masks, scribbles, boundaries, and challenge attributes. In addition, we propose a Progressive Correlation Network (PCNet), which models inter- and intra-modal correlations on the basis of explicit alignment to achieve accurate predictions in unaligned image pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on unaligned and aligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/PCNet.
Authors:Ruoyu Xu, Zhiyu Xiang, Chenwei Zhang, Hanzhi Zhong, Xijun Zhao, Ruina Dang, Peng Xu, Tianyu Pu, Eryun Liu
Abstract:
3D object detection is one of the fundamental perception tasks for autonomous vehicles. Fulfilling such a task with a 4D millimeter-wave radar is very attractive since the sensor is able to acquire 3D point clouds similar to Lidar while maintaining robust measurements under adverse weather. However, due to the high sparsity and noise associated with the radar point clouds, the performance of the existing methods is still much lower than expected. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation (SCKD) method for 4D radar-based 3D object detection. It characterizes the capability of learning the feature from a Lidar-radar-fused teacher network with semi-supervised distillation. We first propose an adaptive fusion module in the teacher network to boost its performance. Then, two feature distillation modules are designed to facilitate the cross-modality knowledge transfer. Finally, a semi-supervised output distillation is proposed to increase the effectiveness and flexibility of the distillation framework. With the same network structure, our radar-only student trained by SCKD boosts the mAP by 10.38% over the baseline and outperforms the state-of-the-art works on the VoD dataset. The experiment on ZJUODset also shows 5.12% mAP improvements on the moderate difficulty level over the baseline when extra unlabeled data are available. Code is available at https://github.com/Ruoyu-Xu/SCKD.
Authors:Xinyu He, Xinhui Li, Xiaojie Guo
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to generalize an object detector trained on labeled source-domain data to a target domain without annotations, the core principle of which is \emph{source-target feature alignment}. Typically, existing approaches employ adversarial learning to align the distributions of the source and target domains as a whole, barely considering the varying significance of distinct regions, say instances under different circumstances and foreground \emph{vs} background areas, during feature alignment. To overcome the shortcoming, we investigates a differential feature alignment strategy. Specifically, a prediction-discrepancy feedback instance alignment module (dubbed PDFA) is designed to adaptively assign higher weights to instances of higher teacher-student detection discrepancy, effectively handling heavier domain-specific information. Additionally, an uncertainty-based foreground-oriented image alignment module (UFOA) is proposed to explicitly guide the model to focus more on regions of interest. Extensive experiments on widely-used DAOD datasets together with ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method and reveal its superiority over other SOTA alternatives. Our code is available at https://github.com/EstrellaXyu/Differential-Alignment-for-DAOD.
Authors:Yiheng Li, Yang Yang, Zhen Lei
Abstract:
In radar-camera 3D object detection, the radar point clouds are sparse and noisy, which causes difficulties in fusing camera and radar modalities. To solve this, we introduce a novel query-based detection method named Radar-Camera Transformer (RCTrans). Specifically, we first design a Radar Dense Encoder to enrich the sparse valid radar tokens, and then concatenate them with the image tokens. By doing this, we can fully explore the 3D information of each interest region and reduce the interference of empty tokens during the fusing stage. We then design a Pruning Sequential Decoder to predict 3D boxes based on the obtained tokens and random initialized queries. To alleviate the effect of elevation ambiguity in radar point clouds, we gradually locate the position of the object via a sequential fusion structure. It helps to get more precise and flexible correspondences between tokens and queries. A pruning training strategy is adopted in the decoder, which can save much time during inference and inhibit queries from losing their distinctiveness. Extensive experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset prove the superiority of our method, and we also achieve new state-of-the-art radar-camera 3D detection results. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/liyih/RCTrans.
Authors:Xiaomeng Chu, Jiajun Deng, Guoliang You, Yifan Duan, Houqiang Li, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
We propose Radar-Camera fusion transformer (RaCFormer) to boost the accuracy of 3D object detection by the following insight. The Radar-Camera fusion in outdoor 3D scene perception is capped by the image-to-BEV transformation--if the depth of pixels is not accurately estimated, the naive combination of BEV features actually integrates unaligned visual content. To avoid this problem, we propose a query-based framework that enables adaptive sampling of instance-relevant features from both the bird's-eye view (BEV) and the original image view. Furthermore, we enhance system performance by two key designs: optimizing query initialization and strengthening the representational capacity of BEV. For the former, we introduce an adaptive circular distribution in polar coordinates to refine the initialization of object queries, allowing for a distance-based adjustment of query density. For the latter, we initially incorporate a radar-guided depth head to refine the transformation from image view to BEV. Subsequently, we focus on leveraging the Doppler effect of radar and introduce an implicit dynamic catcher to capture the temporal elements within the BEV. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and View-of-Delft (VoD) datasets validate the merits of our design. Remarkably, our method achieves superior results of 64.9% mAP and 70.2% NDS on nuScenes. RaCFormer also secures the state-of-the-art performance on the VoD dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/cxmomo/RaCFormer.
Authors:Kunming Li, Mao Shan, Stephany Berrio Perez, Katie Luo, Stewart Worrall
Abstract:
Traffic accidents are a global safety concern, resulting in numerous fatalities each year. A considerable number of these deaths are caused by animal-vehicle collisions (AVCs), which not only endanger human lives but also present serious risks to animal populations. This paper presents an innovative self-training methodology aimed at detecting rare animals, such as the cassowary in Australia, whose survival is threatened by road accidents. The proposed method addresses critical real-world challenges, including acquiring and labelling sensor data for rare animal species in resource-limited environments. It achieves this by leveraging cloud and edge computing, and automatic data labelling to improve the detection performance of the field-deployed model iteratively. Our approach introduces Label-Augmentation Non-Maximum Suppression (LA-NMS), which incorporates a vision-language model (VLM) to enable automated data labelling. During a five-month deployment, we confirmed the method's robustness and effectiveness, resulting in improved object detection accuracy and increased prediction confidence. The source code is available: https://github.com/acfr/CassDetect
Authors:Zijian Gu, Jianwei Ma, Yan Huang, Honghao Wei, Zhanye Chen, Hui Zhang, Wei Hong
Abstract:
Millimeter-wave radar plays a vital role in 3D object detection for autonomous driving due to its all-weather and all-lighting-condition capabilities for perception. However, radar point clouds suffer from pronounced sparsity and unavoidable angle estimation errors. To address these limitations, incorporating a camera may partially help mitigate the shortcomings. Nevertheless, the direct fusion of radar and camera data can lead to negative or even opposite effects due to the lack of depth information in images and low-quality image features under adverse lighting conditions. Hence, in this paper, we present the radar-camera fusion network with Hybrid Generation and Synchronization (HGSFusion), designed to better fuse radar potentials and image features for 3D object detection. Specifically, we propose the Radar Hybrid Generation Module (RHGM), which fully considers the Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation errors in radar signal processing. This module generates denser radar points through different Probability Density Functions (PDFs) with the assistance of semantic information. Meanwhile, we introduce the Dual Sync Module (DSM), comprising spatial sync and modality sync, to enhance image features with radar positional information and facilitate the fusion of distinct characteristics in different modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in the VoD and TJ4DRadSet datasets by $6.53\%$ and $2.03\%$ in RoI AP and BEV AP, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/garfield-cpp/HGSFusion.
Authors:Yuanfan Zheng, Jinlin Wu, Wuyang Li, Zhen Chen
Abstract:
Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) transfers knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unannotated target domain under closed-set assumption. Universal DAOD (UniDAOD) extends DAOD to handle open-set, partial-set, and closed-set domain adaptation. In this paper, we first unveil two issues: domain-private category alignment is crucial for global-level features, and the domain probability heterogeneity of features across different levels. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dual Probabilistic Alignment (DPA) framework to model domain probability as Gaussian distribution, enabling the heterogeneity domain distribution sampling and measurement. The DPA consists of three tailored modules: the Global-level Domain Private Alignment (GDPA), the Instance-level Domain Shared Alignment (IDSA), and the Private Class Constraint (PCC). GDPA utilizes the global-level sampling to mine domain-private category samples and calculate alignment weight through a cumulative distribution function to address the global-level private category alignment. IDSA utilizes instance-level sampling to mine domain-shared category samples and calculates alignment weight through Gaussian distribution to conduct the domain-shared category domain alignment to address the feature heterogeneity. The PCC aggregates domain-private category centroids between feature and probability spaces to mitigate negative transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DPA outperforms state-of-the-art UniDAOD and DAOD methods across various datasets and scenarios, including open, partial, and closed sets. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/zyfone/DPA}.
Authors:Xinran Wang, Muxi Diao, Baoteng Li, Haiwen Zhang, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma
Abstract:
The Controllable Image Captioning Agent (CapAgent) is an innovative system designed to bridge the gap between user simplicity and professional-level outputs in image captioning tasks. CapAgent automatically transforms user-provided simple instructions into detailed, professional instructions, enabling precise and context-aware caption generation. By leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and external tools such as object detection tool and search engines, the system ensures that captions adhere to specified guidelines, including sentiment, keywords, focus, and formatting. CapAgent transparently controls each step of the captioning process, and showcases its reasoning and tool usage at every step, fostering user trust and engagement. The project code is available at https://github.com/xin-ran-w/CapAgent.
Authors:Zhangjun Zhou, Yiping Li, Chunlin Zhong, Jianuo Huang, Jialun Pei, Hua Li, He Tang
Abstract:
While the human visual system employs distinct mechanisms to perceive salient and camouflaged objects, existing models struggle to disentangle these tasks. Specifically, salient object detection (SOD) models frequently misclassify camouflaged objects as salient, while camouflaged object detection (COD) models conversely misinterpret salient objects as camouflaged. We hypothesize that this can be attributed to two factors: (i) the specific annotation paradigm of current SOD and COD datasets, and (ii) the lack of explicit attribute relationship modeling in current models. Prevalent SOD/COD datasets enforce a mutual exclusivity constraint, assuming scenes contain either salient or camouflaged objects, which poorly aligns with the real world. Furthermore, current SOD/COD methods are primarily designed for these highly constrained datasets and lack explicit modeling of the relationship between salient and camouflaged objects. In this paper, to promote the development of unconstrained salient and camouflaged object detection, we construct a large-scale dataset, USC12K, which features comprehensive labels and four different scenes that cover all possible logical existence scenarios of both salient and camouflaged objects. To explicitly model the relationship between salient and camouflaged objects, we propose a model called USCNet, which introduces two distinct prompt query mechanisms for modeling inter-sample and intra-sample attribute relationships. Additionally, to assess the model's ability to distinguish between salient and camouflaged objects, we design an evaluation metric called CSCS. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all scenes in various metrics. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/ssecv/USCNet.
Authors:Jingyu Zhang, Yilei Wang, Lang Qian, Peng Sun, Zengwen Li, Sudong Jiang, Maolin Liu, Liang Song
Abstract:
As a potential application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, multi-agent collaborative perception has achieved significant success in 3D object detection. While these methods have demonstrated impressive results on standard benchmarks, the robustness of such approaches in the face of complex real-world environments requires additional verification. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of collaborative perception methods in the presence of natural corruptions typical of real-world environments. Furthermore, we propose DSRC, a robustness-enhanced collaborative perception method aiming to learn Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware collaborative Representation against Corruptions. DSRC consists of two key designs: i) a semantic-guided sparse-to-dense distillation framework, which constructs multi-view dense objects painted by ground truth bounding boxes to effectively learn density-insensitive and semantic-aware collaborative representation; ii) a feature-to-point cloud reconstruction approach to better fuse critical collaborative representation across agents. To thoroughly evaluate DSRC, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world and simulated datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms SOTA collaborative perception methods in both clean and corrupted conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/Terry9a/DSRC.
Authors:Julian D. Santamaria, Claudia Isaza, Jhony H. Giraldo
Abstract:
Foundation Models (FMs) have been successful in various computer vision tasks like image classification, object detection and image segmentation. However, these tasks remain challenging when these models are tested on datasets with different distributions from the training dataset, a problem known as domain shift. This is especially problematic for recognizing animal species in camera-trap images where we have variability in factors like lighting, camouflage and occlusions. In this paper, we propose the Camera Trap Language-guided Contrastive Learning (CATALOG) model to address these issues. Our approach combines multiple FMs to extract visual and textual features from camera-trap data and uses a contrastive loss function to train the model. We evaluate CATALOG on two benchmark datasets and show that it outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in camera-trap image recognition, especially when the training and testing data have different animal species or come from different geographical areas. Our approach demonstrates the potential of using FMs in combination with multi-modal fusion and contrastive learning for addressing domain shifts in camera-trap image recognition. The code of CATALOG is publicly available at https://github.com/Julian075/CATALOG.
Authors:Lojze Žust, Matej Kristan
Abstract:
Panoptic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision and a crucial component for perception in autonomous vehicles. Recent mask-transformer-based methods achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks but face significant challenges with small objects, crowded scenes and scenes exhibiting a wide range of object scales. We identify several fundamental shortcomings of the current approaches: (i) the query proposal generation process is biased towards larger objects, resulting in missed smaller objects, (ii) initially well-localized queries may drift to other objects, resulting in missed detections, (iii) spatially well-separated instances may be merged into a single mask causing inconsistent and false scene interpretations. To address these issues, we rethink the individual components of the network and its supervision, and propose a novel method for panoptic segmentation PanSR. PanSR effectively mitigates instance merging, enhances small-object detection and increases performance in crowded scenes, delivering a notable +3.4 PQ improvement over state-of-the-art on the challenging LaRS benchmark, while reaching state-of-the-art performance on Cityscapes. The code and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/lojzezust/PanSR.
Authors:Hao-Chiang Shao, Yuan-Rong Liao, Tse-Yu Tseng, Yen-Liang Chuo, Fong-Yi Lin
Abstract:
With increasing revelations of academic fraud, detecting forged experimental images in the biomedical field has become a public concern. The challenge lies in the fact that copy-move targets can include background tissue, small foreground objects, or both, which may be out of the training domain and subject to unseen attacks, rendering standard object-detection-based approaches less effective. To address this, we reformulate the problem of detecting biomedical copy-move forgery regions as an intra-image co-saliency detection task and propose CMSeg-Net, a copy-move forgery segmentation network capable of identifying unseen duplicated areas. Built on a multi-resolution encoder-decoder architecture, CMSeg-Net incorporates self-correlation and correlation-assisted spatial-attention modules to detect intra-image regional similarities within feature tensors at each observation scale. This design helps distinguish even small copy-move targets in complex microscopic images from other similar objects. Furthermore, we created a copy-move forgery dataset of optical microscopic images, named FakeParaEgg, using open data from the ICIP 2022 Challenge to support CMSeg-Net's development and verify its performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on the FakeParaEgg dataset and other open copy-move detection datasets, including CASIA-CMFD, CoMoFoD, and CMF. The FakeParaEgg dataset, our source code, and the CMF dataset with our manually defined segmentation ground truths available at ``https://github.com/YoursEver/FakeParaEgg''.
Authors:Xiaohu Lu, Hayder Radha
Abstract:
Object detection using LiDAR point clouds relies on a large amount of human-annotated samples when training the underlying detectors' deep neural networks. However, generating 3D bounding box annotation for a large-scale dataset could be costly and time-consuming. Alternatively, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables a given object detector to operate on a novel new data, with unlabeled training dataset, by transferring the knowledge learned from training labeled \textit{source domain} data to the new unlabeled \textit{target domain}. Pseudo label strategies, which involve training the 3D object detector using target-domain predicted bounding boxes from a pre-trained model, are commonly used in UDA. However, these pseudo labels often introduce noise, impacting performance. In this paper, we introduce the Domain Adaptive LIdar (DALI) object detection framework to address noise at both distribution and instance levels. Firstly, a post-training size normalization (PTSN) strategy is developed to mitigate bias in pseudo label size distribution by identifying an unbiased scale after network training. To address instance-level noise between pseudo labels and corresponding point clouds, two pseudo point clouds generation (PPCG) strategies, ray-constrained and constraint-free, are developed to generate pseudo point clouds for each instance, ensuring the consistency between pseudo labels and pseudo points during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the publicly available and popular datasets KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes. We show that the proposed DALI framework achieves state-of-the-art results and outperforms leading approaches on most of the domain adaptation tasks. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiaohulugo/T-RO2024-DALI}{https://github.com/xiaohulugo/T-RO2024-DALI}.
Authors:Yi Zhong, Weize Quan, Dong-ming Yan, Jie Jiang, Yingmei Wei
Abstract:
Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct the complete 3D shape from incomplete point clouds, and it is crucial for tasks such as 3D object detection and segmentation. Despite the continuous advances in point cloud analysis techniques, feature extraction methods are still confronted with apparent limitations. The sparse sampling of point clouds, used as inputs in most methods, often results in a certain loss of global structure information. Meanwhile, traditional local feature extraction methods usually struggle to capture the intricate geometric details. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce PointCFormer, a transformer framework optimized for robust global retention and precise local detail capture in point cloud completion. This framework embraces several key advantages. First, we propose a relation-based local feature extraction method to perceive local delicate geometry characteristics. This approach establishes a fine-grained relationship metric between the target point and its k-nearest neighbors, quantifying each neighboring point's contribution to the target point's local features. Secondly, we introduce a progressive feature extractor that integrates our local feature perception method with self-attention. Starting with a denser sampling of points as input, it iteratively queries long-distance global dependencies and local neighborhood relationships. This extractor maintains enhanced global structure and refined local details, without generating substantial computational overhead. Additionally, we develop a correction module after generating point proxies in the latent space to reintroduce denser information from the input points, enhancing the representation capability of the point proxies. PointCFormer demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on several widely used benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zyyyyy0926/PointCFormer_Plus_Pytorch.
Authors:Jiangning Zhang, Teng Hu, Haoyang He, Zhucun Xue, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangtai Li, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
This work focuses on developing parameter-efficient and lightweight models for dense predictions while trading off parameters, FLOPs, and performance. Our goal is to set up the new frontier of the 5M magnitude lightweight model on various downstream tasks. Inverted Residual Block (IRB) serves as the infrastructure for lightweight CNNs, but no counterparts have been recognized by attention-based design. Our work rethinks the lightweight infrastructure of efficient IRB and practical components in Transformer from a unified perspective, extending CNN-based IRB to attention-based models and abstracting a one-residual Meta Mobile Block (MMBlock) for lightweight model design. Following neat but effective design criterion, we deduce a modern Improved Inverted Residual Mobile Block (i2RMB) and improve a hierarchical Efficient MOdel (EMOv2) with no elaborate complex structures. Considering the imperceptible latency for mobile users when downloading models under 4G/5G bandwidth and ensuring model performance, we investigate the performance upper limit of lightweight models with a magnitude of 5M. Extensive experiments on various vision recognition, dense prediction, and image generation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our EMOv2 over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., EMOv2-1M/2M/5M achieve 72.3, 75.8, and 79.4 Top-1 that surpass equal-order CNN-/Attention-based models significantly. At the same time, EMOv2-5M equipped RetinaNet achieves 41.5 mAP for object detection tasks that surpasses the previous EMO-5M by +2.6. When employing the more robust training recipe, our EMOv2-5M eventually achieves 82.9 Top-1 accuracy, which elevates the performance of 5M magnitude models to a new level. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangzjn/EMOv2.
Authors:Xiao Wang, Yu Jin, Wentao Wu, Wei Zhang, Lin Zhu, Bo Jiang, Yonghong Tian
Abstract:
Object detection in event streams has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, demonstrating superior performance in low-light conditions, scenarios with motion blur, and rapid movements. Current detectors leverage spiking neural networks, Transformers, or convolutional neural networks as their core architectures, each with its own set of limitations including restricted performance, high computational overhead, or limited local receptive fields. This paper introduces a novel MoE (Mixture of Experts) heat conduction-based object detection algorithm that strikingly balances accuracy and computational efficiency. Initially, we employ a stem network for event data embedding, followed by processing through our innovative MoE-HCO blocks. Each block integrates various expert modules to mimic heat conduction within event streams. Subsequently, an IoU-based query selection module is utilized for efficient token extraction, which is then channeled into a detection head for the final object detection process. Furthermore, we are pleased to introduce EvDET200K, a novel benchmark dataset for event-based object detection. Captured with a high-definition Prophesee EVK4-HD event camera, this dataset encompasses 10 distinct categories, 200,000 bounding boxes, and 10,054 samples, each spanning 2 to 5 seconds. We also provide comprehensive results from over 15 state-of-the-art detectors, offering a solid foundation for future research and comparison. The source code of this paper will be released on: https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvDET
Authors:Patrick Ramos, Nicolas Gonthier, Selina Khan, Yuta Nakashima, Noa Garcia
Abstract:
Object detection in art is a valuable tool for the digital humanities, as it allows for faster identification of objects in artistic and historical images compared to humans. However, annotating such images poses significant challenges due to the need for specialized domain expertise. We present NADA (no annotations for detection in art), a pipeline that leverages diffusion models' art-related knowledge for object detection in paintings without the need for full bounding box supervision. Our method, which supports both weakly-supervised and zero-shot scenarios and does not require any fine-tuning of its pretrained components, consists of a class proposer based on large vision-language models and a class-conditioned detector based on Stable Diffusion. NADA is evaluated on two artwork datasets, ArtDL 2.0 and IconArt, outperforming prior work in weakly-supervised detection, while being the first work for zero-shot object detection in art. Code is available at https://github.com/patrick-john-ramos/nada
Authors:Yunheng Li, Yuxuan Li, Quansheng Zeng, Wenhai Wang, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot recognition capability, but still underperform in dense prediction tasks. Self-distillation recently is emerging as a promising approach for fine-tuning VLMs to better adapt to local regions without requiring extensive annotations. However, previous state-of-the-art approaches often suffer from significant `foreground bias', where models tend to wrongly identify background regions as foreground objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose DenseVLM, a framework designed to learn unbiased region-language alignment from powerful pre-trained VLM representations. To alleviate this issue, we propose DenseVLM, a framework designed to learn unbiased region-language alignment from powerful pre-trained VLM representations. DenseVLM leverages the pre-trained VLM to retrieve categories for unlabeled regions and then decouples the interference between foreground and background features. We show that DenseVLM can directly replace the original VLM in open-vocabulary object detection and image segmentation methods, leading to notable performance improvements. Furthermore, it exhibits promising zero-shot scalability when training on more extensive and diverse datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/HVision-NKU/DenseVLM.
Authors:Itay Krispin-Avraham, Roy Orfaig, Ben-Zion Bobrovsky
Abstract:
Object detection is a significant field in autonomous driving. Popular sensors for this task include cameras and LiDAR sensors. LiDAR sensors offer several advantages, such as insensitivity to light changes, like in a dark setting and the ability to provide 3D information in the form of point clouds, which include the ranges of objects. However, 3D detection methods, such as PointPillars, typically require high-power hardware. Additionally, most common spinning LiDARs are sparse and may not achieve the desired quality of object detection in front of the car. In this paper, we present the feasibility of performing real-time 3D object detection of cars using 3D point clouds from a LiDAR sensor, processed and deployed on a low-power Hailo-8 AI accelerator. The LiDAR sensor used in this study is the InnovizOne sensor, which captures objects in higher quality compared to spinning LiDAR techniques, especially for distant objects. We successfully achieved real-time inference at a rate of approximately 5Hz with a high accuracy of 0.91% F1 score, with only -0.2% degradation compared to running the same model on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. This work demonstrates that effective real-time 3D object detection can be achieved on low-cost, low-power hardware, representing a significant step towards more accessible autonomous driving technologies. The source code and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AIROTAU/ PointPillarsHailoInnoviz/tree/main
Authors:Jiankang Chen, Ling Deng, Zhiyong Gan, Wei-Shi Zheng, Ruixuan Wang
Abstract:
Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is crucial when deploying machine learning models in open-world applications. The core challenge in OOD detection is mitigating the model's overconfidence on OOD data. While recent methods using auxiliary outlier datasets or synthesizing outlier features have shown promising OOD detection performance, they are limited due to costly data collection or simplified assumptions. In this paper, we propose a novel OOD detection framework FodFoM that innovatively combines multiple foundation models to generate two types of challenging fake outlier images for classifier training.
The first type is based on BLIP-2's image captioning capability, CLIP's vision-language knowledge, and Stable Diffusion's image generation ability. Jointly utilizing these foundation models constructs fake outlier images which are semantically similar to but different from in-distribution (ID) images. For the second type, GroundingDINO's object detection ability is utilized to help construct pure background images by blurring foreground ID objects in ID images. The proposed framework can be flexibly combined with multiple existing OOD detection methods.
Extensive empirical evaluations show that image classifiers with the help of constructed fake images can more accurately differentiate real OOD images from ID ones.
New state-of-the-art OOD detection performance is achieved on multiple benchmarks. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Cverchen/ACMMM2024-FodFoM}.
Authors:Yishuo Chen, Boran Wang, Xinyu Guo, Wenbin Zhu, Jiasheng He, Xiaobin Liu, Jing Yuan
Abstract:
Object detection in poor-illumination environments is a challenging task as objects are usually not clearly visible in RGB images. As infrared images provide additional clear edge information that complements RGB images, fusing RGB and infrared images has potential to enhance the detection ability in poor-illumination environments. However, existing works involving both visible and infrared images only focus on image fusion, instead of object detection. Moreover, they directly fuse the two kinds of image modalities, which ignores the mutual interference between them. To fuse the two modalities to maximize the advantages of cross-modality, we design a dual-enhancement-based cross-modality object detection network DEYOLO, in which semantic-spatial cross modality and novel bi-directional decoupled focus modules are designed to achieve the detection-centered mutual enhancement of RGB-infrared (RGB-IR). Specifically, a dual semantic enhancing channel weight assignment module (DECA) and a dual spatial enhancing pixel weight assignment module (DEPA) are firstly proposed to aggregate cross-modality information in the feature space to improve the feature representation ability, such that feature fusion can aim at the object detection task. Meanwhile, a dual-enhancement mechanism, including enhancements for two-modality fusion and single modality, is designed in both DECAand DEPAto reduce interference between the two kinds of image modalities. Then, a novel bi-directional decoupled focus is developed to enlarge the receptive field of the backbone network in different directions, which improves the representation quality of DEYOLO. Extensive experiments on M3FD and LLVIP show that our approach outperforms SOTA object detection algorithms by a clear margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/chips96/DEYOLO.
Authors:Shihua Huang, Zhichao Lu, Xiaodong Cun, Yongjun Yu, Xiao Zhou, Xi Shen
Abstract:
We introduce DEIM, an innovative and efficient training framework designed to accelerate convergence in real-time object detection with Transformer-based architectures (DETR). To mitigate the sparse supervision inherent in one-to-one (O2O) matching in DETR models, DEIM employs a Dense O2O matching strategy. This approach increases the number of positive samples per image by incorporating additional targets, using standard data augmentation techniques. While Dense O2O matching speeds up convergence, it also introduces numerous low-quality matches that could affect performance. To address this, we propose the Matchability-Aware Loss (MAL), a novel loss function that optimizes matches across various quality levels, enhancing the effectiveness of Dense O2O. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset validate the efficacy of DEIM. When integrated with RT-DETR and D-FINE, it consistently boosts performance while reducing training time by 50%. Notably, paired with RT-DETRv2, DEIM achieves 53.2% AP in a single day of training on an NVIDIA 4090 GPU. Additionally, DEIM-trained real-time models outperform leading real-time object detectors, with DEIM-D-FINE-L and DEIM-D-FINE-X achieving 54.7% and 56.5% AP at 124 and 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU, respectively, without the need for additional data. We believe DEIM sets a new baseline for advancements in real-time object detection. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ShihuaHuang95/DEIM.
Authors:Dmitrii Torbunov, Yihui Ren, Animesh Ghose, Odera Dim, Yonggang Cui
Abstract:
Event-based cameras (EBCs) have emerged as a bio-inspired alternative to traditional cameras, offering advantages in power efficiency, temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, the development of image analysis methods for EBCs is challenging due to the sparse and asynchronous nature of the data. This work addresses the problem of object detection for EBC cameras. The current approaches to EBC object detection focus on constructing complex data representations and rely on specialized architectures. We introduce I2EvDet (Image-to-Event Detection), a novel adaptation framework that bridges mainstream object detection with temporal event data processing. First, we demonstrate that a Real-Time DEtection TRansformer, or RT-DETR, a state-of-the-art natural image detector, trained on a simple image-like representation of the EBC data achieves performance comparable to specialized EBC methods. Next, as part of our framework, we develop an efficient adaptation technique that transforms image-based detectors into event-based detection models by modifying their frozen latent representation space through minimal architectural additions. The resulting EvRT-DETR model reaches state-of-the-art performance on the standard benchmark datasets Gen1 (mAP $+2.3$) and 1Mpx/Gen4 (mAP $+1.4$). These results demonstrate a fundamentally new approach to EBC object detection through principled adaptation of mainstream architectures, offering an efficient alternative with potential applications to other temporal visual domains. The code is available at: https://github.com/realtime-intelligence/evrt-detr
Authors:Lizhen Xu, Shanmin Pang, Wenzhao Qiu, Zehao Wu, Xiuxiu Bai, Kuizhi Mei, Jianru Xue
Abstract:
Query-based models are extensively used in 3D object detection tasks, with a wide range of pre-trained checkpoints readily available online. However, despite their popularity, these models often require an excessive number of object queries, far surpassing the actual number of objects to detect. The redundant queries result in unnecessary computational and memory costs. In this paper, we find that not all queries contribute equally -- a significant portion of queries have a much smaller impact compared to others. Based on this observation, we propose an embarrassingly simple approach called \bd{G}radually \bd{P}runing \bd{Q}ueries (GPQ), which prunes queries incrementally based on their classification scores. It is straightforward to implement in any query-based method, as it can be seamlessly integrated as a fine-tuning step using an existing checkpoint after training. With GPQ, users can easily generate multiple models with fewer queries, starting from a checkpoint with an excessive number of queries. Experiments on various advanced 3D detectors show that GPQ effectively reduces redundant queries while maintaining performance. Using our method, model inference on desktop GPUs can be accelerated by up to 1.31x. Moreover, after deployment on edge devices, it achieves up to a 67.86\% reduction in FLOPs and a 76.38\% decrease in inference time. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/iseri27/Gpq}.
Authors:Philipp Wolters, Johannes Gilg, Torben Teepe, Fabian Herzog, Felix Fent, Gerhard Rigoll
Abstract:
In this work, we present SpaRC, a novel Sparse fusion transformer for 3D perception that integrates multi-view image semantics with Radar and Camera point features. The fusion of radar and camera modalities has emerged as an efficient perception paradigm for autonomous driving systems. While conventional approaches utilize dense Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based architectures for depth estimation, contemporary query-based transformers excel in camera-only detection through object-centric methodology. However, these query-based approaches exhibit limitations in false positive detections and localization precision due to implicit depth modeling. We address these challenges through three key contributions: (1) sparse frustum fusion (SFF) for cross-modal feature alignment, (2) range-adaptive radar aggregation (RAR) for precise object localization, and (3) local self-attention (LSA) for focused query aggregation. In contrast to existing methods requiring computationally intensive BEV-grid rendering, SpaRC operates directly on encoded point features, yielding substantial improvements in efficiency and accuracy. Empirical evaluations on the nuScenes and TruckScenes benchmarks demonstrate that SpaRC significantly outperforms existing dense BEV-based and sparse query-based detectors. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance metrics of 67.1 NDS and 63.1 AMOTA. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/phi-wol/sparc.
Authors:Sönke Tenckhoff, Mario Koddenbrock, Erik Rodner
Abstract:
Automated object detection has become increasingly valuable across diverse applications, yet efficient, high-quality annotation remains a persistent challenge. In this paper, we present the development and evaluation of a platform designed to interactively improve object detection models. The platform allows uploading and annotating images as well as fine-tuning object detection models. Users can then manually review and refine annotations, further creating improved snapshots that are used for automatic object detection on subsequent image uploads - a process we refer to as semi-automatic annotation resulting in a significant gain in annotation efficiency.
Whereas iterative refinement of model results to speed up annotation has become common practice, we are the first to quantitatively evaluate its benefits with respect to time, effort, and interaction savings. Our experimental results show clear evidence for a significant time reduction of up to 53% for semi-automatic compared to manual annotation. Importantly, these efficiency gains did not compromise annotation quality, while matching or occasionally even exceeding the accuracy of manual annotations. These findings demonstrate the potential of our lightweight annotation platform for creating high-quality object detection datasets and provide best practices to guide future development of annotation platforms.
The platform is open-source, with the frontend and backend repositories available on GitHub. To support the understanding of our labeling process, we have created an explanatory video demonstrating the methodology using microscopy images of E. coli bacteria as an example.
Authors:Zewen Du, Zhenjiang Hu, Guiyu Zhao, Ying Jin, Hongbin Ma
Abstract:
Feature upsampling is an essential operation in constructing deep convolutional neural networks. However, existing upsamplers either lack specific feature guidance or necessitate the utilization of high-resolution feature maps, resulting in a loss of performance and flexibility. In this paper, we find that the local self-attention naturally has the feature guidance capability, and its computational paradigm aligns closely with the essence of feature upsampling (\ie feature reassembly of neighboring points). Therefore, we introduce local self-attention into the upsampling task and demonstrate that the majority of existing upsamplers can be regarded as special cases of upsamplers based on local self-attention. Considering the potential semantic gap between upsampled points and their neighboring points, we further introduce the deformation mechanism into the upsampler based on local self-attention, thereby proposing LDA-AQU. As a novel dynamic kernel-based upsampler, LDA-AQU utilizes the feature of queries to guide the model in adaptively adjusting the position and aggregation weight of neighboring points, thereby meeting the upsampling requirements across various complex scenarios. In addition, LDA-AQU is lightweight and can be easily integrated into various model architectures. We evaluate the effectiveness of LDA-AQU across four dense prediction tasks: object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and semantic segmentation. LDA-AQU consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art upsamplers, achieving performance enhancements of 1.7 AP, 1.5 AP, 2.0 PQ, and 2.5 mIoU compared to the baseline models in the aforementioned four tasks, respectively. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/duzw9311/LDA-AQU}.
Authors:Wenbo Zhang, Lu Zhang, Ping Hu, Liqian Ma, Yunzhi Zhuge, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Injecting semantics into 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently garnered significant attention. While current approaches typically distill 3D semantic features from 2D foundational models (e.g., CLIP and SAM) to facilitate novel view segmentation and semantic understanding, their heavy reliance on 2D supervision can undermine cross-view semantic consistency and necessitate complex data preparation processes, therefore hindering view-consistent scene understanding. In this work, we present FreeGS, an unsupervised semantic-embedded 3DGS framework that achieves view-consistent 3D scene understanding without the need for 2D labels. Instead of directly learning semantic features, we introduce the IDentity-coupled Semantic Field (IDSF) into 3DGS, which captures both semantic representations and view-consistent instance indices for each Gaussian. We optimize IDSF with a two-step alternating strategy: semantics help to extract coherent instances in 3D space, while the resulting instances regularize the injection of stable semantics from 2D space. Additionally, we adopt a 2D-3D joint contrastive loss to enhance the complementarity between view-consistent 3D geometry and rich semantics during the bootstrapping process, enabling FreeGS to uniformly perform tasks such as novel-view semantic segmentation, object selection, and 3D object detection. Extensive experiments on LERF-Mask, 3D-OVS, and ScanNet datasets demonstrate that FreeGS performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods while avoiding the complex data preprocessing workload. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wb014/FreeGS.
Authors:Muhammad Sohail Danish, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Syed Roshaan Ali Shah, Kartik Kuckreja, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Paolo Fraccaro, Alexandre Lacoste, Salman Khan
Abstract:
While numerous recent benchmarks focus on evaluating generic Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they do not effectively address the specific challenges of geospatial applications. Generic VLM benchmarks are not designed to handle the complexities of geospatial data, an essential component for applications such as environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster management. Key challenges in the geospatial domain include temporal change detection, large-scale object counting, tiny object detection, and understanding relationships between entities in remote sensing imagery. To bridge this gap, we present GEOBench-VLM, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate VLMs on geospatial tasks, including scene understanding, object counting, localization, fine-grained categorization, segmentation, and temporal analysis. Our benchmark features over 10,000 manually verified instructions and spanning diverse visual conditions, object types, and scales. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs to assess performance on geospatial-specific challenges. The results indicate that although existing VLMs demonstrate potential, they face challenges when dealing with geospatial-specific tasks, highlighting the room for further improvements. Notably, the best-performing LLaVa-OneVision achieves only 41.7% accuracy on MCQs, slightly more than GPT-4o, which is approximately double the random guess performance. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/The-AI-Alliance/GEO-Bench-VLM .
Authors:Xiaoqin Zhang, Zhenni Yu, Li Zhao, Deng-Ping Fan, Guobao Xiao
Abstract:
We rethink the segment anything model (SAM) and propose a novel multiprompt network called COMPrompter for camouflaged object detection (COD). SAM has zero-shot generalization ability beyond other models and can provide an ideal framework for COD. Our network aims to enhance the single prompt strategy in SAM to a multiprompt strategy. To achieve this, we propose an edge gradient extraction module, which generates a mask containing gradient information regarding the boundaries of camouflaged objects. This gradient mask is then used as a novel boundary prompt, enhancing the segmentation process. Thereafter, we design a box-boundary mutual guidance module, which fosters more precise and comprehensive feature extraction via mutual guidance between a boundary prompt and a box prompt. This collaboration enhances the model's ability to accurately detect camouflaged objects. Moreover, we employ the discrete wavelet transform to extract high-frequency features from image embeddings. The high-frequency features serve as a supplementary component to the multiprompt system. Finally, our COMPrompter guides the network to achieve enhanced segmentation results, thereby advancing the development of SAM in terms of COD. Experimental results across COD benchmarks demonstrate that COMPrompter achieves a cutting-edge performance, surpassing the current leading model by an average positive metric of 2.2% in COD10K. In the specific application of COD, the experimental results in polyp segmentation show that our model is superior to top-tier methods as well. The code will be made available at https://github.com/guobaoxiao/COMPrompter.
Authors:Pengfei Lyu, Pak-Hei Yeung, Xiaosheng Yu, Chengdong Wu, Jagath C. Rajapakse
Abstract:
The rapid development of deep learning has significantly improved salient object detection (SOD) combining both RGB and thermal (RGB-T) images. However, existing deep learning-based RGB-T SOD models suffer from two major limitations. First, Transformer-based models with quadratic complexity are computationally expensive and memory-intensive, limiting their application in high-resolution bi-modal feature fusion. Second, even when these models converge to an optimal solution, there remains a frequency gap between the prediction and ground-truth. To overcome these limitations, we propose a purely Fourier transform-based model, namely Deep Fourier-Embedded Network (DFENet), for accurate RGB-T SOD. To address the computational complexity when dealing with high-resolution images, we leverage the efficiency of fast Fourier transform with linear complexity to design three key components: (1) the Modal-coordinated Perception Attention, which fuses RGB and thermal modalities with enhanced multi-dimensional representation; (2) the Frequency-decomposed Edge-aware Block, which clarifies object edges by deeply decomposing and enhancing frequency components of low-level features; and (3) the Fourier Residual Channel Attention Block, which prioritizes high-frequency information while aligning channel-wise global relationships. To mitigate the frequency gap, we propose Co-focus Frequency Loss, which dynamically weights hard frequencies during edge frequency reconstruction by cross-referencing bi-modal edge information in the Fourier domain. Extensive experiments on four RGB-T SOD benchmark datasets demonstrate that DFENet outperforms fifteen existing state-of-the-art RGB-T SOD models. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the value and effectiveness of our newly proposed components. The code is available at https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/DFENet.
Authors:Zhongyu Xia, Jishuo Li, Zhiwei Lin, Xinhao Wang, Yongtao Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract:
Open-world perception aims to develop a model adaptable to novel domains and various sensor configurations and can understand uncommon objects and corner cases. However, current research lacks sufficiently comprehensive open-world 3D perception benchmarks and robust generalizable methodologies. This paper introduces OpenAD, the first real open-world autonomous driving benchmark for 3D object detection. OpenAD is built upon a corner case discovery and annotation pipeline that integrates with a multimodal large language model (MLLM). The proposed pipeline annotates corner case objects in a unified format for five autonomous driving perception datasets with 2000 scenarios. In addition, we devise evaluation methodologies and evaluate various open-world and specialized 2D and 3D models. Moreover, we propose a vision-centric 3D open-world object detection baseline and further introduce an ensemble method by fusing general and specialized models to address the issue of lower precision in existing open-world methods for the OpenAD benchmark. We host an online challenge on EvalAI. Data, toolkit codes, and evaluation codes are available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/OpenAD.
Authors:Hoà ng-Ãn Lê, Paul Berg, Minh-Tan Pham
Abstract:
Object detection and semantic segmentation are both scene understanding tasks yet they differ in data structure and information level. Object detection requires box coordinates for object instances while semantic segmentation requires pixel-wise class labels. Making use of one task's information to train the other would be beneficial for multi-task partially supervised learning where each training example is annotated only for a single task, having the potential to expand training sets with different-task datasets. This paper studies various weak losses for partially annotated data in combination with existing supervised losses. We propose Box-for-Mask and Mask-for-Box strategies, and their combination BoMBo, to distil necessary information from one task annotations to train the other. Ablation studies and experimental results on VOC and COCO datasets show favorable results for the proposed idea. Source code and data splits can be found at https://github.com/lhoangan/multas.
Authors:Xiaowen Ma, Zhenliang Ni, Xinghao Chen
Abstract:
Mamba has shown great potential for computer vision due to its linear complexity in modeling the global context with respect to the input length. However, existing lightweight Mamba-based backbones cannot demonstrate performance that matches Convolution or Transformer-based methods. We observe that simply modifying the scanning path in the image domain is not conducive to fully exploiting the potential of vision Mamba. In this paper, we first perform comprehensive spectral and quantitative analyses, and verify that the Mamba block mainly models low-frequency information under Convolution-Mamba hybrid architecture. Based on the analyses, we introduce a novel Laplace mixer to decouple the features in terms of frequency and input only the low-frequency components into the Mamba block. In addition, considering the redundancy of the features and the different requirements for high-frequency details and low-frequency global information at different stages, we introduce a frequency ramp inception, i.e., gradually reduce the input dimensions of the high-frequency branches, so as to efficiently trade-off the high-frequency and low-frequency components at different layers. By integrating mobile-friendly convolution and efficient Laplace mixer, we build a series of tiny hybrid vision Mamba called TinyViM. The proposed TinyViM achieves impressive performance on several downstream tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection and instance segmentation. In particular, TinyViM outperforms Convolution, Transformer and Mamba-based models with similar scales, and the throughput is about 2-3 times higher than that of other Mamba-based models. Code is available at https://github.com/xwmaxwma/TinyViM.
Authors:Asanobu Kitamoto, Erwan Dzik, Gaspar Faure
Abstract:
This paper presents the Digital Typhoon Dataset V2, a new version of the longest typhoon satellite image dataset for 40+ years aimed at benchmarking machine learning models for long-term spatio-temporal data. The new addition in Dataset V2 is tropical cyclone data from the southern hemisphere, in addition to the northern hemisphere data in Dataset V1. Having data from two hemispheres allows us to ask new research questions about regional differences across basins and hemispheres. We also discuss new developments in representations and tasks of the dataset. We first introduce a self-supervised learning framework for representation learning. Combined with the LSTM model, we discuss performance on intensity forecasting and extra-tropical transition forecasting tasks. We then propose new tasks, such as the typhoon center estimation task. We show that an object detection-based model performs better for stronger typhoons. Finally, we study how machine learning models can generalize across basins and hemispheres, by training the model on the northern hemisphere data and testing it on the southern hemisphere data. The dataset is publicly available at \url{http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/digital-typhoon/dataset/} and \url{https://github.com/kitamoto-lab/digital-typhoon/}.
Authors:Ruoyu Chen, Siyuan Liang, Jingzhi Li, Shiming Liu, Maosen Li, Zhen Huang, Hua Zhang, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
Advances in multimodal pre-training have propelled object-level foundation models, such as Grounding DINO and Florence-2, in tasks like visual grounding and object detection. However, interpreting these models' decisions has grown increasingly challenging. Existing interpretable attribution methods for object-level task interpretation have notable limitations: (1) gradient-based methods lack precise localization due to visual-textual fusion in foundation models, and (2) perturbation-based methods produce noisy saliency maps, limiting fine-grained interpretability. To address these, we propose a Visual Precision Search method that generates accurate attribution maps with fewer regions. Our method bypasses internal model parameters to overcome attribution issues from multimodal fusion, dividing inputs into sparse sub-regions and using consistency and collaboration scores to accurately identify critical decision-making regions. We also conducted a theoretical analysis of the boundary guarantees and scope of applicability of our method. Experiments on RefCOCO, MS COCO, and LVIS show our approach enhances object-level task interpretability over SOTA for Grounding DINO and Florence-2 across various evaluation metrics, with faithfulness gains of 23.7%, 31.6%, and 20.1% on MS COCO, LVIS, and RefCOCO for Grounding DINO, and 102.9% and 66.9% on MS COCO and RefCOCO for Florence-2. Additionally, our method can interpret failures in visual grounding and object detection tasks, surpassing existing methods across multiple evaluation metrics. The code will be released at https://github.com/RuoyuChen10/VPS.
Authors:Yanan Wang, Zhenghao Fei, Ruichen Li, Yibin Ying
Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in large foundation models have enabled the possibility of transferring knowledge pre-trained on vast datasets to domains with limited data availability. Agriculture is one of the domains that lacks sufficient data. This study proposes a framework to train effective, domain-specific, small models from foundation models without manual annotation. Our approach begins with SDM (Segmentation-Description-Matching), a stage that leverages two foundation models: SAM2 (Segment Anything in Images and Videos) for segmentation and OpenCLIP (Open Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) for zero-shot open-vocabulary classification. In the second stage, a novel knowledge distillation mechanism is utilized to distill compact, edge-deployable models from SDM, enhancing both inference speed and perception accuracy. The complete method, termed SDM-D (Segmentation-Description-Matching-Distilling), demonstrates strong performance across various fruit detection tasks object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation) without manual annotation. It nearly matches the performance of models trained with abundant labels. Notably, SDM-D outperforms open-set detection methods such as Grounding SAM and YOLO-World on all tested fruit detection datasets. Additionally, we introduce MegaFruits, a comprehensive fruit segmentation dataset encompassing over 25,000 images, and all code and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/AgRoboticsResearch/SDM-D.git.
Authors:Man Yao, Xuerui Qiu, Tianxiang Hu, Jiakui Hu, Yuhong Chou, Keyu Tian, Jianxing Liao, Luziwei Leng, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
Abstract:
The ambition of brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) is to become a low-power alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). This work addresses two major challenges in realizing this vision: the performance gap between SNNs and ANNs, and the high training costs of SNNs. We identify intrinsic flaws in spiking neurons caused by binary firing mechanisms and propose a Spike Firing Approximation (SFA) method using integer training and spike-driven inference. This optimizes the spike firing pattern of spiking neurons, enhancing efficient training, reducing power consumption, improving performance, enabling easier scaling, and better utilizing neuromorphic chips. We also develop an efficient spike-driven Transformer architecture and a spike-masked autoencoder to prevent performance degradation during SNN scaling. On ImageNet-1k, we achieve state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy of 78.5\%, 79.8\%, 84.0\%, and 86.2\% with models containing 10M, 19M, 83M, and 173M parameters, respectively. For instance, the 10M model outperforms the best existing SNN by 7.2\% on ImageNet, with training time acceleration and inference energy efficiency improved by 4.5$\times$ and 3.9$\times$, respectively. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method across various tasks, including object detection, semantic segmentation, and neuromorphic vision tasks. This work enables SNNs to match ANN performance while maintaining the low-power advantage, marking a significant step towards SNNs as a general visual backbone. Code is available at https://github.com/BICLab/Spike-Driven-Transformer-V3.
Authors:C. Xiao, W. An, Y. Zhang, Z. Su, M. Li, W. Sheng, M. Pietikäinen, L. Liu
Abstract:
Moving object detection in satellite videos (SVMOD) is a challenging task due to the extremely dim and small target characteristics. Current learning-based methods extract spatio-temporal information from multi-frame dense representation with labor-intensive manual labels to tackle SVMOD, which needs high annotation costs and contains tremendous computational redundancy due to the severe imbalance between foreground and background regions. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient unsupervised framework for SVMOD. Specifically, we propose a generic unsupervised framework for SVMOD, in which pseudo labels generated by a traditional method can evolve with the training process to promote detection performance. Furthermore, we propose a highly efficient and effective sparse convolutional anchor-free detection network by sampling the dense multi-frame image form into a sparse spatio-temporal point cloud representation and skipping the redundant computation on background regions. Coping these two designs, we can achieve both high efficiency (label and computation efficiency) and effectiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can not only process 98.8 frames per second on 1024x1024 images but also achieve state-of-the-art performance. The relabeled dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ChaoXiao12/Moving-object-detection-in-satellite-videos-HiEUM.
Authors:Wuzheng Dong, Yujuan Zhu, Sheng Zhang
Abstract:
This paper presents a method for object recognition and automatic labeling in large-area remote sensing images called LRSAA. The method integrates YOLOv11 and MobileNetV3-SSD object detection algorithms through ensemble learning to enhance model performance. Furthermore, it employs Poisson disk sampling segmentation techniques and the EIOU metric to optimize the training and inference processes of segmented images, followed by the integration of results. This approach not only reduces the demand for computational resources but also achieves a good balance between accuracy and speed. The source code for this project has been made publicly available on https://github.com/anaerovane/LRSAA.
Authors:Zhong-Yu Li, Xin Jin, Boyuan Sun, Chun-Le Guo, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
Existing object detection methods often consider sRGB input, which was compressed from RAW data using ISP originally designed for visualization. However, such compression might lose crucial information for detection, especially under complex light and weather conditions. We introduce the AODRaw dataset, which offers 7,785 high-resolution real RAW images with 135,601 annotated instances spanning 62 categories, capturing a broad range of indoor and outdoor scenes under 9 distinct light and weather conditions. Based on AODRaw that supports RAW and sRGB object detection, we provide a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating current detection methods. We find that sRGB pre-training constrains the potential of RAW object detection due to the domain gap between sRGB and RAW, prompting us to directly pre-train on the RAW domain. However, it is harder for RAW pre-training to learn rich representations than sRGB pre-training due to the camera noise. To assist RAW pre-training, we distill the knowledge from an off-the-shelf model pre-trained on the sRGB domain. As a result, we achieve substantial improvements under diverse and adverse conditions without relying on extra pre-processing modules. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lzyhha/AODRaw.
Authors:Chen Xin, Thomas Motz, Andreas Hartel, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract:
Real-time object localization on edge devices is fundamental for numerous applications, ranging from surveillance to industrial automation. Traditional frameworks, such as object detection, segmentation, and keypoint detection, struggle in resource-constrained environments, often resulting in substantial target omissions. To address these challenges, we introduce OCDet, a lightweight Object Center Detection framework optimized for edge devices with NPUs. OCDet predicts heatmaps representing object center probabilities and extracts center points through peak identification. Unlike prior methods using fixed Gaussian distribution, we introduce Generalized Centerness (GC) to generate ground truth heatmaps from bounding box annotations, providing finer spatial details without additional manual labeling. Built on NPU-friendly Semantic FPN with MobileNetV4 backbones, OCDet models are trained by our Balanced Continuous Focal Loss (BCFL), which alleviates data imbalance and focuses training on hard negative examples for probability regression tasks. Leveraging the novel Center Alignment Score (CAS) with Hungarian matching, we demonstrate that OCDet consistently outperforms YOLO11 in object center detection, achieving up to 23% higher CAS while requiring 42% fewer parameters, 34% less computation, and 64% lower NPU latency. When compared to keypoint detection frameworks, OCDet achieves substantial CAS improvements up to 186% using identical models. By integrating GC, BCFL, and CAS, OCDet establishes a new paradigm for efficient and robust object center detection on edge devices with NPUs. The code is released at https://github.com/chen-xin-94/ocdet.
Authors:Datao Tang, Xiangyong Cao, Xuan Wu, Jialin Li, Jing Yao, Xueru Bai, Dongsheng Jiang, Yin Li, Deyu Meng
Abstract:
Remote sensing image object detection (RSIOD) aims to identify and locate specific objects within satellite or aerial imagery. However, there is a scarcity of labeled data in current RSIOD datasets, which significantly limits the performance of current detection algorithms. Although existing techniques, e.g., data augmentation and semi-supervised learning, can mitigate this scarcity issue to some extent, they are heavily dependent on high-quality labeled data and perform worse in rare object classes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a layout-controllable diffusion generative model (i.e. AeroGen) tailored for RSIOD. To our knowledge, AeroGen is the first model to simultaneously support horizontal and rotated bounding box condition generation, thus enabling the generation of high-quality synthetic images that meet specific layout and object category requirements. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end data augmentation framework that integrates a diversity-conditioned generator and a filtering mechanism to enhance both the diversity and quality of generated data. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic data produced by our method are of high quality and diversity. Furthermore, the synthetic RSIOD data can significantly improve the detection performance of existing RSIOD models, i.e., the mAP metrics on DIOR, DIOR-R, and HRSC datasets are improved by 3.7%, 4.3%, and 2.43%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonettoo/AeroGen.
Authors:Ali Awad, Ashraf Saleem, Sidike Paheding, Evan Lucas, Serein Al-Ratrout, Timothy C. Havens
Abstract:
Underwater imagery often suffers from severe degradation resulting in low visual quality and reduced object detection performance. This work aims to evaluate state-of-the-art image enhancement models, investigate their effects on underwater object detection, and explore their potential to improve detection performance. To this end, we apply nine recent underwater image enhancement models, covering physical, non-physical and learning-based categories, to two recent underwater image datasets. Following this, we conduct joint qualitative and quantitative analyses on the original and enhanced images, revealing the discrepancy between the two analyses, and analyzing changes in the quality distribution of the images after enhancement. We then train three recent object detection models on the original datasets, selecting the best-performing detector for further analysis. This detector is subsequently re-trained on the enhanced datasets to evaluate changes in detection performance, highlighting the adverse effect of enhancement on detection performance at the dataset level. Next, we perform a correlation study to examine the relationship between various enhancement metrics and the mean Average Precision (mAP). Finally, we conduct an image-level analysis that reveals images of improved detection performance after enhancement. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of image enhancement to improve detection performance and provide valuable insights for researchers to further explore the effects of enhancement on detection at the individual image level, rather than at the dataset level. This could enable the selective application of enhancement for improved detection. The data generated, code developed, and supplementary materials are publicly available at: https://github.com/RSSL-MTU/Enhancement-Detection-Analysis.
Authors:Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Shengyin Jiang, Ziying Song, Li Liu, Zhi-xin Yang
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning has made substantial strides in image processing, while visual pre-training for autonomous driving is still in its infancy. Existing methods often focus on learning geometric scene information while neglecting texture or treating both aspects separately, hindering comprehensive scene understanding. In this context, we are excited to introduce GaussianPretrain, a novel pre-training paradigm that achieves a holistic understanding of the scene by uniformly integrating geometric and texture representations. Conceptualizing 3D Gaussian anchors as volumetric LiDAR points, our method learns a deepened understanding of scenes to enhance pre-training performance with detailed spatial structure and texture, achieving that 40.6% faster than NeRF-based method UniPAD with 70% GPU memory only. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GaussianPretrain across multiple 3D perception tasks, showing significant performance improvements, such as a 7.05% increase in NDS for 3D object detection, boosts mAP by 1.9% in HD map construction and 0.8% improvement on Occupancy prediction. These significant gains highlight GaussianPretrain's theoretical innovation and strong practical potential, promoting visual pre-training development for autonomous driving. Source code will be available at https://github.com/Public-BOTs/GaussianPretrain
Authors:Zhongling Huang, Long Liu, Shuxin Yang, Zhirui Wang, Gong Cheng, Junwei Han
Abstract:
The disperse structure distributions (discreteness) and variant scattering characteristics (variability) of SAR airplane targets lead to special challenges of object detection and recognition. The current deep learning-based detectors encounter challenges in distinguishing fine-grained SAR airplanes against complex backgrounds. To address it, we propose a novel physics-guided detector (PGD) learning paradigm for SAR airplanes that comprehensively investigate their discreteness and variability to improve the detection performance. It is a general learning paradigm that can be extended to different existing deep learning-based detectors with "backbone-neck-head" architectures. The main contributions of PGD include the physics-guided self-supervised learning, feature enhancement, and instance perception, denoted as PGSSL, PGFE, and PGIP, respectively. PGSSL aims to construct a self-supervised learning task based on a wide range of SAR airplane targets that encodes the prior knowledge of various discrete structure distributions into the embedded space. Then, PGFE enhances the multi-scale feature representation of a detector, guided by the physics-aware information learned from PGSSL. PGIP is constructed at the detection head to learn the refined and dominant scattering point of each SAR airplane instance, thus alleviating the interference from the complex background. We propose two implementations, denoted as PGD and PGD-Lite, and apply them to various existing detectors with different backbones and detection heads. The experiments demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed PGD, which can improve existing detectors on SAR airplane detection with fine-grained classification task (an improvement of 3.1\% mAP most), and achieve the state-of-the-art performance (90.7\% mAP) on SAR-AIRcraft-1.0 dataset. The project is open-source at \url{https://github.com/XAI4SAR/PGD}.
Authors:Mahmudul Hasan
Abstract:
In computer vision tasks, the ability to focus on relevant regions within an image is crucial for improving model performance, particularly when key features are small, subtle, or spatially dispersed. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) typically treat all regions of an image equally, which can lead to inefficient feature extraction. To address this challenge, I have introduced Vision Eagle Attention, a novel attention mechanism that enhances visual feature extraction using convolutional spatial attention. The model applies convolution to capture local spatial features and generates an attention map that selectively emphasizes the most informative regions of the image. This attention mechanism enables the model to focus on discriminative features while suppressing irrelevant background information. I have integrated Vision Eagle Attention into a lightweight ResNet-18 architecture, demonstrating that this combination results in an efficient and powerful model. I have evaluated the performance of the proposed model on three widely used benchmark datasets: FashionMNIST, Intel Image Classification, and OracleMNIST, with a primary focus on image classification. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves classification accuracy. Additionally, this method has the potential to be extended to other vision tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and visual tracking, offering a computationally efficient solution for a wide range of vision-based applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/MahmudulHasan11085/Vision-Eagle-Attention.git
Authors:Ryoma Yataka, Adriano Cardace, Pu Perry Wang, Petros Boufounos, Ryuhei Takahashi
Abstract:
Indoor radar perception has seen rising interest due to affordable costs driven by emerging automotive imaging radar developments and the benefits of reduced privacy concerns and reliability under hazardous conditions (e.g., fire and smoke). However, existing radar perception pipelines fail to account for distinctive characteristics of the multi-view radar setting. In this paper, we propose Radar dEtection TRansformer (RETR), an extension of the popular DETR architecture, tailored for multi-view radar perception. RETR inherits the advantages of DETR, eliminating the need for hand-crafted components for object detection and segmentation in the image plane. More importantly, RETR incorporates carefully designed modifications such as 1) depth-prioritized feature similarity via a tunable positional encoding (TPE); 2) a tri-plane loss from both radar and camera coordinates; and 3) a learnable radar-to-camera transformation via reparameterization, to account for the unique multi-view radar setting. Evaluated on two indoor radar perception datasets, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 15.38+ AP for object detection and 11.91+ IoU for instance segmentation, respectively. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-detection-transformer.
Authors:Xun Huang, Jinlong Wang, Qiming Xia, Siheng Chen, Bisheng Yang, Xin Li, Cheng Wang, Chenglu Wen
Abstract:
Current Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) systems have significantly enhanced 3D object detection using LiDAR and camera data. However, these methods suffer from performance degradation in adverse weather conditions. The weather-robust 4D radar provides Doppler and additional geometric information, raising the possibility of addressing this challenge. To this end, we present V2X-R, the first simulated V2X dataset incorporating LiDAR, camera, and 4D radar. V2X-R contains 12,079 scenarios with 37,727 frames of LiDAR and 4D radar point clouds, 150,908 images, and 170,859 annotated 3D vehicle bounding boxes. Subsequently, we propose a novel cooperative LiDAR-4D radar fusion pipeline for 3D object detection and implement it with various fusion strategies. To achieve weather-robust detection, we additionally propose a Multi-modal Denoising Diffusion (MDD) module in our fusion pipeline. MDD utilizes weather-robust 4D radar feature as a condition to prompt the diffusion model to denoise noisy LiDAR features. Experiments show that our LiDAR-4D radar fusion pipeline demonstrates superior performance in the V2X-R dataset. Over and above this, our MDD module further improved the performance of basic fusion model by up to 5.73%/6.70% in foggy/snowy conditions with barely disrupting normal performance. The dataset and code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/ylwhxht/V2X-R.
Authors:Wuzheng Dong
Abstract:
This paper presents a method for object recognition and automatic labeling in large-area remote sensing images called LRSAA. The method integrates YOLOv11 and MobileNetV3-SSD object detection algorithms through ensemble learning to enhance model performance. Furthermore, it employs Poisson disk sampling segmentation techniques and the EIOU metric to optimize the training and inference processes of segmented images, followed by the integration of results. This approach not only reduces the demand for computational resources but also achieves a good balance between accuracy and speed. The source code for this project has been made publicly available on https://github.com/anaerovane/LRSAA.
Authors:Miguel Antunes-GarcÃa, Luis M. Bergasa, Santiago Montiel-MarÃn, Rafael Barea, Fabio Sánchez-GarcÃa, Ãngel Llamazares
Abstract:
Accurate object detection and prediction are critical to ensure the safety and efficiency of self-driving architectures. Predicting object trajectories and occupancy enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate movements and make decisions with future information, increasing their adaptability and reducing the risk of accidents. Current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches often isolate the detection, tracking, and prediction stages, which can lead to significant prediction errors due to accumulated inaccuracies between stages. Recent advances have improved the feature representation of multi-camera perception systems through Bird's-Eye View (BEV) transformations, boosting the development of end-to-end systems capable of predicting environmental elements directly from vehicle sensor data. These systems, however, often suffer from high processing times and number of parameters, creating challenges for real-world deployment. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel BEV instance prediction architecture based on a simplified paradigm that relies only on instance segmentation and flow prediction. The proposed system prioritizes speed, aiming at reduced parameter counts and inference times compared to existing SOTA architectures, thanks to the incorporation of an efficient transformer-based architecture. Furthermore, the implementation of the proposed architecture is optimized for performance improvements in PyTorch version 2.1. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/miguelag99/Efficient-Instance-Prediction
Authors:Yanguang Sun, Jian Yang, Lei Luo
Abstract:
Recently, deep learning-based salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) have achieved significant breakthroughs. We observe that existing ORSIs-SOD methods consistently center around optimizing pixel features in the spatial domain, progressively distinguishing between backgrounds and objects. However, pixel information represents local attributes, which are often correlated with their surrounding context. Even with strategies expanding the local region, spatial features remain biased towards local characteristics, lacking the ability of global perception. To address this problem, we introduce the Fourier transform that generate global frequency features and achieve an image-size receptive field. To be specific, we propose a novel United Domain Cognition Network (UDCNet) to jointly explore the global-local information in the frequency and spatial domains. Technically, we first design a frequency-spatial domain transformer block that mutually amalgamates the complementary local spatial and global frequency features to strength the capability of initial input features. Furthermore, a dense semantic excavation module is constructed to capture higher-level semantic for guiding the positioning of remote sensing objects. Finally, we devise a dual-branch joint optimization decoder that applies the saliency and edge branches to generate high-quality representations for predicting salient objects. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed UDCNet method over 24 state-of-the-art models, through extensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons in three widely-used ORSIs-SOD datasets. The source code is available at: \href{https://github.com/CSYSI/UDCNet}{\color{blue} https://github.com/CSYSI/UDCNet}.
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Longzhen Wang, Xianyong Fang, Zhengzheng Tu, Linbo Wang
Abstract:
A light field camera can reconstruct 3D scenes using captured multi-focus images that contain rich spatial geometric information, enhancing applications in stereoscopic photography, virtual reality, and robotic vision. In this work, a state-of-the-art salient object detection model for multi-focus light field images, called LFSamba, is introduced to emphasize four main insights: (a) Efficient feature extraction, where SAM is used to extract modality-aware discriminative features; (b) Inter-slice relation modeling, leveraging Mamba to capture long-range dependencies across multiple focal slices, thus extracting implicit depth cues; (c) Inter-modal relation modeling, utilizing Mamba to integrate all-focus and multi-focus images, enabling mutual enhancement; (d) Weakly supervised learning capability, developing a scribble annotation dataset from an existing pixel-level mask dataset, establishing the first scribble-supervised baseline for light field salient object detection.https://github.com/liuzywen/LFScribble
Authors:Fatemeh Shiri, Xiao-Yu Guo, Mona Golestan Far, Xin Yu, Gholamreza Haffari, Yuan-Fang Li
Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved strong performance across a range of vision and language tasks. However, their spatial reasoning capabilities are under-investigated. In this paper, we construct a novel VQA dataset, Spatial-MM, to comprehensively study LMMs' spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities. Our analyses on object-relationship and multi-hop reasoning reveal several important findings. Firstly, bounding boxes and scene graphs, even synthetic ones, can significantly enhance LMMs' spatial reasoning. Secondly, LMMs struggle more with questions posed from the human perspective than the camera perspective about the image. Thirdly, chain of thought (CoT) prompting does not improve model performance on complex multi-hop questions involving spatial relations. % Moreover, spatial reasoning steps are much less accurate than non-spatial ones across MLLMs. Lastly, our perturbation analysis on GQA-spatial reveals that LMMs are much stronger at basic object detection than complex spatial reasoning. We believe our benchmark dataset and in-depth analyses can spark further research on LMMs spatial reasoning. Spatial-MM benchmark is available at: https://github.com/FatemehShiri/Spatial-MM
Authors:Xinhua Jiang, Tianpeng Liu, Li Liu, Zhen Liu, Yongxiang Liu
Abstract:
Occlusion is a longstanding difficulty that challenges the UAV-based object detection. Many works address this problem by adapting the detection model. However, few of them exploit that the UAV could fundamentally improve detection performance by changing its viewpoint. Active Object Detection (AOD) offers an effective way to achieve this purpose. Through Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), AOD endows the UAV with the ability of autonomous path planning to search for the observation that is more conducive to target identification. Unfortunately, there exists no available dataset for developing the UAV AOD method. To fill this gap, we released a UAV's eye view active vision dataset named UEVAVD and hope it can facilitate research on the UAV AOD problem. Additionally, we improve the existing DRL-based AOD method by incorporating the inductive bias when learning the state representation. First, due to the partial observability, we use the gated recurrent unit to extract state representations from the observation sequence instead of the single-view observation. Second, we pre-decompose the scene with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and filter out the irrelevant information with the derived masks. With these practices, the agent could learn an active viewing policy with better generalization capability. The effectiveness of our innovations is validated by the experiments on the UEVAVD dataset. Our dataset will soon be available at https://github.com/Leo000ooo/UEVAVD_dataset.
Authors:Pengfei Lyu, Pak-Hei Yeung, Xiaosheng Yu, Xiufei Cheng, Chengdong Wu, Jagath C. Rajapakse
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based bi-modal salient object detection (BSOD) aims to segment salient objects in a scene utilizing complementary cues in unaligned RGB and thermal image pairs. However, the high computational expense of existing UAV-based BSOD models limits their applicability to real-world UAV devices. To address this problem, we propose an efficient Fourier filter network with contrastive learning that achieves both real-time and accurate performance. Specifically, we first design a semantic contrastive alignment loss to align the two modalities at the semantic level, which facilitates mutual refinement in a parameter-free way. Second, inspired by the fast Fourier transform that obtains global relevance in linear complexity, we propose synchronized alignment fusion, which aligns and fuses bi-modal features in the channel and spatial dimensions by a hierarchical filtering mechanism. Our proposed model, AlignSal, reduces the number of parameters by 70.0%, decreases the floating point operations by 49.4%, and increases the inference speed by 152.5% compared to the cutting-edge BSOD model (i.e., MROS). Extensive experiments on the UAV RGB-T 2400 and seven bi-modal dense prediction datasets demonstrate that AlignSal achieves both real-time inference speed and better performance and generalizability compared to nineteen state-of-the-art models across most evaluation metrics. In addition, our ablation studies further verify AlignSal's potential in boosting the performance of existing aligned BSOD models on UAV-based unaligned data. The code is available at: https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/AlignSal.
Authors:Matthias Bartolo, Dylan Seychell
Abstract:
As object detection techniques continue to evolve, understanding their relationships with complementary visual tasks becomes crucial for optimising model architectures and computational resources. This paper investigates the correlations between object detection accuracy and two fundamental visual tasks: depth prediction and visual saliency prediction. Through comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art models (DeepGaze IIE, Depth Anything, DPT-Large, and Itti's model) on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, we find that visual saliency shows consistently stronger correlations with object detection accuracy (mA$Ï$ up to 0.459 on Pascal VOC) compared to depth prediction (mA$Ï$ up to 0.283). Our analysis reveals significant variations in these correlations across object categories, with larger objects showing correlation values up to three times higher than smaller objects. These findings suggest incorporating visual saliency features into object detection architectures could be more beneficial than depth information, particularly for specific object categories. The observed category-specific variations also provide insights for targeted feature engineering and dataset design improvements, potentially leading to more efficient and accurate object detection systems.
Authors:Yan Li, Weiwei Guo, Xue Yang, Ning Liao, Shaofeng Zhang, Yi Yu, Wenxian Yu, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
In recent years, aerial object detection has been increasingly pivotal in various earth observation applications. However, current algorithms are limited to detecting a set of pre-defined object categories, demanding sufficient annotated training samples, and fail to detect novel object categories. In this paper, we put forth a novel formulation of the aerial object detection problem, namely open-vocabulary aerial object detection (OVAD), which can detect objects beyond training categories without costly collecting new labeled data. We propose CastDet, a CLIP-activated student-teacher detection framework that serves as the first OVAD detector specifically designed for the challenging aerial scenario, where objects often exhibit weak appearance features and arbitrary orientations. Our framework integrates a robust localization teacher along with several box selection strategies to generate high-quality proposals for novel objects. Additionally, the RemoteCLIP model is adopted as an omniscient teacher, which provides rich knowledge to enhance classification capabilities for novel categories. A dynamic label queue is devised to maintain high-quality pseudo-labels during training. By doing so, the proposed CastDet boosts not only novel object proposals but also classification. Furthermore, we extend our approach from horizontal OVAD to oriented OVAD with tailored algorithm designs to effectively manage bounding box representation and pseudo-label generation. Extensive experiments for both tasks on multiple existing aerial object detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/lizzy8587/CastDet.
Authors:Timing Yang, Yuanliang Ju, Li Yi
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D object detection (OV-3Det) aims to generalize beyond the limited number of base categories labeled during the training phase. The biggest bottleneck is the scarcity of annotated 3D data, whereas 2D image datasets are abundant and richly annotated. Consequently, it is intuitive to leverage the wealth of annotations in 2D images to alleviate the inherent data scarcity in OV-3Det. In this paper, we push the task setup to its limits by exploring the potential of using solely 2D images to learn OV-3Det. The major challenges for this setup is the modality gap between training images and testing point clouds, which prevents effective integration of 2D knowledge into OV-3Det. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework ImOV3D to leverage pseudo multimodal representation containing both images and point clouds (PC) to close the modality gap. The key of ImOV3D lies in flexible modality conversion where 2D images can be lifted into 3D using monocular depth estimation and can also be derived from 3D scenes through rendering. This allows unifying both training images and testing point clouds into a common image-PC representation, encompassing a wealth of 2D semantic information and also incorporating the depth and structural characteristics of 3D spatial data. We carefully conduct such conversion to minimize the domain gap between training and test cases. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, SUNRGBD and ScanNet, show that ImOV3D significantly outperforms existing methods, even in the absence of ground truth 3D training data. With the inclusion of a minimal amount of real 3D data for fine-tuning, the performance also significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art. Codes and pre-trained models are released on the https://github.com/yangtiming/ImOV3D.
Authors:Ruigang Fu, Qingyong Hu, Xiaohu Dong, Yinghui Gao, Biao Li, Ping Zhong
Abstract:
As a fundamental operation in modern machine vision models, feature upsampling has been widely used and investigated in the literatures. An ideal upsampling operation should be lightweight, with low computational complexity. That is, it can not only improve the overall performance but also not affect the model complexity. Content-aware Reassembly of Features (CARAFE) is a well-designed learnable operation to achieve feature upsampling. Albeit encouraging performance achieved, this method requires generating large-scale kernels, which brings a mass of extra redundant parameters, and inherently has limited scalability. To this end, we propose a lightweight upsampling operation, termed Dynamic Lightweight Upsampling (DLU) in this paper. In particular, it first constructs a small-scale source kernel space, and then samples the large-scale kernels from the kernel space by introducing learnable guidance offsets, hence avoiding introducing a large collection of trainable parameters in upsampling. Experiments on several mainstream vision tasks show that our DLU achieves comparable and even better performance to the original CARAFE, but with much lower complexity, e.g., DLU requires 91% fewer parameters and at least 63% fewer FLOPs (Floating Point Operations) than CARAFE in the case of 16x upsampling, but outperforms the CARAFE by 0.3% mAP in object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/Fu0511/Dynamic-Lightweight-Upsampling.
Authors:Ming Kang, Fung Fung Ting, Raphaël C. -W. Phan, Chee-Ming Ting
Abstract:
Brain tumor detection in multiplane Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) slices is a challenging task due to the various appearances and relationships in the structure of the multiplane images. In this paper, we propose a new You Only Look Once (YOLO)-based detection model that incorporates Pretrained Knowledge (PK), called PK-YOLO, to improve the performance for brain tumor detection in multiplane MRI slices. To our best knowledge, PK-YOLO is the first pretrained knowledge guided YOLO-based object detector. The main components of the new method are a pretrained pure lightweight convolutional neural network-based backbone via sparse masked modeling, a YOLO architecture with the pretrained backbone, and a regression loss function for improving small object detection. The pretrained backbone allows for feature transferability of object queries on individual plane MRI slices into the model encoders, and the learned domain knowledge base can improve in-domain detection. The improved loss function can further boost detection performance on small-size brain tumors in multiplanar two-dimensional MRI slices. Experimental results show that the proposed PK-YOLO achieves competitive performance on the multiplanar MRI brain tumor detection datasets compared to state-of-the-art YOLO-like and DETR-like object detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/PK-YOLO.
Authors:Yating Xu, Chen Li, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract:
The key challenge of multi-view indoor 3D object detection is to infer accurate geometry information from images for precise 3D detection. Previous method relies on NeRF for geometry reasoning. However, the geometry extracted from NeRF is generally inaccurate, which leads to sub-optimal detection performance. In this paper, we propose MVSDet which utilizes plane sweep for geometry-aware 3D object detection. To circumvent the requirement for a large number of depth planes for accurate depth prediction, we design a probabilistic sampling and soft weighting mechanism to decide the placement of pixel features on the 3D volume. We select multiple locations that score top in the probability volume for each pixel and use their probability score to indicate the confidence. We further apply recent pixel-aligned Gaussian Splatting to regularize depth prediction and improve detection performance with little computation overhead. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and ARKitScenes datasets are conducted to show the superiority of our model. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pixie8888/MVSDet.
Authors:Zhicheng Zhao, Juanjuan Gu, Chenglong Li, Chun Wang, Zhongling Huang, Jin Tang
Abstract:
Optics-guided Thermal UAV image Super-Resolution (OTUAV-SR) has attracted significant research interest due to its potential applications in security inspection, agricultural measurement, and object detection. Existing methods often employ single guidance model to generate the guidance features from optical images to assist thermal UAV images super-resolution. However, single guidance models make it difficult to generate effective guidance features under favorable and adverse conditions in UAV scenarios, thus limiting the performance of OTUAV-SR. To address this issue, we propose a novel Guidance Disentanglement network (GDNet), which disentangles the optical image representation according to typical UAV scenario attributes to form guidance features under both favorable and adverse conditions, for robust OTUAV-SR. Moreover, we design an attribute-aware fusion module to combine all attribute-based optical guidance features, which could form a more discriminative representation and fit the attribute-agnostic guidance process. To facilitate OTUAV-SR research in complex UAV scenarios, we introduce VGTSR2.0, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing 3,500 aligned optical-thermal image pairs captured under diverse conditions and scenes. Extensive experiments on VGTSR2.0 demonstrate that GDNet significantly improves OTUAV-SR performance over state-of-the-art methods, especially in the challenging low-light and foggy environments commonly encountered in UAV scenarios. The dataset and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jocelyney/GDNet.
Authors:Navin Agrawal-Chung, Zohran Moin
Abstract:
Landmine detection using traditional methods is slow, dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Using deep learning-based object detection algorithms drone videos is promising but has multiple challenges due to the small, soda-can size of recently prevalent surface landmines. The literature currently lacks scientific evaluation of optimal ML models for this problem since most object detection research focuses on analysis of ground video surveillance images. In order to help train comprehensive models and drive research for surface landmine detection, we first create a custom dataset comprising drone images of POM-2 and POM-3 Russian surface landmines. Using this dataset, we train, test and compare 4 different computer vision foundation models YOLOF, DETR, Sparse-RCNN and VFNet. Generally, all 4 detectors do well with YOLOF outperforming other models with a mAP score of 0.89 while DETR, VFNET and Sparse-RCNN mAP scores are all around 0.82 for drone images taken from 10m AGL. YOLOF is also quicker to train consuming 56min of training time on a Nvidia V100 compute cluster. Finally, this research contributes landmine image, video datasets and model Jupyter notebooks at https://github.com/UnVeilX/ to enable future research in surface landmine detection.
Authors:Fanqi Pu, Yifan Wang, Jiru Deng, Wenming Yang
Abstract:
Perspective projection has been extensively utilized in monocular 3D object detection methods. It introduces geometric priors from 2D bounding boxes and 3D object dimensions to reduce the uncertainty of depth estimation. However, due to depth errors originating from the object's visual surface, the height of the bounding box often fails to represent the actual projected central height, which undermines the effectiveness of geometric depth. Direct prediction for the projected height unavoidably results in a loss of 2D priors, while multi-depth prediction with complex branches does not fully leverage geometric depth. This paper presents a Transformer-based monocular 3D object detection method called MonoDGP, which adopts perspective-invariant geometry errors to modify the projection formula. We also try to systematically discuss and explain the mechanisms and efficacy behind geometry errors, which serve as a simple but effective alternative to multi-depth prediction. Additionally, MonoDGP decouples the depth-guided decoder and constructs a 2D decoder only dependent on visual features, providing 2D priors and initializing object queries without the disturbance of 3D detection. To further optimize and fine-tune input tokens of the transformer decoder, we also introduce a Region Segment Head (RSH) that generates enhanced features and segment embeddings. Our monocular method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark without extra data. Code is available at https://github.com/PuFanqi23/MonoDGP.
Authors:Mingbo Hong, Shen Cheng, Haibin Huang, Haoqiang Fan, Shuaicheng Liu
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce YOLA, a novel framework for object detection in low-light scenarios. Unlike previous works, we propose to tackle this challenging problem from the perspective of feature learning. Specifically, we propose to learn illumination-invariant features through the Lambertian image formation model. We observe that, under the Lambertian assumption, it is feasible to approximate illumination-invariant feature maps by exploiting the interrelationships between neighboring color channels and spatially adjacent pixels. By incorporating additional constraints, these relationships can be characterized in the form of convolutional kernels, which can be trained in a detection-driven manner within a network. Towards this end, we introduce a novel module dedicated to the extraction of illumination-invariant features from low-light images, which can be easily integrated into existing object detection frameworks. Our empirical findings reveal significant improvements in low-light object detection tasks, as well as promising results in both well-lit and over-lit scenarios. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/MingboHong/YOLA}.
Authors:Dong-Guw Lee, Jeongyun Kim, Younggun Cho, Ayoung Kim
Abstract:
Thermal Infrared (TIR) imaging provides robust perception for navigating in challenging outdoor environments but faces issues with poor texture and low image contrast due to its 14/16-bit format. Conventional methods utilize various tone-mapping methods to enhance contrast and photometric consistency of TIR images, however, the choice of tone-mapping is largely dependent on knowing the task and temperature dependent priors to work well. In this paper, we present Thermal Chameleon Network (TCNet), a task-adaptive tone-mapping approach for RAW 14-bit TIR images. Given the same image, TCNet tone-maps different representations of TIR images tailored for each specific task, eliminating the heuristic image rescaling preprocessing and reliance on the extensive prior knowledge of the scene temperature or task-specific characteristics. TCNet exhibits improved generalization performance across object detection and monocular depth estimation, with minimal computational overhead and modular integration to existing architectures for various tasks. Project Page: https://github.com/donkeymouse/ThermalChameleon
Authors:Qingpeng Li, Yuxin Zhang, Leyuan Fang, Yuhan Kang, Shutao Li, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract:
Object detection algorithms are pivotal components of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imaging systems, extensively employed in complex fields. However, images captured by high-mobility UAVs often suffer from motion blur cases, which significantly impedes the performance of advanced object detection algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative object detection algorithm specifically designed for blurry images, named DREB-Net (Dual-stream Restoration Embedding Blur-feature Fusion Network). First, DREB-Net addresses the particularities of blurry image object detection problem by incorporating a Blurry image Restoration Auxiliary Branch (BRAB) during the training phase. Second, it fuses the extracted shallow features via Multi-level Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (MAGFF) module, to extract richer features. Here, the MAGFF module comprises local attention modules and global attention modules, which assign different weights to the branches. Then, during the inference phase, the deep feature extraction of the BRAB can be removed to reduce computational complexity and improve detection speed. In loss function, a combined loss of MSE and SSIM is added to the BRAB to restore blurry images. Finally, DREB-Net introduces Fast Fourier Transform in the early stages of feature extraction, via a Learnable Frequency domain Amplitude Modulation Module (LFAMM), to adjust feature amplitude and enhance feature processing capability. Experimental results indicate that DREB-Net can still effectively perform object detection tasks under motion blur in captured images, showcasing excellent performance and broad application prospects. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/EEIC-Lab/DREB-Net.git.
Authors:Jinyu Yang, Qingwei Wang, Feng Zheng, Peng Chen, Aleš Leonardis, Deng-Ping Fan
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to detect objects with camouflaged properties. Although previous studies have focused on natural (animals and insects) and unnatural (artistic and synthetic) camouflage detection, plant camouflage has been neglected. However, plant camouflage plays a vital role in natural camouflage. Therefore, this paper introduces a new challenging problem of Plant Camouflage Detection (PCD). To address this problem, we introduce the PlantCamo dataset, which comprises 1,250 images with camouflaged plants representing 58 object categories in various natural scenes. To investigate the current status of plant camouflage detection, we conduct a large-scale benchmark study using 20+ cutting-edge COD models on the proposed dataset. Due to the unique characteristics of plant camouflage, including holes and irregular borders, we developed a new framework, named PCNet, dedicated to PCD. Our PCNet surpasses performance thanks to its multi-scale global feature enhancement and refinement. Finally, we discuss the potential applications and insights, hoping this work fills the gap in fine-grained COD research and facilitates further intelligent ecology research. All resources will be available on https://github.com/yjybuaa/PlantCamo.
Authors:Haiji Liang, Ruize Han
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object perception has become an important topic in artificial intelligence, which aims to identify objects with novel classes that have not been seen during training. Under this setting, open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) in a single image has been studied in many literature. However, open-vocabulary object tracking (OVT) from a video has been studied less, and one reason is the shortage of benchmarks. In this work, we have built a new large-scale benchmark for open-vocabulary multi-object tracking namely OVT-B. OVT-B contains 1,048 categories of objects and 1,973 videos with 637,608 bounding box annotations, which is much larger than the sole open-vocabulary tracking dataset, i.e., OVTAO-val dataset (200+ categories, 900+ videos). The proposed OVT-B can be used as a new benchmark to pave the way for OVT research. We also develop a simple yet effective baseline method for OVT. It integrates the motion features for object tracking, which is an important feature for MOT but is ignored in previous OVT methods. Experimental results have verified the usefulness of the proposed benchmark and the effectiveness of our method. We have released the benchmark to the public at https://github.com/Coo1Sea/OVT-B-Dataset.
Authors:Oleg Sautenkov, Selamawit Asfaw, Yasheerah Yaqoot, Muhammad Ahsan Mustafa, Aleksey Fedoseev, Daria Trinitatova, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract:
The swift advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies necessitates new standards for developing human-drone interaction (HDI) interfaces. Most interfaces for HDI, especially first-person view (FPV) goggles, limit the operator's ability to obtain information from the environment. This paper presents a novel interface, FlightAR, that integrates augmented reality (AR) overlays of UAV first-person view (FPV) and bottom camera feeds with head-mounted display (HMD) to enhance the pilot's situational awareness. Using FlightAR, the system provides pilots not only with a video stream from several UAV cameras simultaneously, but also the ability to observe their surroundings in real time. User evaluation with NASA-TLX and UEQ surveys showed low physical demand ($μ=1.8$, $SD = 0.8$) and good performance ($μ=3.4$, $SD = 0.8$), proving better user assessments in comparison with baseline FPV goggles. Participants also rated the system highly for stimulation ($μ=2.35$, $SD = 0.9$), novelty ($μ=2.1$, $SD = 0.9$) and attractiveness ($μ=1.97$, $SD = 1$), indicating positive user experiences. These results demonstrate the potential of the system to improve UAV piloting experience through enhanced situational awareness and intuitive control. The code is available here: https://github.com/Sautenich/FlightAR
Authors:Yongjian Wu, Yang Zhou, Jiya Saiyin, Bingzheng Wei, Maode Lai, Jianzhong Shou, Yan Xu
Abstract:
Large-scale visual-language pre-trained models (VLPMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in downstream object detection through text prompts for natural scenes. However, their application to zero-shot nuclei detection on histopathology images remains relatively unexplored, mainly due to the significant gap between the characteristics of medical images and the web-originated text-image pairs used for pre-training. This paper aims to investigate the potential of the object-level VLPM, Grounded Language-Image Pre-training (GLIP), for zero-shot nuclei detection. Specifically, we propose an innovative auto-prompting pipeline, named AttriPrompter, comprising attribute generation, attribute augmentation, and relevance sorting, to avoid subjective manual prompt design. AttriPrompter utilizes VLPMs' text-to-image alignment to create semantically rich text prompts, which are then fed into GLIP for initial zero-shot nuclei detection. Additionally, we propose a self-trained knowledge distillation framework, where GLIP serves as the teacher with its initial predictions used as pseudo labels, to address the challenges posed by high nuclei density, including missed detections, false positives, and overlapping instances. Our method exhibits remarkable performance in label-free nuclei detection, outperforming all existing unsupervised methods and demonstrating excellent generality. Notably, this work highlights the astonishing potential of VLPMs pre-trained on natural image-text pairs for downstream tasks in the medical field as well. Code will be released at https://github.com/wuyongjianCODE/AttriPrompter.
Authors:Yufei Zhan, Hongyin Zhao, Yousong Zhu, Fan Yang, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved significant breakthroughs in various vision-language and vision-centric tasks based on auto-regressive modeling. However, these models typically focus on either vision-centric tasks, such as visual grounding and region description, or vision-language tasks, like image caption and multi-scenario VQAs. None of the LMMs have yet comprehensively unified both types of tasks within a single model, as seen in Large Language Models in the natural language processing field. Furthermore, even with abundant multi-task instruction-following data, directly stacking these data for universal capabilities extension remains challenging. To address these issues, we introduce a novel multi-dimension curated and consolidated multimodal dataset, named CCMD-8M, which overcomes the data barriers of unifying vision-centric and vision-language tasks through multi-level data curation and multi-task consolidation. More importantly, we present Griffon-G, a general large multimodal model that addresses both vision-centric and vision-language tasks within a single end-to-end paradigm. Griffon-G resolves the training collapse issue encountered during the joint optimization of these tasks, achieving better training efficiency. Evaluations across multimodal benchmarks, general Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, scene text-centric VQA tasks, document-related VQA tasks, Referring Expression Comprehension, and object detection demonstrate that Griffon-G surpasses the advanced LMMs and achieves expert-level performance in complicated vision-centric tasks.
Authors:Hao-Tang Tsui, Chien-Yao Wang, Hong-Yuan Mark Liao
Abstract:
Identifying and localizing objects within images is a fundamental challenge, and numerous efforts have been made to enhance model accuracy by experimenting with diverse architectures and refining training strategies. Nevertheless, a prevalent limitation in existing models is overemphasizing the current input while ignoring the information from the entire dataset. We introduce an innovative Retriever-Dictionary (RD) module to address this issue. This architecture enables YOLO-based models to efficiently retrieve features from a Dictionary that contains the insight of the dataset, which is built by the knowledge from Visual Models (VM), Large Language Models (LLM), or Visual Language Models (VLM). The flexible RD enables the model to incorporate such explicit knowledge that enhances the ability to benefit multiple tasks, specifically, segmentation, detection, and classification, from pixel to image level. The experiments show that using the RD significantly improves model performance, achieving more than a 3\% increase in mean Average Precision for object detection with less than a 1% increase in model parameters. Beyond 1-stage object detection models, the RD module improves the effectiveness of 2-stage models and DETR-based architectures, such as Faster R-CNN and Deformable DETR. Code is released at https://github.com/henrytsui000/YOLO.
Authors:Yue Zhan, Zhihong Zeng, Haijun Liu, Xiaoheng Tan, Yinli Tian
Abstract:
The purpose of RGB-D Salient Object Detection (SOD) is to pinpoint the most visually conspicuous areas within images accurately. While conventional deep models heavily rely on CNN extractors and overlook the long-range contextual dependencies, subsequent transformer-based models have addressed the issue to some extent but introduce high computational complexity. Moreover, incorporating spatial information from depth maps has been proven effective for this task. A primary challenge of this issue is how to fuse the complementary information from RGB and depth effectively. In this paper, we propose a dual Mamba-driven cross-modal fusion network for RGB-D SOD, named MambaSOD. Specifically, we first employ a dual Mamba-driven feature extractor for both RGB and depth to model the long-range dependencies in multiple modality inputs with linear complexity. Then, we design a cross-modal fusion Mamba for the captured multi-modal features to fully utilize the complementary information between the RGB and depth features. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to explore the potential of the Mamba in the RGB-D SOD task, offering a novel perspective. Numerous experiments conducted on six prevailing datasets demonstrate our method's superiority over sixteen state-of-the-art RGB-D SOD models. The source code will be released at https://github.com/YueZhan721/MambaSOD.
Authors:Yi Liu, Chengxin Li, Shoukun Xu, Jungong Han
Abstract:
Multi-modal fusion has played a vital role in multi-modal scene understanding. Most existing methods focus on cross-modal fusion involving two modalities, often overlooking more complex multi-modal fusion, which is essential for real-world applications like autonomous driving, where visible, depth, event, LiDAR, etc., are used. Besides, few attempts for multi-modal fusion, \emph{e.g.}, simple concatenation, cross-modal attention, and token selection, cannot well dig into the intrinsic shared and specific details of multiple modalities. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we propose a Part-Whole Relational Fusion (PWRF) framework. For the first time, this framework treats multi-modal fusion as part-whole relational fusion. It routes multiple individual part-level modalities to a fused whole-level modality using the part-whole relational routing ability of Capsule Networks (CapsNets). Through this part-whole routing, our PWRF generates modal-shared and modal-specific semantics from the whole-level modal capsules and the routing coefficients, respectively. On top of that, modal-shared and modal-specific details can be employed to solve the issue of multi-modal scene understanding, including synthetic multi-modal segmentation and visible-depth-thermal salient object detection in this paper. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PWRF framework for multi-modal scene understanding. The source code has been released on https://github.com/liuyi1989/PWRF.
Authors:Shuwei He, Rui Liu
Abstract:
Visual Text-to-Speech (VTTS) aims to take the environmental image as the prompt to synthesize reverberant speech for the spoken content. Previous works focus on the RGB modality for global environmental modeling, overlooking the potential of multi-source spatial knowledge like depth, speaker position, and environmental semantics. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-source spatial knowledge understanding scheme for immersive VTTS, termed MS2KU-VTTS. Specifically, we first prioritize RGB image as the dominant source and consider depth image, speaker position knowledge from object detection, and Gemini-generated semantic captions as supplementary sources. Afterwards, we propose a serial interaction mechanism to effectively integrate both dominant and supplementary sources. The resulting multi-source knowledge is dynamically integrated based on the respective contributions of each source.This enriched interaction and integration of multi-source spatial knowledge guides the speech generation model, enhancing the immersive speech experience. Experimental results demonstrate that the MS$^2$KU-VTTS surpasses existing baselines in generating immersive speech. Demos and code are available at: https://github.com/AI-S2-Lab/MS2KU-VTTS.
Authors:Changcai Li, Zonghua Gu, Gang Chen, Libo Huang, Wei Zhang, Huihui Zhou
Abstract:
The ability to promptly respond to environmental changes is crucial for the perception system of autonomous driving. Recently, a new task called streaming perception was proposed. It jointly evaluate the latency and accuracy into a single metric for video online perception. In this work, we introduce StreamDSGN, the first real-time stereo-based 3D object detection framework designed for streaming perception. StreamDSGN is an end-to-end framework that directly predicts the 3D properties of objects in the next moment by leveraging historical information, thereby alleviating the accuracy degradation of streaming perception. Further, StreamDSGN applies three strategies to enhance the perception accuracy: (1) A feature-flow-based fusion method, which generates a pseudo-next feature at the current moment to address the misalignment issue between feature and ground truth. (2) An extra regression loss for explicit supervision of object motion consistency in consecutive frames. (3) A large kernel backbone with a large receptive field for effectively capturing long-range spatial contextual features caused by changes in object positions. Experiments on the KITTI Tracking dataset show that, compared with the strong baseline, StreamDSGN significantly improves the streaming average precision by up to 4.33%. Our code is available at https://github.com/weiyangdaren/streamDSGN-pytorch.
Authors:Konstantinos Panagiotis Alexandridis, Ismail Elezi, Jiankang Deng, Anh Nguyen, Shan Luo
Abstract:
Real-world datasets follow an imbalanced distribution, which poses significant challenges in rare-category object detection. Recent studies tackle this problem by developing re-weighting and re-sampling methods, that utilise the class frequencies of the dataset. However, these techniques focus solely on the frequency statistics and ignore the distribution of the classes in image space, missing important information. In contrast to them, we propose FRActal CALibration (FRACAL): a novel post-calibration method for long-tailed object detection. FRACAL devises a logit adjustment method that utilises the fractal dimension to estimate how uniformly classes are distributed in image space. During inference, it uses the fractal dimension to inversely downweight the probabilities of uniformly spaced class predictions achieving balance in two axes: between frequent and rare categories, and between uniformly spaced and sparsely spaced classes. FRACAL is a post-processing method and it does not require any training, also it can be combined with many off-the-shelf models such as one-stage sigmoid detectors and two-stage instance segmentation models. FRACAL boosts the rare class performance by up to 8.6% and surpasses all previous methods on LVIS dataset, while showing good generalisation to other datasets such as COCO, V3Det and OpenImages. We provide the code at https://github.com/kostas1515/FRACAL.
Authors:Yiming Li, Yi Wang, Wenqian Wang, Dan Lin, Bingbing Li, Kim-Hui Yap
Abstract:
Exploring new knowledge is a fundamental human ability that can be mirrored in the development of deep neural networks, especially in the field of object detection. Open world object detection (OWOD) is an emerging area of research that adapts this principle to explore new knowledge. It focuses on recognizing and learning from objects absent from initial training sets, thereby incrementally expanding its knowledge base when new class labels are introduced. This survey paper offers a thorough review of the OWOD domain, covering essential aspects, including problem definitions, benchmark datasets, source codes, evaluation metrics, and a comparative study of existing methods. Additionally, we investigate related areas like open set recognition (OSR) and incremental learning (IL), underlining their relevance to OWOD. Finally, the paper concludes by addressing the limitations and challenges faced by current OWOD algorithms and proposes directions for future research. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey of the emerging OWOD field with over one hundred references, marking a significant step forward for object detection technology. A comprehensive source code and benchmarks are archived and concluded at https://github.com/ArminLee/OWOD Review.
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Hongbo Jin, Yongtao Wang, Yufei Wei, Nan Dong
Abstract:
As a novel 3D scene representation, semantic occupancy has gained much attention in autonomous driving. However, existing occupancy prediction methods mainly focus on designing better occupancy representations, such as tri-perspective view or neural radiance fields, while ignoring the advantages of using long-temporal information. In this paper, we propose a radar-camera multi-modal temporal enhanced occupancy prediction network, dubbed TEOcc. Our method is inspired by the success of utilizing temporal information in 3D object detection. Specifically, we introduce a temporal enhancement branch to learn temporal occupancy prediction. In this branch, we randomly discard the t-k input frame of the multi-view camera and predict its 3D occupancy by long-term and short-term temporal decoders separately with the information from other adjacent frames and multi-modal inputs. Besides, to reduce computational costs and incorporate multi-modal inputs, we specially designed 3D convolutional layers for long-term and short-term temporal decoders. Furthermore, since the lightweight occupancy prediction head is a dense classification head, we propose to use a shared occupancy prediction head for the temporal enhancement and main branches. It is worth noting that the temporal enhancement branch is only performed during training and is discarded during inference. Experiment results demonstrate that TEOcc achieves state-of-the-art occupancy prediction on nuScenes benchmarks. In addition, the proposed temporal enhancement branch is a plug-and-play module that can be easily integrated into existing occupancy prediction methods to improve the performance of occupancy prediction. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/TEOcc.
Authors:Martin Aubard, László Antal, Ana Madureira, Luis F. Teixeira, Erika Ãbrahám
Abstract:
This paper introduces ROSAR, a novel framework enhancing the robustness of deep learning object detection models tailored for side-scan sonar (SSS) images, generated by autonomous underwater vehicles using sonar sensors. By extending our prior work on knowledge distillation (KD), this framework integrates KD with adversarial retraining to address the dual challenges of model efficiency and robustness against SSS noises. We introduce three novel, publicly available SSS datasets, capturing different sonar setups and noise conditions. We propose and formalize two SSS safety properties and utilize them to generate adversarial datasets for retraining. Through a comparative analysis of projected gradient descent (PGD) and patch-based adversarial attacks, ROSAR demonstrates significant improvements in model robustness and detection accuracy under SSS-specific conditions, enhancing the model's robustness by up to 1.85%. ROSAR is available at https://github.com/remaro-network/ROSAR-framework.
Authors:Khaled Gabr, Mohamed Abdelkader, Imen Jarraya, Abdullah AlMusalami, Anis Koubaa
Abstract:
In the field of sensor fusion and state estimation for object detection and localization, ensuring accurate tracking in dynamic environments poses significant challenges. Traditional methods like the Kalman Filter (KF) often fail when measurements are intermittent, leading to rapid divergence in state estimations. To address this, we introduce SMART (Sensor Measurement Augmentation and Reacquisition Tracker), a novel approach that leverages high-frequency state estimates from the KF to guide the search for new measurements, maintaining tracking continuity even when direct measurements falter. This is crucial for dynamic environments where traditional methods struggle. Our contributions include: 1) Versatile Measurement Augmentation Using KF Feedback: We implement a versatile measurement augmentation system that serves as a backup when primary object detectors fail intermittently. This system is adaptable to various sensors, demonstrated using depth cameras where KF's 3D predictions are projected into 2D depth image coordinates, integrating nonlinear covariance propagation techniques simplified to first-order approximations. 2) Open-source ROS2 Implementation: We provide an open-source ROS2 implementation of the SMART-TRACK framework, validated in a realistic simulation environment using Gazebo and ROS2, fostering broader adaptation and further research. Our results showcase significant enhancements in tracking stability, with estimation RMSE as low as 0.04 m during measurement disruptions, advancing the robustness of UAV tracking and expanding the potential for reliable autonomous UAV operations in complex scenarios. The implementation is available at https://github.com/mzahana/SMART-TRACK.
Authors:Jiwei Chen, Yubao Sun, Laiyan Ding, Rui Huang
Abstract:
Vision-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D object detection has recently become popular in autonomous driving. However, objects with a high similarity to the background from a camera perspective cannot be detected well by existing methods. In this paper, we propose a BEV-based 3D Object Detection Network with 2D Region-Oriented Attention (ROA-BEV), which enables the backbone to focus more on feature learning of the regions where objects exist. Moreover, our method further enhances the information feature learning ability of ROA through multi-scale structures. Each block of ROA utilizes a large kernel to ensure that the receptive field is large enough to catch information about large objects. Experiments on nuScenes show that ROA-BEV improves the performance based on BEVDepth. The source codes of this work will be available at https://github.com/DFLyan/ROA-BEV.
Authors:Tao Lin, Lijia Yu, Gaojie Jin, Renjue Li, Peng Wu, Lijun Zhang
Abstract:
In recent years, the study of adversarial robustness in object detection systems, particularly those based on deep neural networks (DNNs), has become a pivotal area of research. Traditional physical attacks targeting object detectors, such as adversarial patches and texture manipulations, directly manipulate the surface of the object. While these methods are effective, their overt manipulation of objects may draw attention in real-world applications. To address this, this paper introduces a more subtle approach: an inconspicuous adversarial trigger that operates outside the bounding boxes, rendering the object undetectable to the model. We further enhance this approach by proposing the Feature Guidance (FG) technique and the Universal Auto-PGD (UAPGD) optimization strategy for crafting high-quality triggers. The effectiveness of our method is validated through extensive empirical testing, demonstrating its high performance in both digital and physical environments. The code and video will be available at: https://github.com/linToTao/Out-of-bbox-attack.
Authors:Md Tanvir Islam, Inzamamul Alam, Simon S. Woo, Saeed Anwar, IK Hyun Lee, Khan Muhammad
Abstract:
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is essential for numerous computer vision tasks, including object detection, tracking, segmentation, and scene understanding. Despite substantial research on improving low-quality images captured in underexposed conditions, clear vision remains critical for autonomous vehicles, which often struggle with low-light scenarios, signifying the need for continuous research. However, paired datasets for LLIE are scarce, particularly for street scenes, limiting the development of robust LLIE methods. Despite using advanced transformers and/or diffusion-based models, current LLIE methods struggle in real-world low-light conditions and lack training on street-scene datasets, limiting their effectiveness for autonomous vehicles. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a new dataset LoLI-Street (Low-Light Images of Streets) with 33k paired low-light and well-exposed images from street scenes in developed cities, covering 19k object classes for object detection. LoLI-Street dataset also features 1,000 real low-light test images for testing LLIE models under real-life conditions. Furthermore, we propose a transformer and diffusion-based LLIE model named "TriFuse". Leveraging the LoLI-Street dataset, we train and evaluate our TriFuse and SOTA models to benchmark on our dataset. Comparing various models, our dataset's generalization feasibility is evident in testing across different mainstream datasets by significantly enhancing images and object detection for practical applications in autonomous driving and surveillance systems. The complete code and dataset is available on https://github.com/tanvirnwu/TriFuse.
Authors:Haochen Li, Rui Zhang, Hantao Yao, Xin Zhang, Yifan Hao, Xinkai Song, Xiaqing Li, Yongwei Zhao, Ling Li, Yunji Chen
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to generalize detectors trained on an annotated source domain to an unlabelled target domain. As the visual-language models (VLMs) can provide essential general knowledge on unseen images, freezing the visual encoder and inserting a domain-agnostic adapter can learn domain-invariant knowledge for DAOD. However, the domain-agnostic adapter is inevitably biased to the source domain. It discards some beneficial knowledge discriminative on the unlabelled domain, i.e., domain-specific knowledge of the target domain. To solve the issue, we propose a novel Domain-Aware Adapter (DA-Ada) tailored for the DAOD task. The key point is exploiting domain-specific knowledge between the essential general knowledge and domain-invariant knowledge. DA-Ada consists of the Domain-Invariant Adapter (DIA) for learning domain-invariant knowledge and the Domain-Specific Adapter (DSA) for injecting the domain-specific knowledge from the information discarded by the visual encoder. Comprehensive experiments over multiple DAOD tasks show that DA-Ada can efficiently infer a domain-aware visual encoder for boosting domain adaptive object detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/Therock90421/DA-Ada.
Authors:Mingjia Li, Hao Zhao, Xiaojie Guo
Abstract:
Due to the nature of enhancement--the absence of paired ground-truth information, high-level vision tasks have been recently employed to evaluate the performance of low-light image enhancement. A widely-used manner is to see how accurately an object detector trained on enhanced low-light images by different candidates can perform with respect to annotated semantic labels. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the mentioned approach is generally prone to overfitting, and thus diminishes its measurement reliability. In search of a proper evaluation metric, we propose LIME-Bench, the first online benchmark platform designed to collect human preferences for low-light enhancement, providing a valuable dataset for validating the correlation between human perception and automated evaluation metrics. We then customize LIME-Eval, a novel evaluation framework that utilizes detectors pre-trained on standard-lighting datasets without object annotations, to judge the quality of enhanced images. By adopting an energy-based strategy to assess the accuracy of output confidence maps, our LIME-Eval can simultaneously bypass biases associated with retraining detectors and circumvent the reliance on annotations for dim images. Comprehensive experiments are provided to reveal the effectiveness of our LIME-Eval. Our benchmark platform (https://huggingface.co/spaces/lime-j/eval) and code (https://github.com/lime-j/lime-eval) are available online.
Authors:Nguyen Huu Bao Long, Chenyu Zhang, Yuzhi Shi, Tsubasa Hirakawa, Takayoshi Yamashita, Tohgoroh Matsui, Hironobu Fujiyoshi
Abstract:
Vision Transformers with various attention modules have demonstrated superior performance on vision tasks. While using sparsity-adaptive attention, such as in DAT, has yielded strong results in image classification, the key-value pairs selected by deformable points lack semantic relevance when fine-tuning for semantic segmentation tasks. The query-aware sparsity attention in BiFormer seeks to focus each query on top-k routed regions. However, during attention calculation, the selected key-value pairs are influenced by too many irrelevant queries, reducing attention on the more important ones. To address these issues, we propose the Deformable Bi-level Routing Attention (DBRA) module, which optimizes the selection of key-value pairs using agent queries and enhances the interpretability of queries in attention maps. Based on this, we introduce the Deformable Bi-level Routing Attention Transformer (DeBiFormer), a novel general-purpose vision transformer built with the DBRA module. DeBiFormer has been validated on various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, providing strong evidence of its effectiveness.Code is available at {https://github.com/maclong01/DeBiFormer}
Authors:Yuhan Kang, Qingpeng Li, Leyuan Fang, Jian Zhao, Xuelong Li
Abstract:
Concealed object detection (COD) in cluttered scenes is significant for various image processing applications. However, due to that concealed objects are always similar to their background, it is extremely hard to distinguish them. Here, the major obstacle is the tiny feature differences between the inside and outside object boundary region, which makes it trouble for existing COD methods to achieve accurate results. In this paper, considering that the surrounding environment information can be well utilized to identify the concealed objects, and thus, we propose a novel deep Surrounding-Aware Network, namely SurANet, for COD tasks, which introduces surrounding information into feature extraction and loss function to improve the discrimination. First, we enhance the semantics of feature maps using differential fusion of surrounding features to highlight concealed objects. Next, a Surrounding-Aware Contrastive Loss is applied to identify the concealed object via learning surrounding feature maps contrastively. Then, SurANet can be trained end-to-end with high efficiency via our proposed Spatial-Compressed Correlation Transmission strategy after our investigation of feature dynamics, and extensive experiments improve that such features can be well reserved respectively. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SurANet outperforms state-of-the-art COD methods on multiple real datasets. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/kyh433/SurANet.
Authors:Dayan Guan, Yixuan Wu, Tianzhu Liu, Alex C. Kot, Yanfeng Gu
Abstract:
Visible and Infrared Image Fusion (VIF) has garnered significant interest across a wide range of high-level vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. However, the evaluation of VIF methods remains challenging due to the absence of ground truth. This paper proposes a Segmentation-oriented Evaluation Approach (SEA) to assess VIF methods by incorporating the semantic segmentation task and leveraging segmentation labels available in latest VIF datasets. Specifically, SEA utilizes universal segmentation models, capable of handling diverse images and classes, to predict segmentation outputs from fused images and compare these outputs with segmentation labels. Our evaluation of recent VIF methods using SEA reveals that their performance is comparable or even inferior to using visible images only, despite nearly half of the infrared images demonstrating better performance than visible images. Further analysis indicates that the two metrics most correlated to our SEA are the gradient-based fusion metric $Q_{\text{ABF}}$ and the visual information fidelity metric $Q_{\text{VIFF}}$ in conventional VIF evaluation metrics, which can serve as proxies when segmentation labels are unavailable. We hope that our evaluation will guide the development of novel and practical VIF methods. The code has been released in \url{https://github.com/Yixuan-2002/SEA/}.
Authors:Fei Xie, Weijia Zhang, Zhongdao Wang, Chao Ma
Abstract:
Recent advancements in State Space Models, notably Mamba, have demonstrated superior performance over the dominant Transformer models, particularly in reducing the computational complexity from quadratic to linear. Yet, difficulties in adapting Mamba from language to vision tasks arise due to the distinct characteristics of visual data, such as the spatial locality and adjacency within images and large variations in information granularity across visual tokens. Existing vision Mamba approaches either flatten tokens into sequences in a raster scan fashion, which breaks the local adjacency of images, or manually partition tokens into windows, which limits their long-range modeling and generalization capabilities. To address these limitations, we present a new vision Mamba model, coined QuadMamba, that effectively captures local dependencies of varying granularities via quadtree-based image partition and scan. Concretely, our lightweight quadtree-based scan module learns to preserve the 2D locality of spatial regions within learned window quadrants. The module estimates the locality score of each token from their features, before adaptively partitioning tokens into window quadrants. An omnidirectional window shifting scheme is also introduced to capture more intact and informative features across different local regions. To make the discretized quadtree partition end-to-end trainable, we further devise a sequence masking strategy based on Gumbel-Softmax and its straight-through gradient estimator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QuadMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance in various vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The code is in https://github.com/VISION-SJTU/QuadMamba.
Authors:Zishuo Wang, Wenhao Zhou, Jinglin Xu, Yuxin Peng
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) aims to detect novel objects without instance-level annotations to achieve open-world object detection at a lower cost. Existing OVD methods mainly rely on the powerful open-vocabulary image-text alignment capability of Vision-Language Pretrained Models (VLM) such as CLIP. However, CLIP is trained on image-text pairs and lacks the perceptual ability for local regions within an image, resulting in the gap between image and region representations. Directly using CLIP for OVD causes inaccurate region classification. We find the image-region gap is primarily caused by the deformation of region feature maps during region of interest (RoI) extraction. To mitigate the inaccurate region classification in OVD, we propose a new Shape-Invariant Adapter named SIA-OVD to bridge the image-region gap in the OVD task. SIA-OVD learns a set of feature adapters for regions with different shapes and designs a new adapter allocation mechanism to select the optimal adapter for each region. The adapted region representations can align better with text representations learned by CLIP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIA-OVD effectively improves the classification accuracy for regions by addressing the gap between images and regions caused by shape deformation. SIA-OVD achieves substantial improvements over representative methods on the COCO-OVD benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/SIA-OVD_ACMMM2024.
Authors:Long Chen, Yuzhi Huang, Junyu Dong, Qi Xu, Sam Kwong, Huimin Lu, Huchuan Lu, Chongyi Li
Abstract:
Underwater object detection (UOD), aiming to identify and localise the objects in underwater images or videos, presents significant challenges due to the optical distortion, water turbidity, and changing illumination in underwater scenes. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) based methods, especially deep learning methods, have shown promising performance in UOD. To further facilitate future advancements, we comprehensively study AI-based UOD. In this survey, we first categorise existing algorithms into traditional machine learning-based methods and deep learning-based methods, and summarise them by considering learning strategy, experimental dataset, utilised features or frameworks, and learning stage. Next, we discuss the potential challenges and suggest possible solutions and new directions. We also perform both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of mainstream algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets by considering the diverse and biased experimental setups. Finally, we introduce two off-the-shelf detection analysis tools, Diagnosis and TIDE, which well-examine the effects of object characteristics and various types of errors on detectors. These tools help identify the strengths and weaknesses of detectors, providing insigts for further improvement. The source codes, trained models, utilised datasets, detection results, and detection analysis tools are public available at \url{https://github.com/LongChenCV/UODReview}, and will be regularly updated.
Authors:Maria Sokolova, Pieter M. Blok, Angelo Mencarelli, Arjan Vroegop, Aloysius van Helmond, Gert Kootstra
Abstract:
In recent years, powerful data-driven deep-learning techniques have been developed and applied for automated catch registration. However, these methods are dependent on the labelled data, which is time-consuming, labour-intensive, expensive to collect and need expert knowledge. In this study, we present an active learning technique, named BoxAL, which includes estimation of epistemic certainty of the Faster R-CNN object-detection model. The method allows selecting the most uncertain training images from an unlabeled pool, which are then used to train the object-detection model. To evaluate the method, we used an open-source image dataset obtained with a dedicated image-acquisition system developed for commercial trawlers targeting demersal species. We demonstrated, that our approach allows reaching the same object-detection performance as with the random sampling using 400 fewer labelled images. Besides, mean AP score was significantly higher at the last training iteration with 1100 training images, specifically, 39.0±1.6 and 34.8±1.8 for certainty-based sampling and random sampling, respectively. Additionally, we showed that epistemic certainty is a suitable method to sample images that the current iteration of the model cannot deal with yet. Our study additionally showed that the sampled new data is more valuable for training than the remaining unlabeled data. Our software is available on https://github.com/pieterblok/boxal.
Authors:Lorenzo Terenzi, Julian Nubert, Pol Eyschen, Pascal Roth, Simin Fei, Edo Jelavic, Marco Hutter
Abstract:
Construction sites are challenging environments for autonomous systems due to their unstructured nature and the presence of dynamic actors, such as workers and machinery. This work presents a comprehensive panoptic scene understanding solution designed to handle the complexities of such environments by integrating 2D panoptic segmentation with 3D LiDAR mapping. Our system generates detailed environmental representations in real-time by combining semantic and geometric data, supported by Kalman Filter-based tracking for dynamic object detection. We introduce a fine-tuning method that adapts large pre-trained panoptic segmentation models for construction site applications using a limited number of domain-specific samples. For this use case, we release a first-of-its-kind dataset of 502 hand-labeled sample images with panoptic annotations from construction sites. In addition, we propose a dynamic panoptic mapping technique that enhances scene understanding in unstructured environments. As a case study, we demonstrate the system's application for autonomous navigation, utilizing real-time RRT* for reactive path planning in dynamic scenarios. The dataset (https://leggedrobotics.github.io/panoptic-scene-understanding.github.io/) and code (https://github.com/leggedrobotics/rsl_panoptic_mapping) for training and deployment are publicly available to support future research.
Authors:Ashish Kumar, Jaesik Park
Abstract:
Detection Transformers (DETR) are renowned object detection pipelines, however computationally efficient multiscale detection using DETR is still challenging. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Resolution Encoding-Decoding (CRED) mechanism that allows DETR to achieve the accuracy of high-resolution detection while having the speed of low-resolution detection. CRED is based on two modules; Cross Resolution Attention Module (CRAM) and One Step Multiscale Attention (OSMA). CRAM is designed to transfer the knowledge of low-resolution encoder output to a high-resolution feature. While OSMA is designed to fuse multiscale features in a single step and produce a feature map of a desired resolution enriched with multiscale information. When used in prominent DETR methods, CRED delivers accuracy similar to the high-resolution DETR counterpart in roughly 50% fewer FLOPs. Specifically, state-of-the-art DN-DETR, when used with CRED (calling CRED-DETR), becomes 76% faster, with ~50% reduced FLOPs than its high-resolution counterpart with 202 G FLOPs on MS-COCO benchmark. We plan to release pretrained CRED-DETRs for use by the community. Code: https://github.com/ashishkumar822/CRED-DETR
Authors:Dingwen Zhang, Liangbo Cheng, Yi Liu, Xinggang Wang, Junwei Han
Abstract:
The part-whole relational property endowed by Capsule Networks (CapsNets) has been known successful for camouflaged object detection due to its segmentation integrity. However, the previous Expectation Maximization (EM) capsule routing algorithm with heavy computation and large parameters obstructs this trend. The primary attribution behind lies in the pixel-level capsule routing. Alternatively, in this paper, we propose a novel mamba capsule routing at the type level. Specifically, we first extract the implicit latent state in mamba as capsule vectors, which abstract type-level capsules from pixel-level versions. These type-level mamba capsules are fed into the EM routing algorithm to get the high-layer mamba capsules, which greatly reduce the computation and parameters caused by the pixel-level capsule routing for part-whole relationships exploration. On top of that, to retrieve the pixel-level capsule features for further camouflaged prediction, we achieve this on the basis of the low-layer pixel-level capsules with the guidance of the correlations from adjacent-layer type-level mamba capsules. Extensive experiments on three widely used COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts. Code has been available on https://github.com/Liangbo-Cheng/mamba\_capsule.
Authors:Ruiyu Mao, Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Rishabh K Iyer, Yunhui Guo
Abstract:
3D object detection is fundamentally important for various emerging applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. A key requirement for training an accurate 3D object detector is the availability of a large amount of LiDAR-based point cloud data. Unfortunately, labeling point cloud data is extremely challenging, as accurate 3D bounding boxes and semantic labels are required for each potential object. This paper proposes a unified active 3D object detection framework, for greatly reducing the labeling cost of training 3D object detectors. Our framework is based on a novel formulation of submodular optimization, specifically tailored to the problem of active 3D object detection. In particular, we address two fundamental challenges associated with active 3D object detection: data imbalance and the need to cover the distribution of the data, including LiDAR-based point cloud data of varying difficulty levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with high computational efficiency compared to existing active learning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/RuiyuM/STONE.
Authors:Yang Cao, Yuanliang Jv, Dan Xu
Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are widely used for novel-view synthesis and have been adapted for 3D Object Detection (3DOD), offering a promising approach to 3DOD through view-synthesis representation. However, NeRF faces inherent limitations: (i) limited representational capacity for 3DOD due to its implicit nature, and (ii) slow rendering speeds. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an explicit 3D representation that addresses these limitations. Inspired by these advantages, this paper introduces 3DGS into 3DOD for the first time, identifying two main challenges: (i) Ambiguous spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs: 3DGS primarily relies on 2D pixel-level supervision, resulting in unclear 3D spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs and poor differentiation between objects and background, which hinders 3DOD; (ii) Excessive background blobs: 2D images often include numerous background pixels, leading to densely reconstructed 3DGS with many noisy Gaussian blobs representing the background, negatively affecting detection. To tackle the challenge (i), we leverage the fact that 3DGS reconstruction is derived from 2D images, and propose an elegant and efficient solution by incorporating 2D Boundary Guidance to significantly enhance the spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs, resulting in clearer differentiation between objects and their background. To address the challenge (ii), we propose a Box-Focused Sampling strategy using 2D boxes to generate object probability distribution in 3D spaces, allowing effective probabilistic sampling in 3D to retain more object blobs and reduce noisy background blobs. Benefiting from our designs, our 3DGS-DET significantly outperforms the SOTA NeRF-based method, NeRF-Det, achieving improvements of +6.6 on mAP@0.25 and +8.1 on mAP@0.5 for the ScanNet dataset, and impressive +31.5 on mAP@0.25 for the ARKITScenes dataset.
Authors:Rui-Yang Ju, Chun-Tse Chien, Enkaer Xieerke, Jen-Shiun Chiang
Abstract:
Children often suffer wrist trauma in daily life, while they usually need radiologists to analyze and interpret X-ray images before surgical treatment by surgeons. The development of deep learning has enabled neural networks to serve as computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) tools to help doctors and experts in medical image diagnostics. Since YOLOv8 model has obtained the satisfactory success in object detection tasks, it has been applied to various fracture detection. This work introduces four variants of Feature Contexts Excitation-YOLOv8 (FCE-YOLOv8) model, each incorporating a different FCE module (i.e., modules of Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE), Global Context (GC), Gather-Excite (GE), and Gaussian Context Transformer (GCT)) to enhance the model performance. Experimental results on GRAZPEDWRI-DX dataset demonstrate that our proposed YOLOv8+GC-M3 model improves the mAP@50 value from 65.78% to 66.32%, outperforming the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model while reducing inference time. Furthermore, our proposed YOLOv8+SE-M3 model achieves the highest mAP@50 value of 67.07%, exceeding the SOTA performance. The implementation of this work is available at https://github.com/RuiyangJu/FCE-YOLOv8.
Authors:Robin Gerster, Holger Caesar, Matthias Rapp, Alexander Wolpert, Michael Teutsch
Abstract:
Despite their success in various vision tasks, deep neural network architectures often underperform in out-of-distribution scenarios due to the difference between training and target domain style. To address this limitation, we introduce One-Shot Style Adaptation (OSSA), a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for object detection that utilizes a single, unlabeled target image to approximate the target domain style. Specifically, OSSA generates diverse target styles by perturbing the style statistics derived from a single target image and then applies these styles to a labeled source dataset at the feature level using Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN). Extensive experiments show that OSSA establishes a new state-of-the-art among one-shot domain adaptation methods by a significant margin, and in some cases, even outperforms strong baselines that use thousands of unlabeled target images. By applying OSSA in various scenarios, including weather, simulated-to-real (sim2real), and visual-to-thermal adaptations, our study explores the overarching significance of the style gap in these contexts. OSSA's simplicity and efficiency allow easy integration into existing frameworks, providing a potentially viable solution for practical applications with limited data availability. Code is available at https://github.com/RobinGerster7/OSSA
Authors:Kaini Wang, Haolin Wang, Guang-Quan Zhou, Yangang Wang, Ling Yang, Yang Chen, Shuo Li
Abstract:
CNN-based object detection models that strike a balance between performance and speed have been gradually used in polyp detection tasks. Nevertheless, accurately locating polyps within complex colonoscopy video scenes remains challenging since existing methods ignore two key issues: intra-sequence distribution heterogeneity and precision-confidence discrepancy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Temporal-Spatial self-correction detector (TSdetector), which first integrates temporal-level consistency learning and spatial-level reliability learning to detect objects continuously. Technically, we first propose a global temporal-aware convolution, assembling the preceding information to dynamically guide the current convolution kernel to focus on global features between sequences. In addition, we designed a hierarchical queue integration mechanism to combine multi-temporal features through a progressive accumulation manner, fully leveraging contextual consistency information together with retaining long-sequence-dependency features. Meanwhile, at the spatial level, we advance a position-aware clustering to explore the spatial relationships among candidate boxes for recalibrating prediction confidence adaptively, thus eliminating redundant bounding boxes efficiently. The experimental results on three publicly available polyp video dataset show that TSdetector achieves the highest polyp detection rate and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code can be available at https://github.com/soleilssss/TSdetector.
Authors:Zhen Yang, Yanpeng Dong, Jiayu Wang, Heng Wang, Lichao Ma, Zijian Cui, Qi Liu, Haoran Pei, Kexin Zhang, Chao Zhang
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of 3D semantic occupancy prediction, which is crucial for autonomous driving and robotics. However, most existing approaches depend on high-resolution images and complex networks to achieve top performance, hindering their deployment in practical scenarios. Moreover, current multi-sensor fusion approaches mainly focus on improving feature fusion while largely neglecting effective supervision strategies for those features. To address these issues, we propose DAOcc, a novel multi-modal occupancy prediction framework that leverages 3D object detection supervision to assist in achieving superior performance, while using a deployment-friendly image backbone and practical input resolution. In addition, we introduce a BEV View Range Extension strategy to mitigate performance degradation caused by lower image resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAOcc achieves new state-of-the-art results on both the Occ3D-nuScenes and Occ3D-Waymo benchmarks, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin using only a ResNet-50 backbone and 256*704 input resolution. With TensorRT optimization, DAOcc reaches 104.9 FPS while maintaining 54.2 mIoU on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/AlphaPlusTT/DAOcc.
Authors:Changfeng Feng, Zhenyuan Chen, Xiang Li, Chunping Wang, Jian Yang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Yimian Dai, Qiang Fu
Abstract:
Object detection from aerial platforms under adverse atmospheric conditions, particularly haze, is paramount for robust drone autonomy. Yet, this domain remains largely underexplored, primarily hindered by the absence of specialized benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we present \textit{HazyDet}, the first, large-scale benchmark specifically designed for drone-view object detection in hazy conditions. Comprising 383,000 real-world instances derived from both naturally hazy captures and synthetically hazed scenes augmented from clear images, HazyDet provides a challenging and realistic testbed for advancing detection algorithms. To address the severe visual degradation induced by haze, we propose the Depth-Conditioned Detector (DeCoDet), a novel architecture that integrates a Depth-Conditioned Kernel to dynamically modulate feature representations based on depth cues. The practical efficacy and robustness of DeCoDet are further enhanced by its training with a Progressive Domain Fine-Tuning (PDFT) strategy to navigate synthetic-to-real domain shifts, and a Scale-Invariant Refurbishment Loss (SIRLoss) to ensure resilient learning from potentially noisy depth annotations. Comprehensive empirical validation on HazyDet substantiates the superiority of our unified DeCoDet framework, which achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the closest competitor by a notable +1.5\% mAP on challenging real-world hazy test scenarios. Our dataset and toolkit are available at https://github.com/GrokCV/HazyDet.
Authors:Jiaqi Zhao, Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou, Hancheng Zhu, Wen-Liang Du, Rui Yao, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
Abstract:
Oriented object detection in remote sensing images is a challenging task due to objects being distributed in multi-orientation. Recently, end-to-end transformer-based methods have achieved success by eliminating the need for post-processing operators compared to traditional CNN-based methods. However, directly extending transformers to oriented object detection presents three main issues: 1) objects rotate arbitrarily, necessitating the encoding of angles along with position and size; 2) the geometric relations of oriented objects are lacking in self-attention, due to the absence of interaction between content and positional queries; and 3) oriented objects cause misalignment, mainly between values and positional queries in cross-attention, making accurate classification and localization difficult. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based oriented object detector, consisting of three dedicated modules to address these issues. First, Gaussian positional encoding is proposed to encode the angle, position, and size of oriented boxes using Gaussian distributions. Second, Wasserstein self-attention is proposed to introduce geometric relations and facilitate interaction between content and positional queries by utilizing Gaussian Wasserstein distance scores. Third, oriented cross-attention is proposed to align values and positional queries by rotating sampling points around the positional query according to their angles. Experiments on six datasets DIOR-R, a series of DOTA, HRSC2016 and ICDAR2015 show the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with previous end-to-end detectors, the OrientedFormer gains 1.16 and 1.21 AP$_{50}$ on DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 respectively, while reducing training epochs from 3$\times$ to 1$\times$. The codes are available at https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/OrientedFormer.
Authors:Sudhakar Sah, Darshan C. Ganji, Matteo Grimaldi, Ravish Kumar, Alexander Hoffman, Honnesh Rohmetra, Ehsan Saboori
Abstract:
We introduce MCUBench, a benchmark featuring over 100 YOLO-based object detection models evaluated on the VOC dataset across seven different MCUs. This benchmark provides detailed data on average precision, latency, RAM, and Flash usage for various input resolutions and YOLO-based one-stage detectors. By conducting a controlled comparison with a fixed training pipeline, we collect comprehensive performance metrics. Our Pareto-optimal analysis shows that integrating modern detection heads and training techniques allows various YOLO architectures, including legacy models like YOLOv3, to achieve a highly efficient tradeoff between mean Average Precision (mAP) and latency. MCUBench serves as a valuable tool for benchmarking the MCU performance of contemporary object detectors and aids in model selection based on specific constraints.
Authors:Yongqi Xu, Yujian Lee, Gao Yi, Bosheng Liu, Yucong Chen, Peng Liu, Jigang Wu, Xiaoming Chen, Yinhe Han
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful for cognitive tasks such as image classification, object detection, and scene segmentation. One drawback however is the significant high computational complexity and memory consumption, which makes them unfeasible to run real-time on embedded platforms because of the limited hardware resources. Block floating point (BFP) quantization is one of the representative compression approaches for reducing the memory and computational burden owing to their capability to effectively capture the broad data distribution of DNN models. Unfortunately, prior works on BFP-based quantization empirically choose the block size and the precision that preserve accuracy. In this paper, we develop a BFP-based bitwidth-aware analytical modeling framework (called ``BitQ'') for the best BFP implementation of DNN inference on embedded platforms. We formulate and resolve an optimization problem to identify the optimal BFP block size and bitwidth distribution by the trade-off of both accuracy and performance loss. Experimental results show that compared with an equal bitwidth setting, the BFP DNNs with optimized bitwidth allocation provide efficient computation, preserving accuracy on famous benchmarks. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/Cheliosoops/BitQ.
Authors:Tingting Yang, Liang Xiao, Yizhe Zhang
Abstract:
A global threshold (e.g., 0.5) is often applied to determine which bounding boxes should be included in the final results for an object detection task. A higher threshold reduces false positives but may result in missing a significant portion of true positives. A lower threshold can increase detection recall but may also result in more false positives. Because of this, using a preset global threshold (e.g., 0.5) applied to all the bounding box candidates may lead to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a Test-time Self-guided Bounding-box Propagation (TSBP) method, leveraging Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) to enhance object detection in histology images. TSBP utilizes bounding boxes with high confidence to influence those with low confidence, leveraging visual similarities between them. This propagation mechanism enables bounding boxes to be selected in a controllable, explainable, and robust manner, which surpasses the effectiveness of using simple thresholds and uncertainty calibration methods. Importantly, TSBP does not necessitate additional labeled samples for model training or parameter estimation, unlike calibration methods. We conduct experiments on gland detection and cell detection tasks in histology images. The results show that our proposed TSBP significantly improves detection outcomes when working in conjunction with state-of-the-art deep learning-based detection networks. Compared to other methods such as uncertainty calibration, TSBP yields more robust and accurate object detection predictions while using no additional labeled samples. The code is available at https://github.com/jwhgdeu/TSBP.
Authors:Mingle Zhou, Rui Xing, Delong Han, Zhiyong Qi, Gang Li
Abstract:
UAVs emerge as the optimal carriers for visual weed iden?tification and integrated pest and disease management in crops. How?ever, the absence of specialized datasets impedes the advancement of model development in this domain. To address this, we have developed the Pests and Diseases Tree dataset (PDT dataset). PDT dataset repre?sents the first high-precision UAV-based dataset for targeted detection of tree pests and diseases, which is collected in real-world operational environments and aims to fill the gap in available datasets for this field. Moreover, by aggregating public datasets and network data, we further introduced the Common Weed and Crop dataset (CWC dataset) to ad?dress the challenge of inadequate classification capabilities of test models within datasets for this field. Finally, we propose the YOLO-Dense Pest (YOLO-DP) model for high-precision object detection of weed, pest, and disease crop images. We re-evaluate the state-of-the-art detection models with our proposed PDT dataset and CWC dataset, showing the completeness of the dataset and the effectiveness of the YOLO-DP. The proposed PDT dataset, CWC dataset, and YOLO-DP model are pre?sented at https://github.com/RuiXing123/PDT_CWC_YOLO-DP.
Authors:Guohui Cai, Ruicheng Zhang, Hongyang He, Zeyu Zhang, Daji Ergu, Yuanzhouhan Cao, Jinman Zhao, Binbin Hu, Zhinbin Liao, Yang Zhao, Ying Cai
Abstract:
Pulmonary nodules are critical indicators for the early diagnosis of lung cancer, making their detection essential for timely treatment. However, traditional CT imaging methods suffered from cumbersome procedures, low detection rates, and poor localization accuracy. The subtle differences between pulmonary nodules and surrounding tissues in complex lung CT images, combined with repeated downsampling in feature extraction networks, often lead to missed or false detections of small nodules. Existing methods such as FPN, with its fixed feature fusion and limited receptive field, struggle to effectively overcome these issues. To address these challenges, our paper proposed three key contributions: Firstly, we proposed MSDet, a multiscale attention and receptive field network for detecting tiny pulmonary nodules. Secondly, we proposed the extended receptive domain (ERD) strategy to capture richer contextual information and reduce false positives caused by nodule occlusion. We also proposed the position channel attention mechanism (PCAM) to optimize feature learning and reduce multiscale detection errors, and designed the tiny object detection block (TODB) to enhance the detection of tiny nodules. Lastly, we conducted thorough experiments on the public LUNA16 dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP improvement of 8.8% over the previous state-of-the-art method YOLOv8. These advancements significantly boosted detection accuracy and reliability, providing a more effective solution for early lung cancer diagnosis. The code will be available at https://github.com/CaiGuoHui123/MSDet
Authors:Luis Felipe Wolf Batista, Salim Khazem, Mehran Adibi, Seth Hutchinson, Cedric Pradalier
Abstract:
Plastic waste in aquatic environments poses severe risks to marine life and human health. Autonomous robots can be utilized to collect floating waste, but they require accurate object identification capability. While deep learning has been widely used as a powerful tool for this task, its performance is significantly limited by outdoor light conditions and water surface reflection. Light polarization, abundant in such environments yet invisible to the human eye, can be captured by modern sensors to significantly improve litter detection accuracy on water surfaces. With this goal in mind, we introduce PoTATO, a dataset containing 12,380 labeled plastic bottles and rich polarimetric information. We demonstrate under which conditions polarization can enhance object detection and, by providing raw image data, we offer an opportunity for the research community to explore novel approaches and push the boundaries of state-of-the-art object detection algorithms even further. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/luisfelipewb/ PoTATO/tree/eccv2024.
Authors:Nastaran Darabi, Dinithi Jayasuriya, Devashri Naik, Theja Tulabandhula, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks exploit vulnerabilities in a model's decision boundaries through small, carefully crafted perturbations that lead to significant mispredictions. In 3D vision, the high dimensionality and sparsity of data greatly expand the attack surface, making 3D vision particularly vulnerable for safety-critical robotics. To enhance 3D vision's adversarial robustness, we propose a training objective that simultaneously minimizes prediction loss and mutual information (MI) under adversarial perturbations to contain the upper bound of misprediction errors. This approach simplifies handling adversarial examples compared to conventional methods, which require explicit searching and training on adversarial samples. However, minimizing prediction loss conflicts with minimizing MI, leading to reduced robustness and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we integrate curriculum advisors in the training setup that gradually introduce adversarial objectives to balance training and prevent models from being overwhelmed by difficult cases early in the process. The advisors also enhance robustness by encouraging training on diverse MI examples through entropy regularizers. We evaluated our method on ModelNet40 and KITTI using PointNet, DGCNN, SECOND, and PointTransformers, achieving 2-5% accuracy gains on ModelNet40 and a 5-10% mAP improvement in object detection. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/nstrndrbi/Mine-N-Learn.
Authors:Ahmet Soyyigit, Shuochao Yao, Heechul Yun
Abstract:
This work addresses the challenge of adapting dynamic deadline requirements for LiDAR object detection deep neural networks (DNNs). The computing latency of object detection is critically important to ensure safe and efficient navigation. However, state-of-the-art LiDAR object detection DNNs often exhibit significant latency, hindering their real-time performance on resource-constrained edge platforms. Therefore, a tradeoff between detection accuracy and latency should be dynamically managed at runtime to achieve optimum results.
In this paper, we introduce VALO (Versatile Anytime algorithm for LiDAR Object detection), a novel data-centric approach that enables anytime computing of 3D LiDAR object detection DNNs. VALO employs a deadline-aware scheduler to selectively process input regions, making execution time and accuracy tradeoffs without architectural modifications. Additionally, it leverages efficient forecasting of past detection results to mitigate possible loss of accuracy due to partial processing of input. Finally, it utilizes a novel input reduction technique within its detection heads to significantly accelerate execution without sacrificing accuracy.
We implement VALO on state-of-the-art 3D LiDAR object detection networks, namely CenterPoint and VoxelNext, and demonstrate its dynamic adaptability to a wide range of time constraints while achieving higher accuracy than the prior state-of-the-art. Code is available athttps://github.com/CSL-KU/VALO}{github.com/CSL-KU/VALO.
Authors:Jianbo Ma, Chuanming Tang, Fei Wu, Can Zhao, Jianlin Zhang, Zhiyong Xu
Abstract:
Multiple object tracking (MOT) in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) videos is important for diverse applications in computer vision. Current MOT trackers rely on accurate object detection results and precise matching of target reidentification (ReID). These methods focus on optimizing target spatial attributes while overlooking temporal cues in modelling object relationships, especially for challenging tracking conditions such as object deformation and blurring, etc. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Cohesion Multiple Object Tracking framework (STCMOT), which utilizes historical embedding features to model the representation of ReID and detection features in a sequential order. Concretely, a temporal embedding boosting module is introduced to enhance the discriminability of individual embedding based on adjacent frame cooperation. While the trajectory embedding is then propagated by a temporal detection refinement module to mine salient target locations in the temporal field. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone2019 and UAVDT datasets demonstrate our STCMOT sets a new state-of-the-art performance in MOTA and IDF1 metrics. The source codes are released at https://github.com/ydhcg-BoBo/STCMOT.
Authors:Meng Chen, Jiawei Tu, Chao Qi, Yonghao Dang, Feng Zhou, Wei Wei, Jianqin Yin
Abstract:
The significant advancements in embodied vision navigation have raised concerns about its susceptibility to adversarial attacks exploiting deep neural networks. Investigating the adversarial robustness of embodied vision navigation is crucial, especially given the threat of 3D physical attacks that could pose risks to human safety. However, existing attack methods for embodied vision navigation often lack physical feasibility due to challenges in transferring digital perturbations into the physical world. Moreover, current physical attacks for object detection struggle to achieve both multi-view effectiveness and visual naturalness in navigation scenarios. To address this, we propose a practical attack method for embodied navigation by attaching adversarial patches to objects, where both opacity and textures are learnable. Specifically, to ensure effectiveness across varying viewpoints, we employ a multi-view optimization strategy based on object-aware sampling, which optimizes the patch's texture based on feedback from the vision-based perception model used in navigation. To make the patch inconspicuous to human observers, we introduce a two-stage opacity optimization mechanism, in which opacity is fine-tuned after texture optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our adversarial patches decrease the navigation success rate by an average of 22.39%, outperforming previous methods in practicality, effectiveness, and naturalness. Code is available at: https://github.com/chen37058/Physical-Attacks-in-Embodied-Nav
Authors:Xuanru Zhou, Cheol Jun Cho, Ayati Sharma, Brittany Morin, David Baquirin, Jet Vonk, Zoe Ezzes, Zachary Miller, Boon Lead Tee, Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini, Jiachen Lian, Gopala Anumanchipalli
Abstract:
Current de-facto dysfluency modeling methods utilize template matching algorithms which are not generalizable to out-of-domain real-world dysfluencies across languages, and are not scalable with increasing amounts of training data. To handle these problems, we propose Stutter-Solver: an end-to-end framework that detects dysfluency with accurate type and time transcription, inspired by the YOLO object detection algorithm. Stutter-Solver can handle co-dysfluencies and is a natural multi-lingual dysfluency detector. To leverage scalability and boost performance, we also introduce three novel dysfluency corpora: VCTK-Pro, VCTK-Art, and AISHELL3-Pro, simulating natural spoken dysfluencies including repetition, block, missing, replacement, and prolongation through articulatory-encodec and TTS-based methods. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all available dysfluency corpora. Code and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/eureka235/Stutter-Solver
Authors:Yanguang Sun, Hanyu Xuan, Jian Yang, Lei Luo
Abstract:
Recently, biological perception has been a powerful tool for handling the camouflaged object detection (COD) task. However, most existing methods are heavily dependent on the local spatial information of diverse scales from convolutional operations to optimize initial features. A commonly neglected point in these methods is the long-range dependencies between feature pixels from different scale spaces that can help the model build a global structure of the object, inducing a more precise image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel Global-Local Collaborative Optimization Network, called GLCONet. Technically, we first design a collaborative optimization strategy from the perspective of multi-source perception to simultaneously model the local details and global long-range relationships, which can provide features with abundant discriminative information to boost the accuracy in detecting camouflaged objects. Furthermore, we introduce an adjacent reverse decoder that contains cross-layer aggregation and reverse optimization to integrate complementary information from different levels for generating high-quality representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GLCONet method with different backbones can effectively activate potentially significant pixels in an image, outperforming twenty state-of-the-art methods on three public COD datasets. The source code is available at: \https://github.com/CSYSI/GLCONet.
Authors:Emanuele Vivoli, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Andrey Barsky, Artemis LLabrés, Marco Bertini, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Abstract:
Vision-language models have recently evolved into versatile systems capable of high performance across a range of tasks, such as document understanding, visual question answering, and grounding, often in zero-shot settings. Comics Understanding, a complex and multifaceted field, stands to greatly benefit from these advances. Comics, as a medium, combine rich visual and textual narratives, challenging AI models with tasks that span image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and deeper narrative comprehension through sequential panels. However, the unique structure of comics -- characterized by creative variations in style, reading order, and non-linear storytelling -- presents a set of challenges distinct from those in other visual-language domains. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of Comics Understanding from both dataset and task perspectives. Our contributions are fivefold: (1) We analyze the structure of the comics medium, detailing its distinctive compositional elements; (2) We survey the widely used datasets and tasks in comics research, emphasizing their role in advancing the field; (3) We introduce the Layer of Comics Understanding (LoCU) framework, a novel taxonomy that redefines vision-language tasks within comics and lays the foundation for future work; (4) We provide a detailed review and categorization of existing methods following the LoCU framework; (5) Finally, we highlight current research challenges and propose directions for future exploration, particularly in the context of vision-language models applied to comics. This survey is the first to propose a task-oriented framework for comics intelligence and aims to guide future research by addressing critical gaps in data availability and task definition. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/emanuelevivoli/awesome-comics-understanding.
Authors:Shuo Wang, Chunlong Xia, Feng Lv, Yifeng Shi
Abstract:
RT-DETR is the first real-time end-to-end transformer-based object detector. Its efficiency comes from the framework design and the Hungarian matching. However, compared to dense supervision detectors like the YOLO series, the Hungarian matching provides much sparser supervision, leading to insufficient model training and difficult to achieve optimal results. To address these issues, we proposed a hierarchical dense positive supervision method based on RT-DETR, named RT-DETRv3. Firstly, we introduce a CNN-based auxiliary branch that provides dense supervision that collaborates with the original decoder to enhance the encoder feature representation. Secondly, to address insufficient decoder training, we propose a novel learning strategy involving self-attention perturbation. This strategy diversifies label assignment for positive samples across multiple query groups, thereby enriching positive supervisions. Additionally, we introduce a shared-weight decoder branch for dense positive supervision to ensure more high-quality queries matching each ground truth. Notably, all aforementioned modules are training-only. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on COCO val2017. RT-DETRv3 significantly outperforms existing real-time detectors, including the RT-DETR series and the YOLO series. For example, RT-DETRv3-R18 achieves 48.1% AP (+1.6%/+1.4%) compared to RT-DETR-R18/RT-DETRv2-R18, while maintaining the same latency. Furthermore, RT-DETRv3-R101 can attain an impressive 54.6% AP outperforming YOLOv10-X. The code will be released at https://github.com/clxia12/RT-DETRv3.
Authors:Giorgos Savathrakis, Antonis Argyros
Abstract:
Transformers demonstrate competitive performance in terms of precision on the problem of vision-based object detection. However, they require considerable computational resources due to the quadratic size of the attention weights. In this work, we propose to cluster the transformer input on the basis of its entropy, due to its similarity between same object pixels. This is expected to reduce GPU usage during training, while maintaining reasonable accuracy. This idea is realized with an implemented module that is called ENtropy-based Attention Clustering for detection Transformers (ENACT), which serves as a plug-in to any multi-head self-attention based transformer network. Experiments on the COCO object detection dataset and three detection transformers demonstrate that the requirements on memory are reduced, while the detection accuracy is degraded only slightly. The code of the ENACT module is available at https://github.com/GSavathrakis/ENACT.
Authors:Yonghao Yu, Dongcheng Zhao, Guobin Shen, Yiting Dong, Yi Zeng
Abstract:
The hierarchical architecture has become a mainstream design paradigm for Vision Transformers (ViTs), with Patch Merging serving as the pivotal component that transforms a columnar architecture into a hierarchical one. Drawing inspiration from the brain's ability to integrate global and local information for comprehensive visual understanding, we propose Stepwise Patch Merging (SPM), which enhances the subsequent attention mechanism's ability to 'see' better. SPM consists of Multi-Scale Aggregation (MSA) and Guided Local Enhancement (GLE) striking a proper balance between long-range dependency modeling and local feature enhancement. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets, including ImageNet-1K, COCO, and ADE20K, demonstrate that SPM significantly improves the performance of various models, particularly in dense prediction tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Meanwhile, experiments show that combining SPM with different backbones can further improve performance. The code has been released at https://github.com/Yonghao-Yu/StepwisePatchMerging.
Authors:Emirhan Bayar, Cemal Aker
Abstract:
Extracting and matching Re-Identification (ReID) features is used by many state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods, particularly effective against frequent and long-term occlusions. While end-to-end object detection and tracking have been the main focus of recent research, they have yet to outperform traditional methods in benchmarks like MOT17 and MOT20. Thus, from an application standpoint, methods with separate detection and embedding remain the best option for accuracy, modularity, and ease of implementation, though they are impractical for edge devices due to the overhead involved. In this paper, we investigate a selective approach to minimize the overhead of feature extraction while preserving accuracy, modularity, and ease of implementation. This approach can be integrated into various SOTA methods. We demonstrate its effectiveness by applying it to StrongSORT and Deep OC-SORT. Experiments on MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack datasets show that our mechanism retains the advantages of feature extraction during occlusions while significantly reducing runtime. Additionally, it improves accuracy by preventing confusion in the feature-matching stage, particularly in cases of deformation and appearance similarity, which are common in DanceTrack. https://github.com/emirhanbayar/Fast-StrongSORT, https://github.com/emirhanbayar/Fast-Deep-OC-SORT
Authors:Patrick Palmer, Martin Krüger, Stefan Schütte, Richard Altendorfer, Ganesh Adam, Torsten Bertram
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection is vital for automated driving. While lidar sensors are well suited for this task, they are expensive and have limitations in adverse weather conditions. 3+1D imaging radar sensors offer a cost-effective, robust alternative but face challenges due to their low resolution and high measurement noise. Existing 3+1D imaging radar datasets include radar and lidar data, enabling cross-modal model improvements. Although lidar should not be used during inference, it can aid the training of radar-only object detectors. We explore two strategies to transfer knowledge from the lidar to the radar domain and radar-only object detectors: 1. multi-stage training with sequential lidar point cloud thin-out, and 2. cross-modal knowledge distillation. In the multi-stage process, three thin-out methods are examined. Our results show significant performance gains of up to 4.2 percentage points in mean Average Precision with multi-stage training and up to 3.9 percentage points with knowledge distillation by initializing the student with the teacher's weights. The main benefit of these approaches is their applicability to other 3D object detection networks without altering their architecture, as we show by analyzing it on two different object detectors. Our code is available at https://github.com/rst-tu-dortmund/lerojd
Authors:Ramtin Malekpour, M. Mehrdad Morsali, Hoda Mohammadzade
Abstract:
Video synopsis is an efficient method for condensing surveillance videos. This technique begins with the detection and tracking of objects, followed by the creation of object tubes. These tubes consist of sequences, each containing chronologically ordered bounding boxes of a unique object. To generate a condensed video, the first step involves rearranging the object tubes to maximize the number of non-overlapping objects in each frame. Then, these tubes are stitched to a background image extracted from the source video. The lack of a standard dataset for the video synopsis task hinders the comparison of different video synopsis models. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a standard dataset, called SynoClip, designed specifically for the video synopsis task. SynoClip includes all the necessary features needed to evaluate various models directly and effectively. Additionally, this work introduces a video synopsis model, called FGS, with low computational cost. The model includes an empty-frame object detector to identify frames empty of any objects, facilitating efficient utilization of the deep object detector. Moreover, a tube grouping algorithm is proposed to maintain relationships among tubes in the synthesized video. This is followed by a greedy tube rearrangement algorithm, which efficiently determines the start time of each tube. Finally, the proposed model is evaluated using the proposed dataset. The source code, fine-tuned object detection model, and tutorials are available at https://github.com/Ramtin-ma/VideoSynopsis-FGS.
Authors:Ruilin Yao, Shengwu Xiong, Yichen Zhao, Yi Rong
Abstract:
Visual grounding is the task of locating objects specified by natural language expressions. Existing methods extend generic object detection frameworks to tackle this task. They typically extract visual and textual features separately using independent visual and textual encoders, then fuse these features in a multi-modal decoder for final prediction. However, visual grounding presents unique challenges. It often involves locating objects with different text descriptions within the same image. Existing methods struggle with this task because the independent visual encoder produces identical visual features for the same image, limiting detection performance. Some recently approaches propose various language-guided visual encoders to address this issue, but they mostly rely solely on textual information and require sophisticated designs. In this paper, we introduce Multi-modal Conditional Adaptation (MMCA), which enables the visual encoder to adaptively update weights, directing its focus towards text-relevant regions. Specifically, we first integrate information from different modalities to obtain multi-modal embeddings. Then we utilize a set of weighting coefficients, which generated from the multimodal embeddings, to reorganize the weight update matrices and apply them to the visual encoder of the visual grounding model. Extensive experiments on four widely used datasets demonstrate that MMCA achieves significant improvements and state-of-the-art results. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the lightweight and efficiency of our method. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/Mr-Bigworth/MMCA.
Authors:Rongsong Li, Xin Pei
Abstract:
Cooperative perception through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to overcome occlusions and enhance long-distance perception. Great achievements have been made in both datasets and algorithms. However, existing real-world datasets are limited by the presence of few communicable agents, while synthetic datasets typically cover only vehicles. More importantly, the penetration rate of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) , a critical factor for the deployment of cooperative perception technologies, has not been adequately addressed. To tackle these issues, we introduce Multi-V2X, a large-scale, multi-modal, multi-penetration-rate dataset for V2X perception. By co-simulating SUMO and CARLA, we equip a substantial number of cars and roadside units (RSUs) in simulated towns with sensor suites, and collect comprehensive sensing data. Datasets with specified CAV penetration rates can be obtained by masking some equipped cars as normal vehicles. In total, our Multi-V2X dataset comprises 549k RGB frames, 146k LiDAR frames, and 4,219k annotated 3D bounding boxes across six categories. The highest possible CAV penetration rate reaches 86.21%, with up to 31 agents in communication range, posing new challenges in selecting agents to collaborate with. We provide comprehensive benchmarks for cooperative 3D object detection tasks. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/RadetzkyLi/Multi-V2X .
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Sheng Deng, Xinrui Wang, Linbo Wang, Xianyong Fang, Bin Tang
Abstract:
Scribble supervised salient object detection (SSSOD) constructs segmentation ability of attractive objects from surroundings under the supervision of sparse scribble labels. For the better segmentation, depth and thermal infrared modalities serve as the supplement to RGB images in the complex scenes. Existing methods specifically design various feature extraction and multi-modal fusion strategies for RGB, RGB-Depth, RGB-Thermal, and Visual-Depth-Thermal image input respectively, leading to similar model flood. As the recently proposed Segment Anything Model (SAM) possesses extraordinary segmentation and prompt interactive capability, we propose an SSSOD family based on SAM, named SSFam, for the combination input with different modalities. Firstly, different modal-aware modulators are designed to attain modal-specific knowledge which cooperates with modal-agnostic information extracted from the frozen SAM encoder for the better feature ensemble. Secondly, a siamese decoder is tailored to bridge the gap between the training with scribble prompt and the testing with no prompt for the stronger decoding ability. Our model demonstrates the remarkable performance among combinations of different modalities and refreshes the highest level of scribble supervised methods and comes close to the ones of fully supervised methods. https://github.com/liuzywen/SSFam
Authors:Mingjin Zhang, Chi Zhang, Qiming Zhang, Yunsong Li, Xinbo Gao, Jing Zhang
Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep learning have greatly advanced the field of infrared small object detection (IRSTD). Despite their remarkable success, a notable gap persists between these IRSTD methods and generic segmentation approaches in natural image domains. This gap primarily arises from the significant modality differences and the limited availability of infrared data. In this study, we aim to bridge this divergence by investigating the adaptation of generic segmentation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), to IRSTD tasks. Our investigation reveals that many generic segmentation models can achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art IRSTD methods. However, their full potential in IRSTD remains untapped. To address this, we propose a simple, lightweight, yet effective baseline model for segmenting small infrared objects. Through appropriate distillation strategies, we empower smaller student models to outperform state-of-the-art methods, even surpassing fine-tuned teacher results. Furthermore, we enhance the model's performance by introducing a novel query design comprising dense and sparse queries to effectively encode multi-scale features. Through extensive experimentation across four popular IRSTD datasets, our model demonstrates significantly improved performance in both accuracy and throughput compared to existing approaches, surpassing SAM and Semantic-SAM by over 14 IoU on NUDT and 4 IoU on IRSTD1k. The source code and models will be released at https://github.com/O937-blip/SimIR.
Authors:Maksim Kolodiazhnyi, Anna Vorontsova, Matvey Skripkin, Danila Rukhovich, Anton Konushin
Abstract:
Growing customer demand for smart solutions in robotics and augmented reality has attracted considerable attention to 3D object detection from point clouds. Yet, existing indoor datasets taken individually are too small and insufficiently diverse to train a powerful and general 3D object detection model. In the meantime, more general approaches utilizing foundation models are still inferior in quality to those based on supervised training for a specific task. In this work, we propose \ours{}, a simple yet effective 3D object detection model, which is trained on a mixture of indoor datasets and is capable of working in various indoor environments. By unifying different label spaces, \ours{} enables learning a strong representation across multiple datasets through a supervised joint training scheme. The proposed network architecture is built upon a vanilla transformer encoder, making it easy to run, customize and extend the prediction pipeline for practical use. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \ours{} obtains significant gains over existing 3D object detection methods in 6 indoor benchmarks: ScanNet (+1.1 mAP50), ARKitScenes (+19.4 mAP25), S3DIS (+9.1 mAP50), MultiScan (+9.3 mAP50), 3RScan (+3.2 mAP50), and ScanNet++ (+2.7 mAP50). Code is available at https://github.com/filapro/unidet3d .
Authors:Tong Bu, Maohua Li, Zhaofei Yu
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising substitute for Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their advantages of fast inference and low power consumption. However, the lack of efficient training algorithms has hindered their widespread adoption. Even efficient ANN-SNN conversion methods necessitate quantized training of ANNs to enhance the effectiveness of the conversion, incurring additional training costs. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient ANN-SNN conversion framework with only inference scale complexity. The conversion framework includes a local threshold balancing algorithm, which enables efficient calculation of the optimal thresholds and fine-grained adjustment of the threshold value by channel-wise scaling. We also introduce an effective delayed evaluation strategy to mitigate the influence of the spike propagation delays. We demonstrate the scalability of our framework in typical computer vision tasks: image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and video classification. Our algorithm outperforms existing methods, highlighting its practical applicability and efficiency. Moreover, we have evaluated the energy consumption of the converted SNNs, demonstrating their superior low-power advantage compared to conventional ANNs. This approach simplifies the deployment of SNNs by leveraging open-source pre-trained ANN models, enabling fast, low-power inference with negligible performance reduction. Code is available at https://github.com/putshua/Inference-scale-ANN-SNN.
Authors:Jinqing Zhang, Yanan Zhang, Yunlong Qi, Zehua Fu, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a mainstream paradigm for multi-view 3D object detection, demonstrating impressive perceptual capabilities. However, existing methods overlook the geometric quality of BEV representation, leaving it in a low-resolution state and failing to restore the authentic geometric information of the scene. In this paper, we identify the drawbacks of previous approaches that limit the geometric quality of BEV representation and propose Radial-Cartesian BEV Sampling (RC-Sampling), which outperforms other feature transformation methods in efficiently generating high-resolution dense BEV representation to restore fine-grained geometric information. Additionally, we design a novel In-Box Label to substitute the traditional depth label generated from the LiDAR points. This label reflects the actual geometric structure of objects rather than just their surfaces, injecting real-world geometric information into the BEV representation. In conjunction with the In-Box Label, Centroid-Aware Inner Loss (CAI Loss) is developed to capture the inner geometric structure of objects. Finally, we integrate the aforementioned modules into a novel multi-view 3D object detector, dubbed GeoBEV, which achieves a state-of-the-art result of 66.2\% NDS on the nuScenes test set. The code is available at https://github.com/mengtan00/GeoBEV.git.
Authors:Yanguang Sun, Chunyan Xu, Jian Yang, Hanyu Xuan, Lei Luo
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection has attracted a lot of attention in computer vision. The main challenge lies in the high degree of similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings in the spatial domain, making identification difficult. Existing methods attempt to reduce the impact of pixel similarity by maximizing the distinguishing ability of spatial features with complicated design, but often ignore the sensitivity and locality of features in the spatial domain, leading to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose a new approach to address this issue by jointly exploring the representation in the frequency and spatial domains, introducing the Frequency-Spatial Entanglement Learning (FSEL) method. This method consists of a series of well-designed Entanglement Transformer Blocks (ETB) for representation learning, a Joint Domain Perception Module for semantic enhancement, and a Dual-domain Reverse Parser for feature integration in the frequency and spatial domains. Specifically, the ETB utilizes frequency self-attention to effectively characterize the relationship between different frequency bands, while the entanglement feed-forward network facilitates information interaction between features of different domains through entanglement learning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our FSEL over 21 state-of-the-art methods, through comprehensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons in three widely-used datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/FSEL.
Authors:Haobo Yang, Shiyan Zhang, Zhuoyi Yang, Xinyu Zhang, Jilong Guo, Zongyou Yang, Jun Li
Abstract:
With the increasing complexity of the traffic environment, the significance of safety perception in intelligent driving is intensifying. Traditional methods in the field of intelligent driving perception rely on deep learning, which suffers from limited interpretability, often described as a "black box." This paper introduces a novel type of loss function, termed "Entropy Loss," along with an innovative training strategy. Entropy Loss is formulated based on the functionality of feature compression networks within the perception model. Drawing inspiration from communication systems, the information transmission process in a feature compression network is expected to demonstrate steady changes in information volume and a continuous decrease in information entropy. By modeling network layer outputs as continuous random variables, we construct a probabilistic model that quantifies changes in information volume. Entropy Loss is then derived based on these expectations, guiding the update of network parameters to enhance network interpretability. Our experiments indicate that the Entropy Loss training strategy accelerates the training process. Utilizing the same 60 training epochs, the accuracy of 3D object detection models using Entropy Loss on the KITTI test set improved by up to 4.47\% compared to models without Entropy Loss, underscoring the method's efficacy. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/yhbcode000/Eloss-Interpretability.
Authors:Zi-Wei Sun, Ze-Xi Hua, Heng-Chao Li, Zhi-Peng Qi, Xiang Li, Yan Li, Jin-Chi Zhang
Abstract:
A Flying Bird Dataset for Surveillance Videos (FBD-SV-2024) is introduced and tailored for the development and performance evaluation of flying bird detection algorithms in surveillance videos. This dataset comprises 483 video clips, amounting to 28,694 frames in total. Among them, 23,833 frames contain 28,366 instances of flying birds. The proposed dataset of flying birds in surveillance videos is collected from realistic surveillance scenarios, where the birds exhibit characteristics such as inconspicuous features in single frames (in some instances), generally small sizes, and shape variability during flight. These attributes pose challenges that need to be addressed when developing flying bird detection methods for surveillance videos. Finally, advanced (video) object detection algorithms were selected for experimentation on the proposed dataset, and the results demonstrated that this dataset remains challenging for the algorithms above. The FBD-SV-2024 is now publicly available: Please visit https://github.com/Ziwei89/FBD-SV-2024_github for the dataset download link and related processing scripts.
Authors:Zhengru Fang, Senkang Hu, Jingjing Wang, Yiqin Deng, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
Collaborative perception systems leverage multiple edge devices, such surveillance cameras or autonomous cars, to enhance sensing quality and eliminate blind spots. Despite their advantages, challenges such as limited channel capacity and data redundancy impede their effectiveness. To address these issues, we introduce the Prioritized Information Bottleneck (PIB) framework for edge video analytics. This framework prioritizes the shared data based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and camera coverage of the region of interest (RoI), reducing spatial-temporal data redundancy to transmit only essential information. This strategy avoids the need for video reconstruction at edge servers and maintains low latency. It leverages a deterministic information bottleneck method to extract compact, relevant features, balancing informativeness and communication costs. For high-dimensional data, we apply variational approximations for practical optimization. To reduce communication costs in fluctuating connections, we propose a gate mechanism based on distributed online learning (DOL) to filter out less informative messages and efficiently select edge servers. Moreover, we establish the asymptotic optimality of DOL by proving the sublinearity of their regrets. To validate the effectiveness of the PIB framework, we conduct real-world experiments on three types of edge devices with varied computing capabilities. Compared to five coding methods for image and video compression, PIB improves mean object detection accuracy (MODA) while reducing 17.8% and reduces communication costs by 82.65% under poor channel conditions.
Authors:Zhengru Fang, Senkang Hu, Liyan Yang, Yiqin Deng, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
Collaborative edge sensing systems, particularly in collaborative perception systems in autonomous driving, can significantly enhance tracking accuracy and reduce blind spots with multi-view sensing capabilities. However, their limited channel capacity and the redundancy in sensory data pose significant challenges, affecting the performance of collaborative inference tasks. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Prioritized Information Bottleneck (PIB) framework for collaborative edge video analytics. We first propose a priority-based inference mechanism that jointly considers the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the camera's coverage area of the region of interest (RoI). To enable efficient inference, PIB reduces video redundancy in both spatial and temporal domains and transmits only the essential information for the downstream inference tasks. This eliminates the need to reconstruct videos on the edge server while maintaining low latency. Specifically, it derives compact, task-relevant features by employing the deterministic information bottleneck (IB) method, which strikes a balance between feature informativeness and communication costs. Given the computational challenges caused by IB-based objectives with high-dimensional data, we resort to variational approximations for feasible optimization. Compared to TOCOM-TEM, JPEG, and HEVC, PIB achieves an improvement of up to 15.1\% in mean object detection accuracy (MODA) and reduces communication costs by 66.7% when edge cameras experience poor channel conditions.
Authors:Rohit Venkata Sai Dulam, Chandra Kambhamettu
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) has traditionally relied on feature refinement modules that utilize the features of an ImageNet pre-trained backbone. However, this approach limits the possibility of pre-training the entire network because of the distinct nature of SOD and image classification. Additionally, the architecture of these backbones originally built for Image classification is sub-optimal for a dense prediction task like SOD. To address these issues, we propose a novel encoder-decoder-style neural network called SODAWideNet++ that is designed explicitly for SOD. Inspired by the vision transformers ability to attain a global receptive field from the initial stages, we introduce the Attention Guided Long Range Feature Extraction (AGLRFE) module, which combines large dilated convolutions and self-attention. Specifically, we use attention features to guide long-range information extracted by multiple dilated convolutions, thus taking advantage of the inductive biases of a convolution operation and the input dependency brought by self-attention. In contrast to the current paradigm of ImageNet pre-training, we modify 118K annotated images from the COCO semantic segmentation dataset by binarizing the annotations to pre-train the proposed model end-to-end. Further, we supervise the background predictions along with the foreground to push our model to generate accurate saliency predictions. SODAWideNet++ performs competitively on five different datasets while only containing 35% of the trainable parameters compared to the state-of-the-art models. The code and pre-computed saliency maps are provided at https://github.com/VimsLab/SODAWideNetPlusPlus.
Authors:Yu Wang, Shaohua Wang, Yicheng Li, Mingchun Liu
Abstract:
In recent years, 3D object perception has become a crucial component in the development of autonomous driving systems, providing essential environmental awareness. However, as perception tasks in autonomous driving evolve, their variants have increased, leading to diverse insights from industry and academia. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that collect and summarize these perception tasks and their developments from a broader perspective. This review extensively summarizes traditional 3D object detection methods, focusing on camera-based, LiDAR-based, and fusion detection techniques. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of each approach, highlighting advancements in accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we discuss future directions, including methods to improve accuracy such as temporal perception, occupancy grids, and end-to-end learning frameworks. We also explore cooperative perception methods that extend the perception range through collaborative communication. By providing a holistic view of the current state and future developments in 3D object perception, we aim to offer a more comprehensive understanding of perception tasks for autonomous driving. Additionally, we have established an active repository to provide continuous updates on the latest advancements in this field, accessible at: https://github.com/Fishsoup0/Autonomous-Driving-Perception.
Authors:Yongcun Zhang, Jiajun Xu, Yina He, Shaozi Li, Zhiming Luo, Huangwei Lei
Abstract:
Tongue diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a crucial diagnostic method that can reflect an individual's health status. Traditional methods for identifying tooth-marked tongues are subjective and inconsistent because they rely on practitioner experience. We propose a novel fully automated Weakly Supervised method using Vision transformer and Multiple instance learning WSVM for tongue extraction and tooth-marked tongue recognition. Our approach first accurately detects and extracts the tongue region from clinical images, removing any irrelevant background information. Then, we implement an end-to-end weakly supervised object detection method. We utilize Vision Transformer (ViT) to process tongue images in patches and employ multiple instance loss to identify tooth-marked regions with only image-level annotations. WSVM achieves high accuracy in tooth-marked tongue classification, and visualization experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in pinpointing these regions. This automated approach enhances the objectivity and accuracy of tooth-marked tongue diagnosis. It provides significant clinical value by assisting TCM practitioners in making precise diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Code is available at https://github.com/yc-zh/WSVM.
Authors:Zengjie Song, Jiangshe Zhang, Yuxi Wang, Junsong Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
Sound source localization aims to localize objects emitting the sound in visual scenes. Recent works obtaining impressive results typically rely on contrastive learning. However, the common practice of randomly sampling negatives in prior arts can lead to the false negative issue, where the sounds semantically similar to visual instance are sampled as negatives and incorrectly pushed away from the visual anchor/query. As a result, this misalignment of audio and visual features could yield inferior performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel audio-visual learning framework which is instantiated with two individual learning schemes: self-supervised predictive learning (SSPL) and semantic-aware contrastive learning (SACL). SSPL explores image-audio positive pairs alone to discover semantically coherent similarities between audio and visual features, while a predictive coding module for feature alignment is introduced to facilitate the positive-only learning. In this regard SSPL acts as a negative-free method to eliminate false negatives. By contrast, SACL is designed to compact visual features and remove false negatives, providing reliable visual anchor and audio negatives for contrast. Different from SSPL, SACL releases the potential of audio-visual contrastive learning, offering an effective alternative to achieve the same goal. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we highlight the versatility of the learned representation by extending the approach to audio-visual event classification and object detection tasks. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/zjsong/SACL.
Authors:Zichen Yu, Quanli Liu, Wei Wang, Liyong Zhang, Xiaoguang Zhao
Abstract:
Recently, LSS-based multi-view 3D object detection provides an economical and deployment-friendly solution for autonomous driving. However, all the existing LSS-based methods transform multi-view image features into a Cartesian Bird's-Eye-View(BEV) representation, which does not take into account the non-uniform image information distribution and hardly exploits the view symmetry. In this paper, in order to adapt the image information distribution and preserve the view symmetry by regular convolution, we propose to employ the polar BEV representation to substitute the Cartesian BEV representation. To achieve this, we elaborately tailor three modules: a polar view transformer to generate the polar BEV representation, a polar temporal fusion module for fusing historical polar BEV features and a polar detection head to predict the polar-parameterized representation of the object. In addition, we design a 2D auxiliary detection head and a spatial attention enhancement module to improve the quality of feature extraction in perspective view and BEV, respectively. Finally, we integrate the above improvements into a novel multi-view 3D object detector, PolarBEVDet. Experiments on nuScenes show that PolarBEVDet achieves the superior performance. The code is available at https://github.com/Yzichen/PolarBEVDet.git.(This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible)
Authors:Zhihao Lin, Yongtao Wang, Jinhe Zhang, Xiaojie Chu, Haibin Ling
Abstract:
Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) have gained extensive attention for their superior inferencing efficiency and compression ratio compared to traditional full-precision networks. However, due to the unique characteristics of BNNs, designing a powerful binary architecture is challenging and often requires significant manpower. A promising solution is to utilize Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to assist in designing BNNs, but current NAS methods for BNNs are relatively straightforward and leave a performance gap between the searched models and manually designed ones. To address this gap, we propose a novel neural architecture search scheme for binary neural networks, named NAS-BNN. We first carefully design a search space based on the unique characteristics of BNNs. Then, we present three training strategies, which significantly enhance the training of supernet and boost the performance of all subnets. Our discovered binary model family outperforms previous BNNs for a wide range of operations (OPs) from 20M to 200M. For instance, we achieve 68.20% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with only 57M OPs. In addition, we validate the transferability of these searched BNNs on the object detection task, and our binary detectors with the searched BNNs achieve a novel state-of-the-art result, e.g., 31.6% mAP with 370M OPs, on MS COCO dataset. The source code and models will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/NAS-BNN.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Danying Lin, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Although most existing multi-modal salient object detection (SOD) methods demonstrate effectiveness through training models from scratch, the limited multi-modal data hinders these methods from reaching optimality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to explore and exploit the powerful feature representation and zero-shot generalization ability of the pre-trained Segment Anything Model (SAM) for multi-modal SOD. Despite serving as a recent vision fundamental model, driving the class-agnostic SAM to comprehend and detect salient objects accurately is non-trivial, especially in challenging scenes. To this end, we develop \underline{SAM} with se\underline{m}antic f\underline{e}ature fu\underline{s}ion guidanc\underline{e} (Sammese), which incorporates multi-modal saliency-specific knowledge into SAM to adapt SAM to multi-modal SOD tasks. However, it is difficult for SAM trained on single-modal data to directly mine the complementary benefits of multi-modal inputs and comprehensively utilize them to achieve accurate saliency prediction. To address these issues, we first design a multi-modal complementary fusion module to extract robust multi-modal semantic features by integrating information from visible and thermal or depth image pairs. Then, we feed the extracted multi-modal semantic features into both the SAM image encoder and mask decoder for fine-tuning and prompting, respectively. Specifically, in the image encoder, a multi-modal adapter is proposed to adapt the single-modal SAM to multi-modal information. In the mask decoder, a semantic-geometric prompt generation strategy is proposed to produce corresponding embeddings with various saliency cues. Extensive experiments on both RGB-D and RGB-T SOD benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Angknpng/Sammese}.
Authors:Siyuan Yao, Hao Sun, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Xiao Wang, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify the objects that seamlessly blend into the surrounding backgrounds. Due to the intrinsic similarity between the camouflaged objects and the background region, it is extremely challenging to precisely distinguish the camouflaged objects by existing approaches. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical graph interaction network termed HGINet for camouflaged object detection, which is capable of discovering imperceptible objects via effective graph interaction among the hierarchical tokenized features. Specifically, we first design a region-aware token focusing attention (RTFA) with dynamic token clustering to excavate the potentially distinguishable tokens in the local region. Afterwards, a hierarchical graph interaction transformer (HGIT) is proposed to construct bi-directional aligned communication between hierarchical features in the latent interaction space for visual semantics enhancement. Furthermore, we propose a decoder network with confidence aggregated feature fusion (CAFF) modules, which progressively fuses the hierarchical interacted features to refine the local detail in ambiguous regions. Extensive experiments conducted on the prevalent datasets, i.e. COD10K, CAMO, NC4K and CHAMELEON demonstrate the superior performance of HGINet compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Garyson1204/HGINet.
Authors:Fengyang Xiao, Sujie Hu, Yuqi Shen, Chengyu Fang, Jinfa Huang, Chunming He, Longxiang Tang, Ziyun Yang, Xiu Li
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) refers to the task of identifying and segmenting objects that blend seamlessly into their surroundings, posing a significant challenge for computer vision systems. In recent years, COD has garnered widespread attention due to its potential applications in surveillance, wildlife conservation, autonomous systems, and more. While several surveys on COD exist, they often have limitations in terms of the number and scope of papers covered, particularly regarding the rapid advancements made in the field since mid-2023. To address this void, we present the most comprehensive review of COD to date, encompassing both theoretical frameworks and practical contributions to the field. This paper explores various COD methods across four domains, including both image-level and video-level solutions, from the perspectives of traditional and deep learning approaches. We thoroughly investigate the correlations between COD and other camouflaged scenario methods, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for subsequent analyses. Beyond object-level detection, we also summarize extended methods for instance-level tasks, including camouflaged instance segmentation, counting, and ranking. Additionally, we provide an overview of commonly used benchmarks and evaluation metrics in COD tasks, conducting a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning-based techniques in both image and video domains, considering both qualitative and quantitative performance. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current COD models and propose 9 promising directions for future research, focusing on addressing inherent challenges and exploring novel, meaningful technologies. For those interested, a curated list of COD-related techniques, datasets, and additional resources can be found at https://github.com/ChunmingHe/awesome-concealed-object-segmentation
Authors:Anh-Dzung Doan, Vu Minh Hieu Phan, Surabhi Gupta, Markus Wagner, Tat-Jun Chin, Ian Reid
Abstract:
Infrared imaging offers resilience against changing lighting conditions by capturing object temperatures. Yet, in few scenarios, its lack of visual details compared to daytime visible images, poses a significant challenge for human and machine interpretation. This paper proposes a novel diffusion method, dubbed Temporally Consistent Patch Diffusion Models (TC-DPM), for infrared-to-visible video translation. Our method, extending the Patch Diffusion Model, consists of two key components. Firstly, we propose a semantic-guided denoising, leveraging the strong representations of foundational models. As such, our method faithfully preserves the semantic structure of generated visible images. Secondly, we propose a novel temporal blending module to guide the denoising trajectory, ensuring the temporal consistency between consecutive frames. Experiment shows that TC-PDM outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 35.3% in FVD for infrared-to-visible video translation and by 6.1% in AP50 for day-to-night object detection. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dzungdoan6/tc-pdm
Authors:Muhammad Rameez ur Rahman, Piero Simonetto, Anna Polato, Francesco Pasti, Luca Tonin, Sebastiano Vascon
Abstract:
Open vocabulary 3D object detection (OV3D) allows precise and extensible object recognition crucial for adapting to diverse environments encountered in assistive robotics. This paper presents OpenNav, a zero-shot 3D object detection pipeline based on RGB-D images for smart wheelchairs. Our pipeline integrates an open-vocabulary 2D object detector with a mask generator for semantic segmentation, followed by depth isolation and point cloud construction to create 3D bounding boxes. The smart wheelchair exploits these 3D bounding boxes to identify potential targets and navigate safely. We demonstrate OpenNav's performance through experiments on the Replica dataset and we report preliminary results with a real wheelchair. OpenNav improves state-of-the-art significantly on the Replica dataset at mAP25 (+9pts) and mAP50 (+5pts) with marginal improvement at mAP. The code is publicly available at this link: https://github.com/EasyWalk-PRIN/OpenNav.
Authors:Li Li, Tanqiu Qiao, Hubert P. H. Shum, Toby P. Breckon
Abstract:
3D point clouds are essential for perceiving outdoor scenes, especially within the realm of autonomous driving. Recent advances in 3D LiDAR Object Detection focus primarily on the spatial positioning and distribution of points to ensure accurate detection. However, despite their robust performance in variable conditions, these methods are hindered by their sole reliance on coordinates and point intensity, resulting in inadequate isometric invariance and suboptimal detection outcomes. To tackle this challenge, our work introduces Transformation-Invariant Local (TraIL) features and the associated TraIL-Det architecture. Our TraIL features exhibit rigid transformation invariance and effectively adapt to variations in point density, with a design focus on capturing the localized geometry of neighboring structures. They utilize the inherent isotropic radiation of LiDAR to enhance local representation, improve computational efficiency, and boost detection performance. To effectively process the geometric relations among points within each proposal, we propose a Multi-head self-Attention Encoder (MAE) with asymmetric geometric features to encode high-dimensional TraIL features into manageable representations. Our method outperforms contemporary self-supervised 3D object detection approaches in terms of mAP on KITTI (67.8, 20% label, moderate) and Waymo (68.9, 20% label, moderate) datasets under various label ratios (20%, 50%, and 100%).
Authors:Dong Li, Lineng Chen, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Hui Kong
Abstract:
Anomaly detection is critical in surveillance systems and patrol robots by identifying anomalous regions in images for early warning. Depending on whether reference data are utilized, anomaly detection can be categorized into anomaly detection with reference and anomaly detection without reference. Currently, anomaly detection without reference, which is closely related to out-of-distribution (OoD) object detection, struggles with learning anomalous patterns due to the difficulty of collecting sufficiently large and diverse anomaly datasets with the inherent rarity and novelty of anomalies. Alternatively, anomaly detection with reference employs the scheme of change detection to identify anomalies by comparing semantic changes between a reference image and a query one. However, there are very few ADr works due to the scarcity of public datasets in this domain. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by introducing the UMAD Benchmark Dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first benchmark dataset designed specifically for anomaly detection with reference in robotic patrolling scenarios, e.g., where an autonomous robot is employed to detect anomalous objects by comparing a reference and a query video sequences. The reference sequences can be taken by the robot along a specified route when there are no anomalous objects in the scene. The query sequences are captured online by the robot when it is patrolling in the same scene following the same route. Our benchmark dataset is elaborated such that each query image can find a corresponding reference based on accurate robot localization along the same route in the prebuilt 3D map, with which the reference and query images can be geometrically aligned using adaptive warping. Besides the proposed benchmark dataset, we evaluate the baseline models of ADr on this dataset.
Authors:Huaxu He
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) exhibit higher energy efficiency compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) due to their unique spike-driven mechanism. Additionally, SNN possess a crucial characteristic, namely the ability to process spatio-temporal information. However, this ability is constrained by both internal and external factors in practical applications, thereby affecting the performance of SNN. Firstly, the internal issue of SNN lies in the inherent limitations of their network structure and neuronal model, which result in the network adopting a unified processing approach for information of different temporal dimensions when processing input data containing complex temporal information. Secondly, the external issue of SNN stems from the direct encoding method commonly adopted by directly trained SNN, which uses the same feature map for input at each time step, failing to fully exploit the spatio-temporal characteristics of SNN. To address these issues, this paper proposes an Unconstrained Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (ULIF) neuronal model that allows for learning different membrane potential parameters at different time steps, thereby enhancing SNN' ability to process information of different temporal dimensions. Additionally, this paper presents a hybrid encoding scheme aimed at solving the problem of direct encoding lacking temporal dimension information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods effectively improve the overall performance of SNN in object detection and object recognition tasks. related code is available at https://github.com/hhx0320/ASNN.
Authors:Guoting Wei, Xia Yuan, Yu Liu, Zhenhao Shang, Xizhe Xue, Peng Wang, Kelu Yao, Chunxia Zhao, Haokui Zhang, Rong Xiao
Abstract:
Aerial object detection plays a crucial role in numerous applications. However, most existing methods focus on detecting predefined object categories, limiting their applicability in real-world open scenarios. In this paper, we extend aerial object detection to open scenarios through image-text collaboration and propose RT-OVAD, the first real-time open-vocabulary detector for aerial scenes. Specifically, we first introduce an image-to-text alignment loss to replace the conventional category regression loss, thereby eliminating category constraints. Next, we propose a lightweight image-text collaboration strategy comprising an image-text collaboration encoder and a text-guided decoder. The encoder simultaneously enhances visual features and refines textual embeddings, while the decoder guides object queries to focus on class-relevant image features. This design further improves detection accuracy without incurring significant computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RT-OVAD consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across open-vocabulary, zero-shot, and traditional closed-set detection tasks. For instance, on the open-vocabulary aerial detection benchmarks DIOR, DOTA-v2.0, and LAE-80C, RT-OVAD achieves 87.7 AP$_{50}$, 53.8 mAP, and 23.7 mAP, respectively, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art (LAE-DINO) by 2.2, 7.0, and 3.5 points. In addition, RT-OVAD achieves an inference speed of 34 FPS on an RTX 4090 GPU, approximately three times faster than LAE-DINO (10 FPS), meeting the real-time detection requirements of diverse applications. The code will be released at https://github.com/GT-Wei/RT-OVAD.
Authors:Zhiqiang Wu, Yingjie Liu, Hanlin Dong, Xuan Tang, Jian Yang, Bo Jin, Mingsong Chen, Xian Wei
Abstract:
Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) empowers models to explore underlying symmetry in data, improving performance. However, real-world scenarios often deviate from ideal symmetric systems caused by physical permutation, characterized by non-trivial actions of a symmetry group, resulting in asymmetries that affect the outputs, a phenomenon known as Symmetry Breaking. Traditional GConv-based methods are constrained by rigid operational rules within group space, assuming data remains strictly symmetry after limited group transformations. This limitation makes it difficult to adapt to Symmetry-Breaking and non-rigid transformations. Motivated by this, we mainly focus on a common scenario: Rotational Symmetry-Breaking. By relaxing strict group transformations within Strict Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{C}_n$, we redefine a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant group $\mathbf{R}_n$ and introduce a novel Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant GConv (R2GConv) with only a minimal increase of $4n$ parameters compared to GConv. Based on R2GConv, we propose a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Network (R2Net) as the backbone and develop a Relaxed Rotation-Equivariant Object Detector (R2Det) for 2D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed R2GConv in natural image classification, and R2Det achieves excellent performance in 2D object detection with improved generalization capabilities and robustness. The code is available in \texttt{https://github.com/wuer5/r2det}.
Authors:Sanjay Bhargav Dharavath, Tanmoy Dam, Supriyo Chakraborty, Prithwiraj Roy, Aniruddha Maiti
Abstract:
The field of autonomous vehicles (AVs) predominantly leverages multi-modal integration of LiDAR and camera data to achieve better performance compared to using a single modality. However, the fusion process encounters challenges in detecting distant objects due to the disparity between the high resolution of cameras and the sparse data from LiDAR. Insufficient integration of global perspectives with local-level details results in sub-optimal fusion performance.To address this issue, we have developed an innovative two-stage fusion process called Quantum Inverse Contextual Vision Transformers (Q-ICVT). This approach leverages adiabatic computing in quantum concepts to create a novel reversible vision transformer known as the Global Adiabatic Transformer (GAT). GAT aggregates sparse LiDAR features with semantic features in dense images for cross-modal integration in a global form. Additionally, the Sparse Expert of Local Fusion (SELF) module maps the sparse LiDAR 3D proposals and encodes position information of the raw point cloud onto the dense camera feature space using a gating point fusion approach. Our experiments show that Q-ICVT achieves an mAPH of 82.54 for L2 difficulties on the Waymo dataset, improving by 1.88% over current state-of-the-art fusion methods. We also analyze GAT and SELF in ablation studies to highlight the impact of Q-ICVT. Our code is available at https://github.com/sanjay-810/Qicvt Q-ICVT
Authors:Jun Yan, Pengyu Wang, Danni Wang, Weiquan Huang, Daniel Watzenig, Huilin Yin
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation is a significant perception task in autonomous driving. It suffers from the risks of adversarial examples. In the past few years, deep learning has gradually transitioned from convolutional neural network (CNN) models with a relatively small number of parameters to foundation models with a huge number of parameters. The segment-anything model (SAM) is a generalized image segmentation framework that is capable of handling various types of images and is able to recognize and segment arbitrary objects in an image without the need to train on a specific object. It is a unified model that can handle diverse downstream tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and tracking. In the task of semantic segmentation for autonomous driving, it is significant to study the zero-shot adversarial robustness of SAM. Therefore, we deliver a systematic empirical study on the robustness of SAM without additional training. Based on the experimental results, the zero-shot adversarial robustness of the SAM under the black-box corruptions and white-box adversarial attacks is acceptable, even without the need for additional training. The finding of this study is insightful in that the gigantic model parameters and huge amounts of training data lead to the phenomenon of emergence, which builds a guarantee of adversarial robustness. SAM is a vision foundation model that can be regarded as an early prototype of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) pipeline. In such a pipeline, a unified model can handle diverse tasks. Therefore, this research not only inspects the impact of vision foundation models on safe autonomous driving but also provides a perspective on developing trustworthy AGI. The code is available at: https://github.com/momo1986/robust_sam_iv.
Authors:Jiawei Lian, Jianhong Pan, Lefan Wang, Yi Wang, Lap-Pui Chau, Shaohui Mei
Abstract:
Physical attacks against object detection have gained increasing attention due to their significant practical implications. However, conducting physical experiments is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, physical dynamics and cross-domain transformation are challenging to strictly regulate in the real world, leading to unaligned evaluation and comparison, severely hindering the development of physically robust models. To accommodate these challenges, we explore utilizing realistic simulation to thoroughly and rigorously benchmark physical attacks with fairness under controlled physical dynamics and cross-domain transformation. This resolves the problem of capturing identical adversarial images that cannot be achieved in the real world. Our benchmark includes 20 physical attack methods, 48 object detectors, comprehensive physical dynamics, and evaluation metrics. We also provide end-to-end pipelines for dataset generation, detection, evaluation, and further analysis. In addition, we perform 8064 groups of evaluation based on our benchmark, which includes both overall evaluation and further detailed ablation studies for controlled physical dynamics. Through these experiments, we provide in-depth analyses of physical attack performance and physical adversarial robustness, draw valuable observations, and discuss potential directions for future research.
Codebase: https://github.com/JiaweiLian/Benchmarking_Physical_Attack
Authors:Xinyu Xiong, Zihuang Wu, Shuangyi Tan, Wenxue Li, Feilong Tang, Ying Chen, Siying Li, Jie Ma, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
Image segmentation plays an important role in vision understanding. Recently, the emerging vision foundation models continuously achieved superior performance on various tasks. Following such success, in this paper, we prove that the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) can be a strong encoder for U-shaped segmentation models. We propose a simple but effective framework, termed SAM2-UNet, for versatile image segmentation. Specifically, SAM2-UNet adopts the Hiera backbone of SAM2 as the encoder, while the decoder uses the classic U-shaped design. Additionally, adapters are inserted into the encoder to allow parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Preliminary experiments on various downstream tasks, such as camouflaged object detection, salient object detection, marine animal segmentation, mirror detection, and polyp segmentation, demonstrate that our SAM2-UNet can simply beat existing specialized state-of-the-art methods without bells and whistles. Project page: \url{https://github.com/WZH0120/SAM2-UNet}.
Authors:Dongshuo Yin, Leiyi Hu, Bin Li, Youqun Zhang, Xue Yang
Abstract:
Pre-training & fine-tuning can enhance the transferring efficiency and performance in visual tasks. Recent delta-tuning methods provide more options for visual classification tasks. Despite their success, existing visual delta-tuning art fails to exceed the upper limit of full fine-tuning on challenging tasks like object detection and segmentation. To find a competitive alternative to full fine-tuning, we propose the Multi-cognitive Visual Adapter (Mona) tuning, a novel adapter-based tuning method. First, we introduce multiple vision-friendly filters into the adapter to enhance its ability to process visual signals, while previous methods mainly rely on language-friendly linear filters. Second, we add the scaled normalization layer in the adapter to regulate the distribution of input features for visual filters. To fully demonstrate the practicality and generality of Mona, we conduct experiments on multiple representative visual tasks, including instance segmentation on COCO, semantic segmentation on ADE20K, object detection on Pascal VOC, oriented object detection on DOTA/STAR, and image classification on three common datasets. Exciting results illustrate that Mona surpasses full fine-tuning on all these tasks, and is the only delta-tuning method outperforming full fine-tuning on the above various tasks. For example, Mona achieves 1% performance gain on the COCO dataset compared to full fine-tuning. Comprehensive results suggest that Mona-tuning is more suitable for retaining and utilizing the capabilities of pre-trained models than full fine-tuning. The code will be released at https://github.com/Leiyi-Hu/mona.
Authors:Wenxuan Li, Qin Zou, Chi Chen, Bo Du, Long Chen, Jian Zhou, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
3D object detection in driving scenarios faces the challenge of complex road environments, which can lead to the loss or incompleteness of key features, thereby affecting perception performance. To address this issue, we propose an advanced detection framework called Co-Fix3D. Co-Fix3D integrates Local and Global Enhancement (LGE) modules to refine Bird's Eye View (BEV) features. The LGE module uses Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for pixel-level local optimization and incorporates an attention mechanism for global optimization. To handle varying detection difficulties, we adopt multi-head LGE modules, enabling each module to focus on targets with different levels of detection complexity, thus further enhancing overall perception capability. Experimental results show that on the nuScenes dataset's LiDAR benchmark, Co-Fix3D achieves 69.4\% mAP and 73.5\% NDS, while on the multimodal benchmark, it achieves 72.3\% mAP and 74.7\% NDS. The source code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/rubbish001/Co-Fix3d}{https://github.com/rubbish001/Co-Fix3d}.
Authors:Yutong Wang, Chaoyang Jiang, Xieyuanli Chen
Abstract:
This article introduces a novel method for object-level relocalization of robotic systems. It determines the pose of a camera sensor by robustly associating the object detections in the current frame with 3D objects in a lightweight object-level map. Object graphs, considering semantic uncertainties, are constructed for both the incoming camera frame and the pre-built map. Objects are represented as graph nodes, and each node employs unique semantic descriptors based on our devised graph kernels. We extract a subgraph from the target map graph by identifying potential object associations for each object detection, then refine these associations and pose estimations using a RANSAC-inspired strategy. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves more accurate data association and significantly increases relocalization success rates compared to baseline methods. The implementation of our method is released at \url{https://github.com/yutongwangBIT/GOReloc}.
Authors:Matthias Bartolo, Dylan Seychell, Josef Bajada
Abstract:
With the ever-growing variety of object detection approaches, this study explores a series of experiments that combine reinforcement learning (RL)-based visual attention methods with saliency ranking techniques to investigate transparent and sustainable solutions. By integrating saliency ranking for initial bounding box prediction and subsequently applying RL techniques to refine these predictions through a finite set of actions over multiple time steps, this study aims to enhance RL object detection accuracy. Presented as a series of experiments, this research investigates the use of various image feature extraction methods and explores diverse Deep Q-Network (DQN) architectural variations for deep reinforcement learning-based localisation agent training. Additionally, we focus on optimising the detection pipeline at every step by prioritising lightweight and faster models, while also incorporating the capability to classify detected objects, a feature absent in previous RL approaches. We show that by evaluating the performance of these trained agents using the Pascal VOC 2007 dataset, faster and more optimised models were developed. Notably, the best mean Average Precision (mAP) achieved in this study was 51.4, surpassing benchmarks set by RL-based single object detectors in the literature.
Authors:Xiangjie Luo, Zhihao Cai, Bo Shao, Yingxun Wang
Abstract:
Object detection is an important part in the field of computer vision, and the effect of object detection is directly determined by the regression accuracy of the prediction box. As the key to model training, IoU (Intersection over Union) greatly shows the difference between the current prediction box and the Ground Truth box. Subsequent researchers have continuously added more considerations to IoU, such as center distance, aspect ratio, and so on. However, there is an upper limit to just refining the geometric differences; And there is a potential connection between the new consideration index and the IoU itself, and the direct addition or subtraction between the two may lead to the problem of "over-consideration". Based on this, we propose a new IoU loss function, called Unified-IoU (UIoU), which is more concerned with the weight assignment between different quality prediction boxes. Specifically, the loss function dynamically shifts the model's attention from low-quality prediction boxes to high-quality prediction boxes in a novel way to enhance the model's detection performance on high-precision or intensive datasets and achieve a balance in training speed. Our proposed method achieves better performance on multiple datasets, especially at a high IoU threshold, UIoU has a more significant improvement effect compared with other improved IoU losses. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/lxj-drifter/UIOU_files.
Authors:Sven Teufel, Jörg Gamerdinger, Georg Volk, Oliver Bringmann
Abstract:
The safe operation of automated vehicles depends on their ability to perceive the environment comprehensively. However, occlusion, sensor range, and environmental factors limit their perception capabilities. To overcome these limitations, collective perception enables vehicles to exchange information. However, fusing this exchanged information is a challenging task. Early fusion approaches require large amounts of bandwidth, while intermediate fusion approaches face interchangeability issues. Late fusion of shared detections is currently the only feasible approach. However, it often results in inferior performance due to information loss. To address this issue, we propose MR3D-Net, a dynamic multi-resolution 3D sparse voxel grid fusion backbone architecture for LiDAR-based collective perception. We show that sparse voxel grids at varying resolutions provide a meaningful and compact environment representation that can adapt to the communication bandwidth. MR3D-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OPV2V 3D object detection benchmark while reducing the required bandwidth by up to 94% compared to early fusion. Code is available at https://github.com/ekut-es/MR3D-Net
Authors:Junjie Guo, Chenqiang Gao, Fangcen Liu, Deyu Meng
Abstract:
Infrared-visible object detection aims to achieve robust object detection by leveraging the complementary information of infrared and visible image pairs. However, the commonly existing modality misalignment problem presents two challenges: fusing misalignment complementary features is difficult, and current methods cannot accurately locate objects in both modalities under misalignment conditions. In this paper, we propose a Decoupled Position Detection Transformer (DPDETR) to address these problems. Specifically, we explicitly formulate the object category, visible modality position, and infrared modality position to enable the network to learn the intrinsic relationships and output accurate positions of objects in both modalities. To fuse misaligned object features accurately, we propose a Decoupled Position Multispectral Cross-attention module that adaptively samples and aggregates multispectral complementary features with the constraint of infrared and visible reference positions. Additionally, we design a query-decoupled Multispectral Decoder structure to address the optimization gap among the three kinds of object information in our task and propose a Decoupled Position Contrastive DeNosing Training strategy to enhance the DPDETR's ability to learn decoupled positions. Experiments on DroneVehicle and KAIST datasets demonstrate significant improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/gjj45/DPDETR.
Authors:Zhuoyan Liu, Bo Wang, Ye Li
Abstract:
Underwater object detection has higher requirements of running speed and deployment efficiency for the detector due to its specific environmental challenges. NMS of two- or one-stage object detectors and transformer architecture of query-based end-to-end object detectors are not conducive to deployment on underwater embedded devices with limited processing power. As for the detrimental effect of underwater color cast noise, recent underwater object detectors make network architecture or training complex, which also hinders their application and deployment on underwater vehicle platforms. In this paper, we propose the Underwater DECO with improved deNoising training (U-DECN), the query-based end-to-end object detector (with ConvNet encoder-decoder architecture) for underwater color cast noise that addresses the above problems. We integrate advanced technologies from DETR variants into DECO and design optimization methods specifically for the ConvNet architecture, including Separate Contrastive DeNoising Forward and Deformable Convolution in SIM. To address the underwater color cast noise issue, we propose an underwater color denoising query to improve the generalization of the model for the biased object feature information by different color cast noise. Our U-DECN, with ResNet-50 backbone, achieves 61.4 AP (50 epochs), 63.3 AP (72 epochs), 64.0 AP (100 epochs) on DUO, and 21 FPS (5 times faster than Deformable DETR and DINO 4 FPS) on NVIDIA AGX Orin by TensorRT FP16, outperforming the other state-of-the-art query-based end-to-end object detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/LEFTeyex/U-DECN.
Authors:Yingjie Gao, Yanan Zhang, Ziyue Huang, Nanqing Liu, Di Huang
Abstract:
In recent years, Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) has gained widespread attention and made significant progress due to its ability to build models with a good generalization power using extremely limited annotated data. The fine-tuning based paradigm is currently dominating this field, where detectors are initially pre-trained on base classes with sufficient samples and then fine-tuned on novel ones with few samples, but the scarcity of labeled samples of novel classes greatly interferes precisely fitting their data distribution, thus hampering the performance. To address this issue, we propose a new framework for FSOD, namely Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning (PS-TTL). Specifically, we design a Test-Time Learning (TTL) module that employs a mean-teacher network for self-training to discover novel instances from test data, allowing detectors to learn better representations and classifiers for novel classes. Furthermore, we notice that even though relatively low-confidence pseudo-labels exhibit classification confusion, they still tend to recall foreground. We thus develop a Prototype-based Soft-labels (PS) strategy through assessing similarities between low-confidence pseudo-labels and category prototypes as soft-labels to unleash their potential, which substantially mitigates the constraints posed by few-shot samples. Extensive experiments on both the VOC and COCO benchmarks show that PS-TTL achieves the state-of-the-art, highlighting its effectiveness. The code and model are available at https://github.com/gaoyingjay/PS-TTL.
Authors:Zeyu Yang, Nan Song, Wei Li, Xiatian Zhu, Li Zhang, Philip H. S. Torr
Abstract:
Existing top-performance autonomous driving systems typically rely on the multi-modal fusion strategy for reliable scene understanding. This design is however fundamentally restricted due to overlooking the modality-specific strengths and finally hampering the model performance. To address this limitation, in this work, we introduce a novel modality interaction strategy that allows individual per-modality representations to be learned and maintained throughout, enabling their unique characteristics to be exploited during the whole perception pipeline. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, we design DeepInteraction++, a multi-modal interaction framework characterized by a multi-modal representational interaction encoder and a multi-modal predictive interaction decoder. Specifically, the encoder is implemented as a dual-stream Transformer with specialized attention operation for information exchange and integration between separate modality-specific representations. Our multi-modal representational learning incorporates both object-centric, precise sampling-based feature alignment and global dense information spreading, essential for the more challenging planning task. The decoder is designed to iteratively refine the predictions by alternately aggregating information from separate representations in a unified modality-agnostic manner, realizing multi-modal predictive interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework on both 3D object detection and end-to-end autonomous driving tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/fudan-zvg/DeepInteraction.
Authors:Shixuan Gao, Pingping Zhang, Tianyu Yan, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment the most prominent objects in images. Advanced SOD methods often utilize various Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Transformers for deep feature extraction. However, these methods still deliver low performance and poor generalization in complex cases. Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been proposed as a visual fundamental model, which gives strong segmentation and generalization capabilities. Nonetheless, SAM requires accurate prompts of target objects, which are unavailable in SOD. Additionally, SAM lacks the utilization of multi-scale and multi-level information, as well as the incorporation of fine-grained details. To address these shortcomings, we propose a Multi-scale and Detail-enhanced SAM (MDSAM) for SOD. Specifically, we first introduce a Lightweight Multi-Scale Adapter (LMSA), which allows SAM to learn multi-scale information with very few trainable parameters. Then, we propose a Multi-Level Fusion Module (MLFM) to comprehensively utilize the multi-level information from the SAM's encoder. Finally, we propose a Detail Enhancement Module (DEM) to incorporate SAM with fine-grained details. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our model on multiple SOD datasets and its strong generalization on other segmentation tasks. The source code is released at https://github.com/BellyBeauty/MDSAM.
Authors:Tianfang Zhang, Lei Li, Yang Zhou, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Xiangyang Ji
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) mark a revolutionary advance in neural networks with their token mixer's powerful global context capability. However, the pairwise token affinity and complex matrix operations limit its deployment on resource-constrained scenarios and real-time applications, such as mobile devices, although considerable efforts have been made in previous works. In this paper, we introduce CAS-ViT: Convolutional Additive Self-attention Vision Transformers, to achieve a balance between efficiency and performance in mobile applications. Firstly, we argue that the capability of token mixers to obtain global contextual information hinges on multiple information interactions, such as spatial and channel domains. Subsequently, we propose Convolutional Additive Token Mixer (CATM) employing underlying spatial and channel attention as novel interaction forms. This module eliminates troublesome complex operations such as matrix multiplication and Softmax. We introduce Convolutional Additive Self-attention(CAS) block hybrid architecture and utilize CATM for each block. And further, we build a family of lightweight networks, which can be easily extended to various downstream tasks. Finally, we evaluate CAS-ViT across a variety of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our M and T model achieves 83.0\%/84.1\% top-1 with only 12M/21M parameters on ImageNet-1K. Meanwhile, throughput evaluations on GPUs, ONNX, and iPhones also demonstrate superior results compared to other state-of-the-art backbones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a better balance of performance, efficient inference and easy-to-deploy. Our code and model are available at: \url{https://github.com/Tianfang-Zhang/CAS-ViT}
Authors:Renjith Prasad, Chathurangi Shyalika, Ramtin Zand, Fadi El Kalach, Revathy Venkataramanan, Ramy Harik, Amit Sheth
Abstract:
Anomaly detection in manufacturing pipelines remains a critical challenge, intensified by the complexity and variability of industrial environments. This paper introduces AssemAI, an interpretable image-based anomaly detection system tailored for smart manufacturing pipelines. Utilizing a curated image dataset from an industry-focused rocket assembly pipeline, we address the challenge of imbalanced image data and demonstrate the importance of image-based methods in anomaly detection. Our primary contributions include deriving an image dataset, fine-tuning an object detection model YOLO-FF, and implementing a custom anomaly detection model for assembly pipelines. The proposed approach leverages domain knowledge in data preparation, model development and reasoning. We implement several anomaly detection models on the derived image dataset, including a Convolutional Neural Network, Vision Transformer (ViT), and pre-trained versions of these models. Additionally, we incorporate explainability techniques at both user and model levels, utilizing ontology for user-level explanations and SCORE-CAM for in-depth feature and model analysis. Finally, the best-performing anomaly detection model and YOLO-FF are deployed in a real-time setting. Our results include ablation studies on the baselines and a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed system. This work highlights the broader impact of advanced image-based anomaly detection in enhancing the reliability and efficiency of smart manufacturing processes. The image dataset, codes to reproduce the results and additional experiments are available at https://github.com/renjithk4/AssemAI.
Authors:Zhihao Lai, Chuanhao Liu, Shihui Sheng, Zhiqiang Zhang
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection in autonomous driving is critical yet challenging due to occlusions, varying object sizes, and complex urban environments. This paper introduces the KAN-RCBEVDepth method, an innovative approach aimed at enhancing 3D object detection by fusing multimodal sensor data from cameras, LiDAR, and millimeter-wave radar. Our unique Bird's Eye View-based approach significantly improves detection accuracy and efficiency by seamlessly integrating diverse sensor inputs, refining spatial relationship understanding, and optimizing computational procedures. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing techniques across multiple detection metrics, achieving a higher Mean Distance AP (0.389, 23\% improvement), a better ND Score (0.485, 17.1\% improvement), and a faster Evaluation Time (71.28s, 8\% faster). Additionally, the KAN-RCBEVDepth method significantly reduces errors compared to BEVDepth, with lower Transformation Error (0.6044, 13.8\% improvement), Scale Error (0.2780, 2.6\% improvement), Orientation Error (0.5830, 7.6\% improvement), Velocity Error (0.4244, 28.3\% improvement), and Attribute Error (0.2129, 3.2\% improvement). These findings suggest that our method offers enhanced accuracy, reliability, and efficiency, making it well-suited for dynamic and demanding autonomous driving scenarios. The code will be released in \url{https://github.com/laitiamo/RCBEVDepth-KAN}.
Authors:Zilin Chen, Shengnan Lu
Abstract:
Object detection is of paramount importance in biomedical image analysis, particularly for lesion identification. While current methodologies are proficient in identifying and pinpointing lesions, they often lack the precision needed to detect minute biomedical entities (e.g., abnormal cells, lung nodules smaller than 3 mm), which are critical in blood and lung pathology. To address this challenge, we propose CAF-YOLO, based on the YOLOv8 architecture, a nimble yet robust method for medical object detection that leverages the strengths of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers. To overcome the limitation of convolutional kernels, which have a constrained capacity to interact with distant information, we introduce an attention and convolution fusion module (ACFM). This module enhances the modeling of both global and local features, enabling the capture of long-term feature dependencies and spatial autocorrelation. Additionally, to improve the restricted single-scale feature aggregation inherent in feed-forward networks (FFN) within transformer architectures, we design a multi-scale neural network (MSNN). This network improves multi-scale information aggregation by extracting features across diverse scales. Experimental evaluations on widely used datasets, such as BCCD and LUNA16, validate the rationale and efficacy of CAF-YOLO. This methodology excels in detecting and precisely locating diverse and intricate micro-lesions within biomedical imagery. Our codes are available at https://github.com/xiaochen925/CAF-YOLO.
Authors:Muhammad Ali, Salman Khan
Abstract:
The complex marine environment exacerbates the challenges of object detection manifold. Marine trash endangers the aquatic ecosystem, presenting a persistent challenge. Accurate detection of marine deposits is crucial for mitigating this harm. Our work addresses underwater object detection by enhancing image quality and evaluating detection methods. We use Detectron2's backbone with various base models and configurations for this task.
We propose a novel channel stabilization technique alongside a simplified image enhancement model to reduce haze and color cast in training images, improving multi-scale object detection. Following image processing, we test different Detectron2 backbones for optimal detection accuracy. Additionally, we apply a sharpening filter with augmentation techniques to highlight object profiles for easier recognition.
Results are demonstrated on the TrashCan Dataset, both instance and material versions. The best-performing backbone method incorporates our channel stabilization and augmentation techniques. We also compare our Detectron2 detection results with the Deformable Transformer. In the instance version of TrashCan 1.0, our method achieves a 9.53% absolute increase in average precision for small objects and a 7% absolute gain in bounding box detection compared to the baseline. The code will be available on Code: https://github.com/aliman80/Underwater- Object-Detection-via-Channel-Stablization
Authors:Yabin Zhu, Qianwu Wang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Zhixiang Huang
Abstract:
The complementary benefits from visible and thermal infrared data are widely utilized in various computer vision task, such as visual tracking, semantic segmentation and object detection, but rarely explored in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). In this work, we contribute a large-scale Visible-Thermal video benchmark for MOT, called VT-MOT. VT-MOT has the following main advantages. 1) The data is large scale and high diversity. VT-MOT includes 582 video sequence pairs, 401k frame pairs from surveillance, drone, and handheld platforms. 2) The cross-modal alignment is highly accurate. We invite several professionals to perform both spatial and temporal alignment frame by frame. 3) The annotation is dense and high-quality. VT-MOT has 3.99 million annotation boxes annotated and double-checked by professionals, including heavy occlusion and object re-acquisition (object disappear and reappear) challenges. To provide a strong baseline, we design a simple yet effective tracking framework, which effectively fuses temporal information and complementary information of two modalities in a progressive manner, for robust visible-thermal MOT. A comprehensive experiment are conducted on VT-MOT and the results prove the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods. From the evaluation results and analysis, we specify several potential future directions for visible-thermal MOT. The project is released in https://github.com/wqw123wqw/PFTrack.
Authors:Camilo J. Vargas, Qianni Zhang, Ebroul Izquierdo
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel joint neural networks approach to address the challenging one-shot object recognition and detection tasks. Inspired by Siamese neural networks and state-of-art multi-box detection approaches, the joint neural networks are able to perform object recognition and detection for categories that remain unseen during the training process. Following the one-shot object recognition/detection constraints, the training and testing datasets do not contain overlapped classes, in other words, all the test classes remain unseen during training. The joint networks architecture is able to effectively compare pairs of images via stacked convolutional layers of the query and target inputs, recognising patterns of the same input query category without relying on previous training around this category. The proposed approach achieves 61.41% accuracy for one-shot object recognition on the MiniImageNet dataset and 47.1% mAP for one-shot object detection when trained on the COCO dataset and tested using the Pascal VOC dataset. Code available at https://github.com/cjvargasc/JNN recog and https://github.com/cjvargasc/JNN detection/
Authors:Zhe Huang, Shuo Wang, Yongcai Wang, Wanting Li, Deying Li, Lei Wang
Abstract:
Collaborative autonomous driving with multiple vehicles usually requires the data fusion from multiple modalities. To ensure effective fusion, the data from each individual modality shall maintain a reasonably high quality. However, in collaborative perception, the quality of object detection based on a modality is highly sensitive to the relative pose errors among the agents. It leads to feature misalignment and significantly reduces collaborative performance. To address this issue, we propose RoCo, a novel unsupervised framework to conduct iterative object matching and agent pose adjustment. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to model the pose correction problem in collaborative perception as an object matching task, which reliably associates common objects detected by different agents. On top of this, we propose a graph optimization process to adjust the agent poses by minimizing the alignment errors of the associated objects, and the object matching is re-done based on the adjusted agent poses. This process is carried out iteratively until convergence. Experimental study on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed framework RoCo consistently outperforms existing relevant methods in terms of the collaborative object detection performance, and exhibits highly desired robustness when the pose information of agents is with high-level noise. Ablation studies are also provided to show the impact of its key parameters and components. The code is released at https://github.com/HuangZhe885/RoCo.
Authors:Lv Tang, Bo Li
Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM), introduced by Meta AI Research as a generic object segmentation model, quickly garnered widespread attention and significantly influenced the academic community. To extend its application to video, Meta further develops Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a unified model capable of both video and image segmentation. SAM2 shows notable improvements over its predecessor in terms of applicable domains, promptable segmentation accuracy, and running speed. However, this report reveals a decline in SAM2's ability to perceive different objects in images without prompts in its auto mode, compared to SAM. Specifically, we employ the challenging task of camouflaged object detection to assess this performance decrease, hoping to inspire further exploration of the SAM model family by researchers. The results of this paper are provided in \url{https://github.com/luckybird1994/SAMCOD}.
Authors:Xiaofei Zhang, Yining Li, Jinping Wang, Xiangyi Qin, Ying Shen, Zhengping Fan, Xiaojun Tan
Abstract:
Perception systems of autonomous vehicles are susceptible to occlusion, especially when examined from a vehicle-centric perspective. Such occlusion can lead to overlooked object detections, e.g., larger vehicles such as trucks or buses may create blind spots where cyclists or pedestrians could be obscured, accentuating the safety concerns associated with such perception system limitations. To mitigate these challenges, the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) paradigm suggests employing an infrastructure-side perception system (IPS) to complement autonomous vehicles with a broader perceptual scope. Nevertheless, the scarcity of real-world 3D infrastructure-side datasets constrains the advancement of V2X technologies. To bridge these gaps, this paper introduces a new 3D infrastructure-side collaborative perception dataset, abbreviated as inscope. Notably, InScope is the first dataset dedicated to addressing occlusion challenges by strategically deploying multiple-position Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems on the infrastructure side. Specifically, InScope encapsulates a 20-day capture duration with 303 tracking trajectories and 187,787 3D bounding boxes annotated by experts. Through analysis of benchmarks, four different benchmarks are presented for open traffic scenarios, including collaborative 3D object detection, multisource data fusion, data domain transfer, and 3D multiobject tracking tasks. Additionally, a new metric is designed to quantify the impact of occlusion, facilitating the evaluation of detection degradation ratios among various algorithms. The Experimental findings showcase the enhanced performance of leveraging InScope to assist in detecting and tracking 3D multiobjects in real-world scenarios, particularly in tracking obscured, small, and distant objects. The dataset and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/xf-zh/InScope.
Authors:Kuo Wang, Lechao Cheng, Weikai Chen, Pingping Zhang, Liang Lin, Fan Zhou, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
Learning from pseudo-labels that generated with VLMs~(Vision Language Models) has been shown as a promising solution to assist open vocabulary detection (OVD) in recent studies. However, due to the domain gap between VLM and vision-detection tasks, pseudo-labels produced by the VLMs are prone to be noisy, while the training design of the detector further amplifies the bias. In this work, we investigate the root cause of VLMs' biased prediction under the OVD context. Our observations lead to a simple yet effective paradigm, coded MarvelOVD, that generates significantly better training targets and optimizes the learning procedure in an online manner by marrying the capability of the detector with the vision-language model. Our key insight is that the detector itself can act as a strong auxiliary guidance to accommodate VLM's inability of understanding both the ``background'' and the context of a proposal within the image. Based on it, we greatly purify the noisy pseudo-labels via Online Mining and propose Adaptive Reweighting to effectively suppress the biased training boxes that are not well aligned with the target object. In addition, we also identify a neglected ``base-novel-conflict'' problem and introduce stratified label assignments to prevent it. Extensive experiments on COCO and LVIS datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-arts by significant margins. Codes are available at https://github.com/wkfdb/MarvelOVD
Authors:Xinhao Luo, Man Yao, Yuhong Chou, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
Abstract:
Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have bio-plausibility and low-power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Applications of SNNs are currently limited to simple classification tasks because of their poor performance. In this work, we focus on bridging the performance gap between ANNs and SNNs on object detection. Our design revolves around network architecture and spiking neuron. First, the overly complex module design causes spike degradation when the YOLO series is converted to the corresponding spiking version. We design a SpikeYOLO architecture to solve this problem by simplifying the vanilla YOLO and incorporating meta SNN blocks. Second, object detection is more sensitive to quantization errors in the conversion of membrane potentials into binary spikes by spiking neurons. To address this challenge, we design a new spiking neuron that activates Integer values during training while maintaining spike-driven by extending virtual timesteps during inference. The proposed method is validated on both static and neuromorphic object detection datasets. On the static COCO dataset, we obtain 66.2% mAP@50 and 48.9% mAP@50:95, which is +15.0% and +18.7% higher than the prior state-of-the-art SNN, respectively. On the neuromorphic Gen1 dataset, we achieve 67.2% mAP@50, which is +2.5% greater than the ANN with equivalent architecture, and the energy efficiency is improved by 5.7*. Code: https://github.com/BICLab/SpikeYOLO
Authors:Zewen Du, Zhenjiang Hu, Guiyu Zhao, Ying Jin, Hongbin Ma
Abstract:
Object detection in aerial images has always been a challenging task due to the generally small size of the objects. Most current detectors prioritize the development of new detection frameworks, often overlooking research on fundamental components such as feature pyramid networks. In this paper, we introduce the Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Transformer (CFPT), a novel upsampler-free feature pyramid network designed specifically for small object detection in aerial images. CFPT incorporates two meticulously designed attention blocks with linear computational complexity: Cross-Layer Channel-Wise Attention (CCA) and Cross-Layer Spatial-Wise Attention (CSA). CCA achieves cross-layer interaction by dividing channel-wise token groups to perceive cross-layer global information along the spatial dimension, while CSA enables cross-layer interaction by dividing spatial-wise token groups to perceive cross-layer global information along the channel dimension. By integrating these modules, CFPT enables efficient cross-layer interaction in a single step, thereby avoiding the semantic gap and information loss associated with element-wise summation and layer-by-layer transmission. In addition, CFPT incorporates global contextual information, which improves detection performance for small objects. To further enhance location awareness during cross-layer interaction, we propose the Cross-Layer Consistent Relative Positional Encoding (CCPE) based on inter-layer mutual receptive fields. We evaluate the effectiveness of CFPT on three challenging object detection datasets in aerial images: VisDrone2019-DET, TinyPerson, and xView. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFPT outperforms state-of-the-art feature pyramid networks while incurring lower computational costs. The code is available at https://github.com/duzw9311/CFPT.
Authors:Yuheng Shi, Tong Zhang, Xiaojie Guo
Abstract:
Compared with still image object detection, video object detection (VOD) needs to particularly concern the high across-frame variation in object appearance, and the diverse deterioration in some frames. In principle, the detection in a certain frame of a video can benefit from information in other frames. Thus, how to effectively aggregate features across different frames is key to the target problem. Most of contemporary aggregation methods are tailored for two-stage detectors, suffering from high computational costs due to the dual-stage nature. On the other hand, although one-stage detectors have made continuous progress in handling static images, their applicability to VOD lacks sufficient exploration. To tackle the above issues, this study invents a very simple yet potent strategy of feature selection and aggregation, gaining significant accuracy at marginal computational expense. Concretely, for cutting the massive computation and memory consumption from the dense prediction characteristic of one-stage object detectors, we first condense candidate features from dense prediction maps. Then, the relationship between a target frame and its reference frames is evaluated to guide the aggregation. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to validate the efficacy of our design, and showcase its advantage over other cutting-edge VOD methods in both effectiveness and efficiency. Notably, our model reaches \emph{a new record performance, i.e., 92.9\% AP50 at over 30 FPS on the ImageNet VID dataset on a single 3090 GPU}, making it a compelling option for large-scale or real-time applications. The implementation is simple, and accessible at \url{https://github.com/YuHengsss/YOLOV}.
Authors:Tianxiao Zhang, Wenju Xu, Bo Luo, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
The Vision Transformer (ViT) leverages the Transformer's encoder to capture global information by dividing images into patches and achieves superior performance across various computer vision tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism of ViT captures the global context from the outset, overlooking the inherent relationships between neighboring pixels in images or videos. Transformers mainly focus on global information while ignoring the fine-grained local details. Consequently, ViT lacks inductive bias during image or video dataset training. In contrast, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), with their reliance on local filters, possess an inherent inductive bias, making them more efficient and quicker to converge than ViT with less data. In this paper, we present a lightweight Depth-Wise Convolution module as a shortcut in ViT models, bypassing entire Transformer blocks to ensure the models capture both local and global information with minimal overhead. Additionally, we introduce two architecture variants, allowing the Depth-Wise Convolution modules to be applied to multiple Transformer blocks for parameter savings, and incorporating independent parallel Depth-Wise Convolution modules with different kernels to enhance the acquisition of local information. The proposed approach significantly boosts the performance of ViT models on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation by a large margin, especially on small datasets, as evaluated on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet for image classification, and COCO for object detection and instance segmentation. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/ZTX-100/Efficient_ViT_with_DW.
Authors:Juhan Cha, Minseok Joo, Jihwan Park, Sanghyeok Lee, Injae Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Abstract:
Recent advancements in 3D object detection have benefited from multi-modal information from the multi-view cameras and LiDAR sensors. However, the inherent disparities between the modalities pose substantial challenges. We observe that existing multi-modal 3D object detection methods heavily rely on the LiDAR sensor, treating the camera as an auxiliary modality for augmenting semantic details. This often leads to not only underutilization of camera data but also significant performance degradation in scenarios where LiDAR data is unavailable. Additionally, existing fusion methods overlook the detrimental impact of sensor noise induced by environmental changes, on detection performance. In this paper, we propose MEFormer to address the LiDAR over-reliance problem by harnessing critical information for 3D object detection from every available modality while concurrently safeguarding against corrupted signals during the fusion process. Specifically, we introduce Modality Agnostic Decoding (MOAD) that extracts geometric and semantic features with a shared transformer decoder regardless of input modalities and provides promising improvement with a single modality as well as multi-modality. Additionally, our Proximity-based Modality Ensemble (PME) module adaptively utilizes the strengths of each modality depending on the environment while mitigating the effects of a noisy sensor. Our MEFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance of 73.9% NDS and 71.5% mAP in the nuScenes validation set. Extensive analyses validate that our MEFormer improves robustness against challenging conditions such as sensor malfunctions or environmental changes. The source code is available at https://github.com/hanchaa/MEFormer
Authors:Haoran Zhu, Yifan Zhou, Chang Xu, Ruixiang Zhang, Wen Yang
Abstract:
Fine-Grained Object Detection (FGOD) is a critical task in high-resolution aerial image analysis. This letter introduces Orthogonal Mapping (OM), a simple yet effective method aimed at addressing the challenge of semantic confusion inherent in FGOD. OM introduces orthogonal constraints in the feature space by decoupling features from the last layer of the classification branch with a class-wise orthogonal vector basis. This effectively mitigates semantic confusion and enhances classification accuracy. Moreover, OM can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream object detectors. Extensive experiments conducted on three FGOD datasets (FAIR1M, ShipRSImageNet, and MAR20) demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Notably, with just one line of code, OM achieves a 4.08% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) over FCOS on the ShipRSImageNet dataset. Codes are released at https://github.com/ZhuHaoranEIS/Orthogonal-FGOD.
Authors:Qing Su, Shihao Ji
Abstract:
Distillation-based self-supervised learning typically leads to more compressed representations due to its radical clustering process and the implementation of a sharper target distribution. To overcome this limitation and preserve more information from input, we introduce UDI, conceptualized as Unsqueezed Distillation-based self-supervised learning (SSL). UDI enriches the learned representation by encouraging multimodal prediction distilled from a consolidated profile of local predictions that are derived via stratified sampling. Our evaluations show that UDI not only promotes semantically meaningful representations at instance level, delivering superior or competitive results to state-of-the-art SSL methods in image classification, but also effectively preserves the nuisance of input, which yields significant improvement in dense prediction tasks, including object detection and segmentation. Additionally, UDI performs competitively in low-shot image classification, improving the scalability of joint-embedding pipelines. Various visualizations and ablation studies are presented to further elucidate the mechanisms behind UDI. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ISL-CV/udi.
Authors:Hasib Zunair, A. Ben Hamza
Abstract:
Localizing objects in an unsupervised manner poses significant challenges due to the absence of key visual information such as the appearance, type and number of objects, as well as the lack of labeled object classes typically available in supervised settings. While recent approaches to unsupervised object localization have demonstrated significant progress by leveraging self-supervised visual representations, they often require computationally intensive training processes, resulting in high resource demands in terms of computation, learnable parameters, and data. They also lack explicit modeling of visual context, potentially limiting their accuracy in object localization. To tackle these challenges, we propose a single-stage learning framework, dubbed PEEKABOO, for unsupervised object localization by learning context-based representations at both the pixel- and shape-level of the localized objects through image masking. The key idea is to selectively hide parts of an image and leverage the remaining image information to infer the location of objects without explicit supervision. The experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, across various benchmark datasets, demonstrate the simplicity, effectiveness and competitive performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods in both single object discovery and unsupervised salient object detection tasks. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/hasibzunair/peekaboo
Authors:Saad Lahlali, Nicolas Granger, Hervé Le Borgne, Quoc-Cuong Pham
Abstract:
3D object detection plays a crucial role in various applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotics and augmented reality. However, training 3D detectors requires a costly precise annotation, which is a hindrance to scaling annotation to large datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a weakly supervised 3D annotator that relies solely on 2D bounding box annotations from images, along with size priors. One major problem is that supervising a 3D detection model using only 2D boxes is not reliable due to ambiguities between different 3D poses and their identical 2D projection. We introduce a simple yet effective and generic solution: we build 3D proxy objects with annotations by construction and add them to the training dataset. Our method requires only size priors to adapt to new classes. To better align 2D supervision with 3D detection, our method ensures depth invariance with a novel expression of the 2D losses. Finally, to detect more challenging instances, our annotator follows an offline pseudo-labelling scheme which gradually improves its 3D pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method not only performs on-par or above previous works on the Car category, but also achieves performance close to fully supervised methods on more challenging classes. We further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method by being the first to experiment on the more challenging nuScenes dataset. We additionally propose a setting where weak labels are obtained from a 2D detector pre-trained on MS-COCO instead of human annotations. The code is available at https://github.com/CEA-LIST/ALPI
Authors:Jiasen Wang, Zhenglin Li, Ke Sun, Xianyuan Liu, Yang Zhou
Abstract:
Sparse query-based paradigms have achieved significant success in multi-view 3D detection for autonomous vehicles. Current research faces challenges in balancing between enlarging receptive fields and reducing interference when aggregating multi-view features. Moreover, different poses of cameras present challenges in training global attention models. To address these problems, this paper proposes a divided view method, in which features are modeled globally via the visibility crossattention mechanism, but interact only with partial features in a divided local virtual space. This effectively reduces interference from other irrelevant features and alleviates the training difficulties of the transformer by decoupling the position embedding from camera poses. Additionally, 2D historical RoI features are incorporated into the object-centric temporal modeling to utilize highlevel visual semantic information. The model is trained using a one-to-many assignment strategy to facilitate stability. Our framework, named DVPE, achieves state-of-the-art performance (57.2% mAP and 64.5% NDS) on the nuScenes test set. Codes will be available at https://github.com/dop0/DVPE.
Authors:Benjamin Wilson, Nicholas Autio Mitchell, Jhony Kaesemodel Pontes, James Hays
Abstract:
Lidar-based perception pipelines rely on 3D object detection models to interpret complex scenes. While multiple representations for lidar exist, the range-view is enticing since it losslessly encodes the entire lidar sensor output. In this work, we achieve state-of-the-art amongst range-view 3D object detection models without using multiple techniques proposed in past range-view literature. We explore range-view 3D object detection across two modern datasets with substantially different properties: Argoverse 2 and Waymo Open. Our investigation reveals key insights: (1) input feature dimensionality significantly influences the overall performance, (2) surprisingly, employing a classification loss grounded in 3D spatial proximity works as well or better compared to more elaborate IoU-based losses, and (3) addressing non-uniform lidar density via a straightforward range subsampling technique outperforms existing multi-resolution, range-conditioned networks. Our experiments reveal that techniques proposed in recent range-view literature are not needed to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Combining the above findings, we establish a new state-of-the-art model for range-view 3D object detection -- improving AP by 2.2% on the Waymo Open dataset while maintaining a runtime of 10 Hz. We establish the first range-view model on the Argoverse 2 dataset and outperform strong voxel-based baselines. All models are multi-class and open-source. Code is available at https://github.com/benjaminrwilson/range-view-3d-detection.
Authors:Weiming Zhuang, Jian Xu, Chen Chen, Jingtao Li, Lingjuan Lyu
Abstract:
We present COALA, a vision-centric Federated Learning (FL) platform, and a suite of benchmarks for practical FL scenarios, which we categorize into three levels: task, data, and model. At the task level, COALA extends support from simple classification to 15 computer vision tasks, including object detection, segmentation, pose estimation, and more. It also facilitates federated multiple-task learning, allowing clients to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. At the data level, COALA goes beyond supervised FL to benchmark both semi-supervised FL and unsupervised FL. It also benchmarks feature distribution shifts other than commonly considered label distribution shifts. In addition to dealing with static data, it supports federated continual learning for continuously changing data in real-world scenarios. At the model level, COALA benchmarks FL with split models and different models in different clients. COALA platform offers three degrees of customization for these practical FL scenarios, including configuration customization, components customization, and workflow customization. We conduct systematic benchmarking experiments for the practical FL scenarios and highlight potential opportunities for further advancements in FL. Codes are open sourced at https://github.com/SonyResearch/COALA.
Authors:Trinh Le Ba Khanh, Huy-Hung Nguyen, Long Hoang Pham, Duong Nguyen-Ngoc Tran, Jae Wook Jeon
Abstract:
In object detection, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, UDA's reliance on labeled source data restricts its adaptability in privacy-related scenarios. This study focuses on source-free object detection (SFOD), which adapts a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain without using labeled source data. Recent advancements in self-training, particularly with the Mean Teacher (MT) framework, show promise for SFOD deployment. However, the absence of source supervision significantly compromises the stability of these approaches. We identify two primary issues, (1) uncontrollable degradation of the teacher model due to inopportune updates from the student model, and (2) the student model's tendency to replicate errors from incorrect pseudo labels, leading to it being trapped in a local optimum. Both factors contribute to a detrimental circular dependency, resulting in rapid performance degradation in recent self-training frameworks. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Dynamic Retraining-Updating (DRU) mechanism, which actively manages the student training and teacher updating processes to achieve co-evolutionary training. Additionally, we introduce Historical Student Loss to mitigate the influence of incorrect pseudo labels. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the SFOD setting on multiple domain adaptation benchmarks, comparable to or even surpassing advanced UDA methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/lbktrinh/DRU
Authors:Youngmin Oh, Hyung-Il Kim, Seong Tae Kim, Jung Uk Kim
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is an important challenging task in autonomous driving. Existing methods mainly focus on performing 3D detection in ideal weather conditions, characterized by scenarios with clear and optimal visibility. However, the challenge of autonomous driving requires the ability to handle changes in weather conditions, such as foggy weather, not just clear weather. We introduce MonoWAD, a novel weather-robust monocular 3D object detector with a weather-adaptive diffusion model. It contains two components: (1) the weather codebook to memorize the knowledge of the clear weather and generate a weather-reference feature for any input, and (2) the weather-adaptive diffusion model to enhance the feature representation of the input feature by incorporating a weather-reference feature. This serves an attention role in indicating how much improvement is needed for the input feature according to the weather conditions. To achieve this goal, we introduce a weather-adaptive enhancement loss to enhance the feature representation under both clear and foggy weather conditions. Extensive experiments under various weather conditions demonstrate that MonoWAD achieves weather-robust monocular 3D object detection. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/MonoWAD.
Authors:Kai Liu, Zhihang Fu, Sheng Jin, Ze Chen, Fan Zhou, Rongxin Jiang, Yaowu Chen, Jieping Ye
Abstract:
Enlarging input images is a straightforward and effective approach to promote small object detection. However, simple image enlargement is significantly expensive on both computations and GPU memory. In fact, small objects are usually sparsely distributed and locally clustered. Therefore, massive feature extraction computations are wasted on the non-target background area of images. Recent works have tried to pick out target-containing regions using an extra network and perform conventional object detection, but the newly introduced computation limits their final performance. In this paper, we propose to reuse the detector's backbone to conduct feature-level object-seeking and patch-slicing, which can avoid redundant feature extraction and reduce the computation cost. Incorporating a sparse detection head, we are able to detect small objects on high-resolution inputs (e.g., 1080P or larger) for superior performance. The resulting Efficient Small Object Detection (ESOD) approach is a generic framework, which can be applied to both CNN- and ViT-based detectors to save the computation and GPU memory costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our method. In particular, our method consistently surpasses the SOTA detectors by a large margin (e.g., 8% gains on AP) on the representative VisDrone, UAVDT, and TinyPerson datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/esod.
Authors:Weiying Xie, Yusi Zhang, Tianlin Hui, Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Yunsong Li
Abstract:
Multimodal object detection offers a promising prospect to facilitate robust detection in various visual conditions. However, existing two-stream backbone networks are challenged by complex fusion and substantial parameter increments. This is primarily due to large data distribution biases of multimodal homogeneous information. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal object detector, named Low-rank Modal Adaptors (LMA) with a shared backbone. The shared parameters enhance the consistency of homogeneous information, while lightweight modal adaptors focus on modality unique features. Furthermore, we design an adaptive rank allocation strategy to adapt to the varying heterogeneity at different feature levels. When applied to two multimodal object detection datasets, experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on DroneVehicle, LMA attains a 10.4% accuracy improvement over the state-of-the-art method with a 149M-parameters reduction. The code is available at https://github.com/zyszxhy/FoRA.
Our work was submitted to ACM MM in April 2024, but was rejected. We will continue to refine our work and paper writing next, mainly including proof of theory and multi-task applications of FoRA.
Authors:Brian K. S. Isaac-Medina, Yona Falinie A. Gaus, Neelanjan Bhowmik, Toby P. Breckon
Abstract:
Object detection is a pivotal task in computer vision that has received significant attention in previous years. Nonetheless, the capability of a detector to localise objects out of the training distribution remains unexplored. Whilst recent approaches in object-level out-of-distribution (OoD) detection heavily rely on class labels, such approaches contradict truly open-world scenarios where the class distribution is often unknown. In this context, anomaly detection focuses on detecting unseen instances rather than classifying detections as OoD. This work aims to bridge this gap by leveraging an open-world object detector and an OoD detector via virtual outlier synthesis. This is achieved by using the detector backbone features to first learn object pseudo-classes via self-supervision. These pseudo-classes serve as the basis for class-conditional virtual outlier sampling of anomalous features that are classified by an OoD head. Our approach empowers our overall object detector architecture to learn anomaly-aware feature representations without relying on class labels, hence enabling truly open-world object anomaly detection. Empirical validation of our approach demonstrates its effectiveness across diverse datasets encompassing various imaging modalities (visible, infrared, and X-ray). Moreover, our method establishes state-of-the-art performance on object-level anomaly detection, achieving an average recall score improvement of over 5.4% for natural images and 23.5% for a security X-ray dataset compared to the current approaches. In addition, our method detects anomalies in datasets where current approaches fail. Code available at https://github.com/KostadinovShalon/oln-ssos.
Authors:Ammar Ahmed, Abdul Manaf
Abstract:
Wrist fractures are highly prevalent among children and can significantly impact their daily activities, such as attending school, participating in sports, and performing basic self-care tasks. If not treated properly, these fractures can result in chronic pain, reduced wrist functionality, and other long-term complications. Recently, advancements in object detection have shown promise in enhancing fracture detection, with systems achieving accuracy comparable to, or even surpassing, that of human radiologists. The YOLO series, in particular, has demonstrated notable success in this domain. This study is the first to provide a thorough evaluation of various YOLOv10 variants to assess their performance in detecting pediatric wrist fractures using the GRAZPEDWRI-DX dataset. It investigates how changes in model complexity, scaling the architecture, and implementing a dual-label assignment strategy can enhance detection performance. Experimental results indicate that our trained model achieved mean average precision (mAP@50-95) of 51.9\% surpassing the current YOLOv9 benchmark of 43.3\% on this dataset. This represents an improvement of 8.6\%. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/ammarlodhi255/YOLOv10-Fracture-Detection
Authors:Zhili Chen, Shuangjie Xu, Maosheng Ye, Zian Qian, Xiaoyi Zou, Dit-Yan Yeung, Qifeng Chen
Abstract:
The Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation is a critical factor that directly impacts the 3D object detection performance, but the traditional BEV grid representation induces quadratic computational cost as the spatial resolution grows. To address this limitation, we present a new camera-based 3D object detector with high-resolution vector representation: VectorFormer. The presented high-resolution vector representation is combined with the lower-resolution BEV representation to efficiently exploit 3D geometry from multi-camera images at a high resolution through our two novel modules: vector scattering and gathering. To this end, the learned vector representation with richer scene contexts can serve as the decoding query for final predictions. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in NDS and inference time. Furthermore, we investigate query-BEV-based methods incorporated with our proposed vector representation and observe a consistent performance improvement.
Authors:Jingwei Guo, Yitai Cheng, Meihui Wang, Ilya Ilyankou, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Xiaowei Gao, Nicola Christie, James Haworth
Abstract:
Cyclists face a disproportionate risk of injury, yet conventional crash records are too limited to reconstruct the circumstances of incidents or to diagnose risk at the finer spatial and temporal detail needed for targeted interventions. Recently, naturalistic studies have gained traction as a way to capture the complex behavioural and infrastructural factors that contribute to crashes. These approaches typically involve the collection and analysis of video data. A video promising format is panoramic video, which can record 360-degree views around a rider. However, its use is limited by severe distortions, large numbers of small objects and boundary continuity. This study addresses these challenges by proposing a novel three-step framework: (1) enhancing object detection accuracy on panoramic imagery by segmenting and projecting the original 360-degree images into four perspective sub-images, thus reducing distortion; (2) modifying multi-object tracking models to incorporate boundary continuity and object category information for improved tracking consistency; and (3) validating the proposed approach through a real-world application focused on detecting overtaking manoeuvres by vehicles around cyclists. The methodology is evaluated using panoramic videos recorded by cyclists on London's roadways under diverse conditions. Experimental results demonstrate notable improvements over baseline methods, achieving higher average precision across varying image resolutions. Moreover, the enhanced tracking approach yields a 3.0% increase in multi-object tracking accuracy and a 4.6% improvement in identification F-score. The overtaking detection task achieves a high F-score of 0.81, illustrating the practical effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world cycling safety scenarios. The code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/SpaceTimeLab/360_object_tracking) to ensure reproducibility.
Authors:JongHyun Park, Yechan Kim, Moongu Jeon
Abstract:
Recently, numerous methods have achieved impressive performance in remote sensing object detection, relying on convolution or transformer architectures. Such detectors typically have a feature backbone to extract useful features from raw input images. A common practice in current detectors is initializing the backbone with pre-trained weights available online. Fine-tuning the backbone is typically required to generate features suitable for remote-sensing images. While the prolonged training could lead to over-fitting, hindering the extraction of basic visual features, it can enable models to gradually extract deeper insights and richer representations from remote sensing data. Striking a balance between these competing factors is critical for achieving optimal performance. In this study, we aim to investigate the performance and characteristics of remote sensing object detection models under very long training schedules, and propose a novel method named Dynamic Backbone Freezing (DBF) for feature backbone fine-tuning on remote sensing object detection under long-term training. Our method addresses the dilemma of whether the backbone should extract low-level generic features or possess specific knowledge of the remote sensing domain, by introducing a module called 'Freezing Scheduler' to manage the update of backbone features during long-term training dynamically. Extensive experiments on DOTA and DIOR-R show that our approach enables more accurate model learning while substantially reducing computational costs in long-term training. Besides, it can be seamlessly adopted without additional effort due to its straightforward design. The code is available at https://github.com/unique-chan/dbf.
Authors:Ayman Beghdadi, Azeddine Beghdadi, Mohib Ullah, Faouzi Alaya Cheikh, Malik Mallem
Abstract:
Scene understanding plays an important role in several high-level computer vision applications, such as autonomous vehicles, intelligent video surveillance, or robotics. However, too few solutions have been proposed for indoor/outdoor scene classification to ensure scene context adaptability for computer vision frameworks. We propose the first Lightweight Hybrid Graph Convolutional Neural Network (LH-GCNN)-CNN framework as an add-on to object detection models. The proposed approach uses the output of the CNN object detection model to predict the observed scene type by generating a coherent GCNN representing the semantic and geometric content of the observed scene. This new method, applied to natural scenes, achieves an efficiency of over 90\% for scene classification in a COCO-derived dataset containing a large number of different scenes, while requiring fewer parameters than traditional CNN methods. For the benefit of the scientific community, we will make the source code publicly available: https://github.com/Aymanbegh/Hybrid-GCNN-CNN.
Authors:Feyza Yavuz, Baris Can Cam, Adnan Harun Dogan, Kemal Oksuz, Emre Akbas, Sinan Kalkan
Abstract:
Ranking-based loss functions, such as Average Precision Loss and Rank&Sort Loss, outperform widely used score-based losses in object detection. These loss functions better align with the evaluation criteria, have fewer hyperparameters, and offer robustness against the imbalance between positive and negative classes. However, they require pairwise comparisons among $P$ positive and $N$ negative predictions, introducing a time complexity of $\mathcal{O}(PN)$, which is prohibitive since $N$ is often large (e.g., $10^8$ in ATSS). Despite their advantages, the widespread adoption of ranking-based losses has been hindered by their high time and space complexities.
In this paper, we focus on improving the efficiency of ranking-based loss functions. To this end, we propose Bucketed Ranking-based Losses which group negative predictions into $B$ buckets ($B \ll N$) in order to reduce the number of pairwise comparisons so that time complexity can be reduced. Our method enhances the time complexity, reducing it to $\mathcal{O}(\max (N \log(N), P^2))$. To validate our method and show its generality, we conducted experiments on 2 different tasks, 3 different datasets, 7 different detectors. We show that Bucketed Ranking-based (BR) Losses yield the same accuracy with the unbucketed versions and provide $2\times$ faster training on average. We also train, for the first time, transformer-based object detectors using ranking-based losses, thanks to the efficiency of our BR. When we train CoDETR, a state-of-the-art transformer-based object detector, using our BR Loss, we consistently outperform its original results over several different backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/blisgard/BucketedRankingBasedLosses
Authors:Abdelrahman Shaker, Syed Talal Wasim, Salman Khan, Juergen Gall, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
State-space models (SSMs) have recently shown promise in capturing long-range dependencies with subquadratic computational complexity, making them attractive for various applications. However, purely SSM-based models face critical challenges related to stability and achieving state-of-the-art performance in computer vision tasks. Our paper addresses the challenges of scaling SSM-based models for computer vision, particularly the instability and inefficiency of large model sizes. We introduce a parameter-efficient modulated group mamba layer that divides the input channels into four groups and applies our proposed SSM-based efficient Visual Single Selective Scanning (VSSS) block independently to each group, with each VSSS block scanning in one of the four spatial directions. The Modulated Group Mamba layer also wraps the four VSSS blocks into a channel modulation operator to improve cross-channel communication. Furthermore, we introduce a distillation-based training objective to stabilize the training of large models, leading to consistent performance gains. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed contributions, leading to superior performance over existing methods for image classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection, instance segmentation on MS-COCO, and semantic segmentation on ADE20K. Our tiny variant with 23M parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance with a classification top-1 accuracy of 83.3% on ImageNet-1K, while being 26% efficient in terms of parameters, compared to the best existing Mamba design of same model size. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/GroupMamba.
Authors:Guowen Zhang, Junsong Fan, Liyi Chen, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Zhen Lei, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
3D object detection is an indispensable component for scene understanding. However, the annotation of large-scale 3D datasets requires significant human effort. To tackle this problem, many methods adopt weakly supervised 3D object detection that estimates 3D boxes by leveraging 2D boxes and scene/class-specific priors. However, these approaches generally depend on sophisticated manual priors, which is hard to generalize to novel categories and scenes. In this paper, we are motivated to propose a general approach, which can be easily adapted to new scenes and/or classes. A unified framework is developed for learning 3D object detectors from RGB images and associated 2D boxes. In specific, we propose three general components: prior injection module to obtain general object geometric priors from LLM model, 2D space projection constraint to minimize the discrepancy between the boundaries of projected 3D boxes and their corresponding 2D boxes on the image plane, and 3D space geometry constraint to build a Point-to-Box alignment loss to further refine the pose of estimated 3D boxes. Experiments on KITTI and SUN-RGBD datasets demonstrate that our method yields surprisingly high-quality 3D bounding boxes with only 2D annotation. The source code is available at https://github.com/gwenzhang/GGA.
Authors:Ilhoon Yoon, Hyeongjun Kwon, Jin Kim, Junyoung Park, Hyunsung Jang, Kwanghoon Sohn
Abstract:
Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) is a promising strategy for deploying trained detectors to new, unlabeled domains without accessing source data, addressing significant concerns around data privacy and efficiency. Most SFOD methods leverage a Mean-Teacher (MT) self-training paradigm relying heavily on High-confidence Pseudo Labels (HPL). However, these HPL often overlook small instances that undergo significant appearance changes with domain shifts. Additionally, HPL ignore instances with low confidence due to the scarcity of training samples, resulting in biased adaptation toward familiar instances from the source domain. To address this limitation, we introduce the Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation (LPLD) loss within the Mean-Teacher based SFOD framework. This novel approach is designed to leverage the proposals from Region Proposal Network (RPN), which potentially encompasses hard-to-detect objects in unfamiliar domains. Initially, we extract HPL using a standard pseudo-labeling technique and mine a set of Low-confidence Pseudo Labels (LPL) from proposals generated by RPN, leaving those that do not overlap significantly with HPL. These LPL are further refined by leveraging class-relation information and reducing the effect of inherent noise for the LPLD loss calculation. Furthermore, we use feature distance to adaptively weight the LPLD loss to focus on LPL containing a larger foreground area. Our method outperforms previous SFOD methods on four cross-domain object detection benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LPLD loss leads to effective adaptation by reducing false negatives and facilitating the use of domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. Code is available at https://github.com/junia3/LPLD.
Authors:Zhuguanyu Wu, Jiaxin Chen, Hanwen Zhong, Di Huang, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) has become one of the most prevailing fundamental backbone networks in the computer vision community. Despite the high accuracy, deploying it in real applications raises critical challenges including the high computational cost and inference latency. Recently, the post-training quantization (PTQ) technique has emerged as a promising way to enhance ViT's efficiency. Nevertheless, existing PTQ approaches for ViT suffer from the inflexible quantization on the post-Softmax and post-GELU activations that obey the power-law-like distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel non-uniform quantizer, dubbed the Adaptive Logarithm AdaLog (AdaLog) quantizer. It optimizes the logarithmic base to accommodate the power-law-like distribution of activations, while simultaneously allowing for hardware-friendly quantization and de-quantization. By employing the bias reparameterization, the AdaLog quantizer is applicable to both the post-Softmax and post-GELU activations. Moreover, we develop an efficient Fast Progressive Combining Search (FPCS) strategy to determine the optimal logarithm base for AdaLog, as well as the scaling factors and zero points for the uniform quantizers. Extensive experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for various ViT-based architectures and vision tasks including classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/GoatWu/AdaLog.
Authors:Irina Tolstykh, Mikhail Chernyshov, Maksim Kuprashevich
Abstract:
Conventional object detection models are usually limited by the data on which they were trained and by the category logic they define. With the recent rise of Language-Visual Models, new methods have emerged that are not restricted to these fixed categories. Despite their flexibility, such Open Vocabulary detection models still fall short in accuracy compared to traditional models with fixed classes. At the same time, more accurate data-specific models face challenges when there is a need to extend classes or merge different datasets for training. The latter often cannot be combined due to different logics or conflicting class definitions, making it difficult to improve a model without compromising its performance. In this paper, we introduce CerberusDet, a framework with a multi-headed model designed for handling multiple object detection tasks. Proposed model is built on the YOLO architecture and efficiently shares visual features from both backbone and neck components, while maintaining separate task heads. This approach allows CerberusDet to perform very efficiently while still delivering optimal results. We evaluated the model on the PASCAL VOC dataset and Objects365 dataset to demonstrate its abilities. CerberusDet achieved state-of-the-art results with 36% less inference time. The more tasks are trained together, the more efficient the proposed model becomes compared to running individual models sequentially. The training and inference code, as well as the model, are available as open-source (https://github.com/ai-forever/CerberusDet).
Authors:Hu Cao, Zehua Zhang, Yan Xia, Xinyi Li, Jiahao Xia, Guang Chen, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
In frame-based vision, object detection faces substantial performance degradation under challenging conditions due to the limited sensing capability of conventional cameras. Event cameras output sparse and asynchronous events, providing a potential solution to solve these problems. However, effectively fusing two heterogeneous modalities remains an open issue. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical feature refinement network for event-frame fusion. The core concept is the design of the coarse-to-fine fusion module, denoted as the cross-modality adaptive feature refinement (CAFR) module. In the initial phase, the bidirectional cross-modality interaction (BCI) part facilitates information bridging from two distinct sources. Subsequently, the features are further refined by aligning the channel-level mean and variance in the two-fold adaptive feature refinement (TAFR) part. We conducted extensive experiments on two benchmarks: the low-resolution PKU-DDD17-Car dataset and the high-resolution DSEC dataset. Experimental results show that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art by an impressive margin of $\textbf{8.0}\%$ on the DSEC dataset. Besides, our method exhibits significantly better robustness (\textbf{69.5}\% versus \textbf{38.7}\%) when introducing 15 different corruption types to the frame images. The code can be found at the link (https://github.com/HuCaoFighting/FRN).
Authors:Han Zhou, Wei Dong, Xiaohong Liu, Shuaicheng Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai, Jun Chen
Abstract:
Most existing Low-light Image Enhancement (LLIE) methods either directly map Low-Light (LL) to Normal-Light (NL) images or use semantic or illumination maps as guides. However, the ill-posed nature of LLIE and the difficulty of semantic retrieval from impaired inputs limit these methods, especially in extremely low-light conditions. To address this issue, we present a new LLIE network via Generative LAtent feature based codebook REtrieval (GLARE), in which the codebook prior is derived from undegraded NL images using a Vector Quantization (VQ) strategy. More importantly, we develop a generative Invertible Latent Normalizing Flow (I-LNF) module to align the LL feature distribution to NL latent representations, guaranteeing the correct code retrieval in the codebook. In addition, a novel Adaptive Feature Transformation (AFT) module, featuring an adjustable function for users and comprising an Adaptive Mix-up Block (AMB) along with a dual-decoder architecture, is devised to further enhance fidelity while preserving the realistic details provided by codebook prior. Extensive experiments confirm the superior performance of GLARE on various benchmark datasets and real-world data. Its effectiveness as a preprocessing tool in low-light object detection tasks further validates GLARE for high-level vision applications. Code is released at https://github.com/LowLevelAI/GLARE.
Authors:Zhenni Yu, Xiaoqin Zhang, Li Zhao, Yi Bin, Guobao Xiao
Abstract:
This paper introduces a new Segment Anything Model with Depth Perception (DSAM) for Camouflaged Object Detection (COD). DSAM exploits the zero-shot capability of SAM to realize precise segmentation in the RGB-D domain. It consists of the Prompt-Deeper Module and the Finer Module. The Prompt-Deeper Module utilizes knowledge distillation and the Bias Correction Module to achieve the interaction between RGB features and depth features, especially using depth features to correct erroneous parts in RGB features. Then, the interacted features are combined with the box prompt in SAM to create a prompt with depth perception. The Finer Module explores the possibility of accurately segmenting highly camouflaged targets from a depth perspective. It uncovers depth cues in areas missed by SAM through mask reversion, self-filtering, and self-attention operations, compensating for its defects in the COD domain. DSAM represents the first step towards the SAM-based RGB-D COD model. It maximizes the utilization of depth features while synergizing with RGB features to achieve multimodal complementarity, thereby overcoming the segmentation limitations of SAM and improving its accuracy in COD. Experimental results on COD benchmarks demonstrate that DSAM achieves excellent segmentation performance and reaches the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on COD benchmarks with less consumption of training resources. The code will be available at https://github.com/guobaoxiao/DSAM.
Authors:Xiuquan Hou, Meiqin Liu, Senlin Zhang, Ping Wei, Badong Chen, Xuguang Lan
Abstract:
This paper presents a general scheme for enhancing the convergence and performance of DETR (DEtection TRansformer). We investigate the slow convergence problem in transformers from a new perspective, suggesting that it arises from the self-attention that introduces no structural bias over inputs. To address this issue, we explore incorporating position relation prior as attention bias to augment object detection, following the verification of its statistical significance using a proposed quantitative macroscopic correlation (MC) metric. Our approach, termed Relation-DETR, introduces an encoder to construct position relation embeddings for progressive attention refinement, which further extends the traditional streaming pipeline of DETR into a contrastive relation pipeline to address the conflicts between non-duplicate predictions and positive supervision. Extensive experiments on both generic and task-specific datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Under the same configurations, Relation-DETR achieves a significant improvement (+2.0% AP compared to DINO), state-of-the-art performance (51.7% AP for 1x and 52.1% AP for 2x settings), and a remarkably faster convergence speed (over 40% AP with only 2 training epochs) than existing DETR detectors on COCO val2017. Moreover, the proposed relation encoder serves as a universal plug-in-and-play component, bringing clear improvements for theoretically any DETR-like methods. Furthermore, we introduce a class-agnostic detection dataset, SA-Det-100k. The experimental results on the dataset illustrate that the proposed explicit position relation achieves a clear improvement of 1.3% AP, highlighting its potential towards universal object detection. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/xiuqhou/Relation-DETR.
Authors:Qijie Mo, Yipeng Gao, Shenghao Fu, Junkai Yan, Ancong Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract:
In incremental object detection, knowledge distillation has been proven to be an effective way to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. However, previous works focused on preserving the knowledge of old models, ignoring that images could simultaneously contain categories from past, present, and future stages. The co-occurrence of objects makes the optimization objectives inconsistent across different stages since the definition for foreground objects differs across various stages, which limits the model's performance greatly. To overcome this problem, we propose a method called ``Bridge Past and Future'' (BPF), which aligns models across stages, ensuring consistent optimization directions. In addition, we propose a novel Distillation with Future (DwF) loss, fully leveraging the background probability to mitigate the forgetting of old classes while ensuring a high level of adaptability in learning new classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on both Pascal VOC and MS COCO benchmarks. Without memory, BPF outperforms current state-of-the-art methods under various settings. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/BPF.
Authors:Zhi Cai, Yingjie Gao, Yaoyan Zheng, Nan Zhou, Di Huang
Abstract:
In computer vision, object detection is an important task that finds its application in many scenarios. However, obtaining extensive labels can be challenging, especially in crowded scenes. Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been proposed as a powerful zero-shot segmenter, offering a novel approach to instance segmentation tasks. However, the accuracy and efficiency of SAM and its variants are often compromised when handling objects in crowded and occluded scenes. In this paper, we introduce Crowd-SAM, a SAM-based framework designed to enhance SAM's performance in crowded and occluded scenes with the cost of few learnable parameters and minimal labeled images. We introduce an efficient prompt sampler (EPS) and a part-whole discrimination network (PWD-Net), enhancing mask selection and accuracy in crowded scenes. Despite its simplicity, Crowd-SAM rivals state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully-supervised object detection methods on several benchmarks including CrowdHuman and CityPersons. Our code is available at https://github.com/FelixCaae/CrowdSAM.
Authors:Wang Zeng, Sheng Jin, Lumin Xu, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Wanli Ouyang, Ping Luo, Xiaogang Wang
Abstract:
Transformers are widely used in computer vision areas and have achieved remarkable success. Most state-of-the-art approaches split images into regular grids and represent each grid region with a vision token. However, fixed token distribution disregards the semantic meaning of different image regions, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose the Token Clustering Transformer (TCFormer), which generates dynamic vision tokens based on semantic meaning. Our dynamic tokens possess two crucial characteristics: (1) Representing image regions with similar semantic meanings using the same vision token, even if those regions are not adjacent, and (2) concentrating on regions with valuable details and represent them using fine tokens. Through extensive experimentation across various applications, including image classification, human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our TCFormer. The code and models for this work are available at https://github.com/zengwang430521/TCFormer.
Authors:Zijian Zhou, Zheng Zhu, Holger Caesar, Miaojing Shi
Abstract:
Panoptic Scene Graph Generation (PSG) aims to segment objects and recognize their relations, enabling the structured understanding of an image. Previous methods focus on predicting predefined object and relation categories, hence limiting their applications in the open world scenarios. With the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), significant progress has been made in open-set object detection and segmentation, yet open-set relation prediction in PSG remains unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the task of open-set relation prediction integrated with a pretrained open-set panoptic segmentation model to achieve true open-set panoptic scene graph generation (OpenPSG). Our OpenPSG leverages LMMs to achieve open-set relation prediction in an autoregressive manner. We introduce a relation query transformer to efficiently extract visual features of object pairs and estimate the existence of relations between them. The latter can enhance the prediction efficiency by filtering irrelevant pairs. Finally, we design the generation and judgement instructions to perform open-set relation prediction in PSG autoregressively. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose the open-set PSG task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-set relation prediction and panoptic scene graph generation. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/franciszzj/OpenPSG}.
Authors:Chunliang Li, Wencheng Han, Junbo Yin, Sanyuan Zhao, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
Concurrent processing of multiple autonomous driving 3D perception tasks within the same spatiotemporal scene poses a significant challenge, in particular due to the computational inefficiencies and feature competition between tasks when using traditional multi-task learning approaches. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a novel unified representation, RepVF, which harmonizes the representation of various perception tasks such as 3D object detection and 3D lane detection within a single framework. RepVF characterizes the structure of different targets in the scene through a vector field, enabling a single-head, multi-task learning model that significantly reduces computational redundancy and feature competition. Building upon RepVF, we introduce RFTR, a network designed to exploit the inherent connections between different tasks by utilizing a hierarchical structure of queries that implicitly model the relationships both between and within tasks. This approach eliminates the need for task-specific heads and parameters, fundamentally reducing the conflicts inherent in traditional multi-task learning paradigms. We validate our approach by combining labels from the OpenLane dataset with the Waymo Open dataset. Our work presents a significant advancement in the efficiency and effectiveness of multi-task perception in autonomous driving, offering a new perspective on handling multiple 3D perception tasks synchronously and in parallel. The code will be available at: https://github.com/jbji/RepVF
Authors:Yu Wang, Xiangbo Su, Qiang Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Teng Xi, Kun Yao, Errui Ding, Gang Zhang, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection focusing on detecting novel categories guided by natural language. In this report, we propose Open-Vocabulary Light-Weighted Detection Transformer (OVLW-DETR), a deployment friendly open-vocabulary detector with strong performance and low latency. Building upon OVLW-DETR, we provide an end-to-end training recipe that transferring knowledge from vision-language model (VLM) to object detector with simple alignment. We align detector with the text encoder from VLM by replacing the fixed classification layer weights in detector with the class-name embeddings extracted from the text encoder. Without additional fusing module, OVLW-DETR is flexible and deployment friendly, making it easier to implement and modulate. improving the efficiency of interleaved attention computation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior over existing real-time open-vocabulary detectors on standard Zero-Shot LVIS benchmark. Source code and pre-trained models are available at [https://github.com/Atten4Vis/LW-DETR].
Authors:Tuo Feng, Wenguan Wang, Ruijie Quan, Yi Yang
Abstract:
Current 3D self-supervised learning methods of 3D scenes face a data desert issue, resulting from the time-consuming and expensive collecting process of 3D scene data. Conversely, 3D shape datasets are easier to collect. Despite this, existing pre-training strategies on shape data offer limited potential for 3D scene understanding due to significant disparities in point quantities. To tackle these challenges, we propose Shape2Scene (S2S), a novel method that learns representations of large-scale 3D scenes from 3D shape data. We first design multiscale and high-resolution backbones for shape and scene level 3D tasks, i.e., MH-P (point-based) and MH-V (voxel-based). MH-P/V establishes direct paths to highresolution features that capture deep semantic information across multiple scales. This pivotal nature makes them suitable for a wide range of 3D downstream tasks that tightly rely on high-resolution features. We then employ a Shape-to-Scene strategy (S2SS) to amalgamate points from various shapes, creating a random pseudo scene (comprising multiple objects) for training data, mitigating disparities between shapes and scenes. Finally, a point-point contrastive loss (PPC) is applied for the pre-training of MH-P/V. In PPC, the inherent correspondence (i.e., point pairs) is naturally obtained in S2SS. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the transferability of 3D representations learned by MH-P/V across shape-level and scene-level 3D tasks. MH-P achieves notable performance on well-known point cloud datasets (93.8% OA on ScanObjectNN and 87.6% instance mIoU on ShapeNetPart). MH-V also achieves promising performance in 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection.
Authors:Sanmin Kim, Youngseok Kim, Sihwan Hwang, Hyeonjun Jeong, Dongsuk Kum
Abstract:
Recent advancements in camera-based 3D object detection have introduced cross-modal knowledge distillation to bridge the performance gap with LiDAR 3D detectors, leveraging the precise geometric information in LiDAR point clouds. However, existing cross-modal knowledge distillation methods tend to overlook the inherent imperfections of LiDAR, such as the ambiguity of measurements on distant or occluded objects, which should not be transferred to the image detector. To mitigate these imperfections in LiDAR teacher, we propose a novel method that leverages aleatoric uncertainty-free features from ground truth labels. In contrast to conventional label guidance approaches, we approximate the inverse function of the teacher's head to effectively embed label inputs into feature space. This approach provides additional accurate guidance alongside LiDAR teacher, thereby boosting the performance of the image detector. Additionally, we introduce feature partitioning, which effectively transfers knowledge from the teacher modality while preserving the distinctive features of the student, thereby maximizing the potential of both modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves mAP and NDS by 5.1 points and 4.9 points compared to the baseline model, proving the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/sanmin0312/LabelDistill
Authors:Zheng Jiang, Jinqing Zhang, Yanan Zhang, Qingjie Liu, Zhenghui Hu, Baohui Wang, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Although multi-view 3D object detection based on the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) paradigm has garnered widespread attention as an economical and deployment-friendly perception solution for autonomous driving, there is still a performance gap compared to LiDAR-based methods. In recent years, several cross-modal distillation methods have been proposed to transfer beneficial information from teacher models to student models, with the aim of enhancing performance. However, these methods face challenges due to discrepancies in feature distribution originating from different data modalities and network structures, making knowledge transfer exceptionally challenging. In this paper, we propose a Foreground Self-Distillation (FSD) scheme that effectively avoids the issue of distribution discrepancies, maintaining remarkable distillation effects without the need for pre-trained teacher models or cumbersome distillation strategies. Additionally, we design two Point Cloud Intensification (PCI) strategies to compensate for the sparsity of point clouds by frame combination and pseudo point assignment. Finally, we develop a Multi-Scale Foreground Enhancement (MSFE) module to extract and fuse multi-scale foreground features by predicted elliptical Gaussian heatmap, further improving the model's performance. We integrate all the above innovations into a unified framework named FSD-BEV. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset exhibit that FSD-BEV achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its effectiveness. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/CocoBoom/fsd-bev.
Authors:Cheng Shi, Yuchen Zhu, Sibei Yang
Abstract:
Recent advancements in large-scale foundational models have sparked widespread interest in training highly proficient large vision models. A common consensus revolves around the necessity of aggregating extensive, high-quality annotated data. However, given the inherent challenges in annotating dense tasks in computer vision, such as object detection and segmentation, a practical strategy is to combine and leverage all available data for training purposes. In this work, we propose Plain-Det, which offers flexibility to accommodate new datasets, robustness in performance across diverse datasets, training efficiency, and compatibility with various detection architectures. We utilize Def-DETR, with the assistance of Plain-Det, to achieve a mAP of 51.9 on COCO, matching the current state-of-the-art detectors. We conduct extensive experiments on 13 downstream datasets and Plain-Det demonstrates strong generalization capability. Code is release at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Plain-Det
Authors:Ziyue Huang, Yongchao Feng, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Detection pre-training methods for the DETR series detector have been extensively studied in natural scenes, e.g., DETReg. However, the detection pre-training remains unexplored in remote sensing scenes. In existing pre-training methods, alignment between object embeddings extracted from a pre-trained backbone and detector features is significant. However, due to differences in feature extraction methods, a pronounced feature discrepancy still exists and hinders the pre-training performance. The remote sensing images with complex environments and more densely distributed objects exacerbate the discrepancy. In this work, we propose a novel Mutually optimizing pre-training framework for remote sensing object Detection, dubbed as MutDet. In MutDet, we propose a systemic solution against this challenge. Firstly, we propose a mutual enhancement module, which fuses the object embeddings and detector features bidirectionally in the last encoder layer, enhancing their information interaction.Secondly, contrastive alignment loss is employed to guide this alignment process softly and simultaneously enhances detector features' discriminativity. Finally, we design an auxiliary siamese head to mitigate the task gap arising from the introduction of enhancement module. Comprehensive experiments on various settings show new state-of-the-art transfer performance. The improvement is particularly pronounced when data quantity is limited. When using 10% of the DIOR-R data, MutDet improves DetReg by 6.1% in AP50. Codes and models are available at: https://github.com/floatingstarZ/MutDet.
Authors:Xiaopei Wu, Liang Peng, Liang Xie, Yuenan Hou, Binbin Lin, Xiaoshui Huang, Haifeng Liu, Deng Cai, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract:
Semi-supervised learning aims to leverage numerous unlabeled data to improve the model performance. Current semi-supervised 3D object detection methods typically use a teacher to generate pseudo labels for a student, and the quality of the pseudo labels is essential for the final performance. In this paper, we propose PatchTeacher, which focuses on partial scene 3D object detection to provide high-quality pseudo labels for the student. Specifically, we divide a complete scene into a series of patches and feed them to our PatchTeacher sequentially. PatchTeacher leverages the low memory consumption advantage of partial scene detection to process point clouds with a high-resolution voxelization, which can minimize the information loss of quantization and extract more fine-grained features. However, it is non-trivial to train a detector on fractions of the scene. Therefore, we introduce three key techniques, i.e., Patch Normalizer, Quadrant Align, and Fovea Selection, to improve the performance of PatchTeacher. Moreover, we devise PillarMix, a strong data augmentation strategy that mixes truncated pillars from different LiDAR scans to generate diverse training samples and thus help the model learn more general representation. Extensive experiments conducted on Waymo and ONCE datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our method and we achieve new state-of-the-art results, surpassing existing methods by a large margin. Codes are available at https://github.com/LittlePey/PTPM.
Authors:Chen Xin, Andreas Hartel, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract:
Accurate real-time object detection is vital across numerous industrial applications, from safety monitoring to quality control. Traditional approaches, however, are hindered by arduous manual annotation and data collection, struggling to adapt to ever-changing environments and novel target objects. To address these limitations, this paper presents DART, an innovative automated end-to-end pipeline that revolutionizes object detection workflows from data collection to model evaluation. It eliminates the need for laborious human labeling and extensive data collection while achieving outstanding accuracy across diverse scenarios. DART encompasses four key stages: (1) Data Diversification using subject-driven image generation (DreamBooth with SDXL), (2) Annotation via open-vocabulary object detection (Grounding DINO) to generate bounding box and class labels, (3) Review of generated images and pseudo-labels by large multimodal models (InternVL-1.5 and GPT-4o) to guarantee credibility, and (4) Training of real-time object detectors (YOLOv8 and YOLOv10) using the verified data. We apply DART to a self-collected dataset of construction machines named Liebherr Product, which contains over 15K high-quality images across 23 categories. The current instantiation of DART significantly increases average precision (AP) from 0.064 to 0.832. Its modular design ensures easy exchangeability and extensibility, allowing for future algorithm upgrades, seamless integration of new object categories, and adaptability to customized environments without manual labeling and additional data collection. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/chen-xin-94/DART.
Authors:Seonwhee Jin
Abstract:
Models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and transformers have steadily been improved. They also have been applied in various computer vision downstream tasks. However, in object detection tasks, accurately localizing and classifying almost infinite categories of foods in images remains challenging. To address these problems, we first segmented the food as the region-of-interest (ROI) by using the segment-anything model (SAM) and masked the rest of the region except ROI as black pixels. This process simplified the problems into a single classification for which annotation and training were much simpler than object detection. The images in which only the ROI was preserved were fed as inputs to fine-tune various off-the-shelf models that encoded their own inductive biases. Among them, Data-efficient image Transformers (DeiTs) had the best classification performance. Nonetheless, when foods' shapes and textures were similar, the contextual features of the ROI-only images were not enough for accurate classification. Therefore, we introduced a novel type of combined architecture, RveRNet, which consisted of ROI, extra-ROI, and integration modules that allowed it to account for both the ROI's and global contexts. The RveRNet's F1 score was 10% better than other individual models when classifying ambiguous food images. If the RveRNet's modules were DeiT with the knowledge distillation from the CNN, performed the best. We investigated how architectures can be made robust against input noise caused by permutation and translocation. The results indicated that there was a trade-off between how much the CNN teacher's knowledge could be distilled to DeiT and DeiT's innate strength. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Seonwhee-Genome/RveRNet.
Authors:Minghang Zhou, Tianyu Li, Chaofan Qiao, Dongyu Xie, Guoqing Wang, Ningjuan Ruan, Lin Mei, Yang Yang
Abstract:
Multispectral oriented object detection faces challenges due to both inter-modal and intra-modal discrepancies. Recent studies often rely on transformer-based models to address these issues and achieve cross-modal fusion detection. However, the quadratic computational complexity of transformers limits their performance. Inspired by the efficiency and lower complexity of Mamba in long sequence tasks, we propose Disparity-guided Multispectral Mamba (DMM), a multispectral oriented object detection framework comprised of a Disparity-guided Cross-modal Fusion Mamba (DCFM) module, a Multi-scale Target-aware Attention (MTA) module, and a Target-Prior Aware (TPA) auxiliary task. The DCFM module leverages disparity information between modalities to adaptively merge features from RGB and IR images, mitigating inter-modal conflicts. The MTA module aims to enhance feature representation by focusing on relevant target regions within the RGB modality, addressing intra-modal variations. The TPA auxiliary task utilizes single-modal labels to guide the optimization of the MTA module, ensuring it focuses on targets and their local context. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle and VEDAI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining computational efficiency. Code will be available at https://github.com/Another-0/DMM.
Authors:Ali Hatamizadeh, Jan Kautz
Abstract:
We propose a novel hybrid Mamba-Transformer backbone, MambaVision, specifically tailored for vision applications. Our core contribution includes redesigning the Mamba formulation to enhance its capability for efficient modeling of visual features. Through a comprehensive ablation study, we demonstrate the feasibility of integrating Vision Transformers (ViT) with Mamba. Our results show that equipping the Mamba architecture with self-attention blocks in the final layers greatly improves its capacity to capture long-range spatial dependencies. Based on these findings, we introduce a family of MambaVision models with a hierarchical architecture to meet various design criteria. For classification on the ImageNet-1K dataset, MambaVision variants achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of both Top-1 accuracy and throughput. In downstream tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation on MS COCO and ADE20K datasets, MambaVision outperforms comparably sized backbones while demonstrating favorable performance. Code: https://github.com/NVlabs/MambaVision
Authors:Zhi Qin Tan, Olga Isupova, Gustavo Carneiro, Xiatian Zhu, Yunpeng Li
Abstract:
Acquiring fine-grained object detection annotations in unconstrained images is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to noise, especially in crowdsourcing scenarios. Most prior object detection methods assume accurate annotations; A few recent works have studied object detection with noisy crowdsourced annotations, with evaluation on distinct synthetic crowdsourced datasets of varying setups under artificial assumptions. To address these algorithmic limitations and evaluation inconsistency, we first propose a novel Bayesian Detector Combination (BDC) framework to more effectively train object detectors with noisy crowdsourced annotations, with the unique ability of automatically inferring the annotators' label qualities. Unlike previous approaches, BDC is model-agnostic, requires no prior knowledge of the annotators' skill level, and seamlessly integrates with existing object detection models. Due to the scarcity of real-world crowdsourced datasets, we introduce large synthetic datasets by simulating varying crowdsourcing scenarios. This allows consistent evaluation of different models at scale. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic crowdsourced datasets show that BDC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its superiority in leveraging crowdsourced data for object detection. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhiqin1998/bdc.
Authors:Yan Hao, Florent Forest, Olga Fink
Abstract:
This paper focuses on source-free domain adaptation for object detection in computer vision. This task is challenging and of great practical interest, due to the cost of obtaining annotated data sets for every new domain. Recent research has proposed various solutions for Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD), most being variations of teacher-student architectures with diverse feature alignment, regularization and pseudo-label selection strategies. Our work investigates simpler approaches and their performance compared to more complex SFOD methods in several adaptation scenarios. We highlight the importance of batch normalization layers in the detector backbone, and show that adapting only the batch statistics is a strong baseline for SFOD. We propose a simple extension of a Mean Teacher with strong-weak augmentation in the source-free setting, Source-Free Unbiased Teacher (SF-UT), and show that it actually outperforms most of the previous SFOD methods. Additionally, we showcase that an even simpler strategy consisting in training on a fixed set of pseudo-labels can achieve similar performance to the more complex teacher-student mutual learning, while being computationally efficient and mitigating the major issue of teacher-student collapse. We conduct experiments on several adaptation tasks using benchmark driving datasets including (Foggy)Cityscapes, Sim10k and KITTI, and achieve a notable improvement of 4.7\% AP50 on Cityscapes$\rightarrow$Foggy-Cityscapes compared with the latest state-of-the-art in SFOD. Source code is available at https://github.com/EPFL-IMOS/simple-SFOD.
Authors:Yu-Guan Hsieh, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Shih-Ying Yeh, Louis Béthune, Hadi Pour Ansari, Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, Chun-Liang Li, Ranjay Krishna, Oncel Tuzel, Marco Cuturi
Abstract:
Humans describe complex scenes with compositionality, using simple text descriptions enriched with links and relationships. While vision-language research has aimed to develop models with compositional understanding capabilities, this is not reflected yet in existing datasets which, for the most part, still use plain text to describe images. In this work, we propose a new annotation strategy, graph-based captioning (GBC) that describes an image using a labeled graph structure, with nodes of various types. The nodes in GBC are created through a two-stage process: first, identifying and describing entity nodes; second, linking these nodes by highlighting \textit{compositions} and \textit{relations} among them. Since \textit{all} GBC nodes hold plain text descriptions, GBC retains the flexibility found in natural language, but can also encode hierarchical information in its edges. We demonstrate that GBC can be produced automatically, using off-the-shelf multimodal LLMs and object detection models, by building a new dataset GBC10M that gathers GBC annotations for about 10M images of the CC12M dataset. Through CLIP training on GBC10M, we show that leveraging GBC nodes' annotations -- particularly those in composition and relation nodes -- significantly boosts the model's performance across various benchmarks compared to when other annotations are used. To further explore the opportunities provided by GBC, we also investigate the use of GBC as middleware for text-to-image generation, and show the extra benefits of incorporating the graph structure in this task. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/apple/ml-gbc and https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.
Authors:Xiaoli Zhang, Liying Wang, Libo Zhao, Xiongfei Li, Siwei Ma
Abstract:
Multi-modality image fusion aims at fusing modality-specific (complementarity) and modality-shared (correlation) information from multiple source images. To tackle the problem of the neglect of inter-feature relationships, high-frequency information loss, and the limited attention to downstream tasks, this paper focuses on how to model correlation-driven decomposing features and reason high-level graph representation by efficiently extracting complementary information and aggregating multi-guided features. We propose a three-branch encoder-decoder architecture along with corresponding fusion layers as the fusion strategy. Firstly, shallow features from individual modalities are extracted by a depthwise convolution layer combined with the transformer block. In the three parallel branches of the encoder, Cross Attention and Invertible Block (CAI) extracts local features and preserves high-frequency texture details. Base Feature Extraction Module (BFE) captures long-range dependencies and enhances modality-shared information. Graph Reasoning Module (GR) is introduced to reason high-level cross-modality relations and simultaneously extract low-level detail features as CAI's modality-specific complementary information. Experiments demonstrate the competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods in visible/infrared image fusion and medical image fusion tasks. Moreover, the proposed algorithm surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of subsequent tasks, averagely scoring 8.27% mAP@0.5 higher in object detection and 5.85% mIoU higher in semantic segmentation. The code is avaliable at https://github.com/Abraham-Einstein/SMFNet/.
Authors:Hyunjin Cho, Dong Un Kang, Se Young Chun
Abstract:
Short-term object interaction anticipation is an important task in egocentric video analysis, including precise predictions of future interactions and their timings as well as the categories and positions of the involved active objects. To alleviate the complexity of this task, our proposed method, SOIA-DOD, effectively decompose it into 1) detecting active object and 2) classifying interaction and predicting their timing. Our method first detects all potential active objects in the last frame of egocentric video by fine-tuning a pre-trained YOLOv9. Then, we combine these potential active objects as query with transformer encoder, thereby identifying the most promising next active object and predicting its future interaction and time-to-contact. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on the challenge test set, achieving the best performance in predicting next active objects and their interactions. Finally, our proposed ranked the third overall top-5 mAP when including time-to-contact predictions. The source code is available at https://github.com/KeenyJin/SOIA-DOD.
Authors:Anh-Dzung Doan, Bach Long Nguyen, Terry Lim, Madhuka Jayawardhana, Surabhi Gupta, Christophe Guettier, Ian Reid, Markus Wagner, Tat-Jun Chin
Abstract:
Prior to deployment, an object detector is trained on a dataset compiled from a previous data collection campaign. However, the environment in which the object detector is deployed will invariably evolve, particularly in outdoor settings where changes in lighting, weather and seasons will significantly affect the appearance of the scene and target objects. It is almost impossible for all potential scenarios that the object detector may come across to be present in a finite training dataset. This necessitates continuous updates to the object detector to maintain satisfactory performance. Test-time domain adaptation techniques enable machine learning models to self-adapt based on the distributions of the testing data. However, existing methods mainly focus on fully automated adaptation, which makes sense for applications such as self-driving cars. Despite the prevalence of fully automated approaches, in some applications such as surveillance, there is usually a human operator overseeing the system's operation. We propose to involve the operator in test-time domain adaptation to raise the performance of object detection beyond what is achievable by fully automated adaptation. To reduce manual effort, the proposed method only requires the operator to provide weak labels, which are then used to guide the adaptation process. Furthermore, the proposed method can be performed in a streaming setting, where each online sample is observed only once. We show that the proposed method outperforms existing works, demonstrating a great benefit of human-in-the-loop test-time domain adaptation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dzungdoan6/WSTTA
Authors:Yiquan Wu, Zhongtian Wang, You Wu, Ling Huang, Hui Zhou, Shuiwang Li
Abstract:
Object detection has greatly improved over the past decade thanks to advances in deep learning and large-scale datasets. However, detecting objects reflected in surfaces remains an underexplored area. Reflective surfaces are ubiquitous in daily life, appearing in homes, offices, public spaces, and natural environments. Accurate detection and interpretation of reflected objects are essential for various applications. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a extensive benchmark specifically designed for Reflected Object Detection. Our Reflected Object Detection Dataset (RODD) features a diverse collection of images showcasing reflected objects in various contexts, providing standard annotations for both real and reflected objects. This distinguishes it from traditional object detection benchmarks. RODD encompasses 10 categories and includes 21,059 images of real and reflected objects across different backgrounds, complete with standard bounding box annotations and the classification of objects as real or reflected. Additionally, we present baseline results by adapting five state-of-the-art object detection models to address this challenging task. Experimental results underscore the limitations of existing methods when applied to reflected object detection, highlighting the need for specialized approaches. By releasing RODD, we aim to support and advance future research on detecting reflected objects. Dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/jirouvan/ROD.
Authors:Akshat Ramachandran, Souvik Kundu, Tushar Krishna
Abstract:
We present CLAMP-ViT, a data-free post-training quantization method for vision transformers (ViTs). We identify the limitations of recent techniques, notably their inability to leverage meaningful inter-patch relationships, leading to the generation of simplistic and semantically vague data, impacting quantization accuracy. CLAMP-ViT employs a two-stage approach, cyclically adapting between data generation and model quantization. Specifically, we incorporate a patch-level contrastive learning scheme to generate richer, semantically meaningful data. Furthermore, we leverage contrastive learning in layer-wise evolutionary search for fixed- and mixed-precision quantization to identify optimal quantization parameters while mitigating the effects of a non-smooth loss landscape. Extensive evaluations across various vision tasks demonstrate the superiority of CLAMP-ViT, with performance improvements of up to 3% in top-1 accuracy for classification, 0.6 mAP for object detection, and 1.5 mIoU for segmentation at similar or better compression ratio over existing alternatives. Code is available at https://github.com/georgia-tech-synergy-lab/CLAMP-ViT.git
Authors:Yunzhong Si, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu, Wenhao Zhang, Yao Dong, Yuxing Chen, Hongbo Li
Abstract:
Channel and spatial attentions have respectively brought significant improvements in extracting feature dependencies and spatial structure relations for various downstream vision tasks. While their combination is more beneficial for leveraging their individual strengths, the synergy between channel and spatial attentions has not been fully explored, lacking in fully harness the synergistic potential of multi-semantic information for feature guidance and mitigation of semantic disparities. Our study attempts to reveal the synergistic relationship between spatial and channel attention at multiple semantic levels, proposing a novel Spatial and Channel Synergistic Attention module (SCSA). Our SCSA consists of two parts: the Shareable Multi-Semantic Spatial Attention (SMSA) and the Progressive Channel-wise Self-Attention (PCSA). SMSA integrates multi-semantic information and utilizes a progressive compression strategy to inject discriminative spatial priors into PCSA's channel self-attention, effectively guiding channel recalibration. Additionally, the robust feature interactions based on the self-attention mechanism in PCSA further mitigate the disparities in multi-semantic information among different sub-features within SMSA. We conduct extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets, including classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection on MSCOCO 2017, segmentation on ADE20K, and four other complex scene detection datasets. Our results demonstrate that our proposed SCSA not only surpasses the current state-of-the-art attention but also exhibits enhanced generalization capabilities across various task scenarios. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/HZAI-ZJNU/SCSA.
Authors:Min-Hyeok Sun, Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Song, Seung-Hyun Kong
Abstract:
Focusing on the strength of 4D (4-Dimensional) radar, research about robust 3D object detection networks in adverse weather conditions has gained attention. To train such networks, datasets that contain large amounts of 4D radar data and ground truth labels are essential. However, the existing 4D radar datasets (e.g., K-Radar) lack sufficient sensor data and labels, which hinders the advancement in this research domain. Furthermore, enlarging the 4D radar datasets requires a time-consuming and expensive manual labeling process. To address these issues, we propose the auto-labeling method of 4D radar tensor (4DRT) in the K-Radar dataset. The proposed method initially trains a LiDAR-based object detection network (LODN) using calibrated LiDAR point cloud (LPC). The trained LODN then automatically generates ground truth labels (i.e., auto-labels, ALs) of the K-Radar train dataset without human intervention. The generated ALs are used to train the 4D radar-based object detection network (4DRODN), Radar Tensor Network with Height (RTNH). The experimental results demonstrate that RTNH trained with ALs has achieved a similar detection performance to the original RTNH which is trained with manually annotated ground truth labels, thereby verifying the effectiveness of the proposed auto-labeling method. All relevant codes will be soon available at the following GitHub project: https://github.com/kaist-avelab/K-Radar
Authors:Hafiz Mughees Ahmad, Afshin Rahimi
Abstract:
Workplace accidents continue to pose significant risks for human safety, particularly in industries such as construction and manufacturing, and the necessity for effective Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) compliance has become increasingly paramount. Our research focuses on the development of non-invasive techniques based on the Object Detection (OD) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to detect and verify the proper use of various types of PPE such as helmets, safety glasses, masks, and protective clothing. This study proposes the SH17 Dataset, consisting of 8,099 annotated images containing 75,994 instances of 17 classes collected from diverse industrial environments, to train and validate the OD models. We have trained state-of-the-art OD models for benchmarking, and initial results demonstrate promising accuracy levels with You Only Look Once (YOLO)v9-e model variant exceeding 70.9% in PPE detection. The performance of the model validation on cross-domain datasets suggests that integrating these technologies can significantly improve safety management systems, providing a scalable and efficient solution for industries striving to meet human safety regulations and protect their workforce. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ahmadmughees/sh17dataset.
Authors:Zhiqiang Yang, Qiu Guan, Keer Zhao, Jianmin Yang, Xinli Xu, Haixia Long, Ying Tang
Abstract:
Due to the effective performance of multi-scale feature fusion, Path Aggregation FPN (PAFPN) is widely employed in YOLO detectors. However, it cannot efficiently and adaptively integrate high-level semantic information with low-level spatial information simultaneously. We propose a new model named MAF-YOLO in this paper, which is a novel object detection framework with a versatile neck named Multi-Branch Auxiliary FPN (MAFPN). Within MAFPN, the Superficial Assisted Fusion (SAF) module is designed to combine the output of the backbone with the neck, preserving an optimal level of shallow information to facilitate subsequent learning. Meanwhile, the Advanced Assisted Fusion (AAF) module deeply embedded within the neck conveys a more diverse range of gradient information to the output layer.
Furthermore, our proposed Re-parameterized Heterogeneous Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (RepHELAN) module ensures that both the overall model architecture and convolutional design embrace the utilization of heterogeneous large convolution kernels. Therefore, this guarantees the preservation of information related to small targets while simultaneously achieving the multi-scale receptive field. Finally, taking the nano version of MAF-YOLO for example, it can achieve 42.4% AP on COCO with only 3.76M learnable parameters and 10.51G FLOPs, and approximately outperforms YOLOv8n by about 5.1%. The source code of this work is available at: https://github.com/yang-0201/MAF-YOLO.
Authors:Wenqiang Du, Giovanni Beltrame
Abstract:
In dynamic environments, the ability to detect and track moving objects in real-time is crucial for autonomous robots to navigate safely and effectively. Traditional methods for dynamic object detection rely on high accuracy odometry and maps to detect and track moving objects. However, these methods are not suitable for long-term operation in dynamic environments where the surrounding environment is constantly changing. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel system for detecting and tracking dynamic objects in real-time using only LiDAR data. By emphasizing the extraction of low-frequency components from LiDAR data as feature points for foreground objects, our method significantly reduces the time required for object clustering and movement analysis. Additionally, we have developed a tracking approach that employs intensity-based ego-motion estimation along with a sliding window technique to assess object movements. This enables the precise identification of moving objects and enhances the system's resilience to odometry drift. Our experiments show that this system can detect and track dynamic objects in real-time with an average detection accuracy of 88.7\% and a recall rate of 89.1\%. Furthermore, our system demonstrates resilience against the prolonged drift typically associated with front-end only LiDAR odometry. All of the source code, labeled dataset, and the annotation tool are available at: https://github.com/MISTLab/lidar_dynamic_objects_detection.git
Authors:Yunshuang Yuan, Monika Sester
Abstract:
Cooperative perception via communication among intelligent traffic agents has great potential to improve the safety of autonomous driving. However, limited communication bandwidth, localization errors and asynchronized capturing time of sensor data, all introduce difficulties to the data fusion of different agents. To some extend, previous works have attempted to reduce the shared data size, mitigate the spatial feature misalignment caused by localization errors and communication delay. However, none of them have considered the asynchronized sensor ticking times, which can lead to dynamic object misplacement of more than one meter during data fusion. In this work, we propose Time-Aligned COoperative Object Detection (TA-COOD), for which we adapt widely used dataset OPV2V and DairV2X with considering asynchronous LiDAR sensor ticking times and build an efficient fully sparse framework with modeling the temporal information of individual objects with query-based techniques. The experiment results confirmed the superior efficiency of our fully sparse framework compared to the state-of-the-art dense models. More importantly, they show that the point-wise observation timestamps of the dynamic objects are crucial for accurate modeling the object temporal context and the predictability of their time-related locations. The official code is available at \url{https://github.com/YuanYunshuang/CoSense3D}.
Authors:Emanuele Vivoli, Marco Bertini, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Abstract:
The comic domain is rapidly advancing with the development of single-page analysis and synthesis models. However, evaluation metrics and datasets lag behind, often limited to small-scale or single-style test sets. We introduce a novel benchmark, CoMix, designed to evaluate the multi-task capabilities of models in comic analysis. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on isolated tasks such as object detection or text recognition, CoMix addresses a broader range of tasks including object detection, speaker identification, character re-identification, reading order, and multi-modal reasoning tasks like character naming and dialogue generation. Our benchmark comprises three existing datasets with expanded annotations to support multi-task evaluation. To mitigate the over-representation of manga-style data, we have incorporated a new dataset of carefully selected American comic-style books, thereby enriching the diversity of comic styles. CoMix is designed to assess pre-trained models in zero-shot and limited fine-tuning settings, probing their transfer capabilities across different comic styles and tasks. The validation split of the benchmark is publicly available for research purposes, and an evaluation server for the held-out test split is also provided. Comparative results between human performance and state-of-the-art models reveal a significant performance gap, highlighting substantial opportunities for advancements in comic understanding. The dataset, baseline models, and code are accessible at https://github.com/emanuelevivoli/CoMix-dataset. This initiative sets a new standard for comprehensive comic analysis, providing the community with a common benchmark for evaluation on a large and varied set.
Authors:Emanuele Vivoli, Irene Campaioli, Mariateresa Nardoni, Niccolò Biondi, Marco Bertini, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Abstract:
Comics, as a medium, uniquely combine text and images in styles often distinct from real-world visuals. For the past three decades, computational research on comics has evolved from basic object detection to more sophisticated tasks. However, the field faces persistent challenges such as small datasets, inconsistent annotations, inaccessible model weights, and results that cannot be directly compared due to varying train/test splits and metrics. To address these issues, we aim to standardize annotations across datasets, introduce a variety of comic styles into the datasets, and establish benchmark results with clear, replicable settings. Our proposed Comics Datasets Framework standardizes dataset annotations into a common format and addresses the overrepresentation of manga by introducing Comics100, a curated collection of 100 books from the Digital Comics Museum, annotated for detection in our uniform format. We have benchmarked a variety of detection architectures using the Comics Datasets Framework. All related code, model weights, and detailed evaluation processes are available at https://github.com/emanuelevivoli/cdf, ensuring transparency and facilitating replication. This initiative is a significant advancement towards improving object detection in comics, laying the groundwork for more complex computational tasks dependent on precise object recognition.
Authors:Rui-Yang Ju, Chun-Tse Chien, Chia-Min Lin, Jen-Shiun Chiang
Abstract:
Children often suffer wrist injuries in daily life, while fracture injuring radiologists usually need to analyze and interpret X-ray images before surgical treatment by surgeons. The development of deep learning has enabled neural network models to work as computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) tools to help doctors and experts in diagnosis. Since the YOLOv8 models have obtained the satisfactory success in object detection tasks, it has been applied to fracture detection. The Global Context (GC) block effectively models the global context in a lightweight way, and incorporating it into YOLOv8 can greatly improve the model performance. This paper proposes the YOLOv8+GC model for fracture detection, which is an improved version of the YOLOv8 model with the GC block. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to the original YOLOv8 model, the proposed YOLOv8-GC model increases the mean average precision calculated at intersection over union threshold of 0.5 (mAP 50) from 63.58% to 66.32% on the GRAZPEDWRI-DX dataset, achieving the state-of-the-art (SOTA) level. The implementation code for this work is available on GitHub at https://github.com/RuiyangJu/YOLOv8_Global_Context_Fracture_Detection.
Authors:Shuohao Shi, Qiang Fang, Tong Zhao, Xin Xu
Abstract:
Tiny object detection is becoming one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision because of the limited object size and lack of information. The label assignment strategy is a key factor affecting the accuracy of object detection. Although there are some effective label assignment strategies for tiny objects, most of them focus on reducing the sensitivity to the bounding boxes to increase the number of positive samples and have some fixed hyperparameters need to set. However, more positive samples may not necessarily lead to better detection results, in fact, excessive positive samples may lead to more false positives. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective strategy named the Similarity Distance (SimD) to evaluate the similarity between bounding boxes. This proposed strategy not only considers both location and shape similarity but also learns hyperparameters adaptively, ensuring that it can adapt to different datasets and various object sizes in a dataset. Our approach can be simply applied in common anchor-based detectors in place of the IoU for label assignment and Non Maximum Suppression (NMS). Extensive experiments on four mainstream tiny object detection datasets demonstrate superior performance of our method, especially, 1.8 AP points and 4.1 AP points of very tiny higher than the state-of-the-art competitors on AI-TOD. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/cszzshi/SimD}.
Authors:Chengchao Shen, Jianzhong Chen, Jianxin Wang
Abstract:
The existing contrastive learning methods mainly focus on single-grained representation learning, e.g., part-level, object-level or scene-level ones, thus inevitably neglecting the transferability of representations on other granularity levels. In this paper, we aim to learn multi-grained representations, which can effectively describe the image on various granularity levels, thus improving generalization on extensive downstream tasks. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-Grained Contrast method (MGC) for unsupervised representation learning. Specifically, we construct delicate multi-grained correspondences between positive views and then conduct multi-grained contrast by the correspondences to learn more general unsupervised representations.
Without pretrained on large-scale dataset, our method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on extensive downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, scene parsing, semantic segmentation and keypoint detection. Moreover, experimental results support the data-efficient property and excellent representation transferability of our method. The source code and trained weights are available at \url{https://github.com/visresearch/mgc}.
Authors:Muhammad Awais, Mehaboobathunnisa Sahul Hameed, Bidisha Bhattacharya, Orly Reiner, Rao Muhammad Anwer
Abstract:
Recent advances have enabled the study of human brain development using brain organoids derived from stem cells. Quantifying cellular processes like mitosis in these organoids offers insights into neurodevelopmental disorders, but the manual analysis is time-consuming, and existing datasets lack specific details for brain organoid studies. We introduce BOrg, a dataset designed to study mitotic events in the embryonic development of the brain using confocal microscopy images of brain organoids. BOrg utilizes an efficient annotation pipeline with sparse point annotations and techniques that minimize expert effort, overcoming limitations of standard deep learning approaches on sparse data. We adapt and benchmark state-of-the-art object detection and cell counting models on BOrg for detecting and analyzing mitotic cells across prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase stages. Our results demonstrate these adapted models significantly improve mitosis analysis efficiency and accuracy for brain organoid research compared to existing methods. BOrg facilitates the development of automated tools to quantify statistics like mitosis rates, aiding mechanistic studies of neurodevelopmental processes and disorders. Data and code are available at https://github.com/awaisrauf/borg.
Authors:Jialin Yue, Tianyuan Yao, Ruining Deng, Quan Liu, Juming Xiong, Junlin Guo, Haichun Yang, Yuankai Huo
Abstract:
Recently, the use of circle representation has emerged as a method to improve the identification of spherical objects (such as glomeruli, cells, and nuclei) in medical imaging studies. In traditional bounding box-based object detection, combining results from multiple models improves accuracy, especially when real-time processing isn't crucial. Unfortunately, this widely adopted strategy is not readily available for combining circle representations. In this paper, we propose Weighted Circle Fusion (WCF), a simple approach for merging predictions from various circle detection models. Our method leverages confidence scores associated with each proposed bounding circle to generate averaged circles. We evaluate our method on a proprietary dataset for glomerular detection in whole slide imaging (WSI) and find a performance gain of 5% compared to existing ensemble methods. Additionally, we assess the efficiency of two annotation methods, fully manual annotation and a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach, in labeling 200,000 glomeruli. The HITL approach, which integrates machine learning detection with human verification, demonstrated remarkable improvements in annotation efficiency. The Weighted Circle Fusion technique not only enhances object detection precision but also notably reduces false detections, presenting a promising direction for future research and application in pathological image analysis. The source code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/WeightedCircleFusion
Authors:Michelle Adeline, Junn Yong Loo, Vishnu Monn Baskaran
Abstract:
Multi-view 3D object detection is a crucial component of autonomous driving systems. Contemporary query-based methods primarily depend either on dataset-specific initialization of 3D anchors, introducing bias, or utilize dense attention mechanisms, which are computationally inefficient and unscalable. To overcome these issues, we present MDHA, a novel sparse query-based framework, which constructs adaptive 3D output proposals using hybrid anchors from multi-view, multi-scale image input. Fixed 2D anchors are combined with depth predictions to form 2.5D anchors, which are projected to obtain 3D proposals. To ensure high efficiency, our proposed Anchor Encoder performs sparse refinement and selects the top-$k$ anchors and features. Moreover, while existing multi-view attention mechanisms rely on projecting reference points to multiple images, our novel Circular Deformable Attention mechanism only projects to a single image but allows reference points to seamlessly attend to adjacent images, improving efficiency without compromising on performance. On the nuScenes val set, it achieves 46.4\% mAP and 55.0\% NDS with a ResNet101 backbone. MDHA significantly outperforms the baseline where anchor proposals are modelled as learnable embeddings. Code is available at https://github.com/NaomiEX/MDHA.
Authors:Shilei Cao, Juepeng Zheng, Yan Liu, Baoquan Zhao, Ziqi Yuan, Weijia Li, Runmin Dong, Haohuan Fu
Abstract:
Real-world application models are commonly deployed in dynamic environments, where the target domain distribution undergoes temporal changes. Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) has recently emerged as a promising technique to gradually adapt a source-trained model to continually changing target domains. Despite recent advancements in addressing CTTA, two critical issues remain: 1) Fixed thresholds for pseudo-labeling in existing methodologies lead to low-quality pseudo-labels, as model confidence varies across categories and domains; 2) Stochastic parameter restoration methods for mitigating catastrophic forgetting fail to preserve critical information effectively, due to their intrinsic randomness. To tackle these challenges for detection models in CTTA scenarios, we present AMROD, featuring three core components. Firstly, the object-level contrastive learning module extracts object-level features for contrastive learning to refine the feature representation in the target domain. Secondly, the adaptive monitoring module dynamically skips unnecessary adaptation and updates the category-specific threshold based on predicted confidence scores to enable efficiency and improve the quality of pseudo-labels. Lastly, the adaptive randomized restoration mechanism selectively reset inactive parameters with higher possibilities, ensuring the retention of essential knowledge. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AMROD on four CTTA object detection tasks, where AMROD outperforms existing methods, especially achieving a 3.2 mAP improvement and a 20\% increase in efficiency on the Cityscapes-to-Cityscapes-C CTTA task. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/AMROD.
Authors:Zhaoxin Hu, Keyan Ren
Abstract:
Lack of shape guidance and label jitter caused by information deficiency of weak label are the main problems in 3D weakly-supervised object detection. Current weakly-supervised models often use heuristics or assumptions methods to infer information from weak labels without taking advantage of the inherent clues of weakly-supervised and fully-supervised methods, thus it is difficult to explore a method that combines data utilization efficiency and model accuracy. In an attempt to address these issues, we propose a novel plug-and-in point cloud feature representation network called Multi-scale Mixed Attention (MMA). MMA utilizes adjacency attention within neighborhoods and disparity attention at different density scales to build a feature representation network. The smart feature representation obtained from MMA has shape tendency and object existence area inference, which can constrain the region of the detection boxes, thereby alleviating the problems caused by the information default of weak labels. Extensive experiments show that in indoor weak label scenarios, the fully-supervised network can perform close to that of the weakly-supervised network merely through the improvement of point feature by MMA. At the same time, MMA can turn waste into treasure, reversing the label jitter problem that originally interfered with weakly-supervised detection into the source of data enhancement, strengthening the performance of existing weak supervision detection methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/hzx-9894/MMA.
Authors:Jia Syuen Lim, Zhuoxiao Chen, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Zhi Chen, Xin Yu, Zi Huang, Yadan Luo
Abstract:
Class-agnostic object detection (OD) can be a cornerstone or a bottleneck for many downstream vision tasks. Despite considerable advancements in bottom-up and multi-object discovery methods that leverage basic visual cues to identify salient objects, consistently achieving a high recall rate remains difficult due to the diversity of object types and their contextual complexity.
In this work, we investigate using vision-language models (VLMs) to enhance object detection via a self-supervised prompt learning strategy. Our initial findings indicate that manually crafted text queries often result in undetected objects, primarily because detection confidence diminishes when the query words exhibit semantic overlap. To address this, we propose a Dispersing Prompt Expansion (DiPEx) approach. DiPEx progressively learns to expand a set of distinct, non-overlapping hyperspherical prompts to enhance recall rates, thereby improving performance in downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution OD. Specifically, DiPEx initiates the process by self-training generic parent prompts and selecting the one with the highest semantic uncertainty for further expansion. The resulting child prompts are expected to inherit semantics from their parent prompts while capturing more fine-grained semantics. We apply dispersion losses to ensure high inter-class discrepancy among child prompts while preserving semantic consistency between parent-child prompt pairs. To prevent excessive growth of the prompt sets, we utilize the maximum angular coverage (MAC) of the semantic space as a criterion for early termination. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DiPEx through extensive class-agnostic OD and OOD-OD experiments on MS-COCO and LVIS, surpassing other prompting methods by up to 20.1\% in AR and achieving a 21.3\% AP improvement over SAM. The code is available at https://github.com/jason-lim26/DiPEx.
Authors:Zhuoxiao Chen, Junjie Meng, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Yonggang Zhang, Zi Huang, Yadan Luo
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection is crucial for various applications but often experiences performance degradation in real-world deployments due to domain shifts. While most studies focus on cross-dataset shifts, such as changes in environments and object geometries, practical corruptions from sensor variations and weather conditions remain underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel online test-time adaptation framework for 3D detectors that effectively tackles these shifts, including a challenging cross-corruption scenario where cross-dataset shifts and corruptions co-occur. By leveraging long-term knowledge from previous test batches, our approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting and adapts effectively to diverse shifts. Specifically, we propose a Model Synergy (MOS) strategy that dynamically selects historical checkpoints with diverse knowledge and assembles them to best accommodate the current test batch. This assembly is directed by our proposed Synergy Weights (SW), which perform a weighted averaging of the selected checkpoints, minimizing redundancy in the composite model. The SWs are computed by evaluating the similarity of predicted bounding boxes on the test data and the independence of features between checkpoint pairs in the model bank. To maintain an efficient and informative model bank, we discard checkpoints with the lowest average SW scores, replacing them with newly updated models. Our method was rigorously tested against existing test-time adaptation strategies across three datasets and eight types of corruptions, demonstrating superior adaptability to dynamic scenes and conditions. Notably, it achieved a 67.3% improvement in a challenging cross-corruption scenario, offering a more comprehensive benchmark for adaptation. Source code: https://github.com/zhuoxiao-chen/MOS.
Authors:Xinyi Ying, Chao Xiao, Ruojing Li, Xu He, Boyang Li, Xu Cao, Zhaoxu Li, Yingqian Wang, Mingyuan Hu, Qingyu Xu, Zaiping Lin, Miao Li, Shilin Zhou, Wei An, Weidong Sheng, Li Liu
Abstract:
Small object detection (SOD) has been a longstanding yet challenging task for decades, with numerous datasets and algorithms being developed. However, they mainly focus on either visible or thermal modality, while visible-thermal (RGBT) bimodality is rarely explored. Although some RGBT datasets have been developed recently, the insufficient quantity, limited category, misaligned images and large target size cannot provide an impartial benchmark to evaluate multi-category visible-thermal small object detection (RGBT SOD) algorithms. In this paper, we build the first large-scale benchmark with high diversity for RGBT SOD (namely RGBT-Tiny), including 115 paired sequences, 93K frames and 1.2M manual annotations. RGBT-Tiny contains abundant targets (7 categories) and high-diversity scenes (8 types that cover different illumination and density variations). Note that, over 81% of targets are smaller than 16x16, and we provide paired bounding box annotations with tracking ID to offer an extremely challenging benchmark with wide-range applications, such as RGBT fusion, detection and tracking. In addition, we propose a scale adaptive fitness (SAFit) measure that exhibits high robustness on both small and large targets. The proposed SAFit can provide reasonable performance evaluation and promote detection performance. Based on the proposed RGBT-Tiny dataset and SAFit measure, extensive evaluations have been conducted, including 23 recent state-of-the-art algorithms that cover four different types (i.e., visible generic detection, visible SOD, thermal SOD and RGBT object detection). Project is available at https://github.com/XinyiYing/RGBT-Tiny.
Authors:Zijian Cai, Xinquan Yang, Xuguang Li, Xiaoling Luo, Xuechen Li, Linlin Shen, He Meng, Yongqiang Deng
Abstract:
Panoramic X-ray is a simple and effective tool for diagnosing dental diseases in clinical practice. When deep learning models are developed to assist dentist in interpreting panoramic X-rays, most of their performance suffers from the limited annotated data, which requires dentist's expertise and a lot of time cost. Although self-supervised learning (SSL) has been proposed to address this challenge, the two-stage process of pretraining and fine-tuning requires even more training time and computational resources. In this paper, we present a self-supervised auxiliary detection (SSAD) framework, which is plug-and-play and compatible with any detectors. It consists of a reconstruction branch and a detection branch. Both branches are trained simultaneously, sharing the same encoder, without the need for finetuning. The reconstruction branch learns to restore the tooth texture of healthy or diseased teeth, while the detection branch utilizes these learned features for diagnosis. To enhance the encoder's ability to capture fine-grained features, we incorporate the image encoder of SAM to construct a texture consistency (TC) loss, which extracts image embedding from the input and output of reconstruction branch, and then enforces both embedding into the same feature space. Extensive experiments on the public DENTEX dataset through three detection tasks demonstrate that the proposed SSAD framework achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to mainstream object detection methods and SSL methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Dylonsword/SSAD
Authors:Veedant Jain, Gabriel Kreiman, Felipe dos Santos Alves Feitosa
Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in image segmentation and object detection, understanding complex scenes remains a significant challenge. Here, we focus on graphical humor as a paradigmatic example of image interpretation that requires elucidating the interaction of different scene elements in the context of prior cognitive knowledge. This paper introduces \textbf{HumorDB}, a novel, controlled, and carefully curated dataset designed to evaluate and advance visual humor understanding by AI systems. The dataset comprises diverse images spanning photos, cartoons, sketches, and AI-generated content, including minimally contrastive pairs where subtle edits differentiate between humorous and non-humorous versions. We evaluate humans, state-of-the-art vision models, and large vision-language models on three tasks: binary humor classification, funniness rating prediction, and pairwise humor comparison. The results reveal a gap between current AI systems and human-level humor understanding. While pretrained vision-language models perform better than vision-only models, they still struggle with abstract sketches and subtle humor cues. Analysis of attention maps shows that even when models correctly classify humorous images, they often fail to focus on the precise regions that make the image funny. Preliminary mechanistic interpretability studies and evaluation of model explanations provide initial insights into how different architectures process humor. Our results identify promising trends and current limitations, suggesting that an effective understanding of visual humor requires sophisticated architectures capable of detecting subtle contextual features and bridging the gap between visual perception and abstract reasoning. All the code and data are available here: \href{https://github.com/kreimanlab/HumorDB}{https://github.com/kreimanlab/HumorDB}
Authors:Kaishen Wang, Xun Xia, Jian Liu, Zhang Yi, Tao He
Abstract:
In recent years, employing layer attention to enhance interaction among hierarchical layers has proven to be a significant advancement in building network structures. In this paper, we delve into the distinction between layer attention and the general attention mechanism, noting that existing layer attention methods achieve layer interaction on fixed feature maps in a static manner. These static layer attention methods limit the ability for context feature extraction among layers. To restore the dynamic context representation capability of the attention mechanism, we propose a Dynamic Layer Attention (DLA) architecture. The DLA comprises dual paths, where the forward path utilizes an improved recurrent neural network block, named Dynamic Sharing Unit (DSU), for context feature extraction. The backward path updates features using these shared context representations. Finally, the attention mechanism is applied to these dynamically refreshed feature maps among layers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DLA architecture, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods in image recognition and object detection tasks. Additionally, the DSU block has been evaluated as an efficient plugin in the proposed DLA architecture.The code is available at https://github.com/tunantu/Dynamic-Layer-Attention.
Authors:Fengxiang Wang, Hongzhen Wang, Di Wang, Zonghao Guo, Zhenyu Zhong, Long Lan, Wenjing Yang, Jing Zhang
Abstract:
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has become an essential method for building foundational visual models in remote sensing (RS). However, the limitations in size and diversity of existing RS datasets restrict the ability of MIM methods to learn generalizable representations. Additionally, conventional MIM techniques, which require reconstructing all tokens, introduce unnecessary computational overhead. To address these issues, we present a new pre-training pipeline for RS models, featuring the creation of a large-scale RS dataset and an efficient MIM approach. We curated a high-quality dataset named OpticalRS-13M by collecting publicly available RS datasets and processing them through exclusion, slicing, and deduplication. OpticalRS-13M comprises 13 million optical images covering various RS tasks, such as object detection and pixel segmentation. To enhance efficiency, we propose SelectiveMAE, a pre-training method that dynamically encodes and reconstructs semantically rich patch tokens, thereby reducing the inefficiencies of traditional MIM models caused by redundant background pixels in RS images. Extensive experiments show that OpticalRS-13M significantly improves classification, detection, and segmentation performance, while SelectiveMAE increases training efficiency over 2$\times$ times. This highlights the effectiveness and scalability of our pipeline in developing RS foundational models. The dataset, source code, and trained models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/SelectiveMAE.
Authors:Yecheol Kim, Junho Lee, Changsoo Park, Hyoung won Kim, Inho Lim, Christopher Chang, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
3D object detection is crucial for applications like autonomous driving and robotics. However, in real-world environments, variations in sensor data distribution due to sensor upgrades, weather changes, and geographic differences can adversely affect detection performance. Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) aims to mitigate these challenges by transferring knowledge from a source domain, abundant in labeled data, to a target domain where labels are scarce. This paper presents a new SSDA method referred to as Target-Oriented Domain Augmentation (TODA) specifically tailored for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. TODA efficiently utilizes all available data, including labeled data in the source domain, and both labeled data and unlabeled data in the target domain to enhance domain adaptation performance. TODA consists of two stages: TargetMix and AdvMix. TargetMix employs mixing augmentation accounting for LiDAR sensor characteristics to facilitate feature alignment between the source-domain and target-domain. AdvMix applies point-wise adversarial augmentation with mixing augmentation, which perturbs the unlabeled data to align the features within both labeled and unlabeled data in the target domain. Our experiments conducted on the challenging domain adaptation tasks demonstrate that TODA outperforms existing domain adaptation techniques designed for 3D object detection by significant margins. The code is available at: https://github.com/rasd3/TODA.
Authors:Mehar Khurana, Neehar Peri, James Hays, Deva Ramanan
Abstract:
State-of-the-art 3D object detectors are often trained on massive labeled datasets. However, annotating 3D bounding boxes remains prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, particularly for LiDAR. Instead, recent works demonstrate that self-supervised pre-training with unlabeled data can improve detection accuracy with limited labels. Contemporary methods adapt best-practices for self-supervised learning from the image domain to point clouds (such as contrastive learning). However, publicly available 3D datasets are considerably smaller and less diverse than those used for image-based self-supervised learning, limiting their effectiveness. We do note, however, that such 3D data is naturally collected in a multimodal fashion, often paired with images. Rather than pre-training with only self-supervised objectives, we argue that it is better to bootstrap point cloud representations using image-based foundation models trained on internet-scale data. Specifically, we propose a shelf-supervised approach (e.g. supervised with off-the-shelf image foundation models) for generating zero-shot 3D bounding boxes from paired RGB and LiDAR data. Pre-training 3D detectors with such pseudo-labels yields significantly better semi-supervised detection accuracy than prior self-supervised pretext tasks. Importantly, we show that image-based shelf-supervision is helpful for training LiDAR-only, RGB-only and multi-modal (RGB + LiDAR) detectors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on nuScenes and WOD, significantly improving over prior work in limited data settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/meharkhurana03/cm3d
Authors:Hashmat Shadab Malik, Fahad Shamshad, Muzammal Naseer, Karthik Nandakumar, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan
Abstract:
Vision State Space Models (VSSMs), a novel architecture that combines the strengths of recurrent neural networks and latent variable models, have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual perception tasks by efficiently capturing long-range dependencies and modeling complex visual dynamics. However, their robustness under natural and adversarial perturbations remains a critical concern. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of VSSMs' robustness under various perturbation scenarios, including occlusions, image structure, common corruptions, and adversarial attacks, and compare their performance to well-established architectures such as transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks. Furthermore, we investigate the resilience of VSSMs to object-background compositional changes on sophisticated benchmarks designed to test model performance in complex visual scenes. We also assess their robustness on object detection and segmentation tasks using corrupted datasets that mimic real-world scenarios. To gain a deeper understanding of VSSMs' adversarial robustness, we conduct a frequency-based analysis of adversarial attacks, evaluating their performance against low-frequency and high-frequency perturbations. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of VSSMs in handling complex visual corruptions, offering valuable insights for future research. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/HashmatShadab/MambaRobustness.
Authors:Shoujie Li, Yan Huang, Changqing Guo, Tong Wu, Jiawei Zhang, Linrui Zhang, Wenbo Ding
Abstract:
The advent of simulation engines has revolutionized learning and operational efficiency for robots, offering cost-effective and swift pipelines. However, the lack of a universal simulation platform tailored for chemical scenarios impedes progress in robotic manipulation and visualization of reaction processes. Addressing this void, we present Chemistry3D, an innovative toolkit that integrates extensive chemical and robotic knowledge. Chemistry3D not only enables robots to perform chemical experiments but also provides real-time visualization of temperature, color, and pH changes during reactions. Built on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, Chemistry3D offers interfaces for robot operation, visual inspection, and liquid flow control, facilitating the simulation of special objects such as liquids and transparent entities. Leveraging this toolkit, we have devised RL tasks, object detection, and robot operation scenarios. Additionally, to discern disparities between the rendering engine and the real world, we conducted transparent object detection experiments using Sim2Real, validating the toolkit's exceptional simulation performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/huangyan28/Chemistry3D, and a related tutorial can be found at https://www.omni-chemistry.com.
Authors:Hualian Sheng, Sijia Cai, Na Zhao, Bing Deng, Qiao Liang, Min-Jian Zhao, Jieping Ye
Abstract:
The field of 3D object detection from point clouds is rapidly advancing in computer vision, aiming to accurately and efficiently detect and localize objects in three-dimensional space. Current 3D detectors commonly fall short in terms of flexibility and scalability, with ample room for advancements in performance. In this paper, our objective is to address these limitations by introducing two frameworks for 3D object detection with minimal hand-crafted design. Firstly, we propose CT3D, which sequentially performs raw-point-based embedding, a standard Transformer encoder, and a channel-wise decoder for point features within each proposal. Secondly, we present an enhanced network called CT3D++, which incorporates geometric and semantic fusion-based embedding to extract more valuable and comprehensive proposal-aware information. Additionally, CT3D ++ utilizes a point-to-key bidirectional encoder for more efficient feature encoding with reduced computational cost. By replacing the corresponding components of CT3D with these novel modules, CT3D++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the KITTI dataset and the large-scale Way\-mo Open Dataset. The source code for our frameworks will be made accessible at https://github.com/hlsheng1/CT3D-plusplus.
Authors:Nikhil Kumar, Avinash Upadhyay, Shreya Sharma, Manoj Sharma, Pravendra Singh
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel mid-wave infrared (MWIR) small target detection dataset (MWIRSTD) comprising 14 video sequences containing approximately 1053 images with annotated targets of three distinct classes of small objects. Captured using cooled MWIR imagers, the dataset offers a unique opportunity for researchers to develop and evaluate state-of-the-art methods for small object detection in realistic MWIR scenes. Unlike existing datasets, which primarily consist of uncooled thermal images or synthetic data with targets superimposed onto the background or vice versa, MWIRSTD provides authentic MWIR data with diverse targets and environments. Extensive experiments on various traditional methods and deep learning-based techniques for small target detection are performed on the proposed dataset, providing valuable insights into their efficacy. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/avinres/MWIRSTD.
Authors:Sina Tayebati, Theja Tulabandhula, Amit R. Trivedi
Abstract:
In this work, we propose a disruptively frugal LiDAR perception dataflow that generates rather than senses parts of the environment that are either predictable based on the extensive training of the environment or have limited consequence to the overall prediction accuracy. Therefore, the proposed methodology trades off sensing energy with training data for low-power robotics and autonomous navigation to operate frugally with sensors, extending their lifetime on a single battery charge. Our proposed generative pre-training strategy for this purpose, called as radially masked autoencoding (R-MAE), can also be readily implemented in a typical LiDAR system by selectively activating and controlling the laser power for randomly generated angular regions during on-field operations. Our extensive evaluations show that pre-training with R-MAE enables focusing on the radial segments of the data, thereby capturing spatial relationships and distances between objects more effectively than conventional procedures. Therefore, the proposed methodology not only reduces sensing energy but also improves prediction accuracy. For example, our extensive evaluations on Waymo, nuScenes, and KITTI datasets show that the approach achieves over a 5% average precision improvement in detection tasks across datasets and over a 4% accuracy improvement in transferring domains from Waymo and nuScenes to KITTI. In 3D object detection, it enhances small object detection by up to 4.37% in AP at moderate difficulty levels in the KITTI dataset. Even with 90% radial masking, it surpasses baseline models by up to 5.59% in mAP/mAPH across all object classes in the Waymo dataset. Additionally, our method achieves up to 3.17% and 2.31% improvements in mAP and NDS, respectively, on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness with both single and fused LiDAR-camera modalities. https://github.com/sinatayebati/Radial_MAE.
Authors:Brandon Trabucco, Max Gurinas, Kyle Doherty, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Abstract:
Large multimodal models such as Stable Diffusion can generate, detect, and classify new visual concepts after fine-tuning just a single word embedding. Do models learn similar words for the same concepts (i.e. = orange + cat)? We conduct a large-scale analysis on three state-of-the-art models in text-to-image generation, open-set object detection, and zero-shot classification, and find that new word embeddings are model-specific and non-transferable. Across 4,800 new embeddings trained for 40 diverse visual concepts on four standard datasets, we find perturbations within an $ε$-ball to any prior embedding that generate, detect, and classify an arbitrary concept. When these new embeddings are spliced into new models, fine-tuning that targets the original model is lost. We show popular soft prompt-tuning approaches find these perturbative solutions when applied to visual concept learning tasks, and embeddings for visual concepts are not transferable. Code for reproducing our work is available at: https://visual-words.github.io.
Authors:Weiwei Duan, Luping Ji, Shengjia Chen, Sicheng Zhu, Mao Ye
Abstract:
As a sub-field of object detection, moving infrared small target detection presents significant challenges due to tiny target sizes and low contrast against backgrounds. Currently-existing methods primarily rely on the features extracted only from spatio-temporal domain. Frequency domain has hardly been concerned yet, although it has been widely applied in image processing. To extend feature source domains and enhance feature representation, we propose a new Triple-domain Strategy (Tridos) with the frequency-aware memory enhancement on spatio-temporal domain for infrared small target detection. In this scheme, it effectively detaches and enhances frequency features by a local-global frequency-aware module with Fourier transform. Inspired by human visual system, our memory enhancement is designed to capture the spatial relations of infrared targets among video frames. Furthermore, it encodes temporal dynamics motion features via differential learning and residual enhancing. Additionally, we further design a residual compensation to reconcile possible cross-domain feature mismatches. To our best knowledge, proposed Tridos is the first work to explore infrared target feature learning comprehensively in spatio-temporal-frequency domains. The extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., DAUB, ITSDT-15K and IRDST) validate that our triple-domain infrared feature learning scheme could often be obviously superior to state-of-the-art ones. Source codes are available at https://github.com/UESTC-nnLab/Tridos.
Authors:Liang Yao, Fan Liu, Shengxiang Xu, Chuanyi Zhang, Xing Ma, Jianyu Jiang, Zequan Wang, Shimin Di, Jun Zhou
Abstract:
The development of multi-modal learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) typically relies on a large amount of pixel-aligned multi-modal image data. However, existing datasets face challenges such as limited modalities, high construction costs, and imprecise annotations. To this end, we propose a synthetic multi-modal UAV-based multi-task dataset, UEMM-Air. Specifically, we simulate various UAV flight scenarios and object types using the Unreal Engine (UE). Then we design the UAV's flight logic to automatically collect data from different scenarios, perspectives, and altitudes. Furthermore, we propose a novel heuristic automatic annotation algorithm to generate accurate object detection labels. Finally, we utilize labels to generate text descriptions of images to make our UEMM-Air support more cross-modality tasks. In total, our UEMM-Air consists of 120k pairs of images with 6 modalities and precise annotations. Moreover, we conduct numerous experiments and establish new benchmark results on our dataset. We also found that models pre-trained on UEMM-Air exhibit better performance on downstream tasks compared to other similar datasets. The dataset is publicly available (https://github.com/1e12Leon/UEMM-Air) to support the research of multi-modal tasks on UAVs.
Authors:William Avery, Mustafa Munir, Radu Marculescu
Abstract:
To compete with existing mobile architectures, MobileViG introduces Sparse Vision Graph Attention (SVGA), a fast token-mixing operator based on the principles of GNNs. However, MobileViG scales poorly with model size, falling at most 1% behind models with similar latency. This paper introduces Mobile Graph Convolution (MGC), a new vision graph neural network (ViG) module that solves this scaling problem. Our proposed mobile vision architecture, MobileViGv2, uses MGC to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. MGC improves on SVGA by increasing graph sparsity and introducing conditional positional encodings to the graph operation. Our smallest model, MobileViGv2-Ti, achieves a 77.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 2% higher than MobileViG-Ti, with 0.9 ms inference latency on the iPhone 13 Mini NPU. Our largest model, MobileViGv2-B, achieves an 83.4% top-1 accuracy, 0.8% higher than MobileViG-B, with 2.7 ms inference latency. Besides image classification, we show that MobileViGv2 generalizes well to other tasks. For object detection and instance segmentation on MS COCO 2017, MobileViGv2-M outperforms MobileViG-M by 1.2 $AP^{box}$ and 0.7 $AP^{mask}$, and MobileViGv2-B outperforms MobileViG-B by 1.0 $AP^{box}$ and 0.7 $AP^{mask}$. For semantic segmentation on ADE20K, MobileViGv2-M achieves 42.9% $mIoU$ and MobileViGv2-B achieves 44.3% $mIoU$. Our code can be found at \url{https://github.com/SLDGroup/MobileViGv2}.
Authors:Zeyu Wang, Chen Li, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu, Hongbo Li
Abstract:
Driven by the rapid development of deep learning technology, the YOLO series has set a new benchmark for real-time object detectors. Additionally, transformer-based structures have emerged as the most powerful solution in the field, greatly extending the model's receptive field and achieving significant performance improvements. However, this improvement comes at a cost as the quadratic complexity of the self-attentive mechanism increases the computational burden of the model. To address this problem, we introduce a simple yet effective baseline approach called Mamba YOLO. Our contributions are as follows: 1) We propose that the ODMamba backbone introduce a \textbf{S}tate \textbf{S}pace \textbf{M}odel (\textbf{SSM}) with linear complexity to address the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Unlike the other Transformer-base and SSM-base method, ODMamba is simple to train without pretraining. 2) For real-time requirement, we designed the macro structure of ODMamba, determined the optimal stage ratio and scaling size. 3) We design the RG Block that employs a multi-branch structure to model the channel dimensions, which addresses the possible limitations of SSM in sequence modeling, such as insufficient receptive fields and weak image localization. This design captures localized image dependencies more accurately and significantly. Extensive experiments on the publicly available COCO benchmark dataset show that Mamba YOLO achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous methods. Specifically, a tiny version of Mamba YOLO achieves a \textbf{7.5}\% improvement in mAP on a single 4090 GPU with an inference time of \textbf{1.5} ms. The pytorch code is available at: \url{https://github.com/HZAI-ZJNU/Mamba-YOLO}
Authors:Muhammad Nawfal Meeran, Gokul Adethya T, Bhanu Pratyush Mantha
Abstract:
In the domain of large foundation models, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained notable recognition for its exceptional performance in image segmentation. However, tackling the video camouflage object detection (VCOD) task presents a unique challenge. Camouflaged objects typically blend into the background, making them difficult to distinguish in still images. Additionally, ensuring temporal consistency in this context is a challenging problem. As a result, SAM encounters limitations and falls short when applied to the VCOD task. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new method called the SAM Propagation Module (SAM-PM). Our propagation module enforces temporal consistency within SAM by employing spatio-temporal cross-attention mechanisms. Moreover, we exclusively train the propagation module while keeping the SAM network weights frozen, allowing us to integrate task-specific insights with the vast knowledge accumulated by the large model. Our method effectively incorporates temporal consistency and domain-specific expertise into the segmentation network with an addition of less than 1% of SAM's parameters. Extensive experimentation reveals a substantial performance improvement in the VCOD benchmark when compared to the most recent state-of-the-art techniques. Code and pre-trained weights are open-sourced at https://github.com/SpiderNitt/SAM-PM
Authors:Hou-I Liu, Yu-Wen Tseng, Kai-Cheng Chang, Pin-Jyun Wang, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Abstract:
Despite notable advancements in the field of computer vision, the precise detection of tiny objects continues to pose a significant challenge, largely owing to the minuscule pixel representation allocated to these objects in imagery data. This challenge resonates profoundly in the domain of geoscience and remote sensing, where high-fidelity detection of tiny objects can facilitate a myriad of applications ranging from urban planning to environmental monitoring. In this paper, we propose a new framework, namely, DeNoising FPN with Trans R-CNN (DNTR), to improve the performance of tiny object detection. DNTR consists of an easy plug-in design, DeNoising FPN (DN-FPN), and an effective Transformer-based detector, Trans R-CNN. Specifically, feature fusion in the feature pyramid network is important for detecting multiscale objects. However, noisy features may be produced during the fusion process since there is no regularization between the features of different scales. Therefore, we introduce a DN-FPN module that utilizes contrastive learning to suppress noise in each level's features in the top-down path of FPN. Second, based on the two-stage framework, we replace the obsolete R-CNN detector with a novel Trans R-CNN detector to focus on the representation of tiny objects with self-attention. Experimental results manifest that our DNTR outperforms the baselines by at least 17.4% in terms of APvt on the AI-TOD dataset and 9.6% in terms of AP on the VisDrone dataset, respectively. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/DNTR.
Authors:Hao Zhang, Shuaijie Zhang, Renbin Zou
Abstract:
Data augmentation refers to the process of applying a series of transformations or expansions to original data to generate new samples, thereby increasing the diversity and quantity of the data, effectively improving the performance and robustness of models. As a common data augmentation method, Mosaic data augmentation technique stitches multiple images together to increase the diversity and complexity of training data, thereby reducing the risk of overfitting. Although Mosaic data augmentation achieves excellent results in general detection tasks by stitching images together, it still has certain limitations for specific detection tasks. This paper addresses the challenge of detecting a large number of densely distributed small objects in aerial images by proposing the Select-Mosaic data augmentation method, which is improved with a fine-grained region selection strategy. The improved Select-Mosaic method demonstrates superior performance in handling dense small object detection tasks, significantly enhancing the accuracy and stability of detection models. Code is available at https://github.com/malagoutou/Select-Mosaic.
Authors:Abdelrahman Abdallah, Mohamed Mounis, Mahmoud Abdalla, Mahmoud SalahEldin Kasem, Mohamed Mahmoud, Ibrahim Abdelhalim, Mohamed Elkasaby, Yasser ElBendary, Adam Jatowt
Abstract:
Multilingual OCR and information extraction from receipts remains challenging, particularly for complex scripts like Arabic. We introduce \dataset, a comprehensive dataset designed for Arabic-English receipt understanding comprising 20,000 annotated receipts from diverse retail settings, 30,000 OCR-annotated images, and 10,000 item-level annotations, and a new Receipt QA subset with 1265 receipt images paired with 40 question-answer pairs each to support LLM evaluation for receipt understanding. The dataset captures merchant names, item descriptions, prices, receipt numbers, and dates to support object detection, OCR, and information extraction tasks. We establish baseline performance using traditional methods (Tesseract OCR) and advanced neural networks, demonstrating the dataset's effectiveness for processing complex, noisy real-world receipt layouts. Our publicly accessible dataset advances automated multilingual document processing research (see https://github.com/Update-For-Integrated-Business-AI/CORU ).
Authors:Xizhou Zhu, Xue Yang, Zhaokai Wang, Hao Li, Wenhan Dou, Junqi Ge, Lewei Lu, Yu Qiao, Jifeng Dai
Abstract:
Image pyramids are commonly used in modern computer vision tasks to obtain multi-scale features for precise understanding of images. However, image pyramids process multiple resolutions of images using the same large-scale model, which requires significant computational cost. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel network architecture known as the Parameter-Inverted Image Pyramid Networks (PIIP). Our core idea is to use models with different parameter sizes to process different resolution levels of the image pyramid, thereby balancing computational efficiency and performance. Specifically, the input to PIIP is a set of multi-scale images, where higher resolution images are processed by smaller networks. We further propose a feature interaction mechanism to allow features of different resolutions to complement each other and effectively integrate information from different spatial scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the PIIP achieves superior performance in tasks such as object detection, segmentation, and image classification, compared to traditional image pyramid methods and single-branch networks, while reducing computational cost. Notably, when applying our method on a large-scale vision foundation model InternViT-6B, we improve its performance by 1%-2% on detection and segmentation with only 40%-60% of the original computation. These results validate the effectiveness of the PIIP approach and provide a new technical direction for future vision computing tasks. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PIIP.
Authors:Cyprien Quéméneur, Soumaya Cherkaoui
Abstract:
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) emerges as a pivotal component for autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), by enabling low-latency big data processing in a dense interconnected network that comprises vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and the cloud. Autonomous vehicles are heavily reliant on machine learning (ML) and can strongly benefit from the wealth of sensory data generated at the edge, which calls for measures to reconcile model training with preserving the privacy of sensitive user data. Federated learning (FL) stands out as a promising solution to train sophisticated ML models in vehicular networks while protecting the privacy of road users and mitigating communication overhead. This paper examines the federated optimization of the cutting-edge YOLOv7 model to tackle real-time object detection amid data heterogeneity, encompassing unbalancedness, concept drift, and label distribution skews. To this end, we introduce FedPylot, a lightweight MPI-based prototype to simulate federated object detection experiments on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, where we safeguard server-client communications using hybrid encryption. Our study factors in accuracy, communication cost, and inference speed, thereby presenting a balanced approach to the challenges faced by autonomous vehicles. We demonstrate promising results for the applicability of FL in IoV and hope that FedPylot will provide a basis for future research into federated real-time object detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/cyprienquemeneur/fedpylot.
Authors:Qiang Chen, Xiangbo Su, Xinyu Zhang, Jian Wang, Jiahui Chen, Yunpeng Shen, Chuchu Han, Ziliang Chen, Weixiang Xu, Fanrong Li, Shan Zhang, Kun Yao, Errui Ding, Gang Zhang, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a light-weight detection transformer, LW-DETR, which outperforms YOLOs for real-time object detection. The architecture is a simple stack of a ViT encoder, a projector, and a shallow DETR decoder. Our approach leverages recent advanced techniques, such as training-effective techniques, e.g., improved loss and pretraining, and interleaved window and global attentions for reducing the ViT encoder complexity. We improve the ViT encoder by aggregating multi-level feature maps, and the intermediate and final feature maps in the ViT encoder, forming richer feature maps, and introduce window-major feature map organization for improving the efficiency of interleaved attention computation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior over existing real-time detectors, e.g., YOLO and its variants, on COCO and other benchmark datasets. Code and models are available at (https://github.com/Atten4Vis/LW-DETR).
Authors:Wei Dong, Han Zhou, Yuqiong Tian, Jingke Sun, Xiaohong Liu, Guangtao Zhai, Jun Chen
Abstract:
Shadow-affected images often exhibit pronounced spatial discrepancies in color and illumination, consequently degrading various vision applications including object detection and segmentation systems. To effectively eliminate shadows in real-world images while preserving intricate details and producing visually compelling outcomes, we introduce a mask-free Shadow Removal and Refinement network (ShadowRefiner) via Fast Fourier Transformer. Specifically, the Shadow Removal module in our method aims to establish effective mappings between shadow-affected and shadow-free images via spatial and frequency representation learning. To mitigate the pixel misalignment and further improve the image quality, we propose a novel Fast-Fourier Attention based Transformer (FFAT) architecture, where an innovative attention mechanism is designed for meticulous refinement. Our method wins the championship in the Perceptual Track and achieves the second best performance in the Fidelity Track of NTIRE 2024 Image Shadow Removal Challenge. Besides, comprehensive experiment result also demonstrate the compelling effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is publicly available: https://github.com/movingforward100/Shadow_R.
Authors:Yicheng Xiao, Lin Song, Shaoli Huang, Jiangshan Wang, Siyu Song, Yixiao Ge, Xiu Li, Ying Shan
Abstract:
The state space models, employing recursively propagated features, demonstrate strong representation capabilities comparable to Transformer models and superior efficiency. However, constrained by the inherent geometric constraints of sequences, it still falls short in modeling long-range dependencies. To address this issue, we propose the GrootVL network, which first dynamically generates a tree topology based on spatial relationships and input features. Then, feature propagation is performed based on this graph, thereby breaking the original sequence constraints to achieve stronger representation capabilities. Additionally, we introduce a linear complexity dynamic programming algorithm to enhance long-range interactions without increasing computational cost. GrootVL is a versatile multimodal framework that can be applied to both visual and textual tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing structured state space models on image classification, object detection and segmentation. Besides, by fine-tuning large language models, our approach achieves consistent improvements in multiple textual tasks at minor training cost.
Authors:Xinyang Pu, Feng Xu
Abstract:
Deep learning models in satellite onboard enable real-time interpretation of remote sensing images, reducing the need for data transmission to the ground and conserving communication resources. As satellite numbers and observation frequencies increase, the demand for satellite onboard real-time image interpretation grows, highlighting the expanding importance and development of this technology. However, updating the extensive parameters of models deployed on the satellites for spaceborne object detection model is challenging due to the limitations of uplink bandwidth in wireless satellite communications. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method based on parameter-efficient fine-tuning technology with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) module. It involves training low-rank matrix parameters and integrating them with the original model's weight matrix through multiplication and summation, thereby fine-tuning the model parameters to adapt to new data distributions with minimal weight updates. The proposed method combines parameter-efficient fine-tuning with full fine-tuning in the parameter update strategy of the oriented object detection algorithm architecture. This strategy enables model performance improvements close to full fine-tuning effects with minimal parameter updates. In addition, low rank approximation is conducted to pick an optimal rank value for LoRA matrices. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. By fine-tuning and updating only 12.4$\%$ of the model's total parameters, it is able to achieve 97$\%$ to 100$\%$ of the performance of full fine-tuning models. Additionally, the reduced number of trainable parameters accelerates model training iterations and enhances the generalization and robustness of the oriented object detection model. The source code is available at: \url{https://github.com/fudanxu/LoRA-Det}.
Authors:Ding Jia, Jianyuan Guo, Kai Han, Han Wu, Chao Zhang, Chang Xu, Xinghao Chen
Abstract:
Cross-modal transformers have demonstrated superiority in various vision tasks by effectively integrating different modalities. This paper first critiques prior token exchange methods which replace less informative tokens with inter-modal features, and demonstrate exchange based methods underperform cross-attention mechanisms, while the computational demand of the latter inevitably restricts its use with longer sequences. To surmount the computational challenges, we propose GeminiFusion, a pixel-wise fusion approach that capitalizes on aligned cross-modal representations. GeminiFusion elegantly combines intra-modal and inter-modal attentions, dynamically integrating complementary information across modalities. We employ a layer-adaptive noise to adaptively control their interplay on a per-layer basis, thereby achieving a harmonized fusion process. Notably, GeminiFusion maintains linear complexity with respect to the number of input tokens, ensuring this multimodal framework operates with efficiency comparable to unimodal networks. Comprehensive evaluations across multimodal image-to-image translation, 3D object detection and arbitrary-modal semantic segmentation tasks, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, event data, etc. demonstrate the superior performance of our GeminiFusion against leading-edge techniques. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/JiaDingCN/GeminiFusion
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Chenglong Li, Cheng Zhang, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Multi-modal salient object detection (MSOD) aims to boost saliency detection performance by integrating visible sources with depth or thermal infrared ones. Existing methods generally design different fusion schemes to handle certain issues or challenges. Although these fusion schemes are effective at addressing specific issues or challenges, they may struggle to handle multiple complex challenges simultaneously. To solve this problem, we propose a novel adaptive fusion bank that makes full use of the complementary benefits from a set of basic fusion schemes to handle different challenges simultaneously for robust MSOD. We focus on handling five major challenges in MSOD, namely center bias, scale variation, image clutter, low illumination, and thermal crossover or depth ambiguity. The fusion bank proposed consists of five representative fusion schemes, which are specifically designed based on the characteristics of each challenge, respectively. The bank is scalable, and more fusion schemes could be incorporated into the bank for more challenges. To adaptively select the appropriate fusion scheme for multi-modal input, we introduce an adaptive ensemble module that forms the adaptive fusion bank, which is embedded into hierarchical layers for sufficient fusion of different source data. Moreover, we design an indirect interactive guidance module to accurately detect salient hollow objects via the skip integration of high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details. Extensive experiments on three RGBT datasets and seven RGBD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The code and results are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/LAFB.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Danying Lin, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Bin Luo
Abstract:
RGB and Thermal (RGBT) Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to achieve high-quality saliency prediction by exploiting the complementary information of visible and thermal image pairs, which are initially captured in an unaligned manner. However, existing methods are tailored for manually aligned image pairs, which are labor-intensive, and directly applying these methods to original unaligned image pairs could significantly degrade their performance. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address RGBT SOD for initially captured RGB and thermal image pairs without manual alignment. Specifically, we propose a Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network (SACNet) that consists of two novel components: 1) an asymmetric correlation module utilizing semantics-guided attention to model cross-modal correlations specific to unaligned salient regions; 2) an associated feature sampling module to sample relevant thermal features according to the corresponding RGB features for multi-modal feature integration. In addition, we construct a unified benchmark dataset called UVT2000, containing 2000 RGB and thermal image pairs directly captured from various real-world scenes without any alignment, to facilitate research on alignment-free RGBT SOD. Extensive experiments on both aligned and unaligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/SACNet.
Authors:Yang Cao, Yihan Zeng, Hang Xu, Dan Xu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) addresses the detection of objects from an arbitrary list of novel categories in 3D scenes, which remains a very challenging problem. In this work, we propose CoDAv2, a unified framework designed to innovatively tackle both the localization and classification of novel 3D objects, under the condition of limited base categories. For localization, the proposed 3D Novel Object Discovery (3D-NOD) strategy utilizes 3D geometries and 2D open-vocabulary semantic priors to discover pseudo labels for novel objects during training. 3D-NOD is further extended with an Enrichment strategy that significantly enriches the novel object distribution in the training scenes, and then enhances the model's ability to localize more novel objects. The 3D-NOD with Enrichment is termed 3D-NODE. For classification, the Discovery-driven Cross-modal Alignment (DCMA) module aligns features from 3D point clouds and 2D/textual modalities, employing both class-agnostic and class-specific alignments that are iteratively refined to handle the expanding vocabulary of objects. Besides, 2D box guidance boosts the classification accuracy against complex background noises, which is coined as Box-DCMA. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the superiority of CoDAv2. CoDAv2 outperforms the best-performing method by a large margin (AP_Novel of 9.17 vs. 3.61 on SUN-RGBD and 9.12 vs. 3.74 on ScanNetv2). Source code and pre-trained models are available at the GitHub project page.
Authors:Bimsara Pathiraja, Caleb Liu, Ransalu Senanayake
Abstract:
The deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is rapidly expanding to numerous cities. At the heart of AVs, the object detection module assumes a paramount role, directly influencing all downstream decision-making tasks by considering the presence of nearby pedestrians, vehicles, and more. Despite high accuracy of pedestrians detected on held-out datasets, the potential presence of algorithmic bias in such object detectors, particularly in challenging weather conditions, remains unclear. This study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of fairness in detecting pedestrians in a state-of-the-art transformer-based object detector. In addition to classical metrics, we introduce novel probability-based metrics to measure various intricate properties of object detection. Leveraging the state-of-the-art FACET dataset and the Carla high-fidelity vehicle simulator, our analysis explores the effect of protected attributes such as gender, skin tone, and body size on object detection performance in varying environmental conditions such as ambient darkness and fog. Our quantitative analysis reveals how the previously overlooked yet intuitive factors, such as the distribution of demographic groups in the scene, the severity of weather, the pedestrians' proximity to the AV, among others, affect object detection performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/bimsarapathiraja/fair-AV.
Authors:Selim Kuzucu, Kemal Oksuz, Jonathan Sadeghi, Puneet K. Dokania
Abstract:
Reliable usage of object detectors require them to be calibrated -- a crucial problem that requires careful attention. Recent approaches towards this involve (1) designing new loss functions to obtain calibrated detectors by training them from scratch, and (2) post-hoc Temperature Scaling (TS) that learns to scale the likelihood of a trained detector to output calibrated predictions. These approaches are then evaluated based on a combination of Detection Expected Calibration Error (D-ECE) and Average Precision. In this work, via extensive analysis and insights, we highlight that these recent evaluation frameworks, evaluation metrics, and the use of TS have notable drawbacks leading to incorrect conclusions. As a step towards fixing these issues, we propose a principled evaluation framework to jointly measure calibration and accuracy of object detectors. We also tailor efficient and easy-to-use post-hoc calibration approaches such as Platt Scaling and Isotonic Regression specifically for object detection task. Contrary to the common notion, our experiments show that once designed and evaluated properly, post-hoc calibrators, which are extremely cheap to build and use, are much more powerful and effective than the recent train-time calibration methods. To illustrate, D-DETR with our post-hoc Isotonic Regression calibrator outperforms the recent train-time state-of-the-art calibration method Cal-DETR by more than 7 D-ECE on the COCO dataset. Additionally, we propose improved versions of the recently proposed Localization-aware ECE and show the efficacy of our method on these metrics as well. Code is available at: https://github.com/fiveai/detection_calibration.
Authors:Shentong Mo, Sukmin Yun
Abstract:
The joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) recently has shown impressive results in extracting visual representations from unlabeled imagery under a masking strategy. However, we reveal its disadvantages, notably its insufficient understanding of local semantics. This deficiency originates from masked modeling in the embedding space, resulting in a reduction of discriminative power and can even lead to the neglect of critical local semantics. To bridge this gap, we introduce DMT-JEPA, a novel masked modeling objective rooted in JEPA, specifically designed to generate discriminative latent targets from neighboring information. Our key idea is simple: we consider a set of semantically similar neighboring patches as a target of a masked patch. To be specific, the proposed DMT-JEPA (a) computes feature similarities between each masked patch and its corresponding neighboring patches to select patches having semantically meaningful relations, and (b) employs lightweight cross-attention heads to aggregate features of neighboring patches as the masked targets. Consequently, DMT-JEPA demonstrates strong discriminative power, offering benefits across a diverse spectrum of downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate our effectiveness across various visual benchmarks, including ImageNet-1K image classification, ADE20K semantic segmentation, and COCO object detection tasks. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/DMTJEPA/DMTJEPA}.
Authors:Shuai Zeng, Wenzhao Zheng, Jiwen Lu, Haibin Yan
Abstract:
3D object detection aims to recover the 3D information of concerning objects and serves as the fundamental task of autonomous driving perception. Its performance greatly depends on the scale of labeled training data, yet it is costly to obtain high-quality annotations for point cloud data. While conventional methods focus on generating pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples as supplements for training, the structural nature of 3D point cloud data facilitates the composition of objects and backgrounds to synthesize realistic scenes. Motivated by this, we propose a hardness-aware scene synthesis (HASS) method to generate adaptive synthetic scenes to improve the generalization of the detection models. We obtain pseudo-labels for unlabeled objects and generate diverse scenes with different compositions of objects and backgrounds. As the scene synthesis is sensitive to the quality of pseudo-labels, we further propose a hardness-aware strategy to reduce the effect of low-quality pseudo-labels and maintain a dynamic pseudo-database to ensure the diversity and quality of synthetic scenes. Extensive experimental results on the widely used KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HASS method, which outperforms existing semi-supervised learning methods on 3D object detection. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/HASS.
Authors:Guan Wang, Zhimin Li, Qingchao Chen, Yang Liu
Abstract:
Dynamic Scene Graph Generation (DSGG) focuses on identifying visual relationships within the spatial-temporal domain of videos. Conventional approaches often employ multi-stage pipelines, which typically consist of object detection, temporal association, and multi-relation classification. However, these methods exhibit inherent limitations due to the separation of multiple stages, and independent optimization of these sub-problems may yield sub-optimal solutions. To remedy these limitations, we propose a one-stage end-to-end framework, termed OED, which streamlines the DSGG pipeline. This framework reformulates the task as a set prediction problem and leverages pair-wise features to represent each subject-object pair within the scene graph. Moreover, another challenge of DSGG is capturing temporal dependencies, we introduce a Progressively Refined Module (PRM) for aggregating temporal context without the constraints of additional trackers or handcrafted trajectories, enabling end-to-end optimization of the network. Extensive experiments conducted on the Action Genome benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. The code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/guanw-pku/OED}.
Authors:Maëlic Neau, Paulo E. Santos, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Cédric Buche, Akihiro Sugimoto
Abstract:
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) is a task that encodes visual relationships between objects in images as graph structures. SGG shows significant promise as a foundational component for downstream tasks, such as reasoning for embodied agents. To enable real-time applications, SGG must address the trade-off between performance and inference speed. However, current methods tend to focus on one of the following: (1) improving relation prediction accuracy, (2) enhancing object detection accuracy, or (3) reducing latency, without aiming to balance all three objectives simultaneously. To address this limitation, we propose the Real-time Efficiency and Accuracy Compromise for Tradeoffs in Scene Graph Generation (REACT) architecture, which achieves the highest inference speed among existing SGG models, improving object detection accuracy without sacrificing relation prediction performance. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, REACT is 2.7 times faster and improves object detection accuracy by 58\%. Furthermore, our proposal significantly reduces model size, with an average of 5.5x fewer parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/Maelic/SGG-Benchmark
Authors:Kunye Shen, Xiaofei Zhou, Zhi Liu
Abstract:
The automated surface defect detection is a fundamental task in industrial production, and the existing saliencybased works overcome the challenging scenes and give promising detection results. However, the cutting-edge efforts often suffer from large parameter size, heavy computational cost, and slow inference speed, which heavily limits the practical applications. To this end, we devise a multi-scale interactive (MI) module, which employs depthwise convolution (DWConv) and pointwise convolution (PWConv) to independently extract and interactively fuse features of different scales, respectively. Particularly, the MI module can provide satisfactory characterization for defect regions with fewer parameters. Embarking on this module, we propose a lightweight Multi-scale Interactive Network (MINet) to conduct real-time salient object detection of strip steel surface defects. Comprehensive experimental results on SD-Saliency-900 dataset, which contains three kinds of strip steel surface defect detection images (i.e., inclusion, patches, and scratches), demonstrate that the proposed MINet presents comparable detection accuracy with the state-of-the-art methods while running at a GPU speed of 721FPS and a CPU speed of 6.3FPS for 368*368 images with only 0.28M parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/Kunye-Shen/MINet.
Authors:Xue Zhang, Si-Yuan Cao, Fang Wang, Runmin Zhang, Zhe Wu, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaokai Bai, Hui-Liang Shen
Abstract:
Most recent multispectral object detectors employ a two-branch structure to extract features from RGB and thermal images. While the two-branch structure achieves better performance than a single-branch structure, it overlooks inference efficiency. This conflict is increasingly aggressive, as recent works solely pursue higher performance rather than both performance and efficiency. In this paper, we address this issue by improving the performance of efficient single-branch structures. We revisit the reasons causing the performance gap between these structures. For the first time, we reveal the information interference problem in the naive early-fusion strategy adopted by previous single-branch structures. Besides, we find that the domain gap between multispectral images, and weak feature representation of the single-branch structure are also key obstacles for performance. Focusing on these three problems, we propose corresponding solutions, including a novel shape-priority early-fusion strategy, a weakly supervised learning method, and a core knowledge distillation technique. Experiments demonstrate that single-branch networks equipped with these three contributions achieve significant performance enhancements while retaining high efficiency. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XueZ-phd/Efficient-RGB-T-Early-Fusion-Detection}.
Authors:Xiangyu Chen, Zhenzhen Liu, Katie Z Luo, Siddhartha Datta, Adhitya Polavaram, Yan Wang, Yurong You, Boyi Li, Marco Pavone, Wei-Lun Chao, Mark Campbell, Bharath Hariharan, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Abstract:
Ensuring robust 3D object detection and localization is crucial for many applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Recent models, however, face difficulties in maintaining high performance when applied to domains with differing sensor setups or geographic locations, often resulting in poor localization accuracy due to domain shift. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel diffusion-based box refinement approach. This method employs a domain-agnostic diffusion model, conditioned on the LiDAR points surrounding a coarse bounding box, to simultaneously refine the box's location, size, and orientation. We evaluate this approach under various domain adaptation settings, and our results reveal significant improvements across different datasets, object classes and detectors. Our PyTorch implementation is available at \href{https://github.com/cxy1997/DiffuBox}{https://github.com/cxy1997/DiffuBox}.
Authors:Yihong Sun, Bharath Hariharan
Abstract:
Embodied agents must detect and localize objects of interest, e.g. traffic participants for self-driving cars. Supervision in the form of bounding boxes for this task is extremely expensive. As such, prior work has looked at unsupervised instance detection and segmentation, but in the absence of annotated boxes, it is unclear how pixels must be grouped into objects and which objects are of interest. This results in over-/under-segmentation and irrelevant objects. Inspired by human visual system and practical applications, we posit that the key missing cue for unsupervised detection is motion: objects of interest are typically mobile objects that frequently move and their motions can specify separate instances. In this paper, we propose MOD-UV, a Mobile Object Detector learned from Unlabeled Videos only. We begin with instance pseudo-labels derived from motion segmentation, but introduce a novel training paradigm to progressively discover small objects and static-but-mobile objects that are missed by motion segmentation. As a result, though only learned from unlabeled videos, MOD-UV can detect and segment mobile objects from a single static image. Empirically, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised mobile object detection on Waymo Open, nuScenes, and KITTI Datasets without using any external data or supervised models. Code is available at https://github.com/YihongSun/MOD-UV.
Authors:Muhammad Sohail Danish, Muhammad Haris Khan, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, M. Saquib Sarfraz, Mohsen Ali
Abstract:
In this work, we tackle the problem of domain generalization for object detection, specifically focusing on the scenario where only a single source domain is available. We propose an effective approach that involves two key steps: diversifying the source domain and aligning detections based on class prediction confidence and localization. Firstly, we demonstrate that by carefully selecting a set of augmentations, a base detector can outperform existing methods for single domain generalization by a good margin. This highlights the importance of domain diversification in improving the performance of object detectors. Secondly, we introduce a method to align detections from multiple views, considering both classification and localization outputs. This alignment procedure leads to better generalized and well-calibrated object detector models, which are crucial for accurate decision-making in safety-critical applications. Our approach is detector-agnostic and can be seamlessly applied to both single-stage and two-stage detectors. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we conduct extensive experiments and ablations on challenging domain-shift scenarios. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing methods. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/msohaildanish/DivAlign
Authors:Ao Wang, Hui Chen, Lihao Liu, Kai Chen, Zijia Lin, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
Abstract:
Over the past years, YOLOs have emerged as the predominant paradigm in the field of real-time object detection owing to their effective balance between computational cost and detection performance. Researchers have explored the architectural designs, optimization objectives, data augmentation strategies, and others for YOLOs, achieving notable progress. However, the reliance on the non-maximum suppression (NMS) for post-processing hampers the end-to-end deployment of YOLOs and adversely impacts the inference latency. Besides, the design of various components in YOLOs lacks the comprehensive and thorough inspection, resulting in noticeable computational redundancy and limiting the model's capability. It renders the suboptimal efficiency, along with considerable potential for performance improvements. In this work, we aim to further advance the performance-efficiency boundary of YOLOs from both the post-processing and model architecture. To this end, we first present the consistent dual assignments for NMS-free training of YOLOs, which brings competitive performance and low inference latency simultaneously. Moreover, we introduce the holistic efficiency-accuracy driven model design strategy for YOLOs. We comprehensively optimize various components of YOLOs from both efficiency and accuracy perspectives, which greatly reduces the computational overhead and enhances the capability. The outcome of our effort is a new generation of YOLO series for real-time end-to-end object detection, dubbed YOLOv10. Extensive experiments show that YOLOv10 achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency across various model scales. For example, our YOLOv10-S is 1.8$\times$ faster than RT-DETR-R18 under the similar AP on COCO, meanwhile enjoying 2.8$\times$ smaller number of parameters and FLOPs. Compared with YOLOv9-C, YOLOv10-B has 46\% less latency and 25\% fewer parameters for the same performance.
Authors:Safouane El Ghazouali, Arnaud Gucciardi, Umberto Michelucci
Abstract:
Self-rewarding have emerged recently as a powerful tool in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), allowing language models to generate high-quality relevant responses by providing their own rewards during training. This innovative technique addresses the limitations of other methods that rely on human preferences. In this paper, we build upon the concept of self-rewarding models and introduce its vision equivalent for Text-to-Image generative AI models. This approach works by fine-tuning diffusion model on a self-generated self-judged dataset, making the fine-tuning more automated and with better data quality. The proposed mechanism makes use of other pre-trained models such as vocabulary based-object detection, image captioning and is conditioned by the a set of object for which the user might need to improve generated data quality. The approach has been implemented, fine-tuned and evaluated on stable diffusion and has led to a performance that has been evaluated to be at least 60\% better than existing commercial and research Text-to-image models. Additionally, the built self-rewarding mechanism allowed a fully automated generation of images, while increasing the visual quality of the generated images and also more efficient following of prompt instructions. The code used in this work is freely available on https://github.com/safouaneelg/SRT2I.
Authors:Shuai Liu, Boyang Li, Zhiyu Fang, Mingyue Cui, Kai Huang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection has made impressive progress recently, yet most existing models are black-box, lacking interpretability. Previous explanation approaches primarily focus on analyzing image-based models and are not readily applicable to LiDAR-based 3D detectors. In this paper, we propose a feature factorization activation map (FFAM) to generate high-quality visual explanations for 3D detectors. FFAM employs non-negative matrix factorization to generate concept activation maps and subsequently aggregates these maps to obtain a global visual explanation. To achieve object-specific visual explanations, we refine the global visual explanation using the feature gradient of a target object. Additionally, we introduce a voxel upsampling strategy to align the scale between the activation map and input point cloud. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze FFAM with multiple detectors on several datasets. Experimental results validate the high-quality visual explanations produced by FFAM. The Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Say2L/FFAM.git}.
Authors:Jianhong Han, Liang Chen, Yupei Wang
Abstract:
Object detectors frequently encounter significant performance degradation when confronted with domain gaps between collected data (source domain) and data from real-world applications (target domain). To address this task, numerous unsupervised domain adaptive detectors have been proposed, leveraging carefully designed feature alignment techniques. However, these techniques primarily align instance-level features in a class-agnostic manner, overlooking the differences between extracted features from different categories, which results in only limited improvement. Furthermore, the scope of current alignment modules is often restricted to a limited batch of images, failing to learn the entire dataset-level cues, thereby severely constraining the detector's generalization ability to the target domain. To this end, we introduce a strong DETR-based detector named Domain Adaptive detection TRansformer (DATR) for unsupervised domain adaptation of object detection. Firstly, we propose the Class-wise Prototypes Alignment (CPA) module, which effectively aligns cross-domain features in a class-aware manner by bridging the gap between object detection task and domain adaptation task. Then, the designed Dataset-level Alignment Scheme (DAS) explicitly guides the detector to achieve global representation and enhance inter-class distinguishability of instance-level features across the entire dataset, which spans both domains, by leveraging contrastive learning. Moreover, DATR incorporates a mean-teacher based self-training framework, utilizing pseudo-labels generated by the teacher model to further mitigate domain bias. Extensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance and generalization capabilities of our proposed DATR in multiple domain adaptation scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/h751410234/DATR.
Authors:Runou Yang, Tian Tian, Jinwen Tian
Abstract:
Addressing the challenge of domain shift between datasets is vital in maintaining model performance. In the context of cross-domain object detection, the teacher-student framework, a widely-used semi-supervised model, has shown significant accuracy improvements. However, existing methods often overlook class differences, treating all classes equally, resulting in suboptimal results. Furthermore, the integration of instance-level alignment with a one-stage detector, essential due to the absence of a Region Proposal Network (RPN), remains unexplored in this framework. In response to these shortcomings, we introduce a novel teacher-student model named Versatile Teacher (VT). VT differs from previous works by considering class-specific detection difficulty and employing a two-step pseudo-label selection mechanism, referred to as Class-aware Pseudo-label Adaptive Selection (CAPS), to generate more reliable pseudo labels. These labels are leveraged as saliency matrices to guide the discriminator for targeted instance-level alignment. Our method demonstrates promising results on three benchmark datasets, and extends the alignment methods for widely-used one-stage detectors, presenting significant potential for practical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/RicardooYoung/VersatileTeacher.
Authors:Ziang Guo, Zakhar Yagudin, Selamawit Asfaw, Artem Lykov, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract:
Camera, LiDAR and radar are common perception sensors for autonomous driving tasks. Robust prediction of 3D object detection is optimally based on the fusion of these sensors. To exploit their abilities wisely remains a challenge because each of these sensors has its own characteristics. In this paper, we propose FADet, a multi-sensor 3D detection network, which specifically studies the characteristics of different sensors based on our local featured attention modules. For camera images, we propose dual-attention-based sub-module. For LiDAR point clouds, triple-attention-based sub-module is utilized while mixed-attention-based sub-module is applied for features of radar points. With local featured attention sub-modules, our FADet has effective detection results in long-tail and complex scenes from camera, LiDAR and radar input. On NuScenes validation dataset, FADet achieves state-of-the-art performance on LiDAR-camera object detection tasks with 71.8% NDS and 69.0% mAP, at the same time, on radar-camera object detection tasks with 51.7% NDS and 40.3% mAP. Code will be released at https://github.com/ZionGo6/FADet.
Authors:Jialong Guo, Xinghao Chen, Yehui Tang, Yunhe Wang
Abstract:
Transformers have become foundational architectures for both natural language and computer vision tasks. However, the high computational cost makes it quite challenging to deploy on resource-constraint devices. This paper investigates the computational bottleneck modules of efficient transformer, i.e., normalization layers and attention modules. LayerNorm is commonly used in transformer architectures but is not computational friendly due to statistic calculation during inference. However, replacing LayerNorm with more efficient BatchNorm in transformer often leads to inferior performance and collapse in training. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named PRepBN to progressively replace LayerNorm with re-parameterized BatchNorm in training. Moreover, we propose a simplified linear attention (SLA) module that is simple yet effective to achieve strong performance. Extensive experiments on image classification as well as object detection demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. For example, our SLAB-Swin obtains $83.6\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with $16.2$ms latency, which is $2.4$ms less than that of Flatten-Swin with $0.1\%$ higher accuracy. We also evaluated our method for language modeling task and obtain comparable performance and lower latency.Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/SLAB and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/SLAB.
Authors:Tianhe Ren, Qing Jiang, Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Wenlong Liu, Han Gao, Hongjie Huang, Zhengyu Ma, Xiaoke Jiang, Yihao Chen, Yuda Xiong, Hao Zhang, Feng Li, Peijun Tang, Kent Yu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
This paper introduces Grounding DINO 1.5, a suite of advanced open-set object detection models developed by IDEA Research, which aims to advance the "Edge" of open-set object detection. The suite encompasses two models: Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro, a high-performance model designed for stronger generalization capability across a wide range of scenarios, and Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, an efficient model optimized for faster speed demanded in many applications requiring edge deployment. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model advances its predecessor by scaling up the model architecture, integrating an enhanced vision backbone, and expanding the training dataset to over 20 million images with grounding annotations, thereby achieving a richer semantic understanding. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, while designed for efficiency with reduced feature scales, maintains robust detection capabilities by being trained on the same comprehensive dataset. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of Grounding DINO 1.5, with the Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model attaining a 54.3 AP on the COCO detection benchmark and a 55.7 AP on the LVIS-minival zero-shot transfer benchmark, setting new records for open-set object detection. Furthermore, the Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, when optimized with TensorRT, achieves a speed of 75.2 FPS while attaining a zero-shot performance of 36.2 AP on the LVIS-minival benchmark, making it more suitable for edge computing scenarios. Model examples and demos with API will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounding-DINO-1.5-API
Authors:Zhaoxu Li, Wei An, Gaowei Guo, Longguang Wang, Yingqian Wang, Zaiping Lin
Abstract:
Hyperspectral target detection (HTD) aims to identify specific materials based on spectral information in hyperspectral imagery and can detect extremely small-sized objects, some of which occupy a smaller than one-pixel area. However, existing HTD methods are developed based on per-pixel binary classification, neglecting the three-dimensional cube structure of hyperspectral images (HSIs) that integrates both spatial and spectral dimensions. The synergistic existence of spatial and spectral features in HSIs enable objects to simultaneously exhibit both, yet the per-pixel HTD framework limits the joint expression of these features. In this paper, we rethink HTD from the perspective of spatial-spectral synergistic representation and propose hyperspectral point object detection as an innovative task framework. We introduce SpecDETR, the first specialized network for hyperspectral multi-class point object detection, which eliminates dependence on pre-trained backbone networks commonly required by vision-based object detectors. SpecDETR uses a multi-layer Transformer encoder with self-excited subpixel-scale attention modules to directly extract deep spatial-spectral joint features from hyperspectral cubes. We develop a simulated hyperspectral point object detection benchmark termed SPOD, and for the first time, evaluate and compare the performance of visual object detection networks and HTD methods on hyperspectral point object detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed SpecDETR outperforms SOTA visual object detection networks and HTD methods. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhaoxuLi123/SpecDETR.
Authors:Feiran Li, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao, Zhiyong Yang, Runmin Cong, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
Abstract:
This paper explores the size-invariance of evaluation metrics in Salient Object Detection (SOD), especially when multiple targets of diverse sizes co-exist in the same image. We observe that current metrics are size-sensitive, where larger objects are focused, and smaller ones tend to be ignored. We argue that the evaluation should be size-invariant because bias based on size is unjustified without additional semantic information. In pursuit of this, we propose a generic approach that evaluates each salient object separately and then combines the results, effectively alleviating the imbalance. We further develop an optimization framework tailored to this goal, achieving considerable improvements in detecting objects of different sizes. Theoretically, we provide evidence supporting the validity of our new metrics and present the generalization analysis of SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Ferry-Li/SI-SOD.
Authors:Yachan Guo, Yi Xiao, Danna Xue, Jose L. Gomez, Antonio M. Lopez
Abstract:
Instance segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving, but is hindered by the lack of annotated real-world data due to expensive labeling costs. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) offers a solution by transferring knowledge from labeled synthetic data to unlabeled real-world data. While UDA methods for synthetic to real-world domains (synth-to-real) excel in tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection, their application to instance segmentation for autonomous driving remains underexplored and often relies on suboptimal baselines. We introduce UDA4Inst, a powerful framework for synth-to-real UDA in instance segmentation. Our framework enhances instance segmentation through Semantic Category Training and Bidirectional Mixing Training. Semantic Category Training groups semantically related classes for separate training, improving pseudo-label quality and segmentation accuracy. Bidirectional Mixing Training combines instance-wise and patch-wise data mixing, creating coherent composites that enhance generalization across domains. Extensive experiments show UDA4Inst sets a new state-of-the-art on the SYNTHIA-> Cityscapes benchmark (mAP 31.3) and introduces results on novel datasets, using UrbanSyn and Synscapes as sources and Cityscapes and KITTI360 as targets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/gyc-code/UDA4Inst.
Authors:Jeongjin Shin
Abstract:
Deep learning models have achieved unprecedented performance in the domain of object detection, resulting in breakthroughs in areas such as autonomous driving and security. However, deep learning models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. These attacks prompt models to behave similarly to standard models without a trigger; however, they act maliciously upon detecting a predefined trigger. Despite extensive research on backdoor attacks in image classification, their application to object detection remains relatively underexplored. Given the widespread application of object detection in critical real-world scenarios, the sensitivity and potential impact of these vulnerabilities cannot be overstated. In this study, we propose an effective invisible backdoor attack on object detection utilizing a mask-based approach. Three distinct attack scenarios were explored for object detection: object disappearance, object misclassification, and object generation attack. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively examined the effectiveness of these attacks and tested certain defense methods to determine effective countermeasures. Code will be available at https://github.com/jeongjin0/invisible-backdoor-object-detection
Authors:Zong-Wei Hong, Yen-Yang Hung, Chu-Song Chen
Abstract:
In this work, we introduce a novel method for calculating the 6DoF pose of an object using a single RGB-D image. Unlike existing methods that either directly predict objects' poses or rely on sparse keypoints for pose recovery, our approach addresses this challenging task using dense correspondence, i.e., we regress the object coordinates for each visible pixel. Our method leverages existing object detection methods. We incorporate a re-projection mechanism to adjust the camera's intrinsic matrix to accommodate cropping in RGB-D images. Moreover, we transform the 3D object coordinates into a residual representation, which can effectively reduce the output space and yield superior performance. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our approach for 6D pose estimation. Our approach outperforms most previous methods, especially in occlusion scenarios, and demonstrates notable improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available on https://github.com/AI-Application-and-Integration-Lab/RDPN6D.
Authors:Xin Wu, Zhanchao Huang, Li Wang, Jocelyn Chanussot, Jiaojiao Tian
Abstract:
In large-scale disaster events, the planning of optimal rescue routes depends on the object detection ability at the disaster scene, with one of the main challenges being the presence of dense and occluded objects. Existing methods, which are typically based on the RGB modality, struggle to distinguish targets with similar colors and textures in crowded environments and are unable to identify obscured objects. To this end, we first construct two multimodal dense and occlusion vehicle detection datasets for large-scale events, utilizing RGB and height map modalities. Based on these datasets, we propose a multimodal collaboration network for dense and occluded vehicle detection, MuDet for short. MuDet hierarchically enhances the completeness of discriminable information within and across modalities and differentiates between simple and complex samples. MuDet includes three main modules: Unimodal Feature Hierarchical Enhancement (Uni-Enh), Multimodal Cross Learning (Mul-Lea), and Hard-easy Discriminative (He-Dis) Pattern. Uni-Enh and Mul-Lea enhance the features within each modality and facilitate the cross-integration of features from two heterogeneous modalities. He-Dis effectively separates densely occluded vehicle targets with significant intra-class differences and minimal inter-class differences by defining and thresholding confidence values, thereby suppressing the complex background. Experimental results on two re-labeled multimodal benchmark datasets, the 4K-SAI-LCS dataset, and the ISPRS Potsdam dataset, demonstrate the robustness and generalization of the MuDet. The codes of this work are available openly at \url{https://github.com/Shank2358/MuDet}.
Authors:Haoming Chen, Zhizhong Zhang, Yanyun Qu, Ruixin Zhang, Xin Tan, Yuan Xie
Abstract:
An effective pre-training framework with universal 3D representations is extremely desired in perceiving large-scale dynamic scenes. However, establishing such an ideal framework that is both task-generic and label-efficient poses a challenge in unifying the representation of the same primitive across diverse scenes. The current contrastive 3D pre-training methods typically follow a frame-level consistency, which focuses on the 2D-3D relationships in each detached image. Such inconsiderate consistency greatly hampers the promising path of reaching an universal pre-training framework: (1) The cross-scene semantic self-conflict, i.e., the intense collision between primitive segments of the same semantics from different scenes; (2) Lacking a globally unified bond that pushes the cross-scene semantic consistency into 3D representation learning. To address above challenges, we propose a CSC framework that puts a scene-level semantic consistency in the heart, bridging the connection of the similar semantic segments across various scenes. To achieve this goal, we combine the coherent semantic cues provided by the vision foundation model and the knowledge-rich cross-scene prototypes derived from the complementary multi-modality information. These allow us to train a universal 3D pre-training model that facilitates various downstream tasks with less fine-tuning efforts. Empirically, we achieve consistent improvements over SOTA pre-training approaches in semantic segmentation (+1.4% mIoU), object detection (+1.0% mAP), and panoptic segmentation (+3.0% PQ) using their task-specific 3D network on nuScenes. Code is released at https://github.com/chenhaomingbob/CSC, hoping to inspire future research.
Authors:A V Subramanyam, Niyati Singal, Vinay K Verma
Abstract:
Despite the rapid advancement in the field of image recognition, the processing of high-resolution imagery remains a computational challenge. However, this processing is pivotal for extracting detailed object insights in areas ranging from autonomous vehicle navigation to medical imaging analyses. Our study introduces a framework aimed at mitigating these challenges by leveraging memory efficient patch based processing for high resolution images. It incorporates a global context representation alongside local patch information, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the image content. In contrast to traditional training methods which are limited by memory constraints, our method enables training of ultra high resolution images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through superior performance on 7 different benchmarks across classification, object detection, and segmentation. Notably, the proposed method achieves strong performance even on resource-constrained devices like Jetson Nano. Our code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Conception-Group/Localized-Perception-Constrained-Vision-Systems.
Authors:Pierre-Luc Asselin, Vincent Coulombe, William Guimont-Martin, William Larrivée-Hardy
Abstract:
This work examines the reproducibility and benchmarking of state-of-the-art real-time object detection models. As object detection models are often used in real-world contexts, such as robotics, where inference time is paramount, simply measuring models' accuracy is not enough to compare them. We thus compare a large variety of object detection models' accuracy and inference speed on multiple graphics cards. In addition to this large benchmarking attempt, we also reproduce the following models from scratch using PyTorch on the MS COCO 2017 dataset: DETR, RTMDet, ViTDet and YOLOv7. More importantly, we propose a unified training and evaluation pipeline, based on MMDetection's features, to better compare models. Our implementation of DETR and ViTDet could not achieve accuracy or speed performances comparable to what is declared in the original papers. On the other hand, reproduced RTMDet and YOLOv7 could match such performances. Studied papers are also found to be generally lacking for reproducibility purposes. As for MMDetection pretrained models, speed performances are severely reduced with limited computing resources (larger, more accurate models even more so). Moreover, results exhibit a strong trade-off between accuracy and speed, prevailed by anchor-free models - notably RTMDet or YOLOx models. The code used is this paper and all the experiments is available in the repository at https://github.com/willGuimont/segdet_mlcr2024.
Authors:Xinran Liua, Lin Qia, Yuxuan Songa, Qi Wen
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) presents a persistent challenge in accurately identifying objects that seamlessly blend into their surroundings. However, most existing COD models overlook the fact that visual systems operate within a genuine 3D environment. The scene depth inherent in a single 2D image provides rich spatial clues that can assist in the detection of camouflaged objects. Therefore, we propose a novel depth-perception attention fusion network that leverages the depth map as an auxiliary input to enhance the network's ability to perceive 3D information, which is typically challenging for the human eye to discern from 2D images. The network uses a trident-branch encoder to extract chromatic and depth information and their communications. Recognizing that certain regions of a depth map may not effectively highlight the camouflaged object, we introduce a depth-weighted cross-attention fusion module to dynamically adjust the fusion weights on depth and RGB feature maps. To keep the model simple without compromising effectiveness, we design a straightforward feature aggregation decoder that adaptively fuses the enhanced aggregated features. Experiments demonstrate the significant superiority of our proposed method over other states of the arts, which further validates the contribution of depth information in camouflaged object detection. The code will be available at https://github.com/xinran-liu00/DAF-Net.
Authors:Jinke Li, Xiao He, Chonghua Zhou, Xiaoqiang Cheng, Yang Wen, Dan Zhang
Abstract:
3D occupancy, an advanced perception technology for driving scenarios, represents the entire scene without distinguishing between foreground and background by quantifying the physical space into a grid map. The widely adopted projection-first deformable attention, efficient in transforming image features into 3D representations, encounters challenges in aggregating multi-view features due to sensor deployment constraints. To address this issue, we propose our learning-first view attention mechanism for effective multi-view feature aggregation. Moreover, we showcase the scalability of our view attention across diverse multi-view 3D tasks, including map construction and 3D object detection. Leveraging the proposed view attention as well as an additional multi-frame streaming temporal attention, we introduce ViewFormer, a vision-centric transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal feature aggregation. To further explore occupancy-level flow representation, we present FlowOcc3D, a benchmark built on top of existing high-quality datasets. Qualitative and quantitative analyses on this benchmark reveal the potential to represent fine-grained dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/ViewFormerOcc/ViewFormer-Occ}.
Authors:Thennarasi Balakrishnan, Sandeep Singh Sengar
Abstract:
Object detection algorithms particularly those based on YOLO have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in balancing speed and accuracy. However, their application in brain tumour detection remains underexplored. This study proposes RepVGG-GELAN, a novel YOLO architecture enhanced with RepVGG, a reparameterized convolutional approach for object detection tasks particularly focusing on brain tumour detection within medical images. RepVGG-GELAN leverages the RepVGG architecture to improve both speed and accuracy in detecting brain tumours. Integrating RepVGG into the YOLO framework aims to achieve a balance between computational efficiency and detection performance. This study includes a spatial pyramid pooling-based Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN) architecture which further enhances the capability of RepVGG. Experimental evaluation conducted on a brain tumour dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of RepVGG-GELAN surpassing existing RCS-YOLO in terms of precision and speed. Specifically, RepVGG-GELAN achieves an increased precision of 4.91% and an increased AP50 of 2.54% over the latest existing approach while operating at 240.7 GFLOPs. The proposed RepVGG-GELAN with GELAN architecture presents promising results establishing itself as a state-of-the-art solution for accurate and efficient brain tumour detection in medical images. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/ThensiB/RepVGG-GELAN.
Authors:Chengtao Lv, Hong Chen, Jinyang Guo, Yifu Ding, Xianglong Liu
Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has achieved impressive performance in many computer vision tasks. However, as a large-scale model, the immense memory and computation costs hinder its practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework for Segment Anything Model, namely PTQ4SAM. First, we investigate the inherent bottleneck of SAM quantization attributed to the bimodal distribution in post-Key-Linear activations. We analyze its characteristics from both per-tensor and per-channel perspectives, and propose a Bimodal Integration strategy, which utilizes a mathematically equivalent sign operation to transform the bimodal distribution into a relatively easy-quantized normal distribution offline. Second, SAM encompasses diverse attention mechanisms (i.e., self-attention and two-way cross-attention), resulting in substantial variations in the post-Softmax distributions. Therefore, we introduce an Adaptive Granularity Quantization for Softmax through searching the optimal power-of-two base, which is hardware-friendly. Extensive experimental results across various vision tasks (instance segmentation, semantic segmentation and object detection), datasets and model variants show the superiority of PTQ4SAM. For example, when quantizing SAM-L to 6-bit, we achieve lossless accuracy for instance segmentation, about 0.5\% drop with theoretical 3.9$\times$ acceleration. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/PTQ4SAM}.
Authors:Dong Chen, Arman Hosseini, Arik Smith, Amir Farzin Nikkhah, Arsalan Heydarian, Omid Shoghli, Bradford Campbell
Abstract:
Electric scooters (e-scooters) have rapidly emerged as a popular mode of transportation in urban areas, yet they pose significant safety challenges. In the United States, the rise of e-scooters has been marked by a concerning increase in related injuries and fatalities. Recently, while deep-learning object detection holds paramount significance in autonomous vehicles to avoid potential collisions, its application in the context of e-scooters remains relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of cutting-edge object detectors designed for e-scooters. To achieve this, the first comprehensive benchmark involving 22 state-of-the-art YOLO object detectors, including five versions (YOLOv3, YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8), has been established for real-time traffic object detection using a self-collected dataset featuring e-scooters. The detection accuracy, measured in terms of mAP@0.5, ranges from 27.4% (YOLOv7-E6E) to 86.8% (YOLOv5s). All YOLO models, particularly YOLOv3-tiny, have displayed promising potential for real-time object detection in the context of e-scooters. Both the traffic scene dataset (https://zenodo.org/records/10578641) and software program codes (https://github.com/DongChen06/ScooterDet) for model benchmarking in this study are publicly available, which will not only improve e-scooter safety with advanced object detection but also lay the groundwork for tailored solutions, promising a safer and more sustainable urban micromobility landscape.
Authors:Zhennan Chen, Xuying Zhang, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Ying Tai
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment objects visually embedded in their surroundings, which is a very challenging task due to the high similarity between the objects and the background. To address it, most methods often incorporate additional information (e.g., boundary, texture, and frequency clues) to guide feature learning for better detecting camouflaged objects from the background. Although progress has been made, these methods are basically individually tailored to specific auxiliary cues, thus lacking adaptability and not consistently achieving high segmentation performance. To this end, this paper proposes an adaptive guidance learning network, dubbed \textit{AGLNet}, which is a unified end-to-end learnable model for exploring and adapting different additional cues in CNN models to guide accurate camouflaged feature learning. Specifically, we first design a straightforward additional information generation (AIG) module to learn additional camouflaged object cues, which can be adapted for the exploration of effective camouflaged features. Then we present a hierarchical feature combination (HFC) module to deeply integrate additional cues and image features to guide camouflaged feature learning in a multi-level fusion manner.Followed by a recalibration decoder (RD), different features are further aggregated and refined for accurate object prediction. Extensive experiments on three widely used COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements under different additional cues, and outperforms the recent 20 state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our code will be made publicly available at: \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/ZNan-Chen/AGLNet}.
Authors:Guoping Xu, Xiaxia Wang, Xinglong Wu, Xuesong Leng, Yongchao Xu
Abstract:
Deep learning has made significant progress in computer vision, specifically in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. The skip connection has played an essential role in the architecture of deep neural networks,enabling easier optimization through residual learning during the training stage and improving accuracy during testing. Many neural networks have inherited the idea of residual learning with skip connections for various tasks, and it has been the standard choice for designing neural networks. This survey provides a comprehensive summary and outlook on the development of skip connections in deep neural networks. The short history of skip connections is outlined, and the development of residual learning in deep neural networks is surveyed. The effectiveness of skip connections in the training and testing stages is summarized, and future directions for using skip connections in residual learning are discussed. Finally, we summarize seminal papers, source code, models, and datasets that utilize skip connections in computer vision, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and image reconstruction. We hope this survey could inspire peer researchers in the community to develop further skip connections in various forms and tasks and the theory of residual learning in deep neural networks. The project page can be found at https://github.com/apple1986/Residual_Learning_For_Images
Authors:Kai Luo, Hao Wu, Kefu Yi, Kailun Yang, Wei Hao, Rongdong Hu
Abstract:
As human-machine interaction continues to evolve, the capacity for environmental perception is becoming increasingly crucial. Integrating the two most common types of sensory data, images, and point clouds, can enhance detection accuracy. Currently, there is no existing model capable of detecting an object's position in both point clouds and images while also determining their corresponding relationship. This information is invaluable for human-machine interactions, offering new possibilities for their enhancement. In light of this, this paper introduces an end-to-end Consistency Object Detection (COD) algorithm framework that requires only a single forward inference to simultaneously obtain an object's position in both point clouds and images and establish their correlation. Furthermore, to assess the accuracy of the object correlation between point clouds and images, this paper proposes a new evaluation metric, Consistency Precision (CP). To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, an extensive set of experiments has been conducted on the KITTI and DAIR-V2X datasets. The study also explored how the proposed consistency detection method performs on images when the calibration parameters between images and point clouds are disturbed, compared to existing post-processing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits excellent detection performance and robustness, achieving end-to-end consistency detection. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xifen523/COD.
Authors:Rishav Pramanik, José-Fabian Villa-Vásquez, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
Unsupervised object discovery is becoming an essential line of research for tackling recognition problems that require decomposing an image into entities, such as semantic segmentation and object detection. Recently, object-centric methods that leverage self-supervision have gained popularity, due to their simplicity and adaptability to different settings and conditions. However, those methods do not exploit effective techniques already employed in modern self-supervised approaches. In this work, we consider an object-centric approach in which DINO ViT features are reconstructed via a set of queried representations called slots. Based on that, we propose a masking scheme on input features that selectively disregards the background regions, inducing our model to focus more on salient objects during the reconstruction phase. Moreover, we extend the slot attention to a multi-query approach, allowing the model to learn multiple sets of slots, producing more stable masks. During training, these multiple sets of slots are learned independently while, at test time, these sets are merged through Hungarian matching to obtain the final slots. Our experimental results and ablations on the PASCAL-VOC 2012 dataset show the importance of each component and highlight how their combination consistently improves object localization. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/rishavpramanik/maskedmultiqueryslot
Authors:Sheng Jin, Ruijie Yao, Lumin Xu, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Ji Wu, Ping Luo
Abstract:
Instance perception tasks (object detection, instance segmentation, pose estimation, counting) play a key role in industrial applications of visual models. As supervised learning methods suffer from high labeling cost, few-shot learning methods which effectively learn from a limited number of labeled examples are desired. Existing few-shot learning methods primarily focus on a restricted set of tasks, presumably due to the challenges involved in designing a generic model capable of representing diverse tasks in a unified manner. In this paper, we propose UniFS, a universal few-shot instance perception model that unifies a wide range of instance perception tasks by reformulating them into a dynamic point representation learning framework. Additionally, we propose Structure-Aware Point Learning (SAPL) to exploit the higher-order structural relationship among points to further enhance representation learning. Our approach makes minimal assumptions about the tasks, yet it achieves competitive results compared to highly specialized and well optimized specialist models. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/jin-s13/UniFS.
Authors:Zhanwei Zhang, Minghao Chen, Shuai Xiao, Liang Peng, Hengjia Li, Binbin Lin, Ping Li, Wenxiao Wang, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai
Abstract:
Recent self-training techniques have shown notable improvements in unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D object detection (3D UDA). These techniques typically select pseudo labels, i.e., 3D boxes, to supervise models for the target domain. However, this selection process inevitably introduces unreliable 3D boxes, in which 3D points cannot be definitively assigned as foreground or background. Previous techniques mitigate this by reweighting these boxes as pseudo labels, but these boxes can still poison the training process. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel pseudo label refinery framework. Specifically, in the selection process, to improve the reliability of pseudo boxes, we propose a complementary augmentation strategy. This strategy involves either removing all points within an unreliable box or replacing it with a high-confidence box. Moreover, the point numbers of instances in high-beam datasets are considerably higher than those in low-beam datasets, also degrading the quality of pseudo labels during the training process. We alleviate this issue by generating additional proposals and aligning RoI features across different domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the quality of pseudo labels and consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on six autonomous driving benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhanwei-Z/PERE.
Authors:Heitor R. Medeiros, David Latortue, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
In real-world scenarios, using multiple modalities like visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) can greatly improve the performance of a predictive task such as object detection (OD). Multimodal learning is a common way to leverage these modalities, where multiple modality-specific encoders and a fusion module are used to improve performance. In this paper, we tackle a different way to employ RGB and IR modalities, where only one modality or the other is observed by a single shared vision encoder. This realistic setting requires a lower memory footprint and is more suitable for applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which commonly rely on RGB and IR data. However, when learning a single encoder on multiple modalities, one modality can dominate the other, producing uneven recognition results. This work investigates how to efficiently leverage RGB and IR modalities to train a common transformer-based OD vision encoder, while countering the effects of modality imbalance. For this, we introduce a novel training technique to Mix Patches (MiPa) from the two modalities, in conjunction with a patch-wise modality agnostic module, for learning a common representation of both modalities. Our experiments show that MiPa can learn a representation to reach competitive results on traditional RGB/IR benchmarks while only requiring a single modality during inference. Our code is available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/MiPa.
Authors:Yunshuang Yuan, Monika Sester
Abstract:
Collective Perception has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its advantage for mitigating occlusion and expanding the field-of-view, thereby enhancing reliability, efficiency, and, most crucially, decision-making safety. However, developing collective perception models is highly resource demanding due to extensive requirements of processing input data for many agents, usually dozens of images and point clouds for a single frame. This not only slows down the model development process for collective perception but also impedes the utilization of larger models. In this paper, we propose an agent-based training framework that handles the deep learning modules and agent data separately to have a cleaner data flow structure. This framework not only provides an API for flexibly prototyping the data processing pipeline and defining the gradient calculation for each agent, but also provides the user interface for interactive training, testing and data visualization. Training experiment results of four collective object detection models on the prominent collective perception benchmark OPV2V show that the agent-based training can significantly reduce the GPU memory consumption and training time while retaining inference performance. The framework and model implementations are available at \url{https://github.com/YuanYunshuang/CoSense3D}
Authors:Farzad Nozarian, Shashank Agarwal, Farzaneh Rezaeianaran, Danish Shahzad, Atanas Poibrenski, Christian Müller, Philipp Slusallek
Abstract:
Semi-supervised 3D object detection can benefit from the promising pseudo-labeling technique when labeled data is limited. However, recent approaches have overlooked the impact of noisy pseudo-labels during training, despite efforts to enhance pseudo-label quality through confidence-based filtering. In this paper, we examine the impact of noisy pseudo-labels on IoU-based target assignment and propose the Reliable Student framework, which incorporates two complementary approaches to mitigate errors. First, it involves a class-aware target assignment strategy that reduces false negative assignments in difficult classes. Second, it includes a reliability weighting strategy that suppresses false positive assignment errors while also addressing remaining false negatives from the first step. The reliability weights are determined by querying the teacher network for confidence scores of the student-generated proposals. Our work surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on KITTI 3D object detection benchmark on point clouds in the semi-supervised setting. On 1% labeled data, our approach achieves a 6.2% AP improvement for the pedestrian class, despite having only 37 labeled samples available. The improvements become significant for the 2% setting, achieving 6.0% AP and 5.7% AP improvements for the pedestrian and cyclist classes, respectively.
Authors:Leonardo Rossi, Akbar Karimi, Andrea Prati
Abstract:
Current state-of-the-art two-stage models on instance segmentation task suffer from several types of imbalances. In this paper, we address the Intersection over the Union (IoU) distribution imbalance of positive input Regions of Interest (RoIs) during the training of the second stage. Our Self-Balanced R-CNN (SBR-CNN), an evolved version of the Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC) model, brings brand new loop mechanisms of bounding box and mask refinements. With an improved Generic RoI Extraction (GRoIE), we also address the feature-level imbalance at the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) level, originated by a non-uniform integration between low- and high-level features from the backbone layers. In addition, the redesign of the architecture heads toward a fully convolutional approach with FCC further reduces the number of parameters and obtains more clues to the connection between the task to solve and the layers used. Moreover, our SBR-CNN model shows the same or even better improvements if adopted in conjunction with other state-of-the-art models. In fact, with a lightweight ResNet-50 as backbone, evaluated on COCO minival 2017 dataset, our model reaches 45.3% and 41.5% AP for object detection and instance segmentation, with 12 epochs and without extra tricks. The code is available at https://github.com/IMPLabUniPr/mmdetection/tree/sbr_cnn
Authors:Hai Wu, Shijia Zhao, Xun Huang, Chenglu Wen, Xin Li, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
The prevalent approaches of unsupervised 3D object detection follow cluster-based pseudo-label generation and iterative self-training processes. However, the challenge arises due to the sparsity of LiDAR scans, which leads to pseudo-labels with erroneous size and position, resulting in subpar detection performance. To tackle this problem, this paper introduces a Commonsense Prototype-based Detector, termed CPD, for unsupervised 3D object detection. CPD first constructs Commonsense Prototype (CProto) characterized by high-quality bounding box and dense points, based on commonsense intuition. Subsequently, CPD refines the low-quality pseudo-labels by leveraging the size prior from CProto. Furthermore, CPD enhances the detection accuracy of sparsely scanned objects by the geometric knowledge from CProto. CPD outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D detectors on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD), PandaSet, and KITTI datasets by a large margin. Besides, by training CPD on WOD and testing on KITTI, CPD attains 90.85% and 81.01% 3D Average Precision on easy and moderate car classes, respectively. These achievements position CPD in close proximity to fully supervised detectors, highlighting the significance of our method. The code will be available at https://github.com/hailanyi/CPD.
Authors:Haoyuan Li, Qi Hu, Binjia Zhou, You Yao, Jiacheng Lin, Kailun Yang, Peng Chen
Abstract:
Visible-infrared image pairs provide complementary information, enhancing the reliability and robustness of object detection applications in real-world scenarios. However, most existing methods face challenges in maintaining robustness under complex weather conditions, which limits their applicability. Meanwhile, the reliance on attention mechanisms in modality fusion introduces significant computational complexity and storage overhead, particularly when dealing with high-resolution images. To address these challenges, we propose the Cross-modality Fusion Mamba with Weather-removal (CFMW) to augment stability and cost-effectiveness under adverse weather conditions. Leveraging the proposed Perturbation-Adaptive Diffusion Model (PADM) and Cross-modality Fusion Mamba (CFM) modules, CFMW is able to reconstruct visual features affected by adverse weather, enriching the representation of image details. With efficient architecture design, CFMW is 3 times faster than Transformer-style fusion (e.g., CFT). To bridge the gap in relevant datasets, we construct a new Severe Weather Visible-Infrared (SWVI) dataset, encompassing diverse adverse weather scenarios such as rain, haze, and snow. The dataset contains 64,281 paired visible-infrared images, providing a valuable resource for future research. Extensive experiments on public datasets (i.e., M3FD and LLVIP) and the newly constructed SWVI dataset conclusively demonstrate that CFMW achieves state-of-the-art detection performance. Both the dataset and source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lhy-zjut/CFMW.
Authors:Michael Kösel, Marcel Schreiber, Michael Ulrich, Claudius Gläser, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection has become an essential part of automated driving due to its ability to localize and classify objects precisely in 3D. However, object detectors face a critical challenge when dealing with unknown foreground objects, particularly those that were not present in their original training data. These out-of-distribution (OOD) objects can lead to misclassifications, posing a significant risk to the safety and reliability of automated vehicles. Currently, LiDAR-based OOD object detection has not been well studied. We address this problem by generating synthetic training data for OOD objects by perturbing known object categories. Our idea is that these synthetic OOD objects produce different responses in the feature map of an object detector compared to in-distribution (ID) objects. We then extract features using a pre-trained and fixed object detector and train a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) to classify each detection as either ID or OOD. In addition, we propose a new evaluation protocol that allows the use of existing datasets without modifying the point cloud, ensuring a more authentic evaluation of real-world scenarios. The effectiveness of our method is validated through experiments on the newly proposed nuScenes OOD benchmark. The source code is available at https://github.com/uulm-mrm/mmood3d.
Authors:Yahan Li, Yuan Wu
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. The most recent UDA methods always resort to adversarial training to yield state-of-the-art results and a dominant number of existing UDA methods employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as feature extractors to learn domain invariant features. Vision transformer (ViT) has attracted tremendous attention since its emergence and has been widely used in various computer vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, yet its potential in adversarial domain adaptation has never been investigated. In this paper, we fill this gap by employing the ViT as the feature extractor in adversarial domain adaptation. Moreover, we empirically demonstrate that ViT can be a plug-and-play component in adversarial domain adaptation, which means directly replacing the CNN-based feature extractor in existing UDA methods with the ViT-based feature extractor can easily obtain performance improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/LluckyYH/VT-ADA.
Authors:Yao Yuan, Wutao Liu, Pan Gao, Qun Dai, Jie Qin
Abstract:
Recently, unsupervised salient object detection (USOD) has gained increasing attention due to its annotation-free nature. However, current methods mainly focus on specific tasks such as RGB and RGB-D, neglecting the potential for task migration. In this paper, we propose a unified USOD framework for generic USOD tasks. Firstly, we propose a Progressive Curriculum Learning-based Saliency Distilling (PCL-SD) mechanism to extract saliency cues from a pre-trained deep network. This mechanism starts with easy samples and progressively moves towards harder ones, to avoid initial interference caused by hard samples. Afterwards, the obtained saliency cues are utilized to train a saliency detector, and we employ a Self-rectify Pseudo-label Refinement (SPR) mechanism to improve the quality of pseudo-labels. Finally, an adapter-tuning method is devised to transfer the acquired saliency knowledge, leveraging shared knowledge to attain superior transferring performance on the target tasks. Extensive experiments on five representative SOD tasks confirm the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed method. Code and supplement materials are available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/A2S-v3.
Authors:Abhishek Aich, Yumin Suh, Samuel Schulter, Manmohan Chandraker
Abstract:
A powerful architecture for universal segmentation relies on transformers that encode multi-scale image features and decode object queries into mask predictions. With efficiency being a high priority for scaling such models, we observed that the state-of-the-art method Mask2Former uses 50% of its compute only on the transformer encoder. This is due to the retention of a full-length token-level representation of all backbone feature scales at each encoder layer. With this observation, we propose a strategy termed PROgressive Token Length SCALing for Efficient transformer encoders (PRO-SCALE) that can be plugged-in to the Mask2Former segmentation architecture to significantly reduce the computational cost. The underlying principle of PRO-SCALE is: progressively scale the length of the tokens with the layers of the encoder. This allows PRO-SCALE to reduce computations by a large margin with minimal sacrifice in performance (~52% encoder and ~27% overall GFLOPs reduction with no drop in performance on COCO dataset). Experiments conducted on public benchmarks demonstrates PRO-SCALE's flexibility in architectural configurations, and exhibits potential for extension beyond the settings of segmentation tasks to encompass object detection. Code here: https://github.com/abhishekaich27/proscale-pytorch
Authors:Ross Greer, Bjørk Antoniussen, Andreas Møgelmose, Mohan Trivedi
Abstract:
Object detection is crucial for ensuring safe autonomous driving. However, data-driven approaches face challenges when encountering minority or novel objects in the 3D driving scene. In this paper, we propose VisLED, a language-driven active learning framework for diverse open-set 3D Object Detection. Our method leverages active learning techniques to query diverse and informative data samples from an unlabeled pool, enhancing the model's ability to detect underrepresented or novel objects. Specifically, we introduce the Vision-Language Embedding Diversity Querying (VisLED-Querying) algorithm, which operates in both open-world exploring and closed-world mining settings. In open-world exploring, VisLED-Querying selects data points most novel relative to existing data, while in closed-world mining, it mines novel instances of known classes. We evaluate our approach on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate its efficiency compared to random sampling and entropy-querying methods. Our results show that VisLED-Querying consistently outperforms random sampling and offers competitive performance compared to entropy-querying despite the latter's model-optimality, highlighting the potential of VisLED for improving object detection in autonomous driving scenarios. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/Bjork-crypto/VisLED-Querying
Authors:Cheng Shi, Sibei Yang
Abstract:
Foundation models, pre-trained on a large amount of data have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in various downstream tasks. However, in object detection and instance segmentation, two fundamental computer vision tasks heavily reliant on extensive human annotations, foundation models such as SAM and DINO struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. In this study, we reveal that the devil is in the object boundary, \textit{i.e.}, these foundation models fail to discern boundaries between individual objects. For the first time, we probe that CLIP, which has never accessed any instance-level annotations, can provide a highly beneficial and strong instance-level boundary prior in the clustering results of its particular intermediate layer. Following this surprising observation, we propose $\textbf{Zip}$ which $\textbf{Z}$ips up CL$\textbf{ip}$ and SAM in a novel classification-first-then-discovery pipeline, enabling annotation-free, complex-scene-capable, open-vocabulary object detection and instance segmentation. Our Zip significantly boosts SAM's mask AP on COCO dataset by 12.5% and establishes state-of-the-art performance in various settings, including training-free, self-training, and label-efficient finetuning. Furthermore, annotation-free Zip even achieves comparable performance to the best-performing open-vocabulary object detecters using base annotations. Code is released at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Zip-Your-CLIP
Authors:Luca Bompani, Manuele Rusci, Daniele Palossi, Francesco Conti, Luca Benini
Abstract:
This paper introduces Multi-Resolution Rescored Byte-Track (MR2-ByteTrack), a novel video object detection framework for ultra-low-power embedded processors. This method reduces the average compute load of an off-the-shelf Deep Neural Network (DNN) based object detector by up to 2.25$\times$ by alternating the processing of high-resolution images (320$\times$320 pixels) with multiple down-sized frames (192$\times$192 pixels). To tackle the accuracy degradation due to the reduced image input size, MR2-ByteTrack correlates the output detections over time using the ByteTrack tracker and corrects potential misclassification using a novel probabilistic Rescore algorithm. By interleaving two down-sized images for every high-resolution one as the input of different state-of-the-art DNN object detectors with our MR2-ByteTrack, we demonstrate an average accuracy increase of 2.16% and a latency reduction of 43% on the GAP9 microcontroller compared to a baseline frame-by-frame inference scheme using exclusively full-resolution images. Code available at: https://github.com/Bomps4/Multi_Resolution_Rescored_ByteTrack
Authors:Zhenhua Liu, Zhiwei Hao, Kai Han, Yehui Tang, Yunhe Wang
Abstract:
Compact neural networks are specially designed for applications on edge devices with faster inference speed yet modest performance. However, training strategies of compact models are borrowed from that of conventional models at present, which ignores their difference in model capacity and thus may impede the performance of compact models. In this paper, by systematically investigating the impact of different training ingredients, we introduce a strong training strategy for compact models. We find that the appropriate designs of re-parameterization and knowledge distillation are crucial for training high-performance compact models, while some commonly used data augmentations for training conventional models, such as Mixup and CutMix, lead to worse performance. Our experiments on ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that our specialized training strategy for compact models is applicable to various architectures, including GhostNetV2, MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNetV2. Specifically, equipped with our strategy, GhostNetV3 1.3$\times$ achieves a top-1 accuracy of 79.1% with only 269M FLOPs and a latency of 14.46ms on mobile devices, surpassing its ordinarily trained counterpart by a large margin. Moreover, our observation can also be extended to object detection scenarios. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones/tree/master/ghostnetv3_pytorch.
Authors:Jiangning Zhang, Chengjie Wang, Xiangtai Li, Guanzhong Tian, Zhucun Xue, Yong Liu, Guansong Pang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) is often focused on detecting anomaly areas for industrial quality inspection and medical lesion examination. However, due to the specific scenario targets, the data scale for AD is relatively small, and evaluation metrics are still deficient compared to classic vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. To fill these gaps, this work first constructs a large-scale and general-purpose COCO-AD dataset by extending COCO to the AD field. This enables fair evaluation and sustainable development for different methods on this challenging benchmark. Moreover, current metrics such as AU-ROC have nearly reached saturation on simple datasets, which prevents a comprehensive evaluation of different methods. Inspired by the metrics in the segmentation field, we further propose several more practical threshold-dependent AD-specific metrics, ie, m$F_1$$^{.2}_{.8}$, mAcc$^{.2}_{.8}$, mIoU$^{.2}_{.8}$, and mIoU-max. Motivated by GAN inversion's high-quality reconstruction capability, we propose a simple but more powerful InvAD framework to achieve high-quality feature reconstruction. Our method improves the effectiveness of reconstruction-based methods on popular MVTec AD, VisA, and our newly proposed COCO-AD datasets under a multi-class unsupervised setting, where only a single detection model is trained to detect anomalies from different classes. Extensive ablation experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of each component of our InvAD. Full codes and models are available at https://github.com/zhangzjn/ader.
Authors:Dai Quoc Tran, Armstrong Aboah, Yuntae Jeon, Maged Shoman, Minsoo Park, Seunghee Park
Abstract:
This study addresses the evolving challenges in urban traffic monitoring detection systems based on fisheye lens cameras by proposing a framework that improves the efficacy and accuracy of these systems. In the context of urban infrastructure and transportation management, advanced traffic monitoring systems have become critical for managing the complexities of urbanization and increasing vehicle density. Traditional monitoring methods, which rely on static cameras with narrow fields of view, are ineffective in dynamic urban environments, necessitating the installation of multiple cameras, which raises costs. Fisheye lenses, which were recently introduced, provide wide and omnidirectional coverage in a single frame, making them a transformative solution. However, issues such as distorted views and blurriness arise, preventing accurate object detection on these images. Motivated by these challenges, this study proposes a novel approach that combines a ransformer-based image enhancement framework and ensemble learning technique to address these challenges and improve traffic monitoring accuracy, making significant contributions to the future of intelligent traffic management systems. Our proposed methodological framework won 5th place in the 2024 AI City Challenge, Track 4, with an F1 score of 0.5965 on experimental validation data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/daitranskku/AIC2024-TRACK4-TEAM15.
Authors:M. M. Morsali, Z. Sharifi, F. Fallah, S. Hashembeiki, H. Mohammadzade, S. Bagheri Shouraki
Abstract:
This paper introduces SFSORT, the world's fastest multi-object tracking system based on experiments conducted on MOT Challenge datasets. To achieve an accurate and computationally efficient tracker, this paper employs a tracking-by-detection method, following the online real-time tracking approach established in prior literature. By introducing a novel cost function called the Bounding Box Similarity Index, this work eliminates the Kalman Filter, leading to reduced computational requirements. Additionally, this paper demonstrates the impact of scene features on enhancing object-track association and improving track post-processing. Using a 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon CPU, the proposed method achieves an HOTA of 61.7\% with a processing speed of 2242 Hz on the MOT17 dataset and an HOTA of 60.9\% with a processing speed of 304 Hz on the MOT20 dataset. The tracker's source code, fine-tuned object detection model, and tutorials are available at \url{https://github.com/gitmehrdad/SFSORT}.
Authors:Hao Lu, Jiaqi Tang, Xinli Xu, Xu Cao, Yunpeng Zhang, Guoqing Wang, Dalong Du, Hao Chen, Yingcong Chen
Abstract:
The emergence of Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection (MC3D-Det), facilitated by bird's-eye view (BEV) representation, signifies a notable progression in 3D object detection. Scaling MC3D-Det training effectively accommodates varied camera parameters and urban landscapes, paving the way for the MC3D-Det foundation model. However, the multi-view fusion stage of the MC3D-Det method relies on the ill-posed monocular perception during training rather than surround refinement ability, leading to what we term "surround refinement degradation". To this end, our study presents a weak-to-strong eliciting framework aimed at enhancing surround refinement while maintaining robust monocular perception. Specifically, our framework employs weakly tuned experts trained on distinct subsets, and each is inherently biased toward specific camera configurations and scenarios. These biased experts can learn the perception of monocular degeneration, which can help the multi-view fusion stage to enhance surround refinement abilities. Moreover, a composite distillation strategy is proposed to integrate the universal knowledge of 2D foundation models and task-specific information. Finally, for MC3D-Det joint training, the elaborate dataset merge strategy is designed to solve the problem of inconsistent camera numbers and camera parameters. We set up a multiple dataset joint training benchmark for MC3D-Det and adequately evaluated existing methods. Further, we demonstrate the proposed framework brings a generalized and significant boost over multiple baselines. Our code is at \url{https://github.com/EnVision-Research/Scale-BEV}.
Authors:Chenguang Liu, Guangshuai Gao, Ziyue Huang, Zhenghui Hu, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Detecting objects from aerial images poses significant challenges due to the following factors: 1) Aerial images typically have very large sizes, generally with millions or even hundreds of millions of pixels, while computational resources are limited. 2) Small object size leads to insufficient information for effective detection. 3) Non-uniform object distribution leads to computational resource wastage. To address these issues, we propose YOLC (You Only Look Clusters), an efficient and effective framework that builds on an anchor-free object detector, CenterNet. To overcome the challenges posed by large-scale images and non-uniform object distribution, we introduce a Local Scale Module (LSM) that adaptively searches cluster regions for zooming in for accurate detection. Additionally, we modify the regression loss using Gaussian Wasserstein distance (GWD) to obtain high-quality bounding boxes. Deformable convolution and refinement methods are employed in the detection head to enhance the detection of small objects. We perform extensive experiments on two aerial image datasets, including Visdrone2019 and UAVDT, to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/dawn-ech/YOLC.
Authors:Jooyeon Kim, Eulrang Cho, Sehyung Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) has been studied with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect novel objects beyond the pre-trained categories. Previous approaches improve the generalization ability to expand the knowledge of the detector, using 'positive' pseudo-labels with additional 'class' names, e.g., sock, iPod, and alligator. To extend the previous methods in two aspects, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Losses and visual Features (RALF). Our method retrieves related 'negative' classes and augments loss functions. Also, visual features are augmented with 'verbalized concepts' of classes, e.g., worn on the feet, handheld music player, and sharp teeth. Specifically, RALF consists of two modules: Retrieval Augmented Losses (RAL) and Retrieval-Augmented visual Features (RAF). RAL constitutes two losses reflecting the semantic similarity with negative vocabularies. In addition, RAF augments visual features with the verbalized concepts from a large language model (LLM). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RALF on COCO and LVIS benchmark datasets. We achieve improvement up to 3.4 box AP$_{50}^{\text{N}}$ on novel categories of the COCO dataset and 3.6 mask AP$_{\text{r}}$ gains on the LVIS dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RALF .
Authors:Haitian Zhang, Chang Xu, Xinya Wang, Bingde Liu, Guang Hua, Lei Yu, Wen Yang
Abstract:
Object detection is critical in autonomous driving, and it is more practical yet challenging to localize objects of unknown categories: an endeavour known as Class-Agnostic Object Detection (CAOD). Existing studies on CAOD predominantly rely on ordinary cameras, but these frame-based sensors usually have high latency and limited dynamic range, leading to safety risks in real-world scenarios. In this study, we turn to a new modality enabled by the so-called event camera, featured by its sub-millisecond latency and high dynamic range, for robust CAOD. We propose Detecting Every Object in Events (DEOE), an approach tailored for achieving high-speed, class-agnostic open-world object detection in event-based vision. Built upon the fast event-based backbone: recurrent vision transformer, we jointly consider the spatial and temporal consistencies to identify potential objects. The discovered potential objects are assimilated as soft positive samples to avoid being suppressed as background. Moreover, we introduce a disentangled objectness head to separate the foreground-background classification and novel object discovery tasks, enhancing the model's generalization in localizing novel objects while maintaining a strong ability to filter out the background. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of our proposed DEOE in comparison with three strong baseline methods that integrate the state-of-the-art event-based object detector with advancements in RGB-based CAOD. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hatins/DEOE.
Authors:Yurong You, Cheng Perng Phoo, Carlos Andres Diaz-Ruiz, Katie Z Luo, Wei-Lun Chao, Mark Campbell, Bharath Hariharan, Kilian Q Weinberger
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection is crucial to autonomous driving. Though LiDAR-based detectors have achieved impressive performance, the high cost of LiDAR sensors precludes their widespread adoption in affordable vehicles. Camera-based detectors are cheaper alternatives but often suffer inferior performance compared to their LiDAR-based counterparts due to inherent depth ambiguities in images. In this work, we seek to improve monocular 3D detectors by leveraging unlabeled historical LiDAR data. Specifically, at inference time, we assume that the camera-based detectors have access to multiple unlabeled LiDAR scans from past traversals at locations of interest (potentially from other high-end vehicles equipped with LiDAR sensors). Under this setup, we proposed a novel, simple, and end-to-end trainable framework, termed AsyncDepth, to effectively extract relevant features from asynchronous LiDAR traversals of the same location for monocular 3D detectors. We show consistent and significant performance gain (up to 9 AP) across multiple state-of-the-art models and datasets with a negligible additional latency of 9.66 ms and a small storage cost.
Authors:Zihan Wang, Bowen Li, Chen Wang, Sebastian Scherer
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection has drawn increasing attention in the field of robotic exploration, where robots are required to find unseen objects with a few online provided examples. Despite recent efforts have been made to yield online processing capabilities, slow inference speeds of low-powered robots fail to meet the demands of real-time detection-making them impractical for autonomous exploration. Existing methods still face performance and efficiency challenges, mainly due to unreliable features and exhaustive class loops. In this work, we propose a new paradigm AirShot, and discover that, by fully exploiting the valuable correlation map, AirShot can result in a more robust and faster few-shot object detection system, which is more applicable to robotics community. The core module Top Prediction Filter (TPF) can operate on multi-scale correlation maps in both the training and inference stages. During training, TPF supervises the generation of a more representative correlation map, while during inference, it reduces looping iterations by selecting top-ranked classes, thus cutting down on computational costs with better performance. Surprisingly, this dual functionality exhibits general effectiveness and efficiency on various off-the-shelf models. Exhaustive experiments on COCO2017, VOC2014, and SubT datasets demonstrate that TPF can significantly boost the efficacy and efficiency of most off-the-shelf models, achieving up to 36.4% precision improvements along with 56.3% faster inference speed. Code and Data are at: https://github.com/ImNotPrepared/AirShot.
Authors:Hou-I Liu, Christine Wu, Jen-Hao Cheng, Wenhao Chai, Shian-Yun Wang, Gaowen Liu, Hugo Latapie, Jhih-Ciang Wu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) holds noteworthy promise for autonomous driving applications owing to the cost-effectiveness and rich visual context of monocular camera sensors. However, depth ambiguity poses a significant challenge, as it requires extracting precise 3D scene geometry from a single image, resulting in suboptimal performance when transferring knowledge from a LiDAR-based teacher model to a camera-based student model. To facilitate effective distillation, we introduce Monocular Teaching Assistant Knowledge Distillation (MonoTAKD), which proposes a camera-based teaching assistant (TA) model to transfer robust 3D visual knowledge to the student model, leveraging the smaller feature representation gap. Additionally, we define 3D spatial cues as residual features that capture the differences between the teacher and the TA models. We then leverage these cues to improve the student model's 3D perception capabilities. Experimental results show that our MonoTAKD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI3D dataset. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance on nuScenes and KITTI raw datasets to demonstrate the generalization of our model to multi-view 3D and unsupervised data settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/MonoTAKD.
Authors:Weile Li, Muqing Shi, Zhonghua Hong
Abstract:
Traditional deep learning-based object detection networks often resize images during the data preprocessing stage to achieve a uniform size and scale in the feature map. Resizing is done to facilitate model propagation and fully connected classification. However, resizing inevitably leads to object deformation and loss of valuable information in the images. This drawback becomes particularly pronounced for tiny objects like distribution towers with linear shapes and few pixels. To address this issue, we propose abandoning the resizing operation. Instead, we introduce Positional-Encoding Multi-head Criss-Cross Attention. This allows the model to capture contextual information and learn from multiple representation subspaces, effectively enriching the semantics of distribution towers. Additionally, we enhance Spatial Pyramid Pooling by reshaping three pooled feature maps into a new unified one while also reducing the computational burden. This approach allows images of different sizes and scales to generate feature maps with uniform dimensions and can be employed in feature map propagation. Our SCAResNet incorporates these aforementioned improvements into the backbone network ResNet. We evaluated our SCAResNet using the Electric Transmission and Distribution Infrastructure Imagery dataset from Duke University. Without any additional tricks, we employed various object detection models with Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment as the baseline. When incorporating the SCAResNet into the baseline model, we achieved a 2.1% improvement in mAPs. This demonstrates the advantages of our SCAResNet in detecting transmission and distribution towers and its value in tiny object detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/LisavilaLee/SCAResNet_mmdet.
Authors:Lorenzo Bianchi, Fabio Carrara, Nicola Messina, Fabrizio Falchi
Abstract:
Modern applications increasingly demand flexible computer vision models that adapt to novel concepts not encountered during training. This necessity is pivotal in emerging domains like extended reality, robotics, and autonomous driving, which require the ability to respond to open-world stimuli. A key ingredient is the ability to identify objects based on free-form textual queries defined at inference time - a task known as open-vocabulary object detection. Multimodal backbones like CLIP are the main enabling technology for current open-world perception solutions. Despite performing well on generic queries, recent studies highlighted limitations on the fine-grained recognition capabilities in open-vocabulary settings - i.e., for distinguishing subtle object features like color, shape, and material. In this paper, we perform a detailed examination of these open-vocabulary object recognition limitations to find the root cause. We evaluate the performance of CLIP, the most commonly used vision-language backbone, against a fine-grained object-matching benchmark, revealing interesting analogies between the limitations of open-vocabulary object detectors and their backbones. Experiments suggest that the lack of fine-grained understanding is caused by the poor separability of object characteristics in the CLIP latent space. Therefore, we try to understand whether fine-grained knowledge is present in CLIP embeddings but not exploited at inference time due, for example, to the unsuitability of the cosine similarity matching function, which may discard important object characteristics. Our preliminary experiments show that simple CLIP latent-space re-projections help separate fine-grained concepts, paving the way towards the development of backbones inherently able to process fine-grained details. The code for reproducing these experiments is available at https://github.com/lorebianchi98/FG-CLIP.
Authors:Yi-Xin Huang, Hou-I Liu, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Abstract:
Despite previous DETR-like methods having performed successfully in generic object detection, tiny object detection is still a challenging task for them since the positional information of object queries is not customized for detecting tiny objects, whose scale is extraordinarily smaller than general objects. Also, DETR-like methods using a fixed number of queries make them unsuitable for aerial datasets, which only contain tiny objects, and the numbers of instances are imbalanced between different images. Thus, we present a simple yet effective model, named DQ-DETR, which consists of three different components: categorical counting module, counting-guided feature enhancement, and dynamic query selection to solve the above-mentioned problems. DQ-DETR uses the prediction and density maps from the categorical counting module to dynamically adjust the number of object queries and improve the positional information of queries. Our model DQ-DETR outperforms previous CNN-based and DETR-like methods, achieving state-of-the-art mAP 30.2% on the AI-TOD-V2 dataset, which mostly consists of tiny objects. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hoiliu-0801/DQ-DETR.
Authors:Longfei Yan, Pei Yan, Shengzhou Xiong, Xuanyu Xiang, Yihua Tan
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection has attracted widespread attention due to its potential to accurately obtain object 3D localization from a single image at a low cost. Depth estimation is an essential but challenging subtask of monocular 3D object detection due to the ill-posedness of 2D to 3D mapping. Many methods explore multiple local depth clues such as object heights and keypoints and then formulate the object depth estimation as an ensemble of multiple depth predictions to mitigate the insufficiency of single-depth information. However, the errors of existing multiple depths tend to have the same sign, which hinders them from neutralizing each other and limits the overall accuracy of combined depth. To alleviate this problem, we propose to increase the complementarity of depths with two novel designs. First, we add a new depth prediction branch named complementary depth that utilizes global and efficient depth clues from the entire image rather than the local clues to reduce the correlation of depth predictions. Second, we propose to fully exploit the geometric relations between multiple depth clues to achieve complementarity in form. Benefiting from these designs, our method achieves higher complementarity. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without introducing extra data. In addition, complementary depth can also be a lightweight and plug-and-play module to boost multiple existing monocular 3d object detectors. Code is available at https://github.com/elvintanhust/MonoCD.
Authors:Felix Fent, Andras Palffy, Holger Caesar
Abstract:
The perception of autonomous vehicles has to be efficient, robust, and cost-effective. However, cameras are not robust against severe weather conditions, lidar sensors are expensive, and the performance of radar-based perception is still inferior to the others. Camera-radar fusion methods have been proposed to address this issue, but these are constrained by the typical sparsity of radar point clouds and often designed for radars without elevation information. We propose a novel camera-radar fusion approach called Dual Perspective Fusion Transformer (DPFT), designed to overcome these limitations. Our method leverages lower-level radar data (the radar cube) instead of the processed point clouds to preserve as much information as possible and employs projections in both the camera and ground planes to effectively use radars with elevation information and simplify the fusion with camera data. As a result, DPFT has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on the K-Radar dataset while showing remarkable robustness against adverse weather conditions and maintaining a low inference time. The code is made available as open-source software under https://github.com/TUMFTM/DPFT.
Authors:Safouane El Ghazouali, Arnaud Gucciardi, Francesca Venturini, Nicola Venturi, Michael Rueegsegger, Umberto Michelucci
Abstract:
Object detection in remotely sensed satellite pictures is fundamental in many fields such as biophysical, and environmental monitoring. While deep learning algorithms are constantly evolving, they have been mostly implemented and tested on popular ground-based taken photos. This paper critically evaluates and compares a suite of advanced object detection algorithms customized for the task of identifying aircraft within satellite imagery. Using the large HRPlanesV2 dataset, together with a rigorous validation with the GDIT dataset, this research encompasses an array of methodologies including YOLO versions 5 and 8, Faster RCNN, CenterNet, RetinaNet, RTMDet, and DETR, all trained from scratch. This exhaustive training and validation study reveal YOLOv5 as the preeminent model for the specific case of identifying airplanes from remote sensing data, showcasing high precision and adaptability across diverse imaging conditions. This research highlight the nuanced performance landscapes of these algorithms, with YOLOv5 emerging as a robust solution for aerial object detection, underlining its importance through superior mean average precision, Recall, and Intersection over Union scores. The findings described here underscore the fundamental role of algorithm selection aligned with the specific demands of satellite imagery analysis and extend a comprehensive framework to evaluate model efficacy. The benchmark toolkit and codes, available via https://github.com/toelt-llc/FlightScope_Bench, aims to further exploration and innovation in the realm of remote sensing object detection, paving the way for improved analytical methodologies in satellite imagery applications.
Authors:Zhongyu Xia, ZhiWei Lin, Xinhao Wang, Yongtao Wang, Yun Xing, Shengxiang Qi, Nan Dong, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract:
Three-dimensional perception from multi-view cameras is a crucial component in autonomous driving systems, which involves multiple tasks like 3D object detection and bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation. To improve perception precision, large image encoders, high-resolution images, and long-term temporal inputs have been adopted in recent 3D perception models, bringing remarkable performance gains. However, these techniques are often incompatible in training and inference scenarios due to computational resource constraints. Besides, modern autonomous driving systems prefer to adopt an end-to-end framework for multi-task 3D perception, which can simplify the overall system architecture and reduce the implementation complexity. However, conflict between tasks often arises when optimizing multiple tasks jointly within an end-to-end 3D perception model. To alleviate these issues, we present an end-to-end framework named HENet for multi-task 3D perception in this paper. Specifically, we propose a hybrid image encoding network, using a large image encoder for short-term frames and a small image encoder for long-term temporal frames. Then, we introduce a temporal feature integration module based on the attention mechanism to fuse the features of different frames extracted by the two aforementioned hybrid image encoders. Finally, according to the characteristics of each perception task, we utilize BEV features of different grid sizes, independent BEV encoders, and task decoders for different tasks. Experimental results show that HENet achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end multi-task 3D perception results on the nuScenes benchmark, including 3D object detection and BEV semantic segmentation. The source code and models will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/HENet.
Authors:Ho-Joong Kim, Jung-Ho Hong, Heejo Kong, Seong-Whan Lee
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate that the normalized coordinate expression is a key factor as reliance on hand-crafted components in query-based detectors for temporal action detection (TAD). Despite significant advancements towards an end-to-end framework in object detection, query-based detectors have been limited in achieving full end-to-end modeling in TAD. To address this issue, we propose \modelname{}, a full end-to-end temporal action detection transformer that integrates time-aligned coordinate expression. We reformulate coordinate expression utilizing actual timeline values, ensuring length-invariant representations from the extremely diverse video duration environment. Furthermore, our proposed adaptive query selection dynamically adjusts the number of queries based on video length, providing a suitable solution for varying video durations compared to a fixed query set. Our approach not only simplifies the TAD process by eliminating the need for hand-crafted components but also significantly improves the performance of query-based detectors. Our TE-TAD outperforms the previous query-based detectors and achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmark datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/Dotori-HJ/TE-TAD
Authors:Jinbae Im, JeongYeon Nam, Nokyung Park, Hyungmin Lee, Seunghyun Park
Abstract:
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) is a challenging task of detecting objects and predicting relationships between objects. After DETR was developed, one-stage SGG models based on a one-stage object detector have been actively studied. However, complex modeling is used to predict the relationship between objects, and the inherent relationship between object queries learned in the multi-head self-attention of the object detector has been neglected. We propose a lightweight one-stage SGG model that extracts the relation graph from the various relationships learned in the multi-head self-attention layers of the DETR decoder. By fully utilizing the self-attention by-products, the relation graph can be extracted effectively with a shallow relation extraction head. Considering the dependency of the relation extraction task on the object detection task, we propose a novel relation smoothing technique that adjusts the relation label adaptively according to the quality of the detected objects. By the relation smoothing, the model is trained according to the continuous curriculum that focuses on object detection task at the beginning of training and performs multi-task learning as the object detection performance gradually improves. Furthermore, we propose a connectivity prediction task that predicts whether a relation exists between object pairs as an auxiliary task of the relation extraction. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method for the Visual Genome and Open Image V6 datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/naver-ai/egtr.
Authors:Jicheng Yuan, Anh Le-Tuan, Manfred Hauswirth, Danh Le-Phuoc
Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has shown significant advancements in object detection under well-lit conditions; however, its performance degrades notably in low-visibility scenarios, especially at night, posing challenges not only for its adaptability in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions but also for the reliability and efficiency of automated vehicles. To address this problem, we propose a \textbf{Co}operative \textbf{S}tudents (\textbf{CoS}) framework that innovatively employs global-local transformations (GLT) and a proxy-based target consistency (PTC) mechanism to capture the spatial consistency in day- and night-time scenarios effectively, and thus bridge the significant domain shift across contexts. Building upon this, we further devise an adaptive IoU-informed thresholding (AIT) module to gradually avoid overlooking potential true positives and enrich the latent information in the target domain. Comprehensive experiments show that CoS essentially enhanced UDA performance in low-visibility conditions and surpasses current state-of-the-art techniques, achieving an increase in mAP of 3.0\%, 1.9\%, and 2.5\% on BDD100K, SHIFT, and ACDC datasets, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/jichengyuan/Cooperitive_Students.
Authors:Yansong Peng, Hebei Li, Yueyi Zhang, Xiaoyan Sun, Feng Wu
Abstract:
While recent Transformer-based approaches have shown impressive performances on event-based object detection tasks, their high computational costs still diminish the low power consumption advantage of event cameras. Image-based works attempt to reduce these costs by introducing sparse Transformers. However, they display inadequate sparsity and adaptability when applied to event-based object detection, since these approaches cannot balance the fine granularity of token-level sparsification and the efficiency of window-based Transformers, leading to reduced performance and efficiency. Furthermore, they lack scene-specific sparsity optimization, resulting in information loss and a lower recall rate. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Scene Adaptive Sparse Transformer (SAST). SAST enables window-token co-sparsification, significantly enhancing fault tolerance and reducing computational overhead. Leveraging the innovative scoring and selection modules, along with the Masked Sparse Window Self-Attention, SAST showcases remarkable scene-aware adaptability: It focuses only on important objects and dynamically optimizes sparsity level according to scene complexity, maintaining a remarkable balance between performance and computational cost. The evaluation results show that SAST outperforms all other dense and sparse networks in both performance and efficiency on two large-scale event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1). Code: https://github.com/Peterande/SAST
Authors:JooYoung Jang, Youngseo Cha, Jisu Kim, SooHyung Lee, Geonu Lee, Minkook Cho, Young Hwang, Nojun Kwak
Abstract:
Recently, both the frequency and intensity of wildfires have increased worldwide, primarily due to climate change. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for wildfire detection, leveraging semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for object detection, accompanied by a corresponding dataset designed for use by both academics and industries. Our dataset encompasses 30 times more diverse labeled scenes for the current largest benchmark wildfire dataset, HPWREN, and introduces a new labeling policy for wildfire detection. Inspired by CoordConv, we propose a robust baseline, Location-Aware Object Detection for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (LADA), utilizing a teacher-student based framework capable of extracting translational variance features characteristic of wildfires. With only using 1% target domain labeled data, our framework significantly outperforms our source-only baseline by a notable margin of 3.8% in mean Average Precision on the HPWREN wildfire dataset. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/BloomBerry/LADA.
Authors:Zhuolong Li, Xingao Li, Changxing Ding, Xiangmin Xu
Abstract:
Detecting human-object interaction (HOI) has long been limited by the amount of supervised data available. Recent approaches address this issue by pre-training according to pseudo-labels, which align object regions with HOI triplets parsed from image captions. However, pseudo-labeling is tricky and noisy, making HOI pre-training a complex process. Therefore, we propose an efficient disentangled pre-training method for HOI detection (DP-HOI) to address this problem. First, DP-HOI utilizes object detection and action recognition datasets to pre-train the detection and interaction decoder layers, respectively. Then, we arrange these decoder layers so that the pre-training architecture is consistent with the downstream HOI detection task. This facilitates efficient knowledge transfer. Specifically, the detection decoder identifies reliable human instances in each action recognition dataset image, generates one corresponding query, and feeds it into the interaction decoder for verb classification. Next, we combine the human instance verb predictions in the same image and impose image-level supervision. The DP-HOI structure can be easily adapted to the HOI detection task, enabling effective model parameter initialization. Therefore, it significantly enhances the performance of existing HOI detection models on a broad range of rare categories. The code and pre-trained weight are available at https://github.com/xingaoli/DP-HOI.
Authors:Jaeha Kim, Junghun Oh, Kyoung Mu Lee
Abstract:
In real-world scenarios, image recognition tasks, such as semantic segmentation and object detection, often pose greater challenges due to the lack of information available within low-resolution (LR) content. Image super-resolution (SR) is one of the promising solutions for addressing the challenges. However, due to the ill-posed property of SR, it is challenging for typical SR methods to restore task-relevant high-frequency contents, which may dilute the advantage of utilizing the SR method. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Super-Resolution for Image Recognition (SR4IR) that effectively guides the generation of SR images beneficial to achieving satisfactory image recognition performance when processing LR images. The critical component of our SR4IR is the task-driven perceptual (TDP) loss that enables the SR network to acquire task-specific knowledge from a network tailored for a specific task. Moreover, we propose a cross-quality patch mix and an alternate training framework that significantly enhances the efficacy of the TDP loss by addressing potential problems when employing the TDP loss. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our SR4IR achieves outstanding task performance by generating SR images useful for a specific image recognition task, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and image classification. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/JaehaKim97/SR4IR.
Authors:Heitor Rapela Medeiros, Masih Aminbeidokhti, Fidel Guerrero Pena, David Latortue, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
A common practice in deep learning involves training large neural networks on massive datasets to achieve high accuracy across various domains and tasks. While this approach works well in many application areas, it often fails drastically when processing data from a new modality with a significant distribution shift from the data used to pre-train the model. This paper focuses on adapting a large object detection model trained on RGB images to new data extracted from IR images with a substantial modality shift. We propose Modality Translator (ModTr) as an alternative to the common approach of fine-tuning a large model to the new modality. ModTr adapts the IR input image with a small transformation network trained to directly minimize the detection loss. The original RGB model can then work on the translated inputs without any further changes or fine-tuning to its parameters. Experimental results on translating from IR to RGB images on two well-known datasets show that our simple approach provides detectors that perform comparably or better than standard fine-tuning, without forgetting the knowledge of the original model. This opens the door to a more flexible and efficient service-based detection pipeline, where a unique and unaltered server, such as an RGB detector, runs constantly while being queried by different modalities, such as IR with the corresponding translations model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/ModTr.
Authors:Haolin Qin, Tingfa Xu, Peifu Liu, Jingxuan Xu, Jianan Li
Abstract:
Hyperspectral salient object detection (HSOD) has exhibited remarkable promise across various applications, particularly in intricate scenarios where conventional RGB-based approaches fall short. Despite the considerable progress in HSOD method advancements, two critical challenges require immediate attention. Firstly, existing hyperspectral data dimension reduction techniques incur a loss of spectral information, which adversely affects detection accuracy. Secondly, previous methods insufficiently harness the inherent distinctive attributes of hyperspectral images (HSIs) during the feature extraction process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach termed the Distilled Mixed Spectral-Spatial Network (DMSSN), comprising a Distilled Spectral Encoding process and a Mixed Spectral-Spatial Transformer (MSST) feature extraction network. The encoding process utilizes knowledge distillation to construct a lightweight autoencoder for dimension reduction, striking a balance between robust encoding capabilities and low computational costs. The MSST extracts spectral-spatial features through multiple attention head groups, collaboratively enhancing its resistance to intricate scenarios. Moreover, we have created a large-scale HSOD dataset, HSOD-BIT, to tackle the issue of data scarcity in this field and meet the fundamental data requirements of deep network training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DMSSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. We will soon make the code and dataset publicly available on https://github.com/anonymous0519/HSOD-BIT.
Authors:Alexander Gambashidze, Aleksandr Dadukin, Maksim Golyadkin, Maria Razzhivina, Ilya Makarov
Abstract:
This paper addresses the critical challenges of sparsity and occlusion in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Current methods often rely on supplementary modules or specific architectural designs, potentially limiting their applicability to new and evolving architectures. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a versatile technique that seamlessly integrates into any existing framework for 3D Object Detection, marking the first instance of Weak-to-Strong generalization in 3D computer vision. We introduce a novel framework, X-Ray Distillation with Object-Complete Frames, suitable for both supervised and semi-supervised settings, that leverages the temporal aspect of point cloud sequences. This method extracts crucial information from both previous and subsequent LiDAR frames, creating Object-Complete frames that represent objects from multiple viewpoints, thus addressing occlusion and sparsity. Given the limitation of not being able to generate Object-Complete frames during online inference, we utilize Knowledge Distillation within a Teacher-Student framework. This technique encourages the strong Student model to emulate the behavior of the weaker Teacher, which processes simple and informative Object-Complete frames, effectively offering a comprehensive view of objects as if seen through X-ray vision. Our proposed methods surpass state-of-the-art in semi-supervised learning by 1-1.5 mAP and enhance the performance of five established supervised models by 1-2 mAP on standard autonomous driving datasets, even with default hyperparameters. Code for Object-Complete frames is available here: https://github.com/sakharok13/X-Ray-Teacher-Patching-Tools.
Authors:Zihua Liu, Hiroki Sakuma, Masatoshi Okutomi
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection poses a significant challenge in 3D scene understanding due to its inherently ill-posed nature in monocular depth estimation. Existing methods heavily rely on supervised learning using abundant 3D labels, typically obtained through expensive and labor-intensive annotation on LiDAR point clouds. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel weakly supervised 3D object detection framework named VSRD (Volumetric Silhouette Rendering for Detection) to train 3D object detectors without any 3D supervision but only weak 2D supervision. VSRD consists of multi-view 3D auto-labeling and subsequent training of monocular 3D object detectors using the pseudo labels generated in the auto-labeling stage. In the auto-labeling stage, we represent the surface of each instance as a signed distance field (SDF) and render its silhouette as an instance mask through our proposed instance-aware volumetric silhouette rendering. To directly optimize the 3D bounding boxes through rendering, we decompose the SDF of each instance into the SDF of a cuboid and the residual distance field (RDF) that represents the residual from the cuboid. This mechanism enables us to optimize the 3D bounding boxes in an end-to-end manner by comparing the rendered instance masks with the ground truth instance masks. The optimized 3D bounding boxes serve as effective training data for 3D object detection. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset, demonstrating that our method outperforms the existing weakly supervised 3D object detection methods. The code is available at https://github.com/skmhrk1209/VSRD.
Authors:Ruining Yang, Yuqi Peng
Abstract:
Autonomous driving has garnered significant attention as a key research area within artificial intelligence. In the context of autonomous driving scenarios, the varying physical locations of objects correspond to different levels of danger. However, conventional evaluation criteria for automatic driving object detection often overlook the crucial aspect of an object's physical location, leading to evaluation results that may not accurately reflect the genuine threat posed by the object to the autonomous driving vehicle. To enhance the safety of autonomous driving, this paper introduces a novel evaluation criterion based on physical location information, termed PLoc. This criterion transcends the limitations of traditional criteria by acknowledging that the physical location of pedestrians in autonomous driving scenarios can provide valuable safety-related information. Furthermore, this paper presents a newly re-annotated dataset (ApolloScape-R) derived from ApolloScape. ApolloScape-R involves the relabeling of pedestrians based on the significance of their physical location. The dataset is utilized to assess the performance of various object detection models under the proposed PLoc criterion. Experimental results demonstrate that the average accuracy of all object detection models in identifying a person situated in the travel lane of an autonomous vehicle is lower than that for a person on a sidewalk. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/lnyrlyed/ApolloScape-R.git
Authors:Donghyun Kim, Byeongho Heo, Dongyoon Han
Abstract:
This paper revives Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets) and reveals the underrated effectiveness over predominant ResNet-style architectures. We believe DenseNets' potential was overlooked due to untouched training methods and traditional design elements not fully revealing their capabilities. Our pilot study shows dense connections through concatenation are strong, demonstrating that DenseNets can be revitalized to compete with modern architectures. We methodically refine suboptimal components - architectural adjustments, block redesign, and improved training recipes towards widening DenseNets and boosting memory efficiency while keeping concatenation shortcuts. Our models, employing simple architectural elements, ultimately surpass Swin Transformer, ConvNeXt, and DeiT-III - key architectures in the residual learning lineage. Furthermore, our models exhibit near state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet-1K, competing with the very recent models and downstream tasks, ADE20k semantic segmentation, and COCO object detection/instance segmentation. Finally, we provide empirical analyses that uncover the merits of the concatenation over additive shortcuts, steering a renewed preference towards DenseNet-style designs. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/rdnet.
Authors:Shweta Singh, Aayan Yadav, Jitesh Jain, Humphrey Shi, Justin Johnson, Karan Desai
Abstract:
The Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset has been instrumental in benchmarking object detectors over the past decade. Like every dataset, COCO contains subtle errors and imperfections stemming from its annotation procedure. With the advent of high-performing models, we ask whether these errors of COCO are hindering its utility in reliably benchmarking further progress. In search for an answer, we inspect thousands of masks from COCO (2017 version) and uncover different types of errors such as imprecise mask boundaries, non-exhaustively annotated instances, and mislabeled masks. Due to the prevalence of COCO, we choose to correct these errors to maintain continuity with prior research. We develop COCO-ReM (Refined Masks), a cleaner set of annotations with visibly better mask quality than COCO-2017. We evaluate fifty object detectors and find that models that predict visually sharper masks score higher on COCO-ReM, affirming that they were being incorrectly penalized due to errors in COCO-2017. Moreover, our models trained using COCO-ReM converge faster and score higher than their larger variants trained using COCO-2017, highlighting the importance of data quality in improving object detectors. With these findings, we advocate using COCO-ReM for future object detection research. Our dataset is available at https://cocorem.xyz
Authors:Luigi Sigillo, Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Alessandro Nicolosi, Danilo Comminiello
Abstract:
In recent years, remarkable advancements have been achieved in the field of image generation, primarily driven by the escalating demand for high-quality outcomes across various image generation subtasks, such as inpainting, denoising, and super resolution. A major effort is devoted to exploring the application of super-resolution techniques to enhance the quality of low-resolution images. In this context, our method explores in depth the problem of ship image super resolution, which is crucial for coastal and port surveillance. We investigate the opportunity given by the growing interest in text-to-image diffusion models, taking advantage of the prior knowledge that such foundation models have already learned. In particular, we present a diffusion-model-based architecture that leverages text conditioning during training while being class-aware, to best preserve the crucial details of the ships during the generation of the super-resoluted image. Since the specificity of this task and the scarcity availability of off-the-shelf data, we also introduce a large labeled ship dataset scraped from online ship images, mostly from ShipSpotting\footnote{\url{www.shipspotting.com}} website. Our method achieves more robust results than other deep learning models previously employed for super resolution, as proven by the multiple experiments performed. Moreover, we investigate how this model can benefit downstream tasks, such as classification and object detection, thus emphasizing practical implementation in a real-world scenario. Experimental results show flexibility, reliability, and impressive performance of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods for different tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/ShipinSight .
Authors:Shuai Xiang, Pieter M. Blok, James Burridge, Haozhou Wang, Wei Guo
Abstract:
Object detection has wide applications in agriculture, but domain shifts of diverse environments limit the broader use of the trained models. Existing domain adaptation methods usually require retraining the model for new domains, which is impractical for agricultural applications due to constantly changing environments. In this paper, we propose DODA ($D$iffusion for $O$bject-detection $D$omain Adaptation in $A$griculture), a diffusion-based framework that can adapt the detector to a new domain in just 2 minutes. DODA incorporates external domain embeddings and an improved layout-to-image approach, allowing it to generate high-quality detection data for new domains without additional training. We demonstrate DODA's effectiveness on the Global Wheat Head Detection dataset, where fine-tuning detectors on DODA-generated data yields significant improvements across multiple domains. DODA provides a simple yet powerful solution for agricultural domain adaptation, reducing the barriers for growers to use detection in personalised environments. The code is available at https://github.com/UTokyo-FieldPhenomics-Lab/DODA.
Authors:Ye Li, Lingdong Kong, Hanjiang Hu, Xiaohao Xu, Xiaonan Huang
Abstract:
The reliability of driving perception systems under unprecedented conditions is crucial for practical usage. Latest advancements have prompted increasing interest in multi-LiDAR perception. However, prevailing driving datasets predominantly utilize single-LiDAR systems and collect data devoid of adverse conditions, failing to capture the complexities of real-world environments accurately. Addressing these gaps, we proposed Place3D, a full-cycle pipeline that encompasses LiDAR placement optimization, data generation, and downstream evaluations. Our framework makes three appealing contributions. 1) To identify the most effective configurations for multi-LiDAR systems, we introduce the Surrogate Metric of the Semantic Occupancy Grids (M-SOG) to evaluate LiDAR placement quality. 2) Leveraging the M-SOG metric, we propose a novel optimization strategy to refine multi-LiDAR placements. 3) Centered around the theme of multi-condition multi-LiDAR perception, we collect a 280,000-frame dataset from both clean and adverse conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiDAR placements optimized using our approach outperform various baselines. We showcase exceptional results in both LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection tasks, under diverse weather and sensor failure conditions.
Authors:Ruopeng Gao, Ji Qi, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has been a long-standing challenge in video understanding. A natural and intuitive approach is to split this task into two parts: object detection and association. Most mainstream methods employ meticulously crafted heuristic techniques to maintain trajectory information and compute cost matrices for object matching. Although these methods can achieve notable tracking performance, they often require a series of elaborate handcrafted modifications while facing complicated scenarios. We believe that manually assumed priors limit the method's adaptability and flexibility in learning optimal tracking capabilities from domain-specific data. Therefore, we introduce a new perspective that treats Multiple Object Tracking as an in-context ID Prediction task, transforming the aforementioned object association into an end-to-end trainable task. Based on this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed MOTIP. Given a set of trajectories carried with ID information, MOTIP directly decodes the ID labels for current detections to accomplish the association process. Without using tailored or sophisticated architectures, our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks by solely leveraging object-level features as tracking cues. The simplicity and impressive results of MOTIP leave substantial room for future advancements, thereby making it a promising baseline for subsequent research. Our code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOTIP.
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Zhe Liu, Zhongyu Xia, Xinhao Wang, Yongtao Wang, Shengxiang Qi, Yang Dong, Nan Dong, Le Zhang, Ce Zhu
Abstract:
Three-dimensional object detection is one of the key tasks in autonomous driving. To reduce costs in practice, low-cost multi-view cameras for 3D object detection are proposed to replace the expansive LiDAR sensors. However, relying solely on cameras is difficult to achieve highly accurate and robust 3D object detection. An effective solution to this issue is combining multi-view cameras with the economical millimeter-wave radar sensor to achieve more reliable multi-modal 3D object detection. In this paper, we introduce RCBEVDet, a radar-camera fusion 3D object detection method in the bird's eye view (BEV). Specifically, we first design RadarBEVNet for radar BEV feature extraction. RadarBEVNet consists of a dual-stream radar backbone and a Radar Cross-Section (RCS) aware BEV encoder. In the dual-stream radar backbone, a point-based encoder and a transformer-based encoder are proposed to extract radar features, with an injection and extraction module to facilitate communication between the two encoders. The RCS-aware BEV encoder takes RCS as the object size prior to scattering the point feature in BEV. Besides, we present the Cross-Attention Multi-layer Fusion module to automatically align the multi-modal BEV feature from radar and camera with the deformable attention mechanism, and then fuse the feature with channel and spatial fusion layers. Experimental results show that RCBEVDet achieves new state-of-the-art radar-camera fusion results on nuScenes and view-of-delft (VoD) 3D object detection benchmarks. Furthermore, RCBEVDet achieves better 3D detection results than all real-time camera-only and radar-camera 3D object detectors with a faster inference speed at 21~28 FPS. The source code will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/RCBEVDet.
Authors:Nicolas Baumann, Michael Baumgartner, Edoardo Ghignone, Jonas Kühne, Tobias Fischer, Yung-Hsu Yang, Marc Pollefeys, Michele Magno
Abstract:
To enable self-driving vehicles accurate detection and tracking of surrounding objects is essential. While Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors have set the benchmark for high-performance systems, the appeal of camera-only solutions lies in their cost-effectiveness. Notably, despite the prevalent use of Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR) sensors in automotive systems, their potential in 3D detection and tracking has been largely disregarded due to data sparsity and measurement noise. As a recent development, the combination of RADARs and cameras is emerging as a promising solution. This paper presents Camera-RADAR 3D Detection and Tracking (CR3DT), a camera-RADAR fusion model for 3D object detection, and Multi-Object Tracking (MOT). Building upon the foundations of the State-of-the-Art (SotA) camera-only BEVDet architecture, CR3DT demonstrates substantial improvements in both detection and tracking capabilities, by incorporating the spatial and velocity information of the RADAR sensor. Experimental results demonstrate an absolute improvement in detection performance of 5.3% in mean Average Precision (mAP) and a 14.9% increase in Average Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (AMOTA) on the nuScenes dataset when leveraging both modalities. CR3DT bridges the gap between high-performance and cost-effective perception systems in autonomous driving, by capitalizing on the ubiquitous presence of RADAR in automotive applications. The code is available at: https://github.com/ETH-PBL/CR3DT.
Authors:Junbo Yin, Jianbing Shen, Runnan Chen, Wei Li, Ruigang Yang, Pascal Frossard, Wenguan Wang
Abstract:
Bird's eye view (BEV) representation has emerged as a dominant solution for describing 3D space in autonomous driving scenarios. However, objects in the BEV representation typically exhibit small sizes, and the associated point cloud context is inherently sparse, which leads to great challenges for reliable 3D perception. In this paper, we propose IS-Fusion, an innovative multimodal fusion framework that jointly captures the Instance- and Scene-level contextual information. IS-Fusion essentially differs from existing approaches that only focus on the BEV scene-level fusion by explicitly incorporating instance-level multimodal information, thus facilitating the instance-centric tasks like 3D object detection. It comprises a Hierarchical Scene Fusion (HSF) module and an Instance-Guided Fusion (IGF) module. HSF applies Point-to-Grid and Grid-to-Region transformers to capture the multimodal scene context at different granularities. IGF mines instance candidates, explores their relationships, and aggregates the local multimodal context for each instance. These instances then serve as guidance to enhance the scene feature and yield an instance-aware BEV representation. On the challenging nuScenes benchmark, IS-Fusion outperforms all the published multimodal works to date. Code is available at: https://github.com/yinjunbo/IS-Fusion.
Authors:Yimeng Fan, Wei Zhang, Changsong Liu, Mingyang Li, Wenrui Lu
Abstract:
Event cameras, characterized by high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth, offer unique capabilities for object detection in specialized contexts. Despite these advantages, the inherent sparsity and asynchrony of event data pose challenges to existing object detection algorithms. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the way the human brain codes and processes information, offer a potential solution to these difficulties. However, their performance in object detection using event cameras is limited in current implementations. In this paper, we propose the Spiking Fusion Object Detector (SFOD), a simple and efficient approach to SNN-based object detection. Specifically, we design a Spiking Fusion Module, achieving the first-time fusion of feature maps from different scales in SNNs applied to event cameras. Additionally, through integrating our analysis and experiments conducted during the pretraining of the backbone network on the NCAR dataset, we delve deeply into the impact of spiking decoding strategies and loss functions on model performance. Thereby, we establish state-of-the-art classification results based on SNNs, achieving 93.7\% accuracy on the NCAR dataset. Experimental results on the GEN1 detection dataset demonstrate that the SFOD achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 32.1\%, outperforming existing SNN-based approaches. Our research not only underscores the potential of SNNs in object detection with event cameras but also propels the advancement of SNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/yimeng-fan/SFOD.
Authors:Jiaming Li, Xiangru Lin, Wei Zhang, Xiao Tan, Yingying Li, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
Current semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) algorithms typically assume class balanced datasets (PASCAL VOC etc.) or slightly class imbalanced datasets (MS-COCO, etc). This assumption can be easily violated since real world datasets can be extremely class imbalanced in nature, thus making the performance of semi-supervised object detectors far from satisfactory. Besides, the research for this problem in SSOD is severely under-explored. To bridge this research gap, we comprehensively study the class imbalance problem for SSOD under more challenging scenarios, thus forming the first experimental setting for class imbalanced SSOD (CI-SSOD). Moreover, we propose a simple yet effective gradient-based sampling framework that tackles the class imbalance problem from the perspective of two types of confirmation biases. To tackle confirmation bias towards majority classes, the gradient-based reweighting and gradient-based thresholding modules leverage the gradients from each class to fully balance the influence of the majority and minority classes. To tackle the confirmation bias from incorrect pseudo labels of minority classes, the class-rebalancing sampling module resamples unlabeled data following the guidance of the gradient-based reweighting module. Experiments on three proposed sub-tasks, namely MS-COCO, MS-COCO to Object365 and LVIS, suggest that our method outperforms current class imbalanced object detectors by clear margins, serving as a baseline for future research in CI-SSOD. Code will be available at https://github.com/nightkeepers/CI-SSOD.
Authors:Bowen Jiang, Zhijun Zhuang, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Dan Roth, Camillo J. Taylor
Abstract:
This work explores the zero-shot capabilities of foundation models in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. We propose an adaptive multi-agent system, named Multi-Agent VQA, to overcome the limitations of foundation models in object detection and counting by using specialized agents as tools. Unlike existing approaches, our study focuses on the system's performance without fine-tuning it on specific VQA datasets, making it more practical and robust in the open world. We present preliminary experimental results under zero-shot scenarios and highlight some failure cases, offering new directions for future research.
Authors:Qing Jiang, Feng Li, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
We present T-Rex2, a highly practical model for open-set object detection. Previous open-set object detection methods relying on text prompts effectively encapsulate the abstract concept of common objects, but struggle with rare or complex object representation due to data scarcity and descriptive limitations. Conversely, visual prompts excel in depicting novel objects through concrete visual examples, but fall short in conveying the abstract concept of objects as effectively as text prompts. Recognizing the complementary strengths and weaknesses of both text and visual prompts, we introduce T-Rex2 that synergizes both prompts within a single model through contrastive learning. T-Rex2 accepts inputs in diverse formats, including text prompts, visual prompts, and the combination of both, so that it can handle different scenarios by switching between the two prompt modalities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that T-Rex2 exhibits remarkable zero-shot object detection capabilities across a wide spectrum of scenarios. We show that text prompts and visual prompts can benefit from each other within the synergy, which is essential to cover massive and complicated real-world scenarios and pave the way towards generic object detection. Model API is now available at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/T-Rex}.
Authors:Haoran Hou, Mingtao Feng, Zijie Wu, Weisheng Dong, Qing Zhu, Yaonan Wang, Ajmal Mian
Abstract:
3D object detection is a fundamental task in scene understanding. Numerous research efforts have been dedicated to better incorporate Hough voting into the 3D object detection pipeline. However, due to the noisy, cluttered, and partial nature of real 3D scans, existing voting-based methods often receive votes from the partial surfaces of individual objects together with severe noises, leading to sub-optimal detection performance. In this work, we focus on the distributional properties of point clouds and formulate the voting process as generating new points in the high-density region of the distribution of object centers. To achieve this, we propose a new method to move random 3D points toward the high-density region of the distribution by estimating the score function of the distribution with a noise conditioned score network. Specifically, we first generate a set of object center proposals to coarsely identify the high-density region of the object center distribution. To estimate the score function, we perturb the generated object center proposals by adding normalized Gaussian noise, and then jointly estimate the score function of all perturbed distributions. Finally, we generate new votes by moving random 3D points to the high-density region of the object center distribution according to the estimated score function. Extensive experiments on two large scale indoor 3D scene datasets, SUN RGB-D and ScanNet V2, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. The code will be released at https://github.com/HHrEtvP/DiffVote.
Authors:Ziyu Liu, Zeyi Sun, Yuhang Zang, Wei Li, Pan Zhang, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuanjun Xiong, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Abstract:
CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) uses contrastive learning from noise image-text pairs to excel at recognizing a wide array of candidates, yet its focus on broad associations hinders the precision in distinguishing subtle differences among fine-grained items. Conversely, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at classifying fine-grained categories, thanks to their substantial knowledge from pre-training on web-level corpora. However, the performance of MLLMs declines with an increase in category numbers, primarily due to growing complexity and constraints of limited context window size. To synergize the strengths of both approaches and enhance the few-shot/zero-shot recognition abilities for datasets characterized by extensive and fine-grained vocabularies, this paper introduces RAR, a Retrieving And Ranking augmented method for MLLMs. We initially establish a multi-modal retriever based on CLIP to create and store explicit memory for different categories beyond the immediate context window. During inference, RAR retrieves the top-k similar results from the memory and uses MLLMs to rank and make the final predictions. Our proposed approach not only addresses the inherent limitations in fine-grained recognition but also preserves the model's comprehensive knowledge base, significantly boosting accuracy across a range of vision-language recognition tasks. Notably, our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in performance on 5 fine-grained visual recognition benchmarks, 11 few-shot image recognition datasets, and the 2 object detection datasets under the zero-shot recognition setting.
Authors:Yang Yang, Wenhai Wang, Zhe Chen, Jifeng Dai, Liang Zheng
Abstract:
Bounding boxes uniquely characterize object detection, where a good detector gives accurate bounding boxes of categories of interest. However, in the real-world where test ground truths are not provided, it is non-trivial to find out whether bounding boxes are accurate, thus preventing us from assessing the detector generalization ability. In this work, we find under feature map dropout, good detectors tend to output bounding boxes whose locations do not change much, while bounding boxes of poor detectors will undergo noticeable position changes. We compute the box stability score (BoS score) to reflect this stability. Specifically, given an image, we compute a normal set of bounding boxes and a second set after feature map dropout. To obtain BoS score, we use bipartite matching to find the corresponding boxes between the two sets and compute the average Intersection over Union (IoU) across the entire test set. We contribute to finding that BoS score has a strong, positive correlation with detection accuracy measured by mean average precision (mAP) under various test environments. This relationship allows us to predict the accuracy of detectors on various real-world test sets without accessing test ground truths, verified on canonical detection tasks such as vehicle detection and pedestrian detection. Code and data are available at https://github.com/YangYangGirl/BoS.
Authors:Chen Zhao, Tong Zhang, Zheng Dang, Mathieu Salzmann
Abstract:
Determining the relative pose of a previously unseen object between two images is pivotal to the success of generalizable object pose estimation. Existing approaches typically predict 3D translation utilizing the ground-truth object bounding box and approximate 3D rotation with a large number of discrete hypotheses. This strategy makes unrealistic assumptions about the availability of ground truth and incurs a computationally expensive process of scoring each hypothesis at test time. By contrast, we rethink the problem of relative pose estimation for unseen objects by presenting a Deep Voxel Matching Network (DVMNet++). Our method computes the relative object pose in a single pass, eliminating the need for ground-truth object bounding boxes and rotation hypotheses. We achieve open-set object detection by leveraging image feature embedding and natural language understanding as reference. The detection result is then employed to approximate the translation parameters and crop the object from the query image. For rotation estimation, we map the two RGB images, i.e., reference and cropped query, to their respective voxelized 3D representations. The resulting voxels are passed through a rotation estimation module, which aligns the voxels and computes the rotation in an end-to-end fashion by solving a least-squares problem. To enhance robustness, we introduce a weighted closest voxel algorithm capable of mitigating the impact of noisy voxels. We conduct extensive experiments on the CO3D, Objaverse, LINEMOD, and LINEMOD-O datasets, demonstrating that our approach delivers more accurate relative pose estimates for novel objects at a lower computational cost compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code is released at https://github.com/sailor-z/DVMNet/.
Authors:Djamahl Etchegaray, Zi Huang, Tatsuya Harada, Yadan Luo
Abstract:
In this work, we tackle the limitations of current LiDAR-based 3D object detection systems, which are hindered by a restricted class vocabulary and the high costs associated with annotating new object classes. Our exploration of open-vocabulary (OV) learning in urban environments aims to capture novel instances using pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with multi-sensor data. We design and benchmark a set of four potential solutions as baselines, categorizing them into either top-down or bottom-up approaches based on their input data strategies. While effective, these methods exhibit certain limitations, such as missing novel objects in 3D box estimation or applying rigorous priors, leading to biases towards objects near the camera or of rectangular geometries. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a universal \textsc{Find n' Propagate} approach for 3D OV tasks, aimed at maximizing the recall of novel objects and propagating this detection capability to more distant areas thereby progressively capturing more. In particular, we utilize a greedy box seeker to search against 3D novel boxes of varying orientations and depth in each generated frustum and ensure the reliability of newly identified boxes by cross alignment and density ranker. Additionally, the inherent bias towards camera-proximal objects is alleviated by the proposed remote simulator, which randomly diversifies pseudo-labeled novel instances in the self-training process, combined with the fusion of base samples in the memory bank. Extensive experiments demonstrate a 53% improvement in novel recall across diverse OV settings, VLMs, and 3D detectors. Notably, we achieve up to a 3.97-fold increase in Average Precision (AP) for novel object classes. The source code is made available at https://github.com/djamahl99/findnpropagate.
Authors:Di Wang, Jing Zhang, Minqiang Xu, Lin Liu, Dongsheng Wang, Erzhong Gao, Chengxi Han, Haonan Guo, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao, Liangpei Zhang
Abstract:
Foundation models have reshaped the landscape of Remote Sensing (RS) by enhancing various image interpretation tasks. Pretraining is an active research topic, encompassing supervised and self-supervised learning methods to initialize model weights effectively. However, transferring the pretrained models to downstream tasks may encounter task discrepancy due to their formulation of pretraining as image classification or object discrimination tasks. In this study, we explore the Multi-Task Pretraining (MTP) paradigm for RS foundation models to address this issue. Using a shared encoder and task-specific decoder architecture, we conduct multi-task supervised pretraining on the SAMRS dataset, encompassing semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and rotated object detection. MTP supports both convolutional neural networks and vision transformer foundation models with over 300 million parameters. The pretrained models are finetuned on various RS downstream tasks, such as scene classification, horizontal and rotated object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. Extensive experiments across 14 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our models over existing ones of similar size and their competitive performance compared to larger state-of-the-art models, thus validating the effectiveness of MTP.
Authors:Ziming Wang, Ziling Wang, Huaning Li, Lang Qin, Runhao Jiang, De Ma, Huajin Tang
Abstract:
Event cameras, with their high dynamic range and temporal resolution, are ideally suited for object detection, especially under scenarios with motion blur and challenging lighting conditions. However, while most existing approaches prioritize optimizing spatiotemporal representations with advanced detection backbones and early aggregation functions, the crucial issue of adaptive event sampling remains largely unaddressed. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which operate on an event-driven paradigm through sparse spike communication, emerge as a natural fit for addressing this challenge. In this study, we discover that the neural dynamics of spiking neurons align closely with the behavior of an ideal temporal event sampler. Motivated by this insight, we propose a novel adaptive sampling module that leverages recurrent convolutional SNNs enhanced with temporal memory, facilitating a fully end-to-end learnable framework for event-based detection. Additionally, we introduce Residual Potential Dropout (RPD) and Spike-Aware Training (SAT) to regulate potential distribution and address performance degradation encountered in spike-based sampling modules. Empirical evaluation on neuromorphic detection datasets demonstrates that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art spike-based methods with significantly fewer parameters and time steps. For instance, our method yields a 4.4\% mAP improvement on the Gen1 dataset, while requiring 38\% fewer parameters and only three time steps. Moreover, the applicability and effectiveness of our adaptive sampling methodology extend beyond SNNs, as demonstrated through further validation on conventional non-spiking models. Code is available at https://github.com/Windere/EAS-SNN.
Authors:Justin Kay, Timm Haucke, Suzanne Stathatos, Siqi Deng, Erik Young, Pietro Perona, Sara Beery, Grant Van Horn
Abstract:
Object detectors often perform poorly on data that differs from their training set. Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) methods have recently demonstrated strong results on addressing this challenge. Unfortunately, we identify systemic benchmarking pitfalls that call past results into question and hamper further progress: (a) Overestimation of performance due to underpowered baselines, (b) Inconsistent implementation practices preventing transparent comparisons of methods, and (c) Lack of generality due to outdated backbones and lack of diversity in benchmarks. We address these problems by introducing: (1) A unified benchmarking and implementation framework, Align and Distill (ALDI), enabling comparison of DAOD methods and supporting future development, (2) A fair and modern training and evaluation protocol for DAOD that addresses benchmarking pitfalls, (3) A new DAOD benchmark dataset, CFC-DAOD, enabling evaluation on diverse real-world data, and (4) A new method, ALDI++, that achieves state-of-the-art results by a large margin. ALDI++ outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by +3.5 AP50 on Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes, +5.7 AP50 on Sim10k to Cityscapes (where ours is the only method to outperform a fair baseline), and +0.6 AP50 on CFC Kenai to Channel. ALDI and ALDI++ are architecture-agnostic, setting a new state-of-the-art for YOLO and DETR-based DAOD as well without additional hyperparameter tuning. Our framework, dataset, and state-of-the-art method offer a critical reset for DAOD and provide a strong foundation for future research. Code and data are available: https://github.com/justinkay/aldi and https://github.com/visipedia/caltech-fish-counting.
Authors:Yuxuan Li, Xiang Li, Yimian Dai, Qibin Hou, Li Liu, Yongxiang Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Jian Yang
Abstract:
Remote sensing images pose distinct challenges for downstream tasks due to their inherent complexity. While a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to remote sensing classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, most of these studies have overlooked the valuable prior knowledge embedded within remote sensing scenarios. Such prior knowledge can be useful because remote sensing objects may be mistakenly recognized without referencing a sufficiently long-range context, which can vary for different objects. This paper considers these priors and proposes a lightweight Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet) backbone. LSKNet can dynamically adjust its large spatial receptive field to better model the ranging context of various objects in remote sensing scenarios. To our knowledge, large and selective kernel mechanisms have not been previously explored in remote sensing images. Without bells and whistles, our lightweight LSKNet sets new state-of-the-art scores on standard remote sensing classification, object detection and semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our comprehensive analysis further validated the significance of the identified priors and the effectiveness of LSKNet. The code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/LSKNet.
Authors:Hongbo Zhao, Bolin Ni, Haochen Wang, Junsong Fan, Fei Zhu, Yuxi Wang, Yuntao Chen, Gaofeng Meng, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
For privacy and security concerns, the need to erase unwanted information from pre-trained vision models is becoming evident nowadays. In real-world scenarios, erasure requests originate at any time from both users and model owners. These requests usually form a sequence. Therefore, under such a setting, selective information is expected to be continuously removed from a pre-trained model while maintaining the rest. We define this problem as continual forgetting and identify two key challenges. (i) For unwanted knowledge, efficient and effective deleting is crucial. (ii) For remaining knowledge, the impact brought by the forgetting procedure should be minimal. To address them, we propose Group Sparse LoRA (GS-LoRA). Specifically, towards (i), we use LoRA modules to fine-tune the FFN layers in Transformer blocks for each forgetting task independently, and towards (ii), a simple group sparse regularization is adopted, enabling automatic selection of specific LoRA groups and zeroing out the others. GS-LoRA is effective, parameter-efficient, data-efficient, and easy to implement. We conduct extensive experiments on face recognition, object detection and image classification and demonstrate that GS-LoRA manages to forget specific classes with minimal impact on other classes. Codes will be released on \url{https://github.com/bjzhb666/GS-LoRA}.
Authors:Baolu Li, Jinlong Li, Xinyu Liu, Runsheng Xu, Zhengzhong Tu, Jiacheng Guo, Xiaopeng Li, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
Current LiDAR-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) multi-agent perception systems have shown the significant success on 3D object detection. While these models perform well in the trained clean weather, they struggle in unseen adverse weather conditions with the domain gap. In this paper, we propose a Domain Generalization based approach, named \textit{V2X-DGW}, for LiDAR-based 3D object detection on multi-agent perception system under adverse weather conditions. Our research aims to not only maintain favorable multi-agent performance in the clean weather but also promote the performance in the unseen adverse weather conditions by learning only on the clean weather data. To realize the Domain Generalization, we first introduce the Adaptive Weather Augmentation (AWA) to mimic the unseen adverse weather conditions, and then propose two alignments for generalizable representation learning: Trust-region Weather-invariant Alignment (TWA) and Agent-aware Contrastive Alignment (ACA). To evaluate this research, we add Fog, Rain, Snow conditions on two publicized multi-agent datasets based on physics-based models, resulting in two new datasets: OPV2V-w and V2XSet-w. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our V2X-DGW achieved significant improvements in the unseen adverse weathers. The code is available at https://github.com/Baolu1998/V2X-DGW.
Authors:Shibiao Xu, ShuChen Zheng, Wenhao Xu, Rongtao Xu, Changwei Wang, Jiguang Zhang, Xiaoqiang Teng, Ao Li, Li Guo
Abstract:
Infrared small object detection is an important computer vision task involving the recognition and localization of tiny objects in infrared images, which usually contain only a few pixels. However, it encounters difficulties due to the diminutive size of the objects and the generally complex backgrounds in infrared images. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method, HCF-Net, that significantly improves infrared small object detection performance through multiple practical modules. Specifically, it includes the parallelized patch-aware attention (PPA) module, dimension-aware selective integration (DASI) module, and multi-dilated channel refiner (MDCR) module. The PPA module uses a multi-branch feature extraction strategy to capture feature information at different scales and levels. The DASI module enables adaptive channel selection and fusion. The MDCR module captures spatial features of different receptive field ranges through multiple depth-separable convolutional layers. Extensive experimental results on the SIRST infrared single-frame image dataset show that the proposed HCF-Net performs well, surpassing other traditional and deep learning models. Code is available at https://github.com/zhengshuchen/HCFNet.
Authors:Yingqi Tang, Zhaotie Meng, Guoliang Chen, Erkang Cheng
Abstract:
The field of autonomous driving has attracted considerable interest in approaches that directly infer 3D objects in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) from multiple cameras. Some attempts have also explored utilizing 2D detectors from single images to enhance the performance of 3D detection. However, these approaches rely on a two-stage process with separate detectors, where the 2D detection results are utilized only once for token selection or query initialization. In this paper, we present a single model termed SimPB, which simultaneously detects 2D objects in the perspective view and 3D objects in the BEV space from multiple cameras. To achieve this, we introduce a hybrid decoder consisting of several multi-view 2D decoder layers and several 3D decoder layers, specifically designed for their respective detection tasks. A Dynamic Query Allocation module and an Adaptive Query Aggregation module are proposed to continuously update and refine the interaction between 2D and 3D results, in a cyclic 3D-2D-3D manner. Additionally, Query-group Attention is utilized to strengthen the interaction among 2D queries within each camera group. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate promising results for both 2D and 3D detection tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/nullmax-vision/SimPB.
Authors:Atif Belal, Akhil Meethal, Francisco Perdigon Romero, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger
Abstract:
Domain adaptation methods for object detection (OD) strive to mitigate the impact of distribution shifts by promoting feature alignment across source and target domains. Multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) allows leveraging multiple annotated source datasets and unlabeled target data to improve the accuracy and robustness of the detection model. Most state-of-the-art MSDA methods for OD perform feature alignment in a class-agnostic manner. This is challenging since the objects have unique modality information due to variations in object appearance across domains. A recent prototype-based approach proposed a class-wise alignment, yet it suffers from error accumulation caused by noisy pseudo-labels that can negatively affect adaptation with imbalanced data. To overcome these limitations, we propose an attention-based class-conditioned alignment method for MSDA, designed to align instances of each object category across domains. In particular, an attention module combined with an adversarial domain classifier allows learning domain-invariant and class-specific instance representations. Experimental results on multiple benchmarking MSDA datasets indicate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits robustness to class imbalance, achieved through a conceptually simple class-conditioning strategy. Our code is available at: https://github.com/imatif17/ACIA.
Authors:Dinh Phat Do, Taehoon Kim, Jaemin Na, Jiwon Kim, Keonho Lee, Kyunghwan Cho, Wonjun Hwang
Abstract:
Domain adaptation for object detection typically entails transferring knowledge from one visible domain to another visible domain. However, there are limited studies on adapting from the visible to the thermal domain, because the domain gap between the visible and thermal domains is much larger than expected, and traditional domain adaptation can not successfully facilitate learning in this situation. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Distinctive Dual-Domain Teacher (D3T) framework that employs distinct training paradigms for each domain. Specifically, we segregate the source and target training sets for building dual-teachers and successively deploy exponential moving average to the student model to individual teachers of each domain. The framework further incorporates a zigzag learning method between dual teachers, facilitating a gradual transition from the visible to thermal domains during training. We validate the superiority of our method through newly designed experimental protocols with well-known thermal datasets, i.e., FLIR and KAIST. Source code is available at https://github.com/EdwardDo69/D3T .
Authors:Yufei Zhan, Shurong Zheng, Yousong Zhu, Hongyin Zhao, Fan Yang, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract:
Large Vision Language Models have achieved fine-grained object perception, but the limitation of image resolution remains a significant obstacle to surpassing the performance of task-specific experts in complex and dense scenarios. Such limitation further restricts the model's potential to achieve nuanced visual and language referring in domains such as GUI Agents, counting, \textit{etc}. To address this issue, we introduce a unified high-resolution generalist model, Griffon v2, enabling flexible object referring with visual and textual prompts. To efficiently scale up image resolution, we design a simple and lightweight down-sampling projector to overcome the input tokens constraint in Large Language Models. This design inherently preserves the complete contexts and fine details and significantly improves multimodal perception ability, especially for small objects. Building upon this, we further equip the model with visual-language co-referring capabilities through a plug-and-play visual tokenizer. It enables user-friendly interaction with flexible target images, free-form texts, and even coordinates. Experiments demonstrate that Griffon v2 can localize objects of interest with visual and textual referring, achieve state-of-the-art performance on REC and phrase grounding, and outperform expert models in object detection, object counting, and REG. Data and codes are released at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon.
Authors:Jiaqing Zhang, Mingxiang Cao, Weiying Xie, Jie Lei, Daixun Li, Wenbo Huang, Yunsong Li, Xue Yang
Abstract:
Multimodal image fusion and object detection are crucial for autonomous driving. While current methods have advanced the fusion of texture details and semantic information, their complex training processes hinder broader applications. Addressing this challenge, we introduce E2E-MFD, a novel end-to-end algorithm for multimodal fusion detection. E2E-MFD streamlines the process, achieving high performance with a single training phase. It employs synchronous joint optimization across components to avoid suboptimal solutions tied to individual tasks. Furthermore, it implements a comprehensive optimization strategy in the gradient matrix for shared parameters, ensuring convergence to an optimal fusion detection configuration. Our extensive testing on multiple public datasets reveals E2E-MFD's superior capabilities, showcasing not only visually appealing image fusion but also impressive detection outcomes, such as a 3.9% and 2.0% mAP50 increase on horizontal object detection dataset M3FD and oriented object detection dataset DroneVehicle, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/E2E-MFD.
Authors:Martin Aubard, László Antal, Ana Madureira, Erika Ãbrahám
Abstract:
In this paper we present YOLOX-ViT, a novel object detection model, and investigate the efficacy of knowledge distillation for model size reduction without sacrificing performance. Focused on underwater robotics, our research addresses key questions about the viability of smaller models and the impact of the visual transformer layer in YOLOX. Furthermore, we introduce a new side-scan sonar image dataset, and use it to evaluate our object detector's performance. Results show that knowledge distillation effectively reduces false positives in wall detection. Additionally, the introduced visual transformer layer significantly improves object detection accuracy in the underwater environment. The source code of the knowledge distillation in the YOLOX-ViT is at https://github.com/remaro-network/KD-YOLOX-ViT.
Authors:Jialv Zou, Bencheng Liao, Qian Zhang, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Abstract:
Learning robust and scalable visual representations from massive multi-view video data remains a challenge in computer vision and autonomous driving. Existing pre-training methods either rely on expensive supervised learning with 3D annotations, limiting the scalability, or focus on single-frame or monocular inputs, neglecting the temporal information. We propose MIM4D, a novel pre-training paradigm based on dual masked image modeling (MIM). MIM4D leverages both spatial and temporal relations by training on masked multi-view video inputs. It constructs pseudo-3D features using continuous scene flow and projects them onto 2D plane for supervision. To address the lack of dense 3D supervision, MIM4D reconstruct pixels by employing 3D volumetric differentiable rendering to learn geometric representations. We demonstrate that MIM4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes dataset for visual representation learning in autonomous driving. It significantly improves existing methods on multiple downstream tasks, including BEV segmentation (8.7% IoU), 3D object detection (3.5% mAP), and HD map construction (1.4% mAP). Our work offers a new choice for learning representation at scale in autonomous driving. Code and models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/MIM4D
Authors:Jiahui Fu, Chen Gao, Zitian Wang, Lirong Yang, Xiaofei Wang, Beipeng Mu, Si Liu
Abstract:
Recent 3D object detectors typically utilize multi-sensor data and unify multi-modal features in the shared bird's-eye view (BEV) representation space. However, our empirical findings indicate that previous methods have limitations in generating fusion BEV features free from cross-modal conflicts. These conflicts encompass extrinsic conflicts caused by BEV feature construction and inherent conflicts stemming from heterogeneous sensor signals. Therefore, we propose a novel Eliminating Conflicts Fusion (ECFusion) method to explicitly eliminate the extrinsic/inherent conflicts in BEV space and produce improved multi-modal BEV features. Specifically, we devise a Semantic-guided Flow-based Alignment (SFA) module to resolve extrinsic conflicts via unifying spatial distribution in BEV space before fusion. Moreover, we design a Dissolved Query Recovering (DQR) mechanism to remedy inherent conflicts by preserving objectness clues that are lost in the fusion BEV feature. In general, our method maximizes the effective information utilization of each modality and leverages inter-modal complementarity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the highly competitive nuScenes 3D object detection dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/fjhzhixi/ECFusion.
Authors:Nieves Crasto
Abstract:
Object detection, a pivotal task in computer vision, is frequently hindered by dataset imbalances, particularly the under-explored issue of foreground-foreground class imbalance. This lack of attention to foreground-foreground class imbalance becomes even more pronounced in the context of single-stage detectors. This study introduces a benchmarking framework utilizing the YOLOv5 single-stage detector to address the problem of foreground-foreground class imbalance. We crafted a novel 10-class long-tailed dataset from the COCO dataset, termed COCO-ZIPF, tailored to reflect common real-world detection scenarios with a limited number of object classes. Against this backdrop, we scrutinized three established techniques: sampling, loss weighing, and data augmentation. Our comparative analysis reveals that sampling and loss reweighing methods, while shown to be beneficial in two-stage detector settings, do not translate as effectively in improving YOLOv5's performance on the COCO-ZIPF dataset. On the other hand, data augmentation methods, specifically mosaic and mixup, significantly enhance the model's mean Average Precision (mAP), by introducing more variability and complexity into the training data. (Code available: https://github.com/craston/object_detection_cib)
Authors:Tiancheng Zhao, Peng Liu, Xuan He, Lu Zhang, Kyusong Lee
Abstract:
End-to-end transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have shown exceptional performance in both closed-set and open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) tasks through the integration of language modalities. However, their demanding computational requirements have hindered their practical application in real-time object detection (OD) scenarios. In this paper, we scrutinize the limitations of two leading models in the OVDEval benchmark, OmDet and Grounding-DINO, and introduce OmDet-Turbo. This novel transformer-based real-time OVD model features an innovative Efficient Fusion Head (EFH) module designed to alleviate the bottlenecks observed in OmDet and Grounding-DINO. Notably, OmDet-Turbo-Base achieves a 100.2 frames per second (FPS) with TensorRT and language cache techniques applied. Notably, in zero-shot scenarios on COCO and LVIS datasets, OmDet-Turbo achieves performance levels nearly on par with current state-of-the-art supervised models. Furthermore, it establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on ODinW and OVDEval, boasting an AP of 30.1 and an NMS-AP of 26.86, respectively. The practicality of OmDet-Turbo in industrial applications is underscored by its exceptional performance on benchmark datasets and superior inference speed, positioning it as a compelling choice for real-time object detection tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OmDet}
Authors:Yuxuan Li, Xiang Li, Weijie Li, Qibin Hou, Li Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Jian Yang
Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection has gained significant attention recently due to its irreplaceable all-weather imaging capabilities. However, this research field suffers from both limited public datasets (mostly comprising <2K images with only mono-category objects) and inaccessible source code. To tackle these challenges, we establish a new benchmark dataset and an open-source method for large-scale SAR object detection. Our dataset, SARDet-100K, is a result of intense surveying, collecting, and standardizing 10 existing SAR detection datasets, providing a large-scale and diverse dataset for research purposes. To the best of our knowledge, SARDet-100K is the first COCO-level large-scale multi-class SAR object detection dataset ever created. With this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive experiments and uncovered a crucial challenge in SAR object detection: the substantial disparities between the pretraining on RGB datasets and finetuning on SAR datasets in terms of both data domain and model structure. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel Multi-Stage with Filter Augmentation (MSFA) pretraining framework that tackles the problems from the perspective of data input, domain transition, and model migration. The proposed MSFA method significantly enhances the performance of SAR object detection models while demonstrating exceptional generalizability and flexibility across diverse models. This work aims to pave the way for further advancements in SAR object detection. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/SARDet_100K.
Authors:Hayeon O, Chanuk Yang, Kunsoo Huh
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, 3D object detection provides more precise information for downstream tasks, including path planning and motion estimation, compared to 2D object detection. In this paper, we propose SeSame: a method aimed at enhancing semantic information in existing LiDAR-only based 3D object detection. This addresses the limitation of existing 3D detectors, which primarily focus on object presence and classification, thus lacking in capturing relationships between elemental units that constitute the data, akin to semantic segmentation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with performance improvements on the KITTI object detection benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/HAMA-DL-dev/SeSame
Authors:Roy Miles, Ismail Elezi, Jiankang Deng
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is an effective method for training small and efficient deep learning models. However, the efficacy of a single method can degenerate when transferring to other tasks, modalities, or even other architectures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel constrained feature distillation method. This method is derived from a small set of core principles, which results in two emerging components: an orthogonal projection and a task-specific normalisation. Equipped with both of these components, our transformer models can outperform all previous methods on ImageNet and reach up to a 4.4% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art methods. To further demonstrate the generality of our method, we apply it to object detection and image generation, whereby we obtain consistent and substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art. Code and models are publicly available: https://github.com/roymiles/vkd
Authors:Haoxuanye Ji, Pengpeng Liang, Erkang Cheng
Abstract:
Multi-camera-based 3D object detection has made notable progress in the past several years. However, we observe that there are cases (e.g. faraway regions) in which popular 2D object detectors are more reliable than state-of-the-art 3D detectors. In this paper, to improve the performance of query-based 3D object detectors, we present a novel query generating approach termed QAF2D, which infers 3D query anchors from 2D detection results. A 2D bounding box of an object in an image is lifted to a set of 3D anchors by associating each sampled point within the box with depth, yaw angle, and size candidates. Then, the validity of each 3D anchor is verified by comparing its projection in the image with its corresponding 2D box, and only valid anchors are kept and used to construct queries. The class information of the 2D bounding box associated with each query is also utilized to match the predicted boxes with ground truth for the set-based loss. The image feature extraction backbone is shared between the 3D detector and 2D detector by adding a small number of prompt parameters. We integrate QAF2D into three popular query-based 3D object detectors and carry out comprehensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset. The largest improvement that QAF2D can bring about on the nuScenes validation subset is $2.3\%$ NDS and $2.7\%$ mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/nullmax-vision/QAF2D.
Authors:Gang Zhang, Junnan Chen, Guohuan Gao, Jianmin Li, Si Liu, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection plays an essential role in autonomous driving. Existing high-performing 3D object detectors usually build dense feature maps in the backbone network and prediction head. However, the computational costs introduced by the dense feature maps grow quadratically as the perception range increases, making these models hard to scale up to long-range detection. Some recent works have attempted to construct fully sparse detectors to solve this issue; nevertheless, the resulting models either rely on a complex multi-stage pipeline or exhibit inferior performance. In this work, we propose SAFDNet, a straightforward yet highly effective architecture, tailored for fully sparse 3D object detection. In SAFDNet, an adaptive feature diffusion strategy is designed to address the center feature missing problem. We conducted extensive experiments on Waymo Open, nuScenes, and Argoverse2 datasets. SAFDNet performed slightly better than the previous SOTA on the first two datasets but much better on the last dataset, which features long-range detection, verifying the efficacy of SAFDNet in scenarios where long-range detection is required. Notably, on Argoverse2, SAFDNet surpassed the previous best hybrid detector HEDNet by 2.6% mAP while being 2.1x faster, and yielded 2.1% mAP gains over the previous best sparse detector FSDv2 while being 1.3x faster. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/HEDNet.
Authors:Yahao Lu, Yupei Lin, Han Wu, Xiaoyu Xian, Yukai Shi, Liang Lin
Abstract:
Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims to recognize small targets from clutter backgrounds. Recently, convolutional neural networks have achieved significant advantages in general object detection. With the development of Transformer, the scale of SIRST models is constantly increasing. Due to the limited training samples, performance has not been improved accordingly. The quality, quantity, and diversity of the infrared dataset are critical to the detection of small targets. To highlight this issue, we propose a negative sample augmentation method in this paper. Specifically, a negative augmentation approach is proposed to generate massive negatives for self-supervised learning. Firstly, we perform a sequential noise modeling technology to generate realistic infrared data. Secondly, we fuse the extracted noise with the original data to facilitate diversity and fidelity in the generated data. Lastly, we proposed a negative augmentation strategy to enrich diversity as well as maintain semantic invariance. The proposed algorithm produces a synthetic SIRST-5K dataset, which contains massive pseudo-data and corresponding labels. With a rich diversity of infrared small target data, our algorithm significantly improves the model performance and convergence speed. Compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, our method achieves outstanding performance in terms of probability of detection (Pd), false-alarm rate (Fa), and intersection over union (IoU).
Authors:Linwei Chen, Lin Gu, Ying Fu
Abstract:
Dilated convolution, which expands the receptive field by inserting gaps between its consecutive elements, is widely employed in computer vision. In this study, we propose three strategies to improve individual phases of dilated convolution from the view of spectrum analysis. Departing from the conventional practice of fixing a global dilation rate as a hyperparameter, we introduce Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution (FADC), which dynamically adjusts dilation rates spatially based on local frequency components. Subsequently, we design two plug-in modules to directly enhance effective bandwidth and receptive field size. The Adaptive Kernel (AdaKern) module decomposes convolution weights into low-frequency and high-frequency components, dynamically adjusting the ratio between these components on a per-channel basis. By increasing the high-frequency part of convolution weights, AdaKern captures more high-frequency components, thereby improving effective bandwidth. The Frequency Selection (FreqSelect) module optimally balances high- and low-frequency components in feature representations through spatially variant reweighting. It suppresses high frequencies in the background to encourage FADC to learn a larger dilation, thereby increasing the receptive field for an expanded scope. Extensive experiments on segmentation and object detection consistently validate the efficacy of our approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FADC.
Authors:Geonho Bang, Kwangjin Choi, Jisong Kim, Dongsuk Kum, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
The inherent noisy and sparse characteristics of radar data pose challenges in finding effective representations for 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose RadarDistill, a novel knowledge distillation (KD) method, which can improve the representation of radar data by leveraging LiDAR data. RadarDistill successfully transfers desirable characteristics of LiDAR features into radar features using three key components: Cross-Modality Alignment (CMA), Activation-based Feature Distillation (AFD), and Proposal-based Feature Distillation (PFD). CMA enhances the density of radar features by employing multiple layers of dilation operations, effectively addressing the challenge of inefficient knowledge transfer from LiDAR to radar. AFD selectively transfers knowledge based on regions of the LiDAR features, with a specific focus on areas where activation intensity exceeds a predefined threshold. PFD similarly guides the radar network to selectively mimic features from the LiDAR network within the object proposals. Our comparative analyses conducted on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that RadarDistill achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for radar-only object detection task, recording 20.5% in mAP and 43.7% in NDS. Also, RadarDistill significantly improves the performance of the camera-radar fusion model.
Authors:Yihua Fan, Yongzhen Wang, Mingqiang Wei, Fu Lee Wang, Haoran Xie
Abstract:
Adverse weather conditions often impair the quality of captured images, inevitably inducing cutting-edge object detection models for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question: can the combination of image restoration and object detection enhance detection performance in adverse weather conditions? To answer it, we propose an effective architecture that bridges image dehazing and object detection together via guidance information and task-driven learning to achieve detection-friendly dehazing, termed FriendNet. FriendNet aims to deliver both high-quality perception and high detection capacity. Different from existing efforts that intuitively treat image dehazing as pre-processing, FriendNet establishes a positive correlation between these two tasks. Clean features generated by the dehazing network potentially contribute to improvements in object detection performance. Conversely, object detection crucially guides the learning process of the image dehazing network under the task-driven learning scheme. We shed light on how downstream tasks can guide upstream dehazing processes, considering both network architecture and learning objectives. We design Guidance Fusion Block (GFB) and Guidance Attention Block (GAB) to facilitate the integration of detection information into the network. Furthermore, the incorporation of the detection task loss aids in refining the optimization process. Additionally, we introduce a new Physics-aware Feature Enhancement Block (PFEB), which integrates physics-based priors to enhance the feature extraction and representation capabilities. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods on both image quality and detection precision. Our source code is available at https://github.com/fanyihua0309/FriendNet.
Authors:Guanlin Shen, Jingwei Huang, Zhihua Hu, Bin Wang
Abstract:
This paper introduces CN-RMA, a novel approach for 3D indoor object detection from multi-view images. We observe the key challenge as the ambiguity of image and 3D correspondence without explicit geometry to provide occlusion information. To address this issue, CN-RMA leverages the synergy of 3D reconstruction networks and 3D object detection networks, where the reconstruction network provides a rough Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) and guides image features to vote to 3D space correctly in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we associate weights to sampled points of each ray through ray marching, representing the contribution of a pixel in an image to corresponding 3D locations. Such weights are determined by the predicted signed distances so that image features vote only to regions near the reconstructed surface. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D object detection from multi-view images, as measured by mAP@0.25 and mAP@0.5 on the ScanNet and ARKitScenes datasets. The code and models are released at https://github.com/SerCharles/CN-RMA.
Authors:Chenqiang Gao, Chuandong Liu, Jun Shu, Fangcen Liu, Jiang Liu, Luyu Yang, Xinbo Gao, Deyu Meng
Abstract:
Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D object detection methods often require a large amount of 3D bounding box annotations for training. However, collecting such large-scale densely-supervised datasets is notoriously costly. To reduce the cumbersome data annotation process, we propose a novel sparsely-annotated framework, in which we just annotate one 3D object per scene. Such a sparse annotation strategy could significantly reduce the heavy annotation burden, while inexact and incomplete sparse supervision may severely deteriorate the detection performance. To address this issue, we develop the SS3D++ method that alternatively improves 3D detector training and confident fully-annotated scene generation in a unified learning scheme. Using sparse annotations as seeds, we progressively generate confident fully-annotated scenes based on designing a missing-annotated instance mining module and reliable background mining module. Our proposed method produces competitive results when compared with SOTA weakly-supervised methods using the same or even more annotation costs. Besides, compared with SOTA fully-supervised methods, we achieve on-par or even better performance on the KITTI dataset with about 5x less annotation cost, and 90% of their performance on the Waymo dataset with about 15x less annotation cost. The additional unlabeled training scenes could further boost the performance. The code will be available at https://github.com/gaocq/SS3D2.
Authors:Yuxuan Liu
Abstract:
This dissertation is a multifaceted contribution to the advancement of vision-based 3D perception technologies. In the first segment, the thesis introduces structural enhancements to both monocular and stereo 3D object detection algorithms. By integrating ground-referenced geometric priors into monocular detection models, this research achieves unparalleled accuracy in benchmark evaluations for monocular 3D detection. Concurrently, the work refines stereo 3D detection paradigms by incorporating insights and inferential structures gleaned from monocular networks, thereby augmenting the operational efficiency of stereo detection systems. The second segment is devoted to data-driven strategies and their real-world applications in 3D vision detection. A novel training regimen is introduced that amalgamates datasets annotated with either 2D or 3D labels. This approach not only augments the detection models through the utilization of a substantially expanded dataset but also facilitates economical model deployment in real-world scenarios where only 2D annotations are readily available. Lastly, the dissertation presents an innovative pipeline tailored for unsupervised depth estimation in autonomous driving contexts. Extensive empirical analyses affirm the robustness and efficacy of this newly proposed pipeline. Collectively, these contributions lay a robust foundation for the widespread adoption of vision-based 3D perception technologies in autonomous driving applications.
Authors:Shitao Chen, Haolin Zhang, Nanning Zheng
Abstract:
3D object detection based on LiDAR point cloud and prior anchor boxes is a critical technology for autonomous driving environment perception and understanding. Nevertheless, an overlooked practical issue in existing methods is the ambiguity in training sample allocation based on box Intersection over Union (IoU_box). This problem impedes further enhancements in the performance of anchor-based LiDAR 3D object detectors. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a new training sample selection method that utilizes point cloud distribution for anchor sample quality measurement, named Point Assisted Sample Selection (PASS). This method has undergone rigorous evaluation on two widely utilized datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the application of PASS elevates the average precision of anchor-based LiDAR 3D object detectors to a novel state-of-the-art, thereby proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The codes will be made available at https://github.com/XJTU-Haolin/Point_Assisted_Sample_Selection.
Authors:Xin Zhang, Tao Xiao, Gepeng Ji, Xuan Wu, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract:
Camouflage poses challenges in distinguishing a static target, whereas any movement of the target can break this disguise. Existing video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) approaches take noisy motion estimation as input or model motion implicitly, restricting detection performance in complex dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel Explicit Motion handling and Interactive Prompting framework for VCOD, dubbed EMIP, which handles motion cues explicitly using a frozen pre-trained optical flow fundamental model. EMIP is characterized by a two-stream architecture for simultaneously conducting camouflaged segmentation and optical flow estimation. Interactions across the dual streams are realized in an interactive prompting way that is inspired by emerging visual prompt learning. Two learnable modules, i.e., the camouflaged feeder and motion collector, are designed to incorporate segmentation-to-motion and motion-to-segmentation prompts, respectively, and enhance outputs of the both streams. The prompt fed to the motion stream is learned by supervising optical flow in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, we show that long-term historical information can also be incorporated as a prompt into EMIP and achieve more robust results with temporal consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our EMIP achieves new state-of-the-art records on popular VCOD benchmarks. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/zhangxin06/EMIP.
Authors:Jieren Deng, Haojian Zhang, Kun Ding, Jianhua Hu, Xingxuan Zhang, Yunkuan Wang
Abstract:
This paper presents Incremental Vision-Language Object Detection (IVLOD), a novel learning task designed to incrementally adapt pre-trained Vision-Language Object Detection Models (VLODMs) to various specialized domains, while simultaneously preserving their zero-shot generalization capabilities for the generalized domain. To address this new challenge, we present the Zero-interference Reparameterizable Adaptation (ZiRa), a novel method that introduces Zero-interference Loss and reparameterization techniques to tackle IVLOD without incurring additional inference costs or a significant increase in memory usage. Comprehensive experiments on COCO and ODinW-13 datasets demonstrate that ZiRa effectively safeguards the zero-shot generalization ability of VLODMs while continuously adapting to new tasks. Specifically, after training on ODinW-13 datasets, ZiRa exhibits superior performance compared to CL-DETR and iDETR, boosting zero-shot generalizability by substantial 13.91 and 8.74 AP, respectively.Our code is available at https://github.com/JarintotionDin/ZiRaGroundingDINO.
Authors:Junjie Guo, Chenqiang Gao, Fangcen Liu, Deyu Meng, Xinbo Gao
Abstract:
Infrared-visible object detection aims to achieve robust even full-day object detection by fusing the complementary information of infrared and visible images. However, highly dynamically variable complementary characteristics and commonly existing modality misalignment make the fusion of complementary information difficult. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Adaptive Multispectral Detection Transformer (DAMSDet) to simultaneously address these two challenges. Specifically, we propose a Modality Competitive Query Selection strategy to provide useful prior information. This strategy can dynamically select basic salient modality feature representation for each object. To effectively mine the complementary information and adapt to misalignment situations, we propose a Multispectral Deformable Cross-attention module to adaptively sample and aggregate multi-semantic level features of infrared and visible images for each object. In addition, we further adopt the cascade structure of DETR to better mine complementary information. Experiments on four public datasets of different scenes demonstrate significant improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/gjj45/DAMSDet.
Authors:Safouane El Ghazouali, Youssef Mhirit, Ali Oukhrid, Umberto Michelucci, Hichem Nouira
Abstract:
In the realm of computer vision, the integration of advanced techniques into the processing of RGB-D camera inputs poses a significant challenge, given the inherent complexities arising from diverse environmental conditions and varying object appearances. Therefore, this paper introduces FusionVision, an exhaustive pipeline adapted for the robust 3D segmentation of objects in RGB-D imagery. Traditional computer vision systems face limitations in simultaneously capturing precise object boundaries and achieving high-precision object detection on depth map as they are mainly proposed for RGB cameras. To address this challenge, FusionVision adopts an integrated approach by merging state-of-the-art object detection techniques, with advanced instance segmentation methods. The integration of these components enables a holistic (unified analysis of information obtained from both color \textit{RGB} and depth \textit{D} channels) interpretation of RGB-D data, facilitating the extraction of comprehensive and accurate object information. The proposed FusionVision pipeline employs YOLO for identifying objects within the RGB image domain. Subsequently, FastSAM, an innovative semantic segmentation model, is applied to delineate object boundaries, yielding refined segmentation masks. The synergy between these components and their integration into 3D scene understanding ensures a cohesive fusion of object detection and segmentation, enhancing overall precision in 3D object segmentation. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/safouaneelg/FusionVision/.
Authors:Zi-Kai Xiao, Guo-Ye Yang, Xue Yang, Tai-Jiang Mu, Junchi Yan, Shi-min Hu
Abstract:
Considerable efforts have been devoted to Oriented Object Detection (OOD). However, one lasting issue regarding the discontinuity in Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) representation remains unresolved, which is an inherent bottleneck for extant OOD methods. This paper endeavors to completely solve this issue in a theoretically guaranteed manner and puts an end to the ad-hoc efforts in this direction. Prior studies typically can only address one of the two cases of discontinuity: rotation and aspect ratio, and often inadvertently introduce decoding discontinuity, e.g. Decoding Incompleteness (DI) and Decoding Ambiguity (DA) as discussed in literature. Specifically, we propose a novel representation method called Continuous OBB (COBB), which can be readily integrated into existing detectors e.g. Faster-RCNN as a plugin. It can theoretically ensure continuity in bounding box regression which to our best knowledge, has not been achieved in literature for rectangle-based object representation. For fairness and transparency of experiments, we have developed a modularized benchmark based on the open-source deep learning framework Jittor's detection toolbox JDet for OOD evaluation. On the popular DOTA dataset, by integrating Faster-RCNN as the same baseline model, our new method outperforms the peer method Gliding Vertex by 1.13% mAP50 (relative improvement 1.54%), and 2.46% mAP75 (relative improvement 5.91%), without any tricks.
Authors:Chao Hao, Zitong Yu, Xin Liu, Jun Xu, Huanjing Yue, Jingyu Yang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) and salient object detection (SOD) are two distinct yet closely-related computer vision tasks widely studied during the past decades. Though sharing the same purpose of segmenting an image into binary foreground and background regions, their distinction lies in the fact that COD focuses on concealed objects hidden in the image, while SOD concentrates on the most prominent objects in the image. Previous works achieved good performance by stacking various hand-designed modules and multi-scale features. However, these carefully-designed complex networks often performed well on one task but not on another. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective network (SENet) based on vision Transformer (ViT), by employing a simple design of an asymmetric ViT-based encoder-decoder structure, we yield competitive results on both tasks, exhibiting greater versatility than meticulously crafted ones. Furthermore, to enhance the Transformer's ability to model local information, which is important for pixel-level binary segmentation tasks, we propose a local information capture module (LICM). We also propose a dynamic weighted loss (DW loss) based on Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Intersection over Union (IoU) loss, which guides the network to pay more attention to those smaller and more difficult-to-find target objects according to their size. Moreover, we explore the issue of joint training of SOD and COD, and propose a preliminary solution to the conflict in joint training, further improving the performance of SOD. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/linuxsino/SENet.
Authors:Haodong Ouyang
Abstract:
The training paradigm of DETRs is heavily contingent upon pre-training their backbone on the ImageNet dataset. However, the limited supervisory signals provided by the image classification task and one-to-one matching strategy result in an inadequately pre-trained neck for DETRs. Additionally, the instability of matching in the early stages of training engenders inconsistencies in the optimization objectives of DETRs. To address these issues, we have devised an innovative training methodology termed step-by-step training. Specifically, in the first stage of training, we employ a classic detector, pre-trained with a one-to-many matching strategy, to initialize the backbone and neck of the end-to-end detector. In the second stage of training, we froze the backbone and neck of the end-to-end detector, necessitating the training of the decoder from scratch. Through the application of step-by-step training, we have introduced the first real-time end-to-end object detection model that utilizes a purely convolutional structure encoder, DETR with YOLO (DEYO). Without reliance on any supplementary training data, DEYO surpasses all existing real-time object detectors in both speed and accuracy. Moreover, the comprehensive DEYO series can complete its second-phase training on the COCO dataset using a single 8GB RTX 4060 GPU, significantly reducing the training expenditure. Source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ouyanghaodong/DEYO.
Authors:Sahal Shaji Mullappilly, Abhishek Singh Gehlot, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Hisham Cholakkal
Abstract:
Conventional open-world object detection (OWOD) problem setting first distinguishes known and unknown classes and then later incrementally learns the unknown objects when introduced with labels in the subsequent tasks. However, the current OWOD formulation heavily relies on the external human oracle for knowledge input during the incremental learning stages. Such reliance on run-time makes this formulation less realistic in a real-world deployment. To address this, we introduce a more realistic formulation, named semi-supervised open-world detection (SS-OWOD), that reduces the annotation cost by casting the incremental learning stages of OWOD in a semi-supervised manner. We demonstrate that the performance of the state-of-the-art OWOD detector dramatically deteriorates in the proposed SS-OWOD setting. Therefore, we introduce a novel SS-OWOD detector, named SS-OWFormer, that utilizes a feature-alignment scheme to better align the object query representations between the original and augmented images to leverage the large unlabeled and few labeled data. We further introduce a pseudo-labeling scheme for unknown detection that exploits the inherent capability of decoder object queries to capture object-specific information. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our SS-OWOD problem setting and approach for remote sensing object detection, proposing carefully curated splits and baseline performance evaluations. Our experiments on 4 datasets including MS COCO, PASCAL, Objects365 and DOTA demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our source code, models and splits are available here - https://github.com/sahalshajim/SS-OWFormer
Authors:Lianghui Zhu, Junwei Zhou, Yan Liu, Xin Hao, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Abstract:
Weakly supervised visual recognition using inexact supervision is a critical yet challenging learning problem. It significantly reduces human labeling costs and traditionally relies on multi-instance learning and pseudo-labeling. This paper introduces WeakSAM and solves the weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) and segmentation by utilizing the pre-learned world knowledge contained in a vision foundation model, i.e., the Segment Anything Model (SAM). WeakSAM addresses two critical limitations in traditional WSOD retraining, i.e., pseudo ground truth (PGT) incompleteness and noisy PGT instances, through adaptive PGT generation and Region of Interest (RoI) drop regularization. It also addresses the SAM's problems of requiring prompts and category unawareness for automatic object detection and segmentation. Our results indicate that WeakSAM significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in WSOD and WSIS benchmarks with large margins, i.e. average improvements of 7.4% and 8.5%, respectively. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/WeakSAM}.
Authors:Chien-Yao Wang, I-Hau Yeh, Hong-Yuan Mark Liao
Abstract:
Today's deep learning methods focus on how to design the most appropriate objective functions so that the prediction results of the model can be closest to the ground truth. Meanwhile, an appropriate architecture that can facilitate acquisition of enough information for prediction has to be designed. Existing methods ignore a fact that when input data undergoes layer-by-layer feature extraction and spatial transformation, large amount of information will be lost. This paper will delve into the important issues of data loss when data is transmitted through deep networks, namely information bottleneck and reversible functions. We proposed the concept of programmable gradient information (PGI) to cope with the various changes required by deep networks to achieve multiple objectives. PGI can provide complete input information for the target task to calculate objective function, so that reliable gradient information can be obtained to update network weights. In addition, a new lightweight network architecture -- Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN), based on gradient path planning is designed. GELAN's architecture confirms that PGI has gained superior results on lightweight models. We verified the proposed GELAN and PGI on MS COCO dataset based object detection. The results show that GELAN only uses conventional convolution operators to achieve better parameter utilization than the state-of-the-art methods developed based on depth-wise convolution. PGI can be used for variety of models from lightweight to large. It can be used to obtain complete information, so that train-from-scratch models can achieve better results than state-of-the-art models pre-trained using large datasets, the comparison results are shown in Figure 1. The source codes are at: https://github.com/WongKinYiu/yolov9.
Authors:Binglu Wang, Chenxi Guo, Yang Jin, Haisheng Xia, Nian Liu
Abstract:
Gaze object prediction aims to predict the location and category of the object that is watched by a human. Previous gaze object prediction works use CNN-based object detectors to predict the object's location. However, we find that Transformer-based object detectors can predict more accurate object location for dense objects in retail scenarios. Moreover, the long-distance modeling capability of the Transformer can help to build relationships between the human head and the gaze object, which is important for the GOP task. To this end, this paper introduces Transformer into the fields of gaze object prediction and proposes an end-to-end Transformer-based gaze object prediction method named TransGOP. Specifically, TransGOP uses an off-the-shelf Transformer-based object detector to detect the location of objects and designs a Transformer-based gaze autoencoder in the gaze regressor to establish long-distance gaze relationships. Moreover, to improve gaze heatmap regression, we propose an object-to-gaze cross-attention mechanism to let the queries of the gaze autoencoder learn the global-memory position knowledge from the object detector. Finally, to make the whole framework end-to-end trained, we propose a Gaze Box loss to jointly optimize the object detector and gaze regressor by enhancing the gaze heatmap energy in the box of the gaze object. Extensive experiments on the GOO-Synth and GOO-Real datasets demonstrate that our TransGOP achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tracks, i.e., object detection, gaze estimation, and gaze object prediction. Our code will be available at https://github.com/chenxi-Guo/TransGOP.git.
Authors:Chang Won Lee, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) methods have seen a significant boost in performance recently, due to strong interest from the research community and steadily improving object detection methods. The majority of tracking methods follow the tracking-by-detection (TBD) paradigm, blindly trust the incoming detections with no sense of their associated localization uncertainty. This lack of uncertainty awareness poses a problem in safety-critical tasks such as autonomous driving where passengers could be put at risk due to erroneous detections that have propagated to downstream tasks, including MOT. While there are existing works in probabilistic object detection that predict the localization uncertainty around the boxes, no work in 2D MOT for autonomous driving has studied whether these estimates are meaningful enough to be leveraged effectively in object tracking. We introduce UncertaintyTrack, a collection of extensions that can be applied to multiple TBD trackers to account for localization uncertainty estimates from probabilistic object detectors. Experiments on the Berkeley Deep Drive MOT dataset show that the combination of our method and informative uncertainty estimates reduces the number of ID switches by around 19\% and improves mMOTA by 2-3%. The source code is available at https://github.com/TRAILab/UncertaintyTrack
Authors:Philip Müller, Felix Meissen, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract:
Weakly supervised object detection (WSup-OD) increases the usefulness and interpretability of image classification algorithms without requiring additional supervision. The successes of multiple instance learning in this task for natural images, however, do not translate well to medical images due to the very different characteristics of their objects (i.e. pathologies). In this work, we propose Weakly Supervised ROI Proposal Networks (WSRPN), a new method for generating bounding box proposals on the fly using a specialized region of interest-attention (ROI-attention) module. WSRPN integrates well with classic backbone-head classification algorithms and is end-to-end trainable with only image-label supervision. We experimentally demonstrate that our new method outperforms existing methods in the challenging task of disease localization in chest X-ray images. Code: https://github.com/philip-mueller/wsrpn
Authors:Bharat Srikishan, Anika Tabassum, Srikanth Allu, Ramakrishnan Kannan, Nikhil Muralidhar
Abstract:
Deep learning architectures have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation. This may be attributed to the use of over-parameterized, monolithic deep learning architectures executed on large datasets. Although such architectures lead to increased accuracy, this is usually accompanied by a large increase in computation and memory requirements during inference. While this is a non-issue in traditional machine learning pipelines, the recent confluence of machine learning and fields like the Internet of Things has rendered such large architectures infeasible for execution in low-resource settings. In such settings, previous efforts have proposed decision cascades where inputs are passed through models of increasing complexity until desired performance is achieved. However, we argue that cascaded prediction leads to increased computational cost due to wasteful intermediate computations. To address this, we propose PaSeR (Parsimonious Segmentation with Reinforcement Learning) a non-cascading, cost-aware learning pipeline as an alternative to cascaded architectures. Through experimental evaluation on real-world and standard datasets, we demonstrate that PaSeR achieves better accuracy while minimizing computational cost relative to cascaded models. Further, we introduce a new metric IoU/GigaFlop to evaluate the balance between cost and performance. On the real-world task of battery material phase segmentation, PaSeR yields a minimum performance improvement of 174% on the IoU/GigaFlop metric with respect to baselines. We also demonstrate PaSeR's adaptability to complementary models trained on a noisy MNIST dataset, where it achieved a minimum performance improvement on IoU/GigaFlop of 13.4% over SOTA models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/scailab/paser .
Authors:Till Beemelmanns, Quan Zhang, Christian Geller, Lutz Eckstein
Abstract:
Multi-modal 3D object detection models for automated driving have demonstrated exceptional performance on computer vision benchmarks like nuScenes. However, their reliance on densely sampled LiDAR point clouds and meticulously calibrated sensor arrays poses challenges for real-world applications. Issues such as sensor misalignment, miscalibration, and disparate sampling frequencies lead to spatial and temporal misalignment in data from LiDAR and cameras. Additionally, the integrity of LiDAR and camera data is often compromised by adverse environmental conditions such as inclement weather, leading to occlusions and noise interference. To address this challenge, we introduce MultiCorrupt, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of multi-modal 3D object detectors against ten distinct types of corruptions. We evaluate five state-of-the-art multi-modal detectors on MultiCorrupt and analyze their performance in terms of their resistance ability. Our results show that existing methods exhibit varying degrees of robustness depending on the type of corruption and their fusion strategy. We provide insights into which multi-modal design choices make such models robust against certain perturbations. The dataset generation code and benchmark are open-sourced at https://github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/MultiCorrupt.
Authors:Ayan Banerjee, Sanket Biswas, Josep Lladós, Umapada Pal
Abstract:
Object detection in documents is a key step to automate the structural elements identification process in a digital or scanned document through understanding the hierarchical structure and relationships between different elements. Large and complex models, while achieving high accuracy, can be computationally expensive and memory-intensive, making them impractical for deployment on resource constrained devices. Knowledge distillation allows us to create small and more efficient models that retain much of the performance of their larger counterparts. Here we present a graph-based knowledge distillation framework to correctly identify and localize the document objects in a document image. Here, we design a structured graph with nodes containing proposal-level features and edges representing the relationship between the different proposal regions. Also, to reduce text bias an adaptive node sampling strategy is designed to prune the weight distribution and put more weightage on non-text nodes. We encode the complete graph as a knowledge representation and transfer it from the teacher to the student through the proposed distillation loss by effectively capturing both local and global information concurrently. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches. The code will be available at: https://github.com/ayanban011/GraphKD.
Authors:Noreen Anwar, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Wassim Bouachir
Abstract:
Consecutive frames in a video contain redundancy, but they may also contain relevant complementary information for the detection task. The objective of our work is to leverage this complementary information to improve detection. Therefore, we propose a spatio-temporal fusion framework (STF). We first introduce multi-frame and single-frame attention modules that allow a neural network to share feature maps between nearby frames to obtain more robust object representations. Second, we introduce a dual-frame fusion module that merges feature maps in a learnable manner to improve them. Our evaluation is conducted on three different benchmarks including video sequences of moving road users. The performed experiments demonstrate that the proposed spatio-temporal fusion module leads to improved detection performance compared to baseline object detectors. Code is available at https://github.com/noreenanwar/STF-module
Authors:Guanxiong Sun, Yang Hua, Guosheng Hu, Neil Robertson
Abstract:
Deep video models, for example, 3D CNNs or video transformers, have achieved promising performance on sparse video tasks, i.e., predicting one result per video. However, challenges arise when adapting existing deep video models to dense video tasks, i.e., predicting one result per frame. Specifically, these models are expensive for deployment, less effective when handling redundant frames, and difficult to capture long-range temporal correlations. To overcome these issues, we propose a Temporal Dilated Video Transformer (TDViT) that consists of carefully designed temporal dilated transformer blocks (TDTB). TDTB can efficiently extract spatiotemporal representations and effectively alleviate the negative effect of temporal redundancy. Furthermore, by using hierarchical TDTBs, our approach obtains an exponentially expanded temporal receptive field and therefore can model long-range dynamics. Extensive experiments are conducted on two different dense video benchmarks, i.e., ImageNet VID for video object detection and YouTube VIS for video instance segmentation. Excellent experimental results demonstrate the superior efficiency, effectiveness, and compatibility of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.
Authors:Guanxiong Sun, Yang Hua, Guosheng Hu, Neil Robertson
Abstract:
Recently, one-stage detectors have achieved competitive accuracy and faster speed compared with traditional two-stage detectors on image data. However, in the field of video object detection (VOD), most existing VOD methods are still based on two-stage detectors. Moreover, directly adapting existing VOD methods to one-stage detectors introduces unaffordable computational costs. In this paper, we first analyse the computational bottlenecks of using one-stage detectors for VOD. Based on the analysis, we present a simple yet efficient framework to address the computational bottlenecks and achieve efficient one-stage VOD by exploiting the temporal consistency in video frames. Specifically, our method consists of a location-prior network to filter out background regions and a size-prior network to skip unnecessary computations on low-level feature maps for specific frames. We test our method on various modern one-stage detectors and conduct extensive experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset. Excellent experimental results demonstrate the superior effectiveness, efficiency, and compatibility of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.
Authors:Siyuan Li, Zicheng Liu, Juanxi Tian, Ge Wang, Zedong Wang, Weiyang Jin, Di Wu, Cheng Tan, Tao Lin, Yang Liu, Baigui Sun, Stan Z. Li
Abstract:
Exponential Moving Average (EMA) is a widely used weight averaging (WA) regularization to learn flat optima for better generalizations without extra cost in deep neural network (DNN) optimization. Despite achieving better flatness, existing WA methods might fall into worse final performances or require extra test-time computations. This work unveils the full potential of EMA with a single line of modification, i.e., switching the EMA parameters to the original model after each epoch, dubbed as Switch EMA (SEMA). From both theoretical and empirical aspects, we demonstrate that SEMA can help DNNs to reach generalization optima that better trade-off between flatness and sharpness. To verify the effectiveness of SEMA, we conduct comparison experiments with discriminative, generative, and regression tasks on vision and language datasets, including image classification, self-supervised learning, object detection and segmentation, image generation, video prediction, attribute regression, and language modeling. Comprehensive results with popular optimizers and networks show that SEMA is a free lunch for DNN training by improving performances and boosting convergence speeds.
Authors:Tanmoy Dam, Sanjay Bhargav Dharavath, Sameer Alam, Nimrod Lilith, Supriyo Chakraborty, Mir Feroskhan
Abstract:
Combining LiDAR and camera data has shown potential in enhancing short-distance object detection in autonomous driving systems. Yet, the fusion encounters difficulties with extended distance detection due to the contrast between LiDAR's sparse data and the dense resolution of cameras. Besides, discrepancies in the two data representations further complicate fusion methods. We introduce AYDIV, a novel framework integrating a tri-phase alignment process specifically designed to enhance long-distance detection even amidst data discrepancies. AYDIV consists of the Global Contextual Fusion Alignment Transformer (GCFAT), which improves the extraction of camera features and provides a deeper understanding of large-scale patterns; the Sparse Fused Feature Attention (SFFA), which fine-tunes the fusion of LiDAR and camera details; and the Volumetric Grid Attention (VGA) for a comprehensive spatial data fusion. AYDIV's performance on the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) with an improvement of 1.24% in mAPH value(L2 difficulty) and the Argoverse2 Dataset with a performance improvement of 7.40% in AP value demonstrates its efficacy in comparison to other existing fusion-based methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sanjay-810/AYDIV2
Authors:Raza Imam, Muhammad Huzaifa, Nabil Mansour, Shaher Bano Mirza, Fouad Lamghari
Abstract:
In this study, we propose an automated framework for camel farm monitoring, introducing two key contributions: the Unified Auto-Annotation framework and the Fine-Tune Distillation framework. The Unified Auto-Annotation approach combines two models, GroundingDINO (GD), and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), to automatically annotate raw datasets extracted from surveillance videos. Building upon this foundation, the Fine-Tune Distillation framework conducts fine-tuning of student models using the auto-annotated dataset. This process involves transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a student model, resembling a variant of Knowledge Distillation. The Fine-Tune Distillation framework aims to be adaptable to specific use cases, enabling the transfer of knowledge from the large models to the small models, making it suitable for domain-specific applications. By leveraging our raw dataset collected from Al-Marmoom Camel Farm in Dubai, UAE, and a pre-trained teacher model, GroundingDINO, the Fine-Tune Distillation framework produces a lightweight deployable model, YOLOv8. This framework demonstrates high performance and computational efficiency, facilitating efficient real-time object detection. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/Razaimam45/Fine-Tune-Distillation}{https://github.com/Razaimam45/Fine-Tune-Distillation}
Authors:Fan Wu, Jinling Gao, Lanqing Hong, Xinbing Wang, Chenghu Zhou, Nanyang Ye
Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on a realistic yet challenging task, Single Domain Generalization Object Detection (S-DGOD), where only one source domain's data can be used for training object detectors, but have to generalize multiple distinct target domains. In S-DGOD, both high-capacity fitting and generalization abilities are needed due to the task's complexity. Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is known for its high capacity for complex data fitting and we propose to leverage Differentiable NAS to solve S-DGOD. However, it may confront severe over-fitting issues due to the feature imbalance phenomenon, where parameters optimized by gradient descent are biased to learn from the easy-to-learn features, which are usually non-causal and spuriously correlated to ground truth labels, such as the features of background in object detection data. Consequently, this leads to serious performance degradation, especially in generalizing to unseen target domains with huge domain gaps between the source domain and target domains. To address this issue, we propose the Generalizable loss (G-loss), which is an OoD-aware objective, preventing NAS from over-fitting by using gradient descent to optimize parameters not only on a subset of easy-to-learn features but also the remaining predictive features for generalization, and the overall framework is named G-NAS. Experimental results on the S-DGOD urban-scene datasets demonstrate that the proposed G-NAS achieves SOTA performance compared to baseline methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/wufan-cse/G-NAS.
Authors:Feng Liu, Tengteng Huang, Qianjing Zhang, Haotian Yao, Chi Zhang, Fang Wan, Qixiang Ye, Yanzhao Zhou
Abstract:
Multi-view 3D object detection systems often struggle with generating precise predictions due to the challenges in estimating depth from images, increasing redundant and incorrect detections. Our paper presents Ray Denoising, an innovative method that enhances detection accuracy by strategically sampling along camera rays to construct hard negative examples. These examples, visually challenging to differentiate from true positives, compel the model to learn depth-aware features, thereby improving its capacity to distinguish between true and false positives. Ray Denoising is designed as a plug-and-play module, compatible with any DETR-style multi-view 3D detectors, and it only minimally increases training computational costs without affecting inference speed. Our comprehensive experiments, including detailed ablation studies, consistently demonstrate that Ray Denoising outperforms strong baselines across multiple datasets. It achieves a 1.9\% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) over the state-of-the-art StreamPETR method on the NuScenes dataset. It shows significant performance gains on the Argoverse 2 dataset, highlighting its generalization capability. The code will be available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/RayDN.
Authors:Guanxiong Sun, Chi Wang, Zhaoyu Zhang, Jiankang Deng, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Yang Hua
Abstract:
Frame quality deterioration is one of the main challenges in the field of video understanding. To compensate for the information loss caused by deteriorated frames, recent approaches exploit transformer-based integration modules to obtain spatio-temporal information. However, these integration modules are heavy and complex. Furthermore, each integration module is specifically tailored for its target task, making it difficult to generalise to multiple tasks. In this paper, we present a neat and unified framework, called Spatio-Temporal Prompting Network (STPN). It can efficiently extract robust and accurate video features by dynamically adjusting the input features in the backbone network. Specifically, STPN predicts several video prompts containing spatio-temporal information of neighbour frames. Then, these video prompts are prepended to the patch embeddings of the current frame as the updated input for video feature extraction. Moreover, STPN is easy to generalise to various video tasks because it does not contain task-specific modules. Without bells and whistles, STPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used datasets for different video understanding tasks, i.e., ImageNetVID for video object detection, YouTubeVIS for video instance segmentation, and GOT-10k for visual object tracking. Code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.
Authors:Han Li, Yukai Ma, Yuehao Huang, Yaqing Gu, Weihua Xu, Yong Liu, Xingxing Zuo
Abstract:
Dense depth recovery is crucial in autonomous driving, serving as a foundational element for obstacle avoidance, 3D object detection, and local path planning. Adverse weather conditions, including haze, dust, rain, snow, and darkness, introduce significant challenges to accurate dense depth estimation, thereby posing substantial safety risks in autonomous driving. These challenges are particularly pronounced for traditional depth estimation methods that rely on short electromagnetic wave sensors, such as visible spectrum cameras and near-infrared LiDAR, due to their susceptibility to diffraction noise and occlusion in such environments. To fundamentally overcome this issue, we present a novel approach for robust metric depth estimation by fusing a millimeter-wave Radar and a monocular infrared thermal camera, which are capable of penetrating atmospheric particles and unaffected by lighting conditions. Our proposed Radar-Infrared fusion method achieves highly accurate and finely detailed dense depth estimation through three stages, including monocular depth prediction with global scale alignment, quasi-dense Radar augmentation by learning Radar-pixels correspondences, and local scale refinement of dense depth using a scale map learner. Our method achieves exceptional visual quality and accurate metric estimation by addressing the challenges of ambiguity and misalignment that arise from directly fusing multi-modal long-wave features. We evaluate the performance of our approach on the NTU4DRadLM dataset and our self-collected challenging ZJU-Multispectrum dataset. Especially noteworthy is the unprecedented robustness demonstrated by our proposed method in smoky scenarios. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/MMOCKING/RIDERS}.
Authors:Lixing Xiao, Ruixiao Shi, Xiaoyang Tang, Yi Zhou
Abstract:
Previous works on object detection have achieved high accuracy in closed-set scenarios, but their performance in open-world scenarios is not satisfactory. One of the challenging open-world problems is corner case detection in autonomous driving. Existing detectors struggle with these cases, relying heavily on visual appearance and exhibiting poor generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a solution by reducing the discrepancy between known and unknown classes and introduce a multimodal-enhanced objectness notion learner. Leveraging both vision-centric and image-text modalities, our semi-supervised learning framework imparts objectness knowledge to the student model, enabling class-aware detection. Our approach, Multimodal-Enhanced Objectness Learner (MENOL) for Corner Case Detection, significantly improves recall for novel classes with lower training costs. By achieving a 76.6% mAR-corner and 79.8% mAR-agnostic on the CODA-val dataset with just 5100 labeled training images, MENOL outperforms the baseline ORE by 71.3% and 60.6%, respectively. The code will be available at https://github.com/tryhiseyyysum/MENOL.
Authors:Bin Zhao, Pengfei Han, Xuelong Li
Abstract:
Satellites are capable of capturing high-resolution videos. It makes vehicle perception from satellite become possible. Compared to street surveillance, drive recorder or other equipments, satellite videos provide a much broader city-scale view, so that the global dynamic scene of the traffic are captured and displayed. Traffic monitoring from satellite is a new task with great potential applications, including traffic jams prediction, path planning, vehicle dispatching, \emph{etc.}. Practically, limited by the resolution and view, the captured vehicles are very tiny (a few pixels) and move slowly. Worse still, these satellites are in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to capture such high-resolution videos, so the background is also moving. Under this circumstance, traffic monitoring from the satellite view is an extremely challenging task. To attract more researchers into this field, we build a large-scale benchmark for traffic monitoring from satellite. It supports several tasks, including tiny object detection, counting and density estimation. The dataset is constructed based on 12 satellite videos and 14 synthetic videos recorded from GTA-V. They are separated into 408 video clips, which contain 7,336 real satellite images and 1,960 synthetic images. 128,801 vehicles are annotated totally, and the number of vehicles in each image varies from 0 to 101. Several classic and state-of-the-art approaches in traditional computer vision are evaluated on the datasets, so as to compare the performance of different approaches, analyze the challenges in this task, and discuss the future prospects. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/Chenxi1510/Vehicle-Perception-from-Satellite-Videos.
Authors:Takuma Yagi, Misaki Ohashi, Yifei Huang, Ryosuke Furuta, Shungo Adachi, Toutai Mitsuyama, Yoichi Sato
Abstract:
In the development of science, accurate and reproducible documentation of the experimental process is crucial. Automatic recognition of the actions in experiments from videos would help experimenters by complementing the recording of experiments. Towards this goal, we propose FineBio, a new fine-grained video dataset of people performing biological experiments. The dataset consists of multi-view videos of 32 participants performing mock biological experiments with a total duration of 14.5 hours. One experiment forms a hierarchical structure, where a protocol consists of several steps, each further decomposed into a set of atomic operations. The uniqueness of biological experiments is that while they require strict adherence to steps described in each protocol, there is freedom in the order of atomic operations. We provide hierarchical annotation on protocols, steps, atomic operations, object locations, and their manipulation states, providing new challenges for structured activity understanding and hand-object interaction recognition. To find out challenges on activity understanding in biological experiments, we introduce baseline models and results on four different tasks, including (i) step segmentation, (ii) atomic operation detection (iii) object detection, and (iv) manipulated/affected object detection. Dataset and code are available from https://github.com/aistairc/FineBio.
Authors:Olaya Ãlvarez-Tuñón, Luiza Ribeiro Marnet, László Antal, Martin Aubard, Maria Costa, Yury Brodskiy
Abstract:
This paper presents SubPipe, an underwater dataset for SLAM, object detection, and image segmentation. SubPipe has been recorded using a \gls{LAUV}, operated by OceanScan MST, and carrying a sensor suite including two cameras, a side-scan sonar, and an inertial navigation system, among other sensors. The AUV has been deployed in a pipeline inspection environment with a submarine pipe partially covered by sand. The AUV's pose ground truth is estimated from the navigation sensors. The side-scan sonar and RGB images include object detection and segmentation annotations, respectively. State-of-the-art segmentation, object detection, and SLAM methods are benchmarked on SubPipe to demonstrate the dataset's challenges and opportunities for leveraging computer vision algorithms. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first annotated underwater dataset providing a real pipeline inspection scenario. The dataset and experiments are publicly available online at https://github.com/remaro-network/SubPipe-dataset
Authors:Tianheng Cheng, Lin Song, Yixiao Ge, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang, Ying Shan
Abstract:
The You Only Look Once (YOLO) series of detectors have established themselves as efficient and practical tools. However, their reliance on predefined and trained object categories limits their applicability in open scenarios. Addressing this limitation, we introduce YOLO-World, an innovative approach that enhances YOLO with open-vocabulary detection capabilities through vision-language modeling and pre-training on large-scale datasets. Specifically, we propose a new Re-parameterizable Vision-Language Path Aggregation Network (RepVL-PAN) and region-text contrastive loss to facilitate the interaction between visual and linguistic information. Our method excels in detecting a wide range of objects in a zero-shot manner with high efficiency. On the challenging LVIS dataset, YOLO-World achieves 35.4 AP with 52.0 FPS on V100, which outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. Furthermore, the fine-tuned YOLO-World achieves remarkable performance on several downstream tasks, including object detection and open-vocabulary instance segmentation.
Authors:Fei Teng, Jiaming Zhang, Jiawei Liu, Kunyu Peng, Xina Cheng, Zhiyong Li, Kailun Yang
Abstract:
Leveraging rich information is crucial for dense prediction tasks. Light field (LF) cameras are instrumental in this regard, as they allow data to be sampled from various perspectives. This capability provides valuable spatial, depth, and angular information, enhancing scene-parsing tasks. However, we have identified two overlooked issues for the LF salient object detection (SOD) task. (1): Previous approaches predominantly employ a customized two-stream design to discover the spatial and depth features within light field images. The network struggles to learn the implicit angular information between different images due to a lack of intra-network data connectivity. (2): Little research has been directed towards the data augmentation strategy for LF SOD. Research on inter-network data connectivity is scant. In this study, we propose an efficient paradigm (LF Tracy) to address those issues. This comprises a single-pipeline encoder paired with a highly efficient information aggregation (IA) module (around 8M parameters) to establish an intra-network connection. Then, a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy called MixLD is designed to bridge the inter-network connections. Owing to this innovative paradigm, our model surpasses the existing state-of-the-art method through extensive experiments. Especially, LF Tracy demonstrates a 23% improvement over previous results on the latest large-scale PKU dataset. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/FeiBryantkit/LF-Tracy.
Authors:Yuxue Yang, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
Label-efficient LiDAR-based 3D object detection is currently dominated by weakly/semi-supervised methods. Instead of exclusively following one of them, we propose MixSup, a more practical paradigm simultaneously utilizing massive cheap coarse labels and a limited number of accurate labels for Mixed-grained Supervision. We start by observing that point clouds are usually textureless, making it hard to learn semantics. However, point clouds are geometrically rich and scale-invariant to the distances from sensors, making it relatively easy to learn the geometry of objects, such as poses and shapes. Thus, MixSup leverages massive coarse cluster-level labels to learn semantics and a few expensive box-level labels to learn accurate poses and shapes. We redesign the label assignment in mainstream detectors, which allows them seamlessly integrated into MixSup, enabling practicality and universality. We validate its effectiveness in nuScenes, Waymo Open Dataset, and KITTI, employing various detectors. MixSup achieves up to 97.31% of fully supervised performance, using cheap cluster annotations and only 10% box annotations. Furthermore, we propose PointSAM based on the Segment Anything Model for automated coarse labeling, further reducing the annotation burden. The code is available at https://github.com/BraveGroup/PointSAM-for-MixSup.
Authors:Lei Yang, Xinyu Zhang, Jun Li, Li Wang, Chuang Zhang, Li Ju, Zhiwei Li, Yang Shen
Abstract:
Roadside perception can greatly increase the safety of autonomous vehicles by extending their perception ability beyond the visual range and addressing blind spots. However, current state-of-the-art vision-based roadside detection methods possess high accuracy on labeled scenes but have inferior performance on new scenes. This is because roadside cameras remain stationary after installation and can only collect data from a single scene, resulting in the algorithm overfitting these roadside backgrounds and camera poses. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an innovative Scenario Generalization Framework for Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection, dubbed SGV3D. Specifically, we employ a Background-suppressed Module (BSM) to mitigate background overfitting in vision-centric pipelines by attenuating background features during the 2D to bird's-eye-view projection. Furthermore, by introducing the Semi-supervised Data Generation Pipeline (SSDG) using unlabeled images from new scenes, diverse instance foregrounds with varying camera poses are generated, addressing the risk of overfitting specific camera poses. We evaluate our method on two large-scale roadside benchmarks. Our method surpasses all previous methods by a significant margin in new scenes, including +42.57% for vehicle, +5.87% for pedestrian, and +14.89% for cyclist compared to BEVHeight on the DAIR-V2X-I heterologous benchmark. On the larger-scale Rope3D heterologous benchmark, we achieve notable gains of 14.48% for car and 12.41% for large vehicle. We aspire to contribute insights on the exploration of roadside perception techniques, emphasizing their capability for scenario generalization. The code will be available at https://github.com/yanglei18/SGV3D
Authors:Sifan Zhou, Liang Li, Xinyu Zhang, Bo Zhang, Shipeng Bai, Miao Sun, Ziyu Zhao, Xiaobo Lu, Xiangxiang Chu
Abstract:
Due to highly constrained computing power and memory, deploying 3D lidar-based detectors on edge devices equipped in autonomous vehicles and robots poses a crucial challenge. Being a convenient and straightforward model compression approach, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has been widely adopted in 2D vision tasks. However, applying it directly to 3D lidar-based tasks inevitably leads to performance degradation. As a remedy, we propose an effective PTQ method called LiDAR-PTQ, which is particularly curated for 3D lidar detection (both SPConv-based and SPConv-free). Our LiDAR-PTQ features three main components, \textbf{(1)} a sparsity-based calibration method to determine the initialization of quantization parameters, \textbf{(2)} a Task-guided Global Positive Loss (TGPL) to reduce the disparity between the final predictions before and after quantization, \textbf{(3)} an adaptive rounding-to-nearest operation to minimize the layerwise reconstruction error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LiDAR-PTQ can achieve state-of-the-art quantization performance when applied to CenterPoint (both Pillar-based and Voxel-based). To our knowledge, for the very first time in lidar-based 3D detection tasks, the PTQ INT8 model's accuracy is almost the same as the FP32 model while enjoying $3\times$ inference speedup. Moreover, our LiDAR-PTQ is cost-effective being $30\times$ faster than the quantization-aware training method. Code will be released at \url{https://github.com/StiphyJay/LiDAR-PTQ}.
Authors:Sriram Reddy Mandhati, N. Lakmal Deshapriya, Chatura Lavanga Mendis, Kavinda Gunasekara, Frank Yrle, Angsana Chaksan, Sujit Sanjeev
Abstract:
Plastic pollution is a critical environmental issue, and detecting and monitoring plastic litter is crucial to mitigate its impact. This paper presents the methodology of mapping street-level litter, focusing primarily on plastic waste and the location of trash bins. Our methodology involves employing a deep learning technique to identify litter and trash bins from street-level imagery taken by a camera mounted on a vehicle. Subsequently, we utilized heat maps to visually represent the distribution of litter and trash bins throughout cities. Additionally, we provide details about the creation of an open-source dataset ("pLitterStreet") which was developed and utilized in our approach. The dataset contains more than 13,000 fully annotated images collected from vehicle-mounted cameras and includes bounding box labels. To evaluate the effectiveness of our dataset, we tested four well known state-of-the-art object detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, YOLOv3, and YOLOv5), achieving an average precision (AP) above 40%. While the results show average metrics, our experiments demonstrated the reliability of using vehicle-mounted cameras for plastic litter mapping. The "pLitterStreet" can also be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners to develop and further improve existing machine learning models for detecting and mapping plastic litter in an urban environment. The dataset is open-source and more details about the dataset and trained models can be found at https://github.com/gicait/pLitter.
Authors:Yifan Zhang, Junhui Hou, Siyu Ren, Jinjian Wu, Yixuan Yuan, Guangming Shi
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel self-supervised learning framework for enhancing 3D perception in autonomous driving scenes. Specifically, our approach, namely NCLR, focuses on 2D-3D neural calibration, a novel pretext task that estimates the rigid pose aligning camera and LiDAR coordinate systems. First, we propose the learnable transformation alignment to bridge the domain gap between image and point cloud data, converting features into a unified representation space for effective comparison and matching. Second, we identify the overlapping area between the image and point cloud with the fused features. Third, we establish dense 2D-3D correspondences to estimate the rigid pose. The framework not only learns fine-grained matching from points to pixels but also achieves alignment of the image and point cloud at a holistic level, understanding the LiDAR-to-camera extrinsic parameters. We demonstrate the efficacy of NCLR by applying the pre-trained backbone to downstream tasks, such as LiDAR-based 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and panoptic segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets illustrate the superiority of NCLR over existing self-supervised methods. The results confirm that joint learning from different modalities significantly enhances the network's understanding abilities and effectiveness of learned representation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Eaphan/NCLR.
Authors:Peiqi Liu, Yaswanth Orru, Jay Vakil, Chris Paxton, Nur Muhammad Mahi Shafiullah, Lerrel Pinto
Abstract:
Remarkable progress has been made in recent years in the fields of vision, language, and robotics. We now have vision models capable of recognizing objects based on language queries, navigation systems that can effectively control mobile systems, and grasping models that can handle a wide range of objects. Despite these advancements, general-purpose applications of robotics still lag behind, even though they rely on these fundamental capabilities of recognition, navigation, and grasping. In this paper, we adopt a systems-first approach to develop a new Open Knowledge-based robotics framework called OK-Robot. By combining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for object detection, navigation primitives for movement, and grasping primitives for object manipulation, OK-Robot offers a integrated solution for pick-and-drop operations without requiring any training. To evaluate its performance, we run OK-Robot in 10 real-world home environments. The results demonstrate that OK-Robot achieves a 58.5% success rate in open-ended pick-and-drop tasks, representing a new state-of-the-art in Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) with nearly 1.8x the performance of prior work. On cleaner, uncluttered environments, OK-Robot's performance increases to 82%. However, the most important insight gained from OK-Robot is the critical role of nuanced details when combining Open Knowledge systems like VLMs with robotic modules. Videos of our experiments and code are available on our website: https://ok-robot.github.io
Authors:Zikai Zhou, Yunhang Shen, Shitong Shao, Linrui Gong, Shaohui Lin
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation has emerged as a highly effective method for bridging the representation discrepancy between large-scale models and lightweight models. Prevalent approaches involve leveraging appropriate metrics to minimize the divergence or distance between the knowledge extracted from the teacher model and the knowledge learned by the student model. Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) is widely used to measure representation similarity and has been applied in several knowledge distillation methods. However, these methods are complex and fail to uncover the essence of CKA, thus not answering the question of how to use CKA to achieve simple and effective distillation properly. This paper first provides a theoretical perspective to illustrate the effectiveness of CKA, which decouples CKA to the upper bound of Maximum Mean Discrepancy~(MMD) and a constant term. Drawing from this, we propose a novel Relation-Centered Kernel Alignment~(RCKA) framework, which practically establishes a connection between CKA and MMD. Furthermore, we dynamically customize the application of CKA based on the characteristics of each task, with less computational source yet comparable performance than the previous methods. The extensive experiments on the CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, and MS-COCO demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all teacher-student pairs for image classification and object detection, validating the effectiveness of our approaches. Our code is available in https://github.com/Klayand/PCKA
Authors:Xiaolong Huang, Qiankun Li, Xueran Li, Xuesong Gao
Abstract:
Visual fine-tuning has garnered significant attention with the rise of pre-trained vision models. The current prevailing method, full fine-tuning, suffers from the issue of knowledge forgetting as it focuses solely on fitting the downstream training set. In this paper, we propose a novel weight rollback-based fine-tuning method called OLOR (One step Learning, One step Review). OLOR combines fine-tuning with optimizers, incorporating a weight rollback term into the weight update term at each step. This ensures consistency in the weight range of upstream and downstream models, effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting and enhancing fine-tuning performance. In addition, a layer-wise penalty is presented to employ penalty decay and the diversified decay rate to adjust the weight rollback levels of layers for adapting varying downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments on various tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation, we demonstrate the general applicability and state-of-the-art performance of our proposed OLOR. Code is available at https://github.com/rainbow-xiao/OLOR-AAAI-2024.
Authors:Hao Zhang, Shuaijie Zhang
Abstract:
Bounding box regression plays a crucial role in the field of object detection, and the positioning accuracy of object detection largely depends on the loss function of bounding box regression. Existing researchs improve regression performance by utilizing the geometric relationship between bounding boxes, while ignoring the impact of difficult and easy sample distribution on bounding box regression. In this article, we analyzed the impact of difficult and easy sample distribution on regression results, and then proposed Focaler-IoU, which can improve detector performance in different detection tasks by focusing on different regression samples. Finally, comparative experiments were conducted using existing advanced detectors and regression methods for different detection tasks, and the detection performance was further improved by using the method proposed in this paper.Code is available at \url{https://github.com/malagoutou/Focaler-IoU}.
Authors:Wouter Van Gansbeke, Bert De Brabandere
Abstract:
Panoptic and instance segmentation networks are often trained with specialized object detection modules, complex loss functions, and ad-hoc post-processing steps to manage the permutation-invariance of the instance masks. This work builds upon Stable Diffusion and proposes a latent diffusion approach for panoptic segmentation, resulting in a simple architecture that omits these complexities. Our training consists of two steps: (1) training a shallow autoencoder to project the segmentation masks to latent space; (2) training a diffusion model to allow image-conditioned sampling in latent space. This generative approach unlocks the exploration of mask completion or inpainting. The experimental validation on COCO and ADE20k yields strong segmentation results. Finally, we demonstrate our model's adaptability to multi-tasking by introducing learnable task embeddings.
Authors:Guanxiong Sun, Yang Hua, Guosheng Hu, Neil Robertson
Abstract:
State-of-the-art video object detection methods maintain a memory structure, either a sliding window or a memory queue, to enhance the current frame using attention mechanisms. However, we argue that these memory structures are not efficient or sufficient because of two implied operations: (1) concatenating all features in memory for enhancement, leading to a heavy computational cost; (2) frame-wise memory updating, preventing the memory from capturing more temporal information. In this paper, we propose a multi-level aggregation architecture via memory bank called MAMBA. Specifically, our memory bank employs two novel operations to eliminate the disadvantages of existing methods: (1) light-weight key-set construction which can significantly reduce the computational cost; (2) fine-grained feature-wise updating strategy which enables our method to utilize knowledge from the whole video. To better enhance features from complementary levels, i.e., feature maps and proposals, we further propose a generalized enhancement operation (GEO) to aggregate multi-level features in a unified manner. We conduct extensive evaluations on the challenging ImageNetVID dataset. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves superior performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. More remarkably, MAMBA achieves mAP of 83.7/84.6% at 12.6/9.1 FPS with ResNet-101. Code is available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/vfe.pytorch.
Authors:Tzuhsuan Huang, Chen-Che Huang, Chung-Hao Ku, Jun-Cheng Chen
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer a model learned using labeled data from the source domain to unlabeled data in the target domain. To address the large domain gap issue between the source and target domains, we propose a novel regularization method for domain adaptive object detection, BlenDA, by generating the pseudo samples of the intermediate domains and their corresponding soft domain labels for adaptation training. The intermediate samples are generated by dynamically blending the source images with their corresponding translated images using an off-the-shelf pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model which takes the text label of the target domain as input and has demonstrated superior image-to-image translation quality. Based on experimental results from two adaptation benchmarks, our proposed approach can significantly enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detector, Adversarial Query Transformer (AQT). Particularly, in the Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes adaptation, we achieve an impressive 53.4% mAP on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.5%. It is worth noting that our proposed method is also applicable to various paradigms of domain adaptive object detection. The code is available at:https://github.com/aiiu-lab/BlenDA
Authors:Lianghui Zhu, Bencheng Liao, Qian Zhang, Xinlong Wang, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Abstract:
Recently the state space models (SSMs) with efficient hardware-aware designs, i.e., the Mamba deep learning model, have shown great potential for long sequence modeling. Meanwhile building efficient and generic vision backbones purely upon SSMs is an appealing direction. However, representing visual data is challenging for SSMs due to the position-sensitivity of visual data and the requirement of global context for visual understanding. In this paper, we show that the reliance on self-attention for visual representation learning is not necessary and propose a new generic vision backbone with bidirectional Mamba blocks (Vim), which marks the image sequences with position embeddings and compresses the visual representation with bidirectional state space models. On ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and ADE20k semantic segmentation tasks, Vim achieves higher performance compared to well-established vision transformers like DeiT, while also demonstrating significantly improved computation & memory efficiency. For example, Vim is 2.8$\times$ faster than DeiT and saves 86.8% GPU memory when performing batch inference to extract features on images with a resolution of 1248$\times$1248. The results demonstrate that Vim is capable of overcoming the computation & memory constraints on performing Transformer-style understanding for high-resolution images and it has great potential to be the next-generation backbone for vision foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/Vim.
Authors:Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Haishu Tan, Jinyang Li
Abstract:
Existing multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) methods often fail to preserve the uncertain transition region and detect small focus areas within large defocused regions accurately. To address this issue, this study proposes a new small-area-aware MFIF algorithm for enhancing object detection capability. First, we enhance the pixel attributes within the small focus and boundary regions, which are subsequently combined with visual saliency detection to obtain the pre-fusion results used to discriminate the distribution of focused pixels. To accurately ensure pixel focus, we consider the source image as a combination of focused, defocused, and uncertain regions and propose a three-region segmentation strategy. Finally, we design an effective pixel selection rule to generate segmentation decision maps and obtain the final fusion results. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can accurately detect small and smooth focus areas while improving object detection performance, outperforming existing methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. The source code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/SAMF.
Authors:Zhaoge Liu, Xiaohao Xu, Yunkang Cao, Weiming Shen
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is the process of transferring knowledge from a more powerful large model (teacher) to a simpler counterpart (student). Numerous current approaches involve the student imitating the knowledge of the teacher directly. However, redundancy still exists in the learned representations through these prevalent methods, which tend to learn each spatial location's features indiscriminately. To derive a more compact representation (concept feature) from the teacher, inspired by human cognition, we suggest an innovative method, termed Generative Denoise Distillation (GDD), where stochastic noises are added to the concept feature of the student to embed them into the generated instance feature from a shallow network. Then, the generated instance feature is aligned with the knowledge of the instance from the teacher. We extensively experiment with object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation to demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our method. Notably, GDD achieves new state-of-the-art performance in the tasks mentioned above. We have achieved substantial improvements in semantic segmentation by enhancing PspNet and DeepLabV3, both of which are based on ResNet-18, resulting in mIoU scores of 74.67 and 77.69, respectively, surpassing their previous scores of 69.85 and 73.20 on the Cityscapes dataset of 20 categories. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZhgLiu/GDD.
Authors:Zichen Wang, Bo Yang, Haonan Yue, Zhenghao Ma
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims at extending a generic detector for novel object detection with only a few training examples. It attracts great concerns recently due to the practical meanings. Meta-learning has been demonstrated to be an effective paradigm for this task. In general, methods based on meta-learning employ an additional support branch to encode novel examples (a.k.a. support images) into class prototypes, which are then fused with query branch to facilitate the model prediction. However, the class-level prototypes are difficult to precisely generate, and they also lack detailed information, leading to instability in performance.New methods are required to capture the distinctive local context for more robust novel object detection. To this end, we propose to distill the most representative support features into fine-grained prototypes. These prototypes are then assigned into query feature maps based on the matching results, modeling the detailed feature relations between two branches. This process is realized by our Fine-Grained Feature Aggregation (FFA) module. Moreover, in terms of high-level feature fusion, we propose Balanced Class-Agnostic Sampling (B-CAS) strategy and Non-Linear Fusion (NLF) module from differenct perspectives. They are complementary to each other and depict the high-level feature relations more effectively. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks show that our method sets a new state-of-the-art performance in most settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangchen1801/FPD.
Authors:Yingping Liang, Ying Fu
Abstract:
Anchor-free object detectors are highly efficient in performing point-based prediction without the need for extra post-processing of anchors. However, different from the 2D grids, the 3D points used in these detectors are often far from the ground truth center, making it challenging to accurately regress the bounding boxes. To address this issue, we propose a Cascade Voting (CascadeV) strategy that provides high-quality 3D object detection with point-based prediction. Specifically, CascadeV performs cascade detection using a novel Cascade Voting decoder that combines two new components: Instance Aware Voting (IA-Voting) and a Cascade Point Assignment (CPA) module. The IA-Voting module updates the object features of updated proposal points within the bounding box using conditional inverse distance weighting. This approach prevents features from being aggregated outside the instance and helps improve the accuracy of object detection. Additionally, since model training can suffer from a lack of proposal points with high centerness, we have developed the CPA module to narrow down the positive assignment threshold with cascade stages. This approach relaxes the dependence on proposal centerness in the early stages while ensuring an ample quantity of positives with high centerness in the later stages. Experiments show that FCAF3D with our CascadeV achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results with 70.4\% mAP@0.25 and 51.6\% mAP@0.5 on SUN RGB-D and competitive results on ScanNet. Code will be released at https://github.com/Sharpiless/CascadeV-Det
Authors:Shuai Liu, Boyang Li, Zhiyu Fang, Kai Huang
Abstract:
Recently, significant progress has been made in the research of 3D object detection. However, most prior studies have focused on the utilization of center-based or anchor-based label assignment schemes. Alternative label assignment strategies remain unexplored in 3D object detection. We find that the center-based label assignment often fails to generate sufficient positive samples for training, while the anchor-based label assignment tends to encounter an imbalanced issue when handling objects of varying scales. To solve these issues, we introduce a dynamic cross label assignment (DCLA) scheme, which dynamically assigns positive samples for each object from a cross-shaped region, thus providing sufficient and balanced positive samples for training. Furthermore, to address the challenge of accurately regressing objects with varying scales, we put forth a rotation-weighted Intersection over Union (RWIoU) metric to replace the widely used L1 metric in regression loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our DCLA and RWIoU-based regression loss. The Code will be available at https://github.com/Say2L/DCDet.git.
Authors:Yu Hong, Qian Liu, Huayuan Cheng, Danjiao Ma, Hang Dai, Yu Wang, Guangzhi Cao, Yong Ding
Abstract:
The past few years have witnessed the rapid development of vision-centric 3D perception in autonomous driving. Although the 3D perception models share many structural and conceptual similarities, there still exist gaps in their feature representations, data formats, and objectives, posing challenges for unified and efficient 3D perception framework design. In this paper, we present UniVision, a simple and efficient framework that unifies two major tasks in vision-centric 3D perception, \ie, occupancy prediction and object detection. Specifically, we propose an explicit-implicit view transform module for complementary 2D-3D feature transformation. We propose a local-global feature extraction and fusion module for efficient and adaptive voxel and BEV feature extraction, enhancement, and interaction. Further, we propose a joint occupancy-detection data augmentation strategy and a progressive loss weight adjustment strategy which enables the efficiency and stability of the multi-task framework training. We conduct extensive experiments for different perception tasks on four public benchmarks, including nuScenes LiDAR segmentation, nuScenes detection, OpenOccupancy, and Occ3D. UniVision achieves state-of-the-art results with +1.5 mIoU, +1.8 NDS, +1.5 mIoU, and +1.8 mIoU gains on each benchmark, respectively. We believe that the UniVision framework can serve as a high-performance baseline for the unified vision-centric 3D perception task. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Cc-Hy/UniVision}.
Authors:Erik Isai Valle Salgado, Chen Li, Yaqi Han, Linchao Shi, Xinghui Li
Abstract:
Ensemble methods exploit the availability of a given number of classifiers or detectors trained in single or multiple source domains and tasks to address machine learning problems such as domain adaptation or multi-source transfer learning. Existing research measures the domain distance between the sources and the target dataset, trains multiple networks on the same data with different samples per class, or combines predictions from models trained under varied hyperparameters and settings. Their solutions enhanced the performance on small or tail categories but hurt the rest. To this end, we propose a modified consensus focus for semi-supervised and long-tailed object detection. We introduce a voting system based on source confidence that spots the contribution of each model in a consensus, lets the user choose the relevance of each class in the target label space so that it relaxes minority bounding boxes suppression, and combines multiple models' results without discarding the poisonous networks. Our tests on synthetic driving datasets retrieved higher confidence and more accurate bounding boxes than the NMS, soft-NMS, and WBF. The code used to generate the results is available in our GitHub repository: http://github.com/ErikValle/Consensus-focus-for-object-detection.
Authors:Ziqi Yuan, Liyuan Wang, Wenbo Ding, Xingxing Zhang, Jiachen Zhong, Jianyong Ai, Jianmin Li, Jun Zhu
Abstract:
In real-world applications, an object detector often encounters object instances from new classes and needs to accommodate them effectively. Previous work formulated this critical problem as incremental object detection (IOD), which assumes the object instances of new classes to be fully annotated in incremental data. However, as supervisory signals are usually rare and expensive, the supervised IOD may not be practical for implementation. In this work, we consider a more realistic setting named semi-supervised IOD (SSIOD), where the object detector needs to learn new classes incrementally from a few labelled data and massive unlabelled data without catastrophic forgetting of old classes. A commonly-used strategy for supervised IOD is to encourage the current model (as a student) to mimic the behavior of the old model (as a teacher), but it generally fails in SSIOD because a dominant number of object instances from old and new classes are coexisting and unlabelled, with the teacher only recognizing a fraction of them. Observing that learning only the classes of interest tends to preclude detection of other classes, we propose to bridge the coexistence of unlabelled classes by constructing two teacher models respectively for old and new classes, and using the concatenation of their predictions to instruct the student. This approach is referred to as DualTeacher, which can serve as a strong baseline for SSIOD with limited resource overhead and no extra hyperparameters. We build various benchmarks for SSIOD and perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our approach (e.g., the performance lead is up to 18.28 AP on MS-COCO). Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/chuxiuhong/DualTeacher}.
Authors:Nanqing Liu, Xun Xu, Yongyi Su, Chengxin Liu, Peiliang Gong, Heng-Chao Li
Abstract:
Domain adaptation is crucial in aerial imagery, as the visual representation of these images can significantly vary based on factors such as geographic location, time, and weather conditions. Additionally, high-resolution aerial images often require substantial storage space and may not be readily accessible to the public. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) method. Specifically, our approach begins with a self-training framework, which significantly enhances the performance of baseline methods. To alleviate the noisy labels in self-training, we utilize Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to guide the generation of pseudo-labels, termed CLIP-guided Aggregation (CGA). By leveraging CLIP's zero-shot classification capability, we aggregate its scores with the original predicted bounding boxes, enabling us to obtain refined scores for the pseudo-labels. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we constructed two new datasets from different domains based on the DIOR dataset, named DIOR-C and DIOR-Cloudy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other comparative algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/Lans1ng/SFOD-RS.
Authors:Yucheng Han, Na Zhao, Weiling Chen, Keng Teck Ma, Hanwang Zhang
Abstract:
Semi-supervised 3D object detection is a promising yet under-explored direction to reduce data annotation costs, especially for cluttered indoor scenes. A few prior works, such as SESS and 3DIoUMatch, attempt to solve this task by utilizing a teacher model to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples. However, the availability of unlabeled samples in the 3D domain is relatively limited compared to its 2D counterpart due to the greater effort required to collect 3D data. Moreover, the loose consistency regularization in SESS and restricted pseudo-label selection strategy in 3DIoUMatch lead to either low-quality supervision or a limited amount of pseudo labels. To address these issues, we present a novel Dual-Perspective Knowledge Enrichment approach named DPKE for semi-supervised 3D object detection. Our DPKE enriches the knowledge of limited training data, particularly unlabeled data, from two perspectives: data-perspective and feature-perspective. Specifically, from the data-perspective, we propose a class-probabilistic data augmentation method that augments the input data with additional instances based on the varying distribution of class probabilities. Our DPKE achieves feature-perspective knowledge enrichment by designing a geometry-aware feature matching method that regularizes feature-level similarity between object proposals from the student and teacher models. Extensive experiments on the two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DPKE achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art approaches under various label ratio conditions. The source code will be made available to the public.
Authors:Ziying Song, Guoxing Zhang, Lin Liu, Lei Yang, Shaoqing Xu, Caiyan Jia, Feiyang Jia, Li Wang
Abstract:
Multi-modal 3D object detectors are dedicated to exploring secure and reliable perception systems for autonomous driving (AD).Although achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on clean benchmark datasets, they tend to overlook the complexity and harsh conditions of real-world environments. With the emergence of visual foundation models (VFMs), opportunities and challenges are presented for improving the robustness and generalization of multi-modal 3D object detection in AD. Therefore, we propose RoboFusion, a robust framework that leverages VFMs like SAM to tackle out-of-distribution (OOD) noise scenarios. We first adapt the original SAM for AD scenarios named SAM-AD. To align SAM or SAM-AD with multi-modal methods, we then introduce AD-FPN for upsampling the image features extracted by SAM. We employ wavelet decomposition to denoise the depth-guided images for further noise reduction and weather interference. At last, we employ self-attention mechanisms to adaptively reweight the fused features, enhancing informative features while suppressing excess noise. In summary, RoboFusion significantly reduces noise by leveraging the generalization and robustness of VFMs, thereby enhancing the resilience of multi-modal 3D object detection. Consequently, RoboFusion achieves SOTA performance in noisy scenarios, as demonstrated by the KITTI-C and nuScenes-C benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/adept-thu/RoboFusion.
Authors:Chenhongyi Yang, Tianwei Lin, Lichao Huang, Elliot J. Crowley
Abstract:
We present WidthFormer, a novel transformer-based module to compute Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations from multi-view cameras for real-time autonomous-driving applications. WidthFormer is computationally efficient, robust and does not require any special engineering effort to deploy. We first introduce a novel 3D positional encoding mechanism capable of accurately encapsulating 3D geometric information, which enables our model to compute high-quality BEV representations with only a single transformer decoder layer. This mechanism is also beneficial for existing sparse 3D object detectors. Inspired by the recently proposed works, we further improve our model's efficiency by vertically compressing the image features when serving as attention keys and values, and then we develop two modules to compensate for potential information loss due to feature compression. Experimental evaluation on the widely-used nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms previous approaches across different 3D detection architectures. More importantly, our model is highly efficient. For example, when using $256\times 704$ input images, it achieves 1.5 ms and 2.8 ms latency on NVIDIA 3090 GPU and Horizon Journey-5 computation solutions. Furthermore, WidthFormer also exhibits strong robustness to different degrees of camera perturbations. Our study offers valuable insights into the deployment of BEV transformation methods in real-world, complex road environments. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/WidthFormer .
Authors:Shiyu Zhao, Long Zhao, Vijay Kumar B. G, Yumin Suh, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Manmohan Chandraker, Samuel Schulter
Abstract:
The recent progress in language-based open-vocabulary object detection can be largely attributed to finding better ways of leveraging large-scale data with free-form text annotations. Training such models with a discriminative objective function has proven successful, but requires good positive and negative samples. However, the free-form nature and the open vocabulary of object descriptions make the space of negatives extremely large. Prior works randomly sample negatives or use rule-based techniques to build them. In contrast, we propose to leverage the vast knowledge built into modern generative models to automatically build negatives that are more relevant to the original data. Specifically, we use large-language-models to generate negative text descriptions, and text-to-image diffusion models to also generate corresponding negative images. Our experimental analysis confirms the relevance of the generated negative data, and its use in language-based detectors improves performance on two complex benchmarks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/xiaofeng94/Gen-Enhanced-Negs}.
Authors:Hao Zhang, Shuaijie Zhang
Abstract:
As an important component of the detector localization branch, bounding box regression loss plays a significant role in object detection tasks. The existing bounding box regression methods usually consider the geometric relationship between the GT box and the predicted box, and calculate the loss by using the relative position and shape of the bounding boxes, while ignoring the influence of inherent properties such as the shape and scale of the bounding boxes on bounding box regression. In order to make up for the shortcomings of existing research, this article proposes a bounding box regression method that focuses on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself. Firstly, we analyzed the regression characteristics of the bounding boxes and found that the shape and scale factors of the bounding boxes themselves will have an impact on the regression results. Based on the above conclusions, we propose the Shape IoU method, which can calculate the loss by focusing on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself, thereby making the bounding box regression more accurate. Finally, we validated our method through a large number of comparative experiments, which showed that our method can effectively improve detection performance and outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in different detection tasks.Code is available at https://github.com/malagoutou/Shape-IoU
Authors:Li Xiang, Junbo Yin, Wei Li, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Ruigang Yang, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) collaborative perception has recently gained significant attention due to its capability to enhance scene understanding by integrating information from various agents, e.g., vehicles, and infrastructure. However, current works often treat the information from each agent equally, ignoring the inherent domain gap caused by the utilization of different LiDAR sensors of each agent, thus leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose DI-V2X, that aims to learn Domain-Invariant representations through a new distillation framework to mitigate the domain discrepancy in the context of V2X 3D object detection. DI-V2X comprises three essential components: a domain-mixing instance augmentation (DMA) module, a progressive domain-invariant distillation (PDD) module, and a domain-adaptive fusion (DAF) module. Specifically, DMA builds a domain-mixing 3D instance bank for the teacher and student models during training, resulting in aligned data representation. Next, PDD encourages the student models from different domains to gradually learn a domain-invariant feature representation towards the teacher, where the overlapping regions between agents are employed as guidance to facilitate the distillation process. Furthermore, DAF closes the domain gap between the students by incorporating calibration-aware domain-adaptive attention. Extensive experiments on the challenging DAIR-V2X and V2XSet benchmark datasets demonstrate DI-V2X achieves remarkable performance, outperforming all the previous V2X models. Code is available at https://github.com/Serenos/DI-V2X
Authors:Lyes Saad Saoud, Lakmal Seneviratne, Irfan Hussain
Abstract:
Underwater robotic vision encounters significant challenges, necessitating advanced solutions to enhance performance and adaptability. This paper presents MARS (Multi-Scale Adaptive Robotics Vision), a novel approach to underwater object detection tailored for diverse underwater scenarios. MARS integrates Residual Attention YOLOv3 with Domain-Adaptive Multi-Scale Attention (DAMSA) to enhance detection accuracy and adapt to different domains. During training, DAMSA introduces domain class-based attention, enabling the model to emphasize domain-specific features. Our comprehensive evaluation across various underwater datasets demonstrates MARS's performance. On the original dataset, MARS achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 58.57\%, showcasing its proficiency in detecting critical underwater objects like echinus, starfish, holothurian, scallop, and waterweeds. This capability holds promise for applications in marine robotics, marine biology research, and environmental monitoring. Furthermore, MARS excels at mitigating domain shifts. On the augmented dataset, which incorporates all enhancements (+Domain +Residual+Channel Attention+Multi-Scale Attention), MARS achieves an mAP of 36.16\%. This result underscores its robustness and adaptability in recognizing objects and performing well across a range of underwater conditions. The source code for MARS is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/LyesSaadSaoud/MARS-Object-Detection/
Authors:Haozhan Shen, Tiancheng Zhao, Mingwei Zhu, Jianwei Yin
Abstract:
Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.
Authors:Anish Madan, Neehar Peri, Shu Kong, Deva Ramanan
Abstract:
The era of vision-language models (VLMs) trained on web-scale datasets challenges conventional formulations of "open-world" perception. In this work, we revisit the task of few-shot object detection (FSOD) in the context of recent foundational VLMs. First, we point out that zero-shot predictions from VLMs such as GroundingDINO significantly outperform state-of-the-art few-shot detectors (48 vs. 33 AP) on COCO. Despite their strong zero-shot performance, such foundation models may still be sub-optimal. For example, trucks on the web may be defined differently from trucks for a target application such as autonomous vehicle perception. We argue that the task of few-shot recognition can be reformulated as aligning foundation models to target concepts using a few examples. Interestingly, such examples can be multi-modal, using both text and visual cues, mimicking instructions that are often given to human annotators when defining a target concept of interest. Concretely, we propose Foundational FSOD, a new benchmark protocol that evaluates detectors pre-trained on any external data and fine-tuned on multi-modal (text and visual) K-shot examples per target class. We repurpose nuImages for Foundational FSOD, benchmark several popular open-source VLMs, and provide an empirical analysis of state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we discuss our recent CVPR 2024 Foundational FSOD competition and share insights from the community. Notably, the winning team significantly outperforms our baseline by 23.3 mAP! Our code and dataset splits are available at https://github.com/anishmadan23/foundational_fsod
Authors:Dongmei Zhang, Chang Li, Ray Zhang, Shenghao Xie, Wei Xue, Xiaodong Xie, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
The superior performances of pre-trained foundation models in various visual tasks underscore their potential to enhance the 2D models' open-vocabulary ability. Existing methods explore analogous applications in the 3D space. However, most of them only center around knowledge extraction from singular foundation models, which limits the open-vocabulary ability of 3D models. We hypothesize that leveraging complementary pre-trained knowledge from various foundation models can improve knowledge transfer from 2D pre-trained visual language models to the 3D space. In this work, we propose FM-OV3D, a method of Foundation Model-based Cross-modal Knowledge Blending for Open-Vocabulary 3D Detection, which improves the open-vocabulary localization and recognition abilities of 3D model by blending knowledge from multiple pre-trained foundation models, achieving true open-vocabulary without facing constraints from original 3D datasets. Specifically, to learn the open-vocabulary 3D localization ability, we adopt the open-vocabulary localization knowledge of the Grounded-Segment-Anything model. For open-vocabulary 3D recognition ability, We leverage the knowledge of generative foundation models, including GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion models, and cross-modal discriminative models like CLIP. The experimental results on two popular benchmarks for open-vocabulary 3D object detection show that our model efficiently learns knowledge from multiple foundation models to enhance the open-vocabulary ability of the 3D model and successfully achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary 3D object detection tasks. Code is released at https://github.com/dmzhang0425/FM-OV3D.git.
Authors:Kwangrok Ryoo, Yeonsik Jo, Seungjun Lee, Mira Kim, Ahra Jo, Seung Hwan Kim, Seungryong Kim, Soonyoung Lee
Abstract:
For object detection task with noisy labels, it is important to consider not only categorization noise, as in image classification, but also localization noise, missing annotations, and bogus bounding boxes. However, previous studies have only addressed certain types of noise (e.g., localization or categorization). In this paper, we propose Universal-Noise Annotation (UNA), a more practical setting that encompasses all types of noise that can occur in object detection, and analyze how UNA affects the performance of the detector. We analyzed the development direction of previous works of detection algorithms and examined the factors that impact the robustness of detection model learning method. We open-source the code for injecting UNA into the dataset and all the training log and weight are also shared.
Authors:Xinghao Chen, Siwei Li, Yijing Yang, Yunhe Wang
Abstract:
Transformer and its variants have shown great potential for various vision tasks in recent years, including image classification, object detection and segmentation. Meanwhile, recent studies also reveal that with proper architecture design, convolutional networks (ConvNets) also achieve competitive performance with transformers. However, no prior methods have explored to utilize pure convolution to build a Transformer-style Decoder module, which is essential for Encoder-Decoder architecture like Detection Transformer (DETR). To this end, in this paper we explore whether we could build query-based detection and segmentation framework with ConvNets instead of sophisticated transformer architecture. We propose a novel mechanism dubbed InterConv to perform interaction between object queries and image features via convolutional layers. Equipped with the proposed InterConv, we build Detection ConvNet (DECO), which is composed of a backbone and convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. We compare the proposed DECO against prior detectors on the challenging COCO benchmark. Despite its simplicity, our DECO achieves competitive performance in terms of detection accuracy and running speed. Specifically, with the ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 backbone, our DECO achieves $40.5\%$ and $47.8\%$ AP with $66$ and $34$ FPS, respectively. The proposed method is also evaluated on the segment anything task, demonstrating similar performance and higher efficiency. We hope the proposed method brings another perspective for designing architectures for vision tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/DECO and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/DECO.
Authors:Yun Zhu, Le Hui, Yaqi Shen, Jin Xie
Abstract:
Current 3D object detection methods for indoor scenes mainly follow the voting-and-grouping strategy to generate proposals. However, most methods utilize instance-agnostic groupings, such as ball query, leading to inconsistent semantic information and inaccurate regression of the proposals. To this end, we propose a novel superpoint grouping network for indoor anchor-free one-stage 3D object detection. Specifically, we first adopt an unsupervised manner to partition raw point clouds into superpoints, areas with semantic consistency and spatial similarity. Then, we design a geometry-aware voting module that adapts to the centerness in anchor-free detection by constraining the spatial relationship between superpoints and object centers. Next, we present a superpoint-based grouping module to explore the consistent representation within proposals. This module includes a superpoint attention layer to learn feature interaction between neighboring superpoints, and a superpoint-voxel fusion layer to propagate the superpoint-level information to the voxel level. Finally, we employ effective multiple matching to capitalize on the dynamic receptive fields of proposals based on superpoints during the training. Experimental results demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet V2, SUN RGB-D, and S3DIS datasets in the indoor one-stage 3D object detection. Source code is available at https://github.com/zyrant/SPGroup3D.
Authors:Donglin Yang, Zhenfeng Liu, Wentao Jiang, Guohang Yan, Xing Gao, Botian Shi, Si Liu, Xinyu Cai
Abstract:
Employing data augmentation methods to enhance perception performance in adverse weather has attracted considerable attention recently. Most of the LiDAR augmentation methods post-process the existing dataset by physics-based models or machine-learning methods. However, due to the limited environmental annotations and the fixed vehicle trajectories in the existing dataset, it is challenging to edit the scene and expand the diversity of traffic flow and scenario. To this end, we propose a simulator-based physical modeling approach to augment LiDAR data in rainy weather in order to improve the perception performance of LiDAR in this scenario. We complete the modeling task of the rainy weather in the CARLA simulator and establish a pipeline for LiDAR data collection. In particular, we pay special attention to the spray and splash rolled up by the wheels of surrounding vehicles in rain and complete the simulation of this special scenario through the Spray Emitter method we developed. In addition, we examine the influence of different weather conditions on the intensity of the LiDAR echo, develop a prediction network for the intensity of the LiDAR echo, and complete the simulation of 4-feat LiDAR point cloud data. In the experiment, we observe that the model augmented by the synthetic data improves the object detection task's performance in the rainy sequence of the Waymo Open Dataset. Both the code and the dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSim#rainypcsim.
Authors:Aditya Murali, Deepak Alapatt, Pietro Mascagni, Armine Vardazaryan, Alain Garcia, Nariaki Okamoto, Guido Costamagna, Didier Mutter, Jacques Marescaux, Bernard Dallemagne, Nicolas Padoy
Abstract:
This technical report provides a detailed overview of Endoscapes, a dataset of laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) videos with highly intricate annotations targeted at automated assessment of the Critical View of Safety (CVS). Endoscapes comprises 201 LC videos with frames annotated sparsely but regularly with segmentation masks, bounding boxes, and CVS assessment by three different clinical experts. Altogether, there are 11090 frames annotated with CVS and 1933 frames annotated with tool and anatomy bounding boxes from the 201 videos, as well as an additional 422 frames from 50 of the 201 videos annotated with tool and anatomy segmentation masks. In this report, we provide detailed dataset statistics (size, class distribution, dataset splits, etc.) and a comprehensive performance benchmark for instance segmentation, object detection, and CVS prediction. The dataset and model checkpoints are publically available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Endoscapes.
Authors:Wooju Lee, Dasol Hong, Hyungtae Lim, Hyun Myung
Abstract:
Single-domain generalization (S-DG) aims to generalize a model to unseen environments with a single-source domain. However, most S-DG approaches have been conducted in the field of classification. When these approaches are applied to object detection, the semantic features of some objects can be damaged, which can lead to imprecise object localization and misclassification. To address these problems, we propose an object-aware domain generalization (OA-DG) method for single-domain generalization in object detection. Our method consists of data augmentation and training strategy, which are called OA-Mix and OA-Loss, respectively. OA-Mix generates multi-domain data with multi-level transformation and object-aware mixing strategy. OA-Loss enables models to learn domain-invariant representations for objects and backgrounds from the original and OA-Mixed images. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art works on standard benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/WoojuLee24/OA-DG.
Authors:Size Wu, Wenwei Zhang, Lumin Xu, Sheng Jin, Wentao Liu, Chen Change Loy
Abstract:
Detecting objects accurately from a large or open vocabulary necessitates the vision-language alignment on region representations. However, learning such a region-text alignment by obtaining high-quality box annotations with text labels or descriptions is expensive and infeasible. In contrast, collecting image-text pairs is simpler but lacks precise object location information to associate regions with texts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Contrastive Language-Image Mosaic (CLIM), which leverages large-scale image-text pairs effectively for aligning region and text representations. CLIM combines multiple images into a mosaicked image and treats each image as a `pseudo region'. The feature of each pseudo region is extracted and trained to be similar to the corresponding text embedding while dissimilar from others by a contrastive loss, enabling the model to learn the region-text alignment without costly box annotations. As a generally applicable approach, CLIM consistently improves different open-vocabulary object detection methods that use caption supervision. Furthermore, CLIM can effectively enhance the region representation of vision-language models, thus providing stronger backbones for open-vocabulary object detectors. Our experimental results demonstrate that CLIM improves different baseline open-vocabulary object detectors by a large margin on both OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/wusize/CLIM.
Authors:Wentao Li, Danpei Zhao, Bo Yuan, Yue Gao, Zhenwei Shi
Abstract:
Fine-grained object detection (FGOD) extends object detection with the capability of fine-grained recognition. In recent two-stage FGOD methods, the region proposal serves as a crucial link between detection and fine-grained recognition. However, current methods overlook that some proposal-related procedures inherited from general detection are not equally suitable for FGOD, limiting the multi-task learning from generation, representation, to utilization. In this paper, we present PETDet (Proposal Enhancement for Two-stage fine-grained object detection) to better handle the sub-tasks in two-stage FGOD methods. Firstly, an anchor-free Quality Oriented Proposal Network (QOPN) is proposed with dynamic label assignment and attention-based decomposition to generate high-quality oriented proposals. Additionally, we present a Bilinear Channel Fusion Network (BCFN) to extract independent and discriminative features of the proposals. Furthermore, we design a novel Adaptive Recognition Loss (ARL) which offers guidance for the R-CNN head to focus on high-quality proposals. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PETDet. Quantitative analysis reveals that PETDet with ResNet50 reaches state-of-the-art performance on various FGOD datasets, including FAIR1M-v1.0 (42.96 AP), FAIR1M-v2.0 (48.81 AP), MAR20 (85.91 AP) and ShipRSImageNet (74.90 AP). The proposed method also achieves superior compatibility between accuracy and inference speed. Our code and models will be released at https://github.com/canoe-Z/PETDet.
Authors:Ruohuan Fang, Guansong Pang, Xiao Bai
Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages. The code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SIC-CADS.
Authors:Fang Wan, Zheng Wang, Wei Zhang, Chaoyang Song
Abstract:
We present SeeThruFinger, a Vision-Based Tactile Sensing (VBTS) architecture using a markerless See-Thru-Network. It achieves simultaneous visual perception and tactile sensing while providing omni-directional, adaptive grasping for manipulation. Multi-modal perception of intrinsic and extrinsic interactions is critical in building intelligent robots that learn. Instead of adding various sensors for different modalities, a preferred solution is to integrate them into one elegant and coherent design, which is a challenging task. This study leverages the in-finger vision to inpaint occluded regions of the external environment, achieving coherent scene reconstruction for visual perception. By tracking real-time segmentation of the Soft Polyhedral Network's large-scale deformation, we achieved real-time markerless tactile sensing of 6D forces and torques. We demonstrate the capable performances of the SeeThruFinger for reactive grasping without using external cameras or dedicated force and torque sensors on the fingertips. Using the inpainted scene and the deformation mask, we further demonstrate the multi-modal performance of the SeeThruFinger architecture to simultaneously achieve various capabilities, including but not limited to scene inpainting, object detection, depth sensing, scene segmentation, masked deformation tracking, 6D force-and-torque sensing, and contact event detection, all within a single input from the in-finger vision of the See-Thru-Network in a markerless way. All codes are available at https://github.com/ancorasir/SeeThruFinger.
Authors:Dongchen Han, Tianzhu Ye, Yizeng Han, Zhuofan Xia, Siyuan Pan, Pengfei Wan, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Abstract:
The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel attention paradigm, Agent Attention, to strike a favorable balance between computational efficiency and representation power. Specifically, the Agent Attention, denoted as a quadruple $(Q, A, K, V)$, introduces an additional set of agent tokens $A$ into the conventional attention module. The agent tokens first act as the agent for the query tokens $Q$ to aggregate information from $K$ and $V$, and then broadcast the information back to $Q$. Given the number of agent tokens can be designed to be much smaller than the number of query tokens, the agent attention is significantly more efficient than the widely adopted Softmax attention, while preserving global context modelling capability. Interestingly, we show that the proposed agent attention is equivalent to a generalized form of linear attention. Therefore, agent attention seamlessly integrates the powerful Softmax attention and the highly efficient linear attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of agent attention with various vision Transformers and across diverse vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and image generation. Notably, agent attention has shown remarkable performance in high-resolution scenarios, owning to its linear attention nature. For instance, when applied to Stable Diffusion, our agent attention accelerates generation and substantially enhances image generation quality without any additional training. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Agent-Attention.
Authors:Runwei Guan, Haocheng Zhao, Shanliang Yao, Ka Lok Man, Xiaohui Zhu, Limin Yu, Yong Yue, Jeremy Smith, Eng Gee Lim, Weiping Ding, Yutao Yue
Abstract:
Urban water-surface robust perception serves as the foundation for intelligent monitoring of aquatic environments and the autonomous navigation and operation of unmanned vessels, especially in the context of waterway safety. It is worth noting that current multi-sensor fusion and multi-task learning models consume substantial power and heavily rely on high-power GPUs for inference. This contributes to increased carbon emissions, a concern that runs counter to the prevailing emphasis on environmental preservation and the pursuit of sustainable, low-carbon urban environments. In light of these concerns, this paper concentrates on low-power, lightweight, multi-task panoptic perception through the fusion of visual and 4D radar data, which is seen as a promising low-cost perception method. We propose a framework named Achelous++ that facilitates the development and comprehensive evaluation of multi-task water-surface panoptic perception models. Achelous++ can simultaneously execute five perception tasks with high speed and low power consumption, including object detection, object semantic segmentation, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation, and radar point cloud semantic segmentation. Furthermore, to meet the demand for developers to customize models for real-time inference on low-performance devices, a novel multi-modal pruning strategy known as Heterogeneous-Aware SynFlow (HA-SynFlow) is proposed. Besides, Achelous++ also supports random pruning at initialization with different layer-wise sparsity, such as Uniform and Erdos-Renyi-Kernel (ERK). Overall, our Achelous++ framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WaterScenes benchmark, excelling in both accuracy and power efficiency compared to other single-task and multi-task models. We release and maintain the code at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous.
Authors:Shuailei Ma, Yuefeng Wang, Ying Wei, Jiaqi Fan, Enming Zhang, Xinyu Sun, Peihao Chen
Abstract:
In this paper, we attempt to specialize the VLM model for OWOD tasks by distilling its open-world knowledge into a language-agnostic detector. Surprisingly, we observe that the combination of a simple \textbf{knowledge distillation} approach and the automatic pseudo-labeling mechanism in OWOD can achieve better performance for unknown object detection, even with a small amount of data. Unfortunately, knowledge distillation for unknown objects severely affects the learning of detectors with conventional structures for known objects, leading to catastrophic forgetting. To alleviate these problems, we propose the \textbf{down-weight loss function} for knowledge distillation from vision-language to single vision modality. Meanwhile, we propose the \textbf{cascade decouple decoding structure} that decouples the learning of localization and recognition to reduce the impact of category interactions of known and unknown objects on the localization learning process. Ablation experiments demonstrate that both of them are effective in mitigating the impact of open-world knowledge distillation on the learning of known objects. Additionally, to alleviate the current lack of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating the ability of the open-world detector to detect unknown objects in the open world, we propose two benchmarks, which we name "\textbf{StandardSet}$\heartsuit$" and "\textbf{IntensiveSet}$\spadesuit$" respectively, based on the complexity of their testing scenarios. Comprehensive experiments performed on OWOD, MS-COCO, and our proposed benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. The code and proposed dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/xiaomabufei/SKDF}.
Authors:Kuan-Chih Huang, Weijie Lyu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai
Abstract:
Recent temporal LiDAR-based 3D object detectors achieve promising performance based on the two-stage proposal-based approach. They generate 3D box candidates from the first-stage dense detector, followed by different temporal aggregation methods. However, these approaches require per-frame objects or whole point clouds, posing challenges related to memory bank utilization. Moreover, point clouds and trajectory features are combined solely based on concatenation, which may neglect effective interactions between them. In this paper, we propose a point-trajectory transformer with long short-term memory for efficient temporal 3D object detection. To this end, we only utilize point clouds of current-frame objects and their historical trajectories as input to minimize the memory bank storage requirement. Furthermore, we introduce modules to encode trajectory features, focusing on long short-term and future-aware perspectives, and then effectively aggregate them with point cloud features. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo dataset to demonstrate that our approach performs well against state-of-the-art methods. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/PTT.
Authors:Kuan-Chih Huang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract:
Weakly supervised 3D object detection aims to learn a 3D detector with lower annotation cost, e.g., 2D labels. Unlike prior work which still relies on few accurate 3D annotations, we propose a framework to study how to leverage constraints between 2D and 3D domains without requiring any 3D labels. Specifically, we employ visual data from three perspectives to establish connections between 2D and 3D domains. First, we design a feature-level constraint to align LiDAR and image features based on object-aware regions. Second, the output-level constraint is developed to enforce the overlap between 2D and projected 3D box estimations. Finally, the training-level constraint is utilized by producing accurate and consistent 3D pseudo-labels that align with the visual data. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed three constraints. Without using any 3D labels, our method achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches and is competitive with the method that uses 500-frame 3D annotations. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/VG-W3D.
Authors:Joonhyun Jeong, Geondo Park, Jayeon Yoo, Hyungsik Jung, Heesu Kim
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to recognize novel objects whose categories are not included in the training set. In order to classify these unseen classes during training, many OVOD frameworks leverage the zero-shot capability of largely pretrained vision and language models, such as CLIP. To further improve generalization on the unseen novel classes, several approaches proposed to additionally train with pseudo region labeling on the external data sources that contain a substantial number of novel category labels beyond the existing training data. Albeit its simplicity, these pseudo-labeling methods still exhibit limited improvement with regard to the truly unseen novel classes that were not pseudo-labeled. In this paper, we present a novel, yet simple technique that helps generalization on the overall distribution of novel classes. Inspired by our observation that numerous novel classes reside within the convex hull constructed by the base (seen) classes in the CLIP embedding space, we propose to synthesize proxy-novel classes approximating novel classes via linear mixup between a pair of base classes. By training our detector with these synthetic proxy-novel classes, we effectively explore the embedding space of novel classes. The experimental results on various OVOD benchmarks such as LVIS and COCO demonstrate superior performance on novel classes compared to the other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ProxyDet.
Authors:Jingyang Xiang, Siqi Li, Junhao Chen, Zhuangzhi Chen, Tianxin Huang, Linpeng Peng, Yong Liu
Abstract:
N:M sparsity has received increasing attention due to its remarkable performance and latency trade-off compared with structured and unstructured sparsity. However, existing N:M sparsity methods do not differentiate the relative importance of weights among blocks and leave important weights underappreciated. Besides, they directly apply N:M sparsity to the whole network, which will cause severe information loss. Thus, they are still sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective Multi-Axis Query methodology, dubbed as MaxQ, to rectify these problems. During the training, MaxQ employs a dynamic approach to generate soft N:M masks, considering the weight importance across multiple axes. This method enhances the weights with more importance and ensures more effective updates. Meanwhile, a sparsity strategy that gradually increases the percentage of N:M weight blocks is applied, which allows the network to heal from the pruning-induced damage progressively. During the runtime, the N:M soft masks can be precomputed as constants and folded into weights without causing any distortion to the sparse pattern and incurring additional computational overhead. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MaxQ achieves consistent improvements across diverse CNN architectures in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. For ResNet50 with 1:16 sparse pattern, MaxQ can achieve 74.6\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and improve by over 2.8\% over the state-of-the-art. Codes and checkpoints are available at \url{https://github.com/JingyangXiang/MaxQ}.
Authors:Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov
Abstract:
A handful of visual foundation models (VFMs) have recently emerged as the backbones for numerous downstream tasks. VFMs like CLIP, DINOv2, SAM are trained with distinct objectives, exhibiting unique characteristics for various downstream tasks. We find that despite their conceptual differences, these models can be effectively merged into a unified model through multi-teacher distillation. We name this approach AM-RADIO (Agglomerative Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One). This integrative approach not only surpasses the performance of individual teacher models but also amalgamates their distinctive features, such as zero-shot vision-language comprehension, detailed pixel-level understanding, and open vocabulary segmentation capabilities. In pursuit of the most hardware-efficient backbone, we evaluated numerous architectures in our multi-teacher distillation pipeline using the same training recipe. This led to the development of a novel architecture (E-RADIO) that exceeds the performance of its predecessors and is at least 7x faster than the teacher models. Our comprehensive benchmarking process covers downstream tasks including ImageNet classification, ADE20k semantic segmentation, COCO object detection and LLaVa-1.5 framework.
Code: https://github.com/NVlabs/RADIO
Authors:Yang Zhang, Huilin Pan, Mingying Li, An Wang, Yang Zhou, Hongliang Ren
Abstract:
Despite the successful application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in object detection tasks, their efficiency in detecting faults from freight train images remains inadequate for implementation in real-world engineering scenarios. Existing modeling shortcomings of spatial invariance and pooling layers in conventional CNNs often ignore the neglect of crucial global information, resulting in error localization for fault objection tasks of freight trains. To solve these problems, we design a spatial-wise dynamic distillation framework based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for visual fault detection of freight trains. We initially present the axial shift strategy, which allows the MLP-like architecture to overcome the challenge of spatial invariance and effectively incorporate both local and global cues. We propose a dynamic distillation method without a pre-training teacher, including a dynamic teacher mechanism that can effectively eliminate the semantic discrepancy with the student model. Such an approach mines more abundant details from lower-level feature appearances and higher-level label semantics as the extra supervision signal, which utilizes efficient instance embedding to model the global spatial and semantic information. In addition, the proposed dynamic teacher can jointly train with students to further enhance the distillation efficiency. Extensive experiments executed on six typical fault datasets reveal that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art detectors and achieves the highest accuracy with real-time detection at a lower computational cost. The source code will be available at \url{https://github.com/MVME-HBUT/SDD-FTI-FDet}.
Authors:Rongsong Li, Xin Pei
Abstract:
Identifying travelers' transportation modes is important in transportation science and location-based services. It's appealing for researchers to leverage GPS trajectory data to infer transportation modes with the popularity of GPS-enabled devices, e.g., smart phones. Existing studies frame this problem as classification task. The dominant two-stage studies divide the trip into single-one mode segments first and then categorize these segments. The over segmentation strategy and inevitable error propagation bring difficulties to classification stage and make optimizing the whole system hard. The recent one-stage works throw out trajectory segmentation entirely to avoid these by directly conducting point-wise classification for the trip, whereas leaving predictions dis-continuous. To solve above-mentioned problems, inspired by YOLO and SSD in object detection, we propose to reframe change point detection and segment classification as a unified regression task instead of the existing classification task. We directly regress coordinates of change points and classify associated segments. In this way, our method divides the trip into segments under a supervised manner and leverage more contextual information, obtaining predictions with high accuracy and continuity. Two frameworks, TrajYOLO and TrajSSD, are proposed to solve the regression task and various feature extraction backbones are exploited. Exhaustive experiments on GeoLife dataset show that the proposed method has competitive overall identification accuracy of 0.853 when distinguishing five modes: walk, bike, bus, car, train. As for change point detection, our method increases precision at the cost of drop in recall. All codes are available at https://github.com/RadetzkyLi/TrajYOLO-SSD.
Authors:Yiduo Hao, Sohrab Madani, Junfeng Guan, Mohammed Alloulah, Saurabh Gupta, Haitham Hassanieh
Abstract:
The perception of autonomous vehicles using radars has attracted increased research interest due its ability to operate in fog and bad weather. However, training radar models is hindered by the cost and difficulty of annotating large-scale radar data. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a self-supervised learning framework to leverage the large amount of unlabeled radar data to pre-train radar-only embeddings for self-driving perception tasks. The proposed method combines radar-to-radar and radar-to-vision contrastive losses to learn a general representation from unlabeled radar heatmaps paired with their corresponding camera images. When used for downstream object detection, we demonstrate that the proposed self-supervision framework can improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art supervised baselines by $5.8\%$ in mAP. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yiduohao/Radical}.
Authors:Jiawei Fan, Chao Li, Xiaolong Liu, Meina Song, Anbang Yao
Abstract:
In recent years, knowledge distillation methods based on contrastive learning have achieved promising results on image classification and object detection tasks. However, in this line of research, we note that less attention is paid to semantic segmentation. Existing methods heavily rely on data augmentation and memory buffer, which entail high computational resource demands when applying them to handle semantic segmentation that requires to preserve high-resolution feature maps for making dense pixel-wise predictions. In order to address this problem, we present Augmentation-free Dense Contrastive Knowledge Distillation (Af-DCD), a new contrastive distillation learning paradigm to train compact and accurate deep neural networks for semantic segmentation applications. Af-DCD leverages a masked feature mimicking strategy, and formulates a novel contrastive learning loss via taking advantage of tactful feature partitions across both channel and spatial dimensions, allowing to effectively transfer dense and structured local knowledge learnt by the teacher model to a target student model while maintaining training efficiency. Extensive experiments on five mainstream benchmarks with various teacher-student network pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. For instance, the DeepLabV3-Res18|DeepLabV3-MBV2 model trained by Af-DCD reaches 77.03%|76.38% mIOU on Cityscapes dataset when choosing DeepLabV3-Res101 as the teacher, setting new performance records. Besides that, Af-DCD achieves an absolute mIOU improvement of 3.26%|3.04%|2.75%|2.30%|1.42% compared with individually trained counterpart on Cityscapes|Pascal VOC|Camvid|ADE20K|COCO-Stuff-164K. Code is available at https://github.com/OSVAI/Af-DCD
Authors:Gongyang Li, Zhen Bai, Zhi Liu
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) has become increasingly popular recently. Due to the characteristics of ORSIs, ORSI-SOD is full of challenges, such as multiple objects, small objects, low illuminations, and irregular shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a concise yet effective Texture-Semantic Collaboration Network (TSCNet) to explore the collaboration of texture cues and semantic cues for ORSI-SOD. Specifically, TSCNet is based on the generic encoder-decoder structure. In addition to the encoder and decoder, TSCNet includes a vital Texture-Semantic Collaboration Module (TSCM), which performs valuable feature modulation and interaction on basic features extracted from the encoder. The main idea of our TSCM is to make full use of the texture features at the lowest level and the semantic features at the highest level to achieve the expression enhancement of salient regions on features. In the TSCM, we first enhance the position of potential salient regions using semantic features. Then, we render and restore the object details using the texture features. Meanwhile, we also perceive regions of various scales, and construct interactions between different regions. Thanks to the perfect combination of TSCM and generic structure, our TSCNet can take care of both the position and details of salient objects, effectively handling various scenes. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our TSCNet achieves competitive performance compared to 14 state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/TSCNet.
Authors:Xiaohu Lu, Hayder Radha
Abstract:
The adversarial robustness of a model is its ability to resist adversarial attacks in the form of small perturbations to input data. Universal adversarial attack methods such as Fast Sign Gradient Method (FSGM) and Projected Gradient Descend (PGD) are popular for LiDAR object detection, but they are often deficient compared to task-specific adversarial attacks. Additionally, these universal methods typically require unrestricted access to the model's information, which is difficult to obtain in real-world applications. To address these limitations, we present a black-box Scaling Adversarial Robustness (ScAR) method for LiDAR object detection. By analyzing the statistical characteristics of 3D object detection datasets such as KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes, we have found that the model's prediction is sensitive to scaling of 3D instances. We propose three black-box scaling adversarial attack methods based on the available information: model-aware attack, distribution-aware attack, and blind attack. We also introduce a strategy for generating scaling adversarial examples to improve the model's robustness against these three scaling adversarial attacks. Comparison with other methods on public datasets under different 3D object detection architectures demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaohulugo/ScAR-IROS2023.
Authors:Cheng-Ju Ho, Chen-Hsuan Tai, Yen-Yu Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai
Abstract:
Semi-supervised object detection is crucial for 3D scene understanding, efficiently addressing the limitation of acquiring large-scale 3D bounding box annotations. Existing methods typically employ a teacher-student framework with pseudo-labeling to leverage unlabeled point clouds. However, producing reliable pseudo-labels in a diverse 3D space still remains challenging. In this work, we propose Diffusion-SS3D, a new perspective of enhancing the quality of pseudo-labels via the diffusion model for semi-supervised 3D object detection. Specifically, we include noises to produce corrupted 3D object size and class label distributions, and then utilize the diffusion model as a denoising process to obtain bounding box outputs. Moreover, we integrate the diffusion model into the teacher-student framework, so that the denoised bounding boxes can be used to improve pseudo-label generation, as well as the entire semi-supervised learning process. We conduct experiments on the ScanNet and SUN RGB-D benchmark datasets to demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance against existing methods. We also present extensive analysis to understand how our diffusion model design affects performance in semi-supervised learning.
Authors:Xiaoqi Zhao, Youwei Pang, Zhenyu Chen, Qian Yu, Lihe Zhang, Hanqi Liu, Jiaming Zuo, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task named power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense cathode and anode plates endpoints from X-ray images to evaluate the quality of power batteries. Existing manufacturers usually rely on human eye observation to complete PBD, which makes it difficult to balance the accuracy and efficiency of detection. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we first elaborately collect a dataset, called X-ray PBD, which has $1,500$ diverse X-ray images selected from thousands of power batteries of $5$ manufacturers, with $7$ different visual interference. Then, we propose a novel segmentation-based solution for PBD, termed multi-dimensional collaborative network (MDCNet). With the help of line and counting predictors, the representation of the point segmentation branch can be improved at both semantic and detail aspects.Besides, we design an effective distance-adaptive mask generation strategy, which can alleviate the visual challenge caused by the inconsistent distribution density of plates to provide MDCNet with stable supervision. Without any bells and whistles, our segmentation-based MDCNet consistently outperforms various other corner detection, crowd counting and general/tiny object detection-based solutions, making it a strong baseline that can help facilitate future research in PBD. Finally, we share some potential difficulties and works for future researches. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{X-ray PBD}.
Authors:Kangcheng Liu
Abstract:
Existing state-of-the-art 3D point clouds understanding methods only perform well in a fully supervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no unified framework which simultaneously solves the downstream high-level understanding tasks, especially when labels are extremely limited. This work presents a general and simple framework to tackle point clouds understanding when labels are limited. We propose a novel unsupervised region expansion based clustering method for generating clusters. More importantly, we innovatively propose to learn to merge the over-divided clusters based on the local low-level geometric property similarities and the learned high-level feature similarities supervised by weak labels. Hence, the true weak labels guide pseudo labels merging taking both geometric and semantic feature correlations into consideration. Finally, the self-supervised reconstruction and data augmentation optimization modules are proposed to guide the propagation of labels among semantically similar points within a scene. Experimental Results demonstrate that our framework has the best performance among the three most important weakly supervised point clouds understanding tasks including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection even when limited points are labeled, under the data-efficient settings for the large-scale 3D semantic scene parsing. The developed techniques have postentials to be applied to downstream tasks for better representations in robotic manipulation and robotic autonomous navigation. Codes and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/KangchengLiu.
Authors:Yunhang Shen, Chaoyou Fu, Peixian Chen, Mengdan Zhang, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Yunsheng Wu, Shaohui Lin, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Vision foundation models have been explored recently to build general-purpose vision systems. However, predominant paradigms, driven by casting instance-level tasks as an object-word alignment, bring heavy cross-modality interaction, which is not effective in prompting object detection and visual grounding. Another line of work that focuses on pixel-level tasks often encounters a large annotation gap of things and stuff, and suffers from mutual interference between foreground-object and background-class segmentation. In stark contrast to the prevailing methods, we present APE, a universal visual perception model for aligning and prompting everything all at once in an image to perform diverse tasks, i.e., detection, segmentation, and grounding, as an instance-level sentence-object matching paradigm. Specifically, APE advances the convergence of detection and grounding by reformulating language-guided grounding as open-vocabulary detection, which efficiently scales up model prompting to thousands of category vocabularies and region descriptions while maintaining the effectiveness of cross-modality fusion. To bridge the granularity gap of different pixel-level tasks, APE equalizes semantic and panoptic segmentation to proxy instance learning by considering any isolated regions as individual instances. APE aligns vision and language representation on broad data with natural and challenging characteristics all at once without task-specific fine-tuning. The extensive experiments on over 160 datasets demonstrate that, with only one-suit of weights, APE outperforms (or is on par with) the state-of-the-art models, proving that an effective yet universal perception for anything aligning and prompting is indeed feasible. Codes and trained models are released at https://github.com/shenyunhang/APE.
Authors:Zhenxin Li, Shiyi Lan, Jose M. Alvarez, Zuxuan Wu
Abstract:
Recently, the rise of query-based Transformer decoders is reshaping camera-based 3D object detection. These query-based decoders are surpassing the traditional dense BEV (Bird's Eye View)-based methods. However, we argue that dense BEV frameworks remain important due to their outstanding abilities in depth estimation and object localization, depicting 3D scenes accurately and comprehensively. This paper aims to address the drawbacks of the existing dense BEV-based 3D object detectors by introducing our proposed enhanced components, including a CRF-modulated depth estimation module enforcing object-level consistencies, a long-term temporal aggregation module with extended receptive fields, and a two-stage object decoder combining perspective techniques with CRF-modulated depth embedding. These enhancements lead to a "modernized" dense BEV framework dubbed BEVNeXt. On the nuScenes benchmark, BEVNeXt outperforms both BEV-based and query-based frameworks under various settings, achieving a state-of-the-art result of 64.2 NDS on the nuScenes test set. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/BEVNeXt}.
Authors:Che Liu, Cheng Ouyang, Sibo Cheng, Anand Shah, Wenjia Bai, Rossella Arcucci
Abstract:
Recently, medical vision-language pre-training (VLP) has reached substantial progress to learn global visual representation from medical images and their paired radiology reports. However, medical imaging tasks in real world usually require finer granularity in visual features. These tasks include visual localization tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation, object detection) and visual grounding task. Yet, current medical VLP methods face challenges in learning these fine-grained features, as they primarily focus on brute-force alignment between image patches and individual text tokens for local visual feature learning, which is suboptimal for downstream dense prediction tasks. In this work, we propose a new VLP framework, named \textbf{G}lobal to \textbf{D}ense level representation learning (G2D) that achieves significantly improved granularity and more accurate grounding for the learned features, compared to existing medical VLP approaches. In particular, G2D learns dense and semantically-grounded image representations via a pseudo segmentation task parallel with the global vision-language alignment. Notably, generating pseudo segmentation targets does not incur extra trainable parameters: they are obtained on the fly during VLP with a parameter-free processor. G2D achieves superior performance across 6 medical imaging tasks and 25 diseases, particularly in semantic segmentation, which necessitates fine-grained, semantically-grounded image features. In this task, G2D surpasses peer models even when fine-tuned with just 1\% of the training data, compared to the 100\% used by these models. The code can be found in https://github.com/cheliu-computation/G2D-NeurIPS24/tree/main.
Authors:Zhipeng Du, Miaojing Shi, Jiankang Deng
Abstract:
Detecting objects in low-light scenarios presents a persistent challenge, as detectors trained on well-lit data exhibit significant performance degradation on low-light data due to low visibility. Previous methods mitigate this issue by exploring image enhancement or object detection techniques with real low-light image datasets. However, the progress is impeded by the inherent difficulties about collecting and annotating low-light images. To address this challenge, we propose to boost low-light object detection with zero-shot day-night domain adaptation, which aims to generalize a detector from well-lit scenarios to low-light ones without requiring real low-light data. Revisiting Retinex theory in the low-level vision, we first design a reflectance representation learning module to learn Retinex-based illumination invariance in images with a carefully designed illumination invariance reinforcement strategy. Next, an interchange-redecomposition-coherence procedure is introduced to improve over the vanilla Retinex image decomposition process by performing two sequential image decompositions and introducing a redecomposition cohering loss. Extensive experiments on ExDark, DARK FACE, and CODaN datasets show strong low-light generalizability of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZPDu/DAI-Net.
Authors:Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Huan Chen, Shiyun Zhou, Haolin Qin, Jianan Li
Abstract:
Hyperspectral salient object detection (HSOD) aims to detect spectrally salient objects in hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, existing methods inadequately utilize spectral information by either converting HSIs into false-color images or converging neural networks with clustering. We propose a novel approach that fully leverages the spectral characteristics by extracting two distinct frequency components from the spectrum: low-frequency Spectral Saliency and high-frequency Spectral Edge. The Spectral Saliency approximates the region of salient objects, while the Spectral Edge captures edge information of salient objects. These two complementary components, crucial for HSOD, are derived by computing from the inter-layer spectral angular distance of the Gaussian pyramid and the intra-neighborhood spectral angular gradients, respectively. To effectively utilize this dual-frequency information, we introduce a novel lightweight Spectrum-driven Mixed-frequency Network (SMN). SMN incorporates two parameter-free plug-and-play operators, namely Spectral Saliency Generator and Spectral Edge Operator, to extract the Spectral Saliency and Spectral Edge components from the input HSI independently. Subsequently, the Mixed-frequency Attention module, comprised of two frequency-dependent heads, intelligently combines the embedded features of edge and saliency information, resulting in a mixed-frequency feature representation. Furthermore, a saliency-edge-aware decoder progressively scales up the mixed-frequency feature while preserving rich detail and saliency information for accurate salient object prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on the HS-SOD benchmark and our custom dataset HSOD-BIT demonstrate that our SMN outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding HSOD performance. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/laprf/SMN.
Authors:Yudong Wang, Jichang Guo, Wanru He, Huan Gao, Huihui Yue, Zenan Zhang, Chongyi Li
Abstract:
Underwater object detection is a crucial and challenging problem in marine engineering and aquatic robot. The difficulty is partly because of the degradation of underwater images caused by light selective absorption and scattering. Intuitively, enhancing underwater images can benefit high-level applications like underwater object detection. However, it is still unclear whether all object detectors need underwater image enhancement as pre-processing. We therefore pose the questions "Does underwater image enhancement really improve underwater object detection?" and "How does underwater image enhancement contribute to underwater object detection?". With these two questions, we conduct extensive studies. Specifically, we use 18 state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement algorithms, covering traditional, CNN-based, and GAN-based algorithms, to pre-process underwater object detection data. Then, we retrain 7 popular deep learning-based object detectors using the corresponding results enhanced by different algorithms, obtaining 126 underwater object detection models. Coupled with 7 object detection models retrained using raw underwater images, we employ these 133 models to comprehensively analyze the effect of underwater image enhancement on underwater object detection. We expect this study can provide sufficient exploration to answer the aforementioned questions and draw more attention of the community to the joint problem of underwater image enhancement and underwater object detection. The pre-trained models and results are publicly available and will be regularly updated. Project page: https://github.com/BIGWangYuDong/lqit/tree/main/configs/detection/uw_enhancement_affect_detection.
Authors:Weikai Li, Hongfeng Wei, Yanlai Wu, Jie Yang, Yudi Ruan, Yuan Li, Ying Tang
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to extract semantic knowledge from limited object instances of novel categories within a target domain. Recent advances in FSOD focus on fine-tuning the base model based on a few objects via meta-learning or data augmentation. Despite their success, the majority of them are grounded with parametric readjustment to generalize on novel objects, which face considerable challenges in Industry 5.0, such as (i) a certain amount of fine-tuning time is required, and (ii) the parameters of the constructed model being unavailable due to the privilege protection, making the fine-tuning fail. Such constraints naturally limit its application in scenarios with real-time configuration requirements or within black-box settings. To tackle the challenges mentioned above, we formalize a novel FSOD task, referred to as Test TIme Few Shot DEtection (TIDE), where the model is un-tuned in the configuration procedure. To that end, we introduce an asymmetric architecture for learning a support-instance-guided dynamic category classifier. Further, a cross-attention module and a multi-scale resizer are provided to enhance the model performance. Experimental results on multiple few-shot object detection platforms reveal that the proposed TIDE significantly outperforms existing contemporary methods. The implementation codes are available at https://github.com/deku-0621/TIDE
Authors:Soumik Mukhopadhyay, Matthew Gwilliam, Yosuke Yamaguchi, Vatsal Agarwal, Namitha Padmanabhan, Archana Swaminathan, Tianyi Zhou, Jun Ohya, Abhinav Shrivastava
Abstract:
While many unsupervised learning models focus on one family of tasks, either generative or discriminative, we explore the possibility of a unified representation learner: a model which addresses both families of tasks simultaneously. We identify diffusion models, a state-of-the-art method for generative tasks, as a prime candidate. Such models involve training a U-Net to iteratively predict and remove noise, and the resulting model can synthesize high-fidelity, diverse, novel images. We find that the intermediate feature maps of the U-Net are diverse, discriminative feature representations. We propose a novel attention mechanism for pooling feature maps and further leverage this mechanism as DifFormer, a transformer feature fusion of features from different diffusion U-Net blocks and noise steps. We also develop DifFeed, a novel feedback mechanism tailored to diffusion. We find that diffusion models are better than GANs, and, with our fusion and feedback mechanisms, can compete with state-of-the-art unsupervised image representation learning methods for discriminative tasks - image classification with full and semi-supervision, transfer for fine-grained classification, object detection and segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our project website (https://mgwillia.github.io/diffssl/) and code (https://github.com/soumik-kanad/diffssl) are available publicly.
Authors:Jiaqi Zhao, Zeyu Ding, Yong Zhou, Hancheng Zhu, Wenliang Du, Rui Yao, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
Abstract:
Oriented object detection presents a challenging task due to the presence of object instances with multiple orientations, varying scales, and dense distributions. Recently, end-to-end detectors have made significant strides by employing attention mechanisms and refining a fixed number of queries through consecutive decoder layers. However, existing end-to-end oriented object detectors still face two primary challenges: 1) misalignment between positional queries and keys, leading to inconsistency between classification and localization; and 2) the presence of a large number of similar queries, which complicates one-to-one label assignments and optimization. To address these limitations, we propose an end-to-end oriented detector called the Rotated Query Transformer, which integrates two key technologies: Rotated RoI Attention (RRoI Attention) and Selective Distinct Queries (SDQ). First, RRoI Attention aligns positional queries and keys from oriented regions of interest through cross-attention. Second, SDQ collects queries from intermediate decoder layers and filters out similar ones to generate distinct queries, thereby facilitating the optimization of one-to-one label assignments. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on four remote sensing datasets and one scene text dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To further validate its generalization capability, we also extend our approach to horizontal object detection The code is available at \url{https://github.com/wokaikaixinxin/RQFormer}.
Authors:Ziyi Wu, Mathias Gehrig, Qing Lyu, Xudong Liu, Igor Gilitschenski
Abstract:
Object detection with event cameras benefits from the sensor's low latency and high dynamic range. However, it is costly to fully label event streams for supervised training due to their high temporal resolution. To reduce this cost, we present LEOD, the first method for label-efficient event-based detection. Our approach unifies weakly- and semi-supervised object detection with a self-training mechanism. We first utilize a detector pre-trained on limited labels to produce pseudo ground truth on unlabeled events. Then, the detector is re-trained with both real and generated labels. Leveraging the temporal consistency of events, we run bi-directional inference and apply tracking-based post-processing to enhance the quality of pseudo labels. To stabilize training against label noise, we further design a soft anchor assignment strategy. We introduce new experimental protocols to evaluate the task of label-efficient event-based detection on Gen1 and 1Mpx datasets. LEOD consistently outperforms supervised baselines across various labeling ratios. For example, on Gen1, it improves mAP by 8.6% and 7.8% for RVT-S trained with 1% and 2% labels. On 1Mpx, RVT-S with 10% labels even surpasses its fully-supervised counterpart using 100% labels. LEOD maintains its effectiveness even when all labeled data are available, reaching new state-of-the-art results. Finally, we show that our method readily scales to improve larger detectors as well. Code is released at https://github.com/Wuziyi616/LEOD
Authors:Dai Shi
Abstract:
Due to the depth degradation effect in residual connections, many efficient Vision Transformers models that rely on stacking layers for information exchange often fail to form sufficient information mixing, leading to unnatural visual perception. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose Aggregated Attention, a biomimetic design-based token mixer that simulates biological foveal vision and continuous eye movement while enabling each token on the feature map to have a global perception. Furthermore, we incorporate learnable tokens that interact with conventional queries and keys, which further diversifies the generation of affinity matrices beyond merely relying on the similarity between queries and keys. Our approach does not rely on stacking for information exchange, thus effectively avoiding depth degradation and achieving natural visual perception. Additionally, we propose Convolutional GLU, a channel mixer that bridges the gap between GLU and SE mechanism, which empowers each token to have channel attention based on its nearest neighbor image features, enhancing local modeling capability and model robustness. We combine aggregated attention and convolutional GLU to create a new visual backbone called TransNeXt. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TransNeXt achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple model sizes. At a resolution of $224^2$, TransNeXt-Tiny attains an ImageNet accuracy of 84.0%, surpassing ConvNeXt-B with 69% fewer parameters. Our TransNeXt-Base achieves an ImageNet accuracy of 86.2% and an ImageNet-A accuracy of 61.6% at a resolution of $384^2$, a COCO object detection mAP of 57.1, and an ADE20K semantic segmentation mIoU of 54.7.
Authors:Jacob Schnell, Jieke Wang, Lu Qi, Vincent Tao Hu, Meng Tang
Abstract:
Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have made generating high-quality synthetic images widely accessible. Prior works have shown that training on synthetic images improves many perception tasks, such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. We are the first to explore generative data augmentations for scribble-supervised semantic segmentation. We propose ScribbleGen, a generative data augmentation method that leverages a ControlNet diffusion model conditioned on semantic scribbles to produce high-quality training data. However, naive implementations of generative data augmentations may inadvertently harm the performance of the downstream segmentor rather than improve it. We leverage classifier-free diffusion guidance to enforce class consistency and introduce encode ratios to trade off data diversity for data realism. Using the guidance scale and encode ratio, we can generate a spectrum of high-quality training images. We propose multiple augmentation schemes and find that these schemes significantly impact model performance, especially in the low-data regime. Our framework further reduces the gap between the performance of scribble-supervised segmentation and that of fully-supervised segmentation. We also show that our framework significantly improves segmentation performance on small datasets, even surpassing fully-supervised segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/mengtang-lab/scribblegen.
Authors:Daeun Seo, Hoeseok Yang, Hyungshin Kim
Abstract:
Achieving constant accuracy in object detection is challenging due to the inherent variability of object sizes. One effective approach to this problem involves optimizing input resolution, referred to as a multi-resolution strategy. Previous approaches to resolution optimization have often been based on pre-defined resolutions with manual selection. However, there is a lack of study on run-time resolution optimization for existing architectures. This paper introduces DyRA, a dynamic resolution adjustment network providing an image-specific scale factor for existing detectors. This network is co-trained with detectors utilizing specially designed loss functions, namely ParetoScaleLoss and BalanceLoss. ParetoScaleLoss determines an adaptive scale factor for robustness, while BalanceLoss optimizes overall scale factors according to the localization performance of the detector. The loss function is devised to minimize the accuracy drop across contrasting objectives of different-sized objects for scaling. Our proposed network can improve accuracy across various models, including RetinaNet, Faster-RCNN, FCOS, DINO, and H-Deformable-DETR. The code is available at https://github.com/DaEunFullGrace/DyRA.git.
Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Chenglong Li, Zhengzheng Tu, Zhengyi Liu, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Existing single-modal and multi-modal salient object detection (SOD) methods focus on designing specific architectures tailored for their respective tasks. However, developing completely different models for different tasks leads to labor and time consumption, as well as high computational and practical deployment costs. In this paper, we attempt to address both single-modal and multi-modal SOD in a unified framework called UniSOD, which fully exploits the overlapping prior knowledge between different tasks. Nevertheless, assigning appropriate strategies to modality variable inputs is challenging. To this end, UniSOD learns modality-aware prompts with task-specific hints through adaptive prompt learning, which are plugged into the proposed pre-trained baseline SOD model to handle corresponding tasks, while only requiring few learnable parameters compared to training the entire model. Each modality-aware prompt is generated from a switchable prompt generation block, which adaptively performs structural switching based on single-modal and multi-modal inputs without human intervention. Through end-to-end joint training, UniSOD achieves overall performance improvement on 14 benchmark datasets for RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD, which demonstrates that our method effectively and efficiently unifies single-modal and multi-modal SOD tasks.The code and results are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/UniSOD.
Authors:Ziyang Luo, Nian Liu, Wangbo Zhao, Xuguang Yang, Dingwen Zhang, Deng-Ping Fan, Fahad Khan, Junwei Han
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) and camouflaged object detection (COD) are related yet distinct binary mapping tasks. These tasks involve multiple modalities, sharing commonalities and unique cues. Existing research often employs intricate task-specific specialist models, potentially leading to redundancy and suboptimal results. We introduce VSCode, a generalist model with novel 2D prompt learning, to jointly address four SOD tasks and three COD tasks. We utilize VST as the foundation model and introduce 2D prompts within the encoder-decoder architecture to learn domain and task-specific knowledge on two separate dimensions. A prompt discrimination loss helps disentangle peculiarities to benefit model optimization. VSCode outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six tasks on 26 datasets and exhibits zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks by combining 2D prompts, such as RGB-D COD. Source code has been available at https://github.com/Sssssuperior/VSCode.
Authors:Dongshuo Yin, Leiyi Hu, Bin Li, Youqun Zhang
Abstract:
Pre-training & fine-tuning can enhance the transferring efficiency and performance in visual tasks. Recent delta-tuning methods provide more options for visual classification tasks. Despite their success, existing visual delta-tuning art fails to exceed the upper limit of full fine-tuning on challenging tasks like instance segmentation and semantic segmentation. To find a competitive alternative to full fine-tuning, we propose the Multi-cognitive Visual Adapter (Mona) tuning, a novel adapter-based tuning method. First, we introduce multiple vision-friendly filters into the adapter to enhance its ability to process visual signals, while previous methods mainly rely on language-friendly linear filters. Second, we add the scaled normalization layer in the adapter to regulate the distribution of input features for visual filters. To fully demonstrate the practicality and generality of Mona, we conduct experiments on multiple representative visual tasks, including instance segmentation on COCO, semantic segmentation on ADE20K, object detection on Pascal VOC, and image classification on several common datasets. Exciting results illustrate that Mona surpasses full fine-tuning on all these tasks and is the only delta-tuning method outperforming full fine-tuning on instance segmentation and semantic segmentation tasks. For example, Mona achieves a 1% performance gain on the COCO dataset compared to full fine-tuning. Comprehensive results suggest that Mona-tuning is more suitable for retaining and utilizing the capabilities of pre-trained models than full fine-tuning. The code will be released at https://github.com/Leiyi-Hu/mona.
Authors:Martin Tran, Jordan Shipard, Hermawan Mulyono, Arnold Wiliem, Clinton Fookes
Abstract:
High-quality training data is essential for enhancing the robustness of object detection models. Within the maritime domain, obtaining a diverse real image dataset is particularly challenging due to the difficulty of capturing sea images with the presence of maritime objects , especially in stormy conditions. These challenges arise due to resource limitations, in addition to the unpredictable appearance of maritime objects. Nevertheless, acquiring data from stormy conditions is essential for training effective maritime detection models, particularly for search and rescue, where real-world conditions can be unpredictable. In this work, we introduce SafeSea, which is a stepping stone towards transforming actual sea images with various Sea State backgrounds while retaining maritime objects. Compared to existing generative methods such as Stable Diffusion Inpainting~\cite{stableDiffusion}, this approach reduces the time and effort required to create synthetic datasets for training maritime object detection models. The proposed method uses two automated filters to only pass generated images that meet the criteria. In particular, these filters will first classify the sea condition according to its Sea State level and then it will check whether the objects from the input image are still preserved. This method enabled the creation of the SafeSea dataset, offering diverse weather condition backgrounds to supplement the training of maritime models. Lastly, we observed that a maritime object detection model faced challenges in detecting objects in stormy sea backgrounds, emphasizing the impact of weather conditions on detection accuracy. The code, and dataset are available at https://github.com/martin-3240/SafeSea.
Authors:Yi Yu, Xue Yang, Qingyun Li, Feipeng Da, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection (OOD), recent research involving weakly-supervised detectors for learning rotated box (RBox) from the horizontal box (HBox) has attracted more and more attention. In this paper, we explore a more challenging yet label-efficient setting, namely single point-supervised OOD, and present our approach called Point2RBox. Specifically, we propose to leverage two principles: 1) Synthetic pattern knowledge combination: By sampling around each labeled point on the image, we spread the object feature to synthetic visual patterns with known boxes to provide the knowledge for box regression. 2) Transform self-supervision: With a transformed input image (e.g. scaled/rotated), the output RBoxes are trained to follow the same transformation so that the network can perceive the relative size/rotation between objects. The detector is further enhanced by a few devised techniques to cope with peripheral issues, e.g. the anchor/layer assignment as the size of the object is not available in our point supervision setting. To our best knowledge, Point2RBox is the first end-to-end solution for point-supervised OOD. In particular, our method uses a lightweight paradigm, yet it achieves a competitive performance among point-supervised alternatives, 41.05%/27.62%/80.01% on DOTA/DIOR/HRSC datasets.
Authors:Junwei Luo, Xue Yang, Yi Yu, Qingyun Li, Junchi Yan, Yansheng Li
Abstract:
Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB, the first single Point-based OBB generation method, for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view, we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module, respectively. In the former module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions, the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles, which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance, and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.
Authors:Chi-Ping Su, Ching-Hsun Tseng, Bin Pu, Lei Zhao, Jiewen Yang, Zhuangzhuang Chen, Shin-Jye Lee
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) enables a smaller "student" model to mimic a larger "teacher" model by transferring knowledge from the teacher's output or features. However, most KD methods treat all samples uniformly, overlooking the varying learning value of each sample and thereby limiting their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Entropy-based Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (EA-KD), a simple yet effective plug-and-play KD method that prioritizes learning from valuable samples. EA-KD quantifies each sample's learning value by strategically combining the entropy of the teacher and student output, then dynamically reweights the distillation loss to place greater emphasis on high-entropy samples. Extensive experiments across diverse KD frameworks and tasks -- including image classification, object detection, and large language model (LLM) distillation -- demonstrate that EA-KD consistently enhances performance, achieving state-of-the-art results with negligible computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/cpsu00/EA-KD
Authors:Ahmed Sharshar, Aleksandr Matsun
Abstract:
In the realm of aerial image analysis, object detection plays a pivotal role, with significant implications for areas such as remote sensing, urban planning, and disaster management. This study addresses the inherent challenges in this domain, notably the detection of small objects, managing densely packed elements, and accounting for diverse orientations. We present an in-depth evaluation of an object detection model that integrates the Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet)as its backbone with the DiffusionDet head, utilizing the iSAID dataset for empirical analysis. Our approach encompasses the introduction of novel methodologies and extensive ablation studies. These studies critically assess various aspects such as loss functions, box regression techniques, and classification strategies to refine the model's precision in object detection. The paper details the experimental application of the LSKNet backbone in synergy with the DiffusionDet heads, a combination tailored to meet the specific challenges in aerial image object detection. The findings of this research indicate a substantial enhancement in the model's performance, especially in the accuracy-time tradeoff. The proposed model achieves a mean average precision (MAP) of approximately 45.7%, which is a significant improvement, outperforming the RCNN model by 4.7% on the same dataset. This advancement underscores the effectiveness of the proposed modifications and sets a new benchmark in aerial image analysis, paving the way for more accurate and efficient object detection methodologies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/SashaMatsun/LSKDiffDet
Authors:Renu Sharma, Redwan Sony, Arun Ross
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit superior performance in various machine learning tasks, e.g., image classification, speech recognition, biometric recognition, object detection, etc. However, it is essential to analyze their sensitivity to parameter perturbations before deploying them in real-world applications. In this work, we assess the sensitivity of DNNs against perturbations to their weight and bias parameters. The sensitivity analysis involves three DNN architectures (VGG, ResNet, and DenseNet), three types of parameter perturbations (Gaussian noise, weight zeroing, and weight scaling), and two settings (entire network and layer-wise). We perform experiments in the context of iris presentation attack detection and evaluate on two publicly available datasets: LivDet-Iris-2017 and LivDet-Iris-2020. Based on the sensitivity analysis, we propose improved models simply by perturbing parameters of the network without undergoing training. We further combine these perturbed models at the score-level and at the parameter-level to improve the performance over the original model. The ensemble at the parameter-level shows an average improvement of 43.58% on the LivDet-Iris-2017 dataset and 9.25% on the LivDet-Iris-2020 dataset. The source code is available at https://github.com/redwankarimsony/WeightPerturbation-MSU.
Authors:Tong Zhao, Qiang Fang, Shuohao Shi, Xin Xu
Abstract:
Recently, dense pseudo-label, which directly selects pseudo labels from the original output of the teacher model without any complicated post-processing steps, has received considerable attention in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, for the multi-oriented and dense objects that are common in aerial scenes, existing dense pseudo-label selection methods are inefficient because they ignore the significant density difference. Therefore, we propose Density-Guided Dense Pseudo Label Selection (DDPLS) for semi-supervised oriented object detection. In DDPLS, we design a simple but effective adaptive mechanism to guide the selection of dense pseudo labels. Specifically, we propose the Pseudo Density Score (PDS) to estimate the density of potential objects and use this score to select reliable dense pseudo labels. On the DOTA-v1.5 benchmark, the proposed method outperforms previous methods especially when labeled data are scarce. For example, it achieves 49.78 mAP given only 5\% of annotated data, which surpasses previous state-of-the-art method given 10\% of annotated data by 1.15 mAP. Our codes is available at https://github.com/Haru-zt/DDPLS.
Authors:Nils Friederich, Andreas Specker, Jürgen Beyerer
Abstract:
To ensure the security of airports, it is essential to protect the airside from unauthorized access. For this purpose, security fences are commonly used, but they require regular inspection to detect damages. However, due to the growing shortage of human specialists and the large manual effort, there is the need for automated methods. The aim is to automatically inspect the fence for damage with the help of an autonomous robot. In this work, we explore object detection methods to address the fence inspection task and localize various types of damages. In addition to evaluating four State-of-the-Art (SOTA) object detection models, we analyze the impact of several design criteria, aiming at adapting to the task-specific challenges. This includes contrast adjustment, optimization of hyperparameters, and utilization of modern backbones. The experimental results indicate that our optimized You Only Look Once v5 (YOLOv5) model achieves the highest accuracy of the four methods with an increase of 6.9% points in Average Precision (AP) compared to the baseline. Moreover, we show the real-time capability of the model. The trained models are published on GitHub: https://github.com/N-Friederich/airport_fence_inspection.
Authors:Yan Li, Weiwei Guo, Xue Yang, Ning Liao, Dunyun He, Jiaqi Zhou, Wenxian Yu
Abstract:
An increasingly massive number of remote-sensing images spurs the development of extensible object detectors that can detect objects beyond training categories without costly collecting new labeled data. In this paper, we aim to develop open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) technique in aerial images that scales up object vocabulary size beyond training data. The performance of OVD greatly relies on the quality of class-agnostic region proposals and pseudo-labels for novel object categories. To simultaneously generate high-quality proposals and pseudo-labels, we propose CastDet, a CLIP-activated student-teacher open-vocabulary object Detection framework. Our end-to-end framework following the student-teacher self-learning mechanism employs the RemoteCLIP model as an extra omniscient teacher with rich knowledge. By doing so, our approach boosts not only novel object proposals but also classification. Furthermore, we devise a dynamic label queue strategy to maintain high-quality pseudo labels during batch training. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple existing aerial object detection datasets, which are set up for the OVD task. Experimental results demonstrate our CastDet achieving superior open-vocabulary detection performance, e.g., reaching 46.5% mAP on VisDroneZSD novel categories, which outperforms the state-of-the-art open-vocabulary detectors by 21.0% mAP. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to apply and develop the open-vocabulary object detection technique for aerial images. The code is available at https://github.com/lizzy8587/CastDet.
Authors:Xin Zhang, Yingze Song, Tingting Song, Degang Yang, Yichen Ye, Jie Zhou, Liming Zhang
Abstract:
Neural networks based on convolutional operations have achieved remarkable results in the field of deep learning, but there are two inherent flaws in standard convolutional operations. On the one hand, the convolution operation is confined to a local window, so it cannot capture information from other locations, and its sampled shapes is fixed. On the other hand, the size of the convolutional kernel are fixed to k $\times$ k, which is a fixed square shape, and the number of parameters tends to grow squarely with size. Although Deformable Convolution (Deformable Conv) address the problem of fixed sampling of standard convolutions, the number of parameters also tends to grow in a squared manner. In response to the above questions, the Linear Deformable Convolution (LDConv) is explored in this work, which gives the convolution kernel an arbitrary number of parameters and arbitrary sampled shapes to provide richer options for the trade-off between network overhead and performance. In LDConv, a novel coordinate generation algorithm is defined to generate different initial sampled positions for convolutional kernels of arbitrary size. To adapt to changing targets, offsets are introduced to adjust the shape of the samples at each position. LDConv corrects the growth trend of the number of parameters for standard convolution and Deformable Conv to a linear growth. Moreover, it completes the process of efficient feature extraction by irregular convolutional operations and brings more exploration options for convolutional sampled shapes. Object detection experiments on representative datasets COCO2017, VOC 7+12, and VisDrone-DET2021 fully demonstrate the advantages of LDConv. LDConv is a plug-and-play convolutional operation that can replace the convolutional operation to improve network performance. The code for the relevant tasks can be found at https://github.com/CV-ZhangXin/LDConv.
Authors:Lv Tang, Peng-Tao Jiang, Zhihao Shen, Hao Zhang, Jinwei Chen, Bo Li
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal camo-perceptive framework (MMCPF) aimed at handling zero-shot Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) by leveraging the powerful capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Recognizing the inherent limitations of current COD methodologies, which predominantly rely on supervised learning models demanding extensive and accurately annotated datasets, resulting in weak generalization, our research proposes a zero-shot MMCPF that circumvents these challenges. Although MLLMs hold significant potential for broad applications, their effectiveness in COD is hindered and they would make misinterpretations of camouflaged objects. To address this challenge, we further propose a strategic enhancement called the Chain of Visual Perception (CoVP), which significantly improves the perceptual capabilities of MLLMs in camouflaged scenes by leveraging both linguistic and visual cues more effectively. We validate the effectiveness of MMCPF on five widely used COD datasets, containing CAMO, COD10K, NC4K, MoCA-Mask and OVCamo. Experiments show that MMCPF can outperform all existing state-of-the-art zero-shot COD methods, and achieve competitive performance compared to weakly-supervised and fully-supervised methods, which demonstrates the potential of MMCPF. The Github link of this paper is \url{https://github.com/luckybird1994/MMCPF}.
Authors:Zuyao Chen, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Lei, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Changwen Chen
Abstract:
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) offers a structured representation critical in many computer vision applications. Traditional SGG approaches, however, are limited by a closed-set assumption, restricting their ability to recognize only predefined object and relation categories. To overcome this, we categorize SGG scenarios into four distinct settings based on the node and edge: Closed-set SGG, Open Vocabulary (object) Detection-based SGG (OvD-SGG), Open Vocabulary Relation-based SGG (OvR-SGG), and Open Vocabulary Detection + Relationbased SGG (OvD+R-SGG). While object-centric open vocabulary SGG has been studied recently, the more challenging problem of relation-involved open-vocabulary SGG remains relatively unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a unified framework named OvSGTR towards fully open vocabulary SGG from a holistic view. The proposed framework is an end-to-end transformer architecture, which learns a visual-concept alignment for both nodes and edges, enabling the model to recognize unseen categories. For the more challenging settings of relation-involved open vocabulary SGG, the proposed approach integrates relation-aware pretraining utilizing image-caption data and retains visual-concept alignment through knowledge distillation. Comprehensive experimental results on the Visual Genome benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/gpt4vision/OvSGTR/.
Authors:Kaiming Cui, D. J. Armstrong, Fabo Feng
Abstract:
Vast amounts of astronomical photometric data are generated from various projects, requiring significant effort to identify variable stars and other object classes. In light of this, a general, widely applicable classification framework would simplify the process of designing specific classifiers for various astronomical objects. We present a novel deep learning framework for classifying light curves using a weakly supervised object detection model. Our framework identifies the optimal windows for both light curves and power spectra automatically, and zooms in on their corresponding data. This allows for automatic feature extraction from both time and frequency domains, enabling our model to handle data across different scales and sampling intervals. We train our model on data sets obtained from Kepler, TESS, and Zwicky Transient Facility multiband observations of variable stars and transients. We achieve an accuracy of 87% for combined variables and transient events, which is comparable to the performance of previous feature-based models. Our trained model can be utilized directly for other missions, such as the All-sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, without requiring any retraining or fine-tuning. To address known issues with miscalibrated predictive probabilities, we apply conformal prediction to generate robust predictive sets that guarantee true-label coverage with a given probability. Additionally, we incorporate various anomaly detection algorithms to empower our model with the ability to identify out-of-distribution objects. Our framework is implemented in the Deep-LC toolkit, which is an open-source Python package hosted on Github (https://github.com/ckm3/Deep-LC) and PyPI.
Authors:Chenjie Zhao, Ryan Wen Liu, Jingxiang Qu, Ruobin Gao
Abstract:
With the advancement of maritime unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning technologies, the application of UAV-based object detection has become increasingly significant in the fields of maritime industry and ocean engineering. Endowed with intelligent sensing capabilities, the maritime UAVs enable effective and efficient maritime surveillance. To further promote the development of maritime UAV-based object detection, this paper provides a comprehensive review of challenges, relative methods, and UAV aerial datasets. Specifically, in this work, we first briefly summarize four challenges for object detection on maritime UAVs, i.e., object feature diversity, device limitation, maritime environment variability, and dataset scarcity. We then focus on computational methods to improve maritime UAV-based object detection performance in terms of scale-aware, small object detection, view-aware, rotated object detection, lightweight methods, and others. Next, we review the UAV aerial image/video datasets and propose a maritime UAV aerial dataset named MS2ship for ship detection. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments to present the performance evaluation and robustness analysis of object detection methods on maritime datasets. Eventually, we give the discussion and outlook on future works for maritime UAV-based object detection. The MS2ship dataset is available at \href{https://github.com/zcj234/MS2ship}{https://github.com/zcj234/MS2ship}.
Authors:Junjie Huang, Yun Ye, Zhujin Liang, Yi Shan, Dalong Du
Abstract:
3D object Detection with LiDAR-camera encounters overfitting in algorithm development which is derived from the violation of some fundamental rules. We refer to the data annotation in dataset construction for theory complementing and argue that the regression task prediction should not involve the feature from the camera branch. By following the cutting-edge perspective of 'Detecting As Labeling', we propose a novel paradigm dubbed DAL. With the most classical elementary algorithms, a simple predicting pipeline is constructed by imitating the data annotation process. Then we train it in the simplest way to minimize its dependency and strengthen its portability. Though simple in construction and training, the proposed DAL paradigm not only substantially pushes the performance boundary but also provides a superior trade-off between speed and accuracy among all existing methods. With comprehensive superiority, DAL is an ideal baseline for both future work development and practical deployment. The code has been released to facilitate future work on https://github.com/HuangJunJie2017/BEVDet.
Authors:Ayman Beghdadi, Azeddine Beghdadi, Malik Mallem, Lotfi Beji, Faouzi Alaya Cheikh
Abstract:
The recent development of deep learning methods applied to vision has enabled their increasing integration into real-world applications to perform complex Computer Vision (CV) tasks. However, image acquisition conditions have a major impact on the performance of high-level image processing. A possible solution to overcome these limitations is to artificially augment the training databases or to design deep learning models that are robust to signal distortions. We opt here for the first solution by enriching the database with complex and realistic distortions which were ignored until now in the existing databases. To this end, we built a new versatile database derived from the well-known MS-COCO database to which we applied local and global photo-realistic distortions. These new local distortions are generated by considering the scene context of the images that guarantees a high level of photo-realism. Distortions are generated by exploiting the depth information of the objects in the scene as well as their semantics. This guarantees a high level of photo-realism and allows to explore real scenarios ignored in conventional databases dedicated to various CV applications. Our versatile database offers an efficient solution to improve the robustness of various CV tasks such as Object Detection (OD), scene segmentation, and distortion-type classification methods. The image database, scene classification index, and distortion generation codes are publicly available \footnote{\url{https://github.com/Aymanbegh/CD-COCO}}
Authors:Yash Jain, Harkirat Behl, Zsolt Kira, Vibhav Vineet
Abstract:
Construction of a universal detector poses a crucial question: How can we most effectively train a model on a large mixture of datasets? The answer lies in learning dataset-specific features and ensembling their knowledge but do all this in a single model. Previous methods achieve this by having separate detection heads on a common backbone but that results in a significant increase in parameters. In this work, we present Mixture-of-Experts as a solution, highlighting that MoEs are much more than a scalability tool. We propose Dataset-Aware Mixture-of-Experts, DAMEX where we train the experts to become an `expert' of a dataset by learning to route each dataset tokens to its mapped expert. Experiments on Universal Object-Detection Benchmark show that we outperform the existing state-of-the-art by average +10.2 AP score and improve over our non-MoE baseline by average +2.0 AP score. We also observe consistent gains while mixing datasets with (1) limited availability, (2) disparate domains and (3) divergent label sets. Further, we qualitatively show that DAMEX is robust against expert representation collapse.
Authors:Hoà ng-Ãn Lê, Minh-Tan Pham
Abstract:
Multi-task partially annotated data where each data point is annotated for only a single task are potentially helpful for data scarcity if a network can leverage the inter-task relationship. In this paper, we study the joint learning of object detection and semantic segmentation, the two most popular vision problems, from multi-task data with partial annotations. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate each task performance and explore their complementarity when a multi-task network cannot optimize both tasks simultaneously. We propose employing knowledge distillation to leverage joint-task optimization. The experimental results show favorable results for multi-task learning and knowledge distillation over single-task learning and even full supervision scenario. All code and data splits are available at https://github.com/lhoangan/multas
Authors:Jiahao Zhang, Bowen Wang, Liangzhi Li, Yuta Nakashima, Hajime Nagahara
Abstract:
Large-scale models trained on extensive datasets, have emerged as the preferred approach due to their high generalizability across various tasks. In-context learning (ICL), a popular strategy in natural language processing, uses such models for different tasks by providing instructive prompts but without updating model parameters. This idea is now being explored in computer vision, where an input-output image pair (called an in-context pair) is supplied to the model with a query image as a prompt to exemplify the desired output. The efficacy of visual ICL often depends on the quality of the prompts. We thus introduce a method coined Instruct Me More (InMeMo), which augments in-context pairs with a learnable perturbation (prompt), to explore its potential. Our experiments on mainstream tasks reveal that InMeMo surpasses the current state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, compared to the baseline without learnable prompt, InMeMo boosts mIoU scores by 7.35 and 15.13 for foreground segmentation and single object detection tasks, respectively. Our findings suggest that InMeMo offers a versatile and efficient way to enhance the performance of visual ICL with lightweight training. Code is available at https://github.com/Jackieam/InMeMo.
Authors:Austin Ebel, Karthik Garimella, Brandon Reagen
Abstract:
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has the potential to substantially improve privacy and security by enabling computation directly on encrypted data. This is especially true with deep learning, as today, many popular user services are powered by neural networks in the cloud. Beyond its well-known high computational costs, one of the major challenges facing wide-scale deployment of FHE-secured neural inference is effectively mapping these networks to FHE primitives. FHE poses many programming challenges including packing large vectors, managing accumulated noise, and translating arbitrary and general-purpose programs to the limited instruction set provided by FHE. These challenges make building large FHE neural networks intractable using the tools available today.
In this paper we address these challenges with Orion, a fully-automated framework for private neural inference using FHE. Orion accepts deep neural networks written in PyTorch and translates them into efficient FHE programs. We achieve this by proposing a novel single-shot multiplexed packing strategy for arbitrary convolutions and through a new, efficient technique to automate bootstrap placement and scale management. We evaluate Orion on common benchmarks used by the FHE deep learning community and outperform state-of-the-art by 2.38x on ResNet-20, the largest network they report. Orion's techniques enable processing much deeper and larger networks. We demonstrate this by evaluating ResNet-50 on ImageNet and present the first high-resolution FHE object detection experiments using a YOLO-v1 model with 139 million parameters. Orion is open-source for all to use at: https://github.com/baahl-nyu/orion
Authors:Tianyi Zhang, Kishore Kasichainula, Yaoxin Zhuo, Baoxin Li, Jae-Sun Seo, Yu Cao
Abstract:
Early object detection (OD) is a crucial task for the safety of many dynamic systems. Current OD algorithms have limited success for small objects at a long distance. To improve the accuracy and efficiency of such a task, we propose a novel set of algorithms that divide the image into patches, select patches with objects at various scales, elaborate the details of a small object, and detect it as early as possible. Our approach is built upon a transformer-based network and integrates the diffusion model to improve the detection accuracy. As demonstrated on BDD100K, our algorithms enhance the mAP for small objects from 1.03 to 8.93, and reduce the data volume in computation by more than 77\%. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/destiny301/dpr}{https://github.com/destiny301/dpr}
Authors:Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Tao Ye, Xiaoqi Cheng, Wuyang Liu, Haishu Tan
Abstract:
Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) integrates valuable information from different modality images into a fused one. However, the fusion of multiple visible images with different focal regions and infrared images is a unprecedented challenge in real MMIF applications. This is because of the limited depth of the focus of visible optical lenses, which impedes the simultaneous capture of the focal information within the same scene. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a MMIF framework for joint focused integration and modalities information extraction. Specifically, a semi-sparsity-based smoothing filter is introduced to decompose the images into structure and texture components. Subsequently, a novel multi-scale operator is proposed to fuse the texture components, capable of detecting significant information by considering the pixel focus attributes and relevant data from various modal images. Additionally, to achieve an effective capture of scene luminance and reasonable contrast maintenance, we consider the distribution of energy information in the structural components in terms of multi-directional frequency variance and information entropy. Extensive experiments on existing MMIF datasets, as well as the object detection and depth estimation tasks, consistently demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can surpass the state-of-the-art methods in visual perception and quantitative evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/ixilai/MFIF-MMIF.
Authors:Haibao Yu, Yingjuan Tang, Enze Xie, Jilei Mao, Ping Luo, Zaiqing Nie
Abstract:
Cooperatively utilizing both ego-vehicle and infrastructure sensor data can significantly enhance autonomous driving perception abilities. However, the uncertain temporal asynchrony and limited communication conditions can lead to fusion misalignment and constrain the exploitation of infrastructure data. To address these issues in vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D (VIC3D) object detection, we propose the Feature Flow Net (FFNet), a novel cooperative detection framework. FFNet is a flow-based feature fusion framework that uses a feature flow prediction module to predict future features and compensate for asynchrony. Instead of transmitting feature maps extracted from still-images, FFNet transmits feature flow, leveraging the temporal coherence of sequential infrastructure frames. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised training approach that enables FFNet to generate feature flow with feature prediction ability from raw infrastructure sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing cooperative detection methods while only requiring about 1/100 of the transmission cost of raw data and covers all latency in one model on the DAIR-V2X dataset. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/haibao-yu/FFNet-VIC3D}{https://github.com/haibao-yu/FFNet-VIC3D}.
Authors:André Luiz Buarque Vieira e Silva, Heitor de Castro Felix, Franscisco Paulo Magalhães Simões, Veronica Teichrieb, Michel Mozinho dos Santos, Hemir Santiago, Virginia Sgotti, Henrique Lott Neto
Abstract:
Power line maintenance and inspection are essential to avoid power supply interruptions, reducing its high social and financial impacts yearly. Automating power line visual inspections remains a relevant open problem for the industry due to the lack of public real-world datasets of power line components and their various defects to foster new research. This paper introduces InsPLAD, a Power Line Asset Inspection Dataset and Benchmark containing 10,607 high-resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicles colour images. The dataset contains seventeen unique power line assets captured from real-world operating power lines. Additionally, five of those assets present six defects: four of which are corrosion, one is a broken component, and one is a bird's nest presence. All assets were labelled according to their condition, whether normal or the defect name found on an image level. We thoroughly evaluate state-of-the-art and popular methods for three image-level computer vision tasks covered by InsPLAD: object detection, through the AP metric; defect classification, through Balanced Accuracy; and anomaly detection, through the AUROC metric. InsPLAD offers various vision challenges from uncontrolled environments, such as multi-scale objects, multi-size class instances, multiple objects per image, intra-class variation, cluttered background, distinct point-of-views, perspective distortion, occlusion, and varied lighting conditions. To the best of our knowledge, InsPLAD is the first large real-world dataset and benchmark for power line asset inspection with multiple components and defects for various computer vision tasks, with a potential impact to improve state-of-the-art methods in the field. It will be publicly available in its integrity on a repository with a thorough description. It can be found at https://github.com/andreluizbvs/InsPLAD.
Authors:Haosen Yang, Chuofan Ma, Bin Wen, Yi Jiang, Zehuan Yuan, Xiatian Zhu
Abstract:
Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches of unconstrained images, such as open-world object detection, remains a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Extensive experiments in open-world object recognition show that our RegionSpot achieves significant performance gain over prior alternatives, along with substantial computational savings (e.g., training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs). RegionSpot outperforms GLIP-L by 2.9 in mAP on LVIS val set, with an even larger margin of 13.1 AP for more challenging and rare categories, and a 2.5 AP increase on ODinW. Furthermore, it exceeds GroundingDINO-L by 11.0 AP for rare categories on the LVIS minival set.
Authors:Jin Li, Yaoming Wang, Xiaopeng Zhang, Bowen Shi, Dongsheng Jiang, Chenglin Li, Wenrui Dai, Hongkai Xiong, Qi Tian
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a prevalent architecture for vision tasks owing to their impressive performance. However, when it comes to handling long token sequences, especially in dense prediction tasks that require high-resolution input, the complexity of ViTs increases significantly. Notably, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation or object detection, emphasize more on the contours or shapes of objects, while the texture inside objects is less informative. Motivated by this observation, we propose to apply adaptive resolution for different regions in the image according to their importance. Specifically, at the intermediate layer of the ViT, we utilize a spatial-aware density-based clustering algorithm to select representative tokens from the token sequence. Once the representative tokens are determined, we proceed to merge other tokens into their closest representative token. Consequently, semantic similar tokens are merged together to form low-resolution regions, while semantic irrelevant tokens are preserved independently as high-resolution regions. This strategy effectively reduces the number of tokens, allowing subsequent layers to handle a reduced token sequence and achieve acceleration. We evaluate our proposed method on three different datasets and observe promising performance. For example, the "Segmenter ViT-L" model can be accelerated by 48% FPS without fine-tuning, while maintaining the performance. Additionally, our method can be applied to accelerate fine-tuning as well. Experimental results demonstrate that we can save 52% training time while accelerating 2.46 times FPS with only a 0.09% performance drop. The code is available at https://github.com/caddyless/ailurus/tree/main.
Authors:Shen Zheng, Changjie Lu, Srinivasa G. Narasimhan
Abstract:
Rain generation algorithms have the potential to improve the generalization of deraining methods and scene understanding in rainy conditions. However, in practice, they produce artifacts and distortions and struggle to control the amount of rain generated due to a lack of proper constraints. In this paper, we propose an unpaired image-to-image translation framework for generating realistic rainy images. We first introduce a Triangular Probability Similarity (TPS) constraint to guide the generated images toward clear and rainy images in the discriminator manifold, thereby minimizing artifacts and distortions during rain generation. Unlike conventional contrastive learning approaches, which indiscriminately push negative samples away from the anchors, we propose a Semantic Noise Contrastive Estimation (SeNCE) strategy and reassess the pushing force of negative samples based on the semantic similarity between the clear and the rainy images and the feature similarity between the anchor and the negative samples. Experiments demonstrate realistic rain generation with minimal artifacts and distortions, which benefits image deraining and object detection in rain. Furthermore, the method can be used to generate realistic snowy and night images, underscoring its potential for broader applicability. Code is available at https://github.com/ShenZheng2000/TPSeNCE.
Authors:Zhanwen Liu, Nan Yang, Yang Wang, Yuke Li, Xiangmo Zhao, Fei-Yue Wang
Abstract:
Traffic object detection under variable illumination is challenging due to the information loss caused by the limited dynamic range of conventional frame-based cameras. To address this issue, we introduce bio-inspired event cameras and propose a novel Structure-aware Fusion Network (SFNet) that extracts sharp and complete object structures from the event stream to compensate for the lost information in images through cross-modality fusion, enabling the network to obtain illumination-robust representations for traffic object detection. Specifically, to mitigate the sparsity or blurriness issues arising from diverse motion states of traffic objects in fixed-interval event sampling methods, we propose the Reliable Structure Generation Network (RSGNet) to generate Speed Invariant Frames (SIF), ensuring the integrity and sharpness of object structures. Next, we design a novel Adaptive Feature Complement Module (AFCM) which guides the adaptive fusion of two modality features to compensate for the information loss in the images by perceiving the global lightness distribution of the images, thereby generating illumination-robust representations. Finally, considering the lack of large-scale and high-quality annotations in the existing event-based object detection datasets, we build a DSEC-Det dataset, which consists of 53 sequences with 63,931 images and more than 208,000 labels for 8 classes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SFNet can overcome the perceptual boundaries of conventional cameras and outperform the frame-based method by 8.0% in mAP50 and 5.9% in mAP50:95. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/YN-Yang/SFNet.
Authors:Gang Zhang, Junnan Chen, Guohuan Gao, Jianmin Li, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract:
3D object detection in point clouds is important for autonomous driving systems. A primary challenge in 3D object detection stems from the sparse distribution of points within the 3D scene. Existing high-performance methods typically employ 3D sparse convolutional neural networks with small kernels to extract features. To reduce computational costs, these methods resort to submanifold sparse convolutions, which prevent the information exchange among spatially disconnected features. Some recent approaches have attempted to address this problem by introducing large-kernel convolutions or self-attention mechanisms, but they either achieve limited accuracy improvements or incur excessive computational costs. We propose HEDNet, a hierarchical encoder-decoder network for 3D object detection, which leverages encoder-decoder blocks to capture long-range dependencies among features in the spatial space, particularly for large and distant objects. We conducted extensive experiments on the Waymo Open and nuScenes datasets. HEDNet achieved superior detection accuracy on both datasets than previous state-of-the-art methods with competitive efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/HEDNet.
Authors:Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Recent camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged objects and their background, objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To this end, we propose an effective unified collaborative pyramid network that mimics human behavior when observing vague images and videos, \ie zooming in and out. Specifically, our approach employs the zooming strategy to learn discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the multi-head scale integration and rich granularity perception units, which are designed to fully explore imperceptible clues between candidate objects and background surroundings. The former's intrinsic multi-head aggregation provides more diverse visual patterns. The latter's routing mechanism can effectively propagate inter-frame differences in spatiotemporal scenarios and be adaptively deactivated and output all-zero results for static representations. They provide a solid foundation for realizing a unified architecture for static and dynamic COD. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization, uncertainty awareness loss, to encourage predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Our highly task-friendly framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in image and video COD benchmarks. Our code can be found at {https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNeXt}.
Authors:Micah Goldblum, Hossein Souri, Renkun Ni, Manli Shu, Viraj Prabhu, Gowthami Somepalli, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Mark Ibrahim, Adrien Bardes, Judy Hoffman, Rama Chellappa, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Tom Goldstein
Abstract:
Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network. However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones pretrained using various algorithms and datasets. While this abundance of choice has led to performance increases for a range of systems, it is difficult for practitioners to make informed decisions about which backbone to choose. Battle of the Backbones (BoB) makes this choice easier by benchmarking a diverse suite of pretrained models, including vision-language models, those trained via self-supervised learning, and the Stable Diffusion backbone, across a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object detection to OOD generalization and more. Furthermore, BoB sheds light on promising directions for the research community to advance computer vision by illuminating strengths and weakness of existing approaches through a comprehensive analysis conducted on more than 1500 training runs. While vision transformers (ViTs) and self-supervised learning (SSL) are increasingly popular, we find that convolutional neural networks pretrained in a supervised fashion on large training sets still perform best on most tasks among the models we consider. Moreover, in apples-to-apples comparisons on the same architectures and similarly sized pretraining datasets, we find that SSL backbones are highly competitive, indicating that future works should perform SSL pretraining with advanced architectures and larger pretraining datasets. We release the raw results of our experiments along with code that allows researchers to put their own backbones through the gauntlet here: https://github.com/hsouri/Battle-of-the-Backbones
Authors:Sri Aditya Deevi, Connor Lee, Lu Gan, Sushruth Nagesh, Gaurav Pandey, Soon-Jo Chung
Abstract:
Multimodal deep sensor fusion has the potential to enable autonomous vehicles to visually understand their surrounding environments in all weather conditions. However, existing deep sensor fusion methods usually employ convoluted architectures with intermingled multimodal features, requiring large coregistered multimodal datasets for training. In this work, we present an efficient and modular RGB-X fusion network that can leverage and fuse pretrained single-modal models via scene-specific fusion modules, thereby enabling joint input-adaptive network architectures to be created using small, coregistered multimodal datasets. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing works on RGB-thermal and RGB-gated datasets, performing fusion using only a small amount of additional parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/dsriaditya999/RGBXFusion.
Authors:Vishal Asnani, Abhinav Kumar, Suya You, Xiaoming Liu
Abstract:
Previous research in $2D$ object detection focuses on various tasks, including detecting objects in generic and camouflaged images. These works are regarded as passive works for object detection as they take the input image as is. However, convergence to global minima is not guaranteed to be optimal in neural networks; therefore, we argue that the trained weights in the object detector are not optimal. To rectify this problem, we propose a wrapper based on proactive schemes, PrObeD, which enhances the performance of these object detectors by learning a signal. PrObeD consists of an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder network generates an image-dependent signal termed templates to encrypt the input images, and the decoder recovers this template from the encrypted images. We propose that learning the optimum template results in an object detector with an improved detection performance. The template acts as a mask to the input images to highlight semantics useful for the object detector. Finetuning the object detector with these encrypted images enhances the detection performance for both generic and camouflaged. Our experiments on MS-COCO, CAMO, COD$10$K, and NC$4$K datasets show improvement over different detectors after applying PrObeD. Our models/codes are available at https://github.com/vishal3477/Proactive-Object-Detection.
Authors:Chau Pham, Truong Vu, Khoi Nguyen
Abstract:
This paper addresses the challenging problem of open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) where an object detector must identify both seen and unseen classes in test images without labeled examples of the unseen classes in training. A typical approach for OVOD is to use joint text-image embeddings of CLIP to assign box proposals to their closest text label. However, this method has a critical issue: many low-quality boxes, such as over- and under-covered-object boxes, have the same similarity score as high-quality boxes since CLIP is not trained on exact object location information. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, LP-OVOD, that discards low-quality boxes by training a sigmoid linear classifier on pseudo labels retrieved from the top relevant region proposals to the novel text. Experimental results on COCO affirm the superior performance of our approach over the state of the art, achieving $\textbf{40.5}$ in $\text{AP}_{novel}$ using ResNet50 as the backbone and without external datasets or knowing novel classes during training. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LP-OVOD.
Authors:Chuofan Ma, Yi Jiang, Xin Wen, Zehuan Yuan, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract:
Deriving reliable region-word alignment from image-text pairs is critical to learn object-level vision-language representations for open-vocabulary object detection. Existing methods typically rely on pre-trained or self-trained vision-language models for alignment, which are prone to limitations in localization accuracy or generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose CoDet, a novel approach that overcomes the reliance on pre-aligned vision-language space by reformulating region-word alignment as a co-occurring object discovery problem. Intuitively, by grouping images that mention a shared concept in their captions, objects corresponding to the shared concept shall exhibit high co-occurrence among the group. CoDet then leverages visual similarities to discover the co-occurring objects and align them with the shared concept. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoDet has superior performances and compelling scalability in open-vocabulary detection, e.g., by scaling up the visual backbone, CoDet achieves 37.0 $\text{AP}^m_{novel}$ and 44.7 $\text{AP}^m_{all}$ on OV-LVIS, surpassing the previous SoTA by 4.2 $\text{AP}^m_{novel}$ and 9.8 $\text{AP}^m_{all}$. Code is available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/CoDet.
Authors:Ao Mou, Yukang Lu, Jiahao He, Dingyao Min, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract:
Given the widespread adoption of depth-sensing acquisition devices, RGB-D videos and related data/media have gained considerable traction in various aspects of daily life. Consequently, conducting salient object detection (SOD) in RGB-D videos presents a highly promising and evolving avenue. Despite the potential of this area, SOD in RGB-D videos remains somewhat under-explored, with RGB-D SOD and video SOD (VSOD) traditionally studied in isolation. To explore this emerging field, this paper makes two primary contributions: the dataset and the model. On one front, we construct the RDVS dataset, a new RGB-D VSOD dataset with realistic depth and characterized by its diversity of scenes and rigorous frame-by-frame annotations. We validate the dataset through comprehensive attribute and object-oriented analyses, and provide training and testing splits. Moreover, we introduce DCTNet+, a three-stream network tailored for RGB-D VSOD, with an emphasis on RGB modality and treats depth and optical flow as auxiliary modalities. In pursuit of effective feature enhancement, refinement, and fusion for precise final prediction, we propose two modules: the multi-modal attention module (MAM) and the refinement fusion module (RFM). To enhance interaction and fusion within RFM, we design a universal interaction module (UIM) and then integrate holistic multi-modal attentive paths (HMAPs) for refining multi-modal low-level features before reaching RFMs. Comprehensive experiments, conducted on pseudo RGB-D video datasets alongside our RDVS, highlight the superiority of DCTNet+ over 17 VSOD models and 14 RGB-D SOD models. Ablation experiments were performed on both pseudo and realistic RGB-D video datasets to demonstrate the advantages of individual modules as well as the necessity of introducing realistic depth. Our code together with RDVS dataset will be available at https://github.com/kerenfu/RDVS/.
Authors:Chunlei Wang, Wenquan Feng, Xiangtai Li, Guangliang Cheng, Shuchang Lyu, Binghao Liu, Lijiang Chen, Qi Zhao
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary learning has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, particularly in light of the widespread adoption of vision-based foundational models. Its primary objective is to comprehend novel concepts that are not encompassed within a predefined vocabulary. One key facet of this endeavor is Visual Grounding, which entails locating a specific region within an image based on a corresponding language description. While current foundational models excel at various visual language tasks, there's a noticeable absence of models specifically tailored for open-vocabulary visual grounding. This research endeavor introduces novel and challenging OV tasks, namely Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding and Open-Vocabulary Phrase Localization. The overarching aim is to establish connections between language descriptions and the localization of novel objects. To facilitate this, we have curated a comprehensive annotated benchmark, encompassing 7,272 OV-VG images and 1,000 OV-PL images. In our pursuit of addressing these challenges, we delved into various baseline methodologies rooted in existing open-vocabulary object detection, VG, and phrase localization frameworks. Surprisingly, we discovered that state-of-the-art methods often falter in diverse scenarios. Consequently, we developed a novel framework that integrates two critical components: Text-Image Query Selection and Language-Guided Feature Attention. These modules are designed to bolster the recognition of novel categories and enhance the alignment between visual and linguistic information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework, which consistently attains SOTA performance across the OV-VG task. Additionally, ablation studies provide further evidence of the effectiveness of our innovative models. Codes and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cv516Buaa/OV-VG.
Authors:Abhineet Singh
Abstract:
This paper presents a fast and modular framework for Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) based on the Markov descision process (MDP) tracking-by-detection paradigm. It is designed to allow its various functional components to be replaced by custom-designed alternatives to suit a given application. An interactive GUI with integrated object detection, segmentation, MOT and semi-automated labeling is also provided to help make it easier to get started with this framework. Though not breaking new ground in terms of performance, Deep MDP has a large code-base that should be useful for the community to try out new ideas or simply to have an easy-to-use and easy-to-adapt system for any MOT application. Deep MDP is available at https://github.com/abhineet123/deep_mdp.
Authors:Jinlai Ning, Michael Spratling
Abstract:
Tiny object detection has gained considerable attention in the research community owing to the frequent occurrence of tiny objects in numerous critical real-world scenarios. However, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used as the backbone for object detection architectures typically neglect Nyquist's sampling theorem during down-sampling operations, resulting in aliasing and degraded performance. This is likely to be a particular issue for tiny objects that occupy very few pixels and therefore have high spatial frequency features. This paper applied an existing approach WaveCNet for anti-aliasing to tiny object detection. WaveCNet addresses aliasing by replacing standard down-sampling processes in CNNs with Wavelet Pooling (WaveletPool) layers, effectively suppressing aliasing. We modify the original WaveCNet to apply WaveletPool in a consistent way in both pathways of the residual blocks in ResNets. Additionally, we also propose a bottom-heavy version of the backbone, which further improves the performance of tiny object detection while also reducing the required number of parameters by almost half. Experimental results on the TinyPerson, WiderFace, and DOTA datasets demonstrate the importance of anti-aliasing in tiny object detection and the effectiveness of the proposed method which achieves new state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. Codes and experiment results are released at https://github.com/freshn/Anti-aliasing-Tiny-Object-Detection.git.
Authors:Jingyi Yu, Zizhao Zhang, Shengfu Xia, Jizhang Sang
Abstract:
We propose a novel end-to-end pipeline for online long-range vectorized high-definition (HD) map construction using on-board camera sensors. The vectorized representation of HD maps, employing polylines and polygons to represent map elements, is widely used by downstream tasks. However, previous schemes designed with reference to dynamic object detection overlook the structural constraints within linear map elements, resulting in performance degradation in long-range scenarios. In this paper, we exploit the properties of map elements to improve the performance of map construction. We extract more accurate bird's eye view (BEV) features guided by their linear structure, and then propose a hierarchical sparse map representation to further leverage the scalability of vectorized map elements and design a progressive decoding mechanism and a supervision strategy based on this representation. Our approach, ScalableMap, demonstrates superior performance on the nuScenes dataset, especially in long-range scenarios, surpassing previous state-of-the-art model by 6.5 mAP while achieving 18.3 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/jingy1yu/ScalableMap.
Authors:Zhaohui Zheng, Yuming Chen, Qibin Hou, Xiang Li, Ping Wang, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
A fundamental limitation of object detectors is that they suffer from "spatial bias", and in particular perform less satisfactorily when detecting objects near image borders. For a long time, there has been a lack of effective ways to measure and identify spatial bias, and little is known about where it comes from and what degree it is. To this end, we present a new zone evaluation protocol, extending from the traditional evaluation to a more generalized one, which measures the detection performance over zones, yielding a series of Zone Precisions (ZPs). For the first time, we provide numerical results, showing that the object detectors perform quite unevenly across the zones. Surprisingly, the detector's performance in the 96% border zone of the image does not reach the AP value (Average Precision, commonly regarded as the average detection performance in the entire image zone). To better understand spatial bias, a series of heuristic experiments are conducted. Our investigation excludes two intuitive conjectures about spatial bias that the object scale and the absolute positions of objects barely influence the spatial bias. We find that the key lies in the human-imperceptible divergence in data patterns between objects in different zones, thus eventually forming a visible performance gap between the zones. With these findings, we finally discuss a future direction for object detection, namely, spatial disequilibrium problem, aiming at pursuing a balanced detection ability over the entire image zone. By broadly evaluating 10 popular object detectors and 5 detection datasets, we shed light on the spatial bias of object detectors. We hope this work could raise a focus on detection robustness. The source codes, evaluation protocols, and tutorials are publicly available at https://github.com/Zzh-tju/ZoneEval.
Authors:Lingchen Meng, Xiyang Dai, Jianwei Yang, Dongdong Chen, Yinpeng Chen, Mengchen Liu, Yi-Ling Chen, Zuxuan Wu, Lu Yuan, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Long-tailed object detection (LTOD) aims to handle the extreme data imbalance in real-world datasets, where many tail classes have scarce instances. One popular strategy is to explore extra data with image-level labels, yet it produces limited results due to (1) semantic ambiguity -- an image-level label only captures a salient part of the image, ignoring the remaining rich semantics within the image; and (2) location sensitivity -- the label highly depends on the locations and crops of the original image, which may change after data transformations like random cropping. To remedy this, we propose RichSem, a simple but effective method, which is robust to learn rich semantics from coarse locations without the need of accurate bounding boxes. RichSem leverages rich semantics from images, which are then served as additional soft supervision for training detectors. Specifically, we add a semantic branch to our detector to learn these soft semantics and enhance feature representations for long-tailed object detection. The semantic branch is only used for training and is removed during inference. RichSem achieves consistent improvements on both overall and rare-category of LVIS under different backbones and detectors. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring complex training and testing procedures. Moreover, we show the effectiveness of our method on other long-tailed datasets with additional experiments. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/MengLcool/RichSem}.
Authors:Dhruba Ghosh, Hanna Hajishirzi, Ludwig Schmidt
Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in diffusion models, multimodal pretraining, and efficient finetuning have led to an explosion of text-to-image generative models. Given human evaluation is expensive and difficult to scale, automated methods are critical for evaluating the increasingly large number of new models. However, most current automated evaluation metrics like FID or CLIPScore only offer a holistic measure of image quality or image-text alignment, and are unsuited for fine-grained or instance-level analysis. In this paper, we introduce GenEval, an object-focused framework to evaluate compositional image properties such as object co-occurrence, position, count, and color. We show that current object detection models can be leveraged to evaluate text-to-image models on a variety of generation tasks with strong human agreement, and that other discriminative vision models can be linked to this pipeline to further verify properties like object color. We then evaluate several open-source text-to-image models and analyze their relative generative capabilities on our benchmark. We find that recent models demonstrate significant improvement on these tasks, though they are still lacking in complex capabilities such as spatial relations and attribute binding. Finally, we demonstrate how GenEval might be used to help discover existing failure modes, in order to inform development of the next generation of text-to-image models. Our code to run the GenEval framework is publicly available at https://github.com/djghosh13/geneval.
Authors:Hao Lu, Yunpeng Zhang, Qing Lian, Dalong Du, Yingcong Chen
Abstract:
Detecting objects in 3D space using multiple cameras, known as Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection (MC3D-Det), has gained prominence with the advent of bird's-eye view (BEV) approaches. However, these methods often struggle when faced with unfamiliar testing environments due to the lack of diverse training data encompassing various viewpoints and environments. To address this, we propose a novel method that aligns 3D detection with 2D camera plane results, ensuring consistent and accurate detections. Our framework, anchored in perspective debiasing, helps the learning of features resilient to domain shifts. In our approach, we render diverse view maps from BEV features and rectify the perspective bias of these maps, leveraging implicit foreground volumes to bridge the camera and BEV planes. This two-step process promotes the learning of perspective- and context-independent features, crucial for accurate object detection across varying viewpoints, camera parameters, and environmental conditions. Notably, our model-agnostic approach preserves the original network structure without incurring additional inference costs, facilitating seamless integration across various models and simplifying deployment. Furthermore, we also show our approach achieves satisfactory results in real data when trained only with virtual datasets, eliminating the need for real scene annotations. Experimental results on both Domain Generalization (DG) and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) clearly demonstrate its effectiveness. The codes are available at https://github.com/EnVision-Research/Generalizable-BEV.
Authors:Sen Wang, Jin Zheng
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is an inherently ill-posed problem, as it is challenging to predict accurate 3D localization from a single image. Existing monocular 3D detection knowledge distillation methods usually project the LiDAR onto the image plane and train the teacher network accordingly. Transferring LiDAR-based model knowledge to RGB-based models is more complex, so a general distillation strategy is needed. To alleviate cross-modal prob-lem, we propose MonoSKD, a novel Knowledge Distillation framework for Monocular 3D detection based on Spearman correlation coefficient, to learn the relative correlation between cross-modal features. Considering the large gap between these features, strict alignment of features may mislead the training, so we propose a looser Spearman loss. Furthermore, by selecting appropriate distillation locations and removing redundant modules, our scheme saves more GPU resources and trains faster than existing methods. Extensive experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of our framework on the challenging KITTI 3D object detection benchmark. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance until submission with no additional inference computational cost. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Senwang98/MonoSKD
Authors:Zhuoxiao Chen, Yadan Luo, Zixin Wang, Zijian Wang, Xin Yu, Zi Huang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection has recently seen significant advancements through active learning (AL), attaining satisfactory performance by training on a small fraction of strategically selected point clouds. However, in real-world deployments where streaming point clouds may include unknown or novel objects, the ability of current AL methods to capture such objects remains unexplored. This paper investigates a more practical and challenging research task: Open World Active Learning for 3D Object Detection (OWAL-3D), aimed at acquiring informative point clouds with new concepts. To tackle this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective strategy called Open Label Conciseness (OLC), which mines novel 3D objects with minimal annotation costs. Our empirical results show that OLC successfully adapts the 3D detection model to the open world scenario with just a single round of selection. Any generic AL policy can then be integrated with the proposed OLC to efficiently address the OWAL-3D problem. Based on this, we introduce the Open-CRB framework, which seamlessly integrates OLC with our preliminary AL method, CRB, designed specifically for 3D object detection. We develop a comprehensive codebase for easy reproducing and future research, supporting 15 baseline methods (\textit{i.e.}, active learning, out-of-distribution detection and open world detection), 2 types of modern 3D detectors (\textit{i.e.}, one-stage SECOND and two-stage PV-RCNN) and 3 benchmark 3D datasets (\textit{i.e.}, KITTI, nuScenes and Waymo). Extensive experiments evidence that the proposed Open-CRB demonstrates superiority and flexibility in recognizing both novel and known classes with very limited labeling costs, compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Luoyadan/CRB-active-3Ddet/tree/Open-CRB}.
Authors:Zijun Long, George Killick, Richard McCreadie, Gerardo Aragon Camarasa
Abstract:
Robotic vision applications often necessitate a wide range of visual perception tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and identification. While there have been substantial advances in these individual tasks, integrating specialized models into a unified vision pipeline presents significant engineering challenges and costs. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as novel backbones for various downstream tasks. We argue that leveraging the pre-training capabilities of MLLMs enables the creation of a simplified framework, thus mitigating the need for task-specific encoders. Specifically, the large-scale pretrained knowledge in MLLMs allows for easier fine-tuning to downstream robotic vision tasks and yields superior performance. We introduce the RoboLLM framework, equipped with a BEiT-3 backbone, to address all visual perception tasks in the ARMBench challenge-a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset about real-world warehouse scenarios. RoboLLM not only outperforms existing baselines but also substantially reduces the engineering burden associated with model selection and tuning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/longkukuhi/armbench.
Authors:Medha Sawhney, Bhas Karmarkar, Eric J. Leaman, Arka Daw, Anuj Karpatne, Bahareh Behkam
Abstract:
Tracking microrobots is challenging, considering their minute size and high speed. As the field progresses towards developing microrobots for biomedical applications and conducting mechanistic studies in physiologically relevant media (e.g., collagen), this challenge is exacerbated by the dense surrounding environments with feature size and shape comparable to microrobots. Herein, we report Motion Enhanced Multi-level Tracker (MEMTrack), a robust pipeline for detecting and tracking microrobots using synthetic motion features, deep learning-based object detection, and a modified Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) algorithm with interpolation for tracking. Our object detection approach combines different models based on the object's motion pattern. We trained and validated our model using bacterial micro-motors in collagen (tissue phantom) and tested it in collagen and aqueous media. We demonstrate that MEMTrack accurately tracks even the most challenging bacteria missed by skilled human annotators, achieving precision and recall of 77% and 48% in collagen and 94% and 35% in liquid media, respectively. Moreover, we show that MEMTrack can quantify average bacteria speed with no statistically significant difference from the laboriously-produced manual tracking data. MEMTrack represents a significant contribution to microrobot localization and tracking, and opens the potential for vision-based deep learning approaches to microrobot control in dense and low-contrast settings. All source code for training and testing MEMTrack and reproducing the results of the paper have been made publicly available https://github.com/sawhney-medha/MEMTrack.
Authors:Yifan Pu, Weicong Liang, Yiduo Hao, Yuhui Yuan, Yukang Yang, Chao Zhang, Han Hu, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Modern detection transformers (DETRs) use a set of object queries to predict a list of bounding boxes, sort them by their classification confidence scores, and select the top-ranked predictions as the final detection results for the given input image. A highly performant object detector requires accurate ranking for the bounding box predictions. For DETR-based detectors, the top-ranked bounding boxes suffer from less accurate localization quality due to the misalignment between classification scores and localization accuracy, thus impeding the construction of high-quality detectors. In this work, we introduce a simple and highly performant DETR-based object detector by proposing a series of rank-oriented designs, combinedly called Rank-DETR. Our key contributions include: (i) a rank-oriented architecture design that can prompt positive predictions and suppress the negative ones to ensure lower false positive rates, as well as (ii) a rank-oriented loss function and matching cost design that prioritizes predictions of more accurate localization accuracy during ranking to boost the AP under high IoU thresholds. We apply our method to improve the recent SOTA methods (e.g., H-DETR and DINO-DETR) and report strong COCO object detection results when using different backbones such as ResNet-$50$, Swin-T, and Swin-L, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Rank-DETR}.
Authors:Honghui Yang, Sha Zhang, Di Huang, Xiaoyang Wu, Haoyi Zhu, Tong He, Shixiang Tang, Hengshuang Zhao, Qibo Qiu, Binbin Lin, Xiaofei He, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract:
In the context of autonomous driving, the significance of effective feature learning is widely acknowledged. While conventional 3D self-supervised pre-training methods have shown widespread success, most methods follow the ideas originally designed for 2D images. In this paper, we present UniPAD, a novel self-supervised learning paradigm applying 3D volumetric differentiable rendering. UniPAD implicitly encodes 3D space, facilitating the reconstruction of continuous 3D shape structures and the intricate appearance characteristics of their 2D projections. The flexibility of our method enables seamless integration into both 2D and 3D frameworks, enabling a more holistic comprehension of the scenes. We manifest the feasibility and effectiveness of UniPAD by conducting extensive experiments on various downstream 3D tasks. Our method significantly improves lidar-, camera-, and lidar-camera-based baseline by 9.1, 7.7, and 6.9 NDS, respectively. Notably, our pre-training pipeline achieves 73.2 NDS for 3D object detection and 79.4 mIoU for 3D semantic segmentation on the nuScenes validation set, achieving state-of-the-art results in comparison with previous methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/Nightmare-n/UniPAD.
Authors:Xinyu Zhang, Li Wang, Jian Chen, Cheng Fang, Lei Yang, Ziying Song, Guangqi Yang, Yichen Wang, Xiaofei Zhang, Jun Li, Zhiwei Li, Qingshan Yang, Zhenlin Zhang, Shuzhi Sam Ge
Abstract:
Radar has stronger adaptability in adverse scenarios for autonomous driving environmental perception compared to widely adopted cameras and LiDARs. Compared with commonly used 3D radars, the latest 4D radars have precise vertical resolution and higher point cloud density, making it a highly promising sensor for autonomous driving in complex environmental perception. However, due to the much higher noise than LiDAR, manufacturers choose different filtering strategies, resulting in an inverse ratio between noise level and point cloud density. There is still a lack of comparative analysis on which method is beneficial for deep learning-based perception algorithms in autonomous driving. One of the main reasons is that current datasets only adopt one type of 4D radar, making it difficult to compare different 4D radars in the same scene. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel large-scale multi-modal dataset featuring, for the first time, two types of 4D radars captured simultaneously. This dataset enables further research into effective 4D radar perception algorithms.Our dataset consists of 151 consecutive series, most of which last 20 seconds and contain 10,007 meticulously synchronized and annotated frames. Moreover, our dataset captures a variety of challenging driving scenarios, including many road conditions, weather conditions, nighttime and daytime with different lighting intensities and periods. Our dataset annotates consecutive frames, which can be applied to 3D object detection and tracking, and also supports the study of multi-modal tasks. We experimentally validate our dataset, providing valuable results for studying different types of 4D radars. This dataset is released on https://github.com/adept-thu/Dual-Radar.
Authors:Che Liu, Anand Shah, Wenjia Bai, Rossella Arcucci
Abstract:
Medical Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) learns representations jointly from medical images and paired radiology reports. It typically requires large-scale paired image-text datasets to achieve effective pre-training for both the image encoder and text encoder. The advent of text-guided generative models raises a compelling question: Can VLP be implemented solely with synthetic images generated from genuine radiology reports, thereby mitigating the need for extensively pairing and curating image-text datasets? In this work, we scrutinize this very question by examining the feasibility and effectiveness of employing synthetic images for medical VLP. We replace real medical images with their synthetic equivalents, generated from authentic medical reports. Utilizing three state-of-the-art VLP algorithms, we exclusively train on these synthetic samples. Our empirical evaluation across three subsequent tasks, namely image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection, reveals that the performance achieved through synthetic data is on par with or even exceeds that obtained with real images. As a pioneering contribution to this domain, we introduce a large-scale synthetic medical image dataset, paired with anonymized real radiology reports. This alleviates the need of sharing medical images, which are not easy to curate and share in practice. The code and the dataset can be found in \href{https://github.com/cheliu-computation/MedSyn-RepLearn/tree/main}{https://github.com/cheliu-computation/MedSyn-RepLearn/tree/main}.
Authors:Yulong Shi, Mingwei Sun, Yongshuai Wang, Jiahao Ma, Zengqiang Chen
Abstract:
Owing to advancements in deep learning technology, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various computer vision tasks. Nonetheless, ViTs still face some challenges, such as high computational complexity and the absence of desirable inductive biases. To alleviate these issues, {the potential advantages of combining eagle vision with ViTs are explored. We summarize a Bi-Fovea Visual Interaction (BFVI) structure inspired by the unique physiological and visual characteristics of eagle eyes. A novel Bi-Fovea Self-Attention (BFSA) mechanism and Bi-Fovea Feedforward Network (BFFN) are proposed based on this structural design approach, which can be used to mimic the hierarchical and parallel information processing scheme of the biological visual cortex, enabling networks to learn feature representations of targets in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore, a Bionic Eagle Vision (BEV) block is designed as the basic building unit based on the BFSA mechanism and BFFN. By stacking BEV blocks, a unified and efficient family of pyramid backbone networks called Eagle Vision Transformers (EViTs) is developed. Experimental results show that EViTs exhibit highly competitive performance in various computer vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. Compared with other approaches, EViTs have significant advantages, especially in terms of performance and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/nkusyl/EViT
Authors:Caizhen He, Hai Wang, Long Chen, Tong Luo, Yingfeng Cai
Abstract:
Object detection is the central issue of intelligent traffic systems, and recent advancements in single-vehicle lidar-based 3D detection indicate that it can provide accurate position information for intelligent agents to make decisions and plan. Compared with single-vehicle perception, multi-view vehicle-road cooperation perception has fundamental advantages, such as the elimination of blind spots and a broader range of perception, and has become a research hotspot. However, the current perception of cooperation focuses on improving the complexity of fusion while ignoring the fundamental problems caused by the absence of single-view outlines. We propose a multi-view vehicle-road cooperation perception system, vehicle-to-everything cooperative perception (V2X-AHD), in order to enhance the identification capability, particularly for predicting the vehicle's shape. At first, we propose an asymmetric heterogeneous distillation network fed with different training data to improve the accuracy of contour recognition, with multi-view teacher features transferring to single-view student features. While the point cloud data are sparse, we propose Spara Pillar, a spare convolutional-based plug-in feature extraction backbone, to reduce the number of parameters and improve and enhance feature extraction capabilities. Moreover, we leverage the multi-head self-attention (MSA) to fuse the single-view feature, and the lightweight design makes the fusion feature a smooth expression. The results of applying our algorithm to the massive open dataset V2Xset demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art result. The V2X-AHD can effectively improve the accuracy of 3D object detection and reduce the number of network parameters, according to this study, which serves as a benchmark for cooperative perception. The code for this article is available at https://github.com/feeling0414-lab/V2X-AHD.
Authors:Jiawei Yao, Yingxin Lai, Hongrui Kou, Tong Wu, Ruixi Liu
Abstract:
3D object detection plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving and robotics, demanding precise interpretation of Bird's Eye View (BEV) images. The dynamic nature of real-world environments necessitates the use of dynamic query mechanisms in 3D object detection to adaptively capture and process the complex spatio-temporal relationships present in these scenes. However, prior implementations of dynamic queries have often faced difficulties in effectively leveraging these relationships, particularly when it comes to integrating temporal information in a computationally efficient manner. Addressing this limitation, we introduce a framework utilizing dynamic query evolution strategy, harnesses K-means clustering and Top-K attention mechanisms for refined spatio-temporal data processing. By dynamically segmenting the BEV space and prioritizing key features through Top-K attention, our model achieves a real-time, focused analysis of pertinent scene elements. Our extensive evaluation on the nuScenes and Waymo dataset showcases a marked improvement in detection accuracy, setting a new benchmark in the domain of query-based BEV object detection. Our dynamic query evolution strategy has the potential to push the boundaries of current BEV methods with enhanced adaptability and computational efficiency. Project page: https://github.com/Jiawei-Yao0812/QE-BEV
Authors:Duy-Kien Nguyen, Martin R. Oswald, Cees G. M. Snoek
Abstract:
The ability to detect objects in images at varying scales has played a pivotal role in the design of modern object detectors. Despite considerable progress in removing hand-crafted components and simplifying the architecture with transformers, multi-scale feature maps and pyramid designs remain a key factor for their empirical success. In this paper, we show that shifting the multiscale inductive bias into the attention mechanism can work well, resulting in a plain detector `SimPLR' whose backbone and detection head are both non-hierarchical and operate on single-scale features. We find through our experiments that SimPLR with scale-aware attention is plain and simple architecture, yet competitive with multi-scale vision transformer alternatives. Compared to the multi-scale and single-scale state-of-the-art, our model scales better with bigger capacity (self-supervised) models and more pre-training data, allowing us to report a consistently better accuracy and faster runtime for object detection, instance segmentation, as well as panoptic segmentation. Code is released at https://github.com/kienduynguyen/SimPLR.
Authors:Yilong Lv, Min Li, Yujie He, Shaopeng Li, Zhuzhen He, Aitao Yang
Abstract:
Anchor-based detectors have been continuously developed for object detection. However, the individual anchor box makes it difficult to predict the boundary's offset accurately. Instead of taking each bounding box as a closed individual, we consider using multiple boxes together to get prediction boxes. To this end, this paper proposes the \textbf{Box Decouple-Couple(BDC) strategy} in the inference, which no longer discards the overlapping boxes, but decouples the corner points of these boxes. Then, according to each corner's score, we couple the corner points to select the most accurate corner pairs. To meet the BDC strategy, a simple but novel model is designed named the \textbf{Anchor-Intermediate Detector(AID)}, which contains two head networks, i.e., an anchor-based head and an anchor-free \textbf{Corner-aware head}. The corner-aware head is able to score the corners of each bounding box to facilitate the coupling between corner points. Extensive experiments on MS COCO show that the proposed anchor-intermediate detector respectively outperforms their baseline RetinaNet and GFL method by $\sim$2.4 and $\sim$1.2 AP on the MS COCO test-dev dataset without any bells and whistles. Code is available at: https://github.com/YilongLv/AID.
Authors:Xinzhu Ma, Yongtao Wang, Yinmin Zhang, Zhiyi Xia, Yuan Meng, Zhihui Wang, Haojie Li, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract:
In this work, we build a modular-designed codebase, formulate strong training recipes, design an error diagnosis toolbox, and discuss current methods for image-based 3D object detection. In particular, different from other highly mature tasks, e.g., 2D object detection, the community of image-based 3D object detection is still evolving, where methods often adopt different training recipes and tricks resulting in unfair evaluations and comparisons. What is worse, these tricks may overwhelm their proposed designs in performance, even leading to wrong conclusions. To address this issue, we build a module-designed codebase and formulate unified training standards for the community. Furthermore, we also design an error diagnosis toolbox to measure the detailed characterization of detection models. Using these tools, we analyze current methods in-depth under varying settings and provide discussions for some open questions, e.g., discrepancies in conclusions on KITTI-3D and nuScenes datasets, which have led to different dominant methods for these datasets. We hope that this work will facilitate future research in image-based 3D object detection. Our codes will be released at \url{https://github.com/OpenGVLab/3dodi}
Authors:Eungyeom Ha, Heemook Kim, Sung Chul Hong, Dongbin Na
Abstract:
Recent multi-media data such as images and videos have been rapidly spread out on various online services such as social network services (SNS). With the explosive growth of online media services, the number of image content that may harm users is also growing exponentially. Thus, most recent online platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have adopted content filtering systems to prevent the prevalence of harmful content and reduce the possible risk of adverse effects on users. Unfortunately, computer vision research on detecting harmful content has not yet attracted attention enough. Users of each platform still manually click the report button to recognize patterns of harmful content they dislike when exposed to harmful content. However, the problem with manual reporting is that users are already exposed to harmful content. To address these issues, our research goal in this work is to develop automatic harmful object detection systems for online services. We present a new benchmark dataset for harmful object detection. Unlike most related studies focusing on a small subset of object categories, our dataset addresses various categories. Specifically, our proposed dataset contains more than 10,000 images across 6 categories that might be harmful, consisting of not only normal cases but also hard cases that are difficult to detect. Moreover, we have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset. We have utilized the recently proposed state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection architectures and demonstrated our proposed dataset can be greatly useful for the real-time harmful object detection task. The whole source codes and datasets are publicly accessible at https://github.com/poori-nuna/HOD-Benchmark-Dataset.
Authors:Denis Mbey Akola, Gianni Franchi
Abstract:
This paper presents a new approach for training two-stage object detection ensemble models, more specifically, Faster R-CNN models to estimate uncertainty. We propose training one Region Proposal Network(RPN) and multiple Fast R-CNN prediction heads is all you need to build a robust deep ensemble network for estimating uncertainty in object detection. We present this approach and provide experiments to show that this approach is much faster than the naive method of fully training all $n$ models in an ensemble. We also estimate the uncertainty by measuring this ensemble model's Expected Calibration Error (ECE). We then further compare the performance of this model with that of Gaussian YOLOv3, a variant of YOLOv3 that models uncertainty using predicted bounding box coordinates. The source code is released at \url{https://github.com/Akola-Mbey-Denis/EfficientEnsemble}
Authors:Heitor Rapela Medeiros, Fidel A. Guerrero Pena, Masih Aminbeidokhti, Thomas Dubail, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
A powerful way to adapt a visual recognition model to a new domain is through image translation. However, common image translation approaches only focus on generating data from the same distribution as the target domain. Given a cross-modal application, such as pedestrian detection from aerial images, with a considerable shift in data distribution between infrared (IR) to visible (RGB) images, a translation focused on generation might lead to poor performance as the loss focuses on irrelevant details for the task. In this paper, we propose HalluciDet, an IR-RGB image translation model for object detection. Instead of focusing on reconstructing the original image on the IR modality, it seeks to reduce the detection loss of an RGB detector, and therefore avoids the need to access RGB data. This model produces a new image representation that enhances objects of interest in the scene and greatly improves detection performance. We empirically compare our approach against state-of-the-art methods for image translation and for fine-tuning on IR, and show that our HalluciDet improves detection accuracy in most cases by exploiting the privileged information encoded in a pre-trained RGB detector. Code: https://github.com/heitorrapela/HalluciDet
Authors:Cong Zhang, Hongbo Bi, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Ranwan Wu, Jinghui Tong, Xiufang Wang
Abstract:
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study on a new task called collaborative camouflaged object detection (CoCOD), which aims to simultaneously detect camouflaged objects with the same properties from a group of relevant images. To this end, we meticulously construct the first large-scale dataset, termed CoCOD8K, which consists of 8,528 high-quality and elaborately selected images with object mask annotations, covering 5 superclasses and 70 subclasses. The dataset spans a wide range of natural and artificial camouflage scenes with diverse object appearances and backgrounds, making it a very challenging dataset for CoCOD. Besides, we propose the first baseline model for CoCOD, named bilateral-branch network (BBNet), which explores and aggregates co-camouflaged cues within a single image and between images within a group, respectively, for accurate camouflaged object detection in given images. This is implemented by an inter-image collaborative feature exploration (CFE) module, an intra-image object feature search (OFS) module, and a local-global refinement (LGR) module. We benchmark 18 state-of-the-art models, including 12 COD algorithms and 6 CoSOD algorithms, on the proposed CoCOD8K dataset under 5 widely used evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the significantly superior performance compared to other competitors. We hope that our proposed dataset and model will boost growth in the COD community. The dataset, model, and results will be available at: https://github.com/zc199823/BBNet--CoCOD.
Authors:Tsung-Lin Tsou, Tsung-Han Wu, Winston H. Hsu
Abstract:
In the field of domain adaptation (DA) on 3D object detection, most of the work is dedicated to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Yet, without any target annotations, the performance gap between the UDA approaches and the fully-supervised approach is still noticeable, which is impractical for real-world applications. On the other hand, weakly-supervised domain adaptation (WDA) is an underexplored yet practical task that only requires few labeling effort on the target domain. To improve the DA performance in a cost-effective way, we propose a general weak labels guided self-training framework, WLST, designed for WDA on 3D object detection. By incorporating autolabeler, which can generate 3D pseudo labels from 2D bounding boxes, into the existing self-training pipeline, our method is able to generate more robust and consistent pseudo labels that would benefit the training process on the target domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and detector-agnosticism of our WLST framework. Notably, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on all evaluation tasks.
Authors:Hao Shi, Chengshan Pang, Jiaming Zhang, Kailun Yang, Yuhao Wu, Huajian Ni, Yining Lin, Rainer Stiefelhagen, Kaiwei Wang
Abstract:
Roadside camera-driven 3D object detection is a crucial task in intelligent transportation systems, which extends the perception range beyond the limitations of vision-centric vehicles and enhances road safety. While previous studies have limitations in using only depth or height information, we find both depth and height matter and they are in fact complementary. The depth feature encompasses precise geometric cues, whereas the height feature is primarily focused on distinguishing between various categories of height intervals, essentially providing semantic context. This insight motivates the development of Complementary-BEV (CoBEV), a novel end-to-end monocular 3D object detection framework that integrates depth and height to construct robust BEV representations. In essence, CoBEV estimates each pixel's depth and height distribution and lifts the camera features into 3D space for lateral fusion using the newly proposed two-stage complementary feature selection (CFS) module. A BEV feature distillation framework is also seamlessly integrated to further enhance the detection accuracy from the prior knowledge of the fusion-modal CoBEV teacher. We conduct extensive experiments on the public 3D detection benchmarks of roadside camera-based DAIR-V2X-I and Rope3D, as well as the private Supremind-Road dataset, demonstrating that CoBEV not only achieves the accuracy of the new state-of-the-art, but also significantly advances the robustness of previous methods in challenging long-distance scenarios and noisy camera disturbance, and enhances generalization by a large margin in heterologous settings with drastic changes in scene and camera parameters. For the first time, the vehicle AP score of a camera model reaches 80% on DAIR-V2X-I in terms of easy mode. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/CoBEV.
Authors:Yansong Peng, Yueyi Zhang, Zhiwei Xiong, Xiaoyan Sun, Feng Wu
Abstract:
Event cameras are a type of novel neuromorphic sen-sor that has been gaining increasing attention. Existing event-based backbones mainly rely on image-based designs to extract spatial information within the image transformed from events, overlooking important event properties like time and polarity. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-based vision Transformer backbone for Event-based vision, called Group Event Transformer (GET), which de-couples temporal-polarity information from spatial infor-mation throughout the feature extraction process. Specifi-cally, we first propose a new event representation for GET, named Group Token, which groups asynchronous events based on their timestamps and polarities. Then, GET ap-plies the Event Dual Self-Attention block, and Group Token Aggregation module to facilitate effective feature commu-nication and integration in both the spatial and temporal-polarity domains. After that, GET can be integrated with different downstream tasks by connecting it with vari-ous heads. We evaluate our method on four event-based classification datasets (Cifar10-DVS, N-MNIST, N-CARS, and DVS128Gesture) and two event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1), and the results demonstrate that GET outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Peterande/GET-Group-Event-Transformer.
Authors:Yanzhao Wu, Ka-Ho Chow, Wenqi Wei, Ling Liu
Abstract:
Deep neural network ensembles hold the potential of improving generalization performance for complex learning tasks. This paper presents formal analysis and empirical evaluation to show that heterogeneous deep ensembles with high ensemble diversity can effectively leverage model learning heterogeneity to boost ensemble robustness. We first show that heterogeneous DNN models trained for solving the same learning problem, e.g., object detection, can significantly strengthen the mean average precision (mAP) through our weighted bounding box ensemble consensus method. Second, we further compose ensembles of heterogeneous models for solving different learning problems, e.g., object detection and semantic segmentation, by introducing the connected component labeling (CCL) based alignment. We show that this two-tier heterogeneity driven ensemble construction method can compose an ensemble team that promotes high ensemble diversity and low negative correlation among member models of the ensemble, strengthening ensemble robustness against both negative examples and adversarial attacks. Third, we provide a formal analysis of the ensemble robustness in terms of negative correlation. Extensive experiments validate the enhanced robustness of heterogeneous ensembles in both benign and adversarial settings. The source codes are available on GitHub at https://github.com/git-disl/HeteRobust.
Authors:Mattia Segu, Bernt Schiele, Fisher Yu
Abstract:
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a fundamental component of perception systems for autonomous driving, and its robustness to unseen conditions is a requirement to avoid life-critical failures. Despite the urge of safety in driving systems, no solution to the MOT adaptation problem to domain shift in test-time conditions has ever been proposed. However, the nature of a MOT system is manifold - requiring object detection and instance association - and adapting all its components is non-trivial. In this paper, we analyze the effect of domain shift on appearance-based trackers, and introduce DARTH, a holistic test-time adaptation framework for MOT. We propose a detection consistency formulation to adapt object detection in a self-supervised fashion, while adapting the instance appearance representations via our novel patch contrastive loss. We evaluate our method on a variety of domain shifts - including sim-to-real, outdoor-to-indoor, indoor-to-outdoor - and substantially improve the source model performance on all metrics. Code: https://github.com/mattiasegu/darth.
Authors:Jiayuan Wang, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Ning Zhang
Abstract:
High precision, lightweight, and real-time responsiveness are three essential requirements for implementing autonomous driving. In this study, we incorporate A-YOLOM, an adaptive, real-time, and lightweight multi-task model designed to concurrently address object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation tasks. Specifically, we develop an end-to-end multi-task model with a unified and streamlined segmentation structure. We introduce a learnable parameter that adaptively concatenates features between necks and backbone in segmentation tasks, using the same loss function for all segmentation tasks. This eliminates the need for customizations and enhances the model's generalization capabilities. We also introduce a segmentation head composed only of a series of convolutional layers, which reduces the number of parameters and inference time. We achieve competitive results on the BDD100k dataset, particularly in visualization outcomes. The performance results show a mAP50 of 81.1% for object detection, a mIoU of 91.0% for drivable area segmentation, and an IoU of 28.8% for lane line segmentation. Additionally, we introduce real-world scenarios to evaluate our model's performance in a real scene, which significantly outperforms competitors. This demonstrates that our model not only exhibits competitive performance but is also more flexible and faster than existing multi-task models. The source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/JiayuanWang-JW/YOLOv8-multi-task
Authors:Size Wu, Wenwei Zhang, Lumin Xu, Sheng Jin, Xiangtai Li, Wentao Liu, Chen Change Loy
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks including object detection and image segmentation have been advanced by the success of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). CLIP models, particularly those incorporating vision transformers (ViTs), have exhibited remarkable generalization ability in zero-shot image classification. However, when transferring the vision-language alignment of CLIP from global image representation to local region representation for the open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks, CLIP ViTs suffer from the domain shift from full images to local image regions. In this paper, we embark on an in-depth analysis of the region-language alignment in CLIP models, which is essential for downstream open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks. Subsequently, we propose an approach named CLIPSelf, which adapts the image-level recognition ability of CLIP ViT to local image regions without needing any region-text pairs. CLIPSelf empowers ViTs to distill itself by aligning a region representation extracted from its dense feature map with the image-level representation of the corresponding image crop. With the enhanced CLIP ViTs, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on open-vocabulary object detection, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation across various benchmarks. Models and code are released at https://github.com/wusize/CLIPSelf.
Authors:Shilin Xu, Xiangtai Li, Size Wu, Wenwei Zhang, Yunhai Tong, Chen Change Loy
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to detect the objects beyond the set of classes observed during training. This work introduces a straightforward and efficient strategy that utilizes pre-trained vision-language models (VLM), like CLIP, to identify potential novel classes through zero-shot classification. Previous methods use a class-agnostic region proposal network to detect object proposals and consider the proposals that do not match the ground truth as background. Unlike these methods, our method will select a subset of proposals that will be considered as background during the training. Then, we treat them as novel classes during training. We refer to this approach as the self-training strategy, which enhances recall and accuracy for novel classes without requiring extra annotations, datasets, and re-training. Compared to previous pseudo methods, our approach does not require re-training and offline labeling processing, which is more efficient and effective in one-shot training. Empirical evaluations on three datasets, including LVIS, V3Det, and COCO, demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline performance without incurring additional parameters or computational costs during inference. In addition, we also apply our method to various baselines. In particular, compared with the previous method, F-VLM, our method achieves a 1.7% improvement on the LVIS dataset. Combined with the recent method CLIPSelf, our method also achieves 46.7 novel class AP on COCO without introducing extra data for pertaining. We also achieve over 6.5% improvement over the F-VLM baseline in the recent challenging V3Det dataset. We release our code and models at https://github.com/xushilin1/dst-det.
Authors:Thalles Santos Silva, Helio Pedrini, AdÃn RamÃrez Rivera
Abstract:
We present Contextualized Local Visual Embeddings (CLoVE), a self-supervised convolutional-based method that learns representations suited for dense prediction tasks. CLoVE deviates from current methods and optimizes a single loss function that operates at the level of contextualized local embeddings learned from output feature maps of convolution neural network (CNN) encoders. To learn contextualized embeddings, CLoVE proposes a normalized mult-head self-attention layer that combines local features from different parts of an image based on similarity. We extensively benchmark CLoVE's pre-trained representations on multiple datasets. CLoVE reaches state-of-the-art performance for CNN-based architectures in 4 dense prediction downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, keypoint detection, and dense pose estimation.
Authors:Yulu Gan, Sungwoo Park, Alexander Schubert, Anthony Philippakis, Ahmed M. Alaa
Abstract:
Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limited. The current de facto approach for these tasks is to design model architectures and loss functions that are tailored to the task at hand. In this paper, we develop a unified language interface for computer vision tasks that abstracts away task-specific design choices and enables task execution by following natural language instructions. Our approach involves casting multiple computer vision tasks as text-to-image generation problems. Here, the text represents an instruction describing the task, and the resulting image is a visually-encoded task output. To train our model, we pool commonly-used computer vision datasets covering a range of tasks, including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and classification. We then use a large language model to paraphrase prompt templates that convey the specific tasks to be conducted on each image, and through this process, we create a multi-modal and multi-task training dataset comprising input and output images along with annotated instructions. Following the InstructPix2Pix architecture, we apply instruction-tuning to a text-to-image diffusion model using our constructed dataset, steering its functionality from a generative model to an instruction-guided multi-task vision learner. Experiments demonstrate that our model, dubbed InstructCV, performs competitively compared to other generalist and task-specific vision models. Moreover, it exhibits compelling generalization capabilities to unseen data, categories, and user instructions.
Authors:Dahun Kim, Anelia Angelova, Weicheng Kuo
Abstract:
We present a new open-vocabulary detection approach based on region-centric image-language pretraining to bridge the gap between image-level pretraining and open-vocabulary object detection. At the pretraining phase, we incorporate the detector architecture on top of the classification backbone, which better serves the region-level recognition needs of detection by enabling the detector heads to learn from large-scale image-text pairs. Using only standard contrastive loss and no pseudo-labeling, our approach is a simple yet effective extension of the contrastive learning method to learn emergent object-semantic cues. In addition, we propose a shifted-window learning approach upon window attention to make the backbone representation more robust, translation-invariant, and less biased by the window pattern. On the popular LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark, our approach sets a new state of the art of 37.6 mask APr using the common ViT-L backbone and public LAION dataset, and 40.5 mask APr using the DataComp-1B dataset, significantly outperforming the best existing approach by +3.7 mask APr at system level. On the COCO benchmark, we achieve very competitive 39.6 novel AP without pseudo labeling or weak supervision. In addition, we evaluate our approach on the transfer detection setup, where it demonstrates notable improvement over the baseline. Visualization reveals emerging object locality from the pretraining recipes compared to the baseline.
Authors:Neehar Kondapaneni, Markus Marks, Manuel Knott, Rogerio Guimaraes, Pietro Perona
Abstract:
Diffusion models are generative models with impressive text-to-image synthesis capabilities and have spurred a new wave of creative methods for classical machine learning tasks. However, the best way to harness the perceptual knowledge of these generative models for visual tasks is still an open question. Specifically, it is unclear how to use the prompting interface when applying diffusion backbones to vision tasks. We find that automatically generated captions can improve text-image alignment and significantly enhance a model's cross-attention maps, leading to better perceptual performance. Our approach improves upon the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) in diffusion-based semantic segmentation on ADE20K and the current overall SOTA for depth estimation on NYUv2. Furthermore, our method generalizes to the cross-domain setting. We use model personalization and caption modifications to align our model to the target domain and find improvements over unaligned baselines. Our cross-domain object detection model, trained on Pascal VOC, achieves SOTA results on Watercolor2K. Our cross-domain segmentation method, trained on Cityscapes, achieves SOTA results on Dark Zurich-val and Nighttime Driving. Project page: https://www.vision.caltech.edu/tadp/. Code: https://github.com/damaggu/TADP.
Authors:Jianning Deng, Gabriel Chan, Hantao Zhong, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel framework for robust 3D object detection from point clouds via cross-modal hallucination. Our proposed approach is agnostic to either hallucination direction between LiDAR and 4D radar. We introduce multiple alignments on both spatial and feature levels to achieve simultaneous backbone refinement and hallucination generation. Specifically, spatial alignment is proposed to deal with the geometry discrepancy for better instance matching between LiDAR and radar. The feature alignment step further bridges the intrinsic attribute gap between the sensing modalities and stabilizes the training. The trained object detection models can deal with difficult detection cases better, even though only single-modal data is used as the input during the inference stage. Extensive experiments on the View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for both radar and LiDAR object detection while maintaining competitive efficiency in runtime. Code is available at https://github.com/DJNing/See_beyond_seeing.
Authors:Jia Huang, Alvika Gautam, Junghun Choi, Srikanth Saripalli
Abstract:
Robust and accurate tracking and localization of road users like pedestrians and cyclists is crucial to ensure safe and effective navigation of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), particularly so in urban driving scenarios with complex vehicle-pedestrian interactions. Existing datasets that are useful to investigate vehicle-pedestrian interactions are mostly image-centric and thus vulnerable to vision failures. In this paper, we investigate Ultra-wideband (UWB) as an additional modality for road users' localization to enable a better understanding of vehicle-pedestrian interactions. We present WiDEVIEW, the first multimodal dataset that integrates LiDAR, three RGB cameras, GPS/IMU, and UWB sensors for capturing vehicle-pedestrian interactions in an urban autonomous driving scenario. Ground truth image annotations are provided in the form of 2D bounding boxes and the dataset is evaluated on standard 2D object detection and tracking algorithms. The feasibility of UWB is evaluated for typical traffic scenarios in both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions using LiDAR as ground truth. We establish that UWB range data has comparable accuracy with LiDAR with an error of 0.19 meters and reliable anchor-tag range data for up to 40 meters in line-of-sight conditions. UWB performance for non-line-of-sight conditions is subjective to the nature of the obstruction (trees vs. buildings). Further, we provide a qualitative analysis of UWB performance for scenarios susceptible to intermittent vision failures. The dataset can be downloaded via https://github.com/unmannedlab/UWB_Dataset.
Authors:Hanzhe Teng, Yipeng Wang, Xiaoao Song, Konstantinos Karydis
Abstract:
In this work we introduce the CitrusFarm dataset, a comprehensive multimodal sensory dataset collected by a wheeled mobile robot operating in agricultural fields. The dataset offers stereo RGB images with depth information, as well as monochrome, near-infrared and thermal images, presenting diverse spectral responses crucial for agricultural research. Furthermore, it provides a range of navigational sensor data encompassing wheel odometry, LiDAR, inertial measurement unit (IMU), and GNSS with Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) as the centimeter-level positioning ground truth. The dataset comprises seven sequences collected in three fields of citrus trees, featuring various tree species at different growth stages, distinctive planting patterns, as well as varying daylight conditions. It spans a total operation time of 1.7 hours, covers a distance of 7.5 km, and constitutes 1.3 TB of data. We anticipate that this dataset can facilitate the development of autonomous robot systems operating in agricultural tree environments, especially for localization, mapping and crop monitoring tasks. Moreover, the rich sensing modalities offered in this dataset can also support research in a range of robotics and computer vision tasks, such as place recognition, scene understanding, object detection and segmentation, and multimodal learning. The dataset, in conjunction with related tools and resources, is made publicly available at https://github.com/UCR-Robotics/Citrus-Farm-Dataset.
Authors:Atif Belal, Akhil Meethal, Francisco Perdigon Romero, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger
Abstract:
Adapting visual object detectors to operational target domains is a challenging task, commonly achieved using unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods. Recent studies have shown that when the labeled dataset comes from multiple source domains, treating them as separate domains and performing a multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) improves the accuracy and robustness over blending these source domains and performing a UDA. For adaptation, existing MSDA methods learn domain-invariant and domain-specific parameters (for each source domain). However, unlike single-source UDA methods, learning domain-specific parameters makes them grow significantly in proportion to the number of source domains. This paper proposes a novel MSDA method called Prototype-based Mean Teacher (PMT), which uses class prototypes instead of domain-specific subnets to encode domain-specific information. These prototypes are learned using a contrastive loss, aligning the same categories across domains and separating different categories far apart. Given the use of prototypes, the number of parameters required for our PMT method does not increase significantly with the number of source domains, thus reducing memory issues and possible overfitting. Empirical studies indicate that PMT outperforms state-of-the-art MSDA methods on several challenging object detection datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/imatif17/Prototype-Mean-Teacher.
Authors:Shiming Wang, Holger Caesar, Liangliang Nan, Julian F. P. Kooij
Abstract:
Multi-sensor object detection is an active research topic in automated driving, but the robustness of such detection models against missing sensor input (modality missing), e.g., due to a sudden sensor failure, is a critical problem which remains under-studied. In this work, we propose UniBEV, an end-to-end multi-modal 3D object detection framework designed for robustness against missing modalities: UniBEV can operate on LiDAR plus camera input, but also on LiDAR-only or camera-only input without retraining. To facilitate its detector head to handle different input combinations, UniBEV aims to create well-aligned Bird's Eye View (BEV) feature maps from each available modality. Unlike prior BEV-based multi-modal detection methods, all sensor modalities follow a uniform approach to resample features from the native sensor coordinate systems to the BEV features. We furthermore investigate the robustness of various fusion strategies w.r.t. missing modalities: the commonly used feature concatenation, but also channel-wise averaging, and a generalization to weighted averaging termed Channel Normalized Weights. To validate its effectiveness, we compare UniBEV to state-of-the-art BEVFusion and MetaBEV on nuScenes over all sensor input combinations. In this setting, UniBEV achieves $52.5 \%$ mAP on average over all input combinations, significantly improving over the baselines ($43.5 \%$ mAP on average for BEVFusion, $48.7 \%$ mAP on average for MetaBEV). An ablation study shows the robustness benefits of fusing by weighted averaging over regular concatenation, and of sharing queries between the BEV encoders of each modality. Our code is available at https://github.com/tudelft-iv/UniBEV.
Authors:Travis Zhang, Katie Luo, Cheng Perng Phoo, Yurong You, Wei-Lun Chao, Bharath Hariharan, Mark Campbell, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Abstract:
The rapid development of 3D object detection systems for self-driving cars has significantly improved accuracy. However, these systems struggle to generalize across diverse driving environments, which can lead to safety-critical failures in detecting traffic participants. To address this, we propose a method that utilizes unlabeled repeated traversals of multiple locations to adapt object detectors to new driving environments. By incorporating statistics computed from repeated LiDAR scans, we guide the adaptation process effectively. Our approach enhances LiDAR-based detection models using spatial quantized historical features and introduces a lightweight regression head to leverage the statistics for feature regularization. Additionally, we leverage the statistics for a novel self-training process to stabilize the training. The framework is detector model-agnostic and experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate significant improvements, achieving up to a 20-point performance gain, especially in detecting pedestrians and distant objects. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangtravis/Hist-DA.
Authors:Haodong Ouyang
Abstract:
Recently, end-to-end object detectors have gained significant attention from the research community due to their outstanding performance. However, DETR typically relies on supervised pretraining of the backbone on ImageNet, which limits the practical application of DETR and the design of the backbone, affecting the model's potential generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a new training method called step-by-step training. Specifically, in the first stage, the one-to-many pre-trained YOLO detector is used to initialize the end-to-end detector. In the second stage, the backbone and encoder are consistent with the DETR-like model, but only the detector needs to be trained from scratch. Due to this training method, the object detector does not need the additional dataset (ImageNet) to train the backbone, which makes the design of the backbone more flexible and dramatically reduces the training cost of the detector, which is helpful for the practical application of the object detector. At the same time, compared with the DETR-like model, the step-by-step training method can achieve higher accuracy than the traditional training method of the DETR-like model. With the aid of this novel training method, we propose a brand-new end-to-end real-time object detection model called DEYOv3. DEYOv3-N achieves 41.1% on COCO val2017 and 270 FPS on T4 GPU, while DEYOv3-L achieves 51.3% AP and 102 FPS. Without the use of additional training data, DEYOv3 surpasses all existing real-time object detectors in terms of both speed and accuracy. It is worth noting that for models of N, S, and M scales, the training on the COCO dataset can be completed using a single 24GB RTX3090 GPU. Code will be released at https://github.com/ouyanghaodong/DEYOv3.
Authors:Zixuan Yin, Han Sun, Ningzhong Liu, Huiyu Zhou, Jiaquan Shen
Abstract:
Lidars and cameras are critical sensors that provide complementary information for 3D detection in autonomous driving. While most prevalent methods progressively downscale the 3D point clouds and camera images and then fuse the high-level features, the downscaled features inevitably lose low-level detailed information. In this paper, we propose Fine-Grained Lidar-Camera Fusion (FGFusion) that make full use of multi-scale features of image and point cloud and fuse them in a fine-grained way. First, we design a dual pathway hierarchy structure to extract both high-level semantic and low-level detailed features of the image. Second, an auxiliary network is introduced to guide point cloud features to better learn the fine-grained spatial information. Finally, we propose multi-scale fusion (MSF) to fuse the last N feature maps of image and point cloud. Extensive experiments on two popular autonomous driving benchmarks, i.e. KITTI and Waymo, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Chengcheng Wang, Wei He, Ying Nie, Jianyuan Guo, Chuanjian Liu, Kai Han, Yunhe Wang
Abstract:
In the past years, YOLO-series models have emerged as the leading approaches in the area of real-time object detection. Many studies pushed up the baseline to a higher level by modifying the architecture, augmenting data and designing new losses. However, we find previous models still suffer from information fusion problem, although Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PANet) have alleviated this. Therefore, this study provides an advanced Gatherand-Distribute mechanism (GD) mechanism, which is realized with convolution and self-attention operations. This new designed model named as Gold-YOLO, which boosts the multi-scale feature fusion capabilities and achieves an ideal balance between latency and accuracy across all model scales. Additionally, we implement MAE-style pretraining in the YOLO-series for the first time, allowing YOLOseries models could be to benefit from unsupervised pretraining. Gold-YOLO-N attains an outstanding 39.9% AP on the COCO val2017 datasets and 1030 FPS on a T4 GPU, which outperforms the previous SOTA model YOLOv6-3.0-N with similar FPS by +2.4%. The PyTorch code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/Detection/Gold-YOLO, and the MindSpore code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/Gold_YOLO.
Authors:Mingyue Dong, Linxi Huan, Hanjiang Xiong, Shuhan Shen, Xianwei Zheng
Abstract:
This paper proposes a shape anchor guided learning strategy (AncLearn) for robust holistic indoor scene understanding. We observe that the search space constructed by current methods for proposal feature grouping and instance point sampling often introduces massive noise to instance detection and mesh reconstruction. Accordingly, we develop AncLearn to generate anchors that dynamically fit instance surfaces to (i) unmix noise and target-related features for offering reliable proposals at the detection stage, and (ii) reduce outliers in object point sampling for directly providing well-structured geometry priors without segmentation during reconstruction. We embed AncLearn into a reconstruction-from-detection learning system (AncRec) to generate high-quality semantic scene models in a purely instance-oriented manner. Experiments conducted on the challenging ScanNetv2 dataset demonstrate that our shape anchor-based method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of 3D object detection, layout estimation, and shape reconstruction. The code will be available at https://github.com/Geo-Tell/AncRec.
Authors:Fahong Zhang, Yilei Shi, Zhitong Xiong, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract:
Object detection is an essential and fundamental task in computer vision and satellite image processing. Existing deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance thanks to the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. Yet, in real-world applications the availability of labels is limited. In this context, few-shot object detection (FSOD) has emerged as a promising direction, which aims at enabling the model to detect novel objects with only few of them annotated. However, many existing FSOD algorithms overlook a critical issue: when an input image contains multiple novel objects and only a subset of them are annotated, the unlabeled objects will be considered as background during training. This can cause confusions and severely impact the model's ability to recall novel objects. To address this issue, we propose a self-training-based FSOD (ST-FSOD) approach, which incorporates the self-training mechanism into the few-shot fine-tuning process. ST-FSOD aims to enable the discovery of novel objects that are not annotated, and take them into account during training. On the one hand, we devise a two-branch region proposal networks (RPN) to separate the proposal extraction of base and novel objects, On another hand, we incorporate the student-teacher mechanism into RPN and the region of interest (RoI) head to include those highly confident yet unlabeled targets as pseudo labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in various FSOD settings by a large margin. The codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/ST-FSOD.
Authors:Zhijun Pan, Fangqiang Ding, Hantao Zhong, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
Abstract:
Mobile autonomy relies on the precise perception of dynamic environments. Robustly tracking moving objects in 3D world thus plays a pivotal role for applications like trajectory prediction, obstacle avoidance, and path planning. While most current methods utilize LiDARs or cameras for Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), the capabilities of 4D imaging radars remain largely unexplored. Recognizing the challenges posed by radar noise and point sparsity in 4D radar data, we introduce RaTrack, an innovative solution tailored for radar-based tracking. Bypassing the typical reliance on specific object types and 3D bounding boxes, our method focuses on motion segmentation and clustering, enriched by a motion estimation module. Evaluated on the View-of-Delft dataset, RaTrack showcases superior tracking precision of moving objects, largely surpassing the performance of the state of the art. We release our code and model at https://github.com/LJacksonPan/RaTrack.
Authors:Bowen Yin, Xuying Zhang, Zhongyu Li, Li Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Qibin Hou
Abstract:
We present DFormer, a novel RGB-D pretraining framework to learn transferable representations for RGB-D segmentation tasks. DFormer has two new key innovations: 1) Unlike previous works that encode RGB-D information with RGB pretrained backbone, we pretrain the backbone using image-depth pairs from ImageNet-1K, and hence the DFormer is endowed with the capacity to encode RGB-D representations; 2) DFormer comprises a sequence of RGB-D blocks, which are tailored for encoding both RGB and depth information through a novel building block design. DFormer avoids the mismatched encoding of the 3D geometry relationships in depth maps by RGB pretrained backbones, which widely lies in existing methods but has not been resolved. We finetune the pretrained DFormer on two popular RGB-D tasks, i.e., RGB-D semantic segmentation and RGB-D salient object detection, with a lightweight decoder head. Experimental results show that our DFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performance on these two tasks with less than half of the computational cost of the current best methods on two RGB-D semantic segmentation datasets and five RGB-D salient object detection datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/VCIP-RGBD/DFormer.
Authors:Helbert Paat, Qing Lian, Weilong Yao, Tong Zhang
Abstract:
Advancements in deep learning-based 3D object detection necessitate the availability of large-scale datasets. However, this requirement introduces the challenge of manual annotation, which is often both burdensome and time-consuming. To tackle this issue, the literature has seen the emergence of several weakly supervised frameworks for 3D object detection which can automatically generate pseudo labels for unlabeled data. Nevertheless, these generated pseudo labels contain noise and are not as accurate as those labeled by humans. In this paper, we present the first approach that addresses the inherent ambiguities present in pseudo labels by introducing an Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) based uncertainty estimation framework. Specifically, we propose MEDL-U, an EDL framework based on MTrans, which not only generates pseudo labels but also quantifies the associated uncertainties. However, applying EDL to 3D object detection presents three primary challenges: (1) relatively lower pseudolabel quality in comparison to other autolabelers; (2) excessively high evidential uncertainty estimates; and (3) lack of clear interpretability and effective utilization of uncertainties for downstream tasks. We tackle these issues through the introduction of an uncertainty-aware IoU-based loss, an evidence-aware multi-task loss function, and the implementation of a post-processing stage for uncertainty refinement. Our experimental results demonstrate that probabilistic detectors trained using the outputs of MEDL-U surpass deterministic detectors trained using outputs from previous 3D annotators on the KITTI val set for all difficulty levels. Moreover, MEDL-U achieves state-of-the-art results on the KITTI official test set compared to existing 3D automatic annotators.
Authors:Chenchen Zhu, Fanyi Xiao, Andres Alvarado, Yasmine Babaei, Jiabo Hu, Hichem El-Mohri, Sean Chang Culatana, Roshan Sumbaly, Zhicheng Yan
Abstract:
Object understanding in egocentric visual data is arguably a fundamental research topic in egocentric vision. However, existing object datasets are either non-egocentric or have limitations in object categories, visual content, and annotation granularities. In this work, we introduce EgoObjects, a large-scale egocentric dataset for fine-grained object understanding. Its Pilot version contains over 9K videos collected by 250 participants from 50+ countries using 4 wearable devices, and over 650K object annotations from 368 object categories. Unlike prior datasets containing only object category labels, EgoObjects also annotates each object with an instance-level identifier, and includes over 14K unique object instances. EgoObjects was designed to capture the same object under diverse background complexities, surrounding objects, distance, lighting and camera motion. In parallel to the data collection, we conducted data annotation by developing a multi-stage federated annotation process to accommodate the growing nature of the dataset. To bootstrap the research on EgoObjects, we present a suite of 4 benchmark tasks around the egocentric object understanding, including a novel instance level- and the classical category level object detection. Moreover, we also introduce 2 novel continual learning object detection tasks. The dataset and API are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EgoObjects.
Authors:Yao Yuan, Pan Gao, XiaoYang Tan
Abstract:
Most existing salient object detection methods mostly use U-Net or feature pyramid structure, which simply aggregates feature maps of different scales, ignoring the uniqueness and interdependence of them and their respective contributions to the final prediction. To overcome these, we propose the M$^3$Net, i.e., the Multilevel, Mixed and Multistage attention network for Salient Object Detection (SOD). Firstly, we propose Multiscale Interaction Block which innovatively introduces the cross-attention approach to achieve the interaction between multilevel features, allowing high-level features to guide low-level feature learning and thus enhancing salient regions. Secondly, considering the fact that previous Transformer based SOD methods locate salient regions only using global self-attention while inevitably overlooking the details of complex objects, we propose the Mixed Attention Block. This block combines global self-attention and window self-attention, aiming at modeling context at both global and local levels to further improve the accuracy of the prediction map. Finally, we proposed a multilevel supervision strategy to optimize the aggregated feature stage-by-stage. Experiments on six challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed M$^3$Net surpasses recent CNN and Transformer-based SOD arts in terms of four metrics. Codes are available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/M3Net.
Authors:Gongyang Li, Zhen Bai, Zhi Liu, Xinpeng Zhang, Haibin Ling
Abstract:
Existing methods for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images (ORSI-SOD) mainly adopt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as the backbone, such as VGG and ResNet. Since CNNs can only extract features within certain receptive fields, most ORSI-SOD methods generally follow the local-to-contextual paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Global Extraction Local Exploration Network (GeleNet) for ORSI-SOD following the global-to-local paradigm. Specifically, GeleNet first adopts a transformer backbone to generate four-level feature embeddings with global long-range dependencies. Then, GeleNet employs a Direction-aware Shuffle Weighted Spatial Attention Module (D-SWSAM) and its simplified version (SWSAM) to enhance local interactions, and a Knowledge Transfer Module (KTM) to further enhance cross-level contextual interactions. D-SWSAM comprehensively perceives the orientation information in the lowest-level features through directional convolutions to adapt to various orientations of salient objects in ORSIs, and effectively enhances the details of salient objects with an improved attention mechanism. SWSAM discards the direction-aware part of D-SWSAM to focus on localizing salient objects in the highest-level features. KTM models the contextual correlation knowledge of two middle-level features of different scales based on the self-attention mechanism, and transfers the knowledge to the raw features to generate more discriminative features. Finally, a saliency predictor is used to generate the saliency map based on the outputs of the above three modules. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GeleNet outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/GeleNet.
Authors:Yuting Wang, Velibor Ilic, Jiatong Li, Branislav Kisacanin, Vladimir Pavlovic
Abstract:
Object detection (OD), a crucial vision task, remains challenged by the lack of large training datasets with precise object localization labels. In this work, we propose ALWOD, a new framework that addresses this problem by fusing active learning (AL) with weakly and semi-supervised object detection paradigms. Because the performance of AL critically depends on the model initialization, we propose a new auxiliary image generator strategy that utilizes an extremely small labeled set, coupled with a large weakly tagged set of images, as a warm-start for AL. We then propose a new AL acquisition function, another critical factor in AL success, that leverages the student-teacher OD pair disagreement and uncertainty to effectively propose the most informative images to annotate. Finally, to complete the AL loop, we introduce a new labeling task delegated to human annotators, based on selection and correction of model-proposed detections, which is both rapid and effective in labeling the informative images. We demonstrate, across several challenging benchmarks, that ALWOD significantly narrows the gap between the ODs trained on few partially labeled but strategically selected image instances and those that rely on the fully-labeled data. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/seqam-lab/ALWOD.
Authors:Matteo Grimaldi, Darshan C. Ganji, Ivan Lazarevich, Sudhakar Sah
Abstract:
The demand for efficient processing of deep neural networks (DNNs) on embedded devices is a significant challenge limiting their deployment. Exploiting sparsity in the network's feature maps is one of the ways to reduce its inference latency. It is known that unstructured sparsity results in lower accuracy degradation with respect to structured sparsity but the former needs extensive inference engine changes to get latency benefits. To tackle this challenge, we propose a solution to induce semi-structured activation sparsity exploitable through minor runtime modifications. To attain high speedup levels at inference time, we design a sparse training procedure with awareness of the final position of the activations while computing the General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM). We extensively evaluate the proposed solution across various models for image classification and object detection tasks. Remarkably, our approach yields a speed improvement of $1.25 \times$ with a minimal accuracy drop of $1.1\%$ for the ResNet18 model on the ImageNet dataset. Furthermore, when combined with a state-of-the-art structured pruning method, the resulting models provide a good latency-accuracy trade-off, outperforming models that solely employ structured pruning techniques.
Authors:Yunhao Ge, Jiashu Xu, Brian Nlong Zhao, Neel Joshi, Laurent Itti, Vibhav Vineet
Abstract:
We propose a new paradigm to automatically generate training data with accurate labels at scale using the text-to-image synthesis frameworks (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc.). The proposed approach1 decouples training data generation into foreground object generation, and contextually coherent background generation. To generate foreground objects, we employ a straightforward textual template, incorporating the object class name as input prompts. This is fed into a text-to-image synthesis framework, producing various foreground images set against isolated backgrounds. A foreground-background segmentation algorithm is then used to generate foreground object masks. To generate context images, we begin by creating language descriptions of the context. This is achieved by applying an image captioning method to a small set of images representing the desired context. These textual descriptions are then transformed into a diverse array of context images via a text-to-image synthesis framework. Subsequently, we composite these with the foreground object masks produced in the initial step, utilizing a cut-and-paste method, to formulate the training data. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach on five object detection and segmentation datasets, including Pascal VOC and COCO. We found that detectors trained solely on synthetic data produced by our method achieve performance comparable to those trained on real data (Fig. 1). Moreover, a combination of real and synthetic data yields even much better results. Further analysis indicates that the synthetic data distribution complements the real data distribution effectively. Additionally, we emphasize the compositional nature of our data generation approach in out-of-distribution and zero-shot data generation scenarios. We open-source our code at https://github.com/gyhandy/Text2Image-for-Detection
Authors:Aref Miri Rekavandi, Shima Rashidi, Farid Boussaid, Stephen Hoefs, Emre Akbas, Mohammed bennamoun
Abstract:
Transformers have rapidly gained popularity in computer vision, especially in the field of object recognition and detection. Upon examining the outcomes of state-of-the-art object detection methods, we noticed that transformers consistently outperformed well-established CNN-based detectors in almost every video or image dataset. While transformer-based approaches remain at the forefront of small object detection (SOD) techniques, this paper aims to explore the performance benefits offered by such extensive networks and identify potential reasons for their SOD superiority. Small objects have been identified as one of the most challenging object types in detection frameworks due to their low visibility. We aim to investigate potential strategies that could enhance transformers' performance in SOD. This survey presents a taxonomy of over 60 research studies on developed transformers for the task of SOD, spanning the years 2020 to 2023. These studies encompass a variety of detection applications, including small object detection in generic images, aerial images, medical images, active millimeter images, underwater images, and videos. We also compile and present a list of 12 large-scale datasets suitable for SOD that were overlooked in previous studies and compare the performance of the reviewed studies using popular metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP), Frames Per Second (FPS), number of parameters, and more. Researchers can keep track of newer studies on our web page, which is available at \url{https://github.com/arekavandi/Transformer-SOD}.
Authors:Zhuoyan Liu, Bo Wang, Ye Li, Jiaxian He, Yunfeng Li
Abstract:
Underwater object detection faces the problem of underwater image degradation, which affects the performance of the detector. Underwater object detection methods based on noise reduction and image enhancement usually do not provide images preferred by the detector or require additional datasets. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play \textbf{U}nderwater joi\textbf{n}t \textbf{i}mage enhancemen\textbf{t} \textbf{Module} (UnitModule) that provides the input image preferred by the detector. We design an unsupervised learning loss for the joint training of UnitModule with the detector without additional datasets to improve the interaction between UnitModule and the detector. Furthermore, a color cast predictor with the assisting color cast loss and a data augmentation called Underwater Color Random Transfer (UCRT) are designed to improve the performance of UnitModule on underwater images with different color casts. Extensive experiments are conducted on DUO for different object detection models, where UnitModule achieves the highest performance improvement of 2.6 AP for YOLOv5-S and gains the improvement of 3.3 AP on the brand-new test set (\(\text{URPC}_{test}\)). And UnitModule significantly improves the performance of all object detection models we test, especially for models with a small number of parameters. In addition, UnitModule with a small number of parameters of 31K has little effect on the inference speed of the original object detection model. Our quantitative and visual analysis also demonstrates the effectiveness of UnitModule in enhancing the input image and improving the perception ability of the detector for object features. The code is available at https://github.com/LEFTeyex/UnitModule.
Authors:Shuo Liu, Lulu Han, Xiaoyang Liu, Junli Ren, Fang Wang, YingLiu, Yuanshan Lin
Abstract:
Fish tracking plays a vital role in understanding fish behavior and ecology. However, existing tracking methods face challenges in accuracy and robustness dues to morphological change of fish, occlusion and complex environment. This paper proposes FishMOT(Multiple Object Tracking for Fish), a novel fish tracking approach combining object detection and IoU matching, including basic module, interaction module and refind module. Wherein, a basic module performs target association based on IoU of detection boxes between successive frames to deal with morphological change of fish; an interaction module combines IoU of detection boxes and IoU of fish entity to handle occlusions; a refind module use spatio-temporal information uses spatio-temporal information to overcome the tracking failure resulting from the missed detection by the detector under complex environment. FishMOT reduces the computational complexity and memory consumption since it does not require complex feature extraction or identity assignment per fish, and does not need Kalman filter to predict the detection boxes of successive frame. Experimental results demonstrate FishMOT outperforms state-of-the-art multi-object trackers and specialized fish tracking tools in terms of MOTA, accuracy, computation time, memory consumption, etc.. Furthermore, the method exhibits excellent robustness and generalizability for varying environments and fish numbers. The simplified workflow and strong performance make FishMOT as a highly effective fish tracking approach. The source codes and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/gakkistar/FishMOT
Authors:Eric Youn, Sai Mitheran J, Sanjana Prabhu, Siyuan Chen
Abstract:
Vision transformer (ViT) and its variants have swept through visual learning leaderboards and offer state-of-the-art accuracy in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation by attending to different parts of the visual input and capturing long-range spatial dependencies. However, these models are large and computation-heavy. For instance, the recently proposed ViT-B model has 86M parameters making it impractical for deployment on resource-constrained devices. As a result, their deployment on mobile and edge scenarios is limited. In our work, we aim to take a step toward bringing vision transformers to the edge by utilizing popular model compression techniques such as distillation, pruning, and quantization.
Our chosen application environment is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is battery-powered and memory-constrained, carrying a single-board computer on the scale of an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with 4GB of RAM. On the other hand, the UAV requires high accuracy close to that of state-of-the-art ViTs to ensure safe object avoidance in autonomous navigation, or correct localization of humans in search-and-rescue. Inference latency should also be minimized given the application requirements. Hence, our target is to enable rapid inference of a vision transformer on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano (4GB) with minimal accuracy loss. This allows us to deploy ViTs on resource-constrained devices, opening up new possibilities in surveillance, environmental monitoring, etc. Our implementation is made available at https://github.com/chensy7/efficient-vit.
Authors:Qi Han, Yuxuan Cai, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
Masked image modeling (MIM) has become a prevalent pre-training setup for vision foundation models and attains promising performance. Despite its success, existing MIM methods discard the decoder network during downstream applications, resulting in inconsistent representations between pre-training and fine-tuning and can hamper downstream task performance. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, RevColV2, which tackles this issue by keeping the entire autoencoder architecture during both pre-training and fine-tuning. The main body of RevColV2 contains bottom-up columns and top-down columns, between which information is reversibly propagated and gradually disentangled. Such design enables our architecture with the nice property: maintaining disentangled low-level and semantic information at the end of the network in MIM pre-training. Our experimental results suggest that a foundation model with decoupled features can achieve competitive performance across multiple downstream vision tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection. For example, after intermediate fine-tuning on ImageNet-22K dataset, RevColV2-L attains 88.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification and 58.6 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. With extra teacher and large scale dataset, RevColv2-L achieves 62.1 box AP on COCO detection and 60.4 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/megvii-research/RevCol
Authors:Jun Zhang, Huayang Zhuge, Yiyao Liu, Guohao Peng, Zhenyu Wu, Haoyuan Zhang, Qiyang Lyu, Heshan Li, Chunyang Zhao, Dogan Kircali, Sanat Mharolkar, Xun Yang, Su Yi, Yuanzhe Wang, Danwei Wang
Abstract:
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is moving towards a robust perception age. However, LiDAR- and visual- SLAM may easily fail in adverse conditions (rain, snow, smoke and fog, etc.). In comparison, SLAM based on 4D Radar, thermal camera and IMU can work robustly. But only a few literature can be found. A major reason is the lack of related datasets, which seriously hinders the research. Even though some datasets are proposed based on 4D radar in past four years, they are mainly designed for object detection, rather than SLAM. Furthermore, they normally do not include thermal camera. Therefore, in this paper, NTU4DRadLM is presented to meet this requirement. The main characteristics are: 1) It is the only dataset that simultaneously includes all 6 sensors: 4D radar, thermal camera, IMU, 3D LiDAR, visual camera and RTK GPS. 2) Specifically designed for SLAM tasks, which provides fine-tuned ground truth odometry and intentionally formulated loop closures. 3) Considered both low-speed robot platform and fast-speed unmanned vehicle platform. 4) Covered structured, unstructured and semi-structured environments. 5) Considered both middle- and large- scale outdoor environments, i.e., the 6 trajectories range from 246m to 6.95km. 6) Comprehensively evaluated three types of SLAM algorithms. Totally, the dataset is around 17.6km, 85mins, 50GB and it will be accessible from this link: https://github.com/junzhang2016/NTU4DRadLM
Authors:Xuan He, Jin Yuan, Kailun Yang, Zhenchao Zeng, Zhiyong Li
Abstract:
Recently, transformer-based methods have shown exceptional performance in monocular 3D object detection, which can predict 3D attributes from a single 2D image. These methods typically use visual and depth representations to generate query points on objects, whose quality plays a decisive role in the detection accuracy. However, current unsupervised attention mechanisms without any geometry appearance awareness in transformers are susceptible to producing noisy features for query points, which severely limits the network performance and also makes the model have a poor ability to detect multi-category objects in a single training process. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel ``Supervised Shape&Scale-perceptive Deformable Attention'' (S$^3$-DA) module for monocular 3D object detection. Concretely, S$^3$-DA utilizes visual and depth features to generate diverse local features with various shapes and scales and predict the corresponding matching distribution simultaneously to impose valuable shape&scale perception for each query. Benefiting from this, S$^3$-DA effectively estimates receptive fields for query points belonging to any category, enabling them to generate robust query features. Besides, we propose a Multi-classification-based Shape&Scale Matching (MSM) loss to supervise the above process. Extensive experiments on KITTI and Waymo Open datasets demonstrate that S$^3$-DA significantly improves the detection accuracy, yielding state-of-the-art performance of single-category and multi-category 3D object detection in a single training process compared to the existing approaches. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mikasa3lili/S3-MonoDETR.
Authors:Jonathan S. Koning, Ashwin Subramanian, Mazen Alotaibi, Cara L. Appel, Christopher M. Sullivan, Thon Chao, Lisa Truong, Robyn L. Tanguay, Pankaj Jaiswal, Taal Levi, Damon B. Lesmeister
Abstract:
Practitioners interested in using computer vision models lack user-friendly and open-source software that combines features to label training data, allow multiple users, train new algorithms, review output, and implement new models. Labeling training data, such as images, is a key step to developing accurate object detection algorithms using computer vision. This step is often not compatible with many cloud-based services for marking or labeling image and video data due to limited internet bandwidth in many regions of the world. Desktop tools are useful for groups working in remote locations, but users often do not have the capability to combine projects developed locally by multiple collaborators. Furthermore, many tools offer features for labeling data or using pre-trained models for classification, but few allow researchers to combine these steps to create and apply custom models. Free, open-source, and user-friendly software that offers a full suite of features (e.g., ability to work locally and online, and train custom models) is desirable to field researchers and conservationists that may have limited coding skills. We developed Njobvu-AI, a free, open-source tool that can be run on both desktop and server hardware using Node.js, allowing users to label data, combine projects for collaboration and review, train custom algorithms, and implement new computer vision models. The name Njobvu-AI (pronounced N-joh-voo AI), incorporating the Chichewa word for elephant, is inspired by a wildlife monitoring program in Malawi that was a primary impetus for the development of this tool and references similarities between the powerful memory of elephants and properties of computer vision models.
Authors:Hengxu Zhang, Pengpeng Liang, Zhiyong Sun, Bo Song, Erkang Cheng
Abstract:
Both CNN-based and Transformer-based object detection with bounding box representation have been extensively studied in computer vision and medical image analysis, but circular object detection in medical images is still underexplored. Inspired by the recent anchor free CNN-based circular object detection method (CircleNet) for ball-shape glomeruli detection in renal pathology, in this paper, we present CircleFormer, a Transformer-based circular medical object detection with dynamic anchor circles. Specifically, queries with circle representation in Transformer decoder iteratively refine the circular object detection results, and a circle cross attention module is introduced to compute the similarity between circular queries and image features. A generalized circle IoU (gCIoU) is proposed to serve as a new regression loss of circular object detection as well. Moreover, our approach is easy to generalize to the segmentation task by adding a simple segmentation branch to CircleFormer. We evaluate our method in circular nuclei detection and segmentation on the public MoNuSeg dataset, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhanghx-iim-ahu/CircleFormer.
Authors:Haodong He, Jian Ding, Bowen Xu, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
The robustness of object detection models is a major concern when applied to real-world scenarios. The performance of most models tends to degrade when confronted with images affected by corruptions, since they are usually trained and evaluated on clean datasets. While numerous studies have explored the robustness of object detection models on natural images, there is a paucity of research focused on models applied to aerial images, which feature complex backgrounds, substantial variations in scales, and orientations of objects. This paper addresses the challenge of assessing the robustness of object detection models on aerial images, with a specific emphasis on scenarios where images are affected by clouds. In this study, we introduce two novel benchmarks based on DOTA-v1.0. The first benchmark encompasses 19 prevalent corruptions, while the second focuses on the cloud-corrupted condition-a phenomenon uncommon in natural images yet frequent in aerial photography. We systematically evaluate the robustness of mainstream object detection models and perform necessary ablation experiments. Through our investigations, we find that rotation-invariant modeling and enhanced backbone architectures can improve the robustness of models. Furthermore, increasing the capacity of Transformer-based backbones can strengthen their robustness. The benchmarks we propose and our comprehensive experimental analyses can facilitate research on robust object detection on aerial images. The codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/hehaodong530/DOTA-C.
Authors:Mohamed L. Mekhalfi, Davide Boscaini, Fabio Poiesi
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) plays a crucial role in object detection when adapting a source-trained detector to a target domain without annotated data. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective four-step UDA approach that leverages self-supervision and trains source and target data concurrently. We harness self-supervised learning to mitigate the lack of ground truth in the target domain. Our method consists of the following steps: (1) identify the region with the highest-confidence set of detections in each target image, which serve as our pseudo-labels; (2) crop the identified region and generate a collection of its augmented versions; (3) combine these latter into a composite image; (4) adapt the network to the target domain using the composed image. Through extensive experiments under cross-camera, cross-weather, and synthetic-to-real scenarios, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving upon the nearest competitor by more than 2% in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP). The code is available at https://github.com/MohamedTEV/DACA.
Authors:Wenze Liu, Hao Lu, Hongtao Fu, Zhiguo Cao
Abstract:
We present DySample, an ultra-lightweight and effective dynamic upsampler. While impressive performance gains have been witnessed from recent kernel-based dynamic upsamplers such as CARAFE, FADE, and SAPA, they introduce much workload, mostly due to the time-consuming dynamic convolution and the additional sub-network used to generate dynamic kernels. Further, the need for high-res feature guidance of FADE and SAPA somehow limits their application scenarios. To address these concerns, we bypass dynamic convolution and formulate upsampling from the perspective of point sampling, which is more resource-efficient and can be easily implemented with the standard built-in function in PyTorch. We first showcase a naive design, and then demonstrate how to strengthen its upsampling behavior step by step towards our new upsampler, DySample. Compared with former kernel-based dynamic upsamplers, DySample requires no customized CUDA package and has much fewer parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, and latency. Besides the light-weight characteristics, DySample outperforms other upsamplers across five dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/dysample.
Authors:Heewon Lee, Sangtae Ahn
Abstract:
Object detection is a task that performs position identification and label classification of objects in images or videos. The information obtained through this process plays an essential role in various tasks in the field of computer vision. In object detection, the data utilized for training and validation typically originate from public datasets that are well-balanced in terms of the number of objects ascribed to each class in an image. However, in real-world scenarios, handling datasets with much greater class imbalance, i.e., very different numbers of objects for each class , is much more common, and this imbalance may reduce the performance of object detection when predicting unseen test images. In our study, thus, we propose a method that evenly distributes the classes in an image for training and validation, solving the class imbalance problem in object detection. Our proposed method aims to maintain a uniform class distribution through multi-label stratification. We tested our proposed method not only on public datasets that typically exhibit balanced class distribution but also on custom datasets that may have imbalanced class distribution. We found that our proposed method was more effective on datasets containing severe imbalance and less data. Our findings indicate that the proposed method can be effectively used on datasets with substantially imbalanced class distribution.
Authors:Longrong Yang, Xianpan Zhou, Xuewei Li, Liang Qiao, Zheyang Li, Ziwei Yang, Gaoang Wang, Xi Li
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown potential for learning compact models in dense object detection. However, the commonly used softmax-based distillation ignores the absolute classification scores for individual categories. Thus, the optimum of the distillation loss does not necessarily lead to the optimal student classification scores for dense object detectors. This cross-task protocol inconsistency is critical, especially for dense object detectors, since the foreground categories are extremely imbalanced. To address the issue of protocol differences between distillation and classification, we propose a novel distillation method with cross-task consistent protocols, tailored for the dense object detection. For classification distillation, we address the cross-task protocol inconsistency problem by formulating the classification logit maps in both teacher and student models as multiple binary-classification maps and applying a binary-classification distillation loss to each map. For localization distillation, we design an IoU-based Localization Distillation Loss that is free from specific network structures and can be compared with existing localization distillation losses. Our proposed method is simple but effective, and experimental results demonstrate its superiority over existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/TinyTigerPan/BCKD.
Authors:Qiu Zhou, Jinming Cao, Hanchao Leng, Yifang Yin, Yu Kun, Roger Zimmermann
Abstract:
In the field of autonomous driving, accurate and comprehensive perception of the 3D environment is crucial. Bird's Eye View (BEV) based methods have emerged as a promising solution for 3D object detection using multi-view images as input. However, existing 3D object detection methods often ignore the physical context in the environment, such as sidewalk and vegetation, resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called SOGDet (Semantic-Occupancy Guided Multi-view 3D Object Detection), that leverages a 3D semantic-occupancy branch to improve the accuracy of 3D object detection. In particular, the physical context modeled by semantic occupancy helps the detector to perceive the scenes in a more holistic view. Our SOGDet is flexible to use and can be seamlessly integrated with most existing BEV-based methods. To evaluate its effectiveness, we apply this approach to several state-of-the-art baselines and conduct extensive experiments on the exclusive nuScenes dataset. Our results show that SOGDet consistently enhance the performance of three baseline methods in terms of nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) and mean Average Precision (mAP). This indicates that the combination of 3D object detection and 3D semantic occupancy leads to a more comprehensive perception of the 3D environment, thereby aiding build more robust autonomous driving systems. The codes are available at: https://github.com/zhouqiu/SOGDet.
Authors:Yiyang Yao, Peng Liu, Tiancheng Zhao, Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Qing Wang
Abstract:
Object detection (OD) in computer vision has made significant progress in recent years, transitioning from closed-set labels to open-vocabulary detection (OVD) based on large-scale vision-language pre-training (VLP). However, current evaluation methods and datasets are limited to testing generalization over object types and referral expressions, which do not provide a systematic, fine-grained, and accurate benchmark of OVD models' abilities. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark named OVDEval, which includes 9 sub-tasks and introduces evaluations on commonsense knowledge, attribute understanding, position understanding, object relation comprehension, and more. The dataset is meticulously created to provide hard negatives that challenge models' true understanding of visual and linguistic input. Additionally, we identify a problem with the popular Average Precision (AP) metric when benchmarking models on these fine-grained label datasets and propose a new metric called Non-Maximum Suppression Average Precision (NMS-AP) to address this issue. Extensive experimental results show that existing top OVD models all fail on the new tasks except for simple object types, demonstrating the value of the proposed dataset in pinpointing the weakness of current OVD models and guiding future research. Furthermore, the proposed NMS-AP metric is verified by experiments to provide a much more truthful evaluation of OVD models, whereas traditional AP metrics yield deceptive results. Data is available at \url{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OVDEval}
Authors:Chenping Fu, Xin Fan, Jiewen Xiao, Wanqi Yuan, Risheng Liu, Zhongxuan Luo
Abstract:
Underwater object detection suffers from low detection performance because the distance and wavelength dependent imaging process yield evident image quality degradations such as haze-like effects, low visibility, and color distortions. Therefore, we commit to resolving the issue of underwater object detection with compounded environmental degradations. Typical approaches attempt to develop sophisticated deep architecture to generate high-quality images or features. However, these methods are only work for limited ranges because imaging factors are either unstable, too sensitive, or compounded. Unlike these approaches catering for high-quality images or features, this paper seeks transferable prior knowledge from detector-friendly images. The prior guides detectors removing degradations that interfere with detection. It is based on statistical observations that, the heavily degraded regions of detector-friendly (DFUI) and underwater images have evident feature distribution gaps while the lightly degraded regions of them overlap each other. Therefore, we propose a residual feature transference module (RFTM) to learn a mapping between deep representations of the heavily degraded patches of DFUI- and underwater- images, and make the mapping as a heavily degraded prior (HDP) for underwater detection. Since the statistical properties are independent to image content, HDP can be learned without the supervision of semantic labels and plugged into popular CNNbased feature extraction networks to improve their performance on underwater object detection. Without bells and whistles, evaluations on URPC2020 and UODD show that our methods outperform CNN-based detectors by a large margin. Our method with higher speeds and less parameters still performs better than transformer-based detectors. Our code and DFUI dataset can be found in https://github.com/xiaoDetection/Learning-Heavily-Degraed-Prior.
Authors:Po-Yung Chou, Yu-Chun Lo, Bo-Zheng Xie, Cheng-Hung Lin, Yu-Yung Kao
Abstract:
The CoachAI Badminton 2023 Track1 initiative aim to automatically detect events within badminton match videos. Detecting small objects, especially the shuttlecock, is of quite importance and demands high precision within the challenge. Such detection is crucial for tasks like hit count, hitting time, and hitting location. However, even after revising the well-regarded shuttlecock detecting model, TrackNet, our object detection models still fall short of the desired accuracy. To address this issue, we've implemented various deep learning methods to tackle the problems arising from noisy detectied data, leveraging diverse data types to improve precision. In this report, we detail the detection model modifications we've made and our approach to the 11 tasks. Notably, our system garnered a score of 0.78 out of 1.0 in the challenge. We have released our source code in Github https://github.com/jean50621/Badminton_Challenge
Authors:Zichao Dong, Weikun Zhang, Xufeng Huang, Hang Ji, Xin Zhan, Junbo Chen
Abstract:
Human robot interaction is an exciting task, which aimed to guide robots following instructions from human. Since huge gap lies between human natural language and machine codes, end to end human robot interaction models is fair challenging. Further, visual information receiving from sensors of robot is also a hard language for robot to perceive. In this work, HuBo-VLM is proposed to tackle perception tasks associated with human robot interaction including object detection and visual grounding by a unified transformer based vision language model. Extensive experiments on the Talk2Car benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code would be publicly available in https://github.com/dzcgaara/HuBo-VLM.
Authors:Donghao Zhou, Jialin Li, Jinpeng Li, Jiancheng Huang, Qiang Nie, Yong Liu, Bin-Bin Gao, Qiong Wang, Pheng-Ann Heng, Guangyong Chen
Abstract:
Large-scale well-annotated datasets are of great importance for training an effective object detector. However, obtaining accurate bounding box annotations is laborious and demanding. Unfortunately, the resultant noisy bounding boxes could cause corrupt supervision signals and thus diminish detection performance. Motivated by the observation that the real ground-truth is usually situated in the aggregation region of the proposals assigned to a noisy ground-truth, we propose DIStribution-aware CalibratiOn (DISCO) to model the spatial distribution of proposals for calibrating supervision signals. In DISCO, spatial distribution modeling is performed to statistically extract the potential locations of objects. Based on the modeled distribution, three distribution-aware techniques, i.e., distribution-aware proposal augmentation (DA-Aug), distribution-aware box refinement (DA-Ref), and distribution-aware confidence estimation (DA-Est), are developed to improve classification, localization, and interpretability, respectively. Extensive experiments on large-scale noisy image datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC and MS-COCO) demonstrate that DISCO can achieve state-of-the-art detection performance, especially at high noise levels. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/DISCO.
Authors:Jingchun Zhou, Zongxin He, Kin-Man Lam, Yudong Wang, Weishi Zhang, ChunLe Guo, Chongyi Li
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel Amplitude-Modulated Stochastic Perturbation and Vortex Convolutional Network, AMSP-UOD, designed for underwater object detection. AMSP-UOD specifically addresses the impact of non-ideal imaging factors on detection accuracy in complex underwater environments. To mitigate the influence of noise on object detection performance, we propose AMSP Vortex Convolution (AMSP-VConv) to disrupt the noise distribution, enhance feature extraction capabilities, effectively reduce parameters, and improve network robustness. We design the Feature Association Decoupling Cross Stage Partial (FAD-CSP) module, which strengthens the association of long and short range features, improving the network performance in complex underwater environments. Additionally, our sophisticated post-processing method, based on Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) with aspect-ratio similarity thresholds, optimizes detection in dense scenes, such as waterweed and schools of fish, improving object detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on the URPC and RUOD datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and noise immunity. AMSP-UOD proposes an innovative solution with the potential for real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujingchun03/AMSP-UOD.
Authors:Carlos Soto, Shinjae Yoo
Abstract:
We present an extensible method for identifying semantic points to reverse engineer (i.e. extract the values of) data charts, particularly those in scientific articles. Our method uses a point proposal network (akin to region proposal networks for object detection) to directly predict the position of points of interest in a chart, and it is readily extensible to multiple chart types and chart elements. We focus on complex bar charts in the scientific literature, on which our model is able to detect salient points with an accuracy of 0.8705 F1 (@1.5-cell max deviation); it achieves 0.9810 F1 on synthetically-generated charts similar to those used in prior works. We also explore training exclusively on synthetic data with novel augmentations, reaching surprisingly competent performance in this way (0.6621 F1) on real charts with widely varying appearance, and we further demonstrate our unchanged method applied directly to synthetic pie charts (0.8343 F1). Datasets, trained models, and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/BNLNLP/PPN_model.
Authors:Kuan-Chih Huang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai
Abstract:
Recent advances of monocular 3D object detection facilitate the 3D multi-object tracking task based on low-cost camera sensors. In this paper, we find that the motion cue of objects along different time frames is critical in 3D multi-object tracking, which is less explored in existing monocular-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a motion-aware framework for monocular 3D MOT. To this end, we propose MoMA-M3T, a framework that mainly consists of three motion-aware components. First, we represent the possible movement of an object related to all object tracklets in the feature space as its motion features. Then, we further model the historical object tracklet along the time frame in a spatial-temporal perspective via a motion transformer. Finally, we propose a motion-aware matching module to associate historical object tracklets and current observations as final tracking results. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets to demonstrate that our MoMA-M3T achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed tracker is flexible and can be easily plugged into existing image-based 3D object detectors without re-training. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/MoMA-M3T.
Authors:Hongtian Yu, Yunjie Tian, Qixiang Ye, Yunfan Liu
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. However, their potential in rotation-sensitive scenarios has not been fully explored, and this limitation may be inherently attributed to the lack of spatial invariance in the data-forwarding process. In this study, we present a novel approach, termed Spatial Transform Decoupling (STD), providing a simple-yet-effective solution for oriented object detection with ViTs. Built upon stacked ViT blocks, STD utilizes separate network branches to predict the position, size, and angle of bounding boxes, effectively harnessing the spatial transform potential of ViTs in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Moreover, by aggregating cascaded activation masks (CAMs) computed upon the regressed parameters, STD gradually enhances features within regions of interest (RoIs), which complements the self-attention mechanism. Without bells and whistles, STD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets including DOTA-v1.0 (82.24% mAP) and HRSC2016 (98.55% mAP), which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code is available at https://github.com/yuhongtian17/Spatial-Transform-Decoupling.
Authors:Jian Zou, Tianyu Huang, Guanglei Yang, Zhenhua Guo, Tao Luo, Chun-Mei Feng, Wangmeng Zuo
Abstract:
Masked Autoencoders (MAE) play a pivotal role in learning potent representations, delivering outstanding results across various 3D perception tasks essential for autonomous driving. In real-world driving scenarios, it's commonplace to deploy multiple sensors for comprehensive environment perception. Despite integrating multi-modal features from these sensors can produce rich and powerful features, there is a noticeable challenge in MAE methods addressing this integration due to the substantial disparity between the different modalities. This research delves into multi-modal Masked Autoencoders tailored for a unified representation space in autonomous driving, aiming to pioneer a more efficient fusion of two distinct modalities. To intricately marry the semantics inherent in images with the geometric intricacies of LiDAR point clouds, we propose UniM$^2$AE. This model stands as a potent yet straightforward, multi-modal self-supervised pre-training framework, mainly consisting of two designs. First, it projects the features from both modalities into a cohesive 3D volume space to intricately marry the bird's eye view (BEV) with the height dimension. The extension allows for a precise representation of objects and reduces information loss when aligning multi-modal features. Second, the Multi-modal 3D Interactive Module (MMIM) is invoked to facilitate the efficient inter-modal interaction during the interaction process. Extensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes Dataset attest to the efficacy of UniM$^2$AE, indicating enhancements in 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation by 1.2\% NDS and 6.5\% mIoU, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/hollow-503/UniM2AE.
Authors:Wenwen Yu, Yuliang Liu, Xingkui Zhu, Haoyu Cao, Xing Sun, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
We exploit the potential of the large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model to enhance scene text detection and spotting tasks, transforming it into a robust backbone, FastTCM-CR50. This backbone utilizes visual prompt learning and cross-attention in CLIP to extract image and text-based prior knowledge. Using predefined and learnable prompts, FastTCM-CR50 introduces an instance-language matching process to enhance the synergy between image and text embeddings, thereby refining text regions. Our Bimodal Similarity Matching (BSM) module facilitates dynamic language prompt generation, enabling offline computations and improving performance. FastTCM-CR50 offers several advantages: 1) It can enhance existing text detectors and spotters, improving performance by an average of 1.7% and 1.5%, respectively. 2) It outperforms the previous TCM-CR50 backbone, yielding an average improvement of 0.2% and 0.56% in text detection and spotting tasks, along with a 48.5% increase in inference speed. 3) It showcases robust few-shot training capabilities. Utilizing only 10% of the supervised data, FastTCM-CR50 improves performance by an average of 26.5% and 5.5% for text detection and spotting tasks, respectively. 4) It consistently enhances performance on out-of-distribution text detection and spotting datasets, particularly the NightTime-ArT subset from ICDAR2019-ArT and the DOTA dataset for oriented object detection. The code is available at https://github.com/wenwenyu/TCM.
Authors:Runwei Guan, Shanliang Yao, Xiaohui Zhu, Ka Lok Man, Yong Yue, Jeremy Smith, Eng Gee Lim, Yutao Yue
Abstract:
Panoptic Driving Perception (PDP) is critical for the autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). A PDP model typically integrates multiple tasks, necessitating the simultaneous and robust execution of various perception tasks to facilitate downstream path planning. The fusion of visual and radar sensors is currently acknowledged as a robust and cost-effective approach. However, most existing research has primarily focused on fusing visual and radar features dedicated to object detection or utilizing a shared feature space for multiple tasks, neglecting the individual representation differences between various tasks. To address this gap, we propose a pair of Asymmetric Fair Fusion (AFF) modules with favorable explainability designed to efficiently interact with independent features from both visual and radar modalities, tailored to the specific requirements of object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. The AFF modules treat image and radar maps as irregular point sets and transform these features into a crossed-shared feature space for multitasking, ensuring equitable treatment of vision and radar point cloud features. Leveraging AFF modules, we propose a novel and efficient PDP model, ASY-VRNet, which processes image and radar features based on irregular super-pixel point sets. Additionally, we propose an effective multitask learning method specifically designed for PDP models. Compared to other lightweight models, ASY-VRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in object detection, semantic segmentation, and drivable-area segmentation on the WaterScenes benchmark. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/ASY-VRNet.
Authors:Shubham Shrivastava, Xianling Zhang, Sushruth Nagesh, Armin Parchami
Abstract:
Data imbalance is a well-known issue in the field of machine learning, attributable to the cost of data collection, the difficulty of labeling, and the geographical distribution of the data. In computer vision, bias in data distribution caused by image appearance remains highly unexplored. Compared to categorical distributions using class labels, image appearance reveals complex relationships between objects beyond what class labels provide. Clustering deep perceptual features extracted from raw pixels gives a richer representation of the data. This paper presents a novel method for addressing data imbalance in machine learning. The method computes sample likelihoods based on image appearance using deep perceptual embeddings and clustering. It then uses these likelihoods to weigh samples differently during training with a proposed $\textbf{Generalized Focal Loss}$ function. This loss can be easily integrated with deep learning algorithms. Experiments validate the method's effectiveness across autonomous driving vision datasets including KITTI and nuScenes. The loss function improves state-of-the-art 3D object detection methods, achieving over $200\%$ AP gains on under-represented classes (Cyclist) in the KITTI dataset. The results demonstrate the method is generalizable, complements existing techniques, and is particularly beneficial for smaller datasets and rare classes. Code is available at: https://github.com/towardsautonomy/DatasetEquity
Authors:Xiaohui Jiang, Shuailin Li, Yingfei Liu, Shihao Wang, Fan Jia, Tiancai Wang, Lijin Han, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
Recently 3D object detection from surround-view images has made notable advancements with its low deployment cost. However, most works have primarily focused on close perception range while leaving long-range detection less explored. Expanding existing methods directly to cover long distances poses challenges such as heavy computation costs and unstable convergence. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel sparse query-based framework, dubbed Far3D. By utilizing high-quality 2D object priors, we generate 3D adaptive queries that complement the 3D global queries. To efficiently capture discriminative features across different views and scales for long-range objects, we introduce a perspective-aware aggregation module. Additionally, we propose a range-modulated 3D denoising approach to address query error propagation and mitigate convergence issues in long-range tasks. Significantly, Far3D demonstrates SoTA performance on the challenging Argoverse 2 dataset, covering a wide range of 150 meters, surpassing several LiDAR-based approaches. Meanwhile, Far3D exhibits superior performance compared to previous methods on the nuScenes dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/Far3D.
Authors:Xiang Yuan, Gong Cheng, Kebing Yan, Qinghua Zeng, Junwei Han
Abstract:
The past few years have witnessed the immense success of object detection, while current excellent detectors struggle on tackling size-limited instances. Concretely, the well-known challenge of low overlaps between the priors and object regions leads to a constrained sample pool for optimization, and the paucity of discriminative information further aggravates the recognition. To alleviate the aforementioned issues, we propose CFINet, a two-stage framework tailored for small object detection based on the Coarse-to-fine pipeline and Feature Imitation learning. Firstly, we introduce Coarse-to-fine RPN (CRPN) to ensure sufficient and high-quality proposals for small objects through the dynamic anchor selection strategy and cascade regression. Then, we equip the conventional detection head with a Feature Imitation (FI) branch to facilitate the region representations of size-limited instances that perplex the model in an imitation manner. Moreover, an auxiliary imitation loss following supervised contrastive learning paradigm is devised to optimize this branch. When integrated with Faster RCNN, CFINet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale small object detection benchmarks, SODA-D and SODA-A, underscoring its superiority over baseline detector and other mainstream detection approaches.
Authors:Junkai Xu, Liang Peng, Haoran Cheng, Hao Li, Wei Qian, Ke Li, Wenxiao Wang, Deng Cai
Abstract:
In the field of monocular 3D detection, it is common practice to utilize scene geometric clues to enhance the detector's performance. However, many existing works adopt these clues explicitly such as estimating a depth map and back-projecting it into 3D space. This explicit methodology induces sparsity in 3D representations due to the increased dimensionality from 2D to 3D, and leads to substantial information loss, especially for distant and occluded objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose MonoNeRD, a novel detection framework that can infer dense 3D geometry and occupancy. Specifically, we model scenes with Signed Distance Functions (SDF), facilitating the production of dense 3D representations. We treat these representations as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and then employ volume rendering to recover RGB images and depth maps. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to introduce volume rendering for M3D, and demonstrates the potential of implicit reconstruction for image-based 3D perception. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI-3D benchmark and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MonoNeRD. Codes are available at https://github.com/cskkxjk/MonoNeRD.
Authors:Hangjie Yuan, Shiwei Zhang, Xiang Wang, Samuel Albanie, Yining Pan, Tao Feng, Jianwen Jiang, Dong Ni, Yingya Zhang, Deli Zhao
Abstract:
Relational Language-Image Pre-training (RLIP) aims to align vision representations with relational texts, thereby advancing the capability of relational reasoning in computer vision tasks. However, hindered by the slow convergence of RLIPv1 architecture and the limited availability of existing scene graph data, scaling RLIPv1 is challenging. In this paper, we propose RLIPv2, a fast converging model that enables the scaling of relational pre-training to large-scale pseudo-labelled scene graph data. To enable fast scaling, RLIPv2 introduces Asymmetric Language-Image Fusion (ALIF), a mechanism that facilitates earlier and deeper gated cross-modal fusion with sparsified language encoding layers. ALIF leads to comparable or better performance than RLIPv1 in a fraction of the time for pre-training and fine-tuning. To obtain scene graph data at scale, we extend object detection datasets with free-form relation labels by introducing a captioner (e.g., BLIP) and a designed Relation Tagger. The Relation Tagger assigns BLIP-generated relation texts to region pairs, thus enabling larger-scale relational pre-training. Through extensive experiments conducted on Human-Object Interaction Detection and Scene Graph Generation, RLIPv2 shows state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks under fully-finetuning, few-shot and zero-shot settings. Notably, the largest RLIPv2 achieves 23.29mAP on HICO-DET without any fine-tuning, yields 32.22mAP with just 1% data and yields 45.09mAP with 100% data. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/JacobYuan7/RLIPv2.
Authors:Haisong Liu, Yao Teng, Tao Lu, Haiguang Wang, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Camera-based 3D object detection in BEV (Bird's Eye View) space has drawn great attention over the past few years. Dense detectors typically follow a two-stage pipeline by first constructing a dense BEV feature and then performing object detection in BEV space, which suffers from complex view transformations and high computation cost. On the other side, sparse detectors follow a query-based paradigm without explicit dense BEV feature construction, but achieve worse performance than the dense counterparts. In this paper, we find that the key to mitigate this performance gap is the adaptability of the detector in both BEV and image space. To achieve this goal, we propose SparseBEV, a fully sparse 3D object detector that outperforms the dense counterparts. SparseBEV contains three key designs, which are (1) scale-adaptive self attention to aggregate features with adaptive receptive field in BEV space, (2) adaptive spatio-temporal sampling to generate sampling locations under the guidance of queries, and (3) adaptive mixing to decode the sampled features with dynamic weights from the queries. On the test split of nuScenes, SparseBEV achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 67.5 NDS. On the val split, SparseBEV achieves 55.8 NDS while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 23.5 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SparseBEV.
Authors:Fangrui Zhu, Yiming Xie, Weidi Xie, Huaizu Jiang
Abstract:
We have witnessed significant progress in human-object interaction (HOI) detection. The reliance on mAP (mean Average Precision) scores as a summary metric, however, does not provide sufficient insight into the nuances of model performance (e.g., why one model is better than another), which can hinder further innovation in this field. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a diagnosis toolbox to provide detailed quantitative break-down analysis of HOI detection models, inspired by the success of object detection diagnosis toolboxes. We first conduct holistic investigations in the pipeline of HOI detection. By defining a set of errors and the oracles to fix each of them, we can have a quantitative analysis of the significance of different errors according to the mAP improvement obtained from fixing each error. We then delve into two sub-tasks of HOI detection: human-object pair detection and interaction classification, respectively. For the first detection task, we compute the coverage of ground-truth human-object pairs as well as the noisiness level in the detection results. For the second classification task, we measure a model's performance of differentiating positive and negative detection results and also classifying the actual interactions when the human-object pairs are correctly detected. We analyze eight state-of-the-art HOI detection models and provide valuable diagnosis insights to foster future research. For instance, our diagnosis shows that state-of-the-art model RLIPv2 outperforms others mainly because it significantly improves the multi-label interaction classification accuracy. Our toolbox is applicable for different methods across different datasets and available at https://github.com/neu-vi/Diag-HOI.
Authors:Ziyu Li, Jingming Guo, Tongtong Cao, Liu Bingbing, Wankou Yang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D detection has made great progress in recent years. However, the performance of 3D detectors is considerably limited when deployed in unseen environments, owing to the severe domain gap problem. Existing domain adaptive 3D detection methods do not adequately consider the problem of the distributional discrepancy in feature space, thereby hindering generalization of detectors across domains. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptive \textbf{3D} detection framework, namely \textbf{G}eometry-aware \textbf{P}rototype \textbf{A}lignment (\textbf{GPA-3D}), which explicitly leverages the intrinsic geometric relationship from point cloud objects to reduce the feature discrepancy, thus facilitating cross-domain transferring. Specifically, GPA-3D assigns a series of tailored and learnable prototypes to point cloud objects with distinct geometric structures. Each prototype aligns BEV (bird's-eye-view) features derived from corresponding point cloud objects on source and target domains, reducing the distributional discrepancy and achieving better adaptation. The evaluation results obtained on various benchmarks, including Waymo, nuScenes and KITTI, demonstrate the superiority of our GPA-3D over the state-of-the-art approaches for different adaptation scenarios. The MindSpore version code will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Liz66666/GPA3D}.
Authors:Haiyang Wang, Hao Tang, Shaoshuai Shi, Aoxue Li, Zhenguo Li, Bernt Schiele, Liwei Wang
Abstract:
Jointly processing information from multiple sensors is crucial to achieving accurate and robust perception for reliable autonomous driving systems. However, current 3D perception research follows a modality-specific paradigm, leading to additional computation overheads and inefficient collaboration between different sensor data. In this paper, we present an efficient multi-modal backbone for outdoor 3D perception named UniTR, which processes a variety of modalities with unified modeling and shared parameters. Unlike previous works, UniTR introduces a modality-agnostic transformer encoder to handle these view-discrepant sensor data for parallel modal-wise representation learning and automatic cross-modal interaction without additional fusion steps. More importantly, to make full use of these complementary sensor types, we present a novel multi-modal integration strategy by both considering semantic-abundant 2D perspective and geometry-aware 3D sparse neighborhood relations. UniTR is also a fundamentally task-agnostic backbone that naturally supports different 3D perception tasks. It sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark, achieving +1.1 NDS higher for 3D object detection and +12.0 higher mIoU for BEV map segmentation with lower inference latency. Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/UniTR .
Authors:Ching-Hsun Tseng, Shao-Ju Chien, Po-Shen Wang, Shin-Jye Lee, Wei-Huan Hu, Bin Pu, Xiao-jun Zeng
Abstract:
Motion mode (M-mode) recording is an essential part of echocardiography to measure cardiac dimension and function. However, the current diagnosis cannot build an automatic scheme, as there are three fundamental obstructs: Firstly, there is no open dataset available to build the automation for ensuring constant results and bridging M-mode echocardiography with real-time instance segmentation (RIS); Secondly, the examination is involving the time-consuming manual labelling upon M-mode echocardiograms; Thirdly, as objects in echocardiograms occupy a significant portion of pixels, the limited receptive field in existing backbones (e.g., ResNet) composed from multiple convolution layers are inefficient to cover the period of a valve movement. Existing non-local attentions (NL) compromise being unable real-time with a high computation overhead or losing information from a simplified version of the non-local block. Therefore, we proposed RAMEM, a real-time automatic M-mode echocardiography measurement scheme, contributes three aspects to answer the problems: 1) provide MEIS, a dataset of M-mode echocardiograms for instance segmentation, to enable consistent results and support the development of an automatic scheme; 2) propose panel attention, local-to-global efficient attention by pixel-unshuffling, embedding with updated UPANets V2 in a RIS scheme toward big object detection with global receptive field; 3) develop and implement AMEM, an efficient algorithm of automatic M-mode echocardiography measurement enabling fast and accurate automatic labelling among diagnosis. The experimental results show that RAMEM surpasses existing RIS backbones (with non-local attention) in PASCAL 2012 SBD and human performances in real-time MEIS tested. The code of MEIS and dataset are available at https://github.com/hanktseng131415go/RAME.
Authors:Jifeng Shen, Yifei Chen, Yue Liu, Xin Zuo, Heng Fan, Wankou Yang
Abstract:
Effective feature fusion of multispectral images plays a crucial role in multi-spectral object detection. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of feature fusion using convolutional neural networks, but these methods are sensitive to image misalignment due to the inherent deffciency in local-range feature interaction resulting in the performance degradation. To address this issue, a novel feature fusion framework of dual cross-attention transformers is proposed to model global feature interaction and capture complementary information across modalities simultaneously. This framework enhances the discriminability of object features through the query-guided cross-attention mechanism, leading to improved performance. However, stacking multiple transformer blocks for feature enhancement incurs a large number of parameters and high spatial complexity. To handle this, inspired by the human process of reviewing knowledge, an iterative interaction mechanism is proposed to share parameters among block-wise multimodal transformers, reducing model complexity and computation cost. The proposed method is general and effective to be integrated into different detection frameworks and used with different backbones. Experimental results on KAIST, FLIR, and VEDAI datasets show that the proposed method achieves superior performance and faster inference, making it suitable for various practical scenarios. Code will be available at https://github.com/chanchanchan97/ICAFusion.
Authors:Chen Min, Dawei Zhao, Liang Xiao, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai
Abstract:
In this paper, we draw inspiration from Alberto Elfes' pioneering work in 1989, where he introduced the concept of the occupancy grid as World Models for robots. We imbue the robot with a spatial-temporal world model, termed UniWorld, to perceive its surroundings and predict the future behavior of other participants. UniWorld involves initially predicting 4D geometric occupancy as the World Models for foundational stage and subsequently fine-tuning on downstream tasks. UniWorld can estimate missing information concerning the world state and predict plausible future states of the world. Besides, UniWorld's pre-training process is label-free, enabling the utilization of massive amounts of image-LiDAR pairs to build a Foundational Model.The proposed unified pre-training framework demonstrates promising results in key tasks such as motion prediction, multi-camera 3D object detection, and surrounding semantic scene completion. When compared to monocular pre-training methods on the nuScenes dataset, UniWorld shows a significant improvement of about 1.5% in IoU for motion prediction, 2.0% in mAP and 2.0% in NDS for multi-camera 3D object detection, as well as a 3% increase in mIoU for surrounding semantic scene completion. By adopting our unified pre-training method, a 25% reduction in 3D training annotation costs can be achieved, offering significant practical value for the implementation of real-world autonomous driving. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/UniWorld.
Authors:Shuxiao Ding, Eike Rehder, Lukas Schneider, Marius Cordts, Juergen Gall
Abstract:
Tracking 3D objects accurately and consistently is crucial for autonomous vehicles, enabling more reliable downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Based on the substantial progress in object detection in recent years, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has become a popular choice due to its simplicity and efficiency. State-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches typically rely on non-learned model-based algorithms such as Kalman Filter but require many manually tuned parameters. On the other hand, learning-based approaches face the problem of adapting the training to the online setting, leading to inevitable distribution mismatch between training and inference as well as suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose 3DMOTFormer, a learned geometry-based 3D MOT framework building upon the transformer architecture. We use an Edge-Augmented Graph Transformer to reason on the track-detection bipartite graph frame-by-frame and conduct data association via edge classification. To reduce the distribution mismatch between training and inference, we propose a novel online training strategy with an autoregressive and recurrent forward pass as well as sequential batch optimization. Using CenterPoint detections, our approach achieves 71.2% and 68.2% AMOTA on the nuScenes validation and test split, respectively. In addition, a trained 3DMOTFormer model generalizes well across different object detectors. Code is available at: https://github.com/dsx0511/3DMOTFormer.
Authors:Shiyu Zhao, Samuel Schulter, Long Zhao, Zhixing Zhang, Vijay Kumar B. G, Yumin Suh, Manmohan Chandraker, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown promising performance in open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) by utilizing pseudo labels (PLs) from pretrained vision and language models (VLMs). However, teacher-student self-training, a powerful and widely used paradigm to leverage PLs, is rarely explored for OVD. This work identifies two challenges of using self-training in OVD: noisy PLs from VLMs and frequent distribution changes of PLs. To address these challenges, we propose SAS-Det that tames self-training for OVD from two key perspectives. First, we present a split-and-fusion (SAF) head that splits a standard detection into an open-branch and a closed-branch. This design can reduce noisy supervision from pseudo boxes. Moreover, the two branches learn complementary knowledge from different training data, significantly enhancing performance when fused together. Second, in our view, unlike in closed-set tasks, the PL distributions in OVD are solely determined by the teacher model. We introduce a periodic update strategy to decrease the number of updates to the teacher, thereby decreasing the frequency of changes in PL distributions, which stabilizes the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAS-Det is both efficient and effective. SAS-Det outperforms recent models of the same scale by a clear margin and achieves 37.4 AP50 and 29.1 APr on novel categories of the COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/xiaofeng94/SAS-Det}.
Authors:Juming Xiong, Yilin Liu, Ruining Deng, Regina N Tyree, Hernan Correa, Girish Hiremath, Yaohong Wang, Yuankai Huo
Abstract:
Eosinophilic Esophagitis (EoE) is a chronic, immune/antigen-mediated esophageal disease, characterized by symptoms related to esophageal dysfunction and histological evidence of eosinophil-dominant inflammation. Owing to the intricate microscopic representation of EoE in imaging, current methodologies which depend on manual identification are not only labor-intensive but also prone to inaccuracies. In this study, we develop an open-source toolkit, named Open-EoE, to perform end-to-end whole slide image (WSI) level eosinophil (Eos) detection using one line of command via Docker. Specifically, the toolkit supports three state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection models. Furthermore, Open-EoE further optimizes the performance by implementing an ensemble learning strategy, and enhancing the precision and reliability of our results. The experimental results demonstrated that the Open-EoE toolkit can efficiently detect Eos on a testing set with 289 WSIs. At the widely accepted threshold of >= 15 Eos per high power field (HPF) for diagnosing EoE, the Open-EoE achieved an accuracy of 91%, showing decent consistency with pathologist evaluations. This suggests a promising avenue for integrating machine learning methodologies into the diagnostic process for EoE. The docker and source code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/Open-EoE.
Authors:Yufei Yin, Jiajun Deng, Wengang Zhou, Li Li, Houqiang Li
Abstract:
Recent progress in weakly supervised object detection is featured by a combination of multiple instance detection networks (MIDN) and ordinal online refinement. However, with only image-level annotation, MIDN inevitably assigns high scores to some unexpected region proposals when generating pseudo labels. These inaccurate high-scoring region proposals will mislead the training of subsequent refinement modules and thus hamper the detection performance. In this work, we explore how to ameliorate the quality of pseudo-labeling in MIDN. Formally, we devise Cyclic-Bootstrap Labeling (CBL), a novel weakly supervised object detection pipeline, which optimizes MIDN with rank information from a reliable teacher network. Specifically, we obtain this teacher network by introducing a weighted exponential moving average strategy to take advantage of various refinement modules. A novel class-specific ranking distillation algorithm is proposed to leverage the output of weighted ensembled teacher network for distilling MIDN with rank information. As a result, MIDN is guided to assign higher scores to accurate proposals among their neighboring ones, thus benefiting the subsequent pseudo labeling. Extensive experiments on the prevalent PASCAL VOC 2007 \& 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our CBL framework. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yinyf0804/WSOD-CBL/.
Authors:Darren Tsai, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Eduardo Nebot, Stewart Worrall
Abstract:
Deploying 3D detectors in unfamiliar domains has been demonstrated to result in a significant 70-90% drop in detection rate due to variations in lidar, geography, or weather from their training dataset. This domain gap leads to missing detections for densely observed objects, misaligned confidence scores, and increased high-confidence false positives, rendering the detector highly unreliable. To address this, we introduce MS3D++, a self-training framework for multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation in 3D object detection. MS3D++ generates high-quality pseudo-labels, allowing 3D detectors to achieve high performance on a range of lidar types, regardless of their density. Our approach effectively fuses predictions of an ensemble of multi-frame pre-trained detectors from different source domains to improve domain generalization. We subsequently refine predictions temporally to ensure temporal consistency in box localization and object classification. Furthermore, we present an in-depth study into the performance and idiosyncrasies of various 3D detector components in a cross-domain context, providing valuable insights for improved cross-domain detector ensembling. Experimental results on Waymo, nuScenes and Lyft demonstrate that detectors trained with MS3D++ pseudo-labels achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to training with human-annotated labels in Bird's Eye View (BEV) evaluation for both low and high density lidar. Code is available at https://github.com/darrenjkt/MS3D
Authors:Daniel Rosa, Filipe R. Cordeiro, Ruan Carvalho, Everton Souza, Sergio Chevtchenko, Luiz Rodrigues, Marcelo Marinho, Thales Vieira, Valmir Macario
Abstract:
Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) is a challenging task with many educational applications. Recent methods for HMER have been developed for complex mathematical expressions in standard horizontal format. However, solutions for elementary mathematical expression, such as vertical addition and subtraction, have not been explored in the literature. This work proposes a new handwritten elementary mathematical expression dataset composed of addition and subtraction expressions in a vertical format. We also extended the MNIST dataset to generate artificial images with this structure. Furthermore, we proposed a solution for offline HMER, able to recognize vertical addition and subtraction expressions. Our analysis evaluated the object detection algorithms YOLO v7, YOLO v8, YOLO-NAS, NanoDet and FCOS for identifying the mathematical symbols. We also proposed a transcription method to map the bounding boxes from the object detection stage to a mathematical expression in the LATEX markup sequence. Results show that our approach is efficient, achieving a high expression recognition rate. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Danielgol/HME-VAS
Authors:Yuming Chen, Xinbin Yuan, Jiabao Wang, Ruiqi Wu, Xiang Li, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
We aim at providing the object detection community with an efficient and performant object detector, termed YOLO-MS. The core design is based on a series of investigations on how multi-branch features of the basic block and convolutions with different kernel sizes affect the detection performance of objects at different scales. The outcome is a new strategy that can significantly enhance multi-scale feature representations of real-time object detectors. To verify the effectiveness of our work, we train our YOLO-MS on the MS COCO dataset from scratch without relying on any other large-scale datasets, like ImageNet or pre-trained weights. Without bells and whistles, our YOLO-MS outperforms the recent state-of-the-art real-time object detectors, including YOLO-v7, RTMDet, and YOLO-v8. Taking the XS version of YOLO-MS as an example, it can achieve an AP score of 42+% on MS COCO, which is about 2% higher than RTMDet with the same model size. Furthermore, our work can also serve as a plug-and-play module for other YOLO models. Typically, our method significantly advances the APs, APl, and AP of YOLOv8-N from 18%+, 52%+, and 37%+ to 20%+, 55%+, and 40%+, respectively, with even fewer parameters and MACs. Code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/FishAndWasabi/YOLO-MS. We also provide the Jittor version at https://github.com/NK-JittorCV/nk-yolo.
Authors:Akhil Meethal, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
One of the important bottlenecks in training modern object detectors is the need for labeled images where bounding box annotations have to be produced for each object present in the image. This bottleneck is further exacerbated in aerial images where the annotators have to label small objects often distributed in clusters on high-resolution images. In recent days, the mean-teacher approach trained with pseudo-labels and weak-strong augmentation consistency is gaining popularity for semi-supervised object detection. However, a direct adaptation of such semi-supervised detectors for aerial images where small clustered objects are often present, might not lead to optimal results. In this paper, we propose a density crop-guided semi-supervised detector that identifies the cluster of small objects during training and also exploits them to improve performance at inference. During training, image crops of clusters identified from labeled and unlabeled images are used to augment the training set, which in turn increases the chance of detecting small objects and creating good pseudo-labels for small objects on the unlabeled images. During inference, the detector is not only able to detect the objects of interest but also regions with a high density of small objects (density crops) so that detections from the input image and detections from image crops are combined, resulting in an overall more accurate object prediction, especially for small objects. Empirical studies on the popular benchmarks of VisDrone and DOTA datasets show the effectiveness of our density crop-guided semi-supervised detector with an average improvement of more than 2\% over the basic mean-teacher method in COCO style AP. Our code is available at: https://github.com/akhilpm/DroneSSOD.
Authors:Xin Liu, Fatemeh Karimi Nejadasl, Jan C. van Gemert, Olaf Booij, Silvia L. Pintea
Abstract:
Objects in videos are typically characterized by continuous smooth motion. We exploit continuous smooth motion in three ways. 1) Improved accuracy by using object motion as an additional source of supervision, which we obtain by anticipating object locations from a static keyframe. 2) Improved efficiency by only doing the expensive feature computations on a small subset of all frames. Because neighboring video frames are often redundant, we only compute features for a single static keyframe and predict object locations in subsequent frames. 3) Reduced annotation cost, where we only annotate the keyframe and use smooth pseudo-motion between keyframes. We demonstrate computational efficiency, annotation efficiency, and improved mean average precision compared to the state-of-the-art on four datasets: ImageNet VID, EPIC KITCHENS-55, YouTube-BoundingBoxes, and Waymo Open dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/L-KID/Videoobject-detection-by-location-anticipation.
Authors:Yilun Chen, Zhiding Yu, Yukang Chen, Shiyi Lan, Animashree Anandkumar, Jiaya Jia, Jose Alvarez
Abstract:
False negatives (FN) in 3D object detection, {\em e.g.}, missing predictions of pedestrians, vehicles, or other obstacles, can lead to potentially dangerous situations in autonomous driving. While being fatal, this issue is understudied in many current 3D detection methods. In this work, we propose Hard Instance Probing (HIP), a general pipeline that identifies \textit{FN} in a multi-stage manner and guides the models to focus on excavating difficult instances. For 3D object detection, we instantiate this method as FocalFormer3D, a simple yet effective detector that excels at excavating difficult objects and improving prediction recall. FocalFormer3D features a multi-stage query generation to discover hard objects and a box-level transformer decoder to efficiently distinguish objects from massive object candidates. Experimental results on the nuScenes and Waymo datasets validate the superior performance of FocalFormer3D. The advantage leads to strong performance on both detection and tracking, in both LiDAR and multi-modal settings. Notably, FocalFormer3D achieves a 70.5 mAP and 73.9 NDS on nuScenes detection benchmark, while the nuScenes tracking benchmark shows 72.1 AMOTA, both ranking 1st place on the nuScenes LiDAR leaderboard. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/NVlabs/FocalFormer3D}.
Authors:ÄorÄe NedeljkoviÄ
Abstract:
This paper presents an efficient way of detecting directed objects by predicting their center coordinates and direction angle. Since the objects are of uniform size, the proposed model works without predicting the object's width and height. The dataset used for this problem is presented in Honeybee Segmentation and Tracking Datasets project. One of the contributions of this work is an examination of the ability of the standard real-time object detection architecture like YoloV7 to be customized for position and direction detection. A very efficient, tiny version of the architecture is used in this approach. Moreover, only one of three detection heads without anchors is sufficient for this task. We also introduce the extended Skew Intersection over Union (SkewIoU) calculation for rotated boxes - directed IoU (DirIoU), which includes an absolute angle difference. DirIoU is used both in the matching procedure of target and predicted bounding boxes for mAP calculation, and in the NMS filtering procedure. The code and models are available at https://github.com/djordjened92/yudo.
Authors:Yichao Shen, Zigang Geng, Yuhui Yuan, Yutong Lin, Ze Liu, Chunyu Wang, Han Hu, Nanning Zheng, Baining Guo
Abstract:
We introduce a highly performant 3D object detector for point clouds using the DETR framework. The prior attempts all end up with suboptimal results because they fail to learn accurate inductive biases from the limited scale of training data. In particular, the queries often attend to points that are far away from the target objects, violating the locality principle in object detection. To address the limitation, we introduce a novel 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3DV-RPE) method which computes position encoding for each point based on its relative position to the 3D boxes predicted by the queries in each decoder layer, thus providing clear information to guide the model to focus on points near the objects, in accordance with the principle of locality. In addition, we systematically improve the pipeline from various aspects such as data normalization based on our understanding of the task. We show exceptional results on the challenging ScanNetV2 benchmark, achieving significant improvements over the previous 3DETR in $\rm{AP}_{25}$/$\rm{AP}_{50}$ from 65.0\%/47.0\% to 77.8\%/66.0\%, respectively. In addition, our method sets a new record on ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D datasets.Code will be released at http://github.com/yichaoshen-MS/V-DETR.
Authors:Dianze Li, Jianing Li, Yonghong Tian
Abstract:
DAVIS camera, streaming two complementary sensing modalities of asynchronous events and frames, has gradually been used to address major object detection challenges (e.g., fast motion blur and low-light). However, how to effectively leverage rich temporal cues and fuse two heterogeneous visual streams remains a challenging endeavor. To address this challenge, we propose a novel streaming object detector with Transformer, namely SODFormer, which first integrates events and frames to continuously detect objects in an asynchronous manner. Technically, we first build a large-scale multimodal neuromorphic object detection dataset (i.e., PKU-DAVIS-SOD) over 1080.1k manual labels. Then, we design a spatiotemporal Transformer architecture to detect objects via an end-to-end sequence prediction problem, where the novel temporal Transformer module leverages rich temporal cues from two visual streams to improve the detection performance. Finally, an asynchronous attention-based fusion module is proposed to integrate two heterogeneous sensing modalities and take complementary advantages from each end, which can be queried at any time to locate objects and break through the limited output frequency from synchronized frame-based fusion strategies. The results show that the proposed SODFormer outperforms four state-of-the-art methods and our eight baselines by a significant margin. We also show that our unifying framework works well even in cases where the conventional frame-based camera fails, e.g., high-speed motion and low-light conditions. Our dataset and code can be available at https://github.com/dianzl/SODFormer.
Authors:Indranil Sur, Karan Sikka, Matthew Walmer, Kaushik Koneripalli, Anirban Roy, Xiao Lin, Ajay Divakaran, Susmit Jha
Abstract:
We present a Multimodal Backdoor Defense technique TIJO (Trigger Inversion using Joint Optimization). Recent work arXiv:2112.07668 has demonstrated successful backdoor attacks on multimodal models for the Visual Question Answering task. Their dual-key backdoor trigger is split across two modalities (image and text), such that the backdoor is activated if and only if the trigger is present in both modalities. We propose TIJO that defends against dual-key attacks through a joint optimization that reverse-engineers the trigger in both the image and text modalities. This joint optimization is challenging in multimodal models due to the disconnected nature of the visual pipeline which consists of an offline feature extractor, whose output is then fused with the text using a fusion module. The key insight enabling the joint optimization in TIJO is that the trigger inversion needs to be carried out in the object detection box feature space as opposed to the pixel space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TrojVQA benchmark, where TIJO improves upon the state-of-the-art unimodal methods from an AUC of 0.6 to 0.92 on multimodal dual-key backdoors. Furthermore, our method also improves upon the unimodal baselines on unimodal backdoors. We present ablation studies and qualitative results to provide insights into our algorithm such as the critical importance of overlaying the inverted feature triggers on all visual features during trigger inversion. The prototype implementation of TIJO is available at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/TIJO.
Authors:Xinhao Deng, Pingping Zhang, Wei Liu, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment the most conspicuous objects in an image or video. As an important pre-processing step, it has many potential applications in multimedia and vision tasks. With the advance of imaging devices, SOD with high-resolution images is of great demand, recently. However, traditional SOD methods are largely limited to low-resolution images, making them difficult to adapt to the development of High-Resolution SOD (HRSOD). Although some HRSOD methods emerge, there are no large enough datasets for training and evaluating. Besides, current HRSOD methods generally produce incomplete object regions and irregular object boundaries. To address above issues, in this work, we first propose a new HRS10K dataset, which contains 10,500 high-quality annotated images at 2K-8K resolution. As far as we know, it is the largest dataset for the HRSOD task, which will significantly help future works in training and evaluating models. Furthermore, to improve the HRSOD performance, we propose a novel Recurrent Multi-scale Transformer (RMFormer), which recurrently utilizes shared Transformers and multi-scale refinement architectures. Thus, high-resolution saliency maps can be generated with the guidance of lower-resolution predictions. Extensive experiments on both high-resolution and low-resolution benchmarks show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework. The source code and dataset are released at: https://github.com/DrowsyMon/RMFormer.
Authors:Lue Fan, Feng Wang, Naiyan Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based fully sparse architecture has garnered increasing attention. FSDv1 stands out as a representative work, achieving impressive efficacy and efficiency, albeit with intricate structures and handcrafted designs. In this paper, we present FSDv2, an evolution that aims to simplify the previous FSDv1 while eliminating the inductive bias introduced by its handcrafted instance-level representation, thus promoting better general applicability. To this end, we introduce the concept of \textbf{virtual voxels}, which takes over the clustering-based instance segmentation in FSDv1. Virtual voxels not only address the notorious issue of the Center Feature Missing problem in fully sparse detectors but also endow the framework with a more elegant and streamlined approach. Consequently, we develop a suite of components to complement the virtual voxel concept, including a virtual voxel encoder, a virtual voxel mixer, and a virtual voxel assignment strategy. Through empirical validation, we demonstrate that the virtual voxel mechanism is functionally similar to the handcrafted clustering in FSDv1 while being more general. We conduct experiments on three large-scale datasets: Waymo Open Dataset, Argoverse 2 dataset, and nuScenes dataset. Our results showcase state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets, highlighting the superiority of FSDv2 in long-range scenarios and its general applicability to achieve competitive performance across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we provide comprehensive experimental analysis to elucidate the workings of FSDv2. To foster reproducibility and further research, we have open-sourced FSDv2 at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SST.
Authors:Tianhao Qi, Hongtao Xie, Pandeng Li, Jiannan Ge, Yongdong Zhang
Abstract:
Conventional detectors suffer from performance degradation when dealing with long-tailed data due to a classification bias towards the majority head categories. In this paper, we contend that the learning bias originates from two factors: 1) the unequal competition arising from the imbalanced distribution of foreground categories, and 2) the lack of sample diversity in tail categories. To tackle these issues, we introduce a unified framework called BAlanced CLassification (BACL), which enables adaptive rectification of inequalities caused by disparities in category distribution and dynamic intensification of sample diversities in a synchronized manner. Specifically, a novel foreground classification balance loss (FCBL) is developed to ameliorate the domination of head categories and shift attention to difficult-to-differentiate categories by introducing pairwise class-aware margins and auto-adjusted weight terms, respectively. This loss prevents the over-suppression of tail categories in the context of unequal competition. Moreover, we propose a dynamic feature hallucination module (FHM), which enhances the representation of tail categories in the feature space by synthesizing hallucinated samples to introduce additional data variances. In this divide-and-conquer approach, BACL sets a new state-of-the-art on the challenging LVIS benchmark with a decoupled training pipeline, surpassing vanilla Faster R-CNN with ResNet-50-FPN by 5.8% AP and 16.1% AP for overall and tail categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BACL consistently achieves performance improvements across various datasets with different backbones and architectures. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Tianhao-Qi/BACL.
Authors:Nanami Kotani, Asako Kanezaki
Abstract:
One of the intuitive instruction methods in robot navigation is a pointing gesture. In this study, we propose a method using an omnidirectional camera to eliminate the user/object position constraint and the left/right constraint of the pointing arm. Although the accuracy of skeleton and object detection is low due to the high distortion of equirectangular images, the proposed method enables highly accurate estimation by repeatedly extracting regions of interest from the equirectangular image and projecting them onto perspective images. Furthermore, we found that training the likelihood of the target object in machine learning further improves the estimation accuracy.
Authors:Louis Soum-Fontez, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud, François Goulette
Abstract:
Supervised 3D Object Detection models have been displaying increasingly better performance in single-domain cases where the training data comes from the same environment and sensor as the testing data. However, in real-world scenarios data from the target domain may not be available for finetuning or for domain adaptation methods. Indeed, 3D object detection models trained on a source dataset with a specific point distribution have shown difficulties in generalizing to unseen datasets. Therefore, we decided to leverage the information available from several annotated source datasets with our Multi-Dataset Training for 3D Object Detection (MDT3D) method to increase the robustness of 3D object detection models when tested in a new environment with a different sensor configuration. To tackle the labelling gap between datasets, we used a new label mapping based on coarse labels. Furthermore, we show how we managed the mix of datasets during training and finally introduce a new cross-dataset augmentation method: cross-dataset object injection. We demonstrate that this training paradigm shows improvements for different types of 3D object detection models. The source code and additional results for this research project will be publicly available on GitHub for interested parties to access and utilize: https://github.com/LouisSF/MDT3D
Authors:Zhennan Chen, Rongrong Gao, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Fan Lin
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection is a challenging task that aims to identify objects that are highly similar to their background. Due to the powerful noise-to-image denoising capability of denoising diffusion models, in this paper, we propose a diffusion-based framework for camouflaged object detection, termed diffCOD, a new framework that considers the camouflaged object segmentation task as a denoising diffusion process from noisy masks to object masks. Specifically, the object mask diffuses from the ground-truth masks to a random distribution, and the designed model learns to reverse this noising process. To strengthen the denoising learning, the input image prior is encoded and integrated into the denoising diffusion model to guide the diffusion process. Furthermore, we design an injection attention module (IAM) to interact conditional semantic features extracted from the image with the diffusion noise embedding via the cross-attention mechanism to enhance denoising learning. Extensive experiments on four widely used COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves favorable performance compared to the existing 11 state-of-the-art methods, especially in the detailed texture segmentation of camouflaged objects. Our code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/ZNan-Chen/diffCOD.
Authors:Ming Kang, Chee-Ming Ting, Fung Fung Ting, Raphaël C. -W. Phan
Abstract:
With an excellent balance between speed and accuracy, cutting-edge YOLO frameworks have become one of the most efficient algorithms for object detection. However, the performance of using YOLO networks is scarcely investigated in brain tumor detection. We propose a novel YOLO architecture with Reparameterized Convolution based on channel Shuffle (RCS-YOLO). We present RCS and a One-Shot Aggregation of RCS (RCS-OSA), which link feature cascade and computation efficiency to extract richer information and reduce time consumption. Experimental results on the brain tumor dataset Br35H show that the proposed model surpasses YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 in speed and accuracy. Notably, compared with YOLOv7, the precision of RCS-YOLO improves by 1%, and the inference speed by 60% at 114.8 images detected per second (FPS). Our proposed RCS-YOLO achieves state-of-the-art performance on the brain tumor detection task. The code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/RCS-YOLO.
Authors:Chenfeng Xu, Bichen Wu, Ji Hou, Sam Tsai, Ruilong Li, Jialiang Wang, Wei Zhan, Zijian He, Peter Vajda, Kurt Keutzer, Masayoshi Tomizuka
Abstract:
We present NeRF-Det, a novel method for indoor 3D detection with posed RGB images as input. Unlike existing indoor 3D detection methods that struggle to model scene geometry, our method makes novel use of NeRF in an end-to-end manner to explicitly estimate 3D geometry, thereby improving 3D detection performance. Specifically, to avoid the significant extra latency associated with per-scene optimization of NeRF, we introduce sufficient geometry priors to enhance the generalizability of NeRF-MLP. Furthermore, we subtly connect the detection and NeRF branches through a shared MLP, enabling an efficient adaptation of NeRF to detection and yielding geometry-aware volumetric representations for 3D detection. Our method outperforms state-of-the-arts by 3.9 mAP and 3.1 mAP on the ScanNet and ARKITScenes benchmarks, respectively. We provide extensive analysis to shed light on how NeRF-Det works. As a result of our joint-training design, NeRF-Det is able to generalize well to unseen scenes for object detection, view synthesis, and depth estimation tasks without requiring per-scene optimization. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/facebookresearch/NeRF-Det}.
Authors:Ivan Lazarevich, Matteo Grimaldi, Ravish Kumar, Saptarshi Mitra, Shahrukh Khan, Sudhakar Sah
Abstract:
We present YOLOBench, a benchmark comprised of 550+ YOLO-based object detection models on 4 different datasets and 4 different embedded hardware platforms (x86 CPU, ARM CPU, Nvidia GPU, NPU). We collect accuracy and latency numbers for a variety of YOLO-based one-stage detectors at different model scales by performing a fair, controlled comparison of these detectors with a fixed training environment (code and training hyperparameters). Pareto-optimality analysis of the collected data reveals that, if modern detection heads and training techniques are incorporated into the learning process, multiple architectures of the YOLO series achieve a good accuracy-latency trade-off, including older models like YOLOv3 and YOLOv4. We also evaluate training-free accuracy estimators used in neural architecture search on YOLOBench and demonstrate that, while most state-of-the-art zero-cost accuracy estimators are outperformed by a simple baseline like MAC count, some of them can be effectively used to predict Pareto-optimal detection models. We showcase that by using a zero-cost proxy to identify a YOLO architecture competitive against a state-of-the-art YOLOv8 model on a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Deeplite/deeplite-torch-zoo
Authors:Jing Zhao, Li Sun, Qingli Li
Abstract:
End-to-end region-based object detectors like Sparse R-CNN usually have multiple cascade bounding box decoding stages, which refine the current predictions according to their previous results. Model parameters within each stage are independent, evolving a huge cost. In this paper, we find the general setting of decoding stages is actually redundant. By simply sharing parameters and making a recursive decoder, the detector already obtains a significant improvement. The recursive decoder can be further enhanced by positional encoding (PE) of the proposal box, which makes it aware of the exact locations and sizes of input bounding boxes, thus becoming adaptive to proposals from different stages during the recursion. Moreover, we also design centerness-based PE to distinguish the RoI feature element and dynamic convolution kernels at different positions within the bounding box. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct intensive ablations and build the full model on three recent mainstream region-based detectors. The RecusiveDet is able to achieve obvious performance boosts with even fewer model parameters and slightly increased computation cost. Codes are available at https://github.com/bravezzzzzz/RecursiveDet.
Authors:Hongyang Li, Hao Zhang, Zhaoyang Zeng, Shilong Liu, Feng Li, Tianhe Ren, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a new operator, called 3D DeFormable Attention (DFA3D), for 2D-to-3D feature lifting, which transforms multi-view 2D image features into a unified 3D space for 3D object detection. Existing feature lifting approaches, such as Lift-Splat-based and 2D attention-based, either use estimated depth to get pseudo LiDAR features and then splat them to a 3D space, which is a one-pass operation without feature refinement, or ignore depth and lift features by 2D attention mechanisms, which achieve finer semantics while suffering from a depth ambiguity problem. In contrast, our DFA3D-based method first leverages the estimated depth to expand each view's 2D feature map to 3D and then utilizes DFA3D to aggregate features from the expanded 3D feature maps. With the help of DFA3D, the depth ambiguity problem can be effectively alleviated from the root, and the lifted features can be progressively refined layer by layer, thanks to the Transformer-like architecture. In addition, we propose a mathematically equivalent implementation of DFA3D which can significantly improve its memory efficiency and computational speed. We integrate DFA3D into several methods that use 2D attention-based feature lifting with only a few modifications in code and evaluate on the nuScenes dataset. The experiment results show a consistent improvement of +1.41\% mAP on average, and up to +15.1\% mAP improvement when high-quality depth information is available, demonstrating the superiority, applicability, and huge potential of DFA3D. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/3D-deformable-attention.git.
Authors:Hu Zhang, Yanchen Li, Luziwei Leng, Kaiwei Che, Qian Liu, Qinghai Guo, Jianxing Liao, Ran Cheng
Abstract:
Event-based sensors, distinguished by their high temporal resolution of 1 $\mathrmμ\text{s}$ and a dynamic range of 120 $\text{dB}$, stand out as ideal tools for deployment in fast-paced settings like vehicles and drones. Traditional object detection techniques that utilize Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) face challenges due to the sparse and asynchronous nature of the events these sensors capture. In contrast, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative, providing a temporal representation that is inherently aligned with event-based data. This paper explores the unique membrane potential dynamics of SNNs and their ability to modulate sparse events. We introduce an innovative spike-triggered adaptive threshold mechanism designed for stable training. Building on these insights, we present a specialized spiking feature pyramid network (SpikeFPN) optimized for automotive event-based object detection. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that SpikeFPN surpasses both traditional SNNs and advanced ANNs enhanced with attention mechanisms. Evidently, SpikeFPN achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.477 on the GEN1 Automotive Detection (GAD) benchmark dataset, marking significant increases over the selected SNN baselines. Moreover, the efficient design of SpikeFPN ensures robust performance while optimizing computational resources, attributed to its innate sparse computation capabilities. Source codes are publicly accessible at https://github.com/EMI-Group/spikefpn.
Authors:Chi Xie, Zhao Zhang, Yixuan Wu, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Shuang Liang
Abstract:
Detecting objects based on language information is a popular task that includes Open-Vocabulary object Detection (OVD) and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). In this paper, we advance them to a more practical setting called Described Object Detection (DOD) by expanding category names to flexible language expressions for OVD and overcoming the limitation of REC only grounding the pre-existing object. We establish the research foundation for DOD by constructing a Description Detection Dataset ($D^3$). This dataset features flexible language expressions, whether short category names or long descriptions, and annotating all described objects on all images without omission. By evaluating previous SOTA methods on $D^3$, we find some troublemakers that fail current REC, OVD, and bi-functional methods. REC methods struggle with confidence scores, rejecting negative instances, and multi-target scenarios, while OVD methods face constraints with long and complex descriptions. Recent bi-functional methods also do not work well on DOD due to their separated training procedures and inference strategies for REC and OVD tasks. Building upon the aforementioned findings, we propose a baseline that largely improves REC methods by reconstructing the training data and introducing a binary classification sub-task, outperforming existing methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/shikras/d-cube and related works are tracked in https://github.com/Charles-Xie/awesome-described-object-detection.
Authors:Xiaofeng Mao, Yuefeng Chen, Yao Zhu, Da Chen, Hang Su, Rong Zhang, Hui Xue
Abstract:
Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector's OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector's architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o.
Authors:Inyong Koo, Inyoung Lee, Se-Ho Kim, Hee-Seon Kim, Woo-jin Jeon, Changick Kim
Abstract:
One of the main challenges in LiDAR-based 3D object detection is that the sensors often fail to capture the complete spatial information about the objects due to long distance and occlusion. Two-stage detectors with point cloud completion approaches tackle this problem by adding more points to the regions of interest (RoIs) with a pre-trained network. However, these methods generate dense point clouds of objects for all region proposals, assuming that objects always exist in the RoIs. This leads to the indiscriminate point generation for incorrect proposals as well. Motivated by this, we propose Point Generation R-CNN (PG-RCNN), a novel end-to-end detector that generates semantic surface points of foreground objects for accurate detection. Our method uses a jointly trained RoI point generation module to process the contextual information of RoIs and estimate the complete shape and displacement of foreground objects. For every generated point, PG-RCNN assigns a semantic feature that indicates the estimated foreground probability. Extensive experiments show that the point clouds generated by our method provide geometrically and semantically rich information for refining false positive and misaligned proposals. PG-RCNN achieves competitive performance on the KITTI benchmark, with significantly fewer parameters than state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/quotation2520/PG-RCNN.
Authors:Pujin Cheng, Li Lin, Junyan Lyu, Yijin Huang, Wenhan Luo, Xiaoying Tang
Abstract:
Contrastive learning based vision-language joint pre-training has emerged as a successful representation learning strategy. In this paper, we present a prototype representation learning framework incorporating both global and local alignment between medical images and reports. In contrast to standard global multi-modality alignment methods, we employ a local alignment module for fine-grained representation. Furthermore, a cross-modality conditional reconstruction module is designed to interchange information across modalities in the training phase by reconstructing masked images and reports. For reconstructing long reports, a sentence-wise prototype memory bank is constructed, enabling the network to focus on low-level localized visual and high-level clinical linguistic features. Additionally, a non-auto-regressive generation paradigm is proposed for reconstructing non-sequential reports. Experimental results on five downstream tasks, including supervised classification, zero-shot classification, image-to-text retrieval, semantic segmentation, and object detection, show the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets and under different dataset size settings. The code is available at https://github.com/QtacierP/PRIOR.
Authors:Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Deep learning (DL) has advanced the field of dense prediction, while gradually dissolving the inherent barriers between different tasks. However, most existing works focus on designing architectures and constructing visual cues only for the specific task, which ignores the potential uniformity introduced by the DL paradigm. In this paper, we attempt to construct a novel $\underline{ComP}$lementary $\underline{tr}$ansformer, $\textbf{ComPtr}$, for diverse bi-source dense prediction tasks. Specifically, unlike existing methods that over-specialize in a single task or a subset of tasks, ComPtr starts from the more general concept of bi-source dense prediction. Based on the basic dependence on information complementarity, we propose consistency enhancement and difference awareness components with which ComPtr can evacuate and collect important visual semantic cues from different image sources for diverse tasks, respectively. ComPtr treats different inputs equally and builds an efficient dense interaction model in the form of sequence-to-sequence on top of the transformer. This task-generic design provides a smooth foundation for constructing the unified model that can simultaneously deal with various bi-source information. In extensive experiments across several representative vision tasks, i.e. remote sensing change detection, RGB-T crowd counting, RGB-D/T salient object detection, and RGB-D semantic segmentation, the proposed method consistently obtains favorable performance. The code will be available at https://github.com/lartpang/ComPtr.
Authors:Guopeng Li, Yue Xu, Jian Ding, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Existing adversarial attacks against Object Detectors (ODs) suffer from two inherent limitations. Firstly, ODs have complicated meta-structure designs, hence most advanced attacks for ODs concentrate on attacking specific detector-intrinsic structures, which makes it hard for them to work on other detectors and motivates us to design a generic attack against ODs. Secondly, most works against ODs make Adversarial Examples (AEs) by generalizing image-level attacks from classification to detection, which brings redundant computations and perturbations in semantically meaningless areas (e.g., backgrounds) and leads to an emergency for seeking controllable attacks for ODs. To this end, we propose a generic white-box attack, LGP (local perturbations with adaptively global attacks), to blind mainstream object detectors with controllable perturbations. For a detector-agnostic attack, LGP tracks high-quality proposals and optimizes three heterogeneous losses simultaneously. In this way, we can fool the crucial components of ODs with a part of their outputs without the limitations of specific structures. Regarding controllability, we establish an object-wise constraint that exploits foreground-background separation adaptively to induce the attachment of perturbations to foregrounds. Experimentally, the proposed LGP successfully attacked sixteen state-of-the-art object detectors on MS-COCO and DOTA datasets, with promising imperceptibility and transferability obtained. Codes are publicly released in https://github.com/liguopeng0923/LGP.git
Authors:Yiming Cui, Linjie Yang, Haichao Yu
Abstract:
Transformer-based detection and segmentation methods use a list of learned detection queries to retrieve information from the transformer network and learn to predict the location and category of one specific object from each query. We empirically find that random convex combinations of the learned queries are still good for the corresponding models. We then propose to learn a convex combination with dynamic coefficients based on the high-level semantics of the image. The generated dynamic queries, named modulated queries, better capture the prior of object locations and categories in the different images. Equipped with our modulated queries, a wide range of DETR-based models achieve consistent and superior performance across multiple tasks including object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and video instance segmentation.
Authors:Di Wu, Pengfei Chen, Xuehui Yu, Guorong Li, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao
Abstract:
Object detection via inaccurate bounding boxes supervision has boosted a broad interest due to the expensive high-quality annotation data or the occasional inevitability of low annotation quality (\eg tiny objects). The previous works usually utilize multiple instance learning (MIL), which highly depends on category information, to select and refine a low-quality box. Those methods suffer from object drift, group prediction and part domination problems without exploring spatial information. In this paper, we heuristically propose a \textbf{Spatial Self-Distillation based Object Detector (SSD-Det)} to mine spatial information to refine the inaccurate box in a self-distillation fashion. SSD-Det utilizes a Spatial Position Self-Distillation \textbf{(SPSD)} module to exploit spatial information and an interactive structure to combine spatial information and category information, thus constructing a high-quality proposal bag. To further improve the selection procedure, a Spatial Identity Self-Distillation \textbf{(SISD)} module is introduced in SSD-Det to obtain spatial confidence to help select the best proposals. Experiments on MS-COCO and VOC datasets with noisy box annotation verify our method's effectiveness and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/tree/SSD-Det.
Authors:Yosuke Shinya
Abstract:
Scale-wise evaluation of object detectors is important for real-world applications. However, existing metrics are either coarse or not sufficiently reliable. In this paper, we propose novel scale-wise metrics that strike a balance between fineness and reliability, using a filter bank consisting of triangular and trapezoidal band-pass filters. We conduct experiments with two methods on two datasets and show that the proposed metrics can highlight the differences between the methods and between the datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/shinya7y/UniverseNet .
Authors:Binglu Wang, Lei Zhang, Zhaozhong Wang, Yongqiang Zhao, Tianfei Zhou
Abstract:
This paper presents CORE, a conceptually simple, effective and communication-efficient model for multi-agent cooperative perception. It addresses the task from a novel perspective of cooperative reconstruction, based on two key insights: 1) cooperating agents together provide a more holistic observation of the environment, and 2) the holistic observation can serve as valuable supervision to explicitly guide the model learning how to reconstruct the ideal observation based on collaboration. CORE instantiates the idea with three major components: a compressor for each agent to create more compact feature representation for efficient broadcasting, a lightweight attentive collaboration component for cross-agent message aggregation, and a reconstruction module to reconstruct the observation based on aggregated feature representations. This learning-to-reconstruct idea is task-agnostic, and offers clear and reasonable supervision to inspire more effective collaboration, eventually promoting perception tasks. We validate CORE on OPV2V, a large-scale multi-agent percetion dataset, in two tasks, i.e., 3D object detection and semantic segmentation. Results demonstrate that the model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks, and is more communication-efficient.
Authors:Jinqing Zhang, Yanan Zhang, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Recently, the pure camera-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception provides a feasible solution for economical autonomous driving. However, the existing BEV-based multi-view 3D detectors generally transform all image features into BEV features, without considering the problem that the large proportion of background information may submerge the object information. In this paper, we propose Semantic-Aware BEV Pooling (SA-BEVPool), which can filter out background information according to the semantic segmentation of image features and transform image features into semantic-aware BEV features. Accordingly, we propose BEV-Paste, an effective data augmentation strategy that closely matches with semantic-aware BEV feature. In addition, we design a Multi-Scale Cross-Task (MSCT) head, which combines task-specific and cross-task information to predict depth distribution and semantic segmentation more accurately, further improving the quality of semantic-aware BEV feature. Finally, we integrate the above modules into a novel multi-view 3D object detection framework, namely SA-BEV. Experiments on nuScenes show that SA-BEV achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code has been available at https://github.com/mengtan00/SA-BEV.git.
Authors:Kai Lei, Zhan Chen, Shuman Jia, Xiaoteng Zhang
Abstract:
In the field of autonomous driving, 3D object detection is a very important perception module. Although the current SOTA algorithm combines Camera and Lidar sensors, limited by the high price of Lidar, the current mainstream landing schemes are pure Camera sensors or Camera+Radar sensors. In this study, we propose a new detection algorithm called HVDetFusion, which is a multi-modal detection algorithm that not only supports pure camera data as input for detection, but also can perform fusion input of radar data and camera data. The camera stream does not depend on the input of Radar data, thus addressing the downside of previous methods. In the pure camera stream, we modify the framework of Bevdet4D for better perception and more efficient inference, and this stream has the whole 3D detection output. Further, to incorporate the benefits of Radar signals, we use the prior information of different object positions to filter the false positive information of the original radar data, according to the positioning information and radial velocity information recorded by the radar sensors to supplement and fuse the BEV features generated by the original camera data, and the effect is further improved in the process of fusion training. Finally, HVDetFusion achieves the new state-of-the-art 67.4\% NDS on the challenging nuScenes test set among all camera-radar 3D object detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/HVXLab/HVDetFusion
Authors:Mingqiao Ye, Lei Ke, Siyuan Li, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang, Martin Danelljan, Fisher Yu
Abstract:
Object localization in general environments is a fundamental part of vision systems. While dominating on the COCO benchmark, recent Transformer-based detection methods are not competitive in diverse domains. Moreover, these methods still struggle to very accurately estimate the object bounding boxes in complex environments.
We introduce Cascade-DETR for high-quality universal object detection. We jointly tackle the generalization to diverse domains and localization accuracy by proposing the Cascade Attention layer, which explicitly integrates object-centric information into the detection decoder by limiting the attention to the previous box prediction. To further enhance accuracy, we also revisit the scoring of queries. Instead of relying on classification scores, we predict the expected IoU of the query, leading to substantially more well-calibrated confidences. Lastly, we introduce a universal object detection benchmark, UDB10, that contains 10 datasets from diverse domains. While also advancing the state-of-the-art on COCO, Cascade-DETR substantially improves DETR-based detectors on all datasets in UDB10, even by over 10 mAP in some cases. The improvements under stringent quality requirements are even more pronounced. Our code and models will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/cascade-detr.
Authors:Xiangchen Yin, Zhenda Yu, Zetao Fei, Wenjun Lv, Xin Gao
Abstract:
Current object detection models have achieved good results on many benchmark datasets, detecting objects in dark conditions remains a large challenge. To address this issue, we propose a pyramid enhanced network (PENet) and joint it with YOLOv3 to build a dark object detection framework named PE-YOLO. Firstly, PENet decomposes the image into four components of different resolutions using the Laplacian pyramid. Specifically we propose a detail processing module (DPM) to enhance the detail of images, which consists of context branch and edge branch. In addition, we propose a low-frequency enhancement filter (LEF) to capture low-frequency semantics and prevent high-frequency noise. PE-YOLO adopts an end-to-end joint training approach and only uses normal detection loss to simplify the training process. We conduct experiments on the low-light object detection dataset ExDark to demonstrate the effectiveness of ours. The results indicate that compared with other dark detectors and low-light enhancement models, PE-YOLO achieves the advanced results, achieving 78.0% in mAP and 53.6 in FPS, respectively, which can adapt to object detection under different low-light conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/XiangchenYin/PE-YOLO.
Authors:Anindya Mondal, Sauradip Nag, Joaquin M Prada, Xiatian Zhu, Anjan Dutta
Abstract:
Existing action recognition methods are typically actor-specific due to the intrinsic topological and apparent differences among the actors. This requires actor-specific pose estimation (e.g., humans vs. animals), leading to cumbersome model design complexity and high maintenance costs. Moreover, they often focus on learning the visual modality alone and single-label classification whilst neglecting other available information sources (e.g., class name text) and the concurrent occurrence of multiple actions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach called 'actor-agnostic multi-modal multi-label action recognition,' which offers a unified solution for various types of actors, including humans and animals. We further formulate a novel Multi-modal Semantic Query Network (MSQNet) model in a transformer-based object detection framework (e.g., DETR), characterized by leveraging visual and textual modalities to represent the action classes better. The elimination of actor-specific model designs is a key advantage, as it removes the need for actor pose estimation altogether. Extensive experiments on five publicly available benchmarks show that our MSQNet consistently outperforms the prior arts of actor-specific alternatives on human and animal single- and multi-label action recognition tasks by up to 50%. Code is made available at https://github.com/mondalanindya/MSQNet.
Authors:Chaoyang Zhu, Long Chen
Abstract:
As the most fundamental scene understanding tasks, object detection and segmentation have made tremendous progress in deep learning era. Due to the expensive manual labeling cost, the annotated categories in existing datasets are often small-scale and pre-defined, i.e., state-of-the-art fully-supervised detectors and segmentors fail to generalize beyond the closed vocabulary. To resolve this limitation, in the last few years, the community has witnessed an increasing attention toward Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) and Segmentation (OVS). By ``open-vocabulary'', we mean that the models can classify objects beyond pre-defined categories. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review on recent developments of OVD and OVS. A taxonomy is first developed to organize different tasks and methodologies. We find that the permission and usage of weak supervision signals can well discriminate different methodologies, including: visual-semantic space mapping, novel visual feature synthesis, region-aware training, pseudo-labeling, knowledge distillation, and transfer learning. The proposed taxonomy is universal across different tasks, covering object detection, semantic/instance/panoptic segmentation, 3D and video understanding. The main design principles, key challenges, development routes, methodology strengths, and weaknesses are thoroughly analyzed. In addition, we benchmark each task along with the vital components of each method in appendix and updated online at https://github.com/seanzhuh/awesome-open-vocabulary-detection-and-segmentation. Finally, several promising directions are provided and discussed to stimulate future research.
Authors:Yanghao Wang, Zhongqi Yue, Xian-Sheng Hua, Hanwang Zhang
Abstract:
We show that classifiers trained with random region proposals achieve state-of-the-art Open-world Object Detection (OWOD): they can not only maintain the accuracy of the known objects (w/ training labels), but also considerably improve the recall of unknown ones (w/o training labels). Specifically, we propose RandBox, a Fast R-CNN based architecture trained on random proposals at each training iteration, surpassing existing Faster R-CNN and Transformer based OWOD. Its effectiveness stems from the following two benefits introduced by randomness. First, as the randomization is independent of the distribution of the limited known objects, the random proposals become the instrumental variable that prevents the training from being confounded by the known objects. Second, the unbiased training encourages more proposal explorations by using our proposed matching score that does not penalize the random proposals whose prediction scores do not match the known objects. On two benchmarks: Pascal-VOC/MS-COCO and LVIS, RandBox significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in all metrics. We also detail the ablations on randomization and loss designs. Codes are available at https://github.com/scuwyh2000/RandBox.
Authors:Liu Liu, Shuaifeng Zhi, Zhenhua Du, Li Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Kai Huo, Weidong Jiang
Abstract:
Radars, due to their robustness to adverse weather conditions and ability to measure object motions, have served in autonomous driving and intelligent agents for years. However, Radar-based perception suffers from its unintuitive sensing data, which lack of semantic and structural information of scenes. To tackle this problem, camera and Radar sensor fusion has been investigated as a trending strategy with low cost, high reliability and strong maintenance. While most recent works explore how to explore Radar point clouds and images, rich contextual information within Radar observation are discarded. In this paper, we propose a hybrid point-wise Radar-Optical fusion approach for object detection in autonomous driving scenarios. The framework benefits from dense contextual information from both the range-doppler spectrum and images which are integrated to learn a multi-modal feature representation. Furthermore, we propose a novel local coordinate formulation, tackling the object detection task in an object-centric coordinate. Extensive results show that with the information gained from optical images, we could achieve leading performance in object detection (97.69\% recall) compared to recent state-of-the-art methods FFT-RadNet (82.86\% recall). Ablation studies verify the key design choices and practicability of our approach given machine generated imperfect detections. The code will be available at https://github.com/LiuLiu-55/ROFusion.
Authors:Wenze Liu, Hao Lu, Yuliang Liu, Zhiguo Cao
Abstract:
We introduce the notion of point affiliation into feature upsampling. By abstracting a feature map into non-overlapped semantic clusters formed by points of identical semantic meaning, feature upsampling can be viewed as point affiliation -- designating a semantic cluster for each upsampled point. In the framework of kernel-based dynamic upsampling, we show that an upsampled point can resort to its low-res decoder neighbors and high-res encoder point to reason the affiliation, conditioned on the mutual similarity between them. We therefore present a generic formulation for generating similarity-aware upsampling kernels and prove that such kernels encourage not only semantic smoothness but also boundary sharpness. This formulation constitutes a novel, lightweight, and universal upsampling solution, Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation (SAPA). We show its working mechanism via our preliminary designs with window-shape kernel. After probing the limitations of the designs on object detection, we reveal additional insights for upsampling, leading to SAPA with the dynamic kernel shape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAPA outperforms prior upsamplers and invites consistent performance improvements on a number of dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, image matting, and depth estimation. Code is made available at: https://github.com/tiny-smart/sapa
Authors:Jiacheng Zhang, Xiangru Lin, Wei Zhang, Kuo Wang, Xiao Tan, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
We analyze the DETR-based framework on semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) and observe that (1) the one-to-one assignment strategy generates incorrect matching when the pseudo ground-truth bounding box is inaccurate, leading to training inefficiency; (2) DETR-based detectors lack deterministic correspondence between the input query and its prediction output, which hinders the applicability of the consistency-based regularization widely used in current SSOD methods. We present Semi-DETR, the first transformer-based end-to-end semi-supervised object detector, to tackle these problems. Specifically, we propose a Stage-wise Hybrid Matching strategy that combines the one-to-many assignment and one-to-one assignment strategies to improve the training efficiency of the first stage and thus provide high-quality pseudo labels for the training of the second stage. Besides, we introduce a Crossview Query Consistency method to learn the semantic feature invariance of object queries from different views while avoiding the need to find deterministic query correspondence. Furthermore, we propose a Cost-based Pseudo Label Mining module to dynamically mine more pseudo boxes based on the matching cost of pseudo ground truth bounding boxes for consistency training. Extensive experiments on all SSOD settings of both COCO and Pascal VOC benchmark datasets show that our Semi-DETR method outperforms all state-of-the-art methods by clear margins. The PaddlePaddle version code1 is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection/tree/develop/configs/semi_det/semi_detr.
Authors:Harvey Mannering
Abstract:
This work presents a novel strategy to measure bias in text-to-image models. Using paired prompts that specify gender and vaguely reference an object (e.g. "a man/woman holding an item") we can examine whether certain objects are associated with a certain gender. In analysing results from Stable Diffusion, we observed that male prompts generated objects such as ties, knives, trucks, baseball bats, and bicycles more frequently. On the other hand, female prompts were more likely to generate objects such as handbags, umbrellas, bowls, bottles, and cups. We hope that the method outlined here will be a useful tool for examining bias in text-to-image models.
Authors:Zhuoxiao Chen, Yadan Luo, Zheng Wang, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Zi Huang
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) with the aid of pseudo labeling techniques has emerged as a crucial approach for domain-adaptive 3D object detection. While effective, existing DA methods suffer from a substantial drop in performance when applied to a multi-class training setting, due to the co-existence of low-quality pseudo labels and class imbalance issues. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel ReDB framework tailored for learning to detect all classes at once. Our approach produces Reliable, Diverse, and class-Balanced pseudo 3D boxes to iteratively guide the self-training on a distributionally different target domain. To alleviate disruptions caused by the environmental discrepancy (e.g., beam numbers), the proposed cross-domain examination (CDE) assesses the correctness of pseudo labels by copy-pasting target instances into a source environment and measuring the prediction consistency. To reduce computational overhead and mitigate the object shift (e.g., scales and point densities), we design an overlapped boxes counting (OBC) metric that allows to uniformly downsample pseudo-labeled objects across different geometric characteristics. To confront the issue of inter-class imbalance, we progressively augment the target point clouds with a class-balanced set of pseudo-labeled target instances and source objects, which boosts recognition accuracies on both frequently appearing and rare classes. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets using both voxel-based (i.e., SECOND) and point-based 3D detectors (i.e., PointRCNN) demonstrate that our proposed ReDB approach outperforms existing 3D domain adaptation methods by a large margin, improving 23.15% mAP on the nuScenes $\rightarrow$ KITTI task. The code is available at https://github.com/zhuoxiao-chen/ReDB-DA-3Ddet.
Authors:Andrew Alexander Vekinis, Stavros Perantonis
Abstract:
Heading towards navigational autonomy in unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in the maritime sector can fundamentally lead towards safer waters as well as reduced operating costs, while also providing a range of exciting new capabilities for oceanic research, exploration and monitoring. However, achieving such a goal is challenging. USV control systems must, safely and reliably, be able to adhere to the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea (COLREGs) in encounters with other vessels as they navigate to a given waypoint while being affected by realistic weather conditions, either during the day or at night. To deal with the multitude of possible scenarios, it is critical to have a virtual environment that is able to replicate the realistic operating conditions USVs will encounter, before they can be implemented in the real world. Such "digital twins" form the foundations upon which Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Computer Vision (CV) algorithms can be used to develop and guide USV control systems. In this paper we describe the novel development of a COLREG-compliant DRL-based collision avoidant navigational system with CV-based awareness in a realistic ocean simulation environment. The performance of the trained autonomous Agents resulting from this approach is evaluated in several successful navigations to set waypoints in both open sea and coastal encounters with other vessels. A binary executable version of the simulator with trained agents is available at https://github.com/aavek/Aeolus-Ocean
Authors:Jaemyung Lee, Kyeongtak Han, Jaehoon Kim, Hasun Yu, Youhan Lee
Abstract:
Consistency and reliability are crucial for conducting AI research. Many famous research fields, such as object detection, have been compared and validated with solid benchmark frameworks. After AlphaFold2, the protein folding task has entered a new phase, and many methods are proposed based on the component of AlphaFold2. The importance of a unified research framework in protein folding contains implementations and benchmarks to consistently and fairly compare various approaches. To achieve this, we present Solvent, a protein folding framework that supports significant components of state-of-the-art models in the manner of an off-the-shelf interface Solvent contains different models implemented in a unified codebase and supports training and evaluation for defined models on the same dataset. We benchmark well-known algorithms and their components and provide experiments that give helpful insights into the protein structure modeling field. We hope that Solvent will increase the reliability and consistency of proposed models and give efficiency in both speed and costs, resulting in acceleration on protein folding modeling research. The code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/solvent, and the project will continue to be developed.
Authors:Yuxuan Song, Xinyue Li, Lin Qi
Abstract:
The task of Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to accurately segment camouflaged objects that integrated into the environment, which is more challenging than ordinary detection as the texture between the target and background is visually indistinguishable. In this paper, we proposed a novel Feature Grafting and Distractor Aware network (FDNet) to handle the COD task. Specifically, we use CNN and Transformer to encode multi-scale images in parallel. In order to better explore the advantages of the two encoders, we design a cross-attention-based Feature Grafting Module to graft features extracted from Transformer branch into CNN branch, after which the features are aggregated in the Feature Fusion Module. A Distractor Aware Module is designed to explicitly model the two possible distractors in the COD task to refine the coarse camouflage map. We also proposed the largest artificial camouflaged object dataset which contains 2000 images with annotations, named ACOD2K. We conducted extensive experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets and the ACOD2K dataset. The results show that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code and the ACOD2K will be available at https://github.com/syxvision/FDNet.
Authors:Dongyue Sun, Shiyao Jiang, Lin Qi
Abstract:
Existing edge-aware camouflaged object detection (COD) methods normally output the edge prediction in the early stage. However, edges are important and fundamental factors in the following segmentation task. Due to the high visual similarity between camouflaged targets and the surroundings, edge prior predicted in early stage usually introduces erroneous foreground-background and contaminates features for segmentation. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Edge-aware Mirror Network (EAMNet), which models edge detection and camouflaged object segmentation as a cross refinement process. More specifically, EAMNet has a two-branch architecture, where a segmentation-induced edge aggregation module and an edge-induced integrity aggregation module are designed to cross-guide the segmentation branch and edge detection branch. A guided-residual channel attention module which leverages the residual connection and gated convolution finally better extracts structural details from low-level features. Quantitative and qualitative experiment results show that EAMNet outperforms existing cutting-edge baselines on three widely used COD datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/sdy1999/EAMNet.
Authors:Narongrid Seesawad, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Thapanun Sudhawiyangkul, Phattarapong Sawangjai, Peti Thuwajit, Paisarn Boonsakan, Supasan Sripodok, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Phoomraphee Luenam, Komgrid Charngkaew, Ananya Pongpaibul, Napat Angkathunyakul, Narit Hnoohom, Sumeth Yuenyong, Chanitra Thuwajit, Theerawit Wilaiprasitporn
Abstract:
Patch classification models based on deep learning have been utilized in whole-slide images (WSI) of H&E-stained tissue samples to assist pathologists in grading follicular lymphoma patients. However, these approaches still require pathologists to manually identify centroblast cells and provide refined labels for optimal performance. To address this, we propose PseudoCell, an object detection framework to automate centroblast detection in WSI (source code is available at https://github.com/IoBT-VISTEC/PseudoCell.git). This framework incorporates centroblast labels from pathologists and combines them with pseudo-negative labels obtained from undersampled false-positive predictions using the cell's morphological features. By employing PseudoCell, pathologists' workload can be reduced as it accurately narrows down the areas requiring their attention during examining tissue. Depending on the confidence threshold, PseudoCell can eliminate 58.18-99.35% of non-centroblasts tissue areas on WSI. This study presents a practical centroblast prescreening method that does not require pathologists' refined labels for improvement. Detailed guidance on the practical implementation of PseudoCell is provided in the discussion section.
Authors:Junwen Chen, Yingcheng Wang, Keiji Yanai
Abstract:
Recent transformer-based methods achieve notable gains in the Human-object Interaction Detection (HOID) task by leveraging the detection of DETR and the prior knowledge of Vision-Language Model (VLM). However, these methods suffer from extended training times and complex optimization due to the entanglement of object detection and HOI recognition during the decoding process. Especially, the query embeddings used to predict both labels and boxes suffer from ambiguous representations, and the gap between the prediction of HOI labels and verb labels is not considered. To address these challenges, we introduce SOV-STG-VLA with three key components: Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) decoding, Specific Target Guided (STG) denoising, and a Vision-Language Advisor (VLA). Our SOV decoders disentangle object detection and verb recognition with a novel interaction region representation. The STG denoising strategy learns label embeddings with ground-truth information to guide the training and inference. Our SOV-STG achieves a fast convergence speed and high accuracy and builds a foundation for the VLA to incorporate the prior knowledge of the VLM. We introduce a vision advisor decoder to fuse both the interaction region information and the VLM's vision knowledge and a Verb-HOI prediction bridge to promote interaction representation learning. Our VLA notably improves our SOV-STG and achieves SOTA performance with one-sixth of training epochs compared to recent SOTA. Code and models are available at https://github.com/cjw2021/SOV-STG-VLA
Authors:Minh-Quan Dao, Julie Stephany Berrio, Vincent Frémont, Mao Shan, Elwan Héry, Stewart Worrall
Abstract:
Occlusion is a major challenge for LiDAR-based object detection methods. This challenge becomes safety-critical in urban traffic where the ego vehicle must have reliable object detection to avoid collision while its field of view is severely reduced due to the obstruction posed by a large number of road users. Collaborative perception via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, which leverages the diverse perspective thanks to the presence at multiple locations of connected agents to form a complete scene representation, is an appealing solution. State-of-the-art V2X methods resolve the performance-bandwidth tradeoff using a mid-collaboration approach where the Bird-Eye View images of point clouds are exchanged so that the bandwidth consumption is lower than communicating point clouds as in early collaboration, and the detection performance is higher than late collaboration, which fuses agents' output, thanks to a deeper interaction among connected agents. While achieving strong performance, the real-world deployment of most mid-collaboration approaches is hindered by their overly complicated architectures, involving learnable collaboration graphs and autoencoder-based compressor/ decompressor, and unrealistic assumptions about inter-agent synchronization. In this work, we devise a simple yet effective collaboration method that achieves a better bandwidth-performance tradeoff than prior state-of-the-art methods while minimizing changes made to the single-vehicle detection models and relaxing unrealistic assumptions on inter-agent synchronization. Experiments on the V2X-Sim dataset show that our collaboration method achieves 98\% of the performance of an early-collaboration method, while only consuming the equivalent bandwidth of a late-collaboration method.
Authors:Kemal Oksuz, Tom Joy, Puneet K. Dokania
Abstract:
The current approach for testing the robustness of object detectors suffers from serious deficiencies such as improper methods of performing out-of-distribution detection and using calibration metrics which do not consider both localisation and classification quality. In this work, we address these issues, and introduce the Self-Aware Object Detection (SAOD) task, a unified testing framework which respects and adheres to the challenges that object detectors face in safety-critical environments such as autonomous driving. Specifically, the SAOD task requires an object detector to be: robust to domain shift; obtain reliable uncertainty estimates for the entire scene; and provide calibrated confidence scores for the detections. We extensively use our framework, which introduces novel metrics and large scale test datasets, to test numerous object detectors in two different use-cases, allowing us to highlight critical insights into their robustness performance. Finally, we introduce a simple baseline for the SAOD task, enabling researchers to benchmark future proposed methods and move towards robust object detectors which are fit for purpose. Code is available at https://github.com/fiveai/saod
Authors:Xudong Wang, Shufan Li, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Yusuke Kato, Kazuki Kozuka, Trevor Darrell
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary image segmentation aims to partition an image into semantic regions according to arbitrary text descriptions. However, complex visual scenes can be naturally decomposed into simpler parts and abstracted at multiple levels of granularity, introducing inherent segmentation ambiguity. Unlike existing methods that typically sidestep this ambiguity and treat it as an external factor, our approach actively incorporates a hierarchical representation encompassing different semantic-levels into the learning process. We propose a decoupled text-image fusion mechanism and representation learning modules for both "things" and "stuff". Additionally, we systematically examine the differences that exist in the textual and visual features between these types of categories. Our resulting model, named HIPIE, tackles HIerarchical, oPen-vocabulary, and unIvErsal segmentation tasks within a unified framework. Benchmarked on over 40 datasets, e.g., ADE20K, COCO, Pascal-VOC Part, RefCOCO/RefCOCOg, ODinW and SeginW, HIPIE achieves the state-of-the-art results at various levels of image comprehension, including semantic-level (e.g., semantic segmentation), instance-level (e.g., panoptic/referring segmentation and object detection), as well as part-level (e.g., part/subpart segmentation) tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/berkeley-hipie/HIPIE.
Authors:Mustafa Munir, William Avery, Radu Marculescu
Abstract:
Traditionally, convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers (ViT) have dominated computer vision. However, recently proposed vision graph neural networks (ViG) provide a new avenue for exploration. Unfortunately, for mobile applications, ViGs are computationally expensive due to the overhead of representing images as graph structures. In this work, we propose a new graph-based sparse attention mechanism, Sparse Vision Graph Attention (SVGA), that is designed for ViGs running on mobile devices. Additionally, we propose the first hybrid CNN-GNN architecture for vision tasks on mobile devices, MobileViG, which uses SVGA. Extensive experiments show that MobileViG beats existing ViG models and existing mobile CNN and ViT architectures in terms of accuracy and/or speed on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks. Our fastest model, MobileViG-Ti, achieves 75.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with 0.78 ms inference latency on iPhone 13 Mini NPU (compiled with CoreML), which is faster than MobileNetV2x1.4 (1.02 ms, 74.7% top-1) and MobileNetV2x1.0 (0.81 ms, 71.8% top-1). Our largest model, MobileViG-B obtains 82.6% top-1 accuracy with only 2.30 ms latency, which is faster and more accurate than the similarly sized EfficientFormer-L3 model (2.77 ms, 82.4%). Our work proves that well designed hybrid CNN-GNN architectures can be a new avenue of exploration for designing models that are extremely fast and accurate on mobile devices. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/SLDGroup/MobileViG.
Authors:Yifan Zhang, Zhiyu Zhu, Junhui Hou, Dapeng Wu
Abstract:
The Detection Transformer (DETR) has revolutionized the design of CNN-based object detection systems, showcasing impressive performance. However, its potential in the domain of multi-frame 3D object detection remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present STEMD, a novel end-to-end framework that enhances the DETR-like paradigm for multi-frame 3D object detection by addressing three key aspects specifically tailored for this task. First, to model the inter-object spatial interaction and complex temporal dependencies, we introduce the spatial-temporal graph attention network, which represents queries as nodes in a graph and enables effective modeling of object interactions within a social context. To solve the problem of missing hard cases in the proposed output of the encoder in the current frame, we incorporate the output of the previous frame to initialize the query input of the decoder. Finally, it poses a challenge for the network to distinguish between the positive query and other highly similar queries that are not the best match. And similar queries are insufficiently suppressed and turn into redundant prediction boxes. To address this issue, our proposed IoU regularization term encourages similar queries to be distinct during the refinement. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in handling challenging scenarios, while incurring only a minor additional computational overhead. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Eaphan/STEMD.
Authors:Yongjian Wu, Yang Zhou, Jiya Saiyin, Bingzheng Wei, Maode Lai, Jianzhong Shou, Yubo Fan, Yan Xu
Abstract:
Large-scale visual-language pre-trained models (VLPM) have proven their excellent performance in downstream object detection for natural scenes. However, zero-shot nuclei detection on H\&E images via VLPMs remains underexplored. The large gap between medical images and the web-originated text-image pairs used for pre-training makes it a challenging task. In this paper, we attempt to explore the potential of the object-level VLPM, Grounded Language-Image Pre-training (GLIP) model, for zero-shot nuclei detection. Concretely, an automatic prompts design pipeline is devised based on the association binding trait of VLPM and the image-to-text VLPM BLIP, avoiding empirical manual prompts engineering. We further establish a self-training framework, using the automatically designed prompts to generate the preliminary results as pseudo labels from GLIP and refine the predicted boxes in an iterative manner. Our method achieves a remarkable performance for label-free nuclei detection, surpassing other comparison methods. Foremost, our work demonstrates that the VLPM pre-trained on natural image-text pairs exhibits astonishing potential for downstream tasks in the medical field as well. Code will be released at https://github.com/wuyongjianCODE/VLPMNuD.
Authors:Konrad Lis, Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract:
Object detection in 3D is a crucial aspect in the context of autonomous vehicles and drones. However, prototyping detection algorithms is time-consuming and costly in terms of energy and environmental impact. To address these challenges, one can check the effectiveness of different models by training on a subset of the original training set. In this paper, we present a comparison of three algorithms for selecting such a subset - random sampling, random per class sampling, and our proposed MONSPeC (Maximum Object Number Sampling per Class). We provide empirical evidence for the superior effectiveness of random per class sampling and MONSPeC over basic random sampling. By replacing random sampling with one of the more efficient algorithms, the results obtained on the subset are more likely to transfer to the results on the entire dataset. The code is available at: https://github.com/vision-agh/monspec.
Authors:Maciej Baczmanski, Robert Synoczek, Mateusz Wasala, Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract:
Object detection and segmentation are two core modules of an autonomous vehicle perception system. They should have high efficiency and low latency while reducing computational complexity. Currently, the most commonly used algorithms are based on deep neural networks, which guarantee high efficiency but require high-performance computing platforms. In the case of autonomous vehicles, i.e. cars, but also drones, it is necessary to use embedded platforms with limited computing power, which makes it difficult to meet the requirements described above. A reduction in the complexity of the network can be achieved by using an appropriate: architecture, representation (reduced numerical precision, quantisation, pruning), and computing platform. In this paper, we focus on the first factor - the use of so-called detection-segmentation networks as a component of a perception system. We considered the task of segmenting the drivable area and road markings in combination with the detection of selected objects (pedestrians, traffic lights, and obstacles). We compared the performance of three different architectures described in the literature: MultiTask V3, HybridNets, and YOLOP. We conducted the experiments on a custom dataset consisting of approximately 500 images of the drivable area and lane markings, and 250 images of detected objects. Of the three methods analysed, MultiTask V3 proved to be the best, achieving 99% mAP_50 for detection, 97% MIoU for drivable area segmentation, and 91% MIoU for lane segmentation, as well as 124 fps on the RTX 3060 graphics card. This architecture is a good solution for embedded perception systems for autonomous vehicles. The code is available at: https://github.com/vision-agh/MMAR_2023.
Authors:Maoxun Yuan, Xingxing Wei
Abstract:
Object detection on visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images, as an emerging solution to facilitate robust detection for around-the-clock applications, has received extensive attention in recent years. With the help of IR images, object detectors have been more reliable and robust in practical applications by using RGB-IR combined information. However, existing methods still suffer from modality miscalibration and fusion imprecision problems. Since transformer has the powerful capability to model the pairwise correlations between different features, in this paper, we propose a novel Calibrated and Complementary Transformer called $\mathrm{C}^2$Former to address these two problems simultaneously. In $\mathrm{C}^2$Former, we design an Inter-modality Cross-Attention (ICA) module to obtain the calibrated and complementary features by learning the cross-attention relationship between the RGB and IR modality. To reduce the computational cost caused by computing the global attention in ICA, an Adaptive Feature Sampling (AFS) module is introduced to decrease the dimension of feature maps. Because $\mathrm{C}^2$Former performs in the feature domain, it can be embedded into existed RGB-IR object detectors via the backbone network. Thus, one single-stage and one two-stage object detector both incorporating our $\mathrm{C}^2$Former are constructed to evaluate its effectiveness and versatility. With extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle and KAIST RGB-IR datasets, we verify that our method can fully utilize the RGB-IR complementary information and achieve robust detection results. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanmaoxun/Calibrated-and-Complementary-Transformer-for-RGB-Infrared-Object-Detection.git.
Authors:Guoyu Yang, Jie Lei, Zhikuan Zhu, Siyu Cheng, Zunlei Feng, Ronghua Liang
Abstract:
Multi-scale features are of great importance in encoding objects with scale variance in object detection tasks. A common strategy for multi-scale feature extraction is adopting the classic top-down and bottom-up feature pyramid networks. However, these approaches suffer from the loss or degradation of feature information, impairing the fusion effect of non-adjacent levels. This paper proposes an asymptotic feature pyramid network (AFPN) to support direct interaction at non-adjacent levels. AFPN is initiated by fusing two adjacent low-level features and asymptotically incorporates higher-level features into the fusion process. In this way, the larger semantic gap between non-adjacent levels can be avoided. Given the potential for multi-object information conflicts to arise during feature fusion at each spatial location, adaptive spatial fusion operation is further utilized to mitigate these inconsistencies. We incorporate the proposed AFPN into both two-stage and one-stage object detection frameworks and evaluate with the MS-COCO 2017 validation and test datasets. Experimental evaluation shows that our method achieves more competitive results than other state-of-the-art feature pyramid networks. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/gyyang23/AFPN}{https://github.com/gyyang23/AFPN}.
Authors:Raphael Emberger, Jens Michael Boss, Daniel Baumann, Marko Seric, Shufan Huo, Lukas Tuggener, Emanuela Keller, Thilo Stadelmann
Abstract:
Patient monitoring in intensive care units, although assisted by biosensors, needs continuous supervision of staff. To reduce the burden on staff members, IT infrastructures are built to record monitoring data and develop clinical decision support systems. These systems, however, are vulnerable to artifacts (e.g. muscle movement due to ongoing treatment), which are often indistinguishable from real and potentially dangerous signals. Video recordings could facilitate the reliable classification of biosignals using object detection (OD) methods to find sources of unwanted artifacts. Due to privacy restrictions, only blurred videos can be stored, which severely impairs the possibility to detect clinically relevant events such as interventions or changes in patient status with standard OD methods. Hence, new kinds of approaches are necessary that exploit every kind of available information due to the reduced information content of blurred footage and that are at the same time easily implementable within the IT infrastructure of a normal hospital. In this paper, we propose a new method for exploiting information in the temporal succession of video frames. To be efficiently implementable using off-the-shelf object detectors that comply with given hardware constraints, we repurpose the image color channels to account for temporal consistency, leading to an improved detection rate of the object classes. Our method outperforms a standard YOLOv5 baseline model by +1.7% mAP@.5 while also training over ten times faster on our proprietary dataset. We conclude that this approach has shown effectiveness in the preliminary experiments and holds potential for more general video OD in the future.
Authors:Ming Kang, Chee-Ming Ting, Fung Fung Ting, Raphaël Phan
Abstract:
Blood cell detection is a typical small-scale object detection problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a CST-YOLO model for blood cell detection based on YOLOv7 architecture and enhance it with the CNN-Swin Transformer (CST), which is a new attempt at CNN-Transformer fusion. We also introduce three other useful modules: Weighted Efficient Layer Aggregation Networks (W-ELAN), Multiscale Channel Split (MCS), and Concatenate Convolutional Layers (CatConv) in our CST-YOLO to improve small-scale object detection precision. Experimental results show that the proposed CST-YOLO achieves 92.7%, 95.6%, and 91.1% mAP@0.5, respectively, on three blood cell datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art object detectors, e.g., RT-DETR, YOLOv5, and YOLOv7. Our code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/CST-YOLO.
Authors:Thang Doan, Xin Li, Sima Behpour, Wenbin He, Liang Gou, Liu Ren
Abstract:
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a challenging and realistic task that extends beyond the scope of standard Object Detection task. It involves detecting both known and unknown objects while integrating learned knowledge for future tasks. However, the level of "unknownness" varies significantly depending on the context. For example, a tree is typically considered part of the background in a self-driving scene, but it may be significant in a household context. We argue that this contextual information should already be embedded within the known classes. In other words, there should be a semantic or latent structure relationship between the known and unknown items to be discovered. Motivated by this observation, we propose Hyp-OW, a method that learns and models hierarchical representation of known items through a SuperClass Regularizer. Leveraging this representation allows us to effectively detect unknown objects using a similarity distance-based relabeling module. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hyp-OW, achieving improvement in both known and unknown detection (up to 6 percent). These findings are particularly pronounced in our newly designed benchmark, where a strong hierarchical structure exists between known and unknown objects. Our code can be found at https://github.com/boschresearch/Hyp-OW
Authors:Zhizhong Chai, Luyang Luo, Huangjing Lin, Pheng-Ann Heng, Hao Chen
Abstract:
Deep learning (DL)-based rib fracture detection has shown promise of playing an important role in preventing mortality and improving patient outcome. Normally, developing DL-based object detection models requires a huge amount of bounding box annotation. However, annotating medical data is time-consuming and expertise-demanding, making obtaining a large amount of fine-grained annotations extremely infeasible. This poses a pressing need {for} developing label-efficient detection models to alleviate radiologists' labeling burden. To tackle this challenge, the literature on object detection has witnessed an increase of weakly-supervised and semi-supervised approaches, yet still lacks a unified framework that leverages various forms of fully-labeled, weakly-labeled, and unlabeled data. In this paper, we present a novel omni-supervised object detection network, ORF-Netv2, to leverage as much available supervision as possible. Specifically, a multi-branch omni-supervised detection head is introduced with each branch trained with a specific type of supervision. A co-training-based dynamic label assignment strategy is then proposed to enable flexible and robust learning from the weakly-labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive evaluation was conducted for the proposed framework with three rib fracture datasets on both chest CT and X-ray. By leveraging all forms of supervision, ORF-Netv2 achieves mAPs of 34.7, 44.7, and 19.4 on the three datasets, respectively, surpassing the baseline detector which uses only box annotations by mAP gains of 3.8, 4.8, and 5.0, respectively. Furthermore, ORF-Netv2 consistently outperforms other competitive label-efficient methods over various scenarios, showing a promising framework for label-efficient fracture detection. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhizhongchai/ORF-Net.
Authors:Francesco Croce, Naman D Singh, Matthias Hein
Abstract:
Adversarial robustness has been studied extensively in image classification, especially for the $\ell_\infty$-threat model, but significantly less so for related tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation, where attacks turn out to be a much harder optimization problem than for image classification. We propose several problem-specific novel attacks minimizing different metrics in accuracy and mIoU. The ensemble of our attacks, SEA, shows that existing attacks severely overestimate the robustness of semantic segmentation models. Surprisingly, existing attempts of adversarial training for semantic segmentation models turn out to be weak or even completely non-robust. We investigate why previous adaptations of adversarial training to semantic segmentation failed and show how recently proposed robust ImageNet backbones can be used to obtain adversarially robust semantic segmentation models with up to six times less training time for PASCAL-VOC and the more challenging ADE20k. The associated code and robust models are available at https://github.com/nmndeep/robust-segmentation
Authors:Adrian Holzbock, Achyut Hegde, Klaus Dietmayer, Vasileios Belagiannis
Abstract:
Model compression techniques reduce the computational load and memory consumption of deep neural networks. After the compression operation, e.g. parameter pruning, the model is normally fine-tuned on the original training dataset to recover from the performance drop caused by compression. However, the training data is not always available due to privacy issues or other factors. In this work, we present a data-free fine-tuning approach for pruning the backbone of deep neural networks. In particular, the pruned network backbone is trained with synthetically generated images, and our proposed intermediate supervision to mimic the unpruned backbone's output feature map. Afterwards, the pruned backbone can be combined with the original network head to make predictions. We generate synthetic images by back-propagating gradients to noise images while relying on L1-pruning for the backbone pruning. In our experiments, we show that our approach is task-independent due to pruning only the backbone. By evaluating our approach on 2D human pose estimation, object detection, and image classification, we demonstrate promising performance compared to the unpruned model. Our code is available at https://github.com/holzbock/dfbf.
Authors:Chengchao Shen, Dawei Liu, Hao Tang, Zhe Qu, Jianxin Wang
Abstract:
The existing contrastive learning methods widely adopt one-hot instance discrimination as pretext task for self-supervised learning, which inevitably neglects rich inter-instance similarities among natural images, then leading to potential representation degeneration. In this paper, we propose a novel image mix method, PatchMix, for contrastive learning in Vision Transformer (ViT), to model inter-instance similarities among images. Following the nature of ViT, we randomly mix multiple images from mini-batch in patch level to construct mixed image patch sequences for ViT. Compared to the existing sample mix methods, our PatchMix can flexibly and efficiently mix more than two images and simulate more complicated similarity relations among natural images. In this manner, our contrastive framework can significantly reduce the gap between contrastive objective and ground truth in reality. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on both ImageNet-1K and CIFAR datasets, e.g., 3.0% linear accuracy improvement on ImageNet-1K and 8.7% kNN accuracy improvement on CIFAR100. Moreover, our method achieves the leading transfer performance on downstream tasks, object detection and instance segmentation on COCO dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/patchmix
Authors:Jiabao Wang, Yuming Chen, Zhaohui Zheng, Xiang Li, Ming-Ming Cheng, Qibin Hou
Abstract:
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been validated as an effective model compression technique for learning compact object detectors. Existing state-of-the-art KD methods for object detection are mostly based on feature imitation. In this paper, we present a general and effective prediction mimicking distillation scheme, called CrossKD, which delivers the intermediate features of the student's detection head to the teacher's detection head. The resulting cross-head predictions are then forced to mimic the teacher's predictions. This manner relieves the student's head from receiving contradictory supervision signals from the annotations and the teacher's predictions, greatly improving the student's detection performance. Moreover, as mimicking the teacher's predictions is the target of KD, CrossKD offers more task-oriented information in contrast with feature imitation. On MS COCO, with only prediction mimicking losses applied, our CrossKD boosts the average precision of GFL ResNet-50 with 1x training schedule from 40.2 to 43.7, outperforming all existing KD methods. In addition, our method also works well when distilling detectors with heterogeneous backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/jbwang1997/CrossKD.
Authors:Elysia Q. Smyers, Sydney M. Katz, Anthony L. Corso, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Abstract:
Designing robust machine learning systems remains an open problem, and there is a need for benchmark problems that cover both environmental changes and evaluation on a downstream task. In this work, we introduce AVOIDDS, a realistic object detection benchmark for the vision-based aircraft detect-and-avoid problem. We provide a labeled dataset consisting of 72,000 photorealistic images of intruder aircraft with various lighting conditions, weather conditions, relative geometries, and geographic locations. We also provide an interface that evaluates trained models on slices of this dataset to identify changes in performance with respect to changing environmental conditions. Finally, we implement a fully-integrated, closed-loop simulator of the vision-based detect-and-avoid problem to evaluate trained models with respect to the downstream collision avoidance task. This benchmark will enable further research in the design of robust machine learning systems for use in safety-critical applications. The AVOIDDS dataset and code are publicly available at https://purl.stanford.edu/hj293cv5980 and https://github.com/sisl/VisionBasedAircraftDAA respectively.
Authors:Shengjie Zhu, Abhinav Kumar, Masa Hu, Xiaoming Liu
Abstract:
3D sensing for monocular in-the-wild images, e.g., depth estimation and 3D object detection, has become increasingly important. However, the unknown intrinsic parameter hinders their development and deployment. Previous methods for the monocular camera calibration rely on specific 3D objects or strong geometry prior, such as using a checkerboard or imposing a Manhattan World assumption. This work solves the problem from the other perspective by exploiting the monocular 3D prior. Our method is assumption-free and calibrates the complete $4$ Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) intrinsic parameters. First, we demonstrate intrinsic is solved from two well-studied monocular priors, i.e., monocular depthmap, and surface normal map. However, this solution imposes a low-bias and low-variance requirement for depth estimation. Alternatively, we introduce a novel monocular 3D prior, the incidence field, defined as the incidence rays between points in 3D space and pixels in the 2D imaging plane. The incidence field is a pixel-wise parametrization of the intrinsic invariant to image cropping and resizing. With the estimated incidence field, a robust RANSAC algorithm recovers intrinsic. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by showing superior performance on synthetic and zero-shot testing datasets. Beyond calibration, we demonstrate downstream applications in image manipulation detection & restoration, uncalibrated two-view pose estimation, and 3D sensing. Codes, models, and data will be held in https://github.com/ShngJZ/WildCamera.
Authors:Yuqi Wang, Yuntao Chen, Xingyu Liao, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
Comprehensive modeling of the surrounding 3D world is key to the success of autonomous driving. However, existing perception tasks like object detection, road structure segmentation, depth & elevation estimation, and open-set object localization each only focus on a small facet of the holistic 3D scene understanding task. This divide-and-conquer strategy simplifies the algorithm development procedure at the cost of losing an end-to-end unified solution to the problem. In this work, we address this limitation by studying camera-based 3D panoptic segmentation, aiming to achieve a unified occupancy representation for camera-only 3D scene understanding. To achieve this, we introduce a novel method called PanoOcc, which utilizes voxel queries to aggregate spatiotemporal information from multi-frame and multi-view images in a coarse-to-fine scheme, integrating feature learning and scene representation into a unified occupancy representation. We have conducted extensive ablation studies to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results for camera-based semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation on the nuScenes dataset. Furthermore, our method can be easily extended to dense occupancy prediction and has shown promising performance on the Occ3D benchmark. The code will be released at https://github.com/Robertwyq/PanoOcc.
Authors:Sanmin Kim, Youngseok Kim, In-Jae Lee, Dongsuk Kum
Abstract:
Recent camera-based 3D object detection methods have introduced sequential frames to improve the detection performance hoping that multiple frames would mitigate the large depth estimation error. Despite improved detection performance, prior works rely on naive fusion methods (e.g., concatenation) or are limited to static scenes (e.g., temporal stereo), neglecting the importance of the motion cue of objects. These approaches do not fully exploit the potential of sequential images and show limited performance improvements. To address this limitation, we propose a novel 3D object detection model, P2D (Predict to Detect), that integrates a prediction scheme into a detection framework to explicitly extract and leverage motion features. P2D predicts object information in the current frame using solely past frames to learn temporal motion features. We then introduce a novel temporal feature aggregation method that attentively exploits Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features based on predicted object information, resulting in accurate 3D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate that P2D improves mAP and NDS by 3.0% and 3.7% compared to the sequential image-based baseline, illustrating that incorporating a prediction scheme can significantly improve detection accuracy.
Authors:Xiao He, Chang Tang, Xinwang Liu, Wei Zhang, Kun Sun, Jiangfeng Xu
Abstract:
Deep learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) classification and object detection techniques have gained significant attention due to their vital role in image content analysis, interpretation, and wider HSI applications. However, current hyperspectral object detection approaches predominantly emphasize either spectral or spatial information, overlooking the valuable complementary relationship between these two aspects. In this study, we present a novel \textbf{S}pectral-\textbf{S}patial \textbf{A}ggregation (S2ADet) object detector that effectively harnesses the rich spectral and spatial complementary information inherent in hyperspectral images. S2ADet comprises a hyperspectral information decoupling (HID) module, a two-stream feature extraction network, and a one-stage detection head. The HID module processes hyperspectral images by aggregating spectral and spatial information via band selection and principal components analysis, consequently reducing redundancy. Based on the acquired spatial and spectral aggregation information, we propose a feature aggregation two-stream network for interacting spectral-spatial features. Furthermore, to address the limitations of existing databases, we annotate an extensive dataset, designated as HOD3K, containing 3,242 hyperspectral images captured across diverse real-world scenes and encompassing three object classes. These images possess a resolution of 512x256 pixels and cover 16 bands ranging from 470 nm to 620 nm. Comprehensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that S2ADet surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving robust and reliable results. The demo code and dataset of this work are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/hexiao-cs/S2ADet}.
Authors:Bimsara Pathiraja, Malitha Gunawardhana, Muhammad Haris Khan
Abstract:
Albeit achieving high predictive accuracy across many challenging computer vision problems, recent studies suggest that deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to make overconfident predictions, rendering them poorly calibrated. Most of the existing attempts for improving DNN calibration are limited to classification tasks and restricted to calibrating in-domain predictions. Surprisingly, very little to no attempts have been made in studying the calibration of object detection methods, which occupy a pivotal space in vision-based security-sensitive, and safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a new train-time technique for calibrating modern object detection methods. It is capable of jointly calibrating multiclass confidence and box localization by leveraging their predictive uncertainties. We perform extensive experiments on several in-domain and out-of-domain detection benchmarks. Results demonstrate that our proposed train-time calibration method consistently outperforms several baselines in reducing calibration error for both in-domain and out-of-domain predictions. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/bimsarapathiraja/MCCL.
Authors:Xuying Zhang, Bowen Yin, Zheng Lin, Qibin Hou, Deng-Ping Fan, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
We consider the problem of referring camouflaged object detection (Ref-COD), a new task that aims to segment specified camouflaged objects based on a small set of referring images with salient target objects. We first assemble a large-scale dataset, called R2C7K, which consists of 7K images covering 64 object categories in real-world scenarios. Then, we develop a simple but strong dual-branch framework, dubbed R2CNet, with a reference branch embedding the common representations of target objects from referring images and a segmentation branch identifying and segmenting camouflaged objects under the guidance of the common representations. In particular, we design a Referring Mask Generation module to generate pixel-level prior mask and a Referring Feature Enrichment module to enhance the capability of identifying specified camouflaged objects. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our Ref-COD methods over their COD counterparts in segmenting specified camouflaged objects and identifying the main body of target objects. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/zhangxuying1004/RefCOD.
Authors:Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Feng Li, Hao Zhang, Ailing Zeng, Jie Yang, Xingyu Liao, Ding Jia, Hongyang Li, He Cao, Jianan Wang, Zhaoyang Zeng, Xianbiao Qi, Yuhui Yuan, Jianwei Yang, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) algorithm has received considerable attention in the research community and is gradually emerging as a mainstream approach for object detection and other perception tasks. However, the current field lacks a unified and comprehensive benchmark specifically tailored for DETR-based models. To address this issue, we develop a unified, highly modular, and lightweight codebase called detrex, which supports a majority of the mainstream DETR-based instance recognition algorithms, covering various fundamental tasks, including object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation. We conduct extensive experiments under detrex and perform a comprehensive benchmark for DETR-based models. Moreover, we enhance the performance of detection transformers through the refinement of training hyper-parameters, providing strong baselines for supported algorithms.We hope that detrex could offer research communities a standardized and unified platform to evaluate and compare different DETR-based models while fostering a deeper understanding and driving advancements in DETR-based instance recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/detrex. The project is currently being actively developed. We encourage the community to use detrex codebase for further development and contributions.
Authors:Saber Mirzaee Bafti, Chee Siang Ang, Gianluca Marcelli, Md. Moinul Hossain, Sadiya Maxamhud, Anastasios D. Tsaousis
Abstract:
A diversified dataset is crucial for training a well-generalized supervised computer vision algorithm. However, in the field of microbiology, generation and annotation of a diverse dataset including field-taken images are time consuming, costly, and in some cases impossible. Image to image translation frameworks allow us to diversify the dataset by transferring images from one domain to another. However, most existing image translation techniques require a paired dataset (original image and its corresponding image in the target domain), which poses a significant challenge in collecting such datasets. In addition, the application of these image translation frameworks in microbiology is rarely discussed. In this study, we aim to develop an unpaired GAN-based (Generative Adversarial Network) image to image translation model for microbiological images, and study how it can improve generalization ability of object detection models. In this paper, we present an unpaired and unsupervised image translation model to translate laboratory-taken microbiological images to field images, building upon the recent advances in GAN networks and Perceptual loss function. We propose a novel design for a GAN model, BioGAN, by utilizing Adversarial and Perceptual loss in order to transform high level features of laboratory-taken images into field images, while keeping their spatial features. The contribution of Adversarial and Perceptual loss in the generation of realistic field images were studied. We used the synthetic field images, generated by BioGAN, to train an object-detection framework, and compared the results with those of an object-detection framework trained with laboratory images; this resulted in up to 68.1% and 75.3% improvement on F1-score and mAP, respectively. Codes is publicly available at https://github.com/Kahroba2000/BioGAN.
Authors:Qing Su, Anton Netchaev, Hai Li, Shihao Ji
Abstract:
Current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods (e.g., SimCLR, DINO, VICReg,MOCOv3) target primarily on representations at instance level and do not generalize well to dense prediction tasks, such as object detection and segmentation.Towards aligning SSL with dense predictions, this paper demonstrates for the first time the underlying mean-shift clustering process of Vision Transformers (ViT), which aligns well with natural image semantics (e.g., a world of objects and stuffs). By employing transformer for joint embedding and clustering, we propose a two-level feature clustering SSL method, coined Feature-Level Self-supervised Learning (FLSL). We present the formal definition of the FLSL problem and construct the objectives from the mean-shift and k-means perspectives. We show that FLSL promotes remarkable semantic cluster representations and learns an embedding scheme amenable to intra-view and inter-view feature clustering. Experiments show that FLSL yields significant improvements in dense prediction tasks, achieving 44.9 (+2.8)% AP and 46.5% AP in object detection, as well as 40.8 (+2.3)% AP and 42.1% AP in instance segmentation on MS-COCO, using Mask R-CNN with ViT-S/16 and ViT-S/8 as backbone, respectively. FLSL consistently outperforms existing SSL methods across additional benchmarks, including UAV17 object detection on UAVDT, and video instance segmentation on DAVIS 2017.We conclude by presenting visualization and various ablation studies to better understand the success of FLSL. The source code is available at https://github.com/ISL-CV/FLSL.
Authors:Ali Hatamizadeh, Greg Heinrich, Hongxu Yin, Andrew Tao, Jose M. Alvarez, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov
Abstract:
We design a new family of hybrid CNN-ViT neural networks, named FasterViT, with a focus on high image throughput for computer vision (CV) applications. FasterViT combines the benefits of fast local representation learning in CNNs and global modeling properties in ViT. Our newly introduced Hierarchical Attention (HAT) approach decomposes global self-attention with quadratic complexity into a multi-level attention with reduced computational costs. We benefit from efficient window-based self-attention. Each window has access to dedicated carrier tokens that participate in local and global representation learning. At a high level, global self-attentions enable the efficient cross-window communication at lower costs. FasterViT achieves a SOTA Pareto-front in terms of accuracy and image throughput. We have extensively validated its effectiveness on various CV tasks including classification, object detection and segmentation. We also show that HAT can be used as a plug-and-play module for existing networks and enhance them. We further demonstrate significantly faster and more accurate performance than competitive counterparts for images with high resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FasterViT.
Authors:Haochen Li, Rui Zhang, Hantao Yao, Xinkai Song, Yifan Hao, Yongwei Zhao, Ling Li, Yunji Chen
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to generalize detectors trained on an annotated source domain to an unlabelled target domain. However, existing methods focus on reducing the domain bias of the detection backbone by inferring a discriminative visual encoder, while ignoring the domain bias in the detection head. Inspired by the high generalization of vision-language models (VLMs), applying a VLM as the robust detection backbone following a domain-aware detection head is a reasonable way to learn the discriminative detector for each domain, rather than reducing the domain bias in traditional methods. To achieve the above issue, we thus propose a novel DAOD framework named Domain-Aware detection head with Prompt tuning (DA-Pro), which applies the learnable domain-adaptive prompt to generate the dynamic detection head for each domain. Formally, the domain-adaptive prompt consists of the domain-invariant tokens, domain-specific tokens, and the domain-related textual description along with the class label. Furthermore, two constraints between the source and target domains are applied to ensure that the domain-adaptive prompt can capture the domains-shared and domain-specific knowledge. A prompt ensemble strategy is also proposed to reduce the effect of prompt disturbance. Comprehensive experiments over multiple cross-domain adaptation tasks demonstrate that using the domain-adaptive prompt can produce an effectively domain-related detection head for boosting domain-adaptive object detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/Therock90421/DA-Pro.
Authors:Jie Gui, Xiaofeng Cong, Lei He, Yuan Yan Tang, James Tin-Yau Kwok
Abstract:
On the one hand, the dehazing task is an illposedness problem, which means that no unique solution exists. On the other hand, the dehazing task should take into account the subjective factor, which is to give the user selectable dehazed images rather than a single result. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-output dehazing network by introducing illumination controllable ability, called IC-Dehazing. The proposed IC-Dehazing can change the illumination intensity by adjusting the factor of the illumination controllable module, which is realized based on the interpretable Retinex theory. Moreover, the backbone dehazing network of IC-Dehazing consists of a Transformer with double decoders for high-quality image restoration. Further, the prior-based loss function and unsupervised training strategy enable IC-Dehazing to complete the parameter learning process without the need for paired data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed IC-Dehazing, quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted on image dehazing, semantic segmentation, and object detection tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/ICDehazing.
Authors:Xianda Chen, Meixin Zhu, Kehua Chen, Pengqin Wang, Hongliang Lu, Hui Zhong, Xu Han, Yinhai Wang
Abstract:
Car-following is a control process in which a following vehicle (FV) adjusts its acceleration to keep a safe distance from the lead vehicle (LV). Recently, there has been a booming of data-driven models that enable more accurate modeling of car-following through real-world driving datasets. Although there are several public datasets available, their formats are not always consistent, making it challenging to determine the state-of-the-art models and how well a new model performs compared to existing ones. In contrast, research fields such as image recognition and object detection have benchmark datasets like ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, and KITTI. To address this gap and promote the development of microscopic traffic flow modeling, we establish a public benchmark dataset for car-following behavior modeling. The benchmark consists of more than 80K car-following events extracted from five public driving datasets using the same criteria. These events cover diverse situations including different road types, various weather conditions, and mixed traffic flows with autonomous vehicles. Moreover, to give an overview of current progress in car-following modeling, we implemented and tested representative baseline models with the benchmark. Results show that the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based model performs competitively with a lower MSE for spacing compared to traditional intelligent driver model (IDM) and Gazis-Herman-Rothery (GHR) models, and a smaller collision rate compared to fully connected neural network (NN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) models in most datasets. The established benchmark will provide researchers with consistent data formats and metrics for cross-comparing different car-following models, promoting the development of more accurate models. We open-source our dataset and implementation code in https://github.com/HKUST-DRIVE-AI-LAB/FollowNet.
Authors:Tuan Dang, Khang Nguyen, Manfred Huber
Abstract:
As the reliability of the robot's perception correlates with the number of integrated sensing modalities to tackle uncertainty, a practical solution to manage these sensors from different computers, operate them simultaneously, and maintain their real-time performance on the existing robotic system with minimal effort is needed. In this work, we present an end-to-end software-hardware framework, namely ExtPerFC, that supports both conventional hardware and software components and integrates machine learning object detectors without requiring an additional dedicated graphic processor unit (GPU). We first design our framework to achieve real-time performance on the existing robotic system, guarantee configuration optimization, and concentrate on code reusability. We then mathematically model and utilize our transfer learning strategies for 2D object detection and fuse them into depth images for 3D depth estimation. Lastly, we systematically test the proposed framework on the Baxter robot with two 7-DOF arms, a four-wheel mobility base, and an Intel RealSense D435i RGB-D camera. The results show that the robot achieves real-time performance while executing other tasks (e.g., map building, localization, navigation, object detection, arm moving, and grasping) simultaneously with available hardware like Intel onboard CPUS/GPUs on distributed computers. Also, to comprehensively control, program, and monitor the robot system, we design and introduce an end-user application. The source code is available at https://github.com/tuantdang/perception_framework.
Authors:Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
The astounding performance of transformers in natural language processing (NLP) has motivated researchers to explore their applications in computer vision tasks. DEtection TRansformer (DETR) introduces transformers to object detection tasks by reframing detection as a set prediction problem. Consequently, eliminating the need for proposal generation and post-processing steps. Initially, despite competitive performance, DETR suffered from slow training convergence and ineffective detection of smaller objects. However, numerous improvements are proposed to address these issues, leading to substantial improvements in DETR and enabling it to exhibit state-of-the-art performance. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to provide a comprehensive review of 21 recently proposed advancements in the original DETR model. We dive into both the foundational modules of DETR and its recent enhancements, such as modifications to the backbone structure, query design strategies, and refinements to attention mechanisms. Moreover, we conduct a comparative analysis across various detection transformers, evaluating their performance and network architectures. We hope that this study will ignite further interest among researchers in addressing the existing challenges and exploring the application of transformers in the object detection domain. Readers interested in the ongoing developments in detection transformers can refer to our website at: https://github.com/mindgarage-shan/trans_object_detection_survey
Authors:Fusheng Hao, Fengxiang He, Yikai Wang, Fuxiang Wu, Jing Zhang, Jun Cheng, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Massive human-related data is collected to train neural networks for computer vision tasks. A major conflict is exposed relating to software engineers between better developing AI systems and distancing from the sensitive training data. To reconcile this conflict, this paper proposes an efficient privacy-preserving learning paradigm, where images are first encrypted to become ``human-imperceptible, machine-recognizable'' via one of the two encryption strategies: (1) random shuffling to a set of equally-sized patches and (2) mixing-up sub-patches of the images. Then, minimal adaptations are made to vision transformer to enable it to learn on the encrypted images for vision tasks, including image classification and object detection. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and COCO show that the proposed paradigm achieves comparable accuracy with the competitive methods. Decrypting the encrypted images requires solving an NP-hard jigsaw puzzle or an ill-posed inverse problem, which is empirically shown intractable to be recovered by various attackers, including the powerful vision transformer-based attacker. We thus show that the proposed paradigm can ensure the encrypted images have become human-imperceptible while preserving machine-recognizable information. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/FushengHao/PrivacyPreservingML.}
Authors:Aixuan Li, Yuxin Mao, Jing Zhang, Yuchao Dai
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a weakly-supervised RGB-D salient object detection model via scribble supervision. Specifically, as a multimodal learning task, we focus on effective multimodal representation learning via inter-modal mutual information regularization. In particular, following the principle of disentangled representation learning, we introduce a mutual information upper bound with a mutual information minimization regularizer to encourage the disentangled representation of each modality for salient object detection. Based on our multimodal representation learning framework, we introduce an asymmetric feature extractor for our multimodal data, which is proven more effective than the conventional symmetric backbone setting. We also introduce multimodal variational auto-encoder as stochastic prediction refinement techniques, which takes pseudo labels from the first training stage as supervision and generates refined prediction. Experimental results on benchmark RGB-D salient object detection datasets verify both effectiveness of our explicit multimodal disentangled representation learning method and the stochastic prediction refinement strategy, achieving comparable performance with the state-of-the-art fully supervised models. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/baneitixiaomai/MIRV.
Authors:Amar Kulkarni, John Chrosniak, Emory Ducote, Florian Sauerbeck, Andrew Saba, Utkarsh Chirimar, John Link, Marcello Cellina, Madhur Behl
Abstract:
This paper describes the first open dataset for full-scale and high-speed autonomous racing. Multi-modal sensor data has been collected from fully autonomous Indy race cars operating at speeds of up to 170 mph (273 kph). Six teams who raced in the Indy Autonomous Challenge have contributed to this dataset. The dataset spans 11 interesting racing scenarios across two race tracks which include solo laps, multi-agent laps, overtaking situations, high-accelerations, banked tracks, obstacle avoidance, pit entry and exit at different speeds. The dataset contains data from 27 racing sessions across the 11 scenarios with over 6.5 hours of sensor data recorded from the track. The data is organized and released in both ROS2 and nuScenes format. We have also developed the ROS2-to-nuScenes conversion library to achieve this. The RACECAR data is unique because of the high-speed environment of autonomous racing. We present several benchmark problems on localization, object detection and tracking (LiDAR, Radar, and Camera), and mapping using the RACECAR data to explore issues that arise at the limits of operation of the vehicle.
Authors:Chengchao Shen, Jianzhong Chen, Shu Wang, Hulin Kuang, Jin Liu, Jianxin Wang
Abstract:
Asymmetric appearance between positive pair effectively reduces the risk of representation degradation in contrastive learning. However, there are still a mass of appearance similarities between positive pair constructed by the existing methods, which inhibits the further representation improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric patch sampling strategy for contrastive learning, to further boost the appearance asymmetry for better representations. Specifically, dual patch sampling strategies are applied to the given image, to obtain asymmetric positive pairs. First, sparse patch sampling is conducted to obtain the first view, which reduces spatial redundancy of image and allows a more asymmetric view. Second, a selective patch sampling is proposed to construct another view with large appearance discrepancy relative to the first one. Due to the inappreciable appearance similarity between positive pair, the trained model is encouraged to capture the similarity on semantics, instead of low-level ones. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the existing self-supervised methods on both ImageNet-1K and CIFAR dataset, e.g., 2.5% finetune accuracy improvement on CIFAR100. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on downstream tasks, object detection and instance segmentation on COCO.Additionally, compared to other self-supervised methods, our method is more efficient on both memory and computation during training. The source code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/aps.
Authors:Dingyuan Zhang, Dingkang Liang, Hongcheng Yang, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Zhe Liu, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
With the development of large language models, many remarkable linguistic systems like ChatGPT have thrived and achieved astonishing success on many tasks, showing the incredible power of foundation models. In the spirit of unleashing the capability of foundation models on vision tasks, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model for image segmentation, has been proposed recently and presents strong zero-shot ability on many downstream 2D tasks. However, whether SAM can be adapted to 3D vision tasks has yet to be explored, especially 3D object detection. With this inspiration, we explore adapting the zero-shot ability of SAM to 3D object detection in this paper. We propose a SAM-powered BEV processing pipeline to detect objects and get promising results on the large-scale Waymo open dataset. As an early attempt, our method takes a step toward 3D object detection with vision foundation models and presents the opportunity to unleash their power on 3D vision tasks. The code is released at https://github.com/DYZhang09/SAM3D.
Authors:Luping Liu, Zijian Zhang, Yi Ren, Rongjie Huang, Xiang Yin, Zhou Zhao
Abstract:
Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance in text-to-image generation. They utilize a text encoder and cross-attention blocks to infuse textual information into images at a pixel level. However, their capability to generate images with text containing multiple objects is still restricted. Previous works identify the problem of information mixing in the CLIP text encoder and introduce the T5 text encoder or incorporate strong prior knowledge to assist with the alignment. We find that mixing problems also occur on the image side and in the cross-attention blocks. The noisy images can cause different objects to appear similar, and the cross-attention blocks inject information at a pixel level, leading to leakage of global object understanding and resulting in object mixing. In this paper, we introduce Detector Guidance (DG), which integrates a latent object detection model to separate different objects during the generation process. DG first performs latent object detection on cross-attention maps (CAMs) to obtain object information. Based on this information, DG then masks conflicting prompts and enhances related prompts by manipulating the following CAMs. We evaluate the effectiveness of DG using Stable Diffusion on COCO, CC, and a novel multi-related object benchmark, MRO. Human evaluations demonstrate that DG provides an 8-22\% advantage in preventing the amalgamation of conflicting concepts and ensuring that each object possesses its unique region without any human involvement and additional iterations. Our implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/luping-liu/Detector-Guidance}.
Authors:Fusheng Yu, Jiang Li, Xiaoping Wang, Shaojin Wu, Junjie Zhang, Zhigang Zeng
Abstract:
Detecting safety clothing and helmets is paramount for ensuring the safety of construction workers. However, the development of deep learning models in this domain has been impeded by the scarcity of high-quality datasets. In this study, we construct a large, complex, and realistic safety clothing and helmet detection (SFCHD) dataset. SFCHD is derived from two authentic chemical plants, comprising 12,373 images, 7 categories, and 50,552 annotations. We partition the SFCHD dataset into training and testing sets with a ratio of 4:1 and validate its utility by applying several classic object detection algorithms. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from spatial and channel attention mechanisms, we design a spatial and channel attention-based low-light enhancement (SCALE) module. SCALE is a plug-and-play component with a high degree of flexibility. Extensive evaluations of the SCALE module on both the ExDark and SFCHD datasets have empirically demonstrated its efficacy in enhancing the performance of detectors under low-light conditions. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/lijfrank-open/SFCHD-SCALE.
Authors:Yingjie Wang, Jiajun Deng, Yao Li, Jinshui Hu, Cong Liu, Yu Zhang, Jianmin Ji, Wanli Ouyang, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
LiDAR and Radar are two complementary sensing approaches in that LiDAR specializes in capturing an object's 3D shape while Radar provides longer detection ranges as well as velocity hints. Though seemingly natural, how to efficiently combine them for improved feature representation is still unclear. The main challenge arises from that Radar data are extremely sparse and lack height information. Therefore, directly integrating Radar features into LiDAR-centric detection networks is not optimal. In this work, we introduce a bi-directional LiDAR-Radar fusion framework, termed Bi-LRFusion, to tackle the challenges and improve 3D detection for dynamic objects. Technically, Bi-LRFusion involves two steps: first, it enriches Radar's local features by learning important details from the LiDAR branch to alleviate the problems caused by the absence of height information and extreme sparsity; second, it combines LiDAR features with the enhanced Radar features in a unified bird's-eye-view representation. We conduct extensive experiments on nuScenes and ORR datasets, and show that our Bi-LRFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for detecting dynamic objects. Notably, Radar data in these two datasets have different formats, which demonstrates the generalizability of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/JessieW0806/BiLRFusion.
Authors:Yangfan Hu, Qian Zheng, Xudong Jiang, Gang Pan
Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown advantages in computation and energy efficiency over traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs) thanks to their event-driven representations. SNNs also replace weight multiplications in ANNs with additions, which are more energy-efficient and less computationally intensive. However, it remains a challenge to train deep SNNs due to the discrete spike function. A popular approach to circumvent this challenge is ANN-to-SNN conversion. However, due to the quantization error and accumulating error, it often requires lots of time steps (high inference latency) to achieve high performance, which negates SNN's advantages. To this end, this paper proposes Fast-SNN that achieves high performance with low latency. We demonstrate the equivalent mapping between temporal quantization in SNNs and spatial quantization in ANNs, based on which the minimization of the quantization error is transferred to quantized ANN training. With the minimization of the quantization error, we show that the sequential error is the primary cause of the accumulating error, which is addressed by introducing a signed IF neuron model and a layer-wise fine-tuning mechanism. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and low latency on various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Codes are available at: https://github.com/yangfan-hu/Fast-SNN.
Authors:Guofan Fan, Zekun Qi, Wenkai Shi, Kaisheng Ma
Abstract:
Geometry and color information provided by the point clouds are both crucial for 3D scene understanding. Two pieces of information characterize the different aspects of point clouds, but existing methods lack an elaborate design for the discrimination and relevance. Hence we explore a 3D self-supervised paradigm that can better utilize the relations of point cloud information. Specifically, we propose a universal 3D scene pre-training framework via Geometry-Color Contrast (Point-GCC), which aligns geometry and color information using a Siamese network. To take care of actual application tasks, we design (i) hierarchical supervision with point-level contrast and reconstruct and object-level contrast based on the novel deep clustering module to close the gap between pre-training and downstream tasks; (ii) architecture-agnostic backbone to adapt for various downstream models. Benefiting from the object-level representation associated with downstream tasks, Point-GCC can directly evaluate model performance and the result demonstrates the effectiveness of our methods. Transfer learning results on a wide range of tasks also show consistent improvements across all datasets. e.g., new state-of-the-art object detection results on SUN RGB-D and S3DIS datasets. Codes will be released at https://github.com/Asterisci/Point-GCC.
Authors:Yifan Xu, Mengdan Zhang, Chaoyou Fu, Peixian Chen, Xiaoshan Yang, Ke Li, Changsheng Xu
Abstract:
We introduce MQ-Det, an efficient architecture and pre-training strategy design to utilize both textual description with open-set generalization and visual exemplars with rich description granularity as category queries, namely, Multi-modal Queried object Detection, for real-world detection with both open-vocabulary categories and various granularity. MQ-Det incorporates vision queries into existing well-established language-queried-only detectors. A plug-and-play gated class-scalable perceiver module upon the frozen detector is proposed to augment category text with class-wise visual information. To address the learning inertia problem brought by the frozen detector, a vision conditioned masked language prediction strategy is proposed. MQ-Det's simple yet effective architecture and training strategy design is compatible with most language-queried object detectors, thus yielding versatile applications. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-modal queries largely boost open-world detection. For instance, MQ-Det significantly improves the state-of-the-art open-set detector GLIP by +7.8% AP on the LVIS benchmark via multi-modal queries without any downstream finetuning, and averagely +6.3% AP on 13 few-shot downstream tasks, with merely additional 3% modulating time required by GLIP. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/MQ-Det.
Authors:Chen Min, Liang Xiao, Dawei Zhao, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai
Abstract:
Multi-camera 3D perception has emerged as a prominent research field in autonomous driving, offering a viable and cost-effective alternative to LiDAR-based solutions. The existing multi-camera algorithms primarily rely on monocular 2D pre-training. However, the monocular 2D pre-training overlooks the spatial and temporal correlations among the multi-camera system. To address this limitation, we propose the first multi-camera unified pre-training framework, called UniScene, which involves initially reconstructing the 3D scene as the foundational stage and subsequently fine-tuning the model on downstream tasks. Specifically, we employ Occupancy as the general representation for the 3D scene, enabling the model to grasp geometric priors of the surrounding world through pre-training. A significant benefit of UniScene is its capability to utilize a considerable volume of unlabeled image-LiDAR pairs for pre-training purposes. The proposed multi-camera unified pre-training framework demonstrates promising results in key tasks such as multi-camera 3D object detection and surrounding semantic scene completion. When compared to monocular pre-training methods on the nuScenes dataset, UniScene shows a significant improvement of about 2.0% in mAP and 2.0% in NDS for multi-camera 3D object detection, as well as a 3% increase in mIoU for surrounding semantic scene completion. By adopting our unified pre-training method, a 25% reduction in 3D training annotation costs can be achieved, offering significant practical value for the implementation of real-world autonomous driving. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/UniScene.
Authors:Weihuang Liu, Xi Shen, Chi-Man Pun, Xiaodong Cun
Abstract:
Foreground segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision, which includes salient object detection, forgery detection, defocus blur detection, shadow detection, and camouflage object detection. Previous works have typically relied on domain-specific solutions to address accuracy and robustness issues in those applications. In this paper, we present a unified framework for a number of foreground segmentation tasks without any task-specific designs. We take inspiration from the widely-used pre-training and then prompt tuning protocols in NLP and propose a new visual prompting model, named Explicit Visual Prompting (EVP). Different from the previous visual prompting which is typically a dataset-level implicit embedding, our key insight is to enforce the tunable parameters focusing on the explicit visual content from each individual image, i.e., the features from frozen patch embeddings and high-frequency components. Our method freezes a pre-trained model and then learns task-specific knowledge using a few extra parameters. Despite introducing only a small number of tunable parameters, EVP achieves superior performance than full fine-tuning and other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Experiments in fourteen datasets across five tasks show the proposed method outperforms other task-specific methods while being considerably simple. The proposed method demonstrates the scalability in different architectures, pre-trained weights, and tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/NiFangBaAGe/Explicit-Visual-Prompt.
Authors:Yuhang Zang, Wei Li, Jun Han, Kaiyang Zhou, Chen Change Loy
Abstract:
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are remarkable in vision-language tasks, such as image captioning and question answering, but lack the essential perception ability, i.e., object detection. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a novel research problem of contextual object detection -- understanding visible objects within different human-AI interactive contexts. Three representative scenarios are investigated, including the language cloze test, visual captioning, and question answering. Moreover, we present ContextDET, a unified multimodal model that is capable of end-to-end differentiable modeling of visual-language contexts, so as to locate, identify, and associate visual objects with language inputs for human-AI interaction. Our ContextDET involves three key submodels: (i) a visual encoder for extracting visual representations, (ii) a pre-trained LLM for multimodal context decoding, and (iii) a visual decoder for predicting bounding boxes given contextual object words. The new generate-then-detect framework enables us to detect object words within human vocabulary. Extensive experiments show the advantages of ContextDET on our proposed CODE benchmark, open-vocabulary detection, and referring image segmentation. Github: https://github.com/yuhangzang/ContextDET.
Authors:Haojun Yu, Youcheng Li, QuanLin Wu, Ziwei Zhao, Dengbo Chen, Dong Wang, Liwei Wang
Abstract:
During ultrasonic scanning processes, real-time lesion detection can assist radiologists in accurate cancer diagnosis. However, this essential task remains challenging and underexplored. General-purpose real-time object detection models can mistakenly report obvious false positives (FPs) when applied to ultrasound videos, potentially misleading junior radiologists. One key issue is their failure to utilize negative symptoms in previous frames, denoted as negative temporal contexts (NTC). To address this issue, we propose to extract contexts from previous frames, including NTC, with the guidance of inverse optical flow. By aggregating extracted contexts, we endow the model with the ability to suppress FPs by leveraging NTC. We call the resulting model UltraDet. The proposed UltraDet demonstrates significant improvement over previous state-of-the-arts and achieves real-time inference speed. We release the code, checkpoints, and high-quality labels of the CVA-BUS dataset in https://github.com/HaojunYu1998/UltraDet.
Authors:Ao Qu, Xuhuan Huang, Dajiang Suo
Abstract:
Recent advances in sensing and communication have paved the way for collective perception in traffic management, with real-time data sharing among multiple entities. While vehicle-based collective perception has gained traction, infrastructure-based approaches, which entail the real-time sharing and merging of sensing data from different roadside sensors for object detection, grapple with challenges in placement strategy and high ex-post evaluation costs. Despite anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness, many current deployments rely on engineering heuristics and face budget constraints that limit post-deployment adjustments. This paper introduces polynomial-time heuristic algorithms and a simulation tool for the ex-ante evaluation of infrastructure sensor deployment. By modeling it as an integer programming problem, we guide decisions on sensor locations, heights, and configurations to harmonize cost, installation constraints, and coverage. Our simulation engine, integrated with open-source urban driving simulators, enables us to evaluate the effectiveness of each sensor deployment solution through the lens of object detection. A case study with infrastructure LiDARs revealed that the incremental benefit derived from integrating additional low-resolution LiDARs could surpass that of incorporating more high-resolution ones. The results reinforce the necessity of investigating the cost-performance tradeoff prior to deployment. The code for our simulation experiments can be found at https://github.com/dajiangsuo/SEIP.
Authors:Xiao Li, Hang Chen, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract:
Object detection is a critical component of various security-sensitive applications, such as autonomous driving and video surveillance. However, existing object detectors are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which poses a significant challenge to their reliability and security. Through experiments, first, we found that existing works on improving the adversarial robustness of object detectors give a false sense of security. Second, we found that adversarially pre-trained backbone networks were essential for enhancing the adversarial robustness of object detectors. We then proposed a simple yet effective recipe for fast adversarial fine-tuning on object detectors with adversarially pre-trained backbones. Without any modifications to the structure of object detectors, our recipe achieved significantly better adversarial robustness than previous works. Finally, we explored the potential of different modern object detector designs for improving adversarial robustness with our recipe and demonstrated interesting findings, which inspired us to design state-of-the-art (SOTA) robust detectors. Our empirical results set a new milestone for adversarially robust object detection. Code and trained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/thu-ml/oddefense.
Authors:Rui Cao, Jing Jiang
Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) show great zero-shot capabilities. In this paper, we study how to leverage them for zero-shot visual question answering (VQA). Our approach is motivated by a few observations. First, VQA questions often require multiple steps of reasoning, which is still a capability that most PTMs lack. Second, different steps in VQA reasoning chains require different skills such as object detection and relational reasoning, but a single PTM may not possess all these skills. Third, recent work on zero-shot VQA does not explicitly consider multi-step reasoning chains, which makes them less interpretable compared with a decomposition-based approach. We propose a modularized zero-shot network that explicitly decomposes questions into sub reasoning steps and is highly interpretable. We convert sub reasoning tasks to acceptable objectives of PTMs and assign tasks to proper PTMs without any adaptation. Our experiments on two VQA benchmarks under the zero-shot setting demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and better interpretability compared with several baselines.
Authors:Xi Weng, Yunhao Ni, Tengwei Song, Jie Luo, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Lei Huang
Abstract:
Whitening loss offers a theoretical guarantee against feature collapse in self-supervised learning (SSL) with joint embedding architectures. Typically, it involves a hard whitening approach, transforming the embedding and applying loss to the whitened output. In this work, we introduce Spectral Transformation (ST), a framework to modulate the spectrum of embedding and to seek for functions beyond whitening that can avoid dimensional collapse. We show that whitening is a special instance of ST by definition, and our empirical investigations unveil other ST instances capable of preventing collapse. Additionally, we propose a novel ST instance named IterNorm with trace loss (INTL). Theoretical analysis confirms INTL's efficacy in preventing collapse and modulating the spectrum of embedding toward equal-eigenvalues during optimization. Our experiments on ImageNet classification and COCO object detection demonstrate INTL's potential in learning superior representations. The code is available at https://github.com/winci-ai/INTL.
Authors:Adnan Munir, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, Saeed Anwar
Abstract:
To detect unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in real-time, computer vision and deep learning approaches are evolving research areas. Interest in this problem has grown due to concerns regarding the possible hazards and misuse of employing UAVs in many applications. These include potential privacy violations. To address the concerns, vision-based object detection methods have been developed for UAV detection. However, UAV detection in images with complex backgrounds and weather artifacts like rain has yet to be reasonably studied. Hence, for this purpose, we prepared two training datasets. The first dataset has the sky as its background and is called the Sky Background Dataset (SBD). The second training dataset has more complex scenes (with diverse backgrounds) and is named the Complex Background Dataset (CBD). Additionally, two test sets were prepared: one containing clear images and the other with images with three rain artifacts, named the Rainy Test Set (RTS). This work also focuses on benchmarking state-of-the-art object detection models, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the first to investigate the performance of recent and popular vision-based object detection methods for UAV detection under challenging conditions such as complex backgrounds, varying UAV sizes, and low-to-heavy rainy conditions. The findings presented in the paper shall help provide insights concerning the performance of the selected models for UAV detection under challenging conditions and pave the way to develop more robust UAV detection methods. The codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/AdnanMunir294/UAVD-CBRA.
Authors:Tao Huang, Yuan Zhang, Mingkai Zheng, Shan You, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Chang Xu
Abstract:
The representation gap between teacher and student is an emerging topic in knowledge distillation (KD). To reduce the gap and improve the performance, current methods often resort to complicated training schemes, loss functions, and feature alignments, which are task-specific and feature-specific. In this paper, we state that the essence of these methods is to discard the noisy information and distill the valuable information in the feature, and propose a novel KD method dubbed DiffKD, to explicitly denoise and match features using diffusion models. Our approach is based on the observation that student features typically contain more noises than teacher features due to the smaller capacity of student model. To address this, we propose to denoise student features using a diffusion model trained by teacher features. This allows us to perform better distillation between the refined clean feature and teacher feature. Additionally, we introduce a light-weight diffusion model with a linear autoencoder to reduce the computation cost and an adaptive noise matching module to improve the denoising performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffKD is effective across various types of features and achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/hunto/DiffKD.
Authors:Liang Peng, Junkai Xu, Haoran Cheng, Zheng Yang, Xiaopei Wu, Wei Qian, Wenxiao Wang, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai
Abstract:
Monocular 3D detection is a challenging task due to the lack of accurate 3D information. Existing approaches typically rely on geometry constraints and dense depth estimates to facilitate the learning, but often fail to fully exploit the benefits of three-dimensional feature extraction in frustum and 3D space. In this paper, we propose \textbf{OccupancyM3D}, a method of learning occupancy for monocular 3D detection. It directly learns occupancy in frustum and 3D space, leading to more discriminative and informative 3D features and representations. Specifically, by using synchronized raw sparse LiDAR point clouds, we define the space status and generate voxel-based occupancy labels. We formulate occupancy prediction as a simple classification problem and design associated occupancy losses. Resulting occupancy estimates are employed to enhance original frustum/3D features. As a result, experiments on KITTI and Waymo open datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a new state of the art and surpasses other methods by a significant margin. Codes and pre-trained models will be available at \url{https://github.com/SPengLiang/OccupancyM3D}.
Authors:Jiayi Zhu, Xuebin Qin, Abdulmotaleb Elsaddik
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce Divide-and-Conquer into the salient object detection (SOD) task to enable the model to learn prior knowledge that is for predicting the saliency map. We design a novel network, Divide-and-Conquer Network (DC-Net) which uses two encoders to solve different subtasks that are conducive to predicting the final saliency map, here is to predict the edge maps with width 4 and location maps of salient objects and then aggregate the feature maps with different semantic information into the decoder to predict the final saliency map. The decoder of DC-Net consists of our newly designed two-level Residual nested-ASPP (ResASPP$^{2}$) modules, which have the ability to capture a large number of different scale features with a small number of convolution operations and have the advantages of maintaining high resolution all the time and being able to obtain a large and compact effective receptive field (ERF). Based on the advantage of Divide-and-Conquer's parallel computing, we use Parallel Acceleration to speed up DC-Net, allowing it to achieve competitive performance on six LR-SOD and five HR-SOD datasets under high efficiency (60 FPS and 55 FPS). Codes and results are available: https://github.com/PiggyJerry/DC-Net.
Authors:Shitian He, Huanxin Zou, Yingqian Wang, Boyang Li, Xu Cao, Ning Jing
Abstract:
Pointly Supervised Object Detection (PSOD) has attracted considerable interests due to its lower labeling cost as compared to box-level supervised object detection. However, the complex scenes, densely packed and dynamic-scale objects in Remote Sensing (RS) images hinder the development of PSOD methods in RS field. In this paper, we make the first attempt to achieve RS object detection with single point supervision, and propose a PSOD method tailored for RS images. Specifically, we design a point label upgrader (PLUG) to generate pseudo box labels from single point labels, and then use the pseudo boxes to supervise the optimization of existing detectors. Moreover, to handle the challenge of the densely packed objects in RS images, we propose a sparse feature guided semantic prediction module which can generate high-quality semantic maps by fully exploiting informative cues from sparse objects. Extensive ablation studies on the DOTA dataset have validated the effectiveness of our method. Our method can achieve significantly better performance as compared to state-of-the-art image-level and point-level supervised detection methods, and reduce the performance gap between PSOD and box-level supervised object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/heshitian/PLUG.
Authors:Alvari Seppänen, Risto Ojala, Kari Tammi
Abstract:
Adverse weather can cause noise to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. This is a problem since it is used in many outdoor applications, e.g. object detection and mapping. We propose the task of multi-echo denoising, where the goal is to pick the echo that represents the objects of interest and discard other echoes. Thus, the idea is to pick points from alternative echoes that are not available in standard strongest echo point clouds due to the noise. In an intuitive sense, we are trying to see through the adverse weather. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel self-supervised deep learning method and the characteristics similarity regularization method to boost its performance. Based on extensive experiments on a semi-synthetic dataset, our method achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art in self-supervised adverse weather denoising (23% improvement). Moreover, the experiments with a real multi-echo adverse weather dataset prove the efficacy of multi-echo denoising. Our work enables more reliable point cloud acquisition in adverse weather and thus promises safer autonomous driving and driving assistance systems in such conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/alvariseppanen/SMEDNet
Authors:Maysam Orouskhani, Negar Firoozeh, Shaojun Xia, Mahmud Mossa-Basha, Chengcheng Zhu
Abstract:
Intracranial aneurysms are a commonly occurring and life-threatening condition, affecting approximately 3.2% of the general population. Consequently, detecting these aneurysms plays a crucial role in their management. Lesion detection involves the simultaneous localization and categorization of abnormalities within medical images. In this study, we employed the nnDetection framework, a self-configuring framework specifically designed for 3D medical object detection, to detect and localize the 3D coordinates of aneurysms effectively. To capture and extract diverse features associated with aneurysms, we utilized TOF-MRA and structural MRI, both obtained from the ADAM dataset. The performance of our proposed deep learning model was assessed through the utilization of free-response receiver operative characteristics for evaluation purposes. The model's weights and 3D prediction of the bounding box of TOF-MRA are publicly available at https://github.com/orouskhani/AneurysmDetection.
Authors:Tianyou Chen, Jin Xiao, Xiaoguang Hu, Guofeng Zhang, Shaojie Wang
Abstract:
Camouflaged objects are typically assimilated into their backgrounds and exhibit fuzzy boundaries. The complex environmental conditions and the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged targets and their surroundings pose significant challenges in accurately locating and segmenting these objects in their entirety. While existing methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in various real-world scenarios, they still face limitations when confronted with difficult cases, such as small targets, thin structures, and indistinct boundaries. Drawing inspiration from human visual perception when observing images containing camouflaged objects, we propose a three-stage model that enables coarse-to-fine segmentation in a single iteration. Specifically, our model employs three decoders to sequentially process subsampled features, cropped features, and high-resolution original features. This proposed approach not only reduces computational overhead but also mitigates interference caused by background noise. Furthermore, considering the significance of multi-scale information, we have designed a multi-scale feature enhancement module that enlarges the receptive field while preserving detailed structural cues. Additionally, a boundary enhancement module has been developed to enhance performance by leveraging boundary information. Subsequently, a mask-guided fusion module is proposed to generate fine-grained results by integrating coarse prediction maps with high-resolution feature maps. Our network surpasses state-of-the-art CNN-based counterparts without unnecessary complexities. Upon acceptance of the paper, the source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/clelouch/BTSNet.
Authors:Yixuan Wu, Zhao Zhang, Xie Chi, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao
Abstract:
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) is a widely explored multi-modal task, which endeavors to segment the pre-existing object within a single image with a given linguistic expression. However, in broader real-world scenarios, it is not always possible to determine if the described object exists in a specific image. Typically, we have a collection of images, some of which may contain the described objects. The current RES setting curbs its practicality in such situations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a more realistic and general setting, named Group-wise Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES), which expands RES to a collection of related images, allowing the described objects to be present in a subset of input images. To support this new setting, we introduce an elaborately compiled dataset named Grouped Referring Dataset (GRD), containing complete group-wise annotations of target objects described by given expressions. We also present a baseline method named Grouped Referring Segmenter (GRSer), which explicitly captures the language-vision and intra-group vision-vision interactions to achieve state-of-the-art results on the proposed GRES and related tasks, such as Co-Salient Object Detection and RES. Our dataset and codes will be publicly released in https://github.com/yixuan730/group-res.
Authors:Long Bai, Mobarakol Islam, Lalithkumar Seenivasan, Hongliang Ren
Abstract:
Despite the availability of computer-aided simulators and recorded videos of surgical procedures, junior residents still heavily rely on experts to answer their queries. However, expert surgeons are often overloaded with clinical and academic workloads and limit their time in answering. For this purpose, we develop a surgical question-answering system to facilitate robot-assisted surgical scene and activity understanding from recorded videos. Most of the existing VQA methods require an object detector and regions based feature extractor to extract visual features and fuse them with the embedded text of the question for answer generation. However, (1) surgical object detection model is scarce due to smaller datasets and lack of bounding box annotation; (2) current fusion strategy of heterogeneous modalities like text and image is naive; (3) the localized answering is missing, which is crucial in complex surgical scenarios. In this paper, we propose Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgery (Surgical-VQLA) to localize the specific surgical area during the answer prediction. To deal with the fusion of the heterogeneous modalities, we design gated vision-language embedding (GVLE) to build input patches for the Language Vision Transformer (LViT) to predict the answer. To get localization, we add the detection head in parallel with the prediction head of the LViT. We also integrate GIoU loss to boost localization performance by preserving the accuracy of the question-answering model. We annotate two datasets of VQLA by utilizing publicly available surgical videos from MICCAI challenges EndoVis-17 and 18. Our validation results suggest that Surgical-VQLA can better understand the surgical scene and localize the specific area related to the question-answering. GVLE presents an efficient language-vision embedding technique by showing superior performance over the existing benchmarks.
Authors:Leiping Jie, Hui Zhang
Abstract:
As a promptable generic object segmentation model, segment anything model (SAM) has recently attracted significant attention, and also demonstrates its powerful performance. Nevertheless, it still meets its Waterloo when encountering several tasks, e.g., medical image segmentation, camouflaged object detection, etc. In this report, we try SAM on an unexplored popular task: shadow detection. Specifically, four benchmarks were chosen and evaluated with widely used metrics. The experimental results show that the performance for shadow detection using SAM is not satisfactory, especially when comparing with the elaborate models. Code is available at https://github.com/LeipingJie/SAMSh.
Authors:Peize Sun, Shoufa Chen, Chenchen Zhu, Fanyi Xiao, Ping Luo, Saining Xie, Zhicheng Yan
Abstract:
Object detection has been expanded from a limited number of categories to open vocabulary. Moving forward, a complete intelligent vision system requires understanding more fine-grained object descriptions, object parts. In this paper, we propose a detector with the ability to predict both open-vocabulary objects and their part segmentation. This ability comes from two designs. First, we train the detector on the joint of part-level, object-level and image-level data to build the multi-granularity alignment between language and image. Second, we parse the novel object into its parts by its dense semantic correspondence with the base object. These two designs enable the detector to largely benefit from various data sources and foundation models. In open-vocabulary part segmentation experiments, our method outperforms the baseline by 3.3$\sim$7.3 mAP in cross-dataset generalization on PartImageNet, and improves the baseline by 7.3 novel AP$_{50}$ in cross-category generalization on Pascal Part. Finally, we train a detector that generalizes to a wide range of part segmentation datasets while achieving better performance than dataset-specific training.
Authors:Hang Xu, Xinyuan Liu, Haonan Xu, Yike Ma, Zunjie Zhu, Chenggang Yan, Feng Dai
Abstract:
Oriented object detection has been developed rapidly in the past few years, where rotation equivariance is crucial for detectors to predict rotated boxes. It is expected that the prediction can maintain the corresponding rotation when objects rotate, but severe mutation in angular prediction is sometimes observed when objects rotate near the boundary angle, which is well-known boundary discontinuity problem. The problem has been long believed to be caused by the sharp loss increase at the angular boundary, and widely used joint-optim IoU-like methods deal with this problem by loss-smoothing. However, we experimentally find that even state-of-the-art IoU-like methods actually fail to solve the problem. On further analysis, we find that the key to solution lies in encoding mode of the smoothing function rather than in joint or independent optimization. In existing IoU-like methods, the model essentially attempts to fit the angular relationship between box and object, where the break point at angular boundary makes the predictions highly unstable.To deal with this issue, we propose a dual-optimization paradigm for angles. We decouple reversibility and joint-optim from single smoothing function into two distinct entities, which for the first time achieves the objectives of both correcting angular boundary and blending angle with other parameters.Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that boundary discontinuity problem is well-addressed. Moreover, typical IoU-like methods are improved to the same level without obvious performance gap. The code is available at https://github.com/hangxu-cv/cvpr24acm.
Authors:Zhimin Chen, Longlong Jing, Yingwei Li, Bing Li
Abstract:
Foundation models have achieved remarkable results in 2D and language tasks like image segmentation, object detection, and visual-language understanding. However, their potential to enrich 3D scene representation learning is largely untapped due to the existence of the domain gap. In this work, we propose an innovative methodology called Bridge3D to address this gap by pre-training 3D models using features, semantic masks, and captions sourced from foundation models. Specifically, our method employs semantic masks from foundation models to guide the masking and reconstruction process for the masked autoencoder, enabling more focused attention on foreground representations. Moreover, we bridge the 3D-text gap at the scene level using image captioning foundation models, thereby facilitating scene-level knowledge distillation. We further extend this bridging effort by introducing an innovative object-level knowledge distillation method that harnesses highly accurate object-level masks and semantic text data from foundation models. Our methodology significantly surpasses the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods in 3D object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. For instance, on the ScanNet dataset, Bridge3D improves the baseline by a notable margin of 6.3%. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Zhimin-C/Bridge3D
Authors:Joonhyun Jeong, Joonsang Yu, Geondo Park, Dongyoon Han, YoungJoon Yoo
Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to automatically excavate the optimal network architecture with superior test performance. Recent neural architecture search (NAS) approaches rely on validation loss or accuracy to find the superior network for the target data. In this paper, we investigate a new neural architecture search measure for excavating architectures with better generalization. We demonstrate that the flatness of the loss surface can be a promising proxy for predicting the generalization capability of neural network architectures. We evaluate our proposed method on various search spaces, showing similar or even better performance compared to the state-of-the-art NAS methods. Notably, the resultant architecture found by flatness measure generalizes robustly to various shifts in data distribution (e.g. ImageNet-V2,-A,-O), as well as various tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/GeNAS.
Authors:Xin Xiao, Daiguo Zhou, Jiagao Hu, Yi Hu, Yongchao Xu
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation has recently witnessed great progress. Despite the impressive overall results, the segmentation performance in some hard areas (e.g., small objects or thin parts) is still not promising. A straightforward solution is hard sample mining, which is widely used in object detection. Yet, most existing hard pixel mining strategies for semantic segmentation often rely on pixel's loss value, which tends to decrease during training. Intuitively, the pixel hardness for segmentation mainly depends on image structure and is expected to be stable. In this paper, we propose to learn pixel hardness for semantic segmentation, leveraging hardness information contained in global and historical loss values. More precisely, we add a gradient-independent branch for learning a hardness level (HL) map by maximizing hardness-weighted segmentation loss, which is minimized for the segmentation head. This encourages large hardness values in difficult areas, leading to appropriate and stable HL map. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method can be applied to most segmentation methods with no and marginal extra cost during inference and training, respectively. Without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves consistent/significant improvement (1.37% mIoU on average) over most popular semantic segmentation methods on Cityscapes dataset, and demonstrates good generalization ability across domains. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Menoly-xin/Hardness-Level-Learning .
Authors:Zhe Liu, Xiaoqing Ye, Zhikang Zou, Xinwei He, Xiao Tan, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
Multi-modal 3D object detection has received growing attention as the information from different sensors like LiDAR and cameras are complementary. Most fusion methods for 3D detection rely on an accurate alignment and calibration between 3D point clouds and RGB images. However, such an assumption is not reliable in a real-world self-driving system, as the alignment between different modalities is easily affected by asynchronous sensors and disturbed sensor placement. We propose a novel {F}usion network by {B}ox {M}atching (FBMNet) for multi-modal 3D detection, which provides an alternative way for cross-modal feature alignment by learning the correspondence at the bounding box level to free up the dependency of calibration during inference. With the learned assignments between 3D and 2D object proposals, the fusion for detection can be effectively performed by combing their ROI features. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method is much more stable in dealing with challenging cases such as asynchronous sensors, misaligned sensor placement, and degenerated camera images than existing fusion methods. We hope that our FBMNet could provide an available solution to dealing with these challenging cases for safety in real autonomous driving scenarios. Codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/happinesslz/FBMNet.
Authors:Ruixiang Jiang, Lingbo Liu, Changwen Chen
Abstract:
Recent advances in visual-language models have shown remarkable zero-shot text-image matching ability that is transferable to downstream tasks such as object detection and segmentation. Adapting these models for object counting, however, remains a formidable challenge. In this study, we first investigate transferring vision-language models (VLMs) for class-agnostic object counting. Specifically, we propose CLIP-Count, the first end-to-end pipeline that estimates density maps for open-vocabulary objects with text guidance in a zero-shot manner. To align the text embedding with dense visual features, we introduce a patch-text contrastive loss that guides the model to learn informative patch-level visual representations for dense prediction. Moreover, we design a hierarchical patch-text interaction module to propagate semantic information across different resolution levels of visual features. Benefiting from the full exploitation of the rich image-text alignment knowledge of pretrained VLMs, our method effectively generates high-quality density maps for objects-of-interest. Extensive experiments on FSC-147, CARPK, and ShanghaiTech crowd counting datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and generalizability of the proposed method. Code is available: https://github.com/songrise/CLIP-Count.
Authors:Xuan He, Fan Yang, Kailun Yang, Jiacheng Lin, Haolong Fu, Meng Wang, Jin Yuan, Zhiyong Li
Abstract:
Transformer-based methods have demonstrated superior performance for monocular 3D object detection recently, which aims at predicting 3D attributes from a single 2D image. Most existing transformer-based methods leverage both visual and depth representations to explore valuable query points on objects, and the quality of the learned query points has a great impact on detection accuracy. Unfortunately, existing unsupervised attention mechanisms in transformers are prone to generate low-quality query features due to inaccurate receptive fields, especially on hard objects. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel "Supervised Scale-aware Deformable Attention" (SSDA) for monocular 3D object detection. Specifically, SSDA presets several masks with different scales and utilizes depth and visual features to adaptively learn a scale-aware filter for object query augmentation. Imposing the scale awareness, SSDA could well predict the accurate receptive field of an object query to support robust query feature generation. Aside from this, SSDA is assigned with a Weighted Scale Matching (WSM) loss to supervise scale prediction, which presents more confident results as compared to the unsupervised attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo Open datasets demonstrate that SSDA significantly improves the detection accuracy, especially on moderate and hard objects, yielding state-of-the-art performance as compared to the existing approaches. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mikasa3lili/SSD-MonoDETR.
Authors:Dahun Kim, Anelia Angelova, Weicheng Kuo
Abstract:
We present Region-aware Open-vocabulary Vision Transformers (RO-ViT) - a contrastive image-text pretraining recipe to bridge the gap between image-level pretraining and open-vocabulary object detection. At the pretraining phase, we propose to randomly crop and resize regions of positional embeddings instead of using the whole image positional embeddings. This better matches the use of positional embeddings at region-level in the detection finetuning phase. In addition, we replace the common softmax cross entropy loss in contrastive learning with focal loss to better learn the informative yet difficult examples. Finally, we leverage recent advances in novel object proposals to improve open-vocabulary detection finetuning. We evaluate our full model on the LVIS and COCO open-vocabulary detection benchmarks and zero-shot transfer. RO-ViT achieves a state-of-the-art 34.1 $AP_r$ on LVIS, surpassing the best existing approach by +7.8 points in addition to competitive zero-shot transfer detection. Surprisingly, RO-ViT improves the image-level representation as well and achieves the state of the art on 9 out of 12 metrics on COCO and Flickr image-text retrieval benchmarks, outperforming competitive approaches with larger models.
Authors:Ning Ding, Ce Zhang, Azim Eskandarian
Abstract:
Object detection (OD) is crucial to autonomous driving. On the other hand, unknown objects, which have not been seen in training sample set, are one of the reasons that hinder autonomous vehicles from driving beyond the operational domain. To addresss this issue, we propose a saliency-based OD algorithm (SalienDet) to detect unknown objects. Our SalienDet utilizes a saliency-based algorithm to enhance image features for object proposal generation. Moreover, we design a dataset relabeling approach to differentiate the unknown objects from all objects in training sample set to achieve Open-World Detection. To validate the performance of SalienDet, we evaluate SalienDet on KITTI, nuScenes, and BDD datasets, and the result indicates that it outperforms existing algorithms for unknown object detection. Notably, SalienDet can be easily adapted for incremental learning in open-world detection tasks. The project page is \url{https://github.com/dingmike001/SalienDet-Open-Detection.git}.
Authors:Benjamin Gallusser, Max Stieber, Martin Weigert
Abstract:
State-of-the-art object detection and segmentation methods for microscopy images rely on supervised machine learning, which requires laborious manual annotation of training data. Here we present a self-supervised method based on time arrow prediction pre-training that learns dense image representations from raw, unlabeled live-cell microscopy videos. Our method builds upon the task of predicting the correct order of time-flipped image regions via a single-image feature extractor followed by a time arrow prediction head that operates on the fused features. We show that the resulting dense representations capture inherently time-asymmetric biological processes such as cell divisions on a pixel-level. We furthermore demonstrate the utility of these representations on several live-cell microscopy datasets for detection and segmentation of dividing cells, as well as for cell state classification. Our method outperforms supervised methods, particularly when only limited ground truth annotations are available as is commonly the case in practice. We provide code at https://github.com/weigertlab/tarrow.
Authors:Pengyu Yan, Saleem Ahmed, David Doermann
Abstract:
As a prerequisite of chart data extraction, the accurate detection of chart basic elements is essential and mandatory. In contrast to object detection in the general image domain, chart element detection relies heavily on context information as charts are highly structured data visualization formats. To address this, we propose a novel method CACHED, which stands for Context-Aware Chart Element Detection, by integrating a local-global context fusion module consisting of visual context enhancement and positional context encoding with the Cascade R-CNN framework. To improve the generalization of our method for broader applicability, we refine the existing chart element categorization and standardized 18 classes for chart basic elements, excluding plot elements. Our CACHED method, with the updated category of chart elements, achieves state-of-the-art performance in our experiments, underscoring the importance of context in chart element detection. Extending our method to the bar plot detection task, we obtain the best result on the PMC test dataset.
Authors:Xiuwei Xu, Zhihao Sun, Ziwei Wang, Hongmin Liu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an efficient feature pruning strategy for 3D small object detection. Conventional 3D object detection methods struggle on small objects due to the weak geometric information from a small number of points. Although increasing the spatial resolution of feature representations can improve the detection performance on small objects, the additional computational overhead is unaffordable. With in-depth study, we observe the growth of computation mainly comes from the upsampling operation in the decoder of 3D detector. Motivated by this, we present a multi-level 3D detector named DSPDet3D which benefits from high spatial resolution to achieves high accuracy on small object detection, while reducing redundant computation by only focusing on small object areas. Specifically, we theoretically derive a dynamic spatial pruning (DSP) strategy to prune the redundant spatial representation of 3D scene in a cascade manner according to the distribution of objects. Then we design DSP module following this strategy and construct DSPDet3D with this efficient module. On ScanNet and TO-SCENE dataset, our method achieves leading performance on small object detection. Moreover, DSPDet3D trained with only ScanNet rooms can generalize well to scenes in larger scale. It takes less than 2s to directly process a whole building consisting of more than 4500k points while detecting out almost all objects, ranging from cups to beds, on a single RTX 3090 GPU. Project page: https://xuxw98.github.io/DSPDet3D/.
Authors:Misha Urooj Khan, Maham Misbah, Zeeshan Kaleem, Yansha Deng, Abbas Jamalipour
Abstract:
The usage of drones has tremendously increased in different sectors spanning from military to industrial applications. Despite all the benefits they offer, their misuse can lead to mishaps, and tackling them becomes more challenging particularly at night due to their small size and low visibility conditions. To overcome those limitations and improve the detection accuracy at night, we propose an object detector called Ghost Auto Anchor Network (GAANet) for infrared (IR) images. The detector uses a YOLOv5 core to address challenges in object detection for IR images, such as poor accuracy and a high false alarm rate caused by extended altitudes, poor lighting, and low image resolution. To improve performance, we implemented auto anchor calculation, modified the conventional convolution block to ghost-convolution, adjusted the input channel size, and used the AdamW optimizer. To enhance the precision of multiscale tiny object recognition, we also introduced an additional extra-small object feature extractor and detector. Experimental results in a custom IR dataset with multiple classes (birds, drones, planes, and helicopters) demonstrate that GAANet shows improvement compared to state-of-the-art detectors. In comparison to GhostNet-YOLOv5, GAANet has higher overall mean average precision (mAP@50), recall, and precision around 2.5\%, 2.3\%, and 1.4\%, respectively. The dataset and code for this paper are available as open source at https://github.com/ZeeshanKaleem/GhostAutoAnchorNet.
Authors:Minh-Quan Dao, Vincent Frémont, Elwan Héry
Abstract:
Low-resolution point clouds are challenging for object detection methods due to their sparsity. Densifying the present point cloud by concatenating it with its predecessors is a popular solution to this challenge. Such concatenation is possible thanks to the removal of ego vehicle motion using its odometry. This method is called Ego Motion Compensation (EMC). Thanks to the added points, EMC significantly improves the performance of single-frame detectors. However, it suffers from the shadow effect that manifests in dynamic objects' points scattering along their trajectories. This effect results in a misalignment between feature maps and objects' locations, thus limiting performance improvement to stationary and slow-moving objects only. Scene flow allows aligning point clouds in 3D space, thus naturally resolving the misalignment in feature spaces. By observing that scene flow computation shares several components with 3D object detection pipelines, we develop a plug-in module that enables single-frame detectors to compute scene flow to rectify their Bird-Eye View representation. Experiments on the NuScenes dataset show that our module leads to a significant increase (up to 16%) in the Average Precision of large vehicles, which interestingly demonstrates the most severe shadow effect. The code is published at https://github.com/quan-dao/pc-corrector.
Authors:Yuan Zhang, Weihua Chen, Yichen Lu, Tao Huang, Xiuyu Sun, Jian Cao
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is an effective paradigm for boosting the performance of pocket-size model, especially when multiple teacher models are available, the student would break the upper limit again. However, it is not economical to train diverse teacher models for the disposable distillation. In this paper, we introduce a new concept dubbed Avatars for distillation, which are the inference ensemble models derived from the teacher. Concretely, (1) For each iteration of distillation training, various Avatars are generated by a perturbation transformation. We validate that Avatars own higher upper limit of working capacity and teaching ability, aiding the student model in learning diverse and receptive knowledge perspectives from the teacher model. (2) During the distillation, we propose an uncertainty-aware factor from the variance of statistical differences between the vanilla teacher and Avatars, to adjust Avatars' contribution on knowledge transfer adaptively. Avatar Knowledge Distillation AKD is fundamentally different from existing methods and refines with the innovative view of unequal training. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our Avatars mechanism, which polishes up the state-of-the-art distillation methods for dense prediction without more extra computational cost. The AKD brings at most 0.7 AP gains on COCO 2017 for Object Detection and 1.83 mIoU gains on Cityscapes for Semantic Segmentation, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Gumpest/AvatarKD.
Authors:Di Wang, Jing Zhang, Bo Du, Minqiang Xu, Lin Liu, Dacheng Tao, Liangpei Zhang
Abstract:
The success of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates the significance of data-centric machine learning. However, due to the difficulties and high costs associated with annotating Remote Sensing (RS) images, a large amount of valuable RS data remains unlabeled, particularly at the pixel level. In this study, we leverage SAM and existing RS object detection datasets to develop an efficient pipeline for generating a large-scale RS segmentation dataset, dubbed SAMRS. SAMRS totally possesses 105,090 images and 1,668,241 instances, surpassing existing high-resolution RS segmentation datasets in size by several orders of magnitude. It provides object category, location, and instance information that can be used for semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection, either individually or in combination. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of SAMRS from various aspects. Moreover, preliminary experiments highlight the importance of conducting segmentation pre-training with SAMRS to address task discrepancies and alleviate the limitations posed by limited training data during fine-tuning. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/SAMRS.
Authors:Yang Zhang, Le Cheng, Yuting Peng, Chengming Xu, Yanwei Fu, Bo Wu, Guodong Sun
Abstract:
For the ore particle size detection, obtaining a sizable amount of high-quality ore labeled data is time-consuming and expensive. General object detection methods often suffer from severe over-fitting with scarce labeled data. Despite their ability to eliminate over-fitting, existing few-shot object detectors encounter drawbacks such as slow detection speed and high memory requirements, making them difficult to implement in a real-world deployment scenario. To this end, we propose a lightweight and effective few-shot detector to achieve competitive performance with general object detection with only a few samples for ore images. First, the proposed support feature mining block characterizes the importance of location information in support features. Next, the relationship guidance block makes full use of support features to guide the generation of accurate candidate proposals. Finally, the dual-scale semantic aggregation module retrieves detailed features at different resolutions to contribute with the prediction process. Experimental results show that our method consistently exceeds the few-shot detectors with an excellent performance gap on all metrics. Moreover, our method achieves the smallest model size of 19MB as well as being competitive at 50 FPS detection speed compared with general object detectors. The source code is available at https://github.com/MVME-HBUT/Faster-OreFSDet.
Authors:Subhajit Maity, Sanket Biswas, Siladittya Manna, Ayan Banerjee, Josep Lladós, Saumik Bhattacharya, Umapada Pal
Abstract:
Document layout analysis is a known problem to the documents research community and has been vastly explored yielding a multitude of solutions ranging from text mining, and recognition to graph-based representation, visual feature extraction, etc. However, most of the existing works have ignored the crucial fact regarding the scarcity of labeled data. With growing internet connectivity to personal life, an enormous amount of documents had been available in the public domain and thus making data annotation a tedious task. We address this challenge using self-supervision and unlike, the few existing self-supervised document segmentation approaches which use text mining and textual labels, we use a complete vision-based approach in pre-training without any ground-truth label or its derivative. Instead, we generate pseudo-layouts from the document images to pre-train an image encoder to learn the document object representation and localization in a self-supervised framework before fine-tuning it with an object detection model. We show that our pipeline sets a new benchmark in this context and performs at par with the existing methods and the supervised counterparts, if not outperforms. The code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/MaitySubhajit/SelfDocSeg
Authors:Liang Bai, Hangjie Yuan, Tao Feng, Hong Song, Jian Yang
Abstract:
Detecting players from sports broadcast videos is essential for intelligent event analysis. However, existing methods assume fixed player categories, incapably accommodating the real-world scenarios where categories continue to evolve. Directly fine-tuning these methods on newly emerging categories also exist the catastrophic forgetting due to the non-stationary distribution. Inspired by recent research on incremental object detection (IOD), we propose a Refined Response Distillation (R^2D) method to effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting for IOD tasks of the players. Firstly, we design a progressive coarse-to-fine distillation region dividing scheme, separating high-value and low-value regions from classification and regression responses for precise and fine-grained regional knowledge distillation. Subsequently, a tailored refined distillation strategy is developed on regions with varying significance to address the performance limitations posed by pronounced feature homogeneity in the IOD tasks of the players. Furthermore, we present the NBA-IOD and Volleyball-IOD datasets as the benchmark and investigate the IOD tasks of the players systematically. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results.The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/beiyan1911/Players-IOD.
Authors:Long Li, Junwei Han, Ni Zhang, Nian Liu, Salman Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
Most previous co-salient object detection works mainly focus on extracting co-salient cues via mining the consistency relations across images while ignoring explicit exploration of background regions. In this paper, we propose a Discriminative co-saliency and background Mining Transformer framework (DMT) based on several economical multi-grained correlation modules to explicitly mine both co-saliency and background information and effectively model their discrimination. Specifically, we first propose a region-to-region correlation module for introducing inter-image relations to pixel-wise segmentation features while maintaining computational efficiency. Then, we use two types of pre-defined tokens to mine co-saliency and background information via our proposed contrast-induced pixel-to-token correlation and co-saliency token-to-token correlation modules. We also design a token-guided feature refinement module to enhance the discriminability of the segmentation features under the guidance of the learned tokens. We perform iterative mutual promotion for the segmentation feature extraction and token construction. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at: https://github.com/dragonlee258079/DMT.
Authors:Jenny Xu, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
Current LiDAR-based 3D object detectors for autonomous driving are almost entirely trained on human-annotated data collected in specific geographical domains with specific sensor setups, making it difficult to adapt to a different domain. MODEST is the first work to train 3D object detectors without any labels. Our work, HyperMODEST, proposes a universal method implemented on top of MODEST that can largely accelerate the self-training process and does not require tuning on a specific dataset. We filter intermediate pseudo-labels used for data augmentation with low confidence scores. On the nuScenes dataset, we observe a significant improvement of 1.6% in AP BEV in 0-80m range at IoU=0.25 and an improvement of 1.7% in AP BEV in 0-80m range at IoU=0.5 while only using one-fifth of the training time in the original approach by MODEST. On the Lyft dataset, we also observe an improvement over the baseline during the first round of iterative self-training. We explore the trade-off between high precision and high recall in the early stage of the self-training process by comparing our proposed method with two other score filtering methods: confidence score filtering for pseudo-labels with and without static label retention. The code and models of this work are available at https://github.com/TRAILab/HyperMODEST
Authors:Yichen Xie, Chenfeng Xu, Marie-Julie Rakotosaona, Patrick Rim, Federico Tombari, Kurt Keutzer, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan
Abstract:
By identifying four important components of existing LiDAR-camera 3D object detection methods (LiDAR and camera candidates, transformation, and fusion outputs), we observe that all existing methods either find dense candidates or yield dense representations of scenes. However, given that objects occupy only a small part of a scene, finding dense candidates and generating dense representations is noisy and inefficient. We propose SparseFusion, a novel multi-sensor 3D detection method that exclusively uses sparse candidates and sparse representations. Specifically, SparseFusion utilizes the outputs of parallel detectors in the LiDAR and camera modalities as sparse candidates for fusion. We transform the camera candidates into the LiDAR coordinate space by disentangling the object representations. Then, we can fuse the multi-modality candidates in a unified 3D space by a lightweight self-attention module. To mitigate negative transfer between modalities, we propose novel semantic and geometric cross-modality transfer modules that are applied prior to the modality-specific detectors. SparseFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark while also running at the fastest speed, even outperforming methods with stronger backbones. We perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our modules and overall method pipeline. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yichen928/SparseFusion.
Authors:Huan-ang Gao, Beiwen Tian, Pengfei Li, Hao Zhao, Guyue Zhou
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the problem of semi-supervised 3D object detection, which is of great importance considering the high annotation cost for cluttered 3D indoor scenes. We resort to the robust and principled framework of selfteaching, which has triggered notable progress for semisupervised learning recently. While this paradigm is natural for image-level or pixel-level prediction, adapting it to the detection problem is challenged by the issue of proposal matching. Prior methods are based upon two-stage pipelines, matching heuristically selected proposals generated in the first stage and resulting in spatially sparse training signals. In contrast, we propose the first semisupervised 3D detection algorithm that works in the singlestage manner and allows spatially dense training signals. A fundamental issue of this new design is the quantization error caused by point-to-voxel discretization, which inevitably leads to misalignment between two transformed views in the voxel domain. To this end, we derive and implement closed-form rules that compensate this misalignment onthe-fly. Our results are significant, e.g., promoting ScanNet mAP@0.5 from 35.2% to 48.5% using 20% annotation. Codes and data will be publicly available.
Authors:Lue Fan, Yuxue Yang, Yiming Mao, Feng Wang, Yuntao Chen, Naiyan Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
This paper aims for high-performance offline LiDAR-based 3D object detection. We first observe that experienced human annotators annotate objects from a track-centric perspective. They first label the objects with clear shapes in a track, and then leverage the temporal coherence to infer the annotations of obscure objects. Drawing inspiration from this, we propose a high-performance offline detector in a track-centric perspective instead of the conventional object-centric perspective. Our method features a bidirectional tracking module and a track-centric learning module. Such a design allows our detector to infer and refine a complete track once the object is detected at a certain moment. We refer to this characteristic as "onCe detecTed, neveR Lost" and name the proposed system CTRL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable performance of our method, surpassing the human-level annotating accuracy and the previous state-of-the-art methods in the highly competitive Waymo Open Dataset without model ensemble. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SST.
Authors:Yingyan Li, Lue Fan, Yang Liu, Zehao Huang, Yuntao Chen, Naiyan Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
Currently prevalent multimodal 3D detection methods are built upon LiDAR-based detectors that usually use dense Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature maps. However, the cost of such BEV feature maps is quadratic to the detection range, making it not suitable for long-range detection. Fully sparse architecture is gaining attention as they are highly efficient in long-range perception. In this paper, we study how to effectively leverage image modality in the emerging fully sparse architecture. Particularly, utilizing instance queries, our framework integrates the well-studied 2D instance segmentation into the LiDAR side, which is parallel to the 3D instance segmentation part in the fully sparse detector. This design achieves a uniform query-based fusion framework in both the 2D and 3D sides while maintaining the fully sparse characteristic. Extensive experiments showcase state-of-the-art results on the widely used nuScenes dataset and the long-range Argoverse 2 dataset. Notably, the inference speed of the proposed method under the long-range LiDAR perception setting is 2.7 $\times$ faster than that of other state-of-the-art multimodal 3D detection methods. Code will be released at \url{https://github.com/BraveGroup/FullySparseFusion}.
Authors:Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Wei Hu, Fan Zhang, Jun Liu
Abstract:
The recently proposed data augmentation TransMix employs attention labels to help visual transformers (ViT) achieve better robustness and performance. However, TransMix is deficient in two aspects: 1) The image cropping method of TransMix may not be suitable for ViTs. 2) At the early stage of training, the model produces unreliable attention maps. TransMix uses unreliable attention maps to compute mixed attention labels that can affect the model. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling (PAL) in image and label space, respectively. In detail, from the perspective of image space, we design MaskMix, which mixes two images based on a patch-like grid mask. In particular, the size of each mask patch is adjustable and is a multiple of the image patch size, which ensures each image patch comes from only one image and contains more global contents. From the perspective of label space, we design PAL, which utilizes a progressive factor to dynamically re-weight the attention weights of the mixed attention label. Finally, we combine MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling as our new data augmentation method, named MixPro. The experimental results show that our method can improve various ViT-based models at scales on ImageNet classification (73.8\% top-1 accuracy based on DeiT-T for 300 epochs). After being pre-trained with MixPro on ImageNet, the ViT-based models also demonstrate better transferability to semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Furthermore, compared to TransMix, MixPro also shows stronger robustness on several benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/fistyee/MixPro.
Authors:Dongyang Liu, Meina Kan, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Abstract:
Feature distillation makes the student mimic the intermediate features of the teacher. Nearly all existing feature-distillation methods use L2 distance or its slight variants as the distance metric between teacher and student features. However, while L2 distance is isotropic w.r.t. all dimensions, the neural network's operation on different dimensions is usually anisotropic, i.e., perturbations with the same 2-norm but in different dimensions of intermediate features lead to changes in the final output with largely different magnitude. Considering this, we argue that the similarity between teacher and student features should not be measured merely based on their appearance (i.e., L2 distance), but should, more importantly, be measured by their difference in function, namely how later layers of the network will read, decode, and process them. Therefore, we propose Function-Consistent Feature Distillation (FCFD), which explicitly optimizes the functional similarity between teacher and student features. The core idea of FCFD is to make teacher and student features not only numerically similar, but more importantly produce similar outputs when fed to the later part of the same network. With FCFD, the student mimics the teacher more faithfully and learns more from the teacher. Extensive experiments on image classification and object detection demonstrate the superiority of FCFD to existing methods. Furthermore, we can combine FCFD with many existing methods to obtain even higher accuracy. Our codes are available at https://github.com/LiuDongyang6/FCFD.
Authors:Jianheng Liu, Xuanfu Li, Yueqian Liu, Haoyao Chen
Abstract:
Current simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms perform well in static environments but easily fail in dynamic environments. Recent works introduce deep learning-based semantic information to SLAM systems to reduce the influence of dynamic objects. However, it is still challenging to apply a robust localization in dynamic environments for resource-restricted robots. This paper proposes a real-time RGB-D inertial odometry system for resource-restricted robots in dynamic environments named Dynamic-VINS. Three main threads run in parallel: object detection, feature tracking, and state optimization. The proposed Dynamic-VINS combines object detection and depth information for dynamic feature recognition and achieves performance comparable to semantic segmentation. Dynamic-VINS adopts grid-based feature detection and proposes a fast and efficient method to extract high-quality FAST feature points. IMU is applied to predict motion for feature tracking and moving consistency check. The proposed method is evaluated on both public datasets and real-world applications and shows competitive localization accuracy and robustness in dynamic environments. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, it is the best-performance real-time RGB-D inertial odometry for resource-restricted platforms in dynamic environments for now. The proposed system is open source at: https://github.com/HITSZ-NRSL/Dynamic-VINS.git
Authors:Zhengcheng Shen, Yi Gao, Linh Kästner, Jens Lambrecht
Abstract:
The advancement of computer vision and machine learning has made datasets a crucial element for further research and applications. However, the creation and development of robots with advanced recognition capabilities are hindered by the lack of appropriate datasets. Existing image or video processing datasets are unable to accurately depict observations from a moving robot, and they do not contain the kinematics information necessary for robotic tasks. Synthetic data, on the other hand, are cost-effective to create and offer greater flexibility for adapting to various applications. Hence, they are widely utilized in both research and industry. In this paper, we propose the dataset HabitatDyn, which contains both synthetic RGB videos, semantic labels, and depth information, as well as kinetics information. HabitatDyn was created from the perspective of a mobile robot with a moving camera, and contains 30 scenes featuring six different types of moving objects with varying velocities. To demonstrate the usability of our dataset, two existing algorithms are used for evaluation and an approach to estimate the distance between the object and camera is implemented based on these segmentation methods and evaluated through the dataset. With the availability of this dataset, we aspire to foster further advancements in the field of mobile robotics, leading to more capable and intelligent robots that can navigate and interact with their environments more effectively. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ignc-research/HabitatDyn.
Authors:Ji Yu
Abstract:
Despite their superior performance, deep-learning methods often suffer from the disadvantage of needing large-scale well-annotated training data. In response, recent literature has seen a proliferation of efforts aimed at reducing the annotation burden. This paper focuses on a weakly-supervised training setting for single-cell segmentation models, where the only available training label is the rough locations of individual cells. The specific problem is of practical interest due to the widely available nuclei counter-stain data in biomedical literature, from which the cell locations can be derived programmatically. Of more general interest is a proposed self-learning method called collaborative knowledge sharing, which is related to but distinct from the more well-known consistency learning methods. This strategy achieves self-learning by sharing knowledge between a principal model and a very light-weight collaborator model. Importantly, the two models are entirely different in their architectures, capacities, and model outputs: In our case, the principal model approaches the segmentation problem from an object-detection perspective, whereas the collaborator model a sematic segmentation perspective. We assessed the effectiveness of this strategy by conducting experiments on LIVECell, a large single-cell segmentation dataset of bright-field images, and on A431 dataset, a fluorescence image dataset in which the location labels are generated automatically from nuclei counter-stain data. Implementing code is available at https://github.com/jiyuuchc/lacss
Authors:Lukas Schmid, Olov Andersson, Aurelio Sulser, Patrick Pfreundschuh, Roland Siegwart
Abstract:
Real-time detection of moving objects is an essential capability for robots acting autonomously in dynamic environments. We thus propose Dynablox, a novel online mapping-based approach for robust moving object detection in complex environments. The central idea of our approach is to incrementally estimate high confidence free-space areas by modeling and accounting for sensing, state estimation, and mapping limitations during online robot operation. The spatio-temporally conservative free space estimate enables robust detection of moving objects without making any assumptions on the appearance of objects or environments. This allows deployment in complex scenes such as multi-storied buildings or staircases, and for diverse moving objects such as people carrying various items, doors swinging or even balls rolling around. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on real-world data sets, achieving 86% IoU at 17 FPS in typical robotic settings. The method outperforms a recent appearance-based classifier and approaches the performance of offline methods. We demonstrate its generality on a novel data set with rare moving objects in complex environments. We make our efficient implementation and the novel data set available as open-source.
Authors:Dilxat Muhtar, Xueliang Zhang, Pengfeng Xiao, Zhenshi Li, Feng Gu
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained widespread attention in the remote sensing (RS) and earth observation (EO) communities owing to its ability to learn task-agnostic representations without human-annotated labels. Nevertheless, most existing RS SSL methods are limited to learning either global semantic separable or local spatial perceptible representations. We argue that this learning strategy is suboptimal in the realm of RS, since the required representations for different RS downstream tasks are often varied and complex. In this study, we proposed a unified SSL framework that is better suited for RS images representation learning. The proposed SSL framework, Contrastive Mask Image Distillation (CMID), is capable of learning representations with both global semantic separability and local spatial perceptibility by combining contrastive learning (CL) with masked image modeling (MIM) in a self-distillation way. Furthermore, our CMID learning framework is architecture-agnostic, which is compatible with both convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers (ViT), allowing CMID to be easily adapted to a variety of deep learning (DL) applications for RS understanding. Comprehensive experiments have been carried out on four downstream tasks (i.e. scene classification, semantic segmentation, object-detection, and change detection) and the results show that models pre-trained using CMID achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art SSL methods on multiple downstream tasks. The code and pre-trained models will be made available at https://github.com/NJU-LHRS/official-CMID to facilitate SSL research and speed up the development of RS images DL applications.
Authors:Qianjiang Hu, Daizong Liu, Wei Hu
Abstract:
3D object detection from point clouds is crucial in safety-critical autonomous driving. Although many works have made great efforts and achieved significant progress on this task, most of them suffer from expensive annotation cost and poor transferability to unknown data due to the domain gap. Recently, few works attempt to tackle the domain gap in objects, but still fail to adapt to the gap of varying beam-densities between two domains, which is critical to mitigate the characteristic differences of the LiDAR collectors. To this end, we make the attempt to propose a density-insensitive domain adaption framework to address the density-induced domain gap. In particular, we first introduce Random Beam Re-Sampling (RBRS) to enhance the robustness of 3D detectors trained on the source domain to the varying beam-density. Then, we take this pre-trained detector as the backbone model, and feed the unlabeled target domain data into our newly designed task-specific teacher-student framework for predicting its high-quality pseudo labels. To further adapt the property of density-insensitivity into the target domain, we feed the teacher and student branches with the same sample of different densities, and propose an Object Graph Alignment (OGA) module to construct two object-graphs between the two branches for enforcing the consistency in both the attribute and relation of cross-density objects. Experimental results on three widely adopted 3D object detection datasets demonstrate that our proposed domain adaption method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially over varying-density data. Code is available at https://github.com/WoodwindHu/DTS}{https://github.com/WoodwindHu/DTS.
Authors:Chang Xu, Jian Ding, Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Detecting arbitrarily oriented tiny objects poses intense challenges to existing detectors, especially for label assignment. Despite the exploration of adaptive label assignment in recent oriented object detectors, the extreme geometry shape and limited feature of oriented tiny objects still induce severe mismatch and imbalance issues. Specifically, the position prior, positive sample feature, and instance are mismatched, and the learning of extreme-shaped objects is biased and unbalanced due to little proper feature supervision. To tackle these issues, we propose a dynamic prior along with the coarse-to-fine assigner, dubbed DCFL. For one thing, we model the prior, label assignment, and object representation all in a dynamic manner to alleviate the mismatch issue. For another, we leverage the coarse prior matching and finer posterior constraint to dynamically assign labels, providing appropriate and relatively balanced supervision for diverse instances. Extensive experiments on six datasets show substantial improvements to the baseline. Notably, we obtain the state-of-the-art performance for one-stage detectors on the DOTA-v1.5, DOTA-v2.0, and DIOR-R datasets under single-scale training and testing. Codes are available at https://github.com/Chasel-Tsui/mmrotate-dcfl.
Authors:Xiyang Wang, Chunyun Fu, Jiawei He, Mingguang Huang, Ting Meng, Siyu Zhang, Hangning Zhou, Ziyao Xu, Chi Zhang
Abstract:
In the classical tracking-by-detection (TBD) paradigm, detection and tracking are separately and sequentially conducted, and data association must be properly performed to achieve satisfactory tracking performance. In this paper, a new end-to-end multi-object tracking framework is proposed, which integrates object detection and multi-object tracking into a single model. The proposed tracking framework eliminates the complex data association process in the classical TBD paradigm, and requires no additional training. Secondly, the regression confidence of historical trajectories is investigated, and the possible states of a trajectory (weak object or strong object) in the current frame are predicted. Then, a confidence fusion module is designed to guide non-maximum suppression for trajectories and detections to achieve ordered and robust tracking. Thirdly, by integrating historical trajectory features, the regression performance of the detector is enhanced, which better reflects the occlusion and disappearance patterns of objects in real world. Lastly, extensive experiments are conducted on the commonly used KITTI and Waymo datasets. The results show that the proposed framework can achieve robust tracking by using only a 2D detector and a 3D detector, and it is proven more accurate than many of the state-of-the-art TBD-based multi-modal tracking methods. The source codes of the proposed method are available at https://github.com/wangxiyang2022/YONTD-MOT.
Authors:Yahia Dalbah, Jean Lahoud, Hisham Cholakkal
Abstract:
The performance of perception systems developed for autonomous driving vehicles has seen significant improvements over the last few years. This improvement was associated with the increasing use of LiDAR sensors and point cloud data to facilitate the task of object detection and recognition in autonomous driving. However, LiDAR and camera systems show deteriorating performances when used in unfavorable conditions like dusty and rainy weather. Radars on the other hand operate on relatively longer wavelengths which allows for much more robust measurements in these conditions. Despite that, radar-centric data sets do not get a lot of attention in the development of deep learning techniques for radar perception. In this work, we consider the radar object detection problem, in which the radar frequency data is the only input into the detection framework. We further investigate the challenges of using radar-only data in deep learning models. We propose a transformers-based model, named RadarFormer, that utilizes state-of-the-art developments in vision deep learning. Our model also introduces a channel-chirp-time merging module that reduces the size and complexity of our models by more than 10 times without compromising accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on the CRUW radar dataset demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. Our RadarFormer performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods while being 2x faster during inference and requiring only one-tenth of their model parameters. The code associated with this paper is available at https://github.com/YahiDar/RadarFormer.
Authors:Zhi Cai, Songtao Liu, Guodong Wang, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Di Huang
Abstract:
DETR has set up a simple end-to-end pipeline for object detection by formulating this task as a set prediction problem, showing promising potential. Despite its notable advancements, this paper identifies two key forms of misalignment within the model: classification-regression misalignment and cross-layer target misalignment. Both issues impede DETR's convergence and degrade its overall performance. To tackle both issues simultaneously, we introduce a novel loss function, termed as Align Loss, designed to resolve the discrepancy between the two tasks. Align Loss guides the optimization of DETR through a joint quality metric, strengthening the connection between classification and regression. Furthermore, it incorporates an exponential down-weighting term to facilitate a smooth transition from positive to negative samples. Align-DETR also employs many-to-one matching for supervision of intermediate layers, akin to the design of H-DETR, which enhances robustness against instability. We conducted extensive experiments, yielding highly competitive results. Notably, our method achieves a 49.3% (+0.6) AP on the H-DETR baseline with the ResNet-50 backbone. It also sets a new state-of-the-art performance, reaching 50.5% AP in the 1x setting and 51.7% AP in the 2x setting, surpassing several strong competitors. Our code is available at https://github.com/FelixCaae/AlignDETR.
Authors:Thanh-Danh Nguyen, Anh-Khoa Nguyen Vu, Nhat-Duy Nguyen, Vinh-Tiep Nguyen, Thanh Duc Ngo, Thanh-Toan Do, Minh-Triet Tran, Tam V. Nguyen
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection and segmentation is a new and challenging research topic in computer vision. There is a serious issue of lacking data on concealed objects such as camouflaged animals in natural scenes. In this paper, we address the problem of few-shot learning for camouflaged object detection and segmentation. To this end, we first collect a new dataset, CAMO-FS, for the benchmark. As camouflaged instances are challenging to recognize due to their similarity compared to the surroundings, we guide our models to obtain camouflaged features that highly distinguish the instances from the background. In this work, we propose FS-CDIS, a framework to efficiently detect and segment camouflaged instances via two loss functions contributing to the training process. Firstly, the instance triplet loss with the characteristic of differentiating the anchor, which is the mean of all camouflaged foreground points, and the background points are employed to work at the instance level. Secondly, to consolidate the generalization at the class level, we present instance memory storage with the scope of storing camouflaged features of the same category, allowing the model to capture further class-level information during the learning process. The extensive experiments demonstrated that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the newly collected dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/danhntd/FS-CDIS.
Authors:Felix Fent, Philipp Bauerschmidt, Markus Lienkamp
Abstract:
A reliable perception has to be robust against challenging environmental conditions. Therefore, recent efforts focused on the use of radar sensors in addition to camera and lidar sensors for perception applications. However, the sparsity of radar point clouds and the poor data availability remain challenging for current perception methods. To address these challenges, a novel graph neural network is proposed that does not just use the information of the points themselves but also the relationships between the points. The model is designed to consider both point features and point-pair features, embedded in the edges of the graph. Furthermore, a general approach for achieving transformation invariance is proposed which is robust against unseen scenarios and also counteracts the limited data availability. The transformation invariance is achieved by an invariant data representation rather than an invariant model architecture, making it applicable to other methods. The proposed RadarGNN model outperforms all previous methods on the RadarScenes dataset. In addition, the effects of different invariances on the object detection and semantic segmentation quality are investigated. The code is made available as open-source software under https://github.com/TUMFTM/RadarGNN.
Authors:Zhuo Su, Jiehua Zhang, Tianpeng Liu, Zhen Liu, Shuanghui Zhang, Matti Pietikäinen, Li Liu
Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel module called middle spectrum grouped convolution (MSGC) for efficient deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) with the mechanism of grouped convolution. It explores the broad "middle spectrum" area between channel pruning and conventional grouped convolution. Compared with channel pruning, MSGC can retain most of the information from the input feature maps due to the group mechanism; compared with grouped convolution, MSGC benefits from the learnability, the core of channel pruning, for constructing its group topology, leading to better channel division. The middle spectrum area is unfolded along four dimensions: group-wise, layer-wise, sample-wise, and attention-wise, making it possible to reveal more powerful and interpretable structures. As a result, the proposed module acts as a booster that can reduce the computational cost of the host backbones for general image recognition with even improved predictive accuracy. For example, in the experiments on ImageNet dataset for image classification, MSGC can reduce the multiply-accumulates (MACs) of ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 by half but still increase the Top-1 accuracy by more than 1%. With 35% reduction of MACs, MSGC can also increase the Top-1 accuracy of the MobileNetV2 backbone. Results on MS COCO dataset for object detection show similar observations. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/hellozhuo/msgc.
Authors:Zhihao Lin, Yongtao Wang, Jinhe Zhang, Xiaojie Chu
Abstract:
Dynamic neural network is an emerging research topic in deep learning. With adaptive inference, dynamic models can achieve remarkable accuracy and computational efficiency. However, it is challenging to design a powerful dynamic detector, because of no suitable dynamic architecture and exiting criterion for object detection. To tackle these difficulties, we propose a dynamic framework for object detection, named DynamicDet. Firstly, we carefully design a dynamic architecture based on the nature of the object detection task. Then, we propose an adaptive router to analyze the multi-scale information and to decide the inference route automatically. We also present a novel optimization strategy with an exiting criterion based on the detection losses for our dynamic detectors. Last, we present a variable-speed inference strategy, which helps to realize a wide range of accuracy-speed trade-offs with only one dynamic detector. Extensive experiments conducted on the COCO benchmark demonstrate that the proposed DynamicDet achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy-speed trade-offs. For instance, with comparable accuracy, the inference speed of our dynamic detector Dy-YOLOv7-W6 surpasses YOLOv7-E6 by 12%, YOLOv7-D6 by 17%, and YOLOv7-E6E by 39%. The code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/DynamicDet.
Authors:Xue-Jing Luo, Shuo Wang, Zongwei Wu, Christos Sakaridis, Yun Cheng, Deng-Ping Fan, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
The burgeoning field of camouflaged object detection (COD) seeks to identify objects that blend into their surroundings. Despite the impressive performance of recent models, we have identified a limitation in their robustness, where existing methods may misclassify salient objects as camouflaged ones, despite these two characteristics being contradictory. This limitation may stem from lacking multi-pattern training images, leading to less saliency robustness. To address this issue, we introduce CamDiff, a novel approach inspired by AI-Generated Content (AIGC) that overcomes the scarcity of multi-pattern training images. Specifically, we leverage the latent diffusion model to synthesize salient objects in camouflaged scenes, while using the zero-shot image classification ability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to prevent synthesis failures and ensure the synthesized object aligns with the input prompt. Consequently, the synthesized image retains its original camouflage label while incorporating salient objects, yielding camouflage samples with richer characteristics. The results of user studies show that the salient objects in the scenes synthesized by our framework attract the user's attention more; thus, such samples pose a greater challenge to the existing COD models. Our approach enables flexible editing and efficient large-scale dataset generation at a low cost. It significantly enhances COD baselines' training and testing phases, emphasizing robustness across diverse domains. Our newly-generated datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/drlxj/CamDiff.
Authors:Luigi Riz, Andrea Caraffa, Matteo Bortolon, Mohamed Lamine Mekhalfi, Davide Boscaini, André Moura, José Antunes, André Dias, Hugo Silva, Andreas Leonidou, Christos Constantinides, Christos Keleshis, Dante Abate, Fabio Poiesi
Abstract:
We present MONET, a new multimodal dataset captured using a thermal camera mounted on a drone that flew over rural areas, and recorded human and vehicle activities. We captured MONET to study the problem of object localisation and behaviour understanding of targets undergoing large-scale variations and being recorded from different and moving viewpoints. Target activities occur in two different land sites, each with unique scene structures and cluttered backgrounds. MONET consists of approximately 53K images featuring 162K manually annotated bounding boxes. Each image is timestamp-aligned with drone metadata that includes information about attitudes, speed, altitude, and GPS coordinates. MONET is different from previous thermal drone datasets because it features multimodal data, including rural scenes captured with thermal cameras containing both person and vehicle targets, along with trajectory information and metadata. We assessed the difficulty of the dataset in terms of transfer learning between the two sites and evaluated nine object detection algorithms to identify the open challenges associated with this type of data. Project page: https://github.com/fabiopoiesi/monet_dataset.
Authors:Suprim Nakarmi, Sanam Pudasaini, Safal Thapaliya, Pratima Upretee, Retina Shrestha, Basant Giri, Bhanu Bhakta Neupane, Bishesh Khanal
Abstract:
The consumption of microbial-contaminated food and water is responsible for the deaths of millions of people annually. Smartphone-based microscopy systems are portable, low-cost, and more accessible alternatives for the detection of Giardia and Cryptosporidium than traditional brightfield microscopes. However, the images from smartphone microscopes are noisier and require manual cyst identification by trained technicians, usually unavailable in resource-limited settings. Automatic detection of (oo)cysts using deep-learning-based object detection could offer a solution for this limitation. We evaluate the performance of four state-of-the-art object detectors to detect (oo)cysts of Giardia and Cryptosporidium on a custom dataset that includes both smartphone and brightfield microscopic images from vegetable samples. Faster RCNN, RetinaNet, You Only Look Once (YOLOv8s), and Deformable Detection Transformer (Deformable DETR) deep-learning models were employed to explore their efficacy and limitations. Our results show that while the deep-learning models perform better with the brightfield microscopy image dataset than the smartphone microscopy image dataset, the smartphone microscopy predictions are still comparable to the prediction performance of non-experts. Also, we publicly release brightfield and smartphone microscopy datasets with the benchmark results for the detection of Giardia and Cryptosporidium, independently captured on reference (or standard lab setting) and vegetable samples. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/naamiinepal/smartphone_microscopy and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7813183, respectively.
Authors:Lv Tang, Haoke Xiao, Bo Li
Abstract:
SAM is a segmentation model recently released by Meta AI Research and has been gaining attention quickly due to its impressive performance in generic object segmentation. However, its ability to generalize to specific scenes such as camouflaged scenes is still unknown. Camouflaged object detection (COD) involves identifying objects that are seamlessly integrated into their surroundings and has numerous practical applications in fields such as medicine, art, and agriculture. In this study, we try to ask if SAM can address the COD task and evaluate the performance of SAM on the COD benchmark by employing maximum segmentation evaluation and camouflage location evaluation. We also compare SAM's performance with 22 state-of-the-art COD methods. Our results indicate that while SAM shows promise in generic object segmentation, its performance on the COD task is limited. This presents an opportunity for further research to explore how to build a stronger SAM that may address the COD task. The results of this paper are provided in \url{https://github.com/luckybird1994/SAMCOD}.
Authors:Shuhuai Ren, Aston Zhang, Yi Zhu, Shuai Zhang, Shuai Zheng, Mu Li, Alex Smola, Xu Sun
Abstract:
This work proposes POMP, a prompt pre-training method for vision-language models. Being memory and computation efficient, POMP enables the learned prompt to condense semantic information for a rich set of visual concepts with over twenty-thousand classes. Once pre-trained, the prompt with a strong transferable ability can be directly plugged into a variety of visual recognition tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection, to boost recognition performances in a zero-shot manner. Empirical evaluation shows that POMP achieves state-of-the-art performances on 21 datasets, e.g., 67.0% average accuracy on 10 classification datasets (+3.1% compared to CoOp) and 84.4 hIoU on open-vocabulary Pascal VOC segmentation (+6.9 compared to ZSSeg). Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/prompt-pretraining.
Authors:Luping Wang, Bin Liu
Abstract:
Detection Transformer (DETR) is a Transformer architecture based object detection model. In this paper, we demonstrate that it can also be used as a data augmenter. We term our approach as DETR assisted CutMix, or DeMix for short. DeMix builds on CutMix, a simple yet highly effective data augmentation technique that has gained popularity in recent years. CutMix improves model performance by cutting and pasting a patch from one image onto another, yielding a new image. The corresponding label for this new example is specified as the weighted average of the original labels, where the weight is proportional to the area of the patch. CutMix selects a random patch to be cut. In contrast, DeMix elaborately selects a semantically rich patch, located by a pre-trained DETR. The label of the new image is specified in the same way as in CutMix. Experimental results on benchmark datasets for image classification demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms prior art data augmentation methods including CutMix. Oue code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/DeMix.
Authors:Wei Hua, Dingkang Liang, Jingyu Li, Xiaolong Liu, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD), aiming to explore unlabeled data for boosting object detectors, has become an active task in recent years. However, existing SSOD approaches mainly focus on horizontal objects, leaving multi-oriented objects that are common in aerial images unexplored. This paper proposes a novel Semi-supervised Oriented Object Detection model, termed SOOD, built upon the mainstream pseudo-labeling framework. Towards oriented objects in aerial scenes, we design two loss functions to provide better supervision. Focusing on the orientations of objects, the first loss regularizes the consistency between each pseudo-label-prediction pair (includes a prediction and its corresponding pseudo label) with adaptive weights based on their orientation gap. Focusing on the layout of an image, the second loss regularizes the similarity and explicitly builds the many-to-many relation between the sets of pseudo-labels and predictions. Such a global consistency constraint can further boost semi-supervised learning. Our experiments show that when trained with the two proposed losses, SOOD surpasses the state-of-the-art SSOD methods under various settings on the DOTA-v1.5 benchmark. The code will be available at https://github.com/HamPerdredes/SOOD.
Authors:Hiroki Azuma, Yusuke Matsui
Abstract:
Vision-language pre-training models (VLPs) have exhibited revolutionary improvements in various vision-language tasks. In VLP, some adversarial attacks fool a model into false or absurd classifications. Previous studies addressed these attacks by fine-tuning the model or changing its architecture. However, these methods risk losing the original model's performance and are difficult to apply to downstream tasks. In particular, their applicability to other tasks has not been considered. In this study, we addressed the reduction of the impact of typographic attacks on CLIP without changing the model parameters. To achieve this, we expand the idea of "prefix learning" and introduce our simple yet effective method: Defense-Prefix (DP), which inserts the DP token before a class name to make words "robust" against typographic attacks. Our method can be easily applied to downstream tasks, such as object detection, because the proposed method is independent of the model parameters. Our method significantly improves the accuracy of classification tasks for typographic attack datasets, while maintaining the zero-shot capabilities of the model. In addition, we leverage our proposed method for object detection, demonstrating its high applicability and effectiveness. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/azuma164/Defense-Prefix.
Authors:Yi Yu, Xue Yang, Qingyun Li, Yue Zhou, Gefan Zhang, Feipeng Da, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection, e.g. in autonomous driving and remote sensing, the recently proposed paradigm involving weakly-supervised detector H2RBox for learning rotated box (RBox) from the more readily-available horizontal box (HBox) has shown promise. This paper presents H2RBox-v2, to further bridge the gap between HBox-supervised and RBox-supervised oriented object detection. Specifically, we propose to leverage the reflection symmetry via flip and rotate consistencies, using a weakly-supervised network branch similar to H2RBox, together with a novel self-supervised branch that learns orientations from the symmetry inherent in visual objects. The detector is further stabilized and enhanced by practical techniques to cope with peripheral issues e.g. angular periodicity. To our best knowledge, H2RBox-v2 is the first symmetry-aware self-supervised paradigm for oriented object detection. In particular, our method shows less susceptibility to low-quality annotation and insufficient training data compared to H2RBox. Specifically, H2RBox-v2 achieves very close performance to a rotation annotation trained counterpart -- Rotated FCOS: 1) DOTA-v1.0/1.5/2.0: 72.31%/64.76%/50.33% vs. 72.44%/64.53%/51.77%; 2) HRSC: 89.66% vs. 88.99%; 3) FAIR1M: 42.27% vs. 41.25%.
Authors:Ziyue Zhu, Qiang Meng, Xiao Wang, Ke Wang, Liujiang Yan, Jian Yang
Abstract:
This paper explores the potential of curriculum learning in LiDAR-based 3D object detection by proposing a curricular object manipulation (COM) framework. The framework embeds the curricular training strategy into both the loss design and the augmentation process. For the loss design, we propose the COMLoss to dynamically predict object-level difficulties and emphasize objects of different difficulties based on training stages. On top of the widely-used augmentation technique called GT-Aug in LiDAR detection tasks, we propose a novel COMAug strategy which first clusters objects in ground-truth database based on well-designed heuristics. Group-level difficulties rather than individual ones are then predicted and updated during training for stable results. Model performance and generalization capabilities can be improved by sampling and augmenting progressively more difficult objects into the training samples. Extensive experiments and ablation studies reveal the superior and generality of the proposed framework. The code is available at https://github.com/ZZY816/COM.
Authors:Linyan Huang, Huijie Wang, Jia Zeng, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao, Junchi Yan, Hongyang Li
Abstract:
Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.
Authors:Mingjun Xu, Lingyun Qin, Weijie Chen, Shiliang Pu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
Domain shift degrades the performance of object detection models in practical applications. To alleviate the influence of domain shift, plenty of previous work try to decouple and learn the domain-invariant (common) features from source domains via domain adversarial learning (DAL). However, inspired by causal mechanisms, we find that previous methods ignore the implicit insignificant non-causal factors hidden in the common features. This is mainly due to the single-view nature of DAL. In this work, we present an idea to remove non-causal factors from common features by multi-view adversarial training on source domains, because we observe that such insignificant non-causal factors may still be significant in other latent spaces (views) due to the multi-mode structure of data. To summarize, we propose a Multi-view Adversarial Discriminator (MAD) based domain generalization model, consisting of a Spurious Correlations Generator (SCG) that increases the diversity of source domain by random augmentation and a Multi-View Domain Classifier (MVDC) that maps features to multiple latent spaces, such that the non-causal factors are removed and the domain-invariant features are purified. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show our MAD obtains state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Fan Yang
Abstract:
Using deep learning methods to detect the classroom behaviors of both students and teachers is an effective way to automatically analyze classroom performance and enhance teaching effectiveness. Then, there is still a scarcity of publicly available high-quality datasets on student-teacher behaviors. We constructed SCB-Dataset a comprehensive dataset of student and teacher classroom behaviors covering 19 classes. SCB-Dataset is divided into two types: Object Detection and Image Classification. The Object Detection part includes 13,330 images and 122,977 labels, and the Image Classification part includes 21,019 images. We conducted benchmark tests on SCB-Dataset using YOLO series algorithms and Large vision-language model. We believe that SCB-Dataset can provide a solid foundation for future applications of artificial intelligence in education. Code:https://github.com/Whiffe/SCB-dataset
Authors:Darren Tsai, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Eduardo Nebot, Stewart Worrall
Abstract:
We introduce Multi-Source 3D (MS3D), a new self-training pipeline for unsupervised domain adaptation in 3D object detection. Despite the remarkable accuracy of 3D detectors, they often overfit to specific domain biases, leading to suboptimal performance in various sensor setups and environments. Existing methods typically focus on adapting a single detector to the target domain, overlooking the fact that different detectors possess distinct expertise on different unseen domains. MS3D leverages this by combining different pre-trained detectors from multiple source domains and incorporating temporal information to produce high-quality pseudo-labels for fine-tuning. Our proposed Kernel-Density Estimation (KDE) Box Fusion method fuses box proposals from multiple domains to obtain pseudo-labels that surpass the performance of the best source domain detectors. MS3D exhibits greater robustness to domain shift and produces accurate pseudo-labels over greater distances, making it well-suited for high-to-low beam domain adaptation and vice versa. Our method achieved state-of-the-art performance on all evaluated datasets, and we demonstrate that the pre-trained detector's source dataset has minimal impact on the fine-tuned result, making MS3D suitable for real-world applications.
Authors:Chuandong Liu, Chenqiang Gao, Fangcen Liu, Pengcheng Li, Deyu Meng, Xinbo Gao
Abstract:
State-of-the-art 3D object detectors are usually trained on large-scale datasets with high-quality 3D annotations. However, such 3D annotations are often expensive and time-consuming, which may not be practical for real applications. A natural remedy is to adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL) by leveraging a limited amount of labeled samples and abundant unlabeled samples. Current pseudolabeling-based SSL object detection methods mainly adopt a teacher-student framework, with a single fixed threshold strategy to generate supervision signals, which inevitably brings confused supervision when guiding the student network training. Besides, the data augmentation of the point cloud in the typical teacher-student framework is too weak, and only contains basic down sampling and flip-and-shift (i.e., rotate and scaling), which hinders the effective learning of feature information. Hence, we address these issues by introducing a novel approach of Hierarchical Supervision and Shuffle Data Augmentation (HSSDA), which is a simple yet effective teacher-student framework. The teacher network generates more reasonable supervision for the student network by designing a dynamic dual-threshold strategy. Besides, the shuffle data augmentation strategy is designed to strengthen the feature representation ability of the student network. Extensive experiments show that HSSDA consistently outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods on different datasets. The code will be released at https://github.com/azhuantou/HSSDA.
Authors:Rui Xu, Yong Luo, Bo Du
Abstract:
Cross-domain pulmonary nodule detection suffers from performance degradation due to a large shift of data distributions between the source and target domain. Besides, considering the high cost of medical data annotation, it is often assumed that the target images are unlabeled. Existing approaches have made much progress for this unsupervised domain adaptation setting. However, this setting is still rarely plausible in medical applications since the source medical data are often not accessible due to privacy concerns. This motivates us to propose a Source-free Unsupervised cross-domain method for Pulmonary nodule detection (SUP), named Instance-level Contrastive Instruction fine-tuning framework (ICI). It first adapts the source model to the target domain by utilizing instance-level contrastive learning. Then the adapted model is trained in a teacher-student interaction manner, and a weighted entropy loss is incorporated to further improve the accuracy. We establish a benchmark by adapting a pre-trained source model to three popular datasets for pulmonary nodule detection. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first exploration of source-free unsupervised domain adaptation in medical image object detection. Our extensive evaluations reveal that SUP-ICI substantially surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving FROC score improvements ranging from 8.98% to 16.05%. This breakthrough not only sets a new precedent for domain adaptation techniques in medical imaging but also significantly advances the field toward overcoming challenges posed by data privacy and availability. Code: https://github.com/Ruixxxx/SFUDA.
Authors:Zhuoling Li, Chuanrui Zhang, Wei-Chiu Ma, Yipin Zhou, Linyan Huang, Haoqian Wang, SerNam Lim, Hengshuang Zhao
Abstract:
In recent years, transformer-based detectors have demonstrated remarkable performance in 2D visual perception tasks. However, their performance in multi-view 3D object detection remains inferior to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) of convolutional neural network based detectors. In this work, we investigate this issue from the perspective of bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature generation. Specifically, we examine the BEV feature generation method employed by the transformer-based SOTA, BEVFormer, and identify its two limitations: (i) it only generates attention weights from BEV, which precludes the use of lidar points for supervision, and (ii) it aggregates camera view features to the BEV through deformable sampling, which only selects a small subset of features and fails to exploit all information. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel BEV feature generation method, dual-view attention, which generates attention weights from both the BEV and camera view. This method encodes all camera features into the BEV feature. By combining dual-view attention with the BEVFormer architecture, we build a new detector named VoxelFormer. Extensive experiments are conducted on the nuScenes benchmark to verify the superiority of dual-view attention and VoxelForer. We observe that even only adopting 3 encoders and 1 historical frame during training, VoxelFormer still outperforms BEVFormer significantly. When trained in the same setting, VoxelFormer can surpass BEVFormer by 4.9% NDS point. Code is available at: https://github.com/Lizhuoling/VoxelFormer-public.git.
Authors:Youngseok Kim, Juyeb Shin, Sanmin Kim, In-Jae Lee, Jun Won Choi, Dongsuk Kum
Abstract:
Autonomous driving requires an accurate and fast 3D perception system that includes 3D object detection, tracking, and segmentation. Although recent low-cost camera-based approaches have shown promising results, they are susceptible to poor illumination or bad weather conditions and have a large localization error. Hence, fusing camera with low-cost radar, which provides precise long-range measurement and operates reliably in all environments, is promising but has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we propose Camera Radar Net (CRN), a novel camera-radar fusion framework that generates a semantically rich and spatially accurate bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for various tasks. To overcome the lack of spatial information in an image, we transform perspective view image features to BEV with the help of sparse but accurate radar points. We further aggregate image and radar feature maps in BEV using multi-modal deformable attention designed to tackle the spatial misalignment between inputs. CRN with real-time setting operates at 20 FPS while achieving comparable performance to LiDAR detectors on nuScenes, and even outperforms at a far distance on 100m setting. Moreover, CRN with offline setting yields 62.4% NDS, 57.5% mAP on nuScenes test set and ranks first among all camera and camera-radar 3D object detectors.
Authors:Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Jiyang Guan, Ran He
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been shown to be effective in various vision tasks. However, resizing them to a mobile-friendly size leads to significant performance degradation. Therefore, developing lightweight vision transformers has become a crucial area of research. This paper introduces CloFormer, a lightweight vision transformer that leverages context-aware local enhancement. CloFormer explores the relationship between globally shared weights often used in vanilla convolutional operators and token-specific context-aware weights appearing in attention, then proposes an effective and straightforward module to capture high-frequency local information. In CloFormer, we introduce AttnConv, a convolution operator in attention's style. The proposed AttnConv uses shared weights to aggregate local information and deploys carefully designed context-aware weights to enhance local features. The combination of the AttnConv and vanilla attention which uses pooling to reduce FLOPs in CloFormer enables the model to perceive high-frequency and low-frequency information. Extensive experiments were conducted in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, demonstrating the superiority of CloFormer. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/qhfan/CloFormer}.
Authors:Haimei Zhao, Qiming Zhang, Shanshan Zhao, Zhe Chen, Jing Zhang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Multi-view camera-based 3D object detection has become popular due to its low cost, but accurately inferring 3D geometry solely from camera data remains challenging and may lead to inferior performance. Although distilling precise 3D geometry knowledge from LiDAR data could help tackle this challenge, the benefits of LiDAR information could be greatly hindered by the significant modality gap between different sensory modalities. To address this issue, we propose a Simulated multi-modal Distillation (SimDistill) method by carefully crafting the model architecture and distillation strategy. Specifically, we devise multi-modal architectures for both teacher and student models, including a LiDAR-camera fusion-based teacher and a simulated fusion-based student. Owing to the ``identical'' architecture design, the student can mimic the teacher to generate multi-modal features with merely multi-view images as input, where a geometry compensation module is introduced to bridge the modality gap. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal distillation scheme that supports intra-modal, cross-modal, and multi-modal fusion distillation simultaneously in the Bird's-eye-view space. Incorporating them together, our SimDistill can learn better feature representations for 3D object detection while maintaining a cost-effective camera-only deployment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and superiority of SimDistill over state-of-the-art methods, achieving an improvement of 4.8\% mAP and 4.1\% NDS over the baseline detector. The source code will be released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/SimDistill.
Authors:Amirhossein Kazerouni, Amirhossein Heydarian, Milad Soltany, Aida Mohammadshahi, Abbas Omidi, Saeed Ebadollahi
Abstract:
A significant portion of driving hazards is caused by human error and disregard for local driving regulations; Consequently, an intelligent assistance system can be beneficial. This paper proposes a novel vision-based modular package to ensure drivers' safety by perceiving the environment. Each module is designed based on accuracy and inference time to deliver real-time performance. As a result, the proposed system can be implemented on a wide range of vehicles with minimum hardware requirements. Our modular package comprises four main sections: lane detection, object detection, segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. Each section is accompanied by novel techniques to improve the accuracy of others along with the entire system. Furthermore, a GUI is developed to display perceived information to the driver. In addition to using public datasets, like BDD100K, we have also collected and annotated a local dataset that we utilize to fine-tune and evaluate our system. We show that the accuracy of our system is above 80% in all the sections. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Pandas-Team/Autonomous-Vehicle-Environment-Perception
Authors:Tao Lu, Xiang Ding, Haisong Liu, Gangshan Wu, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Extending the success of 2D Large Kernel to 3D perception is challenging due to: 1. the cubically-increasing overhead in processing 3D data; 2. the optimization difficulties from data scarcity and sparsity. Previous work has taken the first step to scale up the kernel size from 3x3x3 to 7x7x7 by introducing block-shared weights. However, to reduce the feature variations within a block, it only employs modest block size and fails to achieve larger kernels like the 21x21x21. To address this issue, we propose a new method, called LinK, to achieve a wider-range perception receptive field in a convolution-like manner with two core designs. The first is to replace the static kernel matrix with a linear kernel generator, which adaptively provides weights only for non-empty voxels. The second is to reuse the pre-computed aggregation results in the overlapped blocks to reduce computation complexity. The proposed method successfully enables each voxel to perceive context within a range of 21x21x21. Extensive experiments on two basic perception tasks, 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, we rank 1st on the public leaderboard of the 3D detection benchmark of nuScenes (LiDAR track), by simply incorporating a LinK-based backbone into the basic detector, CenterPoint. We also boost the strong segmentation baseline's mIoU with 2.7% in the SemanticKITTI test set. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/LinK.
Authors:Mingjian Liang, Junjie Hu, Chenyu Bao, Hua Feng, Fuqin Deng, Tin Lun Lam
Abstract:
Recently, RGB-Thermal based perception has shown significant advances. Thermal information provides useful clues when visual cameras suffer from poor lighting conditions, such as low light and fog. However, how to effectively fuse RGB images and thermal data remains an open challenge. Previous works involve naive fusion strategies such as merging them at the input, concatenating multi-modality features inside models, or applying attention to each data modality. These fusion strategies are straightforward yet insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion method named Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion (EAEF) that fully takes advantage of each type of data. Specifically, we consider the following cases: i) both RGB data and thermal data, ii) only one of the types of data, and iii) none of them generate discriminative features. EAEF uses one branch to enhance feature extraction for i) and iii) and the other branch to remedy insufficient representations for ii). The outputs of two branches are fused to form complementary features. As a result, the proposed fusion method outperforms state-of-the-art by 1.6\% in mIoU on semantic segmentation, 3.1\% in MAE on salient object detection, 2.3\% in mAP on object detection, and 8.1\% in MAE on crowd counting. The code is available at https://github.com/FreeformRobotics/EAEFNet.
Authors:Jiawei He, Yuntao Chen, Naiyan Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
We explore long-term temporal visual correspondence-based optimization for 3D video object detection in this work. Visual correspondence refers to one-to-one mappings for pixels across multiple images. Correspondence-based optimization is the cornerstone for 3D scene reconstruction but is less studied in 3D video object detection, because moving objects violate multi-view geometry constraints and are treated as outliers during scene reconstruction. We address this issue by treating objects as first-class citizens during correspondence-based optimization. In this work, we propose BA-Det, an end-to-end optimizable object detector with object-centric temporal correspondence learning and featuremetric object bundle adjustment. Empirically, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of BA-Det for multiple baseline 3D detectors under various setups. Our BA-Det achieves SOTA performance on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) with only marginal computation cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiaweihe1996/BA-Det.
Authors:Yurong You, Cheng Perng Phoo, Katie Z Luo, Travis Zhang, Wei-Lun Chao, Bharath Hariharan, Mark Campbell, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Abstract:
For a self-driving car to operate reliably, its perceptual system must generalize to the end-user's environment -- ideally without additional annotation efforts. One potential solution is to leverage unlabeled data (e.g., unlabeled LiDAR point clouds) collected from the end-users' environments (i.e. target domain) to adapt the system to the difference between training and testing environments. While extensive research has been done on such an unsupervised domain adaptation problem, one fundamental problem lingers: there is no reliable signal in the target domain to supervise the adaptation process. To overcome this issue we observe that it is easy to collect unsupervised data from multiple traversals of repeated routes. While different from conventional unsupervised domain adaptation, this assumption is extremely realistic since many drivers share the same roads. We show that this simple additional assumption is sufficient to obtain a potent signal that allows us to perform iterative self-training of 3D object detectors on the target domain. Concretely, we generate pseudo-labels with the out-of-domain detector but reduce false positives by removing detections of supposedly mobile objects that are persistent across traversals. Further, we reduce false negatives by encouraging predictions in regions that are not persistent. We experiment with our approach on two large-scale driving datasets and show remarkable improvement in 3D object detection of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, bringing us a step closer to generalizable autonomous driving.
Authors:Qiming Zhang, Jing Zhang, Yufei Xu, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Window-based attention has become a popular choice in vision transformers due to its superior performance, lower computational complexity, and less memory footprint. However, the design of hand-crafted windows, which is data-agnostic, constrains the flexibility of transformers to adapt to objects of varying sizes, shapes, and orientations. To address this issue, we propose a novel quadrangle attention (QA) method that extends the window-based attention to a general quadrangle formulation. Our method employs an end-to-end learnable quadrangle regression module that predicts a transformation matrix to transform default windows into target quadrangles for token sampling and attention calculation, enabling the network to model various targets with different shapes and orientations and capture rich context information. We integrate QA into plain and hierarchical vision transformers to create a new architecture named QFormer, which offers minor code modifications and negligible extra computational cost. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that QFormer outperforms existing representative vision transformers on various vision tasks, including classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation. The code will be made publicly available at \href{https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/QFormer}{QFormer}.
Authors:Chang Liu, Weiming Zhang, Xiangru Lin, Wei Zhang, Xiao Tan, Junyu Han, Xiaomao Li, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
With basic Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) techniques, one-stage detectors generally obtain limited promotions compared with two-stage clusters. We experimentally find that the root lies in two kinds of ambiguities: (1) Selection ambiguity that selected pseudo labels are less accurate, since classification scores cannot properly represent the localization quality. (2) Assignment ambiguity that samples are matched with improper labels in pseudo-label assignment, as the strategy is misguided by missed objects and inaccurate pseudo boxes. To tackle these problems, we propose a Ambiguity-Resistant Semi-supervised Learning (ARSL) for one-stage detectors. Specifically, to alleviate the selection ambiguity, Joint-Confidence Estimation (JCE) is proposed to jointly quantifies the classification and localization quality of pseudo labels. As for the assignment ambiguity, Task-Separation Assignment (TSA) is introduced to assign labels based on pixel-level predictions rather than unreliable pseudo boxes. It employs a "divide-and-conquer" strategy and separately exploits positives for the classification and localization task, which is more robust to the assignment ambiguity. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ARSL effectively mitigates the ambiguities and achieves state-of-the-art SSOD performance on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC. Codes can be found at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.
Authors:Zhou Huang, Hang Dai, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Shuo Wang, Huai-Xin Chen, Jie Qin, Huan Xiong
Abstract:
Vision transformers have recently shown strong global context modeling capabilities in camouflaged object detection. However, they suffer from two major limitations: less effective locality modeling and insufficient feature aggregation in decoders, which are not conducive to camouflaged object detection that explores subtle cues from indistinguishable backgrounds. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based Feature Shrinkage Pyramid Network (FSPNet), which aims to hierarchically decode locality-enhanced neighboring transformer features through progressive shrinking for camouflaged object detection. Specifically, we propose a nonlocal token enhancement module (NL-TEM) that employs the non-local mechanism to interact neighboring tokens and explore graph-based high-order relations within tokens to enhance local representations of transformers. Moreover, we design a feature shrinkage decoder (FSD) with adjacent interaction modules (AIM), which progressively aggregates adjacent transformer features through a layer-bylayer shrinkage pyramid to accumulate imperceptible but effective cues as much as possible for object information decoding. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing 24 competitors on three challenging COD benchmark datasets under six widely-used evaluation metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhouHuang23/FSPNet.
Authors:Kuniaki Saito, Donghyun Kim, Piotr Teterwak, Rogerio Feris, Kate Saenko
Abstract:
Building object detectors that are robust to domain shifts is critical for real-world applications. Prior approaches fine-tune a pre-trained backbone and risk overfitting it to in-distribution (ID) data and distorting features useful for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. We propose to use Relative Gradient Norm (RGN) as a way to measure the vulnerability of a backbone to feature distortion, and show that high RGN is indeed correlated with lower OOD performance. Our analysis of RGN yields interesting findings: some backbones lose OOD robustness during fine-tuning, but others gain robustness because their architecture prevents the parameters from changing too much from the initial model. Given these findings, we present recipes to boost OOD robustness for both types of backbones. Specifically, we investigate regularization and architectural choices for minimizing gradient updates so as to prevent the tuned backbone from losing generalizable features. Our proposed techniques complement each other and show substantial improvements over baselines on diverse architectures and datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/VisionLearningGroup/mind_back.
Authors:Yongqi An, Xu Zhao, Tao Yu, Haiyun Guo, Chaoyang Zhao, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract:
Background subtraction (BGS) aims to extract all moving objects in the video frames to obtain binary foreground segmentation masks. Deep learning has been widely used in this field. Compared with supervised-based BGS methods, unsupervised methods have better generalization. However, previous unsupervised deep learning BGS algorithms perform poorly in sophisticated scenarios such as shadows or night lights, and they cannot detect objects outside the pre-defined categories. In this work, we propose an unsupervised BGS algorithm based on zero-shot object detection called Zero-shot Background Subtraction (ZBS). The proposed method fully utilizes the advantages of zero-shot object detection to build the open-vocabulary instance-level background model. Based on it, the foreground can be effectively extracted by comparing the detection results of new frames with the background model. ZBS performs well for sophisticated scenarios, and it has rich and extensible categories. Furthermore, our method can easily generalize to other tasks, such as abandoned object detection in unseen environments. We experimentally show that ZBS surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised BGS methods by 4.70% F-Measure on the CDnet 2014 dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/ZBS.
Authors:Dian Chen, Jie Li, Vitor Guizilini, Rares Ambrus, Adrien Gaidon
Abstract:
3D object detection from visual sensors is a cornerstone capability of robotic systems. State-of-the-art methods focus on reasoning and decoding object bounding boxes from multi-view camera input. In this work we gain intuition from the integral role of multi-view consistency in 3D scene understanding and geometric learning. To this end, we introduce VEDet, a novel 3D object detection framework that exploits 3D multi-view geometry to improve localization through viewpoint awareness and equivariance. VEDet leverages a query-based transformer architecture and encodes the 3D scene by augmenting image features with positional encodings from their 3D perspective geometry. We design view-conditioned queries at the output level, which enables the generation of multiple virtual frames during training to learn viewpoint equivariance by enforcing multi-view consistency. The multi-view geometry injected at the input level as positional encodings and regularized at the loss level provides rich geometric cues for 3D object detection, leading to state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark. The code and model are made available at https://github.com/TRI-ML/VEDet.
Authors:Bowei Du, Yecheng Huang, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang
Abstract:
Object detection on drone images with low-latency is an important but challenging task on the resource-constrained unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform. This paper investigates optimizing the detection head based on the sparse convolution, which proves effective in balancing the accuracy and efficiency. Nevertheless, it suffers from inadequate integration of contextual information of tiny objects as well as clumsy control of the mask ratio in the presence of foreground with varying scales. To address the issues above, we propose a novel global context-enhanced adaptive sparse convolutional network (CEASC). It first develops a context-enhanced group normalization (CE-GN) layer, by replacing the statistics based on sparsely sampled features with the global contextual ones, and then designs an adaptive multi-layer masking strategy to generate optimal mask ratios at distinct scales for compact foreground coverage, promoting both the accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experimental results on two major benchmarks, i.e. VisDrone and UAVDT, demonstrate that CEASC remarkably reduces the GFLOPs and accelerates the inference procedure when plugging into the typical state-of-the-art detection frameworks (e.g. RetinaNet and GFL V1) with competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Cuogeihong/CEASC.
Authors:Han Xue, Zhiwu Huang, Qianru Sun, Li Song, Wenjun Zhang
Abstract:
Typical layout-to-image synthesis (LIS) models generate images for a closed set of semantic classes, e.g., 182 common objects in COCO-Stuff. In this work, we explore the freestyle capability of the model, i.e., how far can it generate unseen semantics (e.g., classes, attributes, and styles) onto a given layout, and call the task Freestyle LIS (FLIS). Thanks to the development of large-scale pre-trained language-image models, a number of discriminative models (e.g., image classification and object detection) trained on limited base classes are empowered with the ability of unseen class prediction. Inspired by this, we opt to leverage large-scale pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to achieve the generation of unseen semantics. The key challenge of FLIS is how to enable the diffusion model to synthesize images from a specific layout which very likely violates its pre-learned knowledge, e.g., the model never sees "a unicorn sitting on a bench" during its pre-training. To this end, we introduce a new module called Rectified Cross-Attention (RCA) that can be conveniently plugged in the diffusion model to integrate semantic masks. This "plug-in" is applied in each cross-attention layer of the model to rectify the attention maps between image and text tokens. The key idea of RCA is to enforce each text token to act on the pixels in a specified region, allowing us to freely put a wide variety of semantics from pre-trained knowledge (which is general) onto the given layout (which is specific). Extensive experiments show that the proposed diffusion network produces realistic and freestyle layout-to-image generation results with diverse text inputs, which has a high potential to spawn a bunch of interesting applications. Code is available at https://github.com/essunny310/FreestyleNet.
Authors:Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Haris Khan, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have enabled astounding progress in several vision-based problems. Despite showing high predictive accuracy, recently, several works have revealed that they tend to provide overconfident predictions and thus are poorly calibrated. The majority of the works addressing the miscalibration of DNNs fall under the scope of classification and consider only in-domain predictions. However, there is little to no progress in studying the calibration of DNN-based object detection models, which are central to many vision-based safety-critical applications. In this paper, inspired by the train-time calibration methods, we propose a novel auxiliary loss formulation that explicitly aims to align the class confidence of bounding boxes with the accurateness of predictions (i.e. precision). Since the original formulation of our loss depends on the counts of true positives and false positives in a minibatch, we develop a differentiable proxy of our loss that can be used during training with other application-specific loss functions. We perform extensive experiments on challenging in-domain and out-domain scenarios with six benchmark datasets including MS-COCO, Cityscapes, Sim10k, and BDD100k. Our results reveal that our train-time loss surpasses strong calibration baselines in reducing calibration error for both in and out-domain scenarios. Our source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/akhtarvision/bpc_calibration
Authors:Zikui Cai, Yaoteng Tan, M. Salman Asif
Abstract:
We propose an approach for adversarial attacks on dense prediction models (such as object detectors and segmentation). It is well known that the attacks generated by a single surrogate model do not transfer to arbitrary (blackbox) victim models. Furthermore, targeted attacks are often more challenging than the untargeted attacks. In this paper, we show that a carefully designed ensemble can create effective attacks for a number of victim models. In particular, we show that normalization of the weights for individual models plays a critical role in the success of the attacks. We then demonstrate that by adjusting the weights of the ensemble according to the victim model can further improve the performance of the attacks. We performed a number of experiments for object detectors and segmentation to highlight the significance of the our proposed methods. Our proposed ensemble-based method outperforms existing blackbox attack methods for object detection and segmentation. Finally we show that our proposed method can also generate a single perturbation that can fool multiple blackbox detection and segmentation models simultaneously. Code is available at https://github.com/CSIPlab/EBAD.
Authors:Wenteng Liang, Feng Xue, Yihao Liu, Guofeng Zhong, Anlong Ming
Abstract:
The recently proposed open-world object and open-set detection have achieved a breakthrough in finding never-seen-before objects and distinguishing them from known ones. However, their studies on knowledge transfer from known classes to unknown ones are not deep enough, resulting in the scanty capability for detecting unknowns hidden in the background. In this paper, we propose the unknown sniffer (UnSniffer) to find both unknown and known objects. Firstly, the generalized object confidence (GOC) score is introduced, which only uses known samples for supervision and avoids improper suppression of unknowns in the background. Significantly, such confidence score learned from known objects can be generalized to unknown ones. Additionally, we propose a negative energy suppression loss to further suppress the non-object samples in the background. Next, the best box of each unknown is hard to obtain during inference due to lacking their semantic information in training. To solve this issue, we introduce a graph-based determination scheme to replace hand-designed non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing. Finally, we present the Unknown Object Detection Benchmark, the first publicly benchmark that encompasses precision evaluation for unknown detection to our knowledge. Experiments show that our method is far better than the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Runsen Xu, Tai Wang, Wenwei Zhang, Runjian Chen, Jinkun Cao, Jiangmiao Pang, Dahua Lin
Abstract:
This paper introduces the Masked Voxel Jigsaw and Reconstruction (MV-JAR) method for LiDAR-based self-supervised pre-training and a carefully designed data-efficient 3D object detection benchmark on the Waymo dataset. Inspired by the scene-voxel-point hierarchy in downstream 3D object detectors, we design masking and reconstruction strategies accounting for voxel distributions in the scene and local point distributions within the voxel. We employ a Reversed-Furthest-Voxel-Sampling strategy to address the uneven distribution of LiDAR points and propose MV-JAR, which combines two techniques for modeling the aforementioned distributions, resulting in superior performance. Our experiments reveal limitations in previous data-efficient experiments, which uniformly sample fine-tuning splits with varying data proportions from each LiDAR sequence, leading to similar data diversity across splits. To address this, we propose a new benchmark that samples scene sequences for diverse fine-tuning splits, ensuring adequate model convergence and providing a more accurate evaluation of pre-training methods. Experiments on our Waymo benchmark and the KITTI dataset demonstrate that MV-JAR consistently and significantly improves 3D detection performance across various data scales, achieving up to a 6.3% increase in mAPH compared to training from scratch. Codes and the benchmark will be available at https://github.com/SmartBot-PJLab/MV-JAR .
Authors:Mannat Singh, Quentin Duval, Kalyan Vasudev Alwala, Haoqi Fan, Vaibhav Aggarwal, Aaron Adcock, Armand Joulin, Piotr Dollár, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Ross Girshick, Rohit Girdhar, Ishan Misra
Abstract:
This paper revisits the standard pretrain-then-finetune paradigm used in computer vision for visual recognition tasks. Typically, state-of-the-art foundation models are pretrained using large scale (weakly) supervised datasets with billions of images. We introduce an additional pre-pretraining stage that is simple and uses the self-supervised MAE technique to initialize the model. While MAE has only been shown to scale with the size of models, we find that it scales with the size of the training dataset as well. Thus, our MAE-based pre-pretraining scales with both model and data size making it applicable for training foundation models. Pre-pretraining consistently improves both the model convergence and the downstream transfer performance across a range of model scales (millions to billions of parameters), and dataset sizes (millions to billions of images). We measure the effectiveness of pre-pretraining on 10 different visual recognition tasks spanning image classification, video recognition, object detection, low-shot classification and zero-shot recognition. Our largest model achieves new state-of-the-art results on iNaturalist-18 (91.7%), ImageNet-ReaL (91.1%), 1-shot ImageNet-1k (63.6%), and zero-shot transfer on Food-101 (96.2%). Our study reveals that model initialization plays a significant role, even for web-scale pretraining with billions of images, and our models are available publicly.
Authors:Mengyao Lyu, Jundong Zhou, Hui Chen, Yijie Huang, Dongdong Yu, Yaqian Li, Yandong Guo, Yuchen Guo, Liuyu Xiang, Guiguang Ding
Abstract:
Active learning selects informative samples for annotation within budget, which has proven efficient recently on object detection. However, the widely used active detection benchmarks conduct image-level evaluation, which is unrealistic in human workload estimation and biased towards crowded images. Furthermore, existing methods still perform image-level annotation, but equally scoring all targets within the same image incurs waste of budget and redundant labels. Having revealed above problems and limitations, we introduce a box-level active detection framework that controls a box-based budget per cycle, prioritizes informative targets and avoids redundancy for fair comparison and efficient application.
Under the proposed box-level setting, we devise a novel pipeline, namely Complementary Pseudo Active Strategy (ComPAS). It exploits both human annotations and the model intelligence in a complementary fashion: an efficient input-end committee queries labels for informative objects only; meantime well-learned targets are identified by the model and compensated with pseudo-labels. ComPAS consistently outperforms 10 competitors under 4 settings in a unified codebase. With supervision from labeled data only, it achieves 100% supervised performance of VOC0712 with merely 19% box annotations. On the COCO dataset, it yields up to 4.3% mAP improvement over the second-best method. ComPAS also supports training with the unlabeled pool, where it surpasses 90% COCO supervised performance with 85% label reduction. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/lyumengyao/blad.
Authors:Hansheng Chen, Wei Tian, Pichao Wang, Fan Wang, Lu Xiong, Hao Li
Abstract:
Locating 3D objects from a single RGB image via Perspective-n-Point (PnP) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Driven by end-to-end deep learning, recent studies suggest interpreting PnP as a differentiable layer, allowing for partial learning of 2D-3D point correspondences by backpropagating the gradients of pose loss. Yet, learning the entire correspondences from scratch is highly challenging, particularly for ambiguous pose solutions, where the globally optimal pose is theoretically non-differentiable w.r.t. the points. In this paper, we propose the EPro-PnP, a probabilistic PnP layer for general end-to-end pose estimation, which outputs a distribution of pose with differentiable probability density on the SE(3) manifold. The 2D-3D coordinates and corresponding weights are treated as intermediate variables learned by minimizing the KL divergence between the predicted and target pose distribution. The underlying principle generalizes previous approaches, and resembles the attention mechanism. EPro-PnP can enhance existing correspondence networks, closing the gap between PnP-based method and the task-specific leaders on the LineMOD 6DoF pose estimation benchmark. Furthermore, EPro-PnP helps to explore new possibilities of network design, as we demonstrate a novel deformable correspondence network with the state-of-the-art pose accuracy on the nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/tjiiv-cprg/EPro-PnP-v2.
Authors:Shilong Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Jiaqi Wang, Jiangmiao Pang, Chengqi Lyu, Wenwei Zhang, Ping Luo, Kai Chen
Abstract:
One-to-one label assignment in object detection has successfully obviated the need for non-maximum suppression (NMS) as postprocessing and makes the pipeline end-to-end. However, it triggers a new dilemma as the widely used sparse queries cannot guarantee a high recall, while dense queries inevitably bring more similar queries and encounter optimization difficulties. As both sparse and dense queries are problematic, then what are the expected queries in end-to-end object detection? This paper shows that the solution should be Dense Distinct Queries (DDQ). Concretely, we first lay dense queries like traditional detectors and then select distinct ones for one-to-one assignments. DDQ blends the advantages of traditional and recent end-to-end detectors and significantly improves the performance of various detectors including FCN, R-CNN, and DETRs. Most impressively, DDQ-DETR achieves 52.1 AP on MS-COCO dataset within 12 epochs using a ResNet-50 backbone, outperforming all existing detectors in the same setting. DDQ also shares the benefit of end-to-end detectors in crowded scenes and achieves 93.8 AP on CrowdHuman. We hope DDQ can inspire researchers to consider the complementarity between traditional methods and end-to-end detectors. The source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/jshilong/DDQ}.
Authors:Xin Lai, Yukang Chen, Fanbin Lu, Jianhui Liu, Jiaya Jia
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D point cloud recognition has benefited various applications. Without specially considering the LiDAR point distribution, most current methods suffer from information disconnection and limited receptive field, especially for the sparse distant points. In this work, we study the varying-sparsity distribution of LiDAR points and present SphereFormer to directly aggregate information from dense close points to the sparse distant ones. We design radial window self-attention that partitions the space into multiple non-overlapping narrow and long windows. It overcomes the disconnection issue and enlarges the receptive field smoothly and dramatically, which significantly boosts the performance of sparse distant points. Moreover, to fit the narrow and long windows, we propose exponential splitting to yield fine-grained position encoding and dynamic feature selection to increase model representation ability. Notably, our method ranks 1st on both nuScenes and SemanticKITTI semantic segmentation benchmarks with 81.9% and 74.8% mIoU, respectively. Also, we achieve the 3rd place on nuScenes object detection benchmark with 72.8% NDS and 68.5% mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/SphereFormer.git.
Authors:Jungwook Shin, Jaeill Kim, Kyungeun Lee, Hyunghun Cho, Wonjong Rhee
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, data augmentation is commonly used for improving 3D object detection. The most basic methods include insertion of copied objects and rotation and scaling of the entire training frame. Numerous variants have been developed as well. The existing methods, however, are considerably limited when compared to the variety of the real world possibilities. In this work, we develop a diversified and realistic augmentation method that can flexibly construct a whole-body object, freely locate and rotate the object, and apply self-occlusion and external-occlusion accordingly. To improve the diversity of the whole-body object construction, we develop an iterative method that stochastically combines multiple objects observed from the real world into a single object. Unlike the existing augmentation methods, the constructed objects can be randomly located and rotated in the training frame because proper occlusions can be reflected to the whole-body objects in the final step. Finally, proper self-occlusion at each local object level and external-occlusion at the global frame level are applied using the Hidden Point Removal (HPR) algorithm that is computationally efficient. HPR is also used for adaptively controlling the point density of each object according to the object's distance from the LiDAR. Experiment results show that the proposed DR.CPO algorithm is data-efficient and model-agnostic without incurring any computational overhead. Also, DR.CPO can improve mAP performance by 2.08% when compared to the best 3D detection result known for KITTI dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/SNU-DRL/DRCPO.git
Authors:Zhuoming Liu, Xuefeng Hu, Ram Nevatia
Abstract:
We propose a new setting for detecting unseen objects called Zero-shot Annotation object Detection (ZAD). It expands the zero-shot object detection setting by allowing the novel objects to exist in the training images and restricts the additional information the detector uses to novel category names. Recently, to detect unseen objects, large-scale vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) are leveraged by different methods. The distillation-based methods have good overall performance but suffer from a long training schedule caused by two factors. First, existing work creates distillation regions biased to the base categories, which limits the distillation of novel category information. Second, directly using the raw feature from CLIP for distillation neglects the domain gap between the training data of CLIP and the detection datasets, which makes it difficult to learn the mapping from the image region to the vision-language feature space. To solve these problems, we propose Efficient feature distillation for Zero-shot Annotation object Detection (EZAD). Firstly, EZAD adapts the CLIP's feature space to the target detection domain by re-normalizing CLIP; Secondly, EZAD uses CLIP to generate distillation proposals with potential novel category names to avoid the distillation being overly biased toward the base categories. Finally, EZAD takes advantage of semantic meaning for regression to further improve the model performance. As a result, EZAD outperforms the previous distillation-based methods in COCO by 4% with a much shorter training schedule and achieves a 3% improvement on the LVIS dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/dragonlzm/EZAD
Authors:Shihao Wang, Yingfei Liu, Tiancai Wang, Ying Li, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a long-sequence modeling framework, named StreamPETR, for multi-view 3D object detection. Built upon the sparse query design in the PETR series, we systematically develop an object-centric temporal mechanism. The model is performed in an online manner and the long-term historical information is propagated through object queries frame by frame. Besides, we introduce a motion-aware layer normalization to model the movement of the objects. StreamPETR achieves significant performance improvements only with negligible computation cost, compared to the single-frame baseline. On the standard nuScenes benchmark, it is the first online multi-view method that achieves comparable performance (67.6% NDS & 65.3% AMOTA) with lidar-based methods. The lightweight version realizes 45.0% mAP and 31.7 FPS, outperforming the state-of-the-art method (SOLOFusion) by 2.3% mAP and 1.8x faster FPS. Code has been available at https://github.com/exiawsh/StreamPETR.git.
Authors:Ka-Ho Chow, Ling Liu, Wenqi Wei, Fatih Ilhan, Yanzhao Wu
Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) has been gaining popularity as a collaborative learning framework to train deep learning-based object detection models over a distributed population of clients. Despite its advantages, FL is vulnerable to model hijacking. The attacker can control how the object detection system should misbehave by implanting Trojaned gradients using only a small number of compromised clients in the collaborative learning process. This paper introduces STDLens, a principled approach to safeguarding FL against such attacks. We first investigate existing mitigation mechanisms and analyze their failures caused by the inherent errors in spatial clustering analysis on gradients. Based on the insights, we introduce a three-tier forensic framework to identify and expel Trojaned gradients and reclaim the performance over the course of FL. We consider three types of adaptive attacks and demonstrate the robustness of STDLens against advanced adversaries. Extensive experiments show that STDLens can protect FL against different model hijacking attacks and outperform existing methods in identifying and removing Trojaned gradients with significantly higher precision and much lower false-positive rates.
Authors:Jihao Liu, Tai Wang, Boxiao Liu, Qihang Zhang, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
Multi-view camera-based 3D detection is a challenging problem in computer vision. Recent works leverage a pretrained LiDAR detection model to transfer knowledge to a camera-based student network. However, we argue that there is a major domain gap between the LiDAR BEV features and the camera-based BEV features, as they have different characteristics and are derived from different sources. In this paper, we propose Geometry Enhanced Masked Image Modeling (GeoMIM) to transfer the knowledge of the LiDAR model in a pretrain-finetune paradigm for improving the multi-view camera-based 3D detection. GeoMIM is a multi-camera vision transformer with Cross-View Attention (CVA) blocks that uses LiDAR BEV features encoded by the pretrained BEV model as learning targets. During pretraining, GeoMIM's decoder has a semantic branch completing dense perspective-view features and the other geometry branch reconstructing dense perspective-view depth maps. The depth branch is designed to be camera-aware by inputting the camera's parameters for better transfer capability. Extensive results demonstrate that GeoMIM outperforms existing methods on nuScenes benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art performance for camera-based 3D object detection and 3D segmentation. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Sense-X/GeoMIM.
Authors:Yukang Chen, Jianhui Liu, Xiangyu Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi, Jiaya Jia
Abstract:
3D object detectors usually rely on hand-crafted proxies, e.g., anchors or centers, and translate well-studied 2D frameworks to 3D. Thus, sparse voxel features need to be densified and processed by dense prediction heads, which inevitably costs extra computation. In this paper, we instead propose VoxelNext for fully sparse 3D object detection. Our core insight is to predict objects directly based on sparse voxel features, without relying on hand-crafted proxies. Our strong sparse convolutional network VoxelNeXt detects and tracks 3D objects through voxel features entirely. It is an elegant and efficient framework, with no need for sparse-to-dense conversion or NMS post-processing. Our method achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off than other mainframe detectors on the nuScenes dataset. For the first time, we show that a fully sparse voxel-based representation works decently for LIDAR 3D object detection and tracking. Extensive experiments on nuScenes, Waymo, and Argoverse2 benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. Without bells and whistles, our model outperforms all existing LIDAR methods on the nuScenes tracking test benchmark.
Authors:Roy Miles, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Abstract:
In this paper we revisit the efficacy of knowledge distillation as a function matching and metric learning problem. In doing so we verify three important design decisions, namely the normalisation, soft maximum function, and projection layers as key ingredients. We theoretically show that the projector implicitly encodes information on past examples, enabling relational gradients for the student. We then show that the normalisation of representations is tightly coupled with the training dynamics of this projector, which can have a large impact on the students performance. Finally, we show that a simple soft maximum function can be used to address any significant capacity gap problems. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that using these insights can lead to superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques, despite being much more computationally efficient. In particular, we obtain these results across image classification (CIFAR100 and ImageNet), object detection (COCO2017), and on more difficult distillation objectives, such as training data efficient transformers, whereby we attain a 77.2% top-1 accuracy with DeiT-Ti on ImageNet. Code and models are publicly available.
Authors:Yinpeng Dong, Caixin Kang, Jinlai Zhang, Zijian Zhu, Yikai Wang, Xiao Yang, Hang Su, Xingxing Wei, Jun Zhu
Abstract:
3D object detection is an important task in autonomous driving to perceive the surroundings. Despite the excellent performance, the existing 3D detectors lack the robustness to real-world corruptions caused by adverse weathers, sensor noises, etc., provoking concerns about the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. To comprehensively and rigorously benchmark the corruption robustness of 3D detectors, in this paper we design 27 types of common corruptions for both LiDAR and camera inputs considering real-world driving scenarios. By synthesizing these corruptions on public datasets, we establish three corruption robustness benchmarks -- KITTI-C, nuScenes-C, and Waymo-C. Then, we conduct large-scale experiments on 24 diverse 3D object detection models to evaluate their corruption robustness. Based on the evaluation results, we draw several important findings, including: 1) motion-level corruptions are the most threatening ones that lead to significant performance drop of all models; 2) LiDAR-camera fusion models demonstrate better robustness; 3) camera-only models are extremely vulnerable to image corruptions, showing the indispensability of LiDAR point clouds. We release the benchmarks and codes at https://github.com/kkkcx/3D_Corruptions_AD. We hope that our benchmarks and findings can provide insights for future research on developing robust 3D object detection models.
Authors:Srikar Yellapragada, Zhenghong Li, Kevin Bhadresh Doshi, Purva Makarand Mhasakar, Heng Fan, Jie Wei, Erik Blasch, Bin Zhang, Haibin Ling
Abstract:
Gun violence is a critical security problem, and it is imperative for the computer vision community to develop effective gun detection algorithms for real-world scenarios, particularly in Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance data. Despite significant progress in visual object detection, detecting guns in real-world CCTV images remains a challenging and under-explored task. Firearms, especially handguns, are typically very small in size, non-salient in appearance, and often severely occluded or indistinguishable from other small objects. Additionally, the lack of principled benchmarks and difficulty collecting relevant datasets further hinder algorithmic development. In this paper, we present a meticulously crafted and annotated benchmark, called \textbf{CCTV-Gun}, which addresses the challenges of detecting handguns in real-world CCTV images. Our contribution is three-fold. Firstly, we carefully select and analyze real-world CCTV images from three datasets, manually annotate handguns and their holders, and assign each image with relevant challenge factors such as blur and occlusion. Secondly, we propose a new cross-dataset evaluation protocol in addition to the standard intra-dataset protocol, which is vital for gun detection in practical settings. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate both classical and state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, providing an in-depth analysis of their generalizing abilities. The benchmark will facilitate further research and development on this topic and ultimately enhance security. Code, annotations, and trained models are available at https://github.com/srikarym/CCTV-Gun.
Authors:Haibao Yu, Yingjuan Tang, Enze Xie, Jilei Mao, Jirui Yuan, Ping Luo, Zaiqing Nie
Abstract:
Cooperatively utilizing both ego-vehicle and infrastructure sensor data can significantly enhance autonomous driving perception abilities. However, temporal asynchrony and limited wireless communication in traffic environments can lead to fusion misalignment and impact detection performance. This paper proposes Feature Flow Net (FFNet), a novel cooperative detection framework that uses a feature flow prediction module to address these issues in vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D object detection. Rather than transmitting feature maps extracted from still-images, FFNet transmits feature flow, which leverages the temporal coherence of sequential infrastructure frames to predict future features and compensate for asynchrony. Additionally, we introduce a self-supervised approach to enable FFNet to generate feature flow with feature prediction ability. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing cooperative detection methods while requiring no more than 1/10 transmission cost of raw data on the DAIR-V2X dataset when temporal asynchrony exceeds 200$ms$. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/haibao-yu/FFNet-VIC3D}{https://github.com/haibao-yu/FFNet-VIC3D}.
Authors:Kaixin Xiong, Shi Gong, Xiaoqing Ye, Xiao Tan, Ji Wan, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
In this paper, we address the problem of detecting 3D objects from multi-view images. Current query-based methods rely on global 3D position embeddings (PE) to learn the geometric correspondence between images and 3D space. We claim that directly interacting 2D image features with global 3D PE could increase the difficulty of learning view transformation due to the variation of camera extrinsics. Thus we propose a novel method based on CAmera view Position Embedding, called CAPE. We form the 3D position embeddings under the local camera-view coordinate system instead of the global coordinate system, such that 3D position embedding is free of encoding camera extrinsic parameters. Furthermore, we extend our CAPE to temporal modeling by exploiting the object queries of previous frames and encoding the ego-motion for boosting 3D object detection. CAPE achieves state-of-the-art performance (61.0% NDS and 52.5% mAP) among all LiDAR-free methods on nuScenes dataset. Codes and models are available on \href{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Paddle3D}{Paddle3D} and \href{https://github.com/kaixinbear/CAPE}{PyTorch Implementation}.
Authors:Jiawei Ma, Yulei Niu, Jincheng Xu, Shiyuan Huang, Guangxing Han, Shih-Fu Chang
Abstract:
Generalized few-shot object detection aims to achieve precise detection on both base classes with abundant annotations and novel classes with limited training data. Existing approaches enhance few-shot generalization with the sacrifice of base-class performance, or maintain high precision in base-class detection with limited improvement in novel-class adaptation. In this paper, we point out the reason is insufficient Discriminative feature learning for all of the classes. As such, we propose a new training framework, DiGeo, to learn Geometry-aware features of inter-class separation and intra-class compactness. To guide the separation of feature clusters, we derive an offline simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) classifier whose weights serve as class centers and are maximally and equally separated. To tighten the cluster for each class, we include adaptive class-specific margins into the classification loss and encourage the features close to the class centers. Experimental studies on two few-shot benchmark datasets (VOC, COCO) and one long-tail dataset (LVIS) demonstrate that, with a single model, our method can effectively improve generalization on novel classes without hurting the detection of base classes.
Authors:Arushi Rai, Adriana Kovashka
Abstract:
The use of large-scale vision-language datasets is limited for object detection due to the negative impact of label noise on localization. Prior methods have shown how such large-scale datasets can be used for pretraining, which can provide initial signal for localization, but is insufficient without clean bounding-box data for at least some categories. We propose a technique to "vet" labels extracted from noisy captions, and use them for weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD), without any bounding boxes. We analyze and annotate the types of label noise in captions in our Caption Label Noise dataset, and train a classifier that predicts if an extracted label is actually present in the image or not. Our classifier generalizes across dataset boundaries and across categories. We compare the classifier to nine baselines on five datasets, and demonstrate that it can improve WSOD without label vetting by 30% (31.2 to 40.5 mAP when evaluated on PASCAL VOC). See dataset at: https://github.com/arushirai1/CLaNDataset.
Authors:Yi Wei, Linqing Zhao, Wenzhao Zheng, Zheng Zhu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract:
3D scene understanding plays a vital role in vision-based autonomous driving. While most existing methods focus on 3D object detection, they have difficulty describing real-world objects of arbitrary shapes and infinite classes. Towards a more comprehensive perception of a 3D scene, in this paper, we propose a SurroundOcc method to predict the 3D occupancy with multi-camera images. We first extract multi-scale features for each image and adopt spatial 2D-3D attention to lift them to the 3D volume space. Then we apply 3D convolutions to progressively upsample the volume features and impose supervision on multiple levels. To obtain dense occupancy prediction, we design a pipeline to generate dense occupancy ground truth without expansive occupancy annotations. Specifically, we fuse multi-frame LiDAR scans of dynamic objects and static scenes separately. Then we adopt Poisson Reconstruction to fill the holes and voxelize the mesh to get dense occupancy labels. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/weiyithu/SurroundOcc
Authors:Rui-Yang Ju, Chih-Chia Chen, Jen-Shiun Chiang, Yu-Shian Lin, Wei-Han Chen, Chun-Tse Chien
Abstract:
The Transformer-based method has demonstrated remarkable performance for image super-resolution in comparison to the method based on the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, using the self-attention mechanism like SwinIR (Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer) to extract feature information from images needs a significant amount of computational resources, which limits its application on low computing power platforms. To improve the model feature reuse, this research work proposes the Interval Dense Connection Strategy, which connects different blocks according to the newly designed algorithm. We apply this strategy to SwinIR and present a new model, which named SwinOIR (Object Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer). For image super-resolution, an ablation study is conducted to demonstrate the positive effect of the Interval Dense Connection Strategy on the model performance. Furthermore, we evaluate our model on various popular benchmark datasets, and compare it with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) lightweight models. For example, SwinOIR obtains a PSNR of 26.62 dB for x4 upscaling image super-resolution on Urban100 dataset, which is 0.15 dB higher than the SOTA model SwinIR. For real-life application, this work applies the lastest version of You Only Look Once (YOLOv8) model and the proposed model to perform object detection and real-life image super-resolution on low-quality images. This implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/Rubbbbbbbbby/SwinOIR.
Authors:Huanran Chen, Yichi Zhang, Yinpeng Dong, Xiao Yang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Abstract:
It is widely recognized that deep learning models lack robustness to adversarial examples. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is that they can transfer across different models, which enables black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim model. An effective strategy to improve the transferability is attacking an ensemble of models. However, previous works simply average the outputs of different models, lacking an in-depth analysis on how and why model ensemble methods can strongly improve the transferability. In this paper, we rethink the ensemble in adversarial attacks and define the common weakness of model ensemble with two properties: 1) the flatness of loss landscape; and 2) the closeness to the local optimum of each model. We empirically and theoretically show that both properties are strongly correlated with the transferability and propose a Common Weakness Attack (CWA) to generate more transferable adversarial examples by promoting these two properties. Experimental results on both image classification and object detection tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach to improving the adversarial transferability, especially when attacking adversarially trained models. We also successfully apply our method to attack a black-box large vision-language model -- Google's Bard, showing the practical effectiveness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/AdversarialAttacks}.
Authors:Liang Liu, Boshen Zhang, Jiangning Zhang, Wuhao Zhang, Zhenye Gan, Guanzhong Tian, Wenbing Zhu, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang
Abstract:
Scale variation across object instances remains a key challenge in object detection task. Despite the remarkable progress made by modern detection models, this challenge is particularly evident in the semi-supervised case. While existing semi-supervised object detection methods rely on strict conditions to filter high-quality pseudo labels from network predictions, we observe that objects with extreme scale tend to have low confidence, resulting in a lack of positive supervision for these objects. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that addresses the scale variation problem by introducing a mixed scale teacher to improve pseudo label generation and scale-invariant learning. Additionally, we propose mining pseudo labels using score promotion of predictions across scales, which benefits from better predictions from mixed scale features. Our extensive experiments on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks under various semi-supervised settings demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. The code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/lliuz/MixTeacher}.
Authors:Yuxuan Li, Qibin Hou, Zhaohui Zheng, Ming-Ming Cheng, Jian Yang, Xiang Li
Abstract:
Recent research on remote sensing object detection has largely focused on improving the representation of oriented bounding boxes but has overlooked the unique prior knowledge presented in remote sensing scenarios. Such prior knowledge can be useful because tiny remote sensing objects may be mistakenly detected without referencing a sufficiently long-range context, and the long-range context required by different types of objects can vary. In this paper, we take these priors into account and propose the Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet). LSKNet can dynamically adjust its large spatial receptive field to better model the ranging context of various objects in remote sensing scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that large and selective kernel mechanisms have been explored in the field of remote sensing object detection. Without bells and whistles, LSKNet sets new state-of-the-art scores on standard benchmarks, i.e., HRSC2016 (98.46\% mAP), DOTA-v1.0 (81.85\% mAP) and FAIR1M-v1.0 (47.87\% mAP). Based on a similar technique, we rank 2nd place in 2022 the Greater Bay Area International Algorithm Competition. Code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/Large-Selective-Kernel-Network.
Authors:Pu Zhang, Tianhua Chen, Bin Liu
Abstract:
Deep learning has become the dominating approach for object detection. To achieve accurate fine-grained detection, one needs to employ a large enough model and a vast amount of data annotations. In this paper, we propose a commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) which leverages commonsense knowledge to assist a lightweight deep neural network base coarse-grained object detector to achieve accurate fine-grained detection. Specifically, we focus on a scenario where a single image contains objects of similar categories but varying sizes, and we establish a size-related commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) that maps the coarse-grained labels produced by the DL detector to size-related fine-grained labels. Considering that rule-based systems are one of the popular methods of knowledge representation and reasoning, our experiments explored two types of rule-based CKIMs, implemented using crisp-rule and fuzzy-rule approaches, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with baseline methods, our approach achieves accurate fine-grained detection with a reduced amount of annotated data and smaller model size. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/CKIM.
Authors:Long Zhao, Liangzhe Yuan, Boqing Gong, Yin Cui, Florian Schroff, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Hartwig Adam, Ting Liu
Abstract:
This work focuses on training a single visual relationship detector predicting over the union of label spaces from multiple datasets. Merging labels spanning different datasets could be challenging due to inconsistent taxonomies. The issue is exacerbated in visual relationship detection when second-order visual semantics are introduced between pairs of objects. To address this challenge, we propose UniVRD, a novel bottom-up method for Unified Visual Relationship Detection by leveraging vision and language models (VLMs). VLMs provide well-aligned image and text embeddings, where similar relationships are optimized to be close to each other for semantic unification. Our bottom-up design enables the model to enjoy the benefit of training with both object detection and visual relationship datasets. Empirical results on both human-object interaction detection and scene-graph generation demonstrate the competitive performance of our model. UniVRD achieves 38.07 mAP on HICO-DET, outperforming the current best bottom-up HOI detector by 14.26 mAP. More importantly, we show that our unified detector performs as well as dataset-specific models in mAP, and achieves further improvements when we scale up the model. Our code will be made publicly available on GitHub.
Authors:Fartash Faghri, Hadi Pouransari, Sachin Mehta, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Ali Farhadi, Mohammad Rastegari, Oncel Tuzel
Abstract:
We propose Dataset Reinforcement, a strategy to improve a dataset once such that the accuracy of any model architecture trained on the reinforced dataset is improved at no additional training cost for users. We propose a Dataset Reinforcement strategy based on data augmentation and knowledge distillation. Our generic strategy is designed based on extensive analysis across CNN- and transformer-based models and performing large-scale study of distillation with state-of-the-art models with various data augmentations. We create a reinforced version of the ImageNet training dataset, called ImageNet+, as well as reinforced datasets CIFAR-100+, Flowers-102+, and Food-101+. Models trained with ImageNet+ are more accurate, robust, and calibrated, and transfer well to downstream tasks (e.g., segmentation and detection). As an example, the accuracy of ResNet-50 improves by 1.7% on the ImageNet validation set, 3.5% on ImageNetV2, and 10.0% on ImageNet-R. Expected Calibration Error (ECE) on the ImageNet validation set is also reduced by 9.9%. Using this backbone with Mask-RCNN for object detection on MS-COCO, the mean average precision improves by 0.8%. We reach similar gains for MobileNets, ViTs, and Swin-Transformers. For MobileNetV3 and Swin-Tiny, we observe significant improvements on ImageNet-R/A/C of up to 20% improved robustness. Models pretrained on ImageNet+ and fine-tuned on CIFAR-100+, Flowers-102+, and Food-101+, reach up to 3.4% improved accuracy. The code, datasets, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/apple/ml-dr.
Authors:Sucheng Ren, Fangyun Wei, Samuel Albanie, Zheng Zhang, Han Hu
Abstract:
Deep supervision, which involves extra supervisions to the intermediate features of a neural network, was widely used in image classification in the early deep learning era since it significantly reduces the training difficulty and eases the optimization like avoiding gradient vanish over the vanilla training. Nevertheless, with the emergence of normalization techniques and residual connection, deep supervision in image classification was gradually phased out. In this paper, we revisit deep supervision for masked image modeling (MIM) that pre-trains a Vision Transformer (ViT) via a mask-and-predict scheme. Experimentally, we find that deep supervision drives the shallower layers to learn more meaningful representations, accelerates model convergence, and expands attention diversities. Our approach, called DeepMIM, significantly boosts the representation capability of each layer. In addition, DeepMIM is compatible with many MIM models across a range of reconstruction targets. For instance, using ViT-B, DeepMIM on MAE achieves 84.2 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming MAE by +0.6. By combining DeepMIM with a stronger tokenizer CLIP, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks, including image classification (85.6 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, outperforming MAE-CLIP by +0.8), object detection (52.8 APbox on COCO) and semantic segmentation (53.1 mIoU on ADE20K). Code and models are available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/DeepMIM.
Authors:Lei Zhu, Xinjiang Wang, Zhanghan Ke, Wayne Zhang, Rynson Lau
Abstract:
As the core building block of vision transformers, attention is a powerful tool to capture long-range dependency. However, such power comes at a cost: it incurs a huge computation burden and heavy memory footprint as pairwise token interaction across all spatial locations is computed. A series of works attempt to alleviate this problem by introducing handcrafted and content-agnostic sparsity into attention, such as restricting the attention operation to be inside local windows, axial stripes, or dilated windows. In contrast to these approaches, we propose a novel dynamic sparse attention via bi-level routing to enable a more flexible allocation of computations with content awareness. Specifically, for a query, irrelevant key-value pairs are first filtered out at a coarse region level, and then fine-grained token-to-token attention is applied in the union of remaining candidate regions (\ie, routed regions). We provide a simple yet effective implementation of the proposed bi-level routing attention, which utilizes the sparsity to save both computation and memory while involving only GPU-friendly dense matrix multiplications. Built with the proposed bi-level routing attention, a new general vision transformer, named BiFormer, is then presented. As BiFormer attends to a small subset of relevant tokens in a \textbf{query adaptive} manner without distraction from other irrelevant ones, it enjoys both good performance and high computational efficiency, especially in dense prediction tasks. Empirical results across several computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation verify the effectiveness of our design. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/rayleizhu/BiFormer}.
Authors:Runzhou Tao, Wencheng Han, Zhongying Qiu, Cheng-zhong Xu, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection has become a mainstream approach in automatic driving for its easy application. A prominent advantage is that it does not need LiDAR point clouds during the inference. However, most current methods still rely on 3D point cloud data for labeling the ground truths used in the training phase. This inconsistency between the training and inference makes it hard to utilize the large-scale feedback data and increases the data collection expenses. To bridge this gap, we propose a new weakly supervised monocular 3D objection detection method, which can train the model with only 2D labels marked on images. To be specific, we explore three types of consistency in this task, i.e. the projection, multi-view and direction consistency, and design a weakly-supervised architecture based on these consistencies. Moreover, we propose a new 2D direction labeling method in this task to guide the model for accurate rotation direction prediction. Experiments show that our weakly-supervised method achieves comparable performance with some fully supervised methods. When used as a pre-training method, our model can significantly outperform the corresponding fully-supervised baseline with only 1/3 3D labels. https://github.com/weakmono3d/weakmono3d
Authors:Shuning Chang, Pichao Wang, Ming Lin, Fan Wang, David Junhao Zhang, Rong Jin, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract:
The quadratic computational complexity to the number of tokens limits the practical applications of Vision Transformers (ViTs). Several works propose to prune redundant tokens to achieve efficient ViTs. However, these methods generally suffer from (i) dramatic accuracy drops, (ii) application difficulty in the local vision transformer, and (iii) non-general-purpose networks for downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel Semantic Token ViT (STViT), for efficient global and local vision transformers, which can also be revised to serve as backbone for downstream tasks. The semantic tokens represent cluster centers, and they are initialized by pooling image tokens in space and recovered by attention, which can adaptively represent global or local semantic information. Due to the cluster properties, a few semantic tokens can attain the same effect as vast image tokens, for both global and local vision transformers. For instance, only 16 semantic tokens on DeiT-(Tiny,Small,Base) can achieve the same accuracy with more than 100% inference speed improvement and nearly 60% FLOPs reduction; on Swin-(Tiny,Small,Base), we can employ 16 semantic tokens in each window to further speed it up by around 20% with slight accuracy increase. Besides great success in image classification, we also extend our method to video recognition. In addition, we design a STViT-R(ecover) network to restore the detailed spatial information based on the STViT, making it work for downstream tasks, which is powerless for previous token sparsification methods. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve competitive results compared to the original networks in object detection and instance segmentation, with over 30% FLOPs reduction for backbone. Code is available at http://github.com/changsn/STViT-R
Authors:Lei Yang, Kaicheng Yu, Tao Tang, Jun Li, Kun Yuan, Li Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Peng Chen
Abstract:
While most recent autonomous driving system focuses on developing perception methods on ego-vehicle sensors, people tend to overlook an alternative approach to leverage intelligent roadside cameras to extend the perception ability beyond the visual range. We discover that the state-of-the-art vision-centric bird's eye view detection methods have inferior performances on roadside cameras. This is because these methods mainly focus on recovering the depth regarding the camera center, where the depth difference between the car and the ground quickly shrinks while the distance increases. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, dubbed BEVHeight, to address this issue. In essence, instead of predicting the pixel-wise depth, we regress the height to the ground to achieve a distance-agnostic formulation to ease the optimization process of camera-only perception methods. On popular 3D detection benchmarks of roadside cameras, our method surpasses all previous vision-centric methods by a significant margin. The code is available at {\url{https://github.com/ADLab-AutoDrive/BEVHeight}}.
Authors:Peng Mi, Jianghang Lin, Yiyi Zhou, Yunhang Shen, Gen Luo, Xiaoshuai Sun, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Fu, Qiang Xu, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
In this paper, we study teacher-student learning from the perspective of data initialization and propose a novel algorithm called Active Teacher(Source code are available at: \url{https://github.com/HunterJ-Lin/ActiveTeacher}) for semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). Active Teacher extends the teacher-student framework to an iterative version, where the label set is partially initialized and gradually augmented by evaluating three key factors of unlabeled examples, including difficulty, information and diversity. With this design, Active Teacher can maximize the effect of limited label information while improving the quality of pseudo-labels. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the MS-COCO benchmark and compare Active Teacher with a set of recently proposed SSOD methods. The experimental results not only validate the superior performance gain of Active Teacher over the compared methods, but also show that it enables the baseline network, ie, Faster-RCNN, to achieve 100% supervised performance with much less label expenditure, ie 40% labeled examples on MS-COCO. More importantly, we believe that the experimental analyses in this paper can provide useful empirical knowledge for data annotation in practical applications.
Authors:Chenhang He, Ruihuang Li, Yabin Zhang, Shuai Li, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
Point cloud sequences are commonly used to accurately detect 3D objects in applications such as autonomous driving. Current top-performing multi-frame detectors mostly follow a Detect-and-Fuse framework, which extracts features from each frame of the sequence and fuses them to detect the objects in the current frame. However, this inevitably leads to redundant computation since adjacent frames are highly correlated. In this paper, we propose an efficient Motion-guided Sequential Fusion (MSF) method, which exploits the continuity of object motion to mine useful sequential contexts for object detection in the current frame. We first generate 3D proposals on the current frame and propagate them to preceding frames based on the estimated velocities. The points-of-interest are then pooled from the sequence and encoded as proposal features. A novel Bidirectional Feature Aggregation (BiFA) module is further proposed to facilitate the interactions of proposal features across frames. Besides, we optimize the point cloud pooling by a voxel-based sampling technique so that millions of points can be processed in several milliseconds. The proposed MSF method achieves not only better efficiency than other multi-frame detectors but also leading accuracy, with 83.12% and 78.30% mAP on the LEVEL1 and LEVEL2 test sets of Waymo Open Dataset, respectively. Codes can be found at \url{https://github.com/skyhehe123/MSF}.
Authors:Anthony Chen, Kevin Zhang, Renrui Zhang, Zihan Wang, Yuheng Lu, Yandong Guo, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
Masked Autoencoders learn strong visual representations and achieve state-of-the-art results in several independent modalities, yet very few works have addressed their capabilities in multi-modality settings. In this work, we focus on point cloud and RGB image data, two modalities that are often presented together in the real world, and explore their meaningful interactions. To improve upon the cross-modal synergy in existing works, we propose PiMAE, a self-supervised pre-training framework that promotes 3D and 2D interaction through three aspects. Specifically, we first notice the importance of masking strategies between the two sources and utilize a projection module to complementarily align the mask and visible tokens of the two modalities. Then, we utilize a well-crafted two-branch MAE pipeline with a novel shared decoder to promote cross-modality interaction in the mask tokens. Finally, we design a unique cross-modal reconstruction module to enhance representation learning for both modalities. Through extensive experiments performed on large-scale RGB-D scene understanding benchmarks (SUN RGB-D and ScannetV2), we discover it is nontrivial to interactively learn point-image features, where we greatly improve multiple 3D detectors, 2D detectors, and few-shot classifiers by 2.9%, 6.7%, and 2.4%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/BLVLab/PiMAE.
Authors:Yifan Pu, Yiru Wang, Zhuofan Xia, Yizeng Han, Yulin Wang, Weihao Gan, Zidong Wang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Rotated object detection aims to identify and locate objects in images with arbitrary orientation. In this scenario, the oriented directions of objects vary considerably across different images, while multiple orientations of objects exist within an image. This intrinsic characteristic makes it challenging for standard backbone networks to extract high-quality features of these arbitrarily orientated objects. In this paper, we present Adaptive Rotated Convolution (ARC) module to handle the aforementioned challenges. In our ARC module, the convolution kernels rotate adaptively to extract object features with varying orientations in different images, and an efficient conditional computation mechanism is introduced to accommodate the large orientation variations of objects within an image. The two designs work seamlessly in rotated object detection problem. Moreover, ARC can conveniently serve as a plug-and-play module in various vision backbones to boost their representation ability to detect oriented objects accurately. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks (DOTA and HRSC2016) demonstrate that equipped with our proposed ARC module in the backbone network, the performance of multiple popular oriented object detectors is significantly improved (\eg +3.03\% mAP on Rotated RetinaNet and +4.16\% on CFA). Combined with the highly competitive method Oriented R-CNN, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DOTA dataset with 81.77\% mAP. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/ARC}.
Authors:Ziyue Zhu, Zhao Zhang, Zheng Lin, Xing Sun, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
Co-salient object detection (Co-SOD) aims at discovering the common objects in a group of relevant images. Mining a co-representation is essential for locating co-salient objects. Unfortunately, the current Co-SOD method does not pay enough attention that the information not related to the co-salient object is included in the co-representation. Such irrelevant information in the co-representation interferes with its locating of co-salient objects. In this paper, we propose a Co-Representation Purification (CoRP) method aiming at searching noise-free co-representation. We search a few pixel-wise embeddings probably belonging to co-salient regions. These embeddings constitute our co-representation and guide our prediction. For obtaining purer co-representation, we use the prediction to iteratively reduce irrelevant embeddings in our co-representation. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our CoRP achieves state-of-the-art performances on the benchmark datasets. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ZZY816/CoRP.
Authors:Haohan Wang, Liang Liu, Boshen Zhang, Jiangning Zhang, Wuhao Zhang, Zhenye Gan, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Haoqian Wang
Abstract:
Fully supervised object detection requires training images in which all instances are annotated. This is actually impractical due to the high labor and time costs and the unavoidable missing annotations. As a result, the incomplete annotation in each image could provide misleading supervision and harm the training. Recent works on sparsely annotated object detection alleviate this problem by generating pseudo labels for the missing annotations. Such a mechanism is sensitive to the threshold of the pseudo label score. However, the effective threshold is different in different training stages and among different object detectors. Therefore, the current methods with fixed thresholds have sub-optimal performance, and are difficult to be applied to other detectors. In order to resolve this obstacle, we propose a Calibrated Teacher, of which the confidence estimation of the prediction is well calibrated to match its real precision. In this way, different detectors in different training stages would share a similar distribution of the output confidence, so that multiple detectors could share the same fixed threshold and achieve better performance. Furthermore, we present a simple but effective Focal IoU Weight (FIoU) for the classification loss. FIoU aims at reducing the loss weight of false negative samples caused by the missing annotation, and thus works as the complement of the teacher-student paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our methods set new state-of-the-art under all different sparse settings in COCO. Code will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/CalibratedTeacher.
Authors:Feng Li, Ailing Zeng, Shilong Liu, Hao Zhang, Hongyang Li, Lei Zhang, Lionel M. Ni
Abstract:
Recent DEtection TRansformer-based (DETR) models have obtained remarkable performance. Its success cannot be achieved without the re-introduction of multi-scale feature fusion in the encoder. However, the excessively increased tokens in multi-scale features, especially for about 75\% of low-level features, are quite computationally inefficient, which hinders real applications of DETR models. In this paper, we present Lite DETR, a simple yet efficient end-to-end object detection framework that can effectively reduce the GFLOPs of the detection head by 60\% while keeping 99\% of the original performance. Specifically, we design an efficient encoder block to update high-level features (corresponding to small-resolution feature maps) and low-level features (corresponding to large-resolution feature maps) in an interleaved way. In addition, to better fuse cross-scale features, we develop a key-aware deformable attention to predict more reliable attention weights. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed Lite DETR, and the efficient encoder strategy can generalize well across existing DETR-based models. The code will be available in \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Lite-DETR}.
Authors:Wenxiao Wang, Wei Chen, Qibo Qiu, Long Chen, Boxi Wu, Binbin Lin, Xiaofei He, Wei Liu
Abstract:
While features of different scales are perceptually important to visual inputs, existing vision transformers do not yet take advantage of them explicitly. To this end, we first propose a cross-scale vision transformer, CrossFormer. It introduces a cross-scale embedding layer (CEL) and a long-short distance attention (LSDA). On the one hand, CEL blends each token with multiple patches of different scales, providing the self-attention module itself with cross-scale features. On the other hand, LSDA splits the self-attention module into a short-distance one and a long-distance counterpart, which not only reduces the computational burden but also keeps both small-scale and large-scale features in the tokens. Moreover, through experiments on CrossFormer, we observe another two issues that affect vision transformers' performance, i.e., the enlarging self-attention maps and amplitude explosion. Thus, we further propose a progressive group size (PGS) paradigm and an amplitude cooling layer (ACL) to alleviate the two issues, respectively. The CrossFormer incorporating with PGS and ACL is called CrossFormer++. Extensive experiments show that CrossFormer++ outperforms the other vision transformers on image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation tasks. The code will be available at: https://github.com/cheerss/CrossFormer.
Authors:Bo Zhang, Jiakang Yuan, Botian Shi, Tao Chen, Yikang Li, Yu Qiao
Abstract:
Current 3D object detection models follow a single dataset-specific training and testing paradigm, which often faces a serious detection accuracy drop when they are directly deployed in another dataset. In this paper, we study the task of training a unified 3D detector from multiple datasets. We observe that this appears to be a challenging task, which is mainly due to that these datasets present substantial data-level differences and taxonomy-level variations caused by different LiDAR types and data acquisition standards. Inspired by such observation, we present a Uni3D which leverages a simple data-level correction operation and a designed semantic-level coupling-and-recoupling module to alleviate the unavoidable data-level and taxonomy-level differences, respectively. Our method is simple and easily combined with many 3D object detection baselines such as PV-RCNN and Voxel-RCNN, enabling them to effectively learn from multiple off-the-shelf 3D datasets to obtain more discriminative and generalizable representations. Experiments are conducted on many dataset consolidation settings including Waymo-nuScenes, nuScenes-KITTI, Waymo-KITTI, and Waymo-nuScenes-KITTI consolidations. Their results demonstrate that Uni3D exceeds a series of individual detectors trained on a single dataset, with a 1.04x parameter increase over a selected baseline detector. We expect this work will inspire the research of 3D generalization since it will push the limits of perceptual performance.
Authors:Yun-Hao Cao, Peiqin Sun, Shuchang Zhou
Abstract:
We propose universally slimmable self-supervised learning (dubbed as US3L) to achieve better accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for deploying self-supervised models across different devices. We observe that direct adaptation of self-supervised learning (SSL) to universally slimmable networks misbehaves as the training process frequently collapses. We then discover that temporal consistent guidance is the key to the success of SSL for universally slimmable networks, and we propose three guidelines for the loss design to ensure this temporal consistency from a unified gradient perspective. Moreover, we propose dynamic sampling and group regularization strategies to simultaneously improve training efficiency and accuracy. Our US3L method has been empirically validated on both convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. With only once training and one copy of weights, our method outperforms various state-of-the-art methods (individually trained or not) on benchmarks including recognition, object detection and instance segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/US3L-CVPR2023.
Authors:Yuanhao Cai, Hao Bian, Jing Lin, Haoqian Wang, Radu Timofte, Yulun Zhang
Abstract:
When enhancing low-light images, many deep learning algorithms are based on the Retinex theory. However, the Retinex model does not consider the corruptions hidden in the dark or introduced by the light-up process. Besides, these methods usually require a tedious multi-stage training pipeline and rely on convolutional neural networks, showing limitations in capturing long-range dependencies. In this paper, we formulate a simple yet principled One-stage Retinex-based Framework (ORF). ORF first estimates the illumination information to light up the low-light image and then restores the corruption to produce the enhanced image. We design an Illumination-Guided Transformer (IGT) that utilizes illumination representations to direct the modeling of non-local interactions of regions with different lighting conditions. By plugging IGT into ORF, we obtain our algorithm, Retinexformer. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our Retinexformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on thirteen benchmarks. The user study and application on low-light object detection also reveal the latent practical values of our method. Code, models, and results are available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Retinexformer
Authors:Bin Yan, Yi Jiang, Jiannan Wu, Dong Wang, Ping Luo, Zehuan Yuan, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
All instance perception tasks aim at finding certain objects specified by some queries such as category names, language expressions, and target annotations, but this complete field has been split into multiple independent subtasks. In this work, we present a universal instance perception model of the next generation, termed UNINEXT. UNINEXT reformulates diverse instance perception tasks into a unified object discovery and retrieval paradigm and can flexibly perceive different types of objects by simply changing the input prompts. This unified formulation brings the following benefits: (1) enormous data from different tasks and label vocabularies can be exploited for jointly training general instance-level representations, which is especially beneficial for tasks lacking in training data. (2) the unified model is parameter-efficient and can save redundant computation when handling multiple tasks simultaneously. UNINEXT shows superior performance on 20 challenging benchmarks from 10 instance-level tasks including classical image-level tasks (object detection and instance segmentation), vision-and-language tasks (referring expression comprehension and segmentation), and six video-level object tracking tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/MasterBin-IIAU/UNINEXT.
Authors:Haonan Han, Rui Yang, Shuyan Li, Runze Hu, Xiu Li
Abstract:
Interactive devices with touch screen have become commonly used in various aspects of daily life, which raises the demand for high production quality of touch screen glass. While it is desirable to develop effective defect detection technologies to optimize the automatic touch screen production lines, the development of these technologies suffers from the lack of publicly available datasets. To address this issue, we in this paper propose a dedicated touch screen glass defect dataset which includes seven types of defects and consists of 2504 images captured in various scenarios.All data are captured with professional acquisition equipment on the fixed workstation. Additionally, we benchmark the CNN- and Transformer-based object detection frameworks on the proposed dataset to demonstrate the challenges of defect detection on high-resolution images. Dataset and related code will be available at https://github.com/Yangr116/SSGDataset.
Authors:Ibrahim Ethem Hamamci, Sezgin Er, Enis Simsar, Anjany Sekuboyina, Mustafa Gundogar, Bernd Stadlinger, Albert Mehl, Bjoern Menze
Abstract:
Due to the necessity for precise treatment planning, the use of panoramic X-rays to identify different dental diseases has tremendously increased. Although numerous ML models have been developed for the interpretation of panoramic X-rays, there has not been an end-to-end model developed that can identify problematic teeth with dental enumeration and associated diagnoses at the same time. To develop such a model, we structure the three distinct types of annotated data hierarchically following the FDI system, the first labeled with only quadrant, the second labeled with quadrant-enumeration, and the third fully labeled with quadrant-enumeration-diagnosis. To learn from all three hierarchies jointly, we introduce a novel diffusion-based hierarchical multi-label object detection framework by adapting a diffusion-based method that formulates object detection as a denoising diffusion process from noisy boxes to object boxes. Specifically, to take advantage of the hierarchically annotated data, our method utilizes a novel noisy box manipulation technique by adapting the denoising process in the diffusion network with the inference from the previously trained model in hierarchical order. We also utilize a multi-label object detection method to learn efficiently from partial annotations and to give all the needed information about each abnormal tooth for treatment planning. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art object detection methods, including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, DETR, and DiffusionDet for the analysis of panoramic X-rays, demonstrating the great potential of our method for hierarchically and partially annotated datasets. The code and the data are available at: https://github.com/ibrahimethemhamamci/HierarchicalDet.
Authors:Kangcheng Liu, Xinhu Zheng, Chaoqun Wang, Kai Tang, Ming Liu, Baoquan Chen
Abstract:
Contrastive learning has recently demonstrated great potential for unsupervised pre-training in 3D scene understanding tasks. However, most existing work randomly selects point features as anchors while building contrast, leading to a clear bias toward background points that often dominate in 3D scenes. Also, object awareness and foreground-to-background discrimination are neglected, making contrastive learning less effective. To tackle these issues, we propose a general foreground-aware feature contrast FAC++ framework to learn more effective point cloud representations in pre-training. FAC++ consists of two novel contrast designs to construct more effective and informative contrast pairs. The first is building positive pairs within the same foreground segment where points tend to have the same semantics. The second is that we prevent over-discrimination between 3D segments/objects and encourage grouped foreground-to-background distinctions at the segment level with adaptive feature learning in a Siamese correspondence network, which adaptively learns feature correlations within and across point cloud views effectively. Moreover, we have designed the foreground-prompted regional sampling to enhance more balanced foreground-aware learning, which is termed FAC++. Visualization with point activation maps shows that our contrast pairs capture clear correspondences among foreground regions during pre-training. Quantitative experiments also show that FAC++ achieves superior knowledge transfer and data efficiency in various downstream 3D semantic segmentation, instance segmentation as well as object detection tasks. All codes, data, and models are available at: https://github.com/KangchengLiu/FAC_Foreground_Aware_Contrast
Authors:Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Kong, Kevin Tirta Wijaya
Abstract:
Recent works have shown the superior robustness of four-dimensional (4D) Radar-based three-dimensional (3D) object detection in adverse weather conditions. However, processing 4D Radar data remains a challenge due to the large data size, which require substantial amount of memory for computing and storage. In previous work, an online density reduction is performed on the 4D Radar Tensor (4DRT) to reduce the data size, in which the density reduction level is chosen arbitrarily. However, the impact of density reduction on the detection performance and memory consumption remains largely unknown. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by conducting extensive hyperparamter tuning on the density reduction level. Experimental results show that increasing the density level from 0.01% to 50% of the original 4DRT density level proportionally improves the detection performance, at a cost of memory consumption. However, when the density level is increased beyond 5%, only the memory consumption increases, while the detection performance oscillates below the peak point. In addition to the optimized density hyperparameter, we also introduce 4D Sparse Radar Tensor (4DSRT), a new representation for 4D Radar data with offline density reduction, leading to a significantly reduced raw data size. An optimized development kit for training the neural networks is also provided, which along with the utilization of 4DSRT, improves training speed by a factor of 17.1 compared to the state-of-the-art 4DRT-based neural networks. All codes are available at: https://github.com/kaist-avelab/K-Radar.
Authors:Wesley Chen, Andrew Edgley, Raunak Hota, Joshua Liu, Ezra Schwartz, Aminah Yizar, Neehar Peri, James Purtilo
Abstract:
In recent years, supervised learning has become the dominant paradigm for training deep-learning based methods for 3D object detection. Lately, the academic community has studied 3D object detection in the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs) using publicly available datasets such as nuScenes and Argoverse 2.0. However, these datasets may have incomplete annotations, often only labeling a small subset of objects in a scene. Although commercial services exists for 3D bounding box annotation, these are often prohibitively expensive. To address these limitations, we propose ReBound, an open-source 3D visualization and dataset re-annotation tool that works across different datasets. In this paper, we detail the design of our tool and present survey results that highlight the usability of our software. Further, we show that ReBound is effective for exploratory data analysis and can facilitate active-learning. Our code and documentation is available at https://github.com/ajedgley/ReBound
Authors:Luting Wang, Yi Liu, Penghui Du, Zihan Ding, Yue Liao, Qiaosong Qi, Biaolong Chen, Si Liu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches $35.6$ mAP$^{\text{N}}_{50}$, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by $3.3$ mAP$^{\text{N}}_{50}$. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.
Authors:Jiakang Yuan, Bo Zhang, Xiangchao Yan, Tao Chen, Botian Shi, Yikang Li, Yu Qiao
Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) technique has been explored in 3D cross-domain tasks recently. Though preliminary progress has been made, the performance gap between the UDA-based 3D model and the supervised one trained with fully annotated target domain is still large. This motivates us to consider selecting partial-yet-important target data and labeling them at a minimum cost, to achieve a good trade-off between high performance and low annotation cost. To this end, we propose a Bi-domain active learning approach, namely Bi3D, to solve the cross-domain 3D object detection task. The Bi3D first develops a domainness-aware source sampling strategy, which identifies target-domain-like samples from the source domain to avoid the model being interfered by irrelevant source data. Then a diversity-based target sampling strategy is developed, which selects the most informative subset of target domain to improve the model adaptability to the target domain using as little annotation budget as possible. Experiments are conducted on typical cross-domain adaptation scenarios including cross-LiDAR-beam, cross-country, and cross-sensor, where Bi3D achieves a promising target-domain detection accuracy (89.63% on KITTI) compared with UDAbased work (84.29%), even surpassing the detector trained on the full set of the labeled target domain (88.98%). Our code is available at: https://github.com/PJLabADG/3DTrans.
Authors:Phi Vu Tran
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) is a challenging problem aimed at detecting novel concepts from few exemplars. Existing approaches to FSOD all assume abundant base labels to adapt to novel objects. This paper studies the new task of semi-supervised FSOD by considering a realistic scenario in which both base and novel labels are simultaneously scarce. We explore the utility of unlabeled data within our proposed label-efficient detection framework and discover its remarkable ability to boost semi-supervised FSOD by way of region proposals. Motivated by this finding, we introduce SoftER Teacher, a robust detector combining pseudo-labeling with consistency learning on region proposals, to harness unlabeled data for improved FSOD without relying on abundant labels. Rigorous experiments show that SoftER Teacher surpasses the novel performance of a strong supervised detector using only 10% of required base labels, without catastrophic forgetting observed in prior approaches. Our work also sheds light on a potential relationship between semi-supervised and few-shot detection suggesting that a stronger semi-supervised detector leads to a more effective few-shot detector.
Authors:Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren, Feng Li, Hao Zhang, Jie Yang, Qing Jiang, Chunyuan Li, Jianwei Yang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we present an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for cross-modality fusion. While previous works mainly evaluate open-set object detection on novel categories, we propose to also perform evaluations on referring expression comprehension for objects specified with attributes. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a $52.5$ AP on the COCO detection zero-shot transfer benchmark, i.e., without any training data from COCO. It sets a new record on the ODinW zero-shot benchmark with a mean $26.1$ AP. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO}.
Authors:Tao Chen, Ruirui Li, Jiafeng Fu, Daguang Jiang
Abstract:
Object detection on VHR remote sensing images plays a vital role in applications such as urban planning, land resource management, and rescue missions. The large-scale variation of the remote-sensing targets is one of the main challenges in VHR remote-sensing object detection. Existing methods improve the detection accuracy of high-resolution remote sensing objects by improving the structure of feature pyramids and adopting different attention modules. However, for small targets, there still be seriously missed detections due to the loss of key detail features. There is still room for improvement in the way of multiscale feature fusion and balance. To address this issue, this paper proposes two novel modules: Guided Attention and Tucker Bilinear Attention, which are applied to the stages of early fusion and late fusion respectively. The former can effectively retain clean key detail features, and the latter can better balance features through semantic-level correlation mining. Based on two modules, we build a new multi-scale remote sensing object detection framework. No bells and whistles. The proposed method largely improves the average precisions of small objects and achieves the highest mean average precisions compared with 9 state-of-the-art methods on DOTA, DIOR, and NWPU VHR-10.Code and models are available at https://github.com/Shinichict/GTNet.
Authors:Jingyu Li, Zhe Liu, Jinghua Hou, Dingkang Liang
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a simple yet effective semi-supervised 3D object detector named DDS3D. Our main contributions have two-fold. On the one hand, different from previous works using Non-Maximal Suppression (NMS) or its variants for obtaining the sparse pseudo labels, we propose a dense pseudo-label generation strategy to get dense pseudo-labels, which can retain more potential supervision information for the student network. On the other hand, instead of traditional fixed thresholds, we propose a dynamic threshold manner to generate pseudo-labels, which can guarantee the quality and quantity of pseudo-labels during the whole training process. Benefiting from these two components, our DDS3D outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised 3d object detection with mAP of 3.1% on the pedestrian and 2.1% on the cyclist under the same configuration of 1% samples. Extensive ablation studies on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our DDS3D. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/hust-jy/DDS3D
Authors:Ying Zeng, Yushi Chen, Xue Yang, Qingyun Li, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Existing oriented object detection methods commonly use metric AP$_{50}$ to measure the performance of the model. We argue that AP$_{50}$ is inherently unsuitable for oriented object detection due to its large tolerance in angle deviation. Therefore, we advocate using high-precision metric, e.g. AP$_{75}$, to measure the performance of models. In this paper, we propose an Aspect Ratio Sensitive Oriented Object Detector with Transformer, termed ARS-DETR, which exhibits a competitive performance in high-precision oriented object detection. Specifically, a new angle classification method, calling Aspect Ratio aware Circle Smooth Label (AR-CSL), is proposed to smooth the angle label in a more reasonable way and discard the hyperparameter that introduced by previous work (e.g. CSL). Then, a rotated deformable attention module is designed to rotate the sampling points with the corresponding angles and eliminate the misalignment between region features and sampling points. Moreover, a dynamic weight coefficient according to the aspect ratio is adopted to calculate the angle loss. Comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets show that our method achieves competitive performance on the high-precision oriented object detection task.
Authors:Xin Li, Tao Ma, Yuenan Hou, Botian Shi, Yuchen Yang, Youquan Liu, Xingjiao Wu, Qin Chen, Yikang Li, Yu Qiao, Liang He
Abstract:
LiDAR-camera fusion methods have shown impressive performance in 3D object detection. Recent advanced multi-modal methods mainly perform global fusion, where image features and point cloud features are fused across the whole scene. Such practice lacks fine-grained region-level information, yielding suboptimal fusion performance. In this paper, we present the novel Local-to-Global fusion network (LoGoNet), which performs LiDAR-camera fusion at both local and global levels. Concretely, the Global Fusion (GoF) of LoGoNet is built upon previous literature, while we exclusively use point centroids to more precisely represent the position of voxel features, thus achieving better cross-modal alignment. As to the Local Fusion (LoF), we first divide each proposal into uniform grids and then project these grid centers to the images. The image features around the projected grid points are sampled to be fused with position-decorated point cloud features, maximally utilizing the rich contextual information around the proposals. The Feature Dynamic Aggregation (FDA) module is further proposed to achieve information interaction between these locally and globally fused features, thus producing more informative multi-modal features. Extensive experiments on both Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and KITTI datasets show that LoGoNet outperforms all state-of-the-art 3D detection methods. Notably, LoGoNet ranks 1st on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard and obtains 81.02 mAPH (L2) detection performance. It is noteworthy that, for the first time, the detection performance on three classes surpasses 80 APH (L2) simultaneously. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/sankin97/LoGoNet}.
Authors:Dejun Feng, Hongyu Chen, Suning Liu, Ziyang Liao, Xingyu Shen, Yakun Xie, Jun Zhu
Abstract:
With the increasing application of deep learning in various domains, salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) has attracted significant attention. However, most existing ORSI-SOD methods predominantly rely on local information from low-level features to infer salient boundary cues and supervise them using boundary ground truth, but fail to sufficiently optimize and protect the local information, and almost all approaches ignore the potential advantages offered by the last layer of the decoder to maintain the integrity of saliency maps. To address these issues, we propose a novel method named boundary-semantic collaborative guidance network (BSCGNet) with dual-stream feedback mechanism. First, we propose a boundary protection calibration (BPC) module, which effectively reduces the loss of edge position information during forward propagation and suppresses noise in low-level features without relying on boundary ground truth. Second, based on the BPC module, a dual feature feedback complementary (DFFC) module is proposed, which aggregates boundary-semantic dual features and provides effective feedback to coordinate features across different layers, thereby enhancing cross-scale knowledge communication. Finally, to obtain more complete saliency maps, we consider the uniqueness of the last layer of the decoder for the first time and propose the adaptive feedback refinement (AFR) module, which further refines feature representation and eliminates differences between features through a unique feedback mechanism. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that BSCGNet exhibits distinct advantages in challenging scenarios and outperforms the 17 state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches proposed in recent years. Codes and results have been released on GitHub: https://github.com/YUHsss/BSCGNet.
Authors:Hai Wu, Chenglu Wen, Shaoshuai Shi, Xin Li, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
Recently, virtual/pseudo-point-based 3D object detection that seamlessly fuses RGB images and LiDAR data by depth completion has gained great attention. However, virtual points generated from an image are very dense, introducing a huge amount of redundant computation during detection. Meanwhile, noises brought by inaccurate depth completion significantly degrade detection precision. This paper proposes a fast yet effective backbone, termed VirConvNet, based on a new operator VirConv (Virtual Sparse Convolution), for virtual-point-based 3D object detection. VirConv consists of two key designs: (1) StVD (Stochastic Voxel Discard) and (2) NRConv (Noise-Resistant Submanifold Convolution). StVD alleviates the computation problem by discarding large amounts of nearby redundant voxels. NRConv tackles the noise problem by encoding voxel features in both 2D image and 3D LiDAR space. By integrating VirConv, we first develop an efficient pipeline VirConv-L based on an early fusion design. Then, we build a high-precision pipeline VirConv-T based on a transformed refinement scheme. Finally, we develop a semi-supervised pipeline VirConv-S based on a pseudo-label framework. On the KITTI car 3D detection test leaderboard, our VirConv-L achieves 85% AP with a fast running speed of 56ms. Our VirConv-T and VirConv-S attains a high-precision of 86.3% and 87.2% AP, and currently rank 2nd and 1st, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/hailanyi/VirConv.
Authors:You Shen, Yunzhou Zhang, Yanmin Wu, Zhenyu Wang, Linghao Yang, Sonya Coleman, Dermot Kerr
Abstract:
The progress of LiDAR-based 3D object detection has significantly enhanced developments in autonomous driving and robotics. However, due to the limitations of LiDAR sensors, object shapes suffer from deterioration in occluded and distant areas, which creates a fundamental challenge to 3D perception. Existing methods estimate specific 3D shapes and achieve remarkable performance. However, these methods rely on extensive computation and memory, causing imbalances between accuracy and real-time performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel LiDAR-based 3D object detection model named BSH-Det3D, which applies an effective way to enhance spatial features by estimating complete shapes from a bird's eye view (BEV). Specifically, we design the Pillar-based Shape Completion (PSC) module to predict the probability of occupancy whether a pillar contains object shapes. The PSC module generates a BEV shape heatmap for each scene. After integrating with heatmaps, BSH-Det3D can provide additional information in shape deterioration areas and generate high-quality 3D proposals. We also design an attention-based densification fusion module (ADF) to adaptively associate the sparse features with heatmaps and raw points. The ADF module integrates the advantages of points and shapes knowledge with negligible overheads. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of accuracy and speed, demonstrating the efficiency and flexibility of BSH-Det3D. The source code is available on https://github.com/mystorm16/BSH-Det3D.
Authors:Felix Meissen, Philip Müller, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract:
Detection of pathologies is a fundamental task in medical imaging and the evaluation of algorithms that can perform this task automatically is crucial. However, current object detection metrics for natural images do not reflect the specific clinical requirements in pathology detection sufficiently. To tackle this problem, we propose Robust Detection Outcome (RoDeO); a novel metric for evaluating algorithms for pathology detection in medical images, especially in chest X-rays. RoDeO evaluates different errors directly and individually, and reflects clinical needs better than current metrics. Extensive evaluation on the ChestX-ray8 dataset shows the superiority of our metrics compared to existing ones. We released the code at https://github.com/FeliMe/RoDeO and published RoDeO as pip package (rodeometric).
Authors:Aaditya Naik, Yinjun Wu, Mayur Naik, Eric Wong
Abstract:
Machine learning models can make critical errors that are easily hidden within vast amounts of data. Such errors often run counter to rules based on human intuition. However, rules based on human knowledge are challenging to scale or to even formalize. We thereby seek to infer statistical rules from the data and quantify the extent to which a model has learned them. We propose a framework SQRL that integrates logic-based methods with statistical inference to derive these rules from a model's training data without supervision. We further show how to adapt models at test time to reduce rule violations and produce more coherent predictions. SQRL generates up to 300K rules over datasets from vision, tabular, and language settings. We uncover up to 158K violations of those rules by state-of-the-art models for classification, object detection, and data imputation. Test-time adaptation reduces these violations by up to 68.7% with relative performance improvement up to 32%. SQRL is available at https://github.com/DebugML/sqrl.
Authors:Saghir Alfasly, Zaid Al-huda, Saifullah Bello, Ahmed Elazab, Jian Lu, Chen Xu
Abstract:
Current deep models provide remarkable object detection in terms of object classification and localization. However, estimating object rotation with respect to other visual objects in the visual context of an input image still lacks deep studies due to the unavailability of object datasets with rotation annotations.
This paper tackles these two challenges to solve the rotation estimation of a parked bike with respect to its parking area. First, we leverage the power of 3D graphics to build a camera-agnostic well-annotated Synthetic Bike Rotation Dataset (SynthBRSet). Then, we propose an object-to-spot rotation estimator (OSRE) by extending the object detection task to further regress the bike rotations in two axes. Since our model is purely trained on synthetic data, we adopt image smoothing techniques when deploying it on real-world images. The proposed OSRE is evaluated on synthetic and real-world data providing promising results. Our data and code are available at \href{https://github.com/saghiralfasly/OSRE-Project}{https://github.com/saghiralfasly/OSRE-Project}.
Authors:Bilel Benjdira, Anis Koubaa, Ahmad Taher Azar, Zahid Khan, Adel Ammar, Wadii Boulila
Abstract:
Smart traffic engineering and intelligent transportation services are in increasing demand from governmental authorities to optimize traffic performance and thus reduce energy costs, increase the drivers' safety and comfort, ensure traffic laws enforcement, and detect traffic violations. In this paper, we address this challenge, and we leverage the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to develop an AI-integrated video analytics framework, called TAU (Traffic Analysis from UAVs), for automated traffic analytics and understanding. Unlike previous works on traffic video analytics, we propose an automated object detection and tracking pipeline from video processing to advanced traffic understanding using high-resolution UAV images. TAU combines six main contributions. First, it proposes a pre-processing algorithm to adapt the high-resolution UAV image as input to the object detector without lowering the resolution. This ensures an excellent detection accuracy from high-quality features, particularly the small size of detected objects from UAV images. Second, it introduces an algorithm for recalibrating the vehicle coordinates to ensure that vehicles are uniquely identified and tracked across the multiple crops of the same frame. Third, it presents a speed calculation algorithm based on accumulating information from successive frames. Fourth, TAU counts the number of vehicles per traffic zone based on the Ray Tracing algorithm. Fifth, TAU has a fully independent algorithm for crossroad arbitration based on the data gathered from the different zones surrounding it. Sixth, TAU introduces a set of algorithms for extracting twenty-four types of insights from the raw data collected. The code is shared here: https://github.com/bilel-bj/TAU. Video demonstrations are provided here: https://youtu.be/wXJV0H7LviU and here: https://youtu.be/kGv0gmtVEbI.
Authors:Wei Huang, Zhiliang Peng, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Jianbin Jiao, Qixiang Ye
Abstract:
Large vision Transformers (ViTs) driven by self-supervised pre-training mechanisms achieved unprecedented progress. Lightweight ViT models limited by the model capacity, however, benefit little from those pre-training mechanisms. Knowledge distillation defines a paradigm to transfer representations from large (teacher) models to small (student) ones. However, the conventional single-stage distillation easily gets stuck on task-specific transfer, failing to retain the task-agnostic knowledge crucial for model generalization. In this study, we propose generic-to-specific distillation (G2SD), to tap the potential of small ViT models under the supervision of large models pre-trained by masked autoencoders. In generic distillation, decoder of the small model is encouraged to align feature predictions with hidden representations of the large model, so that task-agnostic knowledge can be transferred. In specific distillation, predictions of the small model are constrained to be consistent with those of the large model, to transfer task-specific features which guarantee task performance. With G2SD, the vanilla ViT-Small model respectively achieves 98.7%, 98.1% and 99.3% the performance of its teacher (ViT-Base) for image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, setting a solid baseline for two-stage vision distillation. Code will be available at https://github.com/pengzhiliang/G2SD.
Authors:Peng Zheng, Jie Qin, Shuo Wang, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Huan Xiong
Abstract:
Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims at detecting common salient objects within a group of relevant source images. Most of the latest works employ the attention mechanism for finding common objects. To achieve accurate CoSOD results with high-quality maps and high efficiency, we propose a novel Memory-aided Contrastive Consensus Learning (MCCL) framework, which is capable of effectively detecting co-salient objects in real time (~150 fps). To learn better group consensus, we propose the Group Consensus Aggregation Module (GCAM) to abstract the common features of each image group; meanwhile, to make the consensus representation more discriminative, we introduce the Memory-based Contrastive Module (MCM), which saves and updates the consensus of images from different groups in a queue of memories. Finally, to improve the quality and integrity of the predicted maps, we develop an Adversarial Integrity Learning (AIL) strategy to make the segmented regions more likely composed of complete objects with less surrounding noise. Extensive experiments on all the latest CoSOD benchmarks demonstrate that our lite MCCL outperforms 13 cutting-edge models, achieving the new state of the art (~5.9% and ~6.2% improvement in S-measure on CoSOD3k and CoSal2015, respectively). Our source codes, saliency maps, and online demos are publicly available at https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/MCCL.
Authors:Size Wu, Wenwei Zhang, Sheng Jin, Wentao Liu, Chen Change Loy
Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) learn to align vision and language representations on large-scale datasets, where each image-text pair usually contains a bag of semantic concepts. However, existing open-vocabulary object detectors only align region embeddings individually with the corresponding features extracted from the VLMs. Such a design leaves the compositional structure of semantic concepts in a scene under-exploited, although the structure may be implicitly learned by the VLMs. In this work, we propose to align the embedding of bag of regions beyond individual regions. The proposed method groups contextually interrelated regions as a bag. The embeddings of regions in a bag are treated as embeddings of words in a sentence, and they are sent to the text encoder of a VLM to obtain the bag-of-regions embedding, which is learned to be aligned to the corresponding features extracted by a frozen VLM. Applied to the commonly used Faster R-CNN, our approach surpasses the previous best results by 4.6 box AP50 and 2.8 mask AP on novel categories of open-vocabulary COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wusize/ovdet.
Authors:Nguyen Duc Thuan, Le Hai Anh, Hoang Si Hong
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a synthetic thermal imaging dataset for Person Detection in Intrusion Warning Systems (PDIWS). The dataset consists of a training set with 2000 images and a test set with 500 images. Each image is synthesized by compounding a subject (intruder) with a background using the modified Poisson image editing method. There are a total of 50 different backgrounds and nearly 1000 subjects divided into five classes according to five human poses: creeping, crawling, stooping, climbing and other. The presence of the intruder will be confirmed if the first four poses are detected. Advanced object detection algorithms have been implemented with this dataset and give relatively satisfactory results, with the highest mAP values of 95.5% and 90.9% for IoU of 0.5 and 0.75 respectively. The dataset is freely published online for research purposes at https://github.com/thuan-researcher/Intruder-Thermal-Dataset.
Authors:Apoorv Singh
Abstract:
Sensor fusion is an essential topic in many perception systems, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Transformers-based detection head and CNN-based feature encoder to extract features from raw sensor-data has emerged as one of the best performing sensor-fusion 3D-detection-framework, according to the dataset leaderboards. In this work we provide an in-depth literature survey of transformer based 3D-object detection task in the recent past, primarily focusing on the sensor fusion. We also briefly go through the Vision transformers (ViT) basics, so that readers can easily follow through the paper. Moreover, we also briefly go through few of the non-transformer based less-dominant methods for sensor fusion for autonomous driving. In conclusion we summarize with sensor-fusion trends to follow and provoke future research. More updated summary can be found at: https://github.com/ApoorvRoboticist/Transformers-Sensor-Fusion
Authors:Gen Luo, Yiyi Zhou, Lei Jin, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) is a research hot spot in computer vision, which can greatly reduce the requirement for expensive bounding-box annotations. Despite great success, existing progress mainly focuses on two-stage detection networks like FasterRCNN, while the research on one-stage detectors is often ignored. In this paper, we focus on the semi-supervised learning for the advanced and popular one-stage detection network YOLOv5. Compared with Faster-RCNN, the implementation of YOLOv5 is much more complex, and the various training techniques used in YOLOv5 can also reduce the benefit of SSOD. In addition to this challenge, we also reveal two key issues in one-stage SSOD, which are low-quality pseudo-labeling and multi-task optimization conflict, respectively. To address these issues, we propose a novel teacher-student learning recipe called OneTeacher with two innovative designs, namely Multi-view Pseudo-label Refinement (MPR) and Decoupled Semi-supervised Optimization (DSO). In particular, MPR improves the quality of pseudo-labels via augmented-view refinement and global-view filtering, and DSO handles the joint optimization conflicts via structure tweaks and task-specific pseudo-labeling. In addition, we also carefully revise the implementation of YOLOv5 to maximize the benefits of SSOD, which is also shared with the existing SSOD methods for fair comparison. To validate OneTeacher, we conduct extensive experiments on COCO and Pascal VOC. The extensive experiments show that OneTeacher can not only achieve superior performance than the compared methods, e.g., 15.0% relative AP gains over Unbiased Teacher, but also well handle the key issues in one-stage SSOD. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/luogen1996/OneTeacher.
Authors:Anh-Dzung Doan, Bach Long Nguyen, Surabhi Gupta, Ian Reid, Markus Wagner, Tat-Jun Chin
Abstract:
To ensure reliable object detection in autonomous systems, the detector must be able to adapt to changes in appearance caused by environmental factors such as time of day, weather, and seasons. Continually adapting the detector to incorporate these changes is a promising solution, but it can be computationally costly. Our proposed approach is to selectively adapt the detector only when necessary, using new data that does not have the same distribution as the current training data. To this end, we investigate three popular metrics for domain gap evaluation and find that there is a correlation between the domain gap and detection accuracy. Therefore, we apply the domain gap as a criterion to decide when to adapt the detector. Our experiments show that our approach has the potential to improve the efficiency of the detector's operation in real-world scenarios, where environmental conditions change in a cyclical manner, without sacrificing the overall performance of the detector. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dadung/DGE-CDA.
Authors:Shenghao Hao, Peiyuan Liu, Yibing Zhan, Kaixun Jin, Zuozhu Liu, Mingli Song, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Gaoang Wang
Abstract:
Cross-view multi-object tracking aims to link objects between frames and camera views with substantial overlaps. Although cross-view multi-object tracking has received increased attention in recent years, existing datasets still have several issues, including 1) missing real-world scenarios, 2) lacking diverse scenes, 3) owning a limited number of tracks, 4) comprising only static cameras, and 5) lacking standard benchmarks, which hinder the investigation and comparison of cross-view tracking methods. To solve the aforementioned issues, we introduce DIVOTrack: a new cross-view multi-object tracking dataset for DIVerse Open scenes with dense tracking pedestrians in realistic and non-experimental environments. Our DIVOTrack has fifteen distinct scenarios and 953 cross-view tracks, surpassing all cross-view multi-object tracking datasets currently available. Furthermore, we provide a novel baseline cross-view tracking method with a unified joint detection and cross-view tracking framework named CrossMOT, which learns object detection, single-view association, and cross-view matching with an all-in-one embedding model. Finally, we present a summary of current methodologies and a set of standard benchmarks with our DIVOTrack to provide a fair comparison and conduct a comprehensive analysis of current approaches and our proposed CrossMOT. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/shengyuhao/DIVOTrack.
Authors:Bowen Xu, Mingtao Chen, Wenlong Guan, Lulu Hu
Abstract:
Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) has been successful in improving the performance of both R-CNN series and anchor-free detectors. However, one-stage anchor-based detectors lack the structure to generate high-quality or flexible pseudo labels, leading to serious inconsistency problems in SSOD. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Teacher framework for scalable and effective one-stage anchor-based SSOD training, consisting of Dense Detector, Pseudo Label Assigner, and Epoch Adaptor. Dense Detector is a baseline model that extends RetinaNet with dense sampling techniques inspired by YOLOv5. The Efficient Teacher framework introduces a novel pseudo label assignment mechanism, named Pseudo Label Assigner, which makes more refined use of pseudo labels from Dense Detector. Epoch Adaptor is a method that enables a stable and efficient end-to-end semi-supervised training schedule for Dense Detector. The Pseudo Label Assigner prevents the occurrence of bias caused by a large number of low-quality pseudo labels that may interfere with the Dense Detector during the student-teacher mutual learning mechanism, and the Epoch Adaptor utilizes domain and distribution adaptation to allow Dense Detector to learn globally distributed consistent features, making the training independent of the proportion of labeled data. Our experiments show that the Efficient Teacher framework achieves state-of-the-art results on VOC, COCO-standard, and COCO-additional using fewer FLOPs than previous methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply Semi-Supervised Object Detection to YOLOv5.Code is available: https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/efficientteacher
Authors:Arpit Bansal, Hong-Min Chu, Avi Schwarzschild, Soumyadip Sengupta, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein
Abstract:
Typical diffusion models are trained to accept a particular form of conditioning, most commonly text, and cannot be conditioned on other modalities without retraining. In this work, we propose a universal guidance algorithm that enables diffusion models to be controlled by arbitrary guidance modalities without the need to retrain any use-specific components. We show that our algorithm successfully generates quality images with guidance functions including segmentation, face recognition, object detection, and classifier signals. Code is available at https://github.com/arpitbansal297/Universal-Guided-Diffusion.
Authors:Nishant Kumar, SiniÅ¡a Å egviÄ, Abouzar Eslami, Stefan Gumhold
Abstract:
Real-world deployment of reliable object detectors is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving. However, general-purpose object detectors like Faster R-CNN are prone to providing overconfident predictions for outlier objects. Recent outlier-aware object detection approaches estimate the density of instance-wide features with class-conditional Gaussians and train on synthesized outlier features from their low-likelihood regions. However, this strategy does not guarantee that the synthesized outlier features will have a low likelihood according to the other class-conditional Gaussians. We propose a novel outlier-aware object detection framework that distinguishes outliers from inlier objects by learning the joint data distribution of all inlier classes with an invertible normalizing flow. The appropriate sampling of the flow model ensures that the synthesized outliers have a lower likelihood than inliers of all object classes, thereby modeling a better decision boundary between inlier and outlier objects. Our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for outlier-aware object detection on both image and video datasets. Code available at https://github.com/nish03/FFS
Authors:Apoorv Singh
Abstract:
Due to the trending need of building autonomous robotic perception system, sensor fusion has attracted a lot of attention amongst researchers and engineers to make best use of cross-modality information. However, in order to build a robotic platform at scale we need to emphasize on autonomous robot platform bring-up cost as well. Cameras and radars, which inherently includes complementary perception information, has potential for developing autonomous robotic platform at scale. However, there is a limited work around radar fused with Vision, compared to LiDAR fused with vision work. In this paper, we tackle this gap with a survey on Vision-Radar fusion approaches for a BEV object detection system. First we go through the background information viz., object detection tasks, choice of sensors, sensor setup, benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics for a robotic perception system. Later, we cover per-modality (Camera and RADAR) data representation, then we go into detail about sensor fusion techniques based on sub-groups viz., early-fusion, deep-fusion, and late-fusion to easily understand the pros and cons of each method. Finally, we propose possible future trends for vision-radar fusion to enlighten future research. Regularly updated summary can be found at: https://github.com/ApoorvRoboticist/Vision-RADAR-Fusion-BEV-Survey
Authors:Gang Zhang, Ziyi Li, Chufeng Tang, Jianmin Li, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract:
Multi-scale features are essential for dense prediction tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The prevailing methods usually utilize a classification backbone to extract multi-scale features and then fuse these features using a lightweight module (e.g., the fusion module in FPN and BiFPN, two typical object detection methods). However, as these methods allocate most computational resources to the classification backbone, the multi-scale feature fusion in these methods is delayed, which may lead to inadequate feature fusion. While some methods perform feature fusion from early stages, they either fail to fully leverage high-level features to guide low-level feature learning or have complex structures, resulting in sub-optimal performance. We propose a streamlined cascade encoder-decoder network, dubbed CEDNet, tailored for dense \mbox{prediction} tasks. All stages in CEDNet share the same encoder-decoder structure and perform multi-scale feature fusion within the decoder. A hallmark of CEDNet is its ability to incorporate high-level features from early stages to guide low-level feature learning in subsequent stages, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of multi-scale feature fusion. We explored three well-known encoder-decoder structures: Hourglass, UNet, and FPN. When integrated into CEDNet, they performed much better than traditional methods that use a pre-designed classification backbone combined with a lightweight fusion module. Extensive experiments on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/CEDNet.
Authors:Karttikeya Mangalam, Haoqi Fan, Yanghao Li, Chao-Yuan Wu, Bo Xiong, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Jitendra Malik
Abstract:
We present Reversible Vision Transformers, a memory efficient architecture design for visual recognition. By decoupling the GPU memory requirement from the depth of the model, Reversible Vision Transformers enable scaling up architectures with efficient memory usage. We adapt two popular models, namely Vision Transformer and Multiscale Vision Transformers, to reversible variants and benchmark extensively across both model sizes and tasks of image classification, object detection and video classification. Reversible Vision Transformers achieve a reduced memory footprint of up to 15.5x at roughly identical model complexity, parameters and accuracy, demonstrating the promise of reversible vision transformers as an efficient backbone for hardware resource limited training regimes. Finally, we find that the additional computational burden of recomputing activations is more than overcome for deeper models, where throughput can increase up to 2.3x over their non-reversible counterparts. Full code and trained models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/slowfast. A simpler, easy to understand and modify version is also available at https://github.com/karttikeya/minREV
Authors:Yanwen Fang, Yuxi Cai, Jintai Chen, Jingyu Zhao, Guangjian Tian, Guodong Li
Abstract:
More and more evidence has shown that strengthening layer interactions can enhance the representation power of a deep neural network, while self-attention excels at learning interdependencies by retrieving query-activated information. Motivated by this, we devise a cross-layer attention mechanism, called multi-head recurrent layer attention (MRLA), that sends a query representation of the current layer to all previous layers to retrieve query-related information from different levels of receptive fields. A light-weighted version of MRLA is also proposed to reduce the quadratic computation cost. The proposed layer attention mechanism can enrich the representation power of many state-of-the-art vision networks, including CNNs and vision transformers. Its effectiveness has been extensively evaluated in image classification, object detection and instance segmentation tasks, where improvements can be consistently observed. For example, our MRLA can improve 1.6% Top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50, while only introducing 0.16M parameters and 0.07B FLOPs. Surprisingly, it can boost the performances by a large margin of 3-4% box AP and mask AP in dense prediction tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/joyfang1106/MRLA.
Authors:Yunshuang Yuan, Hao Cheng, Michael Ying Yang, Monika Sester
Abstract:
Safety is critical for autonomous driving, and one aspect of improving safety is to accurately capture the uncertainties of the perception system, especially knowing the unknown. Different from only providing deterministic or probabilistic results, e.g., probabilistic object detection, that only provide partial information for the perception scenario, we propose a complete probabilistic model named GevBEV. It interprets the 2D driving space as a probabilistic Bird's Eye View (BEV) map with point-based spatial Gaussian distributions, from which one can draw evidence as the parameters for the categorical Dirichlet distribution of any new sample point in the continuous driving space. The experimental results show that GevBEV not only provides more reliable uncertainty quantification but also outperforms the previous works on the benchmarks OPV2V and V2V4Real of BEV map interpretation for cooperative perception in simulated and real-world driving scenarios, respectively. A critical factor in cooperative perception is the data transmission size through the communication channels. GevBEV helps reduce communication overhead by selecting only the most important information to share from the learned uncertainty, reducing the average information communicated by 87% with only a slight performance drop. Our code is published at https://github.com/YuanYunshuang/GevBEV.
Authors:Danila Rukhovich, Anna Vorontsova, Anton Konushin
Abstract:
Recently, sparse 3D convolutions have changed 3D object detection. Performing on par with the voting-based approaches, 3D CNNs are memory-efficient and scale to large scenes better. However, there is still room for improvement. With a conscious, practice-oriented approach to problem-solving, we analyze the performance of such methods and localize the weaknesses. Applying modifications that resolve the found issues one by one, we end up with TR3D: a fast fully-convolutional 3D object detection model trained end-to-end, that achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard benchmarks, ScanNet v2, SUN RGB-D, and S3DIS. Moreover, to take advantage of both point cloud and RGB inputs, we introduce an early fusion of 2D and 3D features. We employ our fusion module to make conventional 3D object detection methods multimodal and demonstrate an impressive boost in performance. Our model with early feature fusion, which we refer to as TR3D+FF, outperforms existing 3D object detection approaches on the SUN RGB-D dataset. Overall, besides being accurate, both TR3D and TR3D+FF models are lightweight, memory-efficient, and fast, thereby marking another milestone on the way toward real-time 3D object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/tr3d .
Authors:Sifan Zhou, Zhi Tian, Xiangxiang Chu, Xinyu Zhang, Bo Zhang, Xiaobo Lu, Chengjian Feng, Zequn Jie, Patrick Yin Chiang, Lin Ma
Abstract:
The deployment of 3D detectors strikes one of the major challenges in real-world self-driving scenarios. Existing BEV-based (i.e., Bird Eye View) detectors favor sparse convolutions (known as SPConv) to speed up training and inference, which puts a hard barrier for deployment, especially for on-device applications. In this paper, to tackle the challenge of efficient 3D object detection from an industry perspective, we devise a deployment-friendly pillar-based 3D detector, termed FastPillars. First, we introduce a novel lightweight Max-and-Attention Pillar Encoding (MAPE) module specially for enhancing small 3D objects. Second, we propose a simple yet effective principle for designing a backbone in pillar-based 3D detection. We construct FastPillars based on these designs, achieving high performance and low latency without SPConv. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FastPillars for on-device 3D detection regarding both performance and speed. Specifically, FastPillars delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on Waymo Open Dataset with 1.8X speed up and 3.8 mAPH/L2 improvement over CenterPoint (SPConv-based). Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/StiphyJay/FastPillars.
Authors:Jiaming Han, Yuqiang Ren, Jian Ding, Ke Yan, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
As few-shot object detectors are often trained with abundant base samples and fine-tuned on few-shot novel examples,the learned models are usually biased to base classes and sensitive to the variance of novel examples. To address this issue, we propose a meta-learning framework with two novel feature aggregation schemes. More precisely, we first present a Class-Agnostic Aggregation (CAA) method, where the query and support features can be aggregated regardless of their categories. The interactions between different classes encourage class-agnostic representations and reduce confusion between base and novel classes. Based on the CAA, we then propose a Variational Feature Aggregation (VFA) method, which encodes support examples into class-level support features for robust feature aggregation. We use a variational autoencoder to estimate class distributions and sample variational features from distributions that are more robust to the variance of support examples. Besides, we decouple classification and regression tasks so that VFA is performed on the classification branch without affecting object localization. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and COCO demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms a strong baseline (up to 16\%) and previous state-of-the-art methods (4\% in average). Code will be available at: \url{https://github.com/csuhan/VFA}
Authors:Qiang Wan, Zilong Huang, Jiachen Lu, Gang Yu, Li Zhang
Abstract:
Since the introduction of Vision Transformers, the landscape of many computer vision tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation), which has been overwhelmingly dominated by CNNs, recently has significantly revolutionized. However, the computational cost and memory requirement renders these methods unsuitable on the mobile device. In this paper, we introduce a new method squeeze-enhanced Axial Transformer (SeaFormer) for mobile visual recognition. Specifically, we design a generic attention block characterized by the formulation of squeeze Axial and detail enhancement. It can be further used to create a family of backbone architectures with superior cost-effectiveness. Coupled with a light segmentation head, we achieve the best trade-off between segmentation accuracy and latency on the ARM-based mobile devices on the ADE20K, Cityscapes, Pascal Context and COCO-Stuff datasets. Critically, we beat both the mobilefriendly rivals and Transformer-based counterparts with better performance and lower latency without bells and whistles. Furthermore, we incorporate a feature upsampling-based multi-resolution distillation technique, further reducing the inference latency of the proposed framework. Beyond semantic segmentation, we further apply the proposed SeaFormer architecture to image classification and object detection problems, demonstrating the potential of serving as a versatile mobile-friendly backbone. Our code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/fudan-zvg/SeaFormer.
Authors:Ling Xiao, Toshihiko Yamasaki
Abstract:
Fine-grained fashion retrieval searches for items that share a similar attribute with the query image. Most existing methods use a pre-trained feature extractor (e.g., ResNet 50) to capture image representations. However, a pre-trained feature backbone is typically trained for image classification and object detection, which are fundamentally different tasks from fine-grained fashion retrieval. Therefore, existing methods suffer from a feature gap problem when directly using the pre-trained backbone for fine-tuning. To solve this problem, we introduce an attribute-guided multi-level attention network (AG-MAN). Specifically, we first enhance the pre-trained feature extractor to capture multi-level image embedding, thereby enriching the low-level features within these representations. Then, we propose a classification scheme where images with the same attribute, albeit with different values, are categorized into the same class. This can further alleviate the feature gap problem by perturbing object-centric feature learning. Moreover, we propose an improved attribute-guided attention module for extracting more accurate attribute-specific representations. Our model consistently outperforms existing attention based methods when assessed on the FashionAI (62.8788% in MAP), DeepFashion (8.9804% in MAP), and Zappos50k datasets (93.32% in Prediction accuracy). Especially, ours improves the most typical ASENet_V2 model by 2.12%, 0.31%, and 0.78% points in FashionAI, DeepFashion, and Zappos50k datasets, respectively. The source code is available in https://github.com/Dr-LingXiao/AG-MAN.
Authors:Dong-Guw Lee, Myung-Hwan Jeon, Younggun Cho, Ayoung Kim
Abstract:
The insufficient number of annotated thermal infrared (TIR) image datasets not only hinders TIR image-based deep learning networks to have comparable performances to that of RGB but it also limits the supervised learning of TIR image-based tasks with challenging labels. As a remedy, we propose a modified multidomain RGB to TIR image translation model focused on edge preservation to employ annotated RGB images with challenging labels. Our proposed method not only preserves key details in the original image but also leverages the optimal TIR style code to portray accurate TIR characteristics in the translated image, when applied on both synthetic and real world RGB images. Using our translation model, we have enabled the supervised learning of deep TIR image-based optical flow estimation and object detection that ameliorated in deep TIR optical flow estimation by reduction in end point error by 56.5\% on average and the best object detection mAP of 23.9\% respectively. Our code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/rpmsnu/sRGB-TIR.
Authors:Chenyi Wang, Huan Wang, Peiwen Pan
Abstract:
Infrared small object detection (ISOS) aims to segment small objects only covered with several pixels from clutter background in infrared images. It's of great challenge due to: 1) small objects lack of sufficient intensity, shape and texture information; 2) small objects are easily lost in the process where detection models, say deep neural networks, obtain high-level semantic features and image-level receptive fields through successive downsampling. This paper proposes a reliable detection model for ISOS, dubbed UCFNet, which can handle well the two issues. It builds upon central difference convolution (CDC) and fast Fourier convolution (FFC). On one hand, CDC can effectively guide the network to learn the contrast information between small objects and the background, as the contrast information is very essential in human visual system dealing with the ISOS task. On the other hand, FFC can gain image-level receptive fields and extract global information while preventing small objects from being overwhelmed.Experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art ISOS models, and can provide useful guidelines for designing better ISOS deep models. Code are available at https://github.com/wcyjerry/BasicISOS.
Authors:Xudong Wang, Rohit Girdhar, Stella X. Yu, Ishan Misra
Abstract:
We propose Cut-and-LEaRn (CutLER), a simple approach for training unsupervised object detection and segmentation models. We leverage the property of self-supervised models to 'discover' objects without supervision and amplify it to train a state-of-the-art localization model without any human labels. CutLER first uses our proposed MaskCut approach to generate coarse masks for multiple objects in an image and then learns a detector on these masks using our robust loss function. We further improve the performance by self-training the model on its predictions. Compared to prior work, CutLER is simpler, compatible with different detection architectures, and detects multiple objects. CutLER is also a zero-shot unsupervised detector and improves detection performance AP50 by over 2.7 times on 11 benchmarks across domains like video frames, paintings, sketches, etc. With finetuning, CutLER serves as a low-shot detector surpassing MoCo-v2 by 7.3% APbox and 6.6% APmask on COCO when training with 5% labels.
Authors:Zanjia Tong, Yuhang Chen, Zewei Xu, Rong Yu
Abstract:
The loss function for bounding box regression (BBR) is essential to object detection. Its good definition will bring significant performance improvement to the model. Most existing works assume that the examples in the training data are high-quality and focus on strengthening the fitting ability of BBR loss. If we blindly strengthen BBR on low-quality examples, it will jeopardize localization performance. Focal-EIoU v1 was proposed to solve this problem, but due to its static focusing mechanism (FM), the potential of non-monotonic FM was not fully exploited. Based on this idea, we propose an IoU-based loss with a dynamic non-monotonic FM named Wise-IoU (WIoU). The dynamic non-monotonic FM uses the outlier degree instead of IoU to evaluate the quality of anchor boxes and provides a wise gradient gain allocation strategy. This strategy reduces the competitiveness of high-quality anchor boxes while also reducing the harmful gradient generated by low-quality examples. This allows WIoU to focus on ordinary-quality anchor boxes and improve the detector's overall performance. When WIoU is applied to the state-of-the-art real-time detector YOLOv7, the AP-75 on the MS-COCO dataset is improved from 53.03% to 54.50%. Code is available at https://github.com/Instinct323/wiou.
Authors:Jang Hyun Cho, Philipp Krähenbühl
Abstract:
Large-scale object detection and instance segmentation face a severe data imbalance. The finer-grained object classes become, the less frequent they appear in our datasets. However, at test-time, we expect a detector that performs well for all classes and not just the most frequent ones. In this paper, we provide a theoretical understanding of the long-trail detection problem. We show how the commonly used mean average precision evaluation metric on an unknown test set is bound by a margin-based binary classification error on a long-tailed object detection training set. We optimize margin-based binary classification error with a novel surrogate objective called \textbf{Effective Class-Margin Loss} (ECM). The ECM loss is simple, theoretically well-motivated, and outperforms other heuristic counterparts on LVIS v1 benchmark over a wide range of architecture and detectors. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/janghyuncho/ECM-Loss}.
Authors:Yadan Luo, Zhuoxiao Chen, Zijian Wang, Xin Yu, Zi Huang, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh
Abstract:
To alleviate the high annotation cost in LiDAR-based 3D object detection, active learning is a promising solution that learns to select only a small portion of unlabeled data to annotate, without compromising model performance. Our empirical study, however, suggests that mainstream uncertainty-based and diversity-based active learning policies are not effective when applied in the 3D detection task, as they fail to balance the trade-off between point cloud informativeness and box-level annotation costs. To overcome this limitation, we jointly investigate three novel criteria in our framework Crb for point cloud acquisition - label conciseness}, feature representativeness and geometric balance, which hierarchically filters out the point clouds of redundant 3D bounding box labels, latent features and geometric characteristics (e.g., point cloud density) from the unlabeled sample pool and greedily selects informative ones with fewer objects to annotate. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed criteria align the marginal distributions of the selected subset and the prior distributions of the unseen test set, and minimizes the upper bound of the generalization error. To validate the effectiveness and applicability of Crb, we conduct extensive experiments on the two benchmark 3D object detection datasets of KITTI and Waymo and examine both one-stage (i.e., Second) and two-stage 3D detectors (i.e., Pv-rcnn). Experiments evidence that the proposed approach outperforms existing active learning strategies and achieves fully supervised performance requiring $1\%$ and $8\%$ annotations of bounding boxes and point clouds, respectively. Source code: https://github.com/Luoyadan/CRB-active-3Ddet.
Authors:Yifan Zhang, Qijian Zhang, Junhui Hou, Yixuan Yuan, Guoliang Xing
Abstract:
To achieve reliable and precise scene understanding, autonomous vehicles typically incorporate multiple sensing modalities to capitalize on their complementary attributes. However, existing cross-modal 3D detectors do not fully utilize the image domain information to address the bottleneck issues of the LiDAR-based detectors. This paper presents a new cross-modal 3D object detector, namely UPIDet, which aims to unleash the potential of the image branch from two aspects. First, UPIDet introduces a new 2D auxiliary task called normalized local coordinate map estimation. This approach enables the learning of local spatial-aware features from the image modality to supplement sparse point clouds. Second, we discover that the representational capability of the point cloud backbone can be enhanced through the gradients backpropagated from the training objectives of the image branch, utilizing a succinct and effective point-to-pixel module. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, we achieved the top rank in the highly competitive cyclist class of the KITTI benchmark at the time of submission. The source code is available at https://github.com/Eaphan/UPIDet.
Authors:Muhammad Ali Farooq, Waseem Shariff, Faisal Khan, Peter Corcoran
Abstract:
In this research work, we have proposed a thermal tiny-YOLO multi-class object detection (TTYMOD) system as a smart forward sensing system that should remain effective in all weather and harsh environmental conditions using an end-to-end YOLO deep learning framework. It provides enhanced safety and improved awareness features for driver assistance. The system is trained on large-scale thermal public datasets as well as newly gathered novel open-sourced dataset comprising of more than 35,000 distinct thermal frames. For optimal training and convergence of YOLO-v5 tiny network variant on thermal data, we have employed different optimizers which include stochastic decent gradient (SGD), Adam, and its variant AdamW which has an improved implementation of weight decay. The performance of thermally tuned tiny architecture is further evaluated on the public as well as locally gathered test data in diversified and challenging weather and environmental conditions. The efficacy of a thermally tuned nano network is quantified using various qualitative metrics which include mean average precision, frames per second rate, and average inference time. Experimental outcomes show that the network achieved the best mAP of 56.4% with an average inference time/ frame of 4 milliseconds. The study further incorporates optimization of tiny network variant using the TensorFlow Lite quantization tool this is beneficial for the deployment of deep learning architectures on the edge and mobile devices. For this study, we have used a raspberry pi 4 computing board for evaluating the real-time feasibility performance of an optimized version of the thermal object detection network for the automotive sensor suite. The source code, trained and optimized models and complete validation/ testing results are publicly available at https://github.com/MAli-Farooq/Thermal-YOLO-And-Model-Optimization-Using-TensorFlowLite.
Authors:Rui Huang, Xuran Pan, Henry Zheng, Haojun Jiang, Zhifeng Xie, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Recent advancements in vision-language pre-training (e.g. CLIP) have shown that vision models can benefit from language supervision. While many models using language modality have achieved great success on 2D vision tasks, the joint representation learning of 3D point cloud with text remains under-explored due to the difficulty of 3D-Text data pair acquisition and the irregularity of 3D data structure. In this paper, we propose a novel Text4Point framework to construct language-guided 3D point cloud models. The key idea is utilizing 2D images as a bridge to connect the point cloud and the language modalities. The proposed Text4Point follows the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. During the pre-training stage, we establish the correspondence of images and point clouds based on the readily available RGB-D data and use contrastive learning to align the image and point cloud representations. Together with the well-aligned image and text features achieved by CLIP, the point cloud features are implicitly aligned with the text embeddings. Further, we propose a Text Querying Module to integrate language information into 3D representation learning by querying text embeddings with point cloud features. For fine-tuning, the model learns task-specific 3D representations under informative language guidance from the label set without 2D images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model shows consistent improvement on various downstream tasks, such as point cloud semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. The code will be available here: https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Text4Point
Authors:Yu Gao, Xi Xu, Tianji Jiang, Siyuan Chen, Yi Yang, Yufeng Yue, Mengyin Fu
Abstract:
Object detection and pose estimation are difficult tasks in robotics and autonomous driving. Existing object detection and pose estimation methods mostly adopt the same-dimensional data for training. For example, 2D object detection usually requires a large amount of 2D annotation data with high cost. Using high-dimensional information to supervise lower-dimensional tasks is a feasible way to reduce datasets size. In this work, the DR-WLC, a dimensionality reduction cognitive model, which can perform both object detection and pose estimation tasks at the same time is proposed. The model only requires 3D model of objects and unlabeled environment images (with or without objects) to finish the training. In addition, a bounding boxes generation strategy is also proposed to build the relationship between 3D model and 2D object detection task. Experiments show that our method can qualify the work without any manual annotations and it is easy to deploy for practical applications. Source code is at https://github.com/IN2-ViAUn/DR-WLC.
Authors:Zhaohui Zheng, Yuming Chen, Qibin Hou, Xiang Li, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
Semantic objects are unevenly distributed over images. In this paper, we study the spatial disequilibrium problem of modern object detectors and propose to quantify this ``spatial bias'' by measuring the detection performance over zones. Our analysis surprisingly shows that the spatial imbalance of objects has a great impact on the detection performance, limiting the robustness of detection applications. This motivates us to design a more generalized measurement, termed Spatial equilibrium Precision (SP), to better characterize the detection performance of object detectors. Furthermore, we also present a spatial equilibrium label assignment (SELA) to alleviate the spatial disequilibrium problem by injecting the prior spatial weight into the optimization process of detectors. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and 3 application datasets on face mask/fruit/helmet images demonstrate the advantages of our method. Our findings challenge the conventional sense of object detectors and show the indispensability of spatial equilibrium. We hope these discoveries would stimulate the community to rethink how an excellent object detector should be. All the source code, evaluation protocols, and the tutorials are publicly available at https://github.com/Zzh-tju/ZoneEval
Authors:Jian Guan, Mingjie Xie, Youtian Lin, Guangjun He, Pengming Feng
Abstract:
Label assignment is a crucial process in object detection, which significantly influences the detection performance by determining positive or negative samples during training process. However, existing label assignment strategies barely consider the characteristics of targets in remote sensing images (RSIs) thoroughly, e.g., large variations in scales and aspect ratios, leading to insufficient and imbalanced sampling and introducing more low-quality samples, thereby limiting detection performance. To solve the above problems, an Elliptical Distribution aided Adaptive Rotation Label Assignment (EARL) is proposed to select high-quality positive samples adaptively in anchor-free detectors. Specifically, an adaptive scale sampling (ADS) strategy is presented to select samples adaptively among multi-level feature maps according to the scales of targets, which achieves sufficient sampling with more balanced scale-level sample distribution. In addition, a dynamic elliptical distribution aided sampling (DED) strategy is proposed to make the sample distribution more flexible to fit the shapes and orientations of targets, and filter out low-quality samples. Furthermore, a spatial distance weighting (SDW) module is introduced to integrate the adaptive distance weighting into loss function, which makes the detector more focused on the high-quality samples. Extensive experiments on several popular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed EARL, where without bells and whistles, it can be easily applied to different detectors and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code will be available at: https://github.com/Justlovesmile/EARL.
Authors:Wei Zhao, Binbin Chen, Weijie Chen, Shicai Yang, Di Xie, Shiliang Pu, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract:
OOD-CV challenge is an out-of-distribution generalization task. To solve this problem in object detection track, we propose a simple yet effective Generalize-then-Adapt (G&A) framework, which is composed of a two-stage domain generalization part and a one-stage domain adaptation part. The domain generalization part is implemented by a Supervised Model Pretraining stage using source data for model warm-up and a Weakly Semi-Supervised Model Pretraining stage using both source data with box-level label and auxiliary data (ImageNet-1K) with image-level label for performance boosting. The domain adaptation part is implemented as a Source-Free Domain Adaptation paradigm, which only uses the pre-trained model and the unlabeled target data to further optimize in a self-supervised training manner. The proposed G&A framework help us achieve the first place on the object detection leaderboard of the OOD-CV challenge. Code will be released in https://github.com/hikvision-research/OOD-CV.
Authors:Yuqi Wang, Yuntao Chen, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
The transformation of features from 2D perspective space to 3D space is essential to multi-view 3D object detection. Recent approaches mainly focus on the design of view transformation, either pixel-wisely lifting perspective view features into 3D space with estimated depth or grid-wisely constructing BEV features via 3D projection, treating all pixels or grids equally. However, choosing what to transform is also important but has rarely been discussed before. The pixels of a moving car are more informative than the pixels of the sky. To fully utilize the information contained in images, the view transformation should be able to adapt to different image regions according to their contents. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named FrustumFormer, which pays more attention to the features in instance regions via adaptive instance-aware resampling. Specifically, the model obtains instance frustums on the bird's eye view by leveraging image view object proposals. An adaptive occupancy mask within the instance frustum is learned to refine the instance location. Moreover, the temporal frustum intersection could further reduce the localization uncertainty of objects. Comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FrustumFormer, and we achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/Frustum.
Authors:Youshaa Murhij, Alexander Golodkov, Dmitry Yudin
Abstract:
The main challenge in 3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds is achieving real-time performance without affecting the reliability of the network. In other words, the detecting network must be confident enough about its predictions. In this paper, we present a solution to improve network inference speed and precision at the same time by implementing a fast dynamic voxelizer that works on fast pillar-based models in the same way a voxelizer works on slow voxel-based models. In addition, we propose a lightweight detection sub-head model for classifying predicted objects and filter out false detected objects that significantly improves model precision in a negligible time and computing cost. The developed code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YoushaaMurhij/RVCDet.
Authors:Lin Song, Songyang Zhang, Songtao Liu, Zeming Li, Xuming He, Hongbin Sun, Jian Sun, Nanning Zheng
Abstract:
Transformers, the de-facto standard for language modeling, have been recently applied for vision tasks. This paper introduces sparse queries for vision transformers to exploit the intrinsic spatial redundancy of natural images and save computational costs. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic Grained Encoder for vision transformers, which can adaptively assign a suitable number of queries to each spatial region. Thus it achieves a fine-grained representation in discriminative regions while keeping high efficiency. Besides, the dynamic grained encoder is compatible with most vision transformer frameworks. Without bells and whistles, our encoder allows the state-of-the-art vision transformers to reduce computational complexity by 40%-60% while maintaining comparable performance on image classification. Extensive experiments on object detection and segmentation further demonstrate the generalizability of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/vtpack.
Authors:Keyu Tian, Yi Jiang, Qishuai Diao, Chen Lin, Liwei Wang, Zehuan Yuan
Abstract:
We identify and overcome two key obstacles in extending the success of BERT-style pre-training, or the masked image modeling, to convolutional networks (convnets): (i) convolution operation cannot handle irregular, random-masked input images; (ii) the single-scale nature of BERT pre-training is inconsistent with convnet's hierarchical structure. For (i), we treat unmasked pixels as sparse voxels of 3D point clouds and use sparse convolution to encode. This is the first use of sparse convolution for 2D masked modeling. For (ii), we develop a hierarchical decoder to reconstruct images from multi-scale encoded features. Our method called Sparse masKed modeling (SparK) is general: it can be used directly on any convolutional model without backbone modifications. We validate it on both classical (ResNet) and modern (ConvNeXt) models: on three downstream tasks, it surpasses both state-of-the-art contrastive learning and transformer-based masked modeling by similarly large margins (around +1.0%). Improvements on object detection and instance segmentation are more substantial (up to +3.5%), verifying the strong transferability of features learned. We also find its favorable scaling behavior by observing more gains on larger models. All this evidence reveals a promising future of generative pre-training on convnets. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/keyu-tian/SparK.
Authors:Bin Tang, Zhengyi Liu, Yacheng Tan, Qian He
Abstract:
The High-Resolution Transformer (HRFormer) can maintain high-resolution representation and share global receptive fields. It is friendly towards salient object detection (SOD) in which the input and output have the same resolution. However, two critical problems need to be solved for two-modality SOD. One problem is two-modality fusion. The other problem is the HRFormer output's fusion. To address the first problem, a supplementary modality is injected into the primary modality by using global optimization and an attention mechanism to select and purify the modality at the input level. To solve the second problem, a dual-direction short connection fusion module is used to optimize the output features of HRFormer, thereby enhancing the detailed representation of objects at the output level. The proposed model, named HRTransNet, first introduces an auxiliary stream for feature extraction of supplementary modality. Then, features are injected into the primary modality at the beginning of each multi-resolution branch. Next, HRFormer is applied to achieve forwarding propagation. Finally, all the output features with different resolutions are aggregated by intra-feature and inter-feature interactive transformers. Application of the proposed model results in impressive improvement for driving two-modality SOD tasks, e.g., RGB-D, RGB-T, and light field SOD.https://github.com/liuzywen/HRTransNet
Authors:Teerath Kumar, Alessandra Mileo, Rob Brennan, Malika Bendechache
Abstract:
Deep learning (DL) algorithms have shown significant performance in various computer vision tasks. However, having limited labelled data lead to a network overfitting problem, where network performance is bad on unseen data as compared to training data. Consequently, it limits performance improvement. To cope with this problem, various techniques have been proposed such as dropout, normalization and advanced data augmentation. Among these, data augmentation, which aims to enlarge the dataset size by including sample diversity, has been a hot topic in recent times. In this article, we focus on advanced data augmentation techniques. we provide a background of data augmentation, a novel and comprehensive taxonomy of reviewed data augmentation techniques, and the strengths and weaknesses (wherever possible) of each technique. We also provide comprehensive results of the data augmentation effect on three popular computer vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. For results reproducibility, we compiled available codes of all data augmentation techniques. Finally, we discuss the challenges and difficulties, and possible future direction for the research community. We believe, this survey provides several benefits i) readers will understand the data augmentation working mechanism to fix overfitting problems ii) results will save the searching time of the researcher for comparison purposes. iii) Codes of the mentioned data augmentation techniques are available at https://github.com/kmr2017/Advanced-Data-augmentation-codes iv) Future work will spark interest in research community.
Authors:Gongyang Li, Zhi Liu, Xinpeng Zhang, Weisi Lin
Abstract:
Recently, relying on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), many methods for salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) are proposed. However, most methods ignore the huge parameters and computational cost brought by CNNs, and only a few pay attention to the portability and mobility. To facilitate practical applications, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight network for ORSI-SOD based on semantic matching and edge alignment, termed SeaNet. Specifically, SeaNet includes a lightweight MobileNet-V2 for feature extraction, a dynamic semantic matching module (DSMM) for high-level features, an edge self-alignment module (ESAM) for low-level features, and a portable decoder for inference. First, the high-level features are compressed into semantic kernels. Then, semantic kernels are used to activate salient object locations in two groups of high-level features through dynamic convolution operations in DSMM. Meanwhile, in ESAM, cross-scale edge information extracted from two groups of low-level features is self-aligned through L2 loss and used for detail enhancement. Finally, starting from the highest-level features, the decoder infers salient objects based on the accurate locations and fine details contained in the outputs of the two modules. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our lightweight SeaNet not only outperforms most state-of-the-art lightweight methods but also yields comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art conventional methods, while having only 2.76M parameters and running with 1.7G FLOPs for 288x288 inputs. Our code and results are available at https://github.com/MathLee/SeaNet.
Authors:Lue Fan, Yuxue Yang, Feng Wang, Naiyan Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
As the perception range of LiDAR expands, LiDAR-based 3D object detection contributes ever-increasingly to the long-range perception in autonomous driving. Mainstream 3D object detectors often build dense feature maps, where the cost is quadratic to the perception range, making them hardly scale up to the long-range settings. To enable efficient long-range detection, we first propose a fully sparse object detector termed FSD. FSD is built upon the general sparse voxel encoder and a novel sparse instance recognition (SIR) module. SIR groups the points into instances and applies highly-efficient instance-wise feature extraction. The instance-wise grouping sidesteps the issue of the center feature missing, which hinders the design of the fully sparse architecture. To further enjoy the benefit of fully sparse characteristic, we leverage temporal information to remove data redundancy and propose a super sparse detector named FSD++. FSD++ first generates residual points, which indicate the point changes between consecutive frames. The residual points, along with a few previous foreground points, form the super sparse input data, greatly reducing data redundancy and computational overhead. We comprehensively analyze our method on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset, and state-of-the-art performance is reported. To showcase the superiority of our method in long-range detection, we also conduct experiments on Argoverse 2 Dataset, where the perception range ($200m$) is much larger than Waymo Open Dataset ($75m$). Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SST.
Authors:Zitian Wang, Zehao Huang, Jiahui Fu, Naiyan Wang, Si Liu
Abstract:
3D object detection from multi-view images has drawn much attention over the past few years. Existing methods mainly establish 3D representations from multi-view images and adopt a dense detection head for object detection, or employ object queries distributed in 3D space to localize objects. In this paper, we design Multi-View 2D Objects guided 3D Object Detector (MV2D), which can lift any 2D object detector to multi-view 3D object detection. Since 2D detections can provide valuable priors for object existence, MV2D exploits 2D detectors to generate object queries conditioned on the rich image semantics. These dynamically generated queries help MV2D to recall objects in the field of view and show a strong capability of localizing 3D objects. For the generated queries, we design a sparse cross attention module to force them to focus on the features of specific objects, which suppresses interference from noises. The evaluation results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the dynamic object queries and sparse feature aggregation can promote 3D detection capability. MV2D also exhibits a state-of-the-art performance among existing methods. We hope MV2D can serve as a new baseline for future research. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/tusen-ai/MV2D}.
Authors:Junjie Yan, Yingfei Liu, Jianjian Sun, Fan Jia, Shuailin Li, Tiancai Wang, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a robust 3D detector, named Cross Modal Transformer (CMT), for end-to-end 3D multi-modal detection. Without explicit view transformation, CMT takes the image and point clouds tokens as inputs and directly outputs accurate 3D bounding boxes. The spatial alignment of multi-modal tokens is performed by encoding the 3D points into multi-modal features. The core design of CMT is quite simple while its performance is impressive. It achieves 74.1\% NDS (state-of-the-art with single model) on nuScenes test set while maintaining fast inference speed. Moreover, CMT has a strong robustness even if the LiDAR is missing. Code is released at https://github.com/junjie18/CMT.
Authors:Libo Zhang, Wenzhang Zhou, Heng Fan, Tiejian Luo, Haibin Ling
Abstract:
Domain adaptive detection aims to improve the generalization of detectors on target domain. To reduce discrepancy in feature distributions between two domains, recent approaches achieve domain adaption through feature alignment in different granularities via adversarial learning. However, they neglect the relationship between multiple granularities and different features in alignment, degrading detection. Addressing this, we introduce a unified multi-granularity alignment (MGA)-based detection framework for domain-invariant feature learning. The key is to encode the dependencies across different granularities including pixel-, instance-, and category-levels simultaneously to align two domains. Specifically, based on pixel-level features, we first develop an omni-scale gated fusion (OSGF) module to aggregate discriminative representations of instances with scale-aware convolutions, leading to robust multi-scale detection. Besides, we introduce multi-granularity discriminators to identify where, either source or target domains, different granularities of samples come from. Note that, MGA not only leverages instance discriminability in different categories but also exploits category consistency between two domains for detection. Furthermore, we present an adaptive exponential moving average (AEMA) strategy that explores model assessments for model update to improve pseudo labels and alleviate local misalignment problem, boosting detection robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple domain adaption scenarios validate the superiority of MGA over other approaches on FCOS and Faster R-CNN detectors. Code will be released at https://github.com/tiankongzhang/MGA.
Authors:Xin Ma, Chang Liu, Chunyu Xie, Long Ye, Yafeng Deng, Xiangyang Ji
Abstract:
Masked image modeling (MIM) has shown great promise for self-supervised learning (SSL) yet been criticized for learning inefficiency. We believe the insufficient utilization of training signals should be responsible. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a conceptually simple yet learning-efficient MIM training scheme, termed Disjoint Masking with Joint Distillation (DMJD). For disjoint masking (DM), we sequentially sample multiple masked views per image in a mini-batch with the disjoint regulation to raise the usage of tokens for reconstruction in each image while keeping the masking rate of each view. For joint distillation (JD), we adopt a dual branch architecture to respectively predict invisible (masked) and visible (unmasked) tokens with superior learning targets. Rooting in orthogonal perspectives for training efficiency improvement, DM and JD cooperatively accelerate the training convergence yet not sacrificing the model generalization ability. Concretely, DM can train ViT with half of the effective training epochs (3.7 times less time-consuming) to report competitive performance. With JD, our DMJD clearly improves the linear probing classification accuracy over ConvMAE by 5.8%. On fine-grained downstream tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc., our DMJD also presents superior generalization compared with state-of-the-art SSL methods. The code and model will be made public at https://github.com/mx-mark/DMJD.
Authors:Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie, Yunsong Li, Xiuping Jia
Abstract:
Considering the computation complexity, we propose a Guided Hybrid Quantization with One-to-one Self-Teaching (GHOST}) framework. More concretely, we first design a structure called guided quantization self-distillation (GQSD), which is an innovative idea for realizing lightweight through the synergy of quantization and distillation. The training process of the quantization model is guided by its full-precision model, which is time-saving and cost-saving without preparing a huge pre-trained model in advance. Second, we put forward a hybrid quantization (HQ) module to obtain the optimal bit width automatically under a constrained condition where a threshold for distribution distance between the center and samples is applied in the weight value search space. Third, in order to improve information transformation, we propose a one-to-one self-teaching (OST) module to give the student network a ability of self-judgment. A switch control machine (SCM) builds a bridge between the student network and teacher network in the same location to help the teacher to reduce wrong guidance and impart vital knowledge to the student. This distillation method allows a model to learn from itself and gain substantial improvement without any additional supervision. Extensive experiments on a multimodal dataset (VEDAI) and single-modality datasets (DOTA, NWPU, and DIOR) show that object detection based on GHOST outperforms the existing detectors. The tiny parameters (<9.7 MB) and Bit-Operations (BOPs) (<2158 G) compared with any remote sensing-based, lightweight or distillation-based algorithms demonstrate the superiority in the lightweight design domain. Our code and model will be released at https://github.com/icey-zhang/GHOST.
Authors:Xingxing Xie, Gong Cheng, Qingyang Li, Shicheng Miao, Ke Li, Junwei Han
Abstract:
Current mainstream object detection methods for large aerial images usually divide large images into patches and then exhaustively detect the objects of interest on all patches, no matter whether there exist objects or not. This paradigm, although effective, is inefficient because the detectors have to go through all patches, severely hindering the inference speed. This paper presents an Objectness Activation Network (OAN) to help detectors focus on fewer patches but achieve more efficient inference and more accurate results, enabling a simple and effective solution to object detection in large images. In brief, OAN is a light fully-convolutional network for judging whether each patch contains objects or not, which can be easily integrated into many object detectors and jointly trained with them end-to-end. We extensively evaluate our OAN with five advanced detectors. Using OAN, all five detectors acquire more than 30.0% speed-up on three large-scale aerial image datasets, meanwhile with consistent accuracy improvements. On extremely large Gaofen-2 images (29200$\times$27620 pixels), our OAN improves the detection speed by 70.5%. Moreover, we extend our OAN to driving-scene object detection and 4K video object detection, boosting the detection speed by 112.1% and 75.0%, respectively, without sacrificing the accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/Ranchosky/OAN.
Authors:Yuxuan Cai, Yizhuang Zhou, Qi Han, Jianjian Sun, Xiangwen Kong, Jun Li, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
We propose a new neural network design paradigm Reversible Column Network (RevCol). The main body of RevCol is composed of multiple copies of subnetworks, named columns respectively, between which multi-level reversible connections are employed. Such architectural scheme attributes RevCol very different behavior from conventional networks: during forward propagation, features in RevCol are learned to be gradually disentangled when passing through each column, whose total information is maintained rather than compressed or discarded as other network does. Our experiments suggest that CNN-style RevCol models can achieve very competitive performances on multiple computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, especially with large parameter budget and large dataset. For example, after ImageNet-22K pre-training, RevCol-XL obtains 88.2% ImageNet-1K accuracy. Given more pre-training data, our largest model RevCol-H reaches 90.0% on ImageNet-1K, 63.8% APbox on COCO detection minival set, 61.0% mIoU on ADE20k segmentation. To our knowledge, it is the best COCO detection and ADE20k segmentation result among pure (static) CNN models. Moreover, as a general macro architecture fashion, RevCol can also be introduced into transformers or other neural networks, which is demonstrated to improve the performances in both computer vision and NLP tasks. We release code and models at https://github.com/megvii-research/RevCol
Authors:Yifan Zhang, Junhui Hou, Yixuan Yuan
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in deep learning-based 3D object detection, leading to its widespread adoption in numerous applications. As 3D object detectors become increasingly crucial for security-critical tasks, it is imperative to understand their robustness against adversarial attacks. This paper presents the first comprehensive evaluation and analysis of the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D detectors under adversarial attacks. Specifically, we extend three distinct adversarial attacks to the 3D object detection task, benchmarking the robustness of state-of-the-art LiDAR-based 3D object detectors against attacks on the KITTI and Waymo datasets. We further analyze the relationship between robustness and detector properties. Additionally, we explore the transferability of cross-model, cross-task, and cross-data attacks. Thorough experiments on defensive strategies for 3D detectors are conducted, demonstrating that simple transformations like flipping provide little help in improving robustness when the applied transformation strategy is exposed to attackers. \revise{Finally, we propose balanced adversarial focal training, based on conventional adversarial training, to strike a balance between accuracy and robustness.} Our findings will facilitate investigations into understanding and defending against adversarial attacks on LiDAR-based 3D object detectors, thus advancing the field. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Eaphan/Robust3DOD}.
Authors:Chenxi Huang, Tong He, Haidong Ren, Wenxiao Wang, Binbin Lin, Deng Cai
Abstract:
Compared to typical multi-sensor systems, monocular 3D object detection has attracted much attention due to its simple configuration. However, there is still a significant gap between LiDAR-based and monocular-based methods. In this paper, we find that the ill-posed nature of monocular imagery can lead to depth ambiguity. Specifically, objects with different depths can appear with the same bounding boxes and similar visual features in the 2D image. Unfortunately, the network cannot accurately distinguish different depths from such non-discriminative visual features, resulting in unstable depth training. To facilitate depth learning, we propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play module, \underline{O}ne \underline{B}ounding Box \underline{M}ultiple \underline{O}bjects (OBMO). Concretely, we add a set of suitable pseudo labels by shifting the 3D bounding box along the viewing frustum. To constrain the pseudo-3D labels to be reasonable, we carefully design two label scoring strategies to represent their quality. In contrast to the original hard depth labels, such soft pseudo labels with quality scores allow the network to learn a reasonable depth range, boosting training stability and thus improving final performance. Extensive experiments on KITTI and Waymo benchmarks show that our method significantly improves state-of-the-art monocular 3D detectors by a significant margin (The improvements under the moderate setting on KITTI validation set are $\mathbf{1.82\sim 10.91\%}$ \textbf{mAP in BEV} and $\mathbf{1.18\sim 9.36\%}$ \textbf{mAP in 3D}). Codes have been released at \url{https://github.com/mrsempress/OBMO}.
Authors:Feng Lin, Wenze Hu, Yaowei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Guangming Lu, Fanglin Chen, Yong Xu, Xiaoyu Wang
Abstract:
Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in developing a broad, universal, and general-purpose computer vision system. Such systems have the potential to address a wide range of vision tasks simultaneously, without being limited to specific problems or data domains. This universality is crucial for practical, real-world computer vision applications. In this study, our focus is on a specific challenge: the large-scale, multi-domain universal object detection problem, which contributes to the broader goal of achieving a universal vision system. This problem presents several intricate challenges, including cross-dataset category label duplication, label conflicts, and the necessity to handle hierarchical taxonomies. To address these challenges, we introduce our approach to label handling, hierarchy-aware loss design, and resource-efficient model training utilizing a pre-trained large vision model. Our method has demonstrated remarkable performance, securing a prestigious second-place ranking in the object detection track of the Robust Vision Challenge 2022 (RVC 2022) on a million-scale cross-dataset object detection benchmark. We believe that our comprehensive study will serve as a valuable reference and offer an alternative approach for addressing similar challenges within the computer vision community. The source code for our work is openly available at https://github.com/linfeng93/Large-UniDet.
Authors:Yuyang Zhao, Zhun Zhong, Na Zhao, Nicu Sebe, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract:
Domain shift widely exists in the visual world, while modern deep neural networks commonly suffer from severe performance degradation under domain shift due to the poor generalization ability, which limits the real-world applications. The domain shift mainly lies in the limited source environmental variations and the large distribution gap between source and unseen target data. To this end, we propose a unified framework, Style-HAllucinated Dual consistEncy learning (SHADE), to handle such domain shift in various visual tasks. Specifically, SHADE is constructed based on two consistency constraints, Style Consistency (SC) and Retrospection Consistency (RC). SC enriches the source situations and encourages the model to learn consistent representation across style-diversified samples. RC leverages general visual knowledge to prevent the model from overfitting to source data and thus largely keeps the representation consistent between the source and general visual models. Furthermore, we present a novel style hallucination module (SHM) to generate style-diversified samples that are essential to consistency learning. SHM selects basis styles from the source distribution, enabling the model to dynamically generate diverse and realistic samples during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our versatile SHADE can significantly enhance the generalization in various visual recognition tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection, with different models, i.e., ConvNets and Transformer.
Authors:Chenhongyi Yang, Jiarui Xu, Shalini De Mello, Elliot J. Crowley, Xiaolong Wang
Abstract:
We present the Group Propagation Vision Transformer (GPViT): a novel nonhierarchical (i.e. non-pyramidal) transformer model designed for general visual recognition with high-resolution features. High-resolution features (or tokens) are a natural fit for tasks that involve perceiving fine-grained details such as detection and segmentation, but exchanging global information between these features is expensive in memory and computation because of the way self-attention scales. We provide a highly efficient alternative Group Propagation Block (GP Block) to exchange global information. In each GP Block, features are first grouped together by a fixed number of learnable group tokens; we then perform Group Propagation where global information is exchanged between the grouped features; finally, global information in the updated grouped features is returned back to the image features through a transformer decoder. We evaluate GPViT on a variety of visual recognition tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Our method achieves significant performance gains over previous works across all tasks, especially on tasks that require highresolution outputs, for example, our GPViT-L3 outperforms Swin Transformer-B by 2.0 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation with only half as many parameters. Project page: chenhongyiyang.com/projects/GPViT/GPViT
Authors:Devansh Sharma, Tihitina Hade, Qing Tian
Abstract:
Pedestrian safety is one primary concern in autonomous driving. The under-representation of vulnerable groups in today's pedestrian datasets points to an urgent need for a dataset of vulnerable road users. In order to help train comprehensive models and subsequently drive research to improve the accuracy of vulnerable pedestrian identification, we first introduce a new dataset for vulnerable pedestrian detection in this paper: the BG Vulnerable Pedestrian (BGVP) dataset. The dataset includes four classes, i.e., Children Without Disability, Elderly without Disability, With Disability, and Non-Vulnerable. This dataset consists of images collected from the public domain and manually-annotated bounding boxes. In addition, on the proposed dataset, we have trained and tested five classic or state-of-the-art object detection models, i.e., YOLOv4, YOLOv5, YOLOX, Faster R-CNN, and EfficientDet. Our results indicate that YOLOX and YOLOv4 perform the best on our dataset, YOLOv4 scoring 0.7999 and YOLOX scoring 0.7779 on the mAP 0.5 metric, while YOLOX outperforms YOLOv4 by 3.8 percent on the mAP 0.5:0.95 metric. Generally speaking, all five detectors do well predicting the With Disability class and perform poorly in the Elderly Without Disability class. YOLOX consistently outperforms all other detectors on the mAP (0.5:0.95) per class metric, obtaining 0.5644, 0.5242, 0.4781, and 0.6796 for Children Without Disability, Elderly Without Disability, Non-vulnerable, and With Disability, respectively. Our dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/devvansh1997/BGVP.
Authors:Alexandre Boulch, Corentin Sautier, Björn Michele, Gilles Puy, Renaud Marlet
Abstract:
We propose a new self-supervised method for pre-training the backbone of deep perception models operating on point clouds. The core idea is to train the model on a pretext task which is the reconstruction of the surface on which the 3D points are sampled, and to use the underlying latent vectors as input to the perception head. The intuition is that if the network is able to reconstruct the scene surface, given only sparse input points, then it probably also captures some fragments of semantic information, that can be used to boost an actual perception task. This principle has a very simple formulation, which makes it both easy to implement and widely applicable to a large range of 3D sensors and deep networks performing semantic segmentation or object detection. In fact, it supports a single-stream pipeline, as opposed to most contrastive learning approaches, allowing training on limited resources. We conducted extensive experiments on various autonomous driving datasets, involving very different kinds of lidars, for both semantic segmentation and object detection. The results show the effectiveness of our method to learn useful representations without any annotation, compared to existing approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/ALSO
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Shengxiang Qi, Nan Dong, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract:
Existing LiDAR-based 3D object detection methods for autonomous driving scenarios mainly adopt the training-from-scratch paradigm. Unfortunately, this paradigm heavily relies on large-scale labeled data, whose collection can be expensive and time-consuming. Self-supervised pre-training is an effective and desirable way to alleviate this dependence on extensive annotated data. In this work, we present BEV-MAE, an efficient masked autoencoder pre-training framework for LiDAR-based 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Specifically, we propose a bird's eye view (BEV) guided masking strategy to guide the 3D encoder learning feature representation in a BEV perspective and avoid complex decoder design during pre-training. Furthermore, we introduce a learnable point token to maintain a consistent receptive field size of the 3D encoder with fine-tuning for masked point cloud inputs. Based on the property of outdoor point clouds in autonomous driving scenarios, i.e., the point clouds of distant objects are more sparse, we propose point density prediction to enable the 3D encoder to learn location information, which is essential for object detection. Experimental results show that BEV-MAE surpasses prior state-of-the-art self-supervised methods and achieves a favorably pre-training efficiency. Furthermore, based on TransFusion-L, BEV-MAE achieves new state-of-the-art LiDAR-based 3D object detection results, with 73.6 NDS and 69.6 mAP on the nuScenes benchmark. The source code will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/BEV-MAE
Authors:Zanlin Ni, Yulin Wang, Jiangwei Yu, Haojun Jiang, Yue Cao, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a remarkable success of large deep learning models. However, training these models is challenging due to high computational costs, painfully slow convergence, and overfitting issues. In this paper, we present Deep Incubation, a novel approach that enables the efficient and effective training of large models by dividing them into smaller sub-modules that can be trained separately and assembled seamlessly. A key challenge for implementing this idea is to ensure the compatibility of the independently trained sub-modules. To address this issue, we first introduce a global, shared meta model, which is leveraged to implicitly link all the modules together, and can be designed as an extremely small network with negligible computational overhead. Then we propose a module incubation algorithm, which trains each sub-module to replace the corresponding component of the meta model and accomplish a given learning task. Despite the simplicity, our approach effectively encourages each sub-module to be aware of its role in the target large model, such that the finally-learned sub-modules can collaborate with each other smoothly after being assembled. Empirically, our method outperforms end-to-end (E2E) training in terms of both final accuracy and training efficiency. For example, on top of ViT-Huge, it improves the accuracy by 2.7% on ImageNet or achieves similar performance with 4x less training time. Notably, the gains are significant for downstream tasks as well (e.g., object detection and image segmentation on COCO and ADE20K). Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Deep-Incubation.
Authors:Mohammad Fahes, Tuan-Hung Vu, Andrei Bursuc, Patrick Pérez, Raoul de Charette
Abstract:
Domain adaptation has been vastly investigated in computer vision but still requires access to target images at train time, which might be intractable in some uncommon conditions. In this paper, we propose the task of `Prompt-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation', where we adapt a model trained on a source domain using only a general description in natural language of the target domain, i.e., a prompt. First, we leverage a pretrained contrastive vision-language model (CLIP) to optimize affine transformations of source features, steering them towards the target text embedding while preserving their content and semantics. To achieve this, we propose Prompt-driven Instance Normalization (PIN). Second, we show that these prompt-driven augmentations can be used to perform zero-shot domain adaptation for semantic segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms CLIP-based style transfer baselines on several datasets for the downstream task at hand, even surpassing one-shot unsupervised domain adaptation. A similar boost is observed on object detection and image classification. The code is available at https://github.com/astra-vision/PODA .
Authors:Dong Liang, Jing-Wei Zhang, Ying-Peng Tang, Sheng-Jun Huang
Abstract:
Recent aerial object detection models rely on a large amount of labeled training data, which requires unaffordable manual labeling costs in large aerial scenes with dense objects. Active learning effectively reduces the data labeling cost by selectively querying the informative and representative unlabelled samples. However, existing active learning methods are mainly with class-balanced settings and image-based querying for generic object detection tasks, which are less applicable to aerial object detection scenarios due to the long-tailed class distribution and dense small objects in aerial scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning method for cost-effective aerial object detection. Specifically, both object-level and image-level informativeness are considered in the object selection to refrain from redundant and myopic querying. Besides, an easy-to-use class-balancing criterion is incorporated to favor the minority objects to alleviate the long-tailed class distribution problem in model training. We further devise a training loss to mine the latent knowledge in the unlabeled image regions. Extensive experiments are conducted on the DOTA-v1.0 and DOTA-v2.0 benchmarks to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For the ReDet, KLD, and SASM detectors on the DOTA-v2.0 dataset, the results show that our proposed MUS-CDB method can save nearly 75\% of the labeling cost while achieving comparable performance to other active learning methods in terms of mAP.Code is publicly online (https://github.com/ZJW700/MUS-CDB).
Authors:Lukas Hoyer, Dengxin Dai, Haoran Wang, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a model trained on source data (e.g. synthetic) is adapted to target data (e.g. real-world) without access to target annotation. Most previous UDA methods struggle with classes that have a similar visual appearance on the target domain as no ground truth is available to learn the slight appearance differences. To address this problem, we propose a Masked Image Consistency (MIC) module to enhance UDA by learning spatial context relations of the target domain as additional clues for robust visual recognition. MIC enforces the consistency between predictions of masked target images, where random patches are withheld, and pseudo-labels that are generated based on the complete image by an exponential moving average teacher. To minimize the consistency loss, the network has to learn to infer the predictions of the masked regions from their context. Due to its simple and universal concept, MIC can be integrated into various UDA methods across different visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. MIC significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance across the different recognition tasks for synthetic-to-real, day-to-nighttime, and clear-to-adverse-weather UDA. For instance, MIC achieves an unprecedented UDA performance of 75.9 mIoU and 92.8% on GTA-to-Cityscapes and VisDA-2017, respectively, which corresponds to an improvement of +2.1 and +3.0 percent points over the previous state of the art. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/MIC.
Authors:Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Kartik Sarangmath, Vivek Vijaykumar, Judy Hoffman
Abstract:
Synthetic data offers the promise of cheap and bountiful training data for settings where labeled real-world data is scarce. However, models trained on synthetic data significantly underperform when evaluated on real-world data. In this paper, we propose Proportional Amplitude Spectrum Training Augmentation (PASTA), a simple and effective augmentation strategy to improve out-of-the-box synthetic-to-real (syn-to-real) generalization performance. PASTA perturbs the amplitude spectra of synthetic images in the Fourier domain to generate augmented views. Specifically, with PASTA we propose a structured perturbation strategy where high-frequency components are perturbed relatively more than the low-frequency ones. For the tasks of semantic segmentation (GTAV-to-Real), object detection (Sim10K-to-Real), and object recognition (VisDA-C Syn-to-Real), across a total of 5 syn-to-real shifts, we find that PASTA outperforms more complex state-of-the-art generalization methods while being complementary to the same.
Authors:Xin Wu, Danfeng Hong, Jocelyn Chanussot
Abstract:
Learning-based infrared small object detection methods currently rely heavily on the classification backbone network. This tends to result in tiny object loss and feature distinguishability limitations as the network depth increases. Furthermore, small objects in infrared images are frequently emerged bright and dark, posing severe demands for obtaining precise object contrast information. For this reason, we in this paper propose a simple and effective ``U-Net in U-Net'' framework, UIU-Net for short, and detect small objects in infrared images. As the name suggests, UIU-Net embeds a tiny U-Net into a larger U-Net backbone, enabling the multi-level and multi-scale representation learning of objects. Moreover, UIU-Net can be trained from scratch, and the learned features can enhance global and local contrast information effectively. More specifically, the UIU-Net model is divided into two modules: the resolution-maintenance deep supervision (RM-DS) module and the interactive-cross attention (IC-A) module. RM-DS integrates Residual U-blocks into a deep supervision network to generate deep multi-scale resolution-maintenance features while learning global context information. Further, IC-A encodes the local context information between the low-level details and high-level semantic features. Extensive experiments conducted on two infrared single-frame image datasets, i.e., SIRST and Synthetic datasets, show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed UIU-Net in comparison with several state-of-the-art infrared small object detection methods. The proposed UIU-Net also produces powerful generalization performance for video sequence infrared small object datasets, e.g., ATR ground/air video sequence dataset. The codes of this work are available openly at \url{https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TIP_UIU-Net}.
Authors:Rui Tian, Zuxuan Wu, Qi Dai, Han Hu, Yu Qiao, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved overwhelming success, yet they suffer from vulnerable resolution scalability, i.e., the performance drops drastically when presented with input resolutions that are unseen during training. We introduce, ResFormer, a framework that is built upon the seminal idea of multi-resolution training for improved performance on a wide spectrum of, mostly unseen, testing resolutions. In particular, ResFormer operates on replicated images of different resolutions and enforces a scale consistency loss to engage interactive information across different scales. More importantly, to alternate among varying resolutions effectively, especially novel ones in testing, we propose a global-local positional embedding strategy that changes smoothly conditioned on input sizes. We conduct extensive experiments for image classification on ImageNet. The results provide strong quantitative evidence that ResFormer has promising scaling abilities towards a wide range of resolutions. For instance, ResFormer-B-MR achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 75.86% and 81.72% when evaluated on relatively low and high resolutions respectively (i.e., 96 and 640), which are 48% and 7.49% better than DeiT-B. We also demonstrate, moreover, ResFormer is flexible and can be easily extended to semantic segmentation, object detection and video action recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/ruitian12/resformer.
Authors:Zizhang Wu, Yunzhe Wu, Jian Pu, Xianzhi Li, Xiaoquan Wang
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is a low-cost but challenging task, as it requires generating accurate 3D localization solely from a single image input. Recent developed depth-assisted methods show promising results by using explicit depth maps as intermediate features, which are either precomputed by monocular depth estimation networks or jointly evaluated with 3D object detection. However, inevitable errors from estimated depth priors may lead to misaligned semantic information and 3D localization, hence resulting in feature smearing and suboptimal predictions. To mitigate this issue, we propose ADD, an Attention-based Depth knowledge Distillation framework with 3D-aware positional encoding. Unlike previous knowledge distillation frameworks that adopt stereo- or LiDAR-based teachers, we build up our teacher with identical architecture as the student but with extra ground-truth depth as input. Credit to our teacher design, our framework is seamless, domain-gap free, easily implementable, and is compatible with object-wise ground-truth depth. Specifically, we leverage intermediate features and responses for knowledge distillation. Considering long-range 3D dependencies, we propose \emph{3D-aware self-attention} and \emph{target-aware cross-attention} modules for student adaptation. Extensive experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of our framework on the challenging KITTI 3D object detection benchmark. We implement our framework on three representative monocular detectors, and we achieve state-of-the-art performance with no additional inference computational cost relative to baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/rockywind/ADD.
Authors:Xianzhe Xu, Yiqi Jiang, Weihua Chen, Yilun Huang, Yuan Zhang, Xiuyu Sun
Abstract:
In this report, we present a fast and accurate object detection method dubbed DAMO-YOLO, which achieves higher performance than the state-of-the-art YOLO series. DAMO-YOLO is extended from YOLO with some new technologies, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS), efficient Reparameterized Generalized-FPN (RepGFPN), a lightweight head with AlignedOTA label assignment, and distillation enhancement. In particular, we use MAE-NAS, a method guided by the principle of maximum entropy, to search our detection backbone under the constraints of low latency and high performance, producing ResNet/CSP-like structures with spatial pyramid pooling and focus modules. In the design of necks and heads, we follow the rule of ``large neck, small head''.We import Generalized-FPN with accelerated queen-fusion to build the detector neck and upgrade its CSPNet with efficient layer aggregation networks (ELAN) and reparameterization. Then we investigate how detector head size affects detection performance and find that a heavy neck with only one task projection layer would yield better results.In addition, AlignedOTA is proposed to solve the misalignment problem in label assignment. And a distillation schema is introduced to improve performance to a higher level. Based on these new techs, we build a suite of models at various scales to meet the needs of different scenarios. For general industry requirements, we propose DAMO-YOLO-T/S/M/L. They can achieve 43.6/47.7/50.2/51.9 mAPs on COCO with the latency of 2.78/3.83/5.62/7.95 ms on T4 GPUs respectively. Additionally, for edge devices with limited computing power, we have also proposed DAMO-YOLO-Ns/Nm/Nl lightweight models. They can achieve 32.3/38.2/40.5 mAPs on COCO with the latency of 4.08/5.05/6.69 ms on X86-CPU. Our proposed general and lightweight models have outperformed other YOLO series models in their respective application scenarios.
Authors:Sauradip Nag, Mengmeng Xu, Xiatian Zhu, Juan-Manuel Perez-Rua, Bernard Ghanem, Yi-Zhe Song, Tao Xiang
Abstract:
Few-shot (FS) and zero-shot (ZS) learning are two different approaches for scaling temporal action detection (TAD) to new classes. The former adapts a pretrained vision model to a new task represented by as few as a single video per class, whilst the latter requires no training examples by exploiting a semantic description of the new class. In this work, we introduce a new multi-modality few-shot (MMFS) TAD problem, which can be considered as a marriage of FS-TAD and ZS-TAD by leveraging few-shot support videos and new class names jointly. To tackle this problem, we further introduce a novel MUlti-modality PromPt mETa-learning (MUPPET) method. This is enabled by efficiently bridging pretrained vision and language models whilst maximally reusing already learned capacity. Concretely, we construct multi-modal prompts by mapping support videos into the textual token space of a vision-language model using a meta-learned adapter-equipped visual semantics tokenizer. To tackle large intra-class variation, we further design a query feature regulation scheme. Extensive experiments on ActivityNetv1.3 and THUMOS14 demonstrate that our MUPPET outperforms state-of-the-art alternative methods, often by a large margin. We also show that our MUPPET can be easily extended to tackle the few-shot object detection problem and again achieves the state-of-the-art performance on MS-COCO dataset. The code will be available in https://github.com/sauradip/MUPPET
Authors:Changyong Shu, JIajun Deng, Fisher Yu, Yifan Liu
Abstract:
Transformer-based methods have swept the benchmarks on 2D and 3D detection on images. Because tokenization before the attention mechanism drops the spatial information, positional encoding becomes critical for those methods. Recent works found that encodings based on samples of the 3D viewing rays can significantly improve the quality of multi-camera 3D object detection. We hypothesize that 3D point locations can provide more information than rays. Therefore, we introduce 3D point positional encoding, 3DPPE, to the 3D detection Transformer decoder. Although 3D measurements are not available at the inference time of monocular 3D object detection, 3DPPE uses predicted depth to approximate the real point positions. Our hybriddepth module combines direct and categorical depth to estimate the refined depth of each pixel. Despite the approximation, 3DPPE achieves 46.0 mAP and 51.4 NDS on the competitive nuScenes dataset, significantly outperforming encodings based on ray samples. We make the codes available at https://github.com/drilistbox/3DPPE.
Authors:Zixiang Zhao, Haowen Bai, Jiangshe Zhang, Yulun Zhang, Shuang Xu, Zudi Lin, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Multi-modality (MM) image fusion aims to render fused images that maintain the merits of different modalities, e.g., functional highlight and detailed textures. To tackle the challenge in modeling cross-modality features and decomposing desirable modality-specific and modality-shared features, we propose a novel Correlation-Driven feature Decomposition Fusion (CDDFuse) network. Firstly, CDDFuse uses Restormer blocks to extract cross-modality shallow features. We then introduce a dual-branch Transformer-CNN feature extractor with Lite Transformer (LT) blocks leveraging long-range attention to handle low-frequency global features and Invertible Neural Networks (INN) blocks focusing on extracting high-frequency local information. A correlation-driven loss is further proposed to make the low-frequency features correlated while the high-frequency features uncorrelated based on the embedded information. Then, the LT-based global fusion and INN-based local fusion layers output the fused image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CDDFuse achieves promising results in multiple fusion tasks, including infrared-visible image fusion and medical image fusion. We also show that CDDFuse can boost the performance in downstream infrared-visible semantic segmentation and object detection in a unified benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/MMIF-CDDFuse.
Authors:Eli Schwartz, Assaf Arbelle, Leonid Karlinsky, Sivan Harary, Florian Scheidegger, Sivan Doveh, Raja Giryes
Abstract:
We propose using Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE), a transformer model self-supervisedly trained on image inpainting, for anomaly detection (AD). Assuming anomalous regions are harder to reconstruct compared with normal regions. MAEDAY is the first image-reconstruction-based anomaly detection method that utilizes a pre-trained model, enabling its use for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection (FSAD). We also show the same method works surprisingly well for the novel tasks of Zero-Shot AD (ZSAD) and Zero-Shot Foreign Object Detection (ZSFOD), where no normal samples are available. Code is available at https://github.com/EliSchwartz/MAEDAY .
Authors:Steven Moonen, Bram Vanherle, Joris de Hoog, Taoufik Bourgana, Abdellatif Bey-Temsamani, Nick Michiels
Abstract:
The use of computer vision for product and assembly quality control is becoming ubiquitous in the manufacturing industry. Lately, it is apparent that machine learning based solutions are outperforming classical computer vision algorithms in terms of performance and robustness. However, a main drawback is that they require sufficiently large and labeled training datasets, which are often not available or too tedious and too time consuming to acquire. This is especially true for low-volume and high-variance manufacturing. Fortunately, in this industry, CAD models of the manufactured or assembled products are available. This paper introduces CAD2Render, a GPU-accelerated synthetic data generator based on the Unity High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). CAD2Render is designed to add variations in a modular fashion, making it possible for high customizable data generation, tailored to the needs of the industrial use case at hand. Although CAD2Render is specifically designed for manufacturing use cases, it can be used for other domains as well. We validate CAD2Render by demonstrating state of the art performance in two industrial relevant setups. We demonstrate that the data generated by our approach can be used to train object detection and pose estimation models with a high enough accuracy to direct a robot. The code for CAD2Render is available at https://github.com/EDM-Research/CAD2Render.
Authors:Xiangyang Zhu, Renrui Zhang, Bowei He, Ziyu Guo, Ziyao Zeng, Zipeng Qin, Shanghang Zhang, Peng Gao
Abstract:
Large-scale pre-trained models have shown promising open-world performance for both vision and language tasks. However, their transferred capacity on 3D point clouds is still limited and only constrained to the classification task. In this paper, we first collaborate CLIP and GPT to be a unified 3D open-world learner, named as PointCLIP V2, which fully unleashes their potential for zero-shot 3D classification, segmentation, and detection. To better align 3D data with the pre-trained language knowledge, PointCLIP V2 contains two key designs. For the visual end, we prompt CLIP via a shape projection module to generate more realistic depth maps, narrowing the domain gap between projected point clouds with natural images. For the textual end, we prompt the GPT model to generate 3D-specific text as the input of CLIP's textual encoder. Without any training in 3D domains, our approach significantly surpasses PointCLIP by +42.90%, +40.44%, and +28.75% accuracy on three datasets for zero-shot 3D classification. On top of that, V2 can be extended to few-shot 3D classification, zero-shot 3D part segmentation, and 3D object detection in a simple manner, demonstrating our generalization ability for unified 3D open-world learning.
Authors:Benran Hu, Junkai Huang, Yichen Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Abstract:
This paper presents the first significant object detection framework, NeRF-RPN, which directly operates on NeRF. Given a pre-trained NeRF model, NeRF-RPN aims to detect all bounding boxes of objects in a scene. By exploiting a novel voxel representation that incorporates multi-scale 3D neural volumetric features, we demonstrate it is possible to regress the 3D bounding boxes of objects in NeRF directly without rendering the NeRF at any viewpoint. NeRF-RPN is a general framework and can be applied to detect objects without class labels. We experimented NeRF-RPN with various backbone architectures, RPN head designs and loss functions. All of them can be trained in an end-to-end manner to estimate high quality 3D bounding boxes. To facilitate future research in object detection for NeRF, we built a new benchmark dataset which consists of both synthetic and real-world data with careful labeling and clean up. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lyclyc52/NeRF_RPN.
Authors:Chenhongyi Yang, Lichao Huang, Elliot J. Crowley
Abstract:
Annotating datasets for object detection is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. To minimize this burden, active learning (AL) techniques are employed to select the most informative samples for annotation within a constrained "annotation budget". Traditional AL strategies typically rely on model uncertainty or sample diversity for query sampling, while more advanced methods have focused on developing AL-specific object detector architectures to enhance performance. However, these specialized approaches are not readily adaptable to different object detectors due to the significant engineering effort required for integration. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Plug and Play Active Learning (PPAL), a simple and effective AL strategy for object detection. PPAL is a two-stage method comprising uncertainty-based and diversity-based sampling phases. In the first stage, our Difficulty Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling leverage a category-wise difficulty coefficient that combines both classification and localisation difficulties to re-weight instance uncertainties, from which we sample a candidate pool for the subsequent diversity-based sampling. In the second stage, we propose Category Conditioned Matching Similarity to better compute the similarities of multi-instance images as ensembles of their instance similarities, which is used by the k-Means++ algorithm to sample the final AL queries. PPAL makes no change to model architectures or detector training pipelines; hence it can be easily generalized to different object detectors. We benchmark PPAL on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets using different detector architectures and show that our method outperforms prior work by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/PPAL
Authors:Hao Shi, Qi Jiang, Kailun Yang, Xiaoting Yin, Ze Wang, Kaiwei Wang
Abstract:
Vision sensors are widely applied in vehicles, robots, and roadside infrastructure. However, due to limitations in hardware cost and system size, camera Field-of-View (FoV) is often restricted and may not provide sufficient coverage. Nevertheless, from a spatiotemporal perspective, it is possible to obtain information beyond the camera's physical FoV from past video streams. In this paper, we propose the concept of online video inpainting for autonomous vehicles to expand the field of view, thereby enhancing scene visibility, perception, and system safety. To achieve this, we introduce the FlowLens architecture, which explicitly employs optical flow and implicitly incorporates a novel clip-recurrent transformer for feature propagation. FlowLens offers two key features: 1) FlowLens includes a newly designed Clip-Recurrent Hub with 3D-Decoupled Cross Attention (DDCA) to progressively process global information accumulated over time. 2) It integrates a multi-branch Mix Fusion Feed Forward Network (MixF3N) to enhance the precise spatial flow of local features. To facilitate training and evaluation, we derive the KITTI360 dataset with various FoV mask, which covers both outer- and inner FoV expansion scenarios. We also conduct both quantitative assessments and qualitative comparisons of beyond-FoV semantics and beyond-FoV object detection across different models. We illustrate that employing FlowLens to reconstruct unseen scenes even enhances perception within the field of view by providing reliable semantic context. Extensive experiments and user studies involving offline and online video inpainting, as well as beyond-FoV perception tasks, demonstrate that FlowLens achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code and dataset are made publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/FlowLens.
Authors:Shoufa Chen, Peize Sun, Yibing Song, Ping Luo
Abstract:
We propose DiffusionDet, a new framework that formulates object detection as a denoising diffusion process from noisy boxes to object boxes. During the training stage, object boxes diffuse from ground-truth boxes to random distribution, and the model learns to reverse this noising process. In inference, the model refines a set of randomly generated boxes to the output results in a progressive way. Our work possesses an appealing property of flexibility, which enables the dynamic number of boxes and iterative evaluation. The extensive experiments on the standard benchmarks show that DiffusionDet achieves favorable performance compared to previous well-established detectors. For example, DiffusionDet achieves 5.3 AP and 4.8 AP gains when evaluated with more boxes and iteration steps, under a zero-shot transfer setting from COCO to CrowdHuman. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShoufaChen/DiffusionDet.
Authors:Tamás Matuszka, Iván Barton, Ãdám Butykai, Péter Hajas, Dávid Kiss, Domonkos Kovács, Sándor Kunsági-Máté, Péter Lengyel, Gábor Németh, Levente PetÅ, DezsÅ Ribli, Dávid Szeghy, Szabolcs Vajna, Bálint Varga
Abstract:
Autonomous driving is a popular research area within the computer vision research community. Since autonomous vehicles are highly safety-critical, ensuring robustness is essential for real-world deployment. While several public multimodal datasets are accessible, they mainly comprise two sensor modalities (camera, LiDAR) which are not well suited for adverse weather. In addition, they lack far-range annotations, making it harder to train neural networks that are the base of a highway assistant function of an autonomous vehicle. Therefore, we introduce a multimodal dataset for robust autonomous driving with long-range perception. The dataset consists of 176 scenes with synchronized and calibrated LiDAR, camera, and radar sensors covering a 360-degree field of view. The collected data was captured in highway, urban, and suburban areas during daytime, night, and rain and is annotated with 3D bounding boxes with consistent identifiers across frames. Furthermore, we trained unimodal and multimodal baseline models for 3D object detection. Data are available at \url{https://github.com/aimotive/aimotive_dataset}.
Authors:Yifan Lu, Quanhao Li, Baoan Liu, Mehrdad Dianati, Chen Feng, Siheng Chen, Yanfeng Wang
Abstract:
Collaborative 3D object detection exploits information exchange among multiple agents to enhance accuracy of object detection in presence of sensor impairments such as occlusion. However, in practice, pose estimation errors due to imperfect localization would cause spatial message misalignment and significantly reduce the performance of collaboration. To alleviate adverse impacts of pose errors, we propose CoAlign, a novel hybrid collaboration framework that is robust to unknown pose errors. The proposed solution relies on a novel agent-object pose graph modeling to enhance pose consistency among collaborating agents. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-scale data fusion strategy to aggregate intermediate features at multiple spatial resolutions. Comparing with previous works, which require ground-truth pose for training supervision, our proposed CoAlign is more practical since it doesn't require any ground-truth pose supervision in the training and makes no specific assumptions on pose errors. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method is carried out on multiple datasets, certifying that CoAlign significantly reduce relative localization error and achieving the state of art detection performance when pose errors exist. Code are made available for the use of the research community at https://github.com/yifanlu0227/CoAlign.
Authors:Yabin Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Ruihuang Li, Kui Jia, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
Masked autoencoder has demonstrated its effectiveness in self-supervised point cloud learning. Considering that masking is a kind of corruption, in this work we explore a more general denoising autoencoder for point cloud learning (Point-DAE) by investigating more types of corruptions beyond masking. Specifically, we degrade the point cloud with certain corruptions as input, and learn an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct the original point cloud from its corrupted version. Three corruption families (\ie, density/masking, noise, and affine transformation) and a total of fourteen corruption types are investigated with traditional non-Transformer encoders. Besides the popular masking corruption, we identify another effective corruption family, \ie, affine transformation. The affine transformation disturbs all points globally, which is complementary to the masking corruption where some local regions are dropped. We also validate the effectiveness of affine transformation corruption with the Transformer backbones, where we decompose the reconstruction of the complete point cloud into the reconstructions of detailed local patches and rough global shape, alleviating the position leakage problem in the reconstruction. Extensive experiments on tasks of object classification, few-shot learning, robustness testing, part segmentation, and 3D object detection validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/Point-DAE}.
Authors:Qi Zhang, Shanshe Wang, Xinfeng Zhang, Chuanmin Jia, Zhao Wang, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao
Abstract:
Video Coding for Machines (VCM) aims to compress visual signals for machine analysis. However, existing methods only consider a few machines, neglecting the majority. Moreover, the machine's perceptual characteristics are not leveraged effectively, resulting in suboptimal compression efficiency. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces Satisfied Machine Ratio (SMR), a metric that statistically evaluates the perceptual quality of compressed images and videos for machines by aggregating satisfaction scores from them. Each score is derived from machine perceptual differences between original and compressed images. Targeting image classification and object detection tasks, we build two representative machine libraries for SMR annotation and create a large-scale SMR dataset to facilitate SMR studies. We then propose an SMR prediction model based on the correlation between deep feature differences and SMR. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary task to increase the prediction accuracy by predicting the SMR difference between two images in different quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMR models significantly improve compression performance for machines and exhibit robust generalizability on unseen machines, codecs, datasets, and frame types. SMR enables perceptual coding for machines and propels VCM from specificity to generality. Code is available at https://github.com/ywwynm/SMR.
Authors:Yi Yu, Feipeng Da
Abstract:
With the vigorous development of computer vision, oriented object detection has gradually been featured. In this paper, a novel differentiable angle coder named phase-shifting coder (PSC) is proposed to accurately predict the orientation of objects, along with a dual-frequency version (PSCD). By mapping the rotational periodicity of different cycles into the phase of different frequencies, we provide a unified framework for various periodic fuzzy problems caused by rotational symmetry in oriented object detection. Upon such a framework, common problems in oriented object detection such as boundary discontinuity and square-like problems are elegantly solved in a unified form. Visual analysis and experiments on three datasets prove the effectiveness and the potentiality of our approach. When facing scenarios requiring high-quality bounding boxes, the proposed methods are expected to give a competitive performance. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmrotate.
Authors:Siyuan Li, Zedong Wang, Zicheng Liu, Cheng Tan, Haitao Lin, Di Wu, Zhiyuan Chen, Jiangbin Zheng, Stan Z. Li
Abstract:
By contextualizing the kernel as global as possible, Modern ConvNets have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. However, recent progress on multi-order game-theoretic interaction within deep neural networks (DNNs) reveals the representation bottleneck of modern ConvNets, where the expressive interactions have not been effectively encoded with the increased kernel size. To tackle this challenge, we propose a new family of modern ConvNets, dubbed MogaNet, for discriminative visual representation learning in pure ConvNet-based models with favorable complexity-performance trade-offs. MogaNet encapsulates conceptually simple yet effective convolutions and gated aggregation into a compact module, where discriminative features are efficiently gathered and contextualized adaptively. MogaNet exhibits great scalability, impressive efficiency of parameters, and competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art ViTs and ConvNets on ImageNet and various downstream vision benchmarks, including COCO object detection, ADE20K semantic segmentation, 2D&3D human pose estimation, and video prediction. Notably, MogaNet hits 80.0% and 87.8% accuracy with 5.2M and 181M parameters on ImageNet-1K, outperforming ParC-Net and ConvNeXt-L, while saving 59% FLOPs and 17M parameters, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AI/MogaNet.
Authors:Binyi Su, Hua Zhang, Jingzhi Li, Zhong Zhou
Abstract:
Open-set object detection (OSOD) aims to detect the known categories and reject unknown objects in a dynamic world, which has achieved significant attention. However, previous approaches only consider this problem in data-abundant conditions, while neglecting the few-shot scenes. In this paper, we seek a solution for the generalized few-shot open-set object detection (G-FOOD), which aims to avoid detecting unknown classes as known classes with a high confidence score while maintaining the performance of few-shot detection. The main challenge for this task is that few training samples induce the model to overfit on the known classes, resulting in a poor open-set performance. We propose a new G-FOOD algorithm to tackle this issue, named \underline{F}ew-sh\underline{O}t \underline{O}pen-set \underline{D}etector (FOOD), which contains a novel class weight sparsification classifier (CWSC) and a novel unknown decoupling learner (UDL). To prevent over-fitting, CWSC randomly sparses parts of the normalized weights for the logit prediction of all classes, and then decreases the co-adaptability between the class and its neighbors. Alongside, UDL decouples training the unknown class and enables the model to form a compact unknown decision boundary. Thus, the unknown objects can be identified with a confidence probability without any threshold, prototype, or generation. We compare our method with several state-of-the-art OSOD methods in few-shot scenes and observe that our method improves the F-score of unknown classes by 4.80\%-9.08\% across all shots in VOC-COCO dataset settings \footnote[1]{The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/binyisu/food}}.
Authors:Huayi Zhou, Fei Jiang, Jiaxin Si, Hongtao Lu
Abstract:
Human body orientation estimation (HBOE) is widely applied into various applications, including robotics, surveillance, pedestrian analysis and autonomous driving. Although many approaches have been addressing the HBOE problem from specific under-controlled scenes to challenging in-the-wild environments, they assume human instances are already detected and take a well cropped sub-image as the input. This setting is less efficient and prone to errors in real application, such as crowds of people. In the paper, we propose a single-stage end-to-end trainable framework for tackling the HBOE problem with multi-persons. By integrating the prediction of bounding boxes and direction angles in one embedding, our method can jointly estimate the location and orientation of all bodies in one image directly. Our key idea is to integrate the HBOE task into the multi-scale anchor channel predictions of persons for concurrently benefiting from engaged intermediate features. Therefore, our approach can naturally adapt to difficult instances involving low resolution and occlusion as in object detection. We validated the efficiency and effectiveness of our method in the recently presented benchmark MEBOW with extensive experiments. Besides, we completed ambiguous instances ignored by the MEBOW dataset, and provided corresponding weak body-orientation labels to keep the integrity and consistency of it for supporting studies toward multi-persons. Our work is available at https://github.com/hnuzhy/JointBDOE.
Authors:Kirill Vishniakov, Eric Xing, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract:
The recent progress in self-supervised learning has successfully combined Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with Siamese Networks, harnessing the strengths of both methodologies. Nonetheless, certain challenges persist when integrating conventional erase-based masking within Siamese ConvNets. Two primary concerns are: (1) The continuous data processing nature of ConvNets, which doesn't allow for the exclusion of non-informative masked regions, leading to reduced training efficiency compared to ViT architecture; (2) The misalignment between erase-based masking and the contrastive-based objective, distinguishing it from the MIM technique. To address these challenges, this work introduces a novel filling-based masking approach, termed \textbf{MixMask}. The proposed method replaces erased areas with content from a different image, effectively countering the information depletion seen in traditional masking methods. Additionally, we unveil an adaptive loss function that captures the semantics of the newly patched views, ensuring seamless integration within the architectural framework. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments across various datasets and application scenarios. The findings underscore our framework's enhanced performance in areas such as linear probing, semi-supervised and supervised finetuning, object detection and segmentation. Notably, our method surpasses the MSCN, establishing MixMask as a more advantageous masking solution for Siamese ConvNets. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/kirill-vish/MixMask.
Authors:Wei Dai, Daniel Berleant
Abstract:
Image quality is important, and can affect overall performance in image processing and computer vision as well as for numerous other reasons. Image quality assessment (IQA) is consequently a vital task in different applications from aerial photography interpretation to object detection to medical image analysis. In previous research, the BRISQUE algorithm and the PSNR algorithm were evaluated with high resolution (atleast 512x384 pixels), but relatively small image sets (no more than 4,744 images). However, scientists have not evaluated IQA algorithms on low resolution (no more than 32x32 pixels), multi-perturbation, big image sets (for example, tleast 60,000 different images not counting their perturbations). This study explores these two IQA algorithms through experimental investigation. We first chose two deep learning image sets, CIFAR-10 and MNIST. Then, we added 68 perturbations that add noise to the images in specific sequences and noise intensities. In addition, we tracked the performance outputs of the two IQA algorithms with singly and multiply noised images. After quantitatively analyzing experimental results, we report the limitations of the two IQAs with these noised CIFAR-10 and MNIST image sets. We also explain three potential root causes for performance degradation. These findings point out weaknesses of the two IQA algorithms. The research results provide guidance to scientists and engineers developing accurate, robust IQA algorithms. All source codes, related image sets, and figures are shared on the website (https://github.com/caperock/imagequality) to support future scientific and industrial projects.
Authors:Runsheng Xu, Jinlong Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Hongkai Yu, Jiaqi Ma
Abstract:
Existing multi-agent perception algorithms usually select to share deep neural features extracted from raw sensing data between agents, achieving a trade-off between accuracy and communication bandwidth limit. However, these methods assume all agents have identical neural networks, which might not be practical in the real world. The transmitted features can have a large domain gap when the models differ, leading to a dramatic performance drop in multi-agent perception. In this paper, we propose the first lightweight framework to bridge such domain gaps for multi-agent perception, which can be a plug-in module for most existing systems while maintaining confidentiality. Our framework consists of a learnable feature resizer to align features in multiple dimensions and a sparse cross-domain transformer for domain adaption. Extensive experiments on the public multi-agent perception dataset V2XSet have demonstrated that our method can effectively bridge the gap for features from different domains and outperform other baseline methods significantly by at least 8% for point-cloud-based 3D object detection.
Authors:Xue Yang, Gefan Zhang, Wentong Li, Xuehui Wang, Yue Zhou, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection. This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes. The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate}{MMRotate} and Jittor-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor}{JDet}.
Authors:Wuti Xiong
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a study of the cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) benchmark, consisting of image data from a diverse data domain. On the proposed benchmark, we evaluate state-of-art FSOD approaches, including meta-learning FSOD approaches and fine-tuning FSOD approaches. The results show that these methods tend to fall, and even underperform the naive fine-tuning model. We analyze the reasons for their failure and introduce a strong baseline that uses a mutually-beneficial manner to alleviate the overfitting problem. Our approach is remarkably superior to existing approaches by significant margins (2.0\% on average) on the proposed benchmark. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/FSOD/CD-FSOD}.
Authors:Yunhao Du, Zihang Liu, Fei Su
Abstract:
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has rapidly progressed in recent years. Existing works tend to design a single tracking algorithm to perform both detection and association. Though ensemble learning has been exploited in many tasks, i.e, classification and object detection, it hasn't been studied in the MOT task, which is mainly caused by its complexity and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective ensemble method for MOT, called EnsembleMOT, which merges multiple tracking results from various trackers with spatio-temporal constraints. Meanwhile, several post-processing procedures are applied to filter out abnormal results. Our method is model-independent and doesn't need the learning procedure. What's more, it can easily work in conjunction with other algorithms, e.g., tracklets interpolation. Experiments on the MOT17 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/EnsembleMOT.
Authors:Fuwen Tan, Fatemeh Saleh, Brais Martinez
Abstract:
Despite the impressive progress of self-supervised learning (SSL), its applicability to low-compute networks has received limited attention. Reported performance has trailed behind standard supervised pre-training by a large margin, barring self-supervised learning from making an impact on models that are deployed on device. Most prior works attribute this poor performance to the capacity bottleneck of the low-compute networks and opt to bypass the problem through the use of knowledge distillation (KD). In this work, we revisit SSL for efficient neural networks, taking a closer at what are the detrimental factors causing the practical limitations, and whether they are intrinsic to the self-supervised low-compute setting. We find that, contrary to accepted knowledge, there is no intrinsic architectural bottleneck, we diagnose that the performance bottleneck is related to the model complexity vs regularization strength trade-off. In particular, we start by empirically observing that the use of local views can have a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of the SSL methods. This hints at view sampling being one of the performance bottlenecks for SSL on low-capacity networks. We hypothesize that the view sampling strategy for large neural networks, which requires matching views in very diverse spatial scales and contexts, is too demanding for low-capacity architectures. We systematize the design of the view sampling mechanism, leading to a new training methodology that consistently improves the performance across different SSL methods (e.g. MoCo-v2, SwAV, DINO), different low-size networks (e.g. MobileNetV2, ResNet18, ResNet34, ViT-Ti), and different tasks (linear probe, object detection, instance segmentation and semi-supervised learning). Our best models establish a new state-of-the-art for SSL methods on low-compute networks despite not using a KD loss term.
Authors:Yu Quan, Dong Zhang, Liyan Zhang, Jinhui Tang
Abstract:
Visual feature pyramid has shown its superiority in both effectiveness and efficiency in a wide range of applications. However, the existing methods exorbitantly concentrate on the inter-layer feature interactions but ignore the intra-layer feature regulations, which are empirically proved beneficial. Although some methods try to learn a compact intra-layer feature representation with the help of the attention mechanism or the vision transformer, they ignore the neglected corner regions that are important for dense prediction tasks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Centralized Feature Pyramid (CFP) for object detection, which is based on a globally explicit centralized feature regulation. Specifically, we first propose a spatial explicit visual center scheme, where a lightweight MLP is used to capture the globally long-range dependencies and a parallel learnable visual center mechanism is used to capture the local corner regions of the input images. Based on this, we then propose a globally centralized regulation for the commonly-used feature pyramid in a top-down fashion, where the explicit visual center information obtained from the deepest intra-layer feature is used to regulate frontal shallow features. Compared to the existing feature pyramids, CFP not only has the ability to capture the global long-range dependencies, but also efficiently obtain an all-round yet discriminative feature representation. Experimental results on the challenging MS-COCO validate that our proposed CFP can achieve the consistent performance gains on the state-of-the-art YOLOv5 and YOLOX object detection baselines.
Authors:Ali Hassani, Humphrey Shi
Abstract:
Transformers are quickly becoming one of the most heavily applied deep learning architectures across modalities, domains, and tasks. In vision, on top of ongoing efforts into plain transformers, hierarchical transformers have also gained significant attention, thanks to their performance and easy integration into existing frameworks. These models typically employ localized attention mechanisms, such as the sliding-window Neighborhood Attention (NA) or Swin Transformer's Shifted Window Self Attention. While effective at reducing self attention's quadratic complexity, local attention weakens two of the most desirable properties of self attention: long range inter-dependency modeling, and global receptive field. In this paper, we introduce Dilated Neighborhood Attention (DiNA), a natural, flexible and efficient extension to NA that can capture more global context and expand receptive fields exponentially at no additional cost. NA's local attention and DiNA's sparse global attention complement each other, and therefore we introduce Dilated Neighborhood Attention Transformer (DiNAT), a new hierarchical vision transformer built upon both. DiNAT variants enjoy significant improvements over strong baselines such as NAT, Swin, and ConvNeXt. Our large model is faster and ahead of its Swin counterpart by 1.6% box AP in COCO object detection, 1.4% mask AP in COCO instance segmentation, and 1.4% mIoU in ADE20K semantic segmentation. Paired with new frameworks, our large variant is the new state of the art panoptic segmentation model on COCO (58.5 PQ) and ADE20K (49.4 PQ), and instance segmentation model on Cityscapes (45.1 AP) and ADE20K (35.4 AP) (no extra data). It also matches the state of the art specialized semantic segmentation models on ADE20K (58.1 mIoU), and ranks second on Cityscapes (84.5 mIoU) (no extra data).
Authors:Ching-Yu Tseng, Yi-Rong Chen, Hsin-Ying Lee, Tsung-Han Wu, Wen-Chin Chen, Winston H. Hsu
Abstract:
To achieve accurate 3D object detection at a low cost for autonomous driving, many multi-camera methods have been proposed and solved the occlusion problem of monocular approaches. However, due to the lack of accurate estimated depth, existing multi-camera methods often generate multiple bounding boxes along a ray of depth direction for difficult small objects such as pedestrians, resulting in an extremely low recall. Furthermore, directly applying depth prediction modules to existing multi-camera methods, generally composed of large network architectures, cannot meet the real-time requirements of self-driving applications. To address these issues, we propose Cross-view and Depth-guided Transformers for 3D Object Detection, CrossDTR. First, our lightweight depth predictor is designed to produce precise object-wise sparse depth maps and low-dimensional depth embeddings without extra depth datasets during supervision. Second, a cross-view depth-guided transformer is developed to fuse the depth embeddings as well as image features from cameras of different views and generate 3D bounding boxes. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our method hugely surpassed existing multi-camera methods by 10 percent in pedestrian detection and about 3 percent in overall mAP and NDS metrics. Also, computational analyses showed that our method is 5 times faster than prior approaches. Our codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/sty61010/CrossDTR.
Authors:Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie, Zhenman Fang, Yunsong Li, Qian Du
Abstract:
Accurately and timely detecting multiscale small objects that contain tens of pixels from remote sensing images (RSI) remains challenging. Most of the existing solutions primarily design complex deep neural networks to learn strong feature representations for objects separated from the background, which often results in a heavy computation burden. In this article, we propose an accurate yet fast object detection method for RSI, named SuperYOLO, which fuses multimodal data and performs high-resolution (HR) object detection on multiscale objects by utilizing the assisted super resolution (SR) learning and considering both the detection accuracy and computation cost. First, we utilize a symmetric compact multimodal fusion (MF) to extract supplementary information from various data for improving small object detection in RSI. Furthermore, we design a simple and flexible SR branch to learn HR feature representations that can discriminate small objects from vast backgrounds with low-resolution (LR) input, thus further improving the detection accuracy. Moreover, to avoid introducing additional computation, the SR branch is discarded in the inference stage, and the computation of the network model is reduced due to the LR input. Experimental results show that, on the widely used VEDAI RS dataset, SuperYOLO achieves an accuracy of 75.09% (in terms of mAP50 ), which is more than 10% higher than the SOTA large models, such as YOLOv5l, YOLOv5x, and RS designed YOLOrs. Meanwhile, the parameter size and GFLOPs of SuperYOLO are about 18 times and 3.8 times less than YOLOv5x. Our proposed model shows a favorable accuracy and speed tradeoff compared to the state-of-the-art models. The code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/icey-zhang/SuperYOLO.
Authors:Edward Ayers, Jonathan Sadeghi, John Redford, Romain Mueller, Puneet K. Dokania
Abstract:
There is a longstanding interest in capturing the error behaviour of object detectors by finding images where their performance is likely to be unsatisfactory. In real-world applications such as autonomous driving, it is also crucial to characterise potential failures beyond simple requirements of detection performance. For example, a missed detection of a pedestrian close to an ego vehicle will generally require closer inspection than a missed detection of a car in the distance. The problem of predicting such potential failures at test time has largely been overlooked in the literature and conventional approaches based on detection uncertainty fall short in that they are agnostic to such fine-grained characterisation of errors. In this work, we propose to reformulate the problem of finding "hard" images as a query-based hard image retrieval task, where queries are specific definitions of "hardness", and offer a simple and intuitive method that can solve this task for a large family of queries. Our method is entirely post-hoc, does not require ground-truth annotations, is independent of the choice of a detector, and relies on an efficient Monte Carlo estimation that uses a simple stochastic model in place of the ground-truth. We show experimentally that it can be applied successfully to a wide variety of queries for which it can reliably identify hard images for a given detector without any labelled data. We provide results on ranking and classification tasks using the widely used RetinaNet, Faster-RCNN, Mask-RCNN, and Cascade Mask-RCNN object detectors. The code for this project is available at https://github.com/fiveai/hardest.
Authors:Jiawei Liang, Siyuan Liang, Aishan Liu, Ke Ma, Jingzhi Li, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
Knowledge Distillation (KD) for object detection aims to train a compact detector by transferring knowledge from a teacher model. Since the teacher model perceives data in a way different from humans, existing KD methods only distill knowledge that is consistent with labels annotated by human expert while neglecting knowledge that is not consistent with human perception, which results in insufficient distillation and sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose inconsistent knowledge distillation (IKD), which aims to distill knowledge inherent in the teacher model's counter-intuitive perceptions. We start by considering the teacher model's counter-intuitive perceptions of frequency and non-robust features. Unlike previous works that exploit fine-grained features or introduce additional regularizations, we extract inconsistent knowledge by providing diverse input using data augmentation. Specifically, we propose a sample-specific data augmentation to transfer the teacher model's ability in capturing distinct frequency components and suggest an adversarial feature augmentation to extract the teacher model's perceptions of non-robust features in the data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method which outperforms state-of-the-art KD baselines on one-stage, two-stage and anchor-free object detectors (at most +1.0 mAP). Our codes will be made available at \url{https://github.com/JWLiang007/IKD.git}.
Authors:Nicholas Gray, Megan Moraes, Jiang Bian, Alex Wang, Allen Tian, Kurt Wilson, Yan Huang, Haoyi Xiong, Zhishan Guo
Abstract:
Real-time machine learning object detection algorithms are often found within autonomous vehicle technology and depend on quality datasets. It is essential that these algorithms work correctly in everyday conditions as well as under strong sun glare. Reports indicate glare is one of the two most prominent environment-related reasons for crashes. However, existing datasets, such as the Laboratory for Intelligent & Safe Automobiles Traffic Sign (LISA) Dataset and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark, do not reflect the existence of sun glare at all. This paper presents the GLARE (GLARE is available at: https://github.com/NicholasCG/GLARE_Dataset ) traffic sign dataset: a collection of images with U.S-based traffic signs under heavy visual interference by sunlight. GLARE contains 2,157 images of traffic signs with sun glare, pulled from 33 videos of dashcam footage of roads in the United States. It provides an essential enrichment to the widely used LISA Traffic Sign dataset. Our experimental study shows that although several state-of-the-art baseline architectures have demonstrated good performance on traffic sign detection in conditions without sun glare in the past, they performed poorly when tested against GLARE (e.g., average mAP0.5:0.95 of 19.4). We also notice that current architectures have better detection when trained on images of traffic signs in sun glare performance (e.g., average mAP0.5:0.95 of 39.6), and perform best when trained on a mixture of conditions (e.g., average mAP0.5:0.95 of 42.3).
Authors:Zhuyun Zhou, Zongwei Wu, Rémi Boutteau, Fan Yang, Cédric Demonceaux, Dominique Ginhac
Abstract:
Moving Object Detection (MOD) is a critical vision task for successfully achieving safe autonomous driving. Despite plausible results of deep learning methods, most existing approaches are only frame-based and may fail to reach reasonable performance when dealing with dynamic traffic participants. Recent advances in sensor technologies, especially the Event camera, can naturally complement the conventional camera approach to better model moving objects. However, event-based works often adopt a pre-defined time window for event representation, and simply integrate it to estimate image intensities from events, neglecting much of the rich temporal information from the available asynchronous events. Therefore, from a new perspective, we propose RENet, a novel RGB-Event fusion Network, that jointly exploits the two complementary modalities to achieve more robust MOD under challenging scenarios for autonomous driving. Specifically, we first design a temporal multi-scale aggregation module to fully leverage event frames from both the RGB exposure time and larger intervals. Then we introduce a bi-directional fusion module to attentively calibrate and fuse multi-modal features. To evaluate the performance of our network, we carefully select and annotate a sub-MOD dataset from the commonly used DSEC dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art RGB-Event fusion alternatives. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/ZZY-Zhou/RENet.
Authors:Thang Vu, Kookhoi Kim, Tung M. Luu, Thanh Nguyen, Junyeong Kim, Chang D. Yoo
Abstract:
This paper considers a network referred to as SoftGroup for accurate and scalable 3D instance segmentation. Existing state-of-the-art methods produce hard semantic predictions followed by grouping instance segmentation results. Unfortunately, errors stemming from hard decisions propagate into the grouping, resulting in poor overlap between predicted instances and ground truth and substantial false positives. To address the abovementioned problems, SoftGroup allows each point to be associated with multiple classes to mitigate the uncertainty stemming from semantic prediction. It also suppresses false positive instances by learning to categorize them as background. Regarding scalability, the existing fast methods require computational time on the order of tens of seconds on large-scale scenes, which is unsatisfactory and far from applicable for real-time. Our finding is that the $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$-NN) module, which serves as the prerequisite of grouping, introduces a computational bottleneck. SoftGroup is extended to resolve this computational bottleneck, referred to as SoftGroup++. The proposed SoftGroup++ reduces time complexity with octree $k$-NN and reduces search space with class-aware pyramid scaling and late devoxelization. Experimental results on various indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate the efficacy and generality of the proposed SoftGroup and SoftGroup++. Their performances surpass the best-performing baseline by a large margin (6\% $\sim$ 16\%) in terms of AP$_{50}$. On datasets with large-scale scenes, SoftGroup++ achieves a 6$\times$ speed boost on average compared to SoftGroup. Furthermore, SoftGroup can be extended to perform object detection and panoptic segmentation with nontrivial improvements over existing methods. The source code and trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/thangvubk/SoftGroup}.
Authors:Zhikai Li, Mengjuan Chen, Junrui Xiao, Qingyi Gu
Abstract:
Data-free quantization can potentially address data privacy and security concerns in model compression, and thus has been widely investigated. Recently, PSAQ-ViT designs a relative value metric, patch similarity, to generate data from pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs), achieving the first attempt at data-free quantization for ViTs. In this paper, we propose PSAQ-ViT V2, a more accurate and general data-free quantization framework for ViTs, built on top of PSAQ-ViT. More specifically, following the patch similarity metric in PSAQ-ViT, we introduce an adaptive teacher-student strategy, which facilitates the constant cyclic evolution of the generated samples and the quantized model (student) in a competitive and interactive fashion under the supervision of the full-precision model (teacher), thus significantly improving the accuracy of the quantized model. Moreover, without the auxiliary category guidance, we employ the task- and model-independent prior information, making the general-purpose scheme compatible with a broad range of vision tasks and models. Extensive experiments are conducted on various models on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, and PSAQ-ViT V2, with the naive quantization strategy and without access to real-world data, consistently achieves competitive results, showing potential as a powerful baseline on data-free quantization for ViTs. For instance, with Swin-S as the (backbone) model, 8-bit quantization reaches 82.13 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, 50.9 box AP and 44.1 mask AP on COCO, and 47.2 mIoU on ADE20K. We hope that accurate and general PSAQ-ViT V2 can serve as a potential and practice solution in real-world applications involving sensitive data. Code is released and merged at: https://github.com/zkkli/PSAQ-ViT.
Authors:Xingbin Liu, Jinghao Zhou, Tao Kong, Xianming Lin, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Masked autoencoders have become popular training paradigms for self-supervised visual representation learning. These models randomly mask a portion of the input and reconstruct the masked portion according to the target representations. In this paper, we first show that a careful choice of the target representation is unnecessary for learning good representations, since different targets tend to derive similarly behaved models. Driven by this observation, we propose a multi-stage masked distillation pipeline and use a randomly initialized model as the teacher, enabling us to effectively train high-capacity models without any efforts to carefully design target representations. Interestingly, we further explore using teachers of larger capacity, obtaining distilled students with remarkable transferring ability. On different tasks of classification, transfer learning, object detection, and semantic segmentation, the proposed method to perform masked knowledge distillation with bootstrapped teachers (dBOT) outperforms previous self-supervised methods by nontrivial margins. We hope our findings, as well as the proposed method, could motivate people to rethink the roles of target representations in pre-training masked autoencoders.The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/liuxingbin/dbot.
Authors:Yang Jiao, Zequn Jie, Shaoxiang Chen, Jingjing Chen, Lin Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Fusing LiDAR and camera information is essential for achieving accurate and reliable 3D object detection in autonomous driving systems. This is challenging due to the difficulty of combining multi-granularity geometric and semantic features from two drastically different modalities. Recent approaches aim at exploring the semantic densities of camera features through lifting points in 2D camera images (referred to as seeds) into 3D space, and then incorporate 2D semantics via cross-modal interaction or fusion techniques. However, depth information is under-investigated in these approaches when lifting points into 3D space, thus 2D semantics can not be reliably fused with 3D points. Moreover, their multi-modal fusion strategy, which is implemented as concatenation or attention, either can not effectively fuse 2D and 3D information or is unable to perform fine-grained interactions in the voxel space. To this end, we propose a novel framework with better utilization of the depth information and fine-grained cross-modal interaction between LiDAR and camera, which consists of two important components. First, a Multi-Depth Unprojection (MDU) method with depth-aware designs is used to enhance the depth quality of the lifted points at each interaction level. Second, a Gated Modality-Aware Convolution (GMA-Conv) block is applied to modulate voxels involved with the camera modality in a fine-grained manner and then aggregate multi-modal features into a unified space. Together they provide the detection head with more comprehensive features from LiDAR and camera. On the nuScenes test benchmark, our proposed method, abbreviated as MSMDFusion, achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results with 71.5% mAP and 74.0% NDS, and strong tracking results with 74.0% AMOTA without using test-time-augmentation and ensemble techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/SxJyJay/MSMDFusion.
Authors:Xinjiang Wang, Xingyi Yang, Shilong Zhang, Yijiang Li, Litong Feng, Shijie Fang, Chengqi Lyu, Kai Chen, Wayne Zhang
Abstract:
In this study, we dive deep into the inconsistency of pseudo targets in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). Our core observation is that the oscillating pseudo-targets undermine the training of an accurate detector. It injects noise into the student's training, leading to severe overfitting problems. Therefore, we propose a systematic solution, termed ConsistentTeacher, to reduce the inconsistency. First, adaptive anchor assignment~(ASA) substitutes the static IoU-based strategy, which enables the student network to be resistant to noisy pseudo-bounding boxes. Then we calibrate the subtask predictions by designing a 3D feature alignment module~(FAM-3D). It allows each classification feature to adaptively query the optimal feature vector for the regression task at arbitrary scales and locations. Lastly, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) dynamically revises the score threshold of pseudo-bboxes, which stabilizes the number of ground truths at an early stage and remedies the unreliable supervision signal during training. ConsistentTeacher provides strong results on a large range of SSOD evaluations. It achieves 40.0 mAP with ResNet-50 backbone given only 10% of annotated MS-COCO data, which surpasses previous baselines using pseudo labels by around 3 mAP. When trained on fully annotated MS-COCO with additional unlabeled data, the performance further increases to 47.7 mAP. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Adamdad/ConsistentTeacher}.
Authors:Ziheng Wu, Xinyi Zou, Wenmeng Zhou, Jun Huang
Abstract:
We develop an all-in-one computer vision toolbox named EasyCV to facilitate the use of various SOTA computer vision methods. Recently, we add YOLOX-PAI, an improved version of YOLOX, into EasyCV. We conduct ablation studies to investigate the influence of some detection methods on YOLOX. We also provide an easy use for PAI-Blade which is used to accelerate the inference process based on BladeDISC and TensorRT. Finally, we receive 42.8 mAP on COCO dateset within 1.0 ms on a single NVIDIA V100 GPU, which is a bit faster than YOLOv6. A simple but efficient predictor api is also designed in EasyCV to conduct end2end object detection. Codes and models are now available at: https://github.com/alibaba/EasyCV.
Authors:Bingde Liu, Chang Xu, Wen Yang, Huai Yu, Lei Yu
Abstract:
In this work, we propose a motion robust and high-speed detection pipeline which better leverages the event data. First, we design an event stream representation called temporal active focus (TAF), which efficiently utilizes the spatial-temporal asynchronous event stream, constructing event tensors robust to object motions. Then, we propose a module called the bifurcated folding module (BFM), which encodes the rich temporal information in the TAF tensor at the input layer of the detector. Following this, we design a high-speed lightweight detector called agile event detector (AED) plus a simple but effective data augmentation method, to enhance the detection accuracy and reduce the model's parameter. Experiments on two typical real-scene event camera object detection datasets show that our method is competitive in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and the number of parameters. By classifying objects into multiple motion levels based on the optical flow density metric, we further illustrated the robustness of our method for objects with different velocities relative to the camera. The codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/HarmoniaLeo/FRLW-EvD .
Authors:Yuheng Shi, Naiyan Wang, Xiaojie Guo
Abstract:
Video object detection (VID) is challenging because of the high variation of object appearance as well as the diverse deterioration in some frames. On the positive side, the detection in a certain frame of a video, compared with that in a still image, can draw support from other frames. Hence, how to aggregate features across different frames is pivotal to VID problem. Most of existing aggregation algorithms are customized for two-stage detectors. However, these detectors are usually computationally expensive due to their two-stage nature. This work proposes a simple yet effective strategy to address the above concerns, which costs marginal overheads with significant gains in accuracy. Concretely, different from traditional two-stage pipeline, we select important regions after the one-stage detection to avoid processing massive low-quality candidates. Besides, we evaluate the relationship between a target frame and reference frames to guide the aggregation. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies to verify the efficacy of our design, and reveal its superiority over other state-of-the-art VID approaches in both effectiveness and efficiency. Our YOLOX-based model can achieve promising performance (\emph{e.g.}, 87.5\% AP50 at over 30 FPS on the ImageNet VID dataset on a single 2080Ti GPU), making it attractive for large-scale or real-time applications. The implementation is simple, we have made the demo codes and models available at \url{https://github.com/YuHengsss/YOLOV}.
Authors:Yue Hu, Shaoheng Fang, Weidi Xie, Siheng Chen
Abstract:
Drones equipped with cameras can significantly enhance human ability to perceive the world because of their remarkable maneuverability in 3D space. Ironically, object detection for drones has always been conducted in the 2D image space, which fundamentally limits their ability to understand 3D scenes. Furthermore, existing 3D object detection methods developed for autonomous driving cannot be directly applied to drones due to the lack of deformation modeling, which is essential for the distant aerial perspective with sensitive distortion and small objects. To fill the gap, this work proposes a dual-view detection system named DVDET to achieve aerial monocular object detection in both the 2D image space and the 3D physical space. To address the severe view deformation issue, we propose a novel trainable geo-deformable transformation module that can properly warp information from the drone's perspective to the BEV. Compared to the monocular methods for cars, our transformation includes a learnable deformable network for explicitly revising the severe deviation. To address the dataset challenge, we propose a new large-scale simulation dataset named AM3D-Sim, generated by the co-simulation of AirSIM and CARLA, and a new real-world aerial dataset named AM3D-Real, collected by DJI Matrice 300 RTK, in both datasets, high-quality annotations for 3D object detection are provided. Extensive experiments show that i) aerial monocular 3D object detection is feasible; ii) the model pre-trained on the simulation dataset benefits real-world performance, and iii) DVDET also benefits monocular 3D object detection for cars. To encourage more researchers to investigate this area, we will release the dataset and related code in https://github.com/PhyllisH/DVDET.
Authors:Chenjie Cao, Qiaole Dong, Yanwei Fu
Abstract:
Many recent inpainting works have achieved impressive results by leveraging Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to model various prior information for image restoration. Unfortunately, the performance of these methods is largely limited by the representation ability of vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) backbones.On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViT) with self-supervised pre-training have shown great potential for many visual recognition and object detection tasks. A natural question is whether the inpainting task can be greatly benefited from the ViT backbone? However, it is nontrivial to directly replace the new backbones in inpainting networks, as the inpainting is an inverse problem fundamentally different from the recognition tasks. To this end, this paper incorporates the pre-training based Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) into the inpainting model, which enjoys richer informative priors to enhance the inpainting process. Moreover, we propose to use attention priors from MAE to make the inpainting model learn more long-distance dependencies between masked and unmasked regions. Sufficient ablations have been discussed about the inpainting and the self-supervised pre-training models in this paper. Besides, experiments on both Places2 and FFHQ demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Codes and pre-trained models are released in https://github.com/ewrfcas/MAE-FAR.
Authors:Gongjie Zhang, Zhipeng Luo, Jiaxing Huang, Shijian Lu, Eric P. Xing
Abstract:
The recently proposed DEtection TRansformer (DETR) has established a fully end-to-end paradigm for object detection. However, DETR suffers from slow training convergence, which hinders its applicability to various detection tasks. We observe that DETR's slow convergence is largely attributed to the difficulty in matching object queries to relevant regions due to the unaligned semantics between object queries and encoded image features. With this observation, we design Semantic-Aligned-Matching DETR++ (SAM-DETR++) to accelerate DETR's convergence and improve detection performance. The core of SAM-DETR++ is a plug-and-play module that projects object queries and encoded image features into the same feature embedding space, where each object query can be easily matched to relevant regions with similar semantics. Besides, SAM-DETR++ searches for multiple representative keypoints and exploits their features for semantic-aligned matching with enhanced representation capacity. Furthermore, SAM-DETR++ can effectively fuse multi-scale features in a coarse-to-fine manner on the basis of the designed semantic-aligned matching. Extensive experiments show that the proposed SAM-DETR++ achieves superior convergence speed and competitive detection accuracy. Additionally, as a plug-and-play method, SAM-DETR++ can complement existing DETR convergence solutions with even better performance, achieving 44.8% AP with merely 12 training epochs and 49.1% AP with 50 training epochs on COCO val2017 with ResNet-50. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZhangGongjie/SAM-DETR .
Authors:Zhicheng Huang, Xiaojie Jin, Chengze Lu, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng, Dongmei Fu, Xiaohui Shen, Jiashi Feng
Abstract:
Masked image modeling (MIM) has achieved promising results on various vision tasks. However, the limited discriminability of learned representation manifests there is still plenty to go for making a stronger vision learner. Towards this goal, we propose Contrastive Masked Autoencoders (CMAE), a new self-supervised pre-training method for learning more comprehensive and capable vision representations. By elaboratively unifying contrastive learning (CL) and masked image model (MIM) through novel designs, CMAE leverages their respective advantages and learns representations with both strong instance discriminability and local perceptibility. Specifically, CMAE consists of two branches where the online branch is an asymmetric encoder-decoder and the momentum branch is a momentum updated encoder. During training, the online encoder reconstructs original images from latent representations of masked images to learn holistic features. The momentum encoder, fed with the full images, enhances the feature discriminability via contrastive learning with its online counterpart. To make CL compatible with MIM, CMAE introduces two new components, i.e. pixel shifting for generating plausible positive views and feature decoder for complementing features of contrastive pairs. Thanks to these novel designs, CMAE effectively improves the representation quality and transfer performance over its MIM counterpart. CMAE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on highly competitive benchmarks of image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection. Notably, CMAE-Base achieves $85.3\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and $52.5\%$ mIoU on ADE20k, surpassing previous best results by $0.7\%$ and $1.8\%$ respectively. The source code is publicly accessible at \url{https://github.com/ZhichengHuang/CMAE}.
Authors:Ding Jia, Yuhui Yuan, Haodi He, Xiaopei Wu, Haojun Yu, Weihong Lin, Lei Sun, Chao Zhang, Han Hu
Abstract:
One-to-one set matching is a key design for DETR to establish its end-to-end capability, so that object detection does not require a hand-crafted NMS (non-maximum suppression) to remove duplicate detections. This end-to-end signature is important for the versatility of DETR, and it has been generalized to broader vision tasks. However, we note that there are few queries assigned as positive samples and the one-to-one set matching significantly reduces the training efficacy of positive samples. We propose a simple yet effective method based on a hybrid matching scheme that combines the original one-to-one matching branch with an auxiliary one-to-many matching branch during training. Our hybrid strategy has been shown to significantly improve accuracy. In inference, only the original one-to-one match branch is used, thus maintaining the end-to-end merit and the same inference efficiency of DETR. The method is named H-DETR, and it shows that a wide range of representative DETR methods can be consistently improved across a wide range of visual tasks, including DeformableDETR, PETRv2, PETR, and TransTrack, among others. The code is available at: https://github.com/HDETR
Authors:Tai Wang, Jiangmiao Pang, Dahua Lin
Abstract:
Perceiving 3D objects from monocular inputs is crucial for robotic systems, given its economy compared to multi-sensor settings. It is notably difficult as a single image can not provide any clues for predicting absolute depth values. Motivated by binocular methods for 3D object detection, we take advantage of the strong geometry structure provided by camera ego-motion for accurate object depth estimation and detection. We first make a theoretical analysis on this general two-view case and notice two challenges: 1) Cumulative errors from multiple estimations that make the direct prediction intractable; 2) Inherent dilemmas caused by static cameras and matching ambiguity. Accordingly, we establish the stereo correspondence with a geometry-aware cost volume as the alternative for depth estimation and further compensate it with monocular understanding to address the second problem. Our framework, named Depth from Motion (DfM), then uses the established geometry to lift 2D image features to the 3D space and detects 3D objects thereon. We also present a pose-free DfM to make it usable when the camera pose is unavailable. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the KITTI benchmark. Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses also validate our theoretical conclusions. The code will be released at https://github.com/Tai-Wang/Depth-from-Motion.
Authors:Jinrong Yang, Lin Song, Songtao Liu, Weixin Mao, Zeming Li, Xiaoping Li, Hongbin Sun, Jian Sun, Nanning Zheng
Abstract:
Many point-based 3D detectors adopt point-feature sampling strategies to drop some points for efficient inference. These strategies are typically based on fixed and handcrafted rules, making it difficult to handle complicated scenes. Different from them, we propose a Dynamic Ball Query (DBQ) network to adaptively select a subset of input points according to the input features, and assign the feature transform with a suitable receptive field for each selected point. It can be embedded into some state-of-the-art 3D detectors and trained in an end-to-end manner, which significantly reduces the computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can increase the inference speed by 30%-100% on KITTI, Waymo, and ONCE datasets. Specifically, the inference speed of our detector can reach 162 FPS on KITTI scene, and 30 FPS on Waymo and ONCE scenes without performance degradation. Due to skipping the redundant points, some evaluation metrics show significant improvements. Codes will be released at https://github.com/yancie-yjr/DBQ-SSD.
Authors:Bastian Wittmann, Fernando Navarro, Suprosanna Shit, Bjoern Menze
Abstract:
Detection Transformers represent end-to-end object detection approaches based on a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture, exploiting the attention mechanism for global relation modeling. Although Detection Transformers deliver results on par with or even superior to their highly optimized CNN-based counterparts operating on 2D natural images, their success is closely coupled to access to a vast amount of training data. This, however, restricts the feasibility of employing Detection Transformers in the medical domain, as access to annotated data is typically limited. To tackle this issue and facilitate the advent of medical Detection Transformers, we propose a novel Detection Transformer for 3D anatomical structure detection, dubbed Focused Decoder. Focused Decoder leverages information from an anatomical region atlas to simultaneously deploy query anchors and restrict the cross-attention's field of view to regions of interest, which allows for a precise focus on relevant anatomical structures. We evaluate our proposed approach on two publicly available CT datasets and demonstrate that Focused Decoder not only provides strong detection results and thus alleviates the need for a vast amount of annotated data but also exhibits exceptional and highly intuitive explainability of results via attention weights. Our code is available at https://github.com/bwittmann/transoar.
Authors:Tyler LaBonte, Yale Song, Xin Wang, Vibhav Vineet, Neel Joshi
Abstract:
A critical object detection task is finetuning an existing model to detect novel objects, but the standard workflow requires bounding box annotations which are time-consuming and expensive to collect. Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) offers an appealing alternative, where object detectors can be trained using image-level labels. However, the practical application of current WSOD models is limited, as they only operate at small data scales and require multiple rounds of training and refinement. To address this, we propose the Weakly Supervised Detection Transformer, which enables efficient knowledge transfer from a large-scale pretraining dataset to WSOD finetuning on hundreds of novel objects. Additionally, we leverage pretrained knowledge to improve the multiple instance learning (MIL) framework often used in WSOD methods. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on large-scale novel object detection datasets, and our scaling study reveals that class quantity is more important than image quantity for WSOD pretraining. The code is available at https://github.com/tmlabonte/weakly-supervised-DETR.
Authors:Qihang Yu, Huiyu Wang, Siyuan Qiao, Maxwell Collins, Yukun Zhu, Hartwig Adam, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen
Abstract:
The rise of transformers in vision tasks not only advances network backbone designs, but also starts a brand-new page to achieve end-to-end image recognition (e.g., object detection and panoptic segmentation). Originated from Natural Language Processing (NLP), transformer architectures, consisting of self-attention and cross-attention, effectively learn long-range interactions between elements in a sequence. However, we observe that most existing transformer-based vision models simply borrow the idea from NLP, neglecting the crucial difference between languages and images, particularly the extremely large sequence length of spatially flattened pixel features. This subsequently impedes the learning in cross-attention between pixel features and object queries. In this paper, we rethink the relationship between pixels and object queries and propose to reformulate the cross-attention learning as a clustering process. Inspired by the traditional k-means clustering algorithm, we develop a k-means Mask Xformer (kMaX-DeepLab) for segmentation tasks, which not only improves the state-of-the-art, but also enjoys a simple and elegant design. As a result, our kMaX-DeepLab achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on COCO val set with 58.0% PQ, Cityscapes val set with 68.4% PQ, 44.0% AP, and 83.5% mIoU, and ADE20K val set with 50.9% PQ and 55.2% mIoU without test-time augmentation or external dataset. We hope our work can shed some light on designing transformers tailored for vision tasks. TensorFlow code and models are available at https://github.com/google-research/deeplab2 A PyTorch re-implementation is also available at https://github.com/bytedance/kmax-deeplab
Authors:Sunan He, Taian Guo, Tao Dai, Ruizhi Qiao, Bo Ren, Shu-Tao Xia
Abstract:
Real-world recognition system often encounters the challenge of unseen labels. To identify such unseen labels, multi-label zero-shot learning (ML-ZSL) focuses on transferring knowledge by a pre-trained textual label embedding (e.g., GloVe). However, such methods only exploit single-modal knowledge from a language model, while ignoring the rich semantic information inherent in image-text pairs. Instead, recently developed open-vocabulary (OV) based methods succeed in exploiting such information of image-text pairs in object detection, and achieve impressive performance. Inspired by the success of OV-based methods, we propose a novel open-vocabulary framework, named multi-modal knowledge transfer (MKT), for multi-label classification. Specifically, our method exploits multi-modal knowledge of image-text pairs based on a vision and language pre-training (VLP) model. To facilitate transferring the image-text matching ability of VLP model, knowledge distillation is employed to guarantee the consistency of image and label embeddings, along with prompt tuning to further update the label embeddings. To further enable the recognition of multiple objects, a simple but effective two-stream module is developed to capture both local and global features. Extensive experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on public benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/sunanhe/MKT.
Authors:Lin Li, Jingyi Liu, Shuo Wang, Xunkun Wang, Tian-Zhu Xiang
Abstract:
Trichomoniasis is a common infectious disease with high incidence caused by the parasite Trichomonas vaginalis, increasing the risk of getting HIV in humans if left untreated. Automated detection of Trichomonas vaginalis from microscopic images can provide vital information for the diagnosis of trichomoniasis. However, accurate Trichomonas vaginalis segmentation (TVS) is a challenging task due to the high appearance similarity between the Trichomonas and other cells (e.g., leukocyte), the large appearance variation caused by their motility, and, most importantly, the lack of large-scale annotated data for deep model training. To address these challenges, we elaborately collected the first large-scale Microscopic Image dataset of Trichomonas Vaginalis, named TVMI3K, which consists of 3,158 images covering Trichomonas of various appearances in diverse backgrounds, with high-quality annotations including object-level mask labels, object boundaries, and challenging attributes. Besides, we propose a simple yet effective baseline, termed TVNet, to automatically segment Trichomonas from microscopic images, including high-resolution fusion and foreground-background attention modules. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior segmentation performance and outperforms various cutting-edge object detection models both quantitatively and qualitatively, making it a promising framework to promote future research in TVS tasks. The dataset and results will be publicly available at: https://github.com/CellRecog/cellRecog.
Authors:Yujia Sun, Shuo Wang, Chenglizhao Chen, Tian-Zhu Xiang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD), segmenting objects that are elegantly blended into their surroundings, is a valuable yet challenging task. Existing deep-learning methods often fall into the difficulty of accurately identifying the camouflaged object with complete and fine object structure. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel boundary-guided network (BGNet) for camouflaged object detection. Our method explores valuable and extra object-related edge semantics to guide representation learning of COD, which forces the model to generate features that highlight object structure, thereby promoting camouflaged object detection of accurate boundary localization. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our BGNet significantly outperforms the existing 18 state-of-the-art methods under four widely-used evaluation metrics. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/thograce/BGNet.
Authors:Georg Hess, Johan Jaxing, Elias Svensson, David Hagerman, Christoffer Petersson, Lennart Svensson
Abstract:
Masked autoencoding has become a successful pretraining paradigm for Transformer models for text, images, and, recently, point clouds. Raw automotive datasets are suitable candidates for self-supervised pre-training as they generally are cheap to collect compared to annotations for tasks like 3D object detection (OD). However, the development of masked autoencoders for point clouds has focused solely on synthetic and indoor data. Consequently, existing methods have tailored their representations and models toward small and dense point clouds with homogeneous point densities. In this work, we study masked autoencoding for point clouds in an automotive setting, which are sparse and for which the point density can vary drastically among objects in the same scene. To this end, we propose Voxel-MAE, a simple masked autoencoding pre-training scheme designed for voxel representations. We pre-train the backbone of a Transformer-based 3D object detector to reconstruct masked voxels and to distinguish between empty and non-empty voxels. Our method improves the 3D OD performance by 1.75 mAP points and 1.05 NDS on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Further, we show that by pre-training with Voxel-MAE, we require only 40% of the annotated data to outperform a randomly initialized equivalent. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/voxel-mae
Authors:Yining Shi, Jingyan Shen, Yifan Sun, Yunlong Wang, Jiaxin Li, Shiqi Sun, Kun Jiang, Diange Yang
Abstract:
Detection and tracking of moving objects is an essential component in environmental perception for autonomous driving. In the flourishing field of multi-view 3D camera-based detectors, different transformer-based pipelines are designed to learn queries in 3D space from 2D feature maps of perspective views, but the dominant dense BEV query mechanism is computationally inefficient. This paper proposes Sparse R-CNN 3D (SRCN3D), a novel two-stage fully-sparse detector that incorporates sparse queries, sparse attention with box-wise sampling, and sparse prediction. SRCN3D adopts a cascade structure with the twin-track update of both a fixed number of query boxes and latent query features. Our novel sparse feature sampling module only utilizes local 2D region of interest (RoI) features calculated by the projection of 3D query boxes for further box refinement, leading to a fully-convolutional and deployment-friendly pipeline. For multi-object tracking, motion features, query features and RoI features are comprehensively utilized in multi-hypotheses data association. Extensive experiments on nuScenes dataset demonstrate that SRCN3D achieves competitive performance in both 3D object detection and multi-object tracking tasks, while also exhibiting superior efficiency compared to transformer-based methods. Code and models are available at https://github.com/synsin0/SRCN3D.
Authors:Kailai Zhou, Yibo Wang, Tao Lv, Yunqian Li, Linsen Chen, Qiu Shen, Xun Cao
Abstract:
We endeavor on a rarely explored task named Insubstantial Object Detection (IOD), which aims to localize the object with following characteristics: (1) amorphous shape with indistinct boundary; (2) similarity to surroundings; (3) absence in color. Accordingly, it is far more challenging to distinguish insubstantial objects in a single static frame and the collaborative representation of spatial and temporal information is crucial. Thus, we construct an IOD-Video dataset comprised of 600 videos (141,017 frames) covering various distances, sizes, visibility, and scenes captured by different spectral ranges. In addition, we develop a spatio-temporal aggregation framework for IOD, in which different backbones are deployed and a spatio-temporal aggregation loss (STAloss) is elaborately designed to leverage the consistency along the time axis. Experiments conducted on IOD-Video dataset demonstrate that spatio-temporal aggregation can significantly improve the performance of IOD. We hope our work will attract further researches into this valuable yet challenging task. The code will be available at: \url{https://github.com/CalayZhou/IOD-Video}.
Authors:Yukang Chen, Jianhui Liu, Xiangyu Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi, Jiaya Jia
Abstract:
Recent advance in 2D CNNs has revealed that large kernels are important. However, when directly applying large convolutional kernels in 3D CNNs, severe difficulties are met, where those successful module designs in 2D become surprisingly ineffective on 3D networks, including the popular depth-wise convolution. To address this vital challenge, we instead propose the spatial-wise partition convolution and its large-kernel module. As a result, it avoids the optimization and efficiency issues of naive 3D large kernels. Our large-kernel 3D CNN network, LargeKernel3D, yields notable improvement in 3D tasks of semantic segmentation and object detection. It achieves 73.9% mIoU on the ScanNetv2 semantic segmentation and 72.8% NDS nuScenes object detection benchmarks, ranking 1st on the nuScenes LIDAR leaderboard. The performance further boosts to 74.2% NDS with a simple multi-modal fusion. In addition, LargeKernel3D can be scaled to 17x17x17 kernel size on Waymo 3D object detection. For the first time, we show that large kernels are feasible and essential for 3D visual tasks.
Authors:Chen Min, Xinli Xu, Dawei Zhao, Liang Xiao, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai
Abstract:
Current perception models in autonomous driving heavily rely on large-scale labelled 3D data, which is both costly and time-consuming to annotate. This work proposes a solution to reduce the dependence on labelled 3D training data by leveraging pre-training on large-scale unlabeled outdoor LiDAR point clouds using masked autoencoders (MAE). While existing masked point autoencoding methods mainly focus on small-scale indoor point clouds or pillar-based large-scale outdoor LiDAR data, our approach introduces a new self-supervised masked occupancy pre-training method called Occupancy-MAE, specifically designed for voxel-based large-scale outdoor LiDAR point clouds. Occupancy-MAE takes advantage of the gradually sparse voxel occupancy structure of outdoor LiDAR point clouds and incorporates a range-aware random masking strategy and a pretext task of occupancy prediction. By randomly masking voxels based on their distance to the LiDAR and predicting the masked occupancy structure of the entire 3D surrounding scene, Occupancy-MAE encourages the extraction of high-level semantic information to reconstruct the masked voxel using only a small number of visible voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Occupancy-MAE across several downstream tasks. For 3D object detection, Occupancy-MAE reduces the labelled data required for car detection on the KITTI dataset by half and improves small object detection by approximately 2% in AP on the Waymo dataset. For 3D semantic segmentation, Occupancy-MAE outperforms training from scratch by around 2% in mIoU. For multi-object tracking, Occupancy-MAE enhances training from scratch by approximately 1% in terms of AMOTA and AMOTP. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/Occupancy-MAE.
Authors:Abhilasha Nanda, Sung Won Cho, Hyeopwoo Lee, Jin Hyoung Park
Abstract:
Over the years, datasets have been developed for various object detection tasks. Object detection in the maritime domain is essential for the safety and navigation of ships. However, there is still a lack of publicly available large-scale datasets in the maritime domain. To overcome this challenge, we present KOLOMVERSE, an open large-scale image dataset for object detection in the maritime domain by KRISO (Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering). We collected 5,845 hours of video data captured from 21 territorial waters of South Korea. Through an elaborate data quality assessment process, we gathered around 2,151,470 4K resolution images from the video data. This dataset considers various environments: weather, time, illumination, occlusion, viewpoint, background, wind speed, and visibility. The KOLOMVERSE consists of five classes (ship, buoy, fishnet buoy, lighthouse and wind farm) for maritime object detection. The dataset has images of 3840$\times$2160 pixels and to our knowledge, it is by far the largest publicly available dataset for object detection in the maritime domain. We performed object detection experiments and evaluated our dataset on several pre-trained state-of-the-art architectures to show the effectiveness and usefulness of our dataset. The dataset is available at: \url{https://github.com/MaritimeDataset/KOLOMVERSE}.
Authors:Jiageng Mao, Shaoshuai Shi, Xiaogang Wang, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
Autonomous driving, in recent years, has been receiving increasing attention for its potential to relieve drivers' burdens and improve the safety of driving. In modern autonomous driving pipelines, the perception system is an indispensable component, aiming to accurately estimate the status of surrounding environments and provide reliable observations for prediction and planning. 3D object detection, which intelligently predicts the locations, sizes, and categories of the critical 3D objects near an autonomous vehicle, is an important part of a perception system. This paper reviews the advances in 3D object detection for autonomous driving. First, we introduce the background of 3D object detection and discuss the challenges in this task. Second, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the progress in 3D object detection from the aspects of models and sensory inputs, including LiDAR-based, camera-based, and multi-modal detection approaches. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the potentials and challenges in each category of methods. Additionally, we systematically investigate the applications of 3D object detection in driving systems. Finally, we conduct a performance analysis of the 3D object detection approaches, and we further summarize the research trends over the years and prospect the future directions of this area.
Authors:Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Kong, Kevin Tirta Wijaya
Abstract:
Unlike RGB cameras that use visible light bands (384$\sim$769 THz) and Lidars that use infrared bands (361$\sim$331 THz), Radars use relatively longer wavelength radio bands (77$\sim$81 GHz), resulting in robust measurements in adverse weathers. Unfortunately, existing Radar datasets only contain a relatively small number of samples compared to the existing camera and Lidar datasets. This may hinder the development of sophisticated data-driven deep learning techniques for Radar-based perception. Moreover, most of the existing Radar datasets only provide 3D Radar tensor (3DRT) data that contain power measurements along the Doppler, range, and azimuth dimensions. As there is no elevation information, it is challenging to estimate the 3D bounding box of an object from 3DRT. In this work, we introduce KAIST-Radar (K-Radar), a novel large-scale object detection dataset and benchmark that contains 35K frames of 4D Radar tensor (4DRT) data with power measurements along the Doppler, range, azimuth, and elevation dimensions, together with carefully annotated 3D bounding box labels of objects on the roads. K-Radar includes challenging driving conditions such as adverse weathers (fog, rain, and snow) on various road structures (urban, suburban roads, alleyways, and highways). In addition to the 4DRT, we provide auxiliary measurements from carefully calibrated high-resolution Lidars, surround stereo cameras, and RTK-GPS. We also provide 4DRT-based object detection baseline neural networks (baseline NNs) and show that the height information is crucial for 3D object detection. And by comparing the baseline NN with a similarly-structured Lidar-based neural network, we demonstrate that 4D Radar is a more robust sensor for adverse weather conditions. All codes are available at https://github.com/kaist-avelab/k-radar.
Authors:Yunge Cui, Yinlong Zhang, Jiahua Dong, Haibo Sun, Xieyuanli Chen, Feng Zhu
Abstract:
Feature extraction and matching are the basic parts of many robotic vision tasks, such as 2D or 3D object detection, recognition, and registration. As is known, 2D feature extraction and matching have already achieved great success. Unfortunately, in the field of 3D, the current methods may fail to support the extensive application of 3D LiDAR sensors in robotic vision tasks due to their poor descriptiveness and inefficiency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel 3D feature representation method: Linear Keypoints representation for 3D LiDAR point cloud, called LinK3D. The novelty of LinK3D lies in that it fully considers the characteristics (such as the sparsity and complexity) of LiDAR point clouds and represents the keypoint with its robust neighbor keypoints, which provide strong constraints in the description of the keypoint. The proposed LinK3D has been evaluated on three public datasets, and the experimental results show that our method achieves great matching performance. More importantly, LinK3D also shows excellent real-time performance, faster than the sensor frame rate at 10 Hz of a typical rotating LiDAR sensor. LinK3D only takes an average of 30 milliseconds to extract features from the point cloud collected by a 64-beam LiDAR and takes merely about 20 milliseconds to match two LiDAR scans when executed on a computer with an Intel Core i7 processor. Moreover, our method can be extended to LiDAR odometry task, and shows good scalability. We release the implementation of our method at https://github.com/YungeCui/LinK3D.
Authors:Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, James Gabriel, Jeff Zhu, Oncel Tuzel, Anurag Ranjan
Abstract:
Efficient neural network backbones for mobile devices are often optimized for metrics such as FLOPs or parameter count. However, these metrics may not correlate well with latency of the network when deployed on a mobile device. Therefore, we perform extensive analysis of different metrics by deploying several mobile-friendly networks on a mobile device. We identify and analyze architectural and optimization bottlenecks in recent efficient neural networks and provide ways to mitigate these bottlenecks. To this end, we design an efficient backbone MobileOne, with variants achieving an inference time under 1 ms on an iPhone12 with 75.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. We show that MobileOne achieves state-of-the-art performance within the efficient architectures while being many times faster on mobile. Our best model obtains similar performance on ImageNet as MobileFormer while being 38x faster. Our model obtains 2.3% better top-1 accuracy on ImageNet than EfficientNet at similar latency. Furthermore, we show that our model generalizes to multiple tasks - image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation with significant improvements in latency and accuracy as compared to existing efficient architectures when deployed on a mobile device. Code and models are available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileone
Authors:Hulin Li, Jun Li, Hanbing Wei, Zheng Liu, Zhenfei Zhan, Qiliang Ren
Abstract:
Real-time object detection is significant for industrial and research fields. On edge devices, a giant model is difficult to achieve the real-time detecting requirement and a lightweight model built from a large number of the depth-wise separable convolutional could not achieve the sufficient accuracy. We introduce a new lightweight convolutional technique, GSConv, to lighten the model but maintain the accuracy. The GSConv accomplishes an excellent trade-off between the accuracy and speed. Furthermore, we provide a design suggestion based on the GSConv, Slim-Neck (SNs), to achieve a higher computational cost-effectiveness of the real-time detectors. The effectiveness of the SNs was robustly demonstrated in over twenty sets comparative experiments. In particular, the real-time detectors of ameliorated by the SNs obtain the state-of-the-art (70.9% AP50 for the SODA10M at a speed of ~ 100FPS on a Tesla T4) compared with the baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/alanli1997/slim-neck-by-gsconv
Authors:Jun Chen, Ming Hu, Boyang Li, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning for computer vision has achieved tremendous progress and improved many downstream vision tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Among these, generative self-supervised vision learning approaches such as MAE and BEiT show promising performance. However, their global masked reconstruction mechanism is computationally demanding. To address this issue, we propose local masked reconstruction (LoMaR), a simple yet effective approach that performs masked reconstruction within a small window of 7$\times$7 patches on a simple Transformer encoder, improving the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy compared to global masked reconstruction over the entire image. Extensive experiments show that LoMaR reaches 84.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification, outperforming MAE by 0.5%. After finetuning the pretrained LoMaR on 384$\times$384 images, it can reach 85.4% top-1 accuracy, surpassing MAE by 0.6%. On MS COCO, LoMaR outperforms MAE by 0.5 $\text{AP}^\text{box}$ on object detection and 0.5 $\text{AP}^\text{mask}$ on instance segmentation. LoMaR is especially more computation-efficient on pretraining high-resolution images, e.g., it is 3.1$\times$ faster than MAE with 0.2% higher classification accuracy on pretraining 448$\times$448 images. This local masked reconstruction learning mechanism can be easily integrated into any other generative self-supervised learning approach. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/junchen14/LoMaR.
Authors:Jay Zhangjie Wu, David Junhao Zhang, Wynne Hsu, Mengmi Zhang, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract:
Humans can watch a continuous video stream and effortlessly perform continual acquisition and transfer of new knowledge with minimal supervision yet retaining previously learnt experiences. In contrast, existing continual learning (CL) methods require fully annotated labels to effectively learn from individual frames in a video stream. Here, we examine a more realistic and challenging problem$\unicode{x2014}$Label-Efficient Online Continual Object Detection (LEOCOD) in streaming video. We propose a plug-and-play module, Efficient-CLS, that can be easily inserted into and improve existing continual learners for object detection in video streams with reduced data annotation costs and model retraining time. We show that our method has achieved significant improvement with minimal forgetting across all supervision levels on two challenging CL benchmarks for streaming real-world videos. Remarkably, with only 25% annotated video frames, our method still outperforms the base CL learners, which are trained with 100% annotations on all video frames. The data and source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/showlab/Efficient-CLS.
Authors:Peng Zheng, Huazhu Fu, Deng-Ping Fan, Qi Fan, Jie Qin, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end group collaborative learning network, termed GCoNet+, which can effectively and efficiently (250 fps) identify co-salient objects in natural scenes. The proposed GCoNet+ achieves the new state-of-the-art performance for co-salient object detection (CoSOD) through mining consensus representations based on the following two essential criteria: 1) intra-group compactness to better formulate the consistency among co-salient objects by capturing their inherent shared attributes using our novel group affinity module (GAM); 2) inter-group separability to effectively suppress the influence of noisy objects on the output by introducing our new group collaborating module (GCM) conditioning on the inconsistent consensus. To further improve the accuracy, we design a series of simple yet effective components as follows: i) a recurrent auxiliary classification module (RACM) promoting model learning at the semantic level; ii) a confidence enhancement module (CEM) assisting the model in improving the quality of the final predictions; and iii) a group-based symmetric triplet (GST) loss guiding the model to learn more discriminative features. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks, i.e., CoCA, CoSOD3k, and CoSal2015, demonstrate that our GCoNet+ outperforms the existing 12 cutting-edge models. Code has been released at https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/GCoNet_plus.
Authors:Tao Huang, Yuan Zhang, Shan You, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Jian Cao, Chang Xu
Abstract:
Distilling from the feature maps can be fairly effective for dense prediction tasks since both the feature discriminability and localization priors can be well transferred. However, not every pixel contributes equally to the performance, and a good student should learn from what really matters to the teacher. In this paper, we introduce a learnable embedding dubbed receptive token to localize those pixels of interests (PoIs) in the feature map, with a distillation mask generated via pixel-wise attention. Then the distillation will be performed on the mask via pixel-wise reconstruction. In this way, a distillation mask actually indicates a pattern of pixel dependencies within feature maps of teacher. We thus adopt multiple receptive tokens to investigate more sophisticated and informative pixel dependencies to further enhance the distillation. To obtain a group of masks, the receptive tokens are learned via the regular task loss but with teacher fixed, and we also leverage a Dice loss to enrich the diversity of learned masks. Our method dubbed MasKD is simple and practical, and needs no priors of tasks in application. Experiments show that our MasKD can achieve state-of-the-art performance consistently on object detection and semantic segmentation benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/hunto/MasKD .
Authors:Zhijian Liu, Haotian Tang, Alexander Amini, Xinyu Yang, Huizi Mao, Daniela Rus, Song Han
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion is essential for an accurate and reliable autonomous driving system. Recent approaches are based on point-level fusion: augmenting the LiDAR point cloud with camera features. However, the camera-to-LiDAR projection throws away the semantic density of camera features, hindering the effectiveness of such methods, especially for semantic-oriented tasks (such as 3D scene segmentation). In this paper, we break this deeply-rooted convention with BEVFusion, an efficient and generic multi-task multi-sensor fusion framework. It unifies multi-modal features in the shared bird's-eye view (BEV) representation space, which nicely preserves both geometric and semantic information. To achieve this, we diagnose and lift key efficiency bottlenecks in the view transformation with optimized BEV pooling, reducing latency by more than 40x. BEVFusion is fundamentally task-agnostic and seamlessly supports different 3D perception tasks with almost no architectural changes. It establishes the new state of the art on nuScenes, achieving 1.3% higher mAP and NDS on 3D object detection and 13.6% higher mIoU on BEV map segmentation, with 1.9x lower computation cost. Code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/bevfusion.
Authors:Ge-Peng Ji, Deng-Ping Fan, Yu-Cheng Chou, Dengxin Dai, Alexander Liniger, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
This paper introduces DGNet, a novel deep framework that exploits object gradient supervision for camouflaged object detection (COD). It decouples the task into two connected branches, i.e., a context and a texture encoder. The essential connection is the gradient-induced transition, representing a soft grouping between context and texture features. Benefiting from the simple but efficient framework, DGNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art COD models by a large margin. Notably, our efficient version, DGNet-S, runs in real-time (80 fps) and achieves comparable results to the cutting-edge model JCSOD-CVPR$_{21}$ with only 6.82% parameters. Application results also show that the proposed DGNet performs well in polyp segmentation, defect detection, and transparent object segmentation tasks. Codes will be made available at https://github.com/GewelsJI/DGNet.
Authors:Liping Hou, Ke Lu, Xue Yang, Yuqiu Li, Jian Xue
Abstract:
Typical representations for arbitrary-oriented object detection tasks include oriented bounding box (OBB), quadrilateral bounding box (QBB), and point set (PointSet). Each representation encounters problems that correspond to its characteristics, such as the boundary discontinuity, square-like problem, representation ambiguity, and isolated points, which lead to inaccurate detection. Although many effective strategies have been proposed for various representations, there is still no unified solution. Current detection methods based on Gaussian modeling have demonstrated the possibility of breaking this dilemma; however, they remain limited to OBB. To go further, in this paper, we propose a unified Gaussian representation called G-Rep to construct Gaussian distributions for OBB, QBB, and PointSet, which achieves a unified solution to various representations and problems. Specifically, PointSet or QBB-based object representations are converted into Gaussian distributions, and their parameters are optimized using the maximum likelihood estimation algorithm. Then, three optional Gaussian metrics are explored to optimize the regression loss of the detector because of their excellent parameter optimization mechanisms. Furthermore, we also use Gaussian metrics for sampling to align label assignment and regression loss. Experimental results on several public available datasets, such as DOTA, HRSC2016, UCAS-AOD, and ICDAR2015, show the excellent performance of the proposed method for arbitrary-oriented object detection.
Authors:Yunqiu Lv, Jing Zhang, Yuchao Dai, Aixuan Li, Nick Barnes, Deng-Ping Fan
Abstract:
Preys in the wild evolve to be camouflaged to avoid being recognized by predators. In this way, camouflage acts as a key defence mechanism across species that is critical to survival. To detect and segment the whole scope of a camouflaged object, camouflaged object detection (COD) is introduced as a binary segmentation task, with the binary ground truth camouflage map indicating the exact regions of the camouflaged objects. In this paper, we revisit this task and argue that the binary segmentation setting fails to fully understand the concept of camouflage. We find that explicitly modeling the conspicuousness of camouflaged objects against their particular backgrounds can not only lead to a better understanding about camouflage, but also provide guidance to designing more sophisticated camouflage techniques. Furthermore, we observe that it is some specific parts of camouflaged objects that make them detectable by predators. With the above understanding about camouflaged objects, we present the first triple-task learning framework to simultaneously localize, segment, and rank camouflaged objects, indicating the conspicuousness level of camouflage. As no corresponding datasets exist for either the localization model or the ranking model, we generate localization maps with an eye tracker, which are then processed according to the instance level labels to generate our ranking-based training and testing dataset. We also contribute the largest COD testing set to comprehensively analyse performance of the COD models. Experimental results show that our triple-task learning framework achieves new state-of-the-art, leading to a more explainable COD network. Our code, data, and results are available at: \url{https://github.com/JingZhang617/COD-Rank-Localize-and-Segment}.
Authors:Nguyen Huu Phong, Augusto Santos, Bernardete Ribeiro
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets or CNNs) have been candidly deployed in the scope of computer vision and related fields. Nevertheless, the dynamics of training of these neural networks lie still elusive: it is hard and computationally expensive to train them. A myriad of architectures and training strategies have been proposed to overcome this challenge and address several problems in image processing such as speech, image and action recognition as well as object detection. In this article, we propose a novel Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based training for ConvNets. In such framework, the vector of weights of each ConvNet is typically cast as the position of a particle in phase space whereby PSO collaborative dynamics intertwines with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in order to boost training performance and generalization. Our approach goes as follows: i) [regular phase] each ConvNet is trained independently via SGD; ii) [collaborative phase] ConvNets share among themselves their current vector of weights (or particle-position) along with their gradient estimates of the Loss function. Distinct step sizes are coined by distinct ConvNets. By properly blending ConvNets with large (possibly random) step-sizes along with more conservative ones, we propose an algorithm with competitive performance with respect to other PSO-based approaches on Cifar-10 and Cifar-100 (accuracy of 98.31% and 87.48%). These accuracy levels are obtained by resorting to only four ConvNets -- such results are expected to scale with the number of collaborative ConvNets accordingly. We make our source codes available for download https://github.com/leonlha/PSO-ConvNet-Dynamics.
Authors:Kun Yi, Yixiao Ge, Xiaotong Li, Shusheng Yang, Dian Li, Jianping Wu, Ying Shan, Xiaohu Qie
Abstract:
Since the development of self-supervised visual representation learning from contrastive learning to masked image modeling (MIM), there is no significant difference in essence, that is, how to design proper pretext tasks for vision dictionary look-up. MIM recently dominates this line of research with state-of-the-art performance on vision Transformers (ViTs), where the core is to enhance the patch-level visual context capturing of the network via denoising auto-encoding mechanism. Rather than tailoring image tokenizers with extra training stages as in previous works, we unleash the great potential of contrastive learning on denoising auto-encoding and introduce a pure MIM method, ConMIM, to produce simple intra-image inter-patch contrastive constraints as the sole learning objectives for masked patch prediction. We further strengthen the denoising mechanism with asymmetric designs, including image perturbations and model progress rates, to improve the network pre-training. ConMIM-pretrained models with various scales achieve competitive results on downstream image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks, e.g., on ImageNet-1K classification, we achieve 83.9% top-1 accuracy with ViT-Small and 85.3% with ViT-Base without extra data for pre-training.
Authors:Feng Liu, Xiaosong Zhang, Zhiliang Peng, Zonghao Guo, Fang Wan, Xiangyang Ji, Qixiang Ye
Abstract:
Modern object detectors have taken the advantages of backbone networks pre-trained on large scale datasets. Except for the backbone networks, however, other components such as the detector head and the feature pyramid network (FPN) remain trained from scratch, which hinders fully tapping the potential of representation models. In this study, we propose to integrally migrate pre-trained transformer encoder-decoders (imTED) to a detector, constructing a feature extraction path which is ``fully pre-trained" so that detectors' generalization capacity is maximized. The essential differences between imTED with the baseline detector are twofold: (1) migrating the pre-trained transformer decoder to the detector head while removing the randomly initialized FPN from the feature extraction path; and (2) defining a multi-scale feature modulator (MFM) to enhance scale adaptability. Such designs not only reduce randomly initialized parameters significantly but also unify detector training with representation learning intendedly. Experiments on the MS COCO object detection dataset show that imTED consistently outperforms its counterparts by $\sim$2.4 AP. Without bells and whistles, imTED improves the state-of-the-art of few-shot object detection by up to 7.6 AP. Code is available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/imTED.
Authors:Zhe Chen, Yuchen Duan, Wenhai Wang, Junjun He, Tong Lu, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao
Abstract:
This work investigates a simple yet powerful dense prediction task adapter for Vision Transformer (ViT). Unlike recently advanced variants that incorporate vision-specific inductive biases into their architectures, the plain ViT suffers inferior performance on dense predictions due to weak prior assumptions. To address this issue, we propose the ViT-Adapter, which allows plain ViT to achieve comparable performance to vision-specific transformers. Specifically, the backbone in our framework is a plain ViT that can learn powerful representations from large-scale multi-modal data. When transferring to downstream tasks, a pre-training-free adapter is used to introduce the image-related inductive biases into the model, making it suitable for these tasks. We verify ViT-Adapter on multiple dense prediction tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Notably, without using extra detection data, our ViT-Adapter-L yields state-of-the-art 60.9 box AP and 53.0 mask AP on COCO test-dev. We hope that the ViT-Adapter could serve as an alternative for vision-specific transformers and facilitate future research. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/czczup/ViT-Adapter.
Authors:Jinpeng Lin, Zhihao Liang, Shengheng Deng, Lile Cai, Tao Jiang, Tianrui Li, Kui Jia, Xun Xu
Abstract:
3D object detection has recently received much attention due to its great potential in autonomous vehicle (AV). The success of deep learning based object detectors relies on the availability of large-scale annotated datasets, which is time-consuming and expensive to compile, especially for 3D bounding box annotation. In this work, we investigate diversity-based active learning (AL) as a potential solution to alleviate the annotation burden. Given limited annotation budget, only the most informative frames and objects are automatically selected for human to annotate. Technically, we take the advantage of the multimodal information provided in an AV dataset, and propose a novel acquisition function that enforces spatial and temporal diversity in the selected samples. We benchmark the proposed method against other AL strategies under realistic annotation cost measurement, where the realistic costs for annotating a frame and a 3D bounding box are both taken into consideration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the nuScenes dataset and show that it outperforms existing AL strategies significantly. Code is available at https://github.com/Linkon87/Exploring-Diversity-based-Active-Learning-for-3D-Object-Detection-in-Autonomous-Driving
Authors:Ziming Wang, Shuang Lian, Yuhao Zhang, Xiaoxin Cui, Rui Yan, Huajin Tang
Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) operating with asynchronous discrete events show higher energy efficiency with sparse computation. A popular approach for implementing deep SNNs is ANN-SNN conversion combining both efficient training of ANNs and efficient inference of SNNs. However, the accuracy loss is usually non-negligible, especially under a few time steps, which restricts the applications of SNN on latency-sensitive edge devices greatly. In this paper, we first identify that such performance degradation stems from the misrepresentation of the negative or overflow residual membrane potential in SNNs. Inspired by this, we decompose the conversion error into three parts: quantization error, clipping error, and residual membrane potential representation error. With such insights, we propose a two-stage conversion algorithm to minimize those errors respectively. Besides, We show each stage achieves significant performance gains in a complementary manner. By evaluating on challenging datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR- 100 and ImageNet, the proposed method demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy, latency and energy preservation. Furthermore, our method is evaluated using a more challenging object detection task, revealing notable gains in regression performance under ultra-low latency when compared to existing spike-based detection algorithms. Codes are available at https://github.com/Windere/snn-cvt-dual-phase.
Authors:Min Yang, Guo Chen, Yin-Dong Zheng, Tong Lu, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Temporal action detection (TAD) is extensively studied in the video understanding community by generally following the object detection pipeline in images. However, complex designs are not uncommon in TAD, such as two-stream feature extraction, multi-stage training, complex temporal modeling, and global context fusion. In this paper, we do not aim to introduce any novel technique for TAD. Instead, we study a simple, straightforward, yet must-known baseline given the current status of complex design and low detection efficiency in TAD. In our simple baseline (termed BasicTAD), we decompose the TAD pipeline into several essential components: data sampling, backbone design, neck construction, and detection head. We extensively investigate the existing techniques in each component for this baseline, and more importantly, perform end-to-end training over the entire pipeline thanks to the simplicity of design. As a result, this simple BasicTAD yields an astounding and real-time RGB-Only baseline very close to the state-of-the-art methods with two-stream inputs. In addition, we further improve the BasicTAD by preserving more temporal and spatial information in network representation (termed as PlusTAD). Empirical results demonstrate that our PlusTAD is very efficient and significantly outperforms the previous methods on the datasets of THUMOS14 and FineAction. Meanwhile, we also perform in-depth visualization and error analysis on our proposed method and try to provide more insights on the TAD problem. Our approach can serve as a strong baseline for future TAD research. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/BasicTAD.
Authors:Xinyu Yang, Tilo Burghardt, Majid Mirmehdi
Abstract:
We propose a novel end-to-end curriculum learning approach for sparsely labelled animal datasets leveraging large volumes of unlabelled data to improve supervised species detectors. We exemplify the method in detail on the task of finding great apes in camera trap footage taken in challenging real-world jungle environments. In contrast to previous semi-supervised methods, our approach adjusts learning parameters dynamically over time and gradually improves detection quality by steering training towards virtuous self-reinforcement. To achieve this, we propose integrating pseudo-labelling with curriculum learning policies and show how learning collapse can be avoided. We discuss theoretical arguments, ablations, and significant performance improvements against various state-of-the-art systems when evaluating on the Extended PanAfrican Dataset holding approx. 1.8M frames. We also demonstrate our method can outperform supervised baselines with significant margins on sparse label versions of other animal datasets such as Bees and Snapshot Serengeti. We note that performance advantages are strongest for smaller labelled ratios common in ecological applications. Finally, we show that our approach achieves competitive benchmarks for generic object detection in MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC indicating wider applicability of the dynamic learning concepts introduced. We publish all relevant source code, network weights, and data access details for full reproducibility. The code is available at https://github.com/youshyee/DCL-Detection.
Authors:Jing Zhang, Jianwen Xie, Nick Barnes, Ping Li
Abstract:
We propose a novel generative saliency prediction framework that adopts an informative energy-based model as a prior distribution. The energy-based prior model is defined on the latent space of a saliency generator network that generates the saliency map based on a continuous latent variables and an observed image. Both the parameters of saliency generator and the energy-based prior are jointly trained via Markov chain Monte Carlo-based maximum likelihood estimation, in which the sampling from the intractable posterior and prior distributions of the latent variables are performed by Langevin dynamics. With the generative saliency model, we can obtain a pixel-wise uncertainty map from an image, indicating model confidence in the saliency prediction. Different from existing generative models, which define the prior distribution of the latent variables as a simple isotropic Gaussian distribution, our model uses an energy-based informative prior which can be more expressive in capturing the latent space of the data. With the informative energy-based prior, we extend the Gaussian distribution assumption of generative models to achieve a more representative distribution of the latent space, leading to more reliable uncertainty estimation. We apply the proposed frameworks to both RGB and RGB-D salient object detection tasks with both transformer and convolutional neural network backbones. We further propose an adversarial learning algorithm and a variational inference algorithm as alternatives to train the proposed generative framework. Experimental results show that our generative saliency model with an energy-based prior can achieve not only accurate saliency predictions but also reliable uncertainty maps that are consistent with human perception. Results and code are available at \url{https://github.com/JingZhang617/EBMGSOD}.
Authors:Kang Liao, Xiangyu Xu, Chunyu Lin, Wenqi Ren, Yunchao Wei, Yao Zhao
Abstract:
Image outpainting gains increasing attention since it can generate the complete scene from a partial view, providing a valuable solution to construct {360\textdegree} panoramic images. As image outpainting suffers from the intrinsic issue of unidirectional completion flow, previous methods convert the original problem into inpainting, which allows a bidirectional flow. However, we find that inpainting has its own limitations and is inferior to outpainting in certain situations. The question of how they may be combined for the best of both has as yet remained under-explored. In this paper, we provide a deep analysis of the differences between inpainting and outpainting, which essentially depends on how the source pixels contribute to the unknown regions under different spatial arrangements. Motivated by this analysis, we present a Cylin-Painting framework that involves meaningful collaborations between inpainting and outpainting and efficiently fuses the different arrangements, with a view to leveraging their complementary benefits on a seamless cylinder. Nevertheless, straightforwardly applying the cylinder-style convolution often generates visually unpleasing results as it discards important positional information. To address this issue, we further present a learnable positional embedding strategy to incorporate the missing component of positional encoding into the cylinder convolution, which significantly improves the panoramic results. It is noted that while developed for image outpainting, the proposed algorithm can be effectively extended to other panoramic vision tasks, such as object detection, depth estimation, and image super-resolution. Code will be made available at \url{https://github.com/KangLiao929/Cylin-Painting}.
Authors:Qiming Zhang, Yufei Xu, Jing Zhang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Attention within windows has been widely explored in vision transformers to balance the performance, computation complexity, and memory footprint. However, current models adopt a hand-crafted fixed-size window design, which restricts their capacity of modeling long-term dependencies and adapting to objects of different sizes. To address this drawback, we propose \textbf{V}aried-\textbf{S}ize Window \textbf{A}ttention (VSA) to learn adaptive window configurations from data. Specifically, based on the tokens within each default window, VSA employs a window regression module to predict the size and location of the target window, i.e., the attention area where the key and value tokens are sampled. By adopting VSA independently for each attention head, it can model long-term dependencies, capture rich context from diverse windows, and promote information exchange among overlapped windows. VSA is an easy-to-implement module that can replace the window attention in state-of-the-art representative models with minor modifications and negligible extra computational cost while improving their performance by a large margin, e.g., 1.1\% for Swin-T on ImageNet classification. In addition, the performance gain increases when using larger images for training and test. Experimental results on more downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation, further demonstrate the superiority of VSA over the vanilla window attention in dealing with objects of different sizes. The code will be released https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/ViTAE-VSA.
Authors:Jiashun Suo, Tianyi Wang, Xingzhou Zhang, Haiyang Chen, Wei Zhou, Weisong Shi
Abstract:
We present the HIT-UAV dataset, a high-altitude infrared thermal dataset for object detection applications on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The dataset comprises 2,898 infrared thermal images extracted from 43,470 frames in hundreds of videos captured by UAVs in various scenarios including schools, parking lots, roads, and playgrounds. Moreover, the HIT-UAV provides essential flight data for each image, such as flight altitude, camera perspective, date, and daylight intensity. For each image, we have manually annotated object instances with bounding boxes of two types (oriented and standard) to tackle the challenge of significant overlap of object instances in aerial images. To the best of our knowledge, the HIT-UAV is the first publicly available high-altitude UAV-based infrared thermal dataset for detecting persons and vehicles. We have trained and evaluated well-established object detection algorithms on the HIT-UAV. Our results demonstrate that the detection algorithms perform exceptionally well on the HIT-UAV compared to visual light datasets since infrared thermal images do not contain significant irrelevant information about objects. We believe that the HIT-UAV will contribute to various UAV-based applications and researches. The dataset is freely available at https://github.com/suojiashun/HIT-UAV-Infrared-Thermal-Dataset.
Authors:Di Wang, Jing Zhang, Bo Du, Gui-Song Xia, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Deep learning has largely reshaped remote sensing (RS) research for aerial image understanding and made a great success. Nevertheless, most of the existing deep models are initialized with the ImageNet pretrained weights. Since natural images inevitably present a large domain gap relative to aerial images, probably limiting the finetuning performance on downstream aerial scene tasks. This issue motivates us to conduct an empirical study of remote sensing pretraining (RSP) on aerial images. To this end, we train different networks from scratch with the help of the largest RS scene recognition dataset up to now -- MillionAID, to obtain a series of RS pretrained backbones, including both convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers such as Swin and ViTAE, which have shown promising performance on computer vision tasks. Then, we investigate the impact of RSP on representative downstream tasks including scene recognition, semantic segmentation, object detection, and change detection using these CNN and vision transformer backbones. Empirical study shows that RSP can help deliver distinctive performances in scene recognition tasks and in perceiving RS related semantics such as "Bridge" and "Airplane". We also find that, although RSP mitigates the data discrepancies of traditional ImageNet pretraining on RS images, it may still suffer from task discrepancies, where downstream tasks require different representations from scene recognition tasks. These findings call for further research efforts on both large-scale pretraining datasets and effective pretraining methods. The codes and pretrained models will be released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/ViTAE-Transformer-Remote-Sensing.
Authors:Renrui Zhang, Han Qiu, Tai Wang, Ziyu Guo, Yiwen Tang, Xuanzhuo Xu, Ziteng Cui, Yu Qiao, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection has long been a challenging task in autonomous driving. Most existing methods follow conventional 2D detectors to first localize object centers, and then predict 3D attributes by neighboring features. However, only using local visual features is insufficient to understand the scene-level 3D spatial structures and ignores the long-range inter-object depth relations. In this paper, we introduce the first DETR framework for Monocular DEtection with a depth-guided TRansformer, named MonoDETR. We modify the vanilla transformer to be depth-aware and guide the whole detection process by contextual depth cues. Specifically, concurrent to the visual encoder that captures object appearances, we introduce to predict a foreground depth map, and specialize a depth encoder to extract non-local depth embeddings. Then, we formulate 3D object candidates as learnable queries and propose a depth-guided decoder to conduct object-scene depth interactions. In this way, each object query estimates its 3D attributes adaptively from the depth-guided regions on the image and is no longer constrained to local visual features. On KITTI benchmark with monocular images as input, MonoDETR achieves state-of-the-art performance and requires no extra dense depth annotations. Besides, our depth-guided modules can also be plug-and-play to enhance multi-view 3D object detectors on nuScenes dataset, demonstrating our superior generalization capacity. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/MonoDETR.
Authors:Ryan Grainger, Thomas Paniagua, Xi Song, Naresh Cuntoor, Mun Wai Lee, Tianfu Wu
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) are built on the assumption of treating image patches as ``visual tokens" and learn patch-to-patch attention. The patch embedding based tokenizer has a semantic gap with respect to its counterpart, the textual tokenizer. The patch-to-patch attention suffers from the quadratic complexity issue, and also makes it non-trivial to explain learned ViTs. To address these issues in ViT, this paper proposes to learn Patch-to-Cluster attention (PaCa) in ViT. Queries in our PaCa-ViT starts with patches, while keys and values are directly based on clustering (with a predefined small number of clusters). The clusters are learned end-to-end, leading to better tokenizers and inducing joint clustering-for-attention and attention-for-clustering for better and interpretable models. The quadratic complexity is relaxed to linear complexity. The proposed PaCa module is used in designing efficient and interpretable ViT backbones and semantic segmentation head networks. In experiments, the proposed methods are tested on ImageNet-1k image classification, MS-COCO object detection and instance segmentation and MIT-ADE20k semantic segmentation. Compared with the prior art, it obtains better performance in all the three benchmarks than the SWin and the PVTs by significant margins in ImageNet-1k and MIT-ADE20k. It is also significantly more efficient than PVT models in MS-COCO and MIT-ADE20k due to the linear complexity. The learned clusters are semantically meaningful. Code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/iVMCL/PaCaViT.
Authors:Xiaobin Hu, Shuo Wang, Xuebin Qin, Hang Dai, Wenqi Ren, Ying Tai, Chengjie Wang, Ling Shao
Abstract:
Spotting camouflaged objects that are visually assimilated into the background is tricky for both object detection algorithms and humans who are usually confused or cheated by the perfectly intrinsic similarities between the foreground objects and the background surroundings. To tackle this challenge, we aim to extract the high-resolution texture details to avoid the detail degradation that causes blurred vision in edges and boundaries. We introduce a novel HitNet to refine the low-resolution representations by high-resolution features in an iterative feedback manner, essentially a global loop-based connection among the multi-scale resolutions. In addition, an iterative feedback loss is proposed to impose more constraints on each feedback connection. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets demonstrate that our \ourmodel~breaks the performance bottleneck and achieves significant improvements compared with 29 state-of-the-art methods. To address the data scarcity in camouflaged scenarios, we provide an application example by employing cross-domain learning to extract the features that can reflect the camouflaged object properties and embed the features into salient objects, thereby generating more camouflaged training samples from the diverse salient object datasets The code will be available at https://github.com/HUuxiaobin/HitNet.
Authors:Xiuying Wei, Ruihao Gong, Yuhang Li, Xianglong Liu, Fengwei Yu
Abstract:
Recently, post-training quantization (PTQ) has driven much attention to produce efficient neural networks without long-time retraining. Despite its low cost, current PTQ works tend to fail under the extremely low-bit setting. In this study, we pioneeringly confirm that properly incorporating activation quantization into the PTQ reconstruction benefits the final accuracy. To deeply understand the inherent reason, a theoretical framework is established, indicating that the flatness of the optimized low-bit model on calibration and test data is crucial. Based on the conclusion, a simple yet effective approach dubbed as QDROP is proposed, which randomly drops the quantization of activations during PTQ. Extensive experiments on various tasks including computer vision (image classification, object detection) and natural language processing (text classification and question answering) prove its superiority. With QDROP, the limit of PTQ is pushed to the 2-bit activation for the first time and the accuracy boost can be up to 51.49%. Without bells and whistles, QDROP establishes a new state of the art for PTQ. Our code is available at https://github.com/wimh966/QDrop and has been integrated into MQBench (https://github.com/ModelTC/MQBench)
Authors:Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
The recently proposed camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects that are visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from high intrinsic similarity between the camouflaged objects and their background, the objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To deal with these problems, we propose a mixed-scale triplet network, \textbf{ZoomNet}, which mimics the behavior of humans when observing vague images, i.e., zooming in and out. Specifically, our ZoomNet employs the zoom strategy to learn the discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the designed scale integration unit and hierarchical mixed-scale unit, which fully explores imperceptible clues between the candidate objects and background surroundings. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization constraint, uncertainty-aware loss, to promote the model to accurately produce predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Without bells and whistles, our proposed highly task-friendly model consistently surpasses the existing 23 state-of-the-art methods on four public datasets. Besides, the superior performance over the recent cutting-edge models on the SOD task also verifies the effectiveness and generality of our model. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNet}.
Authors:Joya Chen, Kai Xu, Yuhui Wang, Yifei Cheng, Angela Yao
Abstract:
A standard hardware bottleneck when training deep neural networks is GPU memory. The bulk of memory is occupied by caching intermediate tensors for gradient computation in the backward pass. We propose a novel method to reduce this footprint - Dropping Intermediate Tensors (DropIT). DropIT drops min-k elements of the intermediate tensors and approximates gradients from the sparsified tensors in the backward pass. Theoretically, DropIT reduces noise on estimated gradients and therefore has a higher rate of convergence than vanilla-SGD. Experiments show that we can drop up to 90\% of the intermediate tensor elements in fully-connected and convolutional layers while achieving higher testing accuracy for Visual Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks on various tasks (e.g., classification, object detection, instance segmentation). Our code and models are available at https://github.com/chenjoya/dropit.
Authors:Yunhao Du, Zhicheng Zhao, Yang Song, Yanyun Zhao, Fei Su, Tao Gong, Hongying Meng
Abstract:
Recently, Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has attracted rising attention, and accordingly, remarkable progresses have been achieved. However, the existing methods tend to use various basic models (e.g, detector and embedding model), and different training or inference tricks, etc. As a result, the construction of a good baseline for a fair comparison is essential. In this paper, a classic tracker, i.e., DeepSORT, is first revisited, and then is significantly improved from multiple perspectives such as object detection, feature embedding, and trajectory association. The proposed tracker, named StrongSORT, contributes a strong and fair baseline for the MOT community. Moreover, two lightweight and plug-and-play algorithms are proposed to address two inherent "missing" problems of MOT: missing association and missing detection. Specifically, unlike most methods, which associate short tracklets into complete trajectories at high computation complexity, we propose an appearance-free link model (AFLink) to perform global association without appearance information, and achieve a good balance between speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a Gaussian-smoothed interpolation (GSI) based on Gaussian process regression to relieve the missing detection. AFLink and GSI can be easily plugged into various trackers with a negligible extra computational cost (1.7 ms and 7.1 ms per image, respectively, on MOT17). Finally, by fusing StrongSORT with AFLink and GSI, the final tracker (StrongSORT++) achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple public benchmarks, i.e., MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack and KITTI. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/StrongSORT and https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmtracking.
Authors:Yuqing Lan, Yao Duan, Chenyi Liu, Chenyang Zhu, Yueshan Xiong, Hui Huang, Kai Xu
Abstract:
Relation context has been proved to be useful for many challenging vision tasks. In the field of 3D object detection, previous methods have been taking the advantage of context encoding, graph embedding, or explicit relation reasoning to extract relation context. However, there exists inevitably redundant relation context due to noisy or low-quality proposals. In fact, invalid relation context usually indicates underlying scene misunderstanding and ambiguity, which may, on the contrary, reduce the performance in complex scenes. Inspired by recent attention mechanism like Transformer, we propose a novel 3D attention-based relation module (ARM3D). It encompasses object-aware relation reasoning to extract pair-wise relation contexts among qualified proposals and an attention module to distribute attention weights towards different relation contexts. In this way, ARM3D can take full advantage of the useful relation context and filter those less relevant or even confusing contexts, which mitigates the ambiguity in detection. We have evaluated the effectiveness of ARM3D by plugging it into several state-of-the-art 3D object detectors and showing more accurate and robust detection results. Extensive experiments show the capability and generalization of ARM3D on 3D object detection. Our source code is available at https://github.com/lanlan96/ARM3D.
Authors:Xiaokang Chen, Mingyu Ding, Xiaodi Wang, Ying Xin, Shentong Mo, Yunhao Wang, Shumin Han, Ping Luo, Gang Zeng, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
We present a novel masked image modeling (MIM) approach, context autoencoder (CAE), for self-supervised representation pretraining. We pretrain an encoder by making predictions in the encoded representation space. The pretraining tasks include two tasks: masked representation prediction - predict the representations for the masked patches, and masked patch reconstruction - reconstruct the masked patches. The network is an encoder-regressor-decoder architecture: the encoder takes the visible patches as input; the regressor predicts the representations of the masked patches, which are expected to be aligned with the representations computed from the encoder, using the representations of visible patches and the positions of visible and masked patches; the decoder reconstructs the masked patches from the predicted encoded representations. The CAE design encourages the separation of learning the encoder (representation) from completing the pertaining tasks: masked representation prediction and masked patch reconstruction tasks, and making predictions in the encoded representation space empirically shows the benefit to representation learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our CAE through superior transfer performance in downstream tasks: semantic segmentation, object detection and instance segmentation, and classification. The code will be available at https://github.com/Atten4Vis/CAE.
Authors:Xue Yang, Yue Zhou, Gefan Zhang, Jirui Yang, Wentao Wang, Junchi Yan, Xiaopeng Zhang, Qi Tian
Abstract:
Differing from the well-developed horizontal object detection area whereby the computing-friendly IoU based loss is readily adopted and well fits with the detection metrics. In contrast, rotation detectors often involve a more complicated loss based on SkewIoU which is unfriendly to gradient-based training. In this paper, we propose an effective approximate SkewIoU loss based on Gaussian modeling and Gaussian product, which mainly consists of two items. The first term is a scale-insensitive center point loss, which is used to quickly narrow the distance between the center points of the two bounding boxes. In the distance-independent second term, the product of the Gaussian distributions is adopted to inherently mimic the mechanism of SkewIoU by its definition, and show its alignment with the SkewIoU loss at trend-level within a certain distance (i.e. within 9 pixels). This is in contrast to recent Gaussian modeling based rotation detectors e.g. GWD loss and KLD loss that involve a human-specified distribution distance metric which require additional hyperparameter tuning that vary across datasets and detectors. The resulting new loss called KFIoU loss is easier to implement and works better compared with exact SkewIoU loss, thanks to its full differentiability and ability to handle the non-overlapping cases. We further extend our technique to the 3-D case which also suffers from the same issues as 2-D. Extensive results on various public datasets (2-D/3-D, aerial/text/face images) with different base detectors show the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Kunchang Li, Yali Wang, Junhao Zhang, Peng Gao, Guanglu Song, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li, Yu Qiao
Abstract:
It is a challenging task to learn discriminative representation from images and videos, due to large local redundancy and complex global dependency in these visual data. Convolution neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have been two dominant frameworks in the past few years. Though CNNs can efficiently decrease local redundancy by convolution within a small neighborhood, the limited receptive field makes it hard to capture global dependency. Alternatively, ViTs can effectively capture long-range dependency via self-attention, while blind similarity comparisons among all the tokens lead to high redundancy. To resolve these problems, we propose a novel Unified transFormer (UniFormer), which can seamlessly integrate the merits of convolution and self-attention in a concise transformer format. Different from the typical transformer blocks, the relation aggregators in our UniFormer block are equipped with local and global token affinity respectively in shallow and deep layers, allowing to tackle both redundancy and dependency for efficient and effective representation learning. Finally, we flexibly stack our UniFormer blocks into a new powerful backbone, and adopt it for various vision tasks from image to video domain, from classification to dense prediction. Without any extra training data, our UniFormer achieves 86.3 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification. With only ImageNet-1K pre-training, it can simply achieve state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of downstream tasks, e.g., it obtains 82.9/84.8 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400/600, 60.9/71.2 top-1 accuracy on Sth-Sth V1/V2 video classification, 53.8 box AP and 46.4 mask AP on COCO object detection, 50.8 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation, and 77.4 AP on COCO pose estimation. We further build an efficient UniFormer with 2-4x higher throughput. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniFormer.
Authors:Niclas Vödisch, Ozan Unal, Ke Li, Luc Van Gool, Dengxin Dai
Abstract:
Existing learning methods for LiDAR-based applications use 3D points scanned under a pre-determined beam configuration, e.g., the elevation angles of beams are often evenly distributed. Those fixed configurations are task-agnostic, so simply using them can lead to sub-optimal performance. In this work, we take a new route to learn to optimize the LiDAR beam configuration for a given application. Specifically, we propose a reinforcement learning-based learning-to-optimize (RL-L2O) framework to automatically optimize the beam configuration in an end-to-end manner for different LiDAR-based applications. The optimization is guided by the final performance of the target task and thus our method can be integrated easily with any LiDAR-based application as a simple drop-in module. The method is especially useful when a low-resolution (low-cost) LiDAR is needed, for instance, for system deployment at a massive scale. We use our method to search for the beam configuration of a low-resolution LiDAR for two important tasks: 3D object detection and localization. Experiments show that the proposed RL-L2O method improves the performance in both tasks significantly compared to the baseline methods. We believe that a combination of our method with the recent advances of programmable LiDARs can start a new research direction for LiDAR-based active perception. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/vniclas/lidar_beam_selection
Authors:Guangyu Guo, Dingwen Zhang, Longfei Han, Nian Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Junwei Han
Abstract:
Previous knowledge distillation (KD) methods mostly focus on compressing network architectures, which is not thorough enough in deployment as some costs like transmission bandwidth and imaging equipment are related to the image size. Therefore, we propose Pixel Distillation that extends knowledge distillation into the input level while simultaneously breaking architecture constraints. Such a scheme can achieve flexible cost control for deployment, as it allows the system to adjust both network architecture and image quality according to the overall requirement of resources. Specifically, we first propose an input spatial representation distillation (ISRD) mechanism to transfer spatial knowledge from large images to student's input module, which can facilitate stable knowledge transfer between CNN and ViT. Then, a Teacher-Assistant-Student (TAS) framework is further established to disentangle pixel distillation into the model compression stage and input compression stage, which significantly reduces the overall complexity of pixel distillation and the difficulty of distilling intermediate knowledge. Finally, we adapt pixel distillation to object detection via an aligned feature for preservation (AFP) strategy for TAS, which aligns output dimensions of detectors at each stage by manipulating features and anchors of the assistant. Comprehensive experiments on image classification and object detection demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/gyguo/PixelDistillation.
Authors:Maik Wischow, Guillermo Gallego, Ines Ernst, Anko Börner
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles and robots require increasingly more robustness and reliability to meet the demands of modern tasks. These requirements specially apply to cameras onboard such vehicles because they are the predominant sensors to acquire information about the environment and support actions. Cameras must maintain proper functionality and take automatic countermeasures if necessary. Existing solutions are typically tailored to specific problems or detached from the downstream computer vision tasks of the machines, which, however, determine the requirements on the quality of the produced camera images. We propose a generic and task-oriented self-health-maintenance framework for cameras based on data- and physically-grounded models. To this end, we determine two reliable, real-time capable estimators for typical image effects of a camera in poor condition (blur, noise phenomena and most common combinations) by evaluating traditional and customized machine learning-based approaches in extensive experiments. Furthermore, we implement the framework on a real-world ground vehicle and demonstrate how a camera can adjust its parameters to counter an identified poor condition to achieve optimal application capability based on experimental (non-linear and non-monotonic) input-output performance curves. Object detection is chosen as target application, and the image effects motion blur and sensor noise as conditioning examples. Our framework not only provides a practical ready-to-use solution to monitor and maintain the health of cameras, but can also serve as a basis for extensions to tackle more sophisticated problems that combine additional data sources (e.g., sensor or environment parameters) empirically in order to attain fully reliable and robust machines. Code: https://github.com/MaikWischow/Camera-Condition-Monitoring
Authors:Youwei Pang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Most of the existing bi-modal (RGB-D and RGB-T) salient object detection methods utilize the convolution operation and construct complex interweave fusion structures to achieve cross-modal information integration. The inherent local connectivity of the convolution operation constrains the performance of the convolution-based methods to a ceiling. In this work, we rethink these tasks from the perspective of global information alignment and transformation. Specifically, the proposed \underline{c}ross-mod\underline{a}l \underline{v}iew-mixed transform\underline{er} (CAVER) cascades several cross-modal integration units to construct a top-down transformer-based information propagation path. CAVER treats the multi-scale and multi-modal feature integration as a sequence-to-sequence context propagation and update process built on a novel view-mixed attention mechanism. Besides, considering the quadratic complexity w.r.t. the number of input tokens, we design a parameter-free patch-wise token re-embedding strategy to simplify operations. Extensive experimental results on RGB-D and RGB-T SOD datasets demonstrate that such a simple two-stream encoder-decoder framework can surpass recent state-of-the-art methods when it is equipped with the proposed components. Code and pretrained models will be available at \href{https://github.com/lartpang/CAVER}{the link}.
Authors:Baisong Zhang, Weiqing Min, Jing Wang, Sujuan Hou, Qiang Hou, Yuanjie Zheng, Shuqiang Jiang
Abstract:
Recently, logo detection has received more and more attention for its wide applications in the multimedia field, such as intellectual property protection, product brand management, and logo duration monitoring. Unlike general object detection, logo detection is a challenging task, especially for small logo objects and large aspect ratio logo objects in the real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named Discriminative Semantic Feature Pyramid Network with Guided Anchoring (DSFP-GA), which can address these challenges via aggregating the semantic information and generating different aspect ratio anchor boxes. More specifically, our approach mainly consists of Discriminative Semantic Feature Pyramid (DSFP) and Guided Anchoring (GA). Considering that low-level feature maps that are used to detect small logo objects lack semantic information, we propose the DSFP, which can enrich more discriminative semantic features of low-level feature maps and can achieve better performance on small logo objects. Furthermore, preset anchor boxes are less efficient for detecting large aspect ratio logo objects. We therefore integrate the GA into our method to generate large aspect ratio anchor boxes to mitigate this issue. Extensive experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DSFP-GA. Moreover, we further conduct visual analysis and ablation studies to illustrate the advantage of our method in detecting small and large aspect logo objects. The code and models can be found at https://github.com/Zhangbaisong/DSFP-GA.
Authors:Dong Wu, Manwen Liao, Weitian Zhang, Xinggang Wang, Xiang Bai, Wenqing Cheng, Wenyu Liu
Abstract:
A panoptic driving perception system is an essential part of autonomous driving. A high-precision and real-time perception system can assist the vehicle in making the reasonable decision while driving. We present a panoptic driving perception network (YOLOP) to perform traffic object detection, drivable area segmentation and lane detection simultaneously. It is composed of one encoder for feature extraction and three decoders to handle the specific tasks. Our model performs extremely well on the challenging BDD100K dataset, achieving state-of-the-art on all three tasks in terms of accuracy and speed. Besides, we verify the effectiveness of our multi-task learning model for joint training via ablative studies. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that can process these three visual perception tasks simultaneously in real-time on an embedded device Jetson TX2(23 FPS) and maintain excellent accuracy. To facilitate further research, the source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/YOLOP.
Authors:Yu Qiu, Yun Liu, Le Zhang, Jing Xu
Abstract:
Existing salient object detection (SOD) methods mainly rely on U-shaped convolution neural networks (CNNs) with skip connections to combine the global contexts and local spatial details that are crucial for locating salient objects and refining object details, respectively. Despite great successes, the ability of CNNs in learning global contexts is limited. Recently, the vision transformer has achieved revolutionary progress in computer vision owing to its powerful modeling of global dependencies. However, directly applying the transformer to SOD is suboptimal because the transformer lacks the ability to learn local spatial representations. To this end, this paper explores the combination of transformers and CNNs to learn both global and local representations for SOD. We propose a transformer-based Asymmetric Bilateral U-Net (ABiU-Net). The asymmetric bilateral encoder has a transformer path and a lightweight CNN path, where the two paths communicate at each encoder stage to learn complementary global contexts and local spatial details, respectively. The asymmetric bilateral decoder also consists of two paths to process features from the transformer and CNN encoder paths, with communication at each decoder stage for decoding coarse salient object locations and fine-grained object details, respectively. Such communication between the two encoder/decoder paths enables AbiU-Net to learn complementary global and local representations, taking advantage of the natural merits of transformers and CNNs, respectively. Hence, ABiU-Net provides a new perspective for transformer-based SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ABiU-Net performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art SOD methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yuqiuyuqiu/ABiU-Net.
Authors:Depu Meng, Xiaokang Chen, Zejia Fan, Gang Zeng, Houqiang Li, Yuhui Yuan, Lei Sun, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
The recently-developed DETR approach applies the transformer encoder and decoder architecture to object detection and achieves promising performance. In this paper, we handle the critical issue, slow training convergence, and present a conditional cross-attention mechanism for fast DETR training. Our approach is motivated by that the cross-attention in DETR relies highly on the content embeddings for localizing the four extremities and predicting the box, which increases the need for high-quality content embeddings and thus the training difficulty. Our approach, named conditional DETR, learns a conditional spatial query from the decoder embedding for decoder multi-head cross-attention. The benefit is that through the conditional spatial query, each cross-attention head is able to attend to a band containing a distinct region, e.g., one object extremity or a region inside the object box. This narrows down the spatial range for localizing the distinct regions for object classification and box regression, thus relaxing the dependence on the content embeddings and easing the training. Empirical results show that conditional DETR converges 6.7x faster for the backbones R50 and R101 and 10x faster for stronger backbones DC5-R50 and DC5-R101. Code is available at https://github.com/Atten4Vis/ConditionalDETR.
Authors:Yuki Tatsunami, Masato Taki
Abstract:
For the past ten years, CNN has reigned supreme in the world of computer vision, but recently, Transformer has been on the rise. However, the quadratic computational cost of self-attention has become a serious problem in practice applications. There has been much research on architectures without CNN and self-attention in this context. In particular, MLP-Mixer is a simple architecture designed using MLPs and hit an accuracy comparable to the Vision Transformer. However, the only inductive bias in this architecture is the embedding of tokens. This leaves open the possibility of incorporating a non-convolutional (or non-local) inductive bias into the architecture, so we used two simple ideas to incorporate inductive bias into the MLP-Mixer while taking advantage of its ability to capture global correlations. A way is to divide the token-mixing block vertically and horizontally. Another way is to make spatial correlations denser among some channels of token-mixing. With this approach, we were able to improve the accuracy of the MLP-Mixer while reducing its parameters and computational complexity. The small model that is RaftMLP-S is comparable to the state-of-the-art global MLP-based model in terms of parameters and efficiency per calculation. In addition, we tackled the problem of fixed input image resolution for global MLP-based models by utilizing bicubic interpolation. We demonstrated that these models could be applied as the backbone of architectures for downstream tasks such as object detection. However, it did not have significant performance and mentioned the need for MLP-specific architectures for downstream tasks for global MLP-based models. The source code in PyTorch version is available at \url{https://github.com/okojoalg/raft-mlp}.
Authors:Sucheng Ren, Qiang Wen, Nanxuan Zhao, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He
Abstract:
The fully convolutional network (FCN) has dominated salient object detection for a long period. However, the locality of CNN requires the model deep enough to have a global receptive field and such a deep model always leads to the loss of local details. In this paper, we introduce a new attention-based encoder, vision transformer, into salient object detection to ensure the globalization of the representations from shallow to deep layers. With the global view in very shallow layers, the transformer encoder preserves more local representations to recover the spatial details in final saliency maps. Besides, as each layer can capture a global view of its previous layer, adjacent layers can implicitly maximize the representation differences and minimize the redundant features, making that every output feature of transformer layers contributes uniquely for final prediction. To decode features from the transformer, we propose a simple yet effective deeply-transformed decoder. The decoder densely decodes and upsamples the transformer features, generating the final saliency map with less noise injection. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms other FCN-based and transformer-based methods in five benchmarks by a large margin, with an average of 12.17% improvement in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Code will be available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/GLSTR.
Authors:Weijie Liu, Chong Wang, Haohe Li, Shenghao Yu, Jiafei Wu
Abstract:
Expensive bounding-box annotations have limited the development of object detection task. Thus, it is necessary to focus on more challenging task of few-shot object detection. It requires the detector to recognize objects of novel classes with only a few training samples. Nowadays, many existing popular methods adopting training way similar to meta-learning have achieved promising performance, such as Meta R-CNN series. However, support data is only used as the class attention to guide the detecting of query images each time. Their relevance to each other remains unexploited. Moreover, a lot of recent works treat the support data and query images as independent branch without considering the relationship between them. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic relevance learning model, which utilizes the relationship between all support images and Region of Interest (RoI) on the query images to construct a dynamic graph convolutional network (GCN). By adjusting the prediction distribution of the base detector using the output of this GCN, the proposed model serves as a hard auxiliary classification task, which guides the detector to improve the class representation implicitly. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on Pascal VOC and MS-COCO dataset. The proposed model achieves the best overall performance, which shows its effectiveness of learning more generalized features. Our code is available at https://github.com/liuweijie19980216/DRL-for-FSOD.
Authors:Yinmin Zhang, Xinzhu Ma, Shuai Yi, Jun Hou, Zhihui Wang, Wanli Ouyang, Dan Xu
Abstract:
As a crucial task of autonomous driving, 3D object detection has made great progress in recent years. However, monocular 3D object detection remains a challenging problem due to the unsatisfactory performance in depth estimation. Most existing monocular methods typically directly regress the scene depth while ignoring important relationships between the depth and various geometric elements (e.g. bounding box sizes, 3D object dimensions, and object poses). In this paper, we propose to learn geometry-guided depth estimation with projective modeling to advance monocular 3D object detection. Specifically, a principled geometry formula with projective modeling of 2D and 3D depth predictions in the monocular 3D object detection network is devised. We further implement and embed the proposed formula to enable geometry-aware deep representation learning, allowing effective 2D and 3D interactions for boosting the depth estimation. Moreover, we provide a strong baseline through addressing substantial misalignment between 2D annotation and projected boxes to ensure robust learning with the proposed geometric formula. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our method remarkably improves the detection performance of the state-of-the-art monocular-based method without extra data by 2.80% on the moderate test setting. The model and code will be released at https://github.com/YinminZhang/MonoGeo.
Authors:Mete Ahishali, Mehmet Yamac, Serkan Kiranyaz, Moncef Gabbouj
Abstract:
In this study, we propose a novel approach to predict the distances of the detected objects in an observed scene. The proposed approach modifies the recently proposed Convolutional Support Estimator Networks (CSENs). CSENs are designed to compute a direct mapping for the Support Estimation (SE) task in a representation-based classification problem. We further propose and demonstrate that representation-based methods (sparse or collaborative representation) can be used in well-designed regression problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first representation-based method proposed for performing a regression task by utilizing the modified CSENs; and hence, we name this novel approach as Representation-based Regression (RbR). The initial version of CSENs has a proxy mapping stage (i.e., a coarse estimation for the support set) that is required for the input. In this study, we improve the CSEN model by proposing Compressive Learning CSEN (CL-CSEN) that has the ability to jointly optimize the so-called proxy mapping stage along with convolutional layers. The experimental evaluations using the KITTI 3D Object Detection distance estimation dataset show that the proposed method can achieve a significantly improved distance estimation performance over all competing methods. Finally, the software implementations of the methods are publicly shared at https://github.com/meteahishali/CSENDistance.
Authors:Yun Liu, Yu-Huan Wu, Guolei Sun, Le Zhang, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
This paper tackles the high computational/space complexity associated with Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) in vanilla vision transformers. To this end, we propose Hierarchical MHSA (H-MHSA), a novel approach that computes self-attention in a hierarchical fashion. Specifically, we first divide the input image into patches as commonly done, and each patch is viewed as a token. Then, the proposed H-MHSA learns token relationships within local patches, serving as local relationship modeling. Then, the small patches are merged into larger ones, and H-MHSA models the global dependencies for the small number of the merged tokens. At last, the local and global attentive features are aggregated to obtain features with powerful representation capacity. Since we only calculate attention for a limited number of tokens at each step, the computational load is reduced dramatically. Hence, H-MHSA can efficiently model global relationships among tokens without sacrificing fine-grained information. With the H-MHSA module incorporated, we build a family of Hierarchical-Attention-based Transformer Networks, namely HAT-Net. To demonstrate the superiority of HAT-Net in scene understanding, we conduct extensive experiments on fundamental vision tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Therefore, HAT-Net provides a new perspective for vision transformers. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/yun-liu/HAT-Net.
Authors:Deng Li, Yue Wu, Yicong Zhou
Abstract:
Handwritten Text Line Segmentation (HTLS) is a low-level but important task for many higher-level document processing tasks like handwritten text recognition. It is often formulated in terms of semantic segmentation or object detection in deep learning. However, both formulations have serious shortcomings. The former requires heavy post-processing of splitting/merging adjacent segments, while the latter may fail on dense or curved texts. In this paper, we propose a novel Line Counting formulation for HTLS -- that involves counting the number of text lines from the top at every pixel location. This formulation helps learn an end-to-end HTLS solution that directly predicts per-pixel line number for a given document image. Furthermore, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) model LineCounter to perform HTLS through the Line Counting formulation. Our extensive experiments on the three public datasets (ICDAR2013-HSC, HIT-MW, and VML-AHTE) demonstrate that LineCounter outperforms state-of-the-art HTLS approaches. Source code is available at https://github.com/Leedeng/Line-Counter.
Authors:Deng-Ping Fan, Jing Zhang, Gang Xu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ling Shao
Abstract:
This paper identifies and addresses a serious design bias of existing salient object detection (SOD) datasets, which unrealistically assume that each image should contain at least one clear and uncluttered salient object. This design bias has led to a saturation in performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. However, these models are still far from satisfactory when applied to real-world scenes. Based on our analyses, we propose a new high-quality dataset and update the previous saliency benchmark. Specifically, our dataset, called Salient Objects in Clutter~\textbf{(SOC)}, includes images with both salient and non-salient objects from several common object categories. In addition to object category annotations, each salient image is accompanied by attributes that reflect common challenges in common scenes, which can help provide deeper insight into the SOD problem. Further, with a given saliency encoder, e.g., the backbone network, existing saliency models are designed to achieve mapping from the training image set to the training ground-truth set. We, therefore, argue that improving the dataset can yield higher performance gains than focusing only on the decoder design. With this in mind, we investigate several dataset-enhancement strategies, including label smoothing to implicitly emphasize salient boundaries, random image augmentation to adapt saliency models to various scenarios, and self-supervised learning as a regularization strategy to learn from small datasets. Our extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of these tricks. We also provide a comprehensive benchmark for SOD, which can be found in our repository: https://github.com/DengPingFan/SODBenchmark.
Authors:Deng-Ping Fan, Ge-Peng Ji, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ling Shao
Abstract:
We present the first systematic study on concealed object detection (COD), which aims to identify objects that are "perfectly" embedded in their background. The high intrinsic similarities between the concealed objects and their background make COD far more challenging than traditional object detection/segmentation. To better understand this task, we collect a large-scale dataset, called COD10K, which consists of 10,000 images covering concealed objects in diverse real-world scenarios from 78 object categories. Further, we provide rich annotations including object categories, object boundaries, challenging attributes, object-level labels, and instance-level annotations. Our COD10K is the largest COD dataset to date, with the richest annotations, which enables comprehensive concealed object understanding and can even be used to help progress several other vision tasks, such as detection, segmentation, classification, etc. Motivated by how animals hunt in the wild, we also design a simple but strong baseline for COD, termed the Search Identification Network (SINet). Without any bells and whistles, SINet outperforms 12 cutting-edge baselines on all datasets tested, making them robust, general architectures that could serve as catalysts for future research in COD. Finally, we provide some interesting findings and highlight several potential applications and future directions. To spark research in this new field, our code, dataset, and online demo are available on our project page: http://mmcheng.net/cod.
Authors:Fredrik K. Gustafsson, Martin Danelljan, Thomas B. Schön
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection (3DOD) is crucial for safe navigation of complex environments by autonomous robots. Regressing accurate 3D bounding boxes in cluttered environments based on sparse LiDAR data is however a highly challenging problem. We address this task by exploring recent advances in conditional energy-based models (EBMs) for probabilistic regression. While methods employing EBMs for regression have demonstrated impressive performance on 2D object detection in images, these techniques are not directly applicable to 3D bounding boxes. In this work, we therefore design a differentiable pooling operator for 3D bounding boxes, serving as the core module of our EBM network. We further integrate this general approach into the state-of-the-art 3D object detector SA-SSD. On the KITTI dataset, our proposed approach consistently outperforms the SA-SSD baseline across all 3DOD metrics, demonstrating the potential of EBM-based regression for highly accurate 3DOD. Code is available at https://github.com/fregu856/ebms_3dod.
Authors:Ping-Yang Chen, Ming-Ching Chang, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Yong-Sheng Chen
Abstract:
This paper proposes the Parallel Residual Bi-Fusion Feature Pyramid Network (PRB-FPN) for fast and accurate single-shot object detection. Feature Pyramid (FP) is widely used in recent visual detection, however the top-down pathway of FP cannot preserve accurate localization due to pooling shifting. The advantage of FP is weakened as deeper backbones with more layers are used. In addition, it cannot keep up accurate detection of both small and large objects at the same time. To address these issues, we propose a new parallel FP structure with bi-directional (top-down and bottom-up) fusion and associated improvements to retain high-quality features for accurate localization. We provide the following design improvements: (1) A parallel bifusion FP structure with a bottom-up fusion module (BFM) to detect both small and large objects at once with high accuracy. (2) A concatenation and re-organization (CORE) module provides a bottom-up pathway for feature fusion, which leads to the bi-directional fusion FP that can recover lost information from lower-layer feature maps. (3) The CORE feature is further purified to retain richer contextual information. Such CORE purification in both top-down and bottom-up pathways can be finished in only a few iterations. (4) The adding of a residual design to CORE leads to a new Re-CORE module that enables easy training and integration with a wide range of deeper or lighter backbones. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the UAVDT17 and MS COCO datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/pingyang1117/PRBNet_PyTorch.
Authors:Zhigang Dai, Bolun Cai, Yugeng Lin, Junying Chen
Abstract:
DEtection TRansformer (DETR) for object detection reaches competitive performance compared with Faster R-CNN via a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. However, trained with scratch transformers, DETR needs large-scale training data and an extreme long training schedule even on COCO dataset. Inspired by the great success of pre-training transformers in natural language processing, we propose a novel pretext task named random query patch detection in Unsupervised Pre-training DETR (UP-DETR). Specifically, we randomly crop patches from the given image and then feed them as queries to the decoder. The model is pre-trained to detect these query patches from the input image. During the pre-training, we address two critical issues: multi-task learning and multi-query localization. (1) To trade off classification and localization preferences in the pretext task, we find that freezing the CNN backbone is the prerequisite for the success of pre-training transformers. (2) To perform multi-query localization, we develop UP-DETR with multi-query patch detection with attention mask. Besides, UP-DETR also provides a unified perspective for fine-tuning object detection and one-shot detection tasks. In our experiments, UP-DETR significantly boosts the performance of DETR with faster convergence and higher average precision on object detection, one-shot detection and panoptic segmentation. Code and pre-training models: https://github.com/dddzg/up-detr.
Authors:Xianyu Chen, Ming Jiang, Qi Zhao
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection aims at detecting objects with few annotated examples, which remains a challenging research problem yet to be explored. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of self-learned top-down attention mechanisms in object detection and other vision tasks. The top-down attention, however, is less effective at improving the performance of few-shot detectors. Due to the insufficient training data, object detectors cannot effectively generate attention maps for few-shot examples. To improve the performance and interpretability of few-shot object detectors, we propose an attentive few-shot object detection network (AttFDNet) that takes the advantages of both top-down and bottom-up attention. Being task-agnostic, the bottom-up attention serves as a prior that helps detect and localize naturally salient objects. We further address specific challenges in few-shot object detection by introducing two novel loss terms and a hybrid few-shot learning strategy. Experimental results and visualization demonstrate the complementary nature of the two types of attention and their roles in few-shot object detection. Codes are available at https://github.com/chenxy99/AttFDNet.
Authors:Peng Chen, Jing Liu, Bohan Zhuang, Mingkui Tan, Chunhua Shen
Abstract:
Network quantization allows inference to be conducted using low-precision arithmetic for improved inference efficiency of deep neural networks on edge devices. However, designing aggressively low-bit (e.g., 2-bit) quantization schemes on complex tasks, such as object detection, still remains challenging in terms of severe performance degradation and unverifiable efficiency on common hardware. In this paper, we propose an Accurate Quantized object Detection solution, termed AQD, to fully get rid of floating-point computation. To this end, we target using fixed-point operations in all kinds of layers, including the convolutional layers, normalization layers, and skip connections, allowing the inference to be executed using integer-only arithmetic. To demonstrate the improved latency-vs-accuracy trade-off, we apply the proposed methods on RetinaNet and FCOS. In particular, experimental results on MS-COCO dataset show that our AQD achieves comparable or even better performance compared with the full-precision counterpart under extremely low-bit schemes, which is of great practical value. Source code and models are available at: https://github.com/ziplab/QTool
Authors:Deng-Ping Fan, Tengpeng Li, Zheng Lin, Ge-Peng Ji, Dingwen Zhang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Huazhu Fu, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the co-salient object detection (CoSOD) problem for images. CoSOD is an emerging and rapidly growing extension of salient object detection (SOD), which aims to detect the co-occurring salient objects in a group of images. However, existing CoSOD datasets often have a serious data bias, assuming that each group of images contains salient objects of similar visual appearances. This bias can lead to the ideal settings and effectiveness of models trained on existing datasets, being impaired in real-life situations, where similarities are usually semantic or conceptual. To tackle this issue, we first introduce a new benchmark, called CoSOD3k in the wild, which requires a large amount of semantic context, making it more challenging than existing CoSOD datasets. Our CoSOD3k consists of 3,316 high-quality, elaborately selected images divided into 160 groups with hierarchical annotations. The images span a wide range of categories, shapes, object sizes, and backgrounds. Second, we integrate the existing SOD techniques to build a unified, trainable CoSOD framework, which is long overdue in this field. Specifically, we propose a novel CoEG-Net that augments our prior model EGNet with a co-attention projection strategy to enable fast common information learning. CoEG-Net fully leverages previous large-scale SOD datasets and significantly improves the model scalability and stability. Third, we comprehensively summarize 40 cutting-edge algorithms, benchmarking 18 of them over three challenging CoSOD datasets (iCoSeg, CoSal2015, and our CoSOD3k), and reporting more detailed (i.e., group-level) performance analysis. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future works of CoSOD. We hope that our study will give a strong boost to growth in the CoSOD community. The benchmark toolbox and results are available on our project page at http://dpfan.net/CoSOD3K/.
Authors:Michal RolÃnek, VÃt Musil, Anselm Paulus, Marin Vlastelica, Claudio Michaelis, Georg Martius
Abstract:
Rank-based metrics are some of the most widely used criteria for performance evaluation of computer vision models. Despite years of effort, direct optimization for these metrics remains a challenge due to their non-differentiable and non-decomposable nature. We present an efficient, theoretically sound, and general method for differentiating rank-based metrics with mini-batch gradient descent. In addition, we address optimization instability and sparsity of the supervision signal that both arise from using rank-based metrics as optimization targets. Resulting losses based on recall and Average Precision are applied to image retrieval and object detection tasks. We obtain performance that is competitive with state-of-the-art on standard image retrieval datasets and consistently improve performance of near state-of-the-art object detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/martius-lab/blackbox-backprop
Authors:Deng-Ping Fan, Zheng Lin, Jia-Xing Zhao, Yun Liu, Zhao Zhang, Qibin Hou, Menglong Zhu, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
The use of RGB-D information for salient object detection has been extensively explored in recent years. However, relatively few efforts have been put towards modeling salient object detection in real-world human activity scenes with RGBD. In this work, we fill the gap by making the following contributions to RGB-D salient object detection. (1) We carefully collect a new SIP (salient person) dataset, which consists of ~1K high-resolution images that cover diverse real-world scenes from various viewpoints, poses, occlusions, illuminations, and backgrounds. (2) We conduct a large-scale (and, so far, the most comprehensive) benchmark comparing contemporary methods, which has long been missing in the field and can serve as a baseline for future research. We systematically summarize 32 popular models and evaluate 18 parts of 32 models on seven datasets containing a total of about 97K images. (3) We propose a simple general architecture, called Deep Depth-Depurator Network (D3Net). It consists of a depth depurator unit (DDU) and a three-stream feature learning module (FLM), which performs low-quality depth map filtering and cross-modal feature learning respectively. These components form a nested structure and are elaborately designed to be learned jointly. D3Net exceeds the performance of any prior contenders across all five metrics under consideration, thus serving as a strong model to advance research in this field. We also demonstrate that D3Net can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from real scenes, enabling effective background changing application with a speed of 65fps on a single GPU. All the saliency maps, our new SIP dataset, the D3Net model, and the evaluation tools are publicly available at https://github.com/DengPingFan/D3NetBenchmark.
Authors:Zuoxin Li, Lu Yang, Fuqiang Zhou
Abstract:
SSD (Single Shot Multibox Detector) is one of the best object detection algorithms with both high accuracy and fast speed. However, SSD's feature pyramid detection method makes it hard to fuse the features from different scales. In this paper, we proposed FSSD (Feature Fusion Single Shot Multibox Detector), an enhanced SSD with a novel and lightweight feature fusion module which can improve the performance significantly over SSD with just a little speed drop. In the feature fusion module, features from different layers with different scales are concatenated together, followed by some down-sampling blocks to generate new feature pyramid, which will be fed to multibox detectors to predict the final detection results. On the Pascal VOC 2007 test, our network can achieve 82.7 mAP (mean average precision) at the speed of 65.8 FPS (frame per second) with the input size 300$\times$300 using a single Nvidia 1080Ti GPU. In addition, our result on COCO is also better than the conventional SSD with a large margin. Our FSSD outperforms a lot of state-of-the-art object detection algorithms in both aspects of accuracy and speed. Code is available at https://github.com/lzx1413/CAFFE_SSD/tree/fssd.
Authors:Jifeng Dai, Yi Li, Kaiming He, Jian Sun
Abstract:
We present region-based, fully convolutional networks for accurate and efficient object detection. In contrast to previous region-based detectors such as Fast/Faster R-CNN that apply a costly per-region subnetwork hundreds of times, our region-based detector is fully convolutional with almost all computation shared on the entire image. To achieve this goal, we propose position-sensitive score maps to address a dilemma between translation-invariance in image classification and translation-variance in object detection. Our method can thus naturally adopt fully convolutional image classifier backbones, such as the latest Residual Networks (ResNets), for object detection. We show competitive results on the PASCAL VOC datasets (e.g., 83.6% mAP on the 2007 set) with the 101-layer ResNet. Meanwhile, our result is achieved at a test-time speed of 170ms per image, 2.5-20x faster than the Faster R-CNN counterpart. Code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/daijifeng001/r-fcn
Authors:Danyang Tu, Wei Shen, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract:
This paper proposes an efficient and effective method for joint gaze location detection (GL-D) and gaze object detection (GO-D), \emph{i.e.}, gaze following detection. Current approaches frame GL-D and GO-D as two separate tasks, employing a multi-stage framework where human head crops must first be detected and then be fed into a subsequent GL-D sub-network, which is further followed by an additional object detector for GO-D. In contrast, we reframe the gaze following detection task as detecting human head locations and their gaze followings simultaneously, aiming at jointly detect human gaze location and gaze object in a unified and single-stage pipeline. To this end, we propose GTR, short for \underline{G}aze following detection \underline{TR}ansformer, streamlining the gaze following detection pipeline by eliminating all additional components, leading to the first unified paradigm that unites GL-D and GO-D in a fully end-to-end manner. GTR enables an iterative interaction between holistic semantics and human head features through a hierarchical structure, inferring the relations of salient objects and human gaze from the global image context and resulting in an impressive accuracy. Concretely, GTR achieves a 12.1 mAP gain ($\mathbf{25.1}\%$) on GazeFollowing and a 18.2 mAP gain ($\mathbf{43.3\%}$) on VideoAttentionTarget for GL-D, as well as a 19 mAP improvement ($\mathbf{45.2\%}$) on GOO-Real for GO-D. Meanwhile, unlike existing systems detecting gaze following sequentially due to the need for a human head as input, GTR has the flexibility to comprehend any number of people's gaze followings simultaneously, resulting in high efficiency. Specifically, GTR introduces over a $\times 9$ improvement in FPS and the relative gap becomes more pronounced as the human number grows.
Authors:Yu Guo, Ryan Wen Liu, Jiangtian Nie, Lingjuan Lyu, Zehui Xiong, Jiawen Kang, Han Yu, Dusit Niyato
Abstract:
Visual surveillance technology is an indispensable functional component of advanced traffic management systems. It has been applied to perform traffic supervision tasks, such as object detection, tracking and recognition. However, adverse weather conditions, e.g., fog, haze and mist, pose severe challenges for video-based transportation surveillance. To eliminate the influences of adverse weather conditions, we propose a dual attention and dual frequency-guided dehazing network (termed DADFNet) for real-time visibility enhancement. It consists of a dual attention module (DAM) and a high-low frequency-guided sub-net (HLFN) to jointly consider the attention and frequency mapping to guide haze-free scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate the superiority of DADFNet over state-of-the-art methods in terms of visibility enhancement and improvement in detection accuracy. Furthermore, DADFNet only takes $6.3$ ms to process a 1,920 * 1,080 image on the 2080 Ti GPU, making it highly efficient for deployment in intelligent transportation systems.
Authors:Long Li, Nian Liu, Dingwen Zhang, Zhongyu Li, Salman Khan, Rao Anwer, Hisham Cholakkal, Junwei Han, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
Inter-image association modeling is crucial for co-salient object detection. Despite satisfactory performance, previous methods still have limitations on sufficient inter-image association modeling. Because most of them focus on image feature optimization under the guidance of heuristically calculated raw inter-image associations. They directly rely on raw associations which are not reliable in complex scenarios, and their image feature optimization approach is not explicit for inter-image association modeling. To alleviate these limitations, this paper proposes a deep association learning strategy that deploys deep networks on raw associations to explicitly transform them into deep association features. Specifically, we first create hyperassociations to collect dense pixel-pair-wise raw associations and then deploys deep aggregation networks on them. We design a progressive association generation module for this purpose with additional enhancement of the hyperassociation calculation. More importantly, we propose a correspondence-induced association condensation module that introduces a pretext task, i.e. semantic correspondence estimation, to condense the hyperassociations for computational burden reduction and noise elimination. We also design an object-aware cycle consistency loss for high-quality correspondence estimations. Experimental results in three benchmark datasets demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our proposed method with various training settings.
Authors:Mohamed El Amine Boudjoghra, Angela Dai, Jean Lahoud, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
Recent works on open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation show strong promise, but at the cost of slow inference speed and high computation requirements. This high computation cost is typically due to their heavy reliance on 3D clip features, which require computationally expensive 2D foundation models like Segment Anything (SAM) and CLIP for multi-view aggregation into 3D. As a consequence, this hampers their applicability in many real-world applications that require both fast and accurate predictions. To this end, we propose a fast yet accurate open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation approach, named Open-YOLO 3D, that effectively leverages only 2D object detection from multi-view RGB images for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. We address this task by generating class-agnostic 3D masks for objects in the scene and associating them with text prompts. We observe that the projection of class-agnostic 3D point cloud instances already holds instance information; thus, using SAM might only result in redundancy that unnecessarily increases the inference time. We empirically find that a better performance of matching text prompts to 3D masks can be achieved in a faster fashion with a 2D object detector. We validate our Open-YOLO 3D on two benchmarks, ScanNet200 and Replica, under two scenarios: (i) with ground truth masks, where labels are required for given object proposals, and (ii) with class-agnostic 3D proposals generated from a 3D proposal network. Our Open-YOLO 3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets while obtaining up to $\sim$16$\times$ speedup compared to the best existing method in literature. On ScanNet200 val. set, our Open-YOLO 3D achieves mean average precision (mAP) of 24.7\% while operating at 22 seconds per scene. Code and model are available at github.com/aminebdj/OpenYOLO3D.
Authors:Rohit Bharadwaj, Muzammal Naseer, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
In this work, we address the challenging and emergent problem of novel object detection (NOD), focusing on the accurate detection of both known and novel object categories during inference. Traditional object detection algorithms are inherently closed-set, limiting their capability to handle NOD. We present a novel approach to transform existing closed-set detectors into open-set detectors. This transformation is achieved by leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained foundational models, specifically CLIP and SAM, through our cooperative mechanism. Furthermore, by integrating this mechanism with state-of-the-art open-set detectors such as GDINO, we establish new benchmarks in object detection performance. Our method achieves 17.42 mAP in novel object detection and 42.08 mAP for known objects on the challenging LVIS dataset. Adapting our approach to the COCO OVD split, we surpass the current state-of-the-art by a margin of 7.2 $ \text{AP}_{50} $ for novel classes. Our code is available at https://rohit901.github.io/coop-foundation-models/ .
Authors:Yufei Yin, Lechao Cheng, Wengang Zhou, Jiajun Deng, Zhou Yu, Houqiang Li
Abstract:
In recent years, weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted much attention due to its low labeling cost. The success of recent WSOD models is often ascribed to the two-stage multi-class classification (MCC) task, i.e., multiple instance learning and online classification refinement. Despite achieving non-trivial progresses, these methods overlook potential classification ambiguities between these two MCC tasks and fail to leverage their unique strengths. In this work, we introduce a novel WSOD framework to ameliorate these two issues. For one thing, we propose a self-classification enhancement module that integrates intra-class binary classification (ICBC) to bridge the gap between the two distinct MCC tasks. The ICBC task enhances the network's discrimination between positive and mis-located samples in a class-wise manner and forges a mutually reinforcing relationship with the MCC task. For another, we propose a self-classification correction algorithm during inference, which combines the results of both MCC tasks to effectively reduce the mis-classified predictions. Extensive experiments on the prevalent VOC 2007 & 2012 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework.
Authors:Jiahao Guo, Ziyang Xu, Lianjun Wu, Fei Gao, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Abstract:
Small Video Object Detection (SVOD) is a crucial subfield in modern computer vision, essential for early object discovery and detection. However, existing SVOD datasets are scarce and suffer from issues such as insufficiently small objects, limited object categories, and lack of scene diversity, leading to unitary application scenarios for corresponding methods. To address this gap, we develop the XS-VID dataset, which comprises aerial data from various periods and scenes, and annotates eight major object categories. To further evaluate existing methods for detecting extremely small objects, XS-VID extensively collects three types of objects with smaller pixel areas: extremely small (\textit{es}, $0\sim12^2$), relatively small (\textit{rs}, $12^2\sim20^2$), and generally small (\textit{gs}, $20^2\sim32^2$). XS-VID offers unprecedented breadth and depth in covering and quantifying minuscule objects, significantly enriching the scene and object diversity in the dataset. Extensive validations on XS-VID and the publicly available VisDrone2019VID dataset show that existing methods struggle with small object detection and significantly underperform compared to general object detectors. Leveraging the strengths of previous methods and addressing their weaknesses, we propose YOLOFT, which enhances local feature associations and integrates temporal motion features, significantly improving the accuracy and stability of SVOD. Our datasets and benchmarks are available at \url{https://gjhhust.github.io/XS-VID/}.
Authors:Lin Niu, Jiawei Liu, Zhihang Yuan, Dawei Yang, Xinggang Wang, Wenyu Liu
Abstract:
Efficient inference for object detection networks is a major challenge on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ), which transforms a full-precision model into low bit-width directly, is an effective and convenient approach to reduce model inference complexity. But it suffers severe accuracy drop when applied to complex tasks such as object detection. PTQ optimizes the quantization parameters by different metrics to minimize the perturbation of quantization. The p-norm distance of feature maps before and after quantization, Lp, is widely used as the metric to evaluate perturbation. For the specialty of object detection network, we observe that the parameter p in Lp metric will significantly influence its quantization performance. We indicate that using a fixed hyper-parameter p does not achieve optimal quantization performance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a framework, DetPTQ, to assign different p values for quantizing different layers using an Object Detection Output Loss (ODOL), which represents the task loss of object detection. DetPTQ employs the ODOL-based adaptive Lp metric to select the optimal quantization parameters. Experiments show that our DetPTQ outperforms the state-of-the-art PTQ methods by a significant margin on both 2D and 3D object detectors. For example, we achieve 31.1/31.7(quantization/full-precision) mAP on RetinaNet-ResNet18 with 4-bit weight and 4-bit activation.
Authors:Shaoyu Chen, Tianheng Cheng, Jiemin Fang, Qian Zhang, Yuan Li, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Abstract:
Small object detection requires the detection head to scan a large number of positions on image feature maps, which is extremely hard for computation- and energy-efficient lightweight generic detectors. To accurately detect small objects with limited computation, we propose a two-stage lightweight detection framework with extremely low computation complexity, termed as TinyDet. It enables high-resolution feature maps for dense anchoring to better cover small objects, proposes a sparsely-connected convolution for computation reduction, enhances the early stage features in the backbone, and addresses the feature misalignment problem for accurate small object detection. On the COCO benchmark, our TinyDet-M achieves 30.3 AP and 13.5 AP^s with only 991 MFLOPs, which is the first detector that has an AP over 30 with less than 1 GFLOPs; besides, TinyDet-S and TinyDet-L achieve promising performance under different computation limitation.
Authors:Lingxuan Wu, Xiao Yang, Yinpeng Dong, Liuwei Xie, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Abstract:
The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial patches has motivated numerous defense strategies for boosting model robustness. However, the prevailing defenses depend on single observation or pre-established adversary information to counter adversarial patches, often failing to be confronted with unseen or adaptive adversarial attacks and easily exhibiting unsatisfying performance in dynamic 3D environments. Inspired by active human perception and recurrent feedback mechanisms, we develop Embodied Active Defense (EAD), a proactive defensive strategy that actively contextualizes environmental information to address misaligned adversarial patches in 3D real-world settings. To achieve this, EAD develops two central recurrent sub-modules, i.e., a perception module and a policy module, to implement two critical functions of active vision. These models recurrently process a series of beliefs and observations, facilitating progressive refinement of their comprehension of the target object and enabling the development of strategic actions to counter adversarial patches in 3D environments. To optimize learning efficiency, we incorporate a differentiable approximation of environmental dynamics and deploy patches that are agnostic to the adversary strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAD substantially enhances robustness against a variety of patches within just a few steps through its action policy in safety-critical tasks (e.g., face recognition and object detection), without compromising standard accuracy. Furthermore, due to the attack-agnostic characteristic, EAD facilitates excellent generalization to unseen attacks, diminishing the averaged attack success rate by 95 percent across a range of unseen adversarial attacks.
Authors:Yichi Zhang, Zijian Zhu, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Shibao Zheng, Yuan He, Hui Xue
Abstract:
Modern object detectors are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which may bring risks to real-world applications. The sparse attack is an important task which, compared with the popular adversarial perturbation on the whole image, needs to select the potential pixels that is generally regularized by an $\ell_0$-norm constraint, and simultaneously optimize the corresponding texture. The non-differentiability of $\ell_0$ norm brings challenges and many works on attacking object detection adopted manually-designed patterns to address them, which are meaningless and independent of objects, and therefore lead to relatively poor attack performance.
In this paper, we propose Adversarial Semantic Contour (ASC), an MAP estimate of a Bayesian formulation of sparse attack with a deceived prior of object contour. The object contour prior effectively reduces the search space of pixel selection and improves the attack by introducing more semantic bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ASC can corrupt the prediction of 9 modern detectors with different architectures (\e.g., one-stage, two-stage and Transformer) by modifying fewer than 5\% of the pixels of the object area in COCO in white-box scenario and around 10\% of those in black-box scenario. We further extend the attack to datasets for autonomous driving systems to verify the effectiveness. We conclude with cautions about contour being the common weakness of object detectors with various architecture and the care needed in applying them in safety-sensitive scenarios.
Authors:Chengkun Wang, Wenzhao Zheng, Yuanhui Huang, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract:
Mamba has garnered widespread attention due to its flexible design and efficient hardware performance to process 1D sequences based on the state space model (SSM). Recent studies have attempted to apply Mamba to the visual domain by flattening 2D images into patches and then regarding them as a 1D sequence. To compensate for the 2D structure information loss (e.g., local similarity) of the original image, most existing methods focus on designing different orders to sequentially process the tokens, which could only alleviate this issue to some extent. In this paper, we propose a Visual 2-Dimensional Mamba (V2M) model as a complete solution, which directly processes image tokens in the 2D space. We first generalize SSM to the 2-dimensional space which generates the next state considering two adjacent states on both dimensions (e.g., columns and rows). We then construct our V2M based on the 2-dimensional SSM formulation and incorporate Mamba to achieve hardware-efficient parallel processing. The proposed V2M effectively incorporates the 2D locality prior yet inherits the efficiency and input-dependent scalability of Mamba. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet classification and downstream visual tasks including object detection and instance segmentation on COCO and semantic segmentation on ADE20K demonstrate the effectiveness of our V2M compared with other visual backbones.
Authors:Chengkun Wang, Wenzhao Zheng, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract:
Vision mambas have demonstrated strong performance with linear complexity to the number of vision tokens. Their efficiency results from processing image tokens sequentially. However, most existing methods employ patch-based image tokenization and then flatten them into 1D sequences for causal processing, which ignore the intrinsic 2D structural correlations of images. It is also difficult to extract global information by sequential processing of local patches. In this paper, we propose a global image serialization method to transform the image into a sequence of causal tokens, which contain global information of the 2D image. We first convert the image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and then arrange the pixels with corresponding frequency ranges. We further transform each set within the same frequency band back to the spatial domain to obtain a series of images before tokenization. We construct a vision mamba model, GlobalMamba, with a causal input format based on the proposed global image serialization, which can better exploit the causal relations among image sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our GlobalMamba, including image classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection on COCO, and semantic segmentation on ADE20K.
Authors:Jiaqi Wang, Yuhang Zang, Pan Zhang, Tao Chu, Yuhang Cao, Zeyi Sun, Ziyu Liu, Xiaoyi Dong, Tong Wu, Dahua Lin, Zeming Chen, Zhi Wang, Lingchen Meng, Wenhao Yao, Jianwei Yang, Sihong Wu, Zhineng Chen, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang, Peixi Wu, Bosong Chai, Xuan Nie, Longquan Yan, Zeyu Wang, Qifan Zhou, Boning Wang, Jiaqi Huang, Zunnan Xu, Xiu Li, Kehong Yuan, Yanyan Zu, Jiayao Ha, Qiong Gao, Licheng Jiao
Abstract:
Detecting objects in real-world scenes is a complex task due to various challenges, including the vast range of object categories, and potential encounters with previously unknown or unseen objects. The challenges necessitate the development of public benchmarks and challenges to advance the field of object detection. Inspired by the success of previous COCO and LVIS Challenges, we organize the V3Det Challenge 2024 in conjunction with the 4th Open World Vision Workshop: Visual Perception via Learning in an Open World (VPLOW) at CVPR 2024, Seattle, US. This challenge aims to push the boundaries of object detection research and encourage innovation in this field. The V3Det Challenge 2024 consists of two tracks: 1) Vast Vocabulary Object Detection: This track focuses on detecting objects from a large set of 13204 categories, testing the detection algorithm's ability to recognize and locate diverse objects. 2) Open Vocabulary Object Detection: This track goes a step further, requiring algorithms to detect objects from an open set of categories, including unknown objects. In the following sections, we will provide a comprehensive summary and analysis of the solutions submitted by participants. By analyzing the methods and solutions presented, we aim to inspire future research directions in vast vocabulary and open-vocabulary object detection, driving progress in this field. Challenge homepage: https://v3det.openxlab.org.cn/challenge
Authors:Ziwei Wang, Jiwen Lu, Han Xiao, Shengyu Liu, Jie Zhou
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an ultrafast automated model compression framework called SeerNet for flexible network deployment. Conventional non-differen-tiable methods discretely search the desirable compression policy based on the accuracy from exhaustively trained lightweight models, and existing differentiable methods optimize an extremely large supernet to obtain the required compressed model for deployment. They both cause heavy computational cost due to the complex compression policy search and evaluation process. On the contrary, we obtain the optimal efficient networks by directly optimizing the compression policy with an accurate performance predictor, where the ultrafast automated model compression for various computational cost constraint is achieved without complex compression policy search and evaluation. Specifically, we first train the performance predictor based on the accuracy from uncertain compression policies actively selected by efficient evolutionary search, so that informative supervision is provided to learn the accurate performance predictor with acceptable cost. Then we leverage the gradient that maximizes the predicted performance under the barrier complexity constraint for ultrafast acquisition of the desirable compression policy, where adaptive update stepsizes with momentum are employed to enhance optimality of the acquired pruning and quantization strategy. Compared with the state-of-the-art automated model compression methods, experimental results on image classification and object detection show that our method achieves competitive accuracy-complexity trade-offs with significant reduction of the search cost.
Authors:Lingchen Meng, Xiyang Dai, Yinpeng Chen, Pengchuan Zhang, Dongdong Chen, Mengchen Liu, Jianfeng Wang, Zuxuan Wu, Lu Yuan, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Combining multiple datasets enables performance boost on many computer vision tasks. But similar trend has not been witnessed in object detection when combining multiple datasets due to two inconsistencies among detection datasets: taxonomy difference and domain gap. In this paper, we address these challenges by a new design (named Detection Hub) that is dataset-aware and category-aligned. It not only mitigates the dataset inconsistency but also provides coherent guidance for the detector to learn across multiple datasets. In particular, the dataset-aware design is achieved by learning a dataset embedding that is used to adapt object queries as well as convolutional kernels in detection heads. The categories across datasets are semantically aligned into a unified space by replacing one-hot category representations with word embedding and leveraging the semantic coherence of language embedding. Detection Hub fulfills the benefits of large data on object detection. Experiments demonstrate that joint training on multiple datasets achieves significant performance gains over training on each dataset alone. Detection Hub further achieves SoTA performance on UODB benchmark with wide variety of datasets.
Authors:Cheng Cheng, Lin Song, Ruoyi Xue, Hang Wang, Hongbin Sun, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan
Abstract:
The contrastive vision-language pre-training, known as CLIP, demonstrates remarkable potential in perceiving open-world visual concepts, enabling effective zero-shot image recognition. Nevertheless, few-shot learning methods based on CLIP typically require offline fine-tuning of the parameters on few-shot samples, resulting in longer inference time and the risk of over-fitting in certain domains. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Meta-Adapter, a lightweight residual-style adapter, to refine the CLIP features guided by the few-shot samples in an online manner. With a few training samples, our method can enable effective few-shot learning capabilities and generalize to unseen data or tasks without additional fine-tuning, achieving competitive performance and high efficiency. Without bells and whistles, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art online few-shot learning method by an average of 3.6\% on eight image classification datasets with higher inference speed. Furthermore, our model is simple and flexible, serving as a plug-and-play module directly applicable to downstream tasks. Without further fine-tuning, Meta-Adapter obtains notable performance improvements in open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation tasks.
Authors:Zhengkai Jiang, Liang Liu, Jiangning Zhang, Yabiao Wang, Mingang Chen, Chengjie Wang
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel attention mechanism, called dual attention, which is both efficient and effective. The dual attention mechanism consists of two parallel components: local attention generated by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and long-range attention generated by Vision Transformers (ViTs). To address the high computational complexity and memory footprint of vanilla Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), we introduce a novel Multi-Head Partition-wise Attention (MHPA) mechanism. The partition-wise attention approach models both intra-partition and inter-partition attention simultaneously. Building on the dual attention block and partition-wise attention mechanism, we present a hierarchical vision backbone called DualFormer. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on several computer vision tasks, including image classification on ImageNet, object detection on COCO, and semantic segmentation on Cityscapes. Specifically, the proposed DualFormer-XS achieves 81.5\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming the recent state-of-the-art MPViT-XS by 0.6\% top-1 accuracy with much higher throughput.
Authors:Jiaqi Wang, Pan Zhang, Tao Chu, Yuhang Cao, Yujie Zhou, Tong Wu, Bin Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin
Abstract:
Recent advances in detecting arbitrary objects in the real world are trained and evaluated on object detection datasets with a relatively restricted vocabulary. To facilitate the development of more general visual object detection, we propose V3Det, a vast vocabulary visual detection dataset with precisely annotated bounding boxes on massive images. V3Det has several appealing properties: 1) Vast Vocabulary: It contains bounding boxes of objects from 13,204 categories on real-world images, which is 10 times larger than the existing large vocabulary object detection dataset, e.g., LVIS. 2) Hierarchical Category Organization: The vast vocabulary of V3Det is organized by a hierarchical category tree which annotates the inclusion relationship among categories, encouraging the exploration of category relationships in vast and open vocabulary object detection. 3) Rich Annotations: V3Det comprises precisely annotated objects in 243k images and professional descriptions of each category written by human experts and a powerful chatbot. By offering a vast exploration space, V3Det enables extensive benchmarks on both vast and open vocabulary object detection, leading to new observations, practices, and insights for future research. It has the potential to serve as a cornerstone dataset for developing more general visual perception systems. V3Det is available at https://v3det.openxlab.org.cn/.
Authors:Matthias Neuwirth-Trapp, Maarten Bieshaar, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Visual prompt-based methods have seen growing interest in incremental learning (IL) for image classification. These approaches learn additional embedding vectors while keeping the model frozen, making them efficient to train. However, no prior work has applied such methods to incremental object detection (IOD), leaving their generalizability unclear. In this paper, we analyze three different prompt-based methods under a complex domain-incremental learning setting. We additionally provide a wide range of reference baselines for comparison. Empirically, we show that the prompt-based approaches we tested underperform in this setting. However, a strong yet practical method, combining visual prompts with replaying a small portion of previous data, achieves the best results. Together with additional experiments on prompt length and initialization, our findings offer valuable insights for advancing prompt-based IL in IOD.
Authors:Matthias Neuwirth-Trapp, Maarten Bieshaar, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Incremental Learning (IL) trains models sequentially on new data without full retraining, offering privacy, efficiency, and scalability. IL must balance adaptability to new data with retention of old knowledge. However, evaluations often rely on synthetic, simplified benchmarks, obscuring real-world IL performance. To address this, we introduce two Realistic Incremental Object Detection Benchmarks (RICO): Domain RICO (D-RICO) features domain shifts with a fixed class set, and Expanding-Classes RICO (EC-RICO) integrates new domains and classes per IL step. Built from 14 diverse datasets covering real and synthetic domains, varying conditions (e.g., weather, time of day), camera sensors, perspectives, and labeling policies, both benchmarks capture challenges absent in existing evaluations. Our experiments show that all IL methods underperform in adaptability and retention, while replaying a small amount of previous data already outperforms all methods. However, individual training on the data remains superior. We heuristically attribute this gap to weak teachers in distillation, single models' inability to manage diverse tasks, and insufficient plasticity. Our code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Yu Li, Xingyu Qiu, Yuqian Fu, Jie Chen, Tianwen Qian, Xu Zheng, Danda Pani Paudel, Yanwei Fu, Xuanjing Huang, Luc Van Gool, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) aims to detect novel objects with only a handful of labeled samples from previously unseen domains. While data augmentation and generative methods have shown promise in few-shot learning, their effectiveness for CD-FSOD remains unclear due to the need for both visual realism and domain alignment. Existing strategies, such as copy-paste augmentation and text-to-image generation, often fail to preserve the correct object category or produce backgrounds coherent with the target domain, making them non-trivial to apply directly to CD-FSOD. To address these challenges, we propose Domain-RAG, a training-free, retrieval-guided compositional image generation framework tailored for CD-FSOD. Domain-RAG consists of three stages: domain-aware background retrieval, domain-guided background generation, and foreground-background composition. Specifically, the input image is first decomposed into foreground and background regions. We then retrieve semantically and stylistically similar images to guide a generative model in synthesizing a new background, conditioned on both the original and retrieved contexts. Finally, the preserved foreground is composed with the newly generated domain-aligned background to form the generated image. Without requiring any additional supervision or training, Domain-RAG produces high-quality, domain-consistent samples across diverse tasks, including CD-FSOD, remote sensing FSOD, and camouflaged FSOD. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements over strong baselines and establish new state-of-the-art results. Codes will be released upon acceptance.
Authors:Jiancheng Pan, Yanxing Liu, Yuqian Fu, Muyuan Ma, Jiahao Li, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Xiaomeng Huang
Abstract:
Object detection, particularly open-vocabulary object detection, plays a crucial role in Earth sciences, such as environmental monitoring, natural disaster assessment, and land-use planning. However, existing open-vocabulary detectors, primarily trained on natural-world images, struggle to generalize to remote sensing images due to a significant data domain gap. Thus, this paper aims to advance the development of open-vocabulary object detection in remote sensing community. To achieve this, we first reformulate the task as Locate Anything on Earth (LAE) with the goal of detecting any novel concepts on Earth. We then developed the LAE-Label Engine which collects, auto-annotates, and unifies up to 10 remote sensing datasets creating the LAE-1M - the first large-scale remote sensing object detection dataset with broad category coverage. Using the LAE-1M, we further propose and train the novel LAE-DINO Model, the first open-vocabulary foundation object detector for the LAE task, featuring Dynamic Vocabulary Construction (DVC) and Visual-Guided Text Prompt Learning (VisGT) modules. DVC dynamically constructs vocabulary for each training batch, while VisGT maps visual features to semantic space, enhancing text features. We comprehensively conduct experiments on established remote sensing benchmark DIOR, DOTAv2.0, as well as our newly introduced 80-class LAE-80C benchmark. Results demonstrate the advantages of the LAE-1M dataset and the effectiveness of the LAE-DINO method.
Authors:Asen Nachkov, Martin Danelljan, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
The Bird-Eye-View (BEV) is one of the most widely-used scene representations for visual perception in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) due to its well suited compatibility to downstream tasks. For the enhanced safety of AVs, modeling perception uncertainty in BEV is crucial. Recent diffusion-based methods offer a promising approach to uncertainty modeling for visual perception but fail to effectively detect small objects in the large coverage of the BEV. Such degradation of performance can be attributed primarily to the specific network architectures and the matching strategy used when training. Here, we address this problem by combining the diffusion paradigm with current state-of-the-art 3D object detectors in BEV. We analyze the unique challenges of this approach, which do not exist with deterministic detectors, and present a simple technique based on object query interpolation that allows the model to learn positional dependencies even in the presence of the diffusion noise. Based on this, we present a diffusion-based DETR model for object detection that bears similarities to particle methods. Abundant experimentation on the NuScenes dataset shows equal or better performance for our generative approach, compared to deterministic state-of-the-art methods. Our source code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Chaoya Jiang, Haiyang Xu, Wei Ye, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Shikun Zhang, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
Abstract:
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) methods based on object detection enjoy the rich knowledge of fine-grained object-text alignment but at the cost of computationally expensive inference. Recent Visual-Transformer (ViT)-based approaches circumvent this issue while struggling with long visual sequences without detailed cross-modal alignment information. This paper introduces a ViT-based VLP technique that efficiently incorporates object information through a novel patch-text alignment mechanism. Specifically, we convert object-level signals into patch-level ones and devise a Patch-Text Alignment pre-training task (PTA) to learn a text-aware patch detector. By using off-the-shelf delicate object annotations in 5\% training images, we jointly train PTA with other conventional VLP objectives in an end-to-end manner, bypassing the high computational cost of object detection and yielding an effective patch detector that accurately detects text-relevant patches, thus considerably reducing patch sequences and accelerating computation within the ViT backbone. Our experiments on a variety of widely-used benchmarks reveal that our method achieves a speedup of nearly 88\% compared to prior VLP models while maintaining competitive or superior performance on downstream tasks with similar model size and data scale.
Authors:Yigit Baran Can, Alexander Liniger, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Autonomous driving requires accurate local scene understanding information. To this end, autonomous agents deploy object detection and online BEV lane graph extraction methods as a part of their perception stack. In this work, we propose an architecture and loss formulation to improve the accuracy of local lane graph estimates by using 3D object detection outputs. The proposed method learns to assign the objects to centerlines by considering the centerlines as cluster centers and the objects as data points to be assigned a probability distribution over the cluster centers. This training scheme ensures direct supervision on the relationship between lanes and objects, thus leading to better performance. The proposed method improves lane graph estimation substantially over state-of-the-art methods. The extensive ablations show that our method can achieve significant performance improvements by using the outputs of existing 3D object detection methods. Since our method uses the detection outputs rather than detection method intermediate representations, a single model of our method can use any detection method at test time.
Authors:Zongwei Wu, Danda Pani Paudel, Deng-Ping Fan, Jingjing Wang, Shuo Wang, Cédric Demonceaux, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Depth cues are known to be useful for visual perception. However, direct measurement of depth is often impracticable. Fortunately, though, modern learning-based methods offer promising depth maps by inference in the wild. In this work, we adapt such depth inference models for object segmentation using the objects' "pop-out" prior in 3D. The "pop-out" is a simple composition prior that assumes objects reside on the background surface. Such compositional prior allows us to reason about objects in the 3D space. More specifically, we adapt the inferred depth maps such that objects can be localized using only 3D information. Such separation, however, requires knowledge about contact surface which we learn using the weak supervision of the segmentation mask. Our intermediate representation of contact surface, and thereby reasoning about objects purely in 3D, allows us to better transfer the depth knowledge into semantics. The proposed adaptation method uses only the depth model without needing the source data used for training, making the learning process efficient and practical. Our experiments on eight datasets of two challenging tasks, namely camouflaged object detection and salient object detection, consistently demonstrate the benefit of our method in terms of both performance and generalizability.
Authors:Philip Jacobson, Yichen Xie, Mingyu Ding, Chenfeng Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan, Ming C. Wu
Abstract:
Semi-supervised 3D object detection is a common strategy employed to circumvent the challenge of manually labeling large-scale autonomous driving perception datasets. Pseudo-labeling approaches to semi-supervised learning adopt a teacher-student framework in which machine-generated pseudo-labels on a large unlabeled dataset are used in combination with a small manually-labeled dataset for training. In this work, we address the problem of improving pseudo-label quality through leveraging long-term temporal information captured in driving scenes. More specifically, we leverage pre-trained motion-forecasting models to generate object trajectories on pseudo-labeled data to further enhance the student model training. Our approach improves pseudo-label quality in two distinct manners: first, we suppress false positive pseudo-labels through establishing consistency across multiple frames of motion forecasting outputs. Second, we compensate for false negative detections by directly inserting predicted object tracks into the pseudo-labeled scene. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, improving the performance of standard semi-supervised approaches in a variety of settings.
Authors:Philip Jacobson, Yiyang Zhou, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Ming C. Wu
Abstract:
Leveraging multi-modal fusion, especially between camera and LiDAR, has become essential for building accurate and robust 3D object detection systems for autonomous vehicles. Until recently, point decorating approaches, in which point clouds are augmented with camera features, have been the dominant approach in the field. However, these approaches fail to utilize the higher resolution images from cameras. Recent works projecting camera features to the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space for fusion have also been proposed, however they require projecting millions of pixels, most of which only contain background information. In this work, we propose a novel approach Center Feature Fusion (CFF), in which we leverage center-based detection networks in both the camera and LiDAR streams to identify relevant object locations. We then use the center-based detection to identify the locations of pixel features relevant to object locations, a small fraction of the total number in the image. These are then projected and fused in the BEV frame. On the nuScenes dataset, we outperform the LiDAR-only baseline by 4.9% mAP while fusing up to 100x fewer features than other fusion methods.
Authors:Naman Patel, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami
Abstract:
Mapping and understanding complex 3D environments is fundamental to how autonomous systems perceive and interact with the physical world, requiring both precise geometric reconstruction and rich semantic comprehension. While existing 3D semantic mapping systems excel at reconstructing and identifying predefined object instances, they lack the flexibility to efficiently build semantic maps with open-vocabulary during online operation. Although recent vision-language models have enabled open-vocabulary object recognition in 2D images, they haven't yet bridged the gap to 3D spatial understanding. The critical challenge lies in developing a training-free unified system that can simultaneously construct accurate 3D maps while maintaining semantic consistency and supporting natural language interactions in real time. In this paper, we develop a zero-shot framework that seamlessly integrates GPU-accelerated geometric reconstruction with open-vocabulary vision-language models through online instance-level semantic embedding fusion, guided by hierarchical object association with spatial indexing. Our training-free system achieves superior performance through incremental processing and unified geometric-semantic updates, while robustly handling 2D segmentation inconsistencies. The proposed general-purpose 3D scene understanding framework can be used for various tasks including zero-shot 3D instance retrieval, segmentation, and object detection to reason about previously unseen objects and interpret natural language queries. The project page is available at https://razer-3d.github.io.
Authors:Songsong Duan, Xi Yang, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao
Abstract:
Current RGB-D methods usually leverage large-scale backbones to improve accuracy but sacrifice efficiency. Meanwhile, several existing lightweight methods are difficult to achieve high-precision performance. To balance the efficiency and performance, we propose a Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff Network (SATNet) for Lightweight RGB-D SOD from three fundamental perspectives: depth quality, modality fusion, and feature representation. Concerning depth quality, we introduce the Depth Anything Model to generate high-quality depth maps,which effectively alleviates the multi-modal gaps in the current datasets. For modality fusion, we propose a Decoupled Attention Module (DAM) to explore the consistency within and between modalities. Here, the multi-modal features are decoupled into dual-view feature vectors to project discriminable information of feature maps. For feature representation, we develop a Dual Information Representation Module (DIRM) with a bi-directional inverted framework to enlarge the limited feature space generated by the lightweight backbones. DIRM models texture features and saliency features to enrich feature space, and employ two-way prediction heads to optimal its parameters through a bi-directional backpropagation. Finally, we design a Dual Feature Aggregation Module (DFAM) in the decoder to aggregate texture and saliency features. Extensive experiments on five public RGB-D SOD datasets indicate that the proposed SATNet excels state-of-the-art (SOTA) CNN-based heavyweight models and achieves a lightweight framework with 5.2 M parameters and 415 FPS.
Authors:Jielin Qiu, William Han, Winfred Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Jianfeng Wang, Christos Faloutsos, Lei Li, Lijuan Wang
Abstract:
Open-domain real-world entity recognition is essential yet challenging, involving identifying various entities in diverse environments. The lack of a suitable evaluation dataset has been a major obstacle in this field due to the vast number of entities and the extensive human effort required for data curation. We introduce Entity6K, a comprehensive dataset for real-world entity recognition, featuring 5,700 entities across 26 categories, each supported by 5 human-verified images with annotations. Entity6K offers a diverse range of entity names and categorizations, addressing a gap in existing datasets. We conducted benchmarks with existing models on tasks like image captioning, object detection, zero-shot classification, and dense captioning to demonstrate Entity6K's effectiveness in evaluating models' entity recognition capabilities. We believe Entity6K will be a valuable resource for advancing accurate entity recognition in open-domain settings.
Authors:Runjian Chen, Hyoungseob Park, Bo Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo, Alex Wong
Abstract:
Labeling LiDAR point clouds is notoriously time-and-energy-consuming, which spurs recent unsupervised 3D representation learning methods to alleviate the labeling burden in LiDAR perception via pretrained weights. Almost all existing work focus on a single frame of LiDAR point cloud and neglect the temporal LiDAR sequence, which naturally accounts for object motion (and their semantics). Instead, we propose TREND, namely Temporal REndering with Neural fielD, to learn 3D representation via forecasting the future observation in an unsupervised manner. Unlike existing work that follows conventional contrastive learning or masked auto encoding paradigms, TREND integrates forecasting for 3D pre-training through a Recurrent Embedding scheme to generate 3D embedding across time and a Temporal Neural Field to represent the 3D scene, through which we compute the loss using differentiable rendering. To our best knowledge, TREND is the first work on temporal forecasting for unsupervised 3D representation learning. We evaluate TREND on downstream 3D object detection tasks on popular datasets, including NuScenes, Once and Waymo. Experiment results show that TREND brings up to 90% more improvement as compared to previous SOTA unsupervised 3D pre-training methods and generally improve different downstream models across datasets, demonstrating that indeed temporal forecasting brings improvement for LiDAR perception. Codes and models will be released.
Authors:Xinhao Zhong, Siyu Jiao, Yao Zhao, Yunchao Wei
Abstract:
Current Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) methods enhance detector performance by leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data, assuming that both labeled and unlabeled data share the same label space. However, in open-set scenarios, the unlabeled dataset contains both in-distribution (ID) classes and out-of-distribution (OOD) classes. Applying semi-supervised detectors in such settings can lead to misclassifying OOD class as ID classes. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method, termed Collaborative Feature-Logits Detector (CFL-Detector). Specifically, we introduce a feature-level clustering method using contrastive loss to clarify vector boundaries in the feature space and highlight class differences. Additionally, by optimizing the logits-level uncertainty classification loss, the model enhances its ability to effectively distinguish between ID and OOD classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.
Authors:Zhaoyang Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Yixiao Ge, Xiaogang Wang, Jinwei Gu, Ping Luo
Abstract:
This work introduces a new Transformer model called Cached Transformer, which uses Gated Recurrent Cached (GRC) attention to extend the self-attention mechanism with a differentiable memory cache of tokens. GRC attention enables attending to both past and current tokens, increasing the receptive field of attention and allowing for exploring long-range dependencies. By utilizing a recurrent gating unit to continuously update the cache, our model achieves significant advancements in \textbf{six} language and vision tasks, including language modeling, machine translation, ListOPs, image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. Furthermore, our approach surpasses previous memory-based techniques in tasks such as language modeling and displays the ability to be applied to a broader range of situations.
Authors:Mengxue Qu, Yu Wu, Wu Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Jingkuan Song, Yao Zhao, Yunchao Wei
Abstract:
Intention-oriented object detection aims to detect desired objects based on specific intentions or requirements. For instance, when we desire to "lie down and rest", we instinctively seek out a suitable option such as a "bed" or a "sofa" that can fulfill our needs. Previous work in this area is limited either by the number of intention descriptions or by the affordance vocabulary available for intention objects. These limitations make it challenging to handle intentions in open environments effectively. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive dataset called Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects (RIO). In particular, RIO is specifically designed to incorporate diverse real-world scenarios and a wide range of object categories. It offers the following key features: 1) intention descriptions in RIO are represented as natural sentences rather than a mere word or verb phrase, making them more practical and meaningful; 2) the intention descriptions are contextually relevant to the scene, enabling a broader range of potential functionalities associated with the objects; 3) the dataset comprises a total of 40,214 images and 130,585 intention-object pairs. With the proposed RIO, we evaluate the ability of some existing models to reason intention-oriented objects in open environments.
Authors:Lingdong Kong, Xiang Xu, Youquan Liu, Jun Cen, Runnan Chen, Wenwei Zhang, Liang Pan, Kai Chen, Ziwei Liu
Abstract:
Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have revolutionized visual perception in 2D, yet their potential for 3D scene understanding, particularly in autonomous driving applications, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LargeAD, a versatile and scalable framework designed for large-scale 3D pretraining across diverse real-world driving datasets. Our framework leverages VFMs to extract semantically rich superpixels from 2D images, which are aligned with LiDAR point clouds to generate high-quality contrastive samples. This alignment facilitates cross-modal representation learning, enhancing the semantic consistency between 2D and 3D data. We introduce several key innovations: i) VFM-driven superpixel generation for detailed semantic representation, ii) a VFM-assisted contrastive learning strategy to align multimodal features, iii) superpoint temporal consistency to maintain stable representations across time, and iv) multi-source data pretraining to generalize across various LiDAR configurations. Our approach delivers significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods in both linear probing and fine-tuning tasks for both LiDAR-based segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments on eleven large-scale multi-modal datasets highlight our superior performance, demonstrating the adaptability, efficiency, and robustness in real-world autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors:Zeming Chen, Wenwei Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Kai Chen, Zhi Wang
Abstract:
While the pseudo-label method has demonstrated considerable success in semi-supervised object detection tasks, this paper uncovers notable limitations within this approach. Specifically, the pseudo-label method tends to amplify the inherent strengths of the detector while accentuating its weaknesses, which is manifested in the missed detection of pseudo-labels, particularly for small and tail category objects. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes Mixed Pseudo Labels (MixPL), consisting of Mixup and Mosaic for pseudo-labeled data, to mitigate the negative impact of missed detections and balance the model's learning across different object scales. Additionally, the model's detection performance on tail categories is improved by resampling labeled data with relevant instances. Notably, MixPL consistently improves the performance of various detectors and obtains new state-of-the-art results with Faster R-CNN, FCOS, and DINO on COCO-Standard and COCO-Full benchmarks. Furthermore, MixPL also exhibits good scalability on large models, improving DINO Swin-L by 2.5% mAP and achieving nontrivial new records (60.2% mAP) on the COCO val2017 benchmark without extra annotations.
Authors:Chenming Zhu, Wenwei Zhang, Tai Wang, Xihui Liu, Kai Chen
Abstract:
Point cloud-based open-vocabulary 3D object detection aims to detect 3D categories that do not have ground-truth annotations in the training set. It is extremely challenging because of the limited data and annotations (bounding boxes with class labels or text descriptions) of 3D scenes. Previous approaches leverage large-scale richly-annotated image datasets as a bridge between 3D and category semantics but require an extra alignment process between 2D images and 3D points, limiting the open-vocabulary ability of 3D detectors. Instead of leveraging 2D images, we propose Object2Scene, the first approach that leverages large-scale large-vocabulary 3D object datasets to augment existing 3D scene datasets for open-vocabulary 3D object detection. Object2Scene inserts objects from different sources into 3D scenes to enrich the vocabulary of 3D scene datasets and generates text descriptions for the newly inserted objects. We further introduce a framework that unifies 3D detection and visual grounding, named L3Det, and propose a cross-domain category-level contrastive learning approach to mitigate the domain gap between 3D objects from different datasets. Extensive experiments on existing open-vocabulary 3D object detection benchmarks show that Object2Scene obtains superior performance over existing methods. We further verify the effectiveness of Object2Scene on a new benchmark OV-ScanNet-200, by holding out all rare categories as novel categories not seen during training.
Authors:Bingqi Shen, Shuwei Dai, Yuyin Chen, Rong Xiong, Yue Wang, Yanmei Jiao
Abstract:
3D object detection serves as the core basis of the perception tasks in autonomous driving. Recent years have seen the rapid progress of multi-modal fusion strategies for more robust and accurate 3D object detection. However, current researches for robust fusion are all learning-based frameworks, which demand a large amount of training data and are inconvenient to implement in new scenes. In this paper, we propose GOOD, a general optimization-based fusion framework that can achieve satisfying detection without training additional models and is available for any combinations of 2D and 3D detectors to improve the accuracy and robustness of 3D detection. First we apply the mutual-sided nearest-neighbor probability model to achieve the 3D-2D data association. Then we design an optimization pipeline that can optimize different kinds of instances separately based on the matching result. Apart from this, the 3D MOT method is also introduced to enhance the performance aided by previous frames. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first optimization-based late fusion framework for multi-modal 3D object detection which can be served as a baseline for subsequent research. Experiments on both nuScenes and KITTI datasets are carried out and the results show that GOOD outperforms by 9.1\% on mAP score compared with PointPillars and achieves competitive results with the learning-based late fusion CLOCs.
Authors:Zhongxiang Zhou, Yifei Yang, Yue Wang, Rong Xiong
Abstract:
Detecting both known and unknown objects is a fundamental skill for robot manipulation in unstructured environments. Open-set object detection (OSOD) is a promising direction to handle the problem consisting of two subtasks: objects and background separation, and open-set object classification. In this paper, we present Openset RCNN to address the challenging OSOD. To disambiguate unknown objects and background in the first subtask, we propose to use classification-free region proposal network (CF-RPN) which estimates the objectness score of each region purely using cues from object's location and shape preventing overfitting to the training categories. To identify unknown objects in the second subtask, we propose to represent them using the complementary region of known categories in a latent space which is accomplished by a prototype learning network (PLN). PLN performs instance-level contrastive learning to encode proposals to a latent space and builds a compact region centering with a prototype for each known category. Further, we note that the detection performance of unknown objects can not be unbiasedly evaluated on the situation that commonly used object detection datasets are not fully annotated. Thus, a new benchmark is introduced by reorganizing GraspNet-1billion, a robotic grasp pose detection dataset with complete annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the merits of our method. We finally show that our Openset RCNN can endow the robot with an open-set perception ability to support robotic rearrangement tasks in cluttered environments. More details can be found in https://sites.google.com/view/openset-rcnn/
Authors:Zhe Chen, Jing Zhang, Yufei Xu, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Current object detectors typically have a feature pyramid (FP) module for multi-level feature fusion (MFF) which aims to mitigate the gap between features from different levels and form a comprehensive object representation to achieve better detection performance. However, they usually require heavy cross-level connections or iterative refinement to obtain better MFF result, making them complicated in structure and inefficient in computation. To address these issues, we propose a novel and efficient context modeling mechanism that can help existing FPs deliver better MFF results while reducing the computational costs effectively. In particular, we introduce a novel insight that comprehensive contexts can be decomposed and condensed into two types of representations for higher efficiency. The two representations include a locally concentrated representation and a globally summarized representation, where the former focuses on extracting context cues from nearby areas while the latter extracts key representations of the whole image scene as global context cues. By collecting the condensed contexts, we employ a Transformer decoder to investigate the relations between them and each local feature from the FP and then refine the MFF results accordingly. As a result, we obtain a simple and light-weight Transformer-based Context Condensation (TCC) module, which can boost various FPs and lower their computational costs simultaneously. Extensive experimental results on the challenging MS COCO dataset show that TCC is compatible to four representative FPs and consistently improves their detection accuracy by up to 7.8 % in terms of average precision and reduce their complexities by up to around 20% in terms of GFLOPs, helping them achieve state-of-the-art performance more efficiently. Code will be released.
Authors:Pengwei Liang, Junjun Jiang, Qing Ma, Xianming Liu, Jiayi Ma
Abstract:
Image fusion is famous as an alternative solution to generate one high-quality image from multiple images in addition to image restoration from a single degraded image. The essence of image fusion is to integrate complementary information from source images. Existing fusion methods struggle with generalization across various tasks and often require labor-intensive designs, in which it is difficult to identify and extract useful information from source images due to the diverse requirements of each fusion task. Additionally, these methods develop highly specialized features for different downstream applications, hindering the adaptation to new and diverse downstream tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce DeFusion++, a novel framework that leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) to enhance the versatility of feature representation for different image fusion tasks. DeFusion++ captures the image fusion task-friendly representations from large-scale data in a self-supervised way, overcoming the constraints of limited fusion datasets. Specifically, we introduce two innovative pretext tasks: common and unique decomposition (CUD) and masked feature modeling (MFM). CUD decomposes source images into abstract common and unique components, while MFM refines these components into robust fused features. Jointly training of these tasks enables DeFusion++ to produce adaptable representations that can effectively extract useful information from various source images, regardless of the fusion task. The resulting fused representations are also highly adaptable for a wide range of downstream tasks, including image segmentation and object detection. DeFusion++ stands out by producing versatile fused representations that can enhance both the quality of image fusion and the effectiveness of downstream high-level vision tasks, simplifying the process with the elegant fusion framework.
Authors:Jialei Xu, Wei Yin, Dong Gong, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu
Abstract:
Depth estimation is a critical technology in autonomous driving, and multi-camera systems are often used to achieve a 360$^\circ$ perception. These 360$^\circ$ camera sets often have limited or low-quality overlap regions, making multi-view stereo methods infeasible for the entire image. Alternatively, monocular methods may not produce consistent cross-view predictions. To address these issues, we propose the Stereo Guided Depth Estimation (SGDE) method, which enhances depth estimation of the full image by explicitly utilizing multi-view stereo results on the overlap. We suggest building virtual pinhole cameras to resolve the distortion problem of fisheye cameras and unify the processing for the two types of 360$^\circ$ cameras. For handling the varying noise on camera poses caused by unstable movement, the approach employs a self-calibration method to obtain highly accurate relative poses of the adjacent cameras with minor overlap. These enable the use of robust stereo methods to obtain high-quality depth prior in the overlap region. This prior serves not only as an additional input but also as pseudo-labels that enhance the accuracy of depth estimation methods and improve cross-view prediction consistency. The effectiveness of SGDE is evaluated on one fisheye camera dataset, Synthetic Urban, and two pinhole camera datasets, DDAD and nuScenes. Our experiments demonstrate that SGDE is effective for both supervised and self-supervised depth estimation, and highlight the potential of our method for advancing downstream autonomous driving technologies, such as 3D object detection and occupancy prediction.
Authors:Zhenyu Li, Zhipeng Zhang, Heng Fan, Yuan He, Ke Wang, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang
Abstract:
In this paper, we improve the challenging monocular 3D object detection problem with a general semi-supervised framework. Specifically, having observed that the bottleneck of this task lies in lacking reliable and informative samples to train the detector, we introduce a novel, simple, yet effective `Augment and Criticize' framework that explores abundant informative samples from unlabeled data for learning more robust detection models. In the `Augment' stage, we present the Augmentation-based Prediction aGgregation (APG), which aggregates detections from various automatically learned augmented views to improve the robustness of pseudo label generation. Since not all pseudo labels from APG are beneficially informative, the subsequent `Criticize' phase is presented. In particular, we introduce the Critical Retraining Strategy (CRS) that, unlike simply filtering pseudo labels using a fixed threshold (e.g., classification score) as in 2D semi-supervised tasks, leverages a learnable network to evaluate the contribution of unlabeled images at different training timestamps. This way, the noisy samples prohibitive to model evolution could be effectively suppressed. To validate our framework, we apply it to MonoDLE and MonoFlex. The two new detectors, dubbed 3DSeMo_DLE and 3DSeMo_FLEX, achieve state-of-the-art results with remarkable improvements for over 3.5% AP_3D/BEV (Easy) on KITTI, showing its effectiveness and generality. Code and models will be released.
Authors:Zhe Li, Laurence T. Yang, Bocheng Ren, Xin Nie, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan, Stan Z. Li
Abstract:
The scarcity of annotated data has sparked significant interest in unsupervised pre-training methods that leverage medical reports as auxiliary signals for medical visual representation learning. However, existing research overlooks the multi-granularity nature of medical visual representation and lacks suitable contrastive learning techniques to improve the models' generalizability across different granularities, leading to the underutilization of image-text information. To address this, we propose MLIP, a novel framework leveraging domain-specific medical knowledge as guiding signals to integrate language information into the visual domain through image-text contrastive learning. Our model includes global contrastive learning with our designed divergence encoder, local token-knowledge-patch alignment contrastive learning, and knowledge-guided category-level contrastive learning with expert knowledge. Experimental evaluations reveal the efficacy of our model in enhancing transfer performance for tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Notably, MLIP surpasses state-of-the-art methods even with limited annotated data, highlighting the potential of multimodal pre-training in advancing medical representation learning.
Authors:Yizeng Han, Dongchen Han, Zeyu Liu, Yulin Wang, Xuran Pan, Yifan Pu, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Early exiting has become a promising approach to improving the inference efficiency of deep networks. By structuring models with multiple classifiers (exits), predictions for ``easy'' samples can be generated at earlier exits, negating the need for executing deeper layers. Current multi-exit networks typically implement linear classifiers at intermediate layers, compelling low-level features to encapsulate high-level semantics. This sub-optimal design invariably undermines the performance of later exits. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Perceiver (Dyn-Perceiver) to decouple the feature extraction procedure and the early classification task with a novel dual-branch architecture. A feature branch serves to extract image features, while a classification branch processes a latent code assigned for classification tasks. Bi-directional cross-attention layers are established to progressively fuse the information of both branches. Early exits are placed exclusively within the classification branch, thus eliminating the need for linear separability in low-level features. Dyn-Perceiver constitutes a versatile and adaptable framework that can be built upon various architectures. Experiments on image classification, action recognition, and object detection demonstrate that our method significantly improves the inference efficiency of different backbones, outperforming numerous competitive approaches across a broad range of computational budgets. Evaluation on both CPU and GPU platforms substantiate the superior practical efficiency of Dyn-Perceiver. Code is available at https://www.github.com/LeapLabTHU/Dynamic_Perceiver.
Authors:Penghui Du, Yu Wang, Yifan Sun, Luting Wang, Yue Liao, Gang Zhang, Errui Ding, Yan Wang, Jingdong Wang, Si Liu
Abstract:
Existing methods enhance open-vocabulary object detection by leveraging the robust open-vocabulary recognition capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP.However, two main challenges emerge:(1) A deficiency in concept representation, where the category names in CLIP's text space lack textual and visual knowledge.(2) An overfitting tendency towards base categories, with the open vocabulary knowledge biased towards base categories during the transfer from VLMs to detectors.To address these challenges, we propose the Language Model Instruction (LaMI) strategy, which leverages the relationships between visual concepts and applies them within a simple yet effective DETR-like detector, termed LaMI-DETR.LaMI utilizes GPT to construct visual concepts and employs T5 to investigate visual similarities across categories.These inter-category relationships refine concept representation and avoid overfitting to base categories.Comprehensive experiments validate our approach's superior performance over existing methods in the same rigorous setting without reliance on external training resources.LaMI-DETR achieves a rare box AP of 43.4 on OV-LVIS, surpassing the previous best by 7.8 rare box AP.
Authors:Jinghua Hou, Tong Wang, Xiaoqing Ye, Zhe Liu, Shi Gong, Xiao Tan, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
Accurate depth information is crucial for enhancing the performance of multi-view 3D object detection. Despite the success of some existing multi-view 3D detectors utilizing pixel-wise depth supervision, they overlook two significant phenomena: 1) the depth supervision obtained from LiDAR points is usually distributed on the surface of the object, which is not so friendly to existing DETR-based 3D detectors due to the lack of the depth of 3D object center; 2) for distant objects, fine-grained depth estimation of the whole object is more challenging. Therefore, we argue that the object-wise depth (or 3D center of the object) is essential for accurate detection. In this paper, we propose a new multi-view 3D object detector named OPEN, whose main idea is to effectively inject object-wise depth information into the network through our proposed object-wise position embedding. Specifically, we first employ an object-wise depth encoder, which takes the pixel-wise depth map as a prior, to accurately estimate the object-wise depth. Then, we utilize the proposed object-wise position embedding to encode the object-wise depth information into the transformer decoder, thereby producing 3D object-aware features for final detection. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Furthermore, OPEN achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with 64.4% NDS and 56.7% mAP on the nuScenes test benchmark.
Authors:Jiacheng Zhang, Jiaming Li, Xiangru Lin, Wei Zhang, Xiao Tan, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
We delve into pseudo-labeling for semi-supervised monocular 3D object detection (SSM3OD) and discover two primary issues: a misalignment between the prediction quality of 3D and 2D attributes and the tendency of depth supervision derived from pseudo-labels to be noisy, leading to significant optimization conflicts with other reliable forms of supervision. We introduce a novel decoupled pseudo-labeling (DPL) approach for SSM3OD. Our approach features a Decoupled Pseudo-label Generation (DPG) module, designed to efficiently generate pseudo-labels by separately processing 2D and 3D attributes. This module incorporates a unique homography-based method for identifying dependable pseudo-labels in BEV space, specifically for 3D attributes. Additionally, we present a DepthGradient Projection (DGP) module to mitigate optimization conflicts caused by noisy depth supervision of pseudo-labels, effectively decoupling the depth gradient and removing conflicting gradients. This dual decoupling strategy-at both the pseudo-label generation and gradient levels-significantly improves the utilization of pseudo-labels in SSM3OD. Our comprehensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches.
Authors:Chuyang Zhao, Yifan Sun, Wenhao Wang, Qiang Chen, Errui Ding, Yi Yang, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
DETR accomplishes end-to-end object detection through iteratively generating multiple object candidates based on image features and promoting one candidate for each ground-truth object. The traditional training procedure using one-to-one supervision in the original DETR lacks direct supervision for the object detection candidates.
We aim at improving the DETR training efficiency by explicitly supervising the candidate generation procedure through mixing one-to-one supervision and one-to-many supervision. Our approach, namely MS-DETR, is simple, and places one-to-many supervision to the object queries of the primary decoder that is used for inference. In comparison to existing DETR variants with one-to-many supervision, such as Group DETR and Hybrid DETR, our approach does not need additional decoder branches or object queries. The object queries of the primary decoder in our approach directly benefit from one-to-many supervision and thus are superior in object candidate prediction. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related DETR variants, such as DN-DETR, Hybrid DETR, and Group DETR, and the combination with related DETR variants further improves the performance.
Authors:Linyan Huang, Zhiqi Li, Chonghao Sima, Wenhai Wang, Jingdong Wang, Yu Qiao, Hongyang Li
Abstract:
Current research is primarily dedicated to advancing the accuracy of camera-only 3D object detectors (apprentice) through the knowledge transferred from LiDAR- or multi-modal-based counterparts (expert). However, the presence of the domain gap between LiDAR and camera features, coupled with the inherent incompatibility in temporal fusion, significantly hinders the effectiveness of distillation-based enhancements for apprentices. Motivated by the success of uni-modal distillation, an apprentice-friendly expert model would predominantly rely on camera features, while still achieving comparable performance to multi-modal models. To this end, we introduce VCD, a framework to improve the camera-only apprentice model, including an apprentice-friendly multi-modal expert and temporal-fusion-friendly distillation supervision. The multi-modal expert VCD-E adopts an identical structure as that of the camera-only apprentice in order to alleviate the feature disparity, and leverages LiDAR input as a depth prior to reconstruct the 3D scene, achieving the performance on par with other heterogeneous multi-modal experts. Additionally, a fine-grained trajectory-based distillation module is introduced with the purpose of individually rectifying the motion misalignment for each object in the scene. With those improvements, our camera-only apprentice VCD-A sets new state-of-the-art on nuScenes with a score of 63.1% NDS.
Authors:Muzhi Zhu, Hao Zhong, Canyu Zhao, Zongze Du, Zheng Huang, Mingyu Liu, Hao Chen, Cheng Zou, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Chunhua Shen
Abstract:
Active vision, also known as active perception, refers to the process of actively selecting where and how to look in order to gather task-relevant information. It is a critical component of efficient perception and decision-making in humans and advanced embodied agents. Recently, the use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as central planning and decision-making modules in robotic systems has gained extensive attention. However, despite the importance of active perception in embodied intelligence, there is little to no exploration of how MLLMs can be equipped with or learn active perception capabilities. In this paper, we first provide a systematic definition of MLLM-based active perception tasks. We point out that the recently proposed GPT-o3 model's zoom-in search strategy can be regarded as a special case of active perception; however, it still suffers from low search efficiency and inaccurate region selection. To address these issues, we propose ACTIVE-O3, a purely reinforcement learning based training framework built on top of GRPO, designed to equip MLLMs with active perception capabilities. We further establish a comprehensive benchmark suite to evaluate ACTIVE-O3 across both general open-world tasks, such as small-object and dense object grounding, and domain-specific scenarios, including small object detection in remote sensing and autonomous driving, as well as fine-grained interactive segmentation. In addition, ACTIVE-O3 also demonstrates strong zero-shot reasoning abilities on the V* Benchmark, without relying on any explicit reasoning data. We hope that our work can provide a simple codebase and evaluation protocol to facilitate future research on active perception in MLLMs.
Authors:Jiarun Ding, Peiwen Jiang, Chao-Kai Wen, Shi Jin
Abstract:
Semantic communication has undergone considerable evolution due to the recent rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), significantly enhancing both communication robustness and efficiency. Despite these advancements, most current semantic communication methods for image transmission pay little attention to the differing importance of objects and backgrounds in images. To address this issue, we propose a novel scheme named ASCViT-JSCC, which utilizes vision transformers (ViTs) integrated with an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. This scheme adaptively allocates bandwidth for objects and backgrounds in images according to the importance order of different parts determined by object detection of you only look once version 5 (YOLOv5) and feature points detection of scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). Furthermore, the proposed scheme adheres to digital modulation standards by incorporating quantization modules. We validate this approach through an over-the-air (OTA) testbed named intelligent communication prototype validation platform (ICP) based on a software-defined radio (SDR) and NVIDIA embedded kits. Our findings from both simulations and practical measurements show that ASCViT-JSCC significantly preserves objects in images and enhances reconstruction quality compared to existing methods.
Authors:Rongyao Fang, Peng Gao, Aojun Zhou, Yingjie Cai, Si Liu, Jifeng Dai, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
One-to-one matching is a crucial design in DETR-like object detection frameworks. It enables the DETR to perform end-to-end detection. However, it also faces challenges of lacking positive sample supervision and slow convergence speed. Several recent works proposed the one-to-many matching mechanism to accelerate training and boost detection performance. We revisit these methods and model them in a unified format of augmenting the object queries. In this paper, we propose two methods that realize one-to-many matching from a different perspective of augmenting images or image features. The first method is One-to-many Matching via Data Augmentation (denoted as DataAug-DETR). It spatially transforms the images and includes multiple augmented versions of each image in the same training batch. Such a simple augmentation strategy already achieves one-to-many matching and surprisingly improves DETR's performance. The second method is One-to-many matching via Feature Augmentation (denoted as FeatAug-DETR). Unlike DataAug-DETR, it augments the image features instead of the original images and includes multiple augmented features in the same batch to realize one-to-many matching. FeatAug-DETR significantly accelerates DETR training and boosts detection performance while keeping the inference speed unchanged. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on DETR variants, including DAB-DETR, Deformable-DETR, and H-Deformable-DETR. Without extra training data, FeatAug-DETR shortens the training convergence periods of Deformable-DETR to 24 epochs and achieves 58.3 AP on COCO val2017 set with Swin-L as the backbone.
Authors:Daquan Zhou, Kai Wang, Jianyang Gu, Xiangyu Peng, Dongze Lian, Yifan Zhang, Yang You, Jiashi Feng
Abstract:
State-of-the-art deep neural networks are trained with large amounts (millions or even billions) of data. The expensive computation and memory costs make it difficult to train them on limited hardware resources, especially for recent popular large language models (LLM) and computer vision models (CV). Recent popular dataset distillation methods are thus developed, aiming to reduce the number of training samples via synthesizing small-scale datasets via gradient matching. However, as the gradient calculation is coupled with the specific network architecture, the synthesized dataset is biased and performs poorly when used for training unseen architectures. To address these limitations, we present dataset quantization (DQ), a new framework to compress large-scale datasets into small subsets which can be used for training any neural network architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DQ is able to generate condensed small datasets for training unseen network architectures with state-of-the-art compression ratios for lossless model training. To the best of our knowledge, DQ is the first method that can successfully distill large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1k with a state-of-the-art compression ratio. Notably, with 60% data from ImageNet and 20% data from Alpaca's instruction tuning data, the models can be trained with negligible or no performance drop for both vision tasks (including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection) as well as language tasks (including instruction tuning tasks such as BBH and DROP).
Authors:Cuong Pham, Van-Anh Nguyen, Trung Le, Dinh Phung, Gustavo Carneiro, Thanh-Toan Do
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is an attractive approach for learning compact deep neural networks, which learns a lightweight student model by distilling knowledge from a complex teacher model. Attention-based knowledge distillation is a specific form of intermediate feature-based knowledge distillation that uses attention mechanisms to encourage the student to better mimic the teacher. However, most of the previous attention-based distillation approaches perform attention in the spatial domain, which primarily affects local regions in the input image. This may not be sufficient when we need to capture the broader context or global information necessary for effective knowledge transfer. In frequency domain, since each frequency is determined from all pixels of the image in spatial domain, it can contain global information about the image. Inspired by the benefits of the frequency domain, we propose a novel module that functions as an attention mechanism in the frequency domain. The module consists of a learnable global filter that can adjust the frequencies of student's features under the guidance of the teacher's features, which encourages the student's features to have patterns similar to the teacher's features. We then propose an enhanced knowledge review-based distillation model by leveraging the proposed frequency attention module. The extensive experiments with various teacher and student architectures on image classification and object detection benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms other knowledge distillation methods.
Authors:Aishan Liu, Xinwei Zhang, Yisong Xiao, Yuguang Zhou, Siyuan Liang, Jiakai Wang, Xianglong Liu, Xiaochun Cao, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
Pre-trained vision models (PVMs) have become a dominant component due to their exceptional performance when fine-tuned for downstream tasks. However, the presence of backdoors within PVMs poses significant threats. Unfortunately, existing studies primarily focus on backdooring PVMs for the classification task, neglecting potential inherited backdoors in downstream tasks such as detection and segmentation. In this paper, we propose the Pre-trained Trojan attack, which embeds backdoors into a PVM, enabling attacks across various downstream vision tasks. We highlight the challenges posed by cross-task activation and shortcut connections in successful backdoor attacks. To achieve effective trigger activation in diverse tasks, we stylize the backdoor trigger patterns with class-specific textures, enhancing the recognition of task-irrelevant low-level features associated with the target class in the trigger pattern. Moreover, we address the issue of shortcut connections by introducing a context-free learning pipeline for poison training. In this approach, triggers without contextual backgrounds are directly utilized as training data, diverging from the conventional use of clean images. Consequently, we establish a direct shortcut from the trigger to the target class, mitigating the shortcut connection issue. We conducted extensive experiments to thoroughly validate the effectiveness of our attacks on downstream detection and segmentation tasks. Additionally, we showcase the potential of our approach in more practical scenarios, including large vision models and 3D object detection in autonomous driving. This paper aims to raise awareness of the potential threats associated with applying PVMs in practical scenarios. Our codes will be available upon paper publication.
Authors:Siwei Wang, Zhiwei Chen, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Small object detection is a broadly investigated research task and is commonly conceptualized as a "pipeline-style" engineering process. In the upstream, images serve as raw materials for processing in the detection pipeline, where pre-trained models are employed to generate initial feature maps. In the midstream, an assigner selects training positive and negative samples. Subsequently, these samples and features are fed into the downstream for classification and regression. Previous small object detection methods often focused on improving isolated stages of the pipeline, thereby neglecting holistic optimization and consequently constraining overall performance gains. To address this issue, we have optimized three key aspects, namely Purifying, Labeling, and Utilizing, in this pipeline, proposing a high-quality Small object detection framework termed PLUSNet. Specifically, PLUSNet comprises three sequential components: the Hierarchical Feature Purifier (HFP) for purifying upstream features, the Multiple Criteria Label Assignment (MCLA) for improving the quality of midstream training samples, and the Frequency Decoupled Head (FDHead) for more effectively exploiting information to accomplish downstream tasks. The proposed PLUS modules are readily integrable into various object detectors, thus enhancing their detection capabilities in multi-scale scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed PLUSNet consistently achieves significant and consistent improvements across multiple datasets for small object detection.
Authors:Kai Ye, Haidi Tang, Bowen Liu, Pingyang Dai, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in logistics, agricultural automation, urban management, and emergency response are highly dependent on oriented object detection (OOD) to enhance visual perception. Although existing datasets for OOD in UAV provide valuable resources, they are often designed for specific downstream tasks.Consequently, they exhibit limited generalization performance in real flight scenarios and fail to thoroughly demonstrate algorithm effectiveness in practical environments. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce CODrone, a comprehensive oriented object detection dataset for UAVs that accurately reflects real-world conditions. It also serves as a new benchmark designed to align with downstream task requirements, ensuring greater applicability and robustness in UAV-based OOD.Based on application requirements, we identify four key limitations in current UAV OOD datasets-low image resolution, limited object categories, single-view imaging, and restricted flight altitudes-and propose corresponding improvements to enhance their applicability and robustness.Furthermore, CODrone contains a broad spectrum of annotated images collected from multiple cities under various lighting conditions, enhancing the realism of the benchmark. To rigorously evaluate CODrone as a new benchmark and gain deeper insights into the novel challenges it presents, we conduct a series of experiments based on 22 classical or SOTA methods.Our evaluation not only assesses the effectiveness of CODrone in real-world scenarios but also highlights key bottlenecks and opportunities to advance OOD in UAV applications.Overall, CODrone fills the data gap in OOD from UAV perspective and provides a benchmark with enhanced generalization capability, better aligning with practical applications and future algorithm development.
Authors:Yu Lin, Jianghang Lin, Kai Ye, You Shen, Yan Zhang, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Although fully-supervised oriented object detection has made significant progress in multimodal remote sensing image understanding, it comes at the cost of labor-intensive annotation. Recent studies have explored weakly and semi-supervised learning to alleviate this burden. However, these methods overlook the difficulties posed by dense annotations in complex remote sensing scenes. In this paper, we introduce a novel setting called sparsely annotated oriented object detection (SAOOD), which only labels partial instances, and propose a solution to address its challenges. Specifically, we focus on two key issues in the setting: (1) sparse labeling leading to overfitting on limited foreground representations, and (2) unlabeled objects (false negatives) confusing feature learning. To this end, we propose the S$^2$Teacher, a novel method that progressively mines pseudo-labels for unlabeled objects, from easy to hard, to enhance foreground representations. Additionally, it reweights the loss of unlabeled objects to mitigate their impact during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S$^2$Teacher not only significantly improves detector performance across different sparse annotation levels but also achieves near-fully-supervised performance on the DOTA dataset with only 10% annotation instances, effectively balancing detection accuracy with annotation efficiency. The code will be public.
Authors:Xunfa Lai, Zhiyu Yang, Jie Hu, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao, Guannan Jiang, Zhiyu Wang, Songan Zhang, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Existing camouflaged object detection~(COD) methods depend heavily on large-scale pixel-level annotations.However, acquiring such annotations is laborious due to the inherent camouflage characteristics of the objects.Semi-supervised learning offers a promising solution to this challenge.Yet, its application in COD is hindered by significant pseudo-label noise, both pixel-level and instance-level.We introduce CamoTeacher, a novel semi-supervised COD framework, utilizing Dual-Rotation Consistency Learning~(DRCL) to effectively address these noise issues.Specifically, DRCL minimizes pseudo-label noise by leveraging rotation views' consistency in pixel-level and instance-level.First, it employs Pixel-wise Consistency Learning~(PCL) to deal with pixel-level noise by reweighting the different parts within the pseudo-label.Second, Instance-wise Consistency Learning~(ICL) is used to adjust weights for pseudo-labels, which handles instance-level noise.Extensive experiments on four COD benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed CamoTeacher not only achieves state-of-the-art compared with semi-supervised learning methods, but also rivals established fully-supervised learning methods.Our code will be available soon.
Authors:Liujuan Cao, Jianghang Lin, Zebo Hong, Yunhang Shen, Shaohui Lin, Chao Chen, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Most WSOD methods rely on traditional object proposals to generate candidate regions and are confronted with unstable training, which easily gets stuck in a poor local optimum. In this paper, we introduce a unified, high-capacity weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) network called HUWSOD, which utilizes a comprehensive self-training framework without needing external modules or additional supervision. HUWSOD innovatively incorporates a self-supervised proposal generator and an autoencoder proposal generator with a multi-rate resampling pyramid to replace traditional object proposals, enabling end-to-end WSOD training and inference. Additionally, we implement a holistic self-training scheme that refines detection scores and coordinates through step-wise entropy minimization and consistency-constraint regularization, ensuring consistent predictions across stochastic augmentations of the same image. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that HUWSOD competes with state-of-the-art WSOD methods, eliminating the need for offline proposals and additional data. The peak performance of HUWSOD approaches that of fully-supervised Faster R-CNN. Our findings also indicate that randomly initialized boxes, although significantly different from well-designed offline object proposals, are effective for WSOD training.
Authors:Liunian Harold Li, Zi-Yi Dou, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
Abstract:
Recent development in vision-language approaches has instigated a paradigm shift in learning visual recognition models from language supervision. These approaches align objects with language queries (e.g. "a photo of a cat") and improve the models' adaptability to identify novel objects and domains. Recently, several studies have attempted to query these models with complex language expressions that include specifications of fine-grained semantic details, such as attributes, shapes, textures, and relations. However, simply incorporating language descriptions as queries does not guarantee accurate interpretation by the models. In fact, our experiments show that GLIP, the state-of-the-art vision-language model for object detection, often disregards contextual information in the language descriptions and instead relies heavily on detecting objects solely by their names. To tackle the challenges, we propose a new description-conditioned (DesCo) paradigm of learning object recognition models with rich language descriptions consisting of two major innovations: 1) we employ a large language model as a commonsense knowledge engine to generate rich language descriptions of objects based on object names and the raw image-text caption; 2) we design context-sensitive queries to improve the model's ability in deciphering intricate nuances embedded within descriptions and enforce the model to focus on context rather than object names alone. On two novel object detection benchmarks, LVIS and OminiLabel, under the zero-shot detection setting, our approach achieves 34.8 APr minival (+9.1) and 29.3 AP (+3.6), respectively, surpassing the prior state-of-the-art models, GLIP and FIBER, by a large margin.
Authors:Lei Qi, Dongjia Zhao, Yinghuan Shi, Xin Geng
Abstract:
Despite the significant success of deep learning in computer vision tasks, cross-domain tasks still present a challenge in which the model's performance will degrade when the training set and the test set follow different distributions. Most existing methods employ adversarial learning or instance normalization for achieving data augmentation to solve this task. In contrast, considering that the batch normalization (BN) layer may not be robust for unseen domains and there exist the differences between local patches of an image, we propose a novel method called patch-aware batch normalization (PBN). To be specific, we first split feature maps of a batch into non-overlapping patches along the spatial dimension, and then independently normalize each patch to jointly optimize the shared BN parameter at each iteration. By exploiting the differences between local patches of an image, our proposed PBN can effectively enhance the robustness of the model's parameters. Besides, considering the statistics from each patch may be inaccurate due to their smaller size compared to the global feature maps, we incorporate the globally accumulated statistics with the statistics from each batch to obtain the final statistics for normalizing each patch. Since the proposed PBN can replace the typical BN, it can be integrated into most existing state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our PBN in multiple computer vision tasks, including classification, object detection, instance retrieval, and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Tongtong Feng, Xin Wang, Feilin Han, Leping Zhang, Wenwu Zhu
Abstract:
Modern perception systems for autonomous flight are sensitive to occlusion and have limited long-range capability, which is a key bottleneck in improving low-altitude economic task performance. Recent research has shown that the UAV-to-UAV (U2U) cooperative perception system has great potential to revolutionize the autonomous flight industry. However, the lack of a large-scale dataset is hindering progress in this area. This paper presents U2UData, the first large-scale cooperative perception dataset for swarm UAVs autonomous flight. The dataset was collected by three UAVs flying autonomously in the U2USim, covering a 9 km$^2$ flight area. It comprises 315K LiDAR frames, 945K RGB and depth frames, and 2.41M annotated 3D bounding boxes for 3 classes. It also includes brightness, temperature, humidity, smoke, and airflow values covering all flight routes. U2USim is the first real-world mapping swarm UAVs simulation environment. It takes Yunnan Province as the prototype and includes 4 terrains, 7 weather conditions, and 8 sensor types. U2UData introduces two perception tasks: cooperative 3D object detection and cooperative 3D object tracking. This paper provides comprehensive benchmarks of recent cooperative perception algorithms on these tasks.
Authors:Shangchao Su, Bin Li, Chengzhi Zhang, Mingzhao Yang, Xiangyang Xue
Abstract:
Detection models trained by one party (including server) may face severe performance degradation when distributed to other users (clients). Federated learning can enable multi-party collaborative learning without leaking client data. In this paper, we focus on a special cross-domain scenario in which the server has large-scale labeled data and multiple clients only have a small amount of labeled data; meanwhile, there exist differences in data distributions among the clients. In this case, traditional federated learning methods can't help a client learn both the global knowledge of all participants and its own unique knowledge. To make up for this limitation, we propose a cross-domain federated object detection framework, named FedOD. The proposed framework first performs the federated training to obtain a public global aggregated model through multi-teacher distillation, and sends the aggregated model back to each client for fine-tuning its personalized local model. After a few rounds of communication, on each client we can perform weighted ensemble inference on the public global model and the personalized local model. We establish a federated object detection dataset which has significant background differences and instance differences based on multiple public autonomous driving datasets, and then conduct extensive experiments on the dataset. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Rongyu Zhang, Jiaming Liu, Xiaoqi Li, Xiaowei Chi, Dan Wang, Li Du, Yuan Du, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
Vision-centric Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception holds considerable promise for autonomous driving. Recent studies have prioritized efficiency or accuracy enhancements, yet the issue of domain shift has been overlooked, leading to substantial performance degradation upon transfer. We identify major domain gaps in real-world cross-domain scenarios and initiate the first effort to address the Domain Adaptation (DA) challenge in multi-view 3D object detection for BEV perception. Given the complexity of BEV perception approaches with their multiple components, domain shift accumulation across multi-geometric spaces (e.g., 2D, 3D Voxel, BEV) poses a significant challenge for BEV domain adaptation. In this paper, we introduce an innovative geometric-aware teacher-student framework, BEVUDA++, to diminish this issue, comprising a Reliable Depth Teacher (RDT) and a Geometric Consistent Student (GCS) model. Specifically, RDT effectively blends target LiDAR with dependable depth predictions to generate depth-aware information based on uncertainty estimation, enhancing the extraction of Voxel and BEV features that are essential for understanding the target domain. To collaboratively reduce the domain shift, GCS maps features from multiple spaces into a unified geometric embedding space, thereby narrowing the gap in data distribution between the two domains. Additionally, we introduce a novel Uncertainty-guided Exponential Moving Average (UEMA) to further reduce error accumulation due to domain shifts informed by previously obtained uncertainty guidance. To demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, we execute comprehensive experiments in four cross-domain scenarios, securing state-of-the-art performance in BEV 3D object detection tasks, e.g., 12.9\% NDS and 9.5\% mAP enhancement on Day-Night adaptation.
Authors:Guanqun Wang, Xinyu Wei, Jiaming Liu, Ray Zhang, Yichi Zhang, Kevin Zhang, Maurice Chong, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in tasks like visual question answering and common sense reasoning, while visual perception models have made significant strides in perception tasks, such as detection and segmentation. However, MLLMs mainly focus on high-level image-text interpretations and struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, and vision perception models usually suffer from open-world distribution shifts due to their limited model capacity. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Mutually Reinforced Multimodal Large Language Model (MR-MLLM), a novel framework that synergistically enhances visual perception and multimodal comprehension. First, a shared query fusion mechanism is proposed to harmonize detailed visual inputs from vision models with the linguistic depth of language models, enhancing multimodal comprehension and vision perception synergistically. Second, we propose the perception-enhanced cross-modal integration method, incorporating novel modalities from vision perception outputs, like object detection bounding boxes, to capture subtle visual elements, thus enriching the understanding of both visual and textual data. In addition, an innovative perception-embedded prompt generation mechanism is proposed to embed perceptual information into the language model's prompts, aligning the responses contextually and perceptually for a more accurate multimodal interpretation. Extensive experiments demonstrate MR-MLLM's superior performance in various multimodal comprehension and vision perception tasks, particularly those requiring corner case vision perception and fine-grained language comprehension.
Authors:Hongzhi Gao, Zheng Chen, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Jiaming Liu, Shanghang Zhang, Feng Zhao
Abstract:
Training high-accuracy 3D detectors necessitates massive labeled 3D annotations with 7 degree-of-freedom, which is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, the form of point annotations is proposed to offer significant prospects for practical applications in 3D detection, which is not only more accessible and less expensive but also provides strong spatial information for object localization. In this paper, we empirically discover that it is non-trivial to merely adapt Point-DETR to its 3D form, encountering two main bottlenecks: 1) it fails to encode strong 3D prior into the model, and 2) it generates low-quality pseudo labels in distant regions due to the extreme sparsity of LiDAR points. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Point-DETR3D, a teacher-student framework for weakly semi-supervised 3D detection, designed to fully capitalize on point-wise supervision within a constrained instance-wise annotation budget.Different from Point-DETR which encodes 3D positional information solely through a point encoder, we propose an explicit positional query initialization strategy to enhance the positional prior. Considering the low quality of pseudo labels at distant regions produced by the teacher model, we enhance the detector's perception by incorporating dense imagery data through a novel Cross-Modal Deformable RoI Fusion (D-RoI).Moreover, an innovative point-guided self-supervised learning technique is proposed to allow for fully exploiting point priors, even in student models.Extensive experiments on representative nuScenes dataset demonstrate our Point-DETR3D obtains significant improvements compared to previous works. Notably, with only 5% of labeled data, Point-DETR3D achieves over 90% performance of its fully supervised counterpart.
Authors:Zehui Chen, Qiuchen Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jiaming Liu, Shanghang Zhang, Feng Zhao
Abstract:
In this report, we present our solution to the multi-task robustness track of the 1st Visual Continual Learning (VCL) Challenge at ICCV 2023 Workshop. We propose a vanilla framework named UniNet that seamlessly combines various visual perception algorithms into a multi-task model. Specifically, we choose DETR3D, Mask2Former, and BinsFormer for 3D object detection, instance segmentation, and depth estimation tasks, respectively. The final submission is a single model with InternImage-L backbone, and achieves a 49.6 overall score (29.5 Det mAP, 80.3 mTPS, 46.4 Seg mAP, and 7.93 silog) on SHIFT validation set. Besides, we provide some interesting observations in our experiments which may facilitate the development of multi-task learning in dense visual prediction.
Authors:Zhenzhen Chu, Jiayu Chen, Cen Chen, Chengyu Wang, Ziheng Wu, Jun Huang, Weining Qian
Abstract:
Self-attention-based vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a highly competitive architecture in computer vision. Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs), ViTs are capable of global information sharing. With the development of various structures of ViTs, ViTs are increasingly advantageous for many vision tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention renders ViTs computationally intensive, and their lack of inductive biases of locality and translation equivariance demands larger model sizes compared to CNNs to effectively learn visual features. In this paper, we propose a light-weight and efficient vision transformer model called DualToken-ViT that leverages the advantages of CNNs and ViTs. DualToken-ViT effectively fuses the token with local information obtained by convolution-based structure and the token with global information obtained by self-attention-based structure to achieve an efficient attention structure. In addition, we use position-aware global tokens throughout all stages to enrich the global information, which further strengthening the effect of DualToken-ViT. Position-aware global tokens also contain the position information of the image, which makes our model better for vision tasks. We conducted extensive experiments on image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of DualToken-ViT. On the ImageNet-1K dataset, our models of different scales achieve accuracies of 75.4% and 79.4% with only 0.5G and 1.0G FLOPs, respectively, and our model with 1.0G FLOPs outperforms LightViT-T using global tokens by 0.7%.
Authors:Davinder Pal Singh, Lala Shakti Swarup Ray, Bo Zhou, Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz
Abstract:
We present a novel local-global feature fusion framework for body-weight exercise recognition with floor-based dynamic pressure maps. One step further from the existing studies using deep neural networks mainly focusing on global feature extraction, the proposed framework aims to combine local and global features using image processing techniques and the YOLO object detection to localize pressure profiles from different body parts and consider physical constraints. The proposed local feature extraction method generates two sets of high-level local features consisting of cropped pressure mapping and numerical features such as angular orientation, location on the mat, and pressure area. In addition, we adopt a knowledge distillation for regularization to preserve the knowledge of the global feature extraction and improve the performance of the exercise recognition. Our experimental results demonstrate a notable 11 percent improvement in F1 score for exercise recognition while preserving label-specific features.
Authors:Peidong Jia, Jiaming Liu, Senqiao Yang, Jiarui Wu, Xiaodong Xie, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
The Transformer-based detectors (i.e., DETR) have demonstrated impressive performance on end-to-end object detection. However, transferring DETR to different data distributions may lead to a significant performance degradation. Existing adaptation techniques focus on model-based approaches, which aim to leverage feature alignment to narrow the distribution shift between different domains. In this study, we propose a hierarchical Prompt Domain Memory (PDM) for adapting detection transformers to different distributions. PDM comprehensively leverages the prompt memory to extract domain-specific knowledge and explicitly constructs a long-term memory space for the data distribution, which represents better domain diversity compared to existing methods. Specifically, each prompt and its corresponding distribution value are paired in the memory space, and we inject top M distribution-similar prompts into the input and multi-level embeddings of DETR. Additionally, we introduce the Prompt Memory Alignment (PMA) to reduce the discrepancy between the source and target domains by fully leveraging the domain-specific knowledge extracted from the prompt domain memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detection methods on three benchmarks, including scene, synthetic to real, and weather adaptation. Codes will be released.
Authors:Jiaming Liu, Rongyu Zhang, Xiaoqi Li, Xiaowei Chi, Zehui Chen, Ming Lu, Yandong Guo, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
Vision-centric bird-eye-view (BEV) perception has shown promising potential in autonomous driving. Recent works mainly focus on improving efficiency or accuracy but neglect the challenges when facing environment changing, resulting in severe degradation of transfer performance. For BEV perception, we figure out the significant domain gaps existing in typical real-world cross-domain scenarios and comprehensively solve the Domain Adaption (DA) problem for multi-view 3D object detection. Since BEV perception approaches are complicated and contain several components, the domain shift accumulation on multiple geometric spaces (i.e., 2D, 3D Voxel, BEV) makes BEV DA even challenging. In this paper, we propose a Multi-space Alignment Teacher-Student (MATS) framework to ease the domain shift accumulation, which consists of a Depth-Aware Teacher (DAT) and a Geometric-space Aligned Student (GAS) model. DAT tactfully combines target lidar and reliable depth prediction to construct depth-aware information, extracting target domain-specific knowledge in Voxel and BEV feature spaces. It then transfers the sufficient domain knowledge of multiple spaces to the student model. In order to jointly alleviate the domain shift, GAS projects multi-geometric space features to a shared geometric embedding space and decreases data distribution distance between two domains. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct BEV 3D object detection experiments on three cross-domain scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Yuming Chen, Jiangyan Feng, Haodong Zhang, Lijun Gong, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng, Yibing Song
Abstract:
Language-based object detection (LOD) aims to align visual objects with language expressions. A large amount of paired data is utilized to improve LOD model generalizations. During the training process, recent studies leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to automatically generate human-like expressions for visual objects, facilitating training data scaling up. In this process, we observe that VLM hallucinations bring inaccurate object descriptions (e.g., object name, color, and shape) to deteriorate VL alignment quality. To reduce VLM hallucinations, we propose an agentic workflow controlled by an LLM to re-align language to visual objects via adaptively adjusting image and text prompts. We name this workflow Real-LOD, which includes planning, tool use, and reflection steps. Given an image with detected objects and VLM raw language expressions, Real-LOD reasons its state automatically and arranges action based on our neural symbolic designs (i.e., planning). The action will adaptively adjust the image and text prompts and send them to VLMs for object re-description (i.e., tool use). Then, we use another LLM to analyze these refined expressions for feedback (i.e., reflection). These steps are conducted in a cyclic form to gradually improve language descriptions for re-aligning to visual objects. We construct a dataset that contains a tiny amount of 0.18M images with re-aligned language expression and train a prevalent LOD model to surpass existing LOD methods by around 50% on the standard benchmarks. Our Real-LOD workflow, with automatic VL refinement, reveals a potential to preserve data quality along with scaling up data quantity, which further improves LOD performance from a data-alignment perspective.
Authors:Jiabao Wang, Qiang Meng, Guochao Liu, Liujiang Yan, Ke Wang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Qibin Hou
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, the temporal stability of 3D object detection greatly impacts the driving safety. However, the detection stability cannot be accessed by existing metrics such as mAP and MOTA, and consequently is less explored by the community. To bridge this gap, this work proposes Stability Index (SI), a new metric that can comprehensively evaluate the stability of 3D detectors in terms of confidence, box localization, extent, and heading. By benchmarking state-of-the-art object detectors on the Waymo Open Dataset, SI reveals interesting properties of object stability that have not been previously discovered by other metrics. To help models improve their stability, we further introduce a general and effective training strategy, called Prediction Consistency Learning (PCL). PCL essentially encourages the prediction consistency of the same objects under different timestamps and augmentations, leading to enhanced detection stability. Furthermore, we examine the effectiveness of PCL with the widely-used CenterPoint, and achieve a remarkable SI of 86.00 for vehicle class, surpassing the baseline by 5.48. We hope our work could serve as a reliable baseline and draw the community's attention to this crucial issue in 3D object detection. Codes will be made publicly available.
Authors:Lewei Yao, Renjie Pi, Jianhua Han, Xiaodan Liang, Hang Xu, Wei Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Dan Xu
Abstract:
Existing open-vocabulary object detectors typically require a predefined set of categories from users, significantly confining their application scenarios. In this paper, we introduce DetCLIPv3, a high-performing detector that excels not only at both open-vocabulary object detection, but also generating hierarchical labels for detected objects. DetCLIPv3 is characterized by three core designs: 1. Versatile model architecture: we derive a robust open-set detection framework which is further empowered with generation ability via the integration of a caption head. 2. High information density data: we develop an auto-annotation pipeline leveraging visual large language model to refine captions for large-scale image-text pairs, providing rich, multi-granular object labels to enhance the training. 3. Efficient training strategy: we employ a pre-training stage with low-resolution inputs that enables the object captioner to efficiently learn a broad spectrum of visual concepts from extensive image-text paired data. This is followed by a fine-tuning stage that leverages a small number of high-resolution samples to further enhance detection performance. With these effective designs, DetCLIPv3 demonstrates superior open-vocabulary detection performance, \eg, our Swin-T backbone model achieves a notable 47.0 zero-shot fixed AP on the LVIS minival benchmark, outperforming GLIPv2, GroundingDINO, and DetCLIPv2 by 18.0/19.6/6.6 AP, respectively. DetCLIPv3 also achieves a state-of-the-art 19.7 AP in dense captioning task on VG dataset, showcasing its strong generative capability.
Authors:Alexander H. Berger, Laurin Lux, Suprosanna Shit, Ivan Ezhov, Georgios Kaissis, Martin J. Menten, Daniel Rueckert, Johannes C. Paetzold
Abstract:
Direct image-to-graph transformation is a challenging task that involves solving object detection and relationship prediction in a single model. Due to this task's complexity, large training datasets are rare in many domains, making the training of deep-learning methods challenging. This data sparsity necessitates transfer learning strategies akin to the state-of-the-art in general computer vision. In this work, we introduce a set of methods enabling cross-domain and cross-dimension learning for image-to-graph transformers. We propose (1) a regularized edge sampling loss to effectively learn object relations in multiple domains with different numbers of edges, (2) a domain adaptation framework for image-to-graph transformers aligning image- and graph-level features from different domains, and (3) a projection function that allows using 2D data for training 3D transformers. We demonstrate our method's utility in cross-domain and cross-dimension experiments, where we utilize labeled data from 2D road networks for simultaneous learning in vastly different target domains. Our method consistently outperforms standard transfer learning and self-supervised pretraining on challenging benchmarks, such as retinal or whole-brain vessel graph extraction.
Authors:Dingning Liu, Xiaomeng Dong, Renrui Zhang, Xu Luo, Peng Gao, Xiaoshui Huang, Yongshun Gong, Zhihui Wang
Abstract:
In this work, we present a new visual prompting method called 3DAxiesPrompts (3DAP) to unleash the capabilities of GPT-4V in performing 3D spatial tasks. Our investigation reveals that while GPT-4V exhibits proficiency in discerning the position and interrelations of 2D entities through current visual prompting techniques, its abilities in handling 3D spatial tasks have yet to be explored. In our approach, we create a 3D coordinate system tailored to 3D imagery, complete with annotated scale information. By presenting images infused with the 3DAP visual prompt as inputs, we empower GPT-4V to ascertain the spatial positioning information of the given 3D target image with a high degree of precision. Through experiments, We identified three tasks that could be stably completed using the 3DAP method, namely, 2D to 3D Point Reconstruction, 2D to 3D point matching, and 3D Object Detection. We perform experiments on our proposed dataset 3DAP-Data, the results from these experiments validate the efficacy of 3DAP-enhanced GPT-4V inputs, marking a significant stride in 3D spatial task execution.
Authors:Philip Müller, Felix Meissen, Johannes Brandt, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract:
Pathology detection and delineation enables the automatic interpretation of medical scans such as chest X-rays while providing a high level of explainability to support radiologists in making informed decisions. However, annotating pathology bounding boxes is a time-consuming task such that large public datasets for this purpose are scarce. Current approaches thus use weakly supervised object detection to learn the (rough) localization of pathologies from image-level annotations, which is however limited in performance due to the lack of bounding box supervision. We therefore propose anatomy-driven pathology detection (ADPD), which uses easy-to-annotate bounding boxes of anatomical regions as proxies for pathologies. We study two training approaches: supervised training using anatomy-level pathology labels and multiple instance learning (MIL) with image-level pathology labels. Our results show that our anatomy-level training approach outperforms weakly supervised methods and fully supervised detection with limited training samples, and our MIL approach is competitive with both baseline approaches, therefore demonstrating the potential of our approach.
Authors:Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Xiaodan Liang, Dan Xu, Wei Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Hang Xu
Abstract:
This paper presents DetCLIPv2, an efficient and scalable training framework that incorporates large-scale image-text pairs to achieve open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). Unlike previous OVD frameworks that typically rely on a pre-trained vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) or exploit image-text pairs via a pseudo labeling process, DetCLIPv2 directly learns the fine-grained word-region alignment from massive image-text pairs in an end-to-end manner. To accomplish this, we employ a maximum word-region similarity between region proposals and textual words to guide the contrastive objective. To enable the model to gain localization capability while learning broad concepts, DetCLIPv2 is trained with a hybrid supervision from detection, grounding and image-text pair data under a unified data formulation. By jointly training with an alternating scheme and adopting low-resolution input for image-text pairs, DetCLIPv2 exploits image-text pair data efficiently and effectively: DetCLIPv2 utilizes 13X more image-text pairs than DetCLIP with a similar training time and improves performance. With 13M image-text pairs for pre-training, DetCLIPv2 demonstrates superior open-vocabulary detection performance, e.g., DetCLIPv2 with Swin-T backbone achieves 40.4% zero-shot AP on the LVIS benchmark, which outperforms previous works GLIP/GLIPv2/DetCLIP by 14.4/11.4/4.5% AP, respectively, and even beats its fully-supervised counterpart by a large margin.
Authors:Xiwen Liang, Minzhe Niu, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Chunjing Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract:
Multi-task learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm to solve a range of tasks simultaneously with good efficiency in both computation resources and inference time. However, these algorithms are designed for different tasks mostly not within the scope of autonomous driving, thus making it hard to compare multi-task methods in autonomous driving. Aiming to enable the comprehensive evaluation of present multi-task learning methods in autonomous driving, we extensively investigate the performance of popular multi-task methods on the large-scale driving dataset, which covers four common perception tasks, i.e., object detection, semantic segmentation, drivable area segmentation, and lane detection. We provide an in-depth analysis of current multi-task learning methods under different common settings and find out that the existing methods make progress but there is still a large performance gap compared with single-task baselines. To alleviate this dilemma in autonomous driving, we present an effective multi-task framework, VE-Prompt, which introduces visual exemplars via task-specific prompting to guide the model toward learning high-quality task-specific representations. Specifically, we generate visual exemplars based on bounding boxes and color-based markers, which provide accurate visual appearances of target categories and further mitigate the performance gap. Furthermore, we bridge transformer-based encoders and convolutional layers for efficient and accurate unified perception in autonomous driving. Comprehensive experimental results on the diverse self-driving dataset BDD100K show that the VE-Prompt improves the multi-task baseline and further surpasses single-task models.
Authors:Philip Müller, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract:
Image-text contrastive learning has proven effective for pretraining medical image models. When targeting localized downstream tasks like semantic segmentation or object detection, additional local contrastive losses that align image regions with sentences have shown promising results. We study how local contrastive losses are related to global (per-sample) contrastive losses and which effects they have on localized medical downstream tasks. Based on a theoretical comparison, we propose to remove some components of local losses and replace others by a novel distribution prior which enforces uniformity of representations within each sample. We empirically study this approach on chest X-ray tasks and find it to be very effective, outperforming methods without local losses on 12 of 18 tasks.
Authors:Philip Müller, Georgios Kaissis, Congyu Zou, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract:
Contrastive learning has proven effective for pre-training image models on unlabeled data with promising results for tasks such as medical image classification. Using paired text (like radiological reports) during pre-training improves the results even further. Still, most existing methods target image classification downstream tasks and may not be optimal for localized tasks like semantic segmentation or object detection. We therefore propose Localized representation learning from Vision and Text (LoVT), to our best knowledge, the first text-supervised pre-training method that targets localized medical imaging tasks. Our method combines instance-level image-report contrastive learning with local contrastive learning on image region and report sentence representations. We evaluate LoVT and commonly used pre-training methods on an evaluation framework of 18 localized tasks on chest X-rays from five public datasets. LoVT performs best on 10 of the 18 studied tasks making it the preferred method of choice for localized tasks.
Authors:Haiming Zhang, Yiyao Zhu, Wending Zhou, Xu Yan, Yingjie Cai, Bingbing Liu, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Abstract:
Sparse Perception Models (SPMs) adopt a query-driven paradigm that forgoes explicit dense BEV or volumetric construction, enabling highly efficient computation and accelerated inference. In this paper, we introduce SQS, a novel query-based splatting pre-training specifically designed to advance SPMs in autonomous driving. SQS introduces a plug-in module that predicts 3D Gaussian representations from sparse queries during pre-training, leveraging self-supervised splatting to learn fine-grained contextual features through the reconstruction of multi-view images and depth maps. During fine-tuning, the pre-trained Gaussian queries are seamlessly integrated into downstream networks via query interaction mechanisms that explicitly connect pre-trained queries with task-specific queries, effectively accommodating the diverse requirements of occupancy prediction and 3D object detection. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that SQS delivers considerable performance gains across multiple query-based 3D perception tasks, notably in occupancy prediction and 3D object detection, outperforming prior state-of-the-art pre-training approaches by a significant margin (i.e., +1.3 mIoU on occupancy prediction and +1.0 NDS on 3D detection).
Authors:Elad Feldman, Jacob Shams, Dudi Biton, Alfred Chen, Shaoyuan Xie, Satoru Koda, Yisroel Mirsky, Asaf Shabtai, Yuval Elovici, Ben Nassi
Abstract:
The safety of autonomous cars has come under scrutiny in recent years, especially after 16 documented incidents involving Teslas (with autopilot engaged) crashing into parked emergency vehicles (police cars, ambulances, and firetrucks). While previous studies have revealed that strong light sources often introduce flare artifacts in the captured image, which degrade the image quality, the impact of flare on object detection performance remains unclear. In this research, we unveil PaniCar, a digital phenomenon that causes an object detector's confidence score to fluctuate below detection thresholds when exposed to activated emergency vehicle lighting. This vulnerability poses a significant safety risk, and can cause autonomous vehicles to fail to detect objects near emergency vehicles. In addition, this vulnerability could be exploited by adversaries to compromise the security of advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs). We assess seven commercial ADASs (Tesla Model 3, "manufacturer C", HP, Pelsee, AZDOME, Imagebon, Rexing), four object detectors (YOLO, SSD, RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN), and 14 patterns of emergency vehicle lighting to understand the influence of various technical and environmental factors. We also evaluate four SOTA flare removal methods and show that their performance and latency are insufficient for real-time driving constraints. To mitigate this risk, we propose Caracetamol, a robust framework designed to enhance the resilience of object detectors against the effects of activated emergency vehicle lighting. Our evaluation shows that on YOLOv3 and Faster RCNN, Caracetamol improves the models' average confidence of car detection by 0.20, the lower confidence bound by 0.33, and reduces the fluctuation range by 0.33. In addition, Caracetamol is capable of processing frames at a rate of between 30-50 FPS, enabling real-time ADAS car detection.
Authors:Siran Chen, Yuxiao Luo, Yue Ma, Yu Qiao, Yali Wang
Abstract:
With the prevalence of Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs), autonomous driving has encountered new opportunities and challenges. In particular, multi-modal video understanding is critical to interactively analyze what will happen in the procedure of autonomous driving. However, videos in such a dynamical scene that often contains complex spatial-temporal movements, which restricts the generalization capacity of the existing MLLMs in this field. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Hierarchical Mamba Adaptation (H-MBA) framework to fit the complicated motion changes in autonomous driving videos. Specifically, our H-MBA consists of two distinct modules, including Context Mamba (C-Mamba) and Query Mamba (Q-Mamba). First, C-Mamba contains various types of structure state space models, which can effectively capture multi-granularity video context for different temporal resolutions. Second, Q-Mamba flexibly transforms the current frame as the learnable query, and attentively selects multi-granularity video context into query. Consequently, it can adaptively integrate all the video contexts of multi-scale temporal resolutions to enhance video understanding. Via a plug-and-play paradigm in MLLMs, our H-MBA shows the remarkable performance on multi-modal video tasks in autonomous driving, e.g., for risk object detection, it outperforms the previous SOTA method with 5.5% mIoU improvement.
Authors:Chaoda Zheng, Feng Wang, Naiyan Wang, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Abstract:
While 3D object bounding box (bbox) representation has been widely used in autonomous driving perception, it lacks the ability to capture the precise details of an object's intrinsic geometry. Recently, occupancy has emerged as a promising alternative for 3D scene perception. However, constructing a high-resolution occupancy map remains infeasible for large scenes due to computational constraints. Recognizing that foreground objects only occupy a small portion of the scene, we introduce object-centric occupancy as a supplement to object bboxes. This representation not only provides intricate details for detected objects but also enables higher voxel resolution in practical applications. We advance the development of object-centric occupancy perception from both data and algorithm perspectives. On the data side, we construct the first object-centric occupancy dataset from scratch using an automated pipeline. From the algorithmic standpoint, we introduce a novel object-centric occupancy completion network equipped with an implicit shape decoder that manages dynamic-size occupancy generation. This network accurately predicts the complete object-centric occupancy volume for inaccurate object proposals by leveraging temporal information from long sequences. Our method demonstrates robust performance in completing object shapes under noisy detection and tracking conditions. Additionally, we show that our occupancy features significantly enhance the detection results of state-of-the-art 3D object detectors, especially for incomplete or distant objects in the Waymo Open Dataset.
Authors:Haiming Zhang, Wending Zhou, Yiyao Zhu, Xu Yan, Jiantao Gao, Dongfeng Bai, Yingjie Cai, Bingbing Liu, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Abstract:
This paper introduces VisionPAD, a novel self-supervised pre-training paradigm designed for vision-centric algorithms in autonomous driving. In contrast to previous approaches that employ neural rendering with explicit depth supervision, VisionPAD utilizes more efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct multi-view representations using only images as supervision. Specifically, we introduce a self-supervised method for voxel velocity estimation. By warping voxels to adjacent frames and supervising the rendered outputs, the model effectively learns motion cues in the sequential data. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-frame photometric consistency approach to enhance geometric perception. It projects adjacent frames to the current frame based on rendered depths and relative poses, boosting the 3D geometric representation through pure image supervision. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that VisionPAD significantly improves performance in 3D object detection, occupancy prediction and map segmentation, surpassing state-of-the-art pre-training strategies by a considerable margin.
Authors:Yongdong Luo, Xiawu Zheng, Xiao Yang, Guilin Li, Haojia Lin, Jinfa Huang, Jiayi Ji, Fei Chao, Jiebo Luo, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Existing large video-language models (LVLMs) struggle to comprehend long videos correctly due to limited context. To address this problem, fine-tuning long-context LVLMs and employing GPT-based agents have emerged as promising solutions. However, fine-tuning LVLMs would require extensive high-quality data and substantial GPU resources, while GPT-based agents would rely on proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o). In this paper, we propose Video Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Video-RAG), a training-free and cost-effective pipeline that employs visually-aligned auxiliary texts to help facilitate cross-modality alignment while providing additional information beyond the visual content. Specifically, we leverage open-source external tools to extract visually-aligned information from pure video data (e.g., audio, optical character, and object detection), and incorporate the extracted information into an existing LVLM as auxiliary texts, alongside video frames and queries, in a plug-and-play manner. Our Video-RAG offers several key advantages: (i) lightweight with low computing overhead due to single-turn retrieval; (ii) easy implementation and compatibility with any LVLM; and (iii) significant, consistent performance gains across long video understanding benchmarks, including Video-MME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench. Notably, our model demonstrates superior performance over proprietary models like Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4o when utilized with a 72B model.
Authors:Hongbin Lin, Yifan Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection (Mono 3Det) aims to identify 3D objects from a single RGB image. However, existing methods often assume training and test data follow the same distribution, which may not hold in real-world test scenarios. To address the out-of-distribution (OOD) problems, we explore a new adaptation paradigm for Mono 3Det, termed Fully Test-time Adaptation. It aims to adapt a well-trained model to unlabeled test data by handling potential data distribution shifts at test time without access to training data and test labels. However, applying this paradigm in Mono 3Det poses significant challenges due to OOD test data causing a remarkable decline in object detection scores. This decline conflicts with the pre-defined score thresholds of existing detection methods, leading to severe object omissions (i.e., rare positive detections and many false negatives). Consequently, the limited positive detection and plenty of noisy predictions cause test-time adaptation to fail in Mono 3Det. To handle this problem, we propose a novel Monocular Test-Time Adaptation (MonoTTA) method, based on two new strategies. 1) Reliability-driven adaptation: we empirically find that high-score objects are still reliable and the optimization of high-score objects can enhance confidence across all detections. Thus, we devise a self-adaptive strategy to identify reliable objects for model adaptation, which discovers potential objects and alleviates omissions. 2) Noise-guard adaptation: since high-score objects may be scarce, we develop a negative regularization term to exploit the numerous low-score objects via negative learning, preventing overfitting to noise and trivial solutions. Experimental results show that MonoTTA brings significant performance gains for Mono 3Det models in OOD test scenarios, approximately 190% gains by average on KITTI and 198% gains on nuScenes.
Authors:Oryan Yehezkel, Alon Zolfi, Amit Baras, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai
Abstract:
Vision transformers have contributed greatly to advancements in the computer vision domain, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in diverse tasks (e.g., image classification, object detection). However, their high computational requirements grow quadratically with the number of tokens used. Token sparsification mechanisms have been proposed to address this issue. These mechanisms employ an input-dependent strategy, in which uninformative tokens are discarded from the computation pipeline, improving the model's efficiency. However, their dynamism and average-case assumption makes them vulnerable to a new threat vector - carefully crafted adversarial examples capable of fooling the sparsification mechanism, resulting in worst-case performance. In this paper, we present DeSparsify, an attack targeting the availability of vision transformers that use token sparsification mechanisms. The attack aims to exhaust the operating system's resources, while maintaining its stealthiness. Our evaluation demonstrates the attack's effectiveness on three token sparsification mechanisms and examines the attack's transferability between them and its effect on the GPU resources. To mitigate the impact of the attack, we propose various countermeasures.
Authors:Xinpeng Ding, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Wei Zhang, Xiaomeng Li
Abstract:
Recent efforts to use natural language for interpretable driving focus mainly on planning, neglecting perception tasks. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing ROLISP (Risk Object Localization and Intention and Suggestion Prediction), which towards interpretable risk object detection and suggestion for ego car motions. Accurate ROLISP implementation requires extensive reasoning to identify critical traffic objects and infer their intentions, prompting us to explore the capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the limited perception performance of CLIP-ViT vision encoders in existing MLLMs struggles with capturing essential visual perception information, e.g., high-resolution, multi-scale and visual-related inductive biases, which are important for autonomous driving. Addressing these challenges, we introduce HiLM-D, a resource-efficient framework that enhances visual information processing in MLLMs for ROLISP. Our method is motivated by the fact that the primary variations in autonomous driving scenarios are the motion trajectories rather than the semantic or appearance information (e.g., the shapes and colors) of objects. Hence, the visual process of HiLM-D is a two-stream framework: (i) a temporal reasoning stream, receiving low-resolution dynamic video content, to capture temporal semantics, and (ii) a spatial perception stream, receiving a single high-resolution frame, to capture holistic visual perception-related information. The spatial perception stream can be made very lightweight by a well-designed P-Adapter, which is lightweight, training-efficient, and easily integrated into existing MLLMs. Experiments on the DRAMA-ROLISP dataset show HiLM-D's significant improvements over current MLLMs, with a 3.7% in BLEU-4 for captioning and 8.7% in mIoU for detection.
Authors:Alexander Lehner, Stefano Gasperini, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Michael Schmidt, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam, Federico Tombari
Abstract:
Since real-world training datasets cannot properly sample the long tail of the underlying data distribution, corner cases and rare out-of-domain samples can severely hinder the performance of state-of-the-art models. This problem becomes even more severe for dense tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation, where points of non-standard objects can be confidently associated to the wrong class. In this work, we focus on improving the generalization to out-of-domain data. We achieve this by augmenting the training set with adversarial examples. First, we learn a set of vectors that deform the objects in an adversarial fashion. To prevent the adversarial examples from being too far from the existing data distribution, we preserve their plausibility through a series of constraints, ensuring sensor-awareness and shapes smoothness. Then, we perform adversarial augmentation by applying the learned sample-independent vectors to the available objects when training a model. We conduct extensive experiments across a variety of scenarios on data from KITTI, Waymo, and CrashD for 3D object detection, and on data from SemanticKITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes for 3D semantic segmentation. Despite training on a standard single dataset, our approach substantially improves the robustness and generalization of both 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation methods to out-of-domain data.
Authors:Omer Hofman, Amit Giloni, Yarin Hayun, Ikuya Morikawa, Toshiya Shimizu, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai
Abstract:
Object detection models, which are widely used in various domains (such as retail), have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing methods for detecting adversarial attacks on object detectors have had difficulty detecting new real-life attacks. We present X-Detect, a novel adversarial patch detector that can: i) detect adversarial samples in real time, allowing the defender to take preventive action; ii) provide explanations for the alerts raised to support the defender's decision-making process, and iii) handle unfamiliar threats in the form of new attacks. Given a new scene, X-Detect uses an ensemble of explainable-by-design detectors that utilize object extraction, scene manipulation, and feature transformation techniques to determine whether an alert needs to be raised. X-Detect was evaluated in both the physical and digital space using five different attack scenarios (including adaptive attacks) and the COCO dataset and our new Superstore dataset. The physical evaluation was performed using a smart shopping cart setup in real-world settings and included 17 adversarial patch attacks recorded in 1,700 adversarial videos. The results showed that X-Detect outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in distinguishing between benign and adversarial scenes for all attack scenarios while maintaining a 0% FPR (no false alarms) and providing actionable explanations for the alerts raised. A demo is available.
Authors:Renjie Pi, Jiahui Gao, Shizhe Diao, Rui Pan, Hanze Dong, Jipeng Zhang, Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Zhang
Abstract:
In recent years, the field of computer vision has seen significant advancements thanks to the development of large language models (LLMs). These models have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines, paving the way for novel techniques that blur the lines between human and machine intelligence. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm for object detection that we call reasoning-based object detection. Unlike conventional object detection methods that rely on specific object names, our approach enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity. Our proposed method, called DetGPT, leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user's instructions and the visual scene. This enables DetGPT to automatically locate the object of interest based on the user's expressed desires, even if the object is not explicitly mentioned. For instance, if a user expresses a desire for a cold beverage, DetGPT can analyze the image, identify a fridge, and use its knowledge of typical fridge contents to locate the beverage. This flexibility makes our system applicable across a wide range of fields, from robotics and automation to autonomous driving. Overall, our proposed paradigm and DetGPT demonstrate the potential for more sophisticated and intuitive interactions between humans and machines. We hope that our proposed paradigm and approach will provide inspiration to the community and open the door to more interative and versatile object detection systems. Our project page is launched at detgpt.github.io.
Authors:Xinhang Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Abstract:
While Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) had achieved unprecedented novel view synthesis results, they have been struggling in dealing with large-scale cluttered scenes with sparse input views and highly view-dependent appearances. Specifically, existing NeRF-based models tend to produce blurry rendering with the volumetric reconstruction often inaccurate, where a lot of reconstruction errors are observed in the form of foggy "floaters" hovering within the entire volume of an opaque 3D scene. Such inaccuracies impede NeRF's potential for accurate 3D NeRF registration, object detection, segmentation, etc., which possibly accounts for only limited significant research effort so far to directly address these important 3D fundamental computer vision problems to date. This paper analyzes the NeRF's struggles in such settings and proposes Clean-NeRF for accurate 3D reconstruction and novel view rendering in complex scenes. Our key insights consist of enforcing effective appearance and geometry constraints, which are absent in the conventional NeRF reconstruction, by 1) automatically detecting and modeling view-dependent appearances in the training views to prevent them from interfering with density estimation, which is complete with 2) a geometric correction procedure performed on each traced ray during inference. Clean-NeRF can be implemented as a plug-in that can immediately benefit existing NeRF-based methods without additional input. Codes will be released.
Authors:Bowen Dong, Jiaxi Gu, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Wangmeng Zuo
Abstract:
Existing open-world universal segmentation approaches usually leverage CLIP and pre-computed proposal masks to treat open-world segmentation tasks as proposal classification. However, 1) these works cannot handle universal segmentation in an end-to-end manner, and 2) the limited scale of panoptic datasets restricts the open-world segmentation ability on things classes. In this paper, we present Vision-Language Omni-Supervised Segmentation (VLOSS). VLOSS starts from a Mask2Former universal segmentation framework with CLIP text encoder. To improve the open-world segmentation ability, we leverage omni-supervised data (i.e., panoptic segmentation data, object detection data, and image-text pairs data) into training, thus enriching the open-world segmentation ability and achieving better segmentation accuracy. To better improve the training efficiency and fully release the power of omni-supervised data, we propose several advanced techniques, i.e., FPN-style encoder, switchable training technique, and positive classification loss. Benefiting from the end-to-end training manner with proposed techniques, VLOSS can be applied to various open-world segmentation tasks without further adaptation. Experimental results on different open-world panoptic and instance segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of VLOSS. Notably, with fewer parameters, our VLOSS with Swin-Tiny backbone surpasses MaskCLIP by ~2% in terms of mask AP on LVIS v1 dataset.
Authors:Mingye Xu, Mutian Xu, Tong He, Wanli Ouyang, Yali Wang, Xiaoguang Han, Yu Qiao
Abstract:
Masked Modeling (MM) has demonstrated widespread success in various vision challenges, by reconstructing masked visual patches. Yet, applying MM for large-scale 3D scenes remains an open problem due to the data sparsity and scene complexity. The conventional random masking paradigm used in 2D images often causes a high risk of ambiguity when recovering the masked region of 3D scenes. To this end, we propose a novel informative-preserved reconstruction, which explores local statistics to discover and preserve the representative structured points, effectively enhancing the pretext masking task for 3D scene understanding. Integrated with a progressive reconstruction manner, our method can concentrate on modeling regional geometry and enjoy less ambiguity for masked reconstruction. Besides, such scenes with progressive masking ratios can also serve to self-distill their intrinsic spatial consistency, requiring to learn the consistent representations from unmasked areas. By elegantly combining informative-preserved reconstruction on masked areas and consistency self-distillation from unmasked areas, a unified framework called MM-3DScene is yielded. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a host of downstream tasks. The consistent improvement (e.g., +6.1 mAP@0.5 on object detection and +2.2% mIoU on semantic segmentation) demonstrates the superiority of our approach.
Authors:Alon Zolfi, Guy Amit, Amit Baras, Satoru Koda, Ikuya Morikawa, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai
Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has attracted a large amount of attention from the machine learning research community in recent years due to its importance in deployed systems. Most of the previous studies focused on the detection of OOD samples in the multi-class classification task. However, OOD detection in the multi-label classification task, a more common real-world use case, remains an underexplored domain. In this research, we propose YolOOD - a method that utilizes concepts from the object detection domain to perform OOD detection in the multi-label classification task. Object detection models have an inherent ability to distinguish between objects of interest (in-distribution) and irrelevant objects (e.g., OOD objects) in images that contain multiple objects belonging to different class categories. These abilities allow us to convert a regular object detection model into an image classifier with inherent OOD detection capabilities with just minor changes. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art OOD detection methods and demonstrate YolOOD's ability to outperform these methods on a comprehensive suite of in-distribution and OOD benchmark datasets.
Authors:Alexander Lehner, Stefano Gasperini, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Michael Schmidt, Mohammad-Ali Nikouei Mahani, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam, Federico Tombari
Abstract:
As 3D object detection on point clouds relies on the geometrical relationships between the points, non-standard object shapes can hinder a method's detection capability. However, in safety-critical settings, robustness to out-of-domain and long-tail samples is fundamental to circumvent dangerous issues, such as the misdetection of damaged or rare cars. In this work, we substantially improve the generalization of 3D object detectors to out-of-domain data by deforming point clouds during training. We achieve this with 3D-VField: a novel data augmentation method that plausibly deforms objects via vector fields learned in an adversarial fashion. Our approach constrains 3D points to slide along their sensor view rays while neither adding nor removing any of them. The obtained vectors are transferable, sample-independent and preserve shape and occlusions. Despite training only on a standard dataset, such as KITTI, augmenting with our vector fields significantly improves the generalization to differently shaped objects and scenes. Towards this end, we propose and share CrashD: a synthetic dataset of realistic damaged and rare cars, with a variety of crash scenarios. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Waymo, our CrashD and SUN RGB-D show the generalizability of our techniques to out-of-domain data, different models and sensors, namely LiDAR and ToF cameras, for both indoor and outdoor scenes. Our CrashD dataset is available at https://crashd-cars.github.io.
Authors:Xiangzhao Hao, Kuan Zhu, Hongyu Guo, Haiyun Guo, Ning Jiang, Quan Lu, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract:
Using natural language to query visual information is a fundamental need in real-world applications. Text-Image Retrieval (TIR) retrieves a target image from a gallery based on an image-level description, while Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) localizes a target object within a given image using an instance-level description. However, real-world applications often present more complex demands. Users typically query an instance-level description across a large gallery and expect to receive both relevant image and the corresponding instance location. In such scenarios, TIR struggles with fine-grained descriptions and object-level localization, while REC is limited in its ability to efficiently search large galleries and lacks an effective ranking mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a new task called \textbf{Referring Expression Instance Retrieval (REIR)}, which supports both instance-level retrieval and localization based on fine-grained referring expressions. First, we propose a large-scale benchmark for REIR, named REIRCOCO, constructed by prompting advanced vision-language models to generate high-quality referring expressions for instances in the MSCOCO and RefCOCO datasets. Second, we present a baseline method, Contrastive Language-Instance Alignment with Relation Experts (CLARE), which employs a dual-stream architecture to address REIR in an end-to-end manner. Given a referring expression, the textual branch encodes it into a query embedding. The visual branch detects candidate objects and extracts their instance-level visual features. The most similar candidate to the query is selected for bounding box prediction. CLARE is first trained on object detection and REC datasets to establish initial grounding capabilities, then optimized via Contrastive Language-Instance Alignment (CLIA) for improved retrieval across images. We will release our code and benchmark publicly.
Authors:Jingtong Yue, Zhiwei Lin, Xin Lin, Xiaoyu Zhou, Xiangtai Li, Lu Qi, Yongtao Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract:
While recent low-cost radar-camera approaches have shown promising results in multi-modal 3D object detection, both sensors face challenges from environmental and intrinsic disturbances. Poor lighting or adverse weather conditions degrade camera performance, while radar suffers from noise and positional ambiguity. Achieving robust radar-camera 3D object detection requires consistent performance across varying conditions, a topic that has not yet been fully explored. In this work, we first conduct a systematic analysis of robustness in radar-camera detection on five kinds of noises and propose RobuRCDet, a robust object detection model in BEV. Specifically, we design a 3D Gaussian Expansion (3DGE) module to mitigate inaccuracies in radar points, including position, Radar Cross-Section (RCS), and velocity. The 3DGE uses RCS and velocity priors to generate a deformable kernel map and variance for kernel size adjustment and value distribution. Additionally, we introduce a weather-adaptive fusion module, which adaptively fuses radar and camera features based on camera signal confidence. Extensive experiments on the popular benchmark, nuScenes, show that our model achieves competitive results in regular and noisy conditions.
Authors:Xingyuan Li, Yang Zou, Jinyuan Liu, Zhiying Jiang, Long Ma, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu
Abstract:
With the rapid progression of deep learning technologies, multi-modality image fusion has become increasingly prevalent in object detection tasks. Despite its popularity, the inherent disparities in how different sources depict scene content make fusion a challenging problem. Current fusion methodologies identify shared characteristics between the two modalities and integrate them within this shared domain using either iterative optimization or deep learning architectures, which often neglect the intricate semantic relationships between modalities, resulting in a superficial understanding of inter-modal connections and, consequently, suboptimal fusion outcomes. To address this, we introduce a text-guided multi-modality image fusion method that leverages the high-level semantics from textual descriptions to integrate semantics from infrared and visible images. This method capitalizes on the complementary characteristics of diverse modalities, bolstering both the accuracy and robustness of object detection. The codebook is utilized to enhance a streamlined and concise depiction of the fused intra- and inter-domain dynamics, fine-tuned for optimal performance in detection tasks. We present a bilevel optimization strategy that establishes a nexus between the joint problem of fusion and detection, optimizing both processes concurrently. Furthermore, we introduce the first dataset of paired infrared and visible images accompanied by text prompts, paving the way for future research. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method not only produces visually superior fusion results but also achieves a higher detection mAP over existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Authors:Yangheng Zhao, Zhen Xiang, Sheng Yin, Xianghe Pang, Siheng Chen, Yanfeng Wang
Abstract:
Recently, multi-agent collaborative (MAC) perception has been proposed and outperformed the traditional single-agent perception in many applications, such as autonomous driving. However, MAC perception is more vulnerable to adversarial attacks than single-agent perception due to the information exchange. The attacker can easily degrade the performance of a victim agent by sending harmful information from a malicious agent nearby. In this paper, we extend adversarial attacks to an important perception task -- MAC object detection, where generic defenses such as adversarial training are no longer effective against these attacks. More importantly, we propose Malicious Agent Detection (MADE), a reactive defense specific to MAC perception that can be deployed by each agent to accurately detect and then remove any potential malicious agent in its local collaboration network. In particular, MADE inspects each agent in the network independently using a semi-supervised anomaly detector based on a double-hypothesis test with the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure to control the false positive rate of the inference. For the two hypothesis tests, we propose a match loss statistic and a collaborative reconstruction loss statistic, respectively, both based on the consistency between the agent to be inspected and the ego agent where our detector is deployed. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on a benchmark 3D dataset V2X-sim and a real-road dataset DAIR-V2X and show that with the protection of MADE, the drops in the average precision compared with the best-case "oracle" defender against our attack are merely 1.28% and 0.34%, respectively, much lower than 8.92% and 10.00% for adversarial training, respectively.
Authors:Xiaohan Cui, Long Ma, Tengyu Ma, Jinyuan Liu, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu
Abstract:
Object detection in low-light scenarios has attracted much attention in the past few years. A mainstream and representative scheme introduces enhancers as the pre-processing for regular detectors. However, because of the disparity in task objectives between the enhancer and detector, this paradigm cannot shine at its best ability. In this work, we try to arouse the potential of enhancer + detector. Different from existing works, we extend the illumination-based enhancers (our newly designed or existing) as a scene decomposition module, whose removed illumination is exploited as the auxiliary in the detector for extracting detection-friendly features. A semantic aggregation module is further established for integrating multi-scale scene-related semantic information in the context space. Actually, our built scheme successfully transforms the "trash" (i.e., the ignored illumination in the detector) into the "treasure" for the detector. Plenty of experiments are conducted to reveal our superiority against other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be public if it is accepted.
Authors:Xingyuan Li, Jinyuan Liu, Long Ma, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection plays a pivotal role in the field of autonomous driving and numerous deep learning-based methods have made significant breakthroughs in this area. Despite the advancements in detection accuracy and efficiency, these models tend to fail when faced with such attacks, rendering them ineffective. Therefore, bolstering the adversarial robustness of 3D detection models has become a crucial issue that demands immediate attention and innovative solutions. To mitigate this issue, we propose a depth-aware robust adversarial training method for monocular 3D object detection, dubbed DART3D. Specifically, we first design an adversarial attack that iteratively degrades the 2D and 3D perception capabilities of 3D object detection models(IDP), serves as the foundation for our subsequent defense mechanism. In response to this attack, we propose an uncertainty-based residual learning method for adversarial training. Our adversarial training approach capitalizes on the inherent uncertainty, enabling the model to significantly improve its robustness against adversarial attacks. We conducted extensive experiments on the KITTI 3D datasets, demonstrating that DART3D surpasses direct adversarial training (the most popular approach) under attacks in 3D object detection $AP_{R40}$ of car category for the Easy, Moderate, and Hard settings, with improvements of 4.415%, 4.112%, and 3.195%, respectively.
Authors:Tianchen Zhao, Xuefei Ning, Ke Hong, Zhongyuan Qiu, Pu Lu, Yali Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Lipu Zhou, Guohao Dai, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang
Abstract:
Voxel-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, their significant computational and memory costs pose a challenge for their application to resource-constrained vehicles. One reason for this high resource consumption is the presence of a large number of redundant background points in Lidar point clouds, resulting in spatial redundancy in both 3D voxel and dense BEV map representations. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive inference framework called Ada3D, which focuses on exploiting the input-level spatial redundancy. Ada3D adaptively filters the redundant input, guided by a lightweight importance predictor and the unique properties of the Lidar point cloud. Additionally, we utilize the BEV features' intrinsic sparsity by introducing the Sparsity Preserving Batch Normalization. With Ada3D, we achieve 40% reduction for 3D voxels and decrease the density of 2D BEV feature maps from 100% to 20% without sacrificing accuracy. Ada3D reduces the model computational and memory cost by 5x, and achieves 1.52x/1.45x end-to-end GPU latency and 1.5x/4.5x GPU peak memory optimization for the 3D and 2D backbone respectively.
Authors:Chenping Fu, Wanqi Yuan, Jiewen Xiao, Risheng Liu, Xin Fan
Abstract:
Underwater degraded images greatly challenge existing algorithms to detect objects of interest. Recently, researchers attempt to adopt attention mechanisms or composite connections for improving the feature representation of detectors. However, this solution does \textit{not} eliminate the impact of degradation on image content such as color and texture, achieving minimal improvements. Another feasible solution for underwater object detection is to develop sophisticated deep architectures in order to enhance image quality or features. Nevertheless, the visually appealing output of these enhancement modules do \textit{not} necessarily generate high accuracy for deep detectors. More recently, some multi-task learning methods jointly learn underwater detection and image enhancement, accessing promising improvements. Typically, these methods invoke huge architecture and expensive computations, rendering inefficient inference. Definitely, underwater object detection and image enhancement are two interrelated tasks. Leveraging information coming from the two tasks can benefit each task. Based on these factual opinions, we propose a bilevel optimization formulation for jointly learning underwater object detection and image enhancement, and then unroll to a dual perception network (DPNet) for the two tasks. DPNet with one shared module and two task subnets learns from the two different tasks, seeking a shared representation. The shared representation provides more structural details for image enhancement and rich content information for object detection. Finally, we derive a cooperative training strategy to optimize parameters for DPNet. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic underwater datasets demonstrate that our method outputs visually favoring images and higher detection accuracy.
Authors:Yan Wang, Yuhang Li, Ruihao Gong, Aishan Liu, Yanfei Wang, Jian Hu, Yongqiang Yao, Yunchen Zhang, Tianzi Xiao, Fengwei Yu, Xianglong Liu
Abstract:
Extensive studies have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial and natural noises, yet little is known about model robustness on noises caused by different system implementations. In this paper, we for the first time introduce SysNoise, a frequently occurred but often overlooked noise in the deep learning training-deployment cycle. In particular, SysNoise happens when the source training system switches to a disparate target system in deployments, where various tiny system mismatch adds up to a non-negligible difference. We first identify and classify SysNoise into three categories based on the inference stage; we then build a holistic benchmark to quantitatively measure the impact of SysNoise on 20+ models, comprehending image classification, object detection, instance segmentation and natural language processing tasks. Our extensive experiments revealed that SysNoise could bring certain impacts on model robustness across different tasks and common mitigations like data augmentation and adversarial training show limited effects on it. Together, our findings open a new research topic and we hope this work will raise research attention to deep learning deployment systems accounting for model performance. We have open-sourced the benchmark and framework at https://modeltc.github.io/systemnoise_web.
Authors:Zhiying Jiang, Risheng Liu, Shuzhou Yang, Zengxi Zhang, Xin Fan
Abstract:
Rain streaks significantly decrease the visibility of captured images and are also a stumbling block that restricts the performance of subsequent computer vision applications. The existing deep learning-based image deraining methods employ manually crafted networks and learn a straightforward projection from rainy images to clear images. In pursuit of better deraining performance, they focus on elaborating a more complicated architecture rather than exploiting the intrinsic properties of the positive and negative information. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning-based image deraining method that investigates the correlation between rainy and clear images and leverages a contrastive prior to optimize the mutual information of the rainy and restored counterparts. Given the complex and varied real-world rain patterns, we develop a recursive mechanism. It involves multi-scale feature extraction and dynamic cross-level information recruitment modules. The former advances the portrayal of diverse rain patterns more precisely, while the latter can selectively compensate high-level features for shallow-level information. We term the proposed recursive dynamic multi-scale network with a contrastive prior, RDMC. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world images demonstrate that the proposed RDMC delivers strong performance on the depiction of rain streaks and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, a practical evaluation of object detection and semantic segmentation shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Xingyuan Li, Jinyuan Liu, Yixin Lei, Long Ma, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu
Abstract:
3D object detection plays a crucial role in numerous intelligent vision systems. Detection in the open world inevitably encounters various adverse scenes, such as dense fog, heavy rain, and low light conditions. Although existing efforts primarily focus on diversifying network architecture or training schemes, resulting in significant progress in 3D object detection, most of these learnable modules fail in adverse scenes, thereby hindering detection performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a monocular 3D detection model designed to perceive twin depth in adverse scenes, termed MonoTDP, which effectively mitigates the degradation of detection performance in various harsh environments. Specifically, we first introduce an adaptive learning strategy to aid the model in handling uncontrollable weather conditions, significantly resisting degradation caused by various degrading factors. Then, to address the depth/content loss in adverse regions, we propose a novel twin depth perception module that simultaneously estimates scene and object depth, enabling the integration of scene-level features and object-level features. Additionally, we assemble a new adverse 3D object detection dataset encompassing a wide range of challenging scenes, including rainy, foggy, and low light weather conditions, with each type of scene containing 7,481 images. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by an average of 3.12% in terms of AP_R40 for car category across various adverse environments.
Authors:Di Wang, Jinyuan Liu, Risheng Liu, Xin Fan
Abstract:
This research focuses on the discovery and localization of hidden objects in the wild and serves unmanned systems. Through empirical analysis, infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) enables hard-to-find objects apparent, whereas multimodal salient object detection (SOD) accurately delineates the precise spatial location of objects within the picture. Their common characteristic of seeking complementary cues from different source images motivates us to explore the collaborative relationship between Fusion and Salient object detection tasks on infrared and visible images via an Interactively Reinforced multi-task paradigm for the first time, termed IRFS. To the seamless bridge of multimodal image fusion and SOD tasks, we specifically develop a Feature Screening-based Fusion subnetwork (FSFNet) to screen out interfering features from source images, thereby preserving saliency-related features. After generating the fused image through FSFNet, it is then fed into the subsequent Fusion-Guided Cross-Complementary SOD subnetwork (FC$^2$Net) as the third modality to drive the precise prediction of the saliency map by leveraging the complementary information derived from the fused image. In addition, we develop an interactive loop learning strategy to achieve the mutual reinforcement of IVIF and SOD tasks with a shorter training period and fewer network parameters. Comprehensive experiment results demonstrate that the seamless bridge of IVIF and SOD mutually enhances their performance, and highlights their superiority.
Authors:Zhaowen Li, Yousong Zhu, Zhiyang Chen, Wei Li, Chaoyang Zhao, Rui Zhao, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract:
Inspired by the masked language modeling (MLM) in natural language processing tasks, the masked image modeling (MIM) has been recognized as a strong self-supervised pre-training method in computer vision. However, the high random mask ratio of MIM results in two serious problems: 1) the inadequate data utilization of images within each iteration brings prolonged pre-training, and 2) the high inconsistency of predictions results in unreliable generations, $i.e.$, the prediction of the identical patch may be inconsistent in different mask rounds, leading to divergent semantics in the ultimately generated outcomes. To tackle these problems, we propose the efficient masked autoencoders with self-consistency (EMAE) to improve the pre-training efficiency and increase the consistency of MIM. In particular, we present a parallel mask strategy that divides the image into K non-overlapping parts, each of which is generated by a random mask with the same mask ratio. Then the MIM task is conducted parallelly on all parts in an iteration and the model minimizes the loss between the predictions and the masked patches. Besides, we design the self-consistency learning to further maintain the consistency of predictions of overlapping masked patches among parts. Overall, our method is able to exploit the data more efficiently and obtains reliable representations. Experiments on ImageNet show that EMAE achieves the best performance on ViT-Large with only 13% of MAE pre-training time using NVIDIA A100 GPUs. After pre-training on diverse datasets, EMAE consistently obtains state-of-the-art transfer ability on a variety of downstream tasks, such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Joanne Lin, Crispian Morris, Ruirui Lin, Fan Zhang, David Bull, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract:
Low-light conditions pose significant challenges for both human and machine annotation. This in turn has led to a lack of research into machine understanding for low-light images and (in particular) videos. A common approach is to apply annotations obtained from high quality datasets to synthetically created low light versions. In addition, these approaches are often limited through the use of unrealistic noise models. In this paper, we propose a new Degradation Estimation Network (DEN), which synthetically generates realistic standard RGB (sRGB) noise without the requirement for camera metadata. This is achieved by estimating the parameters of physics-informed noise distributions, trained in a self-supervised manner. This zero-shot approach allows our method to generate synthetic noisy content with a diverse range of realistic noise characteristics, unlike other methods which focus on recreating the noise characteristics of the training data. We evaluate our proposed synthetic pipeline using various methods trained on its synthetic data for typical low-light tasks including synthetic noise replication, video enhancement, and object detection, showing improvements of up to 24\% KLD, 21\% LPIPS, and 62\% AP$_{50-95}$, respectively.
Authors:Yiran Xu, Haoxiang Zhong, Kai Wu, Jialin Li, Yong Liu, Chengjie Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Hongen Liao
Abstract:
Object detectors have shown outstanding performance on various public datasets. However, annotating a new dataset for a new task is usually unavoidable in real, since 1) a single existing dataset usually does not contain all object categories needed; 2) using multiple datasets usually suffers from annotation incompletion and heterogeneous features. We propose a novel problem as "Annotation-incomplete Multi-dataset Detection", and develop an end-to-end multi-task learning architecture which can accurately detect all the object categories with multiple partially annotated datasets. Specifically, we propose an attention feature extractor which helps to mine the relations among different datasets. Besides, a knowledge amalgamation training strategy is incorporated to accommodate heterogeneous features from different sources. Extensive experiments on different object detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods and an improvement of 2.17%, 2.10% in mAP can be achieved on COCO and VOC respectively.
Authors:Xiao Zhao, Xukun Zhang, Dingkang Yang, Mingyang Sun, Mingcheng Li, Shunli Wang, Lihua Zhang
Abstract:
Accurate and robust multimodal multi-task perception is crucial for modern autonomous driving systems. However, current multimodal perception research follows independent paradigms designed for specific perception tasks, leading to a lack of complementary learning among tasks and decreased performance in multi-task learning (MTL) due to joint training. In this paper, we propose MaskBEV, a masked attention-based MTL paradigm that unifies 3D object detection and bird's eye view (BEV) map segmentation. MaskBEV introduces a task-agnostic Transformer decoder to process these diverse tasks, enabling MTL to be completed in a unified decoder without requiring additional design of specific task heads. To fully exploit the complementary information between BEV map segmentation and 3D object detection tasks in BEV space, we propose spatial modulation and scene-level context aggregation strategies. These strategies consider the inherent dependencies between BEV segmentation and 3D detection, naturally boosting MTL performance. Extensive experiments on nuScenes dataset show that compared with previous state-of-the-art MTL methods, MaskBEV achieves 1.3 NDS improvement in 3D object detection and 2.7 mIoU improvement in BEV map segmentation, while also demonstrating slightly leading inference speed.
Authors:Dihe Huang, Ying Chen, Yikang Ding, Jinli Liao, Jianlin Liu, Kai Wu, Qiang Nie, Yong Liu, Chengjie Wang, Zhiheng Li
Abstract:
Bird's eye view (BEV) is widely adopted by most of the current point cloud detectors due to the applicability of well-explored 2D detection techniques. However, existing methods obtain BEV features by simply collapsing voxel or point features along the height dimension, which causes the heavy loss of 3D spatial information. To alleviate the information loss, we propose a novel point cloud detection network based on a Multi-level feature dimensionality reduction strategy, called MDRNet. In MDRNet, the Spatial-aware Dimensionality Reduction (SDR) is designed to dynamically focus on the valuable parts of the object during voxel-to-BEV feature transformation. Furthermore, the Multi-level Spatial Residuals (MSR) is proposed to fuse the multi-level spatial information in the BEV feature maps. Extensive experiments on nuScenes show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available upon publication.
Authors:Zhengxia Zou, Keyan Chen, Zhenwei Shi, Yuhong Guo, Jieping Ye
Abstract:
Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Over the past two decades, we have seen a rapid technological evolution of object detection and its profound impact on the entire computer vision field. If we consider today's object detection technique as a revolution driven by deep learning, then back in the 1990s, we would see the ingenious thinking and long-term perspective design of early computer vision. This paper extensively reviews this fast-moving research field in the light of technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2022). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed-up techniques, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods.
Authors:Yuqian Fu, Xingyu Qiu, Bin Ren, Yanwei Fu, Radu Timofte, Nicu Sebe, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Luc Van Gool, Kaijin Zhang, Qingpeng Nong, Xiugang Dong, Hong Gao, Xiangsheng Zhou, Jiancheng Pan, Yanxing Liu, Xiao He, Jiahao Li, Yuze Sun, Xiaomeng Huang, Zhenyu Zhang, Ran Ma, Yuhan Liu, Zijian Zhuang, Shuai Yi, Yixiong Zou, Lingyi Hong, Mingxi Chen, Runze Li, Xingdong Sheng, Wenqiang Zhang, Weisen Chen, Yongxin Yan, Xinguo Chen, Yuanjie Shao, Zhengrong Zuo, Nong Sang, Hao Wu, Haoran Sun, Shuming Hu, Yan Zhang, Zhiguang Shi, Yu Zhang, Chao Chen, Tao Wang, Da Feng, Linhai Zhuo, Ziming Lin, Yali Huang, Jie Me, Yiming Yang, Mi Guo, Mingyuan Jiu, Mingliang Xu, Maomao Xiong, Qunshu Zhang, Xinyu Cao, Yuqing Yang, Dianmo Sheng, Xuanpu Zhao, Zhiyu Li, Xuyang Ding, Wenqian Li
Abstract:
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) poses significant challenges to existing object detection and few-shot detection models when applied across domains. In conjunction with NTIRE 2025, we organized the 1st CD-FSOD Challenge, aiming to advance the performance of current object detectors on entirely novel target domains with only limited labeled data. The challenge attracted 152 registered participants, received submissions from 42 teams, and concluded with 13 teams making valid final submissions. Participants approached the task from diverse perspectives, proposing novel models that achieved new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under both open-source and closed-source settings. In this report, we present an overview of the 1st NTIRE 2025 CD-FSOD Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and summarizing the results submitted by the participants.
Authors:Tengxue Zhang, Yang Shu, Xinyang Chen, Yifei Long, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang
Abstract:
Pre-trained model assessment for transfer learning aims to identify the optimal candidate for the downstream tasks from a model hub, without the need of time-consuming fine-tuning. Existing advanced works mainly focus on analyzing the intrinsic characteristics of the entire features extracted by each pre-trained model or how well such features fit the target labels. This paper proposes a novel perspective for pre-trained model assessment through the Distribution of Spectral Components (DISCO). Through singular value decomposition of features extracted from pre-trained models, we investigate different spectral components and observe that they possess distinct transferability, contributing diversely to the fine-tuning performance. Inspired by this, we propose an assessment method based on the distribution of spectral components which measures the proportions of their corresponding singular values. Pre-trained models with features concentrating on more transferable components are regarded as better choices for transfer learning. We further leverage the labels of downstream data to better estimate the transferability of each spectral component and derive the final assessment criterion. Our proposed method is flexible and can be applied to both classification and regression tasks. We conducted comprehensive experiments across three benchmarks and two tasks including image classification and object detection, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in choosing proper pre-trained models from the model hub for transfer learning.
Authors:Haojie Huang, Hongchen Luo, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
Abstract:
Intelligent agents accomplish different tasks by utilizing various objects based on their affordance, but how to select appropriate objects according to task context is not well-explored. Current studies treat objects within the affordance category as equivalent, ignoring that object affordances vary in priority with different task contexts, hindering accurate decision-making in complex environments. To enable agents to develop a deeper understanding of the objects required to perform tasks, we propose to leverage task context for object affordance ranking, i.e., given image of a complex scene and the textual description of the affordance and task context, revealing task-object relationships and clarifying the priority rank of detected objects. To this end, we propose a novel Context-embed Group Ranking Framework with task relation mining module and graph group update module to deeply integrate task context and perform global relative relationship transmission. Due to the lack of such data, we construct the first large-scale task-oriented affordance ranking dataset with 25 common tasks, over 50k images and more than 661k objects. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the task context based affordance learning paradigm and the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art models in the fields of saliency ranking and multimodal object detection. The source code and dataset will be made available to the public.
Authors:Jinming Liu, Yuntao Wei, Junyan Lin, Shengyang Zhao, Heming Sun, Zhibo Chen, Wenjun Zeng, Xin Jin
Abstract:
We present a new image compression paradigm to achieve ``intelligently coding for machine'' by cleverly leveraging the common sense of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We are motivated by the evidence that large language/multimodal models are powerful general-purpose semantics predictors for understanding the real world. Different from traditional image compression typically optimized for human eyes, the image coding for machines (ICM) framework we focus on requires the compressed bitstream to more comply with different downstream intelligent analysis tasks. To this end, we employ LMM to \textcolor{red}{tell codec what to compress}: 1) first utilize the powerful semantic understanding capability of LMMs w.r.t object grounding, identification, and importance ranking via prompts, to disentangle image content before compression, 2) and then based on these semantic priors we accordingly encode and transmit objects of the image in order with a structured bitstream. In this way, diverse vision benchmarks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, etc., can be well supported with such a semantically structured bitstream. We dub our method ``\textit{SDComp}'' for ``\textit{S}emantically \textit{D}isentangled \textit{Comp}ression'', and compare it with state-of-the-art codecs on a wide variety of different vision tasks. SDComp codec leads to more flexible reconstruction results, promised decoded visual quality, and a more generic/satisfactory intelligent task-supporting ability.
Authors:Pengkun Jiao, Na Zhao, Jingjing Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D object detection (OV-3DDet) aims to localize and recognize both seen and previously unseen object categories within any new 3D scene. While language and vision foundation models have achieved success in handling various open-vocabulary tasks with abundant training data, OV-3DDet faces a significant challenge due to the limited availability of training data. Although some pioneering efforts have integrated vision-language models (VLM) knowledge into OV-3DDet learning, the full potential of these foundational models has yet to be fully exploited. In this paper, we unlock the textual and visual wisdom to tackle the open-vocabulary 3D detection task by leveraging the language and vision foundation models. We leverage a vision foundation model to provide image-wise guidance for discovering novel classes in 3D scenes. Specifically, we utilize a object detection vision foundation model to enable the zero-shot discovery of objects in images, which serves as the initial seeds and filtering guidance to identify novel 3D objects. Additionally, to align the 3D space with the powerful vision-language space, we introduce a hierarchical alignment approach, where the 3D feature space is aligned with the vision-language feature space using a pre-trained VLM at the instance, category, and scene levels. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and generalization, highlighting the potential of foundation models in advancing open-vocabulary 3D object detection in real-world scenarios.
Authors:Yang Jiao, Zequn Jie, Shaoxiang Chen, Lechao Cheng, Jingjing Chen, Lin Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
Camera-based bird-eye-view (BEV) perception paradigm has made significant progress in the autonomous driving field. Under such a paradigm, accurate BEV representation construction relies on reliable depth estimation for multi-camera images. However, existing approaches exhaustively predict depths for every pixel without prioritizing objects, which are precisely the entities requiring detection in the 3D space. To this end, we propose IA-BEV, which integrates image-plane instance awareness into the depth estimation process within a BEV-based detector. First, a category-specific structural priors mining approach is proposed for enhancing the efficacy of monocular depth generation. Besides, a self-boosting learning strategy is further proposed to encourage the model to place more emphasis on challenging objects in computation-expensive temporal stereo matching. Together they provide advanced depth estimation results for high-quality BEV features construction, benefiting the ultimate 3D detection. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances on the challenging nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our designs.
Authors:Juan Wen, Shupeng Cheng, Peng Xu, Bowen Zhou, Radu Timofte, Weiyan Hou, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Super Resolution (SR) and Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) are two hot topics in computer vision with various joint applications. For instance, low-resolution surveillance images can be successively processed by super-resolution techniques and camouflaged object detection. However, in previous work, these two areas are always studied in isolation. In this paper, we, for the first time, conduct an integrated comparative evaluation for both. Specifically, we benchmark different super-resolution methods on commonly used COD datasets, and meanwhile, we evaluate the robustness of different COD models by using COD data processed by SR methods. Our goal is to bridge these two domains, discover novel experimental phenomena, summarize new experim.
Authors:Omar Moured, Jiaming Zhang, Alina Roitberg, Thorsten Schwarz, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Abstract:
The digitization of documents allows for wider accessibility and reproducibility. While automatic digitization of document layout and text content has been a long-standing focus of research, this problem in regard to graphical elements, such as statistical plots, has been under-explored. In this paper, we introduce the task of fine-grained visual understanding of mathematical graphics and present the Line Graphics (LG) dataset, which includes pixel-wise annotations of 5 coarse and 10 fine-grained categories. Our dataset covers 520 images of mathematical graphics collected from 450 documents from different disciplines. Our proposed dataset can support two different computer vision tasks, i.e., semantic segmentation and object detection. To benchmark our LG dataset, we explore 7 state-of-the-art models. To foster further research on the digitization of statistical graphs, we will make the dataset, code, and models publicly available to the community.
Authors:Yunxu Xie, Shu Hu, Xin Wang, Quanyu Liao, Bin Zhu, Xi Wu, Siwei Lyu
Abstract:
Deep neural networks have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks: subtle perturbation can completely change the prediction result. Existing adversarial attacks on object detection focus on attacking anchor-based detectors, which may not work well for anchor-free detectors. In this paper, we propose the first adversarial attack dedicated to anchor-free detectors. It is a category-wise attack that attacks important pixels of all instances of a category simultaneously. Our attack manifests in two forms, sparse category-wise attack (SCA) and dense category-wise attack (DCA), that minimize the $L_0$ and $L_\infty$ norm-based perturbations, respectively. For DCA, we present three variants, DCA-G, DCA-L, and DCA-S, that select a global region, a local region, and a semantic region, respectively, to attack. Our experiments on large-scale benchmark datasets including PascalVOC, MS-COCO, and MS-COCO Keypoints indicate that our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art attack performance and transferability on both object detection and human pose estimation tasks.
Authors:Haofei Zhang, Feng Mao, Mengqi Xue, Gongfan Fang, Zunlei Feng, Jie Song, Mingli Song
Abstract:
Knowledge amalgamation (KA) is a novel deep model reusing task aiming to transfer knowledge from several well-trained teachers to a multi-talented and compact student. Currently, most of these approaches are tailored for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, there is a tendency that transformers, with a completely different architecture, are starting to challenge the domination of CNNs in many computer vision tasks. Nevertheless, directly applying the previous KA methods to transformers leads to severe performance degradation. In this work, we explore a more effective KA scheme for transformer-based object detection models. Specifically, considering the architecture characteristics of transformers, we propose to dissolve the KA into two aspects: sequence-level amalgamation (SA) and task-level amalgamation (TA). In particular, a hint is generated within the sequence-level amalgamation by concatenating teacher sequences instead of redundantly aggregating them to a fixed-size one as previous KA works. Besides, the student learns heterogeneous detection tasks through soft targets with efficiency in the task-level amalgamation. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and COCO have unfolded that the sequence-level amalgamation significantly boosts the performance of students, while the previous methods impair the students. Moreover, the transformer-based students excel in learning amalgamated knowledge, as they have mastered heterogeneous detection tasks rapidly and achieved superior or at least comparable performance to those of the teachers in their specializations.
Authors:Qihan Huang, Haofei Zhang, Mengqi Xue, Jie Song, Mingli Song
Abstract:
Object detection has achieved a huge breakthrough with deep neural networks and massive annotated data. However, current detection methods cannot be directly transferred to the scenario where the annotated data is scarce due to the severe overfitting problem. Although few-shot learning and zero-shot learning have been extensively explored in the field of image classification, it is indispensable to design new methods for object detection in the data-scarce scenario since object detection has an additional challenging localization task. Low-Shot Object Detection (LSOD) is an emerging research topic of detecting objects from a few or even no annotated samples, consisting of One-Shot Object Detection (OSOD), Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) and Zero-Shot Object Detection (ZSD). This survey provides a comprehensive review of LSOD methods. First, we propose a thorough taxonomy of LSOD methods and analyze them systematically, comprising some extensional topics of LSOD (semi-supervised LSOD, weakly-supervised LSOD, and incremental LSOD). Then, we indicate the pros and cons of current LSOD methods with a comparison of their performance. Finally, we discuss the challenges and promising directions of LSOD to provide guidance for future works.
Authors:Di Wen, Junwei Zheng, Ruiping Liu, Yi Xu, Kunyu Peng, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Abstract:
Industrial assembly tasks increasingly demand rapid adaptation to complex procedures and varied components, yet are often conducted in environments with limited computing, connectivity, and strict privacy requirements. These constraints make conventional cloud-based or fully autonomous solutions impractical for factory deployment. This paper introduces a mobile-device-based assistant system for industrial training and operational support, enabling real-time, semi-hands-free interaction through on-device perception and voice interfaces. The system integrates lightweight object detection, speech recognition, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) into a modular on-device pipeline that operates entirely on-device, enabling intuitive support for part handling and procedure understanding without relying on manual supervision or cloud services. To enable scalable training, we adopt an automated data construction pipeline and introduce a two-stage refinement strategy to improve visual robustness under domain shift. Experiments on our generated dataset, i.e., Gear8, demonstrate improved robustness to domain shift and common visual corruptions. A structured user study further confirms its practical viability, with positive user feedback on the clarity of the guidance and the quality of the interaction. These results indicate that our framework offers a deployable solution for real-time, privacy-preserving smart assistance in industrial environments. We will release the Gear8 dataset and source code upon acceptance.
Authors:Jiaming Li, Jiacheng Zhang, Jichang Li, Ge Li, Si Liu, Liang Lin, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
Open vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims at seeking an optimal object detector capable of recognizing objects from both base and novel categories. Recent advances leverage knowledge distillation to transfer insightful knowledge from pre-trained large-scale vision-language models to the task of object detection, significantly generalizing the powerful capabilities of the detector to identify more unknown object categories. However, these methods face significant challenges in background interpretation and model overfitting and thus often result in the loss of crucial background knowledge, giving rise to sub-optimal inference performance of the detector. To mitigate these issues, we present a novel OVD framework termed LBP to propose learning background prompts to harness explored implicit background knowledge, thus enhancing the detection performance w.r.t. base and novel categories. Specifically, we devise three modules: Background Category-specific Prompt, Background Object Discovery, and Inference Probability Rectification, to empower the detector to discover, represent, and leverage implicit object knowledge explored from background proposals. Evaluation on two benchmark datasets, OV-COCO and OV-LVIS, demonstrates the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art approaches in handling the OVD tasks.
Authors:Jingyu Zhuang, Kuo Wang, Liang Lin, Guanbin Li
Abstract:
Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) has achieved resounding success by leveraging unlabeled data to improve detection performance. However, in Open Scene Semi-Supervised Object Detection (O-SSOD), unlabeled data may contains unknown objects not observed in the labeled data, which will increase uncertainty in the model's predictions for known objects. It is detrimental to the current methods that mainly rely on self-training, as more uncertainty leads to the lower localization and classification precision of pseudo labels. To this end, we propose Credible Teacher, an end-to-end framework. Credible Teacher adopts an interactive teaching mechanism using flexible labels to prevent uncertain pseudo labels from misleading the model and gradually reduces its uncertainty through the guidance of other credible pseudo labels. Empirical results have demonstrated our method effectively restrains the adverse effect caused by O-SSOD and significantly outperforms existing counterparts.
Authors:Weijia Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Chao Ma, Weidong Cai
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection (M3OD) is a significant yet inherently challenging task in autonomous driving due to absence of explicit depth cues in a single RGB image. In this paper, we strive to boost currently underperforming monocular 3D object detectors by leveraging an abundance of unlabelled data via semi-supervised learning. Our proposed ODM3D framework entails cross-modal knowledge distillation at various levels to inject LiDAR-domain knowledge into a monocular detector during training. By identifying foreground sparsity as the main culprit behind existing methods' suboptimal training, we exploit the precise localisation information embedded in LiDAR points to enable more foreground-attentive and efficient distillation via the proposed BEV occupancy guidance mask, leading to notably improved knowledge transfer and M3OD performance. Besides, motivated by insights into why existing cross-modal GT-sampling techniques fail on our task at hand, we further design a novel cross-modal object-wise data augmentation strategy for effective RGB-LiDAR joint learning. Our method ranks 1st in both KITTI validation and test benchmarks, significantly surpassing all existing monocular methods, supervised or semi-supervised, on both BEV and 3D detection metrics.
Authors:Nicky Zimmerman, Matteo Sodano, Elias Marks, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss
Abstract:
Object-based maps are relevant for scene understanding since they integrate geometric and semantic information of the environment, allowing autonomous robots to robustly localize and interact with on objects. In this paper, we address the task of constructing a metric-semantic map for the purpose of long-term object-based localization. We exploit 3D object detections from monocular RGB frames for both, the object-based map construction, and for globally localizing in the constructed map. To tailor the approach to a target environment, we propose an efficient way of generating 3D annotations to finetune the 3D object detection model. We evaluate our map construction in an office building, and test our long-term localization approach on challenging sequences recorded in the same environment over nine months. The experiments suggest that our approach is suitable for constructing metric-semantic maps, and that our localization approach is robust to long-term changes. Both, the mapping algorithm and the localization pipeline can run online on an onboard computer. We release an open-source C++/ROS implementation of our approach.
Authors:Ali Hatamizadeh, Hongxu Yin, Greg Heinrich, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov
Abstract:
We propose global context vision transformer (GC ViT), a novel architecture that enhances parameter and compute utilization for computer vision. Our method leverages global context self-attention modules, joint with standard local self-attention, to effectively and efficiently model both long and short-range spatial interactions, without the need for expensive operations such as computing attention masks or shifting local windows. In addition, we address the lack of the inductive bias in ViTs, and propose to leverage a modified fused inverted residual blocks in our architecture. Our proposed GC ViT achieves state-of-the-art results across image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On ImageNet-1K dataset for classification, the variants of GC ViT with 51M, 90M and 201M parameters achieve 84.3%, 85.0% and 85.7% Top-1 accuracy, respectively, at 224 image resolution and without any pre-training, hence surpassing comparably-sized prior art such as CNN-based ConvNeXt and ViT-based MaxViT and Swin Transformer by a large margin. Pre-trained GC ViT backbones in downstream tasks of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation using MS COCO and ADE20K datasets outperform prior work consistently. Specifically, GC ViT with a 4-scale DINO detection head achieves a box AP of 58.3 on MS COCO dataset.
Authors:Muhammad Zaeem Shahzad, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Bassem Ouni, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) significantly enhance road safety by detecting potential collisions and alerting drivers. However, their reliance on expensive sensor technologies such as LiDAR and radar limits accessibility, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Machine learning-based ADAS (ML-ADAS), leveraging deep neural networks (DNNs) with only standard camera input, offers a cost-effective alternative. Critical to ML-ADAS is the collision avoidance feature, which requires the ability to detect objects and estimate their distances accurately. This is achieved with specialized DNNs like YOLO, which provides real-time object detection, and a lightweight, detection-wise distance estimation approach that relies on key features extracted from the detections like bounding box dimensions and size. However, the robustness of these systems is undermined by security vulnerabilities in object detectors. In this paper, we introduce ShrinkBox, a novel backdoor attack targeting object detection in collision avoidance ML-ADAS. Unlike existing attacks that manipulate object class labels or presence, ShrinkBox subtly shrinks ground truth bounding boxes. This attack remains undetected in dataset inspections and standard benchmarks while severely disrupting downstream distance estimation. We demonstrate that ShrinkBox can be realized in the YOLOv9m object detector at an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 96%, with only a 4% poisoning ratio in the training instances of the KITTI dataset. Furthermore, given the low error targets introduced in our relaxed poisoning strategy, we find that ShrinkBox increases the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in downstream distance estimation by more than 3x on poisoned samples, potentially resulting in delays or prevention of collision warnings altogether.
Authors:Zehua Fu, Chenguang Liu, Yuyu Chen, Jiaqi Zhou, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Despite its significant success, object detection in traffic and transportation scenarios requires time-consuming and laborious efforts in acquiring high-quality labeled data. Therefore, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for object detection has recently gained increasing research attention. UDA for object detection has been dominated by domain alignment methods, which achieve top performance. Recently, self-labeling methods have gained popularity due to their simplicity and efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the limitations that prevent self-labeling detectors from achieving commensurate performance with domain alignment methods. Specifically, we identify the high proportion of simple samples during training, i.e., the simple-label bias, as the central cause. We propose a novel approach called De-Simplifying Pseudo Labels (DeSimPL) to mitigate the issue. DeSimPL utilizes an instance-level memory bank to implement an innovative pseudo label updating strategy. Then, adversarial samples are introduced during training to enhance the proportion. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive weighted loss to avoid the model suffering from an abundance of false positive pseudo labels in the late training period. Experimental results demonstrate that DeSimPL effectively reduces the proportion of simple samples during training, leading to a significant performance improvement for self-labeling detectors. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmarks validate our analysis and conclusions.
Authors:Shumin Wang, Zhuoran Yang, Lidian Wang, Zhipeng Tang, Heng Li, Lehan Pan, Sha Zhang, Jie Peng, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
The significant achievements of pre-trained models leveraging large volumes of data in the field of NLP and 2D vision inspire us to explore the potential of extensive data pre-training for 3D perception in autonomous driving. Toward this goal, this paper proposes to utilize massive unlabeled data from heterogeneous datasets to pre-train 3D perception models. We introduce a self-supervised pre-training framework that learns effective 3D representations from scratch on unlabeled data, combined with a prompt adapter based domain adaptation strategy to reduce dataset bias. The approach significantly improves model performance on downstream tasks such as 3D object detection, BEV segmentation, 3D object tracking, and occupancy prediction, and shows steady performance increase as the training data volume scales up, demonstrating the potential of continually benefit 3D perception models for autonomous driving. We will release the source code to inspire further investigations in the community.
Authors:Ziyue Huang, Yongchao Feng, Shuai Yang, Ziqi Liu, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Remote sensing object detection has made significant progress, but most studies still focus on closed-set detection, limiting generalization across diverse datasets. Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) provides a solution by leveraging multimodal associations between text prompts and visual features. However, existing OVD methods for remote sensing (RS) images are constrained by small-scale datasets and fail to address the unique challenges of remote sensing interpretation, include oriented object detection and the need for both high precision and real-time performance in diverse scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose OpenRSD, a universal open-prompt RS object detection framework. OpenRSD supports multimodal prompts and integrates multi-task detection heads to balance accuracy and real-time requirements. Additionally, we design a multi-stage training pipeline to enhance the generalization of model. Evaluated on seven public datasets, OpenRSD demonstrates superior performance in oriented and horizontal bounding box detection, with real-time inference capabilities suitable for large-scale RS image analysis. Compared to YOLO-World, OpenRSD exhibits an 8.7\% higher average precision and achieves an inference speed of 20.8 FPS. Codes and models will be released.
Authors:Chenguang Liu, Yongchao Feng, Yanan Zhang, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been significant advancement in object detection. However, applying off-the-shelf detectors to a new domain leads to significant performance drop, caused by the domain gap. These detectors exhibit higher-variance class-conditional distributions in the target domain than that in the source domain, along with mean shift. To address this problem, we propose the Prototype Augmented Compact Features (PACF) framework to regularize the distribution of intra-class features. Specifically, we provide an in-depth theoretical analysis on the lower bound of the target features-related likelihood and derive the prototype cross entropy loss to further calibrate the distribution of target RoI features. Furthermore, a mutual regularization strategy is designed to enable the linear and prototype-based classifiers to learn from each other, promoting feature compactness while enhancing discriminability. Thanks to this PACF framework, we have obtained a more compact cross-domain feature space, within which the variance of the target features' class-conditional distributions has significantly decreased, and the class-mean shift between the two domains has also been further reduced. The results on different adaptation settings are state-of-the-art, which demonstrate the board applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Authors:Muhammad Zaeem Shahzad, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices provides a unique opportunity to make Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) accessible to everyone in the form of an application empowered by low-cost Machine/Deep Learning (ML/DL) models to enhance road safety. For the critical feature of Collision Avoidance in Mobile ADAS, lightweight Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for object detection exist, but conventional pixel-wise depth/distance estimation DNNs are vastly more computationally expensive making them unsuitable for a real-time application on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we present a distance estimation model, DECADE, that processes each detector output instead of constructing pixel-wise depth/disparity maps. In it, we propose a pose estimation DNN to estimate allocentric orientation of detections to supplement the distance estimation DNN in its prediction of distance using bounding box features. We demonstrate that these modules can be attached to any detector to extend object detection with fast distance estimation. Evaluation of the proposed modules with attachment to and fine-tuning on the outputs of the YOLO object detector on the KITTI 3D Object Detection dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance with 1.38 meters in Mean Absolute Error and 7.3% in Mean Relative Error in the distance range of 0-150 meters. Our extensive evaluation scheme not only evaluates class-wise performance, but also evaluates range-wise accuracy especially in the critical range of 0-70m.
Authors:Muhammad Zaeem Shahzad, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
In the realm of deploying Machine Learning-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ML-ADAS) into real-world scenarios, adverse weather conditions pose a significant challenge. Conventional ML models trained on clear weather data falter when faced with scenarios like extreme fog or heavy rain, potentially leading to accidents and safety hazards. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a novel approach: employing a Denoising Deep Neural Network as a preprocessing step to transform adverse weather images into clear weather images, thereby enhancing the robustness of ML-ADAS systems. The proposed method eliminates the need for retraining all subsequent Depp Neural Networks (DNN) in the ML-ADAS pipeline, thus saving computational resources and time. Moreover, it improves driver visualization, which is critical for safe navigation in adverse weather conditions. By leveraging the UNet architecture trained on an augmented KITTI dataset with synthetic adverse weather images, we develop the Weather UNet (WUNet) DNN to remove weather artifacts. Our study demonstrates substantial performance improvements in object detection with WUNet preprocessing under adverse weather conditions. Notably, in scenarios involving extreme fog, our proposed solution improves the mean Average Precision (mAP) score of the YOLOv8n from 4% to 70%.
Authors:Zheng Wang, Yingjie Gao, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection~(FSOD), which aims to detect novel objects with limited annotated instances, has made significant progress in recent years. However, existing methods still suffer from biased representations, especially for novel classes in extremely low-shot scenarios. During fine-tuning, a novel class may exploit knowledge from similar base classes to construct its own feature distribution, leading to classification confusion and performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose a fine-tuning based FSOD framework that utilizes semantic embeddings for better detection. In our proposed method, we align the visual features with class name embeddings and replace the linear classifier with our semantic similarity classifier. Our method trains each region proposal to converge to the corresponding class embedding. Furthermore, we introduce a multimodal feature fusion to augment the vision-language communication, enabling a novel class to draw support explicitly from well-trained similar base classes. To prevent class confusion, we propose a semantic-aware max-margin loss, which adaptively applies a margin beyond similar classes. As a result, our method allows each novel class to construct a compact feature space without being confused with similar base classes. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Authors:Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Mingrui Chen, Ran He
Abstract:
The Vision Transformer (ViT) has gained prominence for its superior relational modeling prowess. However, its global attention mechanism's quadratic complexity poses substantial computational burdens. A common remedy spatially groups tokens for self-attention, reducing computational requirements. Nonetheless, this strategy neglects semantic information in tokens, possibly scattering semantically-linked tokens across distinct groups, thus compromising the efficacy of self-attention intended for modeling inter-token dependencies. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a fast and balanced clustering method, named Semantic Equitable Clustering (SEC). SEC clusters tokens based on their global semantic relevance in an efficient, straightforward manner. In contrast to traditional clustering methods requiring multiple iterations, our method achieves token clustering in a single pass. Additionally, SEC regulates the number of tokens per cluster, ensuring a balanced distribution for effective parallel processing on current computational platforms without necessitating further optimization. Capitalizing on SEC, we propose a versatile vision backbone, SECViT. Comprehensive experiments in image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation validate the effectiveness of SECViT. Moreover, SEC can be conveniently and swiftly applied to multimodal large language models (MLLM), such as LLaVA, to serve as a vision language connector, effectively accelerating the model's efficiency while maintaining unchanged or better performance.
Authors:Yu Sheng, Lu Zhang, Xingchen Li, Yifan Duan, Yanyong Zhang, Yu Zhang, Jianmin Ji
Abstract:
Prior point cloud provides 3D environmental context, which enhances the capabilities of monocular camera in downstream vision tasks, such as 3D object detection, via data fusion. However, the absence of accurate and automated registration methods for estimating camera extrinsic parameters in roadside scene point clouds notably constrains the potential applications of roadside cameras. This paper proposes a novel approach for the automatic registration between prior point clouds and images from roadside scenes. The main idea involves rendering photorealistic grayscale views taken at specific perspectives from the prior point cloud with the help of their features like RGB or intensity values. These generated views can reduce the modality differences between images and prior point clouds, thereby improve the robustness and accuracy of the registration results. Particularly, we specify an efficient algorithm, named neighbor rendering, for the rendering process. Then we introduce a method for automatically estimating the initial guess using only rough guesses of camera's position. At last, we propose a procedure for iteratively refining the extrinsic parameters by minimizing the reprojection error for line features extracted from both generated and camera images using Segment Anything Model (SAM). We assess our method using a self-collected dataset, comprising eight cameras strategically positioned throughout the university campus. Experiments demonstrate our method's capability to automatically align prior point cloud with roadside camera image, achieving a rotation accuracy of 0.202 degrees and a translation precision of 0.079m. Furthermore, we validate our approach's effectiveness in visual applications by substantially improving monocular 3D object detection performance.
Authors:Shaowei Fu, Yifan Duan, Yao Li, Chengzhen Meng, Yingjie Wang, Jianmin Ji, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
The integration of complementary characteristics from camera and radar data has emerged as an effective approach in 3D object detection. However, such fusion-based methods remain unexplored for place recognition, an equally important task for autonomous systems. Given that place recognition relies on the similarity between a query scene and the corresponding candidate scene, the stationary background of a scene is expected to play a crucial role in the task. As such, current well-designed camera-radar fusion methods for 3D object detection can hardly take effect in place recognition because they mainly focus on dynamic foreground objects. In this paper, a background-attentive camera-radar fusion-based method, named CRPlace, is proposed to generate background-attentive global descriptors from multi-view images and radar point clouds for accurate place recognition. To extract stationary background features effectively, we design an adaptive module that generates the background-attentive mask by utilizing the camera BEV feature and radar dynamic points. With the guidance of a background mask, we devise a bidirectional cross-attention-based spatial fusion strategy to facilitate comprehensive spatial interaction between the background information of the camera BEV feature and the radar BEV feature. As the first camera-radar fusion-based place recognition network, CRPlace has been evaluated thoroughly on the nuScenes dataset. The results show that our algorithm outperforms a variety of baseline methods across a comprehensive set of metrics (recall@1 reaches 91.2%).
Authors:Ziyue Huang, Mingming Zhang, Yuan Gong, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Deep learning models are essential for scene classification, change detection, land cover segmentation, and other remote sensing image understanding tasks. Most backbones of existing remote sensing deep learning models are typically initialized by pre-trained weights obtained from ImageNet pre-training (IMP). However, domain gaps exist between remote sensing images and natural images (e.g., ImageNet), making deep learning models initialized by pre-trained weights of IMP perform poorly for remote sensing image understanding. Although some pre-training methods are studied in the remote sensing community, current remote sensing pre-training methods face the problem of vague generalization by only using remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing pre-training framework, Generic Knowledge Boosted Remote Sensing Pre-training (GeRSP), to learn robust representations from remote sensing and natural images for remote sensing understanding tasks. GeRSP contains two pre-training branches: (1) A self-supervised pre-training branch is adopted to learn domain-related representations from unlabeled remote sensing images. (2) A supervised pre-training branch is integrated into GeRSP for general knowledge learning from labeled natural images. Moreover, GeRSP combines two pre-training branches using a teacher-student architecture to simultaneously learn representations with general and special knowledge, which generates a powerful pre-trained model for deep learning model initialization. Finally, we evaluate GeRSP and other remote sensing pre-training methods on three downstream tasks, i.e., object detection, semantic segmentation, and scene classification. The extensive experimental results consistently demonstrate that GeRSP can effectively learn robust representations in a unified manner, improving the performance of remote sensing downstream tasks.
Authors:Nandish Chattopadhyay, Amira Guesmi, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Bassem Ouni, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks present a significant challenge to the dependable deployment of machine learning models, with patch-based attacks being particularly potent. These attacks introduce adversarial perturbations in localized regions of an image, deceiving even well-trained models. In this paper, we propose Outlier Detection and Dimension Reduction (ODDR), a comprehensive defense strategy engineered to counteract patch-based adversarial attacks through advanced statistical methodologies. Our approach is based on the observation that input features corresponding to adversarial patches-whether naturalistic or synthetic-deviate from the intrinsic distribution of the remaining image data and can thus be identified as outliers. ODDR operates through a robust three-stage pipeline: Fragmentation, Segregation, and Neutralization. This model-agnostic framework is versatile, offering protection across various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and depth estimation, and is proved effective in both CNN-based and Transformer-based architectures. In the Fragmentation stage, image samples are divided into smaller segments, preparing them for the Segregation stage, where advanced outlier detection techniques isolate anomalous features linked to adversarial perturbations. The Neutralization stage then applies dimension reduction techniques to these outliers, effectively neutralizing the adversarial impact while preserving critical information for the machine learning task. Extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets against state-of-the-art adversarial patches underscores the efficacy of ODDR. Our method enhances model accuracy from 39.26% to 79.1% under the GoogleAp attack, outperforming leading defenses such as LGS (53.86%), Jujutsu (60%), and Jedi (64.34%).
Authors:Yongchao Feng, Shiwei Li, Yingjie Gao, Ziyue Huang, Yanan Zhang, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Though feature-alignment based Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) methods have achieved remarkable progress, they ignore the source bias issue, i.e., the detector tends to acquire more source-specific knowledge, impeding its generalization capabilities in the target domain. Furthermore, these methods face a more formidable challenge in achieving consistent classification and localization in the target domain compared to the source domain. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Distillation-based Source Debiasing (DSD) framework for DAOD, which can distill domain-agnostic knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model, improving the detector's performance on both domains. In addition, we design a Target-Relevant Object Localization Network (TROLN), which can mine target-related localization information from source and target-style mixed data. Accordingly, we present a Domain-aware Consistency Enhancing (DCE) strategy, in which these information are formulated into a new localization representation to further refine classification scores in the testing stage, achieving a harmonization between classification and localization. Extensive experiments have been conducted to manifest the effectiveness of this method, which consistently improves the strong baseline by large margins, outperforming existing alignment-based works.
Authors:Ziyue Huang, Yupeng He, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
In contrast to the incremental classification task, the incremental detection task is characterized by the presence of data ambiguity, as an image may have differently labeled bounding boxes across multiple continuous learning stages. This phenomenon often impairs the model's ability to effectively learn new classes. However, existing research has paid less attention to the forward compatibility of the model, which limits its suitability for incremental learning. To overcome this obstacle, we propose leveraging a visual-language model such as CLIP to generate text feature embeddings for different class sets, which enhances the feature space globally. We then employ super-classes to replace the unavailable novel classes in the early learning stage to simulate the incremental scenario. Finally, we utilize the CLIP image encoder to accurately identify potential objects. We incorporate the finely recognized detection boxes as pseudo-annotations into the training process, thereby further improving the detection performance. We evaluate our approach on various incremental learning settings using the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset, and our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly for recognizing the new classes.
Authors:Mingming Zhang, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Abstract:
Learning representations through self-supervision on unlabeled data has proven highly effective for understanding diverse images. However, remote sensing images often have complex and densely populated scenes with multiple land objects and no clear foreground objects. This intrinsic property generates high object density, resulting in false positive pairs or missing contextual information in self-supervised learning. To address these problems, we propose a context-enhanced masked image modeling method (CtxMIM), a simple yet efficient MIM-based self-supervised learning for remote sensing image understanding. CtxMIM formulates original image patches as a reconstructive template and employs a Siamese framework to operate on two sets of image patches. A context-enhanced generative branch is introduced to provide contextual information through context consistency constraints in the reconstruction. With the simple and elegant design, CtxMIM encourages the pre-training model to learn object-level or pixel-level features on a large-scale dataset without specific temporal or geographical constraints. Finally, extensive experiments show that features learned by CtxMIM outperform fully supervised and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods on various downstream tasks, including land cover classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. These results demonstrate that CtxMIM learns impressive remote sensing representations with high generalization and transferability. Code and data will be made public available.
Authors:Xiaomeng Chu, Jiajun Deng, Jianmin Ji, Yu Zhang, Houqiang Li, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
The recent advance in multi-camera 3D object detection is featured by bird's-eye view (BEV) representation or object queries. However, the ill-posed transformation from image-plane view to 3D space inevitably causes feature clutter and distortion, making the objects blur into the background. To this end, we explore how to incorporate supplementary cues for differentiating objects in the transformed feature representation. Formally, we introduce OA-DET3D, a general plug-in module that improves 3D object detection by bringing object awareness into a variety of existing 3D object detection pipelines. Specifically, OA-DET3D boosts the representation of objects by leveraging object-centric depth information and foreground pseudo points. First, we use object-level supervision from the properties of each 3D bounding box to guide the network in learning the depth distribution. Next, we select foreground pixels using a 2D object detector and project them into 3D space for pseudo-voxel feature encoding. Finally, the object-aware depth features and pseudo-voxel features are incorporated into the BEV representation or query feature from the baseline model with a deformable attention mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and Argoverse 2 dataset to validate the merits of OA-DET3D. Our method achieves consistent improvements over the BEV-based baselines in terms of both average precision and comprehensive detection score.
Authors:Yingjie Wang, Qiuyu Mao, Hanqi Zhu, Jiajun Deng, Yu Zhang, Jianmin Ji, Houqiang Li, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
In this survey, we first introduce the background of popular sensors used for self-driving, their data properties, and the corresponding object detection algorithms. Next, we discuss existing datasets that can be used for evaluating multi-modal 3D object detection algorithms. Then we present a review of multi-modal fusion based 3D detection networks, taking a close look at their fusion stage, fusion input and fusion granularity, and how these design choices evolve with time and technology. After the review, we discuss open challenges as well as possible solutions. We hope that this survey can help researchers to get familiar with the field and embark on investigations in the area of multi-modal 3D object detection.
Authors:Keyi Liu, Weidong Yang, Ben Fei, Ying He
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) for point cloud pre-training has become a cornerstone for many 3D vision tasks, enabling effective learning from large-scale unannotated data. At the scene level, existing SSL methods often incorporate volume rendering into the pre-training framework, using RGB-D images as reconstruction signals to facilitate cross-modal learning. This strategy promotes alignment between 2D and 3D modalities and enables the model to benefit from rich visual cues in the RGB-D inputs. However, these approaches are limited by their reliance on implicit scene representations and high memory demands. Furthermore, since their reconstruction objectives are applied only in 2D space, they often fail to capture underlying 3D geometric structures. To address these challenges, we propose Gaussian2Scene, a novel scene-level SSL framework that leverages the efficiency and explicit nature of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for pre-training. The use of 3DGS not only alleviates the computational burden associated with volume rendering but also supports direct 3D scene reconstruction, thereby enhancing the geometric understanding of the backbone network. Our approach follows a progressive two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, a dual-branch masked autoencoder learns both 2D and 3D scene representations. In the second stage, we initialize training with reconstructed point clouds and further supervise learning using the geometric locations of Gaussian primitives and rendered RGB images. This process reinforces both geometric and cross-modal learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Gaussian2Scene across several downstream 3D object detection tasks, showing consistent improvements over existing pre-training methods.
Authors:Junjie Yang, Junhao Song, Xudong Han, Ziqian Bi, Tianyang Wang, Chia Xin Liang, Xinyuan Song, Yichao Zhang, Qian Niu, Benji Peng, Keyu Chen, Ming Liu
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various applications including image classification, object detection, language modeling, text classification, and sentiment analysis. Recent innovations in KD methods, such as attention-based approaches, block-wise logit distillation, and decoupling distillation, have notably improved student model performance. These techniques focus on stimulus complexity, attention mechanisms, and global information capture to optimize knowledge transfer. In addition, KD has proven effective in compressing large language models while preserving accuracy, reducing computational overhead, and improving inference speed. This survey synthesizes the latest literature, highlighting key findings, contributions, and future directions in knowledge distillation to provide insights for researchers and practitioners on its evolving role in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Authors:Dhruv Parikh, Jacob Fein-Ashley, Tian Ye, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformers (ViT) have dominated the field of Computer Vision (CV). Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have performed remarkably well across diverse domains because they can represent complex relationships via unstructured graphs. However, the applicability of GNNs for visual tasks was unexplored till the introduction of Vision GNNs (ViG). Despite the success of ViGs, their performance is severely bottlenecked due to the expensive $k$-Nearest Neighbors ($k$-NN) based graph construction. Recent works addressing this bottleneck impose constraints on the flexibility of GNNs to build unstructured graphs, undermining their core advantage while introducing additional inefficiencies. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method called Dynamic Efficient Graph Convolution (DEGC) for designing efficient and globally aware ViGs. DEGC partitions the input image and constructs graphs in parallel for each partition, improving graph construction efficiency. Further, DEGC integrates local intra-graph and global inter-graph feature learning, enabling enhanced global context awareness. Using DEGC as a building block, we propose a novel CNN-GNN architecture, ClusterViG, for CV tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that ClusterViG reduces end-to-end inference latency for vision tasks by up to $5\times$ when compared against a suite of models such as ViG, ViHGNN, PVG, and GreedyViG, with a similar model parameter count. Additionally, ClusterViG reaches state-of-the-art performance on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed globally aware learning strategy. Finally, input partitioning performed by DEGC enables ClusterViG to be trained efficiently on higher-resolution images, underscoring the scalability of our approach.
Authors:Jiayi Zhu, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yihao Huang, Yang Liu, Geguang Pu
Abstract:
Co-salient object detection (Co-SOD) aims to identify common salient objects across a group of related images. While recent methods have made notable progress, they typically rely on low-level visual patterns and lack semantic priors, limiting their detection performance. We propose ConceptCoSOD, a concept-guided framework that introduces high-level semantic knowledge to enhance co-saliency detection. By extracting shared text-based concepts from the input image group, ConceptCoSOD provides semantic guidance that anchors the detection process. To further improve concept quality, we analyze the effect of diffusion timesteps and design a resampling strategy that selects more informative steps for learning robust concepts. This semantic prior, combined with the resampling-enhanced representation, enables accurate and consistent segmentation even in challenging visual conditions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and five corrupted settings demonstrate that ConceptCoSOD significantly outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization.
Authors:Tao Ma, Hongbin Zhou, Qiusheng Huang, Xuemeng Yang, Jianfei Guo, Bo Zhang, Min Dou, Yu Qiao, Botian Shi, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
Offboard perception aims to automatically generate high-quality 3D labels for autonomous driving (AD) scenes. Existing offboard methods focus on 3D object detection with closed-set taxonomy and fail to match human-level recognition capability on the rapidly evolving perception tasks. Due to heavy reliance on human labels and the prevalence of data imbalance and sparsity, a unified framework for offboard auto-labeling various elements in AD scenes that meets the distinct needs of perception tasks is not being fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal Zero-shot Offboard Panoptic Perception (ZOPP) framework for autonomous driving scenes. ZOPP integrates the powerful zero-shot recognition capabilities of vision foundation models and 3D representations derived from point clouds. To the best of our knowledge, ZOPP represents a pioneering effort in the domain of multi-modal panoptic perception and auto labeling for autonomous driving scenes. We conduct comprehensive empirical studies and evaluations on Waymo open dataset to validate the proposed ZOPP on various perception tasks. To further explore the usability and extensibility of our proposed ZOPP, we also conduct experiments in downstream applications. The results further demonstrate the great potential of our ZOPP for real-world scenarios.
Authors:Jintao Ren, Ziqian Bi, Qian Niu, Junyu Liu, Benji Peng, Sen Zhang, Xuanhe Pan, Jinlang Wang, Keyu Chen, Caitlyn Heqi Yin, Pohsun Feng, Yizhu Wen, Tianyang Wang, Silin Chen, Ming Li, Jiawei Xu, Ming Liu
Abstract:
An in-depth exploration of object detection and semantic segmentation is provided, combining theoretical foundations with practical applications. State-of-the-art advancements in machine learning and deep learning are reviewed, focusing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), YOLO architectures, and transformer-based approaches such as DETR. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and large language models for enhancing object detection in complex environments is examined. Additionally, a comprehensive analysis of big data processing is presented, with emphasis on model optimization and performance evaluation metrics. By bridging the gap between traditional methods and modern deep learning frameworks, valuable insights are offered for researchers, data scientists, and engineers aiming to apply AI-driven methodologies to large-scale object detection tasks.
Authors:Theodore Zhao, Yu Gu, Jianwei Yang, Naoto Usuyama, Ho Hin Lee, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Angela Crabtree, Jacob Abel, Christine Moung-Wen, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Mu Wei, Hoifung Poon, Sheng Wang
Abstract:
Biomedical image analysis is fundamental for biomedical discovery in cell biology, pathology, radiology, and many other biomedical domains. Holistic image analysis comprises interdependent subtasks such as segmentation, detection, and recognition of relevant objects. Here, we propose BiomedParse, a biomedical foundation model for imaging parsing that can jointly conduct segmentation, detection, and recognition for 82 object types across 9 imaging modalities. Through joint learning, we can improve accuracy for individual tasks and enable novel applications such as segmenting all relevant objects in an image through a text prompt, rather than requiring users to laboriously specify the bounding box for each object. We leveraged readily available natural-language labels or descriptions accompanying those datasets and use GPT-4 to harmonize the noisy, unstructured text information with established biomedical object ontologies. We created a large dataset comprising over six million triples of image, segmentation mask, and textual description. On image segmentation, we showed that BiomedParse is broadly applicable, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on 102,855 test image-mask-label triples across 9 imaging modalities (everything). On object detection, which aims to locate a specific object of interest, BiomedParse again attained state-of-the-art performance, especially on objects with irregular shapes (everywhere). On object recognition, which aims to identify all objects in a given image along with their semantic types, we showed that BiomedParse can simultaneously segment and label all biomedical objects in an image (all at once). In summary, BiomedParse is an all-in-one tool for biomedical image analysis by jointly solving segmentation, detection, and recognition for all major biomedical image modalities, paving the path for efficient and accurate image-based biomedical discovery.
Authors:Jiayi Zhu, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yihao Huang, Yang Liu, Geguang Pu
Abstract:
Co-salient object detection (CoSOD) aims to identify the common and salient (usually in the foreground) regions across a given group of images. Although achieving significant progress, state-of-the-art CoSODs could be easily affected by some adversarial perturbations, leading to substantial accuracy reduction. The adversarial perturbations can mislead CoSODs but do not change the high-level semantic information (e.g., concept) of the co-salient objects. In this paper, we propose a novel robustness enhancement framework by first learning the concept of the co-salient objects based on the input group images and then leveraging this concept to purify adversarial perturbations, which are subsequently fed to CoSODs for robustness enhancement. Specifically, we propose CosalPure containing two modules, i.e., group-image concept learning and concept-guided diffusion purification. For the first module, we adopt a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to learn the concept of co-salient objects within group images where the learned concept is robust to adversarial examples. For the second module, we map the adversarial image to the latent space and then perform diffusion generation by embedding the learned concept into the noise prediction function as an extra condition. Our method can effectively alleviate the influence of the SOTA adversarial attack containing different adversarial patterns, including exposure and noise. The extensive results demonstrate that our method could enhance the robustness of CoSODs significantly.
Authors:Yibo Wang, Ruiyuan Gao, Kai Chen, Kaiqiang Zhou, Yingjie Cai, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Lihui Jiang, Dit-Yan Yeung, Qiang Xu, Kai Zhang
Abstract:
Current perceptive models heavily depend on resource-intensive datasets, prompting the need for innovative solutions. Leveraging recent advances in diffusion models, synthetic data, by constructing image inputs from various annotations, proves beneficial for downstream tasks. While prior methods have separately addressed generative and perceptive models, DetDiffusion, for the first time, harmonizes both, tackling the challenges in generating effective data for perceptive models. To enhance image generation with perceptive models, we introduce perception-aware loss (P.A. loss) through segmentation, improving both quality and controllability. To boost the performance of specific perceptive models, our method customizes data augmentation by extracting and utilizing perception-aware attribute (P.A. Attr) during generation. Experimental results from the object detection task highlight DetDiffusion's superior performance, establishing a new state-of-the-art in layout-guided generation. Furthermore, image syntheses from DetDiffusion can effectively augment training data, significantly enhancing downstream detection performance.
Authors:Anjun Hu, Jindong Gu, Francesco Pinto, Konstantinos Kamnitsas, Philip Torr
Abstract:
Foundation models pre-trained on web-scale vision-language data, such as CLIP, are widely used as cornerstones of powerful machine learning systems. While pre-training offers clear advantages for downstream learning, it also endows downstream models with shared adversarial vulnerabilities that can be easily identified through the open-sourced foundation model. In this work, we expose such vulnerabilities in CLIP's downstream models and show that foundation models can serve as a basis for attacking their downstream systems. In particular, we propose a simple yet effective adversarial attack strategy termed Patch Representation Misalignment (PRM). Solely based on open-sourced CLIP vision encoders, this method produces adversaries that simultaneously fool more than 20 downstream models spanning 4 common vision-language tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image captioning and visual question-answering). Our findings highlight the concerning safety risks introduced by the extensive usage of public foundational models in the development of downstream systems, calling for extra caution in these scenarios.
Authors:Yixuan Wu, Yizhou Wang, Shixiang Tang, Wenhao Wu, Tong He, Wanli Ouyang, Philip Torr, Jian Wu
Abstract:
We present DetToolChain, a novel prompting paradigm, to unleash the zero-shot object detection ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4V and Gemini. Our approach consists of a detection prompting toolkit inspired by high-precision detection priors and a new Chain-of-Thought to implement these prompts. Specifically, the prompts in the toolkit are designed to guide the MLLM to focus on regional information (e.g., zooming in), read coordinates according to measure standards (e.g., overlaying rulers and compasses), and infer from the contextual information (e.g., overlaying scene graphs). Building upon these tools, the new detection chain-of-thought can automatically decompose the task into simple subtasks, diagnose the predictions, and plan for progressive box refinements. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated across a spectrum of detection tasks, especially hard cases. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, GPT-4V with our DetToolChain improves state-of-the-art object detectors by +21.5% AP50 on MS COCO Novel class set for open-vocabulary detection, +24.23% Acc on RefCOCO val set for zero-shot referring expression comprehension, +14.5% AP on D-cube describe object detection FULL setting.
Authors:Yihao Huang, Kaiyuan Yu, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Xiaojun Jia, Tianlin Li, Geguang Pu, Yang Liu
Abstract:
In recent years, LiDAR-camera fusion models have markedly advanced 3D object detection tasks in autonomous driving. However, their robustness against common weather corruption such as fog, rain, snow, and sunlight in the intricate physical world remains underexplored. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of fusion models from the perspective of fusion strategies on the corrupted dataset. Based on the evaluation, we further propose a concise yet practical fusion strategy to enhance the robustness of the fusion models, namely flexibly weighted fusing features from LiDAR and camera sources to adapt to varying weather scenarios. Experiments conducted on four types of fusion models, each with two distinct lightweight implementations, confirm the broad applicability and effectiveness of the approach.
Authors:Jiarui Xu, Yossi Gandelsman, Amir Bar, Jianwei Yang, Jianfeng Gao, Trevor Darrell, Xiaolong Wang
Abstract:
In-context learning allows adapting a model to new tasks given a task description at test time. In this paper, we present IMProv - a generative model that is able to in-context learn visual tasks from multimodal prompts. Given a textual description of a visual task (e.g. "Left: input image, Right: foreground segmentation"), a few input-output visual examples, or both, the model in-context learns to solve it for a new test input. We train a masked generative transformer on a new dataset of figures from computer vision papers and their associated captions, together with a captioned large-scale image-text dataset. During inference time, we prompt the model with text and/or image task example(s) and have the model inpaint the corresponding output. We show that training our model with text conditioning and scaling the dataset size improves in-context learning for computer vision tasks by over +10\% AP for Foreground Segmentation, over +5\% gains in AP for Single Object Detection, and almost 20\% lower LPIPS in Colorization. Our empirical results suggest that vision and language prompts are complementary and it is advantageous to use both to achieve better in-context learning performance. Project page is available at https://jerryxu.net/IMProv .
Authors:Ruiyuan Gao, Kai Chen, Enze Xie, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Dit-Yan Yeung, Qiang Xu
Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enhanced the data synthesis with 2D control. Yet, precise 3D control in street view generation, crucial for 3D perception tasks, remains elusive. Specifically, utilizing Bird's-Eye View (BEV) as the primary condition often leads to challenges in geometry control (e.g., height), affecting the representation of object shapes, occlusion patterns, and road surface elevations, all of which are essential to perception data synthesis, especially for 3D object detection tasks. In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive, a novel street view generation framework, offering diverse 3D geometry controls including camera poses, road maps, and 3D bounding boxes, together with textual descriptions, achieved through tailored encoding strategies. Besides, our design incorporates a cross-view attention module, ensuring consistency across multiple camera views. With MagicDrive, we achieve high-fidelity street-view image & video synthesis that captures nuanced 3D geometry and various scene descriptions, enhancing tasks like BEV segmentation and 3D object detection.
Authors:Tao Ma, Xuemeng Yang, Hongbin Zhou, Xin Li, Botian Shi, Junjie Liu, Yuchen Yang, Zhizheng Liu, Liang He, Yu Qiao, Yikang Li, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
Existing offboard 3D detectors always follow a modular pipeline design to take advantage of unlimited sequential point clouds. We have found that the full potential of offboard 3D detectors is not explored mainly due to two reasons: (1) the onboard multi-object tracker cannot generate sufficient complete object trajectories, and (2) the motion state of objects poses an inevitable challenge for the object-centric refining stage in leveraging the long-term temporal context representation. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel paradigm of offboard 3D object detection, named DetZero. Concretely, an offline tracker coupled with a multi-frame detector is proposed to focus on the completeness of generated object tracks. An attention-mechanism refining module is proposed to strengthen contextual information interaction across long-term sequential point clouds for object refining with decomposed regression methods. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset show our DetZero outperforms all state-of-the-art onboard and offboard 3D detection methods. Notably, DetZero ranks 1st place on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard with 85.15 mAPH (L2) detection performance. Further experiments validate the application of taking the place of human labels with such high-quality results. Our empirical study leads to rethinking conventions and interesting findings that can guide future research on offboard 3D object detection.
Authors:Kai Chen, Enze Xie, Zhe Chen, Yibo Wang, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Dit-Yan Yeung
Abstract:
Diffusion models have attracted significant attention due to the remarkable ability to create content and generate data for tasks like image classification. However, the usage of diffusion models to generate the high-quality object detection data remains an underexplored area, where not only image-level perceptual quality but also geometric conditions such as bounding boxes and camera views are essential. Previous studies have utilized either copy-paste synthesis or layout-to-image (L2I) generation with specifically designed modules to encode the semantic layouts. In this paper, we propose the GeoDiffusion, a simple framework that can flexibly translate various geometric conditions into text prompts and empower pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models for high-quality detection data generation. Unlike previous L2I methods, our GeoDiffusion is able to encode not only the bounding boxes but also extra geometric conditions such as camera views in self-driving scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate GeoDiffusion outperforms previous L2I methods while maintaining 4x training time faster. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to adopt diffusion models for layout-to-image generation with geometric conditions and demonstrate that L2I-generated images can be beneficial for improving the performance of object detectors.
Authors:Chongjian Ge, Junsong Chen, Enze Xie, Zhongdao Wang, Lanqing Hong, Huchuan Lu, Zhenguo Li, Ping Luo
Abstract:
Perception systems in modern autonomous driving vehicles typically take inputs from complementary multi-modal sensors, e.g., LiDAR and cameras. However, in real-world applications, sensor corruptions and failures lead to inferior performances, thus compromising autonomous safety. In this paper, we propose a robust framework, called MetaBEV, to address extreme real-world environments involving overall six sensor corruptions and two extreme sensor-missing situations. In MetaBEV, signals from multiple sensors are first processed by modal-specific encoders. Subsequently, a set of dense BEV queries are initialized, termed meta-BEV. These queries are then processed iteratively by a BEV-Evolving decoder, which selectively aggregates deep features from either LiDAR, cameras, or both modalities. The updated BEV representations are further leveraged for multiple 3D prediction tasks. Additionally, we introduce a new M2oE structure to alleviate the performance drop on distinct tasks in multi-task joint learning. Finally, MetaBEV is evaluated on the nuScenes dataset with 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks. Experiments show MetaBEV outperforms prior arts by a large margin on both full and corrupted modalities. For instance, when the LiDAR signal is missing, MetaBEV improves 35.5% detection NDS and 17.7% segmentation mIoU upon the vanilla BEVFusion model; and when the camera signal is absent, MetaBEV still achieves 69.2% NDS and 53.7% mIoU, which is even higher than previous works that perform on full-modalities. Moreover, MetaBEV performs fairly against previous methods in both canonical perception and multi-task learning settings, refreshing state-of-the-art nuScenes BEV map segmentation with 70.4% mIoU.
Authors:Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Aneeshan Sain, Subhadeep Koley, Tao Xiang, Yi-Zhe Song
Abstract:
Sketches are highly expressive, inherently capturing subjective and fine-grained visual cues. The exploration of such innate properties of human sketches has, however, been limited to that of image retrieval. In this paper, for the first time, we cultivate the expressiveness of sketches but for the fundamental vision task of object detection. The end result is a sketch-enabled object detection framework that detects based on what \textit{you} sketch -- \textit{that} ``zebra'' (e.g., one that is eating the grass) in a herd of zebras (instance-aware detection), and only the \textit{part} (e.g., ``head" of a ``zebra") that you desire (part-aware detection). We further dictate that our model works without (i) knowing which category to expect at testing (zero-shot) and (ii) not requiring additional bounding boxes (as per fully supervised) and class labels (as per weakly supervised). Instead of devising a model from the ground up, we show an intuitive synergy between foundation models (e.g., CLIP) and existing sketch models build for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR), which can already elegantly solve the task -- CLIP to provide model generalisation, and SBIR to bridge the (sketch$\rightarrow$photo) gap. In particular, we first perform independent prompting on both sketch and photo branches of an SBIR model to build highly generalisable sketch and photo encoders on the back of the generalisation ability of CLIP. We then devise a training paradigm to adapt the learned encoders for object detection, such that the region embeddings of detected boxes are aligned with the sketch and photo embeddings from SBIR. Evaluating our framework on standard object detection datasets like PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO outperforms both supervised (SOD) and weakly-supervised object detectors (WSOD) on zero-shot setups. Project Page: \url{https://pinakinathc.github.io/sketch-detect}
Authors:Matteo Risso, Alessio Burrello, Francesco Conti, Lorenzo Lamberti, Yukai Chen, Luca Benini, Enrico Macii, Massimo Poncino, Daniele Jahier Pagliari
Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is quickly becoming the go-to approach to optimize the structure of Deep Learning (DL) models for complex tasks such as Image Classification or Object Detection. However, many other relevant applications of DL, especially at the edge, are based on time-series processing and require models with unique features, for which NAS is less explored. This work focuses in particular on Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), a convolutional model for time-series processing that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to more complex recurrent architectures. We propose the first NAS tool that explicitly targets the optimization of the most peculiar architectural parameters of TCNs, namely dilation, receptive-field and number of features in each layer. The proposed approach searches for networks that offer good trade-offs between accuracy and number of parameters/operations, enabling an efficient deployment on embedded platforms. We test the proposed NAS on four real-world, edge-relevant tasks, involving audio and bio-signals. Results show that, starting from a single seed network, our method is capable of obtaining a rich collection of Pareto optimal architectures, among which we obtain models with the same accuracy as the seed, and 15.9-152x fewer parameters. Compared to three state-of-the-art NAS tools, ProxylessNAS, MorphNet and FBNetV2, our method explores a larger search space for TCNs (up to 10^12x) and obtains superior solutions, while requiring low GPU memory and search time. We deploy our NAS outputs on two distinct edge devices, the multicore GreenWaves Technology GAP8 IoT processor and the single-core STMicroelectronics STM32H7 microcontroller. With respect to the state-of-the-art hand-tuned models, we reduce latency and energy of up to 5.5x and 3.8x on the two targets respectively, without any accuracy loss.
Authors:Qi Guo, Xiaojun Jia, Shanmin Pang, Simeng Qin, Lin Wang, Ju Jia, Yang Liu, Qing Guo
Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are becoming integral to autonomous driving (AD) systems due to their strong vision-language reasoning capabilities. However, MLLMs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly adversarial patch attacks, which can pose serious threats in real-world scenarios. Existing patch-based attack methods are primarily designed for object detection models and perform poorly when transferred to MLLM-based systems due to the latter's complex architectures and reasoning abilities. To address these limitations, we propose PhysPatch, a physically realizable and transferable adversarial patch framework tailored for MLLM-based AD systems. PhysPatch jointly optimizes patch location, shape, and content to enhance attack effectiveness and real-world applicability. It introduces a semantic-based mask initialization strategy for realistic placement, an SVD-based local alignment loss with patch-guided crop-resize to improve transferability, and a potential field-based mask refinement method. Extensive experiments across open-source, commercial, and reasoning-capable MLLMs demonstrate that PhysPatch significantly outperforms prior methods in steering MLLM-based AD systems toward target-aligned perception and planning outputs. Moreover, PhysPatch consistently places adversarial patches in physically feasible regions of AD scenes, ensuring strong real-world applicability and deployability.
Authors:Srikanth Muralidharan, Heitor R. Medeiros, Masih Aminbeidokhti, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
Many real-world applications require recognition models that are robust to different operational conditions and modalities, but at the same time run on small embedded devices, with limited hardware. While for normal size models, pre-training is known to be very beneficial in accuracy and robustness, for small models, that can be employed for embedded and edge devices, its effect is not clear. In this work, we investigate the effect of ImageNet pretraining on increasingly small backbone architectures (ultra-small models, with $<$1M parameters) with respect to robustness in downstream object detection tasks in the infrared visual modality. Using scaling laws derived from standard object recognition architectures, we construct two ultra-small backbone families and systematically study their performance. Our experiments on three different datasets reveal that while ImageNet pre-training is still useful, beyond a certain capacity threshold, it offers diminishing returns in terms of out-of-distribution detection robustness. Therefore, we advise practitioners to still use pre-training and, when possible avoid too small models as while they might work well for in-domain problems, they are brittle when working conditions are different.
Authors:Heitor R. Medeiros, Atif Belal, Masih Aminbeidokhti, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
Object detection (OD) in infrared (IR) imagery is critical for low-light and nighttime applications. However, the scarcity of large-scale IR datasets forces models to rely on weights pre-trained on RGB images. While fine-tuning on IR improves accuracy, it often compromises robustness under distribution shifts due to the inherent modality gap between RGB and IR. To address this, we introduce LLVIP-C and FLIR-C, two cross-modality out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks built by applying corruption to standard IR datasets. Additionally, to fully leverage the complementary knowledge from RGB and infrared trained models, we propose WiSE-OD, a weight-space ensembling method with two variants: WiSE-OD$_{ZS}$, which combines RGB zero-shot and IR fine-tuned weights, and WiSE-OD$_{LP}$, which blends zero-shot and linear probing. Evaluated across three RGB-pretrained detectors and two robust baselines, WiSE-OD improves both cross-modality and corruption robustness without any additional training or inference cost.
Authors:Yun Xing, Nhat Chung, Jie Zhang, Yue Cao, Ivor Tsang, Yang Liu, Lei Ma, Qing Guo
Abstract:
Physical adversarial attacks in driving scenarios can expose critical vulnerabilities in visual perception models. However, developing such attacks remains challenging due to diverse real-world environments and the requirement for maintaining visual naturality. Building upon this challenge, we reformulate physical adversarial attacks as a one-shot patch generation problem. Our approach generates adversarial patches through a deep generative model that considers the specific scene context, enabling direct physical deployment in matching environments. The primary challenge lies in simultaneously achieving two objectives: generating adversarial patches that effectively mislead object detection systems while determining contextually appropriate deployment within the scene. We propose MAGIC (Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation In Context), a novel framework powered by multi-modal LLM agents to address these challenges. MAGIC automatically understands scene context and generates adversarial patch through the synergistic interaction of language and vision capabilities. In particular, MAGIC orchestrates three specialized LLM agents: The adv-patch generation agent (GAgent) masters the creation of deceptive patches through strategic prompt engineering for text-to-image models. The adv-patch deployment agent (DAgent) ensures contextual coherence by determining optimal deployment strategies based on scene understanding. The self-examination agent (EAgent) completes this trilogy by providing critical oversight and iterative refinement of both processes. We validate our method on both digital and physical levels, i.e., nuImage and manually captured real-world scenes, where both statistical and visual results prove that our MAGIC is powerful and effective for attacking widely applied object detection systems, i.e., YOLO and DETR series.
Authors:Xintian Sun, Benji Peng, Charles Zhang, Fei Jin, Qian Niu, Junyu Liu, Keyu Chen, Ming Li, Pohsun Feng, Ziqian Bi, Ming Liu, Yichao Zhang
Abstract:
Remote sensing has evolved from simple image acquisition to complex systems capable of integrating and processing visual and textual data. This review examines the development and application of multi-modal language models (MLLMs) in remote sensing, focusing on their ability to interpret and describe satellite imagery using natural language. We cover the technical underpinnings of MLLMs, including dual-encoder architectures, Transformer models, self-supervised and contrastive learning, and cross-modal integration. The unique challenges of remote sensing data--varying spatial resolutions, spectral richness, and temporal changes--are analyzed for their impact on MLLM performance. Key applications such as scene description, object detection, change detection, text-to-image retrieval, image-to-text generation, and visual question answering are discussed to demonstrate their relevance in environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster response. We review significant datasets and resources supporting the training and evaluation of these models. Challenges related to computational demands, scalability, data quality, and domain adaptation are highlighted. We conclude by proposing future research directions and technological advancements to further enhance MLLM utility in remote sensing.
Authors:Simon Varailhon, Masih Aminbeidokhti, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger
Abstract:
Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) is a challenging problem in object detection, where a pre-trained source model is adapted to a new target domain without using any source domain data for privacy and efficiency reasons. Most state-of-the-art SFDA methods for object detection have been proposed for Faster-RCNN, a detector that is known to have high computational complexity. This paper focuses on domain adaptation techniques for real-world vision systems, particularly for the YOLO family of single-shot detectors known for their fast baselines and practical applications. Our proposed SFDA method - Source-Free YOLO (SF-YOLO) - relies on a teacher-student framework in which the student receives images with a learned, target domain-specific augmentation, allowing the model to be trained with only unlabeled target data and without requiring feature alignment. A challenge with self-training using a mean-teacher architecture in the absence of labels is the rapid decline of accuracy due to noisy or drifting pseudo-labels. To address this issue, a teacher-to-student communication mechanism is introduced to help stabilize the training and reduce the reliance on annotated target data for model selection. Despite its simplicity, our approach is competitive with state-of-the-art detectors on several challenging benchmark datasets, even sometimes outperforming methods that use source data for adaptation.
Authors:Keyu Chen, Ziqian Bi, Qian Niu, Junyu Liu, Benji Peng, Sen Zhang, Ming Liu, Ming Li, Xuanhe Pan, Jiawei Xu, Jinlang Wang, Pohsun Feng
Abstract:
The application of TensorFlow pre-trained models in deep learning is explored, with an emphasis on practical guidance for tasks such as image classification and object detection. The study covers modern architectures, including ResNet, MobileNet, and EfficientNet, and demonstrates the effectiveness of transfer learning through real-world examples and experiments. A comparison of linear probing and model fine-tuning is presented, supplemented by visualizations using techniques like PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP, allowing for an intuitive understanding of the impact of these approaches. The work provides complete example code and step-by-step instructions, offering valuable insights for both beginners and advanced users. By integrating theoretical concepts with hands-on practice, the paper equips readers with the tools necessary to address deep learning challenges efficiently.
Authors:Hemang Chawla, Arnav Varma, Elahe Arani, Bahram Zonooz
Abstract:
Transformers have revolutionized deep learning based computer vision with improved performance as well as robustness to natural corruptions and adversarial attacks. Transformers are used predominantly for 2D vision tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. However, robots and advanced driver assistance systems also require 3D scene understanding for decision making by extracting structure-from-motion (SfM). We propose a robust transformer-based monocular SfM method that learns to predict monocular pixel-wise depth, ego vehicle's translation and rotation, as well as camera's focal length and principal point, simultaneously. With experiments on KITTI and DDAD datasets, we demonstrate how to adapt different vision transformers and compare them against contemporary CNN-based methods. Our study shows that transformer-based architecture, though lower in run-time efficiency, achieves comparable performance while being more robust against natural corruptions, as well as untargeted and targeted attacks.
Authors:Xiaoke Huang, Jianfeng Wang, Yansong Tang, Zheng Zhang, Han Hu, Jiwen Lu, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu
Abstract:
We propose a method to efficiently equip the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the ability to generate regional captions. SAM presents strong generalizability to segment anything while is short for semantic understanding. By introducing a lightweight query-based feature mixer, we align the region-specific features with the embedding space of language models for later caption generation. As the number of trainable parameters is small (typically in the order of tens of millions), it costs less computation, less memory usage, and less communication bandwidth, resulting in both fast and scalable training. To address the scarcity problem of regional caption data, we propose to first pre-train our model on objection detection and segmentation tasks. We call this step weak supervision pretraining since the pre-training data only contains category names instead of full-sentence descriptions. The weak supervision pretraining allows us to leverage many publicly available object detection and segmentation datasets. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our method and validate each design choice. This work serves as a stepping stone towards scaling up regional captioning data and sheds light on exploring efficient ways to augment SAM with regional semantics. The project page, along with the associated code, can be accessed via https://xk-huang.github.io/segment-caption-anything/.
Authors:David Latortue, Moetez Kdayem, Fidel A Guerrero Peña, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
Object detection models are commonly used for people counting (and localization) in many applications but require a dataset with costly bounding box annotations for training. Given the importance of privacy in people counting, these models rely more and more on infrared images, making the task even harder. In this paper, we explore how weaker levels of supervision can affect the performance of deep person counting architectures for image classification and point-level localization. Our experiments indicate that counting people using a CNN Image-Level model achieves competitive results with YOLO detectors and point-level models, yet provides a higher frame rate and a similar amount of model parameters.
Authors:Yan Lu, Xinzhu Ma, Lei Yang, Tianzhu Zhang, Yating Liu, Qi Chu, Tong He, Yonghui Li, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract:
Geometry plays a significant role in monocular 3D object detection. It can be used to estimate object depth by using the perspective projection between object's physical size and 2D projection in the image plane, which can introduce mathematical priors into deep models. However, this projection process also introduces error amplification, where the error of the estimated height is amplified and reflected into the projected depth. It leads to unreliable depth inferences and also impairs training stability. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Geometry Uncertainty Propagation Network (GUPNet++) by modeling geometry projection in a probabilistic manner. This ensures depth predictions are well-bounded and associated with a reasonable uncertainty. The significance of introducing such geometric uncertainty is two-fold: (1). It models the uncertainty propagation relationship of the geometry projection during training, improving the stability and efficiency of the end-to-end model learning. (2). It can be derived to a highly reliable confidence to indicate the quality of the 3D detection result, enabling more reliable detection inference. Experiments show that the proposed approach not only obtains (state-of-the-art) SOTA performance in image-based monocular 3D detection but also demonstrates superiority in efficacy with a simplified framework.
Authors:Ibrahim Batuhan Akkaya, Senthilkumar S. Kathiresan, Elahe Arani, Bahram Zonooz
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) achieve remarkable performance on large datasets, but tend to perform worse than convolutional neural networks (CNNs) when trained from scratch on smaller datasets, possibly due to a lack of local inductive bias in the architecture. Recent studies have therefore added locality to the architecture and demonstrated that it can help ViTs achieve performance comparable to CNNs in the small-size dataset regime. Existing methods, however, are architecture-specific or have higher computational and memory costs. Thus, we propose a module called Local InFormation Enhancer (LIFE) that extracts patch-level local information and incorporates it into the embeddings used in the self-attention block of ViTs. Our proposed module is memory and computation efficient, as well as flexible enough to process auxiliary tokens such as the classification and distillation tokens. Empirical results show that the addition of the LIFE module improves the performance of ViTs on small image classification datasets. We further demonstrate how the effect can be extended to downstream tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. In addition, we introduce a new visualization method, Dense Attention Roll-Out, specifically designed for dense prediction tasks, allowing the generation of class-specific attention maps utilizing the attention maps of all tokens.
Authors:Akhil Meethal, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Abstract:
Detecting objects in aerial images is challenging because they are typically composed of crowded small objects distributed non-uniformly over high-resolution images. Density cropping is a widely used method to improve this small object detection where the crowded small object regions are extracted and processed in high resolution. However, this is typically accomplished by adding other learnable components, thus complicating the training and inference over a standard detection process. In this paper, we propose an efficient Cascaded Zoom-in (CZ) detector that re-purposes the detector itself for density-guided training and inference. During training, density crops are located, labeled as a new class, and employed to augment the training dataset. During inference, the density crops are first detected along with the base class objects, and then input for a second stage of inference. This approach is easily integrated into any detector, and creates no significant change in the standard detection process, like the uniform cropping approach popular in aerial image detection. Experimental results on the aerial images of the challenging VisDrone and DOTA datasets verify the benefits of the proposed approach. The proposed CZ detector also provides state-of-the-art results over uniform cropping and other density cropping methods on the VisDrone dataset, increasing the detection mAP of small objects by more than 3 points.
Authors:Elahe Arani, Shruthi Gowda, Ratnajit Mukherjee, Omar Magdy, Senthilkumar Kathiresan, Bahram Zonooz
Abstract:
Deep neural network based object detectors are continuously evolving and are used in a multitude of applications, each having its own set of requirements. While safety-critical applications need high accuracy and reliability, low-latency tasks need resource and energy-efficient networks. Real-time detectors, which are a necessity in high-impact real-world applications, are continuously proposed, but they overemphasize the improvements in accuracy and speed while other capabilities such as versatility, robustness, resource and energy efficiency are omitted. A reference benchmark for existing networks does not exist, nor does a standard evaluation guideline for designing new networks, which results in ambiguous and inconsistent comparisons. We, thus, conduct a comprehensive study on multiple real-time detectors (anchor-, keypoint-, and transformer-based) on a wide range of datasets and report results on an extensive set of metrics. We also study the impact of variables such as image size, anchor dimensions, confidence thresholds, and architecture layers on the overall performance. We analyze the robustness of detection networks against distribution shifts, natural corruptions, and adversarial attacks. Also, we provide a calibration analysis to gauge the reliability of the predictions. Finally, to highlight the real-world impact, we conduct two unique case studies, on autonomous driving and healthcare applications. To further gauge the capability of networks in critical real-time applications, we report the performance after deploying the detection networks on edge devices. Our extensive empirical study can act as a guideline for the industrial community to make an informed choice on the existing networks. We also hope to inspire the research community towards a new direction in the design and evaluation of networks that focuses on a bigger and holistic overview for a far-reaching impact.
Authors:Hemang Chawla, Arnav Varma, Elahe Arani, Bahram Zonooz
Abstract:
Advances in deep learning have resulted in steady progress in computer vision with improved accuracy on tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, thus presenting a challenge in reliable deployment. Two of the prominent tasks in 3D scene-understanding for robotics and advanced drive assistance systems are monocular depth and pose estimation, often learned together in an unsupervised manner. While studies evaluating the impact of adversarial attacks on monocular depth estimation exist, a systematic demonstration and analysis of adversarial perturbations against pose estimation are lacking. We show how additive imperceptible perturbations can not only change predictions to increase the trajectory drift but also catastrophically alter its geometry. We also study the relation between adversarial perturbations targeting monocular depth and pose estimation networks, as well as the transferability of perturbations to other networks with different architectures and losses. Our experiments show how the generated perturbations lead to notable errors in relative rotation and translation predictions and elucidate vulnerabilities of the networks.
Authors:Zuyao Chen, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Lei, Chang Wen Chen
Abstract:
We present OvSGTR, a novel transformer-based framework for fully open-vocabulary scene graph generation that overcomes the limitations of traditional closed-set models. Conventional methods restrict both object and relationship recognition to a fixed vocabulary, hindering their applicability to real-world scenarios where novel concepts frequently emerge. In contrast, our approach jointly predicts objects (nodes) and their inter-relationships (edges) beyond predefined categories. OvSGTR leverages a DETR-like architecture featuring a frozen image backbone and text encoder to extract high-quality visual and semantic features, which are then fused via a transformer decoder for end-to-end scene graph prediction. To enrich the model's understanding of complex visual relations, we propose a relation-aware pre-training strategy that synthesizes scene graph annotations in a weakly supervised manner. Specifically, we investigate three pipelines--scene parser-based, LLM-based, and multimodal LLM-based--to generate transferable supervision signals with minimal manual annotation. Furthermore, we address the common issue of catastrophic forgetting in open-vocabulary settings by incorporating a visual-concept retention mechanism coupled with a knowledge distillation strategy, ensuring that the model retains rich semantic cues during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on the VG150 benchmark demonstrate that OvSGTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple settings, including closed-set, open-vocabulary object detection-based, relation-based, and fully open-vocabulary scenarios. Our results highlight the promise of large-scale relation-aware pre-training and transformer architectures for advancing scene graph generation towards more generalized and reliable visual understanding.
Authors:Peng Wu, Xuerong Zhou, Guansong Pang, Zhiwei Yang, Qingsen Yan, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract:
Current weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) task aims to achieve frame-level anomalous event detection with only coarse video-level annotations available. Existing works typically involve extracting global features from full-resolution video frames and training frame-level classifiers to detect anomalies in the temporal dimension. However, most anomalous events tend to occur in localized spatial regions rather than the entire video frames, which implies existing frame-level feature based works may be misled by the dominant background information and lack the interpretation of the detected anomalies. To address this dilemma, this paper introduces a novel method called STPrompt that learns spatio-temporal prompt embeddings for weakly supervised video anomaly detection and localization (WSVADL) based on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). Our proposed method employs a two-stream network structure, with one stream focusing on the temporal dimension and the other primarily on the spatial dimension. By leveraging the learned knowledge from pre-trained VLMs and incorporating natural motion priors from raw videos, our model learns prompt embeddings that are aligned with spatio-temporal regions of videos (e.g., patches of individual frames) for identify specific local regions of anomalies, enabling accurate video anomaly detection while mitigating the influence of background information. Without relying on detailed spatio-temporal annotations or auxiliary object detection/tracking, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public benchmarks for the WSVADL task.
Authors:Yilun Chen, Shuai Yang, Haifeng Huang, Tai Wang, Runsen Xu, Ruiyuan Lyu, Dahua Lin, Jiangmiao Pang
Abstract:
Prior studies on 3D scene understanding have primarily developed specialized models for specific tasks or required task-specific fine-tuning. In this study, we propose Grounded 3D-LLM, which explores the potential of 3D large multi-modal models (3D LMMs) to consolidate various 3D vision tasks within a unified generative framework. The model uses scene referent tokens as special noun phrases to reference 3D scenes, enabling it to handle sequences that interleave 3D and textual data. Per-task instruction-following templates are employed to ensure natural and diversity in translating 3D vision tasks into language formats. To facilitate the use of referent tokens in subsequent language modeling, we provide a large-scale, automatically curated grounded scene-text dataset with over 1 million phrase-to-region correspondences and introduce Contrastive Language-Scene Pre-training (CLASP) to perform phrase-level scene-text alignment using this data. Our comprehensive evaluation covers open-ended tasks like dense captioning and 3D question answering, alongside close-ended tasks such as object detection and language grounding. Experiments across multiple 3D benchmarks reveal the leading performance and the broad applicability of Grounded 3D-LLM. Code and datasets are available at the https://groundedscenellm.github.io/grounded_3d-llm.github.io.
Authors:Jihao Liu, Jinliang Zheng, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
This paper proposes a GeneraLIst encoder-Decoder (GLID) pre-training method for better handling various downstream computer vision tasks. While self-supervised pre-training approaches, e.g., Masked Autoencoder, have shown success in transfer learning, task-specific sub-architectures are still required to be appended for different downstream tasks, which cannot enjoy the benefits of large-scale pre-training. GLID overcomes this challenge by allowing the pre-trained generalist encoder-decoder to be fine-tuned on various vision tasks with minimal task-specific architecture modifications. In the GLID training scheme, pre-training pretext task and other downstream tasks are modeled as "query-to-answer" problems, including the pre-training pretext task and other downstream tasks. We pre-train a task-agnostic encoder-decoder with query-mask pairs. During fine-tuning, GLID maintains the pre-trained encoder-decoder and queries, only replacing the topmost linear transformation layer with task-specific linear heads. This minimizes the pretrain-finetune architecture inconsistency and enables the pre-trained model to better adapt to downstream tasks. GLID achieves competitive performance on various vision tasks, including object detection, image segmentation, pose estimation, and depth estimation, outperforming or matching specialist models such as Mask2Former, DETR, ViTPose, and BinsFormer.
Authors:Ziqing Wang, Yuetong Fang, Jiahang Cao, Renjing Xu
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising energy-efficient alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Despite this, bridging the performance gap with ANNs in practical scenarios remains a significant challenge. This paper focuses on addressing the dual objectives of enhancing the performance and efficiency of SNNs through the established SNN Calibration conversion framework. Inspired by the biological nervous system, we propose a novel Adaptive-Firing Neuron Model (AdaFire) that dynamically adjusts firing patterns across different layers, substantially reducing conversion errors within limited timesteps. Moreover, to meet our efficiency objectives, we propose two novel strategies: an Sensitivity Spike Compression (SSC) technique and an Input-aware Adaptive Timesteps (IAT) technique. These techniques synergistically reduce both energy consumption and latency during the conversion process, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of SNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate our approach outperforms state-of-the-art SNNs methods, showcasing superior performance and efficiency in 2D, 3D, and event-driven classification, as well as object detection and segmentation tasks.
Authors:Manyuan Zhang, Guanglu Song, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
The introduction of DETR represents a new paradigm for object detection. However, its decoder conducts classification and box localization using shared queries and cross-attention layers, leading to suboptimal results. We observe that different regions of interest in the visual feature map are suitable for performing query classification and box localization tasks, even for the same object. Salient regions provide vital information for classification, while the boundaries around them are more favorable for box regression. Unfortunately, such spatial misalignment between these two tasks greatly hinders DETR's training. Therefore, in this work, we focus on decoupling localization and classification tasks in DETR. To achieve this, we introduce a new design scheme called spatially decoupled DETR (SD-DETR), which includes a task-aware query generation module and a disentangled feature learning process. We elaborately design the task-aware query initialization process and divide the cross-attention block in the decoder to allow the task-aware queries to match different visual regions. Meanwhile, we also observe that the prediction misalignment problem for high classification confidence and precise localization exists, so we propose an alignment loss to further guide the spatially decoupled DETR training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant improvement in MSCOCO datasets compared to previous work. For instance, we improve the performance of Conditional DETR by 4.5 AP. By spatially disentangling the two tasks, our method overcomes the misalignment problem and greatly improves the performance of DETR for object detection.
Authors:Jiahang Cao, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Jiaxu Wang, Renjing Xu, Lin Wang
Abstract:
The ability to detect objects in all lighting (i.e., normal-, over-, and under-exposed) conditions is crucial for real-world applications, such as self-driving.Traditional RGB-based detectors often fail under such varying lighting conditions.Therefore, recent works utilize novel event cameras to supplement or guide the RGB modality; however, these methods typically adopt asymmetric network structures that rely predominantly on the RGB modality, resulting in limited robustness for all-day detection. In this paper, we propose EOLO, a novel object detection framework that achieves robust and efficient all-day detection by fusing both RGB and event modalities. Our EOLO framework is built based on a lightweight spiking neural network (SNN) to efficiently leverage the asynchronous property of events. Buttressed by it, we first introduce an Event Temporal Attention (ETA) module to learn the high temporal information from events while preserving crucial edge information. Secondly, as different modalities exhibit varying levels of importance under diverse lighting conditions, we propose a novel Symmetric RGB-Event Fusion (SREF) module to effectively fuse RGB-Event features without relying on a specific modality, thus ensuring a balanced and adaptive fusion for all-day detection. In addition, to compensate for the lack of paired RGB-Event datasets for all-day training and evaluation, we propose an event synthesis approach based on the randomized optical flow that allows for directly generating the event frame from a single exposure image. We further build two new datasets, E-MSCOCO and E-VOC based on the popular benchmarks MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EOLO outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors,e.g.,RENet,by a substantial margin (+3.74% mAP50) in all lighting conditions.Our code and datasets will be available at https://vlislab22.github.io/EOLO/
Authors:Minh-Quan Le, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le, Tam V. Nguyen, Thanh-Toan Do
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) and camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) aim to recognize and segment objects that are blended into their surroundings, respectively. While several deep neural network models have been proposed to tackle those tasks, augmentation methods for COD and CIS have not been thoroughly explored. Augmentation strategies can help improve models' performance by increasing the size and diversity of the training data and exposing the model to a wider range of variations in the data. Besides, we aim to automatically learn transformations that help to reveal the underlying structure of camouflaged objects and allow the model to learn to better identify and segment camouflaged objects. To achieve this, we propose a learnable augmentation method in the frequency domain for COD and CIS via the Fourier transform approach, dubbed CamoFA. Our method leverages a conditional generative adversarial network and cross-attention mechanism to generate a reference image and an adaptive hybrid swapping with parameters to mix the low-frequency component of the reference image and the high-frequency component of the input image. This approach aims to make camouflaged objects more visible for detection and segmentation models. Without bells and whistles, our proposed augmentation method boosts the performance of camouflaged object detectors and instance segmenters by large margins.
Authors:Yifan Zhang, Zhen Dong, Huanrui Yang, Ming Lu, Cheng-Ching Tseng, Yuan Du, Kurt Keutzer, Li Du, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
Multi-view 3D detection based on BEV (bird-eye-view) has recently achieved significant improvements. However, the huge memory consumption of state-of-the-art models makes it hard to deploy them on vehicles, and the non-trivial latency will affect the real-time perception of streaming applications. Despite the wide application of quantization to lighten models, we show in our paper that directly applying quantization in BEV tasks will 1) make the training unstable, and 2) lead to intolerable performance degradation. To solve these issues, our method QD-BEV enables a novel view-guided distillation (VGD) objective, which can stabilize the quantization-aware training (QAT) while enhancing the model performance by leveraging both image features and BEV features. Our experiments show that QD-BEV achieves similar or even better accuracy than previous methods with significant efficiency gains. On the nuScenes datasets, the 4-bit weight and 6-bit activation quantized QD-BEV-Tiny model achieves 37.2% NDS with only 15.8 MB model size, outperforming BevFormer-Tiny by 1.8% with an 8x model compression. On the Small and Base variants, QD-BEV models also perform superbly and achieve 47.9% NDS (28.2 MB) and 50.9% NDS (32.9 MB), respectively.
Authors:Yinghui Xing, Dexuan Kong, Shizhou Zhang, Geng Chen, Lingyan Ran, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD), aiming to segment camouflaged objects which exhibit similar patterns with the background, is a challenging task. Most existing works are dedicated to establishing specialized modules to identify camouflaged objects with complete and fine details, while the boundary can not be well located for the lack of object-related semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel ``pre-train, adapt and detect" paradigm to detect camouflaged objects. By introducing a large pre-trained model, abundant knowledge learned from massive multi-modal data can be directly transferred to COD. A lightweight parallel adapter is inserted to adjust the features suitable for the downstream COD task. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art COD models by large margins. Moreover, we design a multi-task learning scheme for tuning the adapter to exploit the shareable knowledge across different semantic classes. Comprehensive experimental results showed that the generalization ability of our model can be substantially improved with multi-task adapter initialization on source tasks and multi-task adaptation on target tasks.
Authors:Qing Lian, Tai Wang, Dahua Lin, Jiangmiao Pang
Abstract:
Recent multi-camera 3D object detectors usually leverage temporal information to construct multi-view stereo that alleviates the ill-posed depth estimation. However, they typically assume all the objects are static and directly aggregate features across frames. This work begins with a theoretical and empirical analysis to reveal that ignoring the motion of moving objects can result in serious localization bias. Therefore, we propose to model Dynamic Objects in RecurrenT (DORT) to tackle this problem. In contrast to previous global Bird-Eye-View (BEV) methods, DORT extracts object-wise local volumes for motion estimation that also alleviates the heavy computational burden. By iteratively refining the estimated object motion and location, the preceding features can be precisely aggregated to the current frame to mitigate the aforementioned adverse effects. The simple framework has two significant appealing properties. It is flexible and practical that can be plugged into most camera-based 3D object detectors. As there are predictions of object motion in the loop, it can easily track objects across frames according to their nearest center distances. Without bells and whistles, DORT outperforms all the previous methods on the nuScenes detection and tracking benchmarks with 62.5\% NDS and 57.6\% AMOTA, respectively. The source code will be released.
Authors:Matthew Inkawhich, Nathan Inkawhich, Hai Li, Yiran Chen
Abstract:
Current state-of-the-art object proposal networks are trained with a closed-world assumption, meaning they learn to only detect objects of the training classes. These models fail to provide high recall in open-world environments where important novel objects may be encountered. While a handful of recent works attempt to tackle this problem, they fail to consider that the optimal behavior of a proposal network can vary significantly depending on the data and application. Our goal is to provide a flexible proposal solution that can be easily tuned to suit a variety of open-world settings. To this end, we design a Tunable Hybrid Proposal Network (THPN) that leverages an adjustable hybrid architecture, a novel self-training procedure, and dynamic loss components to optimize the tradeoff between known and unknown object detection performance. To thoroughly evaluate our method, we devise several new challenges which invoke varying degrees of label bias by altering known class diversity and label count. We find that in every task, THPN easily outperforms existing baselines (e.g., RPN, OLN). Our method is also highly data efficient, surpassing baseline recall with a fraction of the labeled data.
Authors:Geng Chen, Xinrui Chen, Bo Dong, Mingchen Zhuge, Yongxiong Wang, Hongbo Bi, Jian Chen, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD), which aims to identify the objects that conceal themselves into the surroundings, has recently drawn increasing research efforts in the field of computer vision. In practice, the success of deep learning based COD is mainly determined by two key factors, including (i) A significantly large receptive field, which provides rich context information, and (ii) An effective fusion strategy, which aggregates the rich multi-level features for accurate COD. Motivated by these observations, in this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based COD approach, which integrates the large receptive field and effective feature fusion into a unified framework. Specifically, we first extract multi-level features from a backbone network. The resulting features are then fed to the proposed dual-branch mixture convolution modules, each of which utilizes multiple asymmetric convolutional layers and two dilated convolutional layers to extract rich context features from a large receptive field. Finally, we fuse the features using specially-designed multilevel interactive fusion modules, each of which employs an attention mechanism along with feature interaction for effective feature fusion. Our method detects camouflaged objects with an effective fusion strategy, which aggregates the rich context information from a large receptive field. All of these designs meet the requirements of COD well, allowing the accurate detection of camouflaged objects. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method is capable of accurately detecting camouflaged objects and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Dacheng Liao, Mengshi Qi, Liang Liu, Huadong Ma
Abstract:
In current open real-world autonomous driving scenarios, challenges such as sensor failure and extreme weather conditions hinder the generalization of most autonomous driving perception models to these unseen domain due to the domain shifts between the test and training data. As the parameter scale of autonomous driving perception models grows, traditional test-time adaptation (TTA) methods become unstable and often degrade model performance in most scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two new robust methods to improve the Batch Normalization with TTA for object detection in autonomous driving: (1) We introduce a LearnableBN layer based on Generalized-search Entropy Minimization (GSEM) method. Specifically, we modify the traditional BN layer by incorporating auxiliary learnable parameters, which enables the BN layer to dynamically update the statistics according to the different input data. (2) We propose a new semantic-consistency based dual-stage-adaptation strategy, which encourages the model to iteratively search for the optimal solution and eliminates unstable samples during the adaptation process. Extensive experiments on the NuScenes-C dataset shows that our method achieves a maximum improvement of about 8% using BEVFormer as the baseline model across six corruption types and three levels of severity. We will make our source code available soon.
Authors:Yidi Li, Jiahao Wen, Bin Ren, Wenhao Li, Zhenhuan Xu, Hao Guo, Hong Liu, Nicu Sebe
Abstract:
The integration of point and voxel representations is becoming more common in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. However, this combination often struggles with capturing semantic information effectively. Moreover, relying solely on point features within regions of interest can lead to information loss and limitations in local feature representation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage 3D object detector, called Point-Voxel Attention Fusion Network (PVAFN). PVAFN leverages an attention mechanism to improve multi-modal feature fusion during the feature extraction phase. In the refinement stage, it utilizes a multi-pooling strategy to integrate both multi-scale and region-specific information effectively. The point-voxel attention mechanism adaptively combines point cloud and voxel-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, resulting in richer object representations that help to reduce false detections. Additionally, a multi-pooling enhancement module is introduced to boost the model's perception capabilities. This module employs cluster pooling and pyramid pooling techniques to efficiently capture key geometric details and fine-grained shape structures, thereby enhancing the integration of local and global features. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that the proposed PVAFN achieves competitive performance. The code and models will be available.
Authors:Haoran Wei, Lingyu Kong, Jinyue Chen, Liang Zhao, Zheng Ge, En Yu, Jianjian Sun, Chunrui Han, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
Playing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in 2023 is trendy among the AI community. However, the relatively large number of parameters (more than 7B) of popular LVLMs makes it difficult to train and deploy on consumer GPUs, discouraging many researchers with limited resources. Imagine how cool it would be to experience all the features of current LVLMs on an old GTX1080ti (our only game card). Accordingly, we present Vary-toy in this report, a small-size Vary along with Qwen-1.8B as the base ``large'' language model. In Vary-toy, we introduce an improved vision vocabulary, allowing the model to not only possess all features of Vary but also gather more generality. Specifically, we replace negative samples of natural images with positive sample data driven by object detection in the procedure of generating vision vocabulary, more sufficiently utilizing the capacity of the vocabulary network and enabling it to efficiently encode visual information corresponding to natural objects. For experiments, Vary-toy can achieve 65.6% ANLS on DocVQA, 59.1% accuracy on ChartQA, 88.1% accuracy on RefCOCO, and 29% on MMVet. The code will be publicly available on the homepage.
Authors:Che Liu, Sibo Cheng, Chen Chen, Mengyun Qiao, Weitong Zhang, Anand Shah, Wenjia Bai, Rossella Arcucci
Abstract:
Medical vision-language models enable co-learning and integrating features from medical imaging and clinical text. However, these models are not easy to train and the latent representation space can be complex. Here we propose a novel way for pre-training and regularising medical vision-language models. The proposed method, named Medical vision-language pre-training with Frozen language models and Latent spAce Geometry optimization (M-FLAG), leverages a frozen language model for training stability and efficiency and introduces a novel orthogonality loss to harmonize the latent space geometry. We demonstrate the potential of the pre-trained model on three downstream tasks: medical image classification, segmentation, and object detection. Extensive experiments across five public datasets demonstrate that M-FLAG significantly outperforms existing medical vision-language pre-training approaches and reduces the number of parameters by 78\%. Notably, M-FLAG achieves outstanding performance on the segmentation task while using only 1\% of the RSNA dataset, even outperforming ImageNet pre-trained models that have been fine-tuned using 100\% of the data.
Authors:Panwang Pan, Zhiwen Fan, Brandon Y. Feng, Peihao Wang, Chenxin Li, Zhangyang Wang
Abstract:
The accurate estimation of six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) object poses is essential for many applications in robotics and augmented reality. However, existing methods for 6DoF pose estimation often depend on CAD templates or dense support views, restricting their usefulness in realworld situations. In this study, we present a new cascade framework named Cas6D for few-shot 6DoF pose estimation that is generalizable and uses only RGB images. To address the false positives of target object detection in the extreme few-shot setting, our framework utilizes a selfsupervised pre-trained ViT to learn robust feature representations. Then, we initialize the nearest top-K pose candidates based on similarity score and refine the initial poses using feature pyramids to formulate and update the cascade warped feature volume, which encodes context at increasingly finer scales. By discretizing the pose search range using multiple pose bins and progressively narrowing the pose search range in each stage using predictions from the previous stage, Cas6D can overcome the large gap between pose candidates and ground truth poses, which is a common failure mode in sparse-view scenarios. Experimental results on the LINEMOD and GenMOP datasets demonstrate that Cas6D outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 9.2% and 3.8% accuracy (Proj-5) under the 32-shot setting compared to OnePose++ and Gen6D.
Authors:Yuheng Lu, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaobao Wei, Xiaodong Xie, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Kurt Keutzer, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
The goal of open-vocabulary detection is to identify novel objects based on arbitrary textual descriptions. In this paper, we address open-vocabulary 3D point-cloud detection by a dividing-and-conquering strategy, which involves: 1) developing a point-cloud detector that can learn a general representation for localizing various objects, and 2) connecting textual and point-cloud representations to enable the detector to classify novel object categories based on text prompting. Specifically, we resort to rich image pre-trained models, by which the point-cloud detector learns localizing objects under the supervision of predicted 2D bounding boxes from 2D pre-trained detectors. Moreover, we propose a novel de-biased triplet cross-modal contrastive learning to connect the modalities of image, point-cloud and text, thereby enabling the point-cloud detector to benefit from vision-language pre-trained models,i.e.,CLIP. The novel use of image and vision-language pre-trained models for point-cloud detectors allows for open-vocabulary 3D object detection without the need for 3D annotations. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves at least 3.03 points and 7.47 points over a wide range of baselines on the ScanNet and SUN RGB-D datasets, respectively. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis to explain why our approach works.
Authors:Chunrui Han, Jinrong Yang, Jianjian Sun, Zheng Ge, Runpei Dong, Hongyu Zhou, Weixin Mao, Yuang Peng, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
Long-term temporal fusion is a crucial but often overlooked technique in camera-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D perception. Existing methods are mostly in a parallel manner. While parallel fusion can benefit from long-term information, it suffers from increasing computational and memory overheads as the fusion window size grows. Alternatively, BEVFormer adopts a recurrent fusion pipeline so that history information can be efficiently integrated, yet it fails to benefit from longer temporal frames. In this paper, we explore an embarrassingly simple long-term recurrent fusion strategy built upon the LSS-based methods and find it already able to enjoy the merits from both sides, i.e., rich long-term information and efficient fusion pipeline. A temporal embedding module is further proposed to improve the model's robustness against occasionally missed frames in practical scenarios. We name this simple but effective fusing pipeline VideoBEV. Experimental results on the nuScenes benchmark show that VideoBEV obtains strong performance on various camera-based 3D perception tasks, including object detection (55.4\% mAP and 62.9\% NDS), segmentation (48.6\% vehicle mIoU), tracking (54.8\% AMOTA), and motion prediction (0.80m minADE and 0.463 EPA).
Authors:Shiwei Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xiaohan Chen, Xuxi Chen, Qiao Xiao, Boqian Wu, Tommi Kärkkäinen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Decebal Mocanu, Zhangyang Wang
Abstract:
Transformers have quickly shined in the computer vision world since the emergence of Vision Transformers (ViTs). The dominant role of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) seems to be challenged by increasingly effective transformer-based models. Very recently, a couple of advanced convolutional models strike back with large kernels motivated by the local-window attention mechanism, showing appealing performance and efficiency. While one of them, i.e. RepLKNet, impressively manages to scale the kernel size to 31x31 with improved performance, the performance starts to saturate as the kernel size continues growing, compared to the scaling trend of advanced ViTs such as Swin Transformer. In this paper, we explore the possibility of training extreme convolutions larger than 31x31 and test whether the performance gap can be eliminated by strategically enlarging convolutions. This study ends up with a recipe for applying extremely large kernels from the perspective of sparsity, which can smoothly scale up kernels to 61x61 with better performance. Built on this recipe, we propose Sparse Large Kernel Network (SLaK), a pure CNN architecture equipped with sparse factorized 51x51 kernels that can perform on par with or better than state-of-the-art hierarchical Transformers and modern ConvNet architectures like ConvNeXt and RepLKNet, on ImageNet classification as well as a wide range of downstream tasks including semantic segmentation on ADE20K, object detection on PASCAL VOC 2007, and object detection/segmentation on MS COCO.
Authors:Thong Nguyen, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Xiaobao Wu, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
Abstract:
With the burgeoning amount of data of image-text pairs and diversity of Vision-and-Language (V\&L) tasks, scholars have introduced an abundance of deep learning models in this research domain. Furthermore, in recent years, transfer learning has also shown tremendous success in Computer Vision for tasks such as Image Classification, Object Detection, etc., and in Natural Language Processing for Question Answering, Machine Translation, etc. Inheriting the spirit of Transfer Learning, research works in V\&L have devised multiple pretraining techniques on large-scale datasets in order to enhance the performance of downstream tasks. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive revision of contemporary V\&L pretraining models. In particular, we categorize and delineate pretraining approaches, along with the summary of state-of-the-art vision-and-language pretrained models. Moreover, a list of training datasets and downstream tasks is supplied to further polish the perspective into V\&L pretraining. Lastly, we decided to take a further step to discuss numerous directions for future research.
Authors:Tiejun Huang, Yajing Zheng, Zhaofei Yu, Rui Chen, Yuan Li, Ruiqin Xiong, Lei Ma, Junwei Zhao, Siwei Dong, Lin Zhu, Jianing Li, Shanshan Jia, Yihua Fu, Boxin Shi, Si Wu, Yonghong Tian
Abstract:
In digital cameras, we find a major limitation: the image and video form inherited from a film camera obstructs it from capturing the rapidly changing photonic world. Here, we present vidar, a bit sequence array where each bit represents whether the accumulation of photons has reached a threshold, to record and reconstruct the scene radiance at any moment. By employing only consumer-level CMOS sensors and integrated circuits, we have developed a vidar camera that is 1,000x faster than conventional cameras. By treating vidar as spike trains in biological vision, we have further developed a spiking neural network-based machine vision system that combines the speed of the machine and the mechanism of biological vision, achieving high-speed object detection and tracking 1,000x faster than human vision. We demonstrate the utility of the vidar camera and the super vision system in an assistant referee and target pointing system. Our study is expected to fundamentally revolutionize the image and video concepts and related industries, including photography, movies, and visual media, and to unseal a new spiking neural network-enabled speed-free machine vision era.
Authors:Mengya Xu, Rulin Zhou, An Wang, Chaoyang Lyu, Zhen Li, Ning Zhong, Hongliang Ren
Abstract:
Intraoperative bleeding during Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) poses significant risks, demanding precise, real-time localization and continuous monitoring of the bleeding source for effective hemostatic intervention. In particular, endoscopists have to repeatedly flush to clear blood, allowing only milliseconds to identify bleeding sources, an inefficient process that prolongs operations and elevates patient risks. However, current Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods primarily focus on bleeding region segmentation, overlooking the critical need for accurate bleeding source detection and temporal tracking in the challenging ESD environment, which is marked by frequent visual obstructions and dynamic scene changes. This gap is widened by the lack of specialized datasets, hindering the development of robust AI-assisted guidance systems. To address these challenges, we introduce BleedOrigin-Bench, the first comprehensive ESD bleeding source dataset, featuring 1,771 expert-annotated bleeding sources across 106,222 frames from 44 procedures, supplemented with 39,755 pseudo-labeled frames. This benchmark covers 8 anatomical sites and 6 challenging clinical scenarios. We also present BleedOrigin-Net, a novel dual-stage detection-tracking framework for the bleeding source localization in ESD procedures, addressing the complete workflow from bleeding onset detection to continuous spatial tracking. We compare with widely-used object detection models (YOLOv11/v12), multimodal large language models, and point tracking methods. Extensive evaluation demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving 96.85% frame-level accuracy ($\pm\leq8$ frames) for bleeding onset detection, 70.24% pixel-level accuracy ($\leq100$ px) for initial source detection, and 96.11% pixel-level accuracy ($\leq100$ px) for point tracking.
Authors:Rajeev Yasarla, Shizhong Han, Hong Cai, Fatih Porikli
Abstract:
Camera-based 3D object detection in Bird's Eye View (BEV) is one of the most important perception tasks in autonomous driving. Earlier methods rely on dense BEV features, which are costly to construct. More recent works explore sparse query-based detection. However, they still require a large number of queries and can become expensive to run when more video frames are used. In this paper, we propose DySS, a novel method that employs state-space learning and dynamic queries. More specifically, DySS leverages a state-space model (SSM) to sequentially process the sampled features over time steps. In order to encourage the model to better capture the underlying motion and correspondence information, we introduce auxiliary tasks of future prediction and masked reconstruction to better train the SSM. The state of the SSM then provides an informative yet efficient summarization of the scene. Based on the state-space learned features, we dynamically update the queries via merge, remove, and split operations, which help maintain a useful, lean set of detection queries throughout the network. Our proposed DySS achieves both superior detection performance and efficient inference. Specifically, on the nuScenes test split, DySS achieves 65.31 NDS and 57.4 mAP, outperforming the latest state of the art. On the val split, DySS achieves 56.2 NDS and 46.2 mAP, as well as a real-time inference speed of 33 FPS.
Authors:Shizhong Han, Hsin-Pai Cheng, Hong Cai, Jihad Masri, Soyeb Nagori, Fatih Porikli
Abstract:
Existing LiDAR 3D object detection methods predominantely rely on sparse convolutions and/or transformers, which can be challenging to run on resource-constrained edge devices, due to irregular memory access patterns and high computational costs. In this paper, we propose FALO, a hardware-friendly approach to LiDAR 3D detection, which offers both state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection accuracy and fast inference speed. More specifically, given the 3D point cloud and after voxelization, FALO first arranges sparse 3D voxels into a 1D sequence based on their coordinates and proximity. The sequence is then processed by our proposed ConvDotMix blocks, consisting of large-kernel convolutions, Hadamard products, and linear layers. ConvDotMix provides sufficient mixing capability in both spatial and embedding dimensions, and introduces higher-order nonlinear interaction among spatial features. Furthermore, when going through the ConvDotMix layers, we introduce implicit grouping, which balances the tensor dimensions for more efficient inference and takes into account the growing receptive field. All these operations are friendly to run on resource-constrained platforms and proposed FALO can readily deploy on compact, embedded devices. Our extensive evaluation on LiDAR 3D detection benchmarks such as nuScenes and Waymo shows that FALO achieves competitive performance. Meanwhile, FALO is 1.6~9.8x faster than the latest SOTA on mobile Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and mobile Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
Authors:Yining Shi, Kun Jiang, Xin Zhao, Kangan Qian, Chuchu Xie, Tuopu Wen, Mengmeng Yang, Diange Yang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection is a fundamental task in the field of autonomous driving. This paper explores the unique advantage of Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR in autonomous perception. Given a single frame FMCW point cloud with radial velocity measurements, we expect that our object detector can detect the short-term future locations of objects using only the current frame sensor data and demonstrate a fast ability to respond to intermediate danger. To achieve this, we extend the standard object detection task to a novel task named predictive object detection (POD), which aims to predict the short-term future location and dimensions of objects based solely on current observations. Typically, a motion prediction task requires historical sensor information to process the temporal contexts of each object, while our detector's avoidance of multi-frame historical information enables a much faster response time to potential dangers. The core advantage of FMCW LiDAR lies in the radial velocity associated with every reflected point. We propose a novel POD framework, the core idea of which is to generate a virtual future point using a ray casting mechanism, create virtual two-frame point clouds with the current and virtual future frames, and encode these two-frame voxel features with a sparse 4D encoder. Subsequently, the 4D voxel features are separated by temporal indices and remapped into two Bird's Eye View (BEV) features: one decoded for standard current frame object detection and the other for future predictive object detection. Extensive experiments on our in-house dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art standard and predictive detection performance of the proposed POD framework.
Authors:Adarsh Salagame, Sasank Potluri, Keshav Bharadwaj Vaidyanathan, Kruthika Gangaraju, Eric Sihite, Milad Ramezani, Alireza Ramezani
Abstract:
This paper presents the development and integration of a vision-guided loco-manipulation pipeline for Northeastern University's snake robot, COBRA. The system leverages a YOLOv8-based object detection model and depth data from an onboard stereo camera to estimate the 6-DOF pose of target objects in real time. We introduce a framework for autonomous detection and control, enabling closed-loop loco-manipulation for transporting objects to specified goal locations. Additionally, we demonstrate open-loop experiments in which COBRA successfully performs real-time object detection and loco-manipulation tasks.
Authors:Hangtao Zhang, Yichen Wang, Shihui Yan, Chenyu Zhu, Ziqi Zhou, Linshan Hou, Shengshan Hu, Minghui Li, Yanjun Zhang, Leo Yu Zhang
Abstract:
Object detection models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where attackers poison a small subset of training samples by embedding a predefined trigger to manipulate prediction. Detecting poisoned samples (i.e., those containing triggers) at test time can prevent backdoor activation. However, unlike image classification tasks, the unique characteristics of object detection -- particularly its output of numerous objects -- pose fresh challenges for backdoor detection. The complex attack effects (e.g., "ghost" object emergence or "vanishing" object) further render current defenses fundamentally inadequate. To this end, we design TRAnsformation Consistency Evaluation (TRACE), a brand-new method for detecting poisoned samples at test time in object detection. Our journey begins with two intriguing observations: (1) poisoned samples exhibit significantly more consistent detection results than clean ones across varied backgrounds. (2) clean samples show higher detection consistency when introduced to different focal information. Based on these phenomena, TRACE applies foreground and background transformations to each test sample, then assesses transformation consistency by calculating the variance in objects confidences. TRACE achieves black-box, universal backdoor detection, with extensive experiments showing a 30% improvement in AUROC over state-of-the-art defenses and resistance to adaptive attacks.
Authors:Qiude Zhang, Chunyu Lin, Zhijie Shen, Nie Lang, Yao Zhao
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is challenging due to the lack of accurate depth. However, existing depth-assisted solutions still exhibit inferior performance, whose reason is universally acknowledged as the unsatisfactory accuracy of monocular depth estimation models. In this paper, we revisit monocular 3D object detection from the depth perspective and formulate an additional issue as the limited 3D structure-aware capability of existing depth representations (e.g., depth one-hot encoding or depth distribution). To address this issue, we introduce a novel Depth Thickness Field approach to embed clear 3D structures of the scenes. Specifically, we present MonoDTF, a scene-to-instance depth-adapted network for monocular 3D object detection. The framework mainly comprises a Scene-Level Depth Retargeting (SDR) module and an Instance-Level Spatial Refinement (ISR) module. The former retargets traditional depth representations to the proposed depth thickness field, incorporating the scene-level perception of 3D structures. The latter refines the voxel space with the guidance of instances, enhancing the 3D instance-aware capability of the depth thickness field and thus improving detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate our superiority to existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods and the universality when equipped with different depth estimation models. The code will be available.
Authors:Ziqi Zhou, Bowen Li, Yufei Song, Zhifei Yu, Shengshan Hu, Wei Wan, Leo Yu Zhang, Dezhong Yao, Hai Jin
Abstract:
With the advancement of deep learning, object detectors (ODs) with various architectures have achieved significant success in complex scenarios like autonomous driving. Previous adversarial attacks against ODs have been focused on designing customized attacks targeting their specific structures (e.g., NMS and RPN), yielding some results but simultaneously constraining their scalability. Moreover, most efforts against ODs stem from image-level attacks originally designed for classification tasks, resulting in redundant computations and disturbances in object-irrelevant areas (e.g., background). Consequently, how to design a model-agnostic efficient attack to comprehensively evaluate the vulnerabilities of ODs remains challenging and unresolved. In this paper, we propose NumbOD, a brand-new spatial-frequency fusion attack against various ODs, aimed at disrupting object detection within images. We directly leverage the features output by the OD without relying on its internal structures to craft adversarial examples. Specifically, we first design a dual-track attack target selection strategy to select high-quality bounding boxes from OD outputs for targeting. Subsequently, we employ directional perturbations to shift and compress predicted boxes and change classification results to deceive ODs. Additionally, we focus on manipulating the high-frequency components of images to confuse ODs' attention on critical objects, thereby enhancing the attack efficiency. Our extensive experiments on nine ODs and two datasets show that NumbOD achieves powerful attack performance and high stealthiness.
Authors:Meiqi Wang, Han Qiu, Longnv Xu, Di Wang, Yuanjie Li, Tianwei Zhang, Jun Liu, Hewu Li
Abstract:
We are witnessing a surge in the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware for cost-effective in-orbit computing, such as deep neural network (DNN) based on-satellite sensor data processing, Earth object detection, and task decision.However, once exposed to harsh space environments, COTS hardware is vulnerable to cosmic radiation and suffers from exhaustive single-event upsets (SEUs) and multi-unit upsets (MCUs), both threatening the functionality and correctness of in-orbit computing.Existing hardware and system software protections against radiation are expensive for resource-constrained COTS nanosatellites and overwhelming for upper-layer applications due to their requirement for heavy resource redundancy and frequent reboots. Instead, we make a case for cost-effective space radiation tolerance using application domain knowledge. Our solution for the on-satellite DNN tasks, \name, exploits the uneven SEU/MCU sensitivity across DNN layers and MCUs' spatial correlation for lightweight radiation-tolerant in-orbit AI computing. Our extensive experiments using Chaohu-1 SAR satellite payloads and a hardware-in-the-loop, real data-driven space radiation emulator validate that RedNet can suppress the influence of radiation errors to $\approx$ 0 and accelerate the on-satellite DNN inference speed by 8.4%-33.0% at negligible extra costs.
Authors:Pierre-David Letourneau, Manish Kumar Singh, Hsin-Pai Cheng, Shizhong Han, Yunxiao Shi, Dalton Jones, Matthew Harper Langston, Hong Cai, Fatih Porikli
Abstract:
We present Polynomial Attention Drop-in Replacement (PADRe), a novel and unifying framework designed to replace the conventional self-attention mechanism in transformer models. Notably, several recent alternative attention mechanisms, including Hyena, Mamba, SimA, Conv2Former, and Castling-ViT, can be viewed as specific instances of our PADRe framework. PADRe leverages polynomial functions and draws upon established results from approximation theory, enhancing computational efficiency without compromising accuracy. PADRe's key components include multiplicative nonlinearities, which we implement using straightforward, hardware-friendly operations such as Hadamard products, incurring only linear computational and memory costs. PADRe further avoids the need for using complex functions such as Softmax, yet it maintains comparable or superior accuracy compared to traditional self-attention. We assess the effectiveness of PADRe as a drop-in replacement for self-attention across diverse computer vision tasks. These tasks include image classification, image-based 2D object detection, and 3D point cloud object detection. Empirical results demonstrate that PADRe runs significantly faster than the conventional self-attention (11x ~ 43x faster on server GPU and mobile NPU) while maintaining similar accuracy when substituting self-attention in the transformer models.
Authors:Kaixin Xu, Qingtian Feng, Hao Chen, Zhe Wang, Xue Geng, Xulei Yang, Min Wu, Xiaoli Li, Weisi Lin
Abstract:
Applying deep neural networks to 3D point cloud processing has attracted increasing attention due to its advanced performance in many areas, such as AR/VR, autonomous driving, and robotics. However, as neural network models and 3D point clouds expand in size, it becomes a crucial challenge to reduce the computational and memory overhead to meet latency and energy constraints in real-world applications. Although existing approaches have proposed to reduce both computational cost and memory footprint, most of them only address the spatial redundancy in inputs, i.e. removing the redundancy of background points in 3D data. In this paper, we propose a novel post-training weight pruning scheme for 3D object detection that is (1) orthogonal to all existing point cloud sparsifying methods, which determines redundant parameters in the pretrained model that lead to minimal distortion in both locality and confidence (detection distortion); and (2) a universal plug-and-play pruning framework that works with arbitrary 3D detection model. This framework aims to minimize detection distortion of network output to maximally maintain detection precision, by identifying layer-wise sparsity based on second-order Taylor approximation of the distortion. Albeit utilizing second-order information, we introduced a lightweight scheme to efficiently acquire Hessian information, and subsequently perform dynamic programming to solve the layer-wise sparsity. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Nuscenes and ONCE datasets demonstrate that our approach is able to maintain and even boost the detection precision on pruned model under noticeable computation reduction (FLOPs). Noticeably, we achieve over 3.89x, 3.72x FLOPs reduction on CenterPoint and PVRCNN model, respectively, without mAP decrease, significantly improving the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Hao Wang, Jiayou Qin, Xiwen Chen, Ashish Bastola, John Suchanek, Zihao Gong, Abolfazl Razi
Abstract:
Assistive visual navigation systems for visually impaired individuals have become increasingly popular thanks to the rise of mobile computing. Most of these devices work by translating visual information into voice commands. In complex scenarios where multiple objects are present, it is imperative to prioritize object detection and provide immediate notifications for key entities in specific directions. This brings the need for identifying the observer's motion direction (ego-motion) by merely processing visual information, which is the key contribution of this paper. Specifically, we introduce Motor Focus, a lightweight image-based framework that predicts the ego-motion - the humans (and humanoid machines) movement intentions based on their visual feeds, while filtering out camera motion without any camera calibration. To this end, we implement an optical flow-based pixel-wise temporal analysis method to compensate for the camera motion with a Gaussian aggregation to smooth out the movement prediction area. Subsequently, to evaluate the performance, we collect a dataset including 50 clips of pedestrian scenes in 5 different scenarios. We tested this framework with classical feature detectors such as SIFT and ORB to show the comparison. Our framework demonstrates its superiority in speed (> 40FPS), accuracy (MAE = 60pixels), and robustness (SNR = 23dB), confirming its potential to enhance the usability of vision-based assistive navigation tools in complex environments.
Authors:Hangtao Zhang, Shengshan Hu, Yichen Wang, Leo Yu Zhang, Ziqi Zhou, Xianlong Wang, Yanjun Zhang, Chao Chen
Abstract:
Object detection tasks, crucial in safety-critical systems like autonomous driving, focus on pinpointing object locations. These detectors are known to be susceptible to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor techniques have primarily been adapted from classification tasks, overlooking deeper vulnerabilities specific to object detection. This paper is dedicated to bridging this gap by introducing Detector Collapse} (DC), a brand-new backdoor attack paradigm tailored for object detection. DC is designed to instantly incapacitate detectors (i.e., severely impairing detector's performance and culminating in a denial-of-service). To this end, we develop two innovative attack schemes: Sponge for triggering widespread misidentifications and Blinding for rendering objects invisible. Remarkably, we introduce a novel poisoning strategy exploiting natural objects, enabling DC to act as a practical backdoor in real-world environments. Our experiments on different detectors across several benchmarks show a significant improvement ($\sim$10\%-60\% absolute and $\sim$2-7$\times$ relative) in attack efficacy over state-of-the-art attacks.
Authors:Hao Wang, Jiayou Qin, Ashish Bastola, Xiwen Chen, John Suchanek, Zihao Gong, Abolfazl Razi
Abstract:
This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models(LLMs) in zero-shot anomaly detection for safe visual navigation. With the assistance of the state-of-the-art real-time open-world object detection model Yolo-World and specialized prompts, the proposed framework can identify anomalies within camera-captured frames that include any possible obstacles, then generate concise, audio-delivered descriptions emphasizing abnormalities, assist in safe visual navigation in complex circumstances. Moreover, our proposed framework leverages the advantages of LLMs and the open-vocabulary object detection model to achieve the dynamic scenario switch, which allows users to transition smoothly from scene to scene, which addresses the limitation of traditional visual navigation. Furthermore, this paper explored the performance contribution of different prompt components, provided the vision for future improvement in visual accessibility, and paved the way for LLMs in video anomaly detection and vision-language understanding.
Authors:Zeyu Li, Chenghui Shi, Yuwen Pu, Xuhong Zhang, Yu Li, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
Abstract:
The widespread use of deep learning technology across various industries has made deep neural network models highly valuable and, as a result, attractive targets for potential attackers. Model extraction attacks, particularly query-based model extraction attacks, allow attackers to replicate a substitute model with comparable functionality to the victim model and present a significant threat to the confidentiality and security of MLaaS platforms. While many studies have explored threats of model extraction attacks against classification models in recent years, object detection models, which are more frequently used in real-world scenarios, have received less attention. In this paper, we investigate the challenges and feasibility of query-based model extraction attacks against object detection models and propose an effective attack method called MEAOD. It selects samples from the attacker-possessed dataset to construct an efficient query dataset using active learning and enhances the categories with insufficient objects. We additionally improve the extraction effectiveness by updating the annotations of the query dataset. According to our gray-box and black-box scenarios experiments, we achieve an extraction performance of over 70% under the given condition of a 10k query budget.
Authors:Tianqi Wang, Sukmin Kim, Wenxuan Ji, Enze Xie, Chongjian Ge, Junsong Chen, Zhenguo Li, Ping Luo
Abstract:
Safety is the primary priority of autonomous driving. Nevertheless, no published dataset currently supports the direct and explainable safety evaluation for autonomous driving. In this work, we propose DeepAccident, a large-scale dataset generated via a realistic simulator containing diverse accident scenarios that frequently occur in real-world driving. The proposed DeepAccident dataset includes 57K annotated frames and 285K annotated samples, approximately 7 times more than the large-scale nuScenes dataset with 40k annotated samples. In addition, we propose a new task, end-to-end motion and accident prediction, which can be used to directly evaluate the accident prediction ability for different autonomous driving algorithms. Furthermore, for each scenario, we set four vehicles along with one infrastructure to record data, thus providing diverse viewpoints for accident scenarios and enabling V2X (vehicle-to-everything) research on perception and prediction tasks. Finally, we present a baseline V2X model named V2XFormer that demonstrates superior performance for motion and accident prediction and 3D object detection compared to the single-vehicle model.
Authors:Renrui Zhang, Liuhui Wang, Ziyu Guo, Jianbo Shi
Abstract:
Performances on standard 3D point cloud benchmarks have plateaued, resulting in oversized models and complex network design to make a fractional improvement. We present an alternative to enhance existing deep neural networks without any redesigning or extra parameters, termed as Spatial-Neighbor Adapter (SN-Adapter). Building on any trained 3D network, we utilize its learned encoding capability to extract features of the training dataset and summarize them as prototypical spatial knowledge. For a test point cloud, the SN-Adapter retrieves k nearest neighbors (k-NN) from the pre-constructed spatial prototypes and linearly interpolates the k-NN prediction with that of the original 3D network. By providing complementary characteristics, the proposed SN-Adapter serves as a plug-and-play module to economically improve performance in a non-parametric manner. More importantly, our SN-Adapter can be effectively generalized to various 3D tasks, including shape classification, part segmentation, and 3D object detection, demonstrating its superiority and robustness. We hope our approach could show a new perspective for point cloud analysis and facilitate future research.
Authors:Manli Shu, Le Xue, Ning Yu, Roberto MartÃn-MartÃn, Caiming Xiong, Tom Goldstein, Juan Carlos Niebles, Ran Xu
Abstract:
3D object detection is an essential vision technique for various robotic systems, such as augmented reality and domestic robots. Transformers as versatile network architectures have recently seen great success in 3D point cloud object detection. However, the lack of hierarchy in a plain transformer restrains its ability to learn features at different scales. Such limitation makes transformer detectors perform worse on smaller objects and affects their reliability in indoor environments where small objects are the majority. This work proposes two novel attention operations as generic hierarchical designs for point-based transformer detectors. First, we propose Aggregated Multi-Scale Attention (MS-A) that builds multi-scale tokens from a single-scale input feature to enable more fine-grained feature learning. Second, we propose Size-Adaptive Local Attention (Local-A) with adaptive attention regions for localized feature aggregation within bounding box proposals. Both attention operations are model-agnostic network modules that can be plugged into existing point cloud transformers for end-to-end training. We evaluate our method on two widely used indoor detection benchmarks. By plugging our proposed modules into the state-of-the-art transformer-based 3D detectors, we improve the previous best results on both benchmarks, with more significant improvements on smaller objects.
Authors:Tim Broedermann, Christos Sakaridis, Dengxin Dai, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Besides standard cameras, autonomous vehicles typically include multiple additional sensors, such as lidars and radars, which help acquire richer information for perceiving the content of the driving scene. While several recent works focus on fusing certain pairs of sensors - such as camera with lidar or radar - by using architectural components specific to the examined setting, a generic and modular sensor fusion architecture is missing from the literature. In this work, we propose HRFuser, a modular architecture for multi-modal 2D object detection. It fuses multiple sensors in a multi-resolution fashion and scales to an arbitrary number of input modalities. The design of HRFuser is based on state-of-the-art high-resolution networks for image-only dense prediction and incorporates a novel multi-window cross-attention block as the means to perform fusion of multiple modalities at multiple resolutions. We demonstrate via extensive experiments on nuScenes and the adverse conditions DENSE datasets that our model effectively leverages complementary features from additional modalities, substantially improving upon camera-only performance and consistently outperforming state-of-the-art 3D and 2D fusion methods evaluated on 2D object detection metrics. The source code is publicly available.
Authors:Lena Maier-Hein, Annika Reinke, Patrick Godau, Minu D. Tizabi, Florian Buettner, Evangelia Christodoulou, Ben Glocker, Fabian Isensee, Jens Kleesiek, Michal Kozubek, Mauricio Reyes, Michael A. Riegler, Manuel Wiesenfarth, A. Emre Kavur, Carole H. Sudre, Michael Baumgartner, Matthias Eisenmann, Doreen Heckmann-Nötzel, Tim Rädsch, Laura Acion, Michela Antonelli, Tal Arbel, Spyridon Bakas, Arriel Benis, Matthew Blaschko, M. Jorge Cardoso, Veronika Cheplygina, Beth A. Cimini, Gary S. Collins, Keyvan Farahani, Luciana Ferrer, Adrian Galdran, Bram van Ginneken, Robert Haase, Daniel A. Hashimoto, Michael M. Hoffman, Merel Huisman, Pierre Jannin, Charles E. Kahn, Dagmar Kainmueller, Bernhard Kainz, Alexandros Karargyris, Alan Karthikesalingam, Hannes Kenngott, Florian Kofler, Annette Kopp-Schneider, Anna Kreshuk, Tahsin Kurc, Bennett A. Landman, Geert Litjens, Amin Madani, Klaus Maier-Hein, Anne L. Martel, Peter Mattson, Erik Meijering, Bjoern Menze, Karel G. M. Moons, Henning Müller, Brennan Nichyporuk, Felix Nickel, Jens Petersen, Nasir Rajpoot, Nicola Rieke, Julio Saez-Rodriguez, Clara I. Sánchez, Shravya Shetty, Maarten van Smeden, Ronald M. Summers, Abdel A. Taha, Aleksei Tiulpin, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Ben Van Calster, Gaël Varoquaux, Paul F. Jäger
Abstract:
Increasing evidence shows that flaws in machine learning (ML) algorithm validation are an underestimated global problem. Particularly in automatic biomedical image analysis, chosen performance metrics often do not reflect the domain interest, thus failing to adequately measure scientific progress and hindering translation of ML techniques into practice. To overcome this, our large international expert consortium created Metrics Reloaded, a comprehensive framework guiding researchers in the problem-aware selection of metrics. Following the convergence of ML methodology across application domains, Metrics Reloaded fosters the convergence of validation methodology. The framework was developed in a multi-stage Delphi process and is based on the novel concept of a problem fingerprint - a structured representation of the given problem that captures all aspects that are relevant for metric selection, from the domain interest to the properties of the target structure(s), data set and algorithm output. Based on the problem fingerprint, users are guided through the process of choosing and applying appropriate validation metrics while being made aware of potential pitfalls. Metrics Reloaded targets image analysis problems that can be interpreted as a classification task at image, object or pixel level, namely image-level classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks. To improve the user experience, we implemented the framework in the Metrics Reloaded online tool, which also provides a point of access to explore weaknesses, strengths and specific recommendations for the most common validation metrics. The broad applicability of our framework across domains is demonstrated by an instantiation for various biological and medical image analysis use cases.
Authors:Christos Sakaridis, Haoran Wang, Ke Li, René Zurbrügg, Arpit Jadon, Wim Abbeloos, Daniel Olmeda Reino, Luc Van Gool, Dengxin Dai
Abstract:
Level-5 driving automation requires a robust visual perception system that can parse input images under any condition. However, existing driving datasets for dense semantic perception are either dominated by images captured under normal conditions or are small in scale. To address this, we introduce ACDC, the Adverse Conditions Dataset with Correspondences for training and testing methods for diverse semantic perception tasks on adverse visual conditions. ACDC consists of a large set of 8012 images, half of which (4006) are equally distributed between four common adverse conditions: fog, nighttime, rain, and snow. Each adverse-condition image comes with a high-quality pixel-level panoptic annotation, a corresponding image of the same scene under normal conditions, and a binary mask that distinguishes between intra-image regions of clear and uncertain semantic content. 1503 of the corresponding normal-condition images feature panoptic annotations, raising the total annotated images to 5509. ACDC supports the standard tasks of semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation, as well as the newly introduced uncertainty-aware semantic segmentation. A detailed empirical study demonstrates the challenges that the adverse domains of ACDC pose to state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised approaches and indicates the value of our dataset in steering future progress in the field. Our dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://acdc.vision.ee.ethz.ch
Authors:Annika Reinke, Minu D. Tizabi, Carole H. Sudre, Matthias Eisenmann, Tim Rädsch, Michael Baumgartner, Laura Acion, Michela Antonelli, Tal Arbel, Spyridon Bakas, Peter Bankhead, Arriel Benis, Matthew Blaschko, Florian Buettner, M. Jorge Cardoso, Jianxu Chen, Veronika Cheplygina, Evangelia Christodoulou, Beth Cimini, Gary S. Collins, Sandy Engelhardt, Keyvan Farahani, Luciana Ferrer, Adrian Galdran, Bram van Ginneken, Ben Glocker, Patrick Godau, Robert Haase, Fred Hamprecht, Daniel A. Hashimoto, Doreen Heckmann-Nötzel, Peter Hirsch, Michael M. Hoffman, Merel Huisman, Fabian Isensee, Pierre Jannin, Charles E. Kahn, Dagmar Kainmueller, Bernhard Kainz, Alexandros Karargyris, Alan Karthikesalingam, A. Emre Kavur, Hannes Kenngott, Jens Kleesiek, Andreas Kleppe, Sven Kohler, Florian Kofler, Annette Kopp-Schneider, Thijs Kooi, Michal Kozubek, Anna Kreshuk, Tahsin Kurc, Bennett A. Landman, Geert Litjens, Amin Madani, Klaus Maier-Hein, Anne L. Martel, Peter Mattson, Erik Meijering, Bjoern Menze, David Moher, Karel G. M. Moons, Henning Müller, Brennan Nichyporuk, Felix Nickel, M. Alican Noyan, Jens Petersen, Gorkem Polat, Susanne M. Rafelski, Nasir Rajpoot, Mauricio Reyes, Nicola Rieke, Michael Riegler, Hassan Rivaz, Julio Saez-Rodriguez, Clara I. Sánchez, Julien Schroeter, Anindo Saha, M. Alper Selver, Lalith Sharan, Shravya Shetty, Maarten van Smeden, Bram Stieltjes, Ronald M. Summers, Abdel A. Taha, Aleksei Tiulpin, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Ben Van Calster, Gaël Varoquaux, Manuel Wiesenfarth, Ziv R. Yaniv, Paul Jäger, Lena Maier-Hein
Abstract:
While the importance of automatic image analysis is continuously increasing, recent meta-research revealed major flaws with respect to algorithm validation. Performance metrics are particularly key for meaningful, objective, and transparent performance assessment and validation of the used automatic algorithms, but relatively little attention has been given to the practical pitfalls when using specific metrics for a given image analysis task. These are typically related to (1) the disregard of inherent metric properties, such as the behaviour in the presence of class imbalance or small target structures, (2) the disregard of inherent data set properties, such as the non-independence of the test cases, and (3) the disregard of the actual biomedical domain interest that the metrics should reflect. This living dynamically document has the purpose to illustrate important limitations of performance metrics commonly applied in the field of image analysis. In this context, it focuses on biomedical image analysis problems that can be phrased as image-level classification, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, or object detection task. The current version is based on a Delphi process on metrics conducted by an international consortium of image analysis experts from more than 60 institutions worldwide.
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.
Authors:Weiqi Yan, Lvhai Chen, Huaijia Kou, Shengchuan Zhang, Yan Zhang, Liujuan Cao
Abstract:
Unsupervised Camoflaged Object Detection (UCOD) has gained attention since it doesn't need to rely on extensive pixel-level labels. Existing UCOD methods typically generate pseudo-labels using fixed strategies and train 1 x1 convolutional layers as a simple decoder, leading to low performance compared to fully-supervised methods. We emphasize two drawbacks in these approaches: 1). The model is prone to fitting incorrect knowledge due to the pseudo-label containing substantial noise. 2). The simple decoder fails to capture and learn the semantic features of camouflaged objects, especially for small-sized objects, due to the low-resolution pseudo-labels and severe confusion between foreground and background pixels. To this end, we propose a UCOD method with a teacher-student framework via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning called UCOD-DPL, which contains an Adaptive Pseudo-label Module (APM), a Dual-Branch Adversarial (DBA) decoder, and a Look-Twice mechanism. The APM module adaptively combines pseudo-labels generated by fixed strategies and the teacher model to prevent the model from overfitting incorrect knowledge while preserving the ability for self-correction; the DBA decoder takes adversarial learning of different segmentation objectives, guides the model to overcome the foreground-background confusion of camouflaged objects, and the Look-Twice mechanism mimics the human tendency to zoom in on camouflaged objects and performs secondary refinement on small-sized objects. Extensive experiments show that our method demonstrates outstanding performance, even surpassing some existing fully supervised methods. The code is available now.
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Konstantinos I Roumeliotis, Rahul Harsha Cheppally, Marco Flores Calero, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
This review provides a systematic analysis of comprehensive survey of 3D object detection with vision-language models(VLMs) , a rapidly advancing area at the intersection of 3D vision and multimodal AI. By examining over 100 research papers, we provide the first systematic analysis dedicated to 3D object detection with vision-language models. We begin by outlining the unique challenges of 3D object detection with vision-language models, emphasizing differences from 2D detection in spatial reasoning and data complexity. Traditional approaches using point clouds and voxel grids are compared to modern vision-language frameworks like CLIP and 3D LLMs, which enable open-vocabulary detection and zero-shot generalization. We review key architectures, pretraining strategies, and prompt engineering methods that align textual and 3D features for effective 3D object detection with vision-language models. Visualization examples and evaluation benchmarks are discussed to illustrate performance and behavior. Finally, we highlight current challenges, such as limited 3D-language datasets and computational demands, and propose future research directions to advance 3D object detection with vision-language models. >Object Detection, Vision-Language Models, Agents, VLMs, LLMs, AI
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Rahul Harsha Cheppally, Ajay Sharda, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
This study conducts a detailed comparison of RF-DETR object detection base model and YOLOv12 object detection model configurations for detecting greenfruits in a complex orchard environment marked by label ambiguity, occlusions, and background blending. A custom dataset was developed featuring both single-class (greenfruit) and multi-class (occluded and non-occluded greenfruits) annotations to assess model performance under dynamic real-world conditions. RF-DETR object detection model, utilizing a DINOv2 backbone and deformable attention, excelled in global context modeling, effectively identifying partially occluded or ambiguous greenfruits. In contrast, YOLOv12 leveraged CNN-based attention for enhanced local feature extraction, optimizing it for computational efficiency and edge deployment. RF-DETR achieved the highest mean Average Precision (mAP50) of 0.9464 in single-class detection, proving its superior ability to localize greenfruits in cluttered scenes. Although YOLOv12N recorded the highest mAP@50:95 of 0.7620, RF-DETR consistently outperformed in complex spatial scenarios. For multi-class detection, RF-DETR led with an mAP@50 of 0.8298, showing its capability to differentiate between occluded and non-occluded fruits, while YOLOv12L scored highest in mAP@50:95 with 0.6622, indicating better classification in detailed occlusion contexts. Training dynamics analysis highlighted RF-DETR's swift convergence, particularly in single-class settings where it plateaued within 10 epochs, demonstrating the efficiency of transformer-based architectures in adapting to dynamic visual data. These findings validate RF-DETR's effectiveness for precision agricultural applications, with YOLOv12 suited for fast-response scenarios. >Index Terms: RF-DETR object detection, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, YOLOv14, YOLOv15, YOLOE, YOLO World, YOLO, You Only Look Once, Roboflow, Detection Transformers, CNNs
Authors:Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Pasindu Wickramasinghe, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
The rising demand for energy-efficient edge AI systems (e.g., mobile agents/robots) has increased the interest in neuromorphic computing, since it offers ultra-low power/energy AI computation through spiking neural network (SNN) algorithms on neuromorphic processors. However, their efficient implementation strategy has not been comprehensively studied, hence limiting SNN deployments for edge AI systems. Toward this, we propose a design methodology to enable efficient SNN processing on commodity neuromorphic processors. To do this, we first study the key characteristics of targeted neuromorphic hardware (e.g., memory and compute budgets), and leverage this information to perform compatibility analysis for network selection. Afterward, we employ a mapping strategy for efficient SNN implementation on the targeted processor. Furthermore, we incorporate an efficient on-chip learning mechanism to update the systems' knowledge for adapting to new input classes and dynamic environments. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology leads the system to achieve low latency of inference (i.e., less than 50ms for image classification, less than 200ms for real-time object detection in video streaming, and less than 1ms in keyword recognition) and low latency of on-chip learning (i.e., less than 2ms for keyword recognition), while incurring less than 250mW of processing power and less than 15mJ of energy consumption across the respective different applications and scenarios. These results show the potential of the proposed methodology in enabling efficient edge AI systems for diverse application use-cases.
Authors:Hao Li, Yubin Xiao, Ke Liang, Mengzhu Wang, Long Lan, Kenli Li, Xinwang Liu
Abstract:
Single Domain Generalization (SDG) aims to train models with consistent performance across diverse scenarios using data from a single source. While using latent diffusion models (LDMs) show promise in augmenting limited source data, we demonstrate that directly using synthetic data can be detrimental due to significant feature distribution discrepancies between synthetic and real target domains, leading to performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose Discriminative Domain Reassembly and Soft-Fusion (DRSF), a training framework leveraging synthetic data to improve model generalization. We employ LDMs to produce diverse pseudo-target domain samples and introduce two key modules to handle distribution bias. First, Discriminative Feature Decoupling and Reassembly (DFDR) module uses entropy-guided attention to recalibrate channel-level features, suppressing synthetic noise while preserving semantic consistency. Second, Multi-pseudo-domain Soft Fusion (MDSF) module uses adversarial training with latent-space feature interpolation, creating continuous feature transitions between domains. Extensive SDG experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate that DRSF achieves substantial performance gains with only marginal computational overhead. Notably, DRSF's plug-and-play architecture enables seamless integration with unsupervised domain adaptation paradigms, underscoring its broad applicability in addressing diverse and real-world domain challenges.
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
This study evaluated the performance of the YOLOv12 object detection model, and compared against the performances YOLOv11 and YOLOv10 for apple detection in commercial orchards based on the model training completed entirely on synthetic images generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). The YOLOv12n configuration achieved the highest precision at 0.916, the highest recall at 0.969, and the highest mean Average Precision (mAP@50) at 0.978. In comparison, the YOLOv11 series was led by YOLO11x, which achieved the highest precision at 0.857, recall at 0.85, and mAP@50 at 0.91. For the YOLOv10 series, YOLOv10b and YOLOv10l both achieved the highest precision at 0.85, with YOLOv10n achieving the highest recall at 0.8 and mAP@50 at 0.89. These findings demonstrated that YOLOv12, when trained on realistic LLM-generated datasets surpassed its predecessors in key performance metrics. The technique also offered a cost-effective solution by reducing the need for extensive manual data collection in the agricultural field. In addition, this study compared the computational efficiency of all versions of YOLOv12, v11 and v10, where YOLOv11n reported the lowest inference time at 4.7 ms, compared to YOLOv12n's 5.6 ms and YOLOv10n's 5.9 ms. Although YOLOv12 is new and more accurate than YOLOv11, and YOLOv10, YOLO11n still stays the fastest YOLO model among YOLOv10, YOLOv11 and YOLOv12 series of models. (Index: YOLOv12, YOLOv11, YOLOv10, YOLOv13, YOLOv14, YOLOv15, YOLOE, YOLO Object detection)
Authors:Chuanguang Yang, Xinqiang Yu, Han Yang, Zhulin An, Chengqing Yu, Libo Huang, Yongjun Xu
Abstract:
Multi-teacher Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers diverse knowledge from a teacher pool to a student network. The core problem of multi-teacher KD is how to balance distillation strengths among various teachers. Most existing methods often develop weighting strategies from an individual perspective of teacher performance or teacher-student gaps, lacking comprehensive information for guidance. This paper proposes Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation with Reinforcement Learning (MTKD-RL) to optimize multi-teacher weights. In this framework, we construct both teacher performance and teacher-student gaps as state information to an agent. The agent outputs the teacher weight and can be updated by the return reward from the student. MTKD-RL reinforces the interaction between the student and teacher using an agent in an RL-based decision mechanism, achieving better matching capability with more meaningful weights. Experimental results on visual recognition tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, demonstrate that MTKD-RL achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to the existing multi-teacher KD works.
Authors:Hao Li, Xiangyuan Yang, Mengzhu Wang, Long Lan, Ke Liang, Xinwang Liu, Kenli Li
Abstract:
Object detection is a critical task in computer vision, with applications in various domains such as autonomous driving and urban scene monitoring. However, deep learning-based approaches often demand large volumes of annotated data, which are costly and difficult to acquire, particularly in complex and unpredictable real-world environments. This dependency significantly hampers the generalization capability of existing object detection techniques. To address this issue, we introduce a novel single-domain object detection generalization method, named GoDiff, which leverages a pre-trained model to enhance generalization in unseen domains. Central to our approach is the Pseudo Target Data Generation (PTDG) module, which employs a latent diffusion model to generate pseudo-target domain data that preserves source domain characteristics while introducing stylistic variations. By integrating this pseudo data with source domain data, we diversify the training dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-style instance normalization technique to blend style features from different domains generated by the PTDG module, thereby increasing the detector's robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only enhances the generalization ability of existing detectors but also functions as a plug-and-play enhancement for other single-domain generalization methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors:Tobias Rohe, Barbara Böhm, Michael Kölle, Jonas Stein, Robert Müller, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Abstract:
Drones have revolutionized various domains, including agriculture. Recent advances in deep learning have propelled among other things object detection in computer vision. This study utilized YOLO, a real-time object detector, to identify and count coconut palm trees in Ghanaian farm drone footage. The farm presented has lost track of its trees due to different planting phases. While manual counting would be very tedious and error-prone, accurately determining the number of trees is crucial for efficient planning and management of agricultural processes, especially for optimizing yields and predicting production. We assessed YOLO for palm detection within a semi-automated framework, evaluated accuracy augmentations, and pondered its potential for farmers. Data was captured in September 2022 via drones. To optimize YOLO with scarce data, synthetic images were created for model training and validation. The YOLOv7 model, pretrained on the COCO dataset (excluding coconut palms), was adapted using tailored data. Trees from footage were repositioned on synthetic images, with testing on distinct authentic images. In our experiments, we adjusted hyperparameters, improving YOLO's mean average precision (mAP). We also tested various altitudes to determine the best drone height. From an initial mAP@.5 of $0.65$, we achieved 0.88, highlighting the value of synthetic images in agricultural scenarios.
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
In this study, a robust method for 3D pose estimation of immature green apples (fruitlets) in commercial orchards was developed, utilizing the YOLO11(or YOLOv11) object detection and pose estimation algorithm alongside Vision Transformers (ViT) for depth estimation (Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT) and Depth Anything V2). For object detection and pose estimation, performance comparisons of YOLO11 (YOLO11n, YOLO11s, YOLO11m, YOLO11l and YOLO11x) and YOLOv8 (YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s, YOLOv8m, YOLOv8l and YOLOv8x) were made under identical hyperparameter settings among the all configurations. It was observed that YOLO11n surpassed all configurations of YOLO11 and YOLOv8 in terms of box precision and pose precision, achieving scores of 0.91 and 0.915, respectively. Conversely, YOLOv8n exhibited the highest box and pose recall scores of 0.905 and 0.925, respectively. Regarding the mean average precision at 50\% intersection over union (mAP@50), YOLO11s led all configurations with a box mAP@50 score of 0.94, while YOLOv8n achieved the highest pose mAP@50 score of 0.96. In terms of image processing speed, YOLO11n outperformed all configurations with an impressive inference speed of 2.7 ms, significantly faster than the quickest YOLOv8 configuration, YOLOv8n, which processed images in 7.8 ms. Subsequent integration of ViTs for the green fruit's pose depth estimation revealed that Depth Anything V2 outperformed Dense Prediction Transformer in 3D pose length validation, achieving the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.52 and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.28, demonstrating exceptional precision in estimating immature green fruit lengths. Integration of YOLO11 and Depth Anything Model provides a promising solution to 3D pose estimation of immature green fruits for robotic thinning applications. (YOLOv11 pose detection, YOLOv11 Pose, YOLOv11 Keypoints detection, YOLOv11 pose estimation)
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Zhichao Meng, Martin Churuvija, Xiaoqiang Du, Zenghong Ma, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
This study systematically performed an extensive real-world evaluation of the performances of all configurations of YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, YOLO11( or YOLOv11), and YOLOv12 object detection algorithms in terms of precision, recall, mean Average Precision at 50\% Intersection over Union (mAP@50), and computational speeds including pre-processing, inference, and post-processing times immature green apple (or fruitlet) detection in commercial orchards. Additionally, this research performed and validated in-field counting of the fruitlets using an iPhone and machine vision sensors. Among the configurations, YOLOv12l recorded the highest recall rate at 0.90, compared to all other configurations of YOLO models. Likewise, YOLOv10x achieved the highest precision score of 0.908, while YOLOv9 Gelan-c attained a precision of 0.903. Analysis of mAP@0.50 revealed that YOLOv9 Gelan-base and YOLOv9 Gelan-e reached peak scores of 0.935, with YOLO11s and YOLOv12l following closely at 0.933 and 0.931, respectively. For counting validation using images captured with an iPhone 14 Pro, the YOLO11n configuration demonstrated outstanding accuracy, recording RMSE values of 4.51 for Honeycrisp, 4.59 for Cosmic Crisp, 4.83 for Scilate, and 4.96 for Scifresh; corresponding MAE values were 4.07, 3.98, 7.73, and 3.85. Similar performance trends were observed with RGB-D sensor data. Moreover, sensor-specific training on Intel Realsense data significantly enhanced model performance. YOLOv11n achieved highest inference speed of 2.4 ms, outperforming YOLOv8n (4.1 ms), YOLOv9 Gelan-s (11.5 ms), YOLOv10n (5.5 ms), and YOLOv12n (4.6 ms), underscoring its suitability for real-time object detection applications. (YOLOv12 architecture, YOLOv11 Architecture, YOLOv12 object detection, YOLOv11 object detecion, YOLOv12 segmentation)
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Marco Flores Calero, Rizwan Qureshi, Chetan Badgujar, Upesh Nepal, Alwin Poulose, Peter Zeno, Uday Bhanu Prakash Vaddevolu, Sheheryar Khan, Maged Shoman, Hong Yan, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
This review systematically examines the progression of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithms from YOLOv1 to the recently unveiled YOLOv12. Employing a reverse chronological analysis, this study examines the advancements introduced by YOLO algorithms, beginning with YOLOv12 and progressing through YOLO11 (or YOLOv11), YOLOv10, YOLOv9, YOLOv8, and subsequent versions to explore each version's contributions to enhancing speed, detection accuracy, and computational efficiency in real-time object detection. Additionally, this study reviews the alternative versions derived from YOLO architectural advancements of YOLO-NAS, YOLO-X, YOLO-R, DAMO-YOLO, and Gold-YOLO. Moreover, the study highlights the transformative impact of YOLO models across five critical application areas: autonomous vehicles and traffic safety, healthcare and medical imaging, industrial manufacturing, surveillance and security, and agriculture. By detailing the incremental technological advancements in subsequent YOLO versions, this review chronicles the evolution of YOLO, and discusses the challenges and limitations in each of the earlier versions. The evolution signifies a path towards integrating YOLO with multimodal, context-aware, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems for the next YOLO decade, promising significant implications for future developments in AI-driven applications. YOLO Review, YOLO Advances, YOLOv13, YOLOv14, YOLOv15, YOLOv16, YOLOv17, YOLOv18, YOLOv19, YOLOv20, YOLO review, YOLO Object Detection
Authors:Zijia An, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang, Ruiqi Liu, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu
Abstract:
Existing Incremental Object Detection (IOD) methods partially alleviate catastrophic forgetting when incrementally detecting new objects in real-world scenarios. However, many of these methods rely on the assumption that unlabeled old-class objects may co-occur with labeled new-class objects in the incremental data. When unlabeled old-class objects are absent, the performance of existing methods tends to degrade. The absence can be mitigated by generating old-class samples, but it incurs high costs. This paper argues that previous generation-based IOD suffers from redundancy, both in the use of generative models, which require additional training and storage, and in the overproduction of generated samples, many of which do not contribute significantly to performance improvements. To eliminate the redundancy, we propose Inversed Objects Replay (IOR). Specifically, we generate old-class samples by inversing the original detectors, thus eliminating the necessity of training and storing additional generative models. We propose augmented replay to reuse the objects in generated samples, reducing redundant generations. Moreover, we propose high-value knowledge distillation focusing on the positions of old-class objects overwhelmed by the background, which transfers the knowledge to the incremental detector. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO 2017 demonstrate that our method can efficiently improve detection performance in IOD scenarios with the absence of old-class objects.
Authors:Chi Huang, Xinyang Li, Yansong Qu, Changli Wu, Xiaofan Li, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao
Abstract:
In indoor scenes, the diverse distribution of object locations and scales makes the visual 3D perception task a big challenge.
Previous works (e.g, NeRF-Det) have demonstrated that implicit representation has the capacity to benefit the visual 3D perception task in indoor scenes with high amount of overlap between input images.
However, previous works cannot fully utilize the advancement of implicit representation because of fixed sampling and simple multi-view feature fusion.
In this paper, inspired by sparse fashion method (e.g, DETR3D), we propose a simple yet effective method, NeRF-DetS, to address above issues. NeRF-DetS includes two modules: Progressive Adaptive Sampling Strategy (PASS) and Depth-Guided Simplified Multi-Head Attention Fusion (DS-MHA).
Specifically,
(1)PASS can automatically sample features of each layer within a dense 3D detector, using offsets predicted by the previous layer.
(2)DS-MHA can not only efficiently fuse multi-view features with strong occlusion awareness but also reduce computational cost.
Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 dataset demonstrate our NeRF-DetS outperforms NeRF-Det, by achieving +5.02% and +5.92% improvement in mAP under IoU25 and IoU50, respectively. Also, NeRF-DetS shows consistent improvements on ARKITScenes.
Authors:Iqra Bano, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
Autonomous Driving (AD) systems are considered as the future of human mobility and transportation. Solving computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection/segmentation, with high accuracy and low power/energy consumption, is highly needed to realize AD systems in real life. These requirements can potentially be satisfied by Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). However, the state-of-the-art works in SNN-based AD systems still focus on proposing network models that can achieve high accuracy, and they have not systematically studied the roles of SNN parameters when used for learning event-based automotive data. Therefore, we still lack understanding of how to effectively develop SNN models for AD systems. Toward this, we propose a novel methodology to systematically study and analyze the impact of SNN parameters considering event-based automotive data, then leverage this analysis for enhancing SNN developments. To do this, we first explore different settings of SNN parameters that directly affect the learning mechanism (i.e., batch size, learning rate, neuron threshold potential, and weight decay), then analyze the accuracy results. Afterward, we propose techniques that jointly improve SNN accuracy and reduce training time. Experimental results show that our methodology can improve the SNN models for AD systems than the state-of-the-art, as it achieves higher accuracy (i.e., 86%) for the NCARS dataset, and it can also achieve iso-accuracy (i.e., ~85% with standard deviation less than 0.5%) while speeding up the training time by 1.9x. In this manner, our research work provides a set of guidelines for SNN parameter enhancements, thereby enabling the practical developments of SNN-based AD systems.
Authors:Daniel Uvaydov, Milin Zhang, Clifton Paul Robinson, Salvatore D'Oro, Tommaso Melodia, Francesco Restuccia
Abstract:
Spectrum has become an extremely scarce and congested resource. As a consequence, spectrum sensing enables the coexistence of different wireless technologies in shared spectrum bands. Most existing work requires spectrograms to classify signals. Ultimately, this implies that images need to be continuously created from I/Q samples, thus creating unacceptable latency for real-time operations. In addition, spectrogram-based approaches do not achieve sufficient granularity level as they are based on object detection performed on pixels and are based on rectangular bounding boxes. For this reason, we propose a completely novel approach based on semantic spectrum segmentation, where multiple signals are simultaneously classified and localized in both time and frequency at the I/Q level. Conversely from the state-of-the-art computer vision algorithm, we add non-local blocks to combine the spatial features of signals, and thus achieve better performance. In addition, we propose a novel data generation approach where a limited set of easy-to-collect real-world wireless signals are ``stitched together'' to generate large-scale, wideband, and diverse datasets. Experimental results obtained on multiple testbeds (including the Arena testbed) using multiple antennas, multiple sampling frequencies, and multiple radios over the course of 3 days show that our approach classifies and localizes signals with a mean intersection over union (IOU) of 96.70% across 5 wireless protocols while performing in real-time with a latency of 2.6 ms. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach based on non-local blocks achieves 7% more accuracy when segmenting the most challenging signals with respect to the state-of-the-art U-Net algorithm. We will release our 17 GB dataset and code.
Authors:Ranjan Sapkota, Dawood Ahmed, Martin Churuvija, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
Detecting and estimating size of apples during the early stages of growth is crucial for predicting yield, pest management, and making informed decisions related to crop-load management, harvest and post-harvest logistics, and marketing. Traditional fruit size measurement methods are laborious and timeconsuming. This study employs the state-of-the-art YOLOv8 object detection and instance segmentation algorithm in conjunction with geometric shape fitting techniques on 3D point cloud data to accurately determine the size of immature green apples (or fruitlet) in a commercial orchard environment. The methodology utilized two RGB-D sensors: Intel RealSense D435i and Microsoft Azure Kinect DK. Notably, the YOLOv8 instance segmentation models exhibited proficiency in immature green apple detection, with the YOLOv8m-seg model achieving the highest AP@0.5 and AP@0.75 scores of 0.94 and 0.91, respectively. Using the ellipsoid fitting technique on images from the Azure Kinect, we achieved an RMSE of 2.35 mm, MAE of 1.66 mm, MAPE of 6.15 mm, and an R-squared value of 0.9 in estimating the size of apple fruitlets. Challenges such as partial occlusion caused some error in accurately delineating and sizing green apples using the YOLOv8-based segmentation technique, particularly in fruit clusters. In a comparison with 102 outdoor samples, the size estimation technique performed better on the images acquired with Microsoft Azure Kinect than the same with Intel Realsense D435i. This superiority is evident from the metrics: the RMSE values (2.35 mm for Azure Kinect vs. 9.65 mm for Realsense D435i), MAE values (1.66 mm for Azure Kinect vs. 7.8 mm for Realsense D435i), and the R-squared values (0.9 for Azure Kinect vs. 0.77 for Realsense D435i).
Authors:Julian Moosmann, Pietro Bonazzi, Yawei Li, Sizhen Bian, Philipp Mayer, Luca Benini, Michele Magno
Abstract:
Smart glasses are rapidly gaining advanced functionality thanks to cutting-edge computing technologies, accelerated hardware architectures, and tiny AI algorithms. Integrating AI into smart glasses featuring a small form factor and limited battery capacity is still challenging when targeting full-day usage for a satisfactory user experience. This paper illustrates the design and implementation of tiny machine-learning algorithms exploiting novel low-power processors to enable prolonged continuous operation in smart glasses. We explore the energy- and latency-efficient of smart glasses in the case of real-time object detection. To this goal, we designed a smart glasses prototype as a research platform featuring two microcontrollers, including a novel milliwatt-power RISC-V parallel processor with a hardware accelerator for visual AI, and a Bluetooth low-power module for communication. The smart glasses integrate power cycling mechanisms, including image and audio sensing interfaces. Furthermore, we developed a family of novel tiny deep-learning models based on YOLO with sub-million parameters customized for microcontroller-based inference dubbed TinyissimoYOLO v1.3, v5, and v8, aiming at benchmarking object detection with smart glasses for energy and latency. Evaluations on the prototype of the smart glasses demonstrate TinyissimoYOLO's 17ms inference latency and 1.59mJ energy consumption per inference while ensuring acceptable detection accuracy. Further evaluation reveals an end-to-end latency from image capturing to the algorithm's prediction of 56ms or equivalently 18 fps, with a total power consumption of 62.9mW, equivalent to a 9.3 hours of continuous run time on a 154mAh battery. These results outperform MCUNet (TinyNAS+TinyEngine), which runs a simpler task (image classification) at just 7.3 fps per second.
Authors:Nicky Zimmerman, Hanna Müller, Michele Magno, Luca Benini
Abstract:
Nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are well-fit for indoor applications and for close proximity to humans. To enable autonomy, the nano-UAV must be able to self-localize in its operating environment. This is a particularly-challenging task due to the limited sensing and compute resources on board. This work presents an online and onboard approach for localization in floor plans annotated with semantic information. Unlike sensor-based maps, floor plans are readily-available, and do not increase the cost and time of deployment. To overcome the difficulty of localizing in sparse maps, the proposed approach fuses geometric information from miniaturized time-of-flight sensors and semantic cues. The semantic information is extracted from images by deploying a state-of-the-art object detection model on a high-performance multi-core microcontroller onboard the drone, consuming only 2.5mJ per frame and executing in 38ms. In our evaluation, we globally localize in a real-world office environment, achieving 90% success rate. We also release an open-source implementation of our work.
Authors:Zhening Huang, Xiaoyang Wu, Xi Chen, Hengshuang Zhao, Lei Zhu, Joan Lasenby
Abstract:
In this work, we introduce OpenIns3D, a new 3D-input-only framework for 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding. The OpenIns3D framework employs a "Mask-Snap-Lookup" scheme. The "Mask" module learns class-agnostic mask proposals in 3D point clouds, the "Snap" module generates synthetic scene-level images at multiple scales and leverages 2D vision-language models to extract interesting objects, and the "Lookup" module searches through the outcomes of "Snap" to assign category names to the proposed masks. This approach, yet simple, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of 3D open-vocabulary tasks, including recognition, object detection, and instance segmentation, on both indoor and outdoor datasets. Moreover, OpenIns3D facilitates effortless switching between different 2D detectors without requiring retraining. When integrated with powerful 2D open-world models, it achieves excellent results in scene understanding tasks. Furthermore, when combined with LLM-powered 2D models, OpenIns3D exhibits an impressive capability to comprehend and process highly complex text queries that demand intricate reasoning and real-world knowledge. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/OpenIns3D/
Authors:Julian Moosmann, Hanna Mueller, Nicky Zimmerman, Georg Rutishauser, Luca Benini, Michele Magno
Abstract:
This paper deploys and explores variants of TinyissimoYOLO, a highly flexible and fully quantized ultra-lightweight object detection network designed for edge systems with a power envelope of a few milliwatts. With experimental measurements, we present a comprehensive characterization of the network's detection performance, exploring the impact of various parameters, including input resolution, number of object classes, and hidden layer adjustments. We deploy variants of TinyissimoYOLO on state-of-the-art ultra-low-power extreme edge platforms, presenting an in-depth a comparison on latency, energy efficiency, and their ability to efficiently parallelize the workload. In particular, the paper presents a comparison between a novel parallel RISC-V processor (GAP9 from Greenwaves) with and without use of its on-chip hardware accelerator, an ARM Cortex-M7 core (STM32H7 from ST Microelectronics), two ARM Cortex-M4 cores (STM32L4 from STM and Apollo4b from Ambiq), and a multi-core platform with a CNN hardware accelerator (Analog Devices MAX78000). Experimental results show that the GAP9's hardware accelerator achieves the lowest inference latency and energy at 2.12ms and 150uJ respectively, which is around 2x faster and 20% more efficient than the next best platform, the MAX78000. The hardware accelerator of GAP9 can even run an increased resolution version of TinyissimoYOLO with 112x112 pixels and 10 detection classes within 3.2ms, consuming 245uJ. To showcase the competitiveness of a versatile general-purpose system we also deployed and profiled a multi-core implementation on GAP9 at different operating points, achieving 11.3ms with the lowest-latency and 490uJ with the most energy-efficient configuration. With this paper, we demonstrate the suitability and flexibility of TinyissimoYOLO on state-of-the-art detection datasets for real-time ultra-low-power edge inference.
Authors:Salik Ram Khanal, Ranjan Sapkota, Dawood Ahmed, Uddhav Bhattarai, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
Early-stage identification of fruit flowers that are in both opened and unopened condition in an orchard environment is significant information to perform crop load management operations such as flower thinning and pollination using automated and robotic platforms. These operations are important in tree-fruit agriculture to enhance fruit quality, manage crop load, and enhance the overall profit. The recent development in agricultural automation suggests that this can be done using robotics which includes machine vision technology. In this article, we proposed a vision system that detects early-stage flowers in an unstructured orchard environment using YOLOv5 object detection algorithm. For the robotics implementation, the position of a cluster of the flower blossom is important to navigate the robot and the end effector. The centroid of individual flowers (both open and unopen) was identified and associated with flower clusters via K-means clustering. The accuracy of the opened and unopened flower detection is achieved up to mAP of 81.9% in commercial orchard images.
Authors:Zhenyu Wang, Yali Li, Xi Chen, Ser-Nam Lim, Antonio Torralba, Hengshuang Zhao, Shengjin Wang
Abstract:
In this paper, we formally address universal object detection, which aims to detect every scene and predict every category. The dependence on human annotations, the limited visual information, and the novel categories in the open world severely restrict the universality of traditional detectors. We propose UniDetector, a universal object detector that has the ability to recognize enormous categories in the open world. The critical points for the universality of UniDetector are: 1) it leverages images of multiple sources and heterogeneous label spaces for training through the alignment of image and text spaces, which guarantees sufficient information for universal representations. 2) it generalizes to the open world easily while keeping the balance between seen and unseen classes, thanks to abundant information from both vision and language modalities. 3) it further promotes the generalization ability to novel categories through our proposed decoupling training manner and probability calibration. These contributions allow UniDetector to detect over 7k categories, the largest measurable category size so far, with only about 500 classes participating in training. Our UniDetector behaves the strong zero-shot generalization ability on large-vocabulary datasets like LVIS, ImageNetBoxes, and VisualGenome - it surpasses the traditional supervised baselines by more than 4\% on average without seeing any corresponding images. On 13 public detection datasets with various scenes, UniDetector also achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a 3\% amount of training data.
Authors:Malaika Zafar, Roohan Ahmed Khan, Faryal Batool, Yasheerah Yaqoot, Ziang Guo, Mikhail Litvinov, Aleksey Fedoseev, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract:
With the growing demand for efficient logistics, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being paired with automated guided vehicles (AGVs). While UAVs offer the ability to navigate through dense environments and varying altitudes, they are limited by battery life, payload capacity, and flight duration, necessitating coordinated ground support.
Focusing on heterogeneous navigation, SwarmVLM addresses these limitations by enabling semantic collaboration between UAVs and ground robots through impedance control. The system leverages the Vision Language Model (VLM) and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to adjust impedance control parameters in response to environmental changes. In this framework, the UAV acts as a leader using Artificial Potential Field (APF) planning for real-time navigation, while the ground robot follows via virtual impedance links with adaptive link topology to avoid collisions with short obstacles.
The system demonstrated a 92% success rate across 12 real-world trials. Under optimal lighting conditions, the VLM-RAG framework achieved 8% accuracy in object detection and selection of impedance parameters. The mobile robot prioritized short obstacle avoidance, occasionally resulting in a lateral deviation of up to 50 cm from the UAV path, which showcases safe navigation in a cluttered setting.
Authors:Roohan Ahmed Khan, Valerii Serpiva, Demetros Aschalew, Aleksey Fedoseev, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract:
Autonomous drone navigation in dynamic environments remains a critical challenge, especially when dealing with unpredictable scenarios including fast-moving objects with rapidly changing goal positions. While traditional planners and classical optimisation methods have been extensively used to address this dynamic problem, they often face real-time, unpredictable changes that ultimately leads to sub-optimal performance in terms of adaptiveness and real-time decision making. In this work, we propose a novel motion planner, AgilePilot, based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that is trained in dynamic conditions, coupled with real-time Computer Vision (CV) for object detections during flight. The training-to-deployment framework bridges the Sim2Real gap, leveraging sophisticated reward structures that promotes both safety and agility depending upon environment conditions. The system can rapidly adapt to changing environments, while achieving a maximum speed of 3.0 m/s in real-world scenarios. In comparison, our approach outperforms classical algorithms such as Artificial Potential Field (APF) based motion planner by 3 times, both in performance and tracking accuracy of dynamic targets by using velocity predictions while exhibiting 90% success rate in 75 conducted experiments. This work highlights the effectiveness of DRL in tackling real-time dynamic navigation challenges, offering intelligent safety and agility.
Authors:Ngoc Dung Huynh, Mohamed Reda Bouadjenek, Sunil Aryal, Imran Razzak, Hakim Hacid
Abstract:
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an evolving research field aimed at enabling machines to answer questions about visual content by integrating image and language processing techniques such as feature extraction, object detection, text embedding, natural language understanding, and language generation. With the growth of multimodal data research, VQA has gained significant attention due to its broad applications, including interactive educational tools, medical image diagnosis, customer service, entertainment, and social media captioning. Additionally, VQA plays a vital role in assisting visually impaired individuals by generating descriptive content from images. This survey introduces a taxonomy of VQA architectures, categorizing them based on design choices and key components to facilitate comparative analysis and evaluation. We review major VQA approaches, focusing on deep learning-based methods, and explore the emerging field of Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) that have demonstrated success in multimodal tasks like VQA. The paper further examines available datasets and evaluation metrics essential for measuring VQA system performance, followed by an exploration of real-world VQA applications. Finally, we highlight ongoing challenges and future directions in VQA research, presenting open questions and potential areas for further development. This survey serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners interested in the latest advancements and future
Authors:Kunyun Wang, Shuo Yang, Jieru Zhao, Wenchao Ding, Quan Chen, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo
Abstract:
Deep learning models have become pivotal in the field of video processing and is increasingly critical in practical applications such as autonomous driving and object detection. Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated their power, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) remain a highly efficient and high-performance choice for feature extraction and encoding. However, the intensive computational demands of convolution operations hinder its broader adoption as a video encoder. Given the inherent temporal continuity in video frames, changes between consecutive frames are minimal, allowing for the skipping of redundant computations. This technique, which we term as Diff Computation, presents two primary challenges. First, Diff Computation requires to cache intermediate feature maps to ensure the correctness of non-linear computations, leading to significant memory consumption. Second, the imbalance of sparsity among layers, introduced by Diff Computation, incurs accuracy degradation. To address these issues, we propose a memory-efficient scheduling method to eliminate memory overhead and an online adjustment mechanism to minimize accuracy degradation. We integrate these techniques into our framework, SparseTem, to seamlessly support various CNN-based video encoders. SparseTem achieves speedup of 1.79x for EfficientDet and 4.72x for CRNN, with minimal accuracy drop and no additional memory overhead. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SparseTem sets a new state-of-the-art by effectively utilizing temporal continuity to accelerate CNN-based video encoders.
Authors:Shuhan Dong, Yunsong Li, Weiying Xie, Jiaqing Zhang, Jiayuan Tian, Danian Yang, Jie Lei
Abstract:
Multimodal object detection leverages diverse modal information to enhance the accuracy and robustness of detectors. By learning long-term dependencies, Transformer can effectively integrate multimodal features in the feature extraction stage, which greatly improves the performance of multimodal object detection. However, current methods merely stack Transformer-guided fusion techniques without exploring their capability to extract features at various depth layers of network, thus limiting the improvements in detection performance. In this paper, we introduce an accurate and efficient object detection method named SeaDATE. Initially, we propose a novel dual attention Feature Fusion (DTF) module that, under Transformer's guidance, integrates local and global information through a dual attention mechanism, strengthening the fusion of modal features from orthogonal perspectives using spatial and channel tokens. Meanwhile, our theoretical analysis and empirical validation demonstrate that the Transformer-guided fusion method, treating images as sequences of pixels for fusion, performs better on shallow features' detail information compared to deep semantic information. To address this, we designed a contrastive learning (CL) module aimed at learning features of multimodal samples, remedying the shortcomings of Transformer-guided fusion in extracting deep semantic features, and effectively utilizing cross-modal information. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the FLIR, LLVIP, and M3FD datasets have proven our method to be effective, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance.
Authors:Denis Davletshin, Iana Zhura, Vladislav Cheremnykh, Mikhail Rybiyanov, Aleksey Fedoseev, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract:
The paper focuses on the algorithm for improving the quality of 3D reconstruction and segmentation in DSP-SLAM by enhancing the RGB image quality. SharpSLAM algorithm developed by us aims to decrease the influence of high dynamic motion on visual object-oriented SLAM through image deblurring, improving all aspects of object-oriented SLAM, including localization, mapping, and object reconstruction.
The experimental results revealed noticeable improvement in object detection quality, with F-score increased from 82.9% to 86.2% due to the higher number of features and corresponding map points. The RMSE of signed distance function has also decreased from 17.2 to 15.4 cm. Furthermore, our solution has enhanced object positioning, with an increase in the IoU from 74.5% to 75.7%. SharpSLAM algorithm has the potential to highly improve the quality of 3D reconstruction and segmentation in DSP-SLAM and to impact a wide range of fields, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and augmented reality.
Authors:Fan Zhang, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao, Xu Liu, Fang Liu, Shuyuan Yang, Biao Hou
Abstract:
Satellite imagery, due to its long-range imaging, brings with it a variety of scale-preferred tasks, such as the detection of tiny/small objects, making the precise localization and detection of small objects of interest a challenging task. In this article, we design a Knowledge Discovery Network (KDN) to implement the renormalization group theory in terms of efficient feature extraction. Renormalized connection (RC) on the KDN enables ``synergistic focusing'' of multi-scale features. Based on our observations of KDN, we abstract a class of RCs with different connection strengths, called n21C, and generalize it to FPN-based multi-branch detectors. In a series of FPN experiments on the scale-preferred tasks, we found that the ``divide-and-conquer'' idea of FPN severely hampers the detector's learning in the right direction due to the large number of large-scale negative samples and interference from background noise. Moreover, these negative samples cannot be eliminated by the focal loss function. The RCs extends the multi-level feature's ``divide-and-conquer'' mechanism of the FPN-based detectors to a wide range of scale-preferred tasks, and enables synergistic effects of multi-level features on the specific learning goal. In addition, interference activations in two aspects are greatly reduced and the detector learns in a more correct direction. Extensive experiments of 17 well-designed detection architectures embedded with n21s on five different levels of scale-preferred tasks validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the RCs. Especially the simplest linear form of RC, E421C performs well in all tasks and it satisfies the scaling property of RGT. We hope that our approach will transfer a large number of well-designed detectors from the computer vision community to the remote sensing community.
Authors:Shuran Ma, Weiying Xie, Daixun Li, Haowei Li, Yunsong Li
Abstract:
The rapid development of multimedia has provided a large amount of data with different distributions for visual tasks, forming different domains. Federated Learning (FL) can efficiently use this diverse data distributed on different client media in a decentralized manner through model sharing. However, in open-world scenarios, there is a challenge: global models may struggle to predict well on entirely new domain data captured by certain media, which were not encountered during training. Existing methods still rely on strong statistical correlations between samples and labels to address this issue, which can be misleading, as some features may establish spurious short-cut correlations with the predictions. To comprehensively address this challenge, we introduce FedCD (Cross-Domain Invariant Federated Learning), an overall optimization framework at both the local and global levels. We introduce the Spurious Correlation Intervener (SCI), which employs invariance theory to locally generate interventers for features in a self-supervised manner to reduce the model's susceptibility to spurious correlated features. Our approach requires no sharing of data or features, only the gradients related to the model. Additionally, we develop the simple yet effective Risk Extrapolation Aggregation strategy (REA), determining aggregation coefficients through mathematical optimization to facilitate global causal invariant predictions. Extensive experiments and ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of our approach. In both classification and object detection generalization tasks, our method outperforms the baselines by an average of at least 1.45% in Acc, 4.8% and 1.27% in mAP50.
Authors:Dingkang Liang, Wei Hua, Chunsheng Shi, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD), leveraging unlabeled data to boost object detectors, has become a hot topic recently. However, existing SSOD approaches mainly focus on horizontal objects, leaving oriented objects common in aerial images unexplored. At the same time, the annotation cost of oriented objects is significantly higher than that of their horizontal counterparts. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Semi-supervised Oriented Object Detection method termed SOOD++. Specifically, we observe that objects from aerial images usually have arbitrary orientations, small scales, and dense distribution, which inspires the following core designs: a Simple Instance-aware Dense Sampling (SIDS) strategy is used to generate comprehensive dense pseudo-labels; the Geometry-aware Adaptive Weighting (GAW) loss dynamically modulates the importance of each pair between pseudo-label and corresponding prediction by leveraging the intricate geometric information of aerial objects; we treat aerial images as global layouts and explicitly build the many-to-many relationship between the sets of pseudo-labels and predictions via the proposed Noise-driven Global Consistency (NGC). Extensive experiments conducted on various oriented object datasets under various labeled settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. For example, on the DOTA-V2.0/DOTA-V1.5 benchmark, the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) by a large margin (+2.90/2.14, +2.16/2.18, and +2.66/2.32) mAP under 10%, 20%, and 30% labeled data settings, respectively, with single-scale training and testing. More importantly, it still improves upon a strong supervised baseline with 70.66 mAP, trained using the full DOTA-V1.5 train-val set, by +1.82 mAP, resulting in a 72.48 mAP, pushing the new state-of-the-art. The project page is at https://dk-liang.github.io/SOODv2/
Authors:Wen Yin, Jian Lou, Pan Zhou, Yulai Xie, Dan Feng, Yuhua Sun, Tailai Zhang, Lichao Sun
Abstract:
Backdoor attacks have been well-studied in visible light object detection (VLOD) in recent years. However, VLOD can not effectively work in dark and temperature-sensitive scenarios. Instead, thermal infrared object detection (TIOD) is the most accessible and practical in such environments. In this paper, our team is the first to investigate the security vulnerabilities associated with TIOD in the context of backdoor attacks, spanning both the digital and physical realms. We introduce two novel types of backdoor attacks on TIOD, each offering unique capabilities: Object-affecting Attack and Range-affecting Attack. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of key factors influencing trigger design, which include temperature, size, material, and concealment. These factors, especially temperature, significantly impact the efficacy of backdoor attacks on TIOD. A thorough understanding of these factors will serve as a foundation for designing physical triggers and temperature controlling experiments. Our study includes extensive experiments conducted in both digital and physical environments. In the digital realm, we evaluate our approach using benchmark datasets for TIOD, achieving an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of up to 98.21%. In the physical realm, we test our approach in two real-world settings: a traffic intersection and a parking lot, using a thermal infrared camera. Here, we attain an ASR of up to 98.38%.
Authors:Liwen Wang, Yuanyuan Yuan, Ao Sun, Zongjie Li, Pingchuan Ma, Daoyuan Wu, Shuai Wang
Abstract:
Visual deep learning (VDL) systems have shown significant success in real-world applications like image recognition, object detection, and autonomous driving. To evaluate the reliability of VDL, a mainstream approach is software testing, which requires diverse mutations over image semantics. The rapid development of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has introduced revolutionary image mutation potentials through instruction-driven methods. Users can now freely describe desired mutations and let MLLMs generate the mutated images. Hence, parallel to large language models' (LLMs) recent success in traditional software fuzzing, one may also expect MLLMs to be promising for VDL testing in terms of offering unified, diverse, and complex image mutations.
However, the quality and applicability of MLLM-based mutations in VDL testing remain largely unexplored. We present the first study, aiming to assess MLLMs' adequacy from 1) the semantic validity of MLLM mutated images, 2) the alignment of MLLM mutated images with their text instructions (prompts), and 3) the faithfulness of how different mutations preserve semantics that are ought to remain unchanged. With large-scale human studies and quantitative evaluations, we identify MLLM's promising potentials in expanding the covered semantics of image mutations. Notably, while SoTA MLLMs (e.g., GPT-4V) fail to support or perform worse in editing existing semantics in images (as in traditional mutations like rotation), they generate high-quality test inputs using "semantic-replacement" mutations (e.g., "dress a dog with clothes"), which bring extra semantics to images; these were infeasible for past approaches. Hence, we view MLLM-based mutations as a vital complement to traditional mutations, and advocate future VDL testing tasks to combine MLLM-based methods and traditional image mutations for comprehensive and reliable testing.
Authors:Chengjian Feng, Yujie Zhong, Zequn Jie, Weidi Xie, Lin Ma
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel paradigm to enhance the ability of object detector, e.g., expanding categories or improving detection performance, by training on synthetic dataset generated from diffusion models. Specifically, we integrate an instance-level grounding head into a pre-trained, generative diffusion model, to augment it with the ability of localising instances in the generated images. The grounding head is trained to align the text embedding of category names with the regional visual feature of the diffusion model, using supervision from an off-the-shelf object detector, and a novel self-training scheme on (novel) categories not covered by the detector. We conduct thorough experiments to show that, this enhanced version of diffusion model, termed as InstaGen, can serve as a data synthesizer, to enhance object detectors by training on its generated samples, demonstrating superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods in open-vocabulary (+4.5 AP) and data-sparse (+1.2 to 5.2 AP) scenarios. Project page with code: https://fcjian.github.io/InstaGen.
Authors:Kaixin Xiong, Dingyuan Zhang, Dingkang Liang, Zhe Liu, Hongcheng Yang, Wondimu Dikubab, Jianwei Cheng, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
Monocular 3D Object Detection is an essential task for autonomous driving. Meanwhile, accurate 3D object detection from pure images is very challenging due to the loss of depth information. Most existing image-based methods infer objects' location in 3D space based on their 2D sizes on the image plane, which usually ignores the intrinsic position clues from images, leading to unsatisfactory performances. Motivated by the fact that humans could leverage the bottom-up positional clues to locate objects in 3D space from a single image, in this paper, we explore the position modeling from the image feature column and propose a new method named You Only Look Bottum-Up (YOLOBU). Specifically, our YOLOBU leverages Column-based Cross Attention to determine how much a pixel contributes to pixels above it. Next, the Row-based Reverse Cumulative Sum (RRCS) is introduced to build the connections of pixels in the bottom-up direction. Our YOLOBU fully explores the position clues for monocular 3D detection via building the relationship of pixels from the bottom-up way. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Authors:Kai Jiang, Jiaxing Huang, Weiying Xie, Yunsong Li, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Camera-only Bird's Eye View (BEV) has demonstrated great potential in environment perception in a 3D space. However, most existing studies were conducted under a supervised setup which cannot scale well while handling various new data. Unsupervised domain adaptive BEV, which effective learning from various unlabelled target data, is far under-explored. In this work, we design DA-BEV, the first domain adaptive camera-only BEV framework that addresses domain adaptive BEV challenges by exploiting the complementary nature of image-view features and BEV features. DA-BEV introduces the idea of query into the domain adaptation framework to derive useful information from image-view and BEV features. It consists of two query-based designs, namely, query-based adversarial learning (QAL) and query-based self-training (QST), which exploits image-view features or BEV features to regularize the adaptation of the other. Extensive experiments show that DA-BEV achieves superior domain adaptive BEV perception performance consistently across multiple datasets and tasks such as 3D object detection and 3D scene segmentation.
Authors:Mingxiang Cao, Weiying Xie, Jie Lei, Jiaqing Zhang, Daixun Li, Yunsong Li
Abstract:
Deep learning has driven significant progress in object detection using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Existing methods, while achieving promising results, often struggle to effectively integrate local and global information, particularly direction-aware features. This paper proposes SAR-Net, a novel framework specifically designed for global fusion of direction-aware information in SAR object detection. SAR-Net leverages two key innovations: the Unity Compensation Mechanism (UCM) and the Direction-aware Attention Module (DAM). UCM facilitates the establishment of complementary relationships among features across different scales, enabling efficient global information fusion and transmission. Additionally, DAM, through bidirectional attention polymerization, captures direction-aware information, effectively eliminating background interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SAR-Net, achieving state-of-the-art results on aircraft (SAR-AIRcraft-1.0) and ship datasets (SSDD, HRSID), confirming its generalization capability and robustness.
Authors:Yuhang Zhang, Yuang Deng, Xiaopeng Zhang, Jie Li, Robert C. Qiu, Qi Tian
Abstract:
Active learning has been demonstrated effective to reduce labeling cost, while most progress has been designed for image recognition, there still lacks instance-level active learning for object detection. In this paper, we rethink two key components, i.e., localization and recognition, for object detection, and find that the correctness of them are highly related, therefore, it is not necessary to annotate both boxes and classes if we are given pseudo annotations provided with the trained model. Motivated by this, we propose an efficient query strategy, termed as DeLR, that Decoupling the Localization and Recognition for active query. In this way, we are probably free of class annotations when the localization is correct, and able to assign the labeling budget for more informative samples. There are two main differences in DeLR: 1) Unlike previous methods mostly focus on image-level annotations, where the queried samples are selected and exhausted annotated. In DeLR, the query is based on region-level, and we only annotate the object region that is queried; 2) Instead of directly providing both localization and recognition annotations, we separately query the two components, and thus reduce the recognition budget with the pseudo class labels provided by the model. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate its superiority. We hope our proposed query strategy would shed light on researches in active learning in object detection.
Authors:Xin Zhou, Jinghua Hou, Tingting Yao, Dingkang Liang, Zhe Liu, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Jianwei Cheng, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
3D object detection is an essential task for achieving autonomous driving. Existing anchor-based detection methods rely on empirical heuristics setting of anchors, which makes the algorithms lack elegance. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of several generative models, among which diffusion models show great potential for learning the transformation of two distributions. Our proposed Diff3Det migrates the diffusion model to proposal generation for 3D object detection by considering the detection boxes as generative targets. During training, the object boxes diffuse from the ground truth boxes to the Gaussian distribution, and the decoder learns to reverse this noise process. In the inference stage, the model progressively refines a set of random boxes to the prediction results. We provide detailed experiments on the KITTI benchmark and achieve promising performance compared to classical anchor-based 3D detection methods.
Authors:Dhiraj Neupane, Aashish Bhattarai, Sunil Aryal, Mohamed Reda Bouadjenek, Uk-Min Seok, Jongwon Seok
Abstract:
The ongoing expansion of urban areas facilitated by advancements in science and technology has resulted in a considerable increase in the number of privately owned vehicles worldwide, including in South Korea. However, this gradual increment in the number of vehicles has inevitably led to parking-related issues, including the abuse of disabled parking spaces (hereafter referred to as accessible parking spaces) designated for individuals with disabilities. Traditional license plate recognition (LPR) systems have proven inefficient in addressing such a problem in real-time due to the high frame rate of surveillance cameras, the presence of natural and artificial noise, and variations in lighting and weather conditions that impede detection and recognition by these systems. With the growing concept of parking 4.0, many sensors, IoT and deep learning-based approaches have been applied to automatic LPR and parking management systems. Nonetheless, the studies show a need for a robust and efficient model for managing accessible parking spaces in South Korea. To address this, we have proposed a novel system called, Shine, which uses the deep learning-based object detection algorithm for detecting the vehicle, license plate, and disability badges (referred to as cards, badges, or access badges hereafter) and verifies the rights of the driver to use accessible parking spaces by coordinating with the central server. Our model, which achieves a mean average precision of 92.16%, is expected to address the issue of accessible parking space abuse and contributes significantly towards efficient and effective parking management in urban environments.
Authors:Peng Tu, Xu Xie, Guo AI, Yuexiang Li, Yawen Huang, Yefeng Zheng
Abstract:
Efficient detectors for edge devices are often optimized for parameters or speed count metrics, which remain in weak correlation with the energy of detectors.
However, some vision applications of convolutional neural networks, such as always-on surveillance cameras, are critical for energy constraints.
This paper aims to serve as a baseline by designing detectors to reach tradeoffs between energy and performance from two perspectives:
1) We extensively analyze various CNNs to identify low-energy architectures, including selecting activation functions, convolutions operators, and feature fusion structures on necks. These underappreciated details in past work seriously affect the energy consumption of detectors;
2) To break through the dilemmatic energy-performance problem, we propose a balanced detector driven by energy using discovered low-energy components named \textit{FemtoDet}.
In addition to the novel construction, we improve FemtoDet by considering convolutions and training strategy optimizations.
Specifically, we develop a new instance boundary enhancement (IBE) module for convolution optimization to overcome the contradiction between the limited capacity of CNNs and detection tasks in diverse spatial representations, and propose a recursive warm-restart (RecWR) for optimizing training strategy to escape the sub-optimization of light-weight detectors by considering the data shift produced in popular augmentations.
As a result, FemtoDet with only 68.77k parameters achieves a competitive score of 46.3 AP50 on PASCAL VOC and 1.11 W $\&$ 64.47 FPS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 CPU platforms.
Extensive experiments on COCO and TJU-DHD datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves competitive results in diverse scenes.
Authors:Yunjie Tian, Lingxi Xie, Jihao Qiu, Jianbin Jiao, Yaowei Wang, Qi Tian, Qixiang Ye
Abstract:
We propose integrally pre-trained transformer pyramid network (iTPN), towards jointly optimizing the network backbone and the neck, so that transfer gap between representation models and downstream tasks is minimal. iTPN is born with two elaborated designs: 1) The first pre-trained feature pyramid upon vision transformer (ViT). 2) Multi-stage supervision to the feature pyramid using masked feature modeling (MFM). iTPN is updated to Fast-iTPN, reducing computational memory overhead and accelerating inference through two flexible designs. 1) Token migration: dropping redundant tokens of the backbone while replenishing them in the feature pyramid without attention operations. 2) Token gathering: reducing computation cost caused by global attention by introducing few gathering tokens. The base/large-level Fast-iTPN achieve 88.75%/89.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. With 1x training schedule using DINO, the base/large-level Fast-iTPN achieves 58.4%/58.8% box AP on COCO object detection, and a 57.5%/58.7% mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation using MaskDINO. Fast-iTPN can accelerate the inference procedure by up to 70%, with negligible performance loss, demonstrating the potential to be a powerful backbone for downstream vision tasks. The code is available at: github.com/sunsmarterjie/iTPN.
Authors:Chengjian Feng, Zequn Jie, Yujie Zhong, Xiangxiang Chu, Lin Ma
Abstract:
Recent LSS-based multi-view 3D object detection has made tremendous progress, by processing the features in Brid-Eye-View (BEV) via the convolutional detector. However, the typical convolution ignores the radial symmetry of the BEV features and increases the difficulty of the detector optimization. To preserve the inherent property of the BEV features and ease the optimization, we propose an azimuth-equivariant convolution (AeConv) and an azimuth-equivariant anchor. The sampling grid of AeConv is always in the radial direction, thus it can learn azimuth-invariant BEV features. The proposed anchor enables the detection head to learn predicting azimuth-irrelevant targets. In addition, we introduce a camera-decoupled virtual depth to unify the depth prediction for the images with different camera intrinsic parameters. The resultant detector is dubbed Azimuth-equivariant Detector (AeDet). Extensive experiments are conducted on nuScenes, and AeDet achieves a 62.0% NDS, surpassing the recent multi-view 3D object detectors such as PETRv2 and BEVDepth by a large margin. Project page: https://fcjian.github.io/aedet.
Authors:Suorong Yang, Weikang Xiao, Mengchen Zhang, Suhan Guo, Jian Zhao, Furao Shen
Abstract:
Deep learning has achieved remarkable results in many computer vision tasks. Deep neural networks typically rely on large amounts of training data to avoid overfitting. However, labeled data for real-world applications may be limited. By improving the quantity and diversity of training data, data augmentation has become an inevitable part of deep learning model training with image data.
As an effective way to improve the sufficiency and diversity of training data, data augmentation has become a necessary part of successful application of deep learning models on image data. In this paper, we systematically review different image data augmentation methods. We propose a taxonomy of reviewed methods and present the strengths and limitations of these methods. We also conduct extensive experiments with various data augmentation methods on three typical computer vision tasks, including semantic segmentation, image classification and object detection. Finally, we discuss current challenges faced by data augmentation and future research directions to put forward some useful research guidance.
Authors:Haolin Yuan, Jingtao Li, Weiming Zhuang, Chen Chen, Lingjuan Lyu
Abstract:
Federated Object Detection (FOD) enables clients to collaboratively train a global object detection model without accessing their local data from diverse domains. However, significant variations in environment, weather, and other domain specific factors hinder performance, making cross domain generalization a key challenge. Existing FOD methods often overlook the hardware constraints of edge devices and introduce local training regularizations that incur high computational costs, limiting real-world applicability. In this paper, we propose FEDEXCHANGE, a novel FOD framework that bridges domain gaps without introducing additional local computational overhead. FEDEXCHANGE employs a server side dynamic model exchange strategy that enables each client to gain insights from other clients' domain data without direct data sharing. Specifically, FEDEXCHANGE allows the server to alternate between model aggregation and model exchange. During aggregation rounds, the server aggregates all local models as usual. In exchange rounds, FEDEXCHANGE clusters and exchanges local models based on distance measures, allowing local models to learn from a variety of domains. As all operations are performed on the server side, clients can achieve improved cross domain utility without any additional computational overhead. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that FEDEXCHANGE enhances FOD performance, achieving 1.6X better mean average precision in challenging domains, such as rainy conditions, while requiring only 0.8X the computational resources compared to baseline methods.
Authors:Guangyu Sun, Jingtao Li, Weiming Zhuang, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Lingjuan Lyu
Abstract:
Foundation models (FMs) exhibit remarkable generalization but require adaptation to downstream tasks, particularly in privacy-sensitive applications. Due to data privacy regulations, cloud-based FMs cannot directly access private edge data, limiting their adaptation. Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-aware alternative, but existing FL approaches overlook the constraints imposed by edge devices -- namely, limited computational resources and the scarcity of labeled data. To address these challenges, we introduce Practical Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (PSSFL), where edge devices hold only unlabeled, low-resolution data, while the server has limited labeled, high-resolution data. In this setting, we propose the Federated Mixture of Experts (FedMox), a novel framework that enhances FM adaptation in FL. FedMox tackles computational and resolution mismatch challenges via a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, employing a spatial router to align features across resolutions and a Soft-Mixture strategy to stabilize semi-supervised learning. We take object detection as a case study, and experiments on real-world autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that FedMox effectively adapts FMs under PSSFL, significantly improving performance with constrained memory costs on edge devices. Our work paves the way for scalable and privacy-preserving FM adaptation in federated scenarios.
Authors:Jiabo Huang, Chen Chen, Lingjuan Lyu
Abstract:
Vision foundation models (VFMs) are predominantly developed using data-centric methods. These methods require training on vast amounts of data usually with high-quality labels, which poses a bottleneck for most institutions that lack both large-scale data and high-end GPUs. On the other hand, many open-source vision models have been pretrained on domain-specific data, enabling them to distill and represent core knowledge in a form that is transferable across diverse applications. Even though these models are highly valuable assets, they remain largely under-explored in empowering the development of a general-purpose VFM. In this paper, we present a new model-driven approach for training VFMs through joint knowledge transfer and preservation. Our method unifies multiple pre-trained teacher models in a shared latent space to mitigate the ``imbalanced transfer'' issue caused by their distributional gaps. Besides, we introduce a knowledge preservation strategy to take a general-purpose teacher as a knowledge base for integrating knowledge from the remaining purpose-specific teachers using an adapter module. By unifying and aggregating existing models, we build a powerful VFM to inherit teachers' expertise without needing to train on a large amount of labeled data. Our model not only provides generalizable visual features, but also inherently supports multiple downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VFM outperforms existing data-centric models across four fundamental vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic and instance segmentation.
Authors:Md Abrar Jahin, Shahriar Soudeep, M. F. Mridha, Nafiz Fahad, Md. Jakir Hossen
Abstract:
Recent advancements in object detection rely on modular architectures with multi-scale fusion and attention mechanisms. However, static fusion heuristics and class-agnostic attention limit performance in dynamic scenes with occlusions, clutter, and class imbalance. We introduce Dynamic Class-Aware Fusion Network (DyCAF-Net) that addresses these challenges through three innovations: (1) an input-conditioned equilibrium-based neck that iteratively refines multi-scale features via implicit fixed-point modeling, (2) a dual dynamic attention mechanism that adaptively recalibrates channel and spatial responses using input- and class-dependent cues, and (3) class-aware feature adaptation that modulates features to prioritize discriminative regions for rare classes. Through comprehensive ablation studies with YOLOv8 and related architectures, alongside benchmarking against nine state-of-the-art baselines, DyCAF-Net achieves significant improvements in precision, mAP@50, and mAP@50-95 across 13 diverse benchmarks, including occlusion-heavy and long-tailed datasets. The framework maintains computational efficiency ($\sim$11.1M parameters) and competitive inference speeds, while its adaptability to scale variance, semantic overlaps, and class imbalance positions it as a robust solution for real-world detection tasks in medical imaging, surveillance, and autonomous systems.
Authors:Xuesong Li, Dianye Huang, Yameng Zhang, Nassir Navab, Zhongliang Jiang
Abstract:
Understanding medical ultrasound imaging remains a long-standing challenge due to significant visual variability caused by differences in imaging and acquisition parameters. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been used to automatically generate terminology-rich summaries orientated to clinicians with sufficient physiological knowledge. Nevertheless, the increasing demand for improved ultrasound interpretability and basic scanning guidance among non-expert users, e.g., in point-of-care settings, has not yet been explored. In this study, we first introduce the scene graph (SG) for ultrasound images to explain image content to ordinary and provide guidance for ultrasound scanning. The ultrasound SG is first computed using a transformer-based one-stage method, eliminating the need for explicit object detection. To generate a graspable image explanation for ordinary, the user query is then used to further refine the abstract SG representation through LLMs. Additionally, the predicted SG is explored for its potential in guiding ultrasound scanning toward missing anatomies within the current imaging view, assisting ordinary users in achieving more standardized and complete anatomical exploration. The effectiveness of this SG-based image explanation and scanning guidance has been validated on images from the left and right neck regions, including the carotid and thyroid, across five volunteers. The results demonstrate the potential of the method to maximally democratize ultrasound by enhancing its interpretability and usability for ordinaries.
Authors:Jialu Li, Shoubin Yu, Han Lin, Jaemin Cho, Jaehong Yoon, Mohit Bansal
Abstract:
Recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have significantly enhanced the visual quality of the generated videos. However, even recent T2V models find it challenging to follow text descriptions accurately, especially when the prompt requires accurate control of spatial layouts or object trajectories. A recent line of research uses layout guidance for T2V models that require fine-tuning or iterative manipulation of the attention map during inference time. This significantly increases the memory requirement, making it difficult to adopt a large T2V model as a backbone. To address this, we introduce Video-MSG, a training-free Guidance method for T2V generation based on Multimodal planning and Structured noise initialization. Video-MSG consists of three steps, where in the first two steps, Video-MSG creates Video Sketch, a fine-grained spatio-temporal plan for the final video, specifying background, foreground, and object trajectories, in the form of draft video frames. In the last step, Video-MSG guides a downstream T2V diffusion model with Video Sketch through noise inversion and denoising. Notably, Video-MSG does not need fine-tuning or attention manipulation with additional memory during inference time, making it easier to adopt large T2V models. Video-MSG demonstrates its effectiveness in enhancing text alignment with multiple T2V backbones (VideoCrafter2 and CogVideoX-5B) on popular T2V generation benchmarks (T2VCompBench and VBench). We provide comprehensive ablation studies about noise inversion ratio, different background generators, background object detection, and foreground object segmentation.
Authors:Gemini Robotics Team, Saminda Abeyruwan, Joshua Ainslie, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Travis Armstrong, Ashwin Balakrishna, Robert Baruch, Maria Bauza, Michiel Blokzijl, Steven Bohez, Konstantinos Bousmalis, Anthony Brohan, Thomas Buschmann, Arunkumar Byravan, Serkan Cabi, Ken Caluwaerts, Federico Casarini, Oscar Chang, Jose Enrique Chen, Xi Chen, Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang, Krzysztof Choromanski, David D'Ambrosio, Sudeep Dasari, Todor Davchev, Coline Devin, Norman Di Palo, Tianli Ding, Adil Dostmohamed, Danny Driess, Yilun Du, Debidatta Dwibedi, Michael Elabd, Claudio Fantacci, Cody Fong, Erik Frey, Chuyuan Fu, Marissa Giustina, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Laura Graesser, Leonard Hasenclever, Nicolas Heess, Brandon Hernaez, Alexander Herzog, R. Alex Hofer, Jan Humplik, Atil Iscen, Mithun George Jacob, Deepali Jain, Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov, M. Emre Karagozler, Stefani Karp, Chase Kew, Jerad Kirkland, Sean Kirmani, Yuheng Kuang, Thomas Lampe, Antoine Laurens, Isabel Leal, Alex X. Lee, Tsang-Wei Edward Lee, Jacky Liang, Yixin Lin, Sharath Maddineni, Anirudha Majumdar, Assaf Hurwitz Michaely, Robert Moreno, Michael Neunert, Francesco Nori, Carolina Parada, Emilio Parisotto, Peter Pastor, Acorn Pooley, Kanishka Rao, Krista Reymann, Dorsa Sadigh, Stefano Saliceti, Pannag Sanketi, Pierre Sermanet, Dhruv Shah, Mohit Sharma, Kathryn Shea, Charles Shu, Vikas Sindhwani, Sumeet Singh, Radu Soricut, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Rachel Sterneck, Razvan Surdulescu, Jie Tan, Jonathan Tompson, Vincent Vanhoucke, Jake Varley, Grace Vesom, Giulia Vezzani, Oriol Vinyals, Ayzaan Wahid, Stefan Welker, Paul Wohlhart, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Annie Xie, Jinyu Xie, Peng Xu, Sichun Xu, Ying Xu, Zhuo Xu, Yuxiang Yang, Rui Yao, Sergey Yaroshenko, Wenhao Yu, Wentao Yuan, Jingwei Zhang, Tingnan Zhang, Allan Zhou, Yuxiang Zhou
Abstract:
Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. This report introduces a new family of AI models purposefully designed for robotics and built upon the foundation of Gemini 2.0. We present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Gemini Robotics executes smooth and reactive movements to tackle a wide range of complex manipulation tasks while also being robust to variations in object types and positions, handling unseen environments as well as following diverse, open vocabulary instructions. We show that with additional fine-tuning, Gemini Robotics can be specialized to new capabilities including solving long-horizon, highly dexterous tasks, learning new short-horizon tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations and adapting to completely novel robot embodiments. This is made possible because Gemini Robotics builds on top of the Gemini Robotics-ER model, the second model we introduce in this work. Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning) extends Gemini's multimodal reasoning capabilities into the physical world, with enhanced spatial and temporal understanding. This enables capabilities relevant to robotics including object detection, pointing, trajectory and grasp prediction, as well as multi-view correspondence and 3D bounding box predictions. We show how this novel combination can support a variety of robotics applications. We also discuss and address important safety considerations related to this new class of robotics foundation models. The Gemini Robotics family marks a substantial step towards developing general-purpose robots that realizes AI's potential in the physical world.
Authors:Chen Zhou, Peng Cheng, Junfeng Fang, Yifan Zhang, Yibo Yan, Xiaojun Jia, Yanyan Xu, Kun Wang, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
Multispectral object detection, utilizing RGB and TIR (thermal infrared) modalities, is widely recognized as a challenging task. It requires not only the effective extraction of features from both modalities and robust fusion strategies, but also the ability to address issues such as spectral discrepancies, spatial misalignment, and environmental dependencies between RGB and TIR images. These challenges significantly hinder the generalization of multispectral detection systems across diverse scenarios. Although numerous studies have attempted to overcome these limitations, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the performance gains of multispectral detection systems from the impact of these "optimization techniques". Worse still, despite the rapid emergence of high-performing single-modality detection models, there is still a lack of specialized training techniques that can effectively adapt these models for multispectral detection tasks. The absence of a standardized benchmark with fair and consistent experimental setups also poses a significant barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of new approaches. To this end, we propose the first fair and reproducible benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the training "techniques", which systematically classifies existing multispectral object detection methods, investigates their sensitivity to hyper-parameters, and standardizes the core configurations. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across multiple representative multispectral object detection datasets, utilizing various backbone networks and detection frameworks. Additionally, we introduce an efficient and easily deployable multispectral object detection framework that can seamlessly optimize high-performing single-modality models into dual-modality models, integrating our advanced training techniques.
Authors:Shahriar Soudeep, Md Abrar Jahin, M. F. Mridha
Abstract:
The detection and tracking of small, occluded objects such as pedestrians, cyclists, and motorbikes pose significant challenges for traffic surveillance systems because of their erratic movement, frequent occlusion, and poor visibility in dynamic urban environments. Traditional methods like YOLO11, while proficient in spatial feature extraction for precise detection, often struggle with these small and dynamically moving objects, particularly in handling real-time data updates and resource efficiency. This paper introduces DGNN-YOLO, a novel framework that integrates dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) with YOLO11 to address these limitations. Unlike standard GNNs, DGNNs are chosen for their superior ability to dynamically update graph structures in real-time, which enables adaptive and robust tracking of objects in highly variable urban traffic scenarios. This framework constructs and regularly updates its graph representations, capturing objects as nodes and their interactions as edges, thus effectively responding to rapidly changing conditions. Additionally, DGNN-YOLO incorporates Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and Eigen-CAM visualization techniques to enhance interpretability and foster trust, offering insights into the model's decision-making process. Extensive experiments validate the framework's performance, achieving a precision of 0.8382, recall of 0.6875, and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.6476, significantly outperforming existing methods. This study offers a scalable and interpretable solution for real-time traffic surveillance and significantly advances intelligent transportation systems' capabilities by addressing the critical challenge of detecting and tracking small, occluded objects.
Authors:Tianhe Ren, Yihao Chen, Qing Jiang, Zhaoyang Zeng, Yuda Xiong, Wenlong Liu, Zhengyu Ma, Junyi Shen, Yuan Gao, Xiaoke Jiang, Xingyu Chen, Zhuheng Song, Yuhong Zhang, Hongjie Huang, Han Gao, Shilong Liu, Hao Zhang, Feng Li, Kent Yu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP and 5.0 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.
Authors:Yuhang Li, Xin Dong, Chen Chen, Weiming Zhuang, Lingjuan Lyu
Abstract:
In computer vision, it is well-known that a lack of data diversity will impair model performance. In this study, we address the challenges of enhancing the dataset diversity problem in order to benefit various downstream tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. We propose a simple yet effective data augmentation approach by leveraging advancements in generative models, specifically text-to-image synthesis technologies like Stable Diffusion. Our method focuses on generating variations of labeled real images, utilizing generative object and background augmentation via inpainting to augment existing training data without the need for additional annotations. We find that background augmentation, in particular, significantly improves the models' robustness and generalization capabilities. We also investigate how to adjust the prompt and mask to ensure the generated content comply with the existing annotations. The efficacy of our augmentation techniques is validated through comprehensive evaluations of the COCO dataset and several other key object detection benchmarks, demonstrating notable enhancements in model performance across diverse scenarios. This approach offers a promising solution to the challenges of dataset enhancement, contributing to the development of more accurate and robust computer vision models.
Authors:Hongyang Li, Hao Zhang, Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren, Feng Li, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a simple and strong framework for Tracking Any Point with TRansformers (TAPTR). Based on the observation that point tracking bears a great resemblance to object detection and tracking, we borrow designs from DETR-like algorithms to address the task of TAP. In the proposed framework, in each video frame, each tracking point is represented as a point query, which consists of a positional part and a content part. As in DETR, each query (its position and content feature) is naturally updated layer by layer. Its visibility is predicted by its updated content feature. Queries belonging to the same tracking point can exchange information through self-attention along the temporal dimension. As all such operations are well-designed in DETR-like algorithms, the model is conceptually very simple. We also adopt some useful designs such as cost volume from optical flow models and develop simple designs to provide long temporal information while mitigating the feature drifting issue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance with state-of-the-art performance on various TAP datasets with faster inference speed.
Authors:Jiangshan Wang, Yifan Pu, Yizeng Han, Jiayi Guo, Yiru Wang, Xiu Li, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Oriented object detection, an emerging task in recent years, aims to identify and locate objects across varied orientations. This requires the detector to accurately capture the orientation information, which varies significantly within and across images. Despite the existing substantial efforts, simultaneously ensuring model effectiveness and parameter efficiency remains challenging in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a lightweight yet effective Group-wise Rotating and Attention (GRA) module to replace the convolution operations in backbone networks for oriented object detection. GRA can adaptively capture fine-grained features of objects with diverse orientations, comprising two key components: Group-wise Rotating and Group-wise Attention. Group-wise Rotating first divides the convolution kernel into groups, where each group extracts different object features by rotating at a specific angle according to the object orientation. Subsequently, Group-wise Attention is employed to adaptively enhance the object-related regions in the feature. The collaborative effort of these components enables GRA to effectively capture the various orientation information while maintaining parameter efficiency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method. For example, GRA achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the DOTA-v2.0 benchmark, while saving the parameters by nearly 50% compared to the previous SOTA method. Code will be released.
Authors:Yunhao Ge, Hong-Xing Yu, Cheng Zhao, Yuliang Guo, Xinyu Huang, Liu Ren, Laurent Itti, Jiajun Wu
Abstract:
A major challenge in monocular 3D object detection is the limited diversity and quantity of objects in real datasets. While augmenting real scenes with virtual objects holds promise to improve both the diversity and quantity of the objects, it remains elusive due to the lack of an effective 3D object insertion method in complex real captured scenes. In this work, we study augmenting complex real indoor scenes with virtual objects for monocular 3D object detection. The main challenge is to automatically identify plausible physical properties for virtual assets (e.g., locations, appearances, sizes, etc.) in cluttered real scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a physically plausible indoor 3D object insertion approach to automatically copy virtual objects and paste them into real scenes. The resulting objects in scenes have 3D bounding boxes with plausible physical locations and appearances. In particular, our method first identifies physically feasible locations and poses for the inserted objects to prevent collisions with the existing room layout. Subsequently, it estimates spatially-varying illumination for the insertion location, enabling the immersive blending of the virtual objects into the original scene with plausible appearances and cast shadows. We show that our augmentation method significantly improves existing monocular 3D object models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For the first time, we demonstrate that a physically plausible 3D object insertion, serving as a generative data augmentation technique, can lead to significant improvements for discriminative downstream tasks such as monocular 3D object detection. Project website: https://gyhandy.github.io/3D-Copy-Paste/
Authors:Qing Jiang, Feng Li, Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Kent Yu, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
We introduce T-Rex, an interactive object counting model designed to first detect and then count any objects. We formulate object counting as an open-set object detection task with the integration of visual prompts. Users can specify the objects of interest by marking points or boxes on a reference image, and T-Rex then detects all objects with a similar pattern. Guided by the visual feedback from T-Rex, users can also interactively refine the counting results by prompting on missing or falsely-detected objects. T-Rex has achieved state-of-the-art performance on several class-agnostic counting benchmarks. To further exploit its potential, we established a new counting benchmark encompassing diverse scenarios and challenges. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that T-Rex possesses exceptional zero-shot counting capabilities. We also present various practical application scenarios for T-Rex, illustrating its potential in the realm of visual prompting.
Authors:Kun Yang, Dingkang Yang, Jingyu Zhang, Mingcheng Li, Yang Liu, Jing Liu, Hanqi Wang, Peng Sun, Liang Song
Abstract:
Multi-agent collaborative perception as a potential application for vehicle-to-everything communication could significantly improve the perception performance of autonomous vehicles over single-agent perception. However, several challenges remain in achieving pragmatic information sharing in this emerging research. In this paper, we propose SCOPE, a novel collaborative perception framework that aggregates the spatio-temporal awareness characteristics across on-road agents in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, SCOPE has three distinct strengths: i) it considers effective semantic cues of the temporal context to enhance current representations of the target agent; ii) it aggregates perceptually critical spatial information from heterogeneous agents and overcomes localization errors via multi-scale feature interactions; iii) it integrates multi-source representations of the target agent based on their complementary contributions by an adaptive fusion paradigm. To thoroughly evaluate SCOPE, we consider both real-world and simulated scenarios of collaborative 3D object detection tasks on three datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach and the necessity of the proposed components.
Authors:Kiran Kokilepersaud, Mohit Prabhushankar, Yavuz Yarici, Ghassan AlRegib, Armin Parchami
Abstract:
In this work, we present a methodology to shape a fisheye-specific representation space that reflects the interaction between distortion and semantic context present in this data modality. Fisheye data has the wider field of view advantage over other types of cameras, but this comes at the expense of high radial distortion. As a result, objects further from the center exhibit deformations that make it difficult for a model to identify their semantic context. While previous work has attempted architectural and training augmentation changes to alleviate this effect, no work has attempted to guide the model towards learning a representation space that reflects this interaction between distortion and semantic context inherent to fisheye data. We introduce an approach to exploit this relationship by first extracting distortion class labels based on an object's distance from the center of the image. We then shape a backbone's representation space with a weighted contrastive loss that constrains objects of the same semantic class and distortion class to be close to each other within a lower dimensional embedding space. This backbone trained with both semantic and distortion information is then fine-tuned within an object detection setting to empirically evaluate the quality of the learnt representation. We show this method leads to performance improvements by as much as 1.1% mean average precision over standard object detection strategies and .6% improvement over other state of the art representation learning approaches.
Authors:Tianhe Ren, Jianwei Yang, Shilong Liu, Ailing Zeng, Feng Li, Hao Zhang, Hongyang Li, Zhaoyang Zeng, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
This work presents Focal-Stable-DINO, a strong and reproducible object detection model which achieves 64.6 AP on COCO val2017 and 64.8 AP on COCO test-dev using only 700M parameters without any test time augmentation. It explores the combination of the powerful FocalNet-Huge backbone with the effective Stable-DINO detector. Different from existing SOTA models that utilize an extensive number of parameters and complex training techniques on large-scale private data or merged data, our model is exclusively trained on the publicly available dataset Objects365, which ensures the reproducibility of our approach.
Authors:Hao Zhang, Hongyang Li, Ailing Zeng, Feng Li, Shilong Liu, Xingyu Liao, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we present DAT, a Depth-Aware Transformer framework designed for camera-based 3D detection. Our model is based on observing two major issues in existing methods: large depth translation errors and duplicate predictions along depth axes. To mitigate these issues, we propose two key solutions within DAT. To address the first issue, we introduce a Depth-Aware Spatial Cross-Attention (DA-SCA) module that incorporates depth information into spatial cross-attention when lifting image features to 3D space. To address the second issue, we introduce an auxiliary learning task called Depth-aware Negative Suppression loss. First, based on their reference points, we organize features as a Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature map. Then, we sample positive and negative features along each object ray that connects an object and a camera and train the model to distinguish between them. The proposed DA-SCA and DNS methods effectively alleviate these two problems. We show that DAT is a versatile method that enhances the performance of all three popular models, BEVFormer, DETR3D, and PETR. Our evaluation on BEVFormer demonstrates that DAT achieves a significant improvement of +2.8 NDS on nuScenes val under the same settings. Moreover, when using pre-trained VoVNet-99 as the backbone, DAT achieves strong results of 60.0 NDS and 51.5 mAP on nuScenes test. Our code will be soon.
Authors:Gianluca Scarpellini, Stefano Rosa, Pietro Morerio, Lorenzo Natale, Alessio Del Bue
Abstract:
Object detectors often experience a drop in performance when new environmental conditions are insufficiently represented in the training data. This paper studies how to automatically fine-tune a pre-existing object detector while exploring and acquiring images in a new environment without relying on human intervention, i.e., in a self-supervised fashion. In our setting, an agent initially explores the environment using a pre-trained off-the-shelf detector to locate objects and associate pseudo-labels. By assuming that pseudo-labels for the same object must be consistent across different views, we devise a novel mechanism for producing refined predictions from the consensus among observations. Our approach improves the off-the-shelf object detector by 2.66% in terms of mAP and outperforms the current state of the art without relying on ground-truth annotations.
Authors:Gianluca Scarpellini, Stefano Rosa, Pietro Morerio, Lorenzo Natale, Alessio Del Bue
Abstract:
When an object detector is deployed in a novel setting it often experiences a drop in performance. This paper studies how an embodied agent can automatically fine-tune a pre-existing object detector while exploring and acquiring images in a new environment without relying on human intervention, i.e., a fully self-supervised approach. In our setting, an agent initially learns to explore the environment using a pre-trained off-the-shelf detector to locate objects and associate pseudo-labels. By assuming that pseudo-labels for the same object must be consistent across different views, we learn the exploration policy Look Around to mine hard samples, and we devise a novel mechanism called Disagreement Reconciliation for producing refined pseudo-labels from the consensus among observations. We implement a unified benchmark of the current state-of-the-art and compare our approach with pre-existing exploration policies and perception mechanisms. Our method is shown to outperform existing approaches, improving the object detector by 6.2% in a simulated scenario, a 3.59% advancement over other state-of-the-art methods, and by 9.97% in the real robotic test without relying on ground-truth. Code for the proposed approach and baselines are available at https://iit-pavis.github.io/Look_Around_And_Learn/.
Authors:Yanxin Long, Jianhua Han, Runhui Huang, Xu Hang, Yi Zhu, Chunjing Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract:
Inspired by the success of vision-language methods (VLMs) in zero-shot classification, recent works attempt to extend this line of work into object detection by leveraging the localization ability of pre-trained VLMs and generating pseudo labels for unseen classes in a self-training manner. However, since the current VLMs are usually pre-trained with aligning sentence embedding with global image embedding, the direct use of them lacks fine-grained alignment for object instances, which is the core of detection. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective fine-grained Visual-Text Prompt-driven self-training paradigm for Open-Vocabulary Detection (VTP-OVD) that introduces a fine-grained visual-text prompt adapting stage to enhance the current self-training paradigm with a more powerful fine-grained alignment. During the adapting stage, we enable VLM to obtain fine-grained alignment by using learnable text prompts to resolve an auxiliary dense pixel-wise prediction task. Furthermore, we propose a visual prompt module to provide the prior task information (i.e., the categories need to be predicted) for the vision branch to better adapt the pre-trained VLM to the downstream tasks. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance for open-vocabulary object detection, e.g., 31.5% mAP on unseen classes of COCO.
Authors:Peiran Peng, Tingfa Xu, Liqiang Song, Mengqi Zhu, Yuqiang Fang, Jianan Li
Abstract:
Detecting tiny objects in multimodal Red-Green-Blue-Thermal (RGBT) imagery is a critical challenge in computer vision, particularly in surveillance, search and rescue, and autonomous navigation. Drone-based scenarios exacerbate these challenges due to spatial misalignment, low-light conditions, occlusion, and cluttered backgrounds. Current methods struggle to leverage the complementary information between visible and thermal modalities effectively. We propose COXNet, a novel framework for RGBT tiny object detection, addressing these issues through three core innovations: i) the Cross-Layer Fusion Module, fusing high-level visible and low-level thermal features for enhanced semantic and spatial accuracy; ii) the Dynamic Alignment and Scale Refinement module, correcting cross-modal spatial misalignments and preserving multi-scale features; and iii) an optimized label assignment strategy using the GeoShape Similarity Measure for better localization. COXNet achieves a 3.32\% mAP$_{50}$ improvement on the RGBTDronePerson dataset over state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness for robust detection in complex environments.
Authors:Suhwan Cho, Minhyeok Lee, Jungho Lee, Sunghun Yang, Sangyoun Lee
Abstract:
Video salient object detection (SOD) relies on motion cues to distinguish salient objects from backgrounds, but training such models is limited by scarce video datasets compared to abundant image datasets. Existing approaches that use spatial transformations to create video sequences from static images fail for motion-guided tasks, as these transformations produce unrealistic optical flows that lack semantic understanding of motion. We present TransFlow, which transfers motion knowledge from pre-trained video diffusion models to generate realistic training data for video SOD. Video diffusion models have learned rich semantic motion priors from large-scale video data, understanding how different objects naturally move in real scenes. TransFlow leverages this knowledge to generate semantically-aware optical flows from static images, where objects exhibit natural motion patterns while preserving spatial boundaries and temporal coherence. Our method achieves improved performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating effective motion knowledge transfer.
Authors:Antonio Finocchiaro, Alessandro Sebastiano Catinello, Michele Mazzamuto, Rosario Leonardi, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella
Abstract:
Hand-object interaction detection remains an open challenge in real-time applications, where intuitive user experiences depend on fast and accurate detection of interactions with surrounding objects. We propose an efficient approach for detecting hand-objects interactions from streaming egocentric vision that operates in real time. Our approach consists of an action recognition module and an object detection module for identifying active objects upon confirmed interaction. Our Mamba model with EfficientNetV2 as backbone for action recognition achieves 38.52% p-AP on the ENIGMA-51 benchmark at 30fps, while our fine-tuned YOLOWorld reaches 85.13% AP for hand and object. We implement our models in a cascaded architecture where the action recognition and object detection modules operate sequentially. When the action recognition predicts a contact state, it activates the object detection module, which in turn performs inference on the relevant frame to detect and classify the active object.
Authors:Daojie Peng, Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Jun Ma
Abstract:
Object navigation in open-world environments remains a formidable and pervasive challenge for robotic systems, particularly when it comes to executing long-horizon tasks that require both open-world object detection and high-level task planning. Traditional methods often struggle to integrate these components effectively, and this limits their capability to deal with complex, long-range navigation missions. In this paper, we propose LOVON, a novel framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) for hierarchical task planning with open-vocabulary visual detection models, tailored for effective long-range object navigation in dynamic, unstructured environments. To tackle real-world challenges including visual jittering, blind zones, and temporary target loss, we design dedicated solutions such as Laplacian Variance Filtering for visual stabilization. We also develop a functional execution logic for the robot that guarantees LOVON's capabilities in autonomous navigation, task adaptation, and robust task completion. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the successful completion of long-sequence tasks involving real-time detection, search, and navigation toward open-vocabulary dynamic targets. Furthermore, real-world experiments across different legged robots (Unitree Go2, B2, and H1-2) showcase the compatibility and appealing plug-and-play feature of LOVON.
Authors:Shulan Ruan, Rongwei Wang, Xuchen Shen, Huijie Liu, Baihui Xiao, Jun Shi, Kun Zhang, Zhenya Huang, Yu Liu, Enhong Chen, You He
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion perception (MSFP) is a key technology for embodied AI, which can serve a variety of downstream tasks (e.g., 3D object detection and semantic segmentation) and application scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving and swarm robotics). Recently, impressive achievements on AI-based MSFP methods have been reviewed in relevant surveys. However, we observe that the existing surveys have some limitations after a rigorous and detailed investigation. For one thing, most surveys are oriented to a single task or research field, such as 3D object detection or autonomous driving. Therefore, researchers in other related tasks often find it difficult to benefit directly. For another, most surveys only introduce MSFP from a single perspective of multi-modal fusion, while lacking consideration of the diversity of MSFP methods, such as multi-view fusion and time-series fusion. To this end, in this paper, we hope to organize MSFP research from a task-agnostic perspective, where methods are reported from various technical views. Specifically, we first introduce the background of MSFP. Next, we review multi-modal and multi-agent fusion methods. A step further, time-series fusion methods are analyzed. In the era of LLM, we also investigate multimodal LLM fusion methods. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions for MSFP. We hope this survey can help researchers understand the important progress in MSFP and provide possible insights for future research.
Authors:Yi Zhang, Yi Wang, Yawen Cui, Lap-Pui Chau
Abstract:
This paper proposes 3DGeoDet, a novel geometry-aware 3D object detection approach that effectively handles single- and multi-view RGB images in indoor and outdoor environments, showcasing its general-purpose applicability. The key challenge for image-based 3D object detection tasks is the lack of 3D geometric cues, which leads to ambiguity in establishing correspondences between images and 3D representations. To tackle this problem, 3DGeoDet generates efficient 3D geometric representations in both explicit and implicit manners based on predicted depth information. Specifically, we utilize the predicted depth to learn voxel occupancy and optimize the voxelized 3D feature volume explicitly through the proposed voxel occupancy attention. To further enhance 3D awareness, the feature volume is integrated with an implicit 3D representation, the truncated signed distance function (TSDF). Without requiring supervision from 3D signals, we significantly improve the model's comprehension of 3D geometry by leveraging intermediate 3D representations and achieve end-to-end training. Our approach surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art image-based methods on both single- and multi-view benchmark datasets across diverse environments, achieving a 9.3 mAP@0.5 improvement on the SUN RGB-D dataset, a 3.3 mAP@0.5 improvement on the ScanNetV2 dataset, and a 0.19 AP3D@0.7 improvement on the KITTI dataset. The project page is available at: https://cindy0725.github.io/3DGeoDet/.
Authors:Kunyu Wang, Xueyang Fu, Xin Lu, Chengjie Ge, Chengzhi Cao, Wei Zhai, Zheng-Jun Zha
Abstract:
Continual test-time adaptive object detection (CTTA-OD) aims to online adapt a source pre-trained detector to ever-changing environments during inference under continuous domain shifts. Most existing CTTA-OD methods prioritize effectiveness while overlooking computational efficiency, which is crucial for resource-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we propose an efficient CTTA-OD method via pruning. Our motivation stems from the observation that not all learned source features are beneficial; certain domain-sensitive feature channels can adversely affect target domain performance. Inspired by this, we introduce a sensitivity-guided channel pruning strategy that quantifies each channel based on its sensitivity to domain discrepancies at both image and instance levels. We apply weighted sparsity regularization to selectively suppress and prune these sensitive channels, focusing adaptation efforts on invariant ones. Additionally, we introduce a stochastic channel reactivation mechanism to restore pruned channels, enabling recovery of potentially useful features and mitigating the risks of early pruning. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that our method achieves superior adaptation performance while reducing computational overhead by 12% in FLOPs compared to the recent SOTA method.
Authors:Yuhao Qiu, Shuyan Bai, Tingfa Xu, Peifu Liu, Haolin Qin, Jianan Li
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) is crucial in computer vision, yet RGB-based methods face limitations in challenging scenes, such as small objects and similar color features. Hyperspectral images provide a promising solution for more accurate Hyperspectral Salient Object Detection (HSOD) by abundant spectral information, while HSOD methods are hindered by the lack of extensive and available datasets. In this context, we introduce HSOD-BIT-V2, the largest and most challenging HSOD benchmark dataset to date. Five distinct challenges focusing on small objects and foreground-background similarity are designed to emphasize spectral advantages and real-world complexity. To tackle these challenges, we propose Hyper-HRNet, a high-resolution HSOD network. Hyper-HRNet effectively extracts, integrates, and preserves effective spectral information while reducing dimensionality by capturing the self-similar spectral features. Additionally, it conveys fine details and precisely locates object contours by incorporating comprehensive global information and detailed object saliency representations. Experimental analysis demonstrates that Hyper-HRNet outperforms existing models, especially in challenging scenarios.
Authors:Peng Cui, Guande He, Dan Zhang, Zhijie Deng, Yinpeng Dong, Jun Zhu
Abstract:
Datasets collected from the open world unavoidably suffer from various forms of randomness or noiseness, leading to the ubiquity of aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Quantifying such uncertainty is particularly pivotal for object detection, where images contain multi-scale objects with occlusion, obscureness, and even noisy annotations, in contrast to images with centric and similar-scale objects in classification. This paper suggests modeling and exploiting the uncertainty inherent in object detection data with vision foundation models and develops a data-centric reliable training paradigm. Technically, we propose to estimate the data uncertainty of each object instance based on the feature space of vision foundation models, which are trained on ultra-large-scale datasets and able to exhibit universal data representation. In particular, we assume a mixture-of-Gaussian structure of the object features and devise Mahalanobis distance-based measures to quantify the data uncertainty. Furthermore, we suggest two curial and practical usages of the estimated uncertainty: 1) for defining uncertainty-aware sample filter to abandon noisy and redundant instances to avoid over-fitting, and 2) for defining sample adaptive regularizer to balance easy/hard samples for adaptive training. The estimated aleatoric uncertainty serves as an extra level of annotations of the dataset, so it can be utilized in a plug-and-play manner with any model. Extensive empirical studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed aleatoric uncertainty measure on various advanced detection models and challenging benchmarks.
Authors:Suhwan Cho, Minhyeok Lee, Jungho Lee, Sangyoun Lee
Abstract:
In many video processing tasks, leveraging large-scale image datasets is a common strategy, as image data is more abundant and facilitates comprehensive knowledge transfer. A typical approach for simulating video from static images involves applying spatial transformations, such as affine transformations and spline warping, to create sequences that mimic temporal progression. However, in tasks like video salient object detection, where both appearance and motion cues are critical, these basic image-to-video techniques fail to produce realistic optical flows that capture the independent motion properties of each object. In this study, we show that image-to-video diffusion models can generate realistic transformations of static images while understanding the contextual relationships between image components. This ability allows the model to generate plausible optical flows, preserving semantic integrity while reflecting the independent motion of scene elements. By augmenting individual images in this way, we create large-scale image-flow pairs that significantly enhance model training. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all public benchmark datasets, outperforming existing approaches.
Authors:Burak Ercan, Onur Eker, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
Abstract:
Low-light environments pose significant challenges for image enhancement methods. To address these challenges, in this work, we introduce the HUE dataset, a comprehensive collection of high-resolution event and frame sequences captured in diverse and challenging low-light conditions. Our dataset includes 106 sequences, encompassing indoor, cityscape, twilight, night, driving, and controlled scenarios, each carefully recorded to address various illumination levels and dynamic ranges. Utilizing a hybrid RGB and event camera setup. we collect a dataset that combines high-resolution event data with complementary frame data. We employ both qualitative and quantitative evaluations using no-reference metrics to assess state-of-the-art low-light enhancement and event-based image reconstruction methods. Additionally, we evaluate these methods on a downstream object detection task. Our findings reveal that while event-based methods perform well in specific metrics, they may produce false positives in practical applications. This dataset and our comprehensive analysis provide valuable insights for future research in low-light vision and hybrid camera systems.
Authors:Suhwan Cho, Minhyeok Lee, Jungho Lee, Donghyeong Kim, Seunghoon Lee, Sungmin Woo, Sangyoun Lee
Abstract:
Unsupervised video object segmentation (VOS), also known as video salient object detection, aims to detect the most prominent object in a video at the pixel level. Recently, two-stream approaches that leverage both RGB images and optical flow maps have gained significant attention. However, the limited amount of training data remains a substantial challenge. In this study, we propose a novel data generation method that simulates fake optical flows from single images, thereby creating large-scale training data for stable network learning. Inspired by the observation that optical flow maps are highly dependent on depth maps, we generate fake optical flows by refining and augmenting the estimated depth maps of each image. By incorporating our simulated image-flow pairs, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmark datasets without relying on complex modules. We believe that our data generation method represents a potential breakthrough for future VOS research.
Authors:Yushi Hu, Weijia Shi, Xingyu Fu, Dan Roth, Mari Ostendorf, Luke Zettlemoyer, Noah A Smith, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract:
Humans draw to facilitate reasoning: we draw auxiliary lines when solving geometry problems; we mark and circle when reasoning on maps; we use sketches to amplify our ideas and relieve our limited-capacity working memory. However, such actions are missing in current multimodal language models (LMs). Current chain-of-thought and tool-use paradigms only use text as intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we introduce Sketchpad, a framework that gives multimodal LMs a visual sketchpad and tools to draw on the sketchpad. The LM conducts planning and reasoning according to the visual artifacts it has drawn. Different from prior work, which uses text-to-image models to enable LMs to draw, Sketchpad enables LMs to draw with lines, boxes, marks, etc., which is closer to human sketching and better facilitates reasoning. Sketchpad can also use specialist vision models during the sketching process (e.g., draw bounding boxes with object detection models, draw masks with segmentation models), to further enhance visual perception and reasoning. We experiment with a wide range of math tasks (including geometry, functions, graphs, and chess) and complex visual reasoning tasks. Sketchpad substantially improves performance on all tasks over strong base models with no sketching, yielding an average gain of 12.7% on math tasks, and 8.6% on vision tasks. GPT-4o with Sketchpad sets a new state of the art on all tasks, including V*Bench (80.3%), BLINK spatial reasoning (83.9%), and visual correspondence (80.8%). All codes and data are in https://visualsketchpad.github.io/.
Authors:Jianan Li, Shaocong Dong, Lihe Ding, Tingfa Xu
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection in large-scale outdoor scenes, characterized by considerable variations in object scales, necessitates features rich in both long-range and fine-grained information. While recent detectors have utilized window-based transformers to model long-range dependencies, they tend to overlook fine-grained details. To bridge this gap, we propose MsSVT++, an innovative Mixed-scale Sparse Voxel Transformer that simultaneously captures both types of information through a divide-and-conquer approach. This approach involves explicitly dividing attention heads into multiple groups, each responsible for attending to information within a specific range. The outputs of these groups are subsequently merged to obtain final mixed-scale features. To mitigate the computational complexity associated with applying a window-based transformer in 3D voxel space, we introduce a novel Chessboard Sampling strategy and implement voxel sampling and gathering operations sparsely using a hash map. Moreover, an important challenge stems from the observation that non-empty voxels are primarily located on the surface of objects, which impedes the accurate estimation of bounding boxes. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a Center Voting module that integrates newly voted voxels enriched with mixed-scale contextual information towards the centers of the objects, thereby improving precise object localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our single-stage detector, built upon the foundation of MsSVT++, consistently delivers exceptional performance across diverse datasets.
Authors:Alessandro Traspadini, Marco Giordani, Giovanni Giambene, Tomaso De Cola, Michele Zorzi
Abstract:
During the last few years, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with sensors and cameras has emerged as a cutting-edge technology to provide services such as surveillance, infrastructure inspections, and target acquisition. However, this approach requires UAVs to process data onboard, mainly for person/object detection and recognition, which may pose significant energy constraints as UAVs are battery-powered. A possible solution can be the support of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) for edge computing. In particular, UAVs can partially offload data (e.g., video acquisitions from onboard sensors) to more powerful upstream High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) or satellites acting as edge computing servers to increase the battery autonomy compared to local processing, even though at the expense of some data transmission delays. Accordingly, in this study we model the energy consumption of UAVs, HAPs, and satellites considering the energy for data processing, offloading, and hovering. Then, we investigate whether data offloading can improve the system performance. Simulations demonstrate that edge computing can improve both UAV autonomy and end-to-end delay compared to onboard processing in many configurations.
Authors:Jianghang Lin, Yunhang Shen, Bingquan Wang, Shaohui Lin, Ke Li, Liujuan Cao
Abstract:
Despite weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) being a promising step toward evading strong instance-level annotations, its capability is confined to closed-set categories within a single training dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised open-vocabulary object detection framework, namely WSOVOD, to extend traditional WSOD to detect novel concepts and utilize diverse datasets with only image-level annotations. To achieve this, we explore three vital strategies, including dataset-level feature adaptation, image-level salient object localization, and region-level vision-language alignment. First, we perform data-aware feature extraction to produce an input-conditional coefficient, which is leveraged into dataset attribute prototypes to identify dataset bias and help achieve cross-dataset generalization. Second, a customized location-oriented weakly supervised region proposal network is proposed to utilize high-level semantic layouts from the category-agnostic segment anything model to distinguish object boundaries. Lastly, we introduce a proposal-concept synchronized multiple-instance network, i.e., object mining and refinement with visual-semantic alignment, to discover objects matched to the text embeddings of concepts. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that the proposed WSOVOD achieves new state-of-the-art compared with previous WSOD methods in both close-set object localization and detection tasks. Meanwhile, WSOVOD enables cross-dataset and open-vocabulary learning to achieve on-par or even better performance than well-established fully-supervised open-vocabulary object detection (FSOVOD).
Authors:Anh-Khoa Nguyen Vu, Thanh-Toan Do, Vinh-Tiep Nguyen, Tam Le, Minh-Triet Tran, Tam V. Nguyen
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection aims to simultaneously localize and classify the objects in an image with limited training samples. However, most existing few-shot object detection methods focus on extracting the features of a few samples of novel classes that lack diversity. Hence, they may not be sufficient to capture the data distribution. To address that limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel approach in which we train a generator to generate synthetic data for novel classes. Still, directly training a generator on the novel class is not effective due to the lack of novel data. To overcome that issue, we leverage the large-scale dataset of base classes. Our overarching goal is to train a generator that captures the data variations of the base dataset. We then transform the captured variations into novel classes by generating synthetic data with the trained generator. To encourage the generator to capture data variations on base classes, we propose to train the generator with an optimal transport loss that minimizes the optimal transport distance between the distributions of real and synthetic data. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state of the art. Source code will be available.
Authors:Banghua Zhu, Mingyu Ding, Philip Jacobson, Ming Wu, Wei Zhan, Michael Jordan, Jiantao Jiao
Abstract:
Self-training is an important technique for solving semi-supervised learning problems. It leverages unlabeled data by generating pseudo-labels and combining them with a limited labeled dataset for training. The effectiveness of self-training heavily relies on the accuracy of these pseudo-labels. In this paper, we introduce doubly robust self-training, a novel semi-supervised algorithm that provably balances between two extremes. When the pseudo-labels are entirely incorrect, our method reduces to a training process solely using labeled data. Conversely, when the pseudo-labels are completely accurate, our method transforms into a training process utilizing all pseudo-labeled data and labeled data, thus increasing the effective sample size. Through empirical evaluations on both the ImageNet dataset for image classification and the nuScenes autonomous driving dataset for 3D object detection, we demonstrate the superiority of the doubly robust loss over the standard self-training baseline.
Authors:Yaoyao Liu, Bernt Schiele, Andrea Vedaldi, Christian Rupprecht
Abstract:
Incremental object detection (IOD) aims to train an object detector in phases, each with annotations for new object categories. As other incremental settings, IOD is subject to catastrophic forgetting, which is often addressed by techniques such as knowledge distillation (KD) and exemplar replay (ER). However, KD and ER do not work well if applied directly to state-of-the-art transformer-based object detectors such as Deformable DETR and UP-DETR. In this paper, we solve these issues by proposing a ContinuaL DEtection TRansformer (CL-DETR), a new method for transformer-based IOD which enables effective usage of KD and ER in this context. First, we introduce a Detector Knowledge Distillation (DKD) loss, focusing on the most informative and reliable predictions from old versions of the model, ignoring redundant background predictions, and ensuring compatibility with the available ground-truth labels. We also improve ER by proposing a calibration strategy to preserve the label distribution of the training set, therefore better matching training and testing statistics. We conduct extensive experiments on COCO 2017 and demonstrate that CL-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results in the IOD setting.
Authors:Yongwoo Lee, Minhyeok Lee, Suhwan Cho, Sangyoun Lee
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) is a task that involves identifying and segmenting the most visually prominent object in an image. Existing solutions can accomplish this use a multi-scale feature fusion mechanism to detect the global context of an image. However, as there is no consideration of the structures in the image nor the relations between distant pixels, conventional methods cannot deal with complex scenes effectively. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution module (AGCM) to overcome these limitations. Prototype features are initially extracted from the input image using a learnable region generation layer that spatially groups features in the image. The prototype features are then refined by propagating information between them based on a graph architecture, where each feature is regarded as a node. Experimental results show that the proposed AGCM dramatically improves the SOD performance both quantitatively and quantitatively.
Authors:Minhyeok Lee, Suhwan Cho, Chaewon Park, Dogyoon Lee, Jungho Lee, Sangyoun Lee
Abstract:
The camouflaged object detection (COD) task aims to identify and segment objects that blend into the background due to their similar color or texture. Despite the inherent difficulties of the task, COD has gained considerable attention in several fields, such as medicine, life-saving, and anti-military fields. In this paper, we propose a novel solution called the Deformable Point Sampling network (DPS-Net) to address the challenges associated with COD. The proposed DPS-Net utilizes a Deformable Point Sampling transformer (DPS transformer) that can effectively capture sparse local boundary information of significant object boundaries in COD using a deformable point sampling method. Moreover, the DPS transformer demonstrates robust COD performance by extracting contextual features for target object localization through integrating rough global positional information of objects with boundary local information. We evaluate our method on three prominent datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through comparative experiments.
Authors:Yuqing Lan, Chenyang Zhu, Zhirui Gao, Jiazhao Zhang, Yihan Cao, Renjiao Yi, Yijie Wang, Kai Xu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D object detection has gained significant interest due to its critical applications in autonomous driving and embodied AI. Existing detection methods, whether offline or online, typically rely on dense point cloud reconstruction, which imposes substantial computational overhead and memory constraints, hindering real-time deployment in downstream tasks. To address this, we propose a novel reconstruction-free online framework tailored for memory-efficient and real-time 3D detection. Specifically, given streaming posed RGB-D video input, we leverage Cubify Anything as a pre-trained visual foundation model (VFM) for single-view 3D object detection by bounding boxes, coupled with CLIP to capture open-vocabulary semantics of detected objects. To fuse all detected bounding boxes across different views into a unified one, we employ an association module for correspondences of multi-views and an optimization module to fuse the 3D bounding boxes of the same instance predicted in multi-views. The association module utilizes 3D Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and a box correspondence matching module, while the optimization module uses an IoU-guided efficient random optimization technique based on particle filtering to enforce multi-view consistency of the 3D bounding boxes while minimizing computational complexity. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 and CA-1M datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among online methods. Benefiting from this novel reconstruction-free paradigm for 3D object detection, our method exhibits great generalization abilities in various scenarios, enabling real-time perception even in environments exceeding 1000 square meters.
Authors:Huitong Yang, Zhuoxiao Chen, Fengyi Zhang, Zi Huang, Yadan Luo
Abstract:
Maintaining robust 3D perception under dynamic and unpredictable test-time conditions remains a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods often fail in high-variance tasks like 3D object detection due to unstable optimization and sharp minima. While recent model merging strategies based on linear mode connectivity (LMC) offer improved stability by interpolating between fine-tuned checkpoints, they are computationally expensive, requiring repeated checkpoint access and multiple forward passes. In this paper, we introduce CodeMerge, a lightweight and scalable model merging framework that bypasses these limitations by operating in a compact latent space. Instead of loading full models, CodeMerge represents each checkpoint with a low-dimensional fingerprint derived from the source model's penultimate features and constructs a key-value codebook. We compute merging coefficients using ridge leverage scores on these fingerprints, enabling efficient model composition without compromising adaptation quality. Our method achieves strong performance across challenging benchmarks, improving end-to-end 3D detection 14.9% NDS on nuScenes-C and LiDAR-based detection by over 7.6% mAP on nuScenes-to-KITTI, while benefiting downstream tasks such as online mapping, motion prediction and planning even without training. Code and pretrained models are released in the supplementary material.
Authors:Kunjun Li, Cheng-Yen Yang, Hsiang-Wei Huang, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Abstract:
This report introduces ReID-SAM, a novel model developed for the SkiTB Challenge that addresses the complexities of tracking skier appearance. Our approach integrates the SAMURAI tracker with a person re-identification (Re-ID) module and advanced post-processing techniques to enhance accuracy in challenging skiing scenarios. We employ an OSNet-based Re-ID model to minimize identity switches and utilize YOLOv11 with Kalman filtering or STARK-based object detection for precise equipment tracking. When evaluated on the SkiTB dataset, ReID-SAM achieved a state-of-the-art F1-score of 0.870, surpassing existing methods across alpine, ski jumping, and freestyle skiing disciplines. These results demonstrate significant advancements in skier tracking accuracy and provide valuable insights for computer vision applications in winter sports.
Authors:Jia Syuen Lim, Yadan Luo, Zhi Chen, Tianqi Wei, Scott Chapman, Zi Huang
Abstract:
In the Detection and Multi-Object Tracking of Sweet Peppers Challenge, we present Track Any Peppers (TAP) - a weakly supervised ensemble technique for sweet peppers tracking. TAP leverages the zero-shot detection capabilities of vision-language foundation models like Grounding DINO to automatically generate pseudo-labels for sweet peppers in video sequences with minimal human intervention. These pseudo-labels, refined when necessary, are used to train a YOLOv8 segmentation network. To enhance detection accuracy under challenging conditions, we incorporate pre-processing techniques such as relighting adjustments and apply depth-based filtering during post-inference. For object tracking, we integrate the Matching by Segment Anything (MASA) adapter with the BoT-SORT algorithm. Our approach achieves a HOTA score of 80.4%, MOTA of 66.1%, Recall of 74.0%, and Precision of 90.7%, demonstrating effective tracking of sweet peppers without extensive manual effort. This work highlights the potential of foundation models for efficient and accurate object detection and tracking in agricultural settings.
Authors:Zhengru Fang, Jingjing Wang, Yanan Ma, Yihang Tao, Yiqin Deng, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
Collaborative perception enhances sensing in multirobot and vehicular networks by fusing information from multiple agents, improving perception accuracy and sensing range. However, mobility and non-rigid sensor mounts introduce extrinsic calibration errors, necessitating online calibration, further complicated by limited overlap in sensing regions. Moreover, maintaining fresh information is crucial for timely and accurate sensing. To address calibration errors and ensure timely and accurate perception, we propose a robust task-oriented communication strategy to optimize online self-calibration and efficient feature sharing for Real-time Adaptive Collaborative Perception (R-ACP). Specifically, we first formulate an Age of Perceived Targets (AoPT) minimization problem to capture data timeliness of multi-view streaming. Then, in the calibration phase, we introduce a channel-aware self-calibration technique based on reidentification (Re-ID), which adaptively compresses key features according to channel capacities, effectively addressing calibration issues via spatial and temporal cross-camera correlations. In the streaming phase, we tackle the trade-off between bandwidth and inference accuracy by leveraging an Information Bottleneck (IB) based encoding method to adjust video compression rates based on task relevance, thereby reducing communication overhead and latency. Finally, we design a priority-aware network to filter corrupted features to mitigate performance degradation from packet corruption. Extensive studies demonstrate that our framework outperforms five baselines, improving multiple object detection accuracy (MODA) by 25.49% and reducing communication costs by 51.36% under severely poor channel conditions. Code will be made publicly available: github.com/fangzr/R-ACP.
Authors:Xuelu Feng, Yunsheng Li, Dongdong Chen, Chunming Qiao, Junsong Yuan, Lu Yuan, Gang Hua
Abstract:
We introduce pluralistic salient object detection (PSOD), a novel task aimed at generating multiple plausible salient segmentation results for a given input image. Unlike conventional SOD methods that produce a single segmentation mask for salient objects, this new setting recognizes the inherent complexity of real-world images, comprising multiple objects, and the ambiguity in defining salient objects due to different user intentions. To study this task, we present two new SOD datasets "DUTS-MM" and "DUS-MQ", along with newly designed evaluation metrics. DUTS-MM builds upon the DUTS dataset but enriches the ground-truth mask annotations from three aspects which 1) improves the mask quality especially for boundary and fine-grained structures; 2) alleviates the annotation inconsistency issue; and 3) provides multiple ground-truth masks for images with saliency ambiguity. DUTS-MQ consists of approximately 100K image-mask pairs with human-annotated preference scores, enabling the learning of real human preferences in measuring mask quality. Building upon these two datasets, we propose a simple yet effective pluralistic SOD baseline based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) design. Equipped with two prediction heads, it simultaneously predicts multiple masks using different query prompts and predicts human preference scores for each mask candidate. Extensive experiments and analyses underscore the significance of our proposed datasets and affirm the effectiveness of our PSOD framework.
Authors:Yuqing Wen, Yucheng Zhao, Yingfei Liu, Binyuan Huang, Fan Jia, Yanhui Wang, Chi Zhang, Tiancai Wang, Xiaoyan Sun, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
The field of autonomous driving increasingly demands high-quality annotated video training data. In this paper, we propose Panacea+, a powerful and universally applicable framework for generating video data in driving scenes. Built upon the foundation of our previous work, Panacea, Panacea+ adopts a multi-view appearance noise prior mechanism and a super-resolution module for enhanced consistency and increased resolution. Extensive experiments show that the generated video samples from Panacea+ greatly benefit a wide range of tasks on different datasets, including 3D object tracking, 3D object detection, and lane detection tasks on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 dataset. These results strongly prove Panacea+ to be a valuable data generation framework for autonomous driving.
Authors:Zhuoxiao Chen, Zixin Wang, Yadan Luo, Sen Wang, Zi Huang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection has seen impressive advances in recent times. However, deploying trained 3D detectors in the real world often yields unsatisfactory performance when the distribution of the test data significantly deviates from the training data due to different weather conditions, object sizes, \textit{etc}. A key factor in this performance degradation is the diminished generalizability of pre-trained models, which creates a sharp loss landscape during training. Such sharpness, when encountered during testing, can precipitate significant performance declines, even with minor data variations. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose \textbf{dual-perturbation optimization (DPO)} for \textbf{\underline{T}est-\underline{t}ime \underline{A}daptation in \underline{3}D \underline{O}bject \underline{D}etection (TTA-3OD)}. We minimize the sharpness to cultivate a flat loss landscape to ensure model resiliency to minor data variations, thereby enhancing the generalization of the adaptation process. To fully capture the inherent variability of the test point clouds, we further introduce adversarial perturbation to the input BEV features to better simulate the noisy test environment. As the dual perturbation strategy relies on trustworthy supervision signals, we utilize a reliable Hungarian matcher to filter out pseudo-labels sensitive to perturbations. Additionally, we introduce early Hungarian cutoff to avoid error accumulation from incorrect pseudo-labels by halting the adaptation process. Extensive experiments across three types of transfer tasks demonstrate that the proposed DPO significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches, specifically on Waymo $\rightarrow$ KITTI, outperforming the most competitive baseline by 57.72\% in $\text{AP}_\text{3D}$ and reaching 91\% of the fully supervised upper bound.
Authors:Yifan Bai, Dongming Wu, Yingfei Liu, Fan Jia, Weixin Mao, Ziheng Zhang, Yucheng Zhao, Jianbing Shen, Xing Wei, Tiancai Wang, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
Rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving (AD) tasks turned a significant shift toward end-to-end fashion, particularly in the utilization of vision-language models (VLMs) that integrate robust logical reasoning and cognitive abilities to enable comprehensive end-to-end planning. However, these VLM-based approaches tend to integrate 2D vision tokenizers and a large language model (LLM) for ego-car planning, which lack 3D geometric priors as a cornerstone of reliable planning. Naturally, this observation raises a critical concern: Can a 2D-tokenized LLM accurately perceive the 3D environment? Our evaluation of current VLM-based methods across 3D object detection, vectorized map construction, and environmental caption suggests that the answer is, unfortunately, NO. In other words, 2D-tokenized LLM fails to provide reliable autonomous driving. In response, we introduce DETR-style 3D perceptrons as 3D tokenizers, which connect LLM with a one-layer linear projector. This simple yet elegant strategy, termed Atlas, harnesses the inherent priors of the 3D physical world, enabling it to simultaneously process high-resolution multi-view images and employ spatiotemporal modeling. Despite its simplicity, Atlas demonstrates superior performance in both 3D detection and ego planning tasks on nuScenes dataset, proving that 3D-tokenized LLM is the key to reliable autonomous driving. The code and datasets will be released.
Authors:Georg K. J. Fischer, Max Bergau, D. Adriana Gómez-Rosal, Andreas Wachaja, Johannes Gräter, Matthias Odenweller, Uwe Piechottka, Fabian Hoeflinger, Nikhil Gosala, Niklas Wetzel, Daniel Büscher, Abhinav Valada, Wolfram Burgard
Abstract:
Automated and autonomous industrial inspection is a longstanding research field, driven by the necessity to enhance safety and efficiency within industrial settings. In addressing this need, we introduce an autonomously navigating robotic system designed for comprehensive plant inspection. This innovative system comprises a robotic platform equipped with a diverse array of sensors integrated to facilitate the detection of various process and infrastructure parameters. These sensors encompass optical (LiDAR, Stereo, UV/IR/RGB cameras), olfactory (electronic nose), and acoustic (microphone array) capabilities, enabling the identification of factors such as methane leaks, flow rates, and infrastructural anomalies. The proposed system underwent individual evaluation at a wastewater treatment site within a chemical plant, providing a practical and challenging environment for testing. The evaluation process encompassed key aspects such as object detection, 3D localization, and path planning. Furthermore, specific evaluations were conducted for optical methane leak detection and localization, as well as acoustic assessments focusing on pump equipment and gas leak localization.
Authors:Zhao Song, Weixin Wang, Junze Yin
Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to human society. Softmax regression and residual neural networks (ResNet) are two important techniques in deep learning: they not only serve as significant theoretical components supporting the functionality of LLMs but also are related to many other machine learning and theoretical computer science fields, including but not limited to image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and tensors.
Previous research works studied these two concepts separately. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of the regression problem: $\| \langle \exp(Ax) + A x , {\bf 1}_n \rangle^{-1} ( \exp(Ax) + Ax ) - b \|_2^2$, where $A$ is a matrix in $\mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$, $b$ is a vector in $\mathbb{R}^n$, and ${\bf 1}_n$ is the $n$-dimensional vector whose entries are all $1$. This regression problem is a unified scheme that combines softmax regression and ResNet, which has never been done before. We derive the gradient, Hessian, and Lipschitz properties of the loss function. The Hessian is shown to be positive semidefinite, and its structure is characterized as the sum of a low-rank matrix and a diagonal matrix. This enables an efficient approximate Newton method.
As a result, this unified scheme helps to connect two previously thought unrelated fields and provides novel insight into loss landscape and optimization for emerging over-parameterized neural networks, which is meaningful for future research in deep learning models.
Authors:Yadan Luo, Zhuoxiao Chen, Zhen Fang, Zheng Zhang, Zi Huang, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh
Abstract:
Achieving a reliable LiDAR-based object detector in autonomous driving is paramount, but its success hinges on obtaining large amounts of precise 3D annotations. Active learning (AL) seeks to mitigate the annotation burden through algorithms that use fewer labels and can attain performance comparable to fully supervised learning. Although AL has shown promise, current approaches prioritize the selection of unlabeled point clouds with high uncertainty and/or diversity, leading to the selection of more instances for labeling and reduced computational efficiency. In this paper, we resort to a novel kernel coding rate maximization (KECOR) strategy which aims to identify the most informative point clouds to acquire labels through the lens of information theory. Greedy search is applied to seek desired point clouds that can maximize the minimal number of bits required to encode the latent features. To determine the uniqueness and informativeness of the selected samples from the model perspective, we construct a proxy network of the 3D detector head and compute the outer product of Jacobians from all proxy layers to form the empirical neural tangent kernel (NTK) matrix. To accommodate both one-stage (i.e., SECOND) and two-stage detectors (i.e., PVRCNN), we further incorporate the classification entropy maximization and well trade-off between detection performance and the total number of bounding boxes selected for annotation. Extensive experiments conducted on two 3D benchmarks and a 2D detection dataset evidence the superiority and versatility of the proposed approach. Our results show that approximately 44% box-level annotation costs and 26% computational time are reduced compared to the state-of-the-art AL method, without compromising detection performance.
Authors:Anna Bair, Hongxu Yin, Maying Shen, Pavlo Molchanov, Jose Alvarez
Abstract:
Robustness and compactness are two essential attributes of deep learning models that are deployed in the real world. The goals of robustness and compactness may seem to be at odds, since robustness requires generalization across domains, while the process of compression exploits specificity in one domain. We introduce Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Pruning (AdaSAP), which unifies these goals through the lens of network sharpness. The AdaSAP method produces sparse networks that are robust to input variations which are unseen at training time. We achieve this by strategically incorporating weight perturbations in order to optimize the loss landscape. This allows the model to be both primed for pruning and regularized for improved robustness. AdaSAP improves the robust accuracy of pruned models on image classification by up to +6% on ImageNet C and +4% on ImageNet V2, and on object detection by +4% on a corrupted Pascal VOC dataset, over a wide range of compression ratios, pruning criteria, and network architectures, outperforming recent pruning art by large margins.
Authors:Zhitong Xiong, Yanfeng Liu, Qi Wang, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract:
We present the RSSOD-Bench dataset for salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing imagery. While SOD has achieved success in natural scene images with deep learning, research in SOD for remote sensing imagery (RSSOD) is still in its early stages. Existing RSSOD datasets have limitations in terms of scale, and scene categories, which make them misaligned with real-world applications. To address these shortcomings, we construct the RSSOD-Bench dataset, which contains images from four different cities in the USA. The dataset provides annotations for various salient object categories, such as buildings, lakes, rivers, highways, bridges, aircraft, ships, athletic fields, and more. The salient objects in RSSOD-Bench exhibit large-scale variations, cluttered backgrounds, and different seasons. Unlike existing datasets, RSSOD-Bench offers uniform distribution across scene categories. We benchmark 23 different state-of-the-art approaches from both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. Experimental results demonstrate that more research efforts are required for the RSSOD task.
Authors:Yinpeng Chen, Xiyang Dai, Dongdong Chen, Mengchen Liu, Lu Yuan, Zicheng Liu, Youzuo Lin
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel mathematical property applicable to diverse images, referred to as FINOLA (First-Order Norm+Linear Autoregressive). FINOLA represents each image in the latent space as a first-order autoregressive process, in which each regression step simply applies a shared linear model on the normalized value of its immediate neighbor. This intriguing property reveals a mathematical invariance that transcends individual images. Expanding from image grids to continuous coordinates, we unveil the presence of two underlying partial differential equations. We validate the FINOLA property from two distinct angles: image reconstruction and self-supervised learning. Firstly, we demonstrate the ability of FINOLA to auto-regress up to a 256x256 feature map (the same resolution to the image) from a single vector placed at the center, successfully reconstructing the original image by only using three 3x3 convolution layers as decoder. Secondly, we leverage FINOLA for self-supervised learning by employing a simple masked prediction approach. Encoding a single unmasked quadrant block, we autoregressively predict the surrounding masked region. Remarkably, this pre-trained representation proves highly effective in image classification and object detection tasks, even when integrated into lightweight networks, all without the need for extensive fine-tuning. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Dongsheng Wang, Xu Jia, Yang Zhang, Xinyu Zhang, Yaoyuan Wang, Ziyang Zhang, Dong Wang, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors that capture brightness change of every pixel in an asynchronous manner. Compared with frame-based sensors, event cameras have microsecond-level latency and high dynamic range, hence showing great potential for object detection under high-speed motion and poor illumination conditions. Due to sparsity and asynchronism nature with event streams, most of existing approaches resort to hand-crafted methods to convert event data into 2D grid representation. However, they are sub-optimal in aggregating information from event stream for object detection. In this work, we propose to learn an event representation optimized for event-based object detection. Specifically, event streams are divided into grids in the x-y-t coordinates for both positive and negative polarity, producing a set of pillars as 3D tensor representation. To fully exploit information with event streams to detect objects, a dual-memory aggregation network (DMANet) is proposed to leverage both long and short memory along event streams to aggregate effective information for object detection. Long memory is encoded in the hidden state of adaptive convLSTMs while short memory is modeled by computing spatial-temporal correlation between event pillars at neighboring time intervals. Extensive experiments on the recently released event-based automotive detection dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Monish R. Nallapareddy, Kshitij Sirohi, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr, Wolfram Burgard, Chih-Hong Cheng, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Uncertainty estimation is crucial in safety-critical settings such as automated driving as it provides valuable information for several downstream tasks including high-level decision making and path planning. In this work, we propose EvCenterNet, a novel uncertainty-aware 2D object detection framework using evidential learning to directly estimate both classification and regression uncertainties. To employ evidential learning for object detection, we devise a combination of evidential and focal loss functions for the sparse heatmap inputs. We introduce class-balanced weighting for regression and heatmap prediction to tackle the class imbalance encountered by evidential learning. Moreover, we propose a learning scheme to actively utilize the predicted heatmap uncertainties to improve the detection performance by focusing on the most uncertain points. We train our model on the KITTI dataset and evaluate it on challenging out-of-distribution datasets including BDD100K and nuImages. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the precision and minimizes the execution time loss in relation to the base model.
Authors:Hao Chen, Weiwei Wan, Masaki Matsushita, Takeyuki Kotaka, Kensuke Harada
Abstract:
Deep learning methods have recently exhibited impressive performance in object detection. However, such methods needed much training data to achieve high recognition accuracy, which was time-consuming and required considerable manual work like labeling images. In this paper, we automatically prepare training data using robots. Considering the low efficiency and high energy consumption in robot motion, we proposed combining robotic in-hand observation and data synthesis to enlarge the limited data set collected by the robot. We first used a robot with a depth sensor to collect images of objects held in the robot's hands and segment the object pictures. Then, we used a copy-paste method to synthesize the segmented objects with rack backgrounds. The collected and synthetic images are combined to train a deep detection neural network. We conducted experiments to compare YOLOv5x detectors trained with images collected using the proposed method and several other methods. The results showed that combined observation and synthetic images led to comparable performance to manual data preparation. They provided a good guide on optimizing data configurations and parameter settings for training detectors. The proposed method required only a single process and was a low-cost way to produce the combined data. Interested readers may find the data sets and trained models from the following GitHub repository: github.com/wrslab/tubedet
Authors:Bichen Wu, Chaojian Li, Hang Zhang, Xiaoliang Dai, Peizhao Zhang, Matthew Yu, Jialiang Wang, Yingyan Celine Lin, Peter Vajda
Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been widely adopted to design accurate and efficient image classification models. However, applying NAS to a new computer vision task still requires a huge amount of effort. This is because 1) previous NAS research has been over-prioritized on image classification while largely ignoring other tasks; 2) many NAS works focus on optimizing task-specific components that cannot be favorably transferred to other tasks; and 3) existing NAS methods are typically designed to be "proxyless" and require significant effort to be integrated with each new task's training pipelines. To tackle these challenges, we propose FBNetV5, a NAS framework that can search for neural architectures for a variety of vision tasks with much reduced computational cost and human effort. Specifically, we design 1) a search space that is simple yet inclusive and transferable; 2) a multitask search process that is disentangled with target tasks' training pipeline; and 3) an algorithm to simultaneously search for architectures for multiple tasks with a computational cost agnostic to the number of tasks. We evaluate the proposed FBNetV5 targeting three fundamental vision tasks -- image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Models searched by FBNetV5 in a single run of search have outperformed the previous stateof-the-art in all the three tasks: image classification (e.g., +1.3% ImageNet top-1 accuracy under the same FLOPs as compared to FBNetV3), semantic segmentation (e.g., +1.8% higher ADE20K val. mIoU than SegFormer with 3.6x fewer FLOPs), and object detection (e.g., +1.1% COCO val. mAP with 1.2x fewer FLOPs as compared to YOLOX).
Authors:Binghao Ye, Wenjuan Li, Dong Wang, Man Yao, Bing Li, Weiming Hu, Dong Liang, Kun Shang
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are noted for their brain-like computation and energy efficiency, but their performance lags behind Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in tasks like image classification and object detection due to the limited representational capacity. To address this, we propose a novel spiking neuron, Integer Binary-Range Alignment Leaky Integrate-and-Fire to exponentially expand the information expression capacity of spiking neurons with only a slight energy increase. This is achieved through Integer Binary Leaky Integrate-and-Fire and range alignment strategy. The Integer Binary Leaky Integrate-and-Fire allows integer value activation during training and maintains spike-driven dynamics with binary conversion expands virtual timesteps during inference. The range alignment strategy is designed to solve the spike activation limitation problem where neurons fail to activate high integer values. Experiments show our method outperforms previous SNNs, achieving 74.19% accuracy on ImageNet and 66.2% mAP@50 and 49.1% mAP@50:95 on COCO, surpassing previous bests with the same architecture by +3.45% and +1.6% and +1.8%, respectively. Notably, our SNNs match or exceed ANNs' performance with the same architecture, and the energy efficiency is improved by 6.3${\times}$.
Authors:Chenxu Peng, Chenxu Wang, Minrui Zou, Danyang Li, Zhengpeng Yang, Yimian Dai, Ming-Ming Cheng, Xiang Li
Abstract:
Infrared object tracking plays a crucial role in Anti-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Anti-UAV) applications. Existing trackers often depend on cropped template regions and have limited motion modeling capabilities, which pose challenges when dealing with tiny targets. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective infrared tiny-object tracker that enhances tracking performance by integrating global detection and motion-aware learning with temporal priors. Our method is based on object detection and achieves significant improvements through two key innovations. First, we introduce frame dynamics, leveraging frame difference and optical flow to encode both prior target features and motion characteristics at the input level, enabling the model to better distinguish the target from background clutter. Second, we propose a trajectory constraint filtering strategy in the post-processing stage, utilizing spatio-temporal priors to suppress false positives and enhance tracking robustness. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches across multiple metrics in challenging infrared UAV tracking scenarios. Notably, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in the 4th Anti-UAV Challenge, securing 1st place in Track 1 and 2nd place in Track 2.
Authors:Issatay Tokmurziyev, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Muhammad Haris Khan, Yara Mahmoud, Luis Moreno, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Abstract:
We present LLM-Glasses, a wearable navigation system designed to assist visually impaired individuals by combining haptic feedback, YOLO-World object detection, and GPT-4o-driven reasoning. The system delivers real-time tactile guidance via temple-mounted actuators, enabling intuitive and independent navigation. Three user studies were conducted to evaluate its effectiveness: (1) a haptic pattern recognition study achieving an 81.3% average recognition rate across 13 distinct patterns, (2) a VICON-based navigation study in which participants successfully followed predefined paths in open spaces, and (3) an LLM-guided video evaluation demonstrating 91.8% accuracy in open scenarios, 84.6% with static obstacles, and 81.5% with dynamic obstacles. These results demonstrate the system's reliability in controlled environments, with ongoing work focusing on refining its responsiveness and adaptability to diverse real-world scenarios. LLM-Glasses showcases the potential of combining generative AI with haptic interfaces to empower visually impaired individuals with intuitive and effective mobility solutions.
Authors:Antonios Gasteratos, Konstantinos A. Tsintotas, Tobias Fischer, Yiannis Aloimonos, Michael Milford
Abstract:
Visual-based recognition, e.g., image classification, object detection, etc., is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and robotics communities. Concerning the roboticists, since the knowledge of the environment is a prerequisite for complex navigation tasks, visual place recognition is vital for most localization implementations or re-localization and loop closure detection pipelines within simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). More specifically, it corresponds to the system's ability to identify and match a previously visited location using computer vision tools. Towards developing novel techniques with enhanced accuracy and robustness, while motivated by the success presented in natural language processing methods, researchers have recently turned their attention to vision-language models, which integrate visual and textual data.
Authors:Chen Ma, Ningfei Wang, Zhengyu Zhao, Qian Wang, Qi Alfred Chen, Chao Shen
Abstract:
Recent research in adversarial machine learning has focused on visual perception in Autonomous Driving (AD) and has shown that printed adversarial patches can attack object detectors. However, it is important to note that AD visual perception encompasses more than just object detection; it also includes Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). MOT enhances the robustness by compensating for object detection errors and requiring consistent object detection results across multiple frames before influencing tracking results and driving decisions. Thus, MOT makes attacks on object detection alone less effective. To attack such robust AD visual perception, a digital hijacking attack has been proposed to cause dangerous driving scenarios. However, this attack has limited effectiveness.
In this paper, we introduce a novel physical-world adversarial patch attack, ControlLoc, designed to exploit hijacking vulnerabilities in entire AD visual perception. ControlLoc utilizes a two-stage process: initially identifying the optimal location for the adversarial patch, and subsequently generating the patch that can modify the perceived location and shape of objects with the optimal location. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of ControlLoc, achieving an impressive average attack success rate of around 98.1% across various AD visual perceptions and datasets, which is four times greater effectiveness than the existing hijacking attack. The effectiveness of ControlLoc is further validated in physical-world conditions, including real vehicle tests under different conditions such as outdoor light conditions with an average attack success rate of 77.5%. AD system-level impact assessments are also included, such as vehicle collision, using industry-grade AD systems and production-grade AD simulators with an average vehicle collision rate and unnecessary emergency stop rate of 81.3%.
Authors:Chen Ma, Ningfei Wang, Zhengyu Zhao, Qi Alfred Chen, Chao Shen
Abstract:
Autonomous Driving (AD) systems critically depend on visual perception for real-time object detection and multiple object tracking (MOT) to ensure safe driving. However, high latency in these visual perception components can lead to significant safety risks, such as vehicle collisions. While previous research has extensively explored latency attacks within the digital realm, translating these methods effectively to the physical world presents challenges. For instance, existing attacks rely on perturbations that are unrealistic or impractical for AD, such as adversarial perturbations affecting areas like the sky, or requiring large patches that obscure most of a camera's view, thus making them impossible to be conducted effectively in the real world.
In this paper, we introduce SlowPerception, the first physical-world latency attack against AD perception, via generating projector-based universal perturbations. SlowPerception strategically creates numerous phantom objects on various surfaces in the environment, significantly increasing the computational load of Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and MOT, thereby inducing substantial latency. Our SlowPerception achieves second-level latency in physical-world settings, with an average latency of 2.5 seconds across different AD perception systems, scenarios, and hardware configurations. This performance significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art latency attacks. Additionally, we conduct AD system-level impact assessments, such as vehicle collisions, using industry-grade AD systems with production-grade AD simulators with a 97% average rate. We hope that our analyses can inspire further research in this critical domain, enhancing the robustness of AD systems against emerging vulnerabilities.
Authors:Minh-Quan Dao, Holger Caesar, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Stewart Worrall, Vincent Frémont, Ezio Malis
Abstract:
Occlusion presents a significant challenge for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Collaborative perception has recently attracted a large research interest thanks to the ability to enhance the perception of autonomous vehicles via deep information fusion with intelligent roadside units (RSU), thus minimizing the impact of occlusion. While significant advancement has been made, the data-hungry nature of these methods creates a major hurdle for their real-world deployment, particularly due to the need for annotated RSU data. Manually annotating the vast amount of RSU data required for training is prohibitively expensive, given the sheer number of intersections and the effort involved in annotating point clouds. We address this challenge by devising a label-efficient object detection method for RSU based on unsupervised object discovery. Our paper introduces two new modules: one for object discovery based on a spatial-temporal aggregation of point clouds, and another for refinement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on a small portion of annotated data allows our object discovery models to narrow the performance gap with, or even surpass, fully supervised models. Extensive experiments are carried out in simulated and real-world datasets to evaluate our method.
Authors:Ehsan Latif, Ramviyas Parasuraman, Xiaoming Zhai
Abstract:
Robot systems in education can leverage Large language models' (LLMs) natural language understanding capabilities to provide assistance and facilitate learning. This paper proposes a multimodal interactive robot (PhysicsAssistant) built on YOLOv8 object detection, cameras, speech recognition, and chatbot using LLM to provide assistance to students' physics labs. We conduct a user study on ten 8th-grade students to empirically evaluate the performance of PhysicsAssistant with a human expert. The Expert rates the assistants' responses to student queries on a 0-4 scale based on Bloom's taxonomy to provide educational support. We have compared the performance of PhysicsAssistant (YOLOv8+GPT-3.5-turbo) with GPT-4 and found that the human expert rating of both systems for factual understanding is the same. However, the rating of GPT-4 for conceptual and procedural knowledge (3 and 3.2 vs 2.2 and 2.6, respectively) is significantly higher than PhysicsAssistant (p < 0.05). However, the response time of GPT-4 is significantly higher than PhysicsAssistant (3.54 vs 1.64 sec, p < 0.05). Hence, despite the relatively lower response quality of PhysicsAssistant than GPT-4, it has shown potential for being used as a real-time lab assistant to provide timely responses and can offload teachers' labor to assist with repetitive tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to build such an interactive multimodal robotic assistant for K-12 science (physics) education.
Authors:Wenxing Xu, Yuanchun Li, Jiacheng Liu, Yi Sun, Zhengyang Cao, Yixuan Li, Hao Wen, Yunxin Liu
Abstract:
Unlike cloud-based deep learning models that are often large and uniform, edge-deployed models usually demand customization for domain-specific tasks and resource-limited environments. Such customization processes can be costly and time-consuming due to the diversity of edge scenarios and the training load for each scenario. Although various approaches have been proposed for rapid resource-oriented customization and task-oriented customization respectively, achieving both of them at the same time is challenging. Drawing inspiration from the generative AI and the modular composability of neural networks, we introduce NN-Factory, an one-for-all framework to generate customized lightweight models for diverse edge scenarios. The key idea is to use a generative model to directly produce the customized models, instead of training them. The main components of NN-Factory include a modular supernet with pretrained modules that can be conditionally activated to accomplish different tasks and a generative module assembler that manipulate the modules according to task and sparsity requirements. Given an edge scenario, NN-Factory can efficiently customize a compact model specialized in the edge task while satisfying the edge resource constraints by searching for the optimal strategy to assemble the modules. Based on experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with different edge devices, NN-Factory is able to generate high-quality task- and resource-specific models within few seconds, faster than conventional model customization approaches by orders of magnitude.
Authors:Yuhao Chen, Hayden Gunraj, E. Zhixuan Zeng, Robbie Meyer, Maximilian Gilles, Alexander Wong
Abstract:
Recently, there has been tremendous interest in industry 4.0 infrastructure to address labor shortages in global supply chains. Deploying artificial intelligence-enabled robotic bin picking systems in real world has become particularly important for reducing stress and physical demands of workers while increasing speed and efficiency of warehouses. To this end, artificial intelligence-enabled robotic bin picking systems may be used to automate order picking, but with the risk of causing expensive damage during an abnormal event such as sensor failure. As such, reliability becomes a critical factor for translating artificial intelligence research to real world applications and products. In this paper, we propose a reliable object detection and segmentation system with MultiModal Redundancy (MMRNet) for tackling object detection and segmentation for robotic bin picking using data from different modalities. This is the first system that introduces the concept of multimodal redundancy to address sensor failure issues during deployment. In particular, we realize the multimodal redundancy framework with a gate fusion module and dynamic ensemble learning. Finally, we present a new label-free multi-modal consistency (MC) score that utilizes the output from all modalities to measure the overall system output reliability and uncertainty. Through experiments, we demonstrate that in an event of missing modality, our system provides a much more reliable performance compared to baseline models. We also demonstrate that our MC score is a more reliability indicator for outputs during inference time compared to the model generated confidence scores that are often over-confident.
Authors:Chenglin Yang, Siyuan Qiao, Qihang Yu, Xiaoding Yuan, Yukun Zhu, Alan Yuille, Hartwig Adam, Liang-Chieh Chen
Abstract:
This paper presents MOAT, a family of neural networks that build on top of MObile convolution (i.e., inverted residual blocks) and ATtention. Unlike the current works that stack separate mobile convolution and transformer blocks, we effectively merge them into a MOAT block. Starting with a standard Transformer block, we replace its multi-layer perceptron with a mobile convolution block, and further reorder it before the self-attention operation. The mobile convolution block not only enhances the network representation capacity, but also produces better downsampled features. Our conceptually simple MOAT networks are surprisingly effective, achieving 89.1% / 81.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K / ImageNet-1K-V2 with ImageNet22K pretraining. Additionally, MOAT can be seamlessly applied to downstream tasks that require large resolution inputs by simply converting the global attention to window attention. Thanks to the mobile convolution that effectively exchanges local information between pixels (and thus cross-windows), MOAT does not need the extra window-shifting mechanism. As a result, on COCO object detection, MOAT achieves 59.2% box AP with 227M model parameters (single-scale inference, and hard NMS), and on ADE20K semantic segmentation, MOAT attains 57.6% mIoU with 496M model parameters (single-scale inference). Finally, the tiny-MOAT family, obtained by simply reducing the channel sizes, also surprisingly outperforms several mobile-specific transformer-based models on ImageNet. The tiny-MOAT family is also benchmarked on downstream tasks, serving as a baseline for the community. We hope our simple yet effective MOAT will inspire more seamless integration of convolution and self-attention. Code is publicly available.
Authors:Anand Balakrishnan, Jyotirmoy Deshmukh, Bardh Hoxha, Tomoya Yamaguchi, Georgios Fainekos
Abstract:
Perception algorithms in autonomous vehicles are vital for the vehicle to understand the semantics of its surroundings, including detection and tracking of objects in the environment. The outputs of these algorithms are in turn used for decision-making in safety-critical scenarios like collision avoidance, and automated emergency braking. Thus, it is crucial to monitor such perception systems at runtime. However, due to the high-level, complex representations of the outputs of perception systems, it is a challenge to test and verify these systems, especially at runtime. In this paper, we present a runtime monitoring tool, PerceMon that can monitor arbitrary specifications in Timed Quality Temporal Logic (TQTL) and its extensions with spatial operators. We integrate the tool with the CARLA autonomous vehicle simulation environment and the ROS middleware platform while monitoring properties on state-of-the-art object detection and tracking algorithms.
Authors:Lianming Huang, Haibo Hu, Qiao Li, Xin He, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
Abstract:
Transformer-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance on tasks such as image captioning, object recognition, and visual reasoning, but their high computational cost hinders deployment in latency-sensitive applications like autonomous driving. We introduce GM-Skip, a flexible and metric-adaptive framework for Transformer block skipping that accelerates VLM inference while preserving output quality. GM-Skip features a greedy, metric-guided block selection strategy that uses metric feedback (e.g., accuracy, CIDEr) to identify redundant layers, along with a reverse-order deletion mechanism that preserves early foundational blocks to avoid performance collapse. To support diverse deployment needs, it incorporates a tunable trade-off between sparsity and performance via a score-sparsity balance objective. Experiments across multiple tasks and datasets, including COCO and CODA, show that GM-Skip consistently improves inference speed while maintaining task performance. On the COCO dataset, GM-Skip improves single-object classification accuracy on the Person category from 19.1 percent to 87.3 percent while skipping more than 40 percent of Transformer blocks. In real-world deployment, it achieves up to 45.4 percent latency reduction on single-object detection when integrated into an autonomous vehicle running Autoware.Universe, validating the effectiveness of its skip configurations and confirming its practical value in accelerating real-world inference.
Authors:Lianming Huang, Haibo Hu, Yufei Cui, Jiacheng Zuo, Shangyu Wu, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving, deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance perception and decision-making has become increasingly common. However, the real-time application of VLMs is hindered by high latency and computational overhead, limiting their effectiveness in time-critical driving scenarios. This challenge is particularly evident when VLMs exhibit over-inference, continuing to process unnecessary layers even after confident predictions have been reached. To address this inefficiency, we propose AD-EE, an Early Exit framework that incorporates domain characteristics of autonomous driving and leverages causal inference to identify optimal exit layers. We evaluate our method on large-scale real-world autonomous driving datasets, including Waymo and the corner-case-focused CODA, as well as on a real vehicle running the Autoware Universe platform. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs show that our method significantly reduces latency, with maximum improvements reaching up to 57.58%, and enhances object detection accuracy, with maximum gains of up to 44%.
Authors:Neil Reichlin, Nicolas Baumann, Edoardo Ghignone, Michele Magno
Abstract:
Perception within autonomous driving is nearly synonymous with Neural Networks (NNs). Yet, the domain of autonomous racing is often characterized by scaled, computationally limited robots used for cost-effectiveness and safety. For this reason, opponent detection and tracking systems typically resort to traditional computer vision techniques due to computational constraints. This paper introduces TinyCenterSpeed, a streamlined adaptation of the seminal CenterPoint method, optimized for real-time performance on 1:10 scale autonomous racing platforms. This adaptation is viable even on OBCs powered solely by Central Processing Units (CPUs), as it incorporates the use of an external Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). We demonstrate that, compared to Adaptive Breakpoint Detector (ABD), the current State-of-the-Art (SotA) in scaled autonomous racing, TinyCenterSpeed not only improves detection and velocity estimation by up to 61.38% but also supports multi-opponent detection and estimation. It achieves real-time performance with an inference time of just 7.88 ms on the TPU, significantly reducing CPU utilization 8.3-fold.
Authors:Yanan Ma, Senkang Hu, Zhengru Fang, Yun Ji, Yiqin Deng, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
To accommodate constantly changing road conditions, real-time vision model training is essential for autonomous driving (AD). Federated learning (FL) serves as a promising paradigm to enable autonomous vehicles to train models collaboratively with their onboard computing resources. However, existing vehicle selection schemes for FL all assume predetermined and location-independent vehicles' datasets, neglecting the fact that vehicles collect training data along their routes, thereby resulting in suboptimal vehicle selection. In this paper, we focus on the fundamental perception problem and propose Sense4FL, a vehicular crowdsensing-enhanced FL framework featuring \textit{trajectory-dependent} vehicular \textit{training data collection} to \rev{improve the object detection quality} in AD for a region. To this end, we first derive the convergence bound of FL by considering the impact of both vehicles' uncertain trajectories and uploading probabilities, from which we discover that minimizing the training loss is equivalent to minimizing a weighted sum of local and global earth mover's distance (EMD) between vehicles' collected data distribution and global data distribution. Based on this observation, we formulate the trajectory-dependent vehicle selection and data collection problem for FL in AD. Given that the problem is NP-hard, we develop an efficient algorithm to find the solution with an approximation guarantee. Extensive simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in improving object detection performance compared with existing benchmarks.
Authors:Chiara Cappellino, Gianluca Mancusi, Matteo Mosconi, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara
Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary object detectors can generalize to an unrestricted set of categories through simple textual prompting. However, adapting these models to rare classes or reinforcing their abilities on multiple specialized domains remains essential. While recent methods rely on monolithic adaptation strategies with a single set of weights, we embrace modular deep learning. We introduce DitHub, a framework designed to build and maintain a library of efficient adaptation modules. Inspired by Version Control Systems, DitHub manages expert modules as branches that can be fetched and merged as needed. This modular approach allows us to conduct an in-depth exploration of the compositional properties of adaptation modules, marking the first such study in Object Detection. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ODinW-13 benchmark and ODinW-O, a newly introduced benchmark designed to assess class reappearance. For more details, visit our project page: https://aimagelab.github.io/DitHub/
Authors:Yuchao Gu, Yipin Zhou, Yunfan Ye, Yixin Nie, Licheng Yu, Pingchuan Ma, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract:
Natural language often struggles to accurately associate positional and attribute information with multiple instances, which limits current text-based visual generation models to simpler compositions featuring only a few dominant instances. To address this limitation, this work enhances diffusion models by introducing regional instance control, where each instance is governed by a bounding box paired with a free-form caption. Previous methods in this area typically rely on implicit position encoding or explicit attention masks to separate regions of interest (ROIs), resulting in either inaccurate coordinate injection or large computational overhead. Inspired by ROI-Align in object detection, we introduce a complementary operation called ROI-Unpool. Together, ROI-Align and ROI-Unpool enable explicit, efficient, and accurate ROI manipulation on high-resolution feature maps for visual generation. Building on ROI-Unpool, we propose ROICtrl, an adapter for pretrained diffusion models that enables precise regional instance control. ROICtrl is compatible with community-finetuned diffusion models, as well as with existing spatial-based add-ons (\eg, ControlNet, T2I-Adapter) and embedding-based add-ons (\eg, IP-Adapter, ED-LoRA), extending their applications to multi-instance generation. Experiments show that ROICtrl achieves superior performance in regional instance control while significantly reducing computational costs.
Authors:Liam Boyle, Julian Moosmann, Nicolas Baumann, Seonyeong Heo, Michele Magno
Abstract:
Advances in lightweight neural networks have revolutionized computer vision in a broad range of IoT applications, encompassing remote monitoring and process automation. However, the detection of small objects, which is crucial for many of these applications, remains an underexplored area in current computer vision research, particularly for low-power embedded devices that host resource-constrained processors. To address said gap, this paper proposes an adaptive tiling method for lightweight and energy-efficient object detection networks, including YOLO-based models and the popular FOMO network. The proposed tiling enables object detection on low-power MCUs with no compromise on accuracy compared to large-scale detection models. The benefit of the proposed method is demonstrated by applying it to FOMO and TinyissimoYOLO networks on a novel RISC-V-based MCU with built-in ML accelerators. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed tiling method boosts the F1-score by up to 225% for both FOMO and TinyissimoYOLO networks while reducing the average object count error by up to 76% with FOMO and up to 89% for TinyissimoYOLO. Furthermore, the findings of this work indicate that using a soft F1 loss over the popular binary cross-entropy loss can serve as an implicit non-maximum suppression for the FOMO network. To evaluate the real-world performance, the networks are deployed on the RISC-V based GAP9 microcontroller from GreenWaves Technologies, showcasing the proposed method's ability to strike a balance between detection performance ($58% - 95%$ F1 score), low latency (0.6 ms/Inference - 16.2 ms/Inference}), and energy efficiency (31 uJ/Inference} - 1.27 mJ/Inference) while performing multiple predictions using high-resolution images on a MCU.
Authors:Christina Bukas, Harshavardhan Subramanian, Fenja See, Carina Steinchen, Ivan Ezhov, Gowtham Boosarpu, Sara Asgharpour, Gerald Burgstaller, Mareike Lehmann, Florian Kofler, Marie Piraud
Abstract:
High-throughput image analysis in the biomedical domain has gained significant attention in recent years, driving advancements in drug discovery, disease prediction, and personalized medicine. Organoids, specifically, are an active area of research, providing excellent models for human organs and their functions. Automating the quantification of organoids in microscopy images would provide an effective solution to overcome substantial manual quantification bottlenecks, particularly in high-throughput image analysis. However, there is a notable lack of open biomedical datasets, in contrast to other domains, such as autonomous driving, and, notably, only few of them have attempted to quantify annotation uncertainty. In this work, we present MultiOrg a comprehensive organoid dataset tailored for object detection tasks with uncertainty quantification. This dataset comprises over 400 high-resolution 2d microscopy images and curated annotations of more than 60,000 organoids. Most importantly, it includes three label sets for the test data, independently annotated by two experts at distinct time points. We additionally provide a benchmark for organoid detection, and make the best model available through an easily installable, interactive plugin for the popular image visualization tool Napari, to perform organoid quantification.
Authors:Sushant Gautam, Andrea Storås, Cise Midoglu, Steven A. Hicks, Vajira Thambawita, Pål Halvorsen, Michael A. Riegler
Abstract:
We introduce Kvasir-VQA, an extended dataset derived from the HyperKvasir and Kvasir-Instrument datasets, augmented with question-and-answer annotations to facilitate advanced machine learning tasks in Gastrointestinal (GI) diagnostics. This dataset comprises 6,500 annotated images spanning various GI tract conditions and surgical instruments, and it supports multiple question types including yes/no, choice, location, and numerical count. The dataset is intended for applications such as image captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA), text-based generation of synthetic medical images, object detection, and classification. Our experiments demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness in training models for three selected tasks, showcasing significant applications in medical image analysis and diagnostics. We also present evaluation metrics for each task, highlighting the usability and versatility of our dataset. The dataset and supporting artifacts are available at https://datasets.simula.no/kvasir-vqa.
Authors:Guowen Zhang, Lue Fan, Chenhang He, Zhen Lei, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
Serialization-based methods, which serialize the 3D voxels and group them into multiple sequences before inputting to Transformers, have demonstrated their effectiveness in 3D object detection. However, serializing 3D voxels into 1D sequences will inevitably sacrifice the voxel spatial proximity. Such an issue is hard to be addressed by enlarging the group size with existing serialization-based methods due to the quadratic complexity of Transformers with feature sizes. Inspired by the recent advances of state space models (SSMs), we present a Voxel SSM, termed as Voxel Mamba, which employs a group-free strategy to serialize the whole space of voxels into a single sequence. The linear complexity of SSMs encourages our group-free design, alleviating the loss of spatial proximity of voxels. To further enhance the spatial proximity, we propose a Dual-scale SSM Block to establish a hierarchical structure, enabling a larger receptive field in the 1D serialization curve, as well as more complete local regions in 3D space. Moreover, we implicitly apply window partition under the group-free framework by positional encoding, which further enhances spatial proximity by encoding voxel positional information. Our experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes dataset show that Voxel Mamba not only achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods, but also demonstrates significant advantages in computational efficiency.
Authors:Liyu Chen, Huaao Tang, Yi Wen, Hanting Chen, Wei Li, Junchao Liu, Jie Hu
Abstract:
Recent semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) has achieved remarkable progress by leveraging unlabeled data for training. Mainstream SSOD methods rely on Consistency Regularization methods and Exponential Moving Average (EMA), which form a cyclic data flow. However, the EMA updating training approach leads to weight coupling between the teacher and student models. This coupling in a cyclic data flow results in a decrease in the utilization of unlabeled data information and the confirmation bias on low-quality or erroneous pseudo-labels. To address these issues, we propose the Collaboration of Teachers Framework (CTF), which consists of multiple pairs of teacher and student models for training. In the learning process of CTF, the Data Performance Consistency Optimization module (DPCO) informs the best pair of teacher models possessing the optimal pseudo-labels during the past training process, and these most reliable pseudo-labels generated by the best performing teacher would guide the other student models. As a consequence, this framework greatly improves the utilization of unlabeled data and prevents the positive feedback cycle of unreliable pseudo-labels. The CTF achieves outstanding results on numerous SSOD datasets, including a 0.71% mAP improvement on the 10% annotated COCO dataset and a 0.89% mAP improvement on the VOC dataset compared to LabelMatch and converges significantly faster. Moreover, the CTF is plug-and-play and can be integrated with other mainstream SSOD methods.
Authors:Bing Cao, Haiyu Yao, Pengfei Zhu, Qinghua Hu
Abstract:
Tiny object detection is one of the key challenges in the field of object detection. The performance of most generic detectors dramatically decreases in tiny object detection tasks. The main challenge lies in extracting effective features of tiny objects. Existing methods usually perform generation-based feature enhancement, which is seriously affected by spurious textures and artifacts, making it difficult to make the tiny-object-specific features visible and clear for detection. To address this issue, we propose a self-reconstructed tiny object detection (SR-TOD) framework. We for the first time introduce a self-reconstruction mechanism in the detection model, and discover the strong correlation between it and the tiny objects. Specifically, we impose a reconstruction head in-between the neck of a detector, constructing a difference map of the reconstructed image and the input, which shows high sensitivity to tiny objects. This inspires us to enhance the weak representations of tiny objects under the guidance of the difference maps. Thus, improving the visibility of tiny objects for the detectors. Building on this, we further develop a Difference Map Guided Feature Enhancement (DGFE) module to make the tiny feature representation more clear. In addition, we further propose a new multi-instance anti-UAV dataset, which is called DroneSwarms dataset and contains a large number of tiny drones with the smallest average size to date. Extensive experiments on the DroneSwarms dataset and other datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code and dataset will be publicly available.
Authors:Wencheng Zhu, Xin Zhou, Pengfei Zhu, Yu Wang, Qinghua Hu
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective contrastive knowledge distillation framework that achieves sample-wise logit alignment while preserving semantic consistency. Conventional knowledge distillation approaches exhibit over-reliance on feature similarity per sample, which risks overfitting, and contrastive approaches focus on inter-class discrimination at the expense of intra-sample semantic relationships. Our approach transfers "dark knowledge" through teacher-student contrastive alignment at the sample level. Specifically, our method first enforces intra-sample alignment by directly minimizing teacher-student logit discrepancies within individual samples. Then, we utilize inter-sample contrasts to preserve semantic dissimilarities across samples. By redefining positive pairs as aligned teacher-student logits from identical samples and negative pairs as cross-sample logit combinations, we reformulate these dual constraints into an InfoNCE loss framework, reducing computational complexity lower than sample squares while eliminating dependencies on temperature parameters and large batch sizes. We conduct comprehensive experiments across three benchmark datasets, including the CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K, and MS COCO datasets, and experimental results clearly confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks.
Authors:Yuhan Zhu, Guozhen Zhang, Jing Tan, Gangshan Wu, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Temporal Action Detection (TAD) aims to identify the action boundaries and the corresponding category within untrimmed videos. Inspired by the success of DETR in object detection, several methods have adapted the query-based framework to the TAD task. However, these approaches primarily followed DETR to predict actions at the instance level (i.e., identify each action by its center point), leading to sub-optimal boundary localization. To address this issue, we propose a new Dual-level query-based TAD framework, namely DualDETR, to detect actions from both instance-level and boundary-level. Decoding at different levels requires semantics of different granularity, therefore we introduce a two-branch decoding structure. This structure builds distinctive decoding processes for different levels, facilitating explicit capture of temporal cues and semantics at each level. On top of the two-branch design, we present a joint query initialization strategy to align queries from both levels. Specifically, we leverage encoder proposals to match queries from each level in a one-to-one manner. Then, the matched queries are initialized using position and content prior from the matched action proposal. The aligned dual-level queries can refine the matched proposal with complementary cues during subsequent decoding. We evaluate DualDETR on three challenging multi-label TAD benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DualDETR to the existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving a substantial improvement under det-mAP and delivering impressive results under seg-mAP.
Authors:Chuang Lin, Yi Jiang, Lizhen Qu, Zehuan Yuan, Jianfei Cai
Abstract:
In recent research, significant attention has been devoted to the open-vocabulary object detection task, aiming to generalize beyond the limited number of classes labeled during training and detect objects described by arbitrary category names at inference. Compared with conventional object detection, open vocabulary object detection largely extends the object detection categories. However, it relies on calculating the similarity between image regions and a set of arbitrary category names with a pretrained vision-and-language model. This implies that, despite its open-set nature, the task still needs the predefined object categories during the inference stage. This raises the question: What if we do not have exact knowledge of object categories during inference? In this paper, we call such a new setting as generative open-ended object detection, which is a more general and practical problem. To address it, we formulate object detection as a generative problem and propose a simple framework named GenerateU, which can detect dense objects and generate their names in a free-form way. Particularly, we employ Deformable DETR as a region proposal generator with a language model translating visual regions to object names. To assess the free-form object detection task, we introduce an evaluation method designed to quantitatively measure the performance of generative outcomes. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot detection performance of our GenerateU. For example, on the LVIS dataset, our GenerateU achieves comparable results to the open-vocabulary object detection method GLIP, even though the category names are not seen by GenerateU during inference. Code is available at: https:// github.com/FoundationVision/GenerateU .
Authors:Zhe Wang, Siqi Fan, Xiaoliang Huo, Tongda Xu, Yan Wang, Jingjing Liu, Yilun Chen, Ya-Qin Zhang
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, cooperative perception makes use of multi-view cameras from both vehicles and infrastructure, providing a global vantage point with rich semantic context of road conditions beyond a single vehicle viewpoint. Currently, two major challenges persist in vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D (VIC3D) object detection: $1)$ inherent pose errors when fusing multi-view images, caused by time asynchrony across cameras; $2)$ information loss in transmission process resulted from limited communication bandwidth. To address these issues, we propose a novel camera-based 3D detection framework for VIC3D task, Enhanced Multi-scale Image Feature Fusion (EMIFF). To fully exploit holistic perspectives from both vehicles and infrastructure, we propose Multi-scale Cross Attention (MCA) and Camera-aware Channel Masking (CCM) modules to enhance infrastructure and vehicle features at scale, spatial, and channel levels to correct the pose error introduced by camera asynchrony. We also introduce a Feature Compression (FC) module with channel and spatial compression blocks for transmission efficiency. Experiments show that EMIFF achieves SOTA on DAIR-V2X-C datasets, significantly outperforming previous early-fusion and late-fusion methods with comparable transmission costs.
Authors:Liam Boyle, Nicolas Baumann, Seonyeong Heo, Michele Magno
Abstract:
Advances in lightweight neural networks have revolutionized computer vision in a broad range of IoT applications, encompassing remote monitoring and process automation. However, the detection of small objects, which is crucial for many of these applications, remains an underexplored area in current computer vision research, particularly for embedded devices. To address this gap, the paper proposes a novel adaptive tiling method that can be used on top of any existing object detector including the popular FOMO network for object detection on microcontrollers. Our experimental results show that the proposed tiling method can boost the F1-score by up to 225% while reducing the average object count error by up to 76%. Furthermore, the findings of this work suggest that using a soft F1 loss over the popular binary cross-entropy loss can significantly reduce the negative impact of imbalanced data. Finally, we validate our approach by conducting experiments on the Sony Spresense microcontroller, showcasing the proposed method's ability to strike a balance between detection performance, low latency, and minimal memory consumption.
Authors:Luoyi Sun, Xuenan Xu, Mengyue Wu, Weidi Xie
Abstract:
Recently, the AI community has made significant strides in developing powerful foundation models, driven by large-scale multimodal datasets. However, for audio representation learning, existing datasets suffer from limitations in the following aspects: insufficient volume, simplistic content, and arduous collection procedures. To establish an audio dataset with high-quality captions, we propose an innovative, automatic approach leveraging multimodal inputs, such as video frames, audio streams. Specifically, we construct a large-scale, high-quality, audio-language dataset, named as Auto-ACD, comprising over 1.5M audio-text pairs. We exploit a series of pre-trained models or APIs, to determine audio-visual synchronisation, generate image captions, object detection, or audio tags for specific videos. Subsequently, we employ LLM to paraphrase a congruent caption for each audio, guided by the extracted multi-modality clues. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset, we train widely used models on our dataset and show performance improvement on various downstream tasks, for example, audio-language retrieval, audio captioning, zero-shot classification. In addition, we establish a novel benchmark with environmental information and provide a benchmark for audio-text tasks.
Authors:Wenjing Xie, Tao Hu, Neiwen Ling, Guoliang Xing, Chun Jason Xue, Nan Guan
Abstract:
Fusing Radar and Lidar sensor data can fully utilize their complementary advantages and provide more accurate reconstruction of the surrounding for autonomous driving systems. Surround Radar/Lidar can provide 360-degree view sampling with the minimal cost, which are promising sensing hardware solutions for autonomous driving systems. However, due to the intrinsic physical constraints, the rotating speed of surround Radar, and thus the frequency to generate Radar data frames, is much lower than surround Lidar. Existing Radar/Lidar fusion methods have to work at the low frequency of surround Radar, which cannot meet the high responsiveness requirement of autonomous driving systems.This paper develops techniques to fuse surround Radar/Lidar with working frequency only limited by the faster surround Lidar instead of the slower surround Radar, based on the state-of-the-art object detection model MVDNet. The basic idea of our approach is simple: we let MVDNet work with temporally unaligned data from Radar/Lidar, so that fusion can take place at any time when a new Lidar data frame arrives, instead of waiting for the slow Radar data frame. However, directly applying MVDNet to temporally unaligned Radar/Lidar data greatly degrades its object detection accuracy. The key information revealed in this paper is that we can achieve high output frequency with little accuracy loss by enhancing the training procedure to explore the temporal redundancy in MVDNet so that it can tolerate the temporal unalignment of input data. We explore several different ways of training enhancement and compare them quantitatively with experiments.
Authors:Manlin Zhang, Jie Wu, Yuxi Ren, Ming Li, Jie Qin, Xuefeng Xiao, Wei Liu, Rui Wang, Min Zheng, Andy J. Ma
Abstract:
Data is the cornerstone of deep learning. This paper reveals that the recently developed Diffusion Model is a scalable data engine for object detection. Existing methods for scaling up detection-oriented data often require manual collection or generative models to obtain target images, followed by data augmentation and labeling to produce training pairs, which are costly, complex, or lacking diversity. To address these issues, we presentDiffusionEngine (DE), a data scaling-up engine that provides high-quality detection-oriented training pairs in a single stage. DE consists of a pre-trained diffusion model and an effective Detection-Adapter, contributing to generating scalable, diverse and generalizable detection data in a plug-and-play manner. Detection-Adapter is learned to align the implicit semantic and location knowledge in off-the-shelf diffusion models with detection-aware signals to make better bounding-box predictions. Additionally, we contribute two datasets, i.e., COCO-DE and VOC-DE, to scale up existing detection benchmarks for facilitating follow-up research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that data scaling-up via DE can achieve significant improvements in diverse scenarios, such as various detection algorithms, self-supervised pre-training, data-sparse, label-scarce, cross-domain, and semi-supervised learning. For example, when using DE with a DINO-based adapter to scale up data, mAP is improved by 3.1% on COCO, 7.6% on VOC, and 11.5% on Clipart.
Authors:Ming Li, Jie Wu, Xionghui Wang, Chen Chen, Jie Qin, Xuefeng Xiao, Rui Wang, Min Zheng, Xin Pan
Abstract:
The paradigm of large-scale pre-training followed by downstream fine-tuning has been widely employed in various object detection algorithms. In this paper, we reveal discrepancies in data, model, and task between the pre-training and fine-tuning procedure in existing practices, which implicitly limit the detector's performance, generalization ability, and convergence speed. To this end, we propose AlignDet, a unified pre-training framework that can be adapted to various existing detectors to alleviate the discrepancies. AlignDet decouples the pre-training process into two stages, i.e., image-domain and box-domain pre-training. The image-domain pre-training optimizes the detection backbone to capture holistic visual abstraction, and box-domain pre-training learns instance-level semantics and task-aware concepts to initialize the parts out of the backbone. By incorporating the self-supervised pre-trained backbones, we can pre-train all modules for various detectors in an unsupervised paradigm. As depicted in Figure 1, extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignDet can achieve significant improvements across diverse protocols, such as detection algorithm, model backbone, data setting, and training schedule. For example, AlignDet improves FCOS by 5.3 mAP, RetinaNet by 2.1 mAP, Faster R-CNN by 3.3 mAP, and DETR by 2.3 mAP under fewer epochs.
Authors:Hanxue Gu, Haoyu Dong, Nicholas Konz, Maciej A. Mazurowski
Abstract:
The class imbalance problem in deep learning has been explored in several studies, but there has yet to be a systematic analysis of this phenomenon in object detection. Here, we present comprehensive analyses and experiments of the foreground-background (F-B) imbalance problem in object detection, which is very common and caused by small, infrequent objects of interest. We experimentally study the effects of different aspects of F-B imbalance (object size, number of objects, dataset size, object type) on detection performance. In addition, we also compare 9 leading methods for addressing this problem, including Faster-RCNN, SSD, OHEM, Libra-RCNN, Focal-Loss, GHM, PISA, YOLO-v3, and GFL with a range of datasets from different imaging domains. We conclude that (1) the F-B imbalance can indeed cause a significant drop in detection performance, (2) The detection performance is more affected by F-B imbalance when fewer training data are available, (3) in most cases, decreasing object size leads to larger performance drop than decreasing number of objects, given the same change in the ratio of object pixels to non-object pixels, (6) among all selected methods, Libra-RCNN and PISA demonstrate the best performance in addressing the issue of F-B imbalance. (7) When the training dataset size is large, the choice of method is not impactful (8) Soft-sampling methods, including focal-loss, GHM, and GFL, perform fairly well on average but are relatively unstable.
Authors:Jiawei He, Yuqi Wang, Yuntao Chen, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Abstract:
With the rapid development of large models, the need for data has become increasingly crucial. Especially in 3D object detection, costly manual annotations have hindered further advancements. To reduce the burden of annotation, we study the problem of achieving 3D object detection solely based on 2D annotations. Thanks to advanced 3D reconstruction techniques, it is now feasible to reconstruct the overall static 3D scene. However, extracting precise object-level annotations from the entire scene and generalizing these limited annotations to the entire scene remain challenges. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm called BA$^2$-Det, encompassing pseudo label generation and multi-stage generalization. We devise the DoubleClustering algorithm to obtain object clusters from reconstructed scene-level points, and further enhance the model's detection capabilities by developing three stages of generalization: progressing from complete to partial, static to dynamic, and close to distant. Experiments conducted on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset show that the performance of BA$^2$-Det is on par with the fully-supervised methods using 10% annotations. Additionally, using large raw videos for pretraining,BA$^2$-Det can achieve a 20% relative improvement on the KITTI dataset. The method also has great potential for detecting open-set 3D objects in complex scenes. Project page: https://ba2det.site.
Authors:Zhangyang Qi, Jiaqi Wang, Xiaoyang Wu, Hengshuang Zhao
Abstract:
Multi-view 3D object detection is becoming popular in autonomous driving due to its high effectiveness and low cost. Most of the current state-of-the-art detectors follow the query-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) paradigm, which benefits from both BEV's strong perception power and end-to-end pipeline. Despite achieving substantial progress, existing works model objects via globally leveraging temporal and spatial information of BEV features, resulting in problems when handling the challenging complex and dynamic autonomous driving scenarios. In this paper, we proposed an Object-Centric query-BEV detector OCBEV, which can carve the temporal and spatial cues of moving targets more effectively. OCBEV comprises three designs: Object Aligned Temporal Fusion aligns the BEV feature based on ego-motion and estimated current locations of moving objects, leading to a precise instance-level feature fusion. Object Focused Multi-View Sampling samples more 3D features from an adaptive local height ranges of objects for each scene to enrich foreground information. Object Informed Query Enhancement replaces part of pre-defined decoder queries in common DETR-style decoders with positional features of objects on high-confidence locations, introducing more direct object positional priors. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Our approach achieves a state-of-the-art result, surpassing the traditional BEVFormer by 1.5 NDS points. Moreover, we have a faster convergence speed and only need half of the training iterations to get comparable performance, which further demonstrates its effectiveness.
Authors:Jinglin Zhan, Tiejun Liu, Rengang Li, Jingwei Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yuntao Chen
Abstract:
Data and model are the undoubtable two supporting pillars for LiDAR object detection. However, data-centric works have fallen far behind compared with the ever-growing list of fancy new models. In this work, we systematically study the synthesis-based LiDAR data augmentation approach (so-called GT-Aug) which offers maxium controllability over generated data samples. We pinpoint the main shortcoming of existing works is introducing unrealistic LiDAR scan patterns during GT-Aug. In light of this finding, we propose Real-Aug, a synthesis-based augmentation method which prioritizes on generating realistic LiDAR scans. Our method consists a reality-conforming scene composition module which handles the details of the composition and a real-synthesis mixing up training strategy which gradually adapts the data distribution from synthetic data to the real one. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we conduct extensive ablation studies and validate the proposed Real-Aug on a wide combination of detectors and datasets. We achieve a state-of-the-art 0.744 NDS and 0.702 mAP on nuScenes test set. The code shall be released soon.
Authors:Yinhao Li, Jinrong Yang, Jianjian Sun, Han Bao, Zheng Ge, Li Xiao
Abstract:
Bounded by the inherent ambiguity of depth perception, contemporary multi-view 3D object detection methods fall into the performance bottleneck. Intuitively, leveraging temporal multi-view stereo (MVS) technology is the natural knowledge for tackling this ambiguity. However, traditional attempts of MVS has two limitations when applying to 3D object detection scenes: 1) The affinity measurement among all views suffers expensive computational cost; 2) It is difficult to deal with outdoor scenarios where objects are often mobile. To this end, we propose BEVStereo++: by introducing a dynamic temporal stereo strategy, BEVStereo++ is able to cut down the harm that is brought by introducing temporal stereo when dealing with those two scenarios. Going one step further, we apply Motion Compensation Module and long sequence Frame Fusion to BEVStereo++, which shows further performance boosting and error reduction. Without bells and whistles, BEVStereo++ achieves state-of-the-art(SOTA) on both Waymo and nuScenes dataset.
Authors:Zhe Wang, Siqi Fan, Xiaoliang Huo, Tongda Xu, Yan Wang, Jingjing Liu, Yilun Chen, Ya-Qin Zhang
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection (VIC3D) makes use of multi-view cameras from both vehicles and traffic infrastructure, providing a global vantage point with rich semantic context of road conditions beyond a single vehicle viewpoint. Two major challenges prevail in VIC3D: 1) inherent calibration noise when fusing multi-view images, caused by time asynchrony across cameras; 2) information loss when projecting 2D features into 3D space. To address these issues, We propose a novel 3D object detection framework, Vehicles-Infrastructure Multi-view Intermediate fusion (VIMI). First, to fully exploit the holistic perspectives from both vehicles and infrastructure, we propose a Multi-scale Cross Attention (MCA) module that fuses infrastructure and vehicle features on selective multi-scales to correct the calibration noise introduced by camera asynchrony. Then, we design a Camera-aware Channel Masking (CCM) module that uses camera parameters as priors to augment the fused features. We further introduce a Feature Compression (FC) module with channel and spatial compression blocks to reduce the size of transmitted features for enhanced efficiency. Experiments show that VIMI achieves 15.61% overall AP_3D and 21.44% AP_BEV on the new VIC3D dataset, DAIR-V2X-C, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art early fusion and late fusion methods with comparable transmission cost.
Authors:Meng Zhang, Wenxuan Guo, Bohao Fan, Yifan Chen, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou
Abstract:
Multi-view imaging systems enable uniform coverage of 3D space and reduce the impact of occlusion, which is beneficial for 3D object detection and tracking accuracy. However, existing imaging systems built with multi-view cameras or depth sensors are limited by the small applicable scene and complicated composition. In this paper, we propose a wireless multi-view multi-modal 3D imaging system generally applicable to large outdoor scenes, which consists of a master node and several slave nodes. Multiple spatially distributed slave nodes equipped with cameras and LiDARs are connected to form a wireless sensor network. While providing flexibility and scalability, the system applies automatic spatio-temporal calibration techniques to obtain accurate 3D multi-view multi-modal data. This system is the first imaging system that integrates mutli-view RGB cameras and LiDARs in large outdoor scenes among existing 3D imaging systems. We perform point clouds based 3D object detection and long-term tracking using the 3D imaging dataset collected by this system. The experimental results show that multi-view point clouds greatly improve 3D object detection and tracking accuracy regardless of complex and various outdoor environments.
Authors:Keyan Chen, Xiaolong Jiang, Yao Hu, Xu Tang, Yan Gao, Jianqi Chen, Weidi Xie
Abstract:
In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneously detecting objects and inferring their visual attributes in an image, even for those with no manual annotations provided at the training stage, resembling an open-vocabulary scenario. To achieve this goal, we make the following contributions: (i) we start with a naive two-stage approach for open-vocabulary object detection and attribute classification, termed CLIP-Attr. The candidate objects are first proposed with an offline RPN and later classified for semantic category and attributes; (ii) we combine all available datasets and train with a federated strategy to finetune the CLIP model, aligning the visual representation with attributes, additionally, we investigate the efficacy of leveraging freely available online image-caption pairs under weakly supervised learning; (iii) in pursuit of efficiency, we train a Faster-RCNN type model end-to-end with knowledge distillation, that performs class-agnostic object proposals and classification on semantic categories and attributes with classifiers generated from a text encoder; Finally, (iv) we conduct extensive experiments on VAW, MS-COCO, LSA, and OVAD datasets, and show that recognition of semantic category and attributes is complementary for visual scene understanding, i.e., jointly training object detection and attributes prediction largely outperform existing approaches that treat the two tasks independently, demonstrating strong generalization ability to novel attributes and categories.
Authors:Li Zhang, Jiachen Lu, Sixiao Zheng, Xinxuan Zhao, Xiatian Zhu, Yanwei Fu, Tao Xiang, Jianfeng Feng, Philip H. S. Torr
Abstract:
The emergence of vision transformers (ViTs) in image classification has shifted the methodologies for visual representation learning. In particular, ViTs learn visual representation at full receptive field per layer across all the image patches, in comparison to the increasing receptive fields of CNNs across layers and other alternatives (e.g., large kernels and atrous convolution). In this work, for the first time we explore the global context learning potentials of ViTs for dense visual prediction (e.g., semantic segmentation). Our motivation is that through learning global context at full receptive field layer by layer, ViTs may capture stronger long-range dependency information, critical for dense prediction tasks. We first demonstrate that encoding an image as a sequence of patches, a vanilla ViT without local convolution and resolution reduction can yield stronger visual representation for semantic segmentation. For example, our model, termed as SEgmentation TRansformer (SETR), excels on ADE20K (50.28% mIoU, the first position in the test leaderboard on the day of submission) and performs competitively on Cityscapes. However, the basic ViT architecture falls short in broader dense prediction applications, such as object detection and instance segmentation, due to its lack of a pyramidal structure, high computational demand, and insufficient local context. For tackling general dense visual prediction tasks in a cost-effective manner, we further formulate a family of Hierarchical Local-Global (HLG) Transformers, characterized by local attention within windows and global-attention across windows in a pyramidal architecture. Extensive experiments show that our methods achieve appealing performance on a variety of dense prediction tasks (e.g., object detection and instance segmentation and semantic segmentation) as well as image classification.
Authors:Yanqin Jiang, Li Zhang, Zhenwei Miao, Xiatian Zhu, Jin Gao, Weiming Hu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract:
3D object detection in autonomous driving aims to reason "what" and "where" the objects of interest present in a 3D world. Following the conventional wisdom of previous 2D object detection, existing methods often adopt the canonical Cartesian coordinate system with perpendicular axis. However, we conjugate that this does not fit the nature of the ego car's perspective, as each onboard camera perceives the world in shape of wedge intrinsic to the imaging geometry with radical (non-perpendicular) axis. Hence, in this paper we advocate the exploitation of the Polar coordinate system and propose a new Polar Transformer (PolarFormer) for more accurate 3D object detection in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) taking as input only multi-camera 2D images. Specifically, we design a cross attention based Polar detection head without restriction to the shape of input structure to deal with irregular Polar grids. For tackling the unconstrained object scale variations along Polar's distance dimension, we further introduce a multi-scalePolar representation learning strategy. As a result, our model can make best use of the Polar representation rasterized via attending to the corresponding image observation in a sequence-to-sequence fashion subject to the geometric constraints. Thorough experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our PolarFormer outperforms significantly state-of-the-art 3D object detection alternatives.
Authors:Wei Li, Xing Wang, Xin Xia, Jie Wu, Jiashi Li, Xuefeng Xiao, Min Zheng, Shiping Wen
Abstract:
Vision Transformers have witnessed prevailing success in a series of vision tasks. However, these Transformers often rely on extensive computational costs to achieve high performance, which is burdensome to deploy on resource-constrained devices. To alleviate this issue, we draw lessons from depthwise separable convolution and imitate its ideology to design an efficient Transformer backbone, i.e., Separable Vision Transformer, abbreviated as SepViT. SepViT helps to carry out the local-global information interaction within and among the windows in sequential order via a depthwise separable self-attention. The novel window token embedding and grouped self-attention are employed to compute the attention relationship among windows with negligible cost and establish long-range visual interactions across multiple windows, respectively. Extensive experiments on general-purpose vision benchmarks demonstrate that SepViT can achieve a state-of-the-art trade-off between performance and latency. Among them, SepViT achieves 84.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification while decreasing the latency by 40%, compared to the ones with similar accuracy (e.g., CSWin). Furthermore, SepViT achieves 51.0% mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation task, 47.9 AP on the RetinaNet-based COCO detection task, 49.4 box AP and 44.6 mask AP on Mask R-CNN-based COCO object detection and instance segmentation tasks.
Authors:Yixin Zhu, Zuoliang Zhu, Miloš Hašan, Jian Yang, Jin Xie, Beibei Wang
Abstract:
Forward and inverse rendering have emerged as key techniques for enabling understanding and reconstruction in the context of autonomous driving (AD). However, complex weather and illumination pose great challenges to this task. The emergence of large diffusion models has shown promise in achieving reasonable results through learning from 2D priors, but these models are difficult to control and lack robustness. In this paper, we introduce WeatherDiffusion, a diffusion-based framework for forward and inverse rendering on AD scenes with various weather and lighting conditions. Our method enables authentic estimation of material properties, scene geometry, and lighting, and further supports controllable weather and illumination editing through the use of predicted intrinsic maps guided by text descriptions. We observe that different intrinsic maps should correspond to different regions of the original image. Based on this observation, we propose Intrinsic map-aware attention (MAA) to enable high-quality inverse rendering. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic dataset (\ie WeatherSynthetic) and a real-world dataset (\ie WeatherReal) for forward and inverse rendering on AD scenes with diverse weather and lighting. Extensive experiments show that our WeatherDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. Moreover, our method demonstrates significant value in downstream tasks for AD, enhancing the robustness of object detection and image segmentation in challenging weather scenarios.
Authors:Xiangyuan Peng, Yu Wang, Miao Tang, Bierzynski Kay, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract:
Reliable autonomous driving systems require accurate detection of traffic participants. To this end, multi-modal fusion has emerged as an effective strategy. In particular, 4D radar and LiDAR fusion methods based on multi-frame radar point clouds have demonstrated the effectiveness in bridging the point density gap. However, they often neglect radar point clouds' inter-frame misalignment caused by object movement during accumulation and do not fully exploit the object dynamic information from 4D radar. In this paper, we propose MoRAL, a motion-aware multi-frame 4D radar and LiDAR fusion framework for robust 3D object detection. First, a Motion-aware Radar Encoder (MRE) is designed to compensate for inter-frame radar misalignment from moving objects. Later, a Motion Attention Gated Fusion (MAGF) module integrate radar motion features to guide LiDAR features to focus on dynamic foreground objects. Extensive evaluations on the View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset demonstrate that MoRAL outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest mAP of 73.30% in the entire area and 88.68% in the driving corridor. Notably, our method also achieves the best AP of 69.67% for pedestrians in the entire area and 96.25% for cyclists in the driving corridor.
Authors:Yuze Jiang, Ehsan Javanmardi, Manabu Tsukada, Hiroshi Esaki
Abstract:
The deployment of roadside LiDAR sensors plays a crucial role in the development of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). However, the high cost of LiDAR sensors necessitates efficient placement strategies to maximize detection performance. Traditional roadside LiDAR deployment methods rely on expert insight, making them time-consuming. Automating this process, however, demands extensive computation, as it requires not only visibility evaluation but also assessing detection performance across different LiDAR placements. To address this challenge, we propose a fast surrogate metric, the Entropy-Guided Visibility Score (EGVS), based on information gain to evaluate object detection performance in roadside LiDAR configurations. EGVS leverages Traffic Probabilistic Occupancy Grids (TPOG) to prioritize critical areas and employs entropy-based calculations to quantify the information captured by LiDAR beams. This eliminates the need for direct detection performance evaluation, which typically requires extensive labeling and computational resources. By integrating EGVS into the optimization process, we significantly accelerate the search for optimal LiDAR configurations. Experimental results using the AWSIM simulator demonstrate that EGVS strongly correlates with Average Precision (AP) scores and effectively predicts object detection performance. This approach offers a computationally efficient solution for roadside LiDAR deployment, facilitating scalable smart infrastructure development.
Authors:Maoji Zheng, Ziyu Xu, Qiming Xia, Hai Wu, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection and semantic segmentation are critical tasks in 3D scene understanding. Traditional detection and segmentation methods supervise their models through bounding box labels and semantic mask labels. However, these two independent labels inherently contain significant redundancy. This paper aims to eliminate the redundancy by supervising 3D object detection using only semantic labels. However, the challenge arises due to the incomplete geometry structure and boundary ambiguity of point-cloud instances, leading to inaccurate pseudo labels and poor detection results. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method, named Seg2Box. We first introduce a Multi-Frame Multi-Scale Clustering (MFMS-C) module, which leverages the spatio-temporal consistency of point clouds to generate accurate box-level pseudo-labels. Additionally, the Semantic?Guiding Iterative-Mining Self-Training (SGIM-ST) module is proposed to enhance the performance by progressively refining the pseudo-labels and mining the instances without generating pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes Dataset show that our method significantly outperforms other competitive methods by 23.7\% and 10.3\% in mAP, respectively. The results demonstrate the great label-efficient potential and advancement of our method.
Authors:Zhe Wang, Xiaoliang Huo, Siqi Fan, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Yan Wang
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, The perception capabilities of the ego-vehicle can be improved with roadside sensors, which can provide a holistic view of the environment. However, existing monocular detection methods designed for vehicle cameras are not suitable for roadside cameras due to viewpoint domain gaps. To bridge this gap and Improve ROAdside Monocular 3D object detection, we propose IROAM, a semantic-geometry decoupled contrastive learning framework, which takes vehicle-side and roadside data as input simultaneously. IROAM has two significant modules. In-Domain Query Interaction module utilizes a transformer to learn content and depth information for each domain and outputs object queries. Cross-Domain Query Enhancement To learn better feature representations from two domains, Cross-Domain Query Enhancement decouples queries into semantic and geometry parts and only the former is used for contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of IROAM in improving roadside detector's performance. The results validate that IROAM has the capabilities to learn cross-domain information.
Authors:Xiangyuan Peng, Huawei Sun, Kay Bierzynski, Anton Fischbacher, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract:
Radar and LiDAR have been widely used in autonomous driving as LiDAR provides rich structure information, and radar demonstrates high robustness under adverse weather. Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of fusing radar and LiDAR point clouds. However, challenges remain due to the modality misalignment and information loss during feature extractions. To address these issues, we propose a 4D radar-LiDAR framework to mutually enhance their representations. Initially, the indicative features from radar are utilized to guide both radar and LiDAR geometric feature learning. Subsequently, to mitigate their sparsity gap, the shape information from LiDAR is used to enrich radar BEV features. Extensive experiments on the View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset demonstrate our approach's superiority over existing methods, achieving the highest mAP of 71.76% across the entire area and 86.36\% within the driving corridor. Especially for cars, we improve the AP by 4.17% and 4.20% due to the strong indicative features and symmetric shapes.
Authors:Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Talha Uddin Sheikh, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
The primary challenge in Video Object Detection (VOD) is effectively exploiting temporal information to enhance object representations. Traditional strategies, such as aggregating region proposals, often suffer from feature variance due to the inclusion of background information. We introduce a novel instance mask-based feature aggregation approach, significantly refining this process and deepening the understanding of object dynamics across video frames. We present FAIM, a new VOD method that enhances temporal Feature Aggregation by leveraging Instance Mask features. In particular, we propose the lightweight Instance Feature Extraction Module (IFEM) to learn instance mask features and the Temporal Instance Classification Aggregation Module (TICAM) to aggregate instance mask and classification features across video frames. Using YOLOX as a base detector, FAIM achieves 87.9% mAP on the ImageNet VID dataset at 33 FPS on a single 2080Ti GPU, setting a new benchmark for the speed-accuracy trade-off. Additional experiments on multiple datasets validate that our approach is robust, method-agnostic, and effective in multi-object tracking, demonstrating its broader applicability to video understanding tasks.
Authors:You Li, Fan Ma, Yi Yang
Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently been employed to generate high-quality images, reducing the need for manual data collection and improving model generalization in tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and image perception. However, the synthetic framework is usually designed with meticulous human effort for each task due to various requirements on image layout, content, and annotation formats, restricting the application of synthetic data on more general scenarios. In this paper, we propose AnySynth, a unified framework integrating adaptable, comprehensive, and highly controllable components capable of generating an arbitrary type of synthetic data given diverse requirements. Specifically, the Task-Specific Layout Generation Module is first introduced to produce reasonable layouts for different tasks by leveraging the generation ability of large language models and layout priors of real-world images. A Uni-Controlled Image Generation Module is then developed to create high-quality synthetic images that are controllable and based on the generated layouts. In addition, user specific reference images, and style images can be incorporated into the generation to task requirements. Finally, the Task-Oriented Annotation Module offers precise and detailed annotations for the generated images across different tasks. We have validated our framework's performance across various tasks, including Few-shot Object Detection, Cross-domain Object Detection, Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval, and Multi-modal Image Perception and Grounding. The specific data synthesized by our framework significantly improves model performance in these tasks, demonstrating the generality and effectiveness of our framework.
Authors:Jiaxing Huang, Jingyi Zhang, Kai Jiang, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Recent studies on generalizable object detection have attracted increasing attention with additional weak supervision from large-scale datasets with image-level labels. However, weakly-supervised detection learning often suffers from image-to-box label mismatch, i.e., image-level labels do not convey precise object information. We design Language Hierarchical Self-training (LHST) that introduces language hierarchy into weakly-supervised detector training for learning more generalizable detectors. LHST expands the image-level labels with language hierarchy and enables co-regularization between the expanded labels and self-training. Specifically, the expanded labels regularize self-training by providing richer supervision and mitigating the image-to-box label mismatch, while self-training allows assessing and selecting the expanded labels according to the predicted reliability. In addition, we design language hierarchical prompt generation that introduces language hierarchy into prompt generation which helps bridge the vocabulary gaps between training and testing. Extensive experiments show that the proposed techniques achieve superior generalization performance consistently across 14 widely studied object detection datasets.
Authors:Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Test-time prompt tuning, which learns prompts online with unlabelled test samples during the inference stage, has demonstrated great potential by learning effective prompts on-the-fly without requiring any task-specific annotations. However, its performance often degrades clearly along the tuning process when the prompts are continuously updated with the test data flow, and the degradation becomes more severe when the domain of test samples changes continuously. We propose HisTPT, a Historical Test-time Prompt Tuning technique that memorizes the useful knowledge of the learnt test samples and enables robust test-time prompt tuning with the memorized knowledge. HisTPT introduces three types of knowledge banks, namely, local knowledge bank, hard-sample knowledge bank, and global knowledge bank, each of which works with different mechanisms for effective knowledge memorization and test-time prompt optimization. In addition, HisTPT features an adaptive knowledge retrieval mechanism that regularizes the prediction of each test sample by adaptively retrieving the memorized knowledge. Extensive experiments show that HisTPT achieves superior prompt tuning performance consistently while handling different visual recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection) and test samples from continuously changing domains.
Authors:Syed Jawwad Haider Hamdani, Saifullah Saifullah, Stefan Agne, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed
Abstract:
Obtaining annotated table structure data for complex tables is a challenging task due to the inherent diversity and complexity of real-world document layouts. The scarcity of publicly available datasets with comprehensive annotations for intricate table structures hinders the development and evaluation of models designed for such scenarios. This research paper introduces a novel approach for generating annotated images for table structure by leveraging conditioned mask images of rows and columns through the application of latent diffusion models. The proposed method aims to enhance the quality of synthetic data used for training object detection models. Specifically, the study employs a conditioning mechanism to guide the generation of complex document table images, ensuring a realistic representation of table layouts. To evaluate the effectiveness of the generated data, we employ the popular YOLOv5 object detection model for training. The generated table images serve as valuable training samples, enriching the dataset with diverse table structures. The model is subsequently tested on the challenging pubtables-1m testset, a benchmark for table structure recognition in complex document layouts. Experimental results demonstrate that the introduced approach significantly improves the quality of synthetic data for training, leading to YOLOv5 models with enhanced performance. The mean Average Precision (mAP) values obtained on the pubtables-1m testset showcase results closely aligned with state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, low FID results obtained on the synthetic data further validate the efficacy of the proposed methodology in generating annotated images for table structure.
Authors:Qiming Xia, Hongwei Lin, Wei Ye, Hai Wu, Yadan Luo, Cheng Wang, Chenglu Wen
Abstract:
LiDAR-based outdoor 3D object detection has received widespread attention. However, training 3D detectors from the LiDAR point cloud typically relies on expensive bounding box annotations. This paper presents SC3D, an innovative label-efficient method requiring only a single coarse click on the bird's eye view of the 3D point cloud for each frame. A key challenge here is the absence of complete geometric descriptions of the target objects from such simple click annotations. To address this issue, our proposed SC3D adopts a progressive pipeline. Initially, we design a mixed pseudo-label generation module that expands limited click annotations into a mixture of bounding box and semantic mask supervision. Next, we propose a mix-supervised teacher model, enabling the detector to learn mixed supervision information. Finally, we introduce a mixed-supervised student network that leverages the teacher model's generalization ability to learn unclicked instances.Experimental results on the widely used nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our SC3D with only coarse clicks, which requires only 0.2% annotation cost, achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to weakly-supervised 3D detection methods.The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Xun Huang, Ziyu Xu, Hai Wu, Jinlong Wang, Qiming Xia, Yan Xia, Jonathan Li, Kyle Gao, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based vision systems are integral for 3D object detection, which is crucial for autonomous navigation. However, they suffer from performance degradation in adverse weather conditions due to the quality deterioration of LiDAR point clouds. Fusing LiDAR with the weather-robust 4D radar sensor is expected to solve this problem. However, the fusion of LiDAR and 4D radar is challenging because they differ significantly in terms of data quality and the degree of degradation in adverse weather. To address these issues, we introduce L4DR, a weather-robust 3D object detection method that effectively achieves LiDAR and 4D Radar fusion. Our L4DR includes Multi-Modal Encoding (MME) and Foreground-Aware Denoising (FAD) technique to reconcile sensor gaps, which is the first exploration of the complementarity of early fusion between LiDAR and 4D radar. Additionally, we design an Inter-Modal and Intra-Modal ({IM}2 ) parallel feature extraction backbone coupled with a Multi-Scale Gated Fusion (MSGF) module to counteract the varying degrees of sensor degradation under adverse weather conditions. Experimental evaluation on a VoD dataset with simulated fog proves that L4DR is more adaptable to changing weather conditions. It delivers a significant performance increase under different fog levels, improving the 3D mAP by up to 20.0% over the traditional LiDAR-only approach. Moreover, the results on the K-Radar dataset validate the consistent performance improvement of L4DR in real-world adverse weather conditions.
Authors:Xiangyuan Peng, Miao Tang, Huawei Sun, Kay Bierzynski, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract:
In recent years, approaches based on radar object detection have made significant progress in autonomous driving systems due to their robustness under adverse weather compared to LiDAR. However, the sparsity of radar point clouds poses challenges in achieving precise object detection, highlighting the importance of effective and comprehensive feature extraction technologies. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a comprehensive feature extraction method for radar point clouds. This study first enhances the capability of detection networks by using a plug-and-play module, GeoSPA. It leverages the Lalonde features to explore local geometric patterns. Additionally, a distributed multi-view attention mechanism, DEMVA, is designed to integrate the shared information across the entire dataset with the global information of each individual frame. By employing the two modules, we present our method, MUFASA, which enhances object detection performance through improved feature extraction. The approach is evaluated on the VoD and TJ4DRaDSet datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness. In particular, we achieve state-of-the-art results among radar-based methods on the VoD dataset with the mAP of 50.24%.
Authors:Tahira Shehzadi, Ifza, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
The impressive advancements in semi-supervised learning have driven researchers to explore its potential in object detection tasks within the field of computer vision. Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) leverages a combination of a small labeled dataset and a larger, unlabeled dataset. This approach effectively reduces the dependence on large labeled datasets, which are often expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Initially, SSOD models encountered challenges in effectively leveraging unlabeled data and managing noise in generated pseudo-labels for unlabeled data. However, numerous recent advancements have addressed these issues, resulting in substantial improvements in SSOD performance. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 27 cutting-edge developments in SSOD methodologies, from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to Transformers. We delve into the core components of semi-supervised learning and its integration into object detection frameworks, covering data augmentation techniques, pseudo-labeling strategies, consistency regularization, and adversarial training methods. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of various SSOD models, evaluating their performance and architectural differences. We aim to ignite further research interest in overcoming existing challenges and exploring new directions in semi-supervised learning for object detection.
Authors:Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Tahira Shehzadi, Rabeya Noor, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
Automated signature verification on bank checks is critical for fraud prevention and ensuring transaction authenticity. This task is challenging due to the coexistence of signatures with other textual and graphical elements on real-world documents. Verification systems must first detect the signature and then validate its authenticity, a dual challenge often overlooked by current datasets and methodologies focusing only on verification. To address this gap, we introduce a novel dataset specifically designed for signature verification on bank checks. This dataset includes a variety of signature styles embedded within typical check elements, providing a realistic testing ground for advanced detection methods. Moreover, we propose a novel approach for writer-independent signature verification using an object detection network. Our detection-based verification method treats genuine and forged signatures as distinct classes within an object detection framework, effectively handling both detection and verification. We employ a DINO-based network augmented with a dilation module to detect and verify signatures on check images simultaneously. Our approach achieves an AP of 99.2 for genuine and 99.4 for forged signatures, a significant improvement over the DINO baseline, which scored 93.1 and 89.3 for genuine and forged signatures, respectively. This improvement highlights our dilation module's effectiveness in reducing both false positives and negatives. Our results demonstrate substantial advancements in detection-based signature verification technology, offering enhanced security and efficiency in financial document processing.
Authors:Talha Uddin Sheikh, Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
Document layout analysis is a key area in document research, involving techniques like text mining and visual analysis. Despite various methods developed to tackle layout analysis, a critical but frequently overlooked problem is the scarcity of labeled data needed for analyses. With the rise of internet use, an overwhelming number of documents are now available online, making the process of accurately labeling them for research purposes increasingly challenging and labor-intensive. Moreover, the diversity of documents online presents a unique set of challenges in maintaining the quality and consistency of these labels, further complicating document layout analysis in the digital era. To address this, we employ a vision-based approach for analyzing document layouts designed to train a network without labels. Instead, we focus on pre-training, initially generating simple object masks from the unlabeled document images. These masks are then used to train a detector, enhancing object detection and segmentation performance. The model's effectiveness is further amplified through several unsupervised training iterations, continuously refining its performance. This approach significantly advances document layout analysis, particularly precision and efficiency, without labels.
Authors:Tahira Shehzadi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
Document layout analysis involves understanding the arrangement of elements within a document. This paper navigates the complexities of understanding various elements within document images, such as text, images, tables, and headings. The approach employs an advanced Transformer-based object detection network as an innovative graphical page object detector for identifying tables, figures, and displayed elements. We introduce a query encoding mechanism to provide high-quality object queries for contrastive learning, enhancing efficiency in the decoder phase. We also present a hybrid matching scheme that integrates the decoder's original one-to-one matching strategy with the one-to-many matching strategy during the training phase. This approach aims to improve the model's accuracy and versatility in detecting various graphical elements on a page. Our experiments on PubLayNet, DocLayNet, and PubTables benchmarks show that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. It achieves an average precision of 97.3% on PubLayNet, 81.6% on DocLayNet, and 98.6 on PubTables, demonstrating its superior performance in layout analysis. These advancements not only enhance the conversion of document images into editable and accessible formats but also streamline information retrieval and data extraction processes.
Authors:Huawei Sun, Hao Feng, Gianfranco Mauro, Julius Ott, Georg Stettinger, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract:
Radar and camera fusion yields robustness in perception tasks by leveraging the strength of both sensors. The typical extracted radar point cloud is 2D without height information due to insufficient antennas along the elevation axis, which challenges the network performance. This work introduces a learning-based approach to infer the height of radar points associated with 3D objects. A novel robust regression loss is introduced to address the sparse target challenge. In addition, a multi-task training strategy is employed, emphasizing important features. The average radar absolute height error decreases from 1.69 to 0.25 meters compared to the state-of-the-art height extension method. The estimated target height values are used to preprocess and enrich radar data for downstream perception tasks. Integrating this refined radar information further enhances the performance of existing radar camera fusion models for object detection and depth estimation tasks.
Authors:Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
In this paper, we address the limitations of the DETR-based semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) framework, particularly focusing on the challenges posed by the quality of object queries. In DETR-based SSOD, the one-to-one assignment strategy provides inaccurate pseudo-labels, while the one-to-many assignments strategy leads to overlapping predictions. These issues compromise training efficiency and degrade model performance, especially in detecting small or occluded objects. We introduce Sparse Semi-DETR, a novel transformer-based, end-to-end semi-supervised object detection solution to overcome these challenges. Sparse Semi-DETR incorporates a Query Refinement Module to enhance the quality of object queries, significantly improving detection capabilities for small and partially obscured objects. Additionally, we integrate a Reliable Pseudo-Label Filtering Module that selectively filters high-quality pseudo-labels, thereby enhancing detection accuracy and consistency. On the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC object detection benchmarks, Sparse Semi-DETR achieves a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods that highlight Sparse Semi-DETR's effectiveness in semi-supervised object detection, particularly in challenging scenarios involving small or partially obscured objects.
Authors:Xun Huang, Hai Wu, Xin Li, Xiaoliang Fan, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection models have traditionally struggled under rainy conditions due to the degraded and noisy scanning signals. Previous research has attempted to address this by simulating the noise from rain to improve the robustness of detection models. However, significant disparities exist between simulated and actual rain-impacted data points. In this work, we propose a novel rain simulation method, termed DRET, that unifies Dynamics and Rainy Environment Theory to provide a cost-effective means of expanding the available realistic rain data for 3D detection training. Furthermore, we present a Sunny-to-Rainy Knowledge Distillation (SRKD) approach to enhance 3D detection under rainy conditions. Extensive experiments on the WaymoOpenDataset large-scale dataset show that, when combined with the state-of-the-art DSVT model and other classical 3D detectors, our proposed framework demonstrates significant detection accuracy improvements, without losing efficiency. Remarkably, our framework also improves detection capabilities under sunny conditions, therefore offering a robust solution for 3D detection regardless of whether the weather is rainy or sunny
Authors:Sheng Jin, Xueying Jiang, Jiaxing Huang, Lewei Lu, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Inspired by the outstanding zero-shot capability of vision language models (VLMs) in image classification tasks, open-vocabulary object detection has attracted increasing interest by distilling the broad VLM knowledge into detector training. However, most existing open-vocabulary detectors learn by aligning region embeddings with categorical labels (e.g., bicycle) only, disregarding the capability of VLMs on aligning visual embeddings with fine-grained text description of object parts (e.g., pedals and bells). This paper presents DVDet, a Descriptor-Enhanced Open Vocabulary Detector that introduces conditional context prompts and hierarchical textual descriptors that enable precise region-text alignment as well as open-vocabulary detection training in general. Specifically, the conditional context prompt transforms regional embeddings into image-like representations that can be directly integrated into general open vocabulary detection training. In addition, we introduce large language models as an interactive and implicit knowledge repository which enables iterative mining and refining visually oriented textual descriptors for precise region-text alignment. Extensive experiments over multiple large-scale benchmarks show that DVDet outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins.
Authors:Qiyang Zhang, Xin Yuan, Ruolin Xing, Yiran Zhang, Zimu Zheng, Xiao Ma, Mengwei Xu, Schahram Dustdar, Shangguang Wang
Abstract:
With the rapid proliferation of large Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, a huge amount of in-orbit data is generated and needs to be transmitted to the ground for processing. However, traditional LEO satellite constellations, which downlink raw data to the ground, are significantly restricted in transmission capability. Orbital edge computing (OEC), which exploits the computation capacities of LEO satellites and processes the raw data in orbit, is envisioned as a promising solution to relieve the downlink burden. Yet, with OEC, the bottleneck is shifted to the inelastic computation capacities. The computational bottleneck arises from two primary challenges that existing satellite systems have not adequately addressed: the inability to process all captured images and the limited energy supply available for satellite operations. In this work, we seek to fully exploit the scarce satellite computation and communication resources to achieve satellite-ground collaboration and present a satellite-ground collaborative system named TargetFuse for onboard object detection. TargetFuse incorporates a combination of techniques to minimize detection errors under energy and bandwidth constraints. Extensive experiments show that TargetFuse can reduce detection errors by 3.4 times on average, compared to onboard computing. TargetFuse achieves a 9.6 times improvement in bandwidth efficiency compared to the vanilla baseline under the limited bandwidth budget constraint.
Authors:Yiran Song, Qianyu Zhou, Xuequan Lu, Zhiwen Shao, Lizhuang Ma
Abstract:
Segment anything model (SAM) has demonstrated excellent generalizability in common vision scenarios, yet falling short of the ability to understand specialized data. Recently, several methods have combined parameter-efficient techniques with task-specific designs to fine-tune SAM on particular tasks. However, these methods heavily rely on handcraft, complicated, and task-specific designs, and pre/post-processing to achieve acceptable performances on downstream tasks. As a result, this severely restricts generalizability to other downstream tasks. To address this issue, we present a simple and unified framework, namely SU-SAM, that can easily and efficiently fine-tune the SAM model with parameter-efficient techniques while maintaining excellent generalizability toward various downstream tasks. SU-SAM does not require any task-specific designs and aims to improve the adaptability of SAM-like models significantly toward underperformed scenes. Concretely, we abstract parameter-efficient modules of different methods into basic design elements in our framework. Besides, we propose four variants of SU-SAM, i.e., series, parallel, mixed, and LoRA structures. Comprehensive experiments on nine datasets and six downstream tasks to verify the effectiveness of SU-SAM, including medical image segmentation, camouflage object detection, salient object segmentation, surface defect segmentation, complex object shapes, and shadow masking. Our experimental results demonstrate that SU-SAM achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we provide in-depth analyses highlighting the effectiveness of different parameter-efficient designs within SU-SAM. In addition, we propose a generalized model and benchmark, showcasing SU-SAM's generalizability across all diverse datasets simultaneously.
Authors:Zhenyu Wu, Xiuwei Xu, Ziwei Wang, Chong Xia, Linqing Zhao, Jiwen Lu, Haibin Yan
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel network framework for indoor 3D object detection to handle variable input frame numbers in practical scenarios. Existing methods only consider fixed frames of input data for a single detector, such as monocular RGB-D images or point clouds reconstructed from dense multi-view RGB-D images. While in practical application scenes such as robot navigation and manipulation, the raw input to the 3D detectors is the RGB-D images with variable frame numbers instead of the reconstructed scene point cloud. However, the previous approaches can only handle fixed frame input data and have poor performance with variable frame input. In order to facilitate 3D object detection methods suitable for practical tasks, we present a novel 3D detection framework named AnyView for our practical applications, which generalizes well across different numbers of input frames with a single model. To be specific, we propose a geometric learner to mine the local geometric features of each input RGB-D image frame and implement local-global feature interaction through a designed spatial mixture module. Meanwhile, we further utilize a dynamic token strategy to adaptively adjust the number of extracted features for each frame, which ensures consistent global feature density and further enhances the generalization after fusion. Extensive experiments on the ScanNet dataset show our method achieves both great generalizability and high detection accuracy with a simple and clean architecture containing a similar amount of parameters with the baselines.
Authors:Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang, Xueying Jiang, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Black-box unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) learns with source predictions of target data without accessing either source data or source models during training, and it has clear superiority in data privacy and flexibility in target network selection. However, the source predictions of target data are often noisy and training with them is prone to learning collapses. We propose BiMem, a bi-directional memorization mechanism that learns to remember useful and representative information to correct noisy pseudo labels on the fly, leading to robust black-box UDA that can generalize across different visual recognition tasks. BiMem constructs three types of memory, including sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory, which interact in a bi-directional manner for comprehensive and robust memorization of learnt features. It includes a forward memorization flow that identifies and stores useful features and a backward calibration flow that rectifies features' pseudo labels progressively. Extensive experiments show that BiMem achieves superior domain adaptation performance consistently across various visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection.
Authors:Huawei Sun, Hao Feng, Georg Stettinger, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract:
Accurate and robust object detection is critical for autonomous driving. Image-based detectors face difficulties caused by low visibility in adverse weather conditions. Thus, radar-camera fusion is of particular interest but presents challenges in optimally fusing heterogeneous data sources. To approach this issue, we propose two new radar preprocessing techniques to better align radar and camera data. In addition, we introduce a Multi-Task Cross-Modality Attention-Fusion Network (MCAF-Net) for object detection, which includes two new fusion blocks. These allow for exploiting information from the feature maps more comprehensively. The proposed algorithm jointly detects objects and segments free space, which guides the model to focus on the more relevant part of the scene, namely, the occupied space. Our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art radar-camera fusion-based object detectors in the nuScenes dataset and achieves more robust results in adverse weather conditions and nighttime scenarios.
Authors:Zhijie Rao, Jingcai Guo, Luyao Tang, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding, Song Guo
Abstract:
This paper provides a novel framework for single-domain generalized object detection (i.e., Single-DGOD), where we are interested in learning and maintaining the semantic structures of self-augmented compound cross-domain samples to enhance the model's generalization ability. Different from DGOD trained on multiple source domains, Single-DGOD is far more challenging to generalize well to multiple target domains with only one single source domain. Existing methods mostly adopt a similar treatment from DGOD to learn domain-invariant features by decoupling or compressing the semantic space. However, there may have two potential limitations: 1) pseudo attribute-label correlation, due to extremely scarce single-domain data; and 2) the semantic structural information is usually ignored, i.e., we found the affinities of instance-level semantic relations in samples are crucial to model generalization. In this paper, we introduce Semantic Reasoning with Compound Domains (SRCD) for Single-DGOD. Specifically, our SRCD contains two main components, namely, the texture-based self-augmentation (TBSA) module, and the local-global semantic reasoning (LGSR) module. TBSA aims to eliminate the effects of irrelevant attributes associated with labels, such as light, shadow, color, etc., at the image level by a light-yet-efficient self-augmentation. Moreover, LGSR is used to further model the semantic relationships on instance features to uncover and maintain the intrinsic semantic structures. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SRCD.
Authors:Tahira Shehzadi, Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Didier Stricker, Marcus Liwicki, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
This paper takes an important step in bridging the performance gap between DETR and R-CNN for graphical object detection. Existing graphical object detection approaches have enjoyed recent enhancements in CNN-based object detection methods, achieving remarkable progress. Recently, Transformer-based detectors have considerably boosted the generic object detection performance, eliminating the need for hand-crafted features or post-processing steps such as Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) using object queries. However, the effectiveness of such enhanced transformer-based detection algorithms has yet to be verified for the problem of graphical object detection. Essentially, inspired by the latest advancements in the DETR, we employ the existing detection transformer with few modifications for graphical object detection. We modify object queries in different ways, using points, anchor boxes and adding positive and negative noise to the anchors to boost performance. These modifications allow for better handling of objects with varying sizes and aspect ratios, more robustness to small variations in object positions and sizes, and improved image discrimination between objects and non-objects. We evaluate our approach on the four graphical datasets: PubTables, TableBank, NTable and PubLaynet. Upon integrating query modifications in the DETR, we outperform prior works and achieve new state-of-the-art results with the mAP of 96.9\%, 95.7\% and 99.3\% on TableBank, PubLaynet, PubTables, respectively. The results from extensive ablations show that transformer-based methods are more effective for document analysis analogous to other applications. We hope this study draws more attention to the research of using detection transformers in document image analysis.
Authors:Issa Mouawad, Nikolas Brasch, Fabian Manhardt, Federico Tombari, Francesca Odone
Abstract:
For autonomous vehicles, driving safely is highly dependent on the capability to correctly perceive the environment in 3D space, hence the task of 3D object detection represents a fundamental aspect of perception. While 3D sensors deliver accurate metric perception, monocular approaches enjoy cost and availability advantages that are valuable in a wide range of applications. Unfortunately, training monocular methods requires a vast amount of annotated data. Interestingly, self-supervised approaches have recently been successfully applied to ease the training process and unlock access to widely available unlabelled data. While related research leverages different priors including LIDAR scans and stereo images, such priors again limit usability. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel approach to self-supervise 3D object detection purely from RGB sequences alone, leveraging multi-view constraints and weak labels. Our experiments on KITTI 3D dataset demonstrate performance on par with state-of-the-art self-supervised methods using LIDAR scans or stereo images.
Authors:Congpei Qiu, Tong Zhang, Wei Ke, Mathieu Salzmann, Sabine Süsstrunk
Abstract:
Dense Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods address the limitations of using image-level feature representations when handling images with multiple objects. Although the dense features extracted by employing segmentation maps and bounding boxes allow networks to perform SSL for each object, we show that they suffer from coupling and positional bias, which arise from the receptive field increasing with layer depth and zero-padding. We address this by introducing three data augmentation strategies, and leveraging them in (i) a decoupling module that aims to robustify the network to variations in the object's surroundings, and (ii) a de-positioning module that encourages the network to discard positional object information. We demonstrate the benefits of our method on COCO and on a new challenging benchmark, OpenImage-MINI, for object classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Our extensive experiments evidence the better generalization of our method compared to the SOTA dense SSL methods
Authors:Yiran Song, Qianyu Zhou, Lizhuang Ma
Abstract:
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) are powerful to parameterize continuous signals in computer vision. However, almost all INRs methods are limited to low-level tasks, e.g., image/video compression, super-resolution, and image generation. The questions on how to explore INRs to high-level tasks and deep networks are still under-explored. Existing INRs methods suffer from two problems: 1) narrow theoretical definitions of INRs are inapplicable to high-level tasks; 2) lack of representation capabilities to deep networks. Motivated by the above facts, we reformulate the definitions of INRs from a novel perspective and propose an innovative Implicit Neural Representation Network (INRN), which is the first study of INRs to tackle both low-level and high-level tasks. Specifically, we present three key designs for basic blocks in INRN along with two different stacking ways and corresponding loss functions. Extensive experiments with analysis on both low-level tasks (image fitting) and high-level vision tasks (image classification, object detection, instance segmentation) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Bonan Li, Yinhan Hu, Xuecheng Nie, Congying Han, Xiangjian Jiang, Tiande Guo, Luoqi Liu
Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on analyzing and improving the dropout technique for self-attention layers of Vision Transformer, which is important while surprisingly ignored by prior works. In particular, we conduct researches on three core questions: First, what to drop in self-attention layers? Different from dropping attention weights in literature, we propose to move dropout operations forward ahead of attention matrix calculation and set the Key as the dropout unit, yielding a novel dropout-before-softmax scheme. We theoretically verify that this scheme helps keep both regularization and probability features of attention weights, alleviating the overfittings problem to specific patterns and enhancing the model to globally capture vital information; Second, how to schedule the drop ratio in consecutive layers? In contrast to exploit a constant drop ratio for all layers, we present a new decreasing schedule that gradually decreases the drop ratio along the stack of self-attention layers. We experimentally validate the proposed schedule can avoid overfittings in low-level features and missing in high-level semantics, thus improving the robustness and stableness of model training; Third, whether need to perform structured dropout operation as CNN? We attempt patch-based block-version of dropout operation and find that this useful trick for CNN is not essential for ViT. Given exploration on the above three questions, we present the novel DropKey method that regards Key as the drop unit and exploits decreasing schedule for drop ratio, improving ViTs in a general way. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DropKey for various ViT architectures, e.g. T2T and VOLO, as well as for various vision tasks, e.g., image classification, object detection, human-object interaction detection and human body shape recovery.
Authors:Changho Hwang, Wei Cui, Yifan Xiong, Ziyue Yang, Ze Liu, Han Hu, Zilong Wang, Rafael Salas, Jithin Jose, Prabhat Ram, Joe Chau, Peng Cheng, Fan Yang, Mao Yang, Yongqiang Xiong
Abstract:
Sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) has been widely adopted to scale deep learning models to trillion-plus parameters with fixed computational cost. The algorithmic performance of MoE relies on its token routing mechanism that forwards each input token to the right sub-models or experts. While token routing dynamically determines the amount of expert workload at runtime, existing systems suffer inefficient computation due to their static execution, namely static parallelism and pipelining, which does not adapt to the dynamic workload. We present Flex, a highly scalable stack design and implementation for MoE with dynamically adaptive parallelism and pipelining. Flex designs an identical layout for distributing MoE model parameters and input data, which can be leveraged by all possible parallelism or pipelining methods without any mathematical inequivalence or tensor migration overhead. This enables adaptive parallelism/pipelining optimization at zero cost during runtime. Based on this key design, Flex also implements various MoE acceleration techniques. Aggregating all techniques, Flex finally delivers huge speedup at any scale -- 4.96x and 5.75x speedup of a single MoE layer over 16 and 2,048 A100 GPUs, respectively, over the previous state-of-the-art. Our evaluation shows that Flex efficiently and effectively runs a real-world MoE-based model named SwinV2-MoE, built upon Swin Transformer V2, a state-of-the-art computer vision architecture. On efficiency, Flex accelerates SwinV2-MoE, achieving up to 1.55x and 2.11x speedup in training and inference over Fairseq, respectively. On effectiveness, the SwinV2-MoE model achieves superior accuracy in both pre-training and down-stream computer vision tasks such as COCO object detection than the counterpart dense model, indicating the readiness of Flex for end-to-end real-world model training and inference.
Authors:Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Bernard Ghanem
Abstract:
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are ubiquitous and span a variety of applications ranging from image classification to real-time object detection. As DNN models become more sophisticated, the computational cost of training these models becomes a burden. For this reason, outsourcing the training process has been the go-to option for many DNN users. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of vulnerability to backdoor attacks. These attacks aim to establish hidden backdoors in the DNN so that it performs well on clean samples, but outputs a particular target label when a trigger is applied to the input. Existing backdoor attacks either generate triggers in the spatial domain or naively poison frequencies in the Fourier domain. In this work, we propose a pipeline based on Fourier heatmaps to generate a spatially dynamic and invisible backdoor attack in the frequency domain. The proposed attack is extensively evaluated on various datasets and network architectures. Unlike most existing backdoor attacks, the proposed attack can achieve high attack success rates with low poisoning rates and little to no drop in performance while remaining imperceptible to the human eye. Moreover, we show that the models poisoned by our attack are resistant to various state-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses, so we contribute two possible defenses that can evade the attack.
Authors:Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang, Zhipeng Luo, Gongjie Zhang, Xiaoqin Zhang, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
The recent detection transformer (DETR) simplifies the object detection pipeline by removing hand-crafted designs and hyperparameters as employed in conventional two-stage object detectors. However, how to leverage the simple yet effective DETR architecture in domain adaptive object detection is largely neglected. Inspired by the unique DETR attention mechanisms, we design DA-DETR, a domain adaptive object detection transformer that introduces information fusion for effective transfer from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. DA-DETR introduces a novel CNN-Transformer Blender (CTBlender) that fuses the CNN features and Transformer features ingeniously for effective feature alignment and knowledge transfer across domains. Specifically, CTBlender employs the Transformer features to modulate the CNN features across multiple scales where the high-level semantic information and the low-level spatial information are fused for accurate object identification and localization. Extensive experiments show that DA-DETR achieves superior detection performance consistently across multiple widely adopted domain adaptation benchmarks.
Authors:Tianyi Yan, Wencheng Han, Xia Zhou, Xueyang Zhang, Kun Zhan, Cheng-zhong Xu, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
Synthetic data is crucial for advancing autonomous driving (AD) systems, yet current state-of-the-art video generation models, despite their visual realism, suffer from subtle geometric distortions that limit their utility for downstream perception tasks. We identify and quantify this critical issue, demonstrating a significant performance gap in 3D object detection when using synthetic versus real data. To address this, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Geometric Feedback (RLGF), RLGF uniquely refines video diffusion models by incorporating rewards from specialized latent-space AD perception models. Its core components include an efficient Latent-Space Windowing Optimization technique for targeted feedback during diffusion, and a Hierarchical Geometric Reward (HGR) system providing multi-level rewards for point-line-plane alignment, and scene occupancy coherence. To quantify these distortions, we propose GeoScores. Applied to models like DiVE on nuScenes, RLGF substantially reduces geometric errors (e.g., VP error by 21\%, Depth error by 57\%) and dramatically improves 3D object detection mAP by 12.7\%, narrowing the gap to real-data performance. RLGF offers a plug-and-play solution for generating geometrically sound and reliable synthetic videos for AD development.
Authors:Peng-Hao Hsu, Ke Zhang, Fu-En Wang, Tao Tu, Ming-Feng Li, Yu-Lun Liu, Albert Y. C. Chen, Min Sun, Cheng-Hao Kuo
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary (OV) 3D object detection is an emerging field, yet its exploration through image-based methods remains limited compared to 3D point cloud-based methods. We introduce OpenM3D, a novel open-vocabulary multi-view indoor 3D object detector trained without human annotations. In particular, OpenM3D is a single-stage detector adapting the 2D-induced voxel features from the ImGeoNet model. To support OV, it is jointly trained with a class-agnostic 3D localization loss requiring high-quality 3D pseudo boxes and a voxel-semantic alignment loss requiring diverse pre-trained CLIP features. We follow the training setting of OV-3DET where posed RGB-D images are given but no human annotations of 3D boxes or classes are available. We propose a 3D Pseudo Box Generation method using a graph embedding technique that combines 2D segments into coherent 3D structures. Our pseudo-boxes achieve higher precision and recall than other methods, including the method proposed in OV-3DET. We further sample diverse CLIP features from 2D segments associated with each coherent 3D structure to align with the corresponding voxel feature. The key to training a highly accurate single-stage detector requires both losses to be learned toward high-quality targets. At inference, OpenM3D, a highly efficient detector, requires only multi-view images for input and demonstrates superior accuracy and speed (0.3 sec. per scene) on ScanNet200 and ARKitScenes indoor benchmarks compared to existing methods. We outperform a strong two-stage method that leverages our class-agnostic detector with a ViT CLIP-based OV classifier and a baseline incorporating multi-view depth estimator on both accuracy and speed.
Authors:Ao Liang, Lingdong Kong, Dongyue Lu, Youquan Liu, Jian Fang, Huaici Zhao, Wei Tsang Ooi
Abstract:
With the rise of robotics, LiDAR-based 3D object detection has garnered significant attention in both academia and industry. However, existing datasets and methods predominantly focus on vehicle-mounted platforms, leaving other autonomous platforms underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Pi3DET, the first benchmark featuring LiDAR data and 3D bounding box annotations collected from multiple platforms: vehicle, quadruped, and drone, thereby facilitating research in 3D object detection for non-vehicle platforms as well as cross-platform 3D detection. Based on Pi3DET, we propose a novel cross-platform adaptation framework that transfers knowledge from the well-studied vehicle platform to other platforms. This framework achieves perspective-invariant 3D detection through robust alignment at both geometric and feature levels. Additionally, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the resilience and robustness of current 3D detectors in cross-platform scenarios, providing valuable insights for developing adaptive 3D perception systems. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach on challenging cross-platform tasks, demonstrating substantial gains over existing adaptation methods. We hope this work paves the way for generalizable and unified 3D perception systems across diverse and complex environments. Our Pi3DET dataset, cross-platform benchmark suite, and annotation toolkit have been made publicly available.
Authors:Hongxu Ma, Chenbo Zhang, Lu Zhang, Jiaogen Zhou, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou
Abstract:
Zero-shot object detection (ZSD) aims to leverage semantic descriptions to localize and recognize objects of both seen and unseen classes. Existing ZSD works are mainly coarse-grained object detection, where the classes are visually quite different, thus are relatively easy to distinguish. However, in real life we often have to face fine-grained object detection scenarios, where the classes are too similar to be easily distinguished. For example, detecting different kinds of birds, fishes, and flowers.
In this paper, we propose and solve a new problem called Fine-Grained Zero-Shot Object Detection (FG-ZSD for short), which aims to detect objects of different classes with minute differences in details under the ZSD paradigm. We develop an effective method called MSHC for the FG-ZSD task, which is based on an improved two-stage detector and employs a multi-level semantics-aware embedding alignment loss, ensuring tight coupling between the visual and semantic spaces. Considering that existing ZSD datasets are not suitable for the new FG-ZSD task, we build the first FG-ZSD benchmark dataset FGZSD-Birds, which contains 148,820 images falling into 36 orders, 140 families, 579 genera and 1432 species. Extensive experiments on FGZSD-Birds show that our method outperforms existing ZSD models.
Authors:Mingxuan Liu, Tyler L. Hayes, Massimiliano Mancini, Elisa Ricci, Riccardo Volpi, Gabriela Csurka
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection models allow users to freely specify a class vocabulary in natural language at test time, guiding the detection of desired objects. However, vocabularies can be overly broad or even mis-specified, hampering the overall performance of the detector. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play Vocabulary Adapter (VocAda) to refine the user-defined vocabulary, automatically tailoring it to categories that are relevant for a given image. VocAda does not require any training, it operates at inference time in three steps: i) it uses an image captionner to describe visible objects, ii) it parses nouns from those captions, and iii) it selects relevant classes from the user-defined vocabulary, discarding irrelevant ones. Experiments on COCO and Objects365 with three state-of-the-art detectors show that VocAda consistently improves performance, proving its versatility. The code is open source.
Authors:Runling Long, Yunlong Wang, Jia Wan, Xiang Deng, Xinting Zhu, Weili Guan, Antoni B. Chan, Liqiang Nie
Abstract:
Occlusion is one of the fundamental challenges in crowd counting. In the community, various data-driven approaches have been developed to address this issue, yet their effectiveness is limited. This is mainly because most existing crowd counting datasets on which the methods are trained are based on passive cameras, restricting their ability to fully sense the environment. Recently, embodied navigation methods have shown significant potential in precise object detection in interactive scenes. These methods incorporate active camera settings, holding promise in addressing the fundamental issues in crowd counting. However, most existing methods are designed for indoor navigation, showing unknown performance in analyzing complex object distribution in large scale scenes, such as crowds. Besides, most existing embodied navigation datasets are indoor scenes with limited scale and object quantity, preventing them from being introduced into dense crowd analysis. Based on this, a novel task, Embodied Crowd Counting (ECC), is proposed. We first build up an interactive simulator, Embodied Crowd Counting Dataset (ECCD), which enables large scale scenes and large object quantity. A prior probability distribution that approximates realistic crowd distribution is introduced to generate crowds. Then, a zero-shot navigation method (ZECC) is proposed. This method contains a MLLM driven coarse-to-fine navigation mechanism, enabling active Z-axis exploration, and a normal-line-based crowd distribution analysis method for fine counting. Experimental results against baselines show that the proposed method achieves the best trade-off between counting accuracy and navigation cost.
Authors:Yandi Liu, Guowei Liu, Le Liang, Hao Ye, Chongtao Guo, Shi Jin
Abstract:
Stand-alone perception systems in autonomous driving suffer from limited sensing ranges and occlusions at extended distances, potentially resulting in catastrophic outcomes. To address this issue, collaborative perception is envisioned to improve perceptual accuracy by using vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to enable collaboration among connected and autonomous vehicles and roadside units. However, due to limited communication resources, it is impractical for all units to transmit sensing data such as point clouds or high-definition video. As a result, it is essential to optimize the scheduling of communication links to ensure efficient spectrum utilization for the exchange of perceptual data. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based V2X user scheduling algorithm for collaborative perception. Given the challenges in acquiring perceptual labels, we reformulate the conventional label-dependent objective into a label-free goal, based on characteristics of 3D object detection. Incorporating both channel state information (CSI) and semantic information, we develop a double deep Q-Network (DDQN)-based user scheduling framework for collaborative perception, named SchedCP. Simulation results verify the effectiveness and robustness of SchedCP compared with traditional V2X scheduling methods. Finally, we present a case study to illustrate how our proposed algorithm adaptively modifies the scheduling decisions by taking both instantaneous CSI and perceptual semantics into account.
Authors:Runqing Jiang, Ye Zhang, Longguang Wang, Pengpeng Yu, Yulan Guo
Abstract:
Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising solution for reducing the storage and computational cost of vision transformers (ViTs). Recent advances primarily target at crafting quantizers to deal with peculiar activations characterized by ViTs. However, most existing methods underestimate the information loss incurred by weight quantization, resulting in significant performance deterioration, particularly in low-bit cases. Furthermore, a common practice in quantizing post-Softmax activations of ViTs is to employ logarithmic transformations, which unfortunately prioritize less informative values around zero. This approach introduces additional redundancies, ultimately leading to suboptimal quantization efficacy. To handle these, this paper proposes an innovative PTQ method tailored for ViTs, termed AIQViT (Architecture-Informed Post-training Quantization for ViTs). First, we design an architecture-informed low rank compensation mechanism, wherein learnable low-rank weights are introduced to compensate for the degradation caused by weight quantization. Second, we design a dynamic focusing quantizer to accommodate the unbalanced distribution of post-Softmax activations, which dynamically selects the most valuable interval for higher quantization resolution. Extensive experiments on five vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, point cloud classification, and point cloud part segmentation, demonstrate the superiority of AIQViT over state-of-the-art PTQ methods.
Authors:Wei Lu, Si-Bao Chen, Chris H. Q. Ding, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Remote sensing (RS) visual tasks have gained significant academic and practical importance. However, they encounter numerous challenges that hinder effective feature extraction, including the detection and recognition of multiple objects exhibiting substantial variations in scale within a single image. While prior dual-branch or multi-branch architectural strategies have been effective in managing these object variances, they have concurrently resulted in considerable increases in computational demands and parameter counts. Consequently, these architectures are rendered less viable for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Contemporary lightweight backbone networks, designed primarily for natural images, frequently encounter difficulties in effectively extracting features from multi-scale objects, which compromises their efficacy in RS visual tasks. This article introduces LWGANet, a specialized lightweight backbone network tailored for RS visual tasks, incorporating a novel lightweight group attention (LWGA) module designed to address these specific challenges. LWGA module, tailored for RS imagery, adeptly harnesses redundant features to extract a wide range of spatial information, from local to global scales, without introducing additional complexity or computational overhead. This facilitates precise feature extraction across multiple scales within an efficient framework.LWGANet was rigorously evaluated across twelve datasets, which span four crucial RS visual tasks: scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. The results confirm LWGANet's widespread applicability and its ability to maintain an optimal balance between high performance and low complexity, achieving SOTA results across diverse datasets. LWGANet emerged as a novel solution for resource-limited scenarios requiring robust RS image processing capabilities.
Authors:Jin-Cheng Jhang, Tao Tu, Fu-En Wang, Ke Zhang, Min Sun, Cheng-Hao Kuo
Abstract:
The field of indoor monocular 3D object detection is gaining significant attention, fueled by the increasing demand in VR/AR and robotic applications. However, its advancement is impeded by the limited availability and diversity of 3D training data, owing to the labor-intensive nature of 3D data collection and annotation processes. In this paper, we present V-MIND (Versatile Monocular INdoor Detector), which enhances the performance of indoor 3D detectors across a diverse set of object classes by harnessing publicly available large-scale 2D datasets. By leveraging well-established monocular depth estimation techniques and camera intrinsic predictors, we can generate 3D training data by converting large-scale 2D images into 3D point clouds and subsequently deriving pseudo 3D bounding boxes. To mitigate distance errors inherent in the converted point clouds, we introduce a novel 3D self-calibration loss for refining the pseudo 3D bounding boxes during training. Additionally, we propose a novel ambiguity loss to address the ambiguity that arises when introducing new classes from 2D datasets. Finally, through joint training with existing 3D datasets and pseudo 3D bounding boxes derived from 2D datasets, V-MIND achieves state-of-the-art object detection performance across a wide range of classes on the Omni3D indoor dataset.
Authors:Gabriele Magrini, Federico Becattini, Pietro Pala, Alberto Del Bimbo, Antonio Porta
Abstract:
In recent years, drone detection has quickly become a subject of extreme interest: the potential for fast-moving objects of contained dimensions to be used for malicious intents or even terrorist attacks has posed attention to the necessity for precise and resilient systems for detecting and identifying such elements. While extensive literature and works exist on object detection based on RGB data, it is also critical to recognize the limits of such modality when applied to UAVs detection. Detecting drones indeed poses several challenges such as fast-moving objects and scenes with a high dynamic range or, even worse, scarce illumination levels. Neuromorphic cameras, on the other hand, can retain precise and rich spatio-temporal information in situations that are challenging for RGB cameras. They are resilient to both high-speed moving objects and scarce illumination settings, while prone to suffer a rapid loss of information when the objects in the scene are static. In this context, we present a novel model for integrating both domains together, leveraging multimodal data to take advantage of the best of both worlds. To this end, we also release NeRDD (Neuromorphic-RGB Drone Detection), a novel spatio-temporally synchronized Event-RGB Drone detection dataset of more than 3.5 hours of multimodal annotated recordings.
Authors:Haocheng Zhao, Runwei Guan, Taoyu Wu, Ka Lok Man, Limin Yu, Yutao Yue
Abstract:
4D millimeter-wave (MMW) radar, which provides both height information and dense point cloud data over 3D MMW radar, has become increasingly popular in 3D object detection. In recent years, radar-vision fusion models have demonstrated performance close to that of LiDAR-based models, offering advantages in terms of lower hardware costs and better resilience in extreme conditions. However, many radar-vision fusion models treat radar as a sparse LiDAR, underutilizing radar-specific information. Additionally, these multi-modal networks are often sensitive to the failure of a single modality, particularly vision. To address these challenges, we propose the Radar Depth Lift-Splat-Shoot (RDL) module, which integrates radar-specific data into the depth prediction process, enhancing the quality of visual Bird-Eye View (BEV) features. We further introduce a Unified Feature Fusion (UFF) approach that extracts BEV features across different modalities using shared module. To assess the robustness of multi-modal models, we develop a novel Failure Test (FT) ablation experiment, which simulates vision modality failure by injecting Gaussian noise. We conduct extensive experiments on the View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4D datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed Unified BEVFusion (UniBEVFusion) network significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on the TJ4D dataset, with improvements of 1.44 in 3D and 1.72 in BEV object detection accuracy.
Authors:Yassine Himeur, Nour Aburaed, Omar Elharrouss, Iraklis Varlamis, Shadi Atalla, Wathiq Mansoor, Hussain Al Ahmad
Abstract:
With the ever-growing complexity of models in the field of remote sensing (RS), there is an increasing demand for solutions that balance model accuracy with computational efficiency. Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a powerful tool to meet this need, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large, complex models to smaller, more efficient ones without significant loss in performance. This review article provides an extensive examination of KD and its innovative applications in RS. KD, a technique developed to transfer knowledge from a complex, often cumbersome model (teacher) to a more compact and efficient model (student), has seen significant evolution and application across various domains. Initially, we introduce the fundamental concepts and historical progression of KD methods. The advantages of employing KD are highlighted, particularly in terms of model compression, enhanced computational efficiency, and improved performance, which are pivotal for practical deployments in RS scenarios. The article provides a comprehensive taxonomy of KD techniques, where each category is critically analyzed to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the alternative options, and illustrates specific case studies that showcase the practical implementation of KD methods in RS tasks, such as instance segmentation and object detection. Further, the review discusses the challenges and limitations of KD in RS, including practical constraints and prospective future directions, providing a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners in the field of RS. Through this organization, the paper not only elucidates the current state of research in KD but also sets the stage for future research opportunities, thereby contributing significantly to both academic research and real-world applications.
Authors:Yihang Tao, Senkang Hu, Zhengru Fang, Yuguang Fang
Abstract:
Collaborative perception (CP) leverages visual data from connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) to enhance an ego vehicle's field of view (FoV). Despite recent progress, current CP methods expand the ego vehicle's 360-degree perceptual range almost equally, which faces two key challenges. Firstly, in areas with uneven traffic distribution, focusing on directions with little traffic offers limited benefits. Secondly, under limited communication budgets, allocating excessive bandwidth to less critical directions lowers the perception accuracy in more vital areas. To address these issues, we propose Direct-CP, a proactive and direction-aware CP system aiming at improving CP in specific directions. Our key idea is to enable an ego vehicle to proactively signal its interested directions and readjust its attention to enhance local directional CP performance. To achieve this, we first propose an RSU-aided direction masking mechanism that assists an ego vehicle in identifying vital directions. Additionally, we design a direction-aware selective attention module to wisely aggregate pertinent features based on ego vehicle's directional priorities, communication budget, and the positional data of CAVs. Moreover, we introduce a direction-weighted detection loss (DWLoss) to capture the divergence between directional CP outcomes and the ground truth, facilitating effective model training. Extensive experiments on the V2X-Sim 2.0 dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves 19.8\% higher local perception accuracy in interested directions and 2.5\% higher overall perception accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods in collaborative 3D object detection tasks.
Authors:Yi Liu, Luting Wang, Zongheng Tang, Yue Liao, Yifan Sun, Lijun Zhang, Si Liu
Abstract:
Transformers have revolutionized the object detection landscape by introducing DETRs, acclaimed for their simplicity and efficacy. Despite their advantages, the substantial size of these models poses significant challenges for practical deployment, particularly in resource-constrained environments. This paper addresses the challenge of compressing DETR by leveraging knowledge distillation, a technique that holds promise for maintaining model performance while reducing size. A critical aspect of DETRs' performance is their reliance on queries to interpret object representations accurately. Traditional distillation methods often focus exclusively on positive queries, identified through bipartite matching, neglecting the rich information present in hard-negative queries. Our visual analysis indicates that hard-negative queries, focusing on foreground elements, are crucial for enhancing distillation outcomes. To this end, we introduce a novel Group Query Selection strategy, which diverges from traditional query selection in DETR distillation by segmenting queries based on their Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) with ground truth objects, thereby uncovering valuable hard-negative queries for distillation. Furthermore, we present the Knowledge Distillation via Query Selection for DETR (QSKD) framework, which incorporates Attention-Guided Feature Distillation (AGFD) and Local Alignment Prediction Distillation (LAPD). These components optimize the distillation process by focusing on the most informative aspects of the teacher model's intermediate features and output. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation of the MS-COCO dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, significantly improving average precision (AP) across various DETR architectures without incurring substantial computational costs. Specifically, the AP of Conditional DETR ResNet-18 increased from 35.8 to 39.9.
Authors:Jiahao Wang, Caixia Yan, Weizhan Zhang, Haonan Lin, Mengmeng Wang, Guang Dai, Tieliang Gong, Hao Sun, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
Text-to-image diffusion models significantly enhance the efficiency of artistic creation with high-fidelity image generation. However, in typical application scenarios like comic book production, they can neither place each subject into its expected spot nor maintain the consistent appearance of each subject across images. For these issues, we pioneer a novel task, Layout-to-Consistent-Image (L2CI) generation, which produces consistent and compositional images in accordance with the given layout conditions and text prompts. To accomplish this challenging task, we present a new formalization of dual energy guidance with optimization in a dual semantic-latent space and thus propose a training-free pipeline, SpotActor, which features a layout-conditioned backward update stage and a consistent forward sampling stage. In the backward stage, we innovate a nuanced layout energy function to mimic the attention activations with a sigmoid-like objective. While in the forward stage, we design Regional Interconnection Self-Attention (RISA) and Semantic Fusion Cross-Attention (SFCA) mechanisms that allow mutual interactions across images. To evaluate the performance, we present ActorBench, a specified benchmark with hundreds of reasonable prompt-box pairs stemming from object detection datasets. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The results prove that SpotActor fulfills the expectations of this task and showcases the potential for practical applications with superior layout alignment, subject consistency, prompt conformity and background diversity.
Authors:Sondos Mohamed, Walter Zimmer, Ross Greer, Ahmed Alaaeldin Ghita, Modesto Castrillón-Santana, Mohan Trivedi, Alois Knoll, Salvatore Mario Carta, Mirko Marras
Abstract:
Accurately detecting 3D objects from monocular images in dynamic roadside scenarios remains a challenging problem due to varying camera perspectives and unpredictable scene conditions. This paper introduces a two-stage training strategy to address these challenges. Our approach initially trains a model on the large-scale synthetic dataset, RoadSense3D, which offers a diverse range of scenarios for robust feature learning. Subsequently, we fine-tune the model on a combination of real-world datasets to enhance its adaptability to practical conditions. Experimental results of the Cube R-CNN model on challenging public benchmarks show a remarkable improvement in detection performance, with a mean average precision rising from 0.26 to 12.76 on the TUM Traffic A9 Highway dataset and from 2.09 to 6.60 on the DAIR-V2X-I dataset when performing transfer learning. Code, data, and qualitative video results are available on the project website: https://roadsense3d.github.io.
Authors:Mario A. V. Saucedo, Nikolaos Stathoulopoulos, Vidya Sumathy, Christoforos Kanellakis, George Nikolakopoulos
Abstract:
Object detection and global localization play a crucial role in robotics, spanning across a great spectrum of applications from autonomous cars to multi-layered 3D Scene Graphs for semantic scene understanding. This article proposes BOX3D, a novel multi-modal and lightweight scheme for localizing objects of interest by fusing the information from RGB camera and 3D LiDAR. BOX3D is structured around a three-layered architecture, building up from the local perception of the incoming sequential sensor data to the global perception refinement that covers for outliers and the general consistency of each object's observation. More specifically, the first layer handles the low-level fusion of camera and LiDAR data for initial 3D bounding box extraction. The second layer converts each LiDAR's scan 3D bounding boxes to the world coordinate frame and applies a spatial pairing and merging mechanism to maintain the uniqueness of objects observed from different viewpoints. Finally, BOX3D integrates the third layer that supervises the consistency of the results on the global map iteratively, using a point-to-voxel comparison for identifying all points in the global map that belong to the object. Benchmarking results of the proposed novel architecture are showcased in multiple experimental trials on public state-of-the-art large-scale dataset of urban environments.
Authors:Vladislav Li, Georgios Tsoumplekas, Ilias Siniosoglou, Vasileios Argyriou, Anastasios Lytos, Eleftherios Fountoukidis, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis
Abstract:
Current methods for low- and few-shot object detection have primarily focused on enhancing model performance for detecting objects. One common approach to achieve this is by combining model finetuning with data augmentation strategies. However, little attention has been given to the energy efficiency of these approaches in data-scarce regimes. This paper seeks to conduct a comprehensive empirical study that examines both model performance and energy efficiency of custom data augmentations and automated data augmentation selection strategies when combined with a lightweight object detector. The methods are evaluated in three different benchmark datasets in terms of their performance and energy consumption, and the Efficiency Factor is employed to gain insights into their effectiveness considering both performance and efficiency. Consequently, it is shown that in many cases, the performance gains of data augmentation strategies are overshadowed by their increased energy usage, necessitating the development of more energy efficient data augmentation strategies to address data scarcity.
Authors:Shuo Wang, Yongcai Wang, Zhimin Xu, Yongyu Guo, Wanting Li, Zhe Huang, Xuewei Bai, Deying Li
Abstract:
For interacting with mobile objects in unfamiliar environments, simultaneously locating, mapping, and tracking the 3D poses of multiple objects are crucially required. This paper proposes a Tracklet Graph and Query Graph-based framework, i.e., GSLAMOT, to address this challenge. GSLAMOT utilizes camera and LiDAR multimodal information as inputs and divides the representation of the dynamic scene into a semantic map for representing the static environment, a trajectory of the ego-agent, and an online maintained Tracklet Graph (TG) for tracking and predicting the 3D poses of the detected mobile objects. A Query Graph (QG) is constructed in each frame by object detection to query and update TG. For accurate object association, a Multi-criteria Star Graph Association (MSGA) method is proposed to find matched objects between the detections in QG and the predicted tracklets in TG. Then, an Object-centric Graph Optimization (OGO) method is proposed to simultaneously optimize the TG, the semantic map, and the agent trajectory. It triangulates the detected objects into the map to enrich the map's semantic information. We address the efficiency issues to handle the three tightly coupled tasks in parallel. Experiments are conducted on KITTI, Waymo, and an emulated Traffic Congestion dataset that highlights challenging scenarios. Experiments show that GSLAMOT enables accurate crowded object tracking while conducting SLAM accurately in challenging scenarios, demonstrating more excellent performances than the state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset are at https://gslamot.github.io.
Authors:Chao Wu, Yifan Gong, Liangkai Liu, Mengquan Li, Yushu Wu, Xuan Shen, Zhimin Li, Geng Yuan, Weisong Shi, Yanzhi Wang
Abstract:
Object detection on the edge (Edge-OD) is in growing demand thanks to its ever-broad application prospects. However, the development of this field is rigorously restricted by the deployment dilemma of simultaneously achieving high accuracy, excellent power efficiency, and meeting strict real-time requirements. To tackle this dilemma, we propose AyE-Edge, the first-of-this-kind development tool that explores automated algorithm-device deployment space search to realize Accurate yet power-Efficient real-time object detection on the Edge. Through a collaborative exploration of keyframe selection, CPU-GPU configuration, and DNN pruning strategy, AyE-Edge excels in extensive real-world experiments conducted on a mobile device. The results consistently demonstrate AyE-Edge's effectiveness, realizing outstanding real-time performance, detection accuracy, and notably, a remarkable 96.7% reduction in power consumption, compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) competitors.
Authors:Shahab Saquib Sohail, Yassine Himeur, Hamza Kheddar, Abbes Amira, Fodil Fadli, Shadi Atalla, Abigail Copiaco, Wathiq Mansoor
Abstract:
The 3D point cloud (3DPC) has significantly evolved and benefited from the advance of deep learning (DL). However, the latter faces various issues, including the lack of data or annotated data, the existence of a significant gap between training data and test data, and the requirement for high computational resources. To that end, deep transfer learning (DTL), which decreases dependency and costs by utilizing knowledge gained from a source data/task in training a target data/task, has been widely investigated. Numerous DTL frameworks have been suggested for aligning point clouds obtained from several scans of the same scene. Additionally, DA, which is a subset of DTL, has been modified to enhance the point cloud data's quality by dealing with noise and missing points. Ultimately, fine-tuning and DA approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness in addressing the distinct difficulties inherent in point cloud data. This paper presents the first review shedding light on this aspect. it provides a comprehensive overview of the latest techniques for understanding 3DPC using DTL and domain adaptation (DA). Accordingly, DTL's background is first presented along with the datasets and evaluation metrics. A well-defined taxonomy is introduced, and detailed comparisons are presented, considering different aspects such as different knowledge transfer strategies, and performance. The paper covers various applications, such as 3DPC object detection, semantic labeling, segmentation, classification, registration, downsampling/upsampling, and denoising. Furthermore, the article discusses the advantages and limitations of the presented frameworks, identifies open challenges, and suggests potential research directions.
Authors:Peng Wang, Yongcai Wang, Deying Li
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) on static platforms, such as by surveillance cameras, has achieved significant progress, with various paradigms providing attractive performances. However, the effectiveness of traditional MOT methods is significantly reduced when it comes to dynamic platforms like drones. This decrease is attributed to the distinctive challenges in the MOT-on-drone scenario: (1) objects are generally small in the image plane, blurred, and frequently occluded, making them challenging to detect and recognize; (2) drones move and see objects from different angles, causing the unreliability of the predicted positions and feature embeddings of the objects. This paper proposes DroneMOT, which firstly proposes a Dual-domain Integrated Attention (DIA) module that considers the fast movements of drones to enhance the drone-based object detection and feature embedding for small-sized, blurred, and occluded objects. Then, an innovative Motion-Driven Association (MDA) scheme is introduced, considering the concurrent movements of both the drone and the objects. Within MDA, an Adaptive Feature Synchronization (AFS) technique is presented to update the object features seen from different angles. Additionally, a Dual Motion-based Prediction (DMP) method is employed to forecast the object positions. Finally, both the refined feature embeddings and the predicted positions are integrated to enhance the object association. Comprehensive evaluations on VisDrone2019-MOT and UAVDT datasets show that DroneMOT provides substantial performance improvements over the state-of-the-art in the domain of MOT on drones.
Authors:Barath Lakshmanan, Joshua Chen, Shiyi Lan, Maying Shen, Zhiding Yu, Jose M. Alvarez
Abstract:
The cornerstone of autonomous vehicles (AV) is a solid perception system, where camera encoders play a crucial role. Existing works usually leverage pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Vision Transformers (ViTs) designed for general vision tasks, such as image classification, segmentation, and 2D detection. Although those well-known architectures have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in AV-related tasks, e.g., 3D Object Detection, there remains significant potential for improvement in network design due to the nuanced complexities of industrial-level AV dataset. Moreover, existing public AV benchmarks usually contain insufficient data, which might lead to inaccurate evaluation of those architectures.To reveal the AV-specific model insights, we start from a standard general-purpose encoder, ConvNeXt and progressively transform the design. We adjust different design parameters including width and depth of the model, stage compute ratio, attention mechanisms, and input resolution, supported by systematic analysis to each modifications. This customization yields an architecture optimized for AV camera encoder achieving 8.79% mAP improvement over the baseline. We believe our effort could become a sweet cookbook of image encoders for AV and pave the way to the next-level drive system.
Authors:Yansheng Li, Linlin Wang, Tingzhu Wang, Xue Yang, Junwei Luo, Qi Wang, Youming Deng, Wenbin Wang, Xian Sun, Haifeng Li, Bo Dang, Yongjun Zhang, Yi Yu, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Scene graph generation (SGG) in satellite imagery (SAI) benefits promoting understanding of geospatial scenarios from perception to cognition. In SAI, objects exhibit great variations in scales and aspect ratios, and there exist rich relationships between objects (even between spatially disjoint objects), which makes it attractive to holistically conduct SGG in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) SAI. However, there lack such SGG datasets. Due to the complexity of large-size SAI, mining triplets heavily relies on long-range contextual reasoning. Consequently, SGG models designed for small-size natural imagery are not directly applicable to large-size SAI. This paper constructs a large-scale dataset for SGG in large-size VHR SAI with image sizes ranging from 512 x 768 to 27,860 x 31,096 pixels, named STAR (Scene graph generaTion in lArge-size satellite imageRy), encompassing over 210K objects and over 400K triplets. To realize SGG in large-size SAI, we propose a context-aware cascade cognition (CAC) framework to understand SAI regarding object detection (OBD), pair pruning and relationship prediction for SGG. We also release a SAI-oriented SGG toolkit with about 30 OBD and 10 SGG methods which need further adaptation by our devised modules on our challenging STAR dataset. The dataset and toolkit are available at: https://linlin-dev.github.io/project/STAR.
Authors:Xueying Jiang, Sheng Jin, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection aims for precise 3D localization and identification of objects from a single-view image. Despite its recent progress, it often struggles while handling pervasive object occlusions that tend to complicate and degrade the prediction of object dimensions, depths, and orientations. We design MonoMAE, a monocular 3D detector inspired by Masked Autoencoders that addresses the object occlusion issue by masking and reconstructing objects in the feature space. MonoMAE consists of two novel designs. The first is depth-aware masking that selectively masks certain parts of non-occluded object queries in the feature space for simulating occluded object queries for network training. It masks non-occluded object queries by balancing the masked and preserved query portions adaptively according to the depth information. The second is lightweight query completion that works with the depth-aware masking to learn to reconstruct and complete the masked object queries. With the proposed object occlusion and completion, MonoMAE learns enriched 3D representations that achieve superior monocular 3D detection performance qualitatively and quantitatively for both occluded and non-occluded objects. Additionally, MonoMAE learns generalizable representations that can work well in new domains.
Authors:Georgios Tsoumplekas, Vladislav Li, Ilias Siniosoglou, Vasileios Argyriou, Sotirios K. Goudos, Ioannis D. Moscholios, Panagiotis Radoglou-Grammatikis, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis
Abstract:
In the ever-evolving era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), model performance has constituted a key metric driving innovation, leading to an exponential growth in model size and complexity. However, sustainability and energy efficiency have been critical requirements during deployment in contemporary industrial settings, necessitating the use of data-efficient approaches such as few-shot learning. In this paper, to alleviate the burden of lengthy model training and minimize energy consumption, a finetuning approach to adapt standard object detection models to downstream tasks is examined. Subsequently, a thorough case study and evaluation of the energy demands of the developed models, applied in object detection benchmark datasets from volatile industrial environments is presented. Specifically, different finetuning strategies as well as utilization of ancillary evaluation data during training are examined, and the trade-off between performance and efficiency is highlighted in this low-data regime. Finally, this paper introduces a novel way to quantify this trade-off through a customized Efficiency Factor metric.
Authors:Yucheng Sheng, Hao Ye, Le Liang, Shi Jin, Geoffrey Ye Li
Abstract:
Cooperative perception, which has a broader perception field than single-vehicle perception, has played an increasingly important role in autonomous driving to conduct 3D object detection. Through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology, various connected automated vehicles (CAVs) can share their sensory information (LiDAR point clouds) for cooperative perception. We employ an importance map to extract significant semantic information and propose a novel cooperative perception semantic communication scheme with intermediate fusion. Meanwhile, our proposed architecture can be extended to the challenging time-varying multipath fading channel. To alleviate the distortion caused by the time-varying multipath fading, we adopt explicit orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) blocks combined with channel estimation and channel equalization. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the traditional separate source-channel coding over various channel models. Moreover, a robustness study indicates that only part of semantic information is key to cooperative perception. Although our proposed model has only been trained over one specific channel, it has the ability to learn robust coded representations of semantic information that remain resilient to various channel models, demonstrating its generality and robustness.
Authors:Ye Li, Hanjiang Hu, Zuxin Liu, Xiaohao Xu, Xiaonan Huang, Ding Zhao
Abstract:
Cameras and LiDARs are both important sensors for autonomous driving, playing critical roles in 3D object detection. Camera-LiDAR Fusion has been a prevalent solution for robust and accurate driving perception. In contrast to the vast majority of existing arts that focus on how to improve the performance of 3D target detection through cross-modal schemes, deep learning algorithms, and training tricks, we devote attention to the impact of sensor configurations on the performance of learning-based methods. To achieve this, we propose a unified information-theoretic surrogate metric for camera and LiDAR evaluation based on the proposed sensor perception model. We also design an accelerated high-quality framework for data acquisition, model training, and performance evaluation that functions with the CARLA simulator. To show the correlation between detection performance and our surrogate metrics, We conduct experiments using several camera-LiDAR placements and parameters inspired by self-driving companies and research institutions. Extensive experimental results of representative algorithms on nuScenes dataset validate the effectiveness of our surrogate metric, demonstrating that sensor configurations significantly impact point-cloud-image fusion based detection models, which contribute up to 30% discrepancy in terms of the average precision.
Authors:Ronghao Dang, Jiangyan Feng, Haodong Zhang, Chongjian Ge, Lin Song, Lijun Gong, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Yibing Song
Abstract:
We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.
Authors:James C. Liang, Yiming Cui, Qifan Wang, Tong Geng, Wenguan Wang, Dongfang Liu
Abstract:
This paper presents CLUSTERFORMER, a universal vision model that is based on the CLUSTERing paradigm with TransFORMER. It comprises two novel designs: 1. recurrent cross-attention clustering, which reformulates the cross-attention mechanism in Transformer and enables recursive updates of cluster centers to facilitate strong representation learning; and 2. feature dispatching, which uses the updated cluster centers to redistribute image features through similarity-based metrics, resulting in a transparent pipeline. This elegant design streamlines an explainable and transferable workflow, capable of tackling heterogeneous vision tasks (i.e., image classification, object detection, and image segmentation) with varying levels of clustering granularity (i.e., image-, box-, and pixel-level). Empirical results demonstrate that CLUSTERFORMER outperforms various well-known specialized architectures, achieving 83.41% top-1 acc. over ImageNet-1K for image classification, 54.2% and 47.0% mAP over MS COCO for object detection and instance segmentation, 52.4% mIoU over ADE20K for semantic segmentation, and 55.8% PQ over COCO Panoptic for panoptic segmentation. For its efficacy, we hope our work can catalyze a paradigm shift in universal models in computer vision.
Authors:Run Luo, Zikai Song, Lintao Ma, Jinlin Wei, Wei Yang, Min Yang
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a challenging vision task that aims to detect individual objects within a single frame and associate them across multiple frames. Recent MOT approaches can be categorized into two-stage tracking-by-detection (TBD) methods and one-stage joint detection and tracking (JDT) methods. Despite the success of these approaches, they also suffer from common problems, such as harmful global or local inconsistency, poor trade-off between robustness and model complexity, and lack of flexibility in different scenes within the same video. In this paper we propose a simple but robust framework that formulates object detection and association jointly as a consistent denoising diffusion process from paired noise boxes to paired ground-truth boxes. This novel progressive denoising diffusion strategy substantially augments the tracker's effectiveness, enabling it to discriminate between various objects. During the training stage, paired object boxes diffuse from paired ground-truth boxes to random distribution, and the model learns detection and tracking simultaneously by reversing this noising process. In inference, the model refines a set of paired randomly generated boxes to the detection and tracking results in a flexible one-step or multi-step denoising diffusion process. Extensive experiments on three widely used MOT benchmarks, including MOT17, MOT20, and Dancetrack, demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Lu Zhang, Chenbo Zhang, Jiajia Zhao, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou
Abstract:
Zero-shot object detection aims to localize and recognize objects of unseen classes. Most of existing works face two problems: the low recall of RPN in unseen classes and the confusion of unseen classes with background. In this paper, we present the first method that combines DETR and meta-learning to perform zero-shot object detection, named Meta-ZSDETR, where model training is formalized as an individual episode based meta-learning task. Different from Faster R-CNN based methods that firstly generate class-agnostic proposals, and then classify them with visual-semantic alignment module, Meta-ZSDETR directly predict class-specific boxes with class-specific queries and further filter them with the predicted accuracy from classification head. The model is optimized with meta-contrastive learning, which contains a regression head to generate the coordinates of class-specific boxes, a classification head to predict the accuracy of generated boxes, and a contrastive head that utilizes the proposed contrastive-reconstruction loss to further separate different classes in visual space. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets MS COCO and PASCAL VOC. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing ZSD methods by a large margin.
Authors:Tao Tu, Shun-Po Chuang, Yu-Lun Liu, Cheng Sun, Ke Zhang, Donna Roy, Cheng-Hao Kuo, Min Sun
Abstract:
We propose ImGeoNet, a multi-view image-based 3D object detection framework that models a 3D space by an image-induced geometry-aware voxel representation. Unlike previous methods which aggregate 2D features into 3D voxels without considering geometry, ImGeoNet learns to induce geometry from multi-view images to alleviate the confusion arising from voxels of free space, and during the inference phase, only images from multiple views are required. Besides, a powerful pre-trained 2D feature extractor can be leveraged by our representation, leading to a more robust performance. To evaluate the effectiveness of ImGeoNet, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three indoor datasets, namely ARKitScenes, ScanNetV2, and ScanNet200. The results demonstrate that ImGeoNet outperforms the current state-of-the-art multi-view image-based method, ImVoxelNet, on all three datasets in terms of detection accuracy. In addition, ImGeoNet shows great data efficiency by achieving results comparable to ImVoxelNet with 100 views while utilizing only 40 views. Furthermore, our studies indicate that our proposed image-induced geometry-aware representation can enable image-based methods to attain superior detection accuracy than the seminal point cloud-based method, VoteNet, in two practical scenarios: (1) scenarios where point clouds are sparse and noisy, such as in ARKitScenes, and (2) scenarios involve diverse object classes, particularly classes of small objects, as in the case in ScanNet200.
Authors:Shanliang Yao, Runwei Guan, Zhaodong Wu, Yi Ni, Zile Huang, Ryan Wen Liu, Yong Yue, Weiping Ding, Eng Gee Lim, Hyungjoon Seo, Ka Lok Man, Jieming Ma, Xiaohui Zhu, Yutao Yue
Abstract:
Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct benchmark experiments on the uni-modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably improve the accuracy and robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io.
Authors:Vladislav Li, Barbara Villarini, Jean-Christophe Nebel, Thomas Lagkas, Panagiotis Sarigiannidis, Vasileios Argyriou
Abstract:
The objective of augmented reality (AR) is to add digital content to natural images and videos to create an interactive experience between the user and the environment. Scene analysis and object recognition play a crucial role in AR, as they must be performed quickly and accurately. In this study, a new approach is proposed that involves using oriented bounding boxes with a detection and recognition deep network to improve performance and processing time. The approach is evaluated using two datasets: a real image dataset (DOTA dataset) commonly used for computer vision tasks, and a synthetic dataset that simulates different environmental, lighting, and acquisition conditions. The focus of the evaluation is on small objects, which are difficult to detect and recognise. The results indicate that the proposed approach tends to produce better Average Precision and greater accuracy for small objects in most of the tested conditions.
Authors:Shaofeng Zhang, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
We propose ADCLR: A ccurate and D ense Contrastive Representation Learning, a novel self-supervised learning framework for learning accurate and dense vision representation. To extract spatial-sensitive information, ADCLR introduces query patches for contrasting in addition with global contrasting. Compared with previous dense contrasting methods, ADCLR mainly enjoys three merits: i) achieving both global-discriminative and spatial-sensitive representation, ii) model-efficient (no extra parameters in addition to the global contrasting baseline), and iii) correspondence-free and thus simpler to implement. Our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance for contrastive methods. On classification tasks, for ViT-S, ADCLR achieves 77.5% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with linear probing, outperforming our baseline (DINO) without our devised techniques as plug-in, by 0.5%. For ViT-B, ADCLR achieves 79.8%, 84.0% accuracy on ImageNet by linear probing and finetune, outperforming iBOT by 0.3%, 0.2% accuracy. For dense tasks, on MS-COCO, ADCLR achieves significant improvements of 44.3% AP on object detection, 39.7% AP on instance segmentation, outperforming previous SOTA method SelfPatch by 2.2% and 1.2%, respectively. On ADE20K, ADCLR outperforms SelfPatch by 1.0% mIoU, 1.2% mAcc on the segme
Authors:Zhangxuan Gu, Zhuoer Xu, Haoxing Chen, Jun Lan, Changhua Meng, Weiqiang Wang
Abstract:
Recent object detection approaches rely on pretrained vision-language models for image-text alignment. However, they fail to detect the Mobile User Interface (MUI) element since it contains additional OCR information, which describes its content and function but is often ignored. In this paper, we develop a new MUI element detection dataset named MUI-zh and propose an Adaptively Prompt Tuning (APT) module to take advantage of discriminating OCR information. APT is a lightweight and effective module to jointly optimize category prompts across different modalities. For every element, APT uniformly encodes its visual features and OCR descriptions to dynamically adjust the representation of frozen category prompts. We evaluate the effectiveness of our plug-and-play APT upon several existing CLIP-based detectors for both standard and open-vocabulary MUI element detection. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves considerable improvements on two datasets. The datasets is available at \url{github.com/antmachineintelligence/MUI-zh}.
Authors:Ross Greer, Akshay Gopalkrishnan, Jacob Landgren, Lulua Rakla, Anish Gopalan, Mohan Trivedi
Abstract:
One of the most important tasks for ensuring safe autonomous driving systems is accurately detecting road traffic lights and accurately determining how they impact the driver's actions. In various real-world driving situations, a scene may have numerous traffic lights with varying levels of relevance to the driver, and thus, distinguishing and detecting the lights that are relevant to the driver and influence the driver's actions is a critical safety task. This paper proposes a traffic light detection model which focuses on this task by first defining salient lights as the lights that affect the driver's future decisions. We then use this salience property to construct the LAVA Salient Lights Dataset, the first US traffic light dataset with an annotated salience property. Subsequently, we train a Deformable DETR object detection transformer model using Salience-Sensitive Focal Loss to emphasize stronger performance on salient traffic lights, showing that a model trained with this loss function has stronger recall than one trained without.
Authors:Yawen Lu, Qifan Wang, Siqi Ma, Tong Geng, Yingjie Victor Chen, Huaijin Chen, Dongfang Liu
Abstract:
Optical flow is an indispensable building block for various important computer vision tasks, including motion estimation, object tracking, and disparity measurement. In this work, we propose TransFlow, a pure transformer architecture for optical flow estimation. Compared to dominant CNN-based methods, TransFlow demonstrates three advantages. First, it provides more accurate correlation and trustworthy matching in flow estimation by utilizing spatial self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms between adjacent frames to effectively capture global dependencies; Second, it recovers more compromised information (e.g., occlusion and motion blur) in flow estimation through long-range temporal association in dynamic scenes; Third, it enables a concise self-learning paradigm and effectively eliminate the complex and laborious multi-stage pre-training procedures. We achieve the state-of-the-art results on the Sintel, KITTI-15, as well as several downstream tasks, including video object detection, interpolation and stabilization. For its efficacy, we hope TransFlow could serve as a flexible baseline for optical flow estimation.
Authors:Shanliang Yao, Runwei Guan, Xiaoyu Huang, Zhuoxiao Li, Xiangyu Sha, Yong Yue, Eng Gee Lim, Hyungjoon Seo, Ka Lok Man, Xiaohui Zhu, Yutao Yue
Abstract:
Driven by deep learning techniques, perception technology in autonomous driving has developed rapidly in recent years, enabling vehicles to accurately detect and interpret surrounding environment for safe and efficient navigation. To achieve accurate and robust perception capabilities, autonomous vehicles are often equipped with multiple sensors, making sensor fusion a crucial part of the perception system. Among these fused sensors, radars and cameras enable a complementary and cost-effective perception of the surrounding environment regardless of lighting and weather conditions. This review aims to provide a comprehensive guideline for radar-camera fusion, particularly concentrating on perception tasks related to object detection and semantic segmentation.Based on the principles of the radar and camera sensors, we delve into the data processing process and representations, followed by an in-depth analysis and summary of radar-camera fusion datasets. In the review of methodologies in radar-camera fusion, we address interrogative questions, including "why to fuse", "what to fuse", "where to fuse", "when to fuse", and "how to fuse", subsequently discussing various challenges and potential research directions within this domain. To ease the retrieval and comparison of datasets and fusion methods, we also provide an interactive website: https://radar-camera-fusion.github.io.
Authors:Bingchen Zhao, Jiahao Wang, Wufei Ma, Artur Jesslen, Siwei Yang, Shaozuo Yu, Oliver Zendel, Christian Theobalt, Alan Yuille, Adam Kortylewski
Abstract:
Enhancing the robustness of vision algorithms in real-world scenarios is challenging. One reason is that existing robustness benchmarks are limited, as they either rely on synthetic data or ignore the effects of individual nuisance factors. We introduce OOD-CV-v2, a benchmark dataset that includes out-of-distribution examples of 10 object categories in terms of pose, shape, texture, context and the weather conditions, and enables benchmarking of models for image classification, object detection, and 3D pose estimation. In addition to this novel dataset, we contribute extensive experiments using popular baseline methods, which reveal that: 1) Some nuisance factors have a much stronger negative effect on the performance compared to others, also depending on the vision task. 2) Current approaches to enhance robustness have only marginal effects, and can even reduce robustness. 3) We do not observe significant differences between convolutional and transformer architectures. We believe our dataset provides a rich test bed to study robustness and will help push forward research in this area.
Our dataset can be accessed from https://bzhao.me/OOD-CV/
Authors:Xiaoshi Wu, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Hongsheng Li
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) is an object detection task aiming at detecting objects from novel categories beyond the base categories on which the detector is trained. Recent OVD methods rely on large-scale visual-language pre-trained models, such as CLIP, for recognizing novel objects. We identify the two core obstacles that need to be tackled when incorporating these models into detector training: (1) the distribution mismatch that happens when applying a VL-model trained on whole images to region recognition tasks; (2) the difficulty of localizing objects of unseen classes. To overcome these obstacles, we propose CORA, a DETR-style framework that adapts CLIP for Open-vocabulary detection by Region prompting and Anchor pre-matching. Region prompting mitigates the whole-to-region distribution gap by prompting the region features of the CLIP-based region classifier. Anchor pre-matching helps learning generalizable object localization by a class-aware matching mechanism. We evaluate CORA on the COCO OVD benchmark, where we achieve 41.7 AP50 on novel classes, which outperforms the previous SOTA by 2.4 AP50 even without resorting to extra training data. When extra training data is available, we train CORA$^+$ on both ground-truth base-category annotations and additional pseudo bounding box labels computed by CORA. CORA$^+$ achieves 43.1 AP50 on the COCO OVD benchmark and 28.1 box APr on the LVIS OVD benchmark.
Authors:Qiang Zhou, Chaohui Yu, Zhibin Wang, Fan Wang
Abstract:
Despite the promising results, existing oriented object detection methods usually involve heuristically designed rules, e.g., RRoI generation, rotated NMS. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for oriented object detection, which simplifies the model pipeline and obtains superior performance. Our framework is based on DETR, with the box regression head replaced with a points prediction head. The learning of points is more flexible, and the distribution of points can reflect the angle and size of the target rotated box. We further propose to decouple the query features into classification and regression features, which significantly improves the model precision. Aerial images usually contain thousands of instances. To better balance model precision and efficiency, we propose a novel dynamic query design, which reduces the number of object queries in stacked decoder layers without sacrificing model performance. Finally, we rethink the label assignment strategy of existing DETR-like detectors and propose an effective label re-assignment strategy for improved performance. We name our method D2Q-DETR. Experiments on the largest and challenging DOTA-v1.0 and DOTA-v1.5 datasets show that D2Q-DETR outperforms existing NMS-based and NMS-free oriented object detection methods and achieves the new state-of-the-art.
Authors:Ross Greer, Akshay Gopalkrishnan, Nachiket Deo, Akshay Rangesh, Mohan Trivedi
Abstract:
Detecting road traffic signs and accurately determining how they can affect the driver's future actions is a critical task for safe autonomous driving systems. However, various traffic signs in a driving scene have an unequal impact on the driver's decisions, making detecting the salient traffic signs a more important task. Our research addresses this issue, constructing a traffic sign detection model which emphasizes performance on salient signs, or signs that influence the decisions of a driver. We define a traffic sign salience property and use it to construct the LAVA Salient Signs Dataset, the first traffic sign dataset that includes an annotated salience property. Next, we use a custom salience loss function, Salience-Sensitive Focal Loss, to train a Deformable DETR object detection model in order to emphasize stronger performance on salient signs. Results show that a model trained with Salience-Sensitive Focal Loss outperforms a model trained without, with regards to recall of both salient signs and all signs combined. Further, the performance margin on salient signs compared to all signs is largest for the model trained with Salience-Sensitive Focal Loss.
Authors:Yefei He, Zhenyu Lou, Luoming Zhang, Jing Liu, Weijia Wu, Hong Zhou, Bohan Zhuang
Abstract:
Model binarization can significantly compress model size, reduce energy consumption, and accelerate inference through efficient bit-wise operations. Although binarizing convolutional neural networks have been extensively studied, there is little work on exploring binarization of vision Transformers which underpin most recent breakthroughs in visual recognition. To this end, we propose to solve two fundamental challenges to push the horizon of Binary Vision Transformers (BiViT). First, the traditional binary method does not take the long-tailed distribution of softmax attention into consideration, bringing large binarization errors in the attention module. To solve this, we propose Softmax-aware Binarization, which dynamically adapts to the data distribution and reduces the error caused by binarization. Second, to better preserve the information of the pretrained model and restore accuracy, we propose a Cross-layer Binarization scheme that decouples the binarization of self-attention and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and Parameterized Weight Scales which introduce learnable scaling factors for weight binarization. Overall, our method performs favorably against state-of-the-arts by 19.8% on the TinyImageNet dataset. On ImageNet, our BiViT achieves a competitive 75.6% Top-1 accuracy over Swin-S model. Additionally, on COCO object detection, our method achieves an mAP of 40.8 with a Swin-T backbone over Cascade Mask R-CNN framework.
Authors:Gongjie Zhang, Zhipeng Luo, Zichen Tian, Jingyi Zhang, Xiaoqin Zhang, Shijian Lu
Abstract:
Multi-scale features have been proven highly effective for object detection but often come with huge and even prohibitive extra computation costs, especially for the recent Transformer-based detectors. In this paper, we propose Iterative Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (IMFA) -- a generic paradigm that enables efficient use of multi-scale features in Transformer-based object detectors. The core idea is to exploit sparse multi-scale features from just a few crucial locations, and it is achieved with two novel designs. First, IMFA rearranges the Transformer encoder-decoder pipeline so that the encoded features can be iteratively updated based on the detection predictions. Second, IMFA sparsely samples scale-adaptive features for refined detection from just a few keypoint locations under the guidance of prior detection predictions. As a result, the sampled multi-scale features are sparse yet still highly beneficial for object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed IMFA boosts the performance of multiple Transformer-based object detectors significantly yet with only slight computational overhead.
Authors:Tianying Liu, Lu Zhang, Yang Wang, Jihong Guan, Yanwei Fu, Jiajia Zhao, Shuigeng Zhou
Abstract:
The generic object detection (GOD) task has been successfully tackled by recent deep neural networks, trained by an avalanche of annotated training samples from some common classes. However, it is still non-trivial to generalize these object detectors to the novel long-tailed object classes, which have only few labeled training samples. To this end, the Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) has been topical recently, as it mimics the humans' ability of learning to learn, and intelligently transfers the learned generic object knowledge from the common heavy-tailed, to the novel long-tailed object classes. Especially, the research in this emerging field has been flourishing in recent years with various benchmarks, backbones, and methodologies proposed. To review these FSOD works, there are several insightful FSOD survey articles [58, 59, 74, 78] that systematically study and compare them as the groups of fine-tuning/transfer learning, and meta-learning methods. In contrast, we review the existing FSOD algorithms from a new perspective under a new taxonomy based on their contributions, i.e., data-oriented, model-oriented, and algorithm-oriented. Thus, a comprehensive survey with performance comparison is conducted on recent achievements of FSOD. Furthermore, we also analyze the technical challenges, the merits and demerits of these methods, and envision the future directions of FSOD. Specifically, we give an overview of FSOD, including the problem definition, common datasets, and evaluation protocols. The taxonomy is then proposed that groups FSOD methods into three types. Following this taxonomy, we provide a systematic review of the advances in FSOD. Finally, further discussions on performance, challenges, and future directions are presented.
Authors:Pengguang Chen, Shu Liu, Hengshuang Zhao, Xingquan Wang, Jiaya Jia
Abstract:
We propose a novel data augmentation method `GridMask' in this paper. It utilizes information removal to achieve state-of-the-art results in a variety of computer vision tasks. We analyze the requirement of information dropping. Then we show limitation of existing information dropping algorithms and propose our structured method, which is simple and yet very effective. It is based on the deletion of regions of the input image. Our extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the latest AutoAugment, which is way more computationally expensive due to the use of reinforcement learning to find the best policies. On the ImageNet dataset for recognition, COCO2017 object detection, and on Cityscapes dataset for semantic segmentation, our method all notably improves performance over baselines. The extensive experiments manifest the effectiveness and generality of the new method.
Authors:Yixun Zhang, Lizhi Wang, Junjun Zhao, Wending Zhao, Feng Zhou, Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin
Abstract:
Camera-based object detection systems play a vital role in autonomous driving, yet they remain vulnerable to adversarial threats in real-world environments. Existing 2D and 3D physical attacks, due to their focus on texture optimization, often struggle to balance physical realism and attack robustness. In this work, we propose 3D Gaussian-based Adversarial Attack (3DGAA), a novel adversarial object generation framework that leverages the full 14-dimensional parameterization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to jointly optimize geometry and appearance in physically realizable ways. Unlike prior works that rely on patches or texture optimization, 3DGAA jointly perturbs both geometric attributes (shape, scale, rotation) and appearance attributes (color, opacity) to produce physically realistic and transferable adversarial objects. We further introduce a physical filtering module that filters outliers to preserve geometric fidelity, and a physical augmentation module that simulates complex physical scenarios to enhance attack generalization under real-world conditions. We evaluate 3DGAA on both virtual benchmarks and physical-world setups using miniature vehicle models. Experimental results show that 3DGAA achieves to reduce the detection mAP from 87.21\% to 7.38\%, significantly outperforming existing 3D physical attacks. Moreover, our method maintains high transferability across different physical conditions, demonstrating a new state-of-the-art in physically realizable adversarial attacks.
Authors:Mathias Zinnen, Prathmesh Madhu, Inger Leemans, Peter Bell, Azhar Hussian, Hang Tran, Ali HürriyetoÄlu, Andreas Maier, Vincent Christlein
Abstract:
Real-world applications of computer vision in the humanities require algorithms to be robust against artistic abstraction, peripheral objects, and subtle differences between fine-grained target classes. Existing datasets provide instance-level annotations on artworks but are generally biased towards the image centre and limited with regard to detailed object classes. The proposed ODOR dataset fills this gap, offering 38,116 object-level annotations across 4712 images, spanning an extensive set of 139 fine-grained categories. Conducting a statistical analysis, we showcase challenging dataset properties, such as a detailed set of categories, dense and overlapping objects, and spatial distribution over the whole image canvas. Furthermore, we provide an extensive baseline analysis for object detection models and highlight the challenging properties of the dataset through a set of secondary studies. Inspiring further research on artwork object detection and broader visual cultural heritage studies, the dataset challenges researchers to explore the intersection of object recognition and smell perception.
Authors:Yuang Feng, Shuyong Gao, Fuzhen Yan, Yicheng Song, Lingyi Hong, Junjie Hu, Wenqiang Zhang
Abstract:
Video Camouflaged Object Detection (VCOD) aims to segment objects whose appearances closely resemble their surroundings, posing a challenging and emerging task. Existing vision models often struggle in such scenarios due to the indistinguishable appearance of camouflaged objects and the insufficient exploitation of dynamic information in videos. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end VCOD framework inspired by human memory-recognition, which leverages historical video information by integrating memory reference frames for camouflaged sequence processing. Specifically, we design a dual-purpose decoder that simultaneously generates predicted masks and scores, enabling reference frame selection based on scores while introducing auxiliary supervision to enhance feature extraction.Furthermore, this study introduces a novel reference-guided multilevel asymmetric attention mechanism, effectively integrating long-term reference information with short-term motion cues for comprehensive feature extraction. By combining these modules, we develop the Scoring, Remember, and Reference (SRR) framework, which efficiently extracts information to locate targets and employs memory guidance to improve subsequent processing. With its optimized module design and effective utilization of video data, our model achieves significant performance improvements, surpassing existing approaches by 10% on benchmark datasets while requiring fewer parameters (54M) and only a single pass through the video. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Riccardo De Monte, Davide Dalle Pezze, Gian Antonio Susto
Abstract:
Real-time object detectors like YOLO achieve exceptional performance when trained on large datasets for multiple epochs. However, in real-world scenarios where data arrives incrementally, neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting, leading to a loss of previously learned knowledge. To address this, prior research has explored strategies for Class Incremental Learning (CIL) in Continual Learning for Object Detection (CLOD), with most approaches focusing on two-stage object detectors. However, existing work suggests that Learning without Forgetting (LwF) may be ineffective for one-stage anchor-free detectors like YOLO due to noisy regression outputs, which risk transferring corrupted knowledge. In this work, we introduce YOLO LwF, a self-distillation approach tailored for YOLO-based continual object detection. We demonstrate that when coupled with a replay memory, YOLO LwF significantly mitigates forgetting. Compared to previous approaches, it achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving mAP by +2.1% and +2.9% on the VOC and COCO benchmarks, respectively.
Authors:Shuyong Gao, Yu'ang Feng, Qishan Wang, Lingyi Hong, Xinyu Zhou, Liu Fei, Yan Wang, Wenqiang Zhang
Abstract:
Video Camouflaged Object Detection (VCOD) is a challenging task which aims to identify objects that seamlessly concealed within the background in videos. The dynamic properties of video enable detection of camouflaged objects through motion cues or varied perspectives. Previous VCOD datasets primarily contain animal objects, limiting the scope of research to wildlife scenarios. However, the applications of VCOD extend beyond wildlife and have significant implications in security, art, and medical fields. Addressing this problem, we construct a new large-scale multi-domain VCOD dataset MSVCOD. To achieve high-quality annotations, we design a semi-automatic iterative annotation pipeline that reduces costs while maintaining annotation accuracy. Our MSVCOD is the largest VCOD dataset to date, introducing multiple object categories including human, animal, medical, and vehicle objects for the first time, while also expanding background diversity across various environments. This expanded scope increases the practical applicability of the VCOD task in camouflaged object detection. Alongside this dataset, we introduce a one-steam video camouflage object detection model that performs both feature extraction and information fusion without additional motion feature fusion modules. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the existing VCOD animal dataset and the proposed MSVCOD. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Yan Zhang, Wen Yang, Chang Xu, Qian Hu, Fang Xu, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Drone-based RGBT object detection plays a crucial role in many around-the-clock applications. However, real-world drone-viewed RGBT data suffers from the prominent position shift problem, i.e., the position of a tiny object differs greatly in different modalities. For instance, a slight deviation of a tiny object in the thermal modality will induce it to drift from the main body of itself in the RGB modality. Considering RGBT data are usually labeled on one modality (reference), this will cause the unlabeled modality (sensed) to lack accurate supervision signals and prevent the detector from learning a good representation. Moreover, the mismatch of the corresponding feature point between the modalities will make the fused features confusing for the detection head. In this paper, we propose to cast the cross-modality box shift issue as the label noise problem and address it on the fly via a novel Mean Teacher-based Cross-modality Box Correction head ensemble (CBC). In this way, the network can learn more informative representations for both modalities. Furthermore, to alleviate the feature map mismatch problem in RGBT fusion, we devise a Shifted Window-Based Cascaded Alignment (SWCA) module. SWCA mines long-range dependencies between the spatially unaligned features inside shifted windows and cascaded aligns the sensed features with the reference ones. Extensive experiments on two drone-based RGBT object detection datasets demonstrate that the correction results are both visually and quantitatively favorable, thereby improving the detection performance. In particular, our CBC module boosts the precision of the sensed modality ground truth by 25.52 aSim points. Overall, the proposed detector achieves an mAP_50 of 43.55 points on RGBTDronePerson and surpasses a state-of-the-art method by 8.6 mAP50 on a shift subset of DroneVehicle dataset. The code and data will be made publicly available.
Authors:Ying Zang, Runlong Cao, Jianqi Zhang, Yidong Han, Ziyue Cao, Wenjun Hu, Didi Zhu, Lanyun Zhu, Zejian Li, Deyi Ji, Tianrun Chen
Abstract:
Sketches, with their expressive potential, allow humans to convey the essence of an object through even a rough contour. For the first time, we harness this expressive potential to improve segmentation performance in challenging tasks like camouflaged object detection (COD). Our approach introduces an innovative sketch-guided interactive segmentation framework, allowing users to intuitively annotate objects with freehand sketches (drawing a rough contour of the object) instead of the traditional bounding boxes or points used in classic interactive segmentation models like SAM. We demonstrate that sketch input can significantly improve performance in existing iterative segmentation methods, outperforming text or bounding box annotations. Additionally, we introduce key modifications to network architectures and a novel sketch augmentation technique to fully harness the power of sketch input and further boost segmentation accuracy. Remarkably, our model' s output can be directly used to train other neural networks, achieving results comparable to pixel-by-pixel annotations--while reducing annotation time by up to 120 times, which shows great potential in democratizing the annotation process and enabling model training with less reliance on resource-intensive, laborious pixel-level annotations. We also present KOSCamo+, the first freehand sketch dataset for camouflaged object detection. The dataset, code, and the labeling tool will be open sourced.
Authors:Xi Xiao, Zhengji Li, Wentao Wang, Jiacheng Xie, Houjie Lin, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Tianyang Wang, Min Xu
Abstract:
Object detection has witnessed remarkable advancements over the past decade, largely driven by breakthroughs in deep learning and the proliferation of large scale datasets. However, the domain of road damage detection remains relatively under explored, despite its critical significance for applications such as infrastructure maintenance and road safety. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel top down benchmark that offers a complementary perspective to existing datasets, specifically tailored for road damage detection. Our proposed Top Down Road Damage Detection Dataset (TDRD) includes three primary categories of road damage cracks, potholes, and patches captured from a top down viewpoint. The dataset consists of 7,088 high resolution images, encompassing 12,882 annotated instances of road damage. Additionally, we present a novel real time object detection framework, TDYOLOV10, designed to handle the unique challenges posed by the TDRD dataset. Comparative studies with state of the art models demonstrate competitive baseline results. By releasing TDRD, we aim to accelerate research in this crucial area. A sample of the dataset will be made publicly available upon the paper's acceptance.
Authors:Chang Xu, Ruixiang Zhang, Wen Yang, Haoran Zhu, Fang Xu, Jian Ding, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Detecting oriented tiny objects, which are limited in appearance information yet prevalent in real-world applications, remains an intricate and under-explored problem. To address this, we systemically introduce a new dataset, benchmark, and a dynamic coarse-to-fine learning scheme in this study. Our proposed dataset, AI-TOD-R, features the smallest object sizes among all oriented object detection datasets. Based on AI-TOD-R, we present a benchmark spanning a broad range of detection paradigms, including both fully-supervised and label-efficient approaches. Through investigation, we identify a learning bias presents across various learning pipelines: confident objects become increasingly confident, while vulnerable oriented tiny objects are further marginalized, hindering their detection performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning (DCFL) scheme to achieve unbiased learning. DCFL dynamically updates prior positions to better align with the limited areas of oriented tiny objects, and it assigns samples in a way that balances both quantity and quality across different object shapes, thus mitigating biases in prior settings and sample selection. Extensive experiments across eight challenging object detection datasets demonstrate that DCFL achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, high efficiency, and remarkable versatility. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://chasel-tsui.github.io/AI-TOD-R/.
Authors:Haoran Zhu, Chang Xu, Ruixiang Zhang, Fang Xu, Wen Yang, Haijian Zhang, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Tiny objects, with their limited spatial resolution, often resemble point-like distributions. As a result, bounding box prediction using point-level supervision emerges as a natural and cost-effective alternative to traditional box-level supervision. However, the small scale and lack of distinctive features of tiny objects make point annotations prone to noise, posing significant hurdles for model robustness. To tackle these challenges, we propose Point Teacher--the first end-to-end point-supervised method for robust tiny object detection in aerial images. To handle label noise from scale ambiguity and location shifts in point annotations, Point Teacher employs the teacher-student architecture and decouples the learning into a two-phase denoising process. In this framework, the teacher network progressively denoises the pseudo boxes derived from noisy point annotations, guiding the student network's learning. Specifically, in the first phase, random masking of image regions facilitates regression learning, enabling the teacher to transform noisy point annotations into coarse pseudo boxes. In the second phase, these coarse pseudo boxes are refined using dynamic multiple instance learning, which adaptively selects the most reliable instance from dynamically constructed proposal bags around the coarse pseudo boxes. Extensive experiments on three tiny object datasets (i.e., AI-TOD-v2, SODA-A, and TinyPerson) validate the proposed method's effectiveness and robustness against point location shifts. Notably, relying solely on point supervision, our Point Teacher already shows comparable performance with box-supervised learning methods. Codes and models will be made publicly available.
Authors:Francesco Pasti, Riccardo De Monte, Davide Dalle Pezze, Gian Antonio Susto, Nicola Bellotto
Abstract:
Detecting objects in mobile robotics is crucial for numerous applications, from autonomous navigation to inspection. However, robots often need to operate in different domains from those they were trained in, requiring them to adjust to these changes. Tiny mobile robots, subject to size, power, and computational constraints, encounter even more difficulties in running and adapting these algorithms. Such adaptability, though, is crucial for real-world deployment, where robots must operate effectively in dynamic and unpredictable settings. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark to evaluate the continual learning capabilities of object detection systems in tiny robotic platforms. Our contributions include: (i) Tiny Robotics Object Detection~(TiROD), a comprehensive dataset collected using the onboard camera of a small mobile robot, designed to test object detectors across various domains and classes; (ii) a benchmark of different continual learning strategies on this dataset using NanoDet, a lightweight object detector. Our results highlight key challenges in developing robust and efficient continual learning strategies for object detectors in tiny robotics.
Authors:Riccardo De Monte, Davide Dalle Pezze, Marina Ceccon, Francesco Pasti, Francesco Paissan, Elisabetta Farella, Gian Antonio Susto, Nicola Bellotto
Abstract:
Continual Learning (CL) aims to learn new data while remembering previously acquired knowledge. In contrast to CL for image classification, CL for Object Detection faces additional challenges such as the missing annotations problem. In this scenario, images from previous tasks may contain instances of unknown classes that could reappear as labeled in future tasks, leading to task interference in replay-based approaches. Consequently, most approaches in the literature have focused on distillation-based techniques, which are effective when there is a significant class overlap between tasks. In our work, we propose an alternative to distillation-based approaches with a novel approach called Replay Consolidation with Label Propagation for Object Detection (RCLPOD). RCLPOD enhances the replay memory by improving the quality of the stored samples through a technique that promotes class balance while also improving the quality of the ground truth associated with these samples through a technique called label propagation. RCLPOD outperforms existing techniques on well-established benchmarks such as VOC and COC. Moreover, our approach is developed to work with modern architectures like YOLOv8, making it suitable for dynamic, real-world applications such as autonomous driving and robotics, where continuous learning and resource efficiency are essential.
Authors:Francesco Pasti, Marina Ceccon, Davide Dalle Pezze, Francesco Paissan, Elisabetta Farella, Gian Antonio Susto, Nicola Bellotto
Abstract:
While numerous methods achieving remarkable performance exist in the Object Detection literature, addressing data distribution shifts remains challenging. Continual Learning (CL) offers solutions to this issue, enabling models to adapt to new data while maintaining performance on previous data. This is particularly pertinent for edge devices, common in dynamic environments like automotive and robotics. In this work, we address the memory and computation constraints of edge devices in the Continual Learning for Object Detection (CLOD) scenario. Specifically, (i) we investigate the suitability of an open-source, lightweight, and fast detector, namely NanoDet, for CLOD on edge devices, improving upon larger architectures used in the literature. Moreover, (ii) we propose a novel CL method, called Latent Distillation~(LD), that reduces the number of operations and the memory required by state-of-the-art CL approaches without significantly compromising detection performance. Our approach is validated using the well-known VOC and COCO benchmarks, reducing the distillation parameter overhead by 74\% and the Floating Points Operations~(FLOPs) by 56\% per model update compared to other distillation methods.
Authors:Zhiling Chen, Hanning Chen, Mohsen Imani, Ruimin Chen, Farhad Imani
Abstract:
Workplace accidents due to personal protective equipment (PPE) non-compliance raise serious safety concerns and lead to legal liabilities, financial penalties, and reputational damage. While object detection models have shown the capability to address this issue by identifying safety items, most existing models, such as YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and SSD, are limited in verifying the fine-grained attributes of PPE across diverse workplace scenarios. Vision language models (VLMs) are gaining traction for detection tasks by leveraging the synergy between visual and textual information, offering a promising solution to traditional object detection limitations in PPE recognition. Nonetheless, VLMs face challenges in consistently verifying PPE attributes due to the complexity and variability of workplace environments, requiring them to interpret context-specific language and visual cues simultaneously. We introduce Clip2Safety, an interpretable detection framework for diverse workplace safety compliance, which comprises four main modules: scene recognition, the visual prompt, safety items detection, and fine-grained verification. The scene recognition identifies the current scenario to determine the necessary safety gear. The visual prompt formulates the specific visual prompts needed for the detection process. The safety items detection identifies whether the required safety gear is being worn according to the specified scenario. Lastly, the fine-grained verification assesses whether the worn safety equipment meets the fine-grained attribute requirements. We conduct real-world case studies across six different scenarios. The results show that Clip2Safety not only demonstrates an accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art question-answering based VLMs but also achieves inference times two hundred times faster.
Authors:Tianrun Chen, Ankang Lu, Lanyun Zhu, Chaotao Ding, Chunan Yu, Deyi Ji, Zejian Li, Lingyun Sun, Papa Mao, Ying Zang
Abstract:
The advent of large models, also known as foundation models, has significantly transformed the AI research landscape, with models like Segment Anything (SAM) achieving notable success in diverse image segmentation scenarios. Despite its advancements, SAM encountered limitations in handling some complex low-level segmentation tasks like camouflaged object and medical imaging. In response, in 2023, we introduced SAM-Adapter, which demonstrated improved performance on these challenging tasks. Now, with the release of Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), a successor with enhanced architecture and a larger training corpus, we reassess these challenges. This paper introduces SAM2-Adapter, the first adapter designed to overcome the persistent limitations observed in SAM2 and achieve new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in specific downstream tasks including medical image segmentation, camouflaged (concealed) object detection, and shadow detection. SAM2-Adapter builds on the SAM-Adapter's strengths, offering enhanced generalizability and composability for diverse applications. We present extensive experimental results demonstrating SAM2-Adapter's effectiveness. We show the potential and encourage the research community to leverage the SAM2 model with our SAM2-Adapter for achieving superior segmentation outcomes. Code, pre-trained models, and data processing protocols are available at http://tianrun-chen.github.io/SAM-Adaptor/
Authors:Xiangxiang Dai, Zeyu Zhang, Peng Yang, Yuedong Xu, Xutong Liu, John C. S. Lui
Abstract:
The rapid evolution of multimedia and computer vision technologies requires adaptive visual model deployment strategies to effectively handle diverse tasks and varying environments. This work introduces AxiomVision, a novel framework that can guarantee accuracy by leveraging edge computing to dynamically select the most efficient visual models for video analytics under diverse scenarios. Utilizing a tiered edge-cloud architecture, AxiomVision enables the deployment of a broad spectrum of visual models, from lightweight to complex DNNs, that can be tailored to specific scenarios while considering camera source impacts. In addition, AxiomVision provides three core innovations: (1) a dynamic visual model selection mechanism utilizing continual online learning, (2) an efficient online method that efficiently takes into account the influence of the camera's perspective, and (3) a topology-driven grouping approach that accelerates the model selection process. With rigorous theoretical guarantees, these advancements provide a scalable and effective solution for visual tasks inherent to multimedia systems, such as object detection, classification, and counting. Empirically, AxiomVision achieves a 25.7\% improvement in accuracy.
Authors:Xiaomeng Chu, Jiajun Deng, Guoliang You, Yifan Duan, Yao Li, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract:
The recent advances in query-based multi-camera 3D object detection are featured by initializing object queries in the 3D space, and then sampling features from perspective-view images to perform multi-round query refinement. In such a framework, query points near the same camera ray are likely to sample similar features from very close pixels, resulting in ambiguous query features and degraded detection accuracy. To this end, we introduce RayFormer, a camera-ray-inspired query-based 3D object detector that aligns the initialization and feature extraction of object queries with the optical characteristics of cameras. Specifically, RayFormer transforms perspective-view image features into bird's eye view (BEV) via the lift-splat-shoot method and segments the BEV map to sectors based on the camera rays. Object queries are uniformly and sparsely initialized along each camera ray, facilitating the projection of different queries onto different areas in the image to extract distinct features. Besides, we leverage the instance information of images to supplement the uniformly initialized object queries by further involving additional queries along the ray from 2D object detection boxes. To extract unique object-level features that cater to distinct queries, we design a ray sampling method that suitably organizes the distribution of feature sampling points on both images and bird's eye view. Extensive experiments are conducted on the nuScenes dataset to validate our proposed ray-inspired model design. The proposed RayFormer achieves superior performance of 55.5% mAP and 63.3% NDS, respectively.
Authors:Zeyang Zhao, Qilong Xue, Yuhang He, Yifan Bai, Xing Wei, Yihong Gong
Abstract:
This paper introduces the point-axis representation for oriented object detection, emphasizing its flexibility and geometrically intuitive nature with two key components: points and axes. 1) Points delineate the spatial extent and contours of objects, providing detailed shape descriptions. 2) Axes define the primary directionalities of objects, providing essential orientation cues crucial for precise detection. The point-axis representation decouples location and rotation, addressing the loss discontinuity issues commonly encountered in traditional bounding box-based approaches. For effective optimization without introducing additional annotations, we propose the max-projection loss to supervise point set learning and the cross-axis loss for robust axis representation learning. Further, leveraging this representation, we present the Oriented DETR model, seamlessly integrating the DETR framework for precise point-axis prediction and end-to-end detection. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements in oriented object detection tasks.
Authors:Huanrui Yang, Yafeng Huang, Zhen Dong, Denis A Gudovskiy, Tomoyuki Okuno, Yohei Nakata, Yuan Du, Kurt Keutzer, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract:
The impact of quantization on the overall performance of deep learning models is a well-studied problem. However, understanding and mitigating its effects on a more fine-grained level is still lacking, especially for harder tasks such as object detection with both classification and regression objectives. This work defines the performance for a subset of task-critical categories, i.e. the critical-category performance, as a crucial yet largely overlooked fine-grained objective for detection tasks. We analyze the impact of quantization at the category-level granularity, and propose methods to improve performance for the critical categories. Specifically, we find that certain critical categories have a higher sensitivity to quantization, and are prone to overfitting after quantization-aware training (QAT). To explain this, we provide theoretical and empirical links between their performance gaps and the corresponding loss landscapes with the Fisher information framework. Using this evidence, we apply a Fisher-aware mixed-precision quantization scheme, and a Fisher-trace regularization for the QAT on the critical-category loss landscape. The proposed methods improve critical-category metrics of the quantized transformer-based DETR detectors. They are even more significant in case of larger models and higher number of classes where the overfitting becomes more severe. For example, our methods lead to 10.4% and 14.5% mAP gains for, correspondingly, 4-bit DETR-R50 and Deformable DETR on the most impacted critical classes in the COCO Panoptic dataset.
Authors:Francesco Barbato, Umberto Michieli, Jijoong Moon, Pietro Zanuttigh, Mete Ozay
Abstract:
Recent years have seen object detection robotic systems deployed in several personal devices (e.g., home robots and appliances). This has highlighted a challenge in their design, i.e., they cannot efficiently update their knowledge to distinguish between general classes and user-specific instances (e.g., a dog vs. user's dog). We refer to this challenging task as Instance-level Personalized Object Detection (IPOD). The personalization task requires many samples for model tuning and optimization in a centralized server, raising privacy concerns. An alternative is provided by approaches based on recent large-scale Foundation Models, but their compute costs preclude on-device applications.
In our work we tackle both problems at the same time, designing a Few-Shot IPOD strategy called AuXFT. We introduce a conditional coarse-to-fine few-shot learner to refine the coarse predictions made by an efficient object detector, showing that using an off-the-shelf model leads to poor personalization due to neural collapse. Therefore, we introduce a Translator block that generates an auxiliary feature space where features generated by a self-supervised model (e.g., DINOv2) are distilled without impacting the performance of the detector. We validate AuXFT on three publicly available datasets and one in-house benchmark designed for the IPOD task, achieving remarkable gains in all considered scenarios with excellent time-complexity trade-off: AuXFT reaches a performance of 80% its upper bound at just 32% of the inference time, 13% of VRAM and 19% of the model size.
Authors:Umberto Michieli, Jijoong Moon, Daehyun Kim, Mete Ozay
Abstract:
Nowadays, users demand for increased personalization of vision systems to localize and identify personal instances of objects (e.g., my dog rather than dog) from a few-shot dataset only. Despite outstanding results of deep networks on classical label-abundant benchmarks (e.g., those of the latest YOLOv8 model for standard object detection), they struggle to maintain within-class variability to represent different instances rather than object categories only. We construct an Object-conditioned Bag of Instances (OBoI) based on multi-order statistics of extracted features, where generic object detection models are extended to search and identify personal instances from the OBoI's metric space, without need for backpropagation. By relying on multi-order statistics, OBoI achieves consistent superior accuracy in distinguishing different instances. In the results, we achieve 77.1% personal object recognition accuracy in case of 18 personal instances, showing about 12% relative gain over the state of the art.
Authors:Jingyuan Zhu, Huimin Ma, Jiansheng Chen, Jian Yuan
Abstract:
Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have achieved great success in synthesizing high-quality and diverse images given target text prompts. Despite the revolutionary image generation ability, current state-of-the-art models still struggle to deal with multi-concept generation accurately in many cases. This phenomenon is known as ``concept bleeding" and displays as the unexpected overlapping or merging of various concepts. This paper presents a general approach for text-to-image diffusion models to address the mutual interference between different subjects and their attachments in complex scenes, pursuing better text-image consistency. The core idea is to isolate the synthesizing processes of different concepts. We propose to bind each attachment to corresponding subjects separately with split text prompts. Besides, we introduce a revision method to fix the concept bleeding problem in multi-subject synthesis. We first depend on pre-trained object detection and segmentation models to obtain the layouts of subjects. Then we isolate and resynthesize each subject individually with corresponding text prompts to avoid mutual interference. Overall, we achieve a training-free strategy, named Isolated Diffusion, to optimize multi-concept text-to-image synthesis. It is compatible with the latest Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) and prior Stable Diffusion (SD) models. We compare our approach with alternative methods using a variety of multi-concept text prompts and demonstrate its effectiveness with clear advantages in text-image consistency and user study.
Authors:Wenjun Huang, Hanning Chen, Yang Ni, Arghavan Rezvani, Sanggeon Yun, Sungheon Jeon, Eric Pedley, Mohsen Imani
Abstract:
Detecting marine objects inshore presents challenges owing to algorithmic intricacies and complexities in system deployment. We propose a difficulty-aware edge-cloud collaborative sensing system that splits the task into object localization and fine-grained classification. Objects are classified either at the edge or within the cloud, based on their estimated difficulty. The framework comprises a low-power device-tailored front-end model for object localization, classification, and difficulty estimation, along with a transformer-graph convolutional network-based back-end model for fine-grained classification. Our system demonstrates superior performance (mAP@0.5 +4.3%}) on widely used marine object detection datasets, significantly reducing both data transmission volume (by 95.43%) and energy consumption (by 72.7%}) at the system level. We validate the proposed system across various embedded system platforms and in real-world scenarios involving drone deployment.
Authors:Zetong Yang, Zhiding Yu, Chris Choy, Renhao Wang, Anima Anandkumar, Jose M. Alvarez
Abstract:
Improving the detection of distant 3d objects is an important yet challenging task. For camera-based 3D perception, the annotation of 3d bounding relies heavily on LiDAR for accurate depth information. As such, the distance of annotation is often limited due to the sparsity of LiDAR points on distant objects, which hampers the capability of existing detectors for long-range scenarios. We address this challenge by considering only 2D box supervision for distant objects since they are easy to annotate. We propose LR3D, a framework that learns to recover the missing depth of distant objects. LR3D adopts an implicit projection head to learn the generation of mapping between 2D boxes and depth using the 3D supervision on close objects. This mapping allows the depth estimation of distant objects conditioned on their 2D boxes, making long-range 3D detection with 2D supervision feasible. Experiments show that without distant 3D annotations, LR3D allows camera-based methods to detect distant objects (over 200m) with comparable accuracy to full 3D supervision. Our framework is general, and could widely benefit 3D detection methods to a large extent.
Authors:Hanning Chen, Wenjun Huang, Yang Ni, Sanggeon Yun, Yezi Liu, Fei Wen, Alvaro Velasquez, Hugo Latapie, Mohsen Imani
Abstract:
Task-oriented object detection aims to find objects suitable for accomplishing specific tasks. As a challenging task, it requires simultaneous visual data processing and reasoning under ambiguous semantics. Recent solutions are mainly all-in-one models. However, the object detection backbones are pre-trained without text supervision. Thus, to incorporate task requirements, their intricate models undergo extensive learning on a highly imbalanced and scarce dataset, resulting in capped performance, laborious training, and poor generalizability. In contrast, we propose TaskCLIP, a more natural two-stage design composed of general object detection and task-guided object selection. Particularly for the latter, we resort to the recently successful large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as our backbone, which provides rich semantic knowledge and a uniform embedding space for images and texts. Nevertheless, the naive application of VLMs leads to sub-optimal quality, due to the misalignment between embeddings of object images and their visual attributes, which are mainly adjective phrases. To this end, we design a transformer-based aligner after the pre-trained VLMs to re-calibrate both embeddings. Finally, we employ a trainable score function to post-process the VLM matching results for object selection. Experimental results demonstrate that our TaskCLIP outperforms the state-of-the-art DETR-based model TOIST by 3.5% and only requires a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 for both training and inference.
Authors:Hanyu Zhou, Zhiwei Shi, Hao Dong, Shihan Peng, Yi Chang, Luxin Yan
Abstract:
Event-based moving object detection is a challenging task, where static background and moving object are mixed together. Typically, existing methods mainly align the background events to the same spatial coordinate system via motion compensation to distinguish the moving object. However, they neglect the potential spatial tailing effect of moving object events caused by excessive motion, which may affect the structure integrity of the extracted moving object. We discover that the moving object has a complete columnar structure in the point cloud composed of motion-compensated events along the timestamp. Motivated by this, we propose a novel joint spatio-temporal reasoning method for event-based moving object detection. Specifically, we first compensate the motion of background events using inertial measurement unit. In spatial reasoning stage, we project the compensated events into the same image coordinate, discretize the timestamp of events to obtain a time image that can reflect the motion confidence, and further segment the moving object through adaptive threshold on the time image. In temporal reasoning stage, we construct the events into a point cloud along timestamp, and use RANSAC algorithm to extract the columnar shape in the cloud for peeling off the background. Finally, we fuse the results from the two reasoning stages to extract the final moving object region. This joint spatio-temporal reasoning framework can effectively detect the moving object from motion confidence and geometric structure. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments on various datasets to verify that the proposed method can improve the moving object detection accuracy by 13\%.
Authors:Suizhi Huang, Shalayiding Sirejiding, Yuxiang Lu, Yue Ding, Leheng Liu, Hui Zhou, Hongtao Lu
Abstract:
Object detection and semantic segmentation are pivotal components in biomedical image analysis. Current single-task networks exhibit promising outcomes in both detection and segmentation tasks. Multi-task networks have gained prominence due to their capability to simultaneously tackle segmentation and detection tasks, while also accelerating the segmentation inference. Nevertheless, recent multi-task networks confront distinct limitations such as the difficulty in striking a balance between accuracy and inference speed. Additionally, they often overlook the integration of cross-scale features, which is especially important for biomedical image analysis. In this study, we propose an efficient end-to-end multi-task network capable of concurrently performing object detection and semantic segmentation called YOLO-Med. Our model employs a backbone and a neck for multi-scale feature extraction, complemented by the inclusion of two task-specific decoders. A cross-scale task-interaction module is employed in order to facilitate information fusion between various tasks. Our model exhibits promising results in balancing accuracy and speed when evaluated on the Kvasir-seg dataset and a private biomedical image dataset.
Authors:Jinlong Li, Baolu Li, Xinyu Liu, Jianwu Fang, Felix Juefei-Xu, Qing Guo, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
The multi-agent perception system collects visual data from sensors located on various agents and leverages their relative poses determined by GPS signals to effectively fuse information, mitigating the limitations of single-agent sensing, such as occlusion. However, the precision of GPS signals can be influenced by a range of factors, including wireless transmission and obstructions like buildings. Given the pivotal role of GPS signals in perception fusion and the potential for various interference, it becomes imperative to investigate whether specific GPS signals can easily mislead the multi-agent perception system. To address this concern, we frame the task as an adversarial attack challenge and introduce \textsc{AdvGPS}, a method capable of generating adversarial GPS signals which are also stealthy for individual agents within the system, significantly reducing object detection accuracy. To enhance the success rates of these attacks in a black-box scenario, we introduce three types of statistically sensitive natural discrepancies: appearance-based discrepancy, distribution-based discrepancy, and task-aware discrepancy. Our extensive experiments on the OPV2V dataset demonstrate that these attacks substantially undermine the performance of state-of-the-art methods, showcasing remarkable transferability across different point cloud based 3D detection systems. This alarming revelation underscores the pressing need to address security implications within multi-agent perception systems, thereby underscoring a critical area of research.
Authors:Sanggeon Yun, Hanning Chen, Ryozo Masukawa, Hamza Errahmouni Barkam, Andrew Ding, Wenjun Huang, Arghavan Rezvani, Shaahin Angizi, Mohsen Imani
Abstract:
Introducing HyperSense, our co-designed hardware and software system efficiently controls Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) modules' data generation rate based on object presence predictions in sensor data. Addressing challenges posed by escalating sensor quantities and data rates, HyperSense reduces redundant digital data using energy-efficient low-precision ADC, diminishing machine learning system costs. Leveraging neurally-inspired HyperDimensional Computing (HDC), HyperSense analyzes real-time raw low-precision sensor data, offering advantages in handling noise, memory-centricity, and real-time learning. Our proposed HyperSense model combines high-performance software for object detection with real-time hardware prediction, introducing the novel concept of Intelligent Sensor Control. Comprehensive software and hardware evaluations demonstrate our solution's superior performance, evidenced by the highest Area Under the Curve (AUC) and sharpest Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve among lightweight models. Hardware-wise, our FPGA-based domain-specific accelerator tailored for HyperSense achieves a 5.6x speedup compared to YOLOv4 on NVIDIA Jetson Orin while showing up to 92.1% energy saving compared to the conventional system. These results underscore HyperSense's effectiveness and efficiency, positioning it as a promising solution for intelligent sensing and real-time data processing across diverse applications.
Authors:Haoran Zhu, Chang Xu, Wen Yang, Ruixiang Zhang, Yan Zhang, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Precise detection of tiny objects in remote sensing imagery remains a significant challenge due to their limited visual information and frequent occurrence within scenes. This challenge is further exacerbated by the practical burden and inherent errors associated with manual annotation: annotating tiny objects is laborious and prone to errors (i.e., label noise). Training detectors for such objects using noisy labels often leads to suboptimal performance, with networks tending to overfit on noisy labels. In this study, we address the intricate issue of tiny object detection under noisy label supervision. We systematically investigate the impact of various types of noise on network training, revealing the vulnerability of object detectors to class shifts and inaccurate bounding boxes for tiny objects. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a DeNoising Tiny Object Detector (DN-TOD), which incorporates a Class-aware Label Correction (CLC) scheme to address class shifts and a Trend-guided Learning Strategy (TLS) to handle bounding box noise. CLC mitigates inaccurate class supervision by identifying and filtering out class-shifted positive samples, while TLS reduces noisy box-induced erroneous supervision through sample reweighting and bounding box regeneration. Additionally, Our method can be seamlessly integrated into both one-stage and two-stage object detection pipelines. Comprehensive experiments conducted on synthetic (i.e., noisy AI-TOD-v2.0 and DOTA-v2.0) and real-world (i.e., AI-TOD) noisy datasets demonstrate the robustness of DN-TOD under various types of label noise. Notably, when applied to the strong baseline RFLA, DN-TOD exhibits a noteworthy performance improvement of 4.9 points under 40% mixed noise. Datasets, codes, and models will be made publicly available.
Authors:Ruixiang Zhang, Chang Xu, Fang Xu, Wen Yang, Guangjun He, Huai Yu, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the scale imbalance problem of semi-supervised object detection(SSOD) in aerial images. Compared to natural images, objects in aerial images show smaller sizes and larger quantities per image, increasing the difficulty of manual annotation. Meanwhile, the advanced SSOD technique can train superior detectors by leveraging limited labeled data and massive unlabeled data, saving annotation costs. However, as an understudied task in aerial images, SSOD suffers from a drastic performance drop when facing a large proportion of small objects. By analyzing the predictions between small and large objects, we identify three imbalance issues caused by the scale bias, i.e., pseudo-label imbalance, label assignment imbalance, and negative learning imbalance. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Scale-discriminative Semi-Supervised Object Detection (S^3OD) learning pipeline for aerial images. In our S^3OD, three key components, Size-aware Adaptive Thresholding (SAT), Size-rebalanced Label Assignment (SLA), and Teacher-guided Negative Learning (TNL), are proposed to warrant scale unbiased learning. Specifically, SAT adaptively selects appropriate thresholds to filter pseudo-labels for objects at different scales. SLA balances positive samples of objects at different scales through resampling and reweighting. TNL alleviates the imbalance in negative samples by leveraging information generated by a teacher model. Extensive experiments conducted on the DOTA-v1.5 benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods over state-of-the-art competitors. Codes will be released soon.
Authors:Yang Cao, Yihan Zeng, Hang Xu, Dan Xu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) aims to detect objects from an arbitrary list of categories within a 3D scene, which remains seldom explored in the literature. There are primarily two fundamental problems in OV-3DDet, i.e., localizing and classifying novel objects. This paper aims at addressing the two problems simultaneously via a unified framework, under the condition of limited base categories. To localize novel 3D objects, we propose an effective 3D Novel Object Discovery strategy, which utilizes both the 3D box geometry priors and 2D semantic open-vocabulary priors to generate pseudo box labels of the novel objects. To classify novel object boxes, we further develop a cross-modal alignment module based on discovered novel boxes, to align feature spaces between 3D point cloud and image/text modalities. Specifically, the alignment process contains a class-agnostic and a class-discriminative alignment, incorporating not only the base objects with annotations but also the increasingly discovered novel objects, resulting in an iteratively enhanced alignment. The novel box discovery and crossmodal alignment are jointly learned to collaboratively benefit each other. The novel object discovery can directly impact the cross-modal alignment, while a better feature alignment can, in turn, boost the localization capability, leading to a unified OV-3DDet framework, named CoDA, for simultaneous novel object localization and classification. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (i.e., SUN-RGBD and ScanNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and also show a significant mAP improvement upon the best-performing alternative method by 80%. Codes and pre-trained models are released on the project page.
Authors:Zheyuan Zhou, Jiachen Lu, Yihan Zeng, Hang Xu, Li Zhang
Abstract:
3D object detection from LiDAR point cloud is of critical importance for autonomous driving and robotics. While sequential point cloud has the potential to enhance 3D perception through temporal information, utilizing these temporal features effectively and efficiently remains a challenging problem. Based on the observation that the foreground information is sparsely distributed in LiDAR scenes, we believe sufficient knowledge can be provided by sparse format rather than dense maps. To this end, we propose to learn Significance-gUided Information for 3D Temporal detection (SUIT), which simplifies temporal information as sparse features for information fusion across frames. Specifically, we first introduce a significant sampling mechanism that extracts information-rich yet sparse features based on predicted object centroids. On top of that, we present an explicit geometric transformation learning technique, which learns the object-centric transformations among sparse features across frames. We evaluate our method on large-scale nuScenes and Waymo dataset, where our SUIT not only significantly reduces the memory and computation cost of temporal fusion, but also performs well over the state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors:Linhui Dai, Hong Liu, Pinhao Song, Mengyuan Liu
Abstract:
Underwater object detection (UOD) plays a significant role in aquaculture and marine environmental protection. Considering the challenges posed by low contrast and low-light conditions in underwater environments, several underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods have been proposed to improve the quality of underwater images. However, only using the enhanced images does not improve the performance of UOD, since it may unavoidably remove or alter critical patterns and details of underwater objects. In contrast, we believe that exploring the complementary information from the two domains is beneficial for UOD. The raw image preserves the natural characteristics of the scene and texture information of the objects, while the enhanced image improves the visibility of underwater objects. Based on this perspective, we propose a Gated Cross-domain Collaborative Network (GCC-Net) to address the challenges of poor visibility and low contrast in underwater environments, which comprises three dedicated components. Firstly, a real-time UIE method is employed to generate enhanced images, which can improve the visibility of objects in low-contrast areas. Secondly, a cross-domain feature interaction module is introduced to facilitate the interaction and mine complementary information between raw and enhanced image features. Thirdly, to prevent the contamination of unreliable generated results, a gated feature fusion module is proposed to adaptively control the fusion ratio of cross-domain information. Our method presents a new UOD paradigm from the perspective of cross-domain information interaction and fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GCC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on four underwater datasets.
Authors:Yanyang Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian
Abstract:
In recent years, deep learning technology has been maturely applied in the field of object detection, and most algorithms tend to be supervised learning. However, a large amount of labeled data requires high costs of human resources, which brings about low efficiency and limitations. Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) has been paid more and more attentions due to its high research value and practicability. It is designed to learn information by using small amounts of labeled data and large amounts of unlabeled data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the SSOD approaches from five aspects. We first briefly introduce several ways of data augmentation. Then, we dive the mainstream semi-supervised strategies into pseudo labels, consistent regularization, graph based and transfer learning based methods, and introduce some methods in challenging settings. We further present widely-used loss functions, and then we outline the common benchmark datasets and compare the accuracy among different representative approaches. Finally, we conclude this paper and present some promising research directions for the future. Our survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners new to the field as well as more advanced readers with a solid understanding of the main approaches developed over the past few years.
Authors:Tianrun Chen, Lanyun Zhu, Chaotao Ding, Runlong Cao, Yan Wang, Zejian Li, Lingyun Sun, Papa Mao, Ying Zang
Abstract:
The emergence of large models, also known as foundation models, has brought significant advancements to AI research. One such model is Segment Anything (SAM), which is designed for image segmentation tasks. However, as with other foundation models, our experimental findings suggest that SAM may fail or perform poorly in certain segmentation tasks, such as shadow detection and camouflaged object detection (concealed object detection). This study first paves the way for applying the large pre-trained image segmentation model SAM to these downstream tasks, even in situations where SAM performs poorly. Rather than fine-tuning the SAM network, we propose \textbf{SAM-Adapter}, which incorporates domain-specific information or visual prompts into the segmentation network by using simple yet effective adapters. By integrating task-specific knowledge with general knowledge learnt by the large model, SAM-Adapter can significantly elevate the performance of SAM in challenging tasks as shown in extensive experiments. We can even outperform task-specific network models and achieve state-of-the-art performance in the task we tested: camouflaged object detection, shadow detection. We also tested polyp segmentation (medical image segmentation) and achieves better results. We believe our work opens up opportunities for utilizing SAM in downstream tasks, with potential applications in various fields, including medical image processing, agriculture, remote sensing, and more.
Authors:Sicen Guo, Jiahang Li, Yi Feng, Dacheng Zhou, Denghuang Zhang, Chen Chen, Shuai Su, Xingyi Zhu, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan
Abstract:
In the nascent domain of urban digital twins (UDT), the prospects for leveraging cutting-edge deep learning techniques are vast and compelling. Particularly within the specialized area of intelligent road inspection (IRI), a noticeable gap exists, underscored by the current dearth of dedicated research efforts and the lack of large-scale well-annotated datasets. To foster advancements in this burgeoning field, we have launched an online open-source benchmark suite, referred to as UDTIRI. Along with this article, we introduce the road pothole detection task, the first online competition published within this benchmark suite. This task provides a well-annotated dataset, comprising 1,000 RGB images and their pixel/instance-level ground-truth annotations, captured in diverse real-world scenarios under different illumination and weather conditions. Our benchmark provides a systematic and thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation networks, developed based on either convolutional neural networks or Transformers. We anticipate that our benchmark will serve as a catalyst for the integration of advanced UDT techniques into IRI. By providing algorithms with a more comprehensive understanding of diverse road conditions, we seek to unlock their untapped potential and foster innovation in this critical domain.
Authors:Mathias Zinnen, Prathmesh Madhu, Peter Bell, Andreas Maier, Vincent Christlein
Abstract:
We investigate the effect of style and category similarity in multiple datasets used for object detection pretraining. We find that including an additional stage of object-detection pretraining can increase the detection performance considerably. While our experiments suggest that style similarities between pre-training and target datasets are less important than matching categories, further experiments are needed to verify this hypothesis.
Authors:Mathias Zinnen, Prathmesh Madhu, Ronak Kosti, Peter Bell, Andreas Maier, Vincent Christlein
Abstract:
The Odeuropa Challenge on Olfactory Object Recognition aims to foster the development of object detection in the visual arts and to promote an olfactory perspective on digital heritage. Object detection in historical artworks is particularly challenging due to varying styles and artistic periods. Moreover, the task is complicated due to the particularity and historical variance of predefined target objects, which exhibit a large intra-class variance, and the long tail distribution of the dataset labels, with some objects having only very few training examples. These challenges should encourage participants to create innovative approaches using domain adaptation or few-shot learning. We provide a dataset of 2647 artworks annotated with 20 120 tightly fit bounding boxes that are split into a training and validation set (public). A test set containing 1140 artworks and 15 480 annotations is kept private for the challenge evaluation.
Authors:Shixing Cao, Nicholas Konz, James Duncan, Maciej A. Mazurowski
Abstract:
In this work we introduce a novel medical image style transfer method, StyleMapper, that can transfer medical scans to an unseen style with access to limited training data. This is made possible by training our model on unlimited possibilities of simulated random medical imaging styles on the training set, making our work more computationally efficient when compared with other style transfer methods. Moreover, our method enables arbitrary style transfer: transferring images to styles unseen in training. This is useful for medical imaging, where images are acquired using different protocols and different scanner models, resulting in a variety of styles that data may need to be transferred between. Methods: Our model disentangles image content from style and can modify an image's style by simply replacing the style encoding with one extracted from a single image of the target style, with no additional optimization required. This also allows the model to distinguish between different styles of images, including among those that were unseen in training. We propose a formal description of the proposed model. Results: Experimental results on breast magnetic resonance images indicate the effectiveness of our method for style transfer. Conclusion: Our style transfer method allows for the alignment of medical images taken with different scanners into a single unified style dataset, allowing for the training of other downstream tasks on such a dataset for tasks such as classification, object detection and others.
Authors:Amir Bar, Xin Wang, Vadim Kantorov, Colorado J Reed, Roei Herzig, Gal Chechik, Anna Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell, Amir Globerson
Abstract:
Recent self-supervised pretraining methods for object detection largely focus on pretraining the backbone of the object detector, neglecting key parts of detection architecture. Instead, we introduce DETReg, a new self-supervised method that pretrains the entire object detection network, including the object localization and embedding components. During pretraining, DETReg predicts object localizations to match the localizations from an unsupervised region proposal generator and simultaneously aligns the corresponding feature embeddings with embeddings from a self-supervised image encoder. We implement DETReg using the DETR family of detectors and show that it improves over competitive baselines when finetuned on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and Airbus Ship benchmarks. In low-data regimes DETReg achieves improved performance, e.g., when training with only 1% of the labels and in the few-shot learning settings.
Authors:Yung-Hsu Yang, Luigi Piccinelli, Mattia Segu, Siyuan Li, Rui Huang, Yuqian Fu, Marc Pollefeys, Hermann Blum, Zuria Bauer
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is valuable for various applications such as robotics and AR/VR. Existing methods are confined to closed-set settings, where the training and testing sets consist of the same scenes and/or object categories. However, real-world applications often introduce new environments and novel object categories, posing a challenge to these methods. In this paper, we address monocular 3D object detection in an open-set setting and introduce the first end-to-end 3D Monocular Open-set Object Detector (3D-MOOD). We propose to lift the open-set 2D detection into 3D space through our designed 3D bounding box head, enabling end-to-end joint training for both 2D and 3D tasks to yield better overall performance. We condition the object queries with geometry prior and overcome the generalization for 3D estimation across diverse scenes. To further improve performance, we design the canonical image space for more efficient cross-dataset training. We evaluate 3D-MOOD on both closed-set settings (Omni3D) and open-set settings (Omni3D to Argoverse 2, ScanNet), and achieve new state-of-the-art results. Code and models are available at royyang0714.github.io/3D-MOOD.
Authors:Taijin Zhao, Heqian Qiu, Yu Dai, Lanxiao Wang, Fanman Meng, Qingbo Wu, Hongliang Li
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to detect objects with limited samples for novel classes, while relying on abundant data for base classes. Existing FSOD approaches, predominantly built on the Faster R-CNN detector, entangle objectness recognition and foreground classification within shared feature spaces. This paradigm inherently establishes class-specific objectness criteria and suffers from unrepresentative novel class samples. To resolve this limitation, we propose a Uniform Orthogonal Feature Space (UOFS) optimization framework. First, UOFS decouples the feature space into two orthogonal components, where magnitude encodes objectness and angle encodes classification. This decoupling enables transferring class-agnostic objectness knowledge from base classes to novel classes. Moreover, implementing the disentanglement requires careful attention to two challenges: (1) Base set images contain unlabeled foreground instances, causing confusion between potential novel class instances and backgrounds. (2) Angular optimization depends exclusively on base class foreground instances, inducing overfitting of angular distributions to base classes. To address these challenges, we propose a Hybrid Background Optimization (HBO) strategy: (1) Constructing a pure background base set by removing unlabeled instances in original images to provide unbiased magnitude-based objectness supervision. (2) Incorporating unlabeled foreground instances in the original base set into angular optimization to enhance distribution uniformity. Additionally, we propose a Spatial-wise Attention Disentanglement and Association (SADA) module to address task conflicts between class-agnostic and class-specific tasks. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches based on entangled feature spaces.
Authors:Hemanth Saratchandran, Simon Lucey
Abstract:
Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global dependencies among input tokens. However, we reveal that the attention block in transformers suffers from inherent ill-conditioning, which hampers gradient-based optimization and leads to inefficient training. To address this, we develop a theoretical framework that establishes a direct relationship between the conditioning of the attention block and that of the embedded tokenized data. Building on this insight, we introduce conditioned embedded tokens, a method that systematically modifies the embedded tokens to improve the conditioning of the attention mechanism. Our analysis demonstrates that this approach significantly mitigates ill-conditioning, leading to more stable and efficient training. We validate our methodology across various transformer architectures, achieving consistent improvements in image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and natural language processing, highlighting its broad applicability and effectiveness.
Authors:Jiahuan Long, Wen Yao, Tingsong Jiang, Chao Ma
Abstract:
Adversarial patches are widely used to evaluate the robustness of object detection systems in real-world scenarios. These patches were initially designed to deceive single-modal detectors (e.g., visible or infrared) and have recently been extended to target visible-infrared dual-modal detectors. However, existing dual-modal adversarial patch attacks have limited attack effectiveness across diverse physical scenarios. To address this, we propose CDUPatch, a universal cross-modal patch attack against visible-infrared object detectors across scales, views, and scenarios. Specifically, we observe that color variations lead to different levels of thermal absorption, resulting in temperature differences in infrared imaging. Leveraging this property, we propose an RGB-to-infrared adapter that maps RGB patches to infrared patches, enabling unified optimization of cross-modal patches. By learning an optimal color distribution on the adversarial patch, we can manipulate its thermal response and generate an adversarial infrared texture. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale clipping strategy and construct a new visible-infrared dataset, MSDrone, which contains aerial vehicle images in varying scales and perspectives. These data augmentation strategies enhance the robustness of our patch in real-world conditions. Experiments on four benchmark datasets (e.g., DroneVehicle, LLVIP, VisDrone, MSDrone) show that our method outperforms existing patch attacks in the digital domain. Extensive physical tests further confirm strong transferability across scales, views, and scenarios.
Authors:Yubo Peng, Luping Xiang, Kun Yang, Kezhi Wang, Merouane Debbah
Abstract:
Despite the widespread adoption of vision sensors in edge applications, such as surveillance, the transmission of video data consumes substantial spectrum resources. Semantic communication (SC) offers a solution by extracting and compressing information at the semantic level, preserving the accuracy and relevance of transmitted data while significantly reducing the volume of transmitted information. However, traditional SC methods face inefficiencies due to the repeated transmission of static frames in edge videos, exacerbated by the absence of sensing capabilities, which results in spectrum inefficiency. To address this challenge, we propose a SC with computer vision sensing (SCCVS) framework for edge video transmission. The framework first introduces a compression ratio (CR) adaptive SC (CRSC) model, capable of adjusting CR based on whether the frames are static or dynamic, effectively conserving spectrum resources. Additionally, we implement an object detection and semantic segmentation models-enabled sensing (OSMS) scheme, which intelligently senses the changes in the scene and assesses the significance of each frame through in-context analysis. Hence, The OSMS scheme provides CR prompts to the CRSC model based on real-time sensing results. Moreover, both CRSC and OSMS are designed as lightweight models, ensuring compatibility with resource-constrained sensors commonly used in practical edge applications. Experimental simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed SCCVS framework, demonstrating its ability to enhance transmission efficiency without sacrificing critical semantic information.
Authors:Tsui Qin Mok, Shuyong Gao, Haozhe Xing, Miaoyang He, Yan Wang, Wenqiang Zhang
Abstract:
Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection (WSCOD) has gained popularity for its promise to train models with weak labels to segment objects that visually blend into their surroundings. Recently, some methods using sparsely-annotated supervision shown promising results through scribbling in WSCOD, while point-text supervision remains underexplored. Hence, this paper introduces a novel holistically point-guided text framework for WSCOD by decomposing into three phases: segment, choose, train. Specifically, we propose Point-guided Candidate Generation (PCG), where the point's foreground serves as a correction for the text path to explicitly correct and rejuvenate the loss detection object during the mask generation process (SEGMENT). We also introduce a Qualified Candidate Discriminator (QCD) to choose the optimal mask from a given text prompt using CLIP (CHOOSE), and employ the chosen pseudo mask for training with a self-supervised Vision Transformer (TRAIN). Additionally, we developed a new point-supervised dataset (P2C-COD) and a text-supervised dataset (T-COD). Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, and also outperforms some existing fully-supervised camouflaged object detection methods.
Authors:Shuqing Li, Binchang Li, Yepang Liu, Cuiyun Gao, Jianping Zhang, Shing-Chi Cheung, Michael R. Lyu
Abstract:
In recent years, spatial computing Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology, offering users immersive and interactive experiences across diversified virtual environments. Users can interact with VR apps through interactable GUI elements (IGEs) on the stereoscopic three-dimensional (3D) graphical user interface (GUI). The accurate recognition of these IGEs is instrumental, serving as the foundation of many software engineering tasks, including automated testing and effective GUI search. The most recent IGE detection approaches for 2D mobile apps typically train a supervised object detection model based on a large-scale manually-labeled GUI dataset, usually with a pre-defined set of clickable GUI element categories like buttons and spinners. Such approaches can hardly be applied to IGE detection in VR apps, due to a multitude of challenges including complexities posed by open-vocabulary and heterogeneous IGE categories, intricacies of context-sensitive interactability, and the necessities of precise spatial perception and visual-semantic alignment for accurate IGE detection results. Thus, it is necessary to embark on the IGE research tailored to VR apps. In this paper, we propose the first zero-shot cOntext-sensitive inteRactable GUI ElemeNT dEtection framework for virtual Reality apps, named Orienter. By imitating human behaviors, Orienter observes and understands the semantic contexts of VR app scenes first, before performing the detection. The detection process is iterated within a feedback-directed validation and reflection loop. Specifically, Orienter contains three components, including (1) Semantic context comprehension, (2) Reflection-directed IGE candidate detection, and (3) Context-sensitive interactability classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Orienter is more effective than the state-of-the-art GUI element detection approaches.
Authors:Kun Peng, Lei Jiang, Qian Li, Haoran Li, Xiaoyan Yu, Li Sun, Shuo Sun, Yanxian Bi, Hao Peng
Abstract:
Cross-domain Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment elements from target domain sentences by leveraging the knowledge acquired from the source domain. Due to the absence of labeled data in the target domain, recent studies tend to rely on pre-trained language models to generate large amounts of synthetic data for training purposes. However, these approaches entail additional computational costs associated with the generation process. Different from them, we discover a striking resemblance between table-filling methods in ASTE and two-stage Object Detection (OD) in computer vision, which inspires us to revisit the cross-domain ASTE task and approach it from an OD standpoint. This allows the model to benefit from the OD extraction paradigm and region-level alignment. Building upon this premise, we propose a novel method named \textbf{T}able-\textbf{F}illing via \textbf{M}ean \textbf{T}eacher (TFMT). Specifically, the table-filling methods encode the sentence into a 2D table to detect word relations, while TFMT treats the table as a feature map and utilizes a region consistency to enhance the quality of those generated pseudo labels. Additionally, considering the existence of the domain gap, a cross-domain consistency based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy is designed to alleviate domain shift problems. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal parameters and computational costs, making it a strong baseline for cross-domain ASTE.
Authors:Wenbo Jiang, Hongwei Li, Jiaming He, Rui Zhang, Guowen Xu, Tianwei Zhang, Rongxing Lu
Abstract:
Recently, deep learning-based Image-to-Image (I2I) networks have become the predominant choice for I2I tasks such as image super-resolution and denoising. Despite their remarkable performance, the backdoor vulnerability of I2I networks has not been explored. To fill this research gap, we conduct a comprehensive investigation on the susceptibility of I2I networks to backdoor attacks. Specifically, we propose a novel backdoor attack technique, where the compromised I2I network behaves normally on clean input images, yet outputs a predefined image of the adversary for malicious input images containing the trigger. To achieve this I2I backdoor attack, we propose a targeted universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) generation algorithm for I2I networks, where the generated UAP is used as the backdoor trigger. Additionally, in the backdoor training process that contains the main task and the backdoor task, multi-task learning (MTL) with dynamic weighting methods is employed to accelerate convergence rates. In addition to attacking I2I tasks, we extend our I2I backdoor to attack downstream tasks, including image classification and object detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the I2I backdoor on state-of-the-art I2I network architectures, as well as the robustness against different mainstream backdoor defenses.
Authors:Jiangming Chen, Li Liu, Wanxia Deng, Zhen Liu, Yu Liu, Yingmei Wei, Yongxiang Liu
Abstract:
Cross domain object detection learns an object detector for an unlabeled target domain by transferring knowledge from an annotated source domain. Promising results have been achieved via Mean Teacher, however, pseudo labeling which is the bottleneck of mutual learning remains to be further explored. In this study, we find that confidence misalignment of the predictions, including category-level overconfidence, instance-level task confidence inconsistency, and image-level confidence misfocusing, leading to the injection of noisy pseudo label in the training process, will bring suboptimal performance on the target domain. To tackle this issue, we present a novel general framework termed Multi-Granularity Confidence Alignment Mean Teacher (MGCAMT) for cross domain object detection, which alleviates confidence misalignment across category-, instance-, and image-levels simultaneously to obtain high quality pseudo supervision for better teacher-student learning. Specifically, to align confidence with accuracy at category level, we propose Classification Confidence Alignment (CCA) to model category uncertainty based on Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) and filter out the category incorrect labels via an uncertainty-aware selection strategy. Furthermore, to mitigate the instance-level misalignment between classification and localization, we design Task Confidence Alignment (TCA) to enhance the interaction between the two task branches and allow each classification feature to adaptively locate the optimal feature for the regression. Finally, we develop imagery Focusing Confidence Alignment (FCA) adopting another way of pseudo label learning, i.e., we use the original outputs from the Mean Teacher network for supervised learning without label assignment to concentrate on holistic information in the target image. These three procedures benefit from each other from a cooperative learning perspective.
Authors:Wenshu Fan, Hongwei Li, Wenbo Jiang, Meng Hao, Shui Yu, Xiao Zhang
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in multimodal learning. Image captioning, a classical multimodal task, has demonstrated promising applications and attracted extensive research attention. However, recent studies have shown that image caption models are vulnerable to some security threats such as backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks against image captioning typically pair a trigger either with a predefined sentence or a single word as the targeted output, yet they are unrelated to the image content, making them easily noticeable as anomalies by humans. In this paper, we present a novel method to craft targeted backdoor attacks against image caption models, which are designed to be stealthier than prior attacks. Specifically, our method first learns a special trigger by leveraging universal perturbation techniques for object detection, then places the learned trigger in the center of some specific source object and modifies the corresponding object name in the output caption to a predefined target name. During the prediction phase, the caption produced by the backdoored model for input images with the trigger can accurately convey the semantic information of the rest of the whole image, while incorrectly recognizing the source object as the predefined target. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve a high attack success rate while having a negligible impact on model clean performance. In addition, we show our method is stealthy in that the produced backdoor samples are indistinguishable from clean samples in both image and text domains, which can successfully bypass existing backdoor defenses, highlighting the need for better defensive mechanisms against such stealthy backdoor attacks.
Authors:Yang Li, Xiang He, Qingqun Kong, Yi Zeng
Abstract:
Spike-based neuromorphic hardware has demonstrated substantial potential in low energy consumption and efficient inference. However, the direct training of deep spiking neural networks is challenging, and conversion-based methods still require substantial time delay owing to unresolved conversion errors. We determine that the primary source of the conversion errors stems from the inconsistency between the mapping relationship of traditional activation functions and the input-output dynamics of spike neurons. To counter this, we introduce the Consistent ANN-SNN Conversion (CASC) framework. It includes the Consistent IF (CIF) neuron model, specifically contrived to minimize the influence of the stable point's upper bound, and the wake-sleep conversion (WSC) method, synergistically ensuring the uniformity of neuron behavior. This method theoretically achieves a loss-free conversion, markedly diminishing time delays and improving inference performance in extensive classification and object detection tasks. Our approach offers a viable pathway toward more efficient and effective neuromorphic systems.
Authors:Suozhi Huang, Juexiao Zhang, Yiming Li, Chen Feng
Abstract:
Collaborative perception leverages rich visual observations from multiple robots to extend a single robot's perception ability beyond its field of view. Many prior works receive messages broadcast from all collaborators, leading to a scalability challenge when dealing with a large number of robots and sensors. In this work, we aim to address \textit{scalable camera-based collaborative perception} with a Transformer-based architecture. Our key idea is to enable a single robot to intelligently discern the relevance of the collaborators and their associated cameras according to a learned spatial prior. This proactive understanding of the visual features' relevance does not require the transmission of the features themselves, enhancing both communication and computation efficiency. Specifically, we present ActFormer, a Transformer that learns bird's eye view (BEV) representations by using predefined BEV queries to interact with multi-robot multi-camera inputs. Each BEV query can actively select relevant cameras for information aggregation based on pose information, instead of interacting with all cameras indiscriminately. Experiments on the V2X-Sim dataset demonstrate that ActFormer improves the detection performance from 29.89% to 45.15% in terms of AP@0.7 with about 50% fewer queries, showcasing the effectiveness of ActFormer in multi-agent collaborative 3D object detection.
Authors:Shengcao Cao, Dhiraj Joshi, Liang-Yan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang
Abstract:
The human visual perception system demonstrates exceptional capabilities in learning without explicit supervision and understanding the part-to-whole composition of objects. Drawing inspiration from these two abilities, we propose Hierarchical Adaptive Self-Supervised Object Detection (HASSOD), a novel approach that learns to detect objects and understand their compositions without human supervision. HASSOD employs a hierarchical adaptive clustering strategy to group regions into object masks based on self-supervised visual representations, adaptively determining the number of objects per image. Furthermore, HASSOD identifies the hierarchical levels of objects in terms of composition, by analyzing coverage relations between masks and constructing tree structures. This additional self-supervised learning task leads to improved detection performance and enhanced interpretability. Lastly, we abandon the inefficient multi-round self-training process utilized in prior methods and instead adapt the Mean Teacher framework from semi-supervised learning, which leads to a smoother and more efficient training process. Through extensive experiments on prevalent image datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of HASSOD over existing methods, thereby advancing the state of the art in self-supervised object detection. Notably, we improve Mask AR from 20.2 to 22.5 on LVIS, and from 17.0 to 26.0 on SA-1B. Project page: https://HASSOD-NeurIPS23.github.io.
Authors:Chen Zhao, Shuming Liu, Karttikeya Mangalam, Guocheng Qian, Fatimah Zohra, Abdulmohsen Alghannam, Jitendra Malik, Bernard Ghanem
Abstract:
Large pretrained models are increasingly crucial in modern computer vision tasks. These models are typically used in downstream tasks by end-to-end finetuning, which is highly memory-intensive for tasks with high-resolution data, e.g., video understanding, small object detection, and point cloud analysis. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Reversible Dual-Residual Networks, or Dr$^2$Net, a novel family of network architectures that acts as a surrogate network to finetune a pretrained model with substantially reduced memory consumption. Dr$^2$Net contains two types of residual connections, one maintaining the residual structure in the pretrained models, and the other making the network reversible. Due to its reversibility, intermediate activations, which can be reconstructed from output, are cleared from memory during training. We use two coefficients on either type of residual connections respectively, and introduce a dynamic training strategy that seamlessly transitions the pretrained model to a reversible network with much higher numerical precision. We evaluate Dr$^2$Net on various pretrained models and various tasks, and show that it can reach comparable performance to conventional finetuning but with significantly less memory usage.
Authors:Hefei Mei, Taijin Zhao, Shiyuan Tang, Heqian Qiu, Lanxiao Wang, Minjian Zhang, Fanman Meng, Hongliang Li
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to achieve object detection only using a few novel class training data. Most of the existing methods usually adopt a transfer-learning strategy to construct the novel class distribution by transferring the base class knowledge. However, this direct way easily results in confusion between the novel class and other similar categories in the decision space. To address the problem, we propose generating local reverse samples (LRSamples) in Prototype Reference Frames to adaptively adjust the center position and boundary range of the novel class distribution to learn more discriminative novel class samples for FSOD. Firstly, we propose a Center Calibration Variance Augmentation (CCVA) module, which contains the selection rule of LRSamples, the generator of LRSamples, and augmentation on the calibrated distribution centers. Specifically, we design an intra-class feature converter (IFC) as the generator of CCVA to learn the selecting rule. By transferring the knowledge of IFC from the base training to fine-tuning, the IFC generates plentiful novel samples to calibrate the novel class distribution. Moreover, we propose a Feature Density Boundary Optimization (FDBO) module to adaptively adjust the importance of samples depending on their distance from the decision boundary. It can emphasize the importance of the high-density area of the similar class (closer decision boundary area) and reduce the weight of the low-density area of the similar class (farther decision boundary area), thus optimizing a clearer decision boundary for each category. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our method achieves consistent improvement on the Pascal VOC and MS COCO datasets based on DeFRCN and MFDC baselines.
Authors:Yicheng Song, Shuyong Gao, Haozhe Xing, Yiting Cheng, Yan Wang, Wenqiang Zhang
Abstract:
Unsupervised salient object detection aims to detect salient objects without using supervision signals eliminating the tedious task of manually labeling salient objects. To improve training efficiency, end-to-end methods for USOD have been proposed as a promising alternative. However, current solutions rely heavily on noisy handcraft labels and fail to mine rich semantic information from deep features. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised end-to-end salient object detection framework via top-down context. Specifically, motivated by contrastive learning, we exploit the self-localization from the deepest feature to construct the location maps which are then leveraged to learn the most instructive segmentation guidance. Further considering the lack of detailed information in deepest features, we exploit the detail-boosting refiner module to enrich the location labels with details. Moreover, we observe that due to lack of supervision, current unsupervised saliency models tend to detect non-salient objects that are salient in some other samples of corresponding scenarios. To address this widespread issue, we design a novel Unsupervised Non-Salient Suppression (UNSS) method developing the ability to ignore non-salient objects. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves leading performance among the recent end-to-end methods and most of the multi-stage solutions. The code is available.
Authors:Zhong-Yu Li, Bo-Wen Yin, Yongxiang Liu, Li Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract:
Incorporating heterogeneous representations from different architectures has facilitated various vision tasks, e.g., some hybrid networks combine transformers and convolutions. However, complementarity between such heterogeneous architectures has not been well exploited in self-supervised learning. Thus, we propose Heterogeneous Self-Supervised Learning (HSSL), which enforces a base model to learn from an auxiliary head whose architecture is heterogeneous from the base model. In this process, HSSL endows the base model with new characteristics in a representation learning way without structural changes. To comprehensively understand the HSSL, we conduct experiments on various heterogeneous pairs containing a base model and an auxiliary head. We discover that the representation quality of the base model moves up as their architecture discrepancy grows. This observation motivates us to propose a search strategy that quickly determines the most suitable auxiliary head for a specific base model to learn and several simple but effective methods to enlarge the model discrepancy. The HSSL is compatible with various self-supervised methods, achieving superior performances on various downstream tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. Our source code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Can Cui, Yunsheng Ma, Juanwu Lu, Ziran Wang
Abstract:
Sensor fusion is a crucial augmentation technique for improving the accuracy and reliability of perception systems for automated vehicles under diverse driving conditions. However, adverse weather and low-light conditions remain challenging, where sensor performance degrades significantly, exposing vehicle safety to potential risks. Advanced sensors such as LiDARs can help mitigate the issue but with extremely high marginal costs. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based 3D object detection model "REDFormer" to tackle low visibility conditions, exploiting the power of a more practical and cost-effective solution by leveraging bird's-eye-view camera-radar fusion. Using the nuScenes dataset with multi-radar point clouds, weather information, and time-of-day data, our model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on classification and detection accuracy. Finally, we provide extensive ablation studies of each model component on their contributions to address the above-mentioned challenges. Particularly, it is shown in the experiments that our model achieves a significant performance improvement over the baseline model in low-visibility scenarios, specifically exhibiting a 31.31% increase in rainy scenes and a 46.99% enhancement in nighttime scenes.The source code of this study is publicly available.
Authors:Shengcao Cao, Dhiraj Joshi, Liang-Yan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang
Abstract:
Object detectors often suffer from the domain gap between training (source domain) and real-world applications (target domain). Mean-teacher self-training is a powerful paradigm in unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection, but it struggles with low-quality pseudo-labels. In this work, we identify the intriguing alignment and synergy between mean-teacher self-training and contrastive learning. Motivated by this, we propose Contrastive Mean Teacher (CMT) -- a unified, general-purpose framework with the two paradigms naturally integrated to maximize beneficial learning signals. Instead of using pseudo-labels solely for final predictions, our strategy extracts object-level features using pseudo-labels and optimizes them via contrastive learning, without requiring labels in the target domain. When combined with recent mean-teacher self-training methods, CMT leads to new state-of-the-art target-domain performance: 51.9% mAP on Foggy Cityscapes, outperforming the previously best by 2.1% mAP. Notably, CMT can stabilize performance and provide more significant gains as pseudo-label noise increases.
Authors:Sanbao Su, Songyang Han, Yiming Li, Zhili Zhang, Chen Feng, Caiwen Ding, Fei Miao
Abstract:
Object detection and multiple object tracking (MOT) are essential components of self-driving systems. Accurate detection and uncertainty quantification are both critical for onboard modules, such as perception, prediction, and planning, to improve the safety and robustness of autonomous vehicles. Collaborative object detection (COD) has been proposed to improve detection accuracy and reduce uncertainty by leveraging the viewpoints of multiple agents. However, little attention has been paid to how to leverage the uncertainty quantification from COD to enhance MOT performance. In this paper, as the first attempt to address this challenge, we design an uncertainty propagation framework called MOT-CUP. Our framework first quantifies the uncertainty of COD through direct modeling and conformal prediction, and propagates this uncertainty information into the motion prediction and association steps. MOT-CUP is designed to work with different collaborative object detectors and baseline MOT algorithms. We evaluate MOT-CUP on V2X-Sim, a comprehensive collaborative perception dataset, and demonstrate a 2% improvement in accuracy and a 2.67X reduction in uncertainty compared to the baselines, e.g. SORT and ByteTrack. In scenarios characterized by high occlusion levels, our MOT-CUP demonstrates a noteworthy $4.01\%$ improvement in accuracy. MOT-CUP demonstrates the importance of uncertainty quantification in both COD and MOT, and provides the first attempt to improve the accuracy and reduce the uncertainty in MOT based on COD through uncertainty propagation. Our code is public on https://coperception.github.io/MOT-CUP/.
Authors:Yiming Li, Qi Fang, Jiamu Bai, Siheng Chen, Felix Juefei-Xu, Chen Feng
Abstract:
Multiple robots could perceive a scene (e.g., detect objects) collaboratively better than individuals, although easily suffer from adversarial attacks when using deep learning. This could be addressed by the adversarial defense, but its training requires the often-unknown attacking mechanism. Differently, we propose ROBOSAC, a novel sampling-based defense strategy generalizable to unseen attackers. Our key idea is that collaborative perception should lead to consensus rather than dissensus in results compared to individual perception. This leads to our hypothesize-and-verify framework: perception results with and without collaboration from a random subset of teammates are compared until reaching a consensus. In such a framework, more teammates in the sampled subset often entail better perception performance but require longer sampling time to reject potential attackers. Thus, we derive how many sampling trials are needed to ensure the desired size of an attacker-free subset, or equivalently, the maximum size of such a subset that we can successfully sample within a given number of trials. We validate our method on the task of collaborative 3D object detection in autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors:Zhirui Sun, Weinan Chen, Jiankun Wang, Max Q. -H. Meng
Abstract:
This article addresses the localization problem in robotic autonomous luggage trolley collection at airports and provides a systematic evaluation of different methods to solve it. The robotic autonomous luggage trolley collection is a complex system that involves object detection, localization, motion planning and control, manipulation, etc. Among these components, effective localization is essential for the robot to employ subsequent motion planning and end-effector manipulation because it can provide a correct goal position. In this article, we survey four popular and representative localization methods to achieve object localization in the luggage collection process, including radio frequency identification (RFID), Keypoints, ultrawideband (UWB), and Reflectors. To test their performance, we construct a qualitative evaluation framework with Localization Accuracy, Mobile Power Supplies, Coverage Area, Cost, and Scalability. Besides, we conduct a series of quantitative experiments regarding Localization Accuracy and Success Rate on a real-world robotic autonomous luggage trolley collection system. We further analyze the performance of different localization methods based on experiment results, revealing that the Keypoints method is most suitable for indoor environments to achieve the luggage trolley collection.
Authors:Tianyue Zheng, Ang Li, Zhe Chen, Hongbo Wang, Jun Luo
Abstract:
Object detection with on-board sensors (e.g., lidar, radar, and camera) play a crucial role in autonomous driving (AD), and these sensors complement each other in modalities. While crowdsensing may potentially exploit these sensors (of huge quantity) to derive more comprehensive knowledge, \textit{federated learning} (FL) appears to be the necessary tool to reach this potential: it enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to train machine learning models without explicitly sharing raw sensory data. However, the multimodal sensors introduce various data heterogeneity across distributed AVs (e.g., label quantity skews and varied modalities), posing critical challenges to effective FL. To this end, we present AutoFed as a heterogeneity-aware FL framework to fully exploit multimodal sensory data on AVs and thus enable robust AD. Specifically, we first propose a novel model leveraging pseudo-labeling to avoid mistakenly treating unlabeled objects as the background. We also propose an autoencoder-based data imputation method to fill missing data modality (of certain AVs) with the available ones. To further reconcile the heterogeneity, we finally present a client selection mechanism exploiting the similarities among client models to improve both training stability and convergence rate. Our experiments on benchmark dataset confirm that AutoFed substantially improves over status quo approaches in both precision and recall, while demonstrating strong robustness to adverse weather conditions.
Authors:Jiayu Jiao, Yu-Ming Tang, Kun-Yu Lin, Yipeng Gao, Jinhua Ma, Yaowei Wang, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract:
As a de facto solution, the vanilla Vision Transformers (ViTs) are encouraged to model long-range dependencies between arbitrary image patches while the global attended receptive field leads to quadratic computational cost. Another branch of Vision Transformers exploits local attention inspired by CNNs, which only models the interactions between patches in small neighborhoods. Although such a solution reduces the computational cost, it naturally suffers from small attended receptive fields, which may limit the performance. In this work, we explore effective Vision Transformers to pursue a preferable trade-off between the computational complexity and size of the attended receptive field. By analyzing the patch interaction of global attention in ViTs, we observe two key properties in the shallow layers, namely locality and sparsity, indicating the redundancy of global dependency modeling in shallow layers of ViTs. Accordingly, we propose Multi-Scale Dilated Attention (MSDA) to model local and sparse patch interaction within the sliding window. With a pyramid architecture, we construct a Multi-Scale Dilated Transformer (DilateFormer) by stacking MSDA blocks at low-level stages and global multi-head self-attention blocks at high-level stages. Our experiment results show that our DilateFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on various vision tasks. On ImageNet-1K classification task, DilateFormer achieves comparable performance with 70% fewer FLOPs compared with existing state-of-the-art models. Our DilateFormer-Base achieves 85.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification task, 53.5% box mAP/46.1% mask mAP on COCO object detection/instance segmentation task and 51.1% MS mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation task.
Authors:Aotian Wu, Pan He, Xiao Li, Ke Chen, Sanjay Ranka, Anand Rangarajan
Abstract:
Most existing perception systems rely on sensory data acquired from cameras, which perform poorly in low light and adverse weather conditions. To resolve this limitation, we have witnessed advanced LiDAR sensors become popular in perception tasks in autonomous driving applications. Nevertheless, their usage in traffic monitoring systems is less ubiquitous. We identify two significant obstacles in cost-effectively and efficiently developing such a LiDAR-based traffic monitoring system: (i) public LiDAR datasets are insufficient for supporting perception tasks in infrastructure systems, and (ii) 3D annotations on LiDAR point clouds are time-consuming and expensive. To fill this gap, we present an efficient semi-automated annotation tool that automatically annotates LiDAR sequences with tracking algorithms while offering a fully annotated infrastructure LiDAR dataset -- FLORIDA (Florida LiDAR-based Object Recognition and Intelligent Data Annotation) -- which will be made publicly available. Our advanced annotation tool seamlessly integrates multi-object tracking (MOT), single-object tracking (SOT), and suitable trajectory post-processing techniques. Specifically, we introduce a human-in-the-loop schema in which annotators recursively fix and refine annotations imperfectly predicted by our tool and incrementally add them to the training dataset to obtain better SOT and MOT models. By repeating the process, we significantly increase the overall annotation speed by three to four times and obtain better qualitative annotations than a state-of-the-art annotation tool. The human annotation experiments verify the effectiveness of our annotation tool. In addition, we provide detailed statistics and object detection evaluation results for our dataset in serving as a benchmark for perception tasks at traffic intersections.
Authors:Sanbao Su, Yiming Li, Sihong He, Songyang Han, Chen Feng, Caiwen Ding, Fei Miao
Abstract:
Sharing information between connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) fundamentally improves the performance of collaborative object detection for self-driving. However, CAVs still have uncertainties on object detection due to practical challenges, which will affect the later modules in self-driving such as planning and control. Hence, uncertainty quantification is crucial for safety-critical systems such as CAVs. Our work is the first to estimate the uncertainty of collaborative object detection. We propose a novel uncertainty quantification method, called Double-M Quantification, which tailors a moving block bootstrap (MBB) algorithm with direct modeling of the multivariant Gaussian distribution of each corner of the bounding box. Our method captures both the epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty with one inference pass based on the offline Double-M training process. And it can be used with different collaborative object detectors. Through experiments on the comprehensive collaborative perception dataset, we show that our Double-M method achieves more than 4X improvement on uncertainty score and more than 3% accuracy improvement, compared with the state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification methods. Our code is public on https://coperception.github.io/double-m-quantification.
Authors:Ji Lin, Wei-Ming Chen, Han Cai, Chuang Gan, Song Han
Abstract:
Tiny deep learning on microcontroller units (MCUs) is challenging due to the limited memory size. We find that the memory bottleneck is due to the imbalanced memory distribution in convolutional neural network (CNN) designs: the first several blocks have an order of magnitude larger memory usage than the rest of the network. To alleviate this issue, we propose a generic patch-by-patch inference scheduling, which operates only on a small spatial region of the feature map and significantly cuts down the peak memory. However, naive implementation brings overlapping patches and computation overhead. We further propose network redistribution to shift the receptive field and FLOPs to the later stage and reduce the computation overhead. Manually redistributing the receptive field is difficult. We automate the process with neural architecture search to jointly optimize the neural architecture and inference scheduling, leading to MCUNetV2. Patch-based inference effectively reduces the peak memory usage of existing networks by 4-8x. Co-designed with neural networks, MCUNetV2 sets a record ImageNet accuracy on MCU (71.8%), and achieves >90% accuracy on the visual wake words dataset under only 32kB SRAM. MCUNetV2 also unblocks object detection on tiny devices, achieving 16.9% higher mAP on Pascal VOC compared to the state-of-the-art result. Our study largely addressed the memory bottleneck in tinyML and paved the way for various vision applications beyond image classification.
Authors:Xuanchi Ren, Yifan Lu, Tianshi Cao, Ruiyuan Gao, Shengyu Huang, Amirmojtaba Sabour, Tianchang Shen, Tobias Pfaff, Jay Zhangjie Wu, Runjian Chen, Seung Wook Kim, Jun Gao, Laura Leal-Taixe, Mike Chen, Sanja Fidler, Huan Ling
Abstract:
Collecting and annotating real-world data for safety-critical physical AI systems, such as Autonomous Vehicle (AV), is time-consuming and costly. It is especially challenging to capture rare edge cases, which play a critical role in training and testing of an AV system. To address this challenge, we introduce the Cosmos-Drive-Dreams - a synthetic data generation (SDG) pipeline that aims to generate challenging scenarios to facilitate downstream tasks such as perception and driving policy training. Powering this pipeline is Cosmos-Drive, a suite of models specialized from NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation model for the driving domain and are capable of controllable, high-fidelity, multi-view, and spatiotemporally consistent driving video generation. We showcase the utility of these models by applying Cosmos-Drive-Dreams to scale the quantity and diversity of driving datasets with high-fidelity and challenging scenarios. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our generated data helps in mitigating long-tail distribution problems and enhances generalization in downstream tasks such as 3D lane detection, 3D object detection and driving policy learning. We open source our pipeline toolkit, dataset and model weights through the NVIDIA's Cosmos platform.
Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/cosmos_drive_dreams
Authors:Yuan Luo, Rudolf Hoffmann, Yan Xia, Olaf Wysocki, Benedikt Schwab, Thomas H. Kolbe, Daniel Cremers
Abstract:
Semantic 3D city models are worldwide easy-accessible, providing accurate, object-oriented, and semantic-rich 3D priors. To date, their potential to mitigate the noise impact on radar object detection remains under-explored. In this paper, we first introduce a unique dataset, RadarCity, comprising 54K synchronized radar-image pairs and semantic 3D city models. Moreover, we propose a novel neural network, RADLER, leveraging the effectiveness of contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) and semantic 3D city models to enhance radar object detection of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. Specifically, we first obtain the robust radar features via a SSL network in the radar-image pretext task. We then use a simple yet effective feature fusion strategy to incorporate semantic-depth features from semantic 3D city models. Having prior 3D information as guidance, RADLER obtains more fine-grained details to enhance radar object detection. We extensively evaluate RADLER on the collected RadarCity dataset and demonstrate average improvements of 5.46% in mean avarage precision (mAP) and 3.51% in mean avarage recall (mAR) over previous radar object detection methods. We believe this work will foster further research on semantic-guided and map-supported radar object detection. Our project page is publicly available athttps://gpp-communication.github.io/RADLER .
Authors:Johannes Meier, Louis Inchingolo, Oussema Dhaouadi, Yan Xia, Jacques Kaiser, Daniel Cremers
Abstract:
We tackle the problem of monocular 3D object detection across different sensors, environments, and camera setups. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised domain adaptation approach, MonoCT, that generates highly accurate pseudo labels for self-supervision. Inspired by our observation that accurate depth estimation is critical to mitigating domain shifts, MonoCT introduces a novel Generalized Depth Enhancement (GDE) module with an ensemble concept to improve depth estimation accuracy. Moreover, we introduce a novel Pseudo Label Scoring (PLS) module by exploring inner-model consistency measurement and a Diversity Maximization (DM) strategy to further generate high-quality pseudo labels for self-training. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that MonoCT outperforms existing SOTA domain adaptation methods by large margins (~21% minimum for AP Mod.) and generalizes well to car, traffic camera and drone views.
Authors:Yunshuang Yuan, Yan Xia, Daniel Cremers, Monika Sester
Abstract:
Cooperative perception can increase the view field and decrease the occlusion of an ego vehicle, hence improving the perception performance and safety of autonomous driving. Despite the success of previous works on cooperative object detection, they mostly operate on dense Bird's Eye View (BEV) feature maps, which are computationally demanding and can hardly be extended to long-range detection problems. More efficient fully sparse frameworks are rarely explored. In this work, we design a fully sparse framework, SparseAlign, with three key features: an enhanced sparse 3D backbone, a query-based temporal context learning module, and a robust detection head specially tailored for sparse features. Extensive experimental results on both OPV2V and DairV2X datasets show that our framework, despite its sparsity, outperforms the state of the art with less communication bandwidth requirements. In addition, experiments on the OPV2Vt and DairV2Xt datasets for time-aligned cooperative object detection also show a significant performance gain compared to the baseline works.
Authors:Xuejian Zhang, Ruisi He, Mi Yang, Zhengyu Zhang, Ziyi Qi, Bo Ai
Abstract:
The communication scenarios and channel characteristics of 6G will be more complex and difficult to characterize. Conventional methods for channel prediction face challenges in achieving an optimal balance between accuracy, practicality, and generalizability. Additionally, they often fail to effectively leverage environmental features. Within the framework of integration communication and artificial intelligence as a pivotal development vision for 6G, it is imperative to achieve intelligent prediction of channel characteristics. Vision-aided methods have been employed in various wireless communication tasks, excluding channel prediction, and have demonstrated enhanced efficiency and performance. In this paper, we propose a vision-aided two-stage model for channel prediction in millimeter wave vehicular communication scenarios, realizing accurate received power prediction utilizing solely RGB images. Firstly, we obtain original images of propagation environment through an RGB camera. Secondly, three typical computer vision methods including object detection, instance segmentation and binary mask are employed for environmental information extraction from original images in stage 1, and prediction of received power based on processed images is implemented in stage 2. Pre-trained YOLOv8 and ResNets are used in stages 1 and 2, respectively, and fine-tuned on datasets. Finally, we conduct five experiments to evaluate the performance of proposed model, demonstrating its feasibility, accuracy and generalization capabilities. The model proposed in this paper offers novel solutions for achieving intelligent channel prediction in vehicular communications.
Authors:Hyesu Jang, Wooseong Yang, Hanguen Kim, Dongje Lee, Yongjin Kim, Jinbum Park, Minsoo Jeon, Jaeseong Koh, Yejin Kang, Minwoo Jung, Sangwoo Jung, Chng Zhen Hao, Wong Yu Hin, Chew Yihang, Ayoung Kim
Abstract:
Maritime environmental sensing requires overcoming challenges from complex conditions such as harsh weather, platform perturbations, large dynamic objects, and the requirement for long detection ranges. While cameras and LiDAR are commonly used in ground vehicle navigation, their applicability in maritime settings is limited by range constraints and hardware maintenance issues. Radar sensors, however, offer robust long-range detection capabilities and resilience to physical contamination from weather and saline conditions, making it a powerful sensor for maritime navigation. Among various radar types, X-band radar is widely employed for maritime vessel navigation, providing effective long-range detection essential for situational awareness and collision avoidance. Nevertheless, it exhibits limitations during berthing operations where near-field detection is critical. To address this shortcoming, we incorporate W-band radar, which excels in detecting nearby objects with a higher update rate. We present a comprehensive maritime sensor dataset featuring multi-range detection capabilities. This dataset integrates short-range LiDAR data, medium-range W-band radar data, and long-range X-band radar data into a unified framework. Additionally, it includes object labels for oceanic object detection usage, derived from radar and stereo camera images. The dataset comprises seven sequences collected from diverse regions with varying levels of \bl{navigation algorithm} estimation difficulty, ranging from easy to challenging, and includes common locations suitable for global localization tasks. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for advancing research in place recognition, odometry estimation, SLAM, object detection, and dynamic object elimination within maritime environments. Dataset can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/rpmmoana.
Authors:Zhiyu Zhu, Zhibo Jin, Hongsheng Hu, Minhui Xue, Ruoxi Sun, Seyit Camtepe, Praveen Gauravaram, Huaming Chen
Abstract:
AI systems, in particular with deep learning techniques, have demonstrated superior performance for various real-world applications. Given the need for tailored optimization in specific scenarios, as well as the concerns related to the exploits of subsurface vulnerabilities, a more comprehensive and in-depth testing AI system becomes a pivotal topic. We have seen the emergence of testing tools in real-world applications that aim to expand testing capabilities. However, they often concentrate on ad-hoc tasks, rendering them unsuitable for simultaneously testing multiple aspects or components. Furthermore, trustworthiness issues arising from adversarial attacks and the challenge of interpreting deep learning models pose new challenges for developing more comprehensive and in-depth AI system testing tools. In this study, we design and implement a testing tool, \tool, to comprehensively and effectively evaluate AI systems. The tool extensively assesses multiple measurements towards adversarial robustness, model interpretability, and performs neuron analysis. The feasibility of the proposed testing tool is thoroughly validated across various modalities, including image classification, object detection, and text classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \tool is the state-of-the-art tool for a comprehensive assessment of the robustness and trustworthiness of AI systems. Our research sheds light on a general solution for AI systems testing landscape.
Authors:Amira Guesmi, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely heavily on LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems for accurate perception and navigation, providing high-resolution 3D environmental data that is crucial for object detection and classification. However, LiDAR systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which pose significant challenges to the safety and robustness of AVs. This survey presents a thorough review of the current research landscape on physical adversarial attacks targeting LiDAR-based perception systems, covering both single-modality and multi-modality contexts. We categorize and analyze various attack types, including spoofing and physical adversarial object attacks, detailing their methodologies, impacts, and potential real-world implications. Through detailed case studies and analyses, we identify critical challenges and highlight gaps in existing attacks for LiDAR-based systems. Additionally, we propose future research directions to enhance the security and resilience of these systems, ultimately contributing to the safer deployment of autonomous vehicles.
Authors:Huthaifa I. Ashqar, Ahmed Jaber, Taqwa I. Alhadidi, Mohammed Elhenawy
Abstract:
This study aims to comprehensively review and empirically evaluate the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and Large Vision Models (VLMs) in object detection for transportation systems. In the first fold, we provide a background about the potential benefits of MLLMs in transportation applications and conduct a comprehensive review of current MLLM technologies in previous studies. We highlight their effectiveness and limitations in object detection within various transportation scenarios. The second fold involves providing an overview of the taxonomy of end-to-end object detection in transportation applications and future directions. Building on this, we proposed empirical analysis for testing MLLMs on three real-world transportation problems that include object detection tasks namely, road safety attributes extraction, safety-critical event detection, and visual reasoning of thermal images. Our findings provide a detailed assessment of MLLM performance, uncovering both strengths and areas for improvement. Finally, we discuss practical limitations and challenges of MLLMs in enhancing object detection in transportation, thereby offering a roadmap for future research and development in this critical area.
Authors:Mu Cai, Chenxu Luo, Yong Jae Lee, Xiaodong Yang
Abstract:
3D perception in LiDAR point clouds is crucial for a self-driving vehicle to properly act in 3D environment. However, manually labeling point clouds is hard and costly. There has been a growing interest in self-supervised pre-training of 3D perception models. Following the success of contrastive learning in images, current methods mostly conduct contrastive pre-training on point clouds only. Yet an autonomous driving vehicle is typically supplied with multiple sensors including cameras and LiDAR. In this context, we systematically study single modality, cross-modality, and multi-modality for contrastive learning of point clouds, and show that cross-modality wins over other alternatives. In addition, considering the huge difference between the training sources in 2D images and 3D point clouds, it remains unclear how to design more effective contrastive units for LiDAR. We therefore propose the instance-aware and similarity-balanced contrastive units that are tailored for self-driving point clouds. Extensive experiments reveal that our approach achieves remarkable performance gains over various point cloud models across the downstream perception tasks of LiDAR based 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation on the four popular benchmarks including Waymo Open Dataset, nuScenes, SemanticKITTI and ONCE.
Authors:Kasun Weerakoon, Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy, Mohamed Elnoor, Anuj Zore, Dinesh Manocha
Abstract:
We present TOPGN, a novel method for real-time transparent obstacle detection for robot navigation in unknown environments. We use a multi-layer 2D grid map representation obtained by summing the intensities of lidar point clouds that lie in multiple non-overlapping height intervals. We isolate a neighborhood of points reflected from transparent obstacles by comparing the intensities in the different 2D grid map layers. Using the neighborhood, we linearly extrapolate the transparent obstacle by computing a tangential line segment and use it to perform safe, real-time collision avoidance. Finally, we also demonstrate our transparent object isolation's applicability to mapping an environment. We demonstrate that our approach detects transparent objects made of various materials (glass, acrylic, PVC), arbitrary shapes, colors, and textures in a variety of real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios with varying lighting conditions. We compare our method with other glass/transparent object detection methods that use RGB images, 2D laser scans, etc. in these benchmark scenarios. We demonstrate superior detection accuracy in terms of F-score improvement at least by 12.74% and 38.46% decrease in mean absolute error (MAE), improved navigation success rates (at least two times better than the second-best), and a real-time inference rate (~50Hz on a mobile CPU). We will release our code and challenging benchmarks for future evaluations upon publication.
Authors:Christian Fruhwirth-Reisinger, Wei Lin, DuÅ¡an MaliÄ, Horst Bischof, Horst Possegger
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection in LiDAR point clouds is crucial for autonomous driving systems. To achieve state-of-the-art performance, the supervised training of detectors requires large amounts of human-annotated data, which is expensive to obtain and restricted to predefined object categories. To mitigate manual labeling efforts, recent unsupervised object detection approaches generate class-agnostic pseudo-labels for moving objects, subsequently serving as supervision signal to bootstrap a detector. Despite promising results, these approaches do not provide class labels or generalize well to static objects. Furthermore, they are mostly restricted to data containing multiple drives from the same scene or images from a precisely calibrated and synchronized camera setup. To overcome these limitations, we propose a vision-language-guided unsupervised 3D detection approach that operates exclusively on LiDAR point clouds. We transfer CLIP knowledge to classify point clusters of static and moving objects, which we discover by exploiting the inherent spatio-temporal information of LiDAR point clouds for clustering, tracking, as well as box and label refinement. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D object detectors on the Waymo Open Dataset ($+23~\text{AP}_{3D}$) and Argoverse 2 ($+7.9~\text{AP}_{3D}$) and provides class labels not solely based on object size assumptions, marking a significant advancement in the field.
Authors:Xu Cao, Yifan Shen, Bolin Lai, Wenqian Ye, Yunsheng Ma, Joerg Heintz, Jintai Chen, Meihuan Huang, Jianguo Cao, Aidong Zhang, James M. Rehg
Abstract:
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown great promise in language-guided perceptual tasks such as recognition, segmentation, and object detection. However, their effectiveness in addressing visual cognition problems that require high-level multi-image reasoning and visual working memory is not well-established. One such challenge is matrix reasoning - the cognitive ability to discern relationships among patterns in a set of images and extrapolate to predict subsequent patterns. This skill is crucial during the early neurodevelopmental stages of children. Inspired by the matrix reasoning tasks in Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we propose a new dataset MaRs-VQA to evaluate the visual cognition capability of MLLMs and compare their performance with existing human visual cognition studies. Based on the training data of MaRs-VQA, we also finetune a baseline model Qwen2-VCog with multi-stage cognition reasoning annotations. Our comparative experiments with different baselines reveal a gap between MLLMs and human intelligence, highlighting the visual cognitive limitations of current MLLMs. We believe that the public release of MaRs-VQA and the Qwen2-VCog baseline model will drive progress toward the next generation of MLLMs with human-like visual cognition abilities. MaRs-VQA is available at huggingface.co/datasets/IrohXu/VCog-Bench. The training code of Qwen2-VCog is available at github.com/IrohXu/Cognition-MLLM.
Authors:Selvia Nafaa, Hafsa Essam, Karim Ashour, Doaa Emad, Rana Mohamed, Mohammed Elhenawy, Huthaifa I. Ashqar, Abdallah A. Hassan, Taqwa I. Alhadidi
Abstract:
Roadway signs detection and recognition is an essential element in the Advanced Driving Assistant Systems (ADAS). Several artificial intelligence methods have been used widely among of them YOLOv5 and YOLOv8. In this paper, we used a modified YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 to detect and classify different roadway signs under different illumination conditions. Experimental results indicated that for the YOLOv8 model, varying the number of epochs and batch size yields consistent MAP50 scores, ranging from 94.6% to 97.1% on the testing set. The YOLOv5 model demonstrates competitive performance, with MAP50 scores ranging from 92.4% to 96.9%. These results suggest that both models perform well across different training setups, with YOLOv8 generally achieving slightly higher MAP50 scores. These findings suggest that both models can perform well under different training setups, offering valuable insights for practitioners seeking reliable and adaptable solutions in object detection applications.
Authors:Chengming Xu, Chen Liu, Yikai Wang, Yuan Yao, Yanwei Fu
Abstract:
Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) is a prevailing way to transfer visual foundation models to new tasks by leveraging contextual information contained in in-context examples to enhance learning and prediction of query sample. The fundamental problem in VICL is how to select the best prompt to activate its power as much as possible, which is equivalent to the ranking problem to test the in-context behavior of each candidate in the alternative set and select the best one. To utilize more appropriate ranking metric and leverage more comprehensive information among the alternative set, we propose a novel in-context example selection framework to approximately identify the global optimal prompt, i.e. choosing the best performing in-context examples from all alternatives for each query sample. Our method, dubbed Partial2Global, adopts a transformer-based list-wise ranker to provide a more comprehensive comparison within several alternatives, and a consistency-aware ranking aggregator to generate globally consistent ranking. The effectiveness of Partial2Global is validated through experiments on foreground segmentation, single object detection and image colorization, demonstrating that Partial2Global selects consistently better in-context examples compared with other methods, and thus establish the new state-of-the-arts.
Authors:Eunho Lee, Minwoo Jung, Ayoung Kim
Abstract:
Robust 3D object detection is a core challenge for autonomous mobile systems in field robotics. To tackle this issue, many researchers have demonstrated improvements in 3D object detection performance in datasets. However, real-world urban scenarios with unstructured and dynamic situations can still lead to numerous false positives, posing a challenge for robust 3D object detection models. This paper presents a post-processing algorithm that dynamically adjusts object detection thresholds based on the distance from the ego-vehicle. 3D object detection models usually perform well in detecting nearby objects but may exhibit suboptimal performance for distant ones. While conventional perception algorithms typically employ a single threshold in post-processing, the proposed algorithm addresses this issue by employing adaptive thresholds based on the distance from the ego-vehicle, minimizing false negatives and reducing false positives in urban scenarios. The results show performance enhancements in 3D object detection models across a range of scenarios, not only in dynamic urban road conditions but also in scenarios involving adverse weather conditions.
Authors:Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Caleb Robinson, Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Akram Zaytar, Rahul Dodhia, Tsering Wangyal Shawa, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Emmanuel H. Kreike
Abstract:
This study explores object detection in historical aerial photographs of Namibia to identify long-term environmental changes. Specifically, we aim to identify key objects -- Waterholes, Omuti homesteads, and Big trees -- around Oshikango in Namibia using sub-meter gray-scale aerial imagery from 1943 and 1972. In this work, we propose a workflow for analyzing historical aerial imagery using a deep semantic segmentation model on sparse hand-labels. To this end, we employ a number of strategies including class-weighting, pseudo-labeling and empirical p-value-based filtering to balance skewed and sparse representations of objects in the ground truth data. Results demonstrate the benefits of these different training strategies resulting in an average $F_1=0.661$ and $F_1=0.755$ over the three objects of interest for the 1943 and 1972 imagery, respectively. We also identified that the average size of Waterhole and Big trees increased while the average size of Omuti homesteads decreased between 1943 and 1972 reflecting some of the local effects of the massive post-Second World War economic, agricultural, demographic, and environmental changes. This work also highlights the untapped potential of historical aerial photographs in understanding long-term environmental changes beyond Namibia (and Africa). With the lack of adequate satellite technology in the past, archival aerial photography offers a great alternative to uncover decades-long environmental changes.
Authors:Akram Zaytar, Caleb Robinson, Gilles Q. Hacheme, Girmaw A. Tadesse, Rahul Dodhia, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Lacey F. Hughey, Jared A. Stabach, Irene Amoke
Abstract:
Rare object detection is a fundamental task in applied geospatial machine learning, however is often challenging due to large amounts of high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery and few or no labeled positive samples to start with. This paper addresses the problem of bootstrapping such a rare object detection task assuming there is no labeled data and no spatial prior over the area of interest. We propose novel offline and online cluster-based approaches for sampling patches that are significantly more efficient, in terms of exposing positive samples to a human annotator, than random sampling. We apply our methods for identifying bomas, or small enclosures for herd animals, in the Serengeti Mara region of Kenya and Tanzania. We demonstrate a significant enhancement in detection efficiency, achieving a positive sampling rate increase from 2% (random) to 30%. This advancement enables effective machine learning mapping even with minimal labeling budgets, exemplified by an F1 score on the boma detection task of 0.51 with a budget of 300 total patches.
Authors:Yiming Shan, Yan Xia, Yuhong Chen, Daniel Cremers
Abstract:
3D object detection using LiDAR point clouds is a fundamental task in the fields of computer vision, robotics, and autonomous driving. However, existing 3D detectors heavily rely on annotated datasets, which are both time-consuming and prone to errors during the process of labeling 3D bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a Scene Completion Pre-training (SCP) method to enhance the performance of 3D object detectors with less labeled data. SCP offers three key advantages: (1) Improved initialization of the point cloud model. By completing the scene point clouds, SCP effectively captures the spatial and semantic relationships among objects within urban environments. (2) Elimination of the need for additional datasets. SCP serves as a valuable auxiliary network that does not impose any additional efforts or data requirements on the 3D detectors. (3) Reduction of the amount of labeled data for detection. With the help of SCP, the existing state-of-the-art 3D detectors can achieve comparable performance while only relying on 20% labeled data.
Authors:Jianan Liu, Qiuchi Zhao, Weiyi Xiong, Tao Huang, Qing-Long Han, Bing Zhu
Abstract:
The 4D Millimeter wave (mmWave) radar is a promising technology for vehicle sensing due to its cost-effectiveness and operability in adverse weather conditions. However, the adoption of this technology has been hindered by sparsity and noise issues in radar point cloud data. This paper introduces spatial multi-representation fusion (SMURF), a novel approach to 3D object detection using a single 4D imaging radar. SMURF leverages multiple representations of radar detection points, including pillarization and density features of a multi-dimensional Gaussian mixture distribution through kernel density estimation (KDE). KDE effectively mitigates measurement inaccuracy caused by limited angular resolution and multi-path propagation of radar signals. Additionally, KDE helps alleviate point cloud sparsity by capturing density features. Experimental evaluations on View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of SMURF, outperforming recently proposed 4D imaging radar-based single-representation models. Moreover, while using 4D imaging radar only, SMURF still achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art 4D imaging radar and camera fusion-based method, with an increase of 1.22% in the mean average precision on bird's-eye view of TJ4DRadSet dataset and 1.32% in the 3D mean average precision on the entire annotated area of VoD dataset. Our proposed method demonstrates impressive inference time and addresses the challenges of real-time detection, with the inference time no more than 0.05 seconds for most scans on both datasets. This research highlights the benefits of 4D mmWave radar and is a strong benchmark for subsequent works regarding 3D object detection with 4D imaging radar.
Authors:Weiyi Xiong, Jianan Liu, Tao Huang, Qing-Long Han, Yuxuan Xia, Bing Zhu
Abstract:
As an emerging technology and a relatively affordable device, the 4D imaging radar has already been confirmed effective in performing 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Nevertheless, the sparsity and noisiness of 4D radar point clouds hinder further performance improvement, and in-depth studies about its fusion with other modalities are lacking. On the other hand, as a new image view transformation strategy, "sampling" has been applied in a few image-based detectors and shown to outperform the widely applied "depth-based splatting" proposed in Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS), even without image depth prediction. However, the potential of "sampling" is not fully unleashed. This paper investigates the "sampling" view transformation strategy on the camera and 4D imaging radar fusion-based 3D object detection. LiDAR Excluded Lean (LXL) model, predicted image depth distribution maps and radar 3D occupancy grids are generated from image perspective view (PV) features and radar bird's eye view (BEV) features, respectively. They are sent to the core of LXL, called "radar occupancy-assisted depth-based sampling", to aid image view transformation. We demonstrated that more accurate view transformation can be performed by introducing image depths and radar information to enhance the "sampling" strategy. Experiments on VoD and TJ4DRadSet datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art 3D object detection methods by a significant margin without bells and whistles. Ablation studies demonstrate that our method performs the best among different enhancement settings.
Authors:Stefan Leitner, M. Jehanzeb Mirza, Wei Lin, Jakub Micorek, Marc Masana, Mateusz Kozinski, Horst Possegger, Horst Bischof
Abstract:
In autonomous driving scenarios, current object detection models show strong performance when tested in clear weather. However, their performance deteriorates significantly when tested in degrading weather conditions. In addition, even when adapted to perform robustly in a sequence of different weather conditions, they are often unable to perform well in all of them and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. To efficiently mitigate forgetting, we propose Domain-Incremental Learning through Activation Matching (DILAM), which employs unsupervised feature alignment to adapt only the affine parameters of a clear weather pre-trained network to different weather conditions. We propose to store these affine parameters as a memory bank for each weather condition and plug-in their weather-specific parameters during driving (i.e. test time) when the respective weather conditions are encountered. Our memory bank is extremely lightweight, since affine parameters account for less than 2% of a typical object detector. Furthermore, contrary to previous domain-incremental learning approaches, we do not require the weather label when testing and propose to automatically infer the weather condition by a majority voting linear classifier.
Authors:Tingxiang Fan, Bowen Shen, Yinqiang Zhang, Chuye Zhang, Lei Yang, Hua Chen, Wei Zhang, Jia Pan
Abstract:
Despite the increasing prevalence of robots in daily life, their navigation capabilities are still limited to environments with prior knowledge, such as a global map. To fully unlock the potential of robots, it is crucial to enable them to navigate in large-scale unknown and changing unstructured scenarios. This requires the robot to construct an accurate static map in real-time as it explores, while filtering out moving objects to ensure mapping accuracy and, if possible, achieving high-quality pedestrian tracking and collision avoidance. While existing methods can achieve individual goals of spatial mapping or dynamic object detection and tracking, there has been limited research on effectively integrating these two tasks, which are actually coupled and reciprocal. In this work, we propose a solution called S$^2$MAT (Simultaneous and Self-Reinforced Mapping and Tracking) that integrates a front-end dynamic object detection and tracking module with a back-end static mapping module. S$^2$MAT leverages the close and reciprocal interplay between these two modules to efficiently and effectively solve the open problem of simultaneous tracking and mapping in highly dynamic scenarios. We conducted extensive experiments using widely-used datasets and simulations, providing both qualitative and quantitative results to demonstrate S$^2$MAT's state-of-the-art performance in dynamic object detection, tracking, and high-quality static structure mapping. Additionally, we performed long-range robotic navigation in real-world urban scenarios spanning over 7 km, which included challenging obstacles like pedestrians and other traffic agents. The successful navigation provides a comprehensive test of S$^2$MAT's robustness, scalability, efficiency, quality, and its ability to benefit autonomous robots in wild scenarios without pre-built maps.
Authors:Matti Henning, Michael Buchholz, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
The safety of automated vehicles (AVs) relies on the representation of their environment. Consequently, state-of-the-art AVs employ potent sensor systems to achieve the best possible environment representation at all times. Although these high-performing systems achieve impressive results, they induce significant requirements for the processing capabilities of an AV's computational hardware components and their energy consumption.
To enable a dynamic adaptation of such perception systems based on the situational perception requirements, we introduce a model-agnostic method for the scalable employment of single-frame object detection models using frame-dropping in tracking-by-detection systems. We evaluate our approach on the KITTI 3D Tracking Benchmark, showing that significant energy savings can be achieved at acceptable performance degradation, reaching up to 28% reduction of energy consumption at a performance decline of 6.6% in HOTA score.
Authors:Xuanyao Chen, Zhijian Liu, Haotian Tang, Li Yi, Hang Zhao, Song Han
Abstract:
High-resolution images enable neural networks to learn richer visual representations. However, this improved performance comes at the cost of growing computational complexity, hindering their usage in latency-sensitive applications. As not all pixels are equal, skipping computations for less-important regions offers a simple and effective measure to reduce the computation. This, however, is hard to be translated into actual speedup for CNNs since it breaks the regularity of the dense convolution workload. In this paper, we introduce SparseViT that revisits activation sparsity for recent window-based vision transformers (ViTs). As window attentions are naturally batched over blocks, actual speedup with window activation pruning becomes possible: i.e., ~50% latency reduction with 60% sparsity. Different layers should be assigned with different pruning ratios due to their diverse sensitivities and computational costs. We introduce sparsity-aware adaptation and apply the evolutionary search to efficiently find the optimal layerwise sparsity configuration within the vast search space. SparseViT achieves speedups of 1.5x, 1.4x, and 1.3x compared to its dense counterpart in monocular 3D object detection, 2D instance segmentation, and 2D semantic segmentation, respectively, with negligible to no loss of accuracy.
Authors:Amira Guesmi, Ioan Marius Bilasco, Muhammad Shafique, Ihsen Alouani
Abstract:
Physical adversarial attacks pose a significant practical threat as it deceives deep learning systems operating in the real world by producing prominent and maliciously designed physical perturbations. Emphasizing the evaluation of naturalness is crucial in such attacks, as humans can readily detect and eliminate unnatural manipulations. To overcome this limitation, recent work has proposed leveraging generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate naturalistic patches, which may not catch human's attention. However, these approaches suffer from a limited latent space which leads to an inevitable trade-off between naturalness and attack efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate naturalistic and inconspicuous adversarial patches. Specifically, we redefine the optimization problem by introducing an additional loss term to the cost function. This term works as a semantic constraint to ensure that the generated camouflage pattern holds semantic meaning rather than arbitrary patterns. The additional term leverages similarity metrics to construct a similarity loss that we optimize within the global objective function. Our technique is based on directly manipulating the pixel values in the patch, which gives higher flexibility and larger space compared to the GAN-based techniques that are based on indirectly optimizing the patch by modifying the latent vector. Our attack achieves superior success rate of up to 91.19\% and 72\%, respectively, in the digital world and when deployed in smart cameras at the edge compared to the GAN-based technique.
Authors:Ji Hou, Xiaoliang Dai, Zijian He, Angela Dai, Matthias NieÃner
Abstract:
Current popular backbones in computer vision, such as Vision Transformers (ViT) and ResNets are trained to perceive the world from 2D images. However, to more effectively understand 3D structural priors in 2D backbones, we propose Mask3D to leverage existing large-scale RGB-D data in a self-supervised pre-training to embed these 3D priors into 2D learned feature representations. In contrast to traditional 3D contrastive learning paradigms requiring 3D reconstructions or multi-view correspondences, our approach is simple: we formulate a pre-text reconstruction task by masking RGB and depth patches in individual RGB-D frames. We demonstrate the Mask3D is particularly effective in embedding 3D priors into the powerful 2D ViT backbone, enabling improved representation learning for various scene understanding tasks, such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and object detection. Experiments show that Mask3D notably outperforms existing self-supervised 3D pre-training approaches on ScanNet, NYUv2, and Cityscapes image understanding tasks, with an improvement of +6.5% mIoU against the state-of-the-art Pri3D on ScanNet image semantic segmentation.
Authors:Georg Krispel, David Schinagl, Christian Fruhwirth-Reisinger, Horst Possegger, Horst Bischof
Abstract:
The sensing process of large-scale LiDAR point clouds inevitably causes large blind spots, i.e. regions not visible to the sensor. We demonstrate how these inherent sampling properties can be effectively utilized for self-supervised representation learning by designing a highly effective pre-training framework that considerably reduces the need for tedious 3D annotations to train state-of-the-art object detectors. Our Masked AutoEncoder for LiDAR point clouds (MAELi) intuitively leverages the sparsity of LiDAR point clouds in both the encoder and decoder during reconstruction. This results in more expressive and useful initialization, which can be directly applied to downstream perception tasks, such as 3D object detection or semantic segmentation for autonomous driving. In a novel reconstruction approach, MAELi distinguishes between empty and occluded space and employs a new masking strategy that targets the LiDAR's inherent spherical projection. Thereby, without any ground truth whatsoever and trained on single frames only, MAELi obtains an understanding of the underlying 3D scene geometry and semantics. To demonstrate the potential of MAELi, we pre-train backbones in an end-to-end manner and show the effectiveness of our unsupervised pre-trained weights on the tasks of 3D object detection and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Yanlong Yang, Jianan Liu, Tao Huang, Qing-Long Han, Gang Ma, Bing Zhu
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, LiDAR and radar are crucial for environmental perception. LiDAR offers precise 3D spatial sensing information but struggles in adverse weather like fog. Conversely, radar signals can penetrate rain or mist due to their specific wavelength but are prone to noise disturbances. Recent state-of-the-art works reveal that the fusion of radar and LiDAR can lead to robust detection in adverse weather. The existing works adopt convolutional neural network architecture to extract features from each sensor data, then align and aggregate the two branch features to predict object detection results. However, these methods have low accuracy of predicted bounding boxes due to a simple design of label assignment and fusion strategies. In this paper, we propose a bird's-eye view fusion learning-based anchor box-free object detection system, which fuses the feature derived from the radar range-azimuth heatmap and the LiDAR point cloud to estimate possible objects. Different label assignment strategies have been designed to facilitate the consistency between the classification of foreground or background anchor points and the corresponding bounding box regressions. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed object detector is further enhanced by employing a novel interactive transformer module. The superior performance of the methods proposed in this paper has been demonstrated using the recently published Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset. Our system's average precision significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 13.1% and 19.0% at Intersection of Union (IoU) of 0.8 under 'Clear+Foggy' training conditions for 'Clear' and 'Foggy' testing, respectively.
Authors:Tao Pu, Mingzhan Sun, Hefeng Wu, Tianshui Chen, Ling Tian, Liang Lin
Abstract:
Recently many multi-label image recognition (MLR) works have made significant progress by introducing pre-trained object detection models to generate lots of proposals or utilizing statistical label co-occurrence enhance the correlation among different categories. However, these works have some limitations: (1) the effectiveness of the network significantly depends on pre-trained object detection models that bring expensive and unaffordable computation; (2) the network performance degrades when there exist occasional co-occurrence objects in images, especially for the rare categories. To address these problems, we propose a novel and effective semantic representation and dependency learning (SRDL) framework to learn category-specific semantic representation for each category and capture semantic dependency among all categories. Specifically, we design a category-specific attentional regions (CAR) module to generate channel/spatial-wise attention matrices to guide model to focus on semantic-aware regions. We also design an object erasing (OE) module to implicitly learn semantic dependency among categories by erasing semantic-aware regions to regularize the network training. Extensive experiments and comparisons on two popular MLR benchmark datasets (i.e., MS-COCO and Pascal VOC 2007) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over current state-of-the-art algorithms.
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Weicheng Zheng, Yongtao Wang
Abstract:
Detecting objects efficiently from radar sensors has recently become a popular trend due to their robustness against adverse lighting and weather conditions compared with cameras. This paper presents an efficient object detection model for Range-Doppler (RD) radar maps. Specifically, we first represent RD radar maps with multi-representation, i.e., heatmaps and grayscale images, to gather high-level object and fine-grained texture features. Then, we design an additional Adapter branch, an Exchanger Module with two modes, and a Primary-Auxiliary Fusion Module to effectively extract, exchange, and fuse features from the multi-representation inputs, respectively. Furthermore, we construct a supernet with various width and fusion operations in the Adapter branch for the proposed model and employ a One-Shot Neural Architecture Search method to further improve the model's efficiency while maintaining high performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our model obtains favorable accuracy and efficiency trade-off. Moreover, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on RADDet and CARRADA datasets with mAP@50 of 71.9 and 57.1, respectively.
Authors:Xinyi Yu, Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang
Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection faces significant challenges from speckle noise, small target ambiguities, and on-board computational constraints. While existing approaches predominantly focus on SAR-specific architectural modifications, this paper explores the application of the existing lightweight object detector, i.e., YOLOv10, for SAR object detection and enhances its performance through Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Specifically, we employ NAS to systematically optimize the network structure, especially focusing on the backbone architecture search. By constructing an extensive search space and leveraging evolutionary search, our method identifies a favorable architecture that balances accuracy, parameter efficiency, and computational cost. Notably, this work introduces NAS to SAR object detection for the first time. The experimental results on the large-scale SARDet-100K dataset demonstrate that our optimized model outperforms existing SAR detection methods, achieving superior detection accuracy while maintaining lower computational overhead. We hope this work offers a novel perspective on leveraging NAS for real-world applications.
Authors:Xinhao Wang, Zhiwei Lin, Zhongyu Xia, Yongtao Wang
Abstract:
Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) and Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) represent two mainstream model quantization approaches. However, PTQ often leads to unacceptable performance degradation in quantized models, while QAT imposes substantial GPU memory requirements and extended training time due to weight fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose PTQAT, a novel general hybrid quantization algorithm for the efficient deployment of 3D perception networks. To address the speed accuracy trade-off between PTQ and QAT, our method selects critical layers for QAT fine-tuning and performs PTQ on the remaining layers. Contrary to intuition, fine-tuning the layers with smaller output discrepancies before and after quantization, rather than those with larger discrepancies, actually leads to greater improvements in the model's quantization accuracy. This means we better compensate for quantization errors during their propagation, rather than addressing them at the point where they occur. The proposed PTQAT achieves similar performance to QAT with more efficiency by freezing nearly 50% of quantifiable layers. Additionally, PTQAT is a universal quantization method that supports various quantization bit widths (4 bits) as well as different model architectures, including CNNs and Transformers. The experimental results on nuScenes across diverse 3D perception tasks, including object detection, semantic segmentation, and occupancy prediction, show that our method consistently outperforms QAT-only baselines. Notably, it achieves 0.2%-0.9% NDS and 0.3%-1.0% mAP gains in object detection, 0.3%-2.0% mIoU gains in semantic segmentation and occupancy prediction while fine-tuning fewer weights.
Authors:Le Xu, Qi Zhang, Qixian Zhang, Hongyun Zhang, Duoqian Miao, Cairong Zhao
Abstract:
Recent advances in brain-vision decoding have driven significant progress, reconstructing with high fidelity perceived visual stimuli from neural activity, e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in the human visual cortex. Most existing methods decode the brain signal using a two-level strategy, i.e., pixel-level and semantic-level. However, these methods rely heavily on low-level pixel alignment yet lack sufficient and fine-grained semantic alignment, resulting in obvious reconstruction distortions of multiple semantic objects. To better understand the brain's visual perception patterns and how current decoding models process semantic objects, we have developed an experimental framework that uses fMRI representations as intervention conditions. By injecting these representations into multi-scale image features via cross-attention, we compare both downstream performance and intermediate feature changes on object detection and instance segmentation tasks with and without fMRI information. Our results demonstrate that incorporating fMRI signals enhances the accuracy of downstream detection and segmentation, confirming that fMRI contains rich multi-object semantic cues and coarse spatial localization information-elements that current models have yet to fully exploit or integrate.
Authors:Yuqi Shen, Fengyang Xiao, Sujie Hu, Youwei Pang, Yifan Pu, Chengyu Fang, Xiu Li, Chunming He
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) presents inherent challenges due to the subtle visual differences between targets and their backgrounds. While existing methods have made notable progress, there remains significant potential for post-processing refinement that has yet to be fully explored. To address this limitation, we propose the Uncertainty-Masked Bernoulli Diffusion (UMBD) model, the first generative refinement framework specifically designed for COD. UMBD introduces an uncertainty-guided masking mechanism that selectively applies Bernoulli diffusion to residual regions with poor segmentation quality, enabling targeted refinement while preserving correctly segmented areas. To support this process, we design the Hybrid Uncertainty Quantification Network (HUQNet), which employs a multi-branch architecture and fuses uncertainty from multiple sources to improve estimation accuracy. This enables adaptive guidance during the generative sampling process. The proposed UMBD framework can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of existing Encoder-Decoder-based COD models, combining their discriminative capabilities with the generative advantages of diffusion-based refinement. Extensive experiments across multiple COD benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, achieving average gains of 5.5% in MAE and 3.2% in weighted F-measure with only modest computational overhead. Code will be released.
Authors:Aixuan Li, Mochu Xiang, Jing Zhang, Yuchao Dai
Abstract:
3D object detection is a critical component in autonomous driving systems. It allows real-time recognition and detection of vehicles, pedestrians and obstacles under varying environmental conditions. Among existing methods, 3D object detection in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) has emerged as the mainstream framework. To guarantee a safe, robust and trustworthy 3D object detection, 3D adversarial attacks are investigated, where attacks are placed in 3D environments to evaluate the model performance, e.g. putting a film on a car, clothing a pedestrian. The vulnerability of 3D object detection models to 3D adversarial attacks serves as an important indicator to evaluate the robustness of the model against perturbations. To investigate this vulnerability, we generate non-invasive 3D adversarial objects tailored for real-world attack scenarios. Our method verifies the existence of universal adversarial objects that are spatially consistent across time and camera views. Specifically, we employ differentiable rendering techniques to accurately model the spatial relationship between adversarial objects and the target vehicle. Furthermore, we introduce an occlusion-aware module to enhance visual consistency and realism under different viewpoints. To maintain attack effectiveness across multiple frames, we design a BEV spatial feature-guided optimization strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can reliably suppress vehicle predictions from state-of-the-art 3D object detectors, serving as an important tool to test robustness of 3D object detection models before deployment. Moreover, the generated adversarial objects exhibit strong generalization capabilities, retaining its effectiveness at various positions and distances in the scene.
Authors:Wenhua Wu, Chenpeng Su, Siting Zhu, Tianchen Deng, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
Abstract:
Recent advancements in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods have demonstrated exceptional localization precision and remarkable dense mapping performance. However, dynamic objects introduce critical challenges by disrupting scene consistency, leading to tracking drift and mapping artifacts. Existing methods that employ semantic segmentation or object detection for dynamic identification and filtering typically rely on predefined categorical priors, while discarding dynamic scene information crucial for robotic applications such as dynamic obstacle avoidance and environmental interaction. To overcome these challenges, we propose ADD-SLAM: an Adaptive Dynamic Dense SLAM framework based on Gaussian splitting. We design an adaptive dynamic identification mechanism grounded in scene consistency analysis, comparing geometric and textural discrepancies between real-time observations and historical maps. Ours requires no predefined semantic category priors and adaptively discovers scene dynamics. Precise dynamic object recognition effectively mitigates interference from moving targets during localization. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic-static separation mapping strategy that constructs a temporal Gaussian model to achieve online incremental dynamic modeling. Experiments conducted on multiple dynamic datasets demonstrate our method's flexible and accurate dynamic segmentation capabilities, along with state-of-the-art performance in both localization and mapping.
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang
Abstract:
Current perception models have achieved remarkable success by leveraging large-scale labeled datasets, but still face challenges in open-world environments with novel objects. To address this limitation, researchers introduce open-set perception models to detect or segment arbitrary test-time user-input categories. However, open-set models rely on human involvement to provide predefined object categories as input during inference. More recently, researchers have framed a more realistic and challenging task known as open-ended perception that aims to discover unseen objects without requiring any category-level input from humans at inference time. Nevertheless, open-ended models suffer from low performance compared to open-set models. In this paper, we present VL-SAM-V2, an open-world object detection framework that is capable of discovering unseen objects while achieving favorable performance. To achieve this, we combine queries from open-set and open-ended models and propose a general and specific query fusion module to allow different queries to interact. By adjusting queries from open-set models, we enable VL-SAM-V2 to be evaluated in the open-set or open-ended mode. In addition, to learn more diverse queries, we introduce ranked learnable queries to match queries with proposals from open-ended models by sorting. Moreover, we design a denoising point training strategy to facilitate the training process. Experimental results on LVIS show that our method surpasses the previous open-set and open-ended methods, especially on rare objects.
Authors:Bin-Bin Gao, Xiaochen Chen, Zhongyi Huang, Congchong Nie, Jun Liu, Jinxiang Lai, Guannan Jiang, Xi Wang, Chengjie Wang
Abstract:
This paper focus on few-shot object detection~(FSOD) and instance segmentation~(FSIS), which requires a model to quickly adapt to novel classes with a few labeled instances. The existing methods severely suffer from bias classification because of the missing label issue which naturally exists in an instance-level few-shot scenario and is first formally proposed by us. Our analysis suggests that the standard classification head of most FSOD or FSIS models needs to be decoupled to mitigate the bias classification. Therefore, we propose an embarrassingly simple but effective method that decouples the standard classifier into two heads. Then, these two individual heads are capable of independently addressing clear positive samples and noisy negative samples which are caused by the missing label. In this way, the model can effectively learn novel classes while mitigating the effects of noisy negative samples. Without bells and whistles, our model without any additional computation cost and parameters consistently outperforms its baseline and state-of-the-art by a large margin on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO benchmarks for FSOD and FSIS tasks. The Code is available at https://csgaobb.github.io/Projects/DCFS.
Authors:Qi Xu, Jie Deng, Jiangrong Shen, Biwu Chen, Huajin Tang, Gang Pan
Abstract:
Event-based object detection has gained increasing attention due to its advantages such as high temporal resolution, wide dynamic range, and asynchronous address-event representation. Leveraging these advantages, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach, offering low energy consumption and rich spatiotemporal dynamics. To further enhance the performance of event-based object detection, this study proposes a novel hybrid spike vision Transformer (HsVT) model. The HsVT model integrates a spatial feature extraction module to capture local and global features, and a temporal feature extraction module to model time dependencies and long-term patterns in event sequences. This combination enables HsVT to capture spatiotemporal features, improving its capability to handle complex event-based object detection tasks. To support research in this area, we developed and publicly released The Fall Detection Dataset as a benchmark for event-based object detection tasks. This dataset, captured using an event-based camera, ensures facial privacy protection and reduces memory usage due to the event representation format. We evaluated the HsVT model on GEN1 and Fall Detection datasets across various model sizes. Experimental results demonstrate that HsVT achieves significant performance improvements in event detection with fewer parameters.
Authors:Chuxin Wang, Wenfei Yang, Xiang Liu, Tianzhu Zhang
Abstract:
DETR-based methods, which use multi-layer transformer decoders to refine object queries iteratively, have shown promising performance in 3D indoor object detection. However, the scene point features in the transformer decoder remain fixed, leading to minimal contributions from later decoder layers, thereby limiting performance improvement. Recently, State Space Models (SSM) have shown efficient context modeling ability with linear complexity through iterative interactions between system states and inputs. Inspired by SSMs, we propose a new 3D object DEtection paradigm with an interactive STate space model (DEST). In the interactive SSM, we design a novel state-dependent SSM parameterization method that enables system states to effectively serve as queries in 3D indoor detection tasks. In addition, we introduce four key designs tailored to the characteristics of point cloud and SSM: The serialization and bidirectional scanning strategies enable bidirectional feature interaction among scene points within the SSM. The inter-state attention mechanism models the relationships between state points, while the gated feed-forward network enhances inter-channel correlations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to model queries as system states and scene points as system inputs, which can simultaneously update scene point features and query features with linear complexity. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our DEST-based method. Our method improves the GroupFree baseline in terms of AP50 on ScanNet V2 (+5.3) and SUN RGB-D (+3.2) datasets. Based on the VDETR baseline, Our method sets a new SOTA on the ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D datasets.
Authors:Wentao Wu, Chenglong Li, Xiao Wang, Bin Luo, Qi Liu
Abstract:
Existing multimodal UAV object detection methods often overlook the impact of semantic gaps between modalities, which makes it difficult to achieve accurate semantic and spatial alignments, limiting detection performance. To address this problem, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM) guided Progressive feature Alignment Network called LPANet, which leverages the semantic features extracted from a large language model to guide the progressive semantic and spatial alignment between modalities for multimodal UAV object detection. To employ the powerful semantic representation of LLM, we generate the fine-grained text descriptions of each object category by ChatGPT and then extract the semantic features using the large language model MPNet. Based on the semantic features, we guide the semantic and spatial alignments in a progressive manner as follows. First, we design the Semantic Alignment Module (SAM) to pull the semantic features and multimodal visual features of each object closer, alleviating the semantic differences of objects between modalities. Second, we design the Explicit Spatial alignment Module (ESM) by integrating the semantic relations into the estimation of feature-level offsets, alleviating the coarse spatial misalignment between modalities. Finally, we design the Implicit Spatial alignment Module (ISM), which leverages the cross-modal correlations to aggregate key features from neighboring regions to achieve implicit spatial alignment. Comprehensive experiments on two public multimodal UAV object detection datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal UAV object detectors.
Authors:Tao Huang, Yanxiang Ma, Shan You, Chang Xu
Abstract:
Masked autoencoders (MAEs) represent a prominent self-supervised learning paradigm in computer vision. Despite their empirical success, the underlying mechanisms of MAEs remain insufficiently understood. Recent studies have attempted to elucidate the functioning of MAEs through contrastive learning and feature representation analysis, yet these approaches often provide only implicit insights. In this paper, we propose a new perspective for understanding MAEs by leveraging the information bottleneck principle in information theory. Our theoretical analyses reveal that optimizing the latent features to balance relevant and irrelevant information is key to improving MAE performance. Building upon our proofs, we introduce MI-MAE, a novel method that optimizes MAEs through mutual information maximization and minimization. By enhancing latent features to retain maximal relevant information between them and the output, and minimizing irrelevant information between them and the input, our approach achieves better performance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that MI-MAE significantly outperforms MAE models in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Our findings validate the theoretical framework and highlight the practical advantages of applying the information bottleneck principle to MAEs, offering deeper insights for developing more powerful self-supervised learning models.
Authors:Mohamed Lamine Mekhalfi, Davide Boscaini, Fabio Poiesi
Abstract:
Source-free domain-adaptive object detection is an interesting but scarcely addressed topic. It aims at adapting a source-pretrained detector to a distinct target domain without resorting to source data during adaptation. So far, there is no data augmentation scheme tailored to source-free domain-adaptive object detection. To this end, this paper presents a novel data augmentation approach that cuts out target image regions where the detector is confident, augments them along with their respective pseudo-labels, and joins them into a challenging target image to adapt the detector. As the source data is out of reach during adaptation, we implement our approach within a teacher-student learning paradigm to ensure that the model does not collapse during the adaptation procedure. We evaluated our approach on three adaptation benchmarks of traffic scenes, scoring new state-of-the-art on two of them.
Authors:Haitian Zhang, Xiangyuan Wang, Chang Xu, Xinya Wang, Fang Xu, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Wen Yang
Abstract:
Fusing Events and RGB images for object detection leverages the robustness of Event cameras in adverse environments and the rich semantic information provided by RGB cameras. However, two critical mismatches: low-latency Events \textit{vs.}~high-latency RGB frames; temporally sparse labels in training \textit{vs.}~continuous flow in inference, significantly hinder the high-frequency fusion-based object detection. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{F}requency-\textbf{A}daptive Low-Latency \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etector (FAOD). FAOD aligns low-frequency RGB frames with high-frequency Events through an Align Module, which reinforces cross-modal style and spatial proximity to address the Event-RGB Mismatch. We further propose a training strategy, Time Shift, which enforces the module to align the prediction from temporally shifted Event-RGB pairs and their original representation, that is, consistent with Event-aligned annotations. This strategy enables the network to use high-frequency Event data as the primary reference while treating low-frequency RGB images as supplementary information, retaining the low-latency nature of the Event stream toward high-frequency detection. Furthermore, we observe that these corrected Event-RGB pairs demonstrate better generalization from low training frequency to higher inference frequencies compared to using Event data alone. Extensive experiments on the PKU-DAVIS-SOD and DSEC-Detection datasets demonstrate that our FAOD achieves SOTA performance. Specifically, in the PKU-DAVIS-SOD Dataset, FAOD achieves 9.8 points improvement in terms of the mAP in fully paired Event-RGB data with only a quarter of the parameters compared to SODFormer, and even maintains robust performance (only a 3 points drop in mAP) under 80$\times$ Event-RGB frequency mismatch.
Authors:Xingyu Liu, Gu Wang, Chengxi Li, Yingyue Li, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ziqin Huang, Xiangyang Ji
Abstract:
We present GFreeDet, an unseen object detection approach that leverages Gaussian splatting and vision Foundation models under model-free setting. Unlike existing methods that rely on predefined CAD templates, GFreeDet reconstructs objects directly from reference videos using Gaussian splatting, enabling robust detection of novel objects without prior 3D models. Evaluated on the BOP-H3 benchmark, GFreeDet achieves comparable performance to CAD-based methods, demonstrating the viability of model-free detection for mixed reality (MR) applications. Notably, GFreeDet won the best overall method and the best fast method awards in the model-free 2D detection track at BOP Challenge 2024.
Authors:Zengyi Yang, Yafei Zhang, Huafeng Li, Yu Liu
Abstract:
The primary value of infrared and visible image fusion technology lies in applying the fusion results to downstream tasks. However, existing methods face challenges such as increased training complexity and significantly compromised performance of individual tasks when addressing multiple downstream tasks simultaneously. To tackle this, we propose Task-Oriented Adaptive Regulation (T-OAR), an adaptive mechanism specifically designed for multi-task environments. Additionally, we introduce the Task-related Dynamic Prompt Injection (T-DPI) module, which generates task-specific dynamic prompts from user-input text instructions and integrates them into target representations. This guides the feature extraction module to produce representations that are more closely aligned with the specific requirements of downstream tasks. By incorporating the T-DPI module into the T-OAR framework, our approach generates fusion images tailored to task-specific requirements without the need for separate training or task-specific weights. This not only reduces computational costs but also enhances adaptability and performance across multiple tasks. Experimental results show that our method excels in object detection, semantic segmentation, and salient object detection, demonstrating its strong adaptability, flexibility, and task specificity. This provides an efficient solution for image fusion in multi-task environments, highlighting the technology's potential across diverse applications.
Authors:Jyh-Jing Hwang, Runsheng Xu, Hubert Lin, Wei-Chih Hung, Jingwei Ji, Kristy Choi, Di Huang, Tong He, Paul Covington, Benjamin Sapp, Yin Zhou, James Guo, Dragomir Anguelov, Mingxing Tan
Abstract:
We introduce EMMA, an End-to-end Multimodal Model for Autonomous driving. Built upon a multi-modal large language model foundation like Gemini, EMMA directly maps raw camera sensor data into various driving-specific outputs, including planner trajectories, perception objects, and road graph elements. EMMA maximizes the utility of world knowledge from the pre-trained large language models, by representing all non-sensor inputs (e.g. navigation instructions and ego vehicle status) and outputs (e.g. trajectories and 3D locations) as natural language text. This approach allows EMMA to jointly process various driving tasks in a unified language space, and generate the outputs for each task using task-specific prompts. Empirically, we demonstrate EMMA's effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art performance in motion planning on nuScenes as well as competitive results on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD). EMMA also yields competitive results for camera-primary 3D object detection on the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD). We show that co-training EMMA with planner trajectories, object detection, and road graph tasks yields improvements across all three domains, highlighting EMMA's potential as a generalist model for autonomous driving applications. We hope that our results will inspire research to further evolve the state of the art in autonomous driving model architectures.
Authors:Yujin Wang, Tianyi Xu, Fan Zhang, Tianfan Xue, Jinwei Gu
Abstract:
Image Signal Processors (ISPs) convert raw sensor signals into digital images, which significantly influence the image quality and the performance of downstream computer vision tasks. Designing ISP pipeline and tuning ISP parameters are two key steps for building an imaging and vision system. To find optimal ISP configurations, recent works use deep neural networks as a proxy to search for ISP parameters or ISP pipelines. However, these methods are primarily designed to maximize the image quality, which are sub-optimal in the performance of high-level computer vision tasks such as detection, recognition, and tracking. Moreover, after training, the learned ISP pipelines are mostly fixed at the inference time, whose performance degrades in dynamic scenes. To jointly optimize ISP structures and parameters, we propose AdaptiveISP, a task-driven and scene-adaptive ISP. One key observation is that for the majority of input images, only a few processing modules are needed to improve the performance of downstream recognition tasks, and only a few inputs require more processing. Based on this, AdaptiveISP utilizes deep reinforcement learning to automatically generate an optimal ISP pipeline and the associated ISP parameters to maximize the detection performance. Experimental results show that AdaptiveISP not only surpasses the prior state-of-the-art methods for object detection but also dynamically manages the trade-off between detection performance and computational cost, especially suitable for scenes with large dynamic range variations. Project website: https://openimaginglab.github.io/AdaptiveISP/.
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Zhi Tang
Abstract:
Existing perception models achieve great success by learning from large amounts of labeled data, but they still struggle with open-world scenarios. To alleviate this issue, researchers introduce open-set perception tasks to detect or segment unseen objects in the training set. However, these models require predefined object categories as inputs during inference, which are not available in real-world scenarios. Recently, researchers pose a new and more practical problem, \textit{i.e.}, open-ended object detection, which discovers unseen objects without any object categories as inputs. In this paper, we present VL-SAM, a training-free framework that combines the generalized object recognition model (\textit{i.e.,} Vision-Language Model) with the generalized object localization model (\textit{i.e.,} Segment-Anything Model), to address the open-ended object detection and segmentation task. Without additional training, we connect these two generalized models with attention maps as the prompts. Specifically, we design an attention map generation module by employing head aggregation and a regularized attention flow to aggregate and propagate attention maps across all heads and layers in VLM, yielding high-quality attention maps. Then, we iteratively sample positive and negative points from the attention maps with a prompt generation module and send the sampled points to SAM to segment corresponding objects. Experimental results on the long-tail instance segmentation dataset (LVIS) show that our method surpasses the previous open-ended method on the object detection task and can provide additional instance segmentation masks. Besides, VL-SAM achieves favorable performance on the corner case object detection dataset (CODA), demonstrating the effectiveness of VL-SAM in real-world applications. Moreover, VL-SAM exhibits good model generalization that can incorporate various VLMs and SAMs.
Authors:Mankeerat Sidhu, Hetarth Chopra, Ansel Blume, Jeonghwan Kim, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Heng Ji
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce SearchDet, a training-free long-tail object detection framework that significantly enhances open-vocabulary object detection performance. SearchDet retrieves a set of positive and negative images of an object to ground, embeds these images, and computes an input image-weighted query which is used to detect the desired concept in the image. Our proposed method is simple and training-free, yet achieves over 48.7% mAP improvement on ODinW and 59.1% mAP improvement on LVIS compared to state-of-the-art models such as GroundingDINO. We further show that our approach of basing object detection on a set of Web-retrieved exemplars is stable with respect to variations in the exemplars, suggesting a path towards eliminating costly data annotation and training procedures.
Authors:Joakim Bruslund Haurum, Sergio Escalera, Graham W. Taylor, Thomas B. Moeslund
Abstract:
We present Agglomerative Token Clustering (ATC), a novel token merging method that consistently outperforms previous token merging and pruning methods across image classification, image synthesis, and object detection & segmentation tasks. ATC merges clusters through bottom-up hierarchical clustering, without the introduction of extra learnable parameters. We find that ATC achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, and can even perform on par with prior state-of-the-art when applied off-the-shelf, i.e. without fine-tuning. ATC is particularly effective when applied with low keep rates, where only a small fraction of tokens are kept and retaining task performance is especially difficult.
Authors:Jinlong Li, Xinyu Liu, Baolu Li, Runsheng Xu, Jiachen Li, Hongkai Yu, Zhengzhong Tu
Abstract:
Cooperative perception systems play a vital role in enhancing the safety and efficiency of vehicular autonomy. Although recent studies have highlighted the efficacy of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication techniques in autonomous driving, a significant challenge persists: how to efficiently integrate multiple high-bandwidth features across an expanding network of connected agents such as vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce CoMamba, a novel cooperative 3D detection framework designed to leverage state-space models for real-time onboard vehicle perception. Compared to prior state-of-the-art transformer-based models, CoMamba enjoys being a more scalable 3D model using bidirectional state space models, bypassing the quadratic complexity pain-point of attention mechanisms. Through extensive experimentation on V2X/V2V datasets, CoMamba achieves superior performance compared to existing methods while maintaining real-time processing capabilities. The proposed framework not only enhances object detection accuracy but also significantly reduces processing time, making it a promising solution for next-generation cooperative perception systems in intelligent transportation networks.
Authors:Zhiwei Lin, Zhe Liu, Yongtao Wang, Le Zhang, Ce Zhu
Abstract:
Perceiving the surrounding environment is a fundamental task in autonomous driving. To obtain highly accurate perception results, modern autonomous driving systems typically employ multi-modal sensors to collect comprehensive environmental data. Among these, the radar-camera multi-modal perception system is especially favored for its excellent sensing capabilities and cost-effectiveness. However, the substantial modality differences between radar and camera sensors pose challenges in fusing information. To address this problem, this paper presents RCBEVDet, a radar-camera fusion 3D object detection framework. Specifically, RCBEVDet is developed from an existing camera-based 3D object detector, supplemented by a specially designed radar feature extractor, RadarBEVNet, and a Cross-Attention Multi-layer Fusion (CAMF) module. Firstly, RadarBEVNet encodes sparse radar points into a dense bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature using a dual-stream radar backbone and a Radar Cross Section aware BEV encoder. Secondly, the CAMF module utilizes a deformable attention mechanism to align radar and camera BEV features and adopts channel and spatial fusion layers to fuse them. To further enhance RCBEVDet's capabilities, we introduce RCBEVDet++, which advances the CAMF through sparse fusion, supports query-based multi-view camera perception models, and adapts to a broader range of perception tasks. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes show that our method integrates seamlessly with existing camera-based 3D perception models and improves their performance across various perception tasks. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art radar-camera fusion results in 3D object detection, BEV semantic segmentation, and 3D multi-object tracking tasks. Notably, with ViT-L as the image backbone, RCBEVDet++ achieves 72.73 NDS and 67.34 mAP in 3D object detection without test-time augmentation or model ensembling.
Authors:Dongyang Wu, Siyang Wang, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a YOLO-based framework for layout hotspot detection, aiming to enhance the efficiency and performance of the design rule checking (DRC) process. Our approach leverages the YOLOv8 vision model to detect multiple hotspots within each layout image, even when dealing with large layout image sizes. Additionally, to enhance pattern-matching effectiveness, we introduce a novel approach to augment the layout image using information extracted through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The core of our proposed method is an algorithm that utilizes PCA to extract valuable auxiliary information from the layout image. This extracted information is then incorporated into the layout image as an additional color channel. This augmentation significantly improves the accuracy of multi-hotspot detection while reducing the false alarm rate of the object detection algorithm. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework using four datasets generated from layouts found in the ICCAD-2019 benchmark dataset. The results demonstrate that our framework achieves a precision (recall) of approximately 83% (86%) while maintaining a false alarm rate of less than 7.4\%. Also, the studies show that the proposed augmentation approach could improve the detection ability of never-seen-before (NSB) hotspots by about 10%.
Authors:Alexey Nekrasov, Rui Zhou, Miriam Ackermann, Alexander Hermans, Bastian Leibe, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Safe navigation of self-driving cars and robots requires a precise understanding of their environment. Training data for perception systems cannot cover the wide variety of objects that may appear during deployment. Thus, reliable identification of unknown objects, such as wild animals and untypical obstacles, is critical due to their potential to cause serious accidents. Significant progress in semantic segmentation of anomalies has been facilitated by the availability of out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks. However, a comprehensive understanding of scene dynamics requires the segmentation of individual objects, and thus the segmentation of instances is essential. Development in this area has been lagging, largely due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks. The situation is similar in object detection. While there is interest in detecting and potentially tracking every anomalous object, the availability of dedicated benchmarks is clearly limited. To address this gap, this work extends some commonly used anomaly segmentation benchmarks to include the instance segmentation and object detection tasks. Our evaluation of anomaly instance segmentation and object detection methods shows that both of these challenges remain unsolved problems. We provide a competition and benchmark website under https://vision.rwth-aachen.de/oodis
Authors:Lin Liu, Ziying Song, Qiming Xia, Feiyang Jia, Caiyan Jia, Lei Yang, Hongyu Pan
Abstract:
LiDAR-based sparse 3D object detection plays a crucial role in autonomous driving applications due to its computational efficiency advantages. Existing methods either use the features of a single central voxel as an object proxy, or treat an aggregated cluster of foreground points as an object proxy. However, the former lacks the ability to aggregate contextual information, resulting in insufficient information expression in object proxies. The latter relies on multi-stage pipelines and auxiliary tasks, which reduce the inference speed. To maintain the efficiency of the sparse framework while fully aggregating contextual information, in this work, we propose SparseDet which designs sparse queries as object proxies. It introduces two key modules, the Local Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (LMFA) module and the Global Feature Aggregation (GFA) module, aiming to fully capture the contextual information, thereby enhancing the ability of the proxies to represent objects. Where LMFA sub-module achieves feature fusion across different scales for sparse key voxels %which does this through via coordinate transformations and using nearest neighbor relationships to capture object-level details and local contextual information, GFA sub-module uses self-attention mechanisms to selectively aggregate the features of the key voxels across the entire scene for capturing scene-level contextual information. Experiments on nuScenes and KITTI demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, on nuScene, SparseDet surpasses the previous best sparse detector VoxelNeXt by 2.2\% mAP with 13.5 FPS, and on KITTI, it surpasses VoxelNeXt by 1.12\% $\mathbf{AP_{3D}}$ on hard level tasks with 17.9 FPS.
Authors:Yiming Cui, Cheng Han, Dongfang Liu
Abstract:
Visual-based perception is the key module for autonomous driving. Among those visual perception tasks, video object detection is a primary yet challenging one because of feature degradation caused by fast motion or multiple poses. Current models usually aggregate features from the neighboring frames to enhance the object representations for the task heads to generate more accurate predictions. Though getting better performance, these methods rely on the information from the future frames and suffer from high computational complexity. Meanwhile, the aggregation process is not reconfigurable during the inference time. These issues make most of the existing models infeasible for online applications. To solve these problems, we introduce a stepwise spatial global-local aggregation network. Our proposed models mainly contain three parts: 1). Multi-stage stepwise network gradually refines the predictions and object representations from the previous stage; 2). Spatial global-local aggregation fuses the local information from the neighboring frames and global semantics from the current frame to eliminate the feature degradation; 3). Dynamic aggregation strategy stops the aggregation process early based on the refinement results to remove redundancy and improve efficiency. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet VID benchmark validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed models.
Authors:Sifan Zhou, Zhihang Yuan, Dawei Yang, Ziyu Zhao, Xing Hu, Yuguang Shi, Xiaobo Lu, Qiang Wu
Abstract:
Real-time and high-performance 3D object detection plays a critical role in autonomous driving and robotics. Recent pillar-based 3D object detectors have gained significant attention due to their compact representation and low computational overhead, making them suitable for onboard deployment and quantization. However, existing pillar-based detectors still suffer from information loss along height dimension and large numerical distribution difference during pillar feature encoding (PFE), which severely limits their performance and quantization potential. To address above issue, we first unveil the importance of different input information during PFE and identify the height dimension as a key factor in enhancing 3D detection performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose a height-aware pillar feature encoder, called PillarHist. Specifically, PillarHist statistics the discrete distribution of points at different heights within one pillar with the information entropy guidance. This simple yet effective design greatly preserves the information along the height dimension while significantly reducing the computation overhead of the PFE. Meanwhile, PillarHist also constrains the arithmetic distribution of PFE input to a stable range, making it quantization-friendly. Notably, PillarHist operates exclusively within the PFE stage to enhance performance, enabling seamless integration into existing pillar-based methods without introducing complex operations. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of PillarHist in terms of both efficiency and performance.
Authors:Ziying Song, Hongyu Pan, Feiyang Jia, Yongchang Zhang, Lin Liu, Lei Yang, Shaoqing Xu, Peiliang Wu, Caiyan Jia, Zheng Zhang, Yadan Luo
Abstract:
In the field of 3D object detection tasks, fusing heterogeneous features from LiDAR and camera sensors into a unified Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation is a widely adopted paradigm. However, existing methods often suffer from imprecise sensor calibration, leading to feature misalignment in LiDAR-camera BEV fusion. Moreover, such inaccuracies cause errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, aggravating misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a novel ContrastAlign approach that utilizes contrastive learning to enhance the alignment of heterogeneous modalities, thereby improving the robustness of the fusion process. Specifically, our approach comprises three key components: (1) the L-Instance module, which extracts LiDAR instance features within the LiDAR BEV features; (2) the C-Instance module, which predicts camera instance features through Region of Interest (RoI) pooling on the camera BEV features; (3) the InstanceFusion module, which employs contrastive learning to generate consistent instance features across heFterogeneous modalities. Subsequently, we use graph matching to calculate the similarity between the neighboring camera instance features and the similarity instance features to complete the alignment of instance features. Our method achieves SOTA performance, with an mAP of 71.5%, surpassing GraphBEV by 1.4% on the nuScenes val set. Importantly, our method excels BEVFusion under conditions with spatial & temporal misalignment noise, improving mAP by 1.4% and 11.1% on nuScenes dataset. Notably, on the Argoverse2 dataset, ContrastAlign outperforms GraphBEV by 1.0% in mAP, indicating that the farther the distance, the more severe the feature misalignment and the more effective.
Authors:Xianpeng Liu, Ce Zheng, Ming Qian, Nan Xue, Chen Chen, Zhebin Zhang, Chen Li, Tianfu Wu
Abstract:
We present Multi-View Attentive Contextualization (MvACon), a simple yet effective method for improving 2D-to-3D feature lifting in query-based multi-view 3D (MV3D) object detection. Despite remarkable progress witnessed in the field of query-based MV3D object detection, prior art often suffers from either the lack of exploiting high-resolution 2D features in dense attention-based lifting, due to high computational costs, or from insufficiently dense grounding of 3D queries to multi-scale 2D features in sparse attention-based lifting. Our proposed MvACon hits the two birds with one stone using a representationally dense yet computationally sparse attentive feature contextualization scheme that is agnostic to specific 2D-to-3D feature lifting approaches. In experiments, the proposed MvACon is thoroughly tested on the nuScenes benchmark, using both the BEVFormer and its recent 3D deformable attention (DFA3D) variant, as well as the PETR, showing consistent detection performance improvement, especially in enhancing performance in location, orientation, and velocity prediction. It is also tested on the Waymo-mini benchmark using BEVFormer with similar improvement. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that global cluster-based contexts effectively encode dense scene-level contexts for MV3D object detection. The promising results of our proposed MvACon reinforces the adage in computer vision -- ``(contextualized) feature matters".
Authors:Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, Hadi Pouransari, Fartash Faghri, Oncel Tuzel
Abstract:
CLIP models perform remarkably well on zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks. But recent studies have shown that learnt representations in CLIP are not well suited for dense prediction tasks like object detection, semantic segmentation or depth estimation. More recently, multi-stage training methods for CLIP models was introduced to mitigate the weak performance of CLIP on downstream tasks. In this work, we find that simply improving the quality of captions in image-text datasets improves the quality of CLIP's visual representations, resulting in significant improvement on downstream dense prediction vision tasks. In fact, we find that CLIP pretraining with good quality captions can surpass recent supervised, self-supervised and weakly supervised pretraining methods. We show that when CLIP model with ViT-B/16 as image encoder is trained on well aligned image-text pairs it obtains 12.1% higher mIoU and 11.5% lower RMSE on semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks over recent state-of-the-art Masked Image Modeling (MIM) pretraining methods like Masked Autoencoder (MAE). We find that mobile architectures also benefit significantly from CLIP pretraining. A recent mobile vision architecture, MCi2, with CLIP pretraining obtains similar performance as Swin-L, pretrained on ImageNet-22k for semantic segmentation task while being 6.1$\times$ smaller. Moreover, we show that improving caption quality results in $10\times$ data efficiency when finetuning for dense prediction tasks.
Authors:Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Shaoqing Xu, Lin Liu, Dongyang Xu, Caiyan Jia, Feiyang Jia, Li Wang
Abstract:
Integrating LiDAR and camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a crucial aspect of 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are susceptible to the inaccurate calibration relationship between LiDAR and the camera sensor. Such inaccuracies result in errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, ultimately causing misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a robust fusion framework called Graph BEV. Addressing errors caused by inaccurate point cloud projection, we introduce a Local Align module that employs neighbor-aware depth features via Graph matching. Additionally, we propose a Global Align module to rectify the misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. Our Graph BEV framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP of 70.1\%, surpassing BEV Fusion by 1.6\% on the nuscenes validation set. Importantly, our Graph BEV outperforms BEV Fusion by 8.3\% under conditions with misalignment noise.
Authors:Yao Jiang, Xinyu Yan, Ge-Peng Ji, Keren Fu, Meijun Sun, Huan Xiong, Deng-Ping Fan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
The advent of large vision-language models (LVLMs) represents a remarkable advance in the quest for artificial general intelligence. However, the model's effectiveness in both specialized and general tasks warrants further investigation. This paper endeavors to evaluate the competency of popular LVLMs in specialized and general tasks, respectively, aiming to offer a comprehensive understanding of these novel models. To gauge their effectiveness in specialized tasks, we employ six challenging tasks in three different application scenarios: natural, healthcare, and industrial. These six tasks include salient/camouflaged/transparent object detection, as well as polyp detection, skin lesion detection, and industrial anomaly detection. We examine the performance of three recent open-source LVLMs, including MiniGPT-v2, LLaVA-1.5, and Shikra, on both visual recognition and localization in these tasks. Moreover, we conduct empirical investigations utilizing the aforementioned LVLMs together with GPT-4V, assessing their multi-modal understanding capabilities in general tasks including object counting, absurd question answering, affordance reasoning, attribute recognition, and spatial relation reasoning. Our investigations reveal that these LVLMs demonstrate limited proficiency not only in specialized tasks but also in general tasks. We delve deep into this inadequacy and uncover several potential factors, including limited cognition in specialized tasks, object hallucination, text-to-image interference, and decreased robustness in complex problems. We hope that this study can provide useful insights for the future development of LVLMs, helping researchers improve LVLMs for both general and specialized applications.
Authors:Jinlong Li, Baolu Li, Xinyu Liu, Runsheng Xu, Jiaqi Ma, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
The diverse agents in multi-agent perception systems may be from different companies. Each company might use the identical classic neural network architecture based encoder for feature extraction. However, the data source to train the various agents is independent and private in each company, leading to the Distribution Gap of different private data for training distinct agents in multi-agent perception system. The data silos by the above Distribution Gap could result in a significant performance decline in multi-agent perception. In this paper, we thoroughly examine the impact of the distribution gap on existing multi-agent perception systems. To break the data silos, we introduce the Feature Distribution-aware Aggregation (FDA) framework for cross-domain learning to mitigate the above Distribution Gap in multi-agent perception. FDA comprises two key components: Learnable Feature Compensation Module and Distribution-aware Statistical Consistency Module, both aimed at enhancing intermediate features to minimize the distribution gap among multi-agent features. Intensive experiments on the public OPV2V and V2XSet datasets underscore FDA's effectiveness in point cloud-based 3D object detection, presenting it as an invaluable augmentation to existing multi-agent perception systems.
Authors:Ziying Song, Lin Liu, Feiyang Jia, Yadan Luo, Guoxin Zhang, Lei Yang, Li Wang, Caiyan Jia
Abstract:
In the realm of modern autonomous driving, the perception system is indispensable for accurately assessing the state of the surrounding environment, thereby enabling informed prediction and planning. The key step to this system is related to 3D object detection that utilizes vehicle-mounted sensors such as LiDAR and cameras to identify the size, the category, and the location of nearby objects. Despite the surge in 3D object detection methods aimed at enhancing detection precision and efficiency, there is a gap in the literature that systematically examines their resilience against environmental variations, noise, and weather changes. This study emphasizes the importance of robustness, alongside accuracy and latency, in evaluating perception systems under practical scenarios. Our work presents an extensive survey of camera-only, LiDAR-only, and multi-modal 3D object detection algorithms, thoroughly evaluating their trade-off between accuracy, latency, and robustness, particularly on datasets like KITTI-C and nuScenes-C to ensure fair comparisons. Among these, multi-modal 3D detection approaches exhibit superior robustness, and a novel taxonomy is introduced to reorganize the literature for enhanced clarity. This survey aims to offer a more practical perspective on the current capabilities and the constraints of 3D object detection algorithms in real-world applications, thus steering future research towards robustness-centric advancements.
Authors:Jinxiang Lai, Wenlong Wu, Bin-Bin Gao, Jun Liu, Jiawei Zhan, Congchong Nie, Yi Zeng, Chengjie Wang
Abstract:
Image matching and object detection are two fundamental and challenging tasks, while many related applications consider them two individual tasks (i.e. task-individual). In this paper, a collaborative framework called MatchDet (i.e. task-collaborative) is proposed for image matching and object detection to obtain mutual improvements. To achieve the collaborative learning of the two tasks, we propose three novel modules, including a Weighted Spatial Attention Module (WSAM) for Detector, and Weighted Attention Module (WAM) and Box Filter for Matcher. Specifically, the WSAM highlights the foreground regions of target image to benefit the subsequent detector, the WAM enhances the connection between the foreground regions of pair images to ensure high-quality matches, and Box Filter mitigates the impact of false matches. We evaluate the approaches on a new benchmark with two datasets called Warp-COCO and miniScanNet. Experimental results show our approaches are effective and achieve competitive improvements.
Authors:ChuXin Wang, Wenfei Yang, Tianzhu Zhang
Abstract:
Semi-supervised 3D object detection from point cloud aims to train a detector with a small number of labeled data and a large number of unlabeled data. The core of existing methods lies in how to select high-quality pseudo-labels using the designed quality evaluation criterion. However, these methods treat each pseudo bounding box as a whole and assign equal importance to each side during training, which is detrimental to model performance due to many sides having poor localization quality. Besides, existing methods filter out a large number of low-quality pseudo-labels, which also contain some correct regression values that can help with model training. To address the above issues, we propose a side-aware framework for semi-supervised 3D object detection consisting of three key designs: a 3D bounding box parameterization method, an uncertainty estimation module, and a pseudo-label selection strategy. These modules work together to explicitly estimate the localization quality of each side and assign different levels of importance during the training phase. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can consistently outperform baseline models under different scenes and evaluation criteria. Moreover, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets with different labeled ratios.
Authors:Balakrishnan Varadarajan, Bilge Soran, Forrest Iandola, Xiaoyu Xiang, Yunyang Xiong, Lemeng Wu, Chenchen Zhu, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been a cornerstone in the field of interactive segmentation, propelling significant progress in generative AI, computational photography, and medical imaging. Despite its ability to process arbitrary user input and generate corresponding segmentation masks, SAM's 600 million parameter architecture, based on ViT-H, is not compatible with current mobile hardware due to its high computational demands and large model size. Our research aims to adapt SAM for use in mobile photography applications. To this end, we have developed a fully convolutional SqueezeSAM model architecture, which is 62.5 times faster and 31.6 times smaller than the original SAM, making it a viable solution for mobile applications. Furthermore, our tiny model achieves an mIOU within 1% of the original VIT-H architecture.
Automated segmentation holds significant value in the creation flow for photography applications, as evidenced by its adoption by leading industry players like apple and capcut. To facilitate this automation, we employ salient object detection and simulate potential user clicks for foreground object selection, generating an initial segmentation mask that users can subsequently edit interactively. A common user expectation is that a click on a specific part of an object will result in the segmentation of the entire object. For example, a click on a person's t-shirt in a photo should ideally segment the entire person, not just the t-shirt. However, SAM typically only segments the clicked area. We address this limitation through a novel data augmentation scheme. Consequently, if a user clicks on a person holding a basketball, both the person and the basketball are segmented together, aligning with user expectations and enhancing the overall user experience.
Authors:Yunyang Xiong, Bala Varadarajan, Lemeng Wu, Xiaoyu Xiang, Fanyi Xiao, Chenchen Zhu, Xiaoliang Dai, Dilin Wang, Fei Sun, Forrest Iandola, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a powerful tool for numerous vision applications. A key component that drives the impressive performance for zero-shot transfer and high versatility is a super large Transformer model trained on the extensive high-quality SA-1B dataset. While beneficial, the huge computation cost of SAM model has limited its applications to wider real-world applications. To address this limitation, we propose EfficientSAMs, light-weight SAM models that exhibits decent performance with largely reduced complexity. Our idea is based on leveraging masked image pretraining, SAMI, which learns to reconstruct features from SAM image encoder for effective visual representation learning. Further, we take SAMI-pretrained light-weight image encoders and mask decoder to build EfficientSAMs, and finetune the models on SA-1B for segment anything task. We perform evaluations on multiple vision tasks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic object detection, and find that our proposed pretraining method, SAMI, consistently outperforms other masked image pretraining methods. On segment anything task such as zero-shot instance segmentation, our EfficientSAMs with SAMI-pretrained lightweight image encoders perform favorably with a significant gain (e.g., ~4 AP on COCO/LVIS) over other fast SAM models.
Authors:Shupeng Cheng, Ge-Peng Ji, Pengda Qin, Deng-Ping Fan, Bowen Zhou, Peng Xu
Abstract:
Referring camouflaged object detection (Ref-COD) is a recently-proposed problem aiming to segment out specified camouflaged objects matched with a textual or visual reference. This task involves two major challenges: the COD domain-specific perception and multimodal reference-image alignment. Our motivation is to make full use of the semantic intelligence and intrinsic knowledge of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to decompose this complex task in a human-like way. As language is highly condensed and inductive, linguistic expression is the main media of human knowledge learning, and the transmission of knowledge information follows a multi-level progression from simplicity to complexity. In this paper, we propose a large-model-based Multi-Level Knowledge-Guided multimodal method for Ref-COD termed MLKG, where multi-level knowledge descriptions from MLLM are organized to guide the large vision model of segmentation to perceive the camouflage-targets and camouflage-scene progressively and meanwhile deeply align the textual references with camouflaged photos. To our knowledge, our contributions mainly include: (1) This is the first time that the MLLM knowledge is studied for Ref-COD and COD. (2) We, for the first time, propose decomposing Ref-COD into two main perspectives of perceiving the target and scene by integrating MLLM knowledge, and contribute a multi-level knowledge-guided method. (3) Our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the Ref-COD benchmark outperforming numerous strong competitors. Moreover, thanks to the injected rich knowledge, it demonstrates zero-shot generalization ability on uni-modal COD datasets. We will release our code soon.
Authors:Yiming Cui, Cheng Han, Dongfang Liu
Abstract:
The advancement of computer vision has pushed visual analysis tasks from still images to the video domain. In recent years, video instance segmentation, which aims to track and segment multiple objects in video frames, has drawn much attention for its potential applications in various emerging areas such as autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and smart retail. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for instance-level visual analysis on video frames, which can simultaneously conduct object detection, instance segmentation, and multi-object tracking. The core idea of our method is collaborative multi-task learning which is achieved by a novel structure, named associative connections among detection, segmentation, and tracking task heads in an end-to-end learnable CNN. These additional connections allow information propagation across multiple related tasks, so as to benefit these tasks simultaneously. We evaluate the proposed method extensively on KITTI MOTS and MOTS Challenge datasets and obtain quite encouraging results.
Authors:Li Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Fachuan Zhao, Chuze Wu, Yichen Wang, Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Jun Li, Huaping Liu
Abstract:
Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an essential post-processing module used in many 3D object detection frameworks to remove overlapping candidate bounding boxes. However, an overreliance on classification scores and difficulties in determining appropriate thresholds can affect the resulting accuracy directly. To address these issues, we introduce fuzzy learning into NMS and propose a novel generalized Fuzzy-NMS module to achieve finer candidate bounding box filtering. The proposed Fuzzy-NMS module combines the volume and clustering density of candidate bounding boxes, refining them with a fuzzy classification method and optimizing the appropriate suppression thresholds to reduce uncertainty in the NMS process. Adequate validation experiments are conducted using the mainstream KITTI and large-scale Waymo 3D object detection benchmarks. The results of these tests demonstrate the proposed Fuzzy-NMS module can improve the accuracy of numerous recently NMS-based detectors significantly, including PointPillars, PV-RCNN, and IA-SSD, etc. This effect is particularly evident for small objects such as pedestrians and bicycles. As a plug-and-play module, Fuzzy-NMS does not need to be retrained and produces no obvious increases in inference time.
Authors:Zhuoyi Zhang, Yunchen Zhang, Gonglei Shi, Yu Shen, Ruihao Gong, Xiaoxu Xia, Qi Zhang, Lewei Lu, Xianglong Liu
Abstract:
Neural network quantization is widely used to reduce model inference complexity in real-world deployments. However, traditional integer quantization suffers from accuracy degradation when adapting to various dynamic ranges. Recent research has focused on a new 8-bit format, FP8, with hardware support for both training and inference of neural networks but lacks guidance for hardware design. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of using FP8 quantization and provide a comprehensive comparison of FP8 with INT quantization. Then we propose a flexible mixed-precision quantization framework that supports various number systems, enabling optimal selection of the most appropriate quantization format for different neural network architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves competitive performance compared to full precision on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, segmentation, and natural language understanding. Our work furnishes critical insights into the tangible benefits and feasibility of employing FP8 quantization, paving the way for heightened neural network efficiency in tangible scenarios. Our code is available in the supplementary material.
Authors:Ziying Song, Haiyue Wei, Lin Bai, Lei Yang, Caiyan Jia
Abstract:
LiDAR and cameras are complementary sensors for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, it is challenging to explore the unnatural interaction between point clouds and images, and the critical factor is how to conduct feature alignment of heterogeneous modalities. Currently, many methods achieve feature alignment by projection calibration only, without considering the problem of coordinate conversion accuracy errors between sensors, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we present GraphAlign, a more accurate feature alignment strategy for 3D object detection by graph matching. Specifically, we fuse image features from a semantic segmentation encoder in the image branch and point cloud features from a 3D Sparse CNN in the LiDAR branch. To save computation, we construct the nearest neighbor relationship by calculating Euclidean distance within the subspaces that are divided into the point cloud features. Through the projection calibration between the image and point cloud, we project the nearest neighbors of point cloud features onto the image features. Then by matching the nearest neighbors with a single point cloud to multiple images, we search for a more appropriate feature alignment. In addition, we provide a self-attention module to enhance the weights of significant relations to fine-tune the feature alignment between heterogeneous modalities. Extensive experiments on nuScenes benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our GraphAlign.
Authors:Fulong Ma, Xiaoyang Yan, Guoyang Zhao, Xiaojie Xu, Yuxuan Liu, Jun Ma, Ming Liu
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection plays a crucial role in autonomous driving. However, existing monocular 3D detection algorithms depend on 3D labels derived from LiDAR measurements, which are costly to acquire for new datasets and challenging to deploy in novel environments. Specifically, this study investigates the pipeline for training a monocular 3D object detection model on a diverse collection of 3D and 2D datasets. The proposed framework comprises three components: (1) a robust monocular 3D model capable of functioning across various camera settings, (2) a selective-training strategy to accommodate datasets with differing class annotations, and (3) a pseudo 3D training approach using 2D labels to enhance detection performance in scenes containing only 2D labels. With this framework, we could train models on a joint set of various open 3D/2D datasets to obtain models with significantly stronger generalization capability and enhanced performance on new dataset with only 2D labels. We conduct extensive experiments on KITTI/nuScenes/ONCE/Cityscapes/BDD100K datasets to demonstrate the scaling ability of the proposed method.
Authors:Lei Yang, Jiaxin Yu, Xinyu Zhang, Jun Li, Li Wang, Yi Huang, Chuang Zhang, Hong Wang, Yiming Li
Abstract:
Although the majority of recent autonomous driving systems concentrate on developing perception methods based on ego-vehicle sensors, there is an overlooked alternative approach that involves leveraging intelligent roadside cameras to help extend the ego-vehicle perception ability beyond the visual range. We discover that most existing monocular 3D object detectors rely on the ego-vehicle prior assumption that the optical axis of the camera is parallel to the ground. However, the roadside camera is installed on a pole with a pitched angle, which makes the existing methods not optimal for roadside scenes. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for Roadside Monocular 3D object detection with ground-aware embeddings, named MonoGAE. Specifically, the ground plane is a stable and strong prior knowledge due to the fixed installation of cameras in roadside scenarios. In order to reduce the domain gap between the ground geometry information and high-dimensional image features, we employ a supervised training paradigm with a ground plane to predict high-dimensional ground-aware embeddings. These embeddings are subsequently integrated with image features through cross-attention mechanisms. Furthermore, to improve the detector's robustness to the divergences in cameras' installation poses, we replace the ground plane depth map with a novel pixel-level refined ground plane equation map. Our approach demonstrates a substantial performance advantage over all previous monocular 3D object detectors on widely recognized 3D detection benchmarks for roadside cameras. The code and pre-trained models will be released soon.
Authors:Lei Yang, Tao Tang, Jun Li, Peng Chen, Kun Yuan, Li Wang, Yi Huang, Xinyu Zhang, Kaicheng Yu
Abstract:
While most recent autonomous driving system focuses on developing perception methods on ego-vehicle sensors, people tend to overlook an alternative approach to leverage intelligent roadside cameras to extend the perception ability beyond the visual range. We discover that the state-of-the-art vision-centric bird's eye view detection methods have inferior performances on roadside cameras. This is because these methods mainly focus on recovering the depth regarding the camera center, where the depth difference between the car and the ground quickly shrinks while the distance increases. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, dubbed BEVHeight++, to address this issue. In essence, we regress the height to the ground to achieve a distance-agnostic formulation to ease the optimization process of camera-only perception methods. By incorporating both height and depth encoding techniques, we achieve a more accurate and robust projection from 2D to BEV spaces. On popular 3D detection benchmarks of roadside cameras, our method surpasses all previous vision-centric methods by a significant margin. In terms of the ego-vehicle scenario, our BEVHeight++ possesses superior over depth-only methods. Specifically, it yields a notable improvement of +1.9% NDS and +1.1% mAP over BEVDepth when evaluated on the nuScenes validation set. Moreover, on the nuScenes test set, our method achieves substantial advancements, with an increase of +2.8% NDS and +1.7% mAP, respectively.
Authors:Haoke Xiao, Lv Tang, Bo Li, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li
Abstract:
Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD) endeavors to replicate the human visual system's capacity to recognize common and salient objects within a collection of images. Despite recent advancements in deep learning models, these models still rely on training with well-annotated CoSOD datasets. The exploration of training-free zero-shot CoSOD frameworks has been limited. In this paper, taking inspiration from the zero-shot transfer capabilities of foundational computer vision models, we introduce the first zero-shot CoSOD framework that harnesses these models without any training process. To achieve this, we introduce two novel components in our proposed framework: the group prompt generation (GPG) module and the co-saliency map generation (CMP) module. We evaluate the framework's performance on widely-used datasets and observe impressive results. Our approach surpasses existing unsupervised methods and even outperforms fully supervised methods developed before 2020, while remaining competitive with some fully supervised methods developed before 2022.
Authors:Son Tran, Cong Tran, Anh Tran, Cuong Pham
Abstract:
Object detection has long been a topic of high interest in computer vision literature. Motivated by the fact that annotating data for the multi-object tracking (MOT) problem is immensely expensive, recent studies have turned their attention to the unsupervised learning setting. In this paper, we push forward the state-of-the-art performance of unsupervised MOT methods by proposing UnsMOT, a novel framework that explicitly combines the appearance and motion features of objects with geometric information to provide more accurate tracking. Specifically, we first extract the appearance and motion features using CNN and RNN models, respectively. Then, we construct a graph of objects based on their relative distances in a frame, which is fed into a GNN model together with CNN features to output geometric embedding of objects optimized using an unsupervised loss function. Finally, associations between objects are found by matching not only similar extracted features but also geometric embedding of detections and tracklets. Experimental results show remarkable performance in terms of HOTA, IDF1, and MOTA metrics in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Camille Boucher, Gustavo H. Diaz, Shreya Santra, Kentaro Uno, Kazuya Yoshida
Abstract:
The integration of vision-based frameworks to achieve lunar robot applications faces numerous challenges such as terrain configuration or extreme lighting conditions. This paper presents a generic task pipeline using object detection, instance segmentation and grasp detection, that can be used for various applications by using the results of these vision-based systems in a different way. We achieve a rock stacking task on a non-flat surface in difficult lighting conditions with a very good success rate of 92%. Eventually, we present an experiment to assemble 3D printed robot components to initiate more complex tasks in the future.
Authors:Carl McMillan, Junhong Zhao, Bing Xue, Ross Vennell, Mengjie Zhang
Abstract:
The aquaculture sector in New Zealand is experiencing rapid expansion, with a particular emphasis on mussel exports. As the demands of mussel farming operations continue to evolve, the integration of artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques, such as intelligent object detection, is emerging as an effective approach to enhance operational efficiency. This study delves into advancing buoy detection by leveraging deep learning methodologies for intelligent mussel farm monitoring and management. The primary objective centers on improving accuracy and robustness in detecting buoys across a spectrum of real-world scenarios. A diverse dataset sourced from mussel farms is captured and labeled for training, encompassing imagery taken from cameras mounted on both floating platforms and traversing vessels, capturing various lighting and weather conditions. To establish an effective deep learning model for buoy detection with a limited number of labeled data, we employ transfer learning techniques. This involves adapting a pre-trained object detection model to create a specialized deep learning buoy detection model. We explore different pre-trained models, including YOLO and its variants, alongside data diversity to investigate their effects on model performance. Our investigation demonstrates a significant enhancement in buoy detection performance through deep learning, accompanied by improved generalization across diverse weather conditions, highlighting the practical effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Runmin Cong, Hongyu Liu, Chen Zhang, Wei Zhang, Feng Zheng, Ran Song, Sam Kwong
Abstract:
By integrating complementary information from RGB image and depth map, the ability of salient object detection (SOD) for complex and challenging scenes can be improved. In recent years, the important role of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in feature extraction and cross-modality interaction has been fully explored, but it is still insufficient in modeling global long-range dependencies of self-modality and cross-modality. To this end, we introduce CNNs-assisted Transformer architecture and propose a novel RGB-D SOD network with Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement (PICR-Net). On the one hand, considering the prior correlation between RGB modality and depth modality, an attention-triggered cross-modality point-aware interaction (CmPI) module is designed to explore the feature interaction of different modalities with positional constraints. On the other hand, in order to alleviate the block effect and detail destruction problems brought by the Transformer naturally, we design a CNN-induced refinement (CNNR) unit for content refinement and supplementation. Extensive experiments on five RGB-D SOD datasets show that the proposed network achieves competitive results in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons.
Authors:Vic De Ridder, Bappaditya Dey, Enrique Dehaerne, Sandip Halder, Stefan De Gendt, Bartel Van Waeyenberge
Abstract:
Continual shrinking of pattern dimensions in the semiconductor domain is making it increasingly difficult to inspect defects due to factors such as the presence of stochastic noise and the dynamic behavior of defect patterns and types. Conventional rule-based methods and non-parametric supervised machine learning algorithms like KNN mostly fail at the requirements of semiconductor defect inspection at these advanced nodes. Deep Learning (DL)-based methods have gained popularity in the semiconductor defect inspection domain because they have been proven robust towards these challenging scenarios. In this research work, we have presented an automated DL-based approach for efficient localization and classification of defects in SEM images. We have proposed SEMI-CenterNet (SEMI-CN), a customized CN architecture trained on SEM images of semiconductor wafer defects. The use of the proposed CN approach allows improved computational efficiency compared to previously studied DL models. SEMI-CN gets trained to output the center, class, size, and offset of a defect instance. This is different from the approach of most object detection models that use anchors for bounding box prediction. Previous methods predict redundant bounding boxes, most of which are discarded in postprocessing. CN mitigates this by only predicting boxes for likely defect center points. We train SEMI-CN on two datasets and benchmark two ResNet backbones for the framework. Initially, ResNet models pretrained on the COCO dataset undergo training using two datasets separately. Primarily, SEMI-CN shows significant improvement in inference time against previous research works. Finally, transfer learning (using weights of custom SEM dataset) is applied from ADI dataset to AEI dataset and vice-versa, which reduces the required training time for both backbones to reach the best mAP against conventional training method.
Authors:Chunming He, Kai Li, Yachao Zhang, Yulun Zhang, Zhenhua Guo, Xiu Li, Martin Danelljan, Fisher Yu
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) is the challenging task of identifying camouflaged objects visually blended into surroundings. Albeit achieving remarkable success, existing COD detectors still struggle to obtain precise results in some challenging cases. To handle this problem, we draw inspiration from the prey-vs-predator game that leads preys to develop better camouflage and predators to acquire more acute vision systems and develop algorithms from both the prey side and the predator side. On the prey side, we propose an adversarial training framework, Camouflageator, which introduces an auxiliary generator to generate more camouflaged objects that are harder for a COD method to detect. Camouflageator trains the generator and detector in an adversarial way such that the enhanced auxiliary generator helps produce a stronger detector. On the predator side, we introduce a novel COD method, called Internal Coherence and Edge Guidance (ICEG), which introduces a camouflaged feature coherence module to excavate the internal coherence of camouflaged objects, striving to obtain more complete segmentation results. Additionally, ICEG proposes a novel edge-guided separated calibration module to remove false predictions to avoid obtaining ambiguous boundaries. Extensive experiments show that ICEG outperforms existing COD detectors and Camouflageator is flexible to improve various COD detectors, including ICEG, which brings state-of-the-art COD performance.
Authors:Jinlong Li, Runsheng Xu, Xinyu Liu, Jin Ma, Baolu Li, Qin Zou, Jiaqi Ma, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
Typically, object detection methods for autonomous driving that rely on supervised learning make the assumption of a consistent feature distribution between the training and testing data, this such assumption may fail in different weather conditions. Due to the domain gap, a detection model trained under clear weather may not perform well in foggy and rainy conditions. Overcoming detection bottlenecks in foggy and rainy weather is a real challenge for autonomous vehicles deployed in the wild. To bridge the domain gap and improve the performance of object detection in foggy and rainy weather, this paper presents a novel framework for domain-adaptive object detection. The adaptations at both the image-level and object-level are intended to minimize the differences in image style and object appearance between domains. Furthermore, in order to improve the model's performance on challenging examples, we introduce a novel adversarial gradient reversal layer that conducts adversarial mining on difficult instances in addition to domain adaptation. Additionally, we suggest generating an auxiliary domain through data augmentation to enforce a new domain-level metric regularization. Experimental findings on public benchmark exhibit a substantial enhancement in object detection specifically for foggy and rainy driving scenarios.
Authors:Jinlong Li, Runsheng Xu, Xinyu Liu, Baolu Li, Qin Zou, Jiaqi Ma, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
Due to the lack of enough real multi-agent data and time-consuming of labeling, existing multi-agent cooperative perception algorithms usually select the simulated sensor data for training and validating. However, the perception performance is degraded when these simulation-trained models are deployed to the real world, due to the significant domain gap between the simulated and real data. In this paper, we propose the first Simulation-to-Reality transfer learning framework for multi-agent cooperative perception using a novel Vision Transformer, named as S2R-ViT, which considers both the Deployment Gap and Feature Gap between simulated and real data. We investigate the effects of these two types of domain gaps and propose a novel uncertainty-aware vision transformer to effectively relief the Deployment Gap and an agent-based feature adaptation module with inter-agent and ego-agent discriminators to reduce the Feature Gap. Our intensive experiments on the public multi-agent cooperative perception datasets OPV2V and V2V4Real demonstrate that the proposed S2R-ViT can effectively bridge the gap from simulation to reality and outperform other methods significantly for point cloud-based 3D object detection.
Authors:Aixuan Li, Jing Zhang, Yunqiu Lv, Tong Zhang, Yiran Zhong, Mingyi He, Yuchao Dai
Abstract:
Salient objects attract human attention and usually stand out clearly from their surroundings. In contrast, camouflaged objects share similar colors or textures with the environment. In this case, salient objects are typically non-camouflaged, and camouflaged objects are usually not salient. Due to this inherent contradictory attribute, we introduce an uncertainty-aware learning pipeline to extensively explore the contradictory information of salient object detection (SOD) and camouflaged object detection (COD) via data-level and task-wise contradiction modeling. We first exploit the dataset correlation of these two tasks and claim that the easy samples in the COD dataset can serve as hard samples for SOD to improve the robustness of the SOD model. Based on the assumption that these two models should lead to activation maps highlighting different regions of the same input image, we further introduce a contrastive module with a joint-task contrastive learning framework to explicitly model the contradictory attributes of these two tasks. Different from conventional intra-task contrastive learning for unsupervised representation learning, our contrastive module is designed to model the task-wise correlation, leading to cross-task representation learning. To better understand the two tasks from the perspective of uncertainty, we extensively investigate the uncertainty estimation techniques for modeling the main uncertainties of the two tasks, namely task uncertainty (for SOD) and data uncertainty (for COD), and aiming to effectively estimate the challenging regions for each task to achieve difficulty-aware learning. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our solution leads to both state-of-the-art performance and informative uncertainty estimation.
Authors:Huiming Sun, Lan Fu, Jinlong Li, Qing Guo, Zibo Meng, Tianyun Zhang, Yuewei Lin, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
Detecting the salient objects in a remote sensing image has wide applications for the interdisciplinary research. Many existing deep learning methods have been proposed for Salient Object Detection (SOD) in remote sensing images and get remarkable results. However, the recent adversarial attack examples, generated by changing a few pixel values on the original remote sensing image, could result in a collapse for the well-trained deep learning based SOD model. Different with existing methods adding perturbation to original images, we propose to jointly tune adversarial exposure and additive perturbation for attack and constrain image close to cloudy image as Adversarial Cloud. Cloud is natural and common in remote sensing images, however, camouflaging cloud based adversarial attack and defense for remote sensing images are not well studied before. Furthermore, we design DefenseNet as a learn-able pre-processing to the adversarial cloudy images so as to preserve the performance of the deep learning based remote sensing SOD model, without tuning the already deployed deep SOD model. By considering both regular and generalized adversarial examples, the proposed DefenseNet can defend the proposed Adversarial Cloud in white-box setting and other attack methods in black-box setting. Experimental results on a synthesized benchmark from the public remote sensing SOD dataset (EORSSD) show the promising defense against adversarial cloud attacks.
Authors:Jin Ma, Jinlong Li, Qing Guo, Tianyun Zhang, Yuewei Lin, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
The emergence of different sensors (Near-Infrared, Depth, etc.) is a remedy for the limited application scenarios of traditional RGB camera. The RGB-X tasks, which rely on RGB input and another type of data input to resolve specific problems, have become a popular research topic in multimedia. A crucial part in two-branch RGB-X deep neural networks is how to fuse information across modalities. Given the tremendous information inside RGB-X networks, previous works typically apply naive fusion (e.g., average or max fusion) or only focus on the feature fusion at the same scale(s). While in this paper, we propose a novel method called RXFOOD for the fusion of features across different scales within the same modality branch and from different modality branches simultaneously in a unified attention mechanism. An Energy Exchange Module is designed for the interaction of each feature map's energy matrix, who reflects the inter-relationship of different positions and different channels inside a feature map. The RXFOOD method can be easily incorporated to any dual-branch encoder-decoder network as a plug-in module, and help the original backbone network better focus on important positions and channels for object of interest detection. Experimental results on RGB-NIR salient object detection, RGB-D salient object detection, and RGBFrequency image manipulation detection demonstrate the clear effectiveness of the proposed RXFOOD.
Authors:Prannay Kaul, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman
Abstract:
The goal of this paper is open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) $\unicode{x2013}$ building a model that can detect objects beyond the set of categories seen at training, thus enabling the user to specify categories of interest at inference without the need for model retraining. We adopt a standard two-stage object detector architecture, and explore three ways for specifying novel categories: via language descriptions, via image exemplars, or via a combination of the two. We make three contributions: first, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate informative language descriptions for object classes, and construct powerful text-based classifiers; second, we employ a visual aggregator on image exemplars that can ingest any number of images as input, forming vision-based classifiers; and third, we provide a simple method to fuse information from language descriptions and image exemplars, yielding a multi-modal classifier. When evaluating on the challenging LVIS open-vocabulary benchmark we demonstrate that: (i) our text-based classifiers outperform all previous OVOD works; (ii) our vision-based classifiers perform as well as text-based classifiers in prior work; (iii) using multi-modal classifiers perform better than either modality alone; and finally, (iv) our text-based and multi-modal classifiers yield better performance than a fully-supervised detector.
Authors:Xi Chen, Josip Djolonga, Piotr Padlewski, Basil Mustafa, Soravit Changpinyo, Jialin Wu, Carlos Riquelme Ruiz, Sebastian Goodman, Xiao Wang, Yi Tay, Siamak Shakeri, Mostafa Dehghani, Daniel Salz, Mario Lucic, Michael Tschannen, Arsha Nagrani, Hexiang Hu, Mandar Joshi, Bo Pang, Ceslee Montgomery, Paulina Pietrzyk, Marvin Ritter, AJ Piergiovanni, Matthias Minderer, Filip Pavetic, Austin Waters, Gang Li, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Lucas Beyer, Julien Amelot, Kenton Lee, Andreas Peter Steiner, Yang Li, Daniel Keysers, Anurag Arnab, Yuanzhong Xu, Keran Rong, Alexander Kolesnikov, Mojtaba Seyedhosseini, Anelia Angelova, Xiaohua Zhai, Neil Houlsby, Radu Soricut
Abstract:
We present the training recipe and results of scaling up PaLI-X, a multilingual vision and language model, both in terms of size of the components and the breadth of its training task mixture. Our model achieves new levels of performance on a wide-range of varied and complex tasks, including multiple image-based captioning and question-answering tasks, image-based document understanding and few-shot (in-context) learning, as well as object detection, video question answering, and video captioning. PaLI-X advances the state-of-the-art on most vision-and-language benchmarks considered (25+ of them). Finally, we observe emerging capabilities, such as complex counting and multilingual object detection, tasks that are not explicitly in the training mix.
Authors:Zhiyuan Cheng, Hongjun Choi, James Liang, Shiwei Feng, Guanhong Tao, Dongfang Liu, Michael Zuzak, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion (MSF) is widely used in autonomous vehicles (AVs) for perception, particularly for 3D object detection with camera and LiDAR sensors. The purpose of fusion is to capitalize on the advantages of each modality while minimizing its weaknesses. Advanced deep neural network (DNN)-based fusion techniques have demonstrated the exceptional and industry-leading performance. Due to the redundant information in multiple modalities, MSF is also recognized as a general defence strategy against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we attack fusion models from the camera modality that is considered to be of lesser importance in fusion but is more affordable for attackers. We argue that the weakest link of fusion models depends on their most vulnerable modality, and propose an attack framework that targets advanced camera-LiDAR fusion-based 3D object detection models through camera-only adversarial attacks. Our approach employs a two-stage optimization-based strategy that first thoroughly evaluates vulnerable image areas under adversarial attacks, and then applies dedicated attack strategies for different fusion models to generate deployable patches. The evaluations with six advanced camera-LiDAR fusion models and one camera-only model indicate that our attacks successfully compromise all of them. Our approach can either decrease the mean average precision (mAP) of detection performance from 0.824 to 0.353, or degrade the detection score of a target object from 0.728 to 0.156, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed attack framework. Code is available.
Authors:Xinyu Zhang, Zhiwei Li, Zhenhong Zou, Xin Gao, Yijin Xiong, Dafeng Jin, Jun Li, Huaping Liu
Abstract:
Noise has always been nonnegligible trouble in object detection by creating confusion in model reasoning, thereby reducing the informativeness of the data. It can lead to inaccurate recognition due to the shift in the observed pattern, that requires a robust generalization of the models. To implement a general vision model, we need to develop deep learning models that can adaptively select valid information from multi-modal data. This is mainly based on two reasons. Multi-modal learning can break through the inherent defects of single-modal data, and adaptive information selection can reduce chaos in multi-modal data. To tackle this problem, we propose a universal uncertainty-aware multi-modal fusion model. It adopts a multi-pipeline loosely coupled architecture to combine the features and results from point clouds and images. To quantify the correlation in multi-modal information, we model the uncertainty, as the inverse of data information, in different modalities and embed it in the bounding box generation. In this way, our model reduces the randomness in fusion and generates reliable output. Moreover, we conducted a completed investigation on the KITTI 2D object detection dataset and its derived dirty data. Our fusion model is proven to resist severe noise interference like Gaussian, motion blur, and frost, with only slight degradation. The experiment results demonstrate the benefits of our adaptive fusion. Our analysis on the robustness of multi-modal fusion will provide further insights for future research.
Authors:Runsheng Xu, Xin Xia, Jinlong Li, Hanzhao Li, Shuo Zhang, Zhengzhong Tu, Zonglin Meng, Hao Xiang, Xiaoyu Dong, Rui Song, Hongkai Yu, Bolei Zhou, Jiaqi Ma
Abstract:
Modern perception systems of autonomous vehicles are known to be sensitive to occlusions and lack the capability of long perceiving range. It has been one of the key bottlenecks that prevents Level 5 autonomy. Recent research has demonstrated that the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) cooperative perception system has great potential to revolutionize the autonomous driving industry. However, the lack of a real-world dataset hinders the progress of this field. To facilitate the development of cooperative perception, we present V2V4Real, the first large-scale real-world multi-modal dataset for V2V perception. The data is collected by two vehicles equipped with multi-modal sensors driving together through diverse scenarios. Our V2V4Real dataset covers a driving area of 410 km, comprising 20K LiDAR frames, 40K RGB frames, 240K annotated 3D bounding boxes for 5 classes, and HDMaps that cover all the driving routes. V2V4Real introduces three perception tasks, including cooperative 3D object detection, cooperative 3D object tracking, and Sim2Real domain adaptation for cooperative perception. We provide comprehensive benchmarks of recent cooperative perception algorithms on three tasks. The V2V4Real dataset can be found at https://research.seas.ucla.edu/mobility-lab/v2v4real/.
Authors:Shuo Wang, Xinhai Zhao, Hai-Ming Xu, Zehui Chen, Dameng Yu, Jiahao Chang, Zhen Yang, Feng Zhao
Abstract:
Multi-view 3D object detection (MV3D-Det) in Bird-Eye-View (BEV) has drawn extensive attention due to its low cost and high efficiency. Although new algorithms for camera-only 3D object detection have been continuously proposed, most of them may risk drastic performance degradation when the domain of input images differs from that of training. In this paper, we first analyze the causes of the domain gap for the MV3D-Det task. Based on the covariate shift assumption, we find that the gap mainly attributes to the feature distribution of BEV, which is determined by the quality of both depth estimation and 2D image's feature representation. To acquire a robust depth prediction, we propose to decouple the depth estimation from the intrinsic parameters of the camera (i.e. the focal length) through converting the prediction of metric depth to that of scale-invariant depth and perform dynamic perspective augmentation to increase the diversity of the extrinsic parameters (i.e. the camera poses) by utilizing homography. Moreover, we modify the focal length values to create multiple pseudo-domains and construct an adversarial training loss to encourage the feature representation to be more domain-agnostic. Without bells and whistles, our approach, namely DG-BEV, successfully alleviates the performance drop on the unseen target domain without impairing the accuracy of the source domain. Extensive experiments on various public datasets, including Waymo, nuScenes, and Lyft, demonstrate the generalization and effectiveness of our approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study to explore a domain generalization method for MV3D-Det.
Authors:Enrique Dehaerne, Bappaditya Dey, Sandip Halder, Stefan De Gendt
Abstract:
The field of object detection using Deep Learning (DL) is constantly evolving with many new techniques and models being proposed. YOLOv7 is a state-of-the-art object detector based on the YOLO family of models which have become popular for industrial applications. One such possible application domain can be semiconductor defect inspection. The performance of any machine learning model depends on its hyperparameters. Furthermore, combining predictions of one or more models in different ways can also affect performance. In this research, we experiment with YOLOv7, a recently proposed, state-of-the-art object detector, by training and evaluating models with different hyperparameters to investigate which ones improve performance in terms of detection precision for semiconductor line space pattern defects. The base YOLOv7 model with default hyperparameters and Non Maximum Suppression (NMS) prediction combining outperforms all RetinaNet models from previous work in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP). We find that vertically flipping images randomly during training yields a 3% improvement in the mean AP of all defect classes. Other hyperparameter values improved AP only for certain classes compared to the default model. Combining models that achieve the best AP for different defect classes was found to be an effective ensembling strategy. Combining predictions from ensembles using Weighted Box Fusion (WBF) prediction gave the best performance. The best ensemble with WBF improved on the mAP of the default model by 10%.
Authors:André Susano Pinto, Alexander Kolesnikov, Yuge Shi, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai
Abstract:
Misalignment between model predictions and intended usage can be detrimental for the deployment of computer vision models. The issue is exacerbated when the task involves complex structured outputs, as it becomes harder to design procedures which address this misalignment. In natural language processing, this is often addressed using reinforcement learning techniques that align models with a task reward. We adopt this approach and show its surprising effectiveness across multiple computer vision tasks, such as object detection, panoptic segmentation, colorization and image captioning. We believe this approach has the potential to be widely useful for better aligning models with a diverse range of computer vision tasks.
Authors:Wenhao Ding, Nathalie Majcherczyk, Mohit Deshpande, Xuewei Qi, Ding Zhao, Rajasimman Madhivanan, Arnie Sen
Abstract:
Active perception describes a broad class of techniques that couple planning and perception systems to move the robot in a way to give the robot more information about the environment. In most robotic systems, perception is typically independent of motion planning. For example, traditional object detection is passive: it operates only on the images it receives. However, we have a chance to improve the results if we allow planning to consume detection signals and move the robot to collect views that maximize the quality of the results. In this paper, we use reinforcement learning (RL) methods to control the robot in order to obtain images that maximize the detection quality. Specifically, we propose using a Decision Transformer with online fine-tuning, which first optimizes the policy with a pre-collected expert dataset and then improves the learned policy by exploring better solutions in the environment. We evaluate the performance of proposed method on an interactive dataset collected from an indoor scenario simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines, including expert policy and pure offline RL methods. We also provide exhaustive analyses of the reward distribution and observation space.
Authors:Jinlong Li, Runsheng Xu, Xinyu Liu, Jin Ma, Zicheng Chi, Jiaqi Ma, Hongkai Yu
Abstract:
Deep learning has been widely used in the perception (e.g., 3D object detection) of intelligent vehicle driving. Due to the beneficial Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, the deep learning based features from other agents can be shared to the ego vehicle so as to improve the perception of the ego vehicle. It is named as Cooperative Perception in the V2V research, whose algorithms have been dramatically advanced recently. However, all the existing cooperative perception algorithms assume the ideal V2V communication without considering the possible lossy shared features because of the Lossy Communication (LC) which is common in the complex real-world driving scenarios. In this paper, we first study the side effect (e.g., detection performance drop) by the lossy communication in the V2V Cooperative Perception, and then we propose a novel intermediate LC-aware feature fusion method to relieve the side effect of lossy communication by a LC-aware Repair Network (LCRN) and enhance the interaction between the ego vehicle and other vehicles by a specially designed V2V Attention Module (V2VAM) including intra-vehicle attention of ego vehicle and uncertainty-aware inter-vehicle attention. The extensive experiment on the public cooperative perception dataset OPV2V (based on digital-twin CARLA simulator) demonstrates that the proposed method is quite effective for the cooperative point cloud based 3D object detection under lossy V2V communication.
Authors:Jiahao Chang, Shuo Wang, Haiming Xu, Zehui Chen, Chenhongyi Yang, Feng Zhao
Abstract:
Transformer-based detectors (DETRs) are becoming popular for their simple framework, but the large model size and heavy time consumption hinder their deployment in the real world. While knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing technique to compress giant detectors into small ones for comparable detection performance and low inference cost. Since DETRs formulate object detection as a set prediction problem, existing KD methods designed for classic convolution-based detectors may not be directly applicable. In this paper, we propose DETRDistill, a novel knowledge distillation method dedicated to DETR-families. Specifically, we first design a Hungarian-matching logits distillation to encourage the student model to have the exact predictions as that of teacher DETRs. Next, we propose a target-aware feature distillation to help the student model learn from the object-centric features of the teacher model. Finally, in order to improve the convergence rate of the student DETR, we introduce a query-prior assignment distillation to speed up the student model learning from well-trained queries and stable assignment of the teacher model. Extensive experimental results on the COCO dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, DETRDistill consistently improves various DETRs by more than 2.0 mAP, even surpassing their teacher models.
Authors:Quentin Delfosse, Wolfgang Stammer, Thomas Rothenbacher, Dwarak Vittal, Kristian Kersting
Abstract:
Recent unsupervised multi-object detection models have shown impressive performance improvements, largely attributed to novel architectural inductive biases. Unfortunately, they may produce suboptimal object encodings for downstream tasks. To overcome this, we propose to exploit object motion and continuity, i.e., objects do not pop in and out of existence. This is accomplished through two mechanisms: (i) providing priors on the location of objects through integration of optical flow, and (ii) a contrastive object continuity loss across consecutive image frames. Rather than developing an explicit deep architecture, the resulting Motion and Object Continuity (MOC) scheme can be instantiated using any baseline object detection model. Our results show large improvements in the performances of a SOTA model in terms of object discovery, convergence speed and overall latent object representations, particularly for playing Atari games. Overall, we show clear benefits of integrating motion and object continuity for downstream tasks, moving beyond object representation learning based only on reconstruction.
Authors:Chengxiao Luo, Yiming Li, Yong Jiang, Shu-Tao Xia
Abstract:
Recent studies revealed that deep neural networks (DNNs) are exposed to backdoor threats when training with third-party resources (such as training samples or backbones). The backdoored model has promising performance in predicting benign samples, whereas its predictions can be maliciously manipulated by adversaries based on activating its backdoors with pre-defined trigger patterns. Currently, most of the existing backdoor attacks were conducted on the image classification under the targeted manner. In this paper, we reveal that these threats could also happen in object detection, posing threatening risks to many mission-critical applications ($e.g.$, pedestrian detection and intelligent surveillance systems). Specifically, we design a simple yet effective poison-only backdoor attack in an untargeted manner, based on task characteristics. We show that, once the backdoor is embedded into the target model by our attack, it can trick the model to lose detection of any object stamped with our trigger patterns. We conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset, showing its effectiveness in both digital and physical-world settings and its resistance to potential defenses.
Authors:Chengcheng Ma, Yang Liu, Jiankang Deng, Lingxi Xie, Weiming Dong, Changsheng Xu
Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown impressive generalization capability in downstream vision tasks with appropriate text prompts. Instead of designing prompts manually, Context Optimization (CoOp) has been recently proposed to learn continuous prompts using taskspecific training data. Despite the performance improvements on downstream tasks, several studies have reported that CoOp suffers from the overfitting issue in two aspects: (i) the test accuracy on base classes first improves and then worsens during training;(ii) the test accuracy on novel classes keeps decreasing. However, none of the existing studies can understand and mitigate such overfitting problems. In this study, we first explore the cause of overfitting by analyzing the gradient flow. Comparative experiments reveal that CoOp favors generalizable and spurious features in the early and later training stages, respectively, leading to the non-overfitting and overfitting phenomena. Given those observations, we propose Subspace Prompt Tuning (SubPT) to project the gradients in back-propagation onto the low-rank subspace spanned by the early-stage gradient flow eigenvectors during the entire training process and successfully eliminate the overfitting problem. In addition, we equip CoOp with a Novel Feature Learner (NFL) to enhance the generalization ability of the learned prompts onto novel categories beyond the training set, needless of image training data. Extensive experiments on 11 classification datasets demonstrate that SubPT+NFL consistently boost the performance of CoOp and outperform the state-of-the-art CoCoOp approach. Experiments on more challenging vision downstream tasks, including open-vocabulary object detection and zero-shot semantic segmentation, also verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Codes can be found at https://tinyurl.com/mpe64f89.
Authors:Jinxiang Lai, Siqian Yang, Wenlong Liu, Yi Zeng, Zhongyi Huang, Wenlong Wu, Jun Liu, Bin-Bin Gao, Chengjie Wang
Abstract:
Few-Shot Learning (FSL) alleviates the data shortage challenge via embedding discriminative target-aware features among plenty seen (base) and few unseen (novel) labeled samples. Most feature embedding modules in recent FSL methods are specially designed for corresponding learning tasks (e.g., classification, segmentation, and object detection), which limits the utility of embedding features. To this end, we propose a light and universal module named transformer-based Semantic Filter (tSF), which can be applied for different FSL tasks. The proposed tSF redesigns the inputs of a transformer-based structure by a semantic filter, which not only embeds the knowledge from whole base set to novel set but also filters semantic features for target category. Furthermore, the parameters of tSF is equal to half of a standard transformer block (less than 1M). In the experiments, our tSF is able to boost the performances in different classic few-shot learning tasks (about 2% improvement), especially outperforms the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmark datasets in few-shot classification task.
Authors:Jonas Schult, Francis Engelmann, Alexander Hermans, Or Litany, Siyu Tang, Bastian Leibe
Abstract:
Modern 3D semantic instance segmentation approaches predominantly rely on specialized voting mechanisms followed by carefully designed geometric clustering techniques. Building on the successes of recent Transformer-based methods for object detection and image segmentation, we propose the first Transformer-based approach for 3D semantic instance segmentation. We show that we can leverage generic Transformer building blocks to directly predict instance masks from 3D point clouds. In our model called Mask3D each object instance is represented as an instance query. Using Transformer decoders, the instance queries are learned by iteratively attending to point cloud features at multiple scales. Combined with point features, the instance queries directly yield all instance masks in parallel. Mask3D has several advantages over current state-of-the-art approaches, since it neither relies on (1) voting schemes which require hand-selected geometric properties (such as centers) nor (2) geometric grouping mechanisms requiring manually-tuned hyper-parameters (e.g. radii) and (3) enables a loss that directly optimizes instance masks. Mask3D sets a new state-of-the-art on ScanNet test (+6.2 mAP), S3DIS 6-fold (+10.1 mAP), STPLS3D (+11.2 mAP) and ScanNet200 test (+12.4 mAP).
Authors:Hongwu Peng, Deniz Gurevin, Shaoyi Huang, Tong Geng, Weiwen Jiang, Omer Khan, Caiwen Ding
Abstract:
As real-world graphs expand in size, larger GNN models with billions of parameters are deployed. High parameter count in such models makes training and inference on graphs expensive and challenging. To reduce the computational and memory costs of GNNs, optimization methods such as pruning the redundant nodes and edges in input graphs have been commonly adopted. However, model compression, which directly targets the sparsification of model layers, has been mostly limited to traditional Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) used for tasks such as image classification and object detection. In this paper, we utilize two state-of-the-art model compression methods (1) train and prune and (2) sparse training for the sparsification of weight layers in GNNs. We evaluate and compare the efficiency of both methods in terms of accuracy, training sparsity, and training FLOPs on real-world graphs. Our experimental results show that on the ia-email, wiki-talk, and stackoverflow datasets for link prediction, sparse training with much lower training FLOPs achieves a comparable accuracy with the train and prune method. On the brain dataset for node classification, sparse training uses a lower number FLOPs (less than 1/7 FLOPs of train and prune method) and preserves a much better accuracy performance under extreme model sparsity.
Authors:Kazuma Fujii, Hiroshi Kera, Kazuhiko Kawamoto
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation, which involves transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain, can be used to substantially reduce annotation costs in the field of object detection. In this study, we demonstrate that adversarial training in the source domain can be employed as a new approach for unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we establish that adversarially trained detectors achieve improved detection performance in target domains that are significantly shifted from source domains. This phenomenon is attributed to the fact that adversarially trained detectors can be used to extract robust features that are in alignment with human perception and worth transferring across domains while discarding domain-specific non-robust features. In addition, we propose a method that combines adversarial training and feature alignment to ensure the improved alignment of robust features with the target domain. We conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets and confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach on large domain shifts from real to artistic images. Compared to the baseline models, the adversarially trained detectors improve the mean average precision by up to 7.7%, and further by up to 11.8% when feature alignments are incorporated. Although our method degrades performance for small domain shifts, quantification of the domain shift based on the Frechet distance allows us to determine whether adversarial training should be conducted.
Authors:Ge-Peng Ji, Deng-Ping Fan, Keren Fu, Zhe Wu, Jianbing Shen, Ling Shao
Abstract:
Previous video object segmentation approaches mainly focus on using simplex solutions between appearance and motion, limiting feature collaboration efficiency among and across these two cues. In this work, we study a novel and efficient full-duplex strategy network (FSNet) to address this issue, by considering a better mutual restraint scheme between motion and appearance in exploiting the cross-modal features from the fusion and decoding stage. Specifically, we introduce the relational cross-attention module (RCAM) to achieve bidirectional message propagation across embedding sub-spaces. To improve the model's robustness and update the inconsistent features from the spatial-temporal embeddings, we adopt the bidirectional purification module (BPM) after the RCAM. Extensive experiments on five popular benchmarks show that our FSNet is robust to various challenging scenarios (e.g., motion blur, occlusion) and achieves favourable performance against existing cutting-edges both in the video object segmentation and video salient object detection tasks. The project is publicly available at: https://dpfan.net/FSNet.
Authors:Yuxin Mao, Jing Zhang, Zhexiong Wan, Yuchao Dai, Aixuan Li, Yunqiu Lv, Xinyu Tian, Deng-Ping Fan, Nick Barnes
Abstract:
Transformer, which originates from machine translation, is particularly powerful at modeling long-range dependencies. Currently, the transformer is making revolutionary progress in various vision tasks, leading to significant performance improvements compared with the convolutional neural network (CNN) based frameworks. In this paper, we conduct extensive research on exploiting the contributions of transformers for accurate and reliable salient object detection. For the former, we apply transformer to a deterministic model, and explain that the effective structure modeling and global context modeling abilities lead to its superior performance compared with the CNN based frameworks. For the latter, we observe that both CNN and transformer based frameworks suffer greatly from the over-confidence issue, where the models tend to generate wrong predictions with high confidence. To estimate the reliability degree of both CNN- and transformer-based frameworks, we further present a latent variable model, namely inferential generative adversarial network (iGAN), based on the generative adversarial network (GAN). The stochastic attribute of the latent variable makes it convenient to estimate the predictive uncertainty, serving as an auxiliary output to evaluate the reliability of model prediction. Different from the conventional GAN, which defines the distribution of the latent variable as fixed standard normal distribution $\mathcal{N}(0,\mathbf{I})$, the proposed iGAN infers the latent variable by gradient-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), namely Langevin dynamics, leading to an input-dependent latent variable model. We apply our proposed iGAN to both fully and weakly supervised salient object detection, and explain that iGAN within the transformer framework leads to both accurate and reliable salient object detection.
Authors:Zijing Zhao, Zhu Xu, Qingchao Chen, Yuxin Peng, Yang Liu
Abstract:
As a fundamental task for indoor scene understanding, 3D object detection has been extensively studied, and the accuracy on indoor point cloud data has been substantially improved. However, existing researches have been conducted on limited datasets, where the training and testing sets share the same distribution. In this paper, we consider the task of adapting indoor 3D object detectors from one dataset to another, presenting a comprehensive benchmark with ScanNet, SUN RGB-D and 3D Front datasets, as well as our newly proposed large-scale datasets ProcTHOR-OD and ProcFront generated by a 3D simulator. Since indoor point cloud datasets are collected and constructed in different ways, the object detectors are likely to overfit to specific factors within each dataset, such as point cloud quality, bounding box layout and instance features. We conduct experiments across datasets on different adaptation scenarios including synthetic-to-real adaptation, point cloud quality adaptation, layout adaptation and instance feature adaptation, analyzing the impact of different domain gaps on 3D object detectors. We also introduce several approaches to improve adaptation performances, providing baselines for domain adaptive indoor 3D object detection, hoping that future works may propose detectors with stronger generalization ability across domains. Our project homepage can be found in https://jeremyzhao1998.github.io/DAVoteNet-release/.
Authors:Zhiwei Ning, Zhaojiang Liu, Xuanang Gao, Yifan Zuo, Jie Yang, Yuming Fang, Wei Liu
Abstract:
Multi-modal methods based on camera and LiDAR sensors have garnered significant attention in the field of 3D detection. However, many prevalent works focus on single or partial stage fusion, leading to insufficient feature extraction and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we introduce a multi-stage cross-modal fusion 3D detection framework, termed CMF-IOU, to effectively address the challenge of aligning 3D spatial and 2D semantic information. Specifically, we first project the pixel information into 3D space via a depth completion network to get the pseudo points, which unifies the representation of the LiDAR and camera information. Then, a bilateral cross-view enhancement 3D backbone is designed to encode LiDAR points and pseudo points. The first sparse-to-distant (S2D) branch utilizes an encoder-decoder structure to reinforce the representation of sparse LiDAR points. The second residual view consistency (ResVC) branch is proposed to mitigate the influence of inaccurate pseudo points via both the 3D and 2D convolution processes. Subsequently, we introduce an iterative voxel-point aware fine grained pooling module, which captures the spatial information from LiDAR points and textural information from pseudo points in the proposal refinement stage. To achieve more precise refinement during iteration, an intersection over union (IoU) joint prediction branch integrated with a novel proposals generation technique is designed to preserve the bounding boxes with both high IoU and classification scores. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our method on the KITTI, nuScenes and Waymo datasets.
Authors:Jiansheng Li, Xingxuan Zhang, Hao Zou, Yige Guo, Renzhe Xu, Yilong Liu, Chuzhao Zhu, Yue He, Peng Cui
Abstract:
Current object detectors often suffer significant perfor-mance degradation in real-world applications when encountering distributional shifts. Consequently, the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization capability of object detectors has garnered increasing attention from researchers. Despite this growing interest, there remains a lack of a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and evaluation benchmark with fine-grained annotations tailored to assess the OOD generalization on more intricate tasks like object detection and grounding. To address this gap, we introduce COUNTS, a large-scale OOD dataset with object-level annotations. COUNTS encompasses 14 natural distributional shifts, over 222K samples, and more than 1,196K labeled bounding boxes. Leveraging COUNTS, we introduce two novel benchmarks: O(OD)2 and OODG. O(OD)2 is designed to comprehensively evaluate the OOD generalization capabilities of object detectors by utilizing controlled distribution shifts between training and testing data. OODG, on the other hand, aims to assess the OOD generalization of grounding abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our findings reveal that, while large models and extensive pre-training data substantially en hance performance in in-distribution (IID) scenarios, significant limitations and opportunities for improvement persist in OOD contexts for both object detectors and MLLMs. In visual grounding tasks, even the advanced GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 only achieve 56.7% and 28.0% accuracy, respectively. We hope COUNTS facilitates advancements in the development and assessment of robust object detectors and MLLMs capable of maintaining high performance under distributional shifts.
Authors:Van Nguyen Nguyen, Stephen Tyree, Andrew Guo, Mederic Fourmy, Anas Gouda, Taeyeop Lee, Sungphill Moon, Hyeontae Son, Lukas Ranftl, Jonathan Tremblay, Eric Brachmann, Bertram Drost, Vincent Lepetit, Carsten Rother, Stan Birchfield, Jiri Matas, Yann Labbe, Martin Sundermeyer, Tomas Hodan
Abstract:
We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2024, the 6th in a series of public competitions organized to capture the state of the art in 6D object pose estimation and related tasks. In 2024, our goal was to transition BOP from lab-like setups to real-world scenarios. First, we introduced new model-free tasks, where no 3D object models are available and methods need to onboard objects just from provided reference videos. Second, we defined a new, more practical 6D object detection task where identities of objects visible in a test image are not provided as input. Third, we introduced new BOP-H3 datasets recorded with high-resolution sensors and AR/VR headsets, closely resembling real-world scenarios. BOP-H3 include 3D models and onboarding videos to support both model-based and model-free tasks. Participants competed on seven challenge tracks. Notably, the best 2024 method for model-based 6D localization of unseen objects (FreeZeV2.1) achieves 22% higher accuracy on BOP-Classic-Core than the best 2023 method (GenFlow), and is only 4% behind the best 2023 method for seen objects (GPose2023) although being significantly slower (24.9 vs 2.7s per image). A more practical 2024 method for this task is Co-op which takes only 0.8s per image and is 13% more accurate than GenFlow. Methods have similar rankings on 6D detection as on 6D localization but higher run time. On model-based 2D detection of unseen objects, the best 2024 method (MUSE) achieves 21--29% relative improvement compared to the best 2023 method (CNOS). However, the 2D detection accuracy for unseen objects is still -35% behind the accuracy for seen objects (GDet2023), and the 2D detection stage is consequently the main bottleneck of existing pipelines for 6D localization/detection of unseen objects. The online evaluation system stays open and is available at http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/
Authors:Chengyuan Zhang, Yilin Zhang, Lei Zhu, Deyin Liu, Lin Wu, Bo Li, Shichao Zhang, Mohammed Bennamoun, Farid Boussaid
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel framework for unified incremental few-shot object detection (iFSOD) and instance segmentation (iFSIS) using the Transformer architecture. Our goal is to create an optimal solution for situations where only a few examples of novel object classes are available, with no access to training data for base or old classes, while maintaining high performance across both base and novel classes. To achieve this, We extend Mask-DINO into a two-stage incremental learning framework. Stage 1 focuses on optimizing the model using the base dataset, while Stage 2 involves fine-tuning the model on novel classes. Besides, we incorporate a classifier selection strategy that assigns appropriate classifiers to the encoder and decoder according to their distinct functions. Empirical evidence indicates that this approach effectively mitigates the over-fitting on novel classes learning. Furthermore, we implement knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting of base classes. Comprehensive evaluations on the COCO and LVIS datasets for both iFSIS and iFSOD tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors:Kun Shi, Shibo He, Zhenyu Shi, Anjun Chen, Zehui Xiong, Jiming Chen, Jun Luo
Abstract:
Multi-modal fusion is imperative to the implementation of reliable object detection and tracking in complex environments. Exploiting the synergy of heterogeneous modal information endows perception systems the ability to achieve more comprehensive, robust, and accurate performance. As a nucleus concern in wireless-vision collaboration, radar-camera fusion has prompted prospective research directions owing to its extensive applicability, complementarity, and compatibility. Nonetheless, there still lacks a systematic survey specifically focusing on deep fusion of radar and camera for object detection and tracking. To fill this void, we embark on an endeavor to comprehensively review radar-camera fusion in a holistic way. First, we elaborate on the fundamental principles, methodologies, and applications of radar-camera fusion perception. Next, we delve into the key techniques concerning sensor calibration, modal representation, data alignment, and fusion operation. Furthermore, we provide a detailed taxonomy covering the research topics related to object detection and tracking in the context of radar and camera technologies.Finally, we discuss the emerging perspectives in the field of radar-camera fusion perception and highlight the potential areas for future research.
Authors:Mingyi Guo, Yuyang Liu, Zhiyuan Yan, Zongying Lin, Peixi Peng, Yonghong Tian
Abstract:
Incremental object detection is fundamentally challenged by catastrophic forgetting. A major factor contributing to this issue is background shift, where background categories in sequential tasks may overlap with either previously learned or future unseen classes. To address this, we propose a novel method called Class-Agnostic Shared Attribute Base (CASA) that encourages the model to learn category-agnostic attributes shared across incremental classes. Our approach leverages an LLM to generate candidate textual attributes, selects the most relevant ones based on the current training data, and records their importance in an assignment matrix. For subsequent tasks, the retained attributes are frozen, and new attributes are selected from the remaining candidates, ensuring both knowledge retention and adaptability. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
Authors:Wenhao Dong, Haodong Zhu, Shaohui Lin, Xiaoyan Luo, Yunhang Shen, Xuhui Liu, Juan Zhang, Guodong Guo, Baochang Zhang
Abstract:
Cross-modality fusing complementary information from different modalities effectively improves object detection performance, making it more useful and robust for a wider range of applications. Existing fusion strategies combine different types of images or merge different backbone features through elaborated neural network modules. However, these methods neglect that modality disparities affect cross-modality fusion performance, as different modalities with different camera focal lengths, placements, and angles are hardly fused. In this paper, we investigate cross-modality fusion by associating cross-modal features in a hidden state space based on an improved Mamba with a gating mechanism. We design a Fusion-Mamba block (FMB) to map cross-modal features into a hidden state space for interaction, thereby reducing disparities between cross-modal features and enhancing the representation consistency of fused features. FMB contains two modules: the State Space Channel Swapping (SSCS) module facilitates shallow feature fusion, and the Dual State Space Fusion (DSSF) enables deep fusion in a hidden state space. Through extensive experiments on public datasets, our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on $m$AP with 5.9% on $M^3FD$ and 4.9% on FLIR-Aligned datasets, demonstrating superior object detection performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore the potential of Mamba for cross-modal fusion and establish a new baseline for cross-modality object detection.
Authors:Lipeng Gu, Xuefeng Yan, Liangliang Nan, Dingkun Zhu, Honghua Chen, Weiming Wang, Mingqiang Wei
Abstract:
Current methodologies in point cloud analysis predominantly explore 3D geometries, often achieved through the introduction of intricate learnable geometric extractors in the encoder or by deepening networks with repeated blocks. However, these approaches inevitably lead to a significant number of learnable parameters, resulting in substantial computational costs and imposing memory burdens on CPU/GPU. Additionally, the existing strategies are primarily tailored for object-level point cloud classification and segmentation tasks, with limited extensions to crucial scene-level applications, such as autonomous driving. In response to these limitations, we introduce PointeNet, an efficient network designed specifically for point cloud analysis. PointeNet distinguishes itself with its lightweight architecture, low training cost, and plug-and-play capability, effectively capturing representative features. The network consists of a Multivariate Geometric Encoding (MGE) module and an optional Distance-aware Semantic Enhancement (DSE) module. The MGE module employs operations of sampling, grouping, and multivariate geometric aggregation to lightweightly capture and adaptively aggregate multivariate geometric features, providing a comprehensive depiction of 3D geometries. The DSE module, designed for real-world autonomous driving scenarios, enhances the semantic perception of point clouds, particularly for distant points. Our method demonstrates flexibility by seamlessly integrating with a classification/segmentation head or embedding into off-the-shelf 3D object detection networks, achieving notable performance improvements at a minimal cost. Extensive experiments on object-level datasets, including ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, ShapeNetPart, and the scene-level dataset KITTI, demonstrate the superior performance of PointeNet over state-of-the-art methods in point cloud analysis.
Authors:Lihao Liu, Yanqi Cheng, Dongdong Chen, Jing He, Pietro Liò, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Angelica I Aviles-Rivero
Abstract:
Traffic videos inherently differ from generic videos in their stationary camera setup, thus providing a strong motion prior where objects often move in a specific direction over a short time interval. Existing works predominantly employ generic video object detection framework for traffic video object detection, which yield certain advantages such as broad applicability and robustness to diverse scenarios. However, they fail to harness the strength of motion prior to enhance detection accuracy. In this work, we propose two innovative methods to exploit the motion prior and boost the performance of both fully-supervised and semi-supervised traffic video object detection. Firstly, we introduce a new self-attention module that leverages the motion prior to guide temporal information integration in the fully-supervised setting. Secondly, we utilise the motion prior to develop a pseudo-labelling mechanism to eliminate noisy pseudo labels for the semi-supervised setting. Both of our motion-prior-centred methods consistently demonstrates superior performance, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches by a margin of 2% in terms of mAP.
Authors:Chenfeng Xu, Huan Ling, Sanja Fidler, Or Litany
Abstract:
We present 3DiffTection, a state-of-the-art method for 3D object detection from single images, leveraging features from a 3D-aware diffusion model. Annotating large-scale image data for 3D detection is resource-intensive and time-consuming. Recently, pretrained large image diffusion models have become prominent as effective feature extractors for 2D perception tasks. However, these features are initially trained on paired text and image data, which are not optimized for 3D tasks, and often exhibit a domain gap when applied to the target data. Our approach bridges these gaps through two specialized tuning strategies: geometric and semantic. For geometric tuning, we fine-tune a diffusion model to perform novel view synthesis conditioned on a single image, by introducing a novel epipolar warp operator. This task meets two essential criteria: the necessity for 3D awareness and reliance solely on posed image data, which are readily available (e.g., from videos) and does not require manual annotation. For semantic refinement, we further train the model on target data with detection supervision. Both tuning phases employ ControlNet to preserve the integrity of the original feature capabilities. In the final step, we harness these enhanced capabilities to conduct a test-time prediction ensemble across multiple virtual viewpoints. Through our methodology, we obtain 3D-aware features that are tailored for 3D detection and excel in identifying cross-view point correspondences. Consequently, our model emerges as a powerful 3D detector, substantially surpassing previous benchmarks, e.g., Cube-RCNN, a precedent in single-view 3D detection by 9.43\% in AP3D on the Omni3D-ARkitscene dataset. Furthermore, 3DiffTection showcases robust data efficiency and generalization to cross-domain data.
Authors:Bowen Pan, Rameswar Panda, SouYoung Jin, Rogerio Feris, Aude Oliva, Phillip Isola, Yoon Kim
Abstract:
We explore the use of language as a perceptual representation for vision-and-language navigation (VLN), with a focus on low-data settings. Our approach uses off-the-shelf vision systems for image captioning and object detection to convert an agent's egocentric panoramic view at each time step into natural language descriptions. We then finetune a pretrained language model to select an action, based on the current view and the trajectory history, that would best fulfill the navigation instructions. In contrast to the standard setup which adapts a pretrained language model to work directly with continuous visual features from pretrained vision models, our approach instead uses (discrete) language as the perceptual representation. We explore several use cases of our language-based navigation (LangNav) approach on the R2R VLN benchmark: generating synthetic trajectories from a prompted language model (GPT-4) with which to finetune a smaller language model; domain transfer where we transfer a policy learned on one simulated environment (ALFRED) to another (more realistic) environment (R2R); and combining both vision- and language-based representations for VLN. Our approach is found to improve upon baselines that rely on visual features in settings where only a few expert trajectories (10-100) are available, demonstrating the potential of language as a perceptual representation for navigation.
Authors:Tim J. Adler, Jan-Hinrich Nölke, Annika Reinke, Minu Dietlinde Tizabi, Sebastian Gruber, Dasha Trofimova, Lynton Ardizzone, Paul F. Jaeger, Florian Buettner, Ullrich Köthe, Lena Maier-Hein
Abstract:
Current deep learning-based solutions for image analysis tasks are commonly incapable of handling problems to which multiple different plausible solutions exist. In response, posterior-based methods such as conditional Diffusion Models and Invertible Neural Networks have emerged; however, their translation is hampered by a lack of research on adequate validation. In other words, the way progress is measured often does not reflect the needs of the driving practical application. Closing this gap in the literature, we present the first systematic framework for the application-driven validation of posterior-based methods in inverse problems. As a methodological novelty, it adopts key principles from the field of object detection validation, which has a long history of addressing the question of how to locate and match multiple object instances in an image. Treating modes as instances enables us to perform mode-centric validation, using well-interpretable metrics from the application perspective. We demonstrate the value of our framework through instantiations for a synthetic toy example and two medical vision use cases: pose estimation in surgery and imaging-based quantification of functional tissue parameters for diagnostics. Our framework offers key advantages over common approaches to posterior validation in all three examples and could thus revolutionize performance assessment in inverse problems.
Authors:Zixu Zhao, Jiaze Wang, Max Horn, Yizhuo Ding, Tong He, Zechen Bai, Dominik Zietlow, Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel, Bing Shuai, Zhuowen Tu, Thomas Brox, Bernt Schiele, Yanwei Fu, Francesco Locatello, Zheng Zhang, Tianjun Xiao
Abstract:
Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers.
Authors:Yinjie Zhao, Lichen Zhao, Qian Yu, Jing Zhang, Lu Sheng, Dong Xu
Abstract:
With the emergence of VR and AR, 360° data attracts increasing attention from the computer vision and multimedia communities. Typically, 360° data is projected into 2D ERP (equirectangular projection) images for feature extraction. However, existing methods cannot handle the distortions that result from the projection, hindering the development of 360-data-based tasks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model called DATFormer to address the distortion problem. We tackle this issue from two perspectives. Firstly, we introduce two distortion-adaptive modules. The first is a Distortion Mapping Module, which guides the model to pre-adapt to distorted features globally. The second module is a Distortion-Adaptive Attention Block that reduces local distortions on multi-scale features. Secondly, to exploit the unique characteristics of 360° data, we present a learnable relation matrix and use it as part of the positional embedding to further improve performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public datasets, and the results show that our model outperforms existing 2D SOD (salient object detection) and 360 SOD methods.
Authors:Gabin Schieffer, Nattawat Pornthisan, Daniel Araújo de Medeiros, Stefano Markidis, Jacob Wahlgren, Ivy Peng
Abstract:
High-performance GPU-accelerated particle filter methods are critical for object detection applications, ranging from autonomous driving, robot localization, to time-series prediction. In this work, we investigate the design, development and optimization of particle-filter using half-precision on CUDA cores and compare their performance and accuracy with single- and double-precision baselines on Nvidia V100, A100, A40 and T4 GPUs. To mitigate numerical instability and precision losses, we introduce algorithmic changes in the particle filters. Using half-precision leads to a performance improvement of 1.5-2x and 2.5-4.6x with respect to single- and double-precision baselines respectively, at the cost of a relatively small loss of accuracy.
Authors:Chen Sun, Calvin Luo, Xingyi Zhou, Anurag Arnab, Cordelia Schmid
Abstract:
We aim to investigate whether end-to-end learning of visual reasoning can be achieved with general-purpose neural networks, with the help of visual pretraining. A positive result would refute the common belief that explicit visual abstraction (e.g. object detection) is essential for compositional generalization on visual reasoning, and confirm the feasibility of a neural network "generalist" to solve visual recognition and reasoning tasks. We propose a simple and general self-supervised framework which "compresses" each video frame into a small set of tokens with a transformer network, and reconstructs the remaining frames based on the compressed temporal context. To minimize the reconstruction loss, the network must learn a compact representation for each image, as well as capture temporal dynamics and object permanence from temporal context. We perform evaluation on two visual reasoning benchmarks, CATER and ACRE. We observe that pretraining is essential to achieve compositional generalization for end-to-end visual reasoning. Our proposed framework outperforms traditional supervised pretraining, including image classification and explicit object detection, by large margins.
Authors:Bin Xiao, Murat Simsek, Burak Kantarci, Ala Abu Alkheir
Abstract:
Table Detection has become a fundamental task for visually rich document understanding with the surging number of electronic documents. However, popular public datasets widely used in related studies have inherent limitations, including noisy and inconsistent samples, limited training samples, and limited data sources. These limitations make these datasets unreliable to evaluate the model performance and cannot reflect the actual capacity of models. Therefore, this study revisits some open datasets with high-quality annotations, identifies and cleans the noise, and aligns the annotation definitions of these datasets to merge a larger dataset, termed Open-Tables. Moreover, to enrich the data sources, we propose a new ICT-TD dataset using the PDF files of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) commodities, a different domain containing unique samples that hardly appear in open datasets. To ensure the label quality of the dataset, we annotated the dataset manually following the guidance of a domain expert. The proposed dataset is challenging and can be a sample of actual cases in the business context. We built strong baselines using various state-of-the-art object detection models. Our experimental results show that the domain differences among existing open datasets are minor despite having different data sources. Our proposed Open-Tables and ICT-TD can provide a more reliable evaluation for models because of their high quality and consistent annotations. Besides, they are more suitable for cross-domain settings. Our experimental results show that in the cross-domain setting, benchmark models trained with cleaned Open-Tables dataset can achieve 0.6\%-2.6\% higher weighted average F1 than the corresponding ones trained with the noisy version of Open-Tables, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed datasets. The datasets are public available.
Authors:Zijian Zhu, Yichi Zhang, Hai Chen, Yinpeng Dong, Shu Zhao, Wenbo Ding, Jiachen Zhong, Shibao Zheng
Abstract:
3D object detection is an essential perception task in autonomous driving to understand the environments. The Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations have significantly improved the performance of 3D detectors with camera inputs on popular benchmarks. However, there still lacks a systematic understanding of the robustness of these vision-dependent BEV models, which is closely related to the safety of autonomous driving systems. In this paper, we evaluate the natural and adversarial robustness of various representative models under extensive settings, to fully understand their behaviors influenced by explicit BEV features compared with those without BEV. In addition to the classic settings, we propose a 3D consistent patch attack by applying adversarial patches in the 3D space to guarantee the spatiotemporal consistency, which is more realistic for the scenario of autonomous driving. With substantial experiments, we draw several findings: 1) BEV models tend to be more stable than previous methods under different natural conditions and common corruptions due to the expressive spatial representations; 2) BEV models are more vulnerable to adversarial noises, mainly caused by the redundant BEV features; 3) Camera-LiDAR fusion models have superior performance under different settings with multi-modal inputs, but BEV fusion model is still vulnerable to adversarial noises of both point cloud and image. These findings alert the safety issue in the applications of BEV detectors and could facilitate the development of more robust models.
Authors:Marvin Klingner, Shubhankar Borse, Varun Ravi Kumar, Behnaz Rezaei, Venkatraman Narayanan, Senthil Yogamani, Fatih Porikli
Abstract:
Recent advances in 3D object detection (3DOD) have obtained remarkably strong results for LiDAR-based models. In contrast, surround-view 3DOD models based on multiple camera images underperform due to the necessary view transformation of features from perspective view (PV) to a 3D world representation which is ambiguous due to missing depth information. This paper introduces X$^3$KD, a comprehensive knowledge distillation framework across different modalities, tasks, and stages for multi-camera 3DOD. Specifically, we propose cross-task distillation from an instance segmentation teacher (X-IS) in the PV feature extraction stage providing supervision without ambiguous error backpropagation through the view transformation. After the transformation, we apply cross-modal feature distillation (X-FD) and adversarial training (X-AT) to improve the 3D world representation of multi-camera features through the information contained in a LiDAR-based 3DOD teacher. Finally, we also employ this teacher for cross-modal output distillation (X-OD), providing dense supervision at the prediction stage. We perform extensive ablations of knowledge distillation at different stages of multi-camera 3DOD. Our final X$^3$KD model outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on the nuScenes and Waymo datasets and generalizes to RADAR-based 3DOD. Qualitative results video at https://youtu.be/1do9DPFmr38.
Authors:Zengyu Qiu, Xinzhu Ma, Kunlin Yang, Chunya Liu, Jun Hou, Shuai Yi, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown very promising capabilities in transferring learning representations from large models (teachers) to small models (students). However, as the capacity gap between students and teachers becomes larger, existing KD methods fail to achieve better results. Our work shows that the `prior knowledge' is vital to KD, especially when applying large teachers. Particularly, we propose the dynamic prior knowledge (DPK), which integrates part of teacher's features as the prior knowledge before the feature distillation. This means that our method also takes the teacher's feature as `input', not just `target'. Besides, we dynamically adjust the ratio of the prior knowledge during the training phase according to the feature gap, thus guiding the student in an appropriate difficulty. To evaluate the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on two image classification benchmarks (i.e. CIFAR100 and ImageNet) and an object detection benchmark (i.e. MS COCO. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method in performance under varying settings. Besides, our DPK makes the performance of the student model positively correlated with that of the teacher model, which means that we can further boost the accuracy of students by applying larger teachers. More importantly, DPK provides a fast solution in teacher model selection for any given model.
Authors:Svetlana Pavlitska, Christian Hubschneider, Lukas Struppek, J. Marius Zöllner
Abstract:
Sparsely-gated Mixture of Expert (MoE) layers have been recently successfully applied for scaling large transformers, especially for language modeling tasks. An intriguing side effect of sparse MoE layers is that they convey inherent interpretability to a model via natural expert specialization. In this work, we apply sparse MoE layers to CNNs for computer vision tasks and analyze the resulting effect on model interpretability. To stabilize MoE training, we present both soft and hard constraint-based approaches. With hard constraints, the weights of certain experts are allowed to become zero, while soft constraints balance the contribution of experts with an additional auxiliary loss. As a result, soft constraints handle expert utilization better and support the expert specialization process, while hard constraints maintain more generalized experts and increase overall model performance. Our findings demonstrate that experts can implicitly focus on individual sub-domains of the input space. For example, experts trained for CIFAR-100 image classification specialize in recognizing different domains such as flowers or animals without previous data clustering. Experiments with RetinaNet and the COCO dataset further indicate that object detection experts can also specialize in detecting objects of distinct sizes.
Authors:Runsheng Xu, Weizhe Chen, Hao Xiang, Lantao Liu, Jiaqi Ma
Abstract:
Existing multi-agent perception systems assume that every agent utilizes the same model with identical parameters and architecture. The performance can be degraded with different perception models due to the mismatch in their confidence scores. In this work, we propose a model-agnostic multi-agent perception framework to reduce the negative effect caused by the model discrepancies without sharing the model information. Specifically, we propose a confidence calibrator that can eliminate the prediction confidence score bias. Each agent performs such calibration independently on a standard public database to protect intellectual property. We also propose a corresponding bounding box aggregation algorithm that considers the confidence scores and the spatial agreement of neighboring boxes. Our experiments shed light on the necessity of model calibration across different agents, and the results show that the proposed framework improves the baseline 3D object detection performance of heterogeneous agents.
Authors:Harshala Gammulle, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Simon Denman, Lachlan Tychsen-Smith, Lars Petersson, Clinton Fookes
Abstract:
With advances in data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction models have been proposed to capture spatio-temporal features for the analysis of video streams. Recognising actions and detecting action transitions within an input video are challenging but necessary tasks for applications that require real-time human-machine interaction. By reviewing a large body of recent related work in the literature, we thoroughly analyse, explain and compare action segmentation methods and provide details on the feature extraction and learning strategies that are used on most state-of-the-art methods. We cover the impact of the performance of object detection and tracking techniques on human action segmentation methodologies. We investigate the application of such models to real-world scenarios and discuss several limitations and key research directions towards improving interpretability, generalisation, optimisation and deployment.
Authors:Xinzhu Ma, Wanli Ouyang, Andrea Simonelli, Elisa Ricci
Abstract:
3D object detection from images, one of the fundamental and challenging problems in autonomous driving, has received increasing attention from both industry and academia in recent years. Benefiting from the rapid development of deep learning technologies, image-based 3D detection has achieved remarkable progress. Particularly, more than 200 works have studied this problem from 2015 to 2021, encompassing a broad spectrum of theories, algorithms, and applications. However, to date no recent survey exists to collect and organize this knowledge. In this paper, we fill this gap in the literature and provide the first comprehensive survey of this novel and continuously growing research field, summarizing the most commonly used pipelines for image-based 3D detection and deeply analyzing each of their components. Additionally, we also propose two new taxonomies to organize the state-of-the-art methods into different categories, with the intent of providing a more systematic review of existing methods and facilitating fair comparisons with future works. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also analyze the current challenges in the field and discuss future directions for image-based 3D detection research.
Authors:Shuocheng Yang, Zikun Xu, Jiahao Wang, Shahid Nawaz, Jianqiang Wang, Shaobing Xu
Abstract:
Radar has shown strong potential for robust perception in autonomous driving; however, raw radar images are frequently degraded by noise and "ghost" artifacts, making object detection based solely on semantic features highly challenging. To address this limitation, we introduce RaFD, a radar-based object detection framework that estimates inter-frame bird's-eye-view (BEV) flow and leverages the resulting geometric cues to enhance detection accuracy. Specifically, we design a supervised flow estimation auxiliary task that is jointly trained with the detection network. The estimated flow is further utilized to guide feature propagation from the previous frame to the current one. Our flow-guided, radar-only detector achieves achieves state-of-the-art performance on the RADIATE dataset, underscoring the importance of incorporating geometric information to effectively interpret radar signals, which are inherently ambiguous in semantics.
Authors:Melika Ayoughi, Samira Abnar, Chen Huang, Chris Sandino, Sayeri Lala, Eeshan Gunesh Dhekane, Dan Busbridge, Shuangfei Zhai, Vimal Thilak, Josh Susskind, Pascal Mettes, Paul Groth, Hanlin Goh
Abstract:
The composition of objects and their parts, along with object-object positional relationships, provides a rich source of information for representation learning. Hence, spatial-aware pretext tasks have been actively explored in self-supervised learning. Existing works commonly start from a grid structure, where the goal of the pretext task involves predicting the absolute position index of patches within a fixed grid. However, grid-based approaches fall short of capturing the fluid and continuous nature of real-world object compositions. We introduce PART, a self-supervised learning approach that leverages continuous relative transformations between off-grid patches to overcome these limitations. By modeling how parts relate to each other in a continuous space, PART learns the relative composition of images-an off-grid structural relative positioning process that generalizes beyond occlusions and deformations. In tasks requiring precise spatial understanding such as object detection and time series prediction, PART outperforms strong grid-based methods like MAE and DropPos, while also maintaining competitive performance on global classification tasks with minimal hyperparameter tuning. By breaking free from grid constraints, PART opens up an exciting new trajectory for universal self-supervised pretraining across diverse datatypes-from natural images to EEG signals-with promising potential in video, medical imaging, and audio.
Authors:Patrick Pfreundschuh, Giovanni Cioffi, Cornelius von Einem, Alexander Wyss, Hans Wernher van de Venn, Cesar Cadena, Davide Scaramuzza, Roland Siegwart, Alireza Darvishy
Abstract:
Visually impaired individuals face significant challenges navigating and interacting with unknown situations, particularly in tasks requiring spatial awareness and semantic scene understanding. To accelerate the development and evaluate the state of technologies that enable visually impaired people to solve these tasks, the Vision Assistance Race (VIS) at the Cybathlon 2024 competition was organized. In this work, we present Sight Guide, a wearable assistive system designed for the VIS. The system processes data from multiple RGB and depth cameras on an embedded computer that guides the user through complex, real-world-inspired tasks using vibration signals and audio commands. Our software architecture integrates classical robotics algorithms with learning-based approaches to enable capabilities such as obstacle avoidance, object detection, optical character recognition, and touchscreen interaction. In a testing environment, Sight Guide achieved a 95.7% task success rate, and further demonstrated its effectiveness during the Cybathlon competition. This work provides detailed insights into the system design, evaluation results, and lessons learned, and outlines directions towards a broader real-world applicability.
Authors:Hao Wu, Junzhou Chen, Ronghui Zhang, Nengchao Lyu, Hongyu Hu, Yanyong Guo, Tony Z. Qiu
Abstract:
Object detection is a cornerstone of environmental perception in advanced driver assistance systems(ADAS). However, most existing methods rely on RGB cameras, which suffer from significant performance degradation under low-light conditions due to poor image quality. To address this challenge, we proposes WTEFNet, a real-time object detection framework specifically designed for low-light scenarios, with strong adaptability to mainstream detectors. WTEFNet comprises three core modules: a Low-Light Enhancement (LLE) module, a Wavelet-based Feature Extraction (WFE) module, and an Adaptive Fusion Detection (AFFD) module. The LLE enhances dark regions while suppressing overexposed areas; the WFE applies multi-level discrete wavelet transforms to isolate high- and low-frequency components, enabling effective denoising and structural feature retention; the AFFD fuses semantic and illumination features for robust detection. To support training and evaluation, we introduce GSN, a manually annotated dataset covering both clear and rainy night-time scenes. Extensive experiments on BDD100K, SHIFT, nuScenes, and GSN demonstrate that WTEFNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy under low-light conditions. Furthermore, deployment on a embedded platform (NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin) confirms the framework's suitability for real-time ADAS applications.
Authors:Rayson Laroca, Marcelo dos Santos, David Menotti
Abstract:
Detecting small drones, often indistinguishable from birds, is crucial for modern surveillance. This work introduces a drone detection methodology built upon the medium-sized YOLOv11 object detection model. To enhance its performance on small targets, we implemented a multi-scale approach in which the input image is processed both as a whole and in segmented parts, with subsequent prediction aggregation. We also utilized a copy-paste data augmentation technique to enrich the training dataset with diverse drone and bird examples. Finally, we implemented a post-processing technique that leverages frame-to-frame consistency to mitigate missed detections. The proposed approach attained a top-3 ranking in the 8th WOSDETC Drone-vsBird Detection Grand Challenge, held at the 2025 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), showcasing its capability to detect drones in complex environments effectively.
Authors:Ziyu Lin, Yunfan Wu, Yuhang Ma, Junzhou Chen, Ronghui Zhang, Jiaming Wu, Guodong Yin, Liang Lin
Abstract:
Traffic sign detection is essential for autonomous driving and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). However, existing methods struggle with low-light conditions due to issues like indistinct small-object features, limited feature interaction, and poor image quality, which degrade detection accuracy and speed. To address this issue, we propose YOLO-LLTS, an end-to-end real-time traffic sign detection algorithm specifically designed for low-light environments. YOLO-LLTS introduces three main contributions: the High-Resolution Feature Map for Small Object Detection (HRFM-SOD) module to enhance small-object detection by mitigating feature dilution; the Multi-branch Feature Interaction Attention (MFIA) module to improve information extraction through multi-scale features interaction; and the Prior-Guided Feature Enhancement Module (PGFE) to enhance image quality by addressing noise, low contrast, and blurriness. Additionally, we construct a novel dataset, the Chinese Nighttime Traffic Sign Sample Set (CNTSSS), covering diverse nighttime scenarios. Experiments show that YOLO-LLTS achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous best methods by 2.7% mAP50 and 1.6% mAP50:95 on TT100K-night, 1.3% mAP50 and 1.9% mAP50:95 on CNTSSS, 7.5% mAP50 and 9.8% mAP50:95 on GTSDB-night, and superior results on CCTSDB2021. Deployment on edge devices confirms its real-time applicability and effectiveness.
Authors:Connor Schenck, Isaac Reid, Mithun George Jacob, Alex Bewley, Joshua Ainslie, David Rendleman, Deepali Jain, Mohit Sharma, Avinava Dubey, Ayzaan Wahid, Sumeet Singh, René Wagner, Tianli Ding, Chuyuan Fu, Arunkumar Byravan, Jake Varley, Alexey Gritsenko, Matthias Minderer, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Jonathan Tompson, Vikas Sindhwani, Krzysztof Choromanski
Abstract:
We introduce STRING: Separable Translationally Invariant Position Encodings. STRING extends Rotary Position Encodings, a recently proposed and widely used algorithm in large language models, via a unifying theoretical framework. Importantly, STRING still provides exact translation invariance, including token coordinates of arbitrary dimensionality, whilst maintaining a low computational footprint. These properties are especially important in robotics, where efficient 3D token representation is key. We integrate STRING into Vision Transformers with RGB(-D) inputs (color plus optional depth), showing substantial gains, e.g. in open-vocabulary object detection and for robotics controllers. We complement our experiments with a rigorous mathematical analysis, proving the universality of our methods.
Authors:Hua Ma, Alsharif Abuadbba, Yansong Gao, Hyoungshick Kim, Surya Nepal
Abstract:
The exploration of backdoor vulnerabilities in object detectors, particularly in real-world scenarios, remains limited. A significant challenge lies in the absence of a natural physical backdoor dataset, and constructing such a dataset is both time- and labor-intensive. In this work, we address this gap by creating a large-scale dataset comprising approximately 11,800 images/frames with annotations featuring natural objects (e.g., T-shirts and hats) as triggers to incur cloaking adversarial effects in diverse real-world scenarios. This dataset is tailored for the study of physical backdoors in object detectors. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of an insidious cloaking backdoor effect against object detectors, wherein the bounding box around a person vanishes when the individual is near a natural object (e.g., a commonly available T-shirt) in front of the detector. Our evaluations encompass three prevalent attack surfaces: data outsourcing, model outsourcing, and the use of pretrained models. The cloaking effect is successfully implanted in object detectors across all three attack surfaces. We extensively evaluate four popular object detection algorithms (anchor-based Yolo-V3, Yolo-V4, Faster R-CNN, and anchor-free CenterNet) using 19 videos (totaling approximately 11,800 frames) in real-world scenarios. Our results demonstrate that the backdoor attack exhibits remarkable robustness against various factors, including movement, distance, angle, non-rigid deformation, and lighting. In data and model outsourcing scenarios, the attack success rate (ASR) in most videos reaches 100% or near it, while the clean data accuracy of the backdoored model remains indistinguishable from that of the clean model, making it impossible to detect backdoor behavior through a validation set.
Authors:Hengfu Yu, Jinhong Deng, Wen Li, Lixin Duan
Abstract:
Evaluating the performance of deep models in new scenarios has drawn increasing attention in recent years. However, while it is possible to collect data from new scenarios, the annotations are not always available. Existing DAOD methods often rely on validation or test sets on the target domain for model selection, which is impractical in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised model selection approach for domain adaptive object detection, which is able to select almost the optimal model for the target domain without using any target labels. Our approach is based on the flat minima principle, i,e., models located in the flat minima region in the parameter space usually exhibit excellent generalization ability. However, traditional methods require labeled data to evaluate how well a model is located in the flat minima region, which is unrealistic for the DAOD task. Therefore, we design a Detection Adaptation Score (DAS) approach to approximately measure the flat minima without using target labels. We show via a generalization bound that the flatness can be deemed as model variance, while the minima depend on the domain distribution distance for the DAOD task. Accordingly, we propose a Flatness Index Score (FIS) to assess the flatness by measuring the classification and localization fluctuation before and after perturbations of model parameters and a Prototypical Distance Ratio (PDR) score to seek the minima by measuring the transferability and discriminability of the models. In this way, the proposed DAS approach can effectively evaluate the model generalization ability on the target domain. We have conducted extensive experiments on various DAOD benchmarks and approaches, and the experimental results show that the proposed DAS correlates well with the performance of DAOD models and can be used as an effective tool for model selection after training.
Authors:Yusuke Hosoya, Masanori Suganuma, Takayuki Okatani
Abstract:
Detecting objects occupying only small areas in an image is difficult, even for humans. Therefore, annotating small-size object instances is hard and thus costly. This study questions common sense by asking the following: is annotating small-size instances worth its cost? We restate it as the following verifiable question: can we detect small-size instances with a detector trained using training data free of small-size instances? We evaluate a method that upscales input images at test time and a method that downscales images at training time. The experiments conducted using the COCO dataset show the following. The first method, together with a remedy to narrow the domain gap between training and test inputs, achieves at least comparable performance to the baseline detector trained using complete training data. Although the method needs to apply the same detector twice to an input image with different scaling, we show that its distillation yields a single-path detector that performs equally well to the same baseline detector. These results point to the necessity of rethinking the annotation of training data for object detection.
Authors:Mahtab Bigverdi, Zelun Luo, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Ethan Shen, Dongping Chen, Linda G. Shapiro, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract:
Multimodal language models (MLMs) still face challenges in fundamental visual perception tasks where specialized models excel. Tasks requiring reasoning about 3D structures benefit from depth estimation, and reasoning about 2D object instances benefits from object detection. Yet, MLMs can not produce intermediate depth or boxes to reason over. Finetuning MLMs on relevant data doesn't generalize well and outsourcing computation to specialized vision tools is too compute-intensive and memory-inefficient. To address this, we introduce Perception Tokens, intrinsic image representations designed to assist reasoning tasks where language is insufficient. Perception tokens act as auxiliary reasoning tokens, akin to chain-of-thought prompts in language models. For example, in a depth-related task, an MLM augmented with perception tokens can reason by generating a depth map as tokens, enabling it to solve the problem effectively. We propose AURORA, a training method that augments MLMs with perception tokens for improved reasoning over visual inputs. AURORA leverages a VQVAE to transform intermediate image representations, such as depth maps into a tokenized format and bounding box tokens, which is then used in a multi-task training framework. AURORA achieves notable improvements across counting benchmarks: +10.8% on BLINK, +11.3% on CVBench, and +8.3% on SEED-Bench, outperforming finetuning approaches in generalization across datasets. It also improves on relative depth: over +6% on BLINK. With perception tokens, AURORA expands the scope of MLMs beyond language-based reasoning, paving the way for more effective visual reasoning capabilities.
Authors:Junzhou Chen, Heqiang Huang, Ronghui Zhang, Nengchao Lyu, Yanyong Guo, Hong-Ning Dai, Hong Yan
Abstract:
Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Evaluation on challenging public datasets, TT100K and CCTSDB2021, demonstrates that YOLO-TS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. The code for our method will be available.
Authors:Yusuke Hosoya, Masanori Suganuma, Takayuki Okatani
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.
Authors:Kejun Ren, Xin Wu, Lianming Xu, Li Wang
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing is widely applied in fields such as emergency response, owing to its advantages of rapid information acquisition and low cost. However, due to the effects of shooting distance and imaging mechanisms, the objects in the images present challenges such as small size, dense distribution, and low inter-class differentiation. To this end, we propose a multimodal remote sensing detection network that employs a quad-directional selective scanning fusion strategy called RemoteDet-Mamba. RemoteDet-Mamba simultaneously facilitates the learning of single-modal local features and the integration of patch-level global features across modalities, enhancing the distinguishability for small objects and utilizing local information to improve discrimination between different classes. Additionally, the use of Mamba's serial processing significantly increases detection speed. Experimental results on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of RemoteDet-Mamba, which achieves superior detection accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining computational efficiency and parameter count.
Authors:Jinsu Yoo, Zhenyang Feng, Tai-Yu Pan, Yihong Sun, Cheng Perng Phoo, Xiangyu Chen, Mark Campbell, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Bharath Hariharan, Wei-Lun Chao
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection in real-world environments requires a huge amount of annotated data with high quality. Acquiring such data is tedious and expensive, and often needs repeated effort when a new sensor is adopted or when the detector is deployed in a new environment. We investigate a new scenario to construct 3D object detectors: learning from the predictions of a nearby unit that is equipped with an accurate detector. For example, when a self-driving car enters a new area, it may learn from other traffic participants whose detectors have been optimized for that area. This setting is label-efficient, sensor-agnostic, and communication-efficient: nearby units only need to share the predictions with the ego agent (e.g., car). Naively using the received predictions as ground-truths to train the detector for the ego car, however, leads to inferior performance. We systematically study the problem and identify viewpoint mismatches and mislocalization (due to synchronization and GPS errors) as the main causes, which unavoidably result in false positives, false negatives, and inaccurate pseudo labels. We propose a distance-based curriculum, first learning from closer units with similar viewpoints and subsequently improving the quality of other units' predictions via self-training. We further demonstrate that an effective pseudo label refinement module can be trained with a handful of annotated data, largely reducing the data quantity necessary to train an object detector. We validate our approach on the recently released real-world collaborative driving dataset, using reference cars' predictions as pseudo labels for the ego car. Extensive experiments including several scenarios (e.g., different sensors, detectors, and domains) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach toward label-efficient learning of 3D perception from other units' predictions.
Authors:Sier Ha, Honghao Du, Xianjia Yu, Jian Song, Tomi Westerlund
Abstract:
Modern lidar systems can produce not only dense point clouds but also 360 degrees low-resolution images. This advancement facilitates the application of deep learning (DL) techniques initially developed for conventional RGB cameras and simplifies fusion of point cloud data and images without complex processes like lidar-camera calibration. Compared to RGB images from traditional cameras, lidar-generated images show greater robustness under low-light and harsh conditions, such as foggy weather. However, these images typically have lower resolution and often appear overly dark. While various studies have explored DL-based computer vision tasks such as object detection, segmentation, and keypoint detection on lidar imagery, other potentially valuable techniques remain underexplored. This paper provides a comprehensive review and qualitative analysis of DL-based colorization and super-resolution methods applied to lidar imagery. Additionally, we assess the computational performance of these approaches, offering insights into their suitability for downstream robotic and autonomous system applications like odometry and 3D reconstruction.
Authors:Beatriz Soret, Israel Leyva-Mayorga, Antonio M. Mercado-MartÃnez, Marco Moretti, Antonio Jurado-Navas, Marc Martinez-Gost, Celia Sánchez de Miguel, Ainoa Salas-Prendes, Petar Popovski
Abstract:
The integration of Semantic Communications (SemCom) and edge computing in space networks enables the optimal allocation of the scarce energy, computing, and communication resources for data-intensive applications. We use Earth Observation (EO) as a canonical functionality of satellites and review its main characteristics and challenges. We identify the potential of the space segment, represented by a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation, to serve as an edge layer for distributed intelligence. Based on that, propose a system architecture that supports semantic and goal-oriented applications for image reconstruction and object detection and localization. The simulation results show the intricate trade-offs among energy, time, and task-performance using a real dataset and State-of-the-Art (SoA) processing and communication parameters.
Authors:Chao Chen, Ruoyu Wang, Yuliang Guo, Cheng Zhao, Xinyu Huang, Chen Feng, Liu Ren
Abstract:
Autonomous driving in complex urban scenarios requires 3D perception to be both comprehensive and precise. Traditional 3D perception methods focus on object detection, resulting in sparse representations that lack environmental detail. Recent approaches estimate 3D occupancy around vehicles for a more comprehensive scene representation. However, dense 3D occupancy prediction increases computational demands, challenging the balance between efficiency and resolution. High-resolution occupancy grids offer accuracy but demand substantial computational resources, while low-resolution grids are efficient but lack detail. To address this dilemma, we introduce AdaOcc, a novel adaptive-resolution, multi-modal prediction approach. Our method integrates object-centric 3D reconstruction and holistic occupancy prediction within a single framework, performing highly detailed and precise 3D reconstruction only in regions of interest (ROIs). These high-detailed 3D surfaces are represented in point clouds, thus their precision is not constrained by the predefined grid resolution of the occupancy map. We conducted comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrating significant improvements over existing methods. In close-range scenarios, we surpass previous baselines by over 13% in IOU, and over 40% in Hausdorff distance. In summary, AdaOcc offers a more versatile and effective framework for delivering accurate 3D semantic occupancy prediction across diverse driving scenarios.
Authors:Malsha Ashani Mahawatta Dona, Beatriz Cabrero-Daniel, Yinan Yu, Christian Berger
Abstract:
Today's advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), like adaptive cruise control or rear collision warning, are finding broader adoption across vehicle classes. Integrating such advanced, multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) on board a vehicle, which are capable of processing text, images, audio, and other data types, may have the potential to greatly enhance passenger comfort. Yet, an LLM's hallucinations are still a major challenge to be addressed. In this paper, we systematically assessed potential hallucination detection strategies for such LLMs in the context of object detection in vision-based data on the example of pedestrian detection and localization. We evaluate three hallucination detection strategies applied to two state-of-the-art LLMs, the proprietary GPT-4V and the open LLaVA, on two datasets (Waymo/US and PREPER CITY/Sweden). Our results show that these LLMs can describe a traffic situation to an impressive level of detail but are still challenged for further analysis activities such as object localization. We evaluate and extend hallucination detection approaches when applying these LLMs to video sequences in the example of pedestrian detection. Our experiments show that, at the moment, the state-of-the-art proprietary LLM performs much better than the open LLM. Furthermore, consistency enhancement techniques based on voting, such as the Best-of-Three (BO3) method, do not effectively reduce hallucinations in LLMs that tend to exhibit high false negatives in detecting pedestrians. However, extending the hallucination detection by including information from the past helps to improve results.
Authors:Hanna Müller, Victor Kartsch, Luca Benini
Abstract:
The evolution of AI and digital signal processing technologies, combined with affordable energy-efficient processors, has propelled the development of both hardware and software for drone applications. Nano-drones, which fit into the palm of the hand, are suitable for indoor environments and safe for human interaction; however, they often fail to deliver the required performance for complex tasks due to the lack of hardware providing sufficient sensing and computing performance. Addressing this gap, we present the GAP9Shield, a nano-drone-compatible module powered by the GAP9, a 150GOPS-capable SoC. The system also includes a 5MP OV5647 camera for high-definition imaging, a WiFi-BLE NINA module, and a 5D VL53L1-based ranging subsystem, which enhances obstacle avoidance capabilities. In comparison with similarly targeted state-of-the-art systems, GAP9Shield provides a 20% higher sample rate (RGB images) while offering a 20% weight reduction. In this paper, we also highlight the energy efficiency and processing power capabilities of GAP9 for object detection (YOLO), localization, and mapping, which can run within a power envelope of below 100 mW and at low latency (as 17 ms for object detection), highlighting the transformative potential of GAP9 for the new generation of nano-drone applications.
Authors:Prantik Howlader, Hieu Le, Dimitris Samaras
Abstract:
Semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods leverage unlabeled data by pseudo-labeling them. Thus the success of these methods hinges on the reliablility of the pseudo-labels. Existing methods mostly choose high-confidence pixels in an effort to avoid erroneous pseudo-labels. However, high confidence does not guarantee correct pseudo-labels especially in the initial training iterations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reliably learn from pseudo-labels. First, we unify the predictions from a trained object detector and a semantic segmentation model to identify reliable pseudo-label pixels. Second, we assign different learning weights to pseudo-labeled pixels to avoid noisy training signals. To determine these weights, we first use the reliable pseudo-label pixels identified from the first step and labeled pixels to construct a prototype for each class. Then, the per-pixel weight is the structural similarity between the pixel and the prototype measured via rank-statistics similarity. This metric is robust to noise, making it better suited for comparing features from unlabeled images, particularly in the initial training phases where wrong pseudo labels are prone to occur. We show that our method can be easily integrated into four semi-supervised semantic segmentation frameworks, and improves them in both Cityscapes and Pascal VOC datasets.
Authors:Giulia Argüello, Luca A. Lanzendörfer, Roger Wattenhofer
Abstract:
Cue points indicate possible temporal boundaries in a transition between two pieces of music in DJ mixing and constitute a crucial element in autonomous DJ systems as well as for live mixing. In this work, we present a novel method for automatic cue point estimation, interpreted as a computer vision object detection task. Our proposed system is based on a pre-trained object detection transformer which we fine-tune on our novel cue point dataset. Our provided dataset contains 21k manually annotated cue points from human experts as well as metronome information for nearly 5k individual tracks, making this dataset 35x larger than the previously available cue point dataset. Unlike previous methods, our approach does not require low-level musical information analysis, while demonstrating increased precision in retrieving cue point positions. Moreover, our proposed method demonstrates high adherence to phrasing, a type of high-level music structure commonly emphasized in electronic dance music. The code, model checkpoints, and dataset are made publicly available.
Authors:Yunhao Ge, Xiaohui Zeng, Jacob Samuel Huffman, Tsung-Yi Lin, Ming-Yu Liu, Yin Cui
Abstract:
Existing automatic captioning methods for visual content face challenges such as lack of detail, content hallucination, and poor instruction following. In this work, we propose VisualFactChecker (VFC), a flexible training-free pipeline that generates high-fidelity and detailed captions for both 2D images and 3D objects. VFC consists of three steps: 1) proposal, where image-to-text captioning models propose multiple initial captions; 2) verification, where a large language model (LLM) utilizes tools such as object detection and VQA models to fact-check proposed captions; 3) captioning, where an LLM generates the final caption by summarizing caption proposals and the fact check verification results. In this step, VFC can flexibly generate captions in various styles following complex instructions. We conduct comprehensive captioning evaluations using four metrics: 1) CLIP-Score for image-text similarity; 2) CLIP-Image-Score for measuring the image-image similarity between the original and the reconstructed image generated by a text-to-image model using the caption. 3) human study on Amazon Mechanical Turk; 4) GPT-4V for fine-grained evaluation. Evaluation results show that VFC outperforms state-of-the-art open-sourced captioning methods for 2D images on the COCO dataset and 3D assets on the Objaverse dataset. Our study demonstrates that by combining open-source models into a pipeline, we can attain captioning capability comparable to proprietary models such as GPT-4V, despite being over 10x smaller in model size.
Authors:Xunsong Li, Pengzhan Sun, Yangcen Liu, Lixin Duan, Wen Li
Abstract:
The interactions between human and objects are important for recognizing object-centric actions. Existing methods usually adopt a two-stage pipeline, where object proposals are first detected using a pretrained detector, and then are fed to an action recognition model for extracting video features and learning the object relations for action recognition. However, since the action prior is unknown in the object detection stage, important objects could be easily overlooked, leading to inferior action recognition performance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end object-centric action recognition framework that simultaneously performs Detection And Interaction Reasoning in one stage. Particularly, after extracting video features with a base network, we create three modules for concurrent object detection and interaction reasoning. First, a Patch-based Object Decoder generates proposals from video patch tokens. Then, an Interactive Object Refining and Aggregation identifies important objects for action recognition, adjusts proposal scores based on position and appearance, and aggregates object-level info into a global video representation. Lastly, an Object Relation Modeling module encodes object relations. These three modules together with the video feature extractor can be trained jointly in an end-to-end fashion, thus avoiding the heavy reliance on an off-the-shelf object detector, and reducing the multi-stage training burden. We conduct experiments on two datasets, Something-Else and Ikea-Assembly, to evaluate the performance of our proposed approach on conventional, compositional, and few-shot action recognition tasks. Through in-depth experimental analysis, we show the crucial role of interactive objects in learning for action recognition, and we can outperform state-of-the-art methods on both datasets.
Authors:Matthew Inkawhich, Nathan Inkawhich, Hao Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Randolph Linderman, Yiran Chen
Abstract:
An object detector's ability to detect and flag \textit{novel} objects during open-world deployments is critical for many real-world applications. Unfortunately, much of the work in open object detection today is disjointed and fails to adequately address applications that prioritize unknown object recall \textit{in addition to} known-class accuracy. To close this gap, we present a new task called Open-Set Object Detection and Discovery (OSODD) and as a solution propose the Open-Set Regions with ViT features (OSR-ViT) detection framework. OSR-ViT combines a class-agnostic proposal network with a powerful ViT-based classifier. Its modular design simplifies optimization and allows users to easily swap proposal solutions and feature extractors to best suit their application. Using our multifaceted evaluation protocol, we show that OSR-ViT obtains performance levels that far exceed state-of-the-art supervised methods. Our method also excels in low-data settings, outperforming supervised baselines using a fraction of the training data.
Authors:Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Vitor Guizilini, Adrien Gaidon, Zsolt Kira, Rares Ambrus
Abstract:
Neural fields excel in computer vision and robotics due to their ability to understand the 3D visual world such as inferring semantics, geometry, and dynamics. Given the capabilities of neural fields in densely representing a 3D scene from 2D images, we ask the question: Can we scale their self-supervised pretraining, specifically using masked autoencoders, to generate effective 3D representations from posed RGB images. Owing to the astounding success of extending transformers to novel data modalities, we employ standard 3D Vision Transformers to suit the unique formulation of NeRFs. We leverage NeRF's volumetric grid as a dense input to the transformer, contrasting it with other 3D representations such as pointclouds where the information density can be uneven, and the representation is irregular. Due to the difficulty of applying masked autoencoders to an implicit representation, such as NeRF, we opt for extracting an explicit representation that canonicalizes scenes across domains by employing the camera trajectory for sampling. Our goal is made possible by masking random patches from NeRF's radiance and density grid and employing a standard 3D Swin Transformer to reconstruct the masked patches. In doing so, the model can learn the semantic and spatial structure of complete scenes. We pretrain this representation at scale on our proposed curated posed-RGB data, totaling over 1.8 million images. Once pretrained, the encoder is used for effective 3D transfer learning. Our novel self-supervised pretraining for NeRFs, NeRF-MAE, scales remarkably well and improves performance on various challenging 3D tasks. Utilizing unlabeled posed 2D data for pretraining, NeRF-MAE significantly outperforms self-supervised 3D pretraining and NeRF scene understanding baselines on Front3D and ScanNet datasets with an absolute performance improvement of over 20% AP50 and 8% AP25 for 3D object detection.
Authors:Jiajun Deng, Sha Zhang, Feras Dayoub, Wanli Ouyang, Yanyong Zhang, Ian Reid
Abstract:
In this work, we present PoIFusion, a conceptually simple yet effective multi-modal 3D object detection framework to fuse the information of RGB images and LiDAR point clouds at the points of interest (PoIs). Different from the most accurate methods to date that transform multi-sensor data into a unified view or leverage the global attention mechanism to facilitate fusion, our approach maintains the view of each modality and obtains multi-modal features by computation-friendly projection and interpolation. In particular, our PoIFusion follows the paradigm of query-based object detection, formulating object queries as dynamic 3D boxes and generating a set of PoIs based on each query box. The PoIs serve as the keypoints to represent a 3D object and play the role of the basic units in multi-modal fusion. Specifically, we project PoIs into the view of each modality to sample the corresponding feature and integrate the multi-modal features at each PoI through a dynamic fusion block. Furthermore, the features of PoIs derived from the same query box are aggregated together to update the query feature. Our approach prevents information loss caused by view transformation and eliminates the computation-intensive global attention, making the multi-modal 3D object detector more applicable. We conducted extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets to evaluate our approach. Remarkably, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets without any bells and whistles, \emph{i.e.}, 74.9\% NDS and 73.4\% mAP on nuScenes, and 31.6\% CDS and 40.6\% mAP on Argoverse2. The code will be made available at \url{https://djiajunustc.github.io/projects/poifusion}.
Authors:Jianwu Fang, Lei-lei Li, Junfei Zhou, Junbin Xiao, Hongkai Yu, Chen Lv, Jianru Xue, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract:
We present MM-AU, a novel dataset for Multi-Modal Accident video Understanding. MM-AU contains 11,727 in-the-wild ego-view accident videos, each with temporally aligned text descriptions. We annotate over 2.23 million object boxes and 58,650 pairs of video-based accident reasons, covering 58 accident categories. MM-AU supports various accident understanding tasks, particularly multimodal video diffusion to understand accident cause-effect chains for safe driving. With MM-AU, we present an Abductive accident Video understanding framework for Safe Driving perception (AdVersa-SD). AdVersa-SD performs video diffusion via an Object-Centric Video Diffusion (OAVD) method which is driven by an abductive CLIP model. This model involves a contrastive interaction loss to learn the pair co-occurrence of normal, near-accident, accident frames with the corresponding text descriptions, such as accident reasons, prevention advice, and accident categories. OAVD enforces the causal region learning while fixing the content of the original frame background in video generation, to find the dominant cause-effect chain for certain accidents. Extensive experiments verify the abductive ability of AdVersa-SD and the superiority of OAVD against the state-of-the-art diffusion models. Additionally, we provide careful benchmark evaluations for object detection and accident reason answering since AdVersa-SD relies on precise object and accident reason information.
Authors:Zexin Li, Soroush Bateni, Cong Liu
Abstract:
Despite the promising future of autonomous robots, several key issues currently remain that can lead to compromised performance and safety. One such issue is latency, where we find that even the latest embedded platforms from NVIDIA fail to execute intelligence tasks (e.g., object detection) of autonomous vehicles in a real-time fashion. One remedy to this problem is the promising paradigm of edge computing. Through collaboration with our industry partner, we identify key prohibitive limitations of the current edge mindset: (1) servers are not distributed enough and thus, are not close enough to vehicles, (2) current proposed edge solutions do not provide substantially better performance and extra information specific to autonomous vehicles to warrant their cost to the user, and (3) the state-of-the-art solutions are not compatible with popular frameworks used in autonomous systems, particularly the Robot Operating System (ROS).
To remedy these issues, we provide Genie, an encapsulation technique that can enable transparent caching in ROS in a non-intrusive way (i.e., without modifying the source code), can build the cache in a distributed manner (in contrast to traditional central caching methods), and can construct a collective three-dimensional object map to provide substantially better latency (even on low-power edge servers) and higher quality data to all vehicles in a certain locality. We fully implement our design on state-of-the-art industry-adopted embedded and edge platforms, using the prominent autonomous driving software Autoware, and find that Genie can enhance the latency of Autoware Vision Detector by 82% on average, enable object reusability 31% of the time on average and as much as 67% for the incoming requests, and boost the confidence in its object map considerably over time.
Authors:Xinyu Gao, Zhijie Wang, Yang Feng, Lei Ma, Zhenyu Chen, Baowen Xu
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion stands as a pivotal technique in addressing numerous safety-critical tasks and applications, e.g., self-driving cars and automated robotic arms. With the continuous advancement in data-driven artificial intelligence (AI), MSF's potential for sensing and understanding intricate external environments has been further amplified, bringing a profound impact on intelligent systems and specifically on their perception systems. Similar to traditional software, adequate testing is also required for AI-enabled MSF systems. Yet, existing testing methods primarily concentrate on single-sensor perception systems (e.g., image-/point cloud-based object detection systems). There remains a lack of emphasis on generating multi-modal test cases for MSF systems. To address these limitations, we design and implement MultiTest, a fitness-guided metamorphic testing method for complex MSF perception systems. MultiTest employs a physical-aware approach to synthesize realistic multi-modal object instances and insert them into critical positions of background images and point clouds. A fitness metric is designed to guide and boost the test generation process. We conduct extensive experiments with five SOTA perception systems to evaluate MultiTest from the perspectives of: (1) generated test cases' realism, (2) fault detection capabilities, and (3) performance improvement. The results show that MultiTest can generate realistic and modality-consistent test data and effectively detect hundreds of diverse faults of an MSF system under test. Moreover, retraining an MSF system on the test cases generated by MultiTest can improve the system's robustness.
Authors:Lihao Zhang, Haijian Sun, Jin Sun, Rose Qingyang Hu
Abstract:
The accurate modeling of indoor radio propagation is crucial for localization, monitoring, and device coordination, yet remains a formidable challenge, due to the complex nature of indoor environments where radio can propagate along hundreds of paths. These paths are resulted from the room layout, furniture, appliances and even small objects like a glass cup. They are also influenced by the object material and surface roughness. Advanced machine learning (ML) techniques have the potential to take such non-linear and hard-to-model factors into consideration. However, extensive and fine-grained datasets are urgently required. This paper presents WiSegRT, an open-source dataset for indoor radio propagation modeling. Generated by a differentiable ray tracer within the segmented 3-dimensional (3D) indoor environments, WiSegRT provides site-specific channel impulse responses for each grid point relative to the given transmitter location. We expect WiSegRT to support a wide-range of applications, such as ML-based channel prediction, accurate indoor localization, radio-based object detection, wireless digital twin, and more.
Authors:Lei Qi, Peng Dong, Tan Xiong, Hui Xue, Xin Geng
Abstract:
Object detection in urban scenarios is crucial for autonomous driving in intelligent traffic systems. However, unlike conventional object detection tasks, urban-scene images vary greatly in style. For example, images taken on sunny days differ significantly from those taken on rainy days. Therefore, models trained on sunny day images may not generalize well to rainy day images. In this paper, we aim to solve the single-domain generalizable object detection task in urban scenarios, meaning that a model trained on images from one weather condition should be able to perform well on images from any other weather conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Double AUGmentation (DoubleAUG) method that includes image- and feature-level augmentation schemes. In the image-level augmentation, we consider the variation in color information across different weather conditions and propose a Color Perturbation (CP) method that randomly exchanges the RGB channels to generate various images. In the feature-level augmentation, we propose to utilize a Dual-Style Memory (DSM) to explore the diverse style information on the entire dataset, further enhancing the model's generalization capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each module in our proposed method. Moreover, our method is plug-and-play and can be integrated into existing methods to further improve model performance.
Authors:Tai-Yu Pan, Chenyang Ma, Tianle Chen, Cheng Perng Phoo, Katie Z Luo, Yurong You, Mark Campbell, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Bharath Hariharan, Wei-Lun Chao
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection and understanding for self-driving cars heavily relies on LiDAR point clouds, necessitating large amounts of labeled data to train. In this work, we introduce an innovative pre-training approach, Grounded Point Colorization (GPC), to bridge the gap between data and labels by teaching the model to colorize LiDAR point clouds, equipping it with valuable semantic cues. To tackle challenges arising from color variations and selection bias, we incorporate color as "context" by providing ground-truth colors as hints during colorization. Experimental results on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate GPC's remarkable effectiveness. Even with limited labeled data, GPC significantly improves fine-tuning performance; notably, on just 20% of the KITTI dataset, GPC outperforms training from scratch with the entire dataset. In sum, we introduce a fresh perspective on pre-training for 3D object detection, aligning the objective with the model's intended role and ultimately advancing the accuracy and efficiency of 3D object detection for autonomous vehicles.
Authors:Hua Ma, Shang Wang, Yansong Gao, Zhi Zhang, Huming Qiu, Minhui Xue, Alsharif Abuadbba, Anmin Fu, Surya Nepal, Derek Abbott
Abstract:
All current backdoor attacks on deep learning (DL) models fall under the category of a vertical class backdoor (VCB) -- class-dependent. In VCB attacks, any sample from a class activates the implanted backdoor when the secret trigger is present. Existing defense strategies overwhelmingly focus on countering VCB attacks, especially those that are source-class-agnostic. This narrow focus neglects the potential threat of other simpler yet general backdoor types, leading to false security implications. This study introduces a new, simple, and general type of backdoor attack coined as the horizontal class backdoor (HCB) that trivially breaches the class dependence characteristic of the VCB, bringing a fresh perspective to the community. HCB is now activated when the trigger is presented together with an innocuous feature, regardless of class. For example, the facial recognition model misclassifies a person who wears sunglasses with a smiling innocuous feature into the targeted person, such as an administrator, regardless of which person. The key is that these innocuous features are horizontally shared among classes but are only exhibited by partial samples per class. Extensive experiments on attacking performance across various tasks, including MNIST, facial recognition, traffic sign recognition, object detection, and medical diagnosis, confirm the high efficiency and effectiveness of the HCB. We rigorously evaluated the evasiveness of the HCB against a series of eleven representative countermeasures, including Fine-Pruning (RAID 18'), STRIP (ACSAC 19'), Neural Cleanse (Oakland 19'), ABS (CCS 19'), Februus (ACSAC 20'), NAD (ICLR 21'), MNTD (Oakland 21'), SCAn (USENIX SEC 21'), MOTH (Oakland 22'), Beatrix (NDSS 23'), and MM-BD (Oakland 24'). None of these countermeasures prove robustness, even when employing a simplistic trigger, such as a small and static white-square patch.
Authors:Ruohuan Fang, Guansong Pang, Lei Zhou, Xiao Bai, Jin Zheng
Abstract:
Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) extends object detection problem to a realistic and dynamic scenario, where a detection model is required to be capable of detecting both known and unknown objects and incrementally learning newly introduced knowledge. Current OWOD models, such as ORE and OW-DETR, focus on pseudo-labeling regions with high objectness scores as unknowns, whose performance relies heavily on the supervision of known objects. While they can detect the unknowns that exhibit similar features to the known objects, they suffer from a severe label bias problem that they tend to detect all regions (including unknown object regions) that are dissimilar to the known objects as part of the background. To eliminate the label bias, this paper proposes a novel approach that learns an unsupervised discriminative model to recognize true unknown objects from raw pseudo labels generated by unsupervised region proposal methods. The resulting model can be further refined by a classification-free self-training method which iteratively extends pseudo unknown objects to the unlabeled regions. Experimental results show that our method 1) significantly outperforms the prior SOTA in detecting unknown objects while maintaining competitive performance of detecting known object classes on the MS COCO dataset, and 2) achieves better generalization ability on the LVIS and Objects365 datasets.
Authors:Tim Schreier, Katrin Renz, Andreas Geiger, Kashyap Chitta
Abstract:
Prior work in 3D object detection evaluates models using offline metrics like average precision since closed-loop online evaluation on the downstream driving task is costly. However, it is unclear how indicative offline results are of driving performance. In this work, we perform the first empirical evaluation measuring how predictive different detection metrics are of driving performance when detectors are integrated into a full self-driving stack. We conduct extensive experiments on urban driving in the CARLA simulator using 16 object detection models. We find that the nuScenes Detection Score has a higher correlation to driving performance than the widely used average precision metric. In addition, our results call for caution on the exclusive reliance on the emerging class of `planner-centric' metrics.
Authors:Bingqing Zhang, Sen Wang, Yifan Liu, Brano Kusy, Xue Li, Jiajun Liu
Abstract:
Current video object detection (VOD) models often encounter issues with over-aggregation due to redundant aggregation strategies, which perform feature aggregation on every frame. This results in suboptimal performance and increased computational complexity. In this work, we propose an image-level Object Detection Difficulty (ODD) metric to quantify the difficulty of detecting objects in a given image. The derived ODD scores can be used in the VOD process to mitigate over-aggregation. Specifically, we train an ODD predictor as an auxiliary head of a still-image object detector to compute the ODD score for each image based on the discrepancies between detection results and ground-truth bounding boxes. The ODD score enhances the VOD system in two ways: 1) it enables the VOD system to select superior global reference frames, thereby improving overall accuracy; and 2) it serves as an indicator in the newly designed ODD Scheduler to eliminate the aggregation of frames that are easy to detect, thus accelerating the VOD process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that, when utilized for selecting global reference frames, ODD-VOD consistently enhances the accuracy of Global-frame-based VOD models. When employed for acceleration, ODD-VOD consistently improves the frames per second (FPS) by an average of 73.3% across 8 different VOD models without sacrificing accuracy. When combined, ODD-VOD attains state-of-the-art performance when competing with many VOD methods in both accuracy and speed. Our work represents a significant advancement towards making VOD more practical for real-world applications.
Authors:Ming Nie, Yujing Xue, Chunwei Wang, Chaoqiang Ye, Hang Xu, Xinge Zhu, Qingqiu Huang, Michael Bi Mi, Xinchao Wang, Li Zhang
Abstract:
Recently, polar-based representation has shown promising properties in perceptual tasks. In addition to Cartesian-based approaches, which separate point clouds unevenly, representing point clouds as polar grids has been recognized as an alternative due to (1) its advantage in robust performance under different resolutions and (2) its superiority in streaming-based approaches. However, state-of-the-art polar-based detection methods inevitably suffer from the feature distortion problem because of the non-uniform division of polar representation, resulting in a non-negligible performance gap compared to Cartesian-based approaches. To tackle this issue, we present PARTNER, a novel 3D object detector in the polar coordinate. PARTNER alleviates the dilemma of feature distortion with global representation re-alignment and facilitates the regression by introducing instance-level geometric information into the detection head. Extensive experiments show overwhelming advantages in streaming-based detection and different resolutions. Furthermore, our method outperforms the previous polar-based works with remarkable margins of 3.68% and 9.15% on Waymo and ONCE validation set, thus achieving competitive results over the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Ioannis Maniadis Metaxas, Adrian Bulat, Ioannis Patras, Brais Martinez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Abstract:
The unsupervised pretraining of object detectors has recently become a key component of object detector training, as it leads to improved performance and faster convergence during the supervised fine-tuning stage. Existing unsupervised pretraining methods, however, typically rely on low-level information to define proposals that are used to train the detector. Furthermore, in the absence of class labels for these proposals, an auxiliary loss is used to add high-level semantics. This results in complex pipelines and a task gap between the pretraining and the downstream task. We propose a framework that mitigates this issue and consists of three simple yet key ingredients: (i) richer initial proposals that do encode high-level semantics, (ii) class pseudo-labeling through clustering, that enables pretraining using a standard object detection training pipeline, (iii) self-training to iteratively improve and enrich the object proposals. Once the pretraining and downstream tasks are aligned, a simple detection pipeline without further bells and whistles can be directly used for pretraining and, in fact, results in state-of-the-art performance on both the full and low data regimes, across detector architectures and datasets, by significant margins. We further show that our pretraining strategy is also capable of pretraining from scratch (including the backbone) and works on complex images like COCO, paving the path for unsupervised representation learning using object detection directly as a pretext task.
Authors:Ricardo Garcia, Robin Strudel, Shizhe Chen, Etienne Arlaud, Ivan Laptev, Cordelia Schmid
Abstract:
Learning visuomotor policies in simulation is much safer and cheaper than in the real world. However, due to discrepancies between the simulated and real data, simulator-trained policies often fail when transferred to real robots. One common approach to bridge the visual sim-to-real domain gap is domain randomization (DR). While previous work mainly evaluates DR for disembodied tasks, such as pose estimation and object detection, here we systematically explore visual domain randomization methods and benchmark them on a rich set of challenging robotic manipulation tasks. In particular, we propose an off-line proxy task of cube localization to select DR parameters for texture randomization, lighting randomization, variations of object colors and camera parameters. Notably, we demonstrate that DR parameters have similar impact on our off-line proxy task and on-line policies. We, hence, use off-line optimized DR parameters to train visuomotor policies in simulation and directly apply such policies to a real robot. Our approach achieves 93% success rate on average when tested on a diverse set of challenging manipulation tasks. Moreover, we evaluate the robustness of policies to visual variations in real scenes and show that our simulator-trained policies outperform policies learned using real but limited data. Code, simulation environment, real robot datasets and trained models are available at https://www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/robust_s2r/.
Authors:Xinyu Gao, Zhijie Wang, Yang Feng, Lei Ma, Zhenyu Chen, Baowen Xu
Abstract:
Multi-Sensor Fusion (MSF) based perception systems have been the foundation in supporting many industrial applications and domains, such as self-driving cars, robotic arms, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Over the past few years, the fast progress in data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) has brought a fast-increasing trend to empower MSF systems by deep learning techniques to further improve performance, especially on intelligent systems and their perception systems. Although quite a few AI-enabled MSF perception systems and techniques have been proposed, up to the present, limited benchmarks that focus on MSF perception are publicly available. Given that many intelligent systems such as self-driving cars are operated in safety-critical contexts where perception systems play an important role, there comes an urgent need for a more in-depth understanding of the performance and reliability of these MSF systems. To bridge this gap, we initiate an early step in this direction and construct a public benchmark of AI-enabled MSF-based perception systems including three commonly adopted tasks (i.e., object detection, object tracking, and depth completion). Based on this, to comprehensively understand MSF systems' robustness and reliability, we design 14 common and realistic corruption patterns to synthesize large-scale corrupted datasets. We further perform a systematic evaluation of these systems through our large-scale evaluation. Our results reveal the vulnerability of the current AI-enabled MSF perception systems, calling for researchers and practitioners to take robustness and reliability into account when designing AI-enabled MSF.
Authors:Yuan Dong, Chuan Fang, Liefeng Bo, Zilong Dong, Ping Tan
Abstract:
Panoramic image enables deeper understanding and more holistic perception of $360^\circ$ surrounding environment, which can naturally encode enriched scene context information compared to standard perspective image. Previous work has made lots of effort to solve the scene understanding task in a bottom-up form, thus each sub-task is processed separately and few correlations are explored in this procedure. In this paper, we propose a novel method using depth prior for holistic indoor scene understanding which recovers the objects' shapes, oriented bounding boxes and the 3D room layout simultaneously from a single panorama. In order to fully utilize the rich context information, we design a transformer-based context module to predict the representation and relationship among each component of the scene. In addition, we introduce a real-world dataset for scene understanding, including photo-realistic panoramas, high-fidelity depth images, accurately annotated room layouts, and oriented object bounding boxes and shapes. Experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous panoramic scene understanding methods in terms of both layout estimation and 3D object detection.
Authors:Jingyi Xu, Hieu Le, Dimitris Samaras
Abstract:
Two-stage object detectors generate object proposals and classify them to detect objects in images. These proposals often do not contain the objects perfectly but overlap with them in many possible ways, exhibiting great variability in the difficulty levels of the proposals. Training a robust classifier against this crop-related variability requires abundant training data, which is not available in few-shot settings. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel variational autoencoder (VAE) based data generation model, which is capable of generating data with increased crop-related diversity. The main idea is to transform the latent space such latent codes with different norms represent different crop-related variations. This allows us to generate features with increased crop-related diversity in difficulty levels by simply varying the latent norm. In particular, each latent code is rescaled such that its norm linearly correlates with the IoU score of the input crop w.r.t. the ground-truth box. Here the IoU score is a proxy that represents the difficulty level of the crop. We train this VAE model on base classes conditioned on the semantic code of each class and then use the trained model to generate features for novel classes. In our experiments our generated features consistently improve state-of-the-art few-shot object detection methods on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets.
Authors:Adrian Bulat, Ricardo Guerrero, Brais Martinez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Abstract:
This paper is on Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD), where given a few templates (examples) depicting a novel class (not seen during training), the goal is to detect all of its occurrences within a set of images. From a practical perspective, an FSOD system must fulfil the following desiderata: (a) it must be used as is, without requiring any fine-tuning at test time, (b) it must be able to process an arbitrary number of novel objects concurrently while supporting an arbitrary number of examples from each class and (c) it must achieve accuracy comparable to a closed system. Towards satisfying (a)-(c), in this work, we make the following contributions: We introduce, for the first time, a simple, yet powerful, few-shot detection transformer (FS-DETR) based on visual prompting that can address both desiderata (a) and (b). Our system builds upon the DETR framework, extending it based on two key ideas: (1) feed the provided visual templates of the novel classes as visual prompts during test time, and (2) ``stamp'' these prompts with pseudo-class embeddings (akin to soft prompting), which are then predicted at the output of the decoder. Importantly, we show that our system is not only more flexible than existing methods, but also, it makes a step towards satisfying desideratum (c). Specifically, it is significantly more accurate than all methods that do not require fine-tuning and even matches and outperforms the current state-of-the-art fine-tuning based methods on the most well-established benchmarks (PASCAL VOC & MSCOCO).
Authors:Chaoqi Chen, Yushuang Wu, Qiyuan Dai, Hong-Yu Zhou, Mutian Xu, Sibei Yang, Xiaoguang Han, Yizhou Yu
Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Authors:Lanhu Wu, Zilin Gao, Hao Fei, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu
Abstract:
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify the most conspicuous objects in a scene with the incorporation of depth cues. Existing methods mainly rely on CNNs, limited by the local receptive fields, or Vision Transformers that suffer from the cost of quadratic complexity, posing a challenge in balancing performance and computational efficiency. Recently, state space models (SSM), Mamba, have shown great potential for modeling long-range dependency with linear complexity. However, directly applying SSM to RGB-D SOD may lead to deficient local semantics as well as the inadequate cross-modality fusion. To address these issues, we propose a Local Emphatic and Adaptive Fusion state space model (LEAF-Mamba) that contains two novel components: 1) a local emphatic state space module (LE-SSM) to capture multi-scale local dependencies for both modalities. 2) an SSM-based adaptive fusion module (AFM) for complementary cross-modality interaction and reliable cross-modality integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LEAF-Mamba consistently outperforms 16 state-of-the-art RGB-D SOD methods in both efficacy and efficiency. Moreover, our method can achieve excellent performance on the RGB-T SOD task, proving a powerful generalization ability.
Authors:Edoardo Palladin, Roland Dietze, Praveen Narayanan, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide
Abstract:
Multimodal sensor fusion is an essential capability for autonomous robots, enabling object detection and decision-making in the presence of failing or uncertain inputs. While recent fusion methods excel in normal environmental conditions, these approaches fail in adverse weather, e.g., heavy fog, snow, or obstructions due to soiling. We introduce a novel multi-sensor fusion approach tailored to adverse weather conditions. In addition to fusing RGB and LiDAR sensors, which are employed in recent autonomous driving literature, our sensor fusion stack is also capable of learning from NIR gated camera and radar modalities to tackle low light and inclement weather. We fuse multimodal sensor data through attentive, depth-based blending schemes, with learned refinement on the Bird's Eye View (BEV) plane to combine image and range features effectively. Our detections are predicted by a transformer decoder that weighs modalities based on distance and visibility. We demonstrate that our method improves the reliability of multimodal sensor fusion in autonomous vehicles under challenging weather conditions, bridging the gap between ideal conditions and real-world edge cases. Our approach improves average precision by 17.2 AP compared to the next best method for vulnerable pedestrians in long distances and challenging foggy scenes. Our project page is available at https://light.princeton.edu/samfusion/
Authors:Juepeng Zheng, Zi Ye, Yibin Wen, Jianxi Huang, Zhiwei Zhang, Qingmei Li, Qiong Hu, Baodong Xu, Lingyuan Zhao, Haohuan Fu
Abstract:
Powered by advances in multiple remote sensing sensors, the production of high spatial resolution images provides great potential to achieve cost-efficient and high-accuracy agricultural inventory and analysis in an automated way. Lots of studies that aim at providing an inventory of the level of each agricultural parcel have generated many methods for Agricultural Parcel and Boundary Delineation (APBD). This review covers APBD methods for detecting and delineating agricultural parcels and systematically reviews the past and present of APBD-related research applied to remote sensing images. With the goal to provide a clear knowledge map of existing APBD efforts, we conduct a comprehensive review of recent APBD papers to build a meta-data analysis, including the algorithm, the study site, the crop type, the sensor type, the evaluation method, etc. We categorize the methods into three classes: (1) traditional image processing methods (including pixel-based, edge-based and region-based); (2) traditional machine learning methods (such as random forest, decision tree); and (3) deep learning-based methods. With deep learning-oriented approaches contributing to a majority, we further discuss deep learning-based methods like semantic segmentation-based, object detection-based and Transformer-based methods. In addition, we discuss five APBD-related issues to further comprehend the APBD domain using remote sensing data, such as multi-sensor data in APBD task, comparisons between single-task learning and multi-task learning in the APBD domain, comparisons among different algorithms and different APBD tasks, etc. Finally, this review proposes some APBD-related applications and a few exciting prospects and potential hot topics in future APBD research. We hope this review help researchers who involved in APBD domain to keep track of its development and tendency.
Authors:Edoardo Palladin, Samuel Brucker, Filippo Ghilotti, Praveen Narayanan, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide
Abstract:
Outside of urban hubs, autonomous cars and trucks have to master driving on intercity highways. Safe, long-distance highway travel at speeds exceeding 100 km/h demands perception distances of at least 250 m, which is about five times the 50-100m typically addressed in city driving, to allow sufficient planning and braking margins. Increasing the perception ranges also allows to extend autonomy from light two-ton passenger vehicles to large-scale forty-ton trucks, which need a longer planning horizon due to their high inertia. However, most existing perception approaches focus on shorter ranges and rely on Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations, which incur quadratic increases in memory and compute costs as distance grows. To overcome this limitation, we built on top of a sparse representation and introduced an efficient 3D encoding of multi-modal and temporal features, along with a novel self-supervised pre-training scheme that enables large-scale learning from unlabeled camera-LiDAR data. Our approach extends perception distances to 250 meters and achieves an 26.6% improvement in mAP in object detection and a decrease of 30.5% in Chamfer Distance in LiDAR forecasting compared to existing methods, reaching distances up to 250 meters. Project Page: https://light.princeton.edu/lrs4fusion/
Authors:Mengyu Ren, Yutong Li, Hua Li, Runmin Cong, Sam Kwong
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) faces numerous challenges, including significant variations in target scales and low contrast between targets and the background. Existing methods based on vision transformers (ViTs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architectures aim to leverage both global and local features, but the difficulty in effectively integrating these heterogeneous features limits their overall performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a graph-enhanced contextual and regional perception network (GCRPNet), which builds upon the Mamba architecture to simultaneously capture long-range dependencies and enhance regional feature representation. Specifically, we employ the visual state space (VSS) encoder to extract multi-scale features. To further achieve deep guidance and enhancement of these features, we first design a difference-similarity guided hierarchical graph attention module (DS-HGAM). This module strengthens cross-layer interaction capabilities between features of different scales while enhancing the model's structural perception,allowing it to distinguish between foreground and background more effectively. Then, we design the LEVSS block as the decoder of GCRPNet. This module integrates our proposed adaptive scanning strategy and multi-granularity collaborative attention enhancement module (MCAEM). It performs adaptive patch scanning on feature maps processed via multi-scale convolutions, thereby capturing rich local region information and enhancing Mamba's local modeling capability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its effectiveness and superiority.
Authors:Xiwei Xuan, Xiaoqi Wang, Wenbin He, Jorge Piazentin Ono, Liang Gou, Kwan-Liu Ma, Liu Ren
Abstract:
The advances in multi-modal foundation models (FMs) (e.g., CLIP and LLaVA) have facilitated the auto-labeling of large-scale datasets, enhancing model performance in challenging downstream tasks such as open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation. However, the quality of FM-generated labels is less studied as existing approaches focus more on data quantity over quality. This is because validating large volumes of data without ground truth presents a considerable challenge in practice. Existing methods typically rely on limited metrics to identify problematic data, lacking a comprehensive perspective, or apply human validation to only a small data fraction, failing to address the full spectrum of potential issues. To overcome these challenges, we introduce VISTA, a visual analytics framework that improves data quality to enhance the performance of multi-modal models. Targeting the complex and demanding domain of open-vocabulary image segmentation, VISTA integrates multi-phased data validation strategies with human expertise, enabling humans to identify, understand, and correct hidden issues within FM-generated labels. Through detailed use cases on two benchmark datasets and expert reviews, we demonstrate VISTA's effectiveness from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
Authors:Qi Qin, Runmin Cong, Gen Zhan, Yiting Liao, Sam Kwong
Abstract:
The eye-tracking video saliency prediction (VSP) task and video salient object detection (VSOD) task both focus on the most attractive objects in video and show the result in the form of predictive heatmaps and pixel-level saliency masks, respectively. In practical applications, eye tracker annotations are more readily obtainable and align closely with the authentic visual patterns of human eyes. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce fixation information to assist the detection of video salient objects under weak supervision. On the one hand, we ponder how to better explore and utilize the information provided by fixation, and then propose a Position and Semantic Embedding (PSE) module to provide location and semantic guidance during the feature learning process. On the other hand, we achieve spatiotemporal feature modeling under weak supervision from the aspects of feature selection and feature contrast. A Semantics and Locality Query (SLQ) Competitor with semantic and locality constraints is designed to effectively select the most matching and accurate object query for spatiotemporal modeling. In addition, an Intra-Inter Mixed Contrastive (IIMC) model improves the spatiotemporal modeling capabilities under weak supervision by forming an intra-video and inter-video contrastive learning paradigm. Experimental results on five popular VSOD benchmarks indicate that our model outperforms other competitors on various evaluation metrics.
Authors:Huahui Yi, Wei Xu, Ziyuan Qin, Xi Chen, Xiaohu Wu, Kang Li, Qicheng Lao
Abstract:
Existing prompt-based approaches have demonstrated impressive performance in continual learning, leveraging pre-trained large-scale models for classification tasks; however, the tight coupling between foreground-background information and the coupled attention between prompts and image-text tokens present significant challenges in incremental medical object detection tasks, due to the conceptual gap between medical and natural domains. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the \method~framework, which comprises two main components: 1) Instance-level Prompt Generation (\ipg), which decouples fine-grained instance-level knowledge from images and generates prompts that focus on dense predictions, and 2) Decoupled Prompt Attention (\dpa), which decouples the original prompt attention, enabling a more direct and efficient transfer of prompt information while reducing memory usage and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. We collect 13 clinical, cross-modal, multi-organ, and multi-category datasets, referred to as \dataset, and experiments demonstrate that \method~outperforms existing SOTA methods, with FAP improvements of 5.44\%, 4.83\%, 12.88\%, and 4.59\% in full data, 1-shot, 10-shot, and 50-shot settings, respectively.
Authors:Liangyang Ouyang, Yuki Sakai, Ryosuke Furuta, Hisataka Nozawa, Hikoro Matsui, Yoichi Sato
Abstract:
This paper addresses the task of assessing PICU team's leadership skills by developing an automated analysis framework based on egocentric vision. We identify key behavioral cues, including fixation object, eye contact, and conversation patterns, as essential indicators of leadership assessment. In order to capture these multimodal signals, we employ Aria Glasses to record egocentric video, audio, gaze, and head movement data. We collect one-hour videos of four simulated sessions involving doctors with different roles and levels. To automate data processing, we propose a method leveraging REMoDNaV, SAM, YOLO, and ChatGPT for fixation object detection, eye contact detection, and conversation classification. In the experiments, significant correlations are observed between leadership skills and behavioral metrics, i.e., the output of our proposed methods, such as fixation time, transition patterns, and direct orders in speech. These results indicate that our proposed data collection and analysis framework can effectively solve skill assessment for training PICU teams.
Authors:Zilun Zhang, Haozhan Shen, Tiancheng Zhao, Bin Chen, Zian Guan, Yuhao Wang, Xu Jia, Yuxiang Cai, Yongheng Shang, Jianwei Yin
Abstract:
The application of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in remote sensing (RS) has demonstrated significant potential in traditional tasks such as scene classification, object detection, and image captioning. However, current models, which excel in Referring Expression Comprehension (REC), struggle with tasks involving complex instructions (e.g., exists multiple conditions) or pixel-level operations like segmentation and change detection. In this white paper, we provide a comprehensive hierarchical summary of vision-language tasks in RS, categorized by the varying levels of cognitive capability required. We introduce the Remote Sensing Vision-Language Task Set (RSVLTS), which includes Open-Vocabulary Tasks (OVT), Referring Expression Tasks (RET), and Described Object Tasks (DOT) with increased difficulty, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) aloneside. Moreover, we propose a novel unified data representation using a set-of-points approach for RSVLTS, along with a condition parser and a self-augmentation strategy based on cyclic referring. These features are integrated into the GeoRSMLLM model, and this enhanced model is designed to handle a broad range of tasks of RSVLTS, paving the way for a more generalized solution for vision-language tasks in geoscience and remote sensing.
Authors:Lukáš Gajdošech, Hassan Ali, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Martin Madaras, Matthias Kerzel, Stefan Wermter
Abstract:
Datasets for object detection often do not account for enough variety of glasses, due to their transparent and reflective properties. Specifically, open-vocabulary object detectors, widely used in embodied robotic agents, fail to distinguish subclasses of glasses. This scientific gap poses an issue for robotic applications that suffer from accumulating errors between detection, planning, and action execution. This paper introduces a novel method for acquiring real-world data from RGB-D sensors that minimizes human effort. We propose an auto-labeling pipeline that generates labels for all the acquired frames based on the depth measurements. We provide a novel real-world glass object dataset GlassNICOLDataset that was collected on the Neuro-Inspired COLlaborator (NICOL), a humanoid robot platform. The dataset consists of 7850 images recorded from five different cameras. We show that our trained baseline model outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary approaches. In addition, we deploy our baseline model in an embodied agent approach to the NICOL platform, on which it achieves a success rate of 81% in a human-robot bartending scenario.
Authors:Wenxi Li, Yuchen Guo, Jilai Zheng, Haozhe Lin, Chao Ma, Lu Fang, Xiaokang Yang
Abstract:
Recent years have seen an increase in the use of gigapixel-level image and video capture systems and benchmarks with high-resolution wide (HRW) shots. However, unlike close-up shots in the MS COCO dataset, the higher resolution and wider field of view raise unique challenges, such as extreme sparsity and huge scale changes, causing existing close-up detectors inaccuracy and inefficiency. In this paper, we present a novel model-agnostic sparse vision transformer, dubbed SparseFormer, to bridge the gap of object detection between close-up and HRW shots. The proposed SparseFormer selectively uses attentive tokens to scrutinize the sparsely distributed windows that may contain objects. In this way, it can jointly explore global and local attention by fusing coarse- and fine-grained features to handle huge scale changes. SparseFormer also benefits from a novel Cross-slice non-maximum suppression (C-NMS) algorithm to precisely localize objects from noisy windows and a simple yet effective multi-scale strategy to improve accuracy. Extensive experiments on two HRW benchmarks, PANDA and DOTA-v1.0, demonstrate that the proposed SparseFormer significantly improves detection accuracy (up to 5.8%) and speed (up to 3x) over the state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors:Nastaran Darabi, Divake Kumar, Sina Tayebati, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
Abstract:
In this work, we present INTACT, a novel two-phase framework designed to enhance the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) against noisy LiDAR data in safety-critical perception tasks. INTACT combines meta-learning with adversarial curriculum training (ACT) to systematically address challenges posed by data corruption and sparsity in 3D point clouds. The meta-learning phase equips a teacher network with task-agnostic priors, enabling it to generate robust saliency maps that identify critical data regions. The ACT phase leverages these saliency maps to progressively expose a student network to increasingly complex noise patterns, ensuring targeted perturbation and improved noise resilience. INTACT's effectiveness is demonstrated through comprehensive evaluations on object detection, tracking, and classification benchmarks using diverse datasets, including KITTI, Argoverse, and ModelNet40. Results indicate that INTACT improves model robustness by up to 20% across all tasks, outperforming standard adversarial and curriculum training methods. This framework not only addresses the limitations of conventional training strategies but also offers a scalable and efficient solution for real-world deployment in resource-constrained safety-critical systems. INTACT's principled integration of meta-learning and adversarial training establishes a new paradigm for noise-tolerant 3D perception in safety-critical applications. INTACT improved KITTI Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) by 9.6% (64.1% -> 75.1%) and by 12.4% under Gaussian noise (52.5% -> 73.7%). Similarly, KITTI mean Average Precision (mAP) rose from 59.8% to 69.8% (50% point drop) and 49.3% to 70.9% (Gaussian noise), highlighting the framework's ability to enhance deep learning model resilience in safety-critical object tracking scenarios.
Authors:Xudong Wang, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen
Abstract:
Object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing images poses significant challenges due to unstable image quality, small object sizes, complex backgrounds, and environmental occlusions. Small objects, in particular, occupy small portions of images, making their accurate detection highly difficult. Existing multi-scale feature fusion methods address these challenges to some extent by aggregating features across different resolutions. However, they often fail to effectively balance the classification and localization performance for small objects, primarily due to insufficient feature representation and imbalanced network information flow. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion framework specifically designed for UAV object detection tasks to enhance both localization accuracy and classification performance. The proposed framework integrates hybrid upsampling and downsampling modules, enabling feature maps from different network depths to be flexibly adjusted to arbitrary resolutions. This design facilitates cross-layer connections and multi-scale feature fusion, ensuring improved representation of small objects. Our approach leverages hybrid downsampling to enhance fine-grained feature representation, improving spatial localization of small targets, even under complex conditions. Simultaneously, the upsampling module aggregates global contextual information, optimizing feature consistency across scales and enhancing classification robustness in cluttered scenes. Experimental results on two public UAV datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Integrated into the YOLO-v10 model, our method achieves a 2% improvement in average precision (AP) compared to the baseline YOLO-v10 model, while maintaining the same number of parameters. These results highlight the potential of our framework for accurate and efficient UAV object detection.
Authors:Haobin Qin, Calvin Yeung, Rikuhei Umemoto, Keisuke Fujii
Abstract:
In soccer video analysis, player detection is essential for identifying key events and reconstructing tactical positions. The presence of numerous players and frequent occlusions, combined with copyright restrictions, severely restricts the availability of datasets, leaving limited options such as SoccerNet-Tracking and SportsMOT. These datasets suffer from a lack of diversity, which hinders algorithms from adapting effectively to varied soccer video contexts. To address these challenges, we developed SoccerSynth-Detection, the first synthetic dataset designed for the detection of synthetic soccer players. It includes a broad range of random lighting and textures, as well as simulated camera motion blur. We validated its efficacy using the object detection model (Yolov8n) against real-world datasets (SoccerNet-Tracking and SportsMoT). In transfer tests, it matched the performance of real datasets and significantly outperformed them in images with motion blur; in pre-training tests, it demonstrated its efficacy as a pre-training dataset, significantly enhancing the algorithm's overall performance. Our work demonstrates the potential of synthetic datasets to replace real datasets for algorithm training in the field of soccer video analysis.
Authors:Shijun Zheng, Weiquan Liu, Yu Guo, Yu Zang, Siqi Shen, Cheng Wang
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on LiDAR sensors for environmental perception and decision-making in driving scenarios. However, ensuring the safety and reliability of AVs in complex environments remains a pressing challenge. To address this issue, we introduce a real-world dataset (ROLiD) comprising LiDAR-scanned point clouds of two random objects: water mist and smoke. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial perspective by proposing an attack framework that utilizes water mist and smoke to simulate environmental interference. Specifically, we propose a point cloud sequence generation method using a motion and content decomposition generative adversarial network named PCS-GAN to simulate the distribution of random objects. Furthermore, leveraging the simulated LiDAR scanning characteristics implemented with Range Image, we examine the effects of introducing random object perturbations at various positions on the target vehicle. Extensive experiments demonstrate that adversarial perturbations based on random objects effectively deceive vehicle detection and reduce the recognition rate of 3D object detection models.
Authors:Muhayy Ud Din, Ahsan B. Bakht, Waseem Akram, Yihao Dong, Lakmal Seneviratne, Irfan Hussain
Abstract:
Vision-based target tracking is crucial for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to perform tasks such as inspection, monitoring, and surveillance. However, real-time tracking in complex maritime environments is challenging due to dynamic camera movement, low visibility, and scale variation. Typically, object detection methods combined with filtering techniques are commonly used for tracking, but they often lack robustness, particularly in the presence of camera motion and missed detections. Although advanced tracking methods have been proposed recently, their application in maritime scenarios is limited. To address this gap, this study proposes a vision-guided object-tracking framework for USVs, integrating state-of-the-art tracking algorithms with low-level control systems to enable precise tracking in dynamic maritime environments. We benchmarked the performance of seven distinct trackers, developed using advanced deep learning techniques such as Siamese Networks and Transformers, by evaluating them on both simulated and real-world maritime datasets. In addition, we evaluated the robustness of various control algorithms in conjunction with these tracking systems. The proposed framework was validated through simulations and real-world sea experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling dynamic maritime conditions. The results show that SeqTrack, a Transformer-based tracker, performed best in adverse conditions, such as dust storms. Among the control algorithms evaluated, the linear quadratic regulator controller (LQR) demonstrated the most robust and smooth control, allowing for stable tracking of the USV.
Authors:Dongyue Lu, Lingdong Kong, Gim Hee Lee, Camille Simon Chane, Wei Tsang Ooi
Abstract:
Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages for real-time perception in dynamic environments, thanks to the microsecond-level temporal resolution and asynchronous operation. Existing event detectors, however, are limited by fixed-frequency paradigms and fail to fully exploit the high-temporal resolution and adaptability of event data. To address these limitations, we propose FlexEvent, a novel framework that enables detection at varying frequencies. Our approach consists of two key components: FlexFuse, an adaptive event-frame fusion module that integrates high-frequency event data with rich semantic information from RGB frames, and FlexTune, a frequency-adaptive fine-tuning mechanism that generates frequency-adjusted labels to enhance model generalization across varying operational frequencies. This combination allows our method to detect objects with high accuracy in both fast-moving and static scenarios, while adapting to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on large-scale event camera datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in both standard and high-frequency settings. Notably, our method maintains robust performance when scaling from 20 Hz to 90 Hz and delivers accurate detection up to 180 Hz, proving its effectiveness in extreme conditions. Our framework sets a new benchmark for event-based object detection and paves the way for more adaptable, real-time vision systems. Code is publicly available.
Authors:Tianyi Wang, Zichen Wang, Cong Wang, Yuanchao Shu, Ruilong Deng, Peng Cheng, Jiming Chen
Abstract:
Object detection is a fundamental enabler for many real-time downstream applications such as autonomous driving, augmented reality and supply chain management. However, the algorithmic backbone of neural networks is brittle to imperceptible perturbations in the system inputs, which were generally known as misclassifying attacks. By targeting the real-time processing capability, a new class of latency attacks are reported recently. They exploit new attack surfaces in object detectors by creating a computational bottleneck in the post-processing module, that leads to cascading failure and puts the real-time downstream tasks at risks. In this work, we take an initial attempt to defend against this attack via background-attentive adversarial training that is also cognizant of the underlying hardware capabilities. We first draw system-level connections between latency attack and hardware capacity across heterogeneous GPU devices. Based on the particular adversarial behaviors, we utilize objectness loss as a proxy and build background attention into the adversarial training pipeline, and achieve a reasonable balance between clean and robust accuracy. The extensive experiments demonstrate the defense effectiveness of restoring real-time processing capability from $13$ FPS to $43$ FPS on Jetson Orin NX, with a better trade-off between the clean and robust accuracy.
Authors:Yifan Wang, Xiaochen Yang, Fanqi Pu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection has attracted great attention due to simplicity and low cost. Existing methods typically follow conventional 2D detection paradigms, first locating object centers and then predicting 3D attributes via neighboring features. However, these methods predominantly rely on progressive cross-scale feature aggregation and focus solely on local information, which may result in a lack of global awareness and the omission of small-scale objects. In addition, due to large variation in object scales across different scenes and depths, inaccurate receptive fields often lead to background noise and degraded feature representation. To address these issues, we introduces MonoASRH, a novel monocular 3D detection framework composed of Efficient Hybrid Feature Aggregation Module (EH-FAM) and Adaptive Scale-Aware 3D Regression Head (ASRH). Specifically, EH-FAM employs multi-head attention with a global receptive field to extract semantic features for small-scale objects and leverages lightweight convolutional modules to efficiently aggregate visual features across different scales. The ASRH encodes 2D bounding box dimensions and then fuses scale features with the semantic features aggregated by EH-FAM through a scale-semantic feature fusion module. The scale-semantic feature fusion module guides ASRH in learning dynamic receptive field offsets, incorporating scale priors into 3D position prediction for better scale-awareness. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that MonoASRH achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Jinyin Chen, Danxin Liao, Sheng Xiang, Haibin Zheng
Abstract:
Since DNN is vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples, adversarial attack on LiDAR sensors have been extensively studied. We introduce a robust black-box attack dubbed LiDAttack. It utilizes a genetic algorithm with a simulated annealing strategy to strictly limit the location and number of perturbation points, achieving a stealthy and effective attack. And it simulates scanning deviations, allowing it to adapt to dynamic changes in real world scenario variations. Extensive experiments are conducted on 3 datasets (i.e., KITTI, nuScenes, and self-constructed data) with 3 dominant object detection models (i.e., PointRCNN, PointPillar, and PV-RCNN++). The results reveal the efficiency of the LiDAttack when targeting a wide range of object detection models, with an attack success rate (ASR) up to 90%.
Authors:Guanming Huang, Aoran Shen, Yuxiang Hu, Junliang Du, Jiacheng Hu, Yingbin Liang
Abstract:
This paper explores the application of knowledge distillation technology in target detection tasks, especially the impact of different distillation temperatures on the performance of student models. By using YOLOv5l as the teacher network and a smaller YOLOv5s as the student network, we found that with the increase of distillation temperature, the student's detection accuracy gradually improved, and finally achieved mAP50 and mAP50-95 indicators that were better than the original YOLOv5s model at a specific temperature. Experimental results show that appropriate knowledge distillation strategies can not only improve the accuracy of the model but also help improve the reliability and stability of the model in practical applications. This paper also records in detail the accuracy curve and loss function descent curve during the model training process and shows that the model converges to a stable state after 150 training cycles. These findings provide a theoretical basis and technical reference for further optimizing target detection algorithms.
Authors:Rohit Mohan, Daniele Cattaneo, Florian Drews, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion is crucial for accurate 3D object detection in autonomous driving, with cameras and LiDAR being the most commonly used sensors. However, existing methods perform sensor fusion in a single view by projecting features from both modalities either in Bird's Eye View (BEV) or Perspective View (PV), thus sacrificing complementary information such as height or geometric proportions. To address this limitation, we propose ProFusion3D, a progressive fusion framework that combines features in both BEV and PV at both intermediate and object query levels. Our architecture hierarchically fuses local and global features, enhancing the robustness of 3D object detection. Additionally, we introduce a self-supervised mask modeling pre-training strategy to improve multi-modal representation learning and data efficiency through three novel objectives. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets conclusively demonstrate the efficacy of ProFusion3D. Moreover, ProFusion3D is robust to sensor failure, demonstrating strong performance when only one modality is available.
Authors:Shizhou Zhang, Dexuan Kong, Yinghui Xing, Yue Lu, Lingyan Ran, Guoqiang Liang, Hexu Wang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment camouflaged objects which exhibit very similar patterns with the surrounding environment. Recent research works have shown that enhancing the feature representation via the frequency information can greatly alleviate the ambiguity problem between the foreground objects and the background.With the emergence of vision foundation models, like InternImage, Segment Anything Model etc, adapting the pretrained model on COD tasks with a lightweight adapter module shows a novel and promising research direction. Existing adapter modules mainly care about the feature adaptation in the spatial domain. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-guided spatial adaptation method for COD task. Specifically, we transform the input features of the adapter into frequency domain. By grouping and interacting with frequency components located within non overlapping circles in the spectrogram, different frequency components are dynamically enhanced or weakened, making the intensity of image details and contour features adaptively adjusted. At the same time, the features that are conducive to distinguishing object and background are highlighted, indirectly implying the position and shape of camouflaged object. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely adopted benchmark datasets and the proposed method outperforms 26 state-of-the-art methods with large margins. Code will be released.
Authors:Jiacheng Deng, Jiahao Lu, Tianzhu Zhang
Abstract:
3D object detection is essential for understanding 3D scenes. Contemporary techniques often require extensive annotated training data, yet obtaining point-wise annotations for point clouds is time-consuming and laborious. Recent developments in semi-supervised methods seek to mitigate this problem by employing a teacher-student framework to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled point clouds. However, these pseudo-labels frequently suffer from insufficient diversity and inferior quality. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce an Agent-based Diffusion Model for Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection (Diff3DETR). Specifically, an agent-based object query generator is designed to produce object queries that effectively adapt to dynamic scenes while striking a balance between sampling locations and content embedding. Additionally, a box-aware denoising module utilizes the DDIM denoising process and the long-range attention in the transformer decoder to refine bounding boxes incrementally. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that Diff3DETR outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised 3D object detection methods.
Authors:Xingcheng Zhou, Deyu Fu, Walter Zimmer, Mingyu Liu, Venkatnarayanan Lakshminarasimhan, Leah Strand, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract:
Existing roadside perception systems are limited by the absence of publicly available, large-scale, high-quality 3D datasets. Exploring the use of cost-effective, extensive synthetic datasets offers a viable solution to tackle this challenge and enhance the performance of roadside monocular 3D detection. In this study, we introduce the TUMTraf Synthetic Dataset, offering a diverse and substantial collection of high-quality 3D data to augment scarce real-world datasets. Besides, we present WARM-3D, a concise yet effective framework to aid the Sim2Real domain transfer for roadside monocular 3D detection. Our method leverages cheap synthetic datasets and 2D labels from an off-the-shelf 2D detector for weak supervision. We show that WARM-3D significantly enhances performance, achieving a +12.40% increase in mAP 3D over the baseline with only pseudo-2D supervision. With 2D GT as weak labels, WARM-3D even reaches performance close to the Oracle baseline. Moreover, WARM-3D improves the ability of 3D detectors to unseen sample recognition across various real-world environments, highlighting its potential for practical applications.
Authors:Zhe Liu, Jinghua Hou, Xinyu Wang, Xiaoqing Ye, Jingdong Wang, Hengshuang Zhao, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
The benefit of transformers in large-scale 3D point cloud perception tasks, such as 3D object detection, is limited by their quadratic computation cost when modeling long-range relationships. In contrast, linear RNNs have low computational complexity and are suitable for long-range modeling. Toward this goal, we propose a simple and effective window-based framework built on LInear grOup RNN (i.e., perform linear RNN for grouped features) for accurate 3D object detection, called LION. The key property is to allow sufficient feature interaction in a much larger group than transformer-based methods. However, effectively applying linear group RNN to 3D object detection in highly sparse point clouds is not trivial due to its limitation in handling spatial modeling. To tackle this problem, we simply introduce a 3D spatial feature descriptor and integrate it into the linear group RNN operators to enhance their spatial features rather than blindly increasing the number of scanning orders for voxel features. To further address the challenge in highly sparse point clouds, we propose a 3D voxel generation strategy to densify foreground features thanks to linear group RNN as a natural property of auto-regressive models. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed components and the generalization of our LION on different linear group RNN operators including Mamba, RWKV, and RetNet. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that our LION-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art on Waymo, nuScenes, Argoverse V2, and ONCE dataset. Last but not least, our method supports kinds of advanced linear RNN operators (e.g., RetNet, RWKV, Mamba, xLSTM and TTT) on small but popular KITTI dataset for a quick experience with our linear RNN-based framework.
Authors:Wenxi Li, Ruxin Zhang, Haozhe Lin, Yuchen Guo, Chao Ma, Xiaokang Yang
Abstract:
The advancement of deep learning in object detection has predominantly focused on megapixel images, leaving a critical gap in the efficient processing of gigapixel images. These super high-resolution images present unique challenges due to their immense size and computational demands. To address this, we introduce 'SaccadeDet', an innovative architecture for gigapixel-level object detection, inspired by the human eye saccadic movement. The cornerstone of SaccadeDet is its ability to strategically select and process image regions, dramatically reducing computational load. This is achieved through a two-stage process: the 'saccade' stage, which identifies regions of probable interest, and the 'gaze' stage, which refines detection in these targeted areas. Our approach, evaluated on the PANDA dataset, not only achieves an 8x speed increase over the state-of-the-art methods but also demonstrates significant potential in gigapixel-level pathology analysis through its application to Whole Slide Imaging.
Authors:Yiran Yang, Xu Gao, Tong Wang, Xin Hao, Yifeng Shi, Xiao Tan, Xiaoqing Ye, Jingdong Wang
Abstract:
Camera and LiDAR serve as informative sensors for accurate and robust autonomous driving systems. However, these sensors often exhibit heterogeneous natures, resulting in distributional modality gaps that present significant challenges for fusion. To address this, a robust fusion technique is crucial, particularly for enhancing 3D object detection. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic adjustment technology aimed at aligning modal distributions and learning effective modality representations to enhance the fusion process. Specifically, we propose a triphase domain aligning module. This module adjusts the feature distributions from both the camera and LiDAR, bringing them closer to the ground truth domain and minimizing differences. Additionally, we explore improved representation acquisition methods for dynamic fusion, which includes modal interaction and specialty enhancement. Finally, an adaptive learning technique that merges the semantics and geometry information for dynamical instance optimization. Extensive experiments in the nuScenes dataset present competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches. Our code will be released in the future.
Authors:Kaixin Bai, Lei Zhang, Zhaopeng Chen, Fang Wan, Jianwei Zhang
Abstract:
Despite the substantial progress in deep learning, its adoption in industrial robotics projects remains limited, primarily due to challenges in data acquisition and labeling. Previous sim2real approaches using domain randomization require extensive scene and model optimization. To address these issues, we introduce an innovative physically-based structured light simulation system, generating both RGB and physically realistic depth images, surpassing previous dataset generation tools. We create an RGBD dataset tailored for robotic industrial grasping scenarios and evaluate it across various tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and embedding sim2real visual perception in industrial robotic grasping. By reducing the sim2real gap and enhancing deep learning training, we facilitate the application of deep learning models in industrial settings. Project details are available at https://baikaixinpublic.github.io/structured light 3D synthesizer/.
Authors:Xiangyu Wu, Jinling Xu, Longfei Huang, Yang Yang
Abstract:
This report introduces a solution to The task of RGB-TIR object detection from the perspective of unmanned aerial vehicles. Unlike traditional object detection methods, RGB-TIR object detection aims to utilize both RGB and TIR images for complementary information during detection. The challenges of RGB-TIR object detection from the perspective of unmanned aerial vehicles include highly complex image backgrounds, frequent changes in lighting, and uncalibrated RGB-TIR image pairs. To address these challenges at the model level, we utilized a lightweight YOLOv9 model with extended multi-level auxiliary branches that enhance the model's robustness, making it more suitable for practical applications in unmanned aerial vehicle scenarios. For image fusion in RGB-TIR detection, we incorporated a fusion module into the backbone network to fuse images at the feature level, implicitly addressing calibration issues. Our proposed method achieved an mAP score of 0.516 and 0.543 on A and B benchmarks respectively while maintaining the highest inference speed among all models.
Authors:Zhantao Yang, Ruili Feng, Keyu Yan, Huangji Wang, Zhicai Wang, Shangwen Zhu, Han Zhang, Jie Xiao, Pingyu Wu, Kai Zhu, Jixuan Chen, Chen-Wei Xie, Yue Yang, Hongyang Zhang, Yu Liu, Fan Cheng
Abstract:
Advancements in large Vision-Language Models have brought precise, accurate image captioning, vital for advancing multi-modal image understanding and processing. Yet these captions often carry lengthy, intertwined contexts that are difficult to parse and frequently overlook essential cues, posing a great barrier for models like GroundingDINO and SDXL, which lack the strong text encoding and syntax analysis needed to fully leverage dense captions. To address this, we propose BACON, a prompting method that breaks down VLM-generated captions into disentangled, structured elements such as objects, relationships, styles, and themes. This approach not only minimizes confusion from handling complex contexts but also allows for efficient transfer into a JSON dictionary, enabling models without linguistic processing capabilities to easily access key information. We annotated 100,000 image-caption pairs using BACON with GPT-4V and trained an LLaVA captioner on this dataset, enabling it to produce BACON-style captions without relying on costly GPT-4V. Evaluations of overall quality, precision, and recall-as well as user studies-demonstrate that the resulting caption model consistently outperforms other SOTA VLM models in generating high-quality captions. Besides, we show that BACON-style captions exhibit better clarity when applied to various models, enabling them to accomplish previously unattainable tasks or surpass existing SOTA solutions without training. For example, BACON-style captions help GroundingDINO achieve 1.51x higher recall scores on open-vocabulary object detection tasks compared to leading methods.
Authors:Qingrui Hu, Atom Scott, Calvin Yeung, Keisuke Fujii
Abstract:
Recent deep learning-based object detection approaches have led to significant progress in multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithms. The current MOT methods mainly focus on pedestrian or vehicle scenes, but basketball sports scenes are usually accompanied by three or more object occlusion problems with similar appearances and high-intensity complex motions, which we call complex multi-object occlusion (CMOO). Here, we propose an online and robust MOT approach, named Basketball-SORT, which focuses on the CMOO problems in basketball videos. To overcome the CMOO problem, instead of using the intersection-over-union-based (IoU-based) approach, we use the trajectories of neighboring frames based on the projected positions of the players. Our method designs the basketball game restriction (BGR) and reacquiring Long-Lost IDs (RLLI) based on the characteristics of basketball scenes, and we also solve the occlusion problem based on the player trajectories and appearance features. Experimental results show that our method achieves a Higher Order Tracking Accuracy (HOTA) score of 63.48$\%$ on the basketball fixed video dataset and outperforms other recent popular approaches. Overall, our approach solved the CMOO problem more effectively than recent MOT algorithms.
Authors:Wenjie Wang, Yehao Lu, Guangcong Zheng, Shuigen Zhan, Xiaoqing Ye, Zichang Tan, Jingdong Wang, Gaoang Wang, Xi Li
Abstract:
Vision-based roadside 3D object detection has attracted rising attention in autonomous driving domain, since it encompasses inherent advantages in reducing blind spots and expanding perception range. While previous work mainly focuses on accurately estimating depth or height for 2D-to-3D mapping, ignoring the position approximation error in the voxel pooling process. Inspired by this insight, we propose a novel voxel pooling strategy to reduce such error, dubbed BEVSpread. Specifically, instead of bringing the image features contained in a frustum point to a single BEV grid, BEVSpread considers each frustum point as a source and spreads the image features to the surrounding BEV grids with adaptive weights. To achieve superior propagation performance, a specific weight function is designed to dynamically control the decay speed of the weights according to distance and depth. Aided by customized CUDA parallel acceleration, BEVSpread achieves comparable inference time as the original voxel pooling. Extensive experiments on two large-scale roadside benchmarks demonstrate that, as a plug-in, BEVSpread can significantly improve the performance of existing frustum-based BEV methods by a large margin of (1.12, 5.26, 3.01) AP in vehicle, pedestrian and cyclist.
Authors:Prakash Chandra Chhipa, Kanjar De, Meenakshi Subhash Chippa, Rajkumar Saini, Marcus Liwicki
Abstract:
The challenge of Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) robustness remains a critical hurdle towards deploying deep vision models. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently achieved groundbreaking results. VLM-based open-vocabulary object detection extends the capabilities of traditional object detection frameworks, enabling the recognition and classification of objects beyond predefined categories. Investigating OOD robustness in recent open-vocabulary object detection is essential to increase the trustworthiness of these models. This study presents a comprehensive robustness evaluation of the zero-shot capabilities of three recent open-vocabulary (OV) foundation object detection models: OWL-ViT, YOLO World, and Grounding DINO. Experiments carried out on the robustness benchmarks COCO-O, COCO-DC, and COCO-C encompassing distribution shifts due to information loss, corruption, adversarial attacks, and geometrical deformation, highlighting the challenges of the model's robustness to foster the research for achieving robustness. Project page: https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ovod_robustness
Authors:Yuguang Zhang, Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang
Abstract:
In recent years, Transformers have achieved remarkable progress in computer vision tasks. However, their global modeling often comes with substantial computational overhead, in stark contrast to the human eye's efficient information processing. Inspired by the human eye's sparse scanning mechanism, we propose a \textbf{S}parse \textbf{S}can \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{A}ttention mechanism ($\rm{S}^3\rm{A}$). This mechanism predefines a series of Anchors of Interest for each token and employs local attention to efficiently model the spatial information around these anchors, avoiding redundant global modeling and excessive focus on local information. This approach mirrors the human eye's functionality and significantly reduces the computational load of vision models. Building on $\rm{S}^3\rm{A}$, we introduce the \textbf{S}parse \textbf{S}can \textbf{Vi}sion \textbf{T}ransformer (SSViT). Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of SSViT across a variety of tasks. Specifically, on ImageNet classification, without additional supervision or training data, SSViT achieves top-1 accuracies of \textbf{84.4\%/85.7\%} with \textbf{4.4G/18.2G} FLOPs. SSViT also excels in downstream tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Its robustness is further validated across diverse datasets.
Authors:Chen Min, Dawei Zhao, Liang Xiao, Jian Zhao, Xinli Xu, Zheng Zhu, Lei Jin, Jianshu Li, Yulan Guo, Junliang Xing, Liping Jing, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai
Abstract:
Vision-centric autonomous driving has recently raised wide attention due to its lower cost. Pre-training is essential for extracting a universal representation. However, current vision-centric pre-training typically relies on either 2D or 3D pre-text tasks, overlooking the temporal characteristics of autonomous driving as a 4D scene understanding task. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a world model-based autonomous driving 4D representation learning framework, dubbed \emph{DriveWorld}, which is capable of pre-training from multi-camera driving videos in a spatio-temporal fashion. Specifically, we propose a Memory State-Space Model for spatio-temporal modelling, which consists of a Dynamic Memory Bank module for learning temporal-aware latent dynamics to predict future changes and a Static Scene Propagation module for learning spatial-aware latent statics to offer comprehensive scene contexts. We additionally introduce a Task Prompt to decouple task-aware features for various downstream tasks. The experiments demonstrate that DriveWorld delivers promising results on various autonomous driving tasks. When pre-trained with the OpenScene dataset, DriveWorld achieves a 7.5% increase in mAP for 3D object detection, a 3.0% increase in IoU for online mapping, a 5.0% increase in AMOTA for multi-object tracking, a 0.1m decrease in minADE for motion forecasting, a 3.0% increase in IoU for occupancy prediction, and a 0.34m reduction in average L2 error for planning.
Authors:Prakash Chandra Chhipa, Meenakshi Subhash Chippa, Kanjar De, Rajkumar Saini, Marcus Liwicki, Mubarak Shah
Abstract:
Perspective distortion (PD) causes unprecedented changes in shape, size, orientation, angles, and other spatial relationships of visual concepts in images. Precisely estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters is a challenging task that prevents synthesizing perspective distortion. Non-availability of dedicated training data poses a critical barrier to developing robust computer vision methods. Additionally, distortion correction methods make other computer vision tasks a multi-step approach and lack performance. In this work, we propose mitigating perspective distortion (MPD) by employing a fine-grained parameter control on a specific family of Möbius transform to model real-world distortion without estimating camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and without the need for actual distorted data. Also, we present a dedicated perspectively distorted benchmark dataset, ImageNet-PD, to benchmark the robustness of deep learning models against this new dataset. The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks, ImageNet-E and ImageNet-X. Additionally, it significantly improves performance on ImageNet-PD while consistently performing on standard data distribution. Notably, our method shows improved performance on three PD-affected real-world applications crowd counting, fisheye image recognition, and person re-identification and one PD-affected challenging CV task: object detection. The source code, dataset, and models are available on the project webpage at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/mpd.
Authors:Walter Zimmer, Ramandika Pranamulia, Xingcheng Zhou, Mingyu Liu, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract:
In the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), efficient data compression is crucial for managing large-scale point cloud data acquired by roadside LiDAR sensors. The demand for efficient storage, streaming, and real-time object detection capabilities for point cloud data is substantial. This work introduces PointCompress3D, a novel point cloud compression framework tailored specifically for roadside LiDARs. Our framework addresses the challenges of compressing high-resolution point clouds while maintaining accuracy and compatibility with roadside LiDAR sensors. We adapt, extend, integrate, and evaluate three cutting-edge compression methods using our real-world-based TUMTraf dataset family. We achieve a frame rate of 10 FPS while keeping compression sizes below 105 Kb, a reduction of 50 times, and maintaining object detection performance on par with the original data. In extensive experiments and ablation studies, we finally achieved a PSNR d2 of 94.46 and a BPP of 6.54 on our dataset. Future work includes the deployment on the live system. The code is available on our project website: https://pointcompress3d.github.io.
Authors:Junde Wu, Jiayuan Zhu, Min Xu, Yueming Jin
Abstract:
Some visual recognition tasks are more challenging then the general ones as they require professional categories of images. The previous efforts, like fine-grained vision classification, primarily introduced models tailored to specific tasks, like identifying bird species or car brands with limited scalability and generalizability. This paper aims to design a scalable and explainable model to solve Professional Visual Recognition tasks from a generic standpoint. We introduce a biologically-inspired structure named Pro-NeXt and reveal that Pro-NeXt exhibits substantial generalizability across diverse professional fields such as fashion, medicine, and art-areas previously considered disparate. Our basic-sized Pro-NeXt-B surpasses all preceding task-specific models across 12 distinct datasets within 5 diverse domains. Furthermore, we find its good scaling property that scaling up Pro-NeXt in depth and width with increasing GFlops can consistently enhances its accuracy. Beyond scalability and adaptability, the intermediate features of Pro-NeXt achieve reliable object detection and segmentation performance without extra training, highlighting its solid explainability. We will release the code to foster further research in this area.
Authors:Walter Zimmer, Gerhard Arya Wardana, Suren Sritharan, Xingcheng Zhou, Rui Song, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract:
Cooperative perception offers several benefits for enhancing the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and improving road safety. Using roadside sensors in addition to onboard sensors increases reliability and extends the sensor range. External sensors offer higher situational awareness for automated vehicles and prevent occlusions. We propose CoopDet3D, a cooperative multi-modal fusion model, and TUMTraf-V2X, a perception dataset, for the cooperative 3D object detection and tracking task. Our dataset contains 2,000 labeled point clouds and 5,000 labeled images from five roadside and four onboard sensors. It includes 30k 3D boxes with track IDs and precise GPS and IMU data. We labeled eight categories and covered occlusion scenarios with challenging driving maneuvers, like traffic violations, near-miss events, overtaking, and U-turns. Through multiple experiments, we show that our CoopDet3D camera-LiDAR fusion model achieves an increase of +14.36 3D mAP compared to a vehicle camera-LiDAR fusion model. Finally, we make our dataset, model, labeling tool, and dev-kit publicly available on our website: https://tum-traffic-dataset.github.io/tumtraf-v2x.
Authors:Jialun Pei, Diandian Guo, Jingyang Zhang, Manxi Lin, Yueming Jin, Pheng-Ann Heng
Abstract:
Scene graph generation (SGG) of surgical procedures is crucial in enhancing holistically cognitive intelligence in the operating room (OR). However, previous works have primarily relied on multi-stage learning, where the generated semantic scene graphs depend on intermediate processes with pose estimation and object detection. This pipeline may potentially compromise the flexibility of learning multimodal representations, consequently constraining the overall effectiveness. In this study, we introduce a novel single-stage bi-modal transformer framework for SGG in the OR, termed S^2Former-OR, aimed to complementally leverage multi-view 2D scenes and 3D point clouds for SGG in an end-to-end manner. Concretely, our model embraces a View-Sync Transfusion scheme to encourage multi-view visual information interaction. Concurrently, a Geometry-Visual Cohesion operation is designed to integrate the synergic 2D semantic features into 3D point cloud features. Moreover, based on the augmented feature, we propose a novel relation-sensitive transformer decoder that embeds dynamic entity-pair queries and relational trait priors, which enables the direct prediction of entity-pair relations for graph generation without intermediate steps. Extensive experiments have validated the superior SGG performance and lower computational cost of S^2Former-OR on 4D-OR benchmark, compared with current OR-SGG methods, e.g., 3 percentage points Precision increase and 24.2M reduction in model parameters. We further compared our method with generic single-stage SGG methods with broader metrics for a comprehensive evaluation, with consistently better performance achieved.
Authors:Ahmed Ghita, Bjørk Antoniussen, Walter Zimmer, Ross Greer, Christian CreÃ, Andreas Møgelmose, Mohan M. Trivedi, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract:
The curation of large-scale datasets is still costly and requires much time and resources. Data is often manually labeled, and the challenge of creating high-quality datasets remains. In this work, we fill the research gap using active learning for multi-modal 3D object detection. We propose ActiveAnno3D, an active learning framework to select data samples for labeling that are of maximum informativeness for training. We explore various continuous training methods and integrate the most efficient method regarding computational demand and detection performance. Furthermore, we perform extensive experiments and ablation studies with BEVFusion and PV-RCNN on the nuScenes and TUM Traffic Intersection dataset. We show that we can achieve almost the same performance with PV-RCNN and the entropy-based query strategy when using only half of the training data (77.25 mAP compared to 83.50 mAP) of the TUM Traffic Intersection dataset. BEVFusion achieved an mAP of 64.31 when using half of the training data and 75.0 mAP when using the complete nuScenes dataset. We integrate our active learning framework into the proAnno labeling tool to enable AI-assisted data selection and labeling and minimize the labeling costs. Finally, we provide code, weights, and visualization results on our website: https://active3d-framework.github.io/active3d-framework.
Authors:Yuqian Fu, Yu Wang, Yixuan Pan, Lian Huai, Xingyu Qiu, Zeyu Shangguan, Tong Liu, Yanwei Fu, Luc Van Gool, Xingqun Jiang
Abstract:
This paper studies the challenging cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD), aiming to develop an accurate object detector for novel domains with minimal labeled examples. While transformer-based open-set detectors, such as DE-ViT, show promise in traditional few-shot object detection, their generalization to CD-FSOD remains unclear: 1) can such open-set detection methods easily generalize to CD-FSOD? 2) If not, how can models be enhanced when facing huge domain gaps? To answer the first question, we employ measures including style, inter-class variance (ICV), and indefinable boundaries (IB) to understand the domain gap. Based on these measures, we establish a new benchmark named CD-FSOD to evaluate object detection methods, revealing that most of the current approaches fail to generalize across domains. Technically, we observe that the performance decline is associated with our proposed measures: style, ICV, and IB. Consequently, we propose several novel modules to address these issues. First, the learnable instance features align initial fixed instances with target categories, enhancing feature distinctiveness. Second, the instance reweighting module assigns higher importance to high-quality instances with slight IB. Third, the domain prompter encourages features resilient to different styles by synthesizing imaginary domains without altering semantic contents. These techniques collectively contribute to the development of the Cross-Domain Vision Transformer for CD-FSOD (CD-ViTO), significantly improving upon the base DE-ViT. Experimental results validate the efficacy of our model.
Authors:Yue Hu, Xianghe Pang, Xiaoqi Qin, Yonina C. Eldar, Siheng Chen, Ping Zhang, Wenjun Zhang
Abstract:
Collaborative perception allows each agent to enhance its perceptual abilities by exchanging messages with others. It inherently results in a trade-off between perception ability and communication costs. Previous works transmit complete full-frame high-dimensional feature maps among agents, resulting in substantial communication costs. To promote communication efficiency, we propose only transmitting the information needed for the collaborator's downstream task. This pragmatic communication strategy focuses on three key aspects: i) pragmatic message selection, which selects task-critical parts from the complete data, resulting in spatially and temporally sparse feature vectors; ii) pragmatic message representation, which achieves pragmatic approximation of high-dimensional feature vectors with a task-adaptive dictionary, enabling communicating with integer indices; iii) pragmatic collaborator selection, which identifies beneficial collaborators, pruning unnecessary communication links. Following this strategy, we first formulate a mathematical optimization framework for the perception-communication trade-off and then propose PragComm, a multi-agent collaborative perception system with two key components: i) single-agent detection and tracking and ii) pragmatic collaboration. The proposed PragComm promotes pragmatic communication and adapts to a wide range of communication conditions. We evaluate PragComm for both collaborative 3D object detection and tracking tasks in both real-world, V2V4Real, and simulation datasets, OPV2V and V2X-SIM2.0. PragComm consistently outperforms previous methods with more than 32.7K times lower communication volume on OPV2V. Code is available at github.com/PhyllisH/PragComm.
Authors:Thanh Nguyen Canh, Armagan Elibol, Nak Young Chong, Xiem HoangVan
Abstract:
To autonomously navigate in real-world environments, special in search and rescue operations, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) necessitate comprehensive maps to ensure safety. However, the prevalent metric map often lacks semantic information crucial for holistic scene comprehension. In this paper, we proposed a system to construct a probabilistic metric map enriched with object information extracted from the environment from RGB-D images. Our approach combines a state-of-the-art YOLOv8-based object detection framework at the front end and a 2D SLAM method - CartoGrapher at the back end. To effectively track and position semantic object classes extracted from the front-end interface, we employ the innovative BoT-SORT methodology. A novel association method is introduced to extract the position of objects and then project it with the metric map. Unlike previous research, our approach takes into reliable navigating in the environment with various hollow bottom objects. The output of our system is a probabilistic map, which significantly enhances the map's representation by incorporating object-specific attributes, encompassing class distinctions, accurate positioning, and object heights. A number of experiments have been conducted to evaluate our proposed approach. The results show that the robot can effectively produce augmented semantic maps containing several objects (notably chairs and desks). Furthermore, our system is evaluated within an embedded computer - Jetson Xavier AGX unit to demonstrate the use case in real-world applications.
Authors:Stefanos Ginargiros, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas
Abstract:
Deep Learning (DL) has brought significant advances to robotics vision tasks. However, most existing DL methods have a major shortcoming, they rely on a static inference paradigm inherent in traditional computer vision pipelines. On the other hand, recent studies have found that active perception improves the perception abilities of various models by going beyond these static paradigms. Despite the significant potential of active perception, it poses several challenges, primarily involving significant changes in training pipelines for deep learning models. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose a generic supervised active perception pipeline for object detection that can be trained using existing off-the-shelf object detectors, while also leveraging advances in simulation environments. To this end, the proposed method employs an additional neural network architecture that estimates better viewpoints in cases where the object detector confidence is insufficient. The proposed method was evaluated on synthetic datasets, constructed within the Webots robotics simulator, showcasing its effectiveness in two object detection cases.
Authors:Lyes Saad Saoud, Zhenwei Niu, Atif Sultan, Lakmal Seneviratne, Irfan Hussain
Abstract:
This research presents ADOD, a novel approach to address domain generalization in underwater object detection. Our method enhances the model's ability to generalize across diverse and unseen domains, ensuring robustness in various underwater environments. The first key contribution is Residual Attention YOLOv3, a novel variant of the YOLOv3 framework empowered by residual attention modules. These modules enable the model to focus on informative features while suppressing background noise, leading to improved detection accuracy and adaptability to different domains. The second contribution is the attention-based domain classification module, vital during training. This module helps the model identify domain-specific information, facilitating the learning of domain-invariant features. Consequently, ADOD can generalize effectively to underwater environments with distinct visual characteristics. Extensive experiments on diverse underwater datasets demonstrate ADOD's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art domain generalization methods, particularly in challenging scenarios. The proposed model achieves exceptional detection performance in both seen and unseen domains, showcasing its effectiveness in handling domain shifts in underwater object detection tasks. ADOD represents a significant advancement in adaptive object detection, providing a promising solution for real-world applications in underwater environments. With the prevalence of domain shifts in such settings, the model's strong generalization ability becomes a valuable asset for practical underwater surveillance and marine research endeavors.
Authors:Yansheng Li, Junwei Luo, Yongjun Zhang, Yihua Tan, Jin-Gang Yu, Song Bai
Abstract:
Bridge detection in remote sensing images (RSIs) plays a crucial role in various applications, but it poses unique challenges compared to the detection of other objects. In RSIs, bridges exhibit considerable variations in terms of their spatial scales and aspect ratios. Therefore, to ensure the visibility and integrity of bridges, it is essential to perform holistic bridge detection in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) RSIs. However, the lack of datasets with large-size VHR RSIs limits the deep learning algorithms' performance on bridge detection. Due to the limitation of GPU memory in tackling large-size images, deep learning-based object detection methods commonly adopt the cropping strategy, which inevitably results in label fragmentation and discontinuous prediction. To ameliorate the scarcity of datasets, this paper proposes a large-scale dataset named GLH-Bridge comprising 6,000 VHR RSIs sampled from diverse geographic locations across the globe. These images encompass a wide range of sizes, varying from 2,048*2,048 to 16,38*16,384 pixels, and collectively feature 59,737 bridges. Furthermore, we present an efficient network for holistic bridge detection (HBD-Net) in large-size RSIs. The HBD-Net presents a separate detector-based feature fusion (SDFF) architecture and is optimized via a shape-sensitive sample re-weighting (SSRW) strategy. Based on the proposed GLH-Bridge dataset, we establish a bridge detection benchmark including the OBB and HBB tasks, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed HBD-Net. Additionally, cross-dataset generalization experiments on two publicly available datasets illustrate the strong generalization capability of the GLH-Bridge dataset.
Authors:Chongjian Ge, Xiaohan Ding, Zhan Tong, Li Yuan, Jiangliu Wang, Yibing Song, Ping Luo
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been shown to enhance visual recognition through modeling long-range dependencies with multi-head self-attention (MHSA), which is typically formulated as Query-Key-Value computation. However, the attention map generated from the Query and Key captures only token-to-token correlations at one single granularity. In this paper, we argue that self-attention should have a more comprehensive mechanism to capture correlations among tokens and groups (i.e., multiple adjacent tokens) for higher representational capacity. Thereby, we propose Group-Mix Attention (GMA) as an advanced replacement for traditional self-attention, which can simultaneously capture token-to-token, token-to-group, and group-to-group correlations with various group sizes. To this end, GMA splits the Query, Key, and Value into segments uniformly and performs different group aggregations to generate group proxies. The attention map is computed based on the mixtures of tokens and group proxies and used to re-combine the tokens and groups in Value. Based on GMA, we introduce a powerful backbone, namely GroupMixFormer, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation with fewer parameters than existing models. For instance, GroupMixFormer-L (with 70.3M parameters and 384^2 input) attains 86.2% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K without external data, while GroupMixFormer-B (with 45.8M parameters) attains 51.2% mIoU on ADE20K.
Authors:Linh Trinh, Ali Anwar, Siegfried Mercelis
Abstract:
Recently, there has been an upsurge in the research on maritime vision, where a lot of works are influenced by the application of computer vision for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). Various sensor modalities such as camera, radar, and lidar have been used to perform tasks such as object detection, segmentation, object tracking, and motion planning. A large subset of this research is focused on the video analysis, since most of the current vessel fleets contain the camera's onboard for various surveillance tasks. Due to the vast abundance of the video data, video scene change detection is an initial and crucial stage for scene understanding of USVs. This paper outlines our approach to detect dynamic scene changes in USVs. To the best of our understanding, this work represents the first investigation of scene change detection in the maritime vision application. Our objective is to identify significant changes in the dynamic scenes of maritime video data, particularly those scenes that exhibit a high degree of resemblance. In our system for dynamic scene change detection, we propose completely unsupervised learning method. In contrast to earlier studies, we utilize a modified cutting-edge generative picture model called VQ-VAE-2 to train on multiple marine datasets, aiming to enhance the feature extraction. Next, we introduce our innovative similarity scoring technique for directly calculating the level of similarity in a sequence of consecutive frames by utilizing grid calculation on retrieved features. The experiments were conducted using a nautical video dataset called RoboWhaler to showcase the efficient performance of our technique.
Authors:Bin Xiao, Haiping Wu, Weijian Xu, Xiyang Dai, Houdong Hu, Yumao Lu, Michael Zeng, Ce Liu, Lu Yuan
Abstract:
We introduce Florence-2, a novel vision foundation model with a unified, prompt-based representation for a variety of computer vision and vision-language tasks. While existing large vision models excel in transfer learning, they struggle to perform a diversity of tasks with simple instructions, a capability that implies handling the complexity of various spatial hierarchy and semantic granularity. Florence-2 was designed to take text-prompt as task instructions and generate desirable results in text forms, whether it be captioning, object detection, grounding or segmentation. This multi-task learning setup demands large-scale, high-quality annotated data. To this end, we co-developed FLD-5B that consists of 5.4 billion comprehensive visual annotations on 126 million images, using an iterative strategy of automated image annotation and model refinement. We adopted a sequence-to-sequence structure to train Florence-2 to perform versatile and comprehensive vision tasks. Extensive evaluations on numerous tasks demonstrated Florence-2 to be a strong vision foundation model contender with unprecedented zero-shot and fine-tuning capabilities.
Authors:Ryosuke Furuta, Yoichi Sato
Abstract:
Object detectors do not work well when domains largely differ between training and testing data. To overcome this domain gap in object detection without requiring expensive annotations, we consider two problem settings: semi-supervised domain generalizable object detection (SS-DGOD) and weakly-supervised DGOD (WS-DGOD). In contrast to the conventional domain generalization for object detection that requires labeled data from multiple domains, SS-DGOD and WS-DGOD require labeled data only from one domain and unlabeled or weakly-labeled data from multiple domains for training. In this paper, we show that object detectors can be effectively trained on the two settings with the same Mean Teacher learning framework, where a student network is trained with pseudo-labels output from a teacher on the unlabeled or weakly-labeled data. We provide novel interpretations of why the Mean Teacher learning framework works well on the two settings in terms of the relationships between the generalization gap and flat minima in parameter space. On the basis of the interpretations, we also show that incorporating a simple regularization method into the Mean Teacher learning framework leads to flatter minima. The experimental results demonstrate that the regularization leads to flatter minima and boosts the performance of the detectors trained with the Mean Teacher learning framework on the two settings.
Authors:Xiangyu Shi, Yanyuan Qiao, Qi Wu, Lingqiao Liu, Feras Dayoub
Abstract:
Effective object detection in autonomous vehicles is challenged by deployment in diverse and unfamiliar environments. Online Source-Free Domain Adaptation (O-SFDA) offers model adaptation using a stream of unlabeled data from a target domain in an online manner. However, not all captured frames contain information beneficial for adaptation, especially in the presence of redundant data and class imbalance issues. This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance O-SFDA for adaptive object detection through unsupervised data acquisition. Our methodology prioritizes the most informative unlabeled frames for inclusion in the online training process. Empirical evaluation on a real-world dataset reveals that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art O-SFDA techniques, demonstrating the viability of unsupervised data acquisition for improving the adaptive object detector.
Authors:Juepeng Zheng, Shuai Yuan, Weijia Li, Haohuan Fu, Le Yu
Abstract:
Powered by the advances of optical remote sensing sensors, the production of very high spatial resolution multispectral images provides great potential for achieving cost-efficient and high-accuracy forest inventory and analysis in an automated way. Lots of studies that aim at providing an inventory to the level of each individual tree have generated a variety of methods for Individual Tree Crown Detection and Delineation (ITCD). This review covers ITCD methods for detecting and delineating individual tree crowns, and systematically reviews the past and present of ITCD-related researches applied to the optical remote sensing images. With the goal to provide a clear knowledge map of existing ITCD efforts, we conduct a comprehensive review of recent ITCD papers to build a meta-data analysis, including the algorithm, the study site, the tree species, the sensor type, the evaluation method, etc. We categorize the reviewed methods into three classes: (1) traditional image processing methods (such as local maximum filtering, image segmentation, etc.); (2) traditional machine learning methods (such as random forest, decision tree, etc.); and (3) deep learning based methods. With the deep learning-oriented approaches contributing a majority of the papers, we further discuss the deep learning-based methods as semantic segmentation and object detection methods. In addition, we discuss four ITCD-related issues to further comprehend the ITCD domain using optical remote sensing data, such as comparisons between multi-sensor based data and optical data in ITCD domain, comparisons among different algorithms and different ITCD tasks, etc. Finally, this review proposes some ITCD-related applications and a few exciting prospects and potential hot topics in future ITCD research.
Authors:Xiangyu Wu, Yang Yang, Shengdong Xu, Yifeng Wu, Qingguo Chen, Jianfeng Lu
Abstract:
In this paper, we present our solution to a Multi-modal Algorithmic Reasoning Task: SMART-101 Challenge. Different from the traditional visual question-answering datasets, this challenge evaluates the abstraction, deduction, and generalization abilities of neural networks in solving visuolinguistic puzzles designed specifically for children in the 6-8 age group. We employed a divide-and-conquer approach. At the data level, inspired by the challenge paper, we categorized the whole questions into eight types and utilized the llama-2-chat model to directly generate the type for each question in a zero-shot manner. Additionally, we trained a yolov7 model on the icon45 dataset for object detection and combined it with the OCR method to recognize and locate objects and text within the images. At the model level, we utilized the BLIP-2 model and added eight adapters to the image encoder VIT-G to adaptively extract visual features for different question types. We fed the pre-constructed question templates as input and generated answers using the flan-t5-xxl decoder. Under the puzzle splits configuration, we achieved an accuracy score of 26.5 on the validation set and 24.30 on the private test set.
Authors:Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Leitian Tao, Hong-Yu Zhou, Yue Huang, Xiaoguang Han, Yizhou Yu
Abstract:
Albeit the notable performance on in-domain test points, it is non-trivial for deep neural networks to attain satisfactory accuracy when deploying in the open world, where novel domains and object classes often occur. In this paper, we study a practical problem of Domain Generalization under Category Shift (DGCS), which aims to simultaneously detect unknown-class samples and classify known-class samples in the target domains. Compared to prior DG works, we face two new challenges: 1) how to learn the concept of ``unknown'' during training with only source known-class samples, and 2) how to adapt the source-trained model to unseen environments for safe model deployment. To this end, we propose a novel Activate and Reject (ART) framework to reshape the model's decision boundary to accommodate unknown classes and conduct post hoc modification to further discriminate known and unknown classes using unlabeled test data. Specifically, during training, we promote the response to the unknown by optimizing the unknown probability and then smoothing the overall output to mitigate the overconfidence issue. At test time, we introduce a step-wise online adaptation method that predicts the label by virtue of the cross-domain nearest neighbor and class prototype information without updating the network's parameters or using threshold-based mechanisms. Experiments reveal that ART consistently improves the generalization capability of deep networks on different vision tasks. For image classification, ART improves the H-score by 6.1% on average compared to the previous best method. For object detection and semantic segmentation, we establish new benchmarks and achieve competitive performance.
Authors:Kuntai Du, Yuhan Liu, Yitian Hao, Qizheng Zhang, Haodong Wang, Yuyang Huang, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Junchen Jiang
Abstract:
Deep learning inference on streaming media data, such as object detection in video or LiDAR feeds and text extraction from audio waves, is now ubiquitous. To achieve high inference accuracy, these applications typically require significant network bandwidth to gather high-fidelity data and extensive GPU resources to run deep neural networks (DNNs). While the high demand for network bandwidth and GPU resources could be substantially reduced by optimally adapting the configuration knobs, such as video resolution and frame rate, current adaptation techniques fail to meet three requirements simultaneously: adapt configurations (i) with minimum extra GPU or bandwidth overhead; (ii) to reach near-optimal decisions based on how the data affects the final DNN's accuracy, and (iii) do so for a range of configuration knobs. This paper presents OneAdapt, which meets these requirements by leveraging a gradient-ascent strategy to adapt configuration knobs. The key idea is to embrace DNNs' differentiability to quickly estimate the accuracy's gradient to each configuration knob, called AccGrad. Specifically, OneAdapt estimates AccGrad by multiplying two gradients: InputGrad (i.e. how each configuration knob affects the input to the DNN) and DNNGrad (i.e. how the DNN input affects the DNN inference output). We evaluate OneAdapt across five types of configurations, four analytic tasks, and five types of input data. Compared to state-of-the-art adaptation schemes, OneAdapt cuts bandwidth usage and GPU usage by 15-59% while maintaining comparable accuracy or improves accuracy by 1-5% while using equal or fewer resources.
Authors:Runmin Cong, Mengyao Sun, Sanyi Zhang, Xiaofei Zhou, Wei Zhang, Yao Zhao
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to accurately detect objects hidden in the surrounding environment. However, the existing COD methods mainly locate camouflaged objects in the RGB domain, their performance has not been fully exploited in many challenging scenarios. Considering that the features of the camouflaged object and the background are more discriminative in the frequency domain, we propose a novel learnable and separable frequency perception mechanism driven by the semantic hierarchy in the frequency domain. Our entire network adopts a two-stage model, including a frequency-guided coarse localization stage and a detail-preserving fine localization stage. With the multi-level features extracted by the backbone, we design a flexible frequency perception module based on octave convolution for coarse positioning. Then, we design the correction fusion module to step-by-step integrate the high-level features through the prior-guided correction and cross-layer feature channel association, and finally combine them with the shallow features to achieve the detailed correction of the camouflaged objects. Compared with the currently existing models, our proposed method achieves competitive performance in three popular benchmark datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Authors:Neehar Peri, Mengtian Li, Benjamin Wilson, Yu-Xiong Wang, James Hays, Deva Ramanan
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D detection plays a vital role in autonomous navigation. Surprisingly, although autonomous vehicles (AVs) must detect both near-field objects (for collision avoidance) and far-field objects (for longer-term planning), contemporary benchmarks focus only on near-field 3D detection. However, AVs must detect far-field objects for safe navigation. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of far-field 3D detection using the long-range detection dataset Argoverse 2.0 to better understand the problem, and share the following insight: near-field LiDAR measurements are dense and optimally encoded by small voxels, while far-field measurements are sparse and are better encoded with large voxels. We exploit this observation to build a collection of range experts tuned for near-vs-far field detection, and propose simple techniques to efficiently ensemble models for long-range detection that improve efficiency by 33% and boost accuracy by 3.2% CDS.
Authors:Rohit Mohan, José Arce, Sassan Mokhtar, Daniele Cattaneo, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Safety and efficiency are paramount in healthcare facilities where the lives of patients are at stake. Despite the adoption of robots to assist medical staff in challenging tasks such as complex surgeries, human expertise is still indispensable. The next generation of autonomous healthcare robots hinges on their capacity to perceive and understand their complex and frenetic environments. While deep learning models are increasingly used for this purpose, they require extensive annotated training data which is impractical to obtain in real-world healthcare settings. To bridge this gap, we present Syn-Mediverse, the first hyper-realistic multimodal synthetic dataset of diverse healthcare facilities. Syn-Mediverse contains over \num{48000} images from a simulated industry-standard optical tracking camera and provides more than 1.5M annotations spanning five different scene understanding tasks including depth estimation, object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation. We demonstrate the complexity of our dataset by evaluating the performance on a broad range of state-of-the-art baselines for each task. To further advance research on scene understanding of healthcare facilities, along with the public dataset we provide an online evaluation benchmark available at \url{http://syn-mediverse.cs.uni-freiburg.de}
Authors:Yanxin Xi, Yu Liu, Tong Li, Jintao Ding, Yunke Zhang, Sasu Tarkoma, Yong Li, Pan Hui
Abstract:
Cities play an important role in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) to promote economic growth and meet social needs. Especially satellite imagery is a potential data source for studying sustainable urban development. However, a comprehensive dataset in the United States (U.S.) covering multiple cities, multiple years, multiple scales, and multiple indicators for SDG monitoring is lacking. To support the research on SDGs in U.S. cities, we develop a satellite imagery dataset using deep learning models for five SDGs containing 25 sustainable development indicators. The proposed dataset covers the 100 most populated U.S. cities and corresponding Census Block Groups from 2014 to 2023. Specifically, we collect satellite imagery and identify objects with state-of-the-art object detection and semantic segmentation models to observe cities' bird's-eye view. We further gather population, nighttime light, survey, and built environment data to depict SDGs regarding poverty, health, education, inequality, and living environment. We anticipate the dataset to help urban policymakers and researchers to advance SDGs-related studies, especially applying satellite imagery to monitor long-term and multi-scale SDGs in cities.
Authors:Aral Hekimoglu, Philipp Friedrich, Walter Zimmer, Michael Schmidt, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract:
Learning-based solutions for vision tasks require a large amount of labeled training data to ensure their performance and reliability. In single-task vision-based settings, inconsistency-based active learning has proven to be effective in selecting informative samples for annotation. However, there is a lack of research exploiting the inconsistency between multiple tasks in multi-task networks. To address this gap, we propose a novel multi-task active learning strategy for two coupled vision tasks: object detection and semantic segmentation. Our approach leverages the inconsistency between them to identify informative samples across both tasks. We propose three constraints that specify how the tasks are coupled and introduce a method for determining the pixels belonging to the object detected by a bounding box, to later quantify the constraints as inconsistency scores. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we establish multiple baselines for multi-task active learning and introduce a new metric, mean Detection Segmentation Quality (mDSQ), tailored for the multi-task active learning comparison that addresses the performance of both tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuImages and A9 datasets, demonstrating that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by up to 3.4% mDSQ on nuImages. Our approach achieves 95% of the fully-trained performance using only 67% of the available data, corresponding to 20% fewer labels compared to random selection and 5% fewer labels compared to state-of-the-art selection strategy. Our code will be made publicly available after the review process.
Authors:Setareh Dabiri, Vasileios Lioutas, Berend Zwartsenberg, Yunpeng Liu, Matthew Niedoba, Xiaoxuan Liang, Dylan Green, Justice Sefas, Jonathan Wilder Lavington, Frank Wood, Adam Scibior
Abstract:
When training object detection models on synthetic data, it is important to make the distribution of synthetic data as close as possible to the distribution of real data. We investigate specifically the impact of object placement distribution, keeping all other aspects of synthetic data fixed. Our experiment, training a 3D vehicle detection model in CARLA and testing on KITTI, demonstrates a substantial improvement resulting from improving the object placement distribution.
Authors:Kyle Vedder, Neehar Peri, Nathaniel Chodosh, Ishan Khatri, Eric Eaton, Dinesh Jayaraman, Yang Liu, Deva Ramanan, James Hays
Abstract:
Scene flow estimation is the task of describing the 3D motion field between temporally successive point clouds. State-of-the-art methods use strong priors and test-time optimization techniques, but require on the order of tens of seconds to process full-size point clouds, making them unusable as computer vision primitives for real-time applications such as open world object detection. Feedforward methods are considerably faster, running on the order of tens to hundreds of milliseconds for full-size point clouds, but require expensive human supervision. To address both limitations, we propose Scene Flow via Distillation, a simple, scalable distillation framework that uses a label-free optimization method to produce pseudo-labels to supervise a feedforward model. Our instantiation of this framework, ZeroFlow, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 2 Self-Supervised Scene Flow Challenge while using zero human labels by simply training on large-scale, diverse unlabeled data. At test-time, ZeroFlow is over 1000x faster than label-free state-of-the-art optimization-based methods on full-size point clouds (34 FPS vs 0.028 FPS) and over 1000x cheaper to train on unlabeled data compared to the cost of human annotation (\$394 vs ~\$750,000). To facilitate further research, we release our code, trained model weights, and high quality pseudo-labels for the Argoverse 2 and Waymo Open datasets at https://vedder.io/zeroflow.html
Authors:Xiaoyu Tian, Haoxi Ran, Yue Wang, Hang Zhao
Abstract:
This paper tries to address a fundamental question in point cloud self-supervised learning: what is a good signal we should leverage to learn features from point clouds without annotations? To answer that, we introduce a point cloud representation learning framework, based on geometric feature reconstruction. In contrast to recent papers that directly adopt masked autoencoder (MAE) and only predict original coordinates or occupancy from masked point clouds, our method revisits differences between images and point clouds and identifies three self-supervised learning objectives peculiar to point clouds, namely centroid prediction, normal estimation, and curvature prediction. Combined with occupancy prediction, these four objectives yield an nontrivial self-supervised learning task and mutually facilitate models to better reason fine-grained geometry of point clouds. Our pipeline is conceptually simple and it consists of two major steps: first, it randomly masks out groups of points, followed by a Transformer-based point cloud encoder; second, a lightweight Transformer decoder predicts centroid, normal, and curvature for points in each voxel. We transfer the pre-trained Transformer encoder to a downstream peception model. On the nuScene Datset, our model achieves 3.38 mAP improvment for object detection, 2.1 mIoU gain for segmentation, and 1.7 AMOTA gain for multi-object tracking. We also conduct experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and achieve significant performance improvements over baselines as well.
Authors:Ahmed N. Ahmed, Siegfried Mercelis, Ali Anwar
Abstract:
In the domain of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), collaborative perception has emerged as a promising approach to overcome the limitations of individual perception by enabling multiple agents to exchange information, thus enhancing their situational awareness. Collaborative perception overcomes the limitations of individual sensors, allowing connected agents to perceive environments beyond their line-of-sight and field of view. However, the reliability of collaborative perception heavily depends on the data aggregation strategy and communication bandwidth, which must overcome the challenges posed by limited network resources. To improve the precision of object detection and alleviate limited network resources, we propose an intermediate collaborative perception solution in the form of a graph attention network (GAT). The proposed approach develops an attention-based aggregation strategy to fuse intermediate representations exchanged among multiple connected agents. This approach adaptively highlights important regions in the intermediate feature maps at both the channel and spatial levels, resulting in improved object detection precision. We propose a feature fusion scheme using attention-based architectures and evaluate the results quantitatively in comparison to other state-of-the-art collaborative perception approaches. Our proposed approach is validated using the V2XSim dataset. The results of this work demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach for intermediate collaborative perception in improving object detection average precision while reducing network resource usage.
Authors:Walter Zimmer, Joseph Birkner, Marcel Brucker, Huu Tung Nguyen, Stefan Petrovski, Bohan Wang, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract:
Current multi-modal object detection approaches focus on the vehicle domain and are limited in the perception range and the processing capabilities. Roadside sensor units (RSUs) introduce a new domain for perception systems and leverage altitude to observe traffic. Cameras and LiDARs mounted on gantry bridges increase the perception range and produce a full digital twin of the traffic. In this work, we introduce InfraDet3D, a multi-modal 3D object detector for roadside infrastructure sensors. We fuse two LiDARs using early fusion and further incorporate detections from monocular cameras to increase the robustness and to detect small objects. Our monocular 3D detection module uses HD maps to ground object yaw hypotheses, improving the final perception results. The perception framework is deployed on a real-world intersection that is part of the A9 Test Stretch in Munich, Germany. We perform several ablation studies and experiments and show that fusing two LiDARs with two cameras leads to an improvement of +1.90 mAP compared to a camera-only solution. We evaluate our results on the A9 infrastructure dataset and achieve 68.48 mAP on the test set. The dataset and code will be available at https://a9-dataset.com to allow the research community to further improve the perception results and make autonomous driving safer.
Authors:Zongheng Tang, Yifan Sun, Si Liu, Yi Yang
Abstract:
This paper presents a DETR-based method for cross-domain weakly supervised object detection (CDWSOD), aiming at adapting the detector from source to target domain through weak supervision. We think DETR has strong potential for CDWSOD due to an insight: the encoder and the decoder in DETR are both based on the attention mechanism and are thus capable of aggregating semantics across the entire image. The aggregation results, i.e., image-level predictions, can naturally exploit the weak supervision for domain alignment. Such motivated, we propose DETR with additional Global Aggregation (DETR-GA), a CDWSOD detector that simultaneously makes "instance-level + image-level" predictions and utilizes "strong + weak" supervisions. The key point of DETR-GA is very simple: for the encoder / decoder, we respectively add multiple class queries / a foreground query to aggregate the semantics into image-level predictions. Our query-based aggregation has two advantages. First, in the encoder, the weakly-supervised class queries are capable of roughly locating the corresponding positions and excluding the distraction from non-relevant regions. Second, through our design, the object queries and the foreground query in the decoder share consensus on the class semantics, therefore making the strong and weak supervision mutually benefit each other for domain alignment. Extensive experiments on four popular cross-domain benchmarks show that DETR-GA significantly improves CSWSOD and advances the states of the art (e.g., 29.0% --> 79.4% mAP on PASCAL VOC --> Clipart_all dataset).
Authors:Sonia Raychaudhuri, Tommaso Campari, Unnat Jain, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang
Abstract:
We propose a simple but effective modular approach MOPA (Modular ObjectNav with PointGoal agents) to systematically investigate the inherent modularity of the object navigation task in Embodied AI. MOPA consists of four modules: (a) an object detection module trained to identify objects from RGB images, (b) a map building module to build a semantic map of the observed objects, (c) an exploration module enabling the agent to explore the environment, and (d) a navigation module to move to identified target objects. We show that we can effectively reuse a pretrained PointGoal agent as the navigation model instead of learning to navigate from scratch, thus saving time and compute. We also compare various exploration strategies for MOPA and find that a simple uniform strategy significantly outperforms more advanced exploration methods.
Authors:Yijin Chen, Xun Xu, Yongyi Su, Kui Jia
Abstract:
Domain adaptation helps generalizing object detection models to target domain data with distribution shift. It is often achieved by adapting with access to the whole target domain data. In a more realistic scenario, target distribution is often unpredictable until inference stage. This motivates us to explore adapting an object detection model at test-time, a.k.a. test-time adaptation (TTA). In this work, we approach test-time adaptive object detection (TTAOD) from two perspective. First, we adopt a self-training paradigm to generate pseudo labeled objects with an exponential moving average model. The pseudo labels are further used to supervise adapting source domain model. As self-training is prone to incorrect pseudo labels, we further incorporate aligning feature distributions at two output levels as regularizations to self-training. To validate the performance on TTAOD, we create benchmarks based on three standard object detection datasets and adapt generic TTA methods to object detection task. Extensive evaluations suggest our proposed method sets the state-of-the-art on test-time adaptive object detection task.
Authors:Chongjian Ge, Jiangliu Wang, Zhan Tong, Shoufa Chen, Yibing Song, Ping Luo
Abstract:
Contrastive learning methods train visual encoders by comparing views from one instance to others. Typically, the views created from one instance are set as positive, while views from other instances are negative. This binary instance discrimination is studied extensively to improve feature representations in self-supervised learning. In this paper, we rethink the instance discrimination framework and find the binary instance labeling insufficient to measure correlations between different samples. For an intuitive example, given a random image instance, there may exist other images in a mini-batch whose content meanings are the same (i.e., belonging to the same category) or partially related (i.e., belonging to a similar category). How to treat the images that correlate similarly to the current image instance leaves an unexplored problem. We thus propose to support the current image by exploring other correlated instances (i.e., soft neighbors). We first carefully cultivate a candidate neighbor set, which will be further utilized to explore the highly-correlated instances. A cross-attention module is then introduced to predict the correlation score (denoted as positiveness) of other correlated instances with respect to the current one. The positiveness score quantitatively measures the positive support from each correlated instance, and is encoded into the objective for pretext training. To this end, our proposed method benefits in discriminating uncorrelated instances while absorbing correlated instances for SSL. We evaluate our soft neighbor contrastive learning method (SNCLR) on standard visual recognition benchmarks, including image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. The state-of-the-art recognition performance shows that SNCLR is effective in improving feature representations from both ViT and CNN encoders.
Authors:Jiayu Zou, Zheng Zhu, Yun Ye, Xingang Wang
Abstract:
BEV perception is of great importance in the field of autonomous driving, serving as the cornerstone of planning, controlling, and motion prediction. The quality of the BEV feature highly affects the performance of BEV perception. However, taking the noises in camera parameters and LiDAR scans into consideration, we usually obtain BEV representation with harmful noises. Diffusion models naturally have the ability to denoise noisy samples to the ideal data, which motivates us to utilize the diffusion model to get a better BEV representation. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework, named DiffBEV, to exploit the potential of diffusion model to generate a more comprehensive BEV representation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply diffusion model to BEV perception. In practice, we design three types of conditions to guide the training of the diffusion model which denoises the coarse samples and refines the semantic feature in a progressive way. What's more, a cross-attention module is leveraged to fuse the context of BEV feature and the semantic content of conditional diffusion model. DiffBEV achieves a 25.9% mIoU on the nuScenes dataset, which is 6.2% higher than the best-performing existing approach. Quantitative and qualitative results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffBEV in BEV semantic segmentation and 3D object detection tasks. The code will be available soon.
Authors:Brian Li, Steven Palayew, Francis Li, Saad Abbasi, Saeejith Nair, Alexander Wong
Abstract:
There can be numerous electronic components on a given PCB, making the task of visual inspection to detect defects very time-consuming and prone to error, especially at scale. There has thus been significant interest in automatic PCB component detection, particularly leveraging deep learning. However, deep neural networks typically require high computational resources, possibly limiting their feasibility in real-world use cases in manufacturing, which often involve high-volume and high-throughput detection with constrained edge computing resource availability. As a result of an exploration of efficient deep neural network architectures for this use case, we introduce PCBDet, an attention condenser network design that provides state-of-the-art inference throughput while achieving superior PCB component detection performance compared to other state-of-the-art efficient architecture designs. Experimental results show that PCBDet can achieve up to 2$\times$ inference speed-up on an ARM Cortex A72 processor when compared to an EfficientNet-based design while achieving $\sim$2-4\% higher mAP on the FICS-PCB benchmark dataset.
Authors:Qiaosong Chu, Shuyan Li, Guangyi Chen, Kai Li, Xiu Li
Abstract:
Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to transfer a detector pre-trained on a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain without seeing source data. While most existing SFOD methods generate pseudo labels via a source-pretrained model to guide training, these pseudo labels usually contain high noises due to heavy domain discrepancy. In order to obtain better pseudo supervisions, we divide the target domain into source-similar and source-dissimilar parts and align them in the feature space by adversarial learning. Specifically, we design a detection variance-based criterion to divide the target domain. This criterion is motivated by a finding that larger detection variances denote higher recall and larger similarity to the source domain. Then we incorporate an adversarial module into a mean teacher framework to drive the feature spaces of these two subsets indistinguishable. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain object detection datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms the compared SFOD methods.
Authors:Zhe Liu, Xiaoqing Ye, Xiao Tan, Errui Ding, Xiang Bai
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a cross-modal distillation method named StereoDistill to narrow the gap between the stereo and LiDAR-based approaches via distilling the stereo detectors from the superior LiDAR model at the response level, which is usually overlooked in 3D object detection distillation. The key designs of StereoDistill are: the X-component Guided Distillation~(XGD) for regression and the Cross-anchor Logit Distillation~(CLD) for classification. In XGD, instead of empirically adopting a threshold to select the high-quality teacher predictions as soft targets, we decompose the predicted 3D box into sub-components and retain the corresponding part for distillation if the teacher component pilot is consistent with ground truth to largely boost the number of positive predictions and alleviate the mimicking difficulty of the student model. For CLD, we aggregate the probability distribution of all anchors at the same position to encourage the highest probability anchor rather than individually distill the distribution at the anchor level. Finally, our StereoDistill achieves state-of-the-art results for stereo-based 3D detection on the KITTI test benchmark and extensive experiments on KITTI and Argoverse Dataset validate the effectiveness.
Authors:Xin Hu, Lingling Zhang, Jun Liu, Jinfu Fan, Yang You, Yaqiang Wu
Abstract:
Diagram object detection is the key basis of practical applications such as textbook question answering. Because the diagram mainly consists of simple lines and color blocks, its visual features are sparser than those of natural images. In addition, diagrams usually express diverse knowledge, in which there are many low-frequency object categories in diagrams. These lead to the fact that traditional data-driven detection model is not suitable for diagrams. In this work, we propose a gestalt-perception transformer model for diagram object detection, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. Gestalt perception contains a series of laws to explain human perception, that the human visual system tends to perceive patches in an image that are similar, close or connected without abrupt directional changes as a perceptual whole object. Inspired by these thoughts, we build a gestalt-perception graph in transformer encoder, which is composed of diagram patches as nodes and the relationships between patches as edges. This graph aims to group these patches into objects via laws of similarity, proximity, and smoothness implied in these edges, so that the meaningful objects can be effectively detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GPTR achieves the best results in the diagram object detection task. Our model also obtains comparable results over the competitors in natural image object detection.
Authors:Xuebo Tian, Zhongyang Zhu, Junqiao Zhao, Gengxuan Tian, Chen Ye
Abstract:
Ego-pose estimation and dynamic object tracking are two critical problems for autonomous driving systems. The solutions to these problems are generally based on their respective assumptions, \ie{the static world assumption for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and the accurate ego-pose assumption for object tracking}. However, these assumptions are challenging to hold in dynamic road scenarios, where SLAM and object tracking become closely correlated. Therefore, we propose DL-SLOT, a dynamic LiDAR SLAM and object tracking method, to simultaneously address these two coupled problems. This method integrates the state estimations of both the autonomous vehicle and the stationary and dynamic objects in the environment into a unified optimization framework. First, we used object detection to identify all points belonging to potentially dynamic objects. Subsequently, a LiDAR odometry was conducted using the filtered point cloud. Simultaneously, we proposed a sliding window-based object association method that accurately associates objects according to the historical trajectories of tracked objects. The ego-states and those of the stationary and dynamic objects are integrated into the sliding window-based collaborative graph optimization. The stationary objects are subsequently restored from the potentially dynamic object set. Finally, a global pose-graph is implemented to eliminate the accumulated error. Experiments on KITTI datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better accuracy than SLAM and object tracking baseline methods. This confirms that solving SLAM and object tracking simultaneously is mutually advantageous, dramatically improving the robustness and accuracy of SLAM and object tracking in dynamic road scenarios.
Authors:Zhongzhan Huang, Senwei Liang, Mingfu Liang, Liang Lin
Abstract:
The self-attention mechanism has emerged as a critical component for improving the performance of various backbone neural networks. However, current mainstream approaches individually incorporate newly designed self-attention modules (SAMs) into each layer of the network for granted without fully exploiting their parameters' potential. This leads to suboptimal performance and increased parameter consumption as the network depth increases. To improve this paradigm, in this paper, we first present a counterintuitive but inherent phenomenon: SAMs tend to produce strongly correlated attention maps across different layers, with an average Pearson correlation coefficient of up to 0.85. Inspired by this inherent observation, we propose Dense-and-Implicit Attention (DIA), which directly shares SAMs across layers and employs a long short-term memory module to calibrate and bridge the highly correlated attention maps of different layers, thus improving the parameter utilization efficiency of SAMs. This design of DIA is also consistent with the neural network's dynamical system perspective. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our simple yet effective DIA can consistently enhance various network backbones, including ResNet, Transformer, and UNet, across tasks such as image classification, object detection, and image generation using diffusion models.
Authors:Jiawei Liu, Jing Zhang, Ruikai Cui, Kaihao Zhang, Weihao Li, Nick Barnes
Abstract:
We propose a new setting that relaxes an assumption in the conventional Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) setting by allowing the presence of "noisy images" which do not show the shared co-salient object. We call this new setting Generalised Co-Salient Object Detection (GCoSOD). We propose a novel random sampling based Generalised CoSOD Training (GCT) strategy to distill the awareness of inter-image absence of co-salient objects into CoSOD models. It employs a Diverse Sampling Self-Supervised Learning (DS3L) that, in addition to the provided supervised co-salient label, introduces additional self-supervised labels for noisy images (being null, that no co-salient object is present). Further, the random sampling process inherent in GCT enables the generation of a high-quality uncertainty map highlighting potential false-positive predictions at instance level. To evaluate the performance of CoSOD models under the GCoSOD setting, we propose two new testing datasets, namely CoCA-Common and CoCA-Zero, where a common salient object is partially present in the former and completely absent in the latter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the performance of CoSOD models in terms of the performance under the GCoSOD setting as well as the model calibration degrees.
Authors:Gaoang Wang, Mingli Song, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims to associate target objects across video frames in order to obtain entire moving trajectories. With the advancement of deep neural networks and the increasing demand for intelligent video analysis, MOT has gained significantly increased interest in the computer vision community. Embedding methods play an essential role in object location estimation and temporal identity association in MOT. Unlike other computer vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection, re-identification, and segmentation, embedding methods in MOT have large variations, and they have never been systematically analyzed and summarized. In this survey, we first conduct a comprehensive overview with in-depth analysis for embedding methods in MOT from seven different perspectives, including patch-level embedding, single-frame embedding, cross-frame joint embedding, correlation embedding, sequential embedding, tracklet embedding, and cross-track relational embedding. We further summarize the existing widely used MOT datasets and analyze the advantages of existing state-of-the-art methods according to their embedding strategies. Finally, some critical yet under-investigated areas and future research directions are discussed.
Authors:Jiawei Liu, Jing Zhang, Nick Barnes
Abstract:
The success of existing salient object detection models relies on a large pixel-wise labeled training dataset, which is time-consuming and expensive to obtain. We study semi-supervised salient object detection, with access to a small number of labeled samples and a large number of unlabeled samples. Specifically, we present a pseudo label based learn-ing framework with a Conditional Energy-based Model. We model the stochastic nature of human saliency labels using the stochastic latent variable of the Conditional Energy-based Model. It further enables generation of a high-quality pixel-wise uncertainty map, highlighting the reliability of corresponding pseudo label generated for the unlabeled sample. This minimises the contribution of low-certainty pseudo labels in optimising the model, preventing the error propagation. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy can effectively explore the contribution of unlabeled data. With only 1/16 labeled samples, our model achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art fully-supervised models.
Authors:Zhongyao Li, Peirui Cheng, Liangjin Zhao, Chen Chen, Yundu Li, Zhechao Wang, Xue Yang, Xian Sun, Zhirui Wang
Abstract:
Multi-UAV collaborative 3D detection enables accurate and robust perception by fusing multi-view observations from aerial platforms, offering significant advantages in coverage and occlusion handling, while posing new challenges for computation on resource-constrained UAV platforms. In this paper, we present AdaBEV, a novel framework that learns adaptive instance-aware BEV representations through a refine-and-contrast paradigm. Unlike existing methods that treat all BEV grids equally, AdaBEV introduces a Box-Guided Refinement Module (BG-RM) and an Instance-Background Contrastive Learning (IBCL) to enhance semantic awareness and feature discriminability. BG-RM refines only BEV grids associated with foreground instances using 2D supervision and spatial subdivision, while IBCL promotes stronger separation between foreground and background features via contrastive learning in BEV space. Extensive experiments on the Air-Co-Pred dataset demonstrate that AdaBEV achieves superior accuracy-computation trade-offs across model scales, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods at low resolutions and approaching upper bound performance while maintaining low-resolution BEV inputs and negligible overhead.
Authors:Yupeng Zhang, Ruize Han, Fangnan Zhou, Song Wang, Wei Feng, Liang Wan
Abstract:
In this work, we handle a new problem of Open-Domain Open-Vocabulary (ODOV) object detection, which considers the detection model's adaptability to the real world including both domain and category shifts. For this problem, we first construct a new benchmark OD-LVIS, which includes 46,949 images, covers 18 complex real-world domains and 1,203 categories, and provides a comprehensive dataset for evaluating real-world object detection. Besides, we develop a novel baseline method for ODOV detection.The proposed method first leverages large language models to generate the domain-agnostic text prompts for category embedding. It further learns the domain embedding from the given image, which, during testing, can be integrated into the category embedding to form the customized domain-specific category embedding for each test image. We provide sufficient benchmark evaluations for the proposed ODOV detection task and report the results, which verify the rationale of ODOV detection, the usefulness of our benchmark, and the superiority of the proposed method.
Authors:Adwait Chandorkar, Hasan Tercan, Tobias Meisen
Abstract:
Recent advancements in LiDAR-based 3D object detection have significantly accelerated progress toward the realization of fully autonomous driving in real-world environments. Despite achieving high detection performance, most of the approaches still rely on a VGG-based or ResNet-based backbone for feature exploration, which increases the model complexity. Lightweight backbone design is well-explored for 2D object detection, but research on 3D object detection still remains limited. In this work, we introduce Dense Backbone, a lightweight backbone that combines the benefits of high processing speed, lightweight architecture, and robust detection accuracy. We adapt multiple SoTA 3d object detectors, such as PillarNet, with our backbone and show that with our backbone, these models retain most of their detection capability at a significantly reduced computational cost. To our knowledge, this is the first dense-layer-based backbone tailored specifically for 3D object detection from point cloud data. DensePillarNet, our adaptation of PillarNet, achieves a 29% reduction in model parameters and a 28% reduction in latency with just a 2% drop in detection accuracy on the nuScenes test set. Furthermore, Dense Backbone's plug-and-play design allows straightforward integration into existing architectures, requiring no modifications to other network components.
Authors:Jiyue Jiang, Mingtong Chen, Zhengbao Yang
Abstract:
This project aims to develop a system to run the object detection model under low power consumption conditions. The detection scene is set as an outdoor traveling scene, and the detection categories include people and vehicles. In this system, users data does not need to be uploaded to the cloud, which is suitable for use in environments with portable needs and strict requirements for data privacy. The MCU device used in this system is STM32H7, which has better performance among low power devices. The YOLOv5 system is selected to train the object detection model. To overcome the resource limitation of the embedded devices, this project uses several model compression techniques such as pruned, quantization, and distillation, which could improve the performance and efficiency of the detection model. Through these processes, the model s computation and the quantity of model parameters could be reduced, in order to run computer vision models on micro-controller devices for the development of embedded vision applications.
Authors:Md Hasan Shahriar, Md Mohaimin Al Barat, Harshavardhan Sundar, Naren Ramakrishnan, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou
Abstract:
Multimodal fusion (MMF) plays a critical role in the perception of autonomous driving, which primarily fuses camera and LiDAR streams for a comprehensive and efficient scene understanding. However, its strict reliance on precise temporal synchronization exposes it to new vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce DejaVu, a novel attack that exploits network-induced delays to create subtle temporal misalignments across sensor streams, severely degrading downstream MMF-based perception tasks. Our comprehensive attack analysis across different models and datasets reveals these sensors' task-specific imbalanced sensitivities: object detection is overly dependent on LiDAR inputs while object tracking is highly reliant on the camera inputs. Consequently, with a single-frame LiDAR delay, an attacker can reduce the car detection mAP by up to 88.5%, while with a three-frame camera delay, multiple object tracking accuracy (MOTA) for car drops by 73%. To detect such attacks, we propose AION, a defense patch that can work alongside the existing perception model to monitor temporal alignment through cross-modal temporal consistency. AION leverages multimodal shared representation learning and dynamic time warping to determine the path of temporal alignment and calculate anomaly scores based on the alignment. Our thorough evaluation of AION shows it achieves AUROC scores of 0.92-0.98 with low false positives across datasets and model architectures, demonstrating it as a robust and generalized defense against the temporal misalignment attacks.
Authors:Nikolai Polley, Yacin Boualili, Ferdinand Mütsch, Maximilian Zipfl, Tobias Fleck, J. Marius Zöllner
Abstract:
On-board sensors of autonomous vehicles can be obstructed, occluded, or limited by restricted fields of view, complicating downstream driving decisions. Intelligent roadside infrastructure perception systems, installed at elevated vantage points, can provide wide, unobstructed intersection coverage, supplying a complementary information stream to autonomous vehicles via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. However, conventional 3D object-detection algorithms struggle to generalize under the domain shift introduced by top-down perspectives and steep camera angles. We introduce a 2.5D object detection framework, tailored specifically for infrastructure roadside-mounted cameras. Unlike conventional 2D or 3D object detection, we employ a prediction approach to detect ground planes of vehicles as parallelograms in the image frame. The parallelogram preserves the planar position, size, and orientation of objects while omitting their height, which is unnecessary for most downstream applications. For training, a mix of real-world and synthetically generated scenes is leveraged. We evaluate generalizability on a held-out camera viewpoint and in adverse-weather scenarios absent from the training set. Our results show high detection accuracy, strong cross-viewpoint generalization, and robustness to diverse lighting and weather conditions. Model weights and inference code are provided at: https://gitlab.kit.edu/kit/aifb/ATKS/public/digit4taf/2.5d-object-detection
Authors:Alessio Devoto, Jary Pomponi, Mattia Merluzzi, Paolo Di Lorenzo, Simone Scardapane
Abstract:
This paper presents an adaptive framework for edge inference based on a dynamically configurable transformer-powered deep joint source channel coding (DJSCC) architecture. Motivated by a practical scenario where a resource constrained edge device engages in goal oriented semantic communication, such as selectively transmitting essential features for object detection to an edge server, our approach enables efficient task aware data transmission under varying bandwidth and channel conditions. To achieve this, input data is tokenized into compact high level semantic representations, refined by a transformer, and transmitted over noisy wireless channels. As part of the DJSCC pipeline, we employ a semantic token selection mechanism that adaptively compresses informative features into a user specified number of tokens per sample. These tokens are then further compressed through the JSCC module, enabling a flexible token communication strategy that adjusts both the number of transmitted tokens and their embedding dimensions. We incorporate a resource allocation algorithm based on Lyapunov stochastic optimization to enhance robustness under dynamic network conditions, effectively balancing compression efficiency and task performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our system consistently outperforms existing baselines, highlighting its potential as a strong foundation for AI native semantic communication in edge intelligence applications.
Authors:Xinyuan Yan, Xiwei Xuan, Jorge Piazentin Ono, Jiajing Guo, Vikram Mohanty, Shekar Arvind Kumar, Liang Gou, Bei Wang, Liu Ren
Abstract:
Real-world machine learning models require rigorous evaluation before deployment, especially in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving and surveillance. The evaluation of machine learning models often focuses on data slices, which are subsets of the data that share a set of characteristics. Data slice finding automatically identifies conditions or data subgroups where models underperform, aiding developers in mitigating performance issues. Despite its popularity and effectiveness, data slicing for vision model validation faces several challenges. First, data slicing often needs additional image metadata or visual concepts, and falls short in certain computer vision tasks, such as object detection. Second, understanding data slices is a labor-intensive and mentally demanding process that heavily relies on the expert's domain knowledge. Third, data slicing lacks a human-in-the-loop solution that allows experts to form hypothesis and test them interactively. To overcome these limitations and better support the machine learning operations lifecycle, we introduce VISLIX, a novel visual analytics framework that employs state-of-the-art foundation models to help domain experts analyze slices in computer vision models. Our approach does not require image metadata or visual concepts, automatically generates natural language insights, and allows users to test data slice hypothesis interactively. We evaluate VISLIX with an expert study and three use cases, that demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in providing comprehensive insights for validating object detection models.
Authors:Woong-Chan Byun, Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun Song, Seung-Hyun Kong
Abstract:
4D radar has attracted attention in autonomous driving due to its ability to enable robust 3D object detection even under adverse weather conditions. To practically deploy such technologies, it is essential to achieve real-time processing within low-power embedded environments. Addressing this, we present the first on-chip implementation of a 4D radar-based 3D object detection model on the Hailo-8L AI accelerator. Although conventional 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures require 5D inputs, the Hailo-8L only supports 4D tensors, posing a significant challenge. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a tensor transformation method that reshapes 5D inputs into 4D formats during the compilation process, enabling direct deployment without altering the model structure. The proposed system achieves 46.47% AP_3D and 52.75% AP_BEV, maintaining comparable accuracy to GPU-based models while achieving an inference speed of 13.76 Hz. These results demonstrate the applicability of 4D radar-based perception technologies to autonomous driving systems.
Authors:Jiayi Chen, Shuai Wang, Guoliang Li, Wei Xu, Guangxu Zhu, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract:
Navigating autonomous vehicles in open scenarios is a challenge due to the difficulties in handling unseen objects. Existing solutions either rely on small models that struggle with generalization or large models that are resource-intensive. While collaboration between the two offers a promising solution, the key challenge is deciding when and how to engage the large model. To address this issue, this paper proposes opportunistic collaborative planning (OCP), which seamlessly integrates efficient local models with powerful cloud models through two key innovations. First, we propose large vision model guided model predictive control (LVM-MPC), which leverages the cloud for LVM perception and decision making. The cloud output serves as a global guidance for a local MPC, thereby forming a closed-loop perception-to-control system. Second, to determine the best timing for large model query and service, we propose collaboration timing optimization (CTO), including object detection confidence thresholding (ODCT) and cloud forward simulation (CFS), to decide when to seek cloud assistance and when to offer cloud service. Extensive experiments show that the proposed OCP outperforms existing methods in terms of both navigation time and success rate.
Authors:Jun Dong, Wenli Wu, Jintao Cheng, Xiaoyu Tang
Abstract:
Despite the remarkable achievements in object detection, the model's accuracy and efficiency still require further improvement under challenging underwater conditions, such as low image quality and limited computational resources. To address this, we propose an Ultra-Light Real-Time Underwater Object Detection framework, You Sense Only Once Beneath (YSOOB). Specifically, we utilize a Multi-Spectrum Wavelet Encoder (MSWE) to perform frequency-domain encoding on the input image, minimizing the semantic loss caused by underwater optical color distortion. Furthermore, we revisit the unique characteristics of even-sized and transposed convolutions, allowing the model to dynamically select and enhance key information during the resampling process, thereby improving its generalization ability. Finally, we eliminate model redundancy through a simple yet effective channel compression and reconstructed large kernel convolution (RLKC) to achieve model lightweight. As a result, forms a high-performance underwater object detector YSOOB with only 1.2 million parameters. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that, with the fewest parameters, YSOOB achieves mAP50 of 83.1% and 82.9% on the URPC2020 and DUO datasets, respectively, comparable to the current SOTA detectors. The inference speed reaches 781.3 FPS and 57.8 FPS on the T4 GPU (TensorRT FP16) and the edge computing device Jetson Xavier NX (TensorRT FP16), surpassing YOLOv12-N by 28.1% and 22.5%, respectively.
Authors:Theodor Wulff, Fares Abawi, Philipp Allgeuer, Stefan Wermter
Abstract:
The role of long- and short-term dynamics towards salient object detection in videos is under-researched. We present a Transformer-based approach to learn a joint representation of video frames and past saliency information. Our model embeds long- and short-term information to detect dynamically shifting saliency in video. We provide our model with a stream of video frames and past saliency maps, which acts as a prior for the next prediction, and extract spatiotemporal tokens from both modalities. The decomposition of the frame sequence into tokens lets the model incorporate short-term information from within the token, while being able to make long-term connections between tokens throughout the sequence. The core of the system consists of a dual-stream Transformer architecture to process the extracted sequences independently before fusing the two modalities. Additionally, we apply a saliency-based masking scheme to the input frames to learn an embedding that facilitates the recognition of deviations from previous outputs. We observe that the additional prior information aids in the first detection of the salient location. Our findings indicate that the ratio of spatiotemporal long- and short-term features directly impacts the model's performance. While increasing the short-term context is beneficial up to a certain threshold, the model's performance greatly benefits from an expansion of the long-term context.
Authors:Loveneet Saini, Mirko Meuter, Hasan Tercan, Tobias Meisen
Abstract:
Bird's-eye view (BEV) object detection has become important for advanced automotive 3D radar-based perception systems. However, the inherently sparse and non-deterministic nature of radar data limits the effectiveness of traditional single-frame BEV paradigms. In this paper, we addresses this limitation by introducing AttentiveGRU, a novel attention-based recurrent approach tailored for radar constraints, which extracts individualized spatio-temporal context for objects by dynamically identifying and fusing temporally correlated structures across present and memory states. By leveraging the consistency of object's latent representation over time, our approach exploits temporal relations to enrich feature representations for both stationary and moving objects, thereby enhancing detection performance and eliminating the need for externally providing or estimating any information about ego vehicle motion. Our experimental results on the public nuScenes dataset show a significant increase in mAP for the car category by 21% over the best radar-only submission. Further evaluations on an additional dataset demonstrate notable improvements in object detection capabilities, underscoring the applicability and effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Aoting Zhang, Dongbao Yang, Chang Liu, Xiaopeng Hong, Miao Shang, Yu Zhou
Abstract:
Incremental object detection (IOD) aims to cultivate an object detector that can continuously localize and recognize novel classes while preserving its performance on previous classes. Existing methods achieve certain success by improving knowledge distillation and exemplar replay for transformer-based detection frameworks, but the intrinsic forgetting mechanisms remain underexplored. In this paper, we dive into the cause of forgetting and discover forgetting imbalance between localization and recognition in transformer-based IOD, which means that localization is less-forgetting and can generalize to future classes, whereas catastrophic forgetting occurs primarily on recognition. Based on these insights, we propose a Divide-and-Conquer Amnesia (DCA) strategy, which redesigns the transformer-based IOD into a localization-then-recognition process. DCA can well maintain and transfer the localization ability, leaving decoupled fragile recognition to be specially conquered. To reduce feature drift in recognition, we leverage semantic knowledge encoded in pre-trained language models to anchor class representations within a unified feature space across incremental tasks. This involves designing a duplex classifier fusion and embedding class semantic features into the recognition decoding process in the form of queries. Extensive experiments validate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially for long-term incremental scenarios. For example, under the four-step setting on MS-COCO, our DCA strategy significantly improves the final AP by 6.9%.
Authors:Gian Antariksa, Rohit Chakraborty, Shriyank Somvanshi, Subasish Das, Mohammad Jalayer, Deep Rameshkumar Patel, David Mills
Abstract:
Visual object detection utilizing deep learning plays a vital role in computer vision and has extensive applications in transportation engineering. This paper focuses on detecting pavement marking quality during daytime using the You Only Look Once (YOLO) model, leveraging its advanced architectural features to enhance road safety through precise and real-time assessments. Utilizing image data from New Jersey, this study employed three YOLOv8 variants: YOLOv8m, YOLOv8n, and YOLOv8x. The models were evaluated based on their prediction accuracy for classifying pavement markings into good, moderate, and poor visibility categories. The results demonstrated that YOLOv8n provides the best balance between accuracy and computational efficiency, achieving the highest mean Average Precision (mAP) for objects with good visibility and demonstrating robust performance across various Intersections over Union (IoU) thresholds. This research enhances transportation safety by offering an automated and accurate method for evaluating the quality of pavement markings.
Authors:Fei Wang, Chengcheng Chen, Hongyu Chen, Yugang Chang, Weiming Zeng
Abstract:
Recently, large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved significant success, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in understanding various images and videos, particularly in classification and detection tasks. However, due to the substantial differences between remote sensing images and conventional optical images, these models face considerable challenges in comprehension, especially in detection tasks. Directly prompting VLMs with detection instructions often leads to unsatisfactory results. To address this issue, this letter explores the application of VLMs for object detection in remote sensing images. Specifically, we constructed supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets using publicly available remote sensing object detection datasets, including SSDD, HRSID, and NWPU-VHR-10. In these new datasets, we converted annotation information into JSON-compliant natural language descriptions, facilitating more effective understanding and training for the VLM. We then evaluate the detection performance of various fine-tuning strategies for VLMs and derive optimized model weights for object detection in remote sensing images. Finally, we evaluate the model's prior knowledge capabilities using natural language queries. Experimental results demonstrate that, without modifying the model architecture, remote sensing object detection can be effectively achieved using natural language alone. Additionally, the model exhibits the ability to perform certain vision question answering (VQA) tasks. Our datasets and related code will be released soon.
Authors:Xiang Chen, Shuying Gan, Chenyuan Feng, Xijun Wang, Tony Q. S. Quek
Abstract:
The growing demand for efficient semantic communication systems capable of managing diverse tasks and adapting to fluctuating channel conditions has driven the development of robust, resource-efficient frameworks. This article introduces a novel channel-adaptive and multi-task-aware semantic communication framework based on a masked auto-encoder architecture. Our framework optimizes the transmission of meaningful information by incorporating a multi-task-aware scoring mechanism that identifies and prioritizes semantically significant data across multiple concurrent tasks. A channel-aware extractor is employed to dynamically select relevant information in response to real-time channel conditions. By jointly optimizing semantic relevance and transmission efficiency, the framework ensures minimal performance degradation under resource constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our framework compared to conventional methods in tasks such as image reconstruction and object detection. These results underscore the framework's adaptability to heterogeneous channel environments and its scalability for multi-task applications, positioning it as a promising solution for next-generation semantic communication networks.
Authors:Seung-Hyun Song, Dong-Hee Paek, Minh-Quan Dao, Ezio Malis, Seung-Hyun Kong
Abstract:
Recent advances in automotive four-dimensional (4D) Radar have enabled access to raw 4D Radar Tensor (4DRT), offering richer spatial and Doppler information than conventional point clouds. While most existing methods rely on heavily pre-processed, sparse Radar data, recent attempts to leverage raw 4DRT face high computational costs and limited scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a novel three-dimensional (3D) object detection framework that maximizes the utility of 4DRT while preserving efficiency. Our method introduces a multi-teacher knowledge distillation (KD), where multiple teacher models are trained on point clouds derived from diverse 4DRT pre-processing techniques, each capturing complementary signal characteristics. These teacher representations are fused via a dedicated aggregation module and distilled into a lightweight student model that operates solely on a sparse Radar input. Experimental results on the K-Radar dataset demonstrate that our framework achieves improvements of 7.3% in AP_3D and 9.5% in AP_BEV over the baseline RTNH model when using extremely sparse inputs. Furthermore, it attains comparable performance to denser-input baselines while significantly reducing the input data size by about 90 times, confirming the scalability and efficiency of our approach.
Authors:Dong Zhang, Rui Yan, Pingcheng Dong, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Abstract:
While current Vision Transformer (ViT) adapter methods have shown promising accuracy, their inference speed is implicitly hindered by inefficient memory access operations, e.g., standard normalization and frequent reshaping. In this work, we propose META, a simple and fast ViT adapter that can improve the model's memory efficiency and decrease memory time consumption by reducing the inefficient memory access operations. Our method features a memory-efficient adapter block that enables the common sharing of layer normalization between the self-attention and feed-forward network layers, thereby reducing the model's reliance on normalization operations. Within the proposed block, the cross-shaped self-attention is employed to reduce the model's frequent reshaping operations. Moreover, we augment the adapter block with a lightweight convolutional branch that can enhance local inductive biases, particularly beneficial for the dense prediction tasks, e.g., object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The adapter block is finally formulated in a cascaded manner to compute diverse head features, thereby enriching the variety of feature representations. Empirically, extensive evaluations on multiple representative datasets validate that META substantially enhances the predicted quality, while achieving a new state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Theoretically, we demonstrate that META exhibits superior generalization capability and stronger adaptability.
Authors:Xiangyu Gao, Yu Dai, Benliu Qiu, Lanxiao Wang, Heqian Qiu, Hongliang Li
Abstract:
Owing to large-scale image-text contrastive training, pre-trained vision language model (VLM) like CLIP shows superior open-vocabulary recognition ability. Most existing open-vocabulary object detectors attempt to utilize the pre-trained VLMs to attain generalized representation. F-ViT uses the pre-trained visual encoder as the backbone network and freezes it during training. However, its frozen backbone doesn't benefit from the labeled data to strengthen the representation for detection. Therefore, we propose a novel two-branch backbone network, named as \textbf{V}iT-Feature-\textbf{M}odulated Multi-Scale \textbf{C}onvolutional Network (VMCNet), which consists of a trainable convolutional branch, a frozen pre-trained ViT branch and a VMC module. The trainable CNN branch could be optimized with labeled data while the frozen pre-trained ViT branch could keep the representation ability derived from large-scale pre-training. Then, the proposed VMC module could modulate the multi-scale CNN features with the representations from ViT branch. With this proposed mixed structure, the detector is more likely to discover objects of novel categories. Evaluated on two popular benchmarks, our method boosts the detection performance on novel category and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. On OV-COCO, the proposed method achieves 44.3 AP$_{50}^{\mathrm{novel}}$ with ViT-B/16 and 48.5 AP$_{50}^{\mathrm{novel}}$ with ViT-L/14. On OV-LVIS, VMCNet with ViT-B/16 and ViT-L/14 reaches 27.8 and 38.4 mAP$_{r}$.
Authors:Sanjay Kumar, Hiep Truong, Sushil Sharma, Ganesh Sistu, Tony Scanlan, Eoin Grua, Ciarán Eising
Abstract:
Autonomous driving technology is rapidly evolving, offering the potential for safer and more efficient transportation. However, the performance of these systems can be significantly compromised by the occlusion on sensors due to environmental factors like dirt, dust, rain, and fog. These occlusions severely affect vision-based tasks such as object detection, vehicle segmentation, and lane recognition. In this paper, we investigate the impact of various kinds of occlusions on camera sensor by projecting their effects from multi-view camera images of the nuScenes dataset into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV) domain. This approach allows us to analyze how occlusions spatially distribute and influence vehicle segmentation accuracy within the BEV domain. Despite significant advances in sensor technology and multi-sensor fusion, a gap remains in the existing literature regarding the specific effects of camera occlusions on BEV-based perception systems. To address this gap, we use a multi-sensor fusion technique that integrates LiDAR and radar sensor data to mitigate the performance degradation caused by occluded cameras. Our findings demonstrate that this approach significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of vehicle segmentation tasks, leading to more reliable autonomous driving systems.
Authors:Guoxin Zhang, Ziying Song, Lin Liu, Zhonghong Ou
Abstract:
Multimodal 3D object detection has garnered considerable interest in autonomous driving. However, multimodal detectors suffer from dimension mismatches that derive from fusing 3D points with 2D pixels coarsely, which leads to sub-optimal fusion performance. In this paper, we propose a multimodal framework FGU3R to tackle the issue mentioned above via unified 3D representation and fine-grained fusion, which consists of two important components. First, we propose an efficient feature extractor for raw and pseudo points, termed Pseudo-Raw Convolution (PRConv), which modulates multimodal features synchronously and aggregates the features from different types of points on key points based on multimodal interaction. Second, a Cross-Attention Adaptive Fusion (CAAF) is designed to fuse homogeneous 3D RoI (Region of Interest) features adaptively via a cross-attention variant in a fine-grained manner. Together they make fine-grained fusion on unified 3D representation. The experiments conducted on the KITTI and nuScenes show the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors:Hao Tang, Zechao Li, Dong Zhang, Shengfeng He, Jinhui Tang
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection aims to pinpoint prominent objects within aligned pairs of visible and thermal infrared images. Traditional encoder-decoder architectures, while designed for cross-modality feature interactions, may not have adequately considered the robustness against noise originating from defective modalities. Inspired by hierarchical human visual systems, we propose the ConTriNet, a robust Confluent Triple-Flow Network employing a Divide-and-Conquer strategy. Specifically, ConTriNet comprises three flows: two modality-specific flows explore cues from RGB and Thermal modalities, and a third modality-complementary flow integrates cues from both modalities. ConTriNet presents several notable advantages. It incorporates a Modality-induced Feature Modulator in the modality-shared union encoder to minimize inter-modality discrepancies and mitigate the impact of defective samples. Additionally, a foundational Residual Atrous Spatial Pyramid Module in the separated flows enlarges the receptive field, allowing for the capture of multi-scale contextual information. Furthermore, a Modality-aware Dynamic Aggregation Module in the modality-complementary flow dynamically aggregates saliency-related cues from both modality-specific flows. Leveraging the proposed parallel triple-flow framework, we further refine saliency maps derived from different flows through a flow-cooperative fusion strategy, yielding a high-quality, full-resolution saliency map for the final prediction. To evaluate the robustness and stability of our approach, we collect a comprehensive RGB-T SOD benchmark, VT-IMAG, covering various real-world challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and our VT-IMAG dataset demonstrate that ConTriNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both common and challenging scenarios.
Authors:Dianze Li, Jianing Li, Xu Liu, Zhaokun Zhou, Xiaopeng Fan, Yonghong Tian
Abstract:
Combining the complementary benefits of frames and events has been widely used for object detection in challenging scenarios. However, most object detection methods use two independent Artificial Neural Network (ANN) branches, limiting cross-modality information interaction across the two visual streams and encountering challenges in extracting temporal cues from event streams with low power consumption. To address these challenges, we propose HDI-Former, a Hybrid Dynamic Interaction ANN-SNN Transformer, marking the first trial to design a directly trained hybrid ANN-SNN architecture for high-accuracy and energy-efficient object detection using frames and events. Technically, we first present a novel semantic-enhanced self-attention mechanism that strengthens the correlation between image encoding tokens within the ANN Transformer branch for better performance. Then, we design a Spiking Swin Transformer branch to model temporal cues from event streams with low power consumption. Finally, we propose a bio-inspired dynamic interaction mechanism between ANN and SNN sub-networks for cross-modality information interaction. The results demonstrate that our HDI-Former outperforms eleven state-of-the-art methods and our four baselines by a large margin. Our SNN branch also shows comparable performance to the ANN with the same architecture while consuming 10.57$\times$ less energy on the DSEC-Detection dataset. Our open-source code is available in the supplementary material.
Authors:Weiguang Zhao, Chenru Jiang, Chengrui Zhang, Jie Sun, Yuyao Yan, Rui Zhang, Kaizhu Huang
Abstract:
Given the diversity of devices and the product upgrades, cross-device research has become an urgent issue that needs to be tackled. To this end, we pioneer in probing the cross-device (cameras & robotics) grasping policy in the 3D open world. Specifically, we construct two real-world grasping setups, employing robotic arms and cameras from completely different manufacturers. To minimize domain differences in point clouds from diverse cameras, we adopt clustering methods to generate 3D object proposals. However, existing clustering methods are limited to closed-set scenarios, which confines the robotic graspable object categories and ossifies the deployment scenarios. To extend these methods to open-world settings, we introduce the SSGC-Seg module that enables category-agnostic 3D object detection. The proposed module transforms the original multi-class semantic information into binary semantic cues-foreground and background by analyzing the SoftMax value of each point, and then clusters the foreground points based on geometric information to form initial object proposals. Furthermore, ScoreNetâ¡ is designed to score each detection result, and the robotic arm prioritizes grasping the object with the highest confidence score. Experiments on two different types of setups highlight the effectiveness and robustness of our policy for cross-device robotics grasping research. Our code is provided in the supplementary and will be released upon acceptance.
Authors:Fei Wang, Chengcheng Chen, Hongyu Chen, Yugang Chang, Weiming Zeng
Abstract:
Current visual question answering (VQA) tasks often require constructing multimodal datasets and fine-tuning visual language models, which demands significant time and resources. This has greatly hindered the application of VQA to downstream tasks, such as ship information analysis based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. To address this challenge, this letter proposes a novel VQA approach that integrates object detection networks with visual language models, specifically designed for analyzing ships in SAR images. This integration aims to enhance the capabilities of VQA systems, focusing on aspects such as ship location, density, and size analysis, as well as risk behavior detection. Initially, we conducted baseline experiments using YOLO networks on two representative SAR ship detection datasets, SSDD and HRSID, to assess each model's performance in terms of detection accuracy. Based on these results, we selected the optimal model, YOLOv8n, as the most suitable detection network for this task. Subsequently, leveraging the vision-language model Qwen2-VL, we designed and implemented a VQA task specifically for SAR scenes. This task employs the ship location and size information output by the detection network to generate multi-turn dialogues and scene descriptions for SAR imagery. Experimental results indicate that this method not only enables fundamental SAR scene question-answering without the need for additional datasets or fine-tuning but also dynamically adapts to complex, multi-turn dialogue requirements, demonstrating robust semantic understanding and adaptability.
Authors:Yannis Montreuil, Shu Heng Yeo, Axel Carlier, Lai Xing Ng, Wei Tsang Ooi
Abstract:
The Two-Stage Learning-to-Defer (L2D) framework has been extensively studied for classification and, more recently, regression tasks. However, many real-world applications require solving both tasks jointly in a multi-task setting. We introduce a novel Two-Stage L2D framework for multi-task learning that integrates classification and regression through a unified deferral mechanism. Our method leverages a two-stage surrogate loss family, which we prove to be both Bayes-consistent and $(\mathcal{G}, \mathcal{R})$-consistent, ensuring convergence to the Bayes-optimal rejector. We derive explicit consistency bounds tied to the cross-entropy surrogate and the $L_1$-norm of agent-specific costs, and extend minimizability gap analysis to the multi-expert two-stage regime. We also make explicit how shared representation learning -- commonly used in multi-task models -- affects these consistency guarantees. Experiments on object detection and electronic health record analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the limitations of existing L2D methods in multi-task scenarios.
Authors:Zhiqiang Wu, Yingjie Liu, Licheng Sun, Jian Yang, Hanlin Dong, Shing-Ho J. Lin, Xuan Tang, Jinpeng Mi, Bo Jin, Xian Wei
Abstract:
Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) can capture rotational equivariance from original data. It assumes uniform and strict rotational equivariance across all features as the transformations under the specific group. However, the presentation or distribution of real-world data rarely conforms to strict rotational equivariance, commonly referred to as Rotational Symmetry-Breaking (RSB) in the system or dataset, making GConv unable to adapt effectively to this phenomenon. Motivated by this, we propose a simple but highly effective method to address this problem, which utilizes a set of learnable biases called $G$-Biases under the group order to break strict group constraints and then achieve a Relaxed Rotational Equivariant Convolution (RREConv). To validate the efficiency of RREConv, we conduct extensive ablation experiments on the discrete rotational group $\mathcal{C}_n$. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed RREConv-based methods achieve excellent performance compared to existing GConv-based methods in both classification and 2D object detection tasks on the natural image datasets.
Authors:Liang Yao, Fan Liu, Chuanyi Zhang, Zhiquan Ou, Ting Wu
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective method for compressing models in object detection tasks. Due to limited computational capability, UAV-based object detection (UAV-OD) widely adopt the KD technique to obtain lightweight detectors. Existing methods often overlook the significant differences in feature space caused by the large gap in scale between the teacher and student models. This limitation hampers the efficiency of knowledge transfer during the distillation process. Furthermore, the complex backgrounds in UAV images make it challenging for the student model to efficiently learn the object features. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge distillation framework for UAV-OD. Specifically, a progressive distillation approach is designed to alleviate the feature gap between teacher and student models. Then a new feature alignment method is provided to extract object-related features for enhancing student model's knowledge reception efficiency. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in two UAV-OD datasets.
Authors:Bilal Faye, Hanane Azzag, Mustapha Lebbah
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) extends recognition beyond fixed taxonomies by aligning visual and textual features, as in MDETR, GLIP, or RegionCLIP. While effective, these models require updating all parameters of large vision--language backbones, leading to prohibitive training cost. Recent efficient OVD approaches, inspired by parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA or adapters, reduce trainable parameters but often face challenges in selecting which layers to adapt and in balancing efficiency with accuracy. We propose UniProj-Det, a lightweight modular framework for parameter-efficient OVD. UniProj-Det freezes pretrained backbones and introduces a Universal Projection module with a learnable modality token, enabling unified vision--language adaptation at minimal cost. Applied to MDETR, our framework trains only about ~2-5% of parameters while achieving competitive or superior performance on phrase grounding, referring expression comprehension, and segmentation. Comprehensive analysis of FLOPs, memory, latency, and ablations demonstrates UniProj-Det as a principled step toward scalable and efficient open-vocabulary detection.
Authors:Wei Sun, Yuan Li, Qixiang Ye, Jianbin Jiao, Yanzhao Zhou
Abstract:
Depth information provides valuable insights into the 3D structure especially the outline of objects, which can be utilized to improve the semantic segmentation tasks. However, a naive fusion of depth information can disrupt feature and compromise accuracy due to the modality gap between the depth and the vision. In this work, we introduce a Depth-guided Texture Diffusion approach that effectively tackles the outlined challenge. Our method extracts low-level features from edges and textures to create a texture image. This image is then selectively diffused across the depth map, enhancing structural information vital for precisely extracting object outlines. By integrating this enriched depth map with the original RGB image into a joint feature embedding, our method effectively bridges the disparity between the depth map and the image, enabling more accurate semantic segmentation. We conduct comprehensive experiments across diverse, commonly-used datasets spanning a wide range of semantic segmentation tasks, including Camouflaged Object Detection (COD), Salient Object Detection (SOD), and indoor semantic segmentation. With source-free estimated depth or depth captured by depth cameras, our method consistently outperforms existing baselines and achieves new state-of-theart results, demonstrating the effectiveness of our Depth-guided Texture Diffusion for image semantic segmentation.
Authors:Sreetama Sarkar, Gourav Datta, Souvik Kundu, Kai Zheng, Chirayata Bhattacharyya, Peter A. Beerel
Abstract:
Video tasks are compute-heavy and thus pose a challenge when deploying in real-time applications, particularly for tasks that require state-of-the-art Vision Transformers (ViTs). Several research efforts have tried to address this challenge by leveraging the fact that large portions of the video undergo very little change across frames, leading to redundant computations in frame-based video processing. In particular, some works leverage pixel or semantic differences across frames, however, this yields limited latency benefits with significantly increased memory overhead. This paper, in contrast, presents a strategy for masking regions in video frames that leverages the semantic information in images and the temporal correlation between frames to significantly reduce FLOPs and latency with little to no penalty in performance over baseline models. In particular, we demonstrate that by leveraging extracted features from previous frames, ViT backbones directly benefit from region masking, skipping up to 80% of input regions, improving FLOPs and latency by 3.14x and 1.5x. We improve memory and latency over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 2.3x and 1.14x, while maintaining similar detection performance. Additionally, our approach demonstrates promising results on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and provides latency improvements over the SOTA up to 1.3x using specialized computational kernels.
Authors:Zile Huang, Chong Zhang, Mingyu Jin, Fangyu Wu, Chengzhi Liu, Xiaobo Jin
Abstract:
While deep learning-based general object detection has made significant strides in recent years, the effectiveness and efficiency of small object detection remain unsatisfactory. This is primarily attributed not only to the limited characteristics of such small targets but also to the high density and mutual overlap among these targets. The existing transformer-based small object detectors do not leverage the gap between accuracy and inference speed. To address challenges, we propose methods enhancing sampling within an end-to-end framework. Sample Points Refinement (SPR) constrains localization and attention, preserving meaningful interactions in the region of interest and filtering out misleading information. Scale-aligned Target (ST) integrates scale information into target confidence, improving classification for small object detection. A task-decoupled Sample Reweighting (SR) mechanism guides attention toward challenging positive examples, utilizing a weight generator module to assess the difficulty and adjust classification loss based on decoder layer outcomes. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks reveal that our proposed detector excels in detecting small objects. Our model demonstrates a significant enhancement, achieving a 2.9\% increase in average precision (AP) over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the VisDrone dataset and a 1.7\% improvement on the SODA-D dataset.
Authors:Weitai Kang, Luowei Zhou, Junyi Wu, Changchang Sun, Yan Yan
Abstract:
Unlike Object Detection, Visual Grounding task necessitates the detection of an object described by complex free-form language. To simultaneously model such complex semantic and visual representations, recent state-of-the-art studies adopt transformer-based models to fuse features from both modalities, further introducing various modules that modulate visual features to align with the language expressions and eliminate the irrelevant redundant information. However, their loss function, still adopting common Object Detection losses, solely governs the bounding box regression output, failing to fully optimize for the above objectives. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we first analyze the attention mechanisms of transformer-based models. Building upon this, we further propose a novel framework named Attention-Driven Constraint Balancing (AttBalance) to optimize the behavior of visual features within language-relevant regions. Extensive experimental results show that our method brings impressive improvements. Specifically, we achieve constant improvements over five different models evaluated on four different benchmarks. Moreover, we attain a new state-of-the-art performance by integrating our method into QRNet.
Authors:Weitai Kang, Gaowen Liu, Mubarak Shah, Yan Yan
Abstract:
Different from Object Detection, Visual Grounding deals with detecting a bounding box for each text-image pair. This one box for each text-image data provides sparse supervision signals. Although previous works achieve impressive results, their passive utilization of annotation, i.e. the sole use of the box annotation as regression ground truth, results in a suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present SegVG, a novel method transfers the box-level annotation as Segmentation signals to provide an additional pixel-level supervision for Visual Grounding. Specifically, we propose the Multi-layer Multi-task Encoder-Decoder as the target grounding stage, where we learn a regression query and multiple segmentation queries to ground the target by regression and segmentation of the box in each decoding layer, respectively. This approach allows us to iteratively exploit the annotation as signals for both box-level regression and pixel-level segmentation. Moreover, as the backbones are typically initialized by pretrained parameters learned from unimodal tasks and the queries for both regression and segmentation are static learnable embeddings, a domain discrepancy remains among these three types of features, which impairs subsequent target grounding. To mitigate this discrepancy, we introduce the Triple Alignment module, where the query, text, and vision tokens are triangularly updated to share the same space by triple attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on five widely used datasets validate our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
Authors:Philipp Allgeuer, Hassan Ali, Stefan Wermter
Abstract:
We investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to equip neural robotic agents with human-like social and cognitive competencies, for the purpose of open-ended human-robot conversation and collaboration. We introduce a modular and extensible methodology for grounding an LLM with the sensory perceptions and capabilities of a physical robot, and integrate multiple deep learning models throughout the architecture in a form of system integration. The integrated models encompass various functions such as speech recognition, speech generation, open-vocabulary object detection, human pose estimation, and gesture detection, with the LLM serving as the central text-based coordinating unit. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the huge potential of LLMs in providing emergent cognition and interactive language-oriented control of robots in a natural and social manner.
Authors:Zhechao Wang, Peirui Cheng, Pengju Tian, Yuchao Wang, Mingxin Chen, Shujing Duan, Zhirui Wang, Xinming Li, Xian Sun
Abstract:
Remote sensing lightweight foundation models have achieved notable success in online perception within remote sensing. However, their capabilities are restricted to performing online inference solely based on their own observations and models, thus lacking a comprehensive understanding of large-scale remote sensing scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Remote Sensing Distributed Foundation Model (RS-DFM) based on generalized information mapping and interaction. This model can realize online collaborative perception across multiple platforms and various downstream tasks by mapping observations into a unified space and implementing a task-agnostic information interaction strategy. Specifically, we leverage the ground-based geometric prior of remote sensing oblique observations to transform the feature mapping from absolute depth estimation to relative depth estimation, thereby enhancing the model's ability to extract generalized features across diverse heights and perspectives. Additionally, we present a dual-branch information compression module to decouple high-frequency and low-frequency feature information, achieving feature-level compression while preserving essential task-agnostic details. In support of our research, we create a multi-task simulation dataset named AirCo-MultiTasks for multi-UAV collaborative observation. We also conduct extensive experiments, including 3D object detection, instance segmentation, and trajectory prediction. The numerous results demonstrate that our RS-DFM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various downstream tasks.
Authors:Pengju Tian, Peirui Cheng, Yuchao Wang, Zhechao Wang, Zhirui Wang, Menglong Yan, Xue Yang, Xian Sun
Abstract:
Multi-UAV collaborative 3D object detection can perceive and comprehend complex environments by integrating complementary information, with applications encompassing traffic monitoring, delivery services and agricultural management. However, the extremely broad observations in aerial remote sensing and significant perspective differences across multiple UAVs make it challenging to achieve precise and consistent feature mapping from 2D images to 3D space in multi-UAV collaborative 3D object detection paradigm. To address the problem, we propose an unparalleled camera-based multi-UAV collaborative 3D object detection paradigm called UCDNet. Specifically, the depth information from the UAVs to the ground is explicitly utilized as a strong prior to provide a reference for more accurate and generalizable feature mapping. Additionally, we design a homologous points geometric consistency loss as an auxiliary self-supervision, which directly influences the feature mapping module, thereby strengthening the global consistency of multi-view perception. Experiments on AeroCollab3D and CoPerception-UAVs datasets show our method increases 4.7% and 10% mAP respectively compared to the baseline, which demonstrates the superiority of UCDNet.
Authors:Yuchao Wang, Peirui Cheng, Pengju Tian, Ziyang Yuan, Liangjin Zhao, Jing Tian, Wensheng Wang, Zhirui Wang, Xian Sun
Abstract:
With the advancement of collaborative perception, the role of aerial-ground collaborative perception, a crucial component, is becoming increasingly important. The demand for collaborative perception across different perspectives to construct more comprehensive perceptual information is growing. However, challenges arise due to the disparities in the field of view between cross-domain agents and their varying sensitivity to information in images. Additionally, when we transform image features into Bird's Eye View (BEV) features for collaboration, we need accurate depth information. To address these issues, we propose a framework specifically designed for aerial-ground collaboration. First, to mitigate the lack of datasets for aerial-ground collaboration, we develop a virtual dataset named V2U-COO for our research. Second, we design a Cross-Domain Cross-Adaptation (CDCA) module to align the target information obtained from different domains, thereby achieving more accurate perception results. Finally, we introduce a Collaborative Depth Optimization (CDO) module to obtain more precise depth estimation results, leading to more accurate perception outcomes. We conduct extensive experiments on both our virtual dataset and a public dataset to validate the effectiveness of our framework. Our experiments on the V2U-COO dataset and the DAIR-V2X dataset demonstrate that our method improves detection accuracy by 6.1% and 2.7%, respectively.
Authors:Weitai Kang, Mengxue Qu, Jyoti Kini, Yunchao Wei, Mubarak Shah, Yan Yan
Abstract:
In real-life scenarios, humans seek out objects in the 3D world to fulfill their daily needs or intentions. This inspires us to introduce 3D intention grounding, a new task in 3D object detection employing RGB-D, based on human intention, such as "I want something to support my back". Closely related, 3D visual grounding focuses on understanding human reference. To achieve detection based on human intention, it relies on humans to observe the scene, reason out the target that aligns with their intention ("pillow" in this case), and finally provide a reference to the AI system, such as "A pillow on the couch". Instead, 3D intention grounding challenges AI agents to automatically observe, reason and detect the desired target solely based on human intention. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the new Intent3D dataset, consisting of 44,990 intention texts associated with 209 fine-grained classes from 1,042 scenes of the ScanNet dataset. We also establish several baselines based on different language-based 3D object detection models on our benchmark. Finally, we propose IntentNet, our unique approach, designed to tackle this intention-based detection problem. It focuses on three key aspects: intention understanding, reasoning to identify object candidates, and cascaded adaptive learning that leverages the intrinsic priority logic of different losses for multiple objective optimization. Project Page: https://weitaikang.github.io/Intent3D-webpage/
Authors:Fan Liu, Liang Yao, Chuanyi Zhang, Ting Wu, Xinlei Zhang, Xiruo Jiang, Jun Zhou
Abstract:
Detecting objects from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is often hindered by a large number of small objects, resulting in low detection accuracy. To address this issue, mainstream approaches typically utilize multi-stage inferences. Despite their remarkable detecting accuracies, real-time efficiency is sacrificed, making them less practical to handle real applications. To this end, we propose to improve the single-stage inference accuracy through learning scale-invariant features. Specifically, a Scale-Invariant Feature Disentangling module is designed to disentangle scale-related and scale-invariant features. Then an Adversarial Feature Learning scheme is employed to enhance disentanglement. Finally, scale-invariant features are leveraged for robust UAV-based object detection. Furthermore, we construct a multi-modal UAV object detection dataset, State-Air, which incorporates annotated UAV state parameters. We apply our approach to three lightweight detection frameworks on two benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively improve model accuracy and achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on two datasets. Our code and dataset will be publicly available once the paper is accepted.
Authors:Zhechao Wang, Peirui Cheng, Mingxin Chen, Pengju Tian, Zhirui Wang, Xinming Li, Xue Yang, Xian Sun
Abstract:
Collaborative trajectory prediction can comprehensively forecast the future motion of objects through multi-view complementary information. However, it encounters two main challenges in multi-drone collaboration settings. The expansive aerial observations make it difficult to generate precise Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. Besides, excessive interactions can not meet real-time prediction requirements within the constrained drone-based communication bandwidth. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework named "Drones Help Drones" (DHD). Firstly, we incorporate the ground priors provided by the drone's inclined observation to estimate the distance between objects and drones, leading to more precise BEV generation. Secondly, we design a selective mechanism based on the local feature discrepancy to prioritize the critical information contributing to prediction tasks during inter-drone interactions. Additionally, we create the first dataset for multi-drone collaborative prediction, named "Air-Co-Pred", and conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments to validate the effectiveness of our DHD framework.The results demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art approaches, DHD reduces position deviation in BEV representations by over 20% and requires only a quarter of the transmission ratio for interactions while achieving comparable prediction performance. Moreover, DHD also shows promising generalization to the collaborative 3D object detection in CoPerception-UAVs.
Authors:Hakan Yekta Yatbaz, Mehrdad Dianati, Konstantinos Koufos, Roger Woodman
Abstract:
The deep neural network (DNN) models are widely used for object detection in automated driving systems (ADS). Yet, such models are prone to errors which can have serious safety implications. Introspection and self-assessment models that aim to detect such errors are therefore of paramount importance for the safe deployment of ADS. Current research on this topic has focused on techniques to monitor the integrity of the perception mechanism in ADS. Existing introspection models in the literature, however, largely concentrate on detecting perception errors by assigning equal importance to all parts of the input data frame to the perception module. This generic approach overlooks the varying safety significance of different objects within a scene, which obscures the recognition of safety-critical errors, posing challenges in assessing the reliability of perception in specific, crucial instances. Motivated by this shortcoming of state of the art, this paper proposes a novel method integrating raw activation patterns of the underlying DNNs, employed by the perception module, analysis with spatial filtering techniques. This novel approach enhances the accuracy of runtime introspection of the DNN-based 3D object detections by selectively focusing on an area of interest in the data, thereby contributing to the safety and efficacy of ADS perception self-assessment processes.
Authors:Chuheng Wei, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth
Abstract:
A significant challenge in the field of object detection lies in the system's performance under non-ideal imaging conditions, such as rain, fog, low illumination, or raw Bayer images that lack ISP processing. Our study introduces "Feature Corrective Transfer Learning", a novel approach that leverages transfer learning and a bespoke loss function to facilitate the end-to-end detection of objects in these challenging scenarios without the need to convert non-ideal images into their RGB counterparts. In our methodology, we initially train a comprehensive model on a pristine RGB image dataset. Subsequently, non-ideal images are processed by comparing their feature maps against those from the initial ideal RGB model. This comparison employs the Extended Area Novel Structural Discrepancy Loss (EANSDL), a novel loss function designed to quantify similarities and integrate them into the detection loss. This approach refines the model's ability to perform object detection across varying conditions through direct feature map correction, encapsulating the essence of Feature Corrective Transfer Learning. Experimental validation on variants of the KITTI dataset demonstrates a significant improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP), resulting in a 3.8-8.1% relative enhancement in detection under non-ideal conditions compared to the baseline model, and a less marginal performance difference within 1.3% of the mAP@[0.5:0.95] achieved under ideal conditions by the standard Faster RCNN algorithm.
Authors:Bonan Ding, Jin Xie, Jing Nie, Jiale Cao, Xuelong Li, Yanwei Pang
Abstract:
Due to its cost-effectiveness and widespread availability, monocular 3D object detection, which relies solely on a single camera during inference, holds significant importance across various applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. Nevertheless, directly predicting the coordinates of objects in 3D space from monocular images poses challenges. Therefore, an effective solution involves transforming monocular images into LiDAR-like representations and employing a LiDAR-based 3D object detector to predict the 3D coordinates of objects. The key step in this method is accurately converting the monocular image into a reliable point cloud form. In this paper, we present VFMM3D, an innovative framework that leverages the capabilities of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to accurately transform single-view images into LiDAR point cloud representations. VFMM3D utilizes the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Depth Anything Model (DAM) to generate high-quality pseudo-LiDAR data enriched with rich foreground information. Specifically, the Depth Anything Model (DAM) is employed to generate dense depth maps. Subsequently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) is utilized to differentiate foreground and background regions by predicting instance masks. These predicted instance masks and depth maps are then combined and projected into 3D space to generate pseudo-LiDAR points. Finally, any object detectors based on point clouds can be utilized to predict the 3D coordinates of objects. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two challenging 3D object detection datasets, KITTI and Waymo. Our VFMM3D establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate the generality of VFMM3D, showcasing its seamless integration into various LiDAR-based 3D object detectors.
Authors:Hakan Yekta Yatbaz, Mehrdad Dianati, Konstantinos Koufos, Roger Woodman
Abstract:
Monitoring the integrity of object detection for errors within the perception module of automated driving systems (ADS) is paramount for ensuring safety. Despite recent advancements in deep neural network (DNN)-based object detectors, their susceptibility to detection errors, particularly in the less-explored realm of 3D object detection, remains a significant concern. State-of-the-art integrity monitoring (also known as introspection) mechanisms in 2D object detection mainly utilise the activation patterns in the final layer of the DNN-based detector's backbone. However, that may not sufficiently address the complexities and sparsity of data in 3D object detection. To this end, we conduct, in this article, an extensive investigation into the effects of activation patterns extracted from various layers of the backbone network for introspecting the operation of 3D object detectors. Through a comparative analysis using Kitti and NuScenes datasets with PointPillars and CenterPoint detectors, we demonstrate that using earlier layers' activation patterns enhances the error detection performance of the integrity monitoring system, yet increases computational complexity. To address the real-time operation requirements in ADS, we also introduce a novel introspection method that combines activation patterns from multiple layers of the detector's backbone and report its performance.
Authors:Zijian Huang, Wenda Chu, Linyi Li, Chejian Xu, Bo Li
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion systems (MSFs) play a vital role as the perception module in modern autonomous vehicles (AVs). Therefore, ensuring their robustness against common and realistic adversarial semantic transformations, such as rotation and shifting in the physical world, is crucial for the safety of AVs. While empirical evidence suggests that MSFs exhibit improved robustness compared to single-modal models, they are still vulnerable to adversarial semantic transformations. Despite the proposal of empirical defenses, several works show that these defenses can be attacked again by new adaptive attacks. So far, there is no certified defense proposed for MSFs. In this work, we propose the first robustness certification framework COMMIT certify robustness of multi-sensor fusion systems against semantic attacks. In particular, we propose a practical anisotropic noise mechanism that leverages randomized smoothing with multi-modal data and performs a grid-based splitting method to characterize complex semantic transformations. We also propose efficient algorithms to compute the certification in terms of object detection accuracy and IoU for large-scale MSF models. Empirically, we evaluate the efficacy of COMMIT in different settings and provide a comprehensive benchmark of certified robustness for different MSF models using the CARLA simulation platform. We show that the certification for MSF models is at most 48.39% higher than that of single-modal models, which validates the advantages of MSF models. We believe our certification framework and benchmark will contribute an important step towards certifiably robust AVs in practice.
Authors:Hakan Yekta Yatbaz, Mehrdad Dianati, Konstantinos Koufos, Roger Woodman
Abstract:
Reliable detection of various objects and road users in the surrounding environment is crucial for the safe operation of automated driving systems (ADS). Despite recent progresses in developing highly accurate object detectors based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), they still remain prone to detection errors, which can lead to fatal consequences in safety-critical applications such as ADS. An effective remedy to this problem is to equip the system with run-time monitoring, named as introspection in the context of autonomous systems. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel introspection solution, which operates at the frame level for DNN-based 2D object detection and leverages neural network activation patterns. The proposed approach pre-processes the neural activation patterns of the object detector's backbone using several different modes. To provide extensive comparative analysis and fair comparison, we also adapt and implement several state-of-the-art (SOTA) introspection mechanisms for error detection in 2D object detection, using one-stage and two-stage object detectors evaluated on KITTI and BDD datasets. We compare the performance of the proposed solution in terms of error detection, adaptability to dataset shift, and, computational and memory resource requirements. Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed introspection solution outperforms SOTA methods, achieving an absolute reduction in the missed error ratio of 9% to 17% in the BDD dataset.
Authors:Xiaoyu Tang, Xingming Chen, Jintao Cheng, Jin Wu, Rui Fan, Chengxi Zhang, Zebo Zhou
Abstract:
In the era of 5G communication, removing interference sources that affect communication is a resource-intensive task. The rapid development of computer vision has enabled unmanned aerial vehicles to perform various high-altitude detection tasks. Because the field of object detection for antenna interference sources has not been fully explored, this industry lacks dedicated learning samples and detection models for this specific task. In this article, an antenna dataset is created to address important antenna interference source detection issues and serves as the basis for subsequent research. We introduce YOLO-Ant, a lightweight CNN and transformer hybrid detector specifically designed for antenna interference source detection. Specifically, we initially formulated a lightweight design for the network depth and width, ensuring that subsequent investigations were conducted within a lightweight framework. Then, we propose a DSLK-Block module based on depthwise separable convolution and large convolution kernels to enhance the network's feature extraction ability, effectively improving small object detection. To address challenges such as complex backgrounds and large interclass differences in antenna detection, we construct DSLKVit-Block, a powerful feature extraction module that combines DSLK-Block and transformer structures. Considering both its lightweight design and accuracy, our method not only achieves optimal performance on the antenna dataset but also yields competitive results on public datasets.
Authors:Quang-Huy Nguyen, Jin Peng Zhou, Zhenzhen Liu, Khanh-Huyen Bui, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Wei-Lun Chao, Dung D. Le
Abstract:
Recent object detectors have achieved impressive accuracy in identifying objects seen during training. However, real-world deployment often introduces novel and unexpected objects, referred to as out-of-distribution (OOD) objects, posing significant challenges to model trustworthiness. Modern object detectors are typically overconfident, making it unreliable to use their predictions alone for OOD detection. To address this, we propose leveraging an auxiliary model as a complementary solution. Specifically, we utilize an off-the-shelf text-to-image generative model, such as Stable Diffusion, which is trained with objective functions distinct from those of discriminative object detectors. We hypothesize that this fundamental difference enables the detection of OOD objects by measuring inconsistencies between the models. Concretely, for a given detected object bounding box and its predicted in-distribution class label, we perform class-conditioned inpainting on the image with the object removed. If the object is OOD, the inpainted image is likely to deviate significantly from the original, making the reconstruction error a robust indicator of OOD status. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses existing zero-shot and non-zero-shot OOD detection methods, establishing a robust framework for enhancing object detection systems in dynamic environments.
Authors:Dong Zhang, Pingcheng Dong, Long Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Abstract:
It has been revealed that efficient dense image prediction (EDIP) models designed for AI chips, trained using the knowledge distillation (KD) framework, encounter two key challenges, including \emph{maintaining boundary region completeness} and \emph{ensuring target region connectivity}, despite their favorable real-time capacity to recognize the main object regions. In this work, we propose a customized boundary and context knowledge distillation (BCKD) method for EDIPs, which facilitates the targeted KD from large accurate teacher models to compact small student models. Specifically, the \emph{boundary distillation} focuses on extracting explicit object-level boundaries from the hierarchical feature maps to enhance the student model's mask quality in boundary regions. Meanwhile, the \emph{context distillation} leverages self-relations as a bridge to transfer implicit pixel-level contexts from the teacher model to the student model, ensuring strong connectivity in target regions. Our proposed method is specifically designed for the EDIP tasks and is characterized by its simplicity and efficiency. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results across semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation on five representative datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BCKD, resulting in well-defined object boundaries and smooth connecting regions.
Authors:Ziying Song, Guoxin Zhang, Jun Xie, Lin Liu, Caiyan Jia, Shaoqing Xu, Zhepeng Wang
Abstract:
LiDAR-camera fusion can enhance the performance of 3D object detection by utilizing complementary information between depth-aware LiDAR points and semantically rich images. Existing voxel-based methods face significant challenges when fusing sparse voxel features with dense image features in a one-to-one manner, resulting in the loss of the advantages of images, including semantic and continuity information, leading to sub-optimal detection performance, especially at long distances. In this paper, we present VoxelNextFusion, a multi-modal 3D object detection framework specifically designed for voxel-based methods, which effectively bridges the gap between sparse point clouds and dense images. In particular, we propose a voxel-based image pipeline that involves projecting point clouds onto images to obtain both pixel- and patch-level features. These features are then fused using a self-attention to obtain a combined representation. Moreover, to address the issue of background features present in patches, we propose a feature importance module that effectively distinguishes between foreground and background features, thus minimizing the impact of the background features. Extensive experiments were conducted on the widely used KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks. Notably, our VoxelNextFusion achieved around +3.20% in AP@0.7 improvement for car detection in hard level compared to the Voxel R-CNN baseline on the KITTI test dataset
Authors:Hu Zhang, Jianhua Xu, Tao Tang, Haiyang Sun, Xin Yu, Zi Huang, Kaicheng Yu
Abstract:
Traditional LiDAR-based object detection research primarily focuses on closed-set scenarios, which falls short in complex real-world applications. Directly transferring existing 2D open-vocabulary models with some known LiDAR classes for open-vocabulary ability, however, tends to suffer from over-fitting problems: The obtained model will detect the known objects, even presented with a novel category. In this paper, we propose OpenSight, a more advanced 2D-3D modeling framework for LiDAR-based open-vocabulary detection. OpenSight utilizes 2D-3D geometric priors for the initial discernment and localization of generic objects, followed by a more specific semantic interpretation of the detected objects. The process begins by generating 2D boxes for generic objects from the accompanying camera images of LiDAR. These 2D boxes, together with LiDAR points, are then lifted back into the LiDAR space to estimate corresponding 3D boxes. For better generic object perception, our framework integrates both temporal and spatial-aware constraints. Temporal awareness correlates the predicted 3D boxes across consecutive timestamps, recalibrating the missed or inaccurate boxes. The spatial awareness randomly places some ``precisely'' estimated 3D boxes at varying distances, increasing the visibility of generic objects. To interpret the specific semantics of detected objects, we develop a cross-modal alignment and fusion module to first align 3D features with 2D image embeddings and then fuse the aligned 3D-2D features for semantic decoding. Our experiments indicate that our method establishes state-of-the-art open-vocabulary performance on widely used 3D detection benchmarks and effectively identifies objects for new categories of interest.
Authors:Maurice Günder, Sneha Banerjee, Rafet Sifa, Christian Bauckhage
Abstract:
Model-agnostic explanation methods for deep learning models are flexible regarding usability and availability. However, due to the fact that they can only manipulate input to see changes in output, they suffer from weak performance when used with complex model architectures. For models with large inputs as, for instance, in object detection, sampling-based methods like KernelSHAP are inefficient due to many computation-heavy forward passes through the model. In this work, we present a framework for using sampling-based explanation models in a computer vision context by body part relevance assessment for pedestrian detection. Furthermore, we introduce a novel sampling-based method similar to KernelSHAP that shows more robustness for lower sampling sizes and, thus, is more efficient for explainability analyses on large-scale datasets.
Authors:Jiayao Tan, Fan Lyu, Linyan Li, Fuyuan Hu, Tingliang Feng, Fenglei Xu, Rui Yao
Abstract:
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) perception is an innovative technology that enhances vehicle perception accuracy, thereby elevating the security and reliability of autonomous systems. However, existing V2X perception methods focus on static scenes from mainly vehicle-based vision, which is constrained by sensor capabilities and communication loads. To adapt V2X perception models to dynamic scenes, we propose to build V2X perception from road-to-vehicle vision and present Adaptive Road-to-Vehicle Perception (AR2VP) method. In AR2VP,we leverage roadside units to offer stable, wide-range sensing capabilities and serve as communication hubs. AR2VP is devised to tackle both intra-scene and inter-scene changes. For the former, we construct a dynamic perception representing module, which efficiently integrates vehicle perceptions, enabling vehicles to capture a more comprehensive range of dynamic factors within the scene.Moreover, we introduce a road-to-vehicle perception compensating module, aimed at preserving the maximized roadside unit perception information in the presence of intra-scene changes.For inter-scene changes, we implement an experience replay mechanism leveraging the roadside unit's storage capacity to retain a subset of historical scene data, maintaining model robustness in response to inter-scene shifts. We conduct perception experiment on 3D object detection and segmentation, and the results show that AR2VP excels in both performance-bandwidth trade-offs and adaptability within dynamic environments.
Authors:Seung-Hyun Kong, Dong-Hee Paek, Sangjae Cho
Abstract:
Four-dimensional (4D) Radar is a useful sensor for 3D object detection and the relative radial speed estimation of surrounding objects under various weather conditions. However, since Radar measurements are corrupted with invalid components such as noise, interference, and clutter, it is necessary to employ a preprocessing algorithm before the 3D object detection with neural networks. In this paper, we propose RTNH+ that is an enhanced version of RTNH, a 4D Radar object detection network, by two novel algorithms. The first algorithm is the combined constant false alarm rate (CFAR)-based two-level preprocessing (CCTP) algorithm that generates two filtered measurements of different characteristics using the same 4D Radar measurements, which can enrich the information of the input to the 4D Radar object detection network. The second is the vertical encoding (VE) algorithm that effectively encodes vertical features of the road objects from the CCTP outputs. We provide details of the RTNH+, and demonstrate that RTNH+ achieves significant performance improvement of 10.14\% in ${{AP}_{3D}^{IoU=0.3}}$ and 16.12\% in ${{AP}_{3D}^{IoU=0.5}}$ over RTNH.
Authors:Zhixuan Liang, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao, Ping Luo
Abstract:
Active learning strategies aim to train high-performance models with minimal labeled data by selecting the most informative instances for labeling. However, existing methods for assessing data informativeness often fail to align directly with task model performance metrics, such as mean average precision (mAP) in object detection. This paper introduces Mean-AP Guided Reinforced Active Learning for Object Detection (MGRAL), a novel approach that leverages the concept of expected model output changes as informativeness for deep detection networks, directly optimizing the sampling strategy using mAP. MGRAL employs a reinforcement learning agent based on LSTM architecture to efficiently navigate the combinatorial challenge of batch sample selection and the non-differentiable nature between performance and selected batches. The agent optimizes selection using policy gradient with mAP improvement as the reward signal. To address the computational intensity of mAP estimation with unlabeled samples, we implement fast look-up tables, ensuring real-world feasibility. We evaluate MGRAL on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks across various backbone architectures. Our approach demonstrates strong performance, establishing a new paradigm in reinforcement learning-based active learning for object detection.
Authors:Weibin Liao, Xuhong Li, Qingzhong Wang, Yanwu Xu, Zhaozheng Yin, Haoyi Xiong
Abstract:
While pre-training on object detection tasks, such as Common Objects in Contexts (COCO) [1], could significantly boost the performance of cell segmentation, it still consumes on massive fine-annotated cell images [2] with bounding boxes, masks, and cell types for every cell in every image, to fine-tune the pre-trained model. To lower the cost of annotation, this work considers the problem of pre-training DNN models for few-shot cell segmentation, where massive unlabeled cell images are available but only a small proportion is annotated. Hereby, we propose Cross-domain Unsupervised Pre-training, namely CUPre, transferring the capability of object detection and instance segmentation for common visual objects (learned from COCO) to the visual domain of cells using unlabeled images. Given a standard COCO pre-trained network with backbone, neck, and head modules, CUPre adopts an alternate multi-task pre-training (AMT2) procedure with two sub-tasks -- in every iteration of pre-training, AMT2 first trains the backbone with cell images from multiple cell datasets via unsupervised momentum contrastive learning (MoCo) [3], and then trains the whole model with vanilla COCO datasets via instance segmentation. After pre-training, CUPre fine-tunes the whole model on the cell segmentation task using a few annotated images. We carry out extensive experiments to evaluate CUPre using LIVECell [2] and BBBC038 [4] datasets in few-shot instance segmentation settings. The experiment shows that CUPre can outperform existing pre-training methods, achieving the highest average precision (AP) for few-shot cell segmentation and detection.
Authors:Zeyu Wang, Dingwen Li, Chenxu Luo, Cihang Xie, Xiaodong Yang
Abstract:
3D perception based on the representations learned from multi-camera bird's-eye-view (BEV) is trending as cameras are cost-effective for mass production in autonomous driving industry. However, there exists a distinct performance gap between multi-camera BEV and LiDAR based 3D object detection. One key reason is that LiDAR captures accurate depth and other geometry measurements, while it is notoriously challenging to infer such 3D information from merely image input. In this work, we propose to boost the representation learning of a multi-camera BEV based student detector by training it to imitate the features of a well-trained LiDAR based teacher detector. We propose effective balancing strategy to enforce the student to focus on learning the crucial features from the teacher, and generalize knowledge transfer to multi-scale layers with temporal fusion. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple representative models of multi-camera BEV. Experiments reveal that our approach renders significant improvement over the student models, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on the popular benchmark nuScenes.
Authors:Eden Belouadah, Arnaud Dapogny, Kevin Bailly
Abstract:
Class-Incremental learning (CIL) refers to the ability of artificial agents to integrate new classes as they appear in a stream. It is particularly interesting in evolving environments where agents have limited access to memory and computational resources. The main challenge of incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, the inability of neural networks to retain past knowledge when learning a new one. Unfortunately, most existing class-incremental methods for object detection are applied to two-stage algorithms such as Faster-RCNN, and rely on rehearsal memory to retain past knowledge. We argue that those are not suitable in resource-limited environments, and more effort should be dedicated to anchor-free and rehearsal-free object detection. In this paper, we propose MultIOD, a class-incremental object detector based on CenterNet. Our contributions are: (1) we propose a multihead feature pyramid and multihead detection architecture to efficiently separate class representations, (2) we employ transfer learning between classes learned initially and those learned incrementally to tackle catastrophic forgetting, and (3) we use a class-wise non-max-suppression as a post-processing technique to remove redundant boxes. Results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two Pascal VOC datasets, while only saving the model in its current state, contrary to other distillation-based counterparts.
Authors:Long Chen, Yuli Wu, Johannes Stegmaier, Dorit Merhof
Abstract:
Designing metrics for evaluating instance segmentation revolves around comprehensively considering object detection and segmentation accuracy. However, other important properties, such as sensitivity, continuity, and equality, are overlooked in the current study. In this paper, we reveal that most existing metrics have a limited resolution of segmentation quality. They are only conditionally sensitive to the change of masks or false predictions. For certain metrics, the score can change drastically in a narrow range which could provide a misleading indication of the quality gap between results. Therefore, we propose a new metric called sortedAP, which strictly decreases with both object- and pixel-level imperfections and has an uninterrupted penalization scale over the entire domain. We provide the evaluation toolkit and experiment code at https://www.github.com/looooongChen/sortedAP.
Authors:Laura Gustafson, Chloe Rolland, Nikhila Ravi, Quentin Duval, Aaron Adcock, Cheng-Yang Fu, Melissa Hall, Candace Ross
Abstract:
Computer vision models have known performance disparities across attributes such as gender and skin tone. This means during tasks such as classification and detection, model performance differs for certain classes based on the demographics of the people in the image. These disparities have been shown to exist, but until now there has not been a unified approach to measure these differences for common use-cases of computer vision models. We present a new benchmark named FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a large, publicly available evaluation set of 32k images for some of the most common vision tasks - image classification, object detection and segmentation. For every image in FACET, we hired expert reviewers to manually annotate person-related attributes such as perceived skin tone and hair type, manually draw bounding boxes and label fine-grained person-related classes such as disk jockey or guitarist. In addition, we use FACET to benchmark state-of-the-art vision models and present a deeper understanding of potential performance disparities and challenges across sensitive demographic attributes. With the exhaustive annotations collected, we probe models using single demographics attributes as well as multiple attributes using an intersectional approach (e.g. hair color and perceived skin tone). Our results show that classification, detection, segmentation, and visual grounding models exhibit performance disparities across demographic attributes and intersections of attributes. These harms suggest that not all people represented in datasets receive fair and equitable treatment in these vision tasks. We hope current and future results using our benchmark will contribute to fairer, more robust vision models. FACET is available publicly at https://facet.metademolab.com/
Authors:Yifan Xu, Mengdan Zhang, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu
Abstract:
In this paper, we for the first time explore helpful multi-modal contextual knowledge to understand novel categories for open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). The multi-modal contextual knowledge stands for the joint relationship across regions and words. However, it is challenging to incorporate such multi-modal contextual knowledge into OVD. The reason is that previous detection frameworks fail to jointly model multi-modal contextual knowledge, as object detectors only support vision inputs and no caption description is provided at test time. To this end, we propose a multi-modal contextual knowledge distillation framework, MMC-Det, to transfer the learned contextual knowledge from a teacher fusion transformer with diverse multi-modal masked language modeling (D-MLM) to a student detector. The diverse multi-modal masked language modeling is realized by an object divergence constraint upon traditional multi-modal masked language modeling (MLM), in order to extract fine-grained region-level visual contexts, which are vital to object detection. Extensive experiments performed upon various detection datasets show the effectiveness of our multi-modal context learning strategy, where our approach well outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Zheng Zhang, Zheng Ning, Chenliang Xu, Yapeng Tian, Toby Jia-Jun Li
Abstract:
Audio-visual learning seeks to enhance the computer's multi-modal perception leveraging the correlation between the auditory and visual modalities. Despite their many useful downstream tasks, such as video retrieval, AR/VR, and accessibility, the performance and adoption of existing audio-visual models have been impeded by the availability of high-quality datasets. Annotating audio-visual datasets is laborious, expensive, and time-consuming. To address this challenge, we designed and developed an efficient audio-visual annotation tool called Peanut. Peanut's human-AI collaborative pipeline separates the multi-modal task into two single-modal tasks, and utilizes state-of-the-art object detection and sound-tagging models to reduce the annotators' effort to process each frame and the number of manually-annotated frames needed. A within-subject user study with 20 participants found that Peanut can significantly accelerate the audio-visual data annotation process while maintaining high annotation accuracy.
Authors:Xinzhu Liu, Di Guo, Huaping Liu
Abstract:
Multi-agent embodied tasks have recently been studied in complex indoor visual environments. Collaboration among multiple agents can improve work efficiency and has significant practical value. However, most of the existing research focuses on homogeneous multi-agent tasks. Compared with homogeneous agents, heterogeneous agents can leverage their different capabilities to allocate corresponding sub-tasks and cooperate to complete complex tasks. Heterogeneous multi-agent tasks are common in real-world scenarios, and the collaboration strategy among heterogeneous agents is a challenging and important problem to be solved. To study collaboration among heterogeneous agents, we propose the heterogeneous multi-agent tidying-up task, in which multiple heterogeneous agents with different capabilities collaborate with each other to detect misplaced objects and place them in reasonable locations. This is a demanding task since it requires agents to make the best use of their different capabilities to conduct reasonable task planning and complete the whole task. To solve this task, we build a heterogeneous multi-agent tidying-up benchmark dataset in a large number of houses with multiple rooms based on ProcTHOR-10K. We propose the hierarchical decision model based on misplaced object detection, reasonable receptacle prediction, as well as the handshake-based group communication mechanism. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The project's website and videos of experiments can be found at https://hetercol.github.io/.
Authors:Qiaoyi Su, Yuhong Chou, Yifan Hu, Jianing Li, Shijie Mei, Ziyang Zhang, Guoqi Li
Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired energy-efficient models that encode information in spatiotemporal dynamics. Recently, deep SNNs trained directly have shown great success in achieving high performance on classification tasks with very few time steps. However, how to design a directly-trained SNN for the regression task of object detection still remains a challenging problem. To address this problem, we propose EMS-YOLO, a novel directly-trained SNN framework for object detection, which is the first trial to train a deep SNN with surrogate gradients for object detection rather than ANN-SNN conversion strategies. Specifically, we design a full-spike residual block, EMS-ResNet, which can effectively extend the depth of the directly-trained SNN with low power consumption. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze and prove the EMS-ResNet could avoid gradient vanishing or exploding. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art ANN-SNN conversion methods (at least 500 time steps) in extremely fewer time steps (only 4 time steps). It is shown that our model could achieve comparable performance to the ANN with the same architecture while consuming 5.83 times less energy on the frame-based COCO Dataset and the event-based Gen1 Dataset.
Authors:Mostafa Dehghani, Basil Mustafa, Josip Djolonga, Jonathan Heek, Matthias Minderer, Mathilde Caron, Andreas Steiner, Joan Puigcerver, Robert Geirhos, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Avital Oliver, Piotr Padlewski, Alexey Gritsenko, Mario LuÄiÄ, Neil Houlsby
Abstract:
The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged. However, models such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) offer flexible sequence-based modeling, and hence varying input sequence lengths. We take advantage of this with NaViT (Native Resolution ViT) which uses sequence packing during training to process inputs of arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. Alongside flexible model usage, we demonstrate improved training efficiency for large-scale supervised and contrastive image-text pretraining. NaViT can be efficiently transferred to standard tasks such as image and video classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation and leads to improved results on robustness and fairness benchmarks. At inference time, the input resolution flexibility can be used to smoothly navigate the test-time cost-performance trade-off. We believe that NaViT marks a departure from the standard, CNN-designed, input and modelling pipeline used by most computer vision models, and represents a promising direction for ViTs.
Authors:Yifei Liu, Mathias Gehrig, Nico Messikommer, Marco Cannici, Davide Scaramuzza
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown impressive performance in computer vision, but their high computational cost, quadratic in the number of tokens, limits their adoption in computation-constrained applications. However, this large number of tokens may not be necessary, as not all tokens are equally important. In this paper, we investigate token pruning to accelerate inference for object detection and instance segmentation, extending prior works from image classification. Through extensive experiments, we offer four insights for dense tasks: (i) tokens should not be completely pruned and discarded, but rather preserved in the feature maps for later use. (ii) reactivating previously pruned tokens can further enhance model performance. (iii) a dynamic pruning rate based on images is better than a fixed pruning rate. (iv) a lightweight, 2-layer MLP can effectively prune tokens, achieving accuracy comparable with complex gating networks with a simpler design. We assess the effects of these design decisions on the COCO dataset and introduce an approach that incorporates these findings, showing a reduction in performance decline from ~1.5 mAP to ~0.3 mAP in both boxes and masks, compared to existing token pruning methods. In relation to the dense counterpart that utilizes all tokens, our method realizes an increase in inference speed, achieving up to 34% faster performance for the entire network and 46% for the backbone.
Authors:Haochen Xue, Mingyu Jin, Chong Zhang, Yuxuan Huang, Qian Weng, Xiaobo Jin
Abstract:
In recent years, image blending has gained popularity for its ability to create visually stunning content. However, the current image blending algorithms mainly have the following problems: manually creating image blending masks requires a lot of manpower and material resources; image blending algorithms cannot effectively solve the problems of brightness distortion and low resolution. To this end, we propose a new image blending method with automatic mask generation: it combines semantic object detection and segmentation with mask generation to achieve deep blended images based on our proposed new saturation loss and two-stage iteration of the PAN algorithm to fix brightness distortion and low-resolution issues. Results on publicly available datasets show that our method outperforms other classical image blending algorithms on various performance metrics, including PSNR and SSIM.
Authors:Chengyin Hu, Weiwen Shi, Chao Li, Jialiang Sun, Donghua Wang, Junqi Wu, Guijian Tang
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made remarkable strides in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, segmentation, and object detection. However, recent research has revealed a vulnerability in advanced DNNs when faced with deliberate manipulations of input data, known as adversarial attacks. Moreover, the accuracy of DNNs is heavily influenced by the distribution of the training dataset. Distortions or perturbations in the color space of input images can introduce out-of-distribution data, resulting in misclassification. In this work, we propose a brightness-variation dataset, which incorporates 24 distinct brightness levels for each image within a subset of ImageNet. This dataset enables us to simulate the effects of light and shadow on the images, so as is to investigate the impact of light and shadow on the performance of DNNs. In our study, we conduct experiments using several state-of-the-art DNN architectures on the aforementioned dataset. Through our analysis, we discover a noteworthy positive correlation between the brightness levels and the loss of accuracy in DNNs. Furthermore, we assess the effectiveness of recently proposed robust training techniques and strategies, including AugMix, Revisit, and Free Normalizer, using the ResNet50 architecture on our brightness-variation dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that these techniques can enhance the robustness of DNNs against brightness variation, leading to improved performance when dealing with images exhibiting varying brightness levels.
Authors:Hongwei Liu, Jian Yang, Jianfeng Zhang, Dongheng Shao, Jielong Guo, Shaobo Li, Xuan Tang, Xian Wei
Abstract:
Recently, 3D object detection has attracted significant attention and achieved continuous improvement in real road scenarios. The environmental information is collected from a single sensor or multi-sensor fusion to detect interested objects. However, most of the current 3D object detection approaches focus on developing advanced network architectures to improve the detection precision of the object rather than considering the dynamic driving scenes, where data collected from sensors equipped in the vehicle contain various perturbation features. As a result, existing work cannot still tackle the perturbation issue. In order to solve this problem, we propose a group equivariant bird's eye view network (GeqBevNet) based on the group equivariant theory, which introduces the concept of group equivariant into the BEV fusion object detection network. The group equivariant network is embedded into the fused BEV feature map to facilitate the BEV-level rotational equivariant feature extraction, thus leading to lower average orientation error. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GeqBevNet, the network is verified on the nuScenes validation dataset in which mAOE can be decreased to 0.325. Experimental results demonstrate that GeqBevNet can extract more rotational equivariant features in the 3D object detection of the actual road scene and improve the performance of object orientation prediction.
Authors:Hanqing Sun, Yanwei Pang, Jiale Cao, Jin Xie, Xuelong Li
Abstract:
Transformers have shown promising progress in various visual object detection tasks, including monocular 2D/3D detection and surround-view 3D detection. More importantly, the attention mechanism in the Transformer model and the 3D information extraction in binocular stereo are both similarity-based. However, directly applying existing Transformer-based detectors to binocular stereo 3D object detection leads to slow convergence and significant precision drops. We argue that a key cause of that defect is that existing Transformers ignore the binocular-stereo-specific image correspondence information. In this paper, we explore the model design of Transformers in binocular 3D object detection, focusing particularly on extracting and encoding task-specific image correspondence information. To achieve this goal, we present TS3D, a Transformer-based Stereo-aware 3D object detector. In the TS3D, a Disparity-Aware Positional Encoding (DAPE) module is proposed to embed the image correspondence information into stereo features. The correspondence is encoded as normalized sub-pixel-level disparity and is used in conjunction with sinusoidal 2D positional encoding to provide the 3D location information of the scene. To enrich multi-scale stereo features, we propose a Stereo Preserving Feature Pyramid Network (SPFPN). The SPFPN is designed to preserve the correspondence information while fusing intra-scale and aggregating cross-scale stereo features. Our proposed TS3D achieves a 41.29% Moderate Car detection average precision on the KITTI test set and takes 88 ms to detect objects from each binocular image pair. It is competitive with advanced counterparts in terms of both precision and inference speed.
Authors:Xuexue Li, Wenhui Diao, Yongqiang Mao, Peng Gao, Xiuhua Mao, Xinming Li, Xian Sun
Abstract:
Occlusion between objects is one of the overlooked challenges for object detection in UAV images. Due to the variable altitude and angle of UAVs, occlusion in UAV images happens more frequently than that in natural scenes. Compared to occlusion in natural scene images, occlusion in UAV images happens with feature confusion problem and local aggregation characteristic. And we found that extracting or localizing occlusion between objects is beneficial for the detector to address this challenge. According to this finding, the occlusion localization task is introduced, which together with the object detection task constitutes our occlusion-guided multi-task network (OGMN). The OGMN contains the localization of occlusion and two occlusion-guided multi-task interactions. In detail, an occlusion estimation module (OEM) is proposed to precisely localize occlusion. Then the OGMN utilizes the occlusion localization results to implement occlusion-guided detection with two multi-task interactions. One interaction for the guide is between two task decoders to address the feature confusion problem, and an occlusion decoupling head (ODH) is proposed to replace the general detection head. Another interaction for guide is designed in the detection process according to local aggregation characteristic, and a two-phase progressive refinement process (TPP) is proposed to optimize the detection process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our OGMN on the Visdrone and UAVDT datasets. In particular, our OGMN achieves 35.0% mAP on the Visdrone dataset and outperforms the baseline by 5.3%. And our OGMN provides a new insight for accurate occlusion localization and achieves competitive detection performance.
Authors:Yang Yang, Weijie Ma, Hao Chen, Linlin Ou, Xinyi Yu
Abstract:
The combination of LiDAR and camera modalities is proven to be necessary and typical for 3D object detection according to recent studies. Existing fusion strategies tend to overly rely on the LiDAR modal in essence, which exploits the abundant semantics from the camera sensor insufficiently. However, existing methods cannot rely on information from other modalities because the corruption of LiDAR features results in a large domain gap. Following this, we propose CrossFusion, a more robust and noise-resistant scheme that makes full use of the camera and LiDAR features with the designed cross-modal complementation strategy. Extensive experiments we conducted show that our method not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under the setting without introducing an extra depth estimation network but also demonstrates our model's noise resistance without re-training for the specific malfunction scenarios by increasing 5.2\% mAP and 2.4\% NDS.
Authors:Armstrong Aboah, Bin Wang, Ulas Bagci, Yaw Adu-Gyamfi
Abstract:
Traffic safety is a major global concern. Helmet usage is a key factor in preventing head injuries and fatalities caused by motorcycle accidents. However, helmet usage violations continue to be a significant problem. To identify such violations, automatic helmet detection systems have been proposed and implemented using computer vision techniques. Real-time implementation of such systems is crucial for traffic surveillance and enforcement, however, most of these systems are not real-time. This study proposes a robust real-time helmet violation detection system. The proposed system utilizes a unique data processing strategy, referred to as few-shot data sampling, to develop a robust model with fewer annotations, and a single-stage object detection model, YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once Version 8), for detecting helmet violations in real-time from video frames. Our proposed method won 7th place in the 2023 AI City Challenge, Track 5, with an mAP score of 0.5861 on experimental validation data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system.
Authors:Shaobo Lin, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to expand an object detector for novel categories given only a few instances for training. The few training samples restrict the performance of FSOD model. Recent text-to-image generation models have shown promising results in generating high-quality images. How applicable these synthetic images are for FSOD tasks remains under-explored. This work extensively studies how synthetic images generated from state-of-the-art text-to-image generators benefit FSOD tasks. We focus on two perspectives: (1) How to use synthetic data for FSOD? (2) How to find representative samples from the large-scale synthetic dataset? We design a copy-paste-based pipeline for using synthetic data. Specifically, saliency object detection is applied to the original generated image, and the minimum enclosing box is used for cropping the main object based on the saliency map. After that, the cropped object is randomly pasted on the image, which comes from the base dataset. We also study the influence of the input text of text-to-image generator and the number of synthetic images used. To construct a representative synthetic training dataset, we maximize the diversity of the selected images via a sample-based and cluster-based method. However, the severe problem of high false positives (FP) ratio of novel categories in FSOD can not be solved by using synthetic data. We propose integrating CLIP, a zero-shot recognition model, into the FSOD pipeline, which can filter 90% of FP by defining a threshold for the similarity score between the detected object and the text of the predicted category. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO validate the effectiveness of our method, in which performance gain is up to 21.9% compared to the few-shot baseline.
Authors:Guoqiang Jin, Fan Yang, Mingshan Sun, Ruyi Zhao, Yakun Liu, Wei Li, Tianpeng Bao, Liwei Wu, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao
Abstract:
Self-supervised pre-training and transformer-based networks have significantly improved the performance of object detection. However, most of the current self-supervised object detection methods are built on convolutional-based architectures. We believe that the transformers' sequence characteristics should be considered when designing a transformer-based self-supervised method for the object detection task. To this end, we propose SeqCo-DETR, a novel Sequence Consistency-based self-supervised method for object DEtection with TRansformers. SeqCo-DETR defines a simple but effective pretext by minimizes the discrepancy of the output sequences of transformers with different image views as input and leverages bipartite matching to find the most relevant sequence pairs to improve the sequence-level self-supervised representation learning performance. Furthermore, we provide a mask-based augmentation strategy incorporated with the sequence consistency strategy to extract more representative contextual information about the object for the object detection task. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on MS COCO (45.8 AP) and PASCAL VOC (64.1 AP), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Tim Puphal, Benedict Flade, Malte Probst, Volker Willert, Jürgen Adamy, Julian Eggert
Abstract:
The survival analysis of driving trajectories allows for holistic evaluations of car-related risks caused by collisions or curvy roads. This analysis has advantages over common Time-To-X indicators, such as its predictive and probabilistic nature. However, so far, the theoretical risks have not been demonstrated in real-world environments. In this paper, we therefore present Risk Maps (RM) for online warning support in situations with forced lane changes, due to the end of roads. For this purpose, we first unify sensor data in a Relational Local Dynamic Map (R-LDM). RM is afterwards able to be run in real-time and efficiently probes a range of situations in order to determine risk-minimizing behaviors. Hereby, we focus on the improvement of uncertainty-awareness and transparency of the system. Risk, utility and comfort costs are included in a single formula and are intuitively visualized to the driver. In the conducted experiments, a low-cost sensor setup with a GNSS receiver for localization and multiple cameras for object detection are leveraged. The final system is successfully applied on two-lane roads and recommends lane change advices, which are separated in gap and no-gap indications. These results are promising and present an important step towards interpretable safety.
Authors:MatouÅ¡ Vrba, Viktor Walter, Václav Pritzl, Michal Pliska, Tomáš BáÄa, VojtÄch Spurný, Daniel HeÅt, Martin Saska
Abstract:
A new robust and accurate approach for the detection and localization of flying objects with the purpose of highly dynamic aerial interception and agile multi-robot interaction is presented in this paper. The approach is proposed for use on board of autonomous aerial vehicles equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor. It relies on a novel 3D occupancy voxel mapping method for the target detection that provides high localization accuracy and robustness with respect to varying environments and appearance changes of the target. In combination with a proposed cluster-based multi-target tracker, sporadic false positives are suppressed, state estimation of the target is provided, and the detection latency is negligible. This makes the system suitable for tasks of agile multi-robot interaction, such as autonomous aerial interception or formation control where fast, precise, and robust relative localization of other robots is crucial. We evaluate the viability and performance of the system in simulated and real-world experiments which demonstrate that at a range of 20m, our system is capable of reliably detecting a micro-scale UAV with an almost 100% recall, 0.2m accuracy, and 20ms delay.
Authors:Siqi Fan, Zhe Wang, Xiaoliang Huo, Yan Wang, Jingjing Liu
Abstract:
Effective BEV object detection on infrastructure can greatly improve traffic scenes understanding and vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I) cooperative perception. However, cameras installed on infrastructure have various postures, and previous BEV detection methods rely on accurate calibration, which is difficult for practical applications due to inevitable natural factors (e.g., wind and snow). In this paper, we propose a Calibration-free BEV Representation (CBR) network, which achieves 3D detection based on BEV representation without calibration parameters and additional depth supervision. Specifically, we utilize two multi-layer perceptrons for decoupling the features from perspective view to front view and birdeye view under boxes-induced foreground supervision. Then, a cross-view feature fusion module matches features from orthogonal views according to similarity and conducts BEV feature enhancement with front view features. Experimental results on DAIR-V2X demonstrate that CBR achieves acceptable performance without any camera parameters and is naturally not affected by calibration noises. We hope CBR can serve as a baseline for future research addressing practical challenges of infrastructure perception.
Authors:Gianluca D'Amico, Mauro Marinoni, Federico Nesti, Giulio Rossolini, Giorgio Buttazzo, Salvatore Sabina, Gianluigi Lauro
Abstract:
The railway industry is searching for new ways to automate a number of complex train functions, such as object detection, track discrimination, and accurate train positioning, which require the artificial perception of the railway environment through different types of sensors, including cameras, LiDARs, wheel encoders, and inertial measurement units. A promising approach for processing such sensory data is the use of deep learning models, which proved to achieve excellent performance in other application domains, as robotics and self-driving cars. However, testing new algorithms and solutions requires the availability of a large amount of labeled data, acquired in different scenarios and operating conditions, which are difficult to obtain in a real railway setting due to strict regulations and practical constraints in accessing the trackside infrastructure and equipping a train with the required sensors. To address such difficulties, this paper presents a visual simulation framework able to generate realistic railway scenarios in a virtual environment and automatically produce inertial data and labeled datasets from emulated LiDARs and cameras useful for training deep neural networks or testing innovative algorithms. A set of experimental results are reported to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Authors:Shaobo Lin, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to expand an object detector for novel categories given only a few instances for training. However, detecting novel categories with only a few samples usually leads to the problem of misclassification. In FSOD, we notice the false positive (FP) of novel categories is prominent, in which the base categories are often recognized as novel ones. To address this issue, a novel data augmentation pipeline that Crops the Novel instances and Pastes them on the selected Base images, called CNPB, is proposed. There are two key questions to be answered: (1) How to select useful base images? and (2) How to combine novel and base data? We design a multi-step selection strategy to find useful base data. Specifically, we first discover the base images which contain the FP of novel categories and select a certain amount of samples from them for the base and novel categories balance. Then the bad cases, such as the base images that have unlabeled ground truth or easily confused base instances, are removed by using CLIP. Finally, the same category strategy is adopted, in which a novel instance with category n is pasted on the base image with the FP of n. During combination, a novel instance is cropped and randomly down-sized, and thus pasted at the assigned optimal location from the randomly generated candidates in a selected base image. Our method is simple yet effective and can be easy to plug into existing FSOD methods, demonstrating significant potential for use. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO validate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Melissa Hall, Laura Gustafson, Aaron Adcock, Ishan Misra, Candace Ross
Abstract:
We explore the extent to which zero-shot vision-language models exhibit gender bias for different vision tasks. Vision models traditionally required task-specific labels for representing concepts, as well as finetuning; zero-shot models like CLIP instead perform tasks with an open-vocabulary, meaning they do not need a fixed set of labels, by using text embeddings to represent concepts. With these capabilities in mind, we ask: Do vision-language models exhibit gender bias when performing zero-shot image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation? We evaluate different vision-language models with multiple datasets across a set of concepts and find (i) all models evaluated show distinct performance differences based on the perceived gender of the person co-occurring with a given concept in the image and that aggregating analyses over all concepts can mask these concerns; (ii) model calibration (i.e. the relationship between accuracy and confidence) also differs distinctly by perceived gender, even when evaluating on similar representations of concepts; and (iii) these observed disparities align with existing gender biases in word embeddings from language models. These findings suggest that, while language greatly expands the capability of vision tasks, it can also contribute to social biases in zero-shot vision settings. Furthermore, biases can further propagate when foundational models like CLIP are used by other models to enable zero-shot capabilities.
Authors:Shaobo Lin, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao
Abstract:
The generalization power of the pre-trained model is the key for few-shot deep learning. Dropout is a regularization technique used in traditional deep learning methods. In this paper, we explore the power of dropout on few-shot learning and provide some insights about how to use it. Extensive experiments on the few-shot object detection and few-shot image classification datasets, i.e., Pascal VOC, MS COCO, CUB, and mini-ImageNet, validate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Shaoyuan Xie, Zichao Li, Zeyu Wang, Cihang Xie
Abstract:
In recent years, camera-based 3D object detection has gained widespread attention for its ability to achieve high performance with low computational cost. However, the robustness of these methods to adversarial attacks has not been thoroughly examined, especially when considering their deployment in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving. In this study, we conduct the first comprehensive investigation of the robustness of leading camera-based 3D object detection approaches under various adversarial conditions. We systematically analyze the resilience of these models under two attack settings: white-box and black-box; focusing on two primary objectives: classification and localization. Additionally, we delve into two types of adversarial attack techniques: pixel-based and patch-based. Our experiments yield four interesting findings: (a) bird's-eye-view-based representations exhibit stronger robustness against localization attacks; (b) depth-estimation-free approaches have the potential to show stronger robustness; (c) accurate depth estimation effectively improves robustness for depth-estimation-based methods; (d) incorporating multi-frame benign inputs can effectively mitigate adversarial attacks. We hope our findings can steer the development of future camera-based object detection models with enhanced adversarial robustness.
Authors:Ao Chen, Jinghua Zhang, Md Mamunur Rahaman, Hongzan Sun, M. D., Tieyong Zeng, Marcin Grzegorzek, Feng-Lei Fan, Chen Li
Abstract:
The accurate detection of sperms and impurities is a very challenging task, facing problems such as the small size of targets, indefinite target morphologies, low contrast and resolution of the video, and similarity of sperms and impurities. So far, the detection of sperms and impurities still largely relies on the traditional image processing and detection techniques which only yield limited performance and often require manual intervention in the detection process, therefore unfavorably escalating the time cost and injecting the subjective bias into the analysis. Encouraged by the successes of deep learning methods in numerous object detection tasks, here we report a deep learning model based on Double Branch Feature Extraction Network (DBFEN) and Cross-conjugate Feature Pyramid Networks (CCFPN).DBFEN is designed to extract visual features from tiny objects with a double branch structure, and CCFPN is further introduced to fuse the features extracted by DBFEN to enhance the description of position and high-level semantic information. Our work is the pioneer of introducing deep learning approaches to the detection of sperms and impurities. Experiments show that the highest AP50 of the sperm and impurity detection is 91.13% and 59.64%, which lead its competitors by a substantial margin and establish new state-of-the-art results in this problem.
Authors:Chengzhi Wu, Kanran Zhou, Jan-Philipp Kaiser, Norbert Mitschke, Jan-Felix Klein, Julius Pfrommer, Jürgen Beyerer, Gisela Lanza, Michael Heizmann, Kai Furmans
Abstract:
To enable automatic disassembly of different product types with uncertain conditions and degrees of wear in remanufacturing, agile production systems that can adapt dynamically to changing requirements are needed. Machine learning algorithms can be employed due to their generalization capabilities of learning from various types and variants of products. However, in reality, datasets with a diversity of samples that can be used to train models are difficult to obtain in the initial period. This may cause bad performances when the system tries to adapt to new unseen input data in the future. In order to generate large datasets for different learning purposes, in our project, we present a Blender add-on named MotorFactory to generate customized mesh models of various motor instances. MotorFactory allows to create mesh models which, complemented with additional add-ons, can be further used to create synthetic RGB images, depth images, normal images, segmentation ground truth masks, and 3D point cloud datasets with point-wise semantic labels. The created synthetic datasets may be used for various tasks including motor type classification, object detection for decentralized material transfer tasks, part segmentation for disassembly and handling tasks, or even reinforcement learning-based robotics control or view-planning.
Authors:Chengzhi Wu, Julius Pfrommer, Jürgen Beyerer, Kangning Li, Boris Neubert
Abstract:
We present an improved approach for 3D object detection in point cloud data based on the Frustum PointNet (F-PointNet). Compared to the original F-PointNet, our newly proposed method considers the point neighborhood when computing point features. The newly introduced local neighborhood embedding operation mimics the convolutional operations in 2D neural networks. Thus features of each point are not only computed with the features of its own or of the whole point cloud but also computed especially with respect to the features of its neighbors. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves better performance than the F-Pointnet baseline on 3D object detection tasks.
Authors:Carlos Bernal-Cárdenas, Nathan Cooper, Madeleine Havranek, Kevin Moran, Oscar Chaparro, Denys Poshyvanyk, Andrian Marcus
Abstract:
Screen recordings of mobile applications are easy to obtain and capture a wealth of information pertinent to software developers (e.g., bugs or feature requests), making them a popular mechanism for crowdsourced app feedback. Thus, these videos are becoming a common artifact that developers must manage. In light of unique mobile development constraints, including swift release cycles and rapidly evolving platforms, automated techniques for analyzing all types of rich software artifacts provide benefit to mobile developers. Unfortunately, automatically analyzing screen recordings presents serious challenges, due to their graphical nature, compared to other types of (textual) artifacts. To address these challenges, this paper introduces V2S+, an automated approach for translating video recordings of Android app usages into replayable scenarios. V2S+ is based primarily on computer vision techniques and adapts recent solutions for object detection and image classification to detect and classify user gestures captured in a video, and convert these into a replayable test scenario. Given that V2S+ takes a computer vision-based approach, it is applicable to both hybrid and native Android applications. We performed an extensive evaluation of V2S+ involving 243 videos depicting 4,028 GUI-based actions collected from users exercising features and reproducing bugs from a collection of over 90 popular native and hybrid Android apps. Our results illustrate that V2S+ can accurately replay scenarios from screen recordings, and is capable of reproducing $\approx$ 90.2% of sequential actions recorded in native application scenarios on physical devices, and $\approx$ 83% of sequential actions recorded in hybrid application scenarios on emulators, both with low overhead. A case study with three industrial partners illustrates the potential usefulness of V2S+ from the viewpoint of developers.
Authors:Waseem Shariff, Muhammad Ali Farooq, Joe Lemley, Peter Corcoran
Abstract:
Neuromorphic vision or event vision is an advanced vision technology, where in contrast to the visible camera that outputs pixels, the event vision generates neuromorphic events every time there is a brightness change which exceeds a specific threshold in the field of view (FOV). This study focuses on leveraging neuromorphic event data for roadside object detection. This is a proof of concept towards building artificial intelligence (AI) based pipelines which can be used for forward perception systems for advanced vehicular applications. The focus is on building efficient state-of-the-art object detection networks with better inference results for fast-moving forward perception using an event camera. In this article, the event-simulated A2D2 dataset is manually annotated and trained on two different YOLOv5 networks (small and large variants). To further assess its robustness, single model testing and ensemble model testing are carried out.
Authors:Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth, Yongkang Liu, Emrah Akin Sisbot, Kentaro Oguchi
Abstract:
Utilizing the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the computer vision community is now witnessing an unprecedented evolution in all kinds of perception tasks, particularly in object detection. Based on multiple spatially separated perception nodes, Cooperative Perception (CP) has emerged to significantly advance the perception of automated driving. However, current cooperative object detection methods mainly focus on ego-vehicle efficiency without considering the practical issues of system-wide costs. In this paper, we introduce VINet, a unified deep learning-based CP network for scalable, lightweight, and heterogeneous cooperative 3D object detection. VINet is the first CP method designed from the standpoint of large-scale system-level implementation and can be divided into three main phases: 1) Global Pre-Processing and Lightweight Feature Extraction which prepare the data into global style and extract features for cooperation in a lightweight manner; 2) Two-Stream Fusion which fuses the features from scalable and heterogeneous perception nodes; and 3) Central Feature Backbone and 3D Detection Head which further process the fused features and generate cooperative detection results. An open-source data experimental platform is designed and developed for CP dataset acquisition and model evaluation. The experimental analysis shows that VINet can reduce 84% system-level computational cost and 94% system-level communication cost while improving the 3D detection accuracy.
Authors:Chengyin Hu, Weiwen Shi
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have have shown state-of-the-art performance for computer vision applications like image classification, segmentation and object detection. Whereas recent advances have shown their vulnerability to manual digital perturbations in the input data, namely adversarial attacks. The accuracy of the networks is significantly affected by the data distribution of their training dataset. Distortions or perturbations on color space of input images generates out-of-distribution data, which make networks more likely to misclassify them. In this work, we propose a color-variation dataset by distorting their RGB color on a subset of the ImageNet with 27 different combinations. The aim of our work is to study the impact of color variation on the performance of DNNs. We perform experiments on several state-of-the-art DNN architectures on the proposed dataset, and the result shows a significant correlation between color variation and loss of accuracy. Furthermore, based on the ResNet50 architecture, we demonstrate some experiments of the performance of recently proposed robust training techniques and strategies, such as Augmix, revisit, and free normalizer, on our proposed dataset. Experimental results indicate that these robust training techniques can improve the robustness of deep networks to color variation.
Authors:Hua Ma, Yinshan Li, Yansong Gao, Zhi Zhang, Alsharif Abuadbba, Anmin Fu, Said F. Al-Sarawi, Nepal Surya, Derek Abbott
Abstract:
Object detection is the foundation of various critical computer-vision tasks such as segmentation, object tracking, and event detection. To train an object detector with satisfactory accuracy, a large amount of data is required. However, due to the intensive workforce involved with annotating large datasets, such a data curation task is often outsourced to a third party or relied on volunteers. This work reveals severe vulnerabilities of such data curation pipeline. We propose MACAB that crafts clean-annotated images to stealthily implant the backdoor into the object detectors trained on them even when the data curator can manually audit the images. We observe that the backdoor effect of both misclassification and the cloaking are robustly achieved in the wild when the backdoor is activated with inconspicuously natural physical triggers. Backdooring non-classification object detection with clean-annotation is challenging compared to backdooring existing image classification tasks with clean-label, owing to the complexity of having multiple objects within each frame, including victim and non-victim objects. The efficacy of the MACAB is ensured by constructively i abusing the image-scaling function used by the deep learning framework, ii incorporating the proposed adversarial clean image replica technique, and iii combining poison data selection criteria given constrained attacking budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MACAB exhibits more than 90% attack success rate under various real-world scenes. This includes both cloaking and misclassification backdoor effect even restricted with a small attack budget. The poisoned samples cannot be effectively identified by state-of-the-art detection techniques.The comprehensive video demo is at https://youtu.be/MA7L_LpXkp4, which is based on a poison rate of 0.14% for YOLOv4 cloaking backdoor and Faster R-CNN misclassification backdoor.
Authors:Chengyin Hu, Weiwen Shi
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in computer vision tasks like image classification, object detection and segmentation. Whereas recent studies have shown their vulnerability to manual digital perturbations or distortion in the input images. The accuracy of the networks is remarkably influenced by the data distribution of their training dataset. Scaling the raw images creates out-of-distribution data, which makes it a possible adversarial attack to fool the networks. In this work, we propose a Scaling-distortion dataset ImageNet-CS by Scaling a subset of the ImageNet Challenge dataset by different multiples. The aim of our work is to study the impact of scaled images on the performance of advanced DNNs. We perform experiments on several state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures on the proposed ImageNet-CS, and the results show a significant positive correlation between scaling size and accuracy decline. Moreover, based on ResNet50 architecture, we demonstrate some tests on the performance of recent proposed robust training techniques and strategies like Augmix, Revisiting and Normalizer Free on our proposed ImageNet-CS. Experiment results have shown that these robust training techniques can improve networks' robustness to scaling transformation.
Authors:Giulio Rossolini, Federico Nesti, Fabio Brau, Alessandro Biondi, Giorgio Buttazzo
Abstract:
This work presents Z-Mask, a robust and effective strategy to improve the adversarial robustness of convolutional networks against physically-realizable adversarial attacks. The presented defense relies on specific Z-score analysis performed on the internal network features to detect and mask the pixels corresponding to adversarial objects in the input image. To this end, spatially contiguous activations are examined in shallow and deep layers to suggest potential adversarial regions. Such proposals are then aggregated through a multi-thresholding mechanism. The effectiveness of Z-Mask is evaluated with an extensive set of experiments carried out on models for both semantic segmentation and object detection. The evaluation is performed with both digital patches added to the input images and printed patches positioned in the real world. The obtained results confirm that Z-Mask outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both detection accuracy and overall performance of the networks under attack. Additional experiments showed that Z-Mask is also robust against possible defense-aware attacks.
Authors:Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth, Yongkang Liu, Emrah Akin Sisbot, Kentaro Oguchi
Abstract:
3D object detection plays a fundamental role in enabling autonomous driving, which is regarded as the significant key to unlocking the bottleneck of contemporary transportation systems from the perspectives of safety, mobility, and sustainability. Most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods from point clouds are developed based on a single onboard LiDAR, whose performance will be inevitably limited by the range and occlusion, especially in dense traffic scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textit{PillarGrid}, a novel cooperative perception method fusing information from multiple 3D LiDARs (both on-board and roadside), to enhance the situation awareness for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). PillarGrid consists of four main phases: 1) cooperative preprocessing of point clouds, 2) pillar-wise voxelization and feature extraction, 3) grid-wise deep fusion of features from multiple sensors, and 4) convolutional neural network (CNN)-based augmented 3D object detection. A novel cooperative perception platform is developed for model training and testing. Extensive experimentation shows that PillarGrid outperforms the SOTA single-LiDAR-based 3D object detection methods with respect to both accuracy and range by a large margin.
Authors:Muhammad Ali Farooq, Waseem Shariff, Peter Corcoran
Abstract:
This study is focused on evaluating the real-time performance of thermal object detection for smart and safe vehicular systems by deploying the trained networks on GPU & single-board EDGE-GPU computing platforms for onboard automotive sensor suite testing. A novel large-scale thermal dataset comprising of > 35,000 distinct frames is acquired, processed, and open-sourced in challenging weather and environmental scenarios. The dataset is a recorded from lost-cost yet effective uncooled LWIR thermal camera, mounted stand-alone and on an electric vehicle to minimize mechanical vibrations. State-of-the-art YOLO-V5 networks variants are trained using four different public datasets as well newly acquired local dataset for optimal generalization of DNN by employing SGD optimizer. The effectiveness of trained networks is validated on extensive test data using various quantitative metrics which include precision, recall curve, mean average precision, and frames per second. The smaller network variant of YOLO is further optimized using TensorRT inference accelerator to explicitly boost the frames per second rate. Optimized network engine increases the frames per second rate by 3.5 times when testing on low power edge devices thus achieving 11 fps on Nvidia Jetson Nano and 60 fps on Nvidia Xavier NX development boards.
Authors:Zheyuan Zhou, Liang Du, Xiaoqing Ye, Zhikang Zou, Xiao Tan, Li Zhang, Xiangyang Xue, Jianfeng Feng
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection aims to predict the object location, dimension and orientation in 3D space alongside the object category given only a monocular image. It poses a great challenge due to its ill-posed property which is critically lack of depth information in the 2D image plane. While there exist approaches leveraging off-the-shelve depth estimation or relying on LiDAR sensors to mitigate this problem, the dependence on the additional depth model or expensive equipment severely limits their scalability to generic 3D perception. In this paper, we propose a stereo-guided monocular 3D object detection framework, dubbed SGM3D, adapting the robust 3D features learned from stereo inputs to enhance the feature for monocular detection. We innovatively present a multi-granularity domain adaptation (MG-DA) mechanism to exploit the network's ability to generate stereo-mimicking features given only on monocular cues. Coarse BEV feature-level, as well as the fine anchor-level domain adaptation, are both leveraged for guidance in the monocular domain.In addition, we introduce an IoU matching-based alignment (IoU-MA) method for object-level domain adaptation between the stereo and monocular predictions to alleviate the mismatches while adopting the MG-DA. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on KITTI and Lyft datasets.
Authors:Qingxi Meng, Emiliano Flores, Carlos Quintero-Peña, Peizhu Qian, Zachary Kingston, Shannan K. Hamlin, Vaibhav Unhelkar, Lydia E. Kavraki
Abstract:
In this work, we address the problem of planning robot motions for a high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robot that effectively achieves a given perception task while the robot and the perception target move in a dynamic environment. Achieving navigation and perception tasks simultaneously is challenging, as these objectives often impose conflicting requirements. Existing methods that compute motion under perception constraints fail to account for obstacles, are designed for low-DoF robots, or rely on simplified models of perception. Furthermore, in dynamic real-world environments, robots must replan and react quickly to changes and directly evaluating the quality of perception (e.g., object detection confidence) is often expensive or infeasible at runtime. This problem is especially important in human-centered environments such as homes and hospitals, where effective perception is essential for safe and reliable operation. To address these challenges, we propose a GPU-parallelized perception-score-guided probabilistic roadmap planner with a neural surrogate model (PS-PRM). The planner explicitly incorporates the estimated quality of a perception task into motion planning for high-DoF robots. Our method uses a learned model to approximate perception scores and leverages GPU parallelism to enable efficient online replanning in dynamic settings. We demonstrate that our planner, evaluated on high-DoF robots, outperforms baseline methods in both static and dynamic environments in both simulation and real-robot experiments.
Authors:Chengjun Zhang, Yuhao Zhang, Jie Yang, Mohamad Sawan
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the brain, are characterized by minimal power consumption and swift inference capabilities on neuromorphic hardware, and have been widely applied to various visual perception tasks. Current ANN-SNN conversion methods have achieved excellent results in classification tasks with ultra-low time-steps, but their performance in visual detection tasks remains suboptimal. In this paper, we propose a delay-spike approach to mitigate the issue of residual membrane potential caused by heterogeneous spiking patterns. Furthermore, we propose a novel temporal-dependent Integrate-and-Fire (tdIF) neuron architecture for SNNs. This enables Integrate-and-fire (IF) neurons to dynamically adjust their accumulation and firing behaviors based on the temporal order of time-steps. Our method enables spikes to exhibit distinct temporal properties, rather than relying solely on frequency-based representations. Moreover, the tdIF neuron maintains energy consumption on par with traditional IF neuron. We demonstrate that our method achieves more precise feature representation with lower time-steps, enabling high performance and ultra-low latency in visual detection tasks. In this study, we conduct extensive evaluation of the tdIF method across two critical vision tasks: object detection and lane line detection. The results demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses current ANN-SNN conversion approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance with ultra-low latency (within 5 time-steps).
Authors:Fuyang Liu, Jilin Mei, Fangyuan Mao, Chen Min, Yan Xing, Yu Hu
Abstract:
4D radar-based object detection has garnered great attention for its robustness in adverse weather conditions and capacity to deliver rich spatial information across diverse driving scenarios. Nevertheless, the sparse and noisy nature of 4D radar point clouds poses substantial challenges for effective perception. To address the limitation, we present CORENet, a novel cross-modal denoising framework that leverages LiDAR supervision to identify noise patterns and extract discriminative features from raw 4D radar data. Designed as a plug-and-play architecture, our solution enables seamless integration into voxel-based detection frameworks without modifying existing pipelines. Notably, the proposed method only utilizes LiDAR data for cross-modal supervision during training while maintaining full radar-only operation during inference. Extensive evaluation on the challenging Dual-Radar dataset, which is characterized by elevated noise level, demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing detection robustness. Comprehensive experiments validate that CORENet achieves superior performance compared to existing mainstream approaches.
Authors:Wei-Bin Kou, Guangxu Zhu, Rongguang Ye, Jingreng Lei, Shuai Wang, Qingfeng Lin, Ming Tang, Yik-Chung Wu
Abstract:
Various adverse weather conditions such as fog and rain pose a significant challenge to autonomous driving (AD) perception tasks like semantic segmentation, object detection, etc. The common domain adaption strategy is to minimize the disparity between images captured in clear and adverse weather conditions. However, domain adaption faces two challenges: (I) it typically relies on utilizing clear image as a reference, which is challenging to obtain in practice; (II) it generally targets single adverse weather condition and performs poorly when confronting the mixture of multiple adverse weather conditions. To address these issues, we introduce a reference-free and Adverse weather condition-independent (Advent) framework (rather than a specific model architecture) that can be implemented by various backbones and heads. This is achieved by leveraging the homogeneity over short durations, getting rid of clear reference and being generalizable to arbitrary weather condition. Specifically, Advent includes three integral components: (I) Locally Sequential Mechanism (LSM) leverages temporal correlations between adjacent frames to achieve the weather-condition-agnostic effect thanks to the homogeneity behind arbitrary weather condition; (II) Globally Shuffled Mechanism (GSM) is proposed to shuffle segments processed by LSM from different positions of input sequence to prevent the overfitting to LSM-induced temporal patterns; (III) Unfolded Regularizers (URs) are the deep unfolding implementation of two proposed regularizers to penalize the model complexity to enhance across-weather generalization. We take the semantic segmentation task as an example to assess the proposed Advent framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Advent outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines with large margins.
Authors:Haote Zhang, Lipeng Gu, Wuzhou Quan, Fu Lee Wang, Honghui Fan, Jiali Tang, Dingkun Zhu, Haoran Xie, Xiaoping Zhang, Mingqiang Wei
Abstract:
Visible-infrared object detection aims to enhance the detection robustness by exploiting the complementary information of visible and infrared image pairs. However, its performance is often limited by frequent misalignments caused by resolution disparities, spatial displacements, and modality inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose the Wavelet-guided Misalignment-aware Network (WMNet), a unified framework designed to adaptively address different cross-modal misalignment patterns. WMNet incorporates wavelet-based multi-frequency analysis and modality-aware fusion mechanisms to improve the alignment and integration of cross-modal features. By jointly exploiting low and high-frequency information and introducing adaptive guidance across modalities, WMNet alleviates the adverse effects of noise, illumination variation, and spatial misalignment. Furthermore, it enhances the representation of salient target features while suppressing spurious or misleading information, thereby promoting more accurate and robust detection. Extensive evaluations on the DVTOD, DroneVehicle, and M3FD datasets demonstrate that WMNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on misaligned cross-modal object detection tasks, confirming its effectiveness and practical applicability.
Authors:Aayush Atul Verma, Arpitsinh Vaghela, Bharatesh Chakravarthi, Kaustav Chanda, Yezhou Yang
Abstract:
Event-based sensors offer high temporal resolution and low latency by generating sparse, asynchronous data. However, converting this irregular data into dense tensors for use in standard neural networks diminishes these inherent advantages, motivating research into graph representations. While such methods preserve sparsity and support asynchronous inference, their performance on downstream tasks remains limited due to suboptimal modeling of spatiotemporal dynamics. In this work, we propose a novel spatiotemporal multigraph representation to better capture spatial structure and temporal changes. Our approach constructs two decoupled graphs: a spatial graph leveraging B-spline basis functions to model global structure, and a temporal graph utilizing motion vector-based attention for local dynamic changes. This design enables the use of efficient 2D kernels in place of computationally expensive 3D kernels. We evaluate our method on the Gen1 automotive and eTraM datasets for event-based object detection, achieving over a 6% improvement in detection accuracy compared to previous graph-based works, with a 5x speedup, reduced parameter count, and no increase in computational cost. These results highlight the effectiveness of structured graph modeling for asynchronous vision. Project page: eventbasedvision.github.io/eGSMV.
Authors:Svyatoslav Pchelintsev, Maxim Patratskiy, Anatoly Onishchenko, Alexandr Korchemnyi, Aleksandr Medvedev, Uliana Vinogradova, Ilya Galuzinsky, Aleksey Postnikov, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov
Abstract:
Large Language Models are increasingly used in robotics for task planning, but their reliance on textual inputs limits their adaptability to real-world changes and failures. To address these challenges, we propose LERa - Look, Explain, Replan - a Visual Language Model-based replanning approach that utilizes visual feedback. Unlike existing methods, LERa requires only a raw RGB image, a natural language instruction, an initial task plan, and failure detection - without additional information such as object detection or predefined conditions that may be unavailable in a given scenario. The replanning process consists of three steps: (i) Look, where LERa generates a scene description and identifies errors; (ii) Explain, where it provides corrective guidance; and (iii) Replan, where it modifies the plan accordingly. LERa is adaptable to various agent architectures and can handle errors from both dynamic scene changes and task execution failures. We evaluate LERa on the newly introduced ALFRED-ChaOS and VirtualHome-ChaOS datasets, achieving a 40% improvement over baselines in dynamic environments. In tabletop manipulation tasks with a predefined probability of task failure within the PyBullet simulator, LERa improves success rates by up to 67%. Further experiments, including real-world trials with a tabletop manipulator robot, confirm LERa's effectiveness in replanning. We demonstrate that LERa is a robust and adaptable solution for error-aware task execution in robotics. The code is available at https://lera-robo.github.io.
Authors:Hanshi Wang, Jin Gao, Weiming Hu, Zhipeng Zhang
Abstract:
We present the first work demonstrating that a pure Mamba block can achieve efficient Dense Global Fusion, meanwhile guaranteeing top performance for camera-LiDAR multi-modal 3D object detection. Our motivation stems from the observation that existing fusion strategies are constrained by their inability to simultaneously achieve efficiency, long-range modeling, and retaining complete scene information. Inspired by recent advances in state-space models (SSMs) and linear attention, we leverage their linear complexity and long-range modeling capabilities to address these challenges. However, this is non-trivial since our experiments reveal that simply adopting efficient linear-complexity methods does not necessarily yield improvements and may even degrade performance. We attribute this degradation to the loss of height information during multi-modal alignment, leading to deviations in sequence order. To resolve this, we propose height-fidelity LiDAR encoding that preserves precise height information through voxel compression in continuous space, thereby enhancing camera-LiDAR alignment. Subsequently, we introduce the Hybrid Mamba Block, which leverages the enriched height-informed features to conduct local and global contextual learning. By integrating these components, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with the top-tire NDS score of 75.0 on the nuScenes validation benchmark, even surpassing methods that utilize high-resolution inputs. Meanwhile, our method maintains efficiency, achieving faster inference speed than most recent state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Lei Wang, Piotr Koniusz
Abstract:
Understanding human actions in videos requires more than raw pixel analysis; it relies on high-level semantic reasoning and effective integration of multimodal features. We propose a deep translational action recognition framework that enhances recognition accuracy by jointly predicting action concepts and auxiliary features from RGB video frames. At test time, hallucination streams infer missing cues, enriching feature representations without increasing computational overhead. To focus on action-relevant regions beyond raw pixels, we introduce two novel domain-specific descriptors. Object Detection Features (ODF) aggregate outputs from multiple object detectors to capture contextual cues, while Saliency Detection Features (SDF) highlight spatial and intensity patterns crucial for action recognition. Our framework seamlessly integrates these descriptors with auxiliary modalities such as optical flow, Improved Dense Trajectories, skeleton data, and audio cues. It remains compatible with state-of-the-art architectures, including I3D, AssembleNet, Video Transformer Network, FASTER, and recent models like VideoMAE V2 and InternVideo2. To handle uncertainty in auxiliary features, we incorporate aleatoric uncertainty modeling in the hallucination step and introduce a robust loss function to mitigate feature noise. Our multimodal self-supervised action recognition framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and Something-Something V2, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing fine-grained action dynamics.
Authors:R. Spencer Hallyburton, Miroslav Pajic
Abstract:
Many state-of-the-art AI models deployed in cyber-physical systems (CPS), while highly accurate, are simply pattern-matchers.~With limited security guarantees, there are concerns for their reliability in safety-critical and contested domains. To advance assured AI, we advocate for a paradigm shift that imbues data-driven perception models with symbolic structure, inspired by a human's ability to reason over low-level features and high-level context. We propose a neuro-symbolic paradigm for perception (NeuSPaPer) and illustrate how joint object detection and scene graph generation (SGG) yields deep scene understanding.~Powered by foundation models for offline knowledge extraction and specialized SGG algorithms for real-time deployment, we design a framework leveraging structured relational graphs that ensures the integrity of situational awareness in autonomy. Using physics-based simulators and real-world datasets, we demonstrate how SGG bridges the gap between low-level sensor perception and high-level reasoning, establishing a foundation for resilient, context-aware AI and advancing trusted autonomy in CPS.
Authors:Hao Jing, Anhong Wang, Yifan Zhang, Donghan Bu, Junhui Hou
Abstract:
Regarding intelligent transportation systems for vehicle networking, low-bitrate transmission via lossy point cloud compression is vital for facilitating real-time collaborative perception among vehicles with restricted bandwidth. In existing compression transmission systems, the sender lossily compresses point coordinates and reflectance to generate a transmission code stream, which faces transmission burdens from reflectance encoding and limited detection robustness due to information loss. To address these issues, this paper proposes a 3D object detection framework with reflectance prediction-based knowledge distillation (RPKD). We compress point coordinates while discarding reflectance during low-bitrate transmission, and feed the decoded non-reflectance compressed point clouds into a student detector. The discarded reflectance is then reconstructed by a geometry-based reflectance prediction (RP) module within the student detector for precise detection. A teacher detector with the same structure as student detector is designed for performing reflectance knowledge distillation (RKD) and detection knowledge distillation (DKD) from raw to compressed point clouds. Our RPKD framework jointly trains detectors on both raw and compressed point clouds to improve the student detector's robustness. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that our method can boost detection accuracy for compressed point clouds across multiple code rates. Notably, at a low code rate of 2.146 Bpp on the KITTI dataset, our RPKD-PV achieves the highest mAP of 73.6, outperforming existing detection methods with the PV-RCNN baseline.
Authors:Shangquan Sun, Wenqi Ren, Juxiang Zhou, Shu Wang, Jianhou Gan, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
Significant progress has been made in video restoration under rainy conditions over the past decade, largely propelled by advancements in deep learning. Nevertheless, existing methods that depend on paired data struggle to generalize effectively to real-world scenarios, primarily due to the disparity between synthetic and authentic rain effects. To address these limitations, we propose a dual-branch spatio-temporal state-space model to enhance rain streak removal in video sequences. Specifically, we design spatial and temporal state-space model layers to extract spatial features and incorporate temporal dependencies across frames, respectively. To improve multi-frame feature fusion, we derive a dynamic stacking filter, which adaptively approximates statistical filters for superior pixel-wise feature refinement. Moreover, we develop a median stacking loss to enable semi-supervised learning by generating pseudo-clean patches based on the sparsity prior of rain. To further explore the capacity of deraining models in supporting other vision-based tasks in rainy environments, we introduce a novel real-world benchmark focused on object detection and tracking in rainy conditions. Our method is extensively evaluated across multiple benchmarks containing numerous synthetic and real-world rainy videos, consistently demonstrating its superiority in quantitative metrics, visual quality, efficiency, and its utility for downstream tasks.
Authors:Zeeshan Hayder, Ali Cheraghian, Lars Petersson, Mehrtash Harandi
Abstract:
Compact models can be effectively trained through Knowledge Distillation (KD), a technique that transfers knowledge from larger, high-performing teacher models. Two key challenges in Knowledge Distillation (KD) are: 1) balancing learning from the teacher's guidance and the task objective, and 2) handling the disparity in knowledge representation between teacher and student models. To address these, we propose Multi-Task Optimization for Knowledge Distillation (MoKD). MoKD tackles two main gradient issues: a) Gradient Conflicts, where task-specific and distillation gradients are misaligned, and b) Gradient Dominance, where one objective's gradient dominates, causing imbalance. MoKD reformulates KD as a multi-objective optimization problem, enabling better balance between objectives. Additionally, it introduces a subspace learning framework to project feature representations into a high-dimensional space, improving knowledge transfer. Our MoKD is demonstrated to outperform existing methods through extensive experiments on image classification using the ImageNet-1K dataset and object detection using the COCO dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance with greater efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, MoKD models also achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to models trained from scratch.
Authors:Pengfei Chen, Xuehui Yu, Xumeng Han, Kuiran Wang, Guorong Li, Lingxi Xie, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao
Abstract:
Object recognition using single-point supervision has attracted increasing attention recently. However, the performance gap compared with fully-supervised algorithms remains large. Previous works generated class-agnostic \textbf{\textit{proposals in an image}} offline and then treated mixed candidates as a single bag, putting a huge burden on multiple instance learning (MIL). In this paper, we introduce Point-to-Box Network (P2BNet), which constructs balanced \textbf{\textit{instance-level proposal bags}} by generating proposals in an anchor-like way and refining the proposals in a coarse-to-fine paradigm. Through further research, we find that the bag of proposals, either at the image level or the instance level, is established on discrete box sampling. This leads the pseudo box estimation into a sub-optimal solution, resulting in the truncation of object boundaries or the excessive inclusion of background. Hence, we conduct a series exploration of discrete-to-continuous optimization, yielding P2BNet++ and Point-to-Mask Network (P2MNet). P2BNet++ conducts an approximately continuous proposal sampling strategy by better utilizing spatial clues. P2MNet further introduces low-level image information to assist in pixel prediction, and a boundary self-prediction is designed to relieve the limitation of the estimated boxes. Benefiting from the continuous object-aware \textbf{\textit{pixel-level perception}}, P2MNet can generate more precise bounding boxes and generalize to segmentation tasks. Our method largely surpasses the previous methods in terms of the mean average precision on COCO, VOC, SBD, and Cityscapes, demonstrating great potential to bridge the performance gap compared with fully supervised tasks.
Authors:Bonan Ding, Jin Xie, Jing Nie, Jiale Cao
Abstract:
Multimodal 3D object detection based on deep neural networks has indeed made significant progress. However, it still faces challenges due to the misalignment of scale and spatial information between features extracted from 2D images and those derived from 3D point clouds. Existing methods usually aggregate multimodal features at a single stage. However, leveraging multi-stage cross-modal features is crucial for detecting objects of various scales. Therefore, these methods often struggle to integrate features across different scales and modalities effectively, thereby restricting the accuracy of detection. Additionally, the time-consuming Query-Key-Value-based (QKV-based) cross-attention operations often utilized in existing methods aid in reasoning the location and existence of objects by capturing non-local contexts. However, this approach tends to increase computational complexity. To address these challenges, we present SSLFusion, a novel Scale & Space Aligned Latent Fusion Model, consisting of a scale-aligned fusion strategy (SAF), a 3D-to-2D space alignment module (SAM), and a latent cross-modal fusion module (LFM). SAF mitigates scale misalignment between modalities by aggregating features from both images and point clouds across multiple levels. SAM is designed to reduce the inter-modal gap between features from images and point clouds by incorporating 3D coordinate information into 2D image features. Additionally, LFM captures cross-modal non-local contexts in the latent space without utilizing the QKV-based attention operations, thus mitigating computational complexity. Experiments on the KITTI and DENSE datasets demonstrate that our SSLFusion outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our approach obtains an absolute gain of 2.15% in 3D AP, compared with the state-of-art method GraphAlign on the moderate level of the KITTI test set.
Authors:Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Ahsan Bilal, Sagnik Bhattacharya, John M. Cioffi
Abstract:
Future wireless networks aim to deliver high data rates and lower power consumption while ensuring seamless connectivity, necessitating robust optimization. Large language models (LLMs) have been deployed for generalized optimization scenarios. To take advantage of generative AI (GAI) models, we propose retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for multi-sensor wireless environment perception. Utilizing domain-specific prompt engineering, we apply RAG to efficiently harness multimodal data inputs from sensors in a wireless environment. Key pre-processing pipelines including image-to-text conversion, object detection, and distance calculations for multimodal RAG input from multi-sensor data are proposed to obtain a unified vector database crucial for optimizing LLMs in global wireless tasks. Our evaluation, conducted with OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini models, demonstrates an 8%, 8%, 10%, 7%, and 12% improvement in relevancy, faithfulness, completeness, similarity, and accuracy, respectively, compared to conventional LLM-based designs. Furthermore, our RAG-based LLM framework with vectorized databases is computationally efficient, providing real-time convergence under latency constraints.
Authors:Kai Li, Junhao Wang, William Han, Ding Zhao
Abstract:
Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has transformed clinical practice by reducing recovery times, minimizing complications, and enhancing precision. Nonetheless, MIS inherently relies on indirect visualization and precise instrument control, posing unique challenges. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled real-time surgical scene understanding through techniques such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation, with scene reconstruction emerging as a key element for enhanced intraoperative guidance. Although neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have been explored for this purpose, their substantial data requirements and slow rendering inhibit real-time performance. In contrast, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a more efficient alternative, achieving state-of-the-art performance in dynamic surgical scene reconstruction. In this work, we introduce Feature-EndoGaussian (FEG), an extension of 3DGS that integrates 2D segmentation cues into 3D rendering to enable real-time semantic and scene reconstruction. By leveraging pretrained segmentation foundation models, FEG incorporates semantic feature distillation within the Gaussian deformation framework, thereby enhancing both reconstruction fidelity and segmentation accuracy. On the EndoNeRF dataset, FEG achieves superior performance (SSIM of 0.97, PSNR of 39.08, and LPIPS of 0.03) compared to leading methods. Additionally, on the EndoVis18 dataset, FEG demonstrates competitive class-wise segmentation metrics while balancing model size and real-time performance.
Authors:Nandish Chattopadhyay, Abdul Basit, Bassem Ouni, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks have emerged as a major challenge to the trustworthy deployment of machine learning models, particularly in computer vision applications. These attacks have a varied level of potency and can be implemented in both white box and black box approaches. Practical attacks include methods to manipulate the physical world and enforce adversarial behaviour by the corresponding target neural network models. Multiple different approaches to mitigate different kinds of such attacks are available in the literature, each with their own advantages and limitations. In this survey, we present a comprehensive systematization of knowledge on adversarial defenses, focusing on two key computer vision tasks: image classification and object detection. We review the state-of-the-art adversarial defense techniques and categorize them for easier comparison. In addition, we provide a schematic representation of these categories within the context of the overall machine learning pipeline, facilitating clearer understanding and benchmarking of defenses. Furthermore, we map these defenses to the types of adversarial attacks and datasets where they are most effective, offering practical insights for researchers and practitioners. This study is necessary for understanding the scope of how the available defenses are able to address the adversarial threats, and their shortcomings as well, which is necessary for driving the research in this area in the most appropriate direction, with the aim of building trustworthy AI systems for regular practical use-cases.
Authors:Kamyar Barakati, Yu Liu, Utkarsh Pratiush, Boris N. Slautin, Sergei V. Kalinin
Abstract:
Analyzing imaging and hyperspectral data is crucial across scientific fields, including biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics. The primary goal is to transform high-resolution or high-dimensional data into an interpretable format to generate actionable insights, aiding decision-making and advancing knowledge. Currently, this task relies on complex, human-designed workflows comprising iterative steps such as denoising, spatial sampling, keypoint detection, feature generation, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and physics-based deconvolutions. The introduction of machine learning over the past decade has accelerated tasks like image segmentation and object detection via supervised learning, and dimensionality reduction via unsupervised methods. However, both classical and NN-based approaches still require human input, whether for hyperparameter tuning, data labeling, or both. The growing use of automated imaging tools, from atomically resolved imaging to biological applications, demands unsupervised methods that optimize data representation for human decision-making or autonomous experimentation. Here, we discuss advances in reward-based workflows, which adopt expert decision-making principles and demonstrate strong transfer learning across diverse tasks. We represent image analysis as a decision-making process over possible operations and identify desiderata and their mappings to classical decision-making frameworks. Reward-driven workflows enable a shift from supervised, black-box models sensitive to distribution shifts to explainable, unsupervised, and robust optimization in image analysis. They can function as wrappers over classical and DCNN-based methods, making them applicable to both unsupervised and supervised workflows (e.g., classification, regression for structure-property mapping) across imaging and hyperspectral data.
Authors:Yue Sun, Yeqiang Qian, Chunxiang Wang, Ming Yang
Abstract:
Safety and reliability are crucial for the public acceptance of autonomous driving. To ensure accurate and reliable environmental perception, intelligent vehicles must exhibit accuracy and robustness in various environments. Millimeter-wave radar, known for its high penetration capability, can operate effectively in adverse weather conditions such as rain, snow, and fog. Traditional 3D millimeter-wave radars can only provide range, Doppler, and azimuth information for objects. Although the recent emergence of 4D millimeter-wave radars has added elevation resolution, the radar point clouds remain sparse due to Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) operations. In contrast, cameras offer rich semantic details but are sensitive to lighting and weather conditions. Hence, this paper leverages these two highly complementary and cost-effective sensors, 4D millimeter-wave radar and camera. By integrating 4D radar spectra with depth-aware camera images and employing attention mechanisms, we fuse texture-rich images with depth-rich radar data in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) perspective, enhancing 3D object detection. Additionally, we propose using GAN-based networks to generate depth images from radar spectra in the absence of depth sensors, further improving detection accuracy.
Authors:Jiangyong Yu, Changyong Shu, Dawei Yang, Sifan Zhou, Zichen Yu, Xing Hu, Yan Chen
Abstract:
Camera-based multi-view 3D detection has emerged as an attractive solution for autonomous driving due to its low cost and broad applicability. However, despite the strong performance of PETR-based methods in 3D perception benchmarks, their direct INT8 quantization for onboard deployment leads to drastic accuracy drops-up to 58.2% in mAP and 36.9% in NDS on the NuScenes dataset. In this work, we propose Q-PETR, a quantization-aware position embedding transformation that re-engineers key components of the PETR framework to reconcile the discrepancy between the dynamic ranges of positional encodings and image features, and to adapt the cross-attention mechanism for low-bit inference. By redesigning the positional encoding module and introducing an adaptive quantization strategy, Q-PETR maintains floating-point performance with a performance degradation of less than 1% under standard 8-bit per-tensor post-training quantization. Moreover, compared to its FP32 counterpart, Q-PETR achieves a two-fold speedup and reduces memory usage by three times, thereby offering a deployment-friendly solution for resource-constrained onboard devices. Extensive experiments across various PETR-series models validate the strong generalization and practical benefits of our approach.
Authors:Kailai Zhou, Yibo Wang, Tao Lv, Qiu Shen, Xun Cao
Abstract:
Object detection, a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision, has experienced rapid development due to the effectiveness of deep learning. The current objects to be detected are mostly rigid solid substances with apparent and distinct visual characteristics. In this paper, we endeavor on a scarcely explored task named Gaseous Object Detection (GOD), which is undertaken to explore whether the object detection techniques can be extended from solid substances to gaseous substances. Nevertheless, the gas exhibits significantly different visual characteristics: 1) saliency deficiency, 2) arbitrary and ever-changing shapes, 3) lack of distinct boundaries. To facilitate the study on this challenging task, we construct a GOD-Video dataset comprising 600 videos (141,017 frames) that cover various attributes with multiple types of gases. A comprehensive benchmark is established based on this dataset, allowing for a rigorous evaluation of frame-level and video-level detectors. Deduced from the Gaussian dispersion model, the physics-inspired Voxel Shift Field (VSF) is designed to model geometric irregularities and ever-changing shapes in potential 3D space. By integrating VSF into Faster RCNN, the VSF RCNN serves as a simple but strong baseline for gaseous object detection. Our work aims to attract further research into this valuable albeit challenging area.
Authors:Kyle Gao, Liangzhi Li, Hongjie He, Dening Lu, Linlin Xu, Jonathan Li
Abstract:
Recently released open-source pre-trained foundational image segmentation and object detection models (SAM2+GroundingDINO) allow for geometrically consistent segmentation of objects of interest in multi-view 2D images. Users can use text-based or click-based prompts to segment objects of interest without requiring labeled training datasets. Gaussian Splatting allows for the learning of the 3D representation of a scene's geometry and radiance based on 2D images. Combining Google Earth Studio, SAM2+GroundingDINO, 2D Gaussian Splatting, and our improvements in mask refinement based on morphological operations and contour simplification, we created a pipeline to extract the 3D mesh of any building based on its name, address, or geographic coordinates.
Authors:Kaiyuan Chen, Kush Hari, Trinity Chung, Michael Wang, Nan Tian, Christian Juette, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Liu Ren, John Kubiatowicz, Ion Stoica, Ken Goldberg
Abstract:
Cloud robotics enables robots to offload complex computational tasks to cloud servers for performance and ease of management. However, cloud compute can be costly, cloud services can suffer occasional downtime, and connectivity between the robot and cloud can be prone to variations in network Quality-of-Service (QoS). We present FogROS2-FT (Fault Tolerant) to mitigate these issues by introducing a multi-cloud extension that automatically replicates independent stateless robotic services, routes requests to these replicas, and directs the first response back. With replication, robots can still benefit from cloud computations even when a cloud service provider is down or there is low QoS. Additionally, many cloud computing providers offer low-cost spot computing instances that may shutdown unpredictably. Normally, these low-cost instances would be inappropriate for cloud robotics, but the fault tolerance nature of FogROS2-FT allows them to be used reliably. We demonstrate FogROS2-FT fault tolerance capabilities in 3 cloud-robotics scenarios in simulation (visual object detection, semantic segmentation, motion planning) and 1 physical robot experiment (scan-pick-and-place). Running on the same hardware specification, FogROS2-FT achieves motion planning with up to 2.2x cost reduction and up to a 5.53x reduction on 99 Percentile (P99) long-tail latency. FogROS2-FT reduces the P99 long-tail latency of object detection and semantic segmentation by 2.0x and 2.1x, respectively, under network slowdown and resource contention.
Authors:Haowen Bai, Jiangshe Zhang, Zixiang Zhao, Yichen Wu, Lilun Deng, Yukun Cui, Tao Feng, Shuang Xu
Abstract:
Multi-modal image fusion aggregates information from multiple sensor sources, achieving superior visual quality and perceptual features compared to single-source images, often improving downstream tasks. However, current fusion methods for downstream tasks still use predefined fusion objectives that potentially mismatch the downstream tasks, limiting adaptive guidance and reducing model flexibility. To address this, we propose Task-driven Image Fusion (TDFusion), a fusion framework incorporating a learnable fusion loss guided by task loss. Specifically, our fusion loss includes learnable parameters modeled by a neural network called the loss generation module. This module is supervised by the downstream task loss in a meta-learning manner. The learning objective is to minimize the task loss of fused images after optimizing the fusion module with the fusion loss. Iterative updates between the fusion module and the loss module ensure that the fusion network evolves toward minimizing task loss, guiding the fusion process toward the task objectives. TDFusion's training relies entirely on the downstream task loss, making it adaptable to any specific task. It can be applied to any architecture of fusion and task networks. Experiments demonstrate TDFusion's performance through fusion experiments conducted on four different datasets, in addition to evaluations on semantic segmentation and object detection tasks.
Authors:Rui Huang, Henry Zheng, Yan Wang, Zhuofan Xia, Marco Pavone, Gao Huang
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D object detection has recently attracted considerable attention due to its broad applications in autonomous driving and robotics, which aims to effectively recognize novel classes in previously unseen domains. However, existing point cloud-based open-vocabulary 3D detection models are limited by their high deployment costs. In this work, we propose a novel open-vocabulary monocular 3D object detection framework, dubbed OVM3D-Det, which trains detectors using only RGB images, making it both cost-effective and scalable to publicly available data. Unlike traditional methods, OVM3D-Det does not require high-precision LiDAR or 3D sensor data for either input or generating 3D bounding boxes. Instead, it employs open-vocabulary 2D models and pseudo-LiDAR to automatically label 3D objects in RGB images, fostering the learning of open-vocabulary monocular 3D detectors. However, training 3D models with labels directly derived from pseudo-LiDAR is inadequate due to imprecise boxes estimated from noisy point clouds and severely occluded objects. To address these issues, we introduce two innovative designs: adaptive pseudo-LiDAR erosion and bounding box refinement with prior knowledge from large language models. These techniques effectively calibrate the 3D labels and enable RGB-only training for 3D detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of OVM3D-Det over baselines in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The code will be released.
Authors:Gyusam Chang, Jiwon Lee, Donghyun Kim, Jinkyu Kim, Dongwook Lee, Daehyun Ji, Sujin Jang, Sangpil Kim
Abstract:
Recent advances in 3D object detection leveraging multi-view cameras have demonstrated their practical and economical value in various challenging vision tasks. However, typical supervised learning approaches face challenges in achieving satisfactory adaptation toward unseen and unlabeled target datasets (\ie, direct transfer) due to the inevitable geometric misalignment between the source and target domains. In practice, we also encounter constraints on resources for training models and collecting annotations for the successful deployment of 3D object detectors. In this paper, we propose Unified Domain Generalization and Adaptation (UDGA), a practical solution to mitigate those drawbacks. We first propose Multi-view Overlap Depth Constraint that leverages the strong association between multi-view, significantly alleviating geometric gaps due to perspective view changes. Then, we present a Label-Efficient Domain Adaptation approach to handle unfamiliar targets with significantly fewer amounts of labels (\ie, 1$\%$ and 5$\%)$, while preserving well-defined source knowledge for training efficiency. Overall, UDGA framework enables stable detection performance in both source and target domains, effectively bridging inevitable domain gaps, while demanding fewer annotations. We demonstrate the robustness of UDGA with large-scale benchmarks: nuScenes, Lyft, and Waymo, where our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Xiaoyi Han, Yanfei Wu, Nan Pu, Zunlei Feng, Qifei Zhang, Yijun Bei, Lechao Cheng
Abstract:
An effective Fire and Smoke Detection (FSD) and analysis system is of paramount importance due to the destructive potential of fire disasters. However, many existing FSD methods directly employ generic object detection techniques without considering the transparency of fire and smoke, which leads to imprecise localization and reduces detection performance. To address this issue, a new Attentive Fire and Smoke Detection Model (a-FSDM) is proposed. This model not only retains the robust feature extraction and fusion capabilities of conventional detection algorithms but also redesigns the detection head specifically for transparent targets in FSD, termed the Attentive Transparency Detection Head (ATDH). In addition, Burning Intensity (BI) is introduced as a pivotal feature for fire-related downstream risk assessments in traditional FSD methodologies. Extensive experiments on multiple FSD datasets showcase the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed FSD model. The project is available at \href{https://xiaoyihan6.github.io/FSD/}{https://xiaoyihan6.github.io/FSD/}.
Authors:Botao Ren, Xue Yang, Yi Yu, Junwei Luo, Zhidong Deng
Abstract:
Single point supervised oriented object detection has gained attention and made initial progress within the community. Diverse from those approaches relying on one-shot samples or powerful pretrained models (e.g. SAM), PointOBB has shown promise due to its prior-free feature. In this paper, we propose PointOBB-v2, a simpler, faster, and stronger method to generate pseudo rotated boxes from points without relying on any other prior. Specifically, we first generate a Class Probability Map (CPM) by training the network with non-uniform positive and negative sampling. We show that the CPM is able to learn the approximate object regions and their contours. Then, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to accurately estimate the orientation and the boundary of objects. By further incorporating a separation mechanism, we resolve the confusion caused by the overlapping on the CPM, enabling its operation in high-density scenarios. Extensive comparisons demonstrate that our method achieves a training speed 15.58x faster and an accuracy improvement of 11.60%/25.15%/21.19% on the DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0 datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art, PointOBB. This significantly advances the cutting edge of single point supervised oriented detection in the modular track.
Authors:André Schakkal, Guillaume Bellegarda, Auke Ijspeert
Abstract:
This paper presents a framework for dynamic object catching using a quadruped robot's front legs while it stands on its rear legs. The system integrates computer vision, trajectory prediction, and leg control to enable the quadruped to visually detect, track, and successfully catch a thrown object using an onboard camera. Leveraging a fine-tuned YOLOv8 model for object detection and a regression-based trajectory prediction module, the quadruped adapts its front leg positions iteratively to anticipate and intercept the object. The catching maneuver involves identifying the optimal catching position, controlling the front legs with Cartesian PD control, and closing the legs together at the right moment. We propose and validate three different methods for selecting the optimal catching position: 1) intersecting the predicted trajectory with a vertical plane, 2) selecting the point on the predicted trajectory with the minimal distance to the center of the robot's legs in their nominal position, and 3) selecting the point on the predicted trajectory with the highest likelihood on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) modelling the robot's reachable space. Experimental results demonstrate robust catching capabilities across various scenarios, with the GMM method achieving the best performance, leading to an 80% catching success rate. A video demonstration of the system in action can be found at https://youtu.be/sm7RdxRfIYg .
Authors:Boris Sedlak, Andrea Morichetta, Yuhao Wang, Yang Fei, Liang Wang, Schahram Dustdar, Xiaobo Qu
Abstract:
In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), offloading is essential for guaranteeing the execution of perception tasks, e.g., mobile mapping or object detection. While existing work focused extensively on minimizing inter-vehicle networking latency through offloading, other objectives become relevant in the case of vehicle platoons, e.g., energy efficiency or data quality for heavy-duty or public transport. Therefore, we aim to enforce these Service Level Objectives (SLOs) through intelligent task offloading within AV platoons. We present a collaborative framework for handling and offloading services in a purely Vehicle-to-Vehicle approach (V2V) based on Bayesian Networks (BNs). Each service aggregates local observations into a platoon-wide understanding of how to ensure SLOs for heterogeneous vehicle types. With the resulting models, services can proactively decide to offload if this promises to improve global SLO fulfillment. We evaluate the approach in a real-case setting, where vehicles in a platoon continuously (i.e., every 500 ms) interpret the SLOs of three actual perception services. Our probabilistic, predictive method shows promising results in handling large AV platoons; within seconds, it detects and resolves SLO violations through offloading.
Authors:Xuanru Zhou, Jiachen Lian, Cheol Jun Cho, Jingwen Liu, Zongli Ye, Jinming Zhang, Brittany Morin, David Baquirin, Jet Vonk, Zoe Ezzes, Zachary Miller, Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini, Gopala Anumanchipalli
Abstract:
Speech dysfluency modeling is a task to detect dysfluencies in speech, such as repetition, block, insertion, replacement, and deletion. Most recent advancements treat this problem as a time-based object detection problem. In this work, we revisit this problem from a new perspective: tokenizing dysfluencies and modeling the detection problem as a token-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) problem. We propose rule-based speech and text dysfluency simulators and develop VCTK-token, and then develop a Whisper-like seq2seq architecture to build a new benchmark with decent performance. We also systematically compare our proposed token-based methods with time-based methods, and propose a unified benchmark to facilitate future research endeavors. We open-source these resources for the broader scientific community. The project page is available at https://rorizzz.github.io/
Authors:Junkun Chen, Jilin Mei, Liang Chen, Fangzhou Zhao, Yan Xing, Yu Hu
Abstract:
Neural networks that are trained on limited category samples often mispredict out-of-distribution (OOD) objects. We observe that features of the same category are more tightly clustered in feature space, while those of different categories are more dispersed. Based on this, we propose using prototype similarity for OOD detection. Drawing on widely used prototype features in few-shot learning, we introduce a novel OOD detection network structure (Proto-OOD). Proto-OOD enhances the representativeness of category prototypes using contrastive loss and detects OOD data by evaluating the similarity between input features and category prototypes. During training, Proto-OOD generates OOD samples for training the similarity module with a negative embedding generator. When Pascal VOC are used as the in-distribution dataset and MS-COCO as the OOD dataset, Proto-OOD significantly reduces the FPR (false positive rate). Moreover, considering the limitations of existing evaluation metrics, we propose a more reasonable evaluation protocol. The code will be released.
Authors:Huang-Yu Chen, Jia-Fong Yeh, Jia-Wei Liao, Pin-Hsuan Peng, Winston H. Hsu
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection is a critical technology for the development of autonomous driving and robotics. However, the high cost of data annotation limits its advancement. We propose a novel and effective active learning (AL) method called Distribution Discrepancy and Feature Heterogeneity (DDFH), which simultaneously considers geometric features and model embeddings, assessing information from both the instance-level and frame-level perspectives. Distribution Discrepancy evaluates the difference and novelty of instances within the unlabeled and labeled distributions, enabling the model to learn efficiently with limited data. Feature Heterogeneity ensures the heterogeneity of intra-frame instance features, maintaining feature diversity while avoiding redundant or similar instances, thus minimizing annotation costs. Finally, multiple indicators are efficiently aggregated using Quantile Transform, providing a unified measure of informativeness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDFH outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the KITTI and Waymo datasets, effectively reducing the bounding box annotation cost by 56.3% and showing robustness when working with both one-stage and two-stage models.
Authors:Jiaru Zhong, Haibao Yu, Tianyi Zhu, Jiahui Xu, Wenxian Yang, Zaiqing Nie, Chao Sun
Abstract:
Infrastructure sensors installed at elevated positions offer a broader perception range and encounter fewer occlusions. Integrating both infrastructure and ego-vehicle data through V2X communication, known as vehicle-infrastructure cooperation, has shown considerable advantages in enhancing perception capabilities and addressing corner cases encountered in single-vehicle autonomous driving. However, cooperative perception still faces numerous challenges, including limited communication bandwidth and practical communication interruptions. In this paper, we propose CTCE, a novel framework for cooperative 3D object detection. This framework transmits queries with temporal contexts enhancement, effectively balancing transmission efficiency and performance to accommodate real-world communication conditions. Additionally, we propose a temporal-guided fusion module to further improve performance. The roadside temporal enhancement and vehicle-side spatial-temporal fusion together constitute a multi-level temporal contexts integration mechanism, fully leveraging temporal information to enhance performance. Furthermore, a motion-aware reconstruction module is introduced to recover lost roadside queries due to communication interruptions. Experimental results on V2X-Seq and V2X-Sim datasets demonstrate that CTCE outperforms the baseline QUEST, achieving improvements of 3.8% and 1.3% in mAP, respectively. Experiments under communication interruption conditions validate CTCE's robustness to communication interruptions.
Authors:HÃ¥kon Maric Solberg, Mehdi Houshmand Sarkhoosh, Sushant Gautam, Saeed Shafiee Sabet, PÃ¥l Halvorsen, Cise Midoglu
Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving field of sports analytics, the automation of targeted video processing is a pivotal advancement. We propose PlayerTV, an innovative framework which harnesses state-of-the-art AI technologies for automatic player tracking and identification in soccer videos. By integrating object detection and tracking, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and color analysis, PlayerTV facilitates the generation of player-specific highlight clips from extensive game footage, significantly reducing the manual labor traditionally associated with such tasks. Preliminary results from the evaluation of our core pipeline, tested on a dataset from the Norwegian Eliteserien league, indicate that PlayerTV can accurately and efficiently identify teams and players, and our interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) serves as a user-friendly application wrapping this functionality for streamlined use.
Authors:Jianwei Zhao, Xin Li, Fan Yang, Qiang Zhai, Ao Luo, Zicheng Jiao, Hong Cheng
Abstract:
Detecting objects seamlessly blended into their surroundings represents a complex task for both human cognitive capabilities and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms. Currently, the majority of methodologies for detecting camouflaged objects mainly focus on utilizing discriminative models with various unique designs. However, it has been observed that generative models, such as Stable Diffusion, possess stronger capabilities for understanding various objects in complex environments; Yet their potential for the cognition and detection of camouflaged objects has not been extensively explored. In this study, we present a novel denoising diffusion model, namely FocusDiffuser, to investigate how generative models can enhance the detection and interpretation of camouflaged objects. We believe that the secret to spotting camouflaged objects lies in catching the subtle nuances in details. Consequently, our FocusDiffuser innovatively integrates specialized enhancements, notably the Boundary-Driven LookUp (BDLU) module and Cyclic Positioning (CP) module, to elevate standard diffusion models, significantly boosting the detail-oriented analytical capabilities. Our experiments demonstrate that FocusDiffuser, from a generative perspective, effectively addresses the challenge of camouflaged object detection, surpassing leading models on benchmarks like CAMO, COD10K and NC4K.
Authors:Chuanrui Zhang, Yonggen Ling, Minglei Lu, Minghan Qin, Haoqian Wang
Abstract:
We study the 3D object understanding task for manipulating everyday objects with different material properties (diffuse, specular, transparent and mixed). Existing monocular and RGB-D methods suffer from scale ambiguity due to missing or imprecise depth measurements. We present CODERS, a one-stage approach for Category-level Object Detection, pose Estimation and Reconstruction from Stereo images. The base of our pipeline is an implicit stereo matching module that combines stereo image features with 3D position information. Concatenating this presented module and the following transform-decoder architecture leads to end-to-end learning of multiple tasks required by robot manipulation. Our approach significantly outperforms all competing methods in the public TOD dataset. Furthermore, trained on simulated data, CODERS generalize well to unseen category-level object instances in real-world robot manipulation experiments. Our dataset, code, and demos will be available on our project page.
Authors:Hao Jing, Anhong Wang, Lijun Zhao, Yakun Yang, Donghan Bu, Jing Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Junhui Hou
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, LiDAR sensors are vital for acquiring 3D point clouds, providing reliable geometric information. However, traditional sampling methods of preprocessing often ignore semantic features, leading to detail loss and ground point interference in 3D object detection. To address this, we propose a multi-branch two-stage 3D object detection framework using a Semantic-aware Multi-branch Sampling (SMS) module and multi-view consistency constraints. The SMS module includes random sampling, Density Equalization Sampling (DES) for enhancing distant objects, and Ground Abandonment Sampling (GAS) to focus on non-ground points. The sampled multi-view points are processed through a Consistent KeyPoint Selection (CKPS) module to generate consistent keypoint masks for efficient proposal sampling. The first-stage detector uses multi-branch parallel learning with multi-view consistency loss for feature aggregation, while the second-stage detector fuses multi-view data through a Multi-View Fusion Pooling (MVFP) module to precisely predict 3D objects. The experimental results on the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset show that our method achieves excellent detection performance improvement for a variety of backbones, especially for low-performance backbones with the simple network structures.
Authors:Lam Pham, Phat Lam, Tin Nguyen, Hieu Tang, Alexander Schindler
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a toolchain for a comprehensive audio/video analysis by leveraging deep learning based multimodal approach. To this end, different specific tasks of Speech to Text (S2T), Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC), Acoustic Event Detection (AED), Visual Object Detection (VOD), Image Captioning (IC), and Video Captioning (VC) are conducted and integrated into the toolchain. By combining individual tasks and analyzing both audio \& visual data extracted from input video, the toolchain offers various audio/video-based applications: Two general applications of audio/video clustering, comprehensive audio/video summary and a specific application of riot or violent context detection. Furthermore, the toolchain presents a flexible and adaptable architecture that is effective to integrate new models for further audio/video-based applications.
Authors:Zhengrui Xu, Guan'an Wang, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang
Abstract:
The denoising model has been proven a powerful generative model but has little exploration of discriminative tasks. Representation learning is important in discriminative tasks, which is defined as "learning representations (or features) of the data that make it easier to extract useful information when building classifiers or other predictors". In this paper, we propose a novel Denoising Model for Representation Learning (DenoiseRep) to improve feature discrimination with joint feature extraction and denoising. DenoiseRep views each embedding layer in a backbone as a denoising layer, processing the cascaded embedding layers as if we are recursively denoise features step-by-step. This unifies the frameworks of feature extraction and denoising, where the former progressively embeds features from low-level to high-level, and the latter recursively denoises features step-by-step. After that, DenoiseRep fuses the parameters of feature extraction and denoising layers, and theoretically demonstrates its equivalence before and after the fusion, thus making feature denoising computation-free. DenoiseRep is a label-free algorithm that incrementally improves features but also complementary to the label if available. Experimental results on various discriminative vision tasks, including re-identification (Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, MSMT17, CUHK-03, vehicleID), image classification (ImageNet, UB200, Oxford-Pet, Flowers), object detection (COCO), image segmentation (ADE20K) show stability and impressive improvements. We also validate its effectiveness on the CNN (ResNet) and Transformer (ViT, Swin, Vmamda) architectures.
Authors:Sergio Casas, Ben Agro, Jiageng Mao, Thomas Gilles, Alexander Cui, Thomas Li, Raquel Urtasun
Abstract:
The tasks of object detection and trajectory forecasting play a crucial role in understanding the scene for autonomous driving. These tasks are typically executed in a cascading manner, making them prone to compounding errors. Furthermore, there is usually a very thin interface between the two tasks, creating a lossy information bottleneck. To address these challenges, our approach formulates the union of the two tasks as a trajectory refinement problem, where the first pose is the detection (current time), and the subsequent poses are the waypoints of the multiple forecasts (future time). To tackle this unified task, we design a refinement transformer that infers the presence, pose, and multi-modal future behaviors of objects directly from LiDAR point clouds and high-definition maps. We call this model DeTra, short for object Detection and Trajectory forecasting. In our experiments, we observe that \ourmodel{} outperforms the state-of-the-art on Argoverse 2 Sensor and Waymo Open Dataset by a large margin, across a broad range of metrics. Last but not least, we perform extensive ablation studies that show the value of refinement for this task, that every proposed component contributes positively to its performance, and that key design choices were made.
Authors:Siavash Golkar, Alberto Bietti, Mariel Pettee, Michael Eickenberg, Miles Cranmer, Keiya Hirashima, Geraud Krawezik, Nicholas Lourie, Michael McCabe, Rudy Morel, Ruben Ohana, Liam Holden Parker, Bruno Régaldo-Saint Blancard, Kyunghyun Cho, Shirley Ho
Abstract:
Transformers have revolutionized machine learning across diverse domains, yet understanding their behavior remains crucial, particularly in high-stakes applications. This paper introduces the contextual counting task, a novel toy problem aimed at enhancing our understanding of Transformers in quantitative and scientific contexts. This task requires precise localization and computation within datasets, akin to object detection or region-based scientific analysis. We present theoretical and empirical analysis using both causal and non-causal Transformer architectures, investigating the influence of various positional encodings on performance and interpretability. In particular, we find that causal attention is much better suited for the task, and that no positional embeddings lead to the best accuracy, though rotary embeddings are competitive and easier to train. We also show that out of distribution performance is tightly linked to which tokens it uses as a bias term.
Authors:Mingyu Liu, Ekim Yurtsever, Marc Brede, Jun Meng, Walter Zimmer, Xingcheng Zhou, Bare Luka Zagar, Yuning Cui, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
Accurate and effective 3D object detection is critical for ensuring the driving safety of autonomous vehicles. Recently, state-of-the-art two-stage 3D object detectors have exhibited promising performance. However, these methods refine proposals individually, ignoring the rich contextual information in the object relationships between the neighbor proposals. In this study, we introduce an object relation module, consisting of a graph generator and a graph neural network (GNN), to learn the spatial information from certain patterns to improve 3D object detection. Specifically, we create an inter-object relationship graph based on proposals in a frame via the graph generator to connect each proposal with its neighbor proposals. Afterward, the GNN module extracts edge features from the generated graph and iteratively refines proposal features with the captured edge features. Ultimately, we leverage the refined features as input to the detection head to obtain detection results. Our approach improves upon the baseline PV-RCNN on the KITTI validation set for the car class across easy, moderate, and hard difficulty levels by 0.82%, 0.74%, and 0.58%, respectively. Additionally, our method outperforms the baseline by more than 1% under the moderate and hard levels BEV AP on the test server.
Authors:Zitong Huang, Ze Chen, Bowen Dong, Chaoqi Liang, Erjin Zhou, Wangmeng Zuo
Abstract:
Model Weight Averaging (MWA) is a technique that seeks to enhance model's performance by averaging the weights of multiple trained models. This paper first empirically finds that 1) the vanilla MWA can benefit the class-imbalanced learning, and 2) performing model averaging in the early epochs of training yields a greater performance improvement than doing that in later epochs. Inspired by these two observations, in this paper we propose a novel MWA technique for class-imbalanced learning tasks named Iterative Model Weight Averaging (IMWA). Specifically, IMWA divides the entire training stage into multiple episodes. Within each episode, multiple models are concurrently trained from the same initialized model weight, and subsequently averaged into a singular model. Then, the weight of this average model serves as a fresh initialization for the ensuing episode, thus establishing an iterative learning paradigm. Compared to vanilla MWA, IMWA achieves higher performance improvements with the same computational cost. Moreover, IMWA can further enhance the performance of those methods employing EMA strategy, demonstrating that IMWA and EMA can complement each other. Extensive experiments on various class-imbalanced learning tasks, i.e., class-imbalanced image classification, semi-supervised class-imbalanced image classification and semi-supervised object detection tasks showcase the effectiveness of our IMWA.
Authors:Sourav Biswas, Sergio Casas, Quinlan Sykora, Ben Agro, Abbas Sadat, Raquel Urtasun
Abstract:
A self-driving vehicle must understand its environment to determine the appropriate action. Traditional autonomy systems rely on object detection to find the agents in the scene. However, object detection assumes a discrete set of objects and loses information about uncertainty, so any errors compound when predicting the future behavior of those agents. Alternatively, dense occupancy grid maps have been utilized to understand free-space. However, predicting a grid for the entire scene is wasteful since only certain spatio-temporal regions are reachable and relevant to the self-driving vehicle. We present a unified, interpretable, and efficient autonomy framework that moves away from cascading modules that first perceive, then predict, and finally plan. Instead, we shift the paradigm to have the planner query occupancy at relevant spatio-temporal points, restricting the computation to those regions of interest. Exploiting this representation, we evaluate candidate trajectories around key factors such as collision avoidance, comfort, and progress for safety and interpretability. Our approach achieves better highway driving quality than the state-of-the-art in high-fidelity closed-loop simulations.
Authors:Edrina Gashi, Jiankang Deng, Ismail Elezi
Abstract:
We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art deep active learning methods. Surprisingly, under general settings, no single-model method decisively outperforms entropy-based active learning, and some even fall short of random sampling. We delve into overlooked aspects like starting budget, budget step, and pretraining's impact, revealing their significance in achieving superior results. Additionally, we extend our evaluation to other tasks, exploring the active learning effectiveness in combination with semi-supervised learning, and object detection. Our experiments provide valuable insights and concrete recommendations for future active learning studies. By uncovering the limitations of current methods and understanding the impact of different experimental settings, we aim to inspire more efficient training of deep learning models in real-world scenarios with limited annotation budgets. This work contributes to advancing active learning's efficacy in deep learning and empowers researchers to make informed decisions when applying active learning to their tasks.
Authors:Andreas Ziegler, Karl Vetter, Thomas Gossard, Jonas Tebbe, Sebastian Otte, Andreas Zell
Abstract:
Neuromorphic Computing (NC) and Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) in particular are often viewed as the next generation of Neural Networks (NNs). NC is a novel bio-inspired paradigm for energy efficient neural computation, often relying on SNNs in which neurons communicate via spikes in a sparse, event-based manner. This communication via spikes can be exploited by neuromorphic hardware implementations very effectively and results in a drastic reductions of power consumption and latency in contrast to regular GPU-based NNs. In recent years, neuromorphic hardware has become more accessible, and the support of learning frameworks has improved. However, available hardware is partially still experimental, and it is not transparent what these solutions are effectively capable of, how they integrate into real-world robotics applications, and how they realistically benefit energy efficiency and latency. In this work, we provide the robotics research community with an overview of what is possible with SNNs on neuromorphic hardware focusing on real-time processing. We introduce a benchmark of three popular neuromorphic hardware devices for the task of event-based object detection. Moreover, we show that an SNN on a neuromorphic hardware is able to run in a challenging table tennis robot setup in real-time.
Authors:Jiawang Cao, Yongliang Wu, Weiheng Chi, Wenbo Zhu, Ziyue Su, Jay Wu
Abstract:
The proliferation of mobile devices and social media has revolutionized content dissemination, with short-form video becoming increasingly prevalent. This shift has introduced the challenge of video reframing to fit various screen aspect ratios, a process that highlights the most compelling parts of a video. Traditionally, video reframing is a manual, time-consuming task requiring professional expertise, which incurs high production costs. A potential solution is to adopt some machine learning models, such as video salient object detection, to automate the process. However, these methods often lack generalizability due to their reliance on specific training data. The advent of powerful large language models (LLMs) open new avenues for AI capabilities. Building on this, we introduce Reframe Any Video Agent (RAVA), a LLM-based agent that leverages visual foundation models and human instructions to restructure visual content for video reframing. RAVA operates in three stages: perception, where it interprets user instructions and video content; planning, where it determines aspect ratios and reframing strategies; and execution, where it invokes the editing tools to produce the final video. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of RAVA in video salient object detection and real-world reframing tasks, demonstrating its potential as a tool for AI-powered video editing.
Authors:Gyusam Chang, Wonseok Roh, Sujin Jang, Dongwook Lee, Daehyun Ji, Gyeongrok Oh, Jinsun Park, Jinkyu Kim, Sangpil Kim
Abstract:
Recent LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection (3DOD) methods show promising results, but they often do not generalize well to target domains outside the source (or training) data distribution. To reduce such domain gaps and thus to make 3DOD models more generalizable, we introduce a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, called CMDA, which (i) leverages visual semantic cues from an image modality (i.e., camera images) as an effective semantic bridge to close the domain gap in the cross-modal Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. Further, (ii) we also introduce a self-training-based learning strategy, wherein a model is adversarially trained to generate domain-invariant features, which disrupt the discrimination of whether a feature instance comes from a source or an unseen target domain. Overall, our CMDA framework guides the 3DOD model to generate highly informative and domain-adaptive features for novel data distributions. In our extensive experiments with large-scale benchmarks, such as nuScenes, Waymo, and KITTI, those mentioned above provide significant performance gains for UDA tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Boxuan Zhang, Zengmao Wang, Bo Du
Abstract:
The lack of object-level annotations poses a significant challenge for object detection in remote sensing images (RSIs). To address this issue, active learning (AL) and semi-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have been proposed to enhance the quality and quantity of annotations. AL focuses on selecting the most informative samples for annotation, while SSL leverages the knowledge from unlabeled samples. In this letter, we propose a novel AL method to boost semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) for remote sensing images with a teacher student network, called SSOD-AT. The proposed method incorporates an RoI comparison module (RoICM) to generate high-confidence pseudo-labels for regions of interest (RoIs). Meanwhile, the RoICM is utilized to identify the top-K uncertain images. To reduce redundancy in the top-K uncertain images for human labeling, a diversity criterion is introduced based on object-level prototypes of different categories using both labeled and pseudo-labeled images. Extensive experiments on DOTA and DIOR, two popular datasets, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for object detection in RSIs. Compared with the best performance in the SOTA methods, the proposed method achieves 1 percent improvement in most cases in the whole AL.
Authors:Zhuoling Li, Xiaogang Xu, SerNam Lim, Hengshuang Zhao
Abstract:
Realizing unified 3D object detection, including both indoor and outdoor scenes, holds great importance in applications like robot navigation. However, involving various scenarios of data to train models poses challenges due to their significantly distinct characteristics, \eg, diverse geometry properties and heterogeneous domain distributions. In this work, we propose to address the challenges from two perspectives, the algorithm perspective and data perspective. In terms of the algorithm perspective, we first build a monocular 3D object detector based on the bird's-eye-view (BEV) detection paradigm, where the explicit feature projection is beneficial to addressing the geometry learning ambiguity. In this detector, we split the classical BEV detection architecture into two stages and propose an uneven BEV grid design to handle the convergence instability caused by geometry difference between scenarios. Besides, we develop a sparse BEV feature projection strategy to reduce the computational cost and a unified domain alignment method to handle heterogeneous domains. From the data perspective, we propose to incorporate depth information to improve training robustness. Specifically, we build the first unified multi-modal 3D object detection benchmark MM-Omni3D and extend the aforementioned monocular detector to its multi-modal version, which is the first unified multi-modal 3D object detector. We name the designed monocular and multi-modal detectors as UniMODE and MM-UniMODE, respectively. The experimental results reveal several insightful findings highlighting the benefits of multi-modal data and confirm the effectiveness of all the proposed strategies.
Authors:Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Tristan de Blegiers, Chen Chen, Mubarak Shah
Abstract:
Malaria is a major health issue worldwide, and its diagnosis requires scalable solutions that can work effectively with low-cost microscopes (LCM). Deep learning-based methods have shown success in computer-aided diagnosis from microscopic images. However, these methods need annotated images that show cells affected by malaria parasites and their life stages. Annotating images from LCM significantly increases the burden on medical experts compared to annotating images from high-cost microscopes (HCM). For this reason, a practical solution would be trained on HCM images which should generalize well on LCM images during testing. While earlier methods adopted a multi-stage learning process, they did not offer an end-to-end approach. In this work, we present an end-to-end learning framework, named CodaMal (COntrastive Domain Adpation for MALaria). In order to bridge the gap between HCM (training) and LCM (testing), we propose a domain adaptive contrastive loss. It reduces the domain shift by promoting similarity between the representations of HCM and its corresponding LCM image, without imposing an additional annotation burden. In addition, the training objective includes object detection objectives with carefully designed augmentations, ensuring the accurate detection of malaria parasites. On the publicly available large-scale M5-dataset, our proposed method shows a significant improvement of 16% over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the mean average precision metric (mAP), provides 21x speed improvement during inference and requires only half of the learnable parameters used in prior methods. Our code is publicly available: https://daveishan.github.io/codamal-webpage/.
Authors:Ke Zhu, Minghao Fu, Jie Shao, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Wu
Abstract:
Long-tailed object detection faces great challenges because of its extremely imbalanced class distribution. Recent methods mainly focus on the classification bias and its loss function design, while ignoring the subtle influence of the regression branch. This paper shows that the regression bias exists and does adversely and seriously impact the detection accuracy. While existing methods fail to handle the regression bias, the class-specific regression head for rare classes is hypothesized to be the main cause of it in this paper. As a result, three kinds of viable solutions to cater for the rare categories are proposed, including adding a class-agnostic branch, clustering heads and merging heads. The proposed methods brings in consistent and significant improvements over existing long-tailed detection methods, especially in rare and common classes. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the large vocabulary LVIS dataset with different backbones and architectures. It generalizes well to more difficult evaluation metrics, relatively balanced datasets, and the mask branch. This is the first attempt to reveal and explore rectifying of the regression bias in long-tailed object detection.
Authors:Tzu-Heng Huang, Changho Shin, Sui Jiet Tay, Dyah Adila, Frederic Sala
Abstract:
We propose an approach for curating multimodal data that we used for our entry in the 2023 DataComp competition filtering track. Our technique combines object detection and weak supervision-based ensembling. In the first of two steps in our approach, we employ an out-of-the-box zero-shot object detection model to extract granular information and produce a variety of filter designs. In the second step, we employ weak supervision to ensemble filtering rules. This approach results in a 4% performance improvement when compared to the best-performing baseline, producing the top-ranking position in the small scale track at the time of writing. Furthermore, in the medium scale track, we achieve a noteworthy 4.2% improvement over the baseline by simply ensembling existing baselines with weak supervision.
Authors:Katharina Bendig, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
Abstract:
Recently, Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVSs) sparked a lot of interest due to their inherent advantages over conventional RGB cameras. These advantages include a low latency, a high dynamic range and a low energy consumption. Nevertheless, the processing of DVS data using Deep Learning (DL) methods remains a challenge, particularly since the availability of event training data is still limited. This leads to a need for event data augmentation techniques in order to improve accuracy as well as to avoid over-fitting on the training data. Another challenge especially in real world automotive applications is occlusion, meaning one object is hindering the view onto the object behind it. In this paper, we present a novel event data augmentation approach, which addresses this problem by introducing synthetic events for randomly moving objects in a scene. We test our method on multiple DVS classification datasets, resulting in an relative improvement of up to 6.5 % in top1-accuracy. Moreover, we apply our augmentation technique on the real world Gen1 Automotive Event Dataset for object detection, where we especially improve the detection of pedestrians by up to 5 %.
Authors:Yanmin Wu, Qiankun Gao, Renrui Zhang, Jian Zhang
Abstract:
The scale and quality of point cloud datasets constrain the advancement of point cloud learning. Recently, with the development of multi-modal learning, the incorporation of domain-agnostic prior knowledge from other modalities, such as images and text, to assist in point cloud feature learning has been considered a promising avenue. Existing methods have demonstrated the effectiveness of multi-modal contrastive training and feature distillation on point clouds. However, challenges remain, including the requirement for paired triplet data, redundancy and ambiguity in supervised features, and the disruption of the original priors. In this paper, we propose a language-assisted approach to point cloud feature learning (LAST-PCL), enriching semantic concepts through LLMs-based text enrichment. We achieve de-redundancy and feature dimensionality reduction without compromising textual priors by statistical-based and training-free significant feature selection. Furthermore, we also delve into an in-depth analysis of the impact of text contrastive training on the point cloud. Extensive experiments validate that the proposed method learns semantically meaningful point cloud features and achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance in 3D semantic segmentation, 3D object detection, and 3D scene classification tasks.
Authors:Michael Fürst, Rahul Jakkamsetty, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
Abstract:
The state of the art in 3D object detection using sensor fusion heavily relies on calibration quality, which is difficult to maintain in large scale deployment outside a lab environment. We present the first calibration-free approach for 3D object detection. Thus, eliminating the need for complex and costly calibration procedures. Our approach uses transformers to map the features between multiple views of different sensors at multiple abstraction levels. In an extensive evaluation for object detection, we not only show that our approach outperforms single modal setups by 14.1% in BEV mAP, but also that the transformer indeed learns mapping. By showing calibration is not necessary for sensor fusion, we hope to motivate other researchers following the direction of calibration-free fusion. Additionally, resulting approaches have a substantial resilience against rotation and translation changes.
Authors:Nikhel Gupta, Zeeshan Hayder, Ray P. Norris, Minh Hyunh, Lars Petersson
Abstract:
We present a novel multimodal dataset developed by expert astronomers to automate the detection and localisation of multi-component extended radio galaxies and their corresponding infrared hosts. The dataset comprises 4,155 instances of galaxies in 2,800 images with both radio and infrared modalities. Each instance contains information on the extended radio galaxy class, its corresponding bounding box that encompasses all of its components, pixel-level segmentation mask, and the position of its corresponding infrared host galaxy. Our dataset is the first publicly accessible dataset that includes images from a highly sensitive radio telescope, infrared satellite, and instance-level annotations for their identification. We benchmark several object detection algorithms on the dataset and propose a novel multimodal approach to identify radio galaxies and the positions of infrared hosts simultaneously.
Authors:Bo Yang, Xiaoyu Ji, Zizhi Jin, Yushi Cheng, Wenyuan Xu
Abstract:
Our study assesses the adversarial robustness of LiDAR-camera fusion models in 3D object detection. We introduce an attack technique that, by simply adding a limited number of physically constrained adversarial points above a car, can make the car undetectable by the fusion model. Experimental results reveal that even without changes to the image data channel, the fusion model can be deceived solely by manipulating the LiDAR data channel. This finding raises safety concerns in the field of autonomous driving. Further, we explore how the quantity of adversarial points, the distance between the front-near car and the LiDAR-equipped car, and various angular factors affect the attack success rate. We believe our research can contribute to the understanding of multi-sensor robustness, offering insights and guidance to enhance the safety of autonomous driving.
Authors:Nikhel Gupta, Zeeshan Hayder, Ray P. Norris, Minh Huynh, Lars Petersson
Abstract:
Creating radio galaxy catalogues from next-generation deep surveys requires automated identification of associated components of extended sources and their corresponding infrared hosts. In this paper, we introduce RadioGalaxyNET, a multimodal dataset, and a suite of novel computer vision algorithms designed to automate the detection and localization of multi-component extended radio galaxies and their corresponding infrared hosts. The dataset comprises 4,155 instances of galaxies in 2,800 images with both radio and infrared channels. Each instance provides information about the extended radio galaxy class, its corresponding bounding box encompassing all components, the pixel-level segmentation mask, and the keypoint position of its corresponding infrared host galaxy. RadioGalaxyNET is the first dataset to include images from the highly sensitive Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, corresponding infrared images, and instance-level annotations for galaxy detection. We benchmark several object detection algorithms on the dataset and propose a novel multimodal approach to simultaneously detect radio galaxies and the positions of infrared hosts.
Authors:Guangming Cao, Xuehui Yu, Wenwen Yu, Xumeng Han, Xue Yang, Guorong Li, Jianbin Jiao, Zhenjun Han
Abstract:
Single-point annotation in oriented object detection of remote sensing scenarios is gaining increasing attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, due to the granularity ambiguity of points, there is a significant performance gap between previous methods and those with fully supervision. In this study, we introduce P2RBox, which employs point prompt to generate rotated box (RBox) annotation for oriented object detection. P2RBox employs the SAM model to generate high-quality mask proposals. These proposals are then refined using the semantic and spatial information from annotation points. The best masks are converted into oriented boxes based on the feature directions suggested by the model. P2RBox incorporates two advanced guidance cues: Boundary Sensitive Mask guidance, which leverages semantic information, and Centrality guidance, which utilizes spatial information to reduce granularity ambiguity. This combination enhances detection capabilities significantly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, enhancements based on the baseline were observed by integrating three different detectors. Furthermore, compared to the state-of-the-art point-annotated generative method PointOBB, P2RBox outperforms by about 29% mAP (62.43% vs 33.31%) on DOTA-v1.0 dataset, which provides possibilities for the practical application of point annotations.
Authors:Lunjun Zhang, Anqi Joyce Yang, Yuwen Xiong, Sergio Casas, Bin Yang, Mengye Ren, Raquel Urtasun
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised object detection from 3D point clouds in self-driving scenes. We present a simple yet effective method that exploits (i) point clustering in near-range areas where the point clouds are dense, (ii) temporal consistency to filter out noisy unsupervised detections, (iii) translation equivariance of CNNs to extend the auto-labels to long range, and (iv) self-supervision for improving on its own. Our approach, OYSTER (Object Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Refinement), does not impose constraints on data collection (such as repeated traversals of the same location), is able to detect objects in a zero-shot manner without supervised finetuning (even in sparse, distant regions), and continues to self-improve given more rounds of iterative self-training. To better measure model performance in self-driving scenarios, we propose a new planning-centric perception metric based on distance-to-collision. We demonstrate that our unsupervised object detector significantly outperforms unsupervised baselines on PandaSet and Argoverse 2 Sensor dataset, showing promise that self-supervision combined with object priors can enable object discovery in the wild. For more information, visit the project website: https://waabi.ai/research/oyster
Authors:Nian Liu, Ziyang Luo, Ni Zhang, Junwei Han
Abstract:
While previous CNN-based models have exhibited promising results for salient object detection (SOD), their ability to explore global long-range dependencies is restricted. Our previous work, the Visual Saliency Transformer (VST), addressed this constraint from a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence perspective, to unify RGB and RGB-D SOD. In VST, we developed a multi-task transformer decoder that concurrently predicts saliency and boundary outcomes in a pure transformer architecture. Moreover, we introduced a novel token upsampling method called reverse T2T for predicting a high-resolution saliency map effortlessly within transformer-based structures. Building upon the VST model, we further propose an efficient and stronger VST version in this work, i.e. VST++. To mitigate the computational costs of the VST model, we propose a Select-Integrate Attention (SIA) module, partitioning foreground into fine-grained segments and aggregating background information into a single coarse-grained token. To incorporate 3D depth information with low cost, we design a novel depth position encoding method tailored for depth maps. Furthermore, we introduce a token-supervised prediction loss to provide straightforward guidance for the task-related tokens. We evaluate our VST++ model across various transformer-based backbones on RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T SOD benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods while achieving a 25% reduction in computational costs without significant performance compromise. The demonstrated strong ability for generalization, enhanced performance, and heightened efficiency of our VST++ model highlight its potential.
Authors:Zhicheng Cai, Xiaohan Ding, Qiu Shen, Xun Cao
Abstract:
We propose Re-parameterized Refocusing Convolution (RefConv) as a replacement for regular convolutional layers, which is a plug-and-play module to improve the performance without any inference costs. Specifically, given a pre-trained model, RefConv applies a trainable Refocusing Transformation to the basis kernels inherited from the pre-trained model to establish connections among the parameters. For example, a depth-wise RefConv can relate the parameters of a specific channel of convolution kernel to the parameters of the other kernel, i.e., make them refocus on the other parts of the model they have never attended to, rather than focus on the input features only. From another perspective, RefConv augments the priors of existing model structures by utilizing the representations encoded in the pre-trained parameters as the priors and refocusing on them to learn novel representations, thus further enhancing the representational capacity of the pre-trained model. Experimental results validated that RefConv can improve multiple CNN-based models by a clear margin on image classification (up to 1.47% higher top-1 accuracy on ImageNet), object detection and semantic segmentation without introducing any extra inference costs or altering the original model structure. Further studies demonstrated that RefConv can reduce the redundancy of channels and smooth the loss landscape, which explains its effectiveness.
Authors:Weifeng Lin, Ziheng Wu, Wentao Yang, Mingxin Huang, Jun Huang, Lianwen Jin
Abstract:
Fine-tuning pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) has showcased significant promise in enhancing visual recognition tasks. Yet, the demand for individualized and comprehensive fine-tuning processes for each task entails substantial computational and memory costs, posing a considerable challenge. Recent advancements in Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) have shown potential for achieving high performance with fewer parameter updates compared to full fine-tuning. However, their effectiveness is primarily observed in simple tasks like image classification, while they encounter challenges with more complex vision tasks like dense prediction. To address this gap, this study aims to identify an effective tuning method that caters to a wider range of visual tasks. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical Side-Tuning (HST), an innovative PETL method facilitating the transfer of ViT models to diverse downstream tasks. Diverging from existing methods that focus solely on fine-tuning parameters within specific input spaces or modules, HST employs a lightweight Hierarchical Side Network (HSN). This network leverages intermediate activations from the ViT backbone to model multi-scale features, enhancing prediction capabilities. To evaluate HST, we conducted comprehensive experiments across a range of visual tasks, including classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Remarkably, HST achieved state-of-the-art performance in 13 out of the 19 tasks on the VTAB-1K benchmark, with the highest average Top-1 accuracy of 76.1%, while fine-tuning a mere 0.78M parameters. When applied to object detection and semantic segmentation tasks on the COCO and ADE20K testdev benchmarks, HST outperformed existing PETL methods and even surpassed full fine-tuning.
Authors:Yiming Xie, Huaizu Jiang, Georgia Gkioxari, Julian Straub
Abstract:
We present PARQ - a multi-view 3D object detector with transformer and pixel-aligned recurrent queries. Unlike previous works that use learnable features or only encode 3D point positions as queries in the decoder, PARQ leverages appearance-enhanced queries initialized from reference points in 3D space and updates their 3D location with recurrent cross-attention operations. Incorporating pixel-aligned features and cross attention enables the model to encode the necessary 3D-to-2D correspondences and capture global contextual information of the input images. PARQ outperforms prior best methods on the ScanNet and ARKitScenes datasets, learns and detects faster, is more robust to distribution shifts in reference points, can leverage additional input views without retraining, and can adapt inference compute by changing the number of recurrent iterations.
Authors:Yufei Wang, Yuxin Mao, Qi Liu, Yuchao Dai
Abstract:
RGB-guided depth completion aims at predicting dense depth maps from sparse depth measurements and corresponding RGB images, where how to effectively and efficiently exploit the multi-modal information is a key issue. Guided dynamic filters, which generate spatially-variant depth-wise separable convolutional filters from RGB features to guide depth features, have been proven to be effective in this task. However, the dynamically generated filters require massive model parameters, computational costs and memory footprints when the number of feature channels is large. In this paper, we propose to decompose the guided dynamic filters into a spatially-shared component multiplied by content-adaptive adaptors at each spatial location. Based on the proposed idea, we introduce two decomposition schemes A and B, which decompose the filters by splitting the filter structure and using spatial-wise attention, respectively. The decomposed filters not only maintain the favorable properties of guided dynamic filters as being content-dependent and spatially-variant, but also reduce model parameters and hardware costs, as the learned adaptors are decoupled with the number of feature channels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the methods using our schemes outperform state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI dataset, and rank 1st and 2nd on the KITTI benchmark at the time of submission. Meanwhile, they also achieve comparable performance on the NYUv2 dataset. In addition, our proposed methods are general and could be employed as plug-and-play feature fusion blocks in other multi-modal fusion tasks such as RGB-D salient object detection.
Authors:Dahun Kim, Anelia Angelova, Weicheng Kuo
Abstract:
We present Contrastive Feature Masking Vision Transformer (CFM-ViT) - an image-text pretraining methodology that achieves simultaneous learning of image- and region-level representation for open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). Our approach combines the masked autoencoder (MAE) objective into the contrastive learning objective to improve the representation for localization tasks. Unlike standard MAE, we perform reconstruction in the joint image-text embedding space, rather than the pixel space as is customary with the classical MAE method, which causes the model to better learn region-level semantics. Moreover, we introduce Positional Embedding Dropout (PED) to address scale variation between image-text pretraining and detection finetuning by randomly dropping out the positional embeddings during pretraining. PED improves detection performance and enables the use of a frozen ViT backbone as a region classifier, preventing the forgetting of open-vocabulary knowledge during detection finetuning. On LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark, CFM-ViT achieves a state-of-the-art 33.9 AP$r$, surpassing the best approach by 7.6 points and achieves better zero-shot detection transfer. Finally, CFM-ViT acquires strong image-level representation, outperforming the state of the art on 8 out of 12 metrics on zero-shot image-text retrieval benchmarks.
Authors:Maya Varma, Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Sarah Hooper, Akshay Chaudhari, Curtis Langlotz
Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP and ALIGN, are generally trained on datasets consisting of image-caption pairs obtained from the web. However, real-world multimodal datasets, such as healthcare data, are significantly more complex: each image (e.g. X-ray) is often paired with text (e.g. physician report) that describes many distinct attributes occurring in fine-grained regions of the image. We refer to these samples as exhibiting high pairwise complexity, since each image-text pair can be decomposed into a large number of region-attribute pairings. The extent to which VLMs can capture fine-grained relationships between image regions and textual attributes when trained on such data has not been previously evaluated. The first key contribution of this work is to demonstrate through systematic evaluations that as the pairwise complexity of the training dataset increases, standard VLMs struggle to learn region-attribute relationships, exhibiting performance degradations of up to 37% on retrieval tasks. In order to address this issue, we introduce ViLLA as our second key contribution. ViLLA, which is trained to capture fine-grained region-attribute relationships from complex datasets, involves two components: (a) a lightweight, self-supervised mapping model to decompose image-text samples into region-attribute pairs, and (b) a contrastive VLM to learn representations from generated region-attribute pairs. We demonstrate with experiments across four domains (synthetic, product, medical, and natural images) that ViLLA outperforms comparable VLMs on fine-grained reasoning tasks, such as zero-shot object detection (up to 3.6 AP50 points on COCO and 0.6 mAP points on LVIS) and retrieval (up to 14.2 R-Precision points).
Authors:Mufeng Yao, Jiaqi Wang, Jinlong Peng, Mingmin Chi, Chao Liu
Abstract:
Multiple object tracking (MOT) has been successfully investigated in computer vision.
However, MOT for the videos captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is still challenging due to small object size, blurred object appearance, and very large and/or irregular motion in both ground objects and UAV platforms.
In this paper, we propose FOLT to mitigate these problems and reach fast and accurate MOT in UAV view.
Aiming at speed-accuracy trade-off, FOLT adopts a modern detector and light-weight optical flow extractor to extract object detection features and motion features at a minimum cost.
Given the extracted flow, the flow-guided feature augmentation is designed to augment the object detection feature based on its optical flow, which improves the detection of small objects.
Then the flow-guided motion prediction is also proposed to predict the object's position in the next frame, which improves the tracking performance of objects with very large displacements between adjacent frames.
Finally, the tracker matches the detected objects and predicted objects using a spatially matching scheme to generate tracks for every object.
Experiments on Visdrone and UAVDT datasets show that our proposed model can successfully track small objects with large and irregular motion and outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in UAV-MOT tasks.
Authors:Yuchen Ma, Zhengcong Fei, Junshi Huang
Abstract:
Recently, the tokens of images share the same static data flow in many dense networks. However, challenges arise from the variance among the objects in images, such as large variations in the spatial scale and difficulties of recognition for visual entities. In this paper, we propose a data-dependent token routing strategy to elaborate the routing paths of image tokens for Dynamic Vision Transformer, dubbed DiT. The proposed framework generates a data-dependent path per token, adapting to the object scales and visual discrimination of tokens. In feed-forward, the differentiable routing gates are designed to select the scaling paths and feature transformation paths for image tokens, leading to multi-path feature propagation. In this way, the impact of object scales and visual discrimination of image representation can be carefully tuned. Moreover, the computational cost can be further reduced by giving budget constraints to the routing gate and early-stopping of feature extraction. In experiments, our DiT achieves superior performance and favorable complexity/accuracy trade-offs than many SoTA methods on ImageNet classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Particularly, the DiT-B5 obtains 84.8\% top-1 Acc on ImageNet with 10.3 GFLOPs, which is 1.0\% higher than that of the SoTA method with similar computational complexity. These extensive results demonstrate that DiT can serve as versatile backbones for various vision tasks.
Authors:Ben Agro, Quinlan Sykora, Sergio Casas, Raquel Urtasun
Abstract:
A self-driving vehicle (SDV) must be able to perceive its surroundings and predict the future behavior of other traffic participants. Existing works either perform object detection followed by trajectory forecasting of the detected objects, or predict dense occupancy and flow grids for the whole scene. The former poses a safety concern as the number of detections needs to be kept low for efficiency reasons, sacrificing object recall. The latter is computationally expensive due to the high-dimensionality of the output grid, and suffers from the limited receptive field inherent to fully convolutional networks. Furthermore, both approaches employ many computational resources predicting areas or objects that might never be queried by the motion planner. This motivates our unified approach to perception and future prediction that implicitly represents occupancy and flow over time with a single neural network. Our method avoids unnecessary computation, as it can be directly queried by the motion planner at continuous spatio-temporal locations. Moreover, we design an architecture that overcomes the limited receptive field of previous explicit occupancy prediction methods by adding an efficient yet effective global attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments in both urban and highway settings, we demonstrate that our implicit model outperforms the current state-of-the-art. For more information, visit the project website: https://waabi.ai/research/implicito.
Authors:Ke Zhu, Yin-Yin He, Jianxin Wu
Abstract:
Neural network quantization aims to accelerate and trim full-precision neural network models by using low bit approximations. Methods adopting the quantization aware training (QAT) paradigm have recently seen a rapid growth, but are often conceptually complicated. This paper proposes a novel and highly effective QAT method, quantized feature distillation (QFD). QFD first trains a quantized (or binarized) representation as the teacher, then quantize the network using knowledge distillation (KD). Quantitative results show that QFD is more flexible and effective (i.e., quantization friendly) than previous quantization methods. QFD surpasses existing methods by a noticeable margin on not only image classification but also object detection, albeit being much simpler. Furthermore, QFD quantizes ViT and Swin-Transformer on MS-COCO detection and segmentation, which verifies its potential in real world deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that vision transformers have been quantized in object detection and image segmentation tasks.
Authors:Marc K. Ickler, Michael Baumgartner, Saikat Roy, Tassilo Wald, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
Abstract:
The accurate detection of suspicious regions in medical images is an error-prone and time-consuming process required by many routinely performed diagnostic procedures. To support clinicians during this difficult task, several automated solutions were proposed relying on complex methods with many hyperparameters. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of DEtection TRansformer (DETR) models for volumetric medical object detection. In contrast to previous works, these models directly predict a set of objects without relying on the design of anchors or manual heuristics such as non-maximum-suppression to detect objects. We show by conducting extensive experiments with three models, namely DETR, Conditional DETR, and DINO DETR on four data sets (CADA, RibFrac, KiTS19, and LIDC) that these set prediction models can perform on par with or even better than currently existing methods. DINO DETR, the best-performing model in our experiments demonstrates this by outperforming a strong anchor-based one-stage detector, Retina U-Net, on three out of four data sets.
Authors:Mahdiyar Molahasani, Ali Etemad, Michael Greenspan
Abstract:
A continual learning solution is proposed to address the out-of-distribution generalization problem for pedestrian detection. While recent pedestrian detection models have achieved impressive performance on various datasets, they remain sensitive to shifts in the distribution of the inference data. Our method adopts and modifies Elastic Weight Consolidation to a backbone object detection network, in order to penalize the changes in the model weights based on their importance towards the initially learned task. We show that when trained with one dataset and fine-tuned on another, our solution learns the new distribution and maintains its performance on the previous one, avoiding catastrophic forgetting. We use two popular datasets, CrowdHuman and CityPersons for our cross-dataset experiments, and show considerable improvements over standard fine-tuning, with a 9% and 18% miss rate percent reduction improvement in the CrowdHuman and CityPersons datasets, respectively.
Authors:Phuoc Nguyen Thuan, Tomi Westerlund, Jorge Peña Queralta
Abstract:
The remarkable growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has also sparked concerns about safety measures during their missions. To advance towards safer autonomous aerial robots, this work presents a vision-based solution to ensuring safe autonomous UAV landings with minimal infrastructure. During docking maneuvers, UAVs pose a hazard to people in the vicinity. In this paper, we propose the use of a single omnidirectional panoramic camera pointing upwards from a landing pad to detect and estimate the position of people around the landing area. The images are processed in real-time in an embedded computer, which communicates with the onboard computer of approaching UAVs to transition between landing, hovering or emergency landing states. While landing, the ground camera also aids in finding an optimal position, which can be required in case of low-battery or when hovering is no longer possible. We use a YOLOv7-based object detection model and a XGBooxt model for localizing nearby people, and the open-source ROS and PX4 frameworks for communication, interfacing, and control of the UAV. We present both simulation and real-world indoor experimental results to show the efficiency of our methods.
Authors:Po-han Li, Sravan Kumar Ankireddy, Ruihan Zhao, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi-Pari, Ufuk Topcu, Sandeep Chinchali, Hyeji Kim
Abstract:
Efficient compression of correlated data is essential to minimize communication overload in multi-sensor networks. In such networks, each sensor independently compresses the data and transmits them to a central node due to limited communication bandwidth. A decoder at the central node decompresses and passes the data to a pre-trained machine learning-based task to generate the final output. Thus, it is important to compress the features that are relevant to the task. Additionally, the final performance depends heavily on the total available bandwidth. In practice, it is common to encounter varying availability in bandwidth, and higher bandwidth results in better performance of the task. We design a novel distributed compression framework composed of independent encoders and a joint decoder, which we call neural distributed principal component analysis (NDPCA). NDPCA flexibly compresses data from multiple sources to any available bandwidth with a single model, reducing computing and storage overhead. NDPCA achieves this by learning low-rank task representations and efficiently distributing bandwidth among sensors, thus providing a graceful trade-off between performance and bandwidth. Experiments show that NDPCA improves the success rate of multi-view robotic arm manipulation by 9% and the accuracy of object detection tasks on satellite imagery by 14% compared to an autoencoder with uniform bandwidth allocation.
Authors:Yao Rong, Xiangyu Wei, Tianwei Lin, Yueyu Wang, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract:
Augmenting LiDAR input with multiple previous frames provides richer semantic information and thus boosts performance in 3D object detection, However, crowded point clouds in multi-frames can hurt the precise position information due to the motion blur and inaccurate point projection. In this work, we propose a novel feature fusion strategy, DynStaF (Dynamic-Static Fusion), which enhances the rich semantic information provided by the multi-frame (dynamic branch) with the accurate location information from the current single-frame (static branch). To effectively extract and aggregate complimentary features, DynStaF contains two modules, Neighborhood Cross Attention (NCA) and Dynamic-Static Interaction (DSI), operating through a dual pathway architecture. NCA takes the features in the static branch as queries and the features in the dynamic branch as keys (values). When computing the attention, we address the sparsity of point clouds and take only neighborhood positions into consideration. NCA fuses two features at different feature map scales, followed by DSI providing the comprehensive interaction. To analyze our proposed strategy DynStaF, we conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset. On the test set, DynStaF increases the performance of PointPillars in NDS by a large margin from 57.7% to 61.6%. When combined with CenterPoint, our framework achieves 61.0% mAP and 67.7% NDS, leading to state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles.
Authors:Kaichao You, Guo Qin, Anchang Bao, Meng Cao, Ping Huang, Jiulong Shan, Mingsheng Long
Abstract:
Convolution-BatchNorm (ConvBN) blocks are integral components in various computer vision tasks and other domains. A ConvBN block can operate in three modes: Train, Eval, and Deploy. While the Train mode is indispensable for training models from scratch, the Eval mode is suitable for transfer learning and beyond, and the Deploy mode is designed for the deployment of models. This paper focuses on the trade-off between stability and efficiency in ConvBN blocks: Deploy mode is efficient but suffers from training instability; Eval mode is widely used in transfer learning but lacks efficiency. To solve the dilemma, we theoretically reveal the reason behind the diminished training stability observed in the Deploy mode. Subsequently, we propose a novel Tune mode to bridge the gap between Eval mode and Deploy mode. The proposed Tune mode is as stable as Eval mode for transfer learning, and its computational efficiency closely matches that of the Deploy mode. Through extensive experiments in object detection, classification, and adversarial example generation across $5$ datasets and $12$ model architectures, we demonstrate that the proposed Tune mode retains the performance while significantly reducing GPU memory footprint and training time, thereby contributing efficient ConvBN blocks for transfer learning and beyond. Our method has been integrated into both PyTorch (general machine learning framework) and MMCV/MMEngine (computer vision framework). Practitioners just need one line of code to enjoy our efficient ConvBN blocks thanks to PyTorch's builtin machine learning compilers.
Authors:Yongcheng Jing, Xinchao Wang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract:
The recent work known as Segment Anything (SA) has made significant strides in pushing the boundaries of semantic segmentation into the era of foundation models. The impact of SA has sparked extremely active discussions and ushered in an encouraging new wave of developing foundation models for the diverse tasks in the Euclidean domain, such as object detection and image inpainting. Despite the promising advances led by SA, the concept has yet to be extended to the non-Euclidean graph domain. In this paper, we explore a novel Segment Non-Euclidean Anything (SNA) paradigm that strives to develop foundation models that can handle the diverse range of graph data within the non-Euclidean domain, seeking to expand the scope of SA and lay the groundwork for future research in this direction. To achieve this goal, we begin by discussing the recent achievements in foundation models associated with SA. We then shed light on the unique challenges that arise when applying the SA concept to graph analysis, which involves understanding the differences between the Euclidean and non-Euclidean domains from both the data and task perspectives. Motivated by these observations, we present several preliminary solutions to tackle the challenges of SNA and detail their corresponding limitations, along with several potential directions to pave the way for future SNA research. Experiments on five Open Graph Benchmark (OGB) datasets across various tasks, including graph property classification and regression, as well as multi-label prediction, demonstrate that the performance of the naive SNA solutions has considerable room for improvement, pointing towards a promising avenue for future exploration of Graph General Intelligence.
Authors:Yulu Gao, Chonghao Sima, Shaoshuai Shi, Shangzhe Di, Si Liu, Hongyang Li
Abstract:
With the prevalence of multimodal learning, camera-LiDAR fusion has gained popularity in 3D object detection. Although multiple fusion approaches have been proposed, they can be classified into either sparse-only or dense-only fashion based on the feature representation in the fusion module. In this paper, we analyze them in a common taxonomy and thereafter observe two challenges: 1) sparse-only solutions preserve 3D geometric prior and yet lose rich semantic information from the camera, and 2) dense-only alternatives retain the semantic continuity but miss the accurate geometric information from LiDAR. By analyzing these two formulations, we conclude that the information loss is inevitable due to their design scheme. To compensate for the information loss in either manner, we propose Sparse Dense Fusion (SDF), a complementary framework that incorporates both sparse-fusion and dense-fusion modules via the Transformer architecture. Such a simple yet effective sparse-dense fusion structure enriches semantic texture and exploits spatial structure information simultaneously. Through our SDF strategy, we assemble two popular methods with moderate performance and outperform baseline by 4.3% in mAP and 2.5% in NDS, ranking first on the nuScenes benchmark. Extensive ablations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and empirically align our analysis.
Authors:Weicheng Kuo, AJ Piergiovanni, Dahun Kim, Xiyang Luo, Ben Caine, Wei Li, Abhijit Ogale, Luowei Zhou, Andrew Dai, Zhifeng Chen, Claire Cui, Anelia Angelova
Abstract:
The development of language models have moved from encoder-decoder to decoder-only designs. In addition, we observe that the two most popular multimodal tasks, the generative and contrastive tasks, are nontrivial to accommodate in one architecture, and further need adaptations for downstream tasks. We propose a novel paradigm of training with a decoder-only model for multimodal tasks, which is surprisingly effective in jointly learning of these disparate vision-language tasks. This is done with a simple model, called MaMMUT. It consists of a single vision encoder and a text decoder, and is able to accommodate contrastive and generative learning by a novel two-pass approach on the text decoder. We demonstrate that joint learning of these diverse objectives is simple, effective, and maximizes the weight-sharing of the model across these tasks. Furthermore, the same architecture enables straightforward extensions to open-vocabulary object detection and video-language tasks. The model tackles a diverse range of tasks, while being modest in capacity. Our model achieves the state of the art on image-text and text-image retrieval, video question answering and open-vocabulary detection tasks, outperforming much larger and more extensively trained foundational models. It shows very competitive results on VQA and Video Captioning, especially considering its capacity. Ablations confirm the flexibility and advantages of our approach.
Authors:Yi-Syuan Liou, Tsung-Han Wu, Jia-Fong Yeh, Wen-Chin Chen, Winston H. Hsu
Abstract:
Obtaining large-scale labeled object detection dataset can be costly and time-consuming, as it involves annotating images with bounding boxes and class labels. Thus, some specialized active learning methods have been proposed to reduce the cost by selecting either coarse-grained samples or fine-grained instances from unlabeled data for labeling. However, the former approaches suffer from redundant labeling, while the latter methods generally lead to training instability and sampling bias. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called Multi-scale Region-based Active Learning (MuRAL) for object detection. MuRAL identifies informative regions of various scales to reduce annotation costs for well-learned objects and improve training performance. The informative region score is designed to consider both the predicted confidence of instances and the distribution of each object category, enabling our method to focus more on difficult-to-detect classes. Moreover, MuRAL employs a scale-aware selection strategy that ensures diverse regions are selected from different scales for labeling and downstream finetuning, which enhances training stability. Our proposed method surpasses all existing coarse-grained and fine-grained baselines on Cityscapes and MS COCO datasets, and demonstrates significant improvement in difficult category performance.
Authors:Kunyang Sun, Wei Lin, Haoqin Shi, Zhengming Zhang, Yongming Huang, Horst Bischof
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection is a challenging vision task where object detectors are adapted from a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Recent advances prove the efficacy of the adversarial based domain alignment where the adversarial training between the feature extractor and domain discriminator results in domain-invariance in the feature space. However, due to the domain shift, domain discrimination, especially on low-level features, is an easy task. This results in an imbalance of the adversarial training between the domain discriminator and the feature extractor. In this work, we achieve a better domain alignment by introducing an auxiliary regularization task to improve the training balance. Specifically, we propose Adversarial Image Reconstruction (AIR) as the regularizer to facilitate the adversarial training of the feature extractor. We further design a multi-level feature alignment module to enhance the adaptation performance. Our evaluations across several datasets of challenging domain shifts demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all previous methods, of both one- and two-stage, in most settings.
Authors:Yunsong Zhou, Quan Liu, Hongzi Zhu, Yunzhe Li, Shan Chang, Minyi Guo
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) in mobile settings (e.g., on a vehicle, a drone, or a robot) is an important yet challenging task. Due to the near-far disparity phenomenon of monocular vision and the ever-changing camera pose, it is hard to acquire high detection accuracy, especially for far objects. Inspired by the insight that the depth of an object can be well determined according to the depth of the ground where it stands, in this paper, we propose a novel Mono3D framework, called MoGDE, which constantly estimates the corresponding ground depth of an image and then utilizes the estimated ground depth information to guide Mono3D. To this end, we utilize a pose detection network to estimate the pose of the camera and then construct a feature map portraying pixel-level ground depth according to the 3D-to-2D perspective geometry. Moreover, to improve Mono3D with the estimated ground depth, we design an RGB-D feature fusion network based on the transformer structure, where the long-range self-attention mechanism is utilized to effectively identify ground-contacting points and pin the corresponding ground depth to the image feature map. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world KITTI dataset. The results demonstrate that MoGDE can effectively improve the Mono3D accuracy and robustness for both near and far objects. MoGDE yields the best performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and is ranked number one on the KITTI 3D benchmark.
Authors:Yunsong Zhou, Hongzi Zhu, Quan Liu, Shan Chang, Minyi Guo
Abstract:
Mobile monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) (e.g., on a vehicle, a drone, or a robot) is an important yet challenging task. Existing transformer-based offline Mono3D models adopt grid-based vision tokens, which is suboptimal when using coarse tokens due to the limited available computational power. In this paper, we propose an online Mono3D framework, called MonoATT, which leverages a novel vision transformer with heterogeneous tokens of varying shapes and sizes to facilitate mobile Mono3D. The core idea of MonoATT is to adaptively assign finer tokens to areas of more significance before utilizing a transformer to enhance Mono3D. To this end, we first use prior knowledge to design a scoring network for selecting the most important areas of the image, and then propose a token clustering and merging network with an attention mechanism to gradually merge tokens around the selected areas in multiple stages. Finally, a pixel-level feature map is reconstructed from heterogeneous tokens before employing a SOTA Mono3D detector as the underlying detection core. Experiment results on the real-world KITTI dataset demonstrate that MonoATT can effectively improve the Mono3D accuracy for both near and far objects and guarantee low latency. MonoATT yields the best performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and is ranked number one on the KITTI 3D benchmark.
Authors:Michael Baumgartner, Peter M. Full, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
Abstract:
The accurate detection of mediastinal lesions is one of the rarely explored medical object detection problems. In this work, we applied a modified version of the self-configuring method nnDetection to the Mediastinal Lesion Analysis (MELA) Challenge 2022. By incorporating automatically generated pseudo masks, training high capacity models with large patch sizes in a multi GPU setup and an adapted augmentation scheme to reduce localization errors caused by rotations, our method achieved an excellent FROC score of 0.9922 at IoU 0.10 and 0.9880 at IoU 0.3 in our cross-validation experiments. The submitted ensemble ranked third in the competition with a FROC score of 0.9897 on the MELA challenge leaderboard.
Authors:Karmesh Yadav, Arjun Majumdar, Ram Ramrakhya, Naoki Yokoyama, Alexei Baevski, Zsolt Kira, Oleksandr Maksymets, Dhruv Batra
Abstract:
We present a single neural network architecture composed of task-agnostic components (ViTs, convolutions, and LSTMs) that achieves state-of-art results on both the ImageNav ("go to location in ") and ObjectNav ("find a chair") tasks without any task-specific modules like object detection, segmentation, mapping, or planning modules. Such general-purpose methods offer advantages of simplicity in design, positive scaling with available compute, and versatile applicability to multiple tasks. Our work builds upon the recent success of self-supervised learning (SSL) for pre-training vision transformers (ViT). However, while the training recipes for convolutional networks are mature and robust, the recipes for ViTs are contingent and brittle, and in the case of ViTs for visual navigation, yet to be fully discovered. Specifically, we find that vanilla ViTs do not outperform ResNets on visual navigation. We propose the use of a compression layer operating over ViT patch representations to preserve spatial information along with policy training improvements. These improvements allow us to demonstrate positive scaling laws for the first time in visual navigation tasks. Consequently, our model advances state-of-the-art performance on ImageNav from 54.2% to 82.0% success and performs competitively against concurrent state-of-art on ObjectNav with success rate of 64.0% vs. 65.0%. Overall, this work does not present a fundamentally new approach, but rather recommendations for training a general-purpose architecture that achieves state-of-art performance today and could serve as a strong baseline for future methods.
Authors:Yonghao Xu, Tao Bai, Weikang Yu, Shizhen Chang, Peter M. Atkinson, Pedram Ghamisi
Abstract:
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly intensified research in the geoscience and remote sensing (RS) field. AI algorithms, especially deep learning-based ones, have been developed and applied widely to RS data analysis. The successful application of AI covers almost all aspects of Earth observation (EO) missions, from low-level vision tasks like super-resolution, denoising and inpainting, to high-level vision tasks like scene classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. While AI techniques enable researchers to observe and understand the Earth more accurately, the vulnerability and uncertainty of AI models deserve further attention, considering that many geoscience and RS tasks are highly safety-critical. This paper reviews the current development of AI security in the geoscience and RS field, covering the following five important aspects: adversarial attack, backdoor attack, federated learning, uncertainty and explainability. Moreover, the potential opportunities and trends are discussed to provide insights for future research. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to provide a systematic review of AI security-related research in the geoscience and RS community. Available code and datasets are also listed in the paper to move this vibrant field of research forward.
Authors:Weicheng Kuo, Yin Cui, Xiuye Gu, AJ Piergiovanni, Anelia Angelova
Abstract:
We present F-VLM, a simple open-vocabulary object detection method built upon Frozen Vision and Language Models. F-VLM simplifies the current multi-stage training pipeline by eliminating the need for knowledge distillation or detection-tailored pretraining. Surprisingly, we observe that a frozen VLM: 1) retains the locality-sensitive features necessary for detection, and 2) is a strong region classifier. We finetune only the detector head and combine the detector and VLM outputs for each region at inference time. F-VLM shows compelling scaling behavior and achieves +6.5 mask AP improvement over the previous state of the art on novel categories of LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark. In addition, we demonstrate very competitive results on COCO open-vocabulary detection benchmark and cross-dataset transfer detection, in addition to significant training speed-up and compute savings. Code will be released at the https://sites.google.com/view/f-vlm/home
Authors:Xiaogang Xu, Hengshuang Zhao
Abstract:
Existing automatic data augmentation (DA) methods either ignore updating DA's parameters according to the target model's state during training or adopt update strategies that are not effective enough. In this work, we design a novel data augmentation strategy called "Universal Adaptive Data Augmentation" (UADA). Different from existing methods, UADA would adaptively update DA's parameters according to the target model's gradient information during training: given a pre-defined set of DA operations, we randomly decide types and magnitudes of DA operations for every data batch during training, and adaptively update DA's parameters along the gradient direction of the loss concerning DA's parameters. In this way, UADA can increase the training loss of the target networks, and the target networks would learn features from harder samples to improve the generalization. Moreover, UADA is very general and can be utilized in numerous tasks, e.g., image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments with various models are conducted on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, tiny-ImageNet, Cityscapes, and VOC07+12 to prove the significant performance improvements brought by UADA.
Authors:Huajun Zhou, Bo Qiao, Lingxiao Yang, Jianhuang Lai, Xiaohua Xie
Abstract:
Deep Learning-based Unsupervised Salient Object Detection (USOD) mainly relies on the noisy saliency pseudo labels that have been generated from traditional handcraft methods or pre-trained networks. To cope with the noisy labels problem, a class of methods focus on only easy samples with reliable labels but ignore valuable knowledge in hard samples. In this paper, we propose a novel USOD method to mine rich and accurate saliency knowledge from both easy and hard samples. First, we propose a Confidence-aware Saliency Distilling (CSD) strategy that scores samples conditioned on samples' confidences, which guides the model to distill saliency knowledge from easy samples to hard samples progressively. Second, we propose a Boundary-aware Texture Matching (BTM) strategy to refine the boundaries of noisy labels by matching the textures around the predicted boundary. Extensive experiments on RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T, and video SOD benchmarks prove that our method achieves state-of-the-art USOD performance.
Authors:Wonseok Roh, Gyusam Chang, Seokha Moon, Giljoo Nam, Chanyoung Kim, Younghyun Kim, Jinkyu Kim, Sangpil Kim
Abstract:
Current multi-view 3D object detection methods often fail to detect objects in the overlap region properly, and the networks' understanding of the scene is often limited to that of a monocular detection network. Moreover, objects in the overlap region are often largely occluded or suffer from deformation due to camera distortion, causing a domain shift. To mitigate this issue, we propose using the following two main modules: (1) Stereo Disparity Estimation for Weak Depth Supervision and (2) Adversarial Overlap Region Discriminator. The former utilizes the traditional stereo disparity estimation method to obtain reliable disparity information from the overlap region. Given the disparity estimates as supervision, we propose regularizing the network to fully utilize the geometric potential of binocular images and improve the overall detection accuracy accordingly. Further, the latter module minimizes the representational gap between non-overlap and overlapping regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with the nuScenes large-scale multi-view 3D object detection data. Our experiments show that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art models, i.e., DETR3D and BEVDet.
Authors:Jaeyoung Yoo, Hojun Lee, Seunghyeon Seo, Inseop Chung, Nojun Kwak
Abstract:
Recent end-to-end multi-object detectors simplify the inference pipeline by removing hand-crafted processes such as non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, during training, they still heavily rely on heuristics and hand-crafted processes which deteriorate the reliability of the predicted confidence score. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to train an end-to-end multi-object detector consisting of only two terms: negative log-likelihood (NLL) and a regularization term. In doing so, the multi-object detection problem is treated as density estimation of the ground truth bounding boxes utilizing a regularized mixture density model. The proposed \textit{end-to-end multi-object Detection with a Regularized Mixture Model} (D-RMM) is trained by minimizing the NLL with the proposed regularization term, maximum component maximization (MCM) loss, preventing duplicate predictions. Our method reduces the heuristics of the training process and improves the reliability of the predicted confidence score. Moreover, our D-RMM outperforms the previous end-to-end detectors on MS COCO dataset.
Authors:Shi-Xue Zhang, Xiaobin Zhu, Jie-Bo Hou, Xu-Cheng Yin
Abstract:
In object detection, non-maximum suppression (NMS) methods are extensively adopted to remove horizontal duplicates of detected dense boxes for generating final object instances. However, due to the degraded quality of dense detection boxes and not explicit exploration of the context information, existing NMS methods via simple intersection-over-union (IoU) metrics tend to underperform on multi-oriented and long-size objects detection. Distinguishing with general NMS methods via duplicate removal, we propose a novel graph fusion network, named GFNet, for multi-oriented object detection. Our GFNet is extensible and adaptively fuse dense detection boxes to detect more accurate and holistic multi-oriented object instances. Specifically, we first adopt a locality-aware clustering algorithm to group dense detection boxes into different clusters. We will construct an instance sub-graph for the detection boxes belonging to one cluster. Then, we propose a graph-based fusion network via Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to learn to reason and fuse the detection boxes for generating final instance boxes. Extensive experiments both on public available multi-oriented text datasets (including MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, ICDAR2017-MLT) and multi-oriented object datasets (DOTA) verify the effectiveness and robustness of our method against general NMS methods in multi-oriented object detection.
Authors:Keli Huang, Botian Shi, Xiang Li, Xin Li, Siyuan Huang, Yikang Li
Abstract:
Multi-modal fusion is a fundamental task for the perception of an autonomous driving system, which has recently intrigued many researchers. However, achieving a rather good performance is not an easy task due to the noisy raw data, underutilized information, and the misalignment of multi-modal sensors. In this paper, we provide a literature review of the existing multi-modal-based methods for perception tasks in autonomous driving. Generally, we make a detailed analysis including over 50 papers leveraging perception sensors including LiDAR and camera trying to solve object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Different from traditional fusion methodology for categorizing fusion models, we propose an innovative way that divides them into two major classes, four minor classes by a more reasonable taxonomy in the view of the fusion stage. Moreover, we dive deep into the current fusion methods, focusing on the remaining problems and open-up discussions on the potential research opportunities. In conclusion, what we expect to do in this paper is to present a new taxonomy of multi-modal fusion methods for the autonomous driving perception tasks and provoke thoughts of the fusion-based techniques in the future.
Authors:Kai Chen, Jin Xiao, Leheng Zhang, Kexuan Shi, Shuhang Gu
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a growing trend in computer vision towards exploiting RAW sensor data, which preserves richer information compared to conventional low-bit RGB images. Early studies mainly focused on enhancing visual quality, while more recent efforts aim to leverage the abundant information in RAW data to improve the performance of visual perception tasks such as object detection and segmentation. However, existing approaches still face two key limitations: large-scale ISP networks impose heavy computational overhead, while methods based on tuning traditional ISP pipelines are restricted by limited representational capacity.To address these issues, we propose Task-Aware Image Signal Processing (TA-ISP), a compact RAW-to-RGB framework that produces task-oriented representations for pretrained vision models. Instead of heavy dense convolutional pipelines, TA-ISP predicts a small set of lightweight, multi-scale modulation operators that act at global, regional, and pixel scales to reshape image statistics across different spatial extents. This factorized control significantly expands the range of spatially varying transforms that can be represented while keeping memory usage, computation, and latency tightly constrained. Evaluated on several RAW-domain detection and segmentation benchmarks under both daytime and nighttime conditions, TA-ISP consistently improves downstream accuracy while markedly reducing parameter count and inference time, making it well suited for deployment on resource-constrained devices.
Authors:Aditya Bagri, Vasanthakumar Venugopal, Anandakumar D, Revathi Ezhumalai, Kalyan Sivasailam, Bargava Subramanian, VarshiniPriya, Meenakumari K S, Abi M, Renita S
Abstract:
Background: Accurate diagnosis of wrist and hand fractures using radiographs is essential in emergency care, but manual interpretation is slow and prone to errors. Transformer-based models show promise in improving medical image analysis, but their application to extremity fractures is limited. This study addresses this gap by applying object detection transformers to wrist and hand X-rays.
Methods: We fine-tuned the RT-DETR and Co-DETR models, pre-trained on COCO, using over 26,000 annotated X-rays from a proprietary clinical dataset. Each image was labeled for fracture presence with bounding boxes. A ResNet-50 classifier was trained on cropped regions to refine abnormality classification. Supervised contrastive learning was used to enhance embedding quality. Performance was evaluated using AP@50, precision, and recall metrics, with additional testing on real-world X-rays.
Results: RT-DETR showed moderate results (AP@50 = 0.39), while Co-DETR outperformed it with an AP@50 of 0.615 and faster convergence. The integrated pipeline achieved 83.1% accuracy, 85.1% precision, and 96.4% recall on real-world X-rays, demonstrating strong generalization across 13 fracture types. Visual inspection confirmed accurate localization.
Conclusion: Our Co-DETR-based pipeline demonstrated high accuracy and clinical relevance in wrist and hand fracture detection, offering reliable localization and differentiation of fracture types. It is scalable, efficient, and suitable for real-time deployment in hospital workflows, improving diagnostic speed and reliability in musculoskeletal radiology.
Authors:Zheng Tang, Shuo Wang, David C. Anastasiu, Ming-Ching Chang, Anuj Sharma, Quan Kong, Norimasa Kobori, Munkhjargal Gochoo, Ganzorig Batnasan, Munkh-Erdene Otgonbold, Fady Alnajjar, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Tomasz Kornuta, Xiaolong Li, Yilin Zhao, Han Zhang, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Arihant Jain, Ratnesh Kumar, Vidya N. Murali, Yuxing Wang, Sameer Satish Pusegaonkar, Yizhou Wang, Sujit Biswas, Xunlei Wu, Zhedong Zheng, Pranamesh Chakraborty, Rama Chellappa
Abstract:
The ninth AI City Challenge continues to advance real-world applications of computer vision and AI in transportation, industrial automation, and public safety. The 2025 edition featured four tracks and saw a 17% increase in participation, with 245 teams from 15 countries registered on the evaluation server. Public release of challenge datasets led to over 30,000 downloads to date. Track 1 focused on multi-class 3D multi-camera tracking, involving people, humanoids, autonomous mobile robots, and forklifts, using detailed calibration and 3D bounding box annotations. Track 2 tackled video question answering in traffic safety, with multi-camera incident understanding enriched by 3D gaze labels. Track 3 addressed fine-grained spatial reasoning in dynamic warehouse environments, requiring AI systems to interpret RGB-D inputs and answer spatial questions that combine perception, geometry, and language. Both Track 1 and Track 3 datasets were generated in NVIDIA Omniverse. Track 4 emphasized efficient road object detection from fisheye cameras, supporting lightweight, real-time deployment on edge devices. The evaluation framework enforced submission limits and used a partially held-out test set to ensure fair benchmarking. Final rankings were revealed after the competition concluded, fostering reproducibility and mitigating overfitting. Several teams achieved top-tier results, setting new benchmarks in multiple tasks.
Authors:Cesar Alan Contreras, Manolis Chiou, Alireza Rastegarpanah, Michal Szulik, Rustam Stolkin
Abstract:
Human-robot collaboration requires robots to quickly infer user intent, provide transparent reasoning, and assist users in achieving their goals. Our recent work introduced GUIDER, our framework for inferring navigation and manipulation intents. We propose augmenting GUIDER with a vision-language model (VLM) and a text-only language model (LLM) to form a semantic prior that filters objects and locations based on the mission prompt. A vision pipeline (YOLO for object detection and the Segment Anything Model for instance segmentation) feeds candidate object crops into the VLM, which scores their relevance given an operator prompt; in addition, the list of detected object labels is ranked by a text-only LLM. These scores weight the existing navigation and manipulation layers of GUIDER, selecting context-relevant targets while suppressing unrelated objects. Once the combined belief exceeds a threshold, autonomy changes occur, enabling the robot to navigate to the desired area and retrieve the desired object, while adapting to any changes in the operator's intent. Future work will evaluate the system on Isaac Sim using a Franka Emika arm on a Ridgeback base, with a focus on real-time assistance.
Authors:Wenwen Li, Chia-Yu Hsu, Maosheng Hu
Abstract:
Recent interest in geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) has fostered a wide range of applications using artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning, for geospatial problem solving. However, major challenges such as a lack of training data and the neglect of spatial principles and spatial effects in AI model design remain, significantly hindering the in-depth integration of AI with geospatial research. This paper reports our work in developing a deep learning model that enables object detection, particularly of natural features, in a weakly supervised manner. Our work makes three contributions: First, we present a method of object detection using only weak labels. This is achieved by developing a spatially explicit model based on Tobler's first law of geography. Second, we incorporate attention maps into the object detection pipeline and develop a multistage training strategy to improve performance. Third, we apply this model to detect impact craters on Mars, a task that previously required extensive manual effort. The model generalizes to both natural and human-made features on the surfaces of Earth and other planets. This research advances the theoretical and methodological foundations of GeoAI.
Authors:Mohammad Mohammadi, Ziyi Wu, Igor Gilitschenski
Abstract:
Long-term temporal information is crucial for event-based perception tasks, as raw events only encode pixel brightness changes. Recent works show that when trained from scratch, recurrent models achieve better results than feedforward models in these tasks. However, when leveraging self-supervised pre-trained weights, feedforward models can outperform their recurrent counterparts. Current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods for event-based pre-training largely mimic RGB image-based approaches. They pre-train feedforward models on raw events within a short time interval, ignoring the temporal information of events. In this work, we introduce TESPEC, a self-supervised pre-training framework tailored for learning spatio-temporal information. TESPEC is well-suited for recurrent models, as it is the first framework to leverage long event sequences during pre-training. TESPEC employs the masked image modeling paradigm with a new reconstruction target. We design a novel method to accumulate events into pseudo grayscale videos containing high-level semantic information about the underlying scene, which is robust to sensor noise and reduces motion blur. Reconstructing this target thus requires the model to reason about long-term history of events. Extensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art results in downstream tasks, including object detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. Project webpage: https://mhdmohammadi.github.io/TESPEC_webpage.
Authors:Yehao Lu, Minghe Weng, Zekang Xiao, Rui Jiang, Wei Su, Guangcong Zheng, Ping Lu, Xi Li
Abstract:
The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has excelled in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), yet its potential in real-time open-vocabulary object detectors, which also leverage large-scale vision-language datasets but smaller models, remains unexplored. This work investigates this domain, revealing intriguing insights. In the shallow layers, experts tend to cooperate with diverse peers to expand the search space. While in the deeper layers, fixed collaborative structures emerge, where each expert maintains 2-3 fixed partners and distinct expert combinations are specialized in processing specific patterns. Concretely, we propose Dynamic-DINO, which extends Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge from a dense model to a dynamic inference framework via an efficient MoE-Tuning strategy. Additionally, we design a granularity decomposition mechanism to decompose the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of base model into multiple smaller expert networks, expanding the subnet search space. To prevent performance degradation at the start of fine-tuning, we further propose a pre-trained weight allocation strategy for the experts, coupled with a specific router initialization. During inference, only the input-relevant experts are activated to form a compact subnet. Experiments show that, pretrained with merely 1.56M open-source data, Dynamic-DINO outperforms Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, pretrained on the private Grounding20M dataset.
Authors:Feiyang Kang, Nadine Chang, Maying Shen, Marc T. Law, Rafid Mahmood, Ruoxi Jia, Jose M. Alvarez
Abstract:
The computational burden and inherent redundancy of large-scale datasets challenge the training of contemporary machine learning models. Data pruning offers a solution by selecting smaller, informative subsets, yet existing methods struggle: density-based approaches can be task-agnostic, while model-based techniques may introduce redundancy or prove computationally prohibitive. We introduce Adaptive De-Duplication (AdaDeDup), a novel hybrid framework that synergistically integrates density-based pruning with model-informed feedback in a cluster-adaptive manner. AdaDeDup first partitions data and applies an initial density-based pruning. It then employs a proxy model to evaluate the impact of this initial pruning within each cluster by comparing losses on kept versus pruned samples. This task-aware signal adaptively adjusts cluster-specific pruning thresholds, enabling more aggressive pruning in redundant clusters while preserving critical data in informative ones. Extensive experiments on large-scale object detection benchmarks (Waymo, COCO, nuScenes) using standard models (BEVFormer, Faster R-CNN) demonstrate AdaDeDup's advantages. It significantly outperforms prominent baselines, substantially reduces performance degradation (e.g., over 54% versus random sampling on Waymo), and achieves near-original model performance while pruning 20% of data, highlighting its efficacy in enhancing data efficiency for large-scale model training. Code is open-sourced.
Authors:Xinrun Xu, Jianwen Yang, Qiuhong Zhang, Zhanbiao Lian, Zhiming Ding, Shan Jiang
Abstract:
Continually adapting edge models in cloud-edge collaborative object detection for traffic monitoring suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously learned knowledge when adapting to new data distributions. This is especially problematic in dynamic traffic environments characterised by periodic variations (e.g., day/night, peak hours), where past knowledge remains valuable. Existing approaches like experience replay and visual prompts offer some mitigation, but struggle to effectively prioritize and leverage historical data for optimal knowledge retention and adaptation. Specifically, simply storing and replaying all historical data can be inefficient, while treating all historical experiences as equally important overlooks their varying relevance to the current domain. This paper proposes ER-EMU, an edge model update algorithm based on adaptive experience replay, to address these limitations. ER-EMU utilizes a limited-size experience buffer managed using a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) principle, and a novel Domain Distance Metric-based Experience Selection (DDM-ES) algorithm. DDM-ES employs the multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MK-MMD) to quantify the dissimilarity between target domains, prioritizing the selection of historical data that is most dissimilar to the current target domain. This ensures training diversity and facilitates the retention of knowledge from a wider range of past experiences, while also preventing overfitting to the new domain. The experience buffer is also updated using a simple random sampling strategy to maintain a balanced representation of previous domains. Experiments on the Bellevue traffic video dataset, involving repeated day/night cycles, demonstrate that ER-EMU consistently improves the performance of several state-of-the-art cloud-edge collaborative object detection frameworks.
Authors:Xiao Li, Yiming Zhu, Yifan Huang, Wei Zhang, Yingzhe He, Jie Shi, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract:
Object detection plays a crucial role in many security-sensitive applications. However, several recent studies have shown that object detectors can be easily fooled by physically realizable attacks, \eg, adversarial patches and recent adversarial textures, which pose realistic and urgent threats. Adversarial Training (AT) has been recognized as the most effective defense against adversarial attacks. While AT has been extensively studied in the $l_\infty$ attack settings on classification models, AT against physically realizable attacks on object detectors has received limited exploration. Early attempts are only performed to defend against adversarial patches, leaving AT against a wider range of physically realizable attacks under-explored. In this work, we consider defending against various physically realizable attacks with a unified AT method. We propose PBCAT, a novel Patch-Based Composite Adversarial Training strategy. PBCAT optimizes the model by incorporating the combination of small-area gradient-guided adversarial patches and imperceptible global adversarial perturbations covering the entire image. With these designs, PBCAT has the potential to defend against not only adversarial patches but also unseen physically realizable attacks such as adversarial textures. Extensive experiments in multiple settings demonstrated that PBCAT significantly improved robustness against various physically realizable attacks over state-of-the-art defense methods. Notably, it improved the detection accuracy by 29.7\% over previous defense methods under one recent adversarial texture attack.
Authors:Muhammad Tayyab Khan, Lequn Chen, Zane Yong, Jun Ming Tan, Wenhe Feng, Seung Ki Moon
Abstract:
Efficient and accurate extraction of key information from 2D engineering drawings is essential for advancing digital manufacturing workflows. Such information includes geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), measures, material specifications, and textual annotations. Manual extraction is slow and labor-intensive, while generic OCR models often fail due to complex layouts, engineering symbols, and rotated text, leading to incomplete and unreliable outputs. These limitations result in incomplete and unreliable outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid vision-language framework that integrates a rotation-aware object detection model (YOLOv11-obb) with a transformer-based vision-language parser. Our structured pipeline applies YOLOv11-OBB to localize annotations and extract oriented bounding box (OBB) patches, which are then parsed into structured outputs using a fine-tuned, lightweight vision-language model (VLM). We curate a dataset of 1,367 2D mechanical drawings annotated across nine key categories. YOLOv11-OBB is trained on this dataset to detect OBBs and extract annotation patches. These are parsed using two open-source VLMs: Donut and Florence-2. Both models are lightweight and well-suited for specialized industrial tasks under limited computational overhead. Following fine-tuning of both models on the curated dataset of image patches paired with structured annotation labels, a comparative experiment is conducted to evaluate parsing performance across four key metrics. Donut outperforms Florence-2, achieving 88.5% precision, 99.2% recall, and a 93.5% F1-score, with a hallucination rate of 11.5%. Finally, a case study demonstrates how the extracted structured information supports downstream manufacturing tasks such as process and tool selection, showcasing the practical utility of the proposed framework in modernizing 2D drawing interpretation.
Authors:Shenqi Wang, Yingfu Xu, Amirreza Yousefzadeh, Sherif Eissa, Henk Corporaal, Federico Corradi, Guangzhi Tang
Abstract:
Leveraging the high temporal resolution and dynamic range, object detection with event cameras can enhance the performance and safety of automotive and robotics applications in real-world scenarios. However, processing sparse event data requires compute-intensive convolutional recurrent units, complicating their integration into resource-constrained edge applications. Here, we propose the Sparse Event-based Efficient Detector (SEED) for efficient event-based object detection on neuromorphic processors. We introduce sparse convolutional recurrent learning, which achieves over 92% activation sparsity in recurrent processing, vastly reducing the cost for spatiotemporal reasoning on sparse event data. We validated our method on Prophesee's 1 Mpx and Gen1 event-based object detection datasets. Notably, SEED sets a new benchmark in computational efficiency for event-based object detection which requires long-term temporal learning. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, SEED significantly reduces synaptic operations while delivering higher or same-level mAP. Our hardware simulations showcase the critical role of SEED's hardware-aware design in achieving energy-efficient and low-latency neuromorphic processing.
Authors:Fanhu Zeng, Deli Yu, Zhenglun Kong, Hao Tang
Abstract:
Vision transformers have been widely explored in various vision tasks. Due to heavy computational cost, much interest has aroused for compressing vision transformer dynamically in the aspect of tokens. Current methods mainly pay attention to token pruning or merging to reduce token numbers, in which tokens are compressed exclusively, causing great information loss and therefore post-training is inevitably required to recover the performance. In this paper, we rethink token reduction and unify the process as an explicit form of token matrix transformation, in which all existing methods are constructing special forms of matrices within the framework. Furthermore, we propose a many-to-many Token Transforming framework that serves as a generalization of all existing methods and reserves the most information, even enabling training-free acceleration. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our framework. Specifically, we reduce 40% FLOPs and accelerate DeiT-S by $\times$1.5 with marginal 0.1% accuracy drop. Furthermore, we extend the method to dense prediction tasks including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and language model generation. Results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves substantial improvements, offering a better computation-performance trade-off, impressive budget reduction and inference acceleration.
Authors:Nicolas Pfitzer, Yifan Zhou, Marco Poggensee, Defne Kurtulus, Bessie Dominguez-Dager, Mihai Dusmanu, Marc Pollefeys, Zuria Bauer
Abstract:
Over 43 million people worldwide live with severe visual impairment, facing significant challenges in navigating unfamiliar environments. We present MR.NAVI, a mixed reality system that enhances spatial awareness for visually impaired users through real-time scene understanding and intuitive audio feedback. Our system combines computer vision algorithms for object detection and depth estimation with natural language processing to provide contextual scene descriptions, proactive collision avoidance, and navigation instructions. The distributed architecture processes sensor data through MobileNet for object detection and employs RANSAC-based floor detection with DBSCAN clustering for obstacle avoidance. Integration with public transit APIs enables navigation with public transportation directions. Through our experiments with user studies, we evaluated both scene description and navigation functionalities in unfamiliar environments, showing promising usability and effectiveness.
Authors:Yihao Ding, Soyeon Caren Han, Yan Li, Josiah Poon
Abstract:
Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) has emerged as a critical field in document intelligence, enabling automated extraction of key information from complex documents across domains such as medical, financial, and educational applications. However, form-like documents pose unique challenges due to their complex layouts, multi-stakeholder involvement, and high structural variability. Addressing these issues, the VRD-IU Competition was introduced, focusing on extracting and localizing key information from multi-format forms within the Form-NLU dataset, which includes digital, printed, and handwritten documents. This paper presents insights from the competition, which featured two tracks: Track A, emphasizing entity-based key information retrieval, and Track B, targeting end-to-end key information localization from raw document images. With over 20 participating teams, the competition showcased various state-of-the-art methodologies, including hierarchical decomposition, transformer-based retrieval, multimodal feature fusion, and advanced object detection techniques. The top-performing models set new benchmarks in VRDU, providing valuable insights into document intelligence.
Authors:Luigi Sigillo, Christian Bianchi, Aurelio Uncini, Danilo Comminiello
Abstract:
Image Super-Resolution is a fundamental problem in computer vision with broad applications spacing from medical imaging to satellite analysis. The ability to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs is crucial for enhancing downstream tasks such as object detection and segmentation. While deep learning has significantly advanced SR, achieving high-quality reconstructions with fine-grained details and realistic textures remains challenging, particularly at high upscaling factors. Recent approaches leveraging diffusion models have demonstrated promising results, yet they often struggle to balance perceptual quality with structural fidelity. In this work, we introduce ResQu a novel SR framework that integrates a quaternion wavelet preprocessing framework with latent diffusion models, incorporating a new quaternion wavelet- and time-aware encoder. Unlike prior methods that simply apply wavelet transforms within diffusion models, our approach enhances the conditioning process by exploiting quaternion wavelet embeddings, which are dynamically integrated at different stages of denoising. Furthermore, we also leverage the generative priors of foundation models such as Stable Diffusion. Extensive experiments on domain-specific datasets demonstrate that our method achieves outstanding SR results, outperforming in many cases existing approaches in perceptual quality and standard evaluation metrics. The code will be available after the revision process.
Authors:Haosheng Chen, Lian Luo, Mengjingcheng Mo, Zhanjie Wu, Guobao Xiao, Ji Gan, Jiaxu Leng, Xinbo Gao
Abstract:
Event cameras, with microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) characteristics, emit high-speed event stream for perception tasks. Despite the recent advancement in GNN-based perception methods, they are prone to use straightforward pairwise connectivity mechanisms in the pure Euclidean space where they struggle to capture long-range dependencies and fail to effectively characterize the inherent hierarchical structures of non-uniformly distributed event stream. To this end, in this paper we propose a novel approach named EHGCN, which is a pioneer to perceive event stream in both Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces for event vision. In EHGCN, we introduce an adaptive sampling strategy to dynamically regulate sampling rates, retaining discriminative events while attenuating chaotic noise. Then we present a Markov Vector Field (MVF)-driven motion-aware hyperedge generation method based on motion state transition probabilities, thereby eliminating cross-target spurious associations and providing critically topological priors while capturing long-range dependencies between events. Finally, we propose a Euclidean-Hyperbolic GCN to fuse the information locally aggregated and globally hierarchically modeled in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces, respectively, to achieve hybrid event perception. Experimental results on event perception tasks such as object detection and recognition validate the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Nguyen Ngoc Dat, Tom Richardson, Matthew Watson, Kilian Meier, Jenna Kline, Sid Reid, Guy Maalouf, Duncan Hine, Majid Mirmehdi, Tilo Burghardt
Abstract:
Live tracking of wildlife via high-resolution video processing directly onboard drones is widely unexplored and most existing solutions rely on streaming video to ground stations to support navigation. Yet, both autonomous animal-reactive flight control beyond visual line of sight and/or mission-specific individual and behaviour recognition tasks rely to some degree on this capability. In response, we introduce WildLive - a near real-time animal detection and tracking framework for high-resolution imagery running directly onboard uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). The system performs multi-animal detection and tracking at 17.81fps for HD and 7.53fps on 4K video streams suitable for operation during higher altitude flights to minimise animal disturbance. Our system is optimised for Jetson Orin AGX onboard hardware. It integrates the efficiency of sparse optical flow tracking and mission-specific sampling with device-optimised and proven YOLO-driven object detection and segmentation techniques. Essentially, computational resource is focused onto spatio-temporal regions of high uncertainty to significantly improve UAV processing speeds. Alongside, we introduce our WildLive dataset, which comprises 200K+ annotated animal instances across 19K+ frames from 4K UAV videos collected at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. All frames contain ground truth bounding boxes, segmentation masks, as well as individual tracklets and tracking point trajectories. We compare our system against current object tracking approaches including OC-SORT, ByteTrack, and SORT. Our multi-animal tracking experiments with onboard hardware confirm that near real-time high-resolution wildlife tracking is possible on UAVs whilst maintaining high accuracy levels as needed for future navigational and mission-specific animal-centric operational autonomy. Our materials are available at: https://dat-nguyenvn.github.io/WildLive/
Authors:Yangxiao Lu, Ruosen Li, Liqiang Jing, Jikai Wang, Xinya Du, Yunhui Guo, Nicholas Ruozzi, Yu Xiang
Abstract:
Visual grounding focuses on detecting objects from images based on language expressions. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced visual grounding performance by training large models with large-scale datasets. However, the problem remains challenging, especially when similar objects appear in the input image. For example, an LVLM may not be able to differentiate Diet Coke and regular Coke in an image. In this case, if additional reference images of Diet Coke and regular Coke are available, it can help the visual grounding of similar objects. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Reference Visual Grounding (MRVG). In this task, a model has access to a set of reference images of objects in a database. Based on these reference images and a language expression, the model is required to detect a target object from a query image. We first introduce a new dataset to study the MRVG problem. Then we introduce a novel method, named MRVG-Net, to solve this visual grounding problem. We show that by efficiently using reference images with few-shot object detection and using Large Language Models (LLMs) for object matching, our method achieves superior visual grounding performance compared to the state-of-the-art LVLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B. Our approach bridges the gap between few-shot detection and visual grounding, unlocking new capabilities for visual understanding, which has wide applications in robotics. Project page with our video, code, and dataset: https://irvlutd.github.io/MultiGrounding
Authors:Xinrun Xu, Qiuhong Zhang, Jianwen Yang, Zhanbiao Lian, Jin Yan, Zhiming Ding, Shan Jiang
Abstract:
Generating high-quality pseudo-labels on the cloud is crucial for cloud-edge object detection, especially in dynamic traffic monitoring where data distributions evolve. Existing methods often assume reliable cloud models, neglecting potential errors or struggling with complex distribution shifts. This paper proposes Cloud-Adaptive High-Quality Pseudo-label generation (CA-HQP), addressing these limitations by incorporating a learnable Visual Prompt Generator (VPG) and dual feature alignment into cloud model updates. The VPG enables parameter-efficient adaptation by injecting visual prompts, enhancing flexibility without extensive fine-tuning. CA-HQP mitigates domain discrepancies via two feature alignment techniques: global Domain Query Feature Alignment (DQFA) capturing scene-level shifts, and fine-grained Temporal Instance-Aware Feature Embedding Alignment (TIAFA) addressing instance variations. Experiments on the Bellevue traffic dataset demonstrate that CA-HQP significantly improves pseudo-label quality compared to existing methods, leading to notable performance gains for the edge model and showcasing CA-HQP's adaptation effectiveness. Ablation studies validate each component (DQFA, TIAFA, VPG) and the synergistic effect of combined alignment strategies, highlighting the importance of adaptive cloud updates and domain adaptation for robust object detection in evolving scenarios. CA-HQP provides a promising solution for enhancing cloud-edge object detection systems in real-world applications.
Authors:Sreetama Sarkar, Sumit Bam Shrestha, Yue Che, Leobardo Campos-Macias, Gourav Datta, Peter A. Beerel
Abstract:
The rapidly growing demand for on-chip edge intelligence on resource-constrained devices has motivated approaches to reduce energy and latency of deep learning models. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained particular interest due to their promise to reduce energy consumption using event-based processing. We assert that while sigma-delta encoding in SNNs can take advantage of the temporal redundancy across video frames, they still involve a significant amount of redundant computations due to processing insignificant events. In this paper, we propose a region masking strategy that identifies regions of interest at the input of the SNN, thereby eliminating computation and data movement for events arising from unimportant regions. Our approach demonstrates that masking regions at the input not only significantly reduces the overall spiking activity of the network, but also provides significant improvement in throughput and latency. We apply region masking during video object detection on Loihi 2, demonstrating that masking approximately 60% of input regions can reduce energy-delay product by 1.65x over a baseline sigma-delta network, with a degradation in mAP@0.5 by 1.09%.
Authors:Katharina Prasse, Marcel Kleinmann, Inken Adam, Kerstin Beckersjuergen, Andreas Edte, Jona Frroku, Timotheus Gumpp, Steffen Jung, Isaac Bravo, Stefanie Walter, Margret Keuper
Abstract:
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century, sparking widespread discourse across social media platforms. Activists, policymakers, and researchers seek to understand public sentiment and narratives while access to social media data has become increasingly restricted in the post-API era. In this study, we analyze a dataset of climate change-related tweets from X (formerly Twitter) shared in 2019, containing 730k tweets along with the shared images. Our approach integrates statistical analysis, image classification, object detection, and sentiment analysis to explore visual narratives in climate discourse. Additionally, we introduce a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate interactive data exploration. Our findings reveal key themes in climate communication, highlight sentiment divergence between images and text, and underscore the strengths and limitations of foundation models in analyzing social media imagery. By releasing our code and tools, we aim to support future research on the intersection of climate change, social media, and computer vision.
Authors:Changshun Wu, Weicheng He, Chih-Hong Cheng, Xiaowei Huang, Saddek Bensalem
Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OoD) inputs pose a persistent challenge to deep learning models, often triggering overconfident predictions on non-target objects. While prior work has primarily focused on refining scoring functions and adjusting test-time thresholds, such algorithmic improvements offer only incremental gains. We argue that a rethinking of the entire development lifecycle is needed to mitigate these risks effectively. This work addresses two overlooked dimensions of OoD detection in object detection. First, we reveal fundamental flaws in widely used evaluation benchmarks: contrary to their design intent, up to 13% of objects in the OoD test sets actually belong to in-distribution classes, and vice versa. These quality issues severely distort the reported performance of existing methods and contribute to their high false positive rates. Second, we introduce a novel training-time mitigation paradigm that operates independently of external OoD detectors. Instead of relying solely on post-hoc scoring, we fine-tune the detector using a carefully synthesized OoD dataset that semantically resembles in-distribution objects. This process shapes a defensive decision boundary by suppressing objectness on OoD objects, leading to a 91% reduction in hallucination error of a YOLO model on BDD-100K. Our methodology generalizes across detection paradigms such as YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and RT-DETR, and supports few-shot adaptation. Together, these contributions offer a principled and effective way to reduce OoD-induced hallucination in object detectors. Code and data are available at: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/m-hood.
Authors:Shaobin Zhuang, Zhipeng Huang, Binxin Yang, Ying Zhang, Fangyikang Wang, Canmiao Fu, Chong Sun, Zheng-Jun Zha, Chen Li, Yali Wang
Abstract:
Video editing increasingly demands the ability to incorporate specific real-world instances into existing footage, yet current approaches fundamentally fail to capture the unique visual characteristics of particular subjects and ensure natural instance/scene interactions. We formalize this overlooked yet critical editing paradigm as "Get-In-Video Editing", where users provide reference images to precisely specify visual elements they wish to incorporate into videos. Addressing this task's dual challenges, severe training data scarcity and technical challenges in maintaining spatiotemporal coherence, we introduce three key contributions. First, we develop GetIn-1M dataset created through our automated Recognize-Track-Erase pipeline, which sequentially performs video captioning, salient instance identification, object detection, temporal tracking, and instance removal to generate high-quality video editing pairs with comprehensive annotations (reference image, tracking mask, instance prompt). Second, we present GetInVideo, a novel end-to-end framework that leverages a diffusion transformer architecture with 3D full attention to process reference images, condition videos, and masks simultaneously, maintaining temporal coherence, preserving visual identity, and ensuring natural scene interactions when integrating reference objects into videos. Finally, we establish GetInBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for Get-In-Video Editing scenario, demonstrating our approach's superior performance through extensive evaluations. Our work enables accessible, high-quality incorporation of specific real-world subjects into videos, significantly advancing personalized video editing capabilities.
Authors:Zhefan Xu, Haoyu Shen, Xinming Han, Hanyu Jin, Kanlong Ye, Kenji Shimada
Abstract:
Accurate perception of dynamic obstacles is essential for autonomous robot navigation in indoor environments. Although sophisticated 3D object detection and tracking methods have been investigated and developed thoroughly in the fields of computer vision and autonomous driving, their demands on expensive and high-accuracy sensor setups and substantial computational resources from large neural networks make them unsuitable for indoor robotics. Recently, more lightweight perception algorithms leveraging onboard cameras or LiDAR sensors have emerged as promising alternatives. However, relying on a single sensor poses significant limitations: cameras have limited fields of view and can suffer from high noise, whereas LiDAR sensors operate at lower frequencies and lack the richness of visual features. To address this limitation, we propose a dynamic obstacle detection and tracking framework that uses both onboard camera and LiDAR data to enable lightweight and accurate perception. Our proposed method expands on our previous ensemble detection approach, which integrates outputs from multiple low-accuracy but computationally efficient detectors to ensure real-time performance on the onboard computer. In this work, we propose a more robust fusion strategy that integrates both LiDAR and visual data to enhance detection accuracy further. We then utilize a tracking module that adopts feature-based object association and the Kalman filter to track and estimate detected obstacles' states. Besides, a dynamic obstacle classification algorithm is designed to robustly identify moving objects. The dataset evaluation demonstrates a better perception performance compared to benchmark methods. The physical experiments on a quadcopter robot confirms the feasibility for real-world navigation.
Authors:Tessa Pulli, Peter Hönig, Stefan Thalhammer, Matthias Hirschmanner, Markus Vincze
Abstract:
Object pose estimation of transparent objects remains a challenging task in the field of robot vision due to the immense influence of lighting, background, and reflections. However, the edges of clear objects have the highest contrast, which leads to stable and prominent features. We propose a novel approach by incorporating edge detection in a pre-processing step for the tasks of object detection and object pose estimation. We conducted experiments to investigate the effect of edge detectors on transparent objects. We examine the performance of the state-of-the-art 6D object pose estimation pipeline GDR-Net and the object detector YOLOX when applying different edge detectors as pre-processing steps (i.e., Canny edge detection with and without color information, and holistically-nested edges (HED)). We evaluate the physically-based rendered dataset Trans6D-32 K of transparent objects with parameters proposed by the BOP Challenge. Our results indicate that applying edge detection as a pre-processing enhances performance for certain objects.
Authors:Nan Yang, Yang Wang, Zhanwen Liu, Meng Li, Yisheng An, Xiangmo Zhao
Abstract:
Transformer-based methods have achieved remarkable performance in event-based object detection, owing to the global modeling ability. However, they neglect the influence of non-event and noisy regions and process them uniformly, leading to high computational overhead. To mitigate computation cost, some researchers propose window attention based sparsification strategies to discard unimportant regions, which sacrifices the global modeling ability and results in suboptimal performance. To achieve better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, we propose Sparse Mamba (SMamba), which performs adaptive sparsification to reduce computational effort while maintaining global modeling capability. Specifically, a Spatio-Temporal Continuity Assessment module is proposed to measure the information content of tokens and discard uninformative ones by leveraging the spatiotemporal distribution differences between activity and noise events. Based on the assessment results, an Information-Prioritized Local Scan strategy is designed to shorten the scan distance between high-information tokens, facilitating interactions among them in the spatial dimension. Furthermore, to extend the global interaction from 2D space to 3D representations, a Global Channel Interaction module is proposed to aggregate channel information from a global spatial perspective. Results on three datasets (Gen1, 1Mpx, and eTram) demonstrate that our model outperforms other methods in both performance and efficiency.
Authors:Mustafa Munir, Md Mostafijur Rahman, Radu Marculescu
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) have dominated computer vision in recent years. However, ViTs are computationally expensive and not well suited for mobile devices; this led to the prevalence of convolutional neural network (CNN) and ViT-based hybrid models for mobile vision applications. Recently, Vision GNN (ViG) and CNN hybrid models have also been proposed for mobile vision tasks. However, all of these methods remain slower compared to pure CNN-based models. In this work, we propose Multi-Level Dilated Convolutions to devise a purely CNN-based mobile backbone. Using Multi-Level Dilated Convolutions allows for a larger theoretical receptive field than standard convolutions. Different levels of dilation also allow for interactions between the short-range and long-range features in an image. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) mobile CNN, ViT, ViG, and hybrid architectures in terms of accuracy and/or speed on image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our fastest model, RapidNet-Ti, achieves 76.3\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with 0.9 ms inference latency on an iPhone 13 mini NPU, which is faster and more accurate than MobileNetV2x1.4 (74.7\% top-1 with 1.0 ms latency). Our work shows that pure CNN architectures can beat SOTA hybrid and ViT models in terms of accuracy and speed when designed properly.
Authors:Ke Li, Di Wang, Zhangyuan Hu, Shaofeng Li, Weiping Ni, Lin Zhao, Quan Wang
Abstract:
Infrared-visible object detection (IVOD) seeks to harness the complementary information in infrared and visible images, thereby enhancing the performance of detectors in complex environments. However, existing methods often neglect the frequency characteristics of complementary information, such as the abundant high-frequency details in visible images and the valuable low-frequency thermal information in infrared images, thus constraining detection performance. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel Frequency-Driven Feature Decomposition Network for IVOD, called FD2-Net, which effectively captures the unique frequency representations of complementary information across multimodal visual spaces. Specifically, we propose a feature decomposition encoder, wherein the high-frequency unit (HFU) utilizes discrete cosine transform to capture representative high-frequency features, while the low-frequency unit (LFU) employs dynamic receptive fields to model the multi-scale context of diverse objects. Next, we adopt a parameter-free complementary strengths strategy to enhance multimodal features through seamless inter-frequency recoupling. Furthermore, we innovatively design a multimodal reconstruction mechanism that recovers image details lost during feature extraction, further leveraging the complementary information from infrared and visible images to enhance overall representational capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FD2-Net outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across various IVOD benchmarks, i.e. LLVIP (96.2% mAP), FLIR (82.9% mAP), and M3FD (83.5% mAP).
Authors:Bowei Du, Zhixuan Liao, Yanan Zhang, Zhi Cai, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang
Abstract:
Developing accurate and efficient detectors for drone imagery is challenging due to the inherent complexity of aerial scenes. While some existing methods aim to achieve high accuracy by utilizing larger models, their computational cost is prohibitive for drones. Recently, Knowledge Distillation (KD) has shown promising potential for maintaining satisfactory accuracy while significantly compressing models in general object detection. Considering the advantages of KD, this paper presents the first attempt to adapt it to object detection on drone imagery and addresses two intrinsic issues: (1) low foreground-background ratio and (2) small instances and complex backgrounds, which lead to inadequate training, resulting insufficient distillation. Therefore, we propose a task-wise Lightweight Mutual Lifting (Light-ML) module with a Centerness-based Instance-aware Distillation (CID) strategy. The Light-ML module mutually harmonizes the classification and localization branches by channel shuffling and convolution, integrating teacher supervision across different tasks during back-propagation, thus facilitating training the student model. The CID strategy extracts valuable regions surrounding instances through the centerness of proposals, enhancing distillation efficacy. Experiments on the VisDrone, UAVDT, and COCO benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach promotes the accuracies of existing state-of-the-art KD methods with comparable computational requirements. Codes will be available upon acceptance.
Authors:Minkyoung Cho, Yulong Cao, Jiachen Sun, Qingzhao Zhang, Marco Pavone, Jeong Joon Park, Heng Yang, Z. Morley Mao
Abstract:
An important paradigm in 3D object detection is the use of multiple modalities to enhance accuracy in both normal and challenging conditions, particularly for long-tail scenarios. To address this, recent studies have explored two directions of adaptive approaches: MoE-based adaptive fusion, which struggles with uncertainties arising from distinct object configurations, and late fusion for output-level adaptive fusion, which relies on separate detection pipelines and limits comprehensive understanding. In this work, we introduce Cocoon, an object- and feature-level uncertainty-aware fusion framework. The key innovation lies in uncertainty quantification for heterogeneous representations, enabling fair comparison across modalities through the introduction of a feature aligner and a learnable surrogate ground truth, termed feature impression. We also define a training objective to ensure that their relationship provides a valid metric for uncertainty quantification. Cocoon consistently outperforms existing static and adaptive methods in both normal and challenging conditions, including those with natural and artificial corruptions. Furthermore, we show the validity and efficacy of our uncertainty metric across diverse datasets.
Authors:Jiuzheng Yang, Song Tang, Yangkuiyi Zhang, Shuaifeng Li, Mao Ye, Jianwei Zhang, Xiatian Zhu
Abstract:
Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) aims to transfer a detector (pre-trained on source domain) to new unlabelled target domains. Current SFOD methods typically follow the Mean Teacher framework, where weak-to-strong augmentation provides diverse and sharp contrast for self-supervised learning. However, this augmentation strategy suffers from an inherent problem called crucial semantics loss: Due to random, strong disturbance, strong augmentation is prone to losing typical visual components, hindering cross-domain feature extraction. To address this thus-far ignored limitation, this paper introduces a novel Weak-to-Strong Contrastive Learning (WSCoL) approach. The core idea is to distill semantics lossless knowledge in the weak features (from the weak/teacher branch) to guide the representation learning upon the strong features (from the strong/student branch). To achieve this, we project the original features into a shared space using a mapping network, thereby reducing the bias between the weak and strong features. Meanwhile, a weak features-guided contrastive learning is performed in a weak-to-strong manner alternatively. Specifically, we first conduct an adaptation-aware prototype-guided clustering on the weak features to generate pseudo labels for corresponding strong features matched through proposals. Sequentially, we identify positive-negative samples based on the pseudo labels and perform cross-category contrastive learning on the strong features where an uncertainty estimator encourages adaptive background contrast. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WSCoL yields new state-of-the-art performance, offering a built-in mechanism mitigating crucial semantics loss for traditional Mean Teacher framework. The code and data will be released soon.
Authors:Cedric Le Gentil, Raphael Falque, Teresa Vidal-Calleja
Abstract:
Over the past decade, lidars have become a cornerstone of robotics state estimation and perception thanks to their ability to provide accurate geometric information about their surroundings in the form of 3D scans. Unfortunately, most of nowadays lidars do not take snapshots of the environment but sweep the environment over a period of time (typically around 100 ms). Such a rolling-shutter-like mechanism introduces motion distortion into the collected lidar scan, thus hindering downstream perception applications. In this paper, we present a novel method for motion distortion correction of lidar data by tightly coupling lidar with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. The motivation of this work is a map-free dynamic object detection based on lidar. The proposed lidar data undistortion method relies on continuous preintegrated of IMU measurements that allow parameterising the sensors' continuous 6-DoF trajectory using solely eleven discrete state variables (biases, initial velocity, and gravity direction). The undistortion consists of feature-based distance minimisation of point-to-line and point-to-plane residuals in a non-linear least-square formulation. Given undistorted geometric data over a short temporal window, the proposed pipeline computes the spatiotemporal normal vector of each of the lidar points. The temporal component of the normals is a proxy for the corresponding point's velocity, therefore allowing for learning-free dynamic object classification without the need for registration in a global reference frame. We demonstrate the soundness of the proposed method and its different components using public datasets and compare them with state-of-the-art lidar-inertial state estimation and dynamic object detection algorithms.
Authors:Md Abdullah-Al Kaiser, Sreetama Sarkar, Peter A. Beerel, Akhilesh R. Jaiswal, Gourav Datta
Abstract:
Current video-based computer vision (CV) applications typically suffer from high energy consumption due to reading and processing all pixels in a frame, regardless of their significance. While previous works have attempted to reduce this energy by skipping input patches or pixels and using feedback from the end task to guide the skipping algorithm, the skipping is not performed during the sensor read phase. As a result, these methods can not optimize the front-end sensor energy. Moreover, they may not be suitable for real-time applications due to the long latency of modern CV networks that are deployed in the back-end. To address this challenge, this paper presents a custom-designed reconfigurable CMOS image sensor (CIS) system that improves energy efficiency by selectively skipping uneventful regions or rows within a frame during the sensor's readout phase, and the subsequent analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) phase. A novel masking algorithm intelligently directs the skipping process in real-time, optimizing both the front-end sensor and back-end neural networks for applications including autonomous driving and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). Our system can also operate in standard mode without skipping, depending on application needs. We evaluate our hardware-algorithm co-design framework on object detection based on BDD100K and ImageNetVID, and gaze estimation based on OpenEDS, achieving up to 53% reduction in front-end sensor energy while maintaining state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy.
Authors:Zitian Wang, Zehao Huang, Yulu Gao, Naiyan Wang, Si Liu
Abstract:
The rise of autonomous vehicles has significantly increased the demand for robust 3D object detection systems. While cameras and LiDAR sensors each offer unique advantages--cameras provide rich texture information and LiDAR offers precise 3D spatial data--relying on a single modality often leads to performance limitations. This paper introduces MV2DFusion, a multi-modal detection framework that integrates the strengths of both worlds through an advanced query-based fusion mechanism. By introducing an image query generator to align with image-specific attributes and a point cloud query generator, MV2DFusion effectively combines modality-specific object semantics without biasing toward one single modality. Then the sparse fusion process can be accomplished based on the valuable object semantics, ensuring efficient and accurate object detection across various scenarios. Our framework's flexibility allows it to integrate with any image and point cloud-based detectors, showcasing its adaptability and potential for future advancements. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate that MV2DFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly excelling in long-range detection scenarios.
Authors:Punnawat Siripathitti, Florent Forest, Olga Fink
Abstract:
Damage to road pavement can develop into cracks, potholes, spallings, and other issues posing significant challenges to the integrity, safety, and durability of the road structure. Detecting and monitoring the evolution of these damages is crucial for maintaining the condition and structural health of road infrastructure. In recent years, researchers have explored various data-driven methods for image-based damage detection in road monitoring applications. The field gained attention with the introduction of the Road Damage Detection Challenge (RDDC2018), encouraging competition in developing object detectors on street-view images from various countries. Leading teams have demonstrated the effectiveness of ensemble models, mostly based on the YOLO and Faster R-CNN series. Data augmentations have also shown benefits in object detection within the computer vision field, including transformations such as random flipping, cropping, cutting out patches, as well as cut-and-pasting object instances. Applying cut-and-paste augmentation to road damages appears to be a promising approach to increase data diversity. However, the standard cut-and-paste technique, which involves sampling an object instance from a random image and pasting it at a random location onto the target image, has demonstrated limited effectiveness for road damage detection. This method overlooks the location of the road and disregards the difference in perspective between the sampled damage and the target image, resulting in unrealistic augmented images. In this work, we propose an improved Cut-and-Paste augmentation technique that is both content-aware (i.e. considers the true location of the road in the image) and perspective-aware (i.e. takes into account the difference in perspective between the injected damage and the target image).
Authors:Junhao Lin, Lei Zhu, Jiaxing Shen, Huazhu Fu, Qing Zhang, Liansheng Wang
Abstract:
With the rapid development of depth sensor, more and more RGB-D videos could be obtained. Identifying the foreground in RGB-D videos is a fundamental and important task. However, the existing salient object detection (SOD) works only focus on either static RGB-D images or RGB videos, ignoring the collaborating of RGB-D and video information. In this paper, we first collect a new annotated RGB-D video SOD (ViDSOD-100) dataset, which contains 100 videos within a total of 9,362 frames, acquired from diverse natural scenes. All the frames in each video are manually annotated to a high-quality saliency annotation. Moreover, we propose a new baseline model, named attentive triple-fusion network (ATF-Net), for RGB-D video salient object detection. Our method aggregates the appearance information from an input RGB image, spatio-temporal information from an estimated motion map, and the geometry information from the depth map by devising three modality-specific branches and a multi-modality integration branch. The modality-specific branches extract the representation of different inputs, while the multi-modality integration branch combines the multi-level modality-specific features by introducing the encoder feature aggregation (MEA) modules and decoder feature aggregation (MDA) modules. The experimental findings conducted on both our newly introduced ViDSOD-100 dataset and the well-established DAVSOD dataset highlight the superior performance of the proposed ATF-Net. This performance enhancement is demonstrated both quantitatively and qualitatively, surpassing the capabilities of current state-of-the-art techniques across various domains, including RGB-D saliency detection, video saliency detection, and video object segmentation. Our data and our code are available at github.com/jhl-Det/RGBD_Video_SOD.
Authors:Junfei Yi, Jianxu Mao, Tengfei Liu, Mingjie Li, Hanyu Gu, Hui Zhang, Xiaojun Chang, Yaonan Wang
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted and effective method for compressing models in object detection tasks. Particularly, feature-based distillation methods have shown remarkable performance. Existing approaches often ignore the uncertainty in the teacher model's knowledge, which stems from data noise and imperfect training. This limits the student model's ability to learn latent knowledge, as it may overly rely on the teacher's imperfect guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel feature-based distillation paradigm with knowledge uncertainty for object detection, termed "Uncertainty Estimation-Discriminative Knowledge Extraction-Knowledge Transfer (UET)", which can seamlessly integrate with existing distillation methods. By leveraging the Monte Carlo dropout technique, we introduce knowledge uncertainty into the training process of the student model, facilitating deeper exploration of latent knowledge. Our method performs effectively during the KD process without requiring intricate structures or extensive computational resources. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach across various distillation strategies, detectors, and backbone architectures. Specifically, following our proposed paradigm, the existing FGD method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, with ResNet50-based GFL achieving 44.1% mAP on the COCO dataset, surpassing the baselines by 3.9%.
Authors:Mustafa Munir, William Avery, Md Mostafijur Rahman, Radu Marculescu
Abstract:
Vision graph neural networks (ViG) offer a new avenue for exploration in computer vision. A major bottleneck in ViGs is the inefficient k-nearest neighbor (KNN) operation used for graph construction. To solve this issue, we propose a new method for designing ViGs, Dynamic Axial Graph Construction (DAGC), which is more efficient than KNN as it limits the number of considered graph connections made within an image. Additionally, we propose a novel CNN-GNN architecture, GreedyViG, which uses DAGC. Extensive experiments show that GreedyViG beats existing ViG, CNN, and ViT architectures in terms of accuracy, GMACs, and parameters on image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation tasks. Our smallest model, GreedyViG-S, achieves 81.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 2.9% higher than Vision GNN and 2.2% higher than Vision HyperGraph Neural Network (ViHGNN), with less GMACs and a similar number of parameters. Our largest model, GreedyViG-B obtains 83.9% top-1 accuracy, 0.2% higher than Vision GNN, with a 66.6% decrease in parameters and a 69% decrease in GMACs. GreedyViG-B also obtains the same accuracy as ViHGNN with a 67.3% decrease in parameters and a 71.3% decrease in GMACs. Our work shows that hybrid CNN-GNN architectures not only provide a new avenue for designing efficient models, but that they can also exceed the performance of current state-of-the-art models.
Authors:Yanbing Bai, Siao Li, Rui-Yang Ju, Zihao Yang, Jinze Yu, Jen-Shiun Chiang
Abstract:
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities seriously affect various aspects of human life. However, traditional methods for detecting and monitoring IUU fishing activities at sea have limitations. Although synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can complement existing vessel detection systems, extracting useful information from SAR images using traditional methods remains a challenge, especially in IUU fishing. This paper proposes a deep learning based fishing activity detection system, which is implemented on the xView3 dataset using six classical object detection models: SSD, RetinaNet, FSAF, FCOS, Faster R-CNN, and Cascade R-CNN. In addition, this work employs different enhancement techniques to improve the performance of the Faster R-CNN model. The experimental results demonstrate that training the Faster R-CNN model using the Online Hard Example Mining (OHEM) strategy increases the Avg-F1 value from 0.212 to 0.216.
Authors:Dominic Maggio, Yun Chang, Nathan Hughes, Matthew Trang, Dan Griffith, Carlyn Dougherty, Eric Cristofalo, Lukas Schmid, Luca Carlone
Abstract:
Modern tools for class-agnostic image segmentation (e.g., SegmentAnything) and open-set semantic understanding (e.g., CLIP) provide unprecedented opportunities for robot perception and mapping. While traditional closed-set metric-semantic maps were restricted to tens or hundreds of semantic classes, we can now build maps with a plethora of objects and countless semantic variations. This leaves us with a fundamental question: what is the right granularity for the objects (and, more generally, for the semantic concepts) the robot has to include in its map representation? While related work implicitly chooses a level of granularity by tuning thresholds for object detection, we argue that such a choice is intrinsically task-dependent. The first contribution of this paper is to propose a task-driven 3D scene understanding problem, where the robot is given a list of tasks in natural language and has to select the granularity and the subset of objects and scene structure to retain in its map that is sufficient to complete the tasks. We show that this problem can be naturally formulated using the Information Bottleneck (IB), an established information-theoretic framework. The second contribution is an algorithm for task-driven 3D scene understanding based on an Agglomerative IB approach, that is able to cluster 3D primitives in the environment into task-relevant objects and regions and executes incrementally. The third contribution is to integrate our task-driven clustering algorithm into a real-time pipeline, named Clio, that constructs a hierarchical 3D scene graph of the environment online using only onboard compute, as the robot explores it. Our final contribution is an extensive experimental campaign showing that Clio not only allows real-time construction of compact open-set 3D scene graphs, but also improves the accuracy of task execution by limiting the map to relevant semantic concepts.
Authors:Duy-Tho Le, Hengcan Shi, Jianfei Cai, Hamid Rezatofighi
Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently gained prominence as powerful deep generative models, demonstrating unmatched performance across various domains. However, their potential in multi-sensor fusion remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce DifFUSER, a novel approach that leverages diffusion models for multi-modal fusion in 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation. Benefiting from the inherent denoising property of diffusion, DifFUSER is able to refine or even synthesize sensor features in case of sensor malfunction, thereby improving the quality of the fused output. In terms of architecture, our DifFUSER blocks are chained together in a hierarchical BiFPN fashion, termed cMini-BiFPN, offering an alternative architecture for latent diffusion. We further introduce a Gated Self-conditioned Modulated (GSM) latent diffusion module together with a Progressive Sensor Dropout Training (PSDT) paradigm, designed to add stronger conditioning to the diffusion process and robustness to sensor failures. Our extensive evaluations on the Nuscenes dataset reveal that DifFUSER not only achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 70.04% mIOU in BEV map segmentation tasks but also competes effectively with leading transformer-based fusion techniques in 3D object detection.
Authors:Changshun Wu, Weicheng He, Chih-Hong Cheng, Xiaowei Huang, Saddek Bensalem
Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OoD) detection techniques for deep neural networks (DNNs) become crucial thanks to their filtering of abnormal inputs, especially when DNNs are used in safety-critical applications and interact with an open and dynamic environment. Nevertheless, integrating OoD detection into state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection DNNs poses significant challenges, partly due to the complexity introduced by the SOTA OoD construction methods, which require the modification of DNN architecture and the introduction of complex loss functions. This paper proposes a simple, yet surprisingly effective, method that requires neither retraining nor architectural change in object detection DNN, called Box Abstraction-based Monitors (BAM). The novelty of BAM stems from using a finite union of convex box abstractions to capture the learned features of objects for in-distribution (ID) data, and an important observation that features from OoD data are more likely to fall outside of these boxes. The union of convex regions within the feature space allows the formation of non-convex and interpretable decision boundaries, overcoming the limitations of VOS-like detectors without sacrificing real-time performance. Experiments integrating BAM into Faster R-CNN-based object detection DNNs demonstrate a considerably improved performance against SOTA OoD detection techniques.
Authors:Madhumitha Sakthi, Louis Kerofsky, Varun Ravi Kumar, Senthil Yogamani
Abstract:
Autonomous driving systems require extensive data collection schemes to cover the diverse scenarios needed for building a robust and safe system. The data volumes are in the order of Exabytes and have to be stored for a long period of time (i.e., more than 10 years of the vehicle's life cycle). Lossless compression doesn't provide sufficient compression ratios, hence, lossy video compression has been explored. It is essential to prove that lossy video compression artifacts do not impact the performance of the perception algorithms. However, there is limited work in this area to provide a solid conclusion. In particular, there is no such work for fisheye cameras, which have high radial distortion and where compression may have higher artifacts. Fisheye cameras are commonly used in automotive systems for 3D object detection task. In this work, we provide the first analysis of the impact of standard video compression codecs on wide FOV fisheye camera images. We demonstrate that the achievable compression with negligible impact depends on the dataset and temporal prediction of the video codec. We propose a radial distortion-aware zonal metric to evaluate the performance of artifacts in fisheye images. In addition, we present a novel method for estimating affine mode parameters of the latest VVC codec, and suggest some areas for improvement in video codecs for the application to fisheye imagery.
Authors:Yiheng Li, Hongyang Li, Zehao Huang, Hong Chang, Naiyan Wang
Abstract:
Multi-modal 3D object detection has exhibited significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods can hardly scale to long-range scenarios due to their reliance on dense 3D features, which substantially escalate computational demands and memory usage. In this paper, we introduce SparseFusion, a novel multi-modal fusion framework fully built upon sparse 3D features to facilitate efficient long-range perception. The core of our method is the Sparse View Transformer module, which selectively lifts regions of interest in 2D image space into the unified 3D space. The proposed module introduces sparsity from both semantic and geometric aspects which only fill grids that foreground objects potentially reside in. Comprehensive experiments have verified the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework in long-range 3D perception. Remarkably, on the long-range Argoverse2 dataset, SparseFusion reduces memory footprint and accelerates the inference by about two times compared to dense detectors. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance with mAP of 41.2% and CDS of 32.1%. The versatility of SparseFusion is also validated in the temporal object detection task and 3D lane detection task. Codes will be released upon acceptance.
Authors:Zhao Wang, Aoxue Li, Fengwei Zhou, Zhenguo Li, Qi Dou
Abstract:
Classical object detectors are incapable of detecting novel class objects that are not encountered before. Regarding this issue, Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) is proposed, which aims to detect the objects in the candidate class list. However, current OVOD models are suffering from overfitting on the base classes, heavily relying on the large-scale extra data, and complex training process. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel framework with Meta prompt and Instance Contrastive learning (MIC) schemes. Firstly, we simulate a novel-class-emerging scenario to help the prompt learner that learns class and background prompts generalize to novel classes. Secondly, we design an instance-level contrastive strategy to promote intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, which benefits generalization of the detector to novel class objects. Without using knowledge distillation, ensemble model or extra training data during detector training, our proposed MIC outperforms previous SOTA methods trained with these complex techniques on LVIS. Most importantly, MIC shows great generalization ability on novel classes, e.g., with $+4.3\%$ and $+1.9\% \ \mathrm{AP}$ improvement compared with previous SOTA on COCO and Objects365, respectively.
Authors:Zhiting Mei, Anushri Dixit, Meghan Booker, Emily Zhou, Mariko Storey-Matsutani, Allen Z. Ren, Ola Shorinwa, Anirudha Majumdar
Abstract:
Rapid advances in perception have enabled large pre-trained models to be used out of the box for transforming high-dimensional, noisy, and partial observations of the world into rich occupancy representations. However, the reliability of these models and consequently their safe integration onto robots remains unknown when deployed in environments unseen during training. To provide safety guarantees, we rigorously quantify the uncertainty of pre-trained perception systems for object detection and scene completion via a novel calibration technique based on conformal prediction. Crucially, this procedure guarantees robustness to distribution shifts in states when perception outputs are used in conjunction with a planner. As a result, the calibrated perception system can be used in combination with any safe planner to provide an end-to-end statistical assurance on safety in unseen environments. We evaluate the resulting approach, Perceive with Confidence (PwC), in simulation and on hardware where a quadruped robot navigates through previously unseen indoor, static environments. These experiments validate the safety assurances for obstacle avoidance provided by PwC. In simulation, our method reduces obstacle misdetection by $70\%$ compared to uncalibrated perception models. While misdetections lead to collisions for baseline methods, our approach consistently achieves $100\%$ safety. We further demonstrate reducing the conservatism of our method without sacrificing safety, achieving a $46\%$ increase in success rates in challenging environments while maintaining $100\%$ safety. In hardware experiments, our method improves empirical safety by $40\%$ over baselines and reduces obstacle misdetection by $93.3\%$. The safety gap widens to $46.7\%$ when navigation speed increases, highlighting our approach's robustness under more demanding conditions.
Authors:Alzayat Saleh, Alex Olsen, Jake Wood, Bronson Philippa, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi
Abstract:
Shadows significantly hinder computer vision tasks in outdoor environments, particularly in field robotics, where varying lighting conditions complicate object detection and localisation. We present FieldNet, a novel deep learning framework for real-time shadow removal, optimised for resource-constrained hardware. FieldNet introduces a probabilistic enhancement module and a novel loss function to address challenges of inconsistent shadow boundary supervision and artefact generation, achieving enhanced accuracy and simplicity without requiring shadow masks during inference. Trained on a dataset of 10,000 natural images augmented with synthetic shadows, FieldNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets (ISTD, ISTD+, SRD), with up to $9$x speed improvements (66 FPS on Nvidia 2080Ti) and superior shadow removal quality (PSNR: 38.67, SSIM: 0.991). Real-world case studies in precision agriculture robotics demonstrate the practical impact of FieldNet in enhancing weed detection accuracy. These advancements establish FieldNet as a robust, efficient solution for real-time vision tasks in field robotics and beyond.
Authors:Jiajia Li, Dong Chen, Xunyuan Yin, Zhaojian Li
Abstract:
Effective weed control plays a crucial role in optimizing crop yield and enhancing agricultural product quality. However, the reliance on herbicide application not only poses a critical threat to the environment but also promotes the emergence of resistant weeds. Fortunately, recent advances in precision weed management enabled by ML and DL provide a sustainable alternative. Despite great progress, existing algorithms are mainly developed based on supervised learning approaches, which typically demand large-scale datasets with manual-labeled annotations, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. As such, label-efficient learning methods, especially semi-supervised learning, have gained increased attention in the broader domain of computer vision and have demonstrated promising performance. These methods aim to utilize a small number of labeled data samples along with a great number of unlabeled samples to develop high-performing models comparable to the supervised learning counterpart trained on a large amount of labeled data samples. In this study, we assess the effectiveness of a semi-supervised learning framework for multi-class weed detection, employing two well-known object detection frameworks, namely FCOS and Faster-RCNN. Specifically, we evaluate a generalized student-teacher framework with an improved pseudo-label generation module to produce reliable pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. To enhance generalization, an ensemble student network is employed to facilitate the training process. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to achieve approximately 76\% and 96\% detection accuracy as the supervised methods with only 10\% of labeled data in CottenWeedDet3 and CottonWeedDet12, respectively. We offer access to the source code, contributing a valuable resource for ongoing semi-supervised learning research in weed detection and beyond.
Authors:Zhengqing Zang, Chenyu Lin, Chenwei Tang, Tao Wang, Jiancheng Lv
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Existing object detection models are mainly trained on large-scale labeled datasets. However, annotating data for novel aerial object classes is expensive since it is time-consuming and may require expert knowledge. Thus, it is desirable to study label-efficient object detection methods on aerial images. In this work, we propose a zero-shot method for aerial object detection named visual Description Regularization, or DescReg. Concretely, we identify the weak semantic-visual correlation of the aerial objects and aim to address the challenge with prior descriptions of their visual appearance. Instead of directly encoding the descriptions into class embedding space which suffers from the representation gap problem, we propose to infuse the prior inter-class visual similarity conveyed in the descriptions into the embedding learning. The infusion process is accomplished with a newly designed similarity-aware triplet loss which incorporates structured regularization on the representation space. We conduct extensive experiments with three challenging aerial object detection datasets, including DIOR, xView, and DOTA. The results demonstrate that DescReg significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art ZSD methods with complex projection designs and generative frameworks, e.g., DescReg outperforms best reported ZSD method on DIOR by 4.5 mAP on unseen classes and 8.1 in HM. We further show the generalizability of DescReg by integrating it into generative ZSD methods as well as varying the detection architecture.
Authors:Wen-Jia Tang, Xiao Liu, Peng Gao, Fei Wang, Ru-Yue Yuan
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Manually-designed network architectures for thermal infrared pedestrian tracking (TIR-PT) require substantial effort from human experts. AlexNet and ResNet are widely used as backbone networks in TIR-PT applications. However, these architectures were originally designed for image classification and object detection tasks, which are less complex than the challenges presented by TIR-PT. This paper makes an early attempt to search an optimal network architecture for TIR-PT automatically, employing single-bottom and dual-bottom cells as basic search units and incorporating eight operation candidates within the search space. To expedite the search process, a random channel selection strategy is employed prior to assessing operation candidates. Classification, batch hard triplet, and center loss are jointly used to retrain the searched architecture. The outcome is a high-performance network architecture that is both parameter- and computation-efficient. Extensive experiments proved the effectiveness of the automated method.
Authors:Chun-Lin Ji, Tao Yu, Peng Gao, Fei Wang, Ru-Yue Yuan
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Object detection, a crucial aspect of computer vision, has seen significant advancements in accuracy and robustness. Despite these advancements, practical applications still face notable challenges, primarily the inaccurate detection or missed detection of small objects. In this paper, we propose YOLO-TLA, an advanced object detection model building on YOLOv5. We first introduce an additional detection layer for small objects in the neck network pyramid architecture, thereby producing a feature map of a larger scale to discern finer features of small objects. Further, we integrate the C3CrossCovn module into the backbone network. This module uses sliding window feature extraction, which effectively minimizes both computational demand and the number of parameters, rendering the model more compact. Additionally, we have incorporated a global attention mechanism into the backbone network. This mechanism combines the channel information with global information to create a weighted feature map. This feature map is tailored to highlight the attributes of the object of interest, while effectively ignoring irrelevant details. In comparison to the baseline YOLOv5s model, our newly developed YOLO-TLA model has shown considerable improvements on the MS COCO validation dataset, with increases of 4.6% in mAP@0.5 and 4% in mAP@0.5:0.95, all while keeping the model size compact at 9.49M parameters. Further extending these improvements to the YOLOv5m model, the enhanced version exhibited a 1.7% and 1.9% increase in mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95, respectively, with a total of 27.53M parameters. These results validate the YOLO-TLA model's efficient and effective performance in small object detection, achieving high accuracy with fewer parameters and computational demands.
Authors:Shihao Shen, Louis Kerofsky, Varun Ravi Kumar, Senthil Yogamani
Abstract:
Dense 3D reconstruction has many applications in automated driving including automated annotation validation, multimodal data augmentation, providing ground truth annotations for systems lacking LiDAR, as well as enhancing auto-labeling accuracy. LiDAR provides highly accurate but sparse depth, whereas camera images enable estimation of dense depth but noisy particularly at long ranges. In this paper, we harness the strengths of both sensors and propose a multimodal 3D scene reconstruction using a framework combining neural implicit surfaces and radiance fields. In particular, our method estimates dense and accurate 3D structures and creates an implicit map representation based on signed distance fields, which can be further rendered into RGB images, and depth maps. A mesh can be extracted from the learned signed distance field and culled based on occlusion. Dynamic objects are efficiently filtered on the fly during sampling using 3D object detection models. We demonstrate qualitative and quantitative results on challenging automotive scenes.
Authors:Chaoqun Wang, Yiran Qin, Zijian Kang, Ningning Ma, Ruimao Zhang
Abstract:
Recent camera-based 3D object detection is limited by the precision of transforming from image to 3D feature spaces, as well as the accuracy of object localization within the 3D space. This paper aims to address such a fundamental problem of camera-based 3D object detection: How to effectively learn depth information for accurate feature lifting and object localization. Different from previous methods which directly predict depth distributions by using a supervised estimation model, we propose a cascade framework consisting of two depth-aware learning paradigms. First, a depth estimation (DE) scheme leverages relative depth information to realize the effective feature lifting from 2D to 3D spaces. Furthermore, a depth calibration (DC) scheme introduces depth reconstruction to further adjust the 3D object localization perturbation along the depth axis. In practice, the DE is explicitly realized by using both the absolute and relative depth optimization loss to promote the precision of depth prediction, while the capability of DC is implicitly embedded into the detection Transformer through a depth denoising mechanism in the training phase. The entire model training is accomplished through an end-to-end manner. We propose a baseline detector and evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal with +2.2%/+2.7% NDS/mAP improvements on NuScenes benchmark, and gain a comparable performance with 55.9%/45.7% NDS/mAP. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate its generality based on various detectors with about +2% NDS improvements.
Authors:Peter Hönig, Stefan Thalhammer, Jean-Baptiste Weibel, Matthias Hirschmanner, Markus Vincze
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Recent advances in machine learning have greatly benefited object detection and 6D pose estimation. However, textureless and metallic objects still pose a significant challenge due to few visual cues and the texture bias of CNNs. To address his issue, we propose a strategy for inducing a shape bias to CNN training. In particular, by randomizing textures applied to object surfaces during data rendering, we create training data without consistent textural cues. This methodology allows for seamless integration into existing data rendering engines, and results in negligible computational overhead for data rendering and network training. Our findings demonstrate that the shape bias we induce via randomized texturing, improves over existing approaches using style transfer. We evaluate with three detectors and two pose estimators. For the most recent object detector and for pose estimation in general, estimation accuracy improves for textureless and metallic objects. Additionally we show that our approach increases the pose estimation accuracy in the presence of image noise and strong illumination changes. Code and datasets are publicly available at github.com/hoenigpeter/randomized_texturing.
Authors:Chuhao Liu, Ke Wang, Jieqi Shi, Zhijian Qiao, Shaojie Shen
Abstract:
Semantic mapping based on the supervised object detectors is sensitive to image distribution. In real-world environments, the object detection and segmentation performance can lead to a major drop, preventing the use of semantic mapping in a wider domain. On the other hand, the development of vision-language foundation models demonstrates a strong zero-shot transferability across data distribution. It provides an opportunity to construct generalizable instance-aware semantic maps. Hence, this work explores how to boost instance-aware semantic mapping from object detection generated from foundation models. We propose a probabilistic label fusion method to predict close-set semantic classes from open-set label measurements. An instance refinement module merges the over-segmented instances caused by inconsistent segmentation. We integrate all the modules into a unified semantic mapping system. Reading a sequence of RGB-D input, our work incrementally reconstructs an instance-aware semantic map. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of our method in ScanNet and SceneNN datasets. Our method achieves 40.3 mean average precision (mAP) on the ScanNet semantic instance segmentation task. It outperforms the traditional semantic mapping method significantly.
Authors:Layth Hamad, Muhammad Asif Khan, Hamid Menouar, Fethi Filali, Amr Mohamed
Abstract:
This paper presents Haris, an advanced autonomous mobile robot system for tracking the location of vehicles in crowded car parks using license plate recognition. The system employs simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for autonomous navigation and precise mapping of the parking area, eliminating the need for GPS dependency. In addition, the system utilizes a sophisticated framework using computer vision techniques for object detection and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) for reading and associating license plate numbers with location data. This information is subsequently synchronized with a back-end service and made accessible to users via a user-friendly mobile app, offering effortless vehicle location and alleviating congestion within the parking facility. The proposed system has the potential to improve the management of short-term large outdoor parking areas in crowded places such as sports stadiums. The demo of the robot can be found on https://youtu.be/ZkTCM35fxa0?si=QjggJuN7M1o3oifx.
Authors:Jialu Zhang, Xiaoying Yang, Wentao He, Jianfeng Ren, Qian Zhang, Titian Zhao, Ruibin Bai, Xiangjian He, Jiang Liu
Abstract:
Object detection in aerial imagery presents a significant challenge due to large scale variations among objects. This paper proposes an evolutionary reinforcement learning agent, integrated within a coarse-to-fine object detection framework, to optimize the scale for more effective detection of objects in such images. Specifically, a set of patches potentially containing objects are first generated. A set of rewards measuring the localization accuracy, the accuracy of predicted labels, and the scale consistency among nearby patches are designed in the agent to guide the scale optimization. The proposed scale-consistency reward ensures similar scales for neighboring objects of the same category. Furthermore, a spatial-semantic attention mechanism is designed to exploit the spatial semantic relations between patches. The agent employs the proximal policy optimization strategy in conjunction with the evolutionary strategy, effectively utilizing both the current patch status and historical experience embedded in the agent. The proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets for object detection on drone imagery. It significantly outperforms all the compared methods.
Authors:Lingyi Hong, Wei Zhang, Shuyong Gao, Hong Lu, WenQiang Zhang
Abstract:
Unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) aims at detecting the primary objects in a given video sequence without any human interposing. Most existing methods rely on two-stream architectures that separately encode the appearance and motion information before fusing them to identify the target and generate object masks. However, this pipeline is computationally expensive and can lead to suboptimal performance due to the difficulty of fusing the two modalities properly. In this paper, we propose a novel UVOS model called SimulFlow that simultaneously performs feature extraction and target identification, enabling efficient and effective unsupervised video object segmentation. Concretely, we design a novel SimulFlow Attention mechanism to bridege the image and motion by utilizing the flexibility of attention operation, where coarse masks predicted from fused feature at each stage are used to constrain the attention operation within the mask area and exclude the impact of noise. Because of the bidirectional information flow between visual and optical flow features in SimulFlow Attention, no extra hand-designed fusing module is required and we only adopt a light decoder to obtain the final prediction. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results. Our proposed approach not only outperforms existing methods but also addresses the computational complexity and fusion difficulties caused by two-stream architectures. Our models achieve 87.4% J & F on DAVIS-16 with the highest speed (63.7 FPS on a 3090) and the lowest parameters (13.7 M). Our SimulFlow also obtains competitive results on video salient object detection datasets.
Authors:Yingjie Niu, Ming Ding, Keisuke Fujii, Kento Ohtani, Alexander Carballo, Kazuya Takeda
Abstract:
Traffic accidents frequently lead to fatal injuries, contributing to over 50 million deaths until 2023. To mitigate driving hazards and ensure personal safety, it is crucial to assist vehicles in anticipating important objects during travel. Previous research on important object detection primarily assessed the importance of individual participants, treating them as independent entities and frequently overlooking the connections between these participants. Unfortunately, this approach has proven less effective in detecting important objects in complex scenarios. In response, we introduce Driving scene Relationship self-Understanding transformer (DRUformer), designed to enhance the important object detection task. The DRUformer is a transformer-based multi-modal important object detection model that takes into account the relationships between all the participants in the driving scenario. Recognizing that driving intention also significantly affects the detection of important objects during driving, we have incorporated a module for embedding driving intention. To assess the performance of our approach, we conducted a comparative experiment on the DRAMA dataset, pitting our model against other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. The results demonstrated a noteworthy 16.2\% improvement in mIoU and a substantial 12.3\% boost in ACC compared to SOTA methods. Furthermore, we conducted a qualitative analysis of our model's ability to detect important objects across different road scenarios and classes, highlighting its effectiveness in diverse contexts. Finally, we conducted various ablation studies to assess the efficiency of the proposed modules in our DRUformer model.
Authors:Se-Ho Kim, Inyong Koo, Inyoung Lee, Byeongjun Park, Changick Kim
Abstract:
Denoising diffusion models show remarkable performances in generative tasks, and their potential applications in perception tasks are gaining interest. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework named DiffRef3D which adopts the diffusion process on 3D object detection with point clouds for the first time. Specifically, we formulate the proposal refinement stage of two-stage 3D object detectors as a conditional diffusion process. During training, DiffRef3D gradually adds noise to the residuals between proposals and target objects, then applies the noisy residuals to proposals to generate hypotheses. The refinement module utilizes these hypotheses to denoise the noisy residuals and generate accurate box predictions. In the inference phase, DiffRef3D generates initial hypotheses by sampling noise from a Gaussian distribution as residuals and refines the hypotheses through iterative steps. DiffRef3D is a versatile proposal refinement framework that consistently improves the performance of existing 3D object detection models. We demonstrate the significance of DiffRef3D through extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark. Code will be available.
Authors:Chenyu Lin, Yusheng He, Zhengqing Zang, Chenwei Tang, Tao Wang, Jiancheng Lv
Abstract:
This report outlines our team's participation in VCL Challenges B Continual Test_time Adaptation, focusing on the technical details of our approach. Our primary focus is Testtime Adaptation using bi_level adaptations, encompassing image_level and detector_level adaptations. At the image level, we employ adjustable parameterbased image filters, while at the detector level, we leverage adjustable parameterbased mean teacher modules. Ultimately, through the utilization of these bi_level adaptations, we have achieved a remarkable 38.3% mAP on the target domain of the test set within VCL Challenges B. It is worth noting that the minimal drop in mAP, is mearly 4.2%, and the overall performance is 32.5% mAP.
Authors:Alessandro Saviolo, Pratyaksh Rao, Vivek Radhakrishnan, Jiuhong Xiao, Giuseppe Loianno
Abstract:
Visual control enables quadrotors to adaptively navigate using real-time sensory data, bridging perception with action. Yet, challenges persist, including generalization across scenarios, maintaining reliability, and ensuring real-time responsiveness. This paper introduces a perception framework grounded in foundation models for universal object detection and tracking, moving beyond specific training categories. Integral to our approach is a multi-layered tracker integrated with the foundation detector, ensuring continuous target visibility, even when faced with motion blur, abrupt light shifts, and occlusions. Complementing this, we introduce a model-free controller tailored for resilient quadrotor visual tracking. Our system operates efficiently on limited hardware, relying solely on an onboard camera and an inertial measurement unit. Through extensive validation in diverse challenging indoor and outdoor environments, we demonstrate our system's effectiveness and adaptability. In conclusion, our research represents a step forward in quadrotor visual tracking, moving from task-specific methods to more versatile and adaptable operations.
Authors:Qiang Liu, Yongjie Xue, Yuru Zhang, Dawei Chen, Kyungtae Han
Abstract:
Cooperative perception is the key approach to augment the perception of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) toward safe autonomous driving. However, it is challenging to achieve real-time perception sharing for hundreds of CAVs in large-scale deployment scenarios. In this paper, we propose AdaMap, a new high-scalable real-time cooperative perception system, which achieves assured percentile end-to-end latency under time-varying network dynamics. To achieve AdaMap, we design a tightly coupled data plane and control plane. In the data plane, we design a new hybrid localization module to dynamically switch between object detection and tracking, and a novel point cloud representation module to adaptively compress and reconstruct the point cloud of detected objects. In the control plane, we design a new graph-based object selection method to un-select excessive multi-viewed point clouds of objects, and a novel approximated gradient descent algorithm to optimize the representation of point clouds. We implement AdaMap on an emulation platform, including realistic vehicle and server computation and a simulated 5G network, under a 150-CAV trace collected from the CARLA simulator. The evaluation results show that, AdaMap reduces up to 49x average transmission data size at the cost of 0.37 reconstruction loss, as compared to state-of-the-art solutions, which verifies its high scalability, adaptability, and computation efficiency.
Authors:Yiran Qin, Chaoqun Wang, Zijian Kang, Ningning Ma, Zhen Li, Ruimao Zhang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel training strategy called SupFusion, which provides an auxiliary feature level supervision for effective LiDAR-Camera fusion and significantly boosts detection performance. Our strategy involves a data enhancement method named Polar Sampling, which densifies sparse objects and trains an assistant model to generate high-quality features as the supervision. These features are then used to train the LiDAR-Camera fusion model, where the fusion feature is optimized to simulate the generated high-quality features. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective deep fusion module, which contiguously gains superior performance compared with previous fusion methods with SupFusion strategy. In such a manner, our proposal shares the following advantages. Firstly, SupFusion introduces auxiliary feature-level supervision which could boost LiDAR-Camera detection performance without introducing extra inference costs. Secondly, the proposed deep fusion could continuously improve the detector's abilities. Our proposed SupFusion and deep fusion module is plug-and-play, we make extensive experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness. Specifically, we gain around 2% 3D mAP improvements on KITTI benchmark based on multiple LiDAR-Camera 3D detectors.
Authors:Cheng Shi, Sibei Yang
Abstract:
Vision-language models such as CLIP have boosted the performance of open-vocabulary object detection, where the detector is trained on base categories but required to detect novel categories. Existing methods leverage CLIP's strong zero-shot recognition ability to align object-level embeddings with textual embeddings of categories. However, we observe that using CLIP for object-level alignment results in overfitting to base categories, i.e., novel categories most similar to base categories have particularly poor performance as they are recognized as similar base categories. In this paper, we first identify that the loss of critical fine-grained local image semantics hinders existing methods from attaining strong base-to-novel generalization. Then, we propose Early Dense Alignment (EDA) to bridge the gap between generalizable local semantics and object-level prediction. In EDA, we use object-level supervision to learn the dense-level rather than object-level alignment to maintain the local fine-grained semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance to competing approaches under the same strict setting and without using external training resources, i.e., improving the +8.4% novel box AP50 on COCO and +3.9% rare mask AP on LVIS.
Authors:Shiva Hanifi, Elisa Maiettini, Maria Lombardi, Lorenzo Natale
Abstract:
This research report explores the role of eye gaze in human-robot interactions and proposes a learning system for detecting objects gazed at by humans using solely visual feedback. The system leverages face detection, human attention prediction, and online object detection, and it allows the robot to perceive and interpret human gaze accurately, paving the way for establishing joint attention with human partners. Additionally, a novel dataset collected with the humanoid robot iCub is introduced, comprising over 22,000 images from ten participants gazing at different annotated objects. This dataset serves as a benchmark for the field of human gaze estimation in table-top human-robot interaction (HRI) contexts. In this work, we use it to evaluate the performance of the proposed pipeline and examine the performance of each component. Furthermore, the developed system is deployed on the iCub, and a supplementary video showcases its functionality. The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach as a first step to enhance social awareness and responsiveness in social robotics, as well as improve assistance and support in collaborative scenarios, promoting efficient human-robot collaboration.
Authors:Tobias Uelwer, Jan Robine, Stefan Sylvius Wagner, Marc Höftmann, Eric Upschulte, Sebastian Konietzny, Maike Behrendt, Stefan Harmeling
Abstract:
Learning meaningful representations is at the heart of many tasks in the field of modern machine learning. Recently, a lot of methods were introduced that allow learning of image representations without supervision. These representations can then be used in downstream tasks like classification or object detection. The quality of these representations is close to supervised learning, while no labeled images are needed. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of these methods in a unified notation, points out similarities and differences of these methods, and proposes a taxonomy which sets these methods in relation to each other. Furthermore, our survey summarizes the most-recent experimental results reported in the literature in form of a meta-study. Our survey is intended as a starting point for researchers and practitioners who want to dive into the field of representation learning.
Authors:Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Mingbao Lin, Jihao Yin, Baochang Zhang, Xianbin Cao
Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on developing knowledge distillation (KD) for compact 3D detectors. We observe that off-the-shelf KD methods manifest their efficacy only when the teacher model and student counterpart share similar intermediate feature representations. This might explain why they are less effective in building extreme-compact 3D detectors where significant representation disparity arises due primarily to the intrinsic sparsity and irregularity in 3D point clouds. This paper presents a novel representation disparity-aware distillation (RDD) method to address the representation disparity issue and reduce performance gap between compact students and over-parameterized teachers. This is accomplished by building our RDD from an innovative perspective of information bottleneck (IB), which can effectively minimize the disparity of proposal region pairs from student and teacher in features and logits. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superiority of our RDD over existing KD methods. For example, our RDD increases mAP of CP-Voxel-S to 57.1% on nuScenes dataset, which even surpasses teacher performance while taking up only 42% FLOPs.
Authors:Changjian Chen, Yukai Guo, Fengyuan Tian, Shilong Liu, Weikai Yang, Zhaowei Wang, Jing Wu, Hang Su, Hanspeter Pfister, Shixia Liu
Abstract:
Existing model evaluation tools mainly focus on evaluating classification models, leaving a gap in evaluating more complex models, such as object detection. In this paper, we develop an open-source visual analysis tool, Uni-Evaluator, to support a unified model evaluation for classification, object detection, and instance segmentation in computer vision. The key idea behind our method is to formulate both discrete and continuous predictions in different tasks as unified probability distributions. Based on these distributions, we develop 1) a matrix-based visualization to provide an overview of model performance; 2) a table visualization to identify the problematic data subsets where the model performs poorly; 3) a grid visualization to display the samples of interest. These visualizations work together to facilitate the model evaluation from a global overview to individual samples. Two case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Uni-Evaluator in evaluating model performance and making informed improvements.
Authors:Mohsen Gholami, Mohammad Akbari, Xinglu Wang, Behnam Kamranian, Yong Zhang
Abstract:
This paper addresses the problem of ranking pre-trained models for object detection and image classification. Selecting the best pre-trained model by fine-tuning is an expensive and time-consuming task. Previous works have proposed transferability estimation based on features extracted by the pre-trained models. We argue that quantifying whether the target dataset is in-distribution (IND) or out-of-distribution (OOD) for the pre-trained model is an important factor in the transferability estimation. To this end, we propose ETran, an energy-based transferability assessment metric, which includes three scores: 1) energy score, 2) classification score, and 3) regression score. We use energy-based models to determine whether the target dataset is OOD or IND for the pre-trained model. In contrast to the prior works, ETran is applicable to a wide range of tasks including classification, regression, and object detection (classification+regression). This is the first work that proposes transferability estimation for object detection task. Our extensive experiments on four benchmarks and two tasks show that ETran outperforms previous works on object detection and classification benchmarks by an average of 21% and 12%, respectively, and achieves SOTA in transferability assessment.
Authors:Jing Wu, Jennifer Hobbs, Naira Hovakimyan
Abstract:
Contrastive learning models based on Siamese structure have demonstrated remarkable performance in self-supervised learning. Such a success of contrastive learning relies on two conditions, a sufficient number of positive pairs and adequate variations between them. If the conditions are not met, these frameworks will lack semantic contrast and be fragile on overfitting. To address these two issues, we propose Hallucinator that could efficiently generate additional positive samples for further contrast. The Hallucinator is differentiable and creates new data in the feature space. Thus, it is optimized directly with the pre-training task and introduces nearly negligible computation. Moreover, we reduce the mutual information of hallucinated pairs and smooth them through non-linear operations. This process helps avoid over-confident contrastive learning models during the training and achieves more transformation-invariant feature embeddings. Remarkably, we empirically prove that the proposed Hallucinator generalizes well to various contrastive learning models, including MoCoV1&V2, SimCLR and SimSiam. Under the linear classification protocol, a stable accuracy gain is achieved, ranging from 0.3% to 3.0% on CIFAR10&100, Tiny ImageNet, STL-10 and ImageNet. The improvement is also observed in transferring pre-train encoders to the downstream tasks, including object detection and segmentation.
Authors:Ning Gao, Qiying Huang, Cen Li, Shi Jin, Michail Matthaiou
Abstract:
Wireless networks are vulnerable to physical layer spoofing attacks due to the wireless broadcast nature, thus, integrating communications and security (ICAS) is urgently needed for 6G endogenous security. In this letter, we propose an environment semantics enabled physical layer authentication network based on deep learning, namely EsaNet, to authenticate the spoofing from the underlying wireless protocol. Specifically, the frequency independent wireless channel fingerprint (FiFP) is extracted from the channel state information (CSI) of a massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system based on environment semantics knowledge. Then, we transform the received signal into a two-dimensional red green blue (RGB) image and apply the you only look once (YOLO), a single-stage object detection network, to quickly capture the FiFP. Next, a lightweight classification network is designed to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate users. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed EsaNet can effectively detect physical layer spoofing attacks and is robust in time-varying wireless environments.
Authors:Sambit Mohapatra, Senthil Yogamani, Varun Ravi Kumar, Stefan Milz, Heinrich Gotzig, Patrick Mäder
Abstract:
LiDAR is crucial for robust 3D scene perception in autonomous driving. LiDAR perception has the largest body of literature after camera perception. However, multi-task learning across tasks like detection, segmentation, and motion estimation using LiDAR remains relatively unexplored, especially on automotive-grade embedded platforms. We present a real-time multi-task convolutional neural network for LiDAR-based object detection, semantics, and motion segmentation. The unified architecture comprises a shared encoder and task-specific decoders, enabling joint representation learning. We propose a novel Semantic Weighting and Guidance (SWAG) module to transfer semantic features for improved object detection selectively. Our heterogeneous training scheme combines diverse datasets and exploits complementary cues between tasks. The work provides the first embedded implementation unifying these key perception tasks from LiDAR point clouds achieving 3ms latency on the embedded NVIDIA Xavier platform. We achieve state-of-the-art results for two tasks, semantic and motion segmentation, and close to state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection. By maximizing hardware efficiency and leveraging multi-task synergies, our method delivers an accurate and efficient solution tailored for real-world automated driving deployment. Qualitative results can be seen at https://youtu.be/H-hWRzv2lIY.
Authors:Chi-Chih Chang, Wei-Cheng Lin, Pei-Shuo Wang, Sheng-Feng Yu, Yu-Chen Lu, Kuan-Cheng Lin, Kai-Chiang Wu
Abstract:
In this work, we present an efficient and quantization-aware panoptic driving perception model (Q- YOLOP) for object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation, in the context of autonomous driving. Our model employs the Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (ELAN) as its backbone and task-specific heads for each task. We employ a four-stage training process that includes pretraining on the BDD100K dataset, finetuning on both the BDD100K and iVS datasets, and quantization-aware training (QAT) on BDD100K. During the training process, we use powerful data augmentation techniques, such as random perspective and mosaic, and train the model on a combination of the BDD100K and iVS datasets. Both strategies enhance the model's generalization capabilities. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance with an mAP@0.5 of 0.622 for object detection and an mIoU of 0.612 for segmentation, while maintaining low computational and memory requirements.
Authors:Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Xianbin Cao, Li'an Zhuo, Baochang Zhang, Tian Wang, Guodong Guo
Abstract:
Neural architecture search (NAS) proves to be among the effective approaches for many tasks by generating an application-adaptive neural architecture, which is still challenged by high computational cost and memory consumption. At the same time, 1-bit convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with binary weights and activations show their potential for resource-limited embedded devices. One natural approach is to use 1-bit CNNs to reduce the computation and memory cost of NAS by taking advantage of the strengths of each in a unified framework, while searching the 1-bit CNNs is more challenging due to the more complicated processes involved. In this paper, we introduce Discrepant Child-Parent Neural Architecture Search (DCP-NAS) to efficiently search 1-bit CNNs, based on a new framework of searching the 1-bit model (Child) under the supervision of a real-valued model (Parent). Particularly, we first utilize a Parent model to calculate a tangent direction, based on which the tangent propagation method is introduced to search the optimized 1-bit Child. We further observe a coupling relationship between the weights and architecture parameters existing in such differentiable frameworks. To address the issue, we propose a decoupled optimization method to search an optimized architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DCP-NAS achieves much better results than prior arts on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. In particular, the backbones achieved by our DCP-NAS achieve strong generalization performance on person re-identification and object detection.
Authors:Wei Su, Peihan Miao, Huanzhang Dou, Yongjian Fu, Xi Li
Abstract:
Different from universal object detection, referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to locate specific objects referred to by natural language expressions. The expression provides high-level concepts of relevant visual and contextual patterns, which vary significantly with different expressions and account for only a few of those encoded in the REC model. This leads us to a question: do we really need the entire network with a fixed structure for various referring expressions? Ideally, given an expression, only expression-relevant components of the REC model are required. These components should be small in number as each expression only contains very few visual and contextual clues. This paper explores the adaptation between expressions and REC models for dynamic inference. Concretely, we propose a neat yet efficient framework named Language Adaptive Dynamic Subnets (LADS), which can extract language-adaptive subnets from the REC model conditioned on the referring expressions. By using the compact subnet, the inference can be more economical and efficient. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and Referit show that the proposed method achieves faster inference speed and higher accuracy against state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors:Julian Moosmann, Marco Giordano, Christian Vogt, Michele Magno
Abstract:
This paper introduces a highly flexible, quantized, memory-efficient, and ultra-lightweight object detection network, called TinyissimoYOLO. It aims to enable object detection on microcontrollers in the power domain of milliwatts, with less than 0.5MB memory available for storing convolutional neural network (CNN) weights. The proposed quantized network architecture with 422k parameters, enables real-time object detection on embedded microcontrollers, and it has been evaluated to exploit CNN accelerators. In particular, the proposed network has been deployed on the MAX78000 microcontroller achieving high frame-rate of up to 180fps and an ultra-low energy consumption of only 196μJ per inference with an inference efficiency of more than 106 MAC/Cycle. TinyissimoYOLO can be trained for any multi-object detection. However, considering the small network size, adding object detection classes will increase the size and memory consumption of the network, thus object detection with up to 3 classes is demonstrated. Furthermore, the network is trained using quantization-aware training and deployed with 8-bit quantization on different microcontrollers, such as STM32H7A3, STM32L4R9, Apollo4b and on the MAX78000's CNN accelerator. Performance evaluations are presented in this paper.
Authors:Takahiro Shindo, Taiju Watanabe, Kein Yamada, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract:
In recent years, video analysis using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely used, due to the remarkable development of image recognition technology using deep learning. In 2019, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has started standardization of Video Coding for Machines (VCM) as a video coding technology for image recognition. In the framework of VCM, both higher image recognition accuracy and video compression performance are required. In this paper, we propose an extention scheme of video coding for object detection using Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Unlike video for human vision, video used for object detection does not require a large image size or high contrast. Since downsampling of the image can reduce the amount of information to be transmitted. Due to the decrease in image contrast, entropy of the image becomes smaller. Therefore, in our proposed scheme, the original image is reduced in size and contrast, then coded with VVC encoder to achieve high compression performance. Then, the output image from the VVC decoder is restored to its original image size using the bicubic method. Experimental results show that the proposed video coding scheme achieves better coding performance than regular VVC in terms of object detection accuracy.
Authors:Feng Gao, Jiaxu Leng, Gan Ji, Xinbo Gao
Abstract:
DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and its variants (DETRs) achieved impressive performance in general object detection. However, in crowded pedestrian detection, the performance of DETRs is still unsatisfactory due to the inappropriate sample selection method which results in more false positives. To settle the issue, we propose a simple but effective sample selection method for DETRs, Sample Selection for Crowded Pedestrians (SSCP), which consists of the constraint-guided label assignment scheme (CGLA) and the utilizability-aware focal loss (UAFL). Our core idea is to select learnable samples for DETRs and adaptively regulate the loss weights of samples based on their utilizability. Specifically, in CGLA, we proposed a new cost function to ensure that only learnable positive training samples are retained and the rest are negative training samples. Further, considering the utilizability of samples, we designed UAFL to adaptively assign different loss weights to learnable positive samples depending on their gradient ratio and IoU. Experimental results show that the proposed SSCP effectively improves the baselines without introducing any overhead in inference. Especially, Iter Deformable DETR is improved to 39.7(-2.0)% MR on Crowdhuman and 31.8(-0.4)% MR on Citypersons.
Authors:Chong Yu, Tao Chen, Zhongxue Gan
Abstract:
Adversarial attack is commonly regarded as a huge threat to neural networks because of misleading behavior. This paper presents an opposite perspective: adversarial attacks can be harnessed to improve neural models if amended correctly. Unlike traditional adversarial defense or adversarial training schemes that aim to improve the adversarial robustness, the proposed adversarial amendment (AdvAmd) method aims to improve the original accuracy level of neural models on benign samples. We thoroughly analyze the distribution mismatch between the benign and adversarial samples. This distribution mismatch and the mutual learning mechanism with the same learning ratio applied in prior art defense strategies is the main cause leading the accuracy degradation for benign samples. The proposed AdvAmd is demonstrated to steadily heal the accuracy degradation and even leads to a certain accuracy boost of common neural models on benign classification, object detection, and segmentation tasks. The efficacy of the AdvAmd is contributed by three key components: mediate samples (to reduce the influence of distribution mismatch with a fine-grained amendment), auxiliary batch norm (to solve the mutual learning mechanism and the smoother judgment surface), and AdvAmd loss (to adjust the learning ratios according to different attack vulnerabilities) through quantitative and ablation experiments.
Authors:Bum Jun Kim, Hyeyeon Choi, Hyeonah Jang, Sang Woo Kim
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) that model an image as a sequence of partitioned patches have shown notable performance in diverse vision tasks. Because partitioning patches eliminates the image structure, to reflect the order of patches, ViTs utilize an explicit component called positional embedding. However, we claim that the use of positional embedding does not simply guarantee the order-awareness of ViT. To support this claim, we analyze the actual behavior of ViTs using an effective receptive field. We demonstrate that during training, ViT acquires an understanding of patch order from the positional embedding that is trained to be a specific pattern. Based on this observation, we propose explicitly adding a Gaussian attention bias that guides the positional embedding to have the corresponding pattern from the beginning of training. We evaluated the influence of Gaussian attention bias on the performance of ViTs in several image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation experiments. The results showed that proposed method not only facilitates ViTs to understand images but also boosts their performance on various datasets, including ImageNet, COCO 2017, and ADE20K.
Authors:Nikola ZubiÄ, Daniel Gehrig, Mathias Gehrig, Davide Scaramuzza
Abstract:
Today, state-of-the-art deep neural networks that process events first convert them into dense, grid-like input representations before using an off-the-shelf network. However, selecting the appropriate representation for the task traditionally requires training a neural network for each representation and selecting the best one based on the validation score, which is very time-consuming. This work eliminates this bottleneck by selecting representations based on the Gromov-Wasserstein Discrepancy (GWD) between raw events and their representation. It is about 200 times faster to compute than training a neural network and preserves the task performance ranking of event representations across multiple representations, network backbones, datasets, and tasks. Thus finding representations with high task scores is equivalent to finding representations with a low GWD. We use this insight to, for the first time, perform a hyperparameter search on a large family of event representations, revealing new and powerful representations that exceed the state-of-the-art. Our optimized representations outperform existing representations by 1.7 mAP on the 1 Mpx dataset and 0.3 mAP on the Gen1 dataset, two established object detection benchmarks, and reach a 3.8% higher classification score on the mini N-ImageNet benchmark. Moreover, we outperform state-of-the-art by 2.1 mAP on Gen1 and state-of-the-art feed-forward methods by 6.0 mAP on the 1 Mpx datasets. This work opens a new unexplored field of explicit representation optimization for event-based learning.
Authors:Yifan Yin, Xu Cheng, Fan Shi, Xiufeng Liu, Huan Huo, Shengyong Chen
Abstract:
Accurate and reliable optical remote sensing image-based small-ship detection is crucial for maritime surveillance systems, but existing methods often struggle with balancing detection performance and computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight framework called \textit{HSI-ShipDetectionNet} that is based on high-order spatial interactions and is suitable for deployment on resource-limited platforms, such as satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. HSI-ShipDetectionNet includes a prediction branch specifically for tiny ships and a lightweight hybrid attention block for reduced complexity. Additionally, the use of a high-order spatial interactions module improves advanced feature understanding and modeling ability. Our model is evaluated using the public Kaggle marine ship detection dataset and compared with multiple state-of-the-art models including small object detection models, lightweight detection models, and ship detection models. The results show that HSI-ShipDetectionNet outperforms the other models in terms of recall, and mean average precision (mAP) while being lightweight and suitable for deployment on resource-limited platforms.
Authors:Takahiro Shindo, Taiju Watanabe, Kein Yamada, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract:
With advances in image recognition technology based on deep learning, automatic video analysis by Artificial Intelligence is becoming more widespread. As the amount of video used for image recognition increases, efficient compression methods for such video data are necessary. In general, when the image quality deteriorates due to image encoding, the image recognition accuracy also falls. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a neural-network-based approach to improve image recognition accuracy, especially the object detection accuracy by applying post-processing to the encoded video. Versatile Video Coding (VVC) will be used for the video compression method, since it is the latest video coding method with the best encoding performance. The neural network is trained using the features of YOLO-v7, the latest object detection model. By using VVC as the video coding method and YOLO-v7 as the detection model, high object detection accuracy is achieved even at low bit rates. Experimental results show that the combination of the proposed method and VVC achieves better coding performance than regular VVC in object detection accuracy.
Authors:Sheng Xu, Yanjing Li, Mingbao Lin, Peng Gao, Guodong Guo, Jinhu Lu, Baochang Zhang
Abstract:
The recent detection transformer (DETR) has advanced object detection, but its application on resource-constrained devices requires massive computation and memory resources. Quantization stands out as a solution by representing the network in low-bit parameters and operations. However, there is a significant performance drop when performing low-bit quantized DETR (Q-DETR) with existing quantization methods. We find that the bottlenecks of Q-DETR come from the query information distortion through our empirical analyses. This paper addresses this problem based on a distribution rectification distillation (DRD). We formulate our DRD as a bi-level optimization problem, which can be derived by generalizing the information bottleneck (IB) principle to the learning of Q-DETR. At the inner level, we conduct a distribution alignment for the queries to maximize the self-information entropy. At the upper level, we introduce a new foreground-aware query matching scheme to effectively transfer the teacher information to distillation-desired features to minimize the conditional information entropy. Extensive experimental results show that our method performs much better than prior arts. For example, the 4-bit Q-DETR can theoretically accelerate DETR with ResNet-50 backbone by 6.6x and achieve 39.4% AP, with only 2.6% performance gaps than its real-valued counterpart on the COCO dataset.
Authors:Chao Zhou, Yanan Zhang, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang
Abstract:
A key challenge for LiDAR-based 3D object detection is to capture sufficient features from large scale 3D scenes especially for distant or/and occluded objects. Albeit recent efforts made by Transformers with the long sequence modeling capability, they fail to properly balance the accuracy and efficiency, suffering from inadequate receptive fields or coarse-grained holistic correlations. In this paper, we propose an Octree-based Transformer, named OcTr, to address this issue. It first constructs a dynamic octree on the hierarchical feature pyramid through conducting self-attention on the top level and then recursively propagates to the level below restricted by the octants, which captures rich global context in a coarse-to-fine manner while maintaining the computational complexity under control. Furthermore, for enhanced foreground perception, we propose a hybrid positional embedding, composed of the semantic-aware positional embedding and attention mask, to fully exploit semantic and geometry clues. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI Dataset, and OcTr reaches newly state-of-the-art results.
Authors:Loizos Hadjiloizou, Evagoras Makridis, Themistoklis Charalambous, Kyriakos M. Deliparaschos
Abstract:
We present a multisensor fusion framework for the onboard real-time navigation of a quadrotor in an indoor environment. The framework integrates sensor readings from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a camera-based object detection algorithm, and an Ultra-WideBand (UWB) localisation system. Often the sensor readings are not always readily available, leading to inaccurate pose estimation and hence poor navigation performance. To effectively handle and fuse sensor readings, and accurately estimate the pose of the quadrotor for tracking a predefined trajectory, we design a Maximum Correntropy Criterion Kalman Filter (MCC-KF) that can manage intermittent observations. The MCC-KF is designed to improve the performance of the estimation process when is done with a Kalman Filter (KF), since KFs are likely to degrade dramatically in practical scenarios in which noise is non-Gaussian (especially when the noise is heavy-tailed). To evaluate the performance of the MCC-KF, we compare it with a previously designed Kalman filter by the authors. Through this comparison, we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of the MCC-KF in handling indoor navigation missions. The simulation results show that our presented framework offers low positioning errors, while effectively handling intermittent sensor measurements.
Authors:Yong He, Hongshan Yu, Zhengeng Yang, Xiaoyan Liu, Wei Sun, Ajmal Mian
Abstract:
Point cloud processing methods exploit local point features and global context through aggregation which does not explicity model the internal correlations between local and global features. To address this problem, we propose full point encoding which is applicable to convolution and transformer architectures. Specifically, we propose Full Point Convolution (FPConv) and Full Point Transformer (FPTransformer) architectures. The key idea is to adaptively learn the weights from local and global geometric connections, where the connections are established through local and global correlation functions respectively. FPConv and FPTransformer simultaneously model the local and global geometric relationships as well as their internal correlations, demonstrating strong generalization ability and high performance. FPConv is incorporated in classical hierarchical network architectures to achieve local and global shape-aware learning. In FPTransformer, we introduce full point position encoding in self-attention, that hierarchically encodes each point position in the global and local receptive field. We also propose a shape aware downsampling block which takes into account the local shape and the global context. Experimental comparison to existing methods on benchmark datasets show the efficacy of FPConv and FPTransformer for semantic segmentation, object detection, classification, and normal estimation tasks. In particular, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results of 76% mIoU on S3DIS 6-fold and 72.2% on S3DIS Area5.
Authors:Raz Lapid, Eylon Mizrahi, Moshe Sipper
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks on deep-learning models have been receiving increased attention in recent years. Work in this area has mostly focused on gradient-based techniques, so-called "white-box" attacks, wherein the attacker has access to the targeted model's internal parameters; such an assumption is usually unrealistic in the real world. Some attacks additionally use the entire pixel space to fool a given model, which is neither practical nor physical (i.e., real-world). On the contrary, we propose herein a direct, black-box, gradient-free method that uses the learned image manifold of a pretrained generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate naturalistic physical adversarial patches for object detectors. To our knowledge this is the first and only method that performs black-box physical attacks directly on object-detection models, which results with a model-agnostic attack. We show that our proposed method works both digitally and physically. We compared our approach against four different black-box attacks with different configurations. Our approach outperformed all other approaches that were tested in our experiments by a large margin.
Authors:Huixin Sun, Yanjing Li, Linlin Yang, Xianbin Cao, Baochang Zhang
Abstract:
Despite advances in generic object detection, there remains a performance gap in detecting small objects compared to normal-scale objects. We reveal that conventional object localization methods suffer from gradient instability in small objects due to sharper loss curvature, leading to a convergence challenge. To address the issue, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Gradient Stabilization (UGS), a framework that reformulates object localization as a classification task to stabilize gradients. UGS quantizes continuous labels into interval non-uniform discrete representations. Under a classification-based objective, the localization branch generates bounded and confidence-driven gradients, mitigating instability. Furthermore, UGS integrates an uncertainty minimization (UM) loss that reduces prediction variance and an uncertainty-guided refinement (UR) module that identifies and refines high-uncertainty regions via perturbations. Evaluated on four benchmarks, UGS consistently improves anchor-based, anchor-free, and leading small object detectors. Especially, UGS enhances DINO-5scale by 2.6 AP on VisDrone, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results.
Authors:Zhefan Xu, Xiaoyang Zhan, Yumeng Xiu, Christopher Suzuki, Kenji Shimada
Abstract:
Deploying autonomous robots in crowded indoor environments usually requires them to have accurate dynamic obstacle perception. Although plenty of previous works in the autonomous driving field have investigated the 3D object detection problem, the usage of dense point clouds from a heavy Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor and their high computation cost for learning-based data processing make those methods not applicable to small robots, such as vision-based UAVs with small onboard computers. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight 3D dynamic obstacle detection and tracking (DODT) method based on an RGB-D camera, which is designed for low-power robots with limited computing power. Our method adopts a novel ensemble detection strategy, combining multiple computationally efficient but low-accuracy detectors to achieve real-time high-accuracy obstacle detection. Besides, we introduce a new feature-based data association and tracking method to prevent mismatches utilizing point clouds' statistical features. In addition, our system includes an optional and auxiliary learning-based module to enhance the obstacle detection range and dynamic obstacle identification. The proposed method is implemented in a small quadcopter, and the results show that our method can achieve the lowest position error (0.11m) and a comparable velocity error (0.23m/s) across the benchmarking algorithms running on the robot's onboard computer. The flight experiments prove that the tracking results from the proposed method can make the robot efficiently alter its trajectory for navigating dynamic environments. Our software is available on GitHub as an open-source ROS package.
Authors:Jingzong Li, Yik Hong Cai, Libin Liu, Yu Mao, Chun Jason Xue, Hong Xu
Abstract:
3D object detection plays a pivotal role in many applications, most notably autonomous driving and robotics. These applications are commonly deployed on edge devices to promptly interact with the environment, and often require near real-time response. With limited computation power, it is challenging to execute 3D detection on the edge using highly complex neural networks. Common approaches such as offloading to the cloud induce significant latency overheads due to the large amount of point cloud data during transmission. To resolve the tension between wimpy edge devices and compute-intensive inference workloads, we explore the possibility of empowering fast 2D detection to extrapolate 3D bounding boxes. To this end, we present Moby, a novel system that demonstrates the feasibility and potential of our approach. We design a transformation pipeline for Moby that generates 3D bounding boxes efficiently and accurately based on 2D detection results without running 3D detectors. Further, we devise a frame offloading scheduler that decides when to launch the 3D detector judiciously in the cloud to avoid the errors from accumulating. Extensive evaluations on NVIDIA Jetson TX2 with real-world autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that Moby offers up to 91.9% latency improvement with modest accuracy loss over state of the art.
Authors:Bo Zhang, Yuchen Guo, Runzhao Yang, Zhihong Zhang, Jiayi Xie, Jinli Suo, Qionghai Dai
Abstract:
Imaging and perception in photon-limited scenarios is necessary for various applications, e.g., night surveillance or photography, high-speed photography, and autonomous driving. In these cases, cameras suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio, which degrades the image quality severely and poses challenges for downstream high-level vision tasks like object detection and recognition. Data-driven methods have achieved enormous success in both image restoration and high-level vision tasks. However, the lack of high-quality benchmark dataset with task-specific accurate annotations for photon-limited images/videos delays the research progress heavily. In this paper, we contribute the first multi-illuminance, multi-camera, and low-light dataset, named DarkVision, serving for both image enhancement and object detection. We provide bright and dark pairs with pixel-wise registration, in which the bright counterpart provides reliable reference for restoration and annotation. The dataset consists of bright-dark pairs of 900 static scenes with objects from 15 categories, and 32 dynamic scenes with 4-category objects. For each scene, images/videos were captured at 5 illuminance levels using three cameras of different grades, and average photons can be reliably estimated from the calibration data for quantitative studies. The static-scene images and dynamic videos respectively contain around 7,344 and 320,667 instances in total. With DarkVision, we established baselines for image/video enhancement and object detection by representative algorithms. To demonstrate an exemplary application of DarkVision, we propose two simple yet effective approaches for improving performance in video enhancement and object detection respectively. We believe DarkVision would advance the state-of-the-arts in both imaging and related computer vision tasks in low-light environment.
Authors:Xinyu Zhou, Jun Zhao
Abstract:
The Metaverse is deemed the next evolution of the Internet and has received much attention recently. Metaverse applications via mobile augmented reality (MAR) require rapid and accurate object detection to mix digital data with the real world. As mobile devices evolve, their computational capabilities are increasing, and thus their computational resources can be leveraged to train machine learning models. In light of the increasing concerns of user privacy and data security, federated learning (FL) has become a promising distributed learning framework for privacy-preserving analytics. In this article, FL and MAR are brought together in the Metaverse. We discuss the necessity and rationality of the combination of FL and MAR. The prospective technologies that support FL and MAR in the Metaverse are also discussed. In addition, existing challenges that prevent the fulfillment of FL and MAR in the Metaverse and several application scenarios are presented. Finally, three case studies of Metaverse FL-MAR systems are demonstrated.
Authors:Mathias Gehrig, Davide Scaramuzza
Abstract:
We present Recurrent Vision Transformers (RVTs), a novel backbone for object detection with event cameras. Event cameras provide visual information with sub-millisecond latency at a high-dynamic range and with strong robustness against motion blur. These unique properties offer great potential for low-latency object detection and tracking in time-critical scenarios. Prior work in event-based vision has achieved outstanding detection performance but at the cost of substantial inference time, typically beyond 40 milliseconds. By revisiting the high-level design of recurrent vision backbones, we reduce inference time by a factor of 6 while retaining similar performance. To achieve this, we explore a multi-stage design that utilizes three key concepts in each stage: First, a convolutional prior that can be regarded as a conditional positional embedding. Second, local and dilated global self-attention for spatial feature interaction. Third, recurrent temporal feature aggregation to minimize latency while retaining temporal information. RVTs can be trained from scratch to reach state-of-the-art performance on event-based object detection - achieving an mAP of 47.2% on the Gen1 automotive dataset. At the same time, RVTs offer fast inference (<12 ms on a T4 GPU) and favorable parameter efficiency (5 times fewer than prior art). Our study brings new insights into effective design choices that can be fruitful for research beyond event-based vision.
Authors:Xuewu Lin, Tianwei Lin, Zixiang Pei, Lichao Huang, Zhizhong Su
Abstract:
Bird-eye-view (BEV) based methods have made great progress recently in multi-view 3D detection task. Comparing with BEV based methods, sparse based methods lag behind in performance, but still have lots of non-negligible merits. To push sparse 3D detection further, in this work, we introduce a novel method, named Sparse4D, which does the iterative refinement of anchor boxes via sparsely sampling and fusing spatial-temporal features. (1) Sparse 4D Sampling: for each 3D anchor, we assign multiple 4D keypoints, which are then projected to multi-view/scale/timestamp image features to sample corresponding features; (2) Hierarchy Feature Fusion: we hierarchically fuse sampled features of different view/scale, different timestamp and different keypoints to generate high-quality instance feature. In this way, Sparse4D can efficiently and effectively achieve 3D detection without relying on dense view transformation nor global attention, and is more friendly to edge devices deployment. Furthermore, we introduce an instance-level depth reweight module to alleviate the ill-posed issue in 3D-to-2D projection. In experiment, our method outperforms all sparse based methods and most BEV based methods on detection task in the nuScenes dataset.
Authors:Xinyu Zhou, Chang Liu, Jun Zhao
Abstract:
The Metaverse has received much attention recently. Metaverse applications via mobile augmented reality (MAR) require rapid and accurate object detection to mix digital data with the real world. Federated learning (FL) is an intriguing distributed machine learning approach due to its privacy-preserving characteristics. Due to privacy concerns and the limited computation resources on mobile devices, we incorporate FL into MAR systems of the Metaverse to train a model cooperatively. Besides, to balance the trade-off between energy, execution latency and model accuracy, thereby accommodating different demands and application scenarios, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize a weighted combination of total energy consumption, completion time and model accuracy. Through decomposing the non-convex optimization problem into two subproblems, we devise a resource allocation algorithm to determine the bandwidth allocation, transmission power, CPU frequency and video frame resolution for each participating device. We further present the convergence analysis and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm has better performance (in terms of energy consumption, completion time and model accuracy) under different weight parameters compared to existing benchmarks.
Authors:Zhiheng Hu, Yongzhen Wang, Peng Li, Jie Qin, Haoran Xie, Mingqiang Wei
Abstract:
Small targets are often submerged in cluttered backgrounds of infrared images. Conventional detectors tend to generate false alarms, while CNN-based detectors lose small targets in deep layers. To this end, we propose iSmallNet, a multi-stream densely nested network with label decoupling for infrared small object detection. On the one hand, to fully exploit the shape information of small targets, we decouple the original labeled ground-truth (GT) map into an interior map and a boundary one. The GT map, in collaboration with the two additional maps, tackles the unbalanced distribution of small object boundaries. On the other hand, two key modules are delicately designed and incorporated into the proposed network to boost the overall performance. First, to maintain small targets in deep layers, we develop a multi-scale nested interaction module to explore a wide range of context information. Second, we develop an interior-boundary fusion module to integrate multi-granularity information. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and NUDT-SIRST clearly show the superiority of iSmallNet over 11 state-of-the-art detectors.
Authors:Philippe Weinzaepfel, Vincent Leroy, Thomas Lucas, Romain Brégier, Yohann Cabon, Vaibhav Arora, Leonid Antsfeld, Boris Chidlovskii, Gabriela Csurka, Jérôme Revaud
Abstract:
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has recently been established as a potent pre-training paradigm. A pretext task is constructed by masking patches in an input image, and this masked content is then predicted by a neural network using visible patches as sole input. This pre-training leads to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned for high-level semantic tasks, e.g. image classification and object detection. In this paper we instead seek to learn representations that transfer well to a wide variety of 3D vision and lower-level geometric downstream tasks, such as depth prediction or optical flow estimation. Inspired by MIM, we propose an unsupervised representation learning task trained from pairs of images showing the same scene from different viewpoints. More precisely, we propose the pretext task of cross-view completion where the first input image is partially masked, and this masked content has to be reconstructed from the visible content and the second image. In single-view MIM, the masked content often cannot be inferred precisely from the visible portion only, so the model learns to act as a prior influenced by high-level semantics. In contrast, this ambiguity can be resolved with cross-view completion from the second unmasked image, on the condition that the model is able to understand the spatial relationship between the two images. Our experiments show that our pretext task leads to significantly improved performance for monocular 3D vision downstream tasks such as depth estimation. In addition, our model can be directly applied to binocular downstream tasks like optical flow or relative camera pose estimation, for which we obtain competitive results without bells and whistles, i.e., using a generic architecture without any task-specific design.
Authors:Maria Lombardi, Elisa Maiettini, Vadim Tikhanoff, Lorenzo Natale
Abstract:
Performing joint interaction requires constant mutual monitoring of own actions and their effects on the other's behaviour. Such an action-effect monitoring is boosted by social cues and might result in an increasing sense of agency. Joint actions and joint attention are strictly correlated and both of them contribute to the formation of a precise temporal coordination. In human-robot interaction, the robot's ability to establish joint attention with a human partner and exploit various social cues to react accordingly is a crucial step in creating communicative robots. Along the social component, an effective human-robot interaction can be seen as a new method to improve and make the robot's learning process more natural and robust for a given task. In this work we use different social skills, such as mutual gaze, gaze following, speech and human face recognition, to develop an effective teacher-learner scenario tailored to visual object learning in dynamic environments. Experiments on the iCub robot demonstrate that the system allows the robot to learn new objects through a natural interaction with a human teacher in presence of distractors.
Authors:Alireza Ghaffari, Marzieh S. Tahaei, Mohammadreza Tayaranian, Masoud Asgharian, Vahid Partovi Nia
Abstract:
The ever-increasing computational complexity of deep learning models makes their training and deployment difficult on various cloud and edge platforms. Replacing floating-point arithmetic with low-bit integer arithmetic is a promising approach to save energy, memory footprint, and latency of deep learning models. As such, quantization has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. However, using integer numbers to form a fully functional integer training pipeline including forward pass, back-propagation, and stochastic gradient descent is not studied in detail. Our empirical and mathematical results reveal that integer arithmetic seems to be enough to train deep learning models. Unlike recent proposals, instead of quantization, we directly switch the number representation of computations. Our novel training method forms a fully integer training pipeline that does not change the trajectory of the loss and accuracy compared to floating-point, nor does it need any special hyper-parameter tuning, distribution adjustment, or gradient clipping. Our experimental results show that our proposed method is effective in a wide variety of tasks such as classification (including vision transformers), object detection, and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Varun Ravi Kumar, Ciaran Eising, Christian Witt, Senthil Yogamani
Abstract:
Surround-view fisheye cameras are commonly used for near-field sensing in automated driving. Four fisheye cameras on four sides of the vehicle are sufficient to cover 360° around the vehicle capturing the entire near-field region. Some primary use cases are automated parking, traffic jam assist, and urban driving. There are limited datasets and very little work on near-field perception tasks as the focus in automotive perception is on far-field perception. In contrast to far-field, surround-view perception poses additional challenges due to high precision object detection requirements of 10cm and partial visibility of objects. Due to the large radial distortion of fisheye cameras, standard algorithms cannot be extended easily to the surround-view use case. Thus, we are motivated to provide a self-contained reference for automotive fisheye camera perception for researchers and practitioners. Firstly, we provide a unified and taxonomic treatment of commonly used fisheye camera models. Secondly, we discuss various perception tasks and existing literature. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future direction.
Authors:Lingxiao Li, Noam Aigerman, Vladimir G. Kim, Jiajin Li, Kristjan Greenewald, Mikhail Yurochkin, Justin Solomon
Abstract:
Finding multiple solutions of non-convex optimization problems is a ubiquitous yet challenging task. Most past algorithms either apply single-solution optimization methods from multiple random initial guesses or search in the vicinity of found solutions using ad hoc heuristics. We present an end-to-end method to learn the proximal operator of a family of training problems so that multiple local minima can be quickly obtained from initial guesses by iterating the learned operator, emulating the proximal-point algorithm that has fast convergence. The learned proximal operator can be further generalized to recover multiple optima for unseen problems at test time, enabling applications such as object detection. The key ingredient in our formulation is a proximal regularization term, which elevates the convexity of our training loss: by applying recent theoretical results, we show that for weakly-convex objectives with Lipschitz gradients, training of the proximal operator converges globally with a practical degree of over-parameterization. We further present an exhaustive benchmark for multi-solution optimization to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Shichao Li, Xijie Huang, Zechun Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Abstract:
We present a new learning-based framework S-3D-RCNN that can recover accurate object orientation in SO(3) and simultaneously predict implicit rigid shapes from stereo RGB images. For orientation estimation, in contrast to previous studies that map local appearance to observation angles, we propose a progressive approach by extracting meaningful Intermediate Geometrical Representations (IGRs). This approach features a deep model that transforms perceived intensities from one or two views to object part coordinates to achieve direct egocentric object orientation estimation in the camera coordinate system. To further achieve finer description inside 3D bounding boxes, we investigate the implicit shape estimation problem from stereo images. We model visible object surfaces by designing a point-based representation, augmenting IGRs to explicitly address the unseen surface hallucination problem. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed IGRs, and S-3D-RCNN achieves superior 3D scene understanding performance. We also designed new metrics on the KITTI benchmark for our evaluation of implicit shape estimation.
Authors:Varun Ravi Kumar, Senthil Yogamani, Hazem Rashed, Ganesh Sistu, Christian Witt, Isabelle Leang, Stefan Milz, Patrick Mäder
Abstract:
Surround View fisheye cameras are commonly deployed in automated driving for 360° near-field sensing around the vehicle. This work presents a multi-task visual perception network on unrectified fisheye images to enable the vehicle to sense its surrounding environment. It consists of six primary tasks necessary for an autonomous driving system: depth estimation, visual odometry, semantic segmentation, motion segmentation, object detection, and lens soiling detection. We demonstrate that the jointly trained model performs better than the respective single task versions. Our multi-task model has a shared encoder providing a significant computational advantage and has synergized decoders where tasks support each other. We propose a novel camera geometry based adaptation mechanism to encode the fisheye distortion model both at training and inference. This was crucial to enable training on the WoodScape dataset, comprised of data from different parts of the world collected by 12 different cameras mounted on three different cars with different intrinsics and viewpoints. Given that bounding boxes is not a good representation for distorted fisheye images, we also extend object detection to use a polygon with non-uniformly sampled vertices. We additionally evaluate our model on standard automotive datasets, namely KITTI and Cityscapes. We obtain the state-of-the-art results on KITTI for depth estimation and pose estimation tasks and competitive performance on the other tasks. We perform extensive ablation studies on various architecture choices and task weighting methodologies. A short video at https://youtu.be/xbSjZ5OfPes provides qualitative results.
Authors:Xiaopei Zhu, Xiao Li, Jianmin Li, Zheyao Wang, Xiaolin Hu
Abstract:
Thermal infrared detection systems play an important role in many areas such as night security, autonomous driving, and body temperature detection. They have the unique advantages of passive imaging, temperature sensitivity and penetration. But the security of these systems themselves has not been fully explored, which poses risks in applying these systems. We propose a physical attack method with small bulbs on a board against the state of-the-art pedestrian detectors. Our goal is to make infrared pedestrian detectors unable to detect real-world pedestrians. Towards this goal, we first showed that it is possible to use two kinds of patches to attack the infrared pedestrian detector based on YOLOv3. The average precision (AP) dropped by 64.12% in the digital world, while a blank board with the same size caused the AP to drop by 29.69% only. After that, we designed and manufactured a physical board and successfully attacked YOLOv3 in the real world. In recorded videos, the physical board caused AP of the target detector to drop by 34.48%, while a blank board with the same size caused the AP to drop by 14.91% only. With the ensemble attack techniques, the designed physical board had good transferability to unseen detectors. We also proposed the first physical multispectral (infrared and visible) attack. By using a combination method, we successfully hide from the visible light and infrared object detection systems at the same time.
Authors:Yixun Zhang, Feng Zhou, Jianqin Yin
Abstract:
Camera-based perception is critical to autonomous driving yet remains vulnerable to task-specific adversarial manipulations in object detection and monocular depth estimation. Most existing 2D/3D attacks are developed in task silos, lack mechanisms to induce controllable depth bias, and offer no standardized protocol to quantify cross-task transfer, leaving the interaction between detection and depth underexplored. We present BiTAA, a bi-task adversarial attack built on 3D Gaussian Splatting that yields a single perturbation capable of simultaneously degrading detection and biasing monocular depth. Specifically, we introduce a dual-model attack framework that supports both full-image and patch settings and is compatible with common detectors and depth estimators, with optional expectation-over-transformation (EOT) for physical reality. In addition, we design a composite loss that couples detection suppression with a signed, magnitude-controlled log-depth bias within regions of interest (ROIs) enabling controllable near or far misperception while maintaining stable optimization across tasks. We also propose a unified evaluation protocol with cross-task transfer metrics and real-world evaluations, showing consistent cross-task degradation and a clear asymmetry between Det to Depth and from Depth to Det transfer. The results highlight practical risks for multi-task camera-only perception and motivate cross-task-aware defenses in autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors:Geonho Bang, Minjae Seong, Jisong Kim, Geunju Baek, Daye Oh, Junhyung Kim, Junho Koh, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
Radar-camera fusion methods have emerged as a cost-effective approach for 3D object detection but still lag behind LiDAR-based methods in performance. Recent works have focused on employing temporal fusion and Knowledge Distillation (KD) strategies to overcome these limitations. However, existing approaches have not sufficiently accounted for uncertainties arising from object motion or sensor-specific errors inherent in radar and camera modalities. In this work, we propose RCTDistill, a novel cross-modal KD method based on temporal fusion, comprising three key modules: Range-Azimuth Knowledge Distillation (RAKD), Temporal Knowledge Distillation (TKD), and Region-Decoupled Knowledge Distillation (RDKD). RAKD is designed to consider the inherent errors in the range and azimuth directions, enabling effective knowledge transfer from LiDAR features to refine inaccurate BEV representations. TKD mitigates temporal misalignment caused by dynamic objects by aligning historical radar-camera BEV features with current LiDAR representations. RDKD enhances feature discrimination by distilling relational knowledge from the teacher model, allowing the student to differentiate foreground and background features. RCTDistill achieves state-of-the-art radar-camera fusion performance on both the nuScenes and View-of-Delft (VoD) datasets, with the fastest inference speed of 26.2 FPS.
Authors:Samet Hicsonmez, Abd El Rahman Shabayek, Arunkumar Rathinam, Djamila Aouada
Abstract:
Object detection is essential in space applications targeting Space Domain Awareness and also applications involving relative navigation scenarios. Current deep learning models for Object Detection in space applications are often trained on synthetic data from simulators, however, the model performance drops significantly on real-world data due to the domain gap. However, domain adaptive object detection is an overlooked problem in the community. In this work, we first show the importance of domain adaptation and then explore Supervised Domain Adaptation (SDA) to reduce this gap using minimal labeled real data. We build on a recent semi-supervised adaptation method and tailor it for object detection. Our approach combines domain-invariant feature learning with a CNN-based domain discriminator and invariant risk minimization using a domain-independent regression head. To meet real-time deployment needs, we test our method on a lightweight Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) with MobileNet backbone and on the more advanced Fully Convolutional One-Stage object detector (FCOS) with ResNet-50 backbone. We evaluated on two space datasets, SPEED+ and SPARK. The results show up to 20-point improvements in average precision (AP) with just 250 labeled real images.
Authors:Changwon Kang, Jisong Kim, Hongjae Shin, Junseo Park, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
The goal of multi-task learning is to learn to conduct multiple tasks simultaneously based on a shared data representation. While this approach can improve learning efficiency, it may also cause performance degradation due to task conflicts that arise when optimizing the model for different objectives. To address this challenge, we introduce MAESTRO, a structured framework designed to generate task-specific features and mitigate feature interference in multi-task 3D perception, including 3D object detection, bird's-eye view (BEV) map segmentation, and 3D occupancy prediction. MAESTRO comprises three components: the Class-wise Prototype Generator (CPG), the Task-Specific Feature Generator (TSFG), and the Scene Prototype Aggregator (SPA). CPG groups class categories into foreground and background groups and generates group-wise prototypes. The foreground and background prototypes are assigned to the 3D object detection task and the map segmentation task, respectively, while both are assigned to the 3D occupancy prediction task. TSFG leverages these prototype groups to retain task-relevant features while suppressing irrelevant features, thereby enhancing the performance for each task. SPA enhances the prototype groups assigned for 3D occupancy prediction by utilizing the information produced by the 3D object detection head and the map segmentation head. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Occ3D benchmarks demonstrate that MAESTRO consistently outperforms existing methods across 3D object detection, BEV map segmentation, and 3D occupancy prediction tasks.
Authors:Inder Pal Singh, Nidhal Eddine Chenni, Abd El Rahman Shabayek, Arunkumar Rathinam, Djamila Aouada
Abstract:
Spacecraft Pose Estimation (SPE) is a fundamental capability for autonomous space operations such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing. Hybrid pipelines that combine object detection, keypoint regression, and Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solvers have recently achieved strong results on synthetic datasets, yet their performance deteriorates sharply on real or lab-generated imagery due to the persistent synthetic-to-real domain gap. Existing unsupervised domain adaptation approaches aim to mitigate this issue but often underperform when a modest number of labeled target samples are available. In this work, we propose the first Supervised Domain Adaptation (SDA) framework tailored for SPE keypoint regression. Building on the Learning Invariant Representation and Risk (LIRR) paradigm, our method jointly optimizes domain-invariant representations and task-specific risk using both labeled synthetic and limited labeled real data, thereby reducing generalization error under domain shift. Extensive experiments on the SPEED+ benchmark demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms source-only, fine-tuning, and oracle baselines. Notably, with only 5% labeled target data, our method matches or surpasses oracle performance trained on larger fractions of labeled data. The framework is lightweight, backbone-agnostic, and computationally efficient, offering a practical pathway toward robust and deployable spacecraft pose estimation in real-world space environments.
Authors:Ozan Karaali, Hossam Farag, Strahinja Dosen, Cedomir Stefanovic
Abstract:
This study examines the potential of utilizing Vision Language Models (VLMs) to improve the perceptual capabilities of semi-autonomous prosthetic hands. We introduce a unified benchmark for end-to-end perception and grasp inference, evaluating a single VLM to perform tasks that traditionally require complex pipelines with separate modules for object detection, pose estimation, and grasp planning. To establish the feasibility and current limitations of this approach, we benchmark eight contemporary VLMs on their ability to perform a unified task essential for bionic grasping. From a single static image, they should (1) identify common objects and their key properties (name, shape, orientation, and dimensions), and (2) infer appropriate grasp parameters (grasp type, wrist rotation, hand aperture, and number of fingers). A corresponding prompt requesting a structured JSON output was employed with a dataset of 34 snapshots of common objects. Key performance metrics, including accuracy for categorical attributes (e.g., object name, shape) and errors in numerical estimates (e.g., dimensions, hand aperture), along with latency and cost, were analyzed. The results demonstrated that most models exhibited high performance in object identification and shape recognition, while accuracy in estimating dimensions and inferring optimal grasp parameters, particularly hand rotation and aperture, varied more significantly. This work highlights the current capabilities and limitations of VLMs as advanced perceptual modules for semi-autonomous control of bionic limbs, demonstrating their potential for effective prosthetic applications.
Authors:Weichao Wang, Wendong Mao, Zhongfeng Wang
Abstract:
The deployment of high-accuracy 3D object detection models from point cloud remains a significant challenge due to their substantial computational and memory requirements. To address this, we introduce StripDet, a novel lightweight framework designed for on-device efficiency. First, we propose the novel Strip Attention Block (SAB), a highly efficient module designed to capture long-range spatial dependencies. By decomposing standard 2D convolutions into asymmetric strip convolutions, SAB efficiently extracts directional features while reducing computational complexity from quadratic to linear. Second, we design a hardware-friendly hierarchical backbone that integrates SAB with depthwise separable convolutions and a simple multiscale fusion strategy, achieving end-to-end efficiency. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset validate StripDet's superiority. With only 0.65M parameters, our model achieves a 79.97% mAP for car detection, surpassing the baseline PointPillars with a 7x parameter reduction. Furthermore, StripDet outperforms recent lightweight and knowledge distillation-based methods, achieving a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off while establishing itself as a practical solution for real-world 3D detection on edge devices.
Authors:Xinxin Huang, Han Sun, Ningzhong Liu, Huiyu Zhou, Yinan Yao
Abstract:
Underwater Camouflaged Object Detection (UCOD) aims to identify objects that blend seamlessly into underwater environments. This task is critically important to marine ecology. However, it remains largely underexplored and accurate identification is severely hindered by optical distortions, water turbidity, and the complex traits of marine organisms. To address these challenges, we introduce the UCOD task and present DeepCamo, a benchmark dataset designed for this domain. We also propose Semantic Localization and Enhancement Network (SLENet), a novel framework for UCOD. We first benchmark state-of-the-art COD models on DeepCamo to reveal key issues, upon which SLENet is built. In particular, we incorporate Gamma-Asymmetric Enhancement (GAE) module and a Localization Guidance Branch (LGB) to enhance multi-scale feature representation while generating a location map enriched with global semantic information. This map guides the Multi-Scale Supervised Decoder (MSSD) to produce more accurate predictions. Experiments on our DeepCamo dataset and three benchmark COD datasets confirm SLENet's superior performance over SOTA methods, and underscore its high generality for the broader COD task.
Authors:Xinyi Yin, Wenbo Yuan, Xuecheng Wu, Liangyu Fu, Danlei Huang
Abstract:
Abnormal Human Behavior Detection (AHBD) under special scenarios is becoming increasingly crucial. While YOLO-based detection methods excel in real-time tasks, they remain hindered by challenges including small objects, task conflicts, and multi-scale fusion in AHBD. To tackle them, we propose TACR-YOLO, a new real-time framework for AHBD. We introduce a Coordinate Attention Module to enhance small object detection, a Task-Aware Attention Module to deal with classification-regression conflicts, and a Strengthen Neck Network for refined multi-scale fusion, respectively. In addition, we optimize Anchor Box sizes using K-means clustering and deploy DIoU-Loss to improve bounding box regression. The Personnel Anomalous Behavior Detection (PABD) dataset, which includes 8,529 samples across four behavior categories, is also presented. Extensive experimental results indicate that TACR-YOLO achieves 91.92% mAP on PABD, with competitive speed and robustness. Ablation studies highlight the contribution of each improvement. This work provides new insights for abnormal behavior detection under special scenarios, advancing its progress.
Authors:Hang Jin, Chenqiang Gao, Junjie Guo, Fangcen Liu, Kanghui Tian, Qinyao Chang
Abstract:
Infrared-visible object detection has shown great potential in real-world applications, enabling robust all-day perception by leveraging the complementary information of infrared and visible images. However, existing methods typically require dual-modality annotations to output detection results for both modalities during prediction, which incurs high annotation costs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel infrared-visible Decoupled Object Detection framework with Single-modality Annotations, called DOD-SA. The architecture of DOD-SA is built upon a Single- and Dual-Modality Collaborative Teacher-Student Network (CoSD-TSNet), which consists of a single-modality branch (SM-Branch) and a dual-modality decoupled branch (DMD-Branch). The teacher model generates pseudo-labels for the unlabeled modality, simultaneously supporting the training of the student model. The collaborative design enables cross-modality knowledge transfer from the labeled modality to the unlabeled modality, and facilitates effective SM-to-DMD branch supervision. To further improve the decoupling ability of the model and the pseudo-label quality, we introduce a Progressive and Self-Tuning Training Strategy (PaST) that trains the model in three stages: (1) pretraining SM-Branch, (2) guiding the learning of DMD-Branch by SM-Branch, and (3) refining DMD-Branch. In addition, we design a Pseudo Label Assigner (PLA) to align and pair labels across modalities, explicitly addressing modality misalignment during training. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA).
Authors:Jin Ma, Abyad Enan, Long Cheng, Mashrur Chowdhury
Abstract:
Artistic crosswalks featuring asphalt art, introduced by different organizations in recent years, aim to enhance the visibility and safety of pedestrians. However, their visual complexity may interfere with surveillance systems that rely on vision-based object detection models. In this study, we investigate the impact of asphalt art on pedestrian detection performance of a pretrained vision-based object detection model. We construct realistic crosswalk scenarios by compositing various street art patterns into a fixed surveillance scene and evaluate the model's performance in detecting pedestrians on asphalt-arted crosswalks under both benign and adversarial conditions. A benign case refers to pedestrian crosswalks painted with existing normal asphalt art, whereas an adversarial case involves digitally crafted or altered asphalt art perpetrated by an attacker. Our results show that while simple, color-based designs have minimal effect, complex artistic patterns, particularly those with high visual salience, can significantly degrade pedestrian detection performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that adversarially crafted asphalt art can be exploited to deliberately obscure real pedestrians or generate non-existent pedestrian detections. These findings highlight a potential vulnerability in urban vision-based pedestrian surveillance systems and underscore the importance of accounting for environmental visual variations when designing robust pedestrian perception models.
Authors:Muayad Abujabal, Lyes Saad Saoud, Irfan Hussain
Abstract:
Accurate fish detection in underwater imagery is essential for ecological monitoring, aquaculture automation, and robotic perception. However, practical deployment remains limited by fragmented datasets, heterogeneous imaging conditions, and inconsistent evaluation protocols. To address these gaps, we present \textit{FishDet-M}, the largest unified benchmark for fish detection, comprising 13 publicly available datasets spanning diverse aquatic environments including marine, brackish, occluded, and aquarium scenes. All data are harmonized using COCO-style annotations with both bounding boxes and segmentation masks, enabling consistent and scalable cross-domain evaluation. We systematically benchmark 28 contemporary object detection models, covering the YOLOv8 to YOLOv12 series, R-CNN based detectors, and DETR based models. Evaluations are conducted using standard metrics including mAP, mAP@50, and mAP@75, along with scale-specific analyses (AP$_S$, AP$_M$, AP$_L$) and inference profiling in terms of latency and parameter count. The results highlight the varying detection performance across models trained on FishDet-M, as well as the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency across models of different architectures. To support adaptive deployment, we introduce a CLIP-based model selection framework that leverages vision-language alignment to dynamically identify the most semantically appropriate detector for each input image. This zero-shot selection strategy achieves high performance without requiring ensemble computation, offering a scalable solution for real-time applications. FishDet-M establishes a standardized and reproducible platform for evaluating object detection in complex aquatic scenes. All datasets, pretrained models, and evaluation tools are publicly available to facilitate future research in underwater computer vision and intelligent marine systems.
Authors:Md Meftahul Ferdaus, Kendall N. Niles, Joe Tom, Mahdi Abdelguerfi, Elias Ioup
Abstract:
Few-shot learning (FSL) enables object detection models to recognize novel classes given only a few annotated examples, thereby reducing expensive manual data labeling. This survey examines recent FSL advances for video and 3D object detection. For video, FSL is especially valuable since annotating objects across frames is more laborious than for static images. By propagating information across frames, techniques like tube proposals and temporal matching networks can detect new classes from a couple examples, efficiently leveraging spatiotemporal structure. FSL for 3D detection from LiDAR or depth data faces challenges like sparsity and lack of texture. Solutions integrate FSL with specialized point cloud networks and losses tailored for class imbalance. Few-shot 3D detection enables practical autonomous driving deployment by minimizing costly 3D annotation needs. Core issues in both domains include balancing generalization and overfitting, integrating prototype matching, and handling data modality properties. In summary, FSL shows promise for reducing annotation requirements and enabling real-world video, 3D, and other applications by efficiently leveraging information across feature, temporal, and data modalities. By comprehensively surveying recent advancements, this paper illuminates FSL's potential to minimize supervision needs and enable deployment across video, 3D, and other real-world applications.
Authors:Zhimeng Xin, Tianxu Wu, Yixiong Zou, Shiming Chen, Dingjie Fu, Xinge You
Abstract:
Due to the limited training samples in few-shot object detection (FSOD), we observe that current methods may struggle to accurately extract effective features from each channel. Specifically, this issue manifests in two aspects: i) channels with high weights may not necessarily be effective, and ii) channels with low weights may still hold significant value. To handle this problem, we consider utilizing the inter-channel correlation to facilitate the novel model's adaptation process to novel conditions, ensuring the model can correctly highlight effective channels and rectify those incorrect ones. Since the channel sequence is also 1-dimensional, its similarity with the temporal sequence inspires us to take Mamba for modeling the correlation in the channel sequence. Based on this concept, we propose a Spatial-Channel State Space Modeling (SCSM) module for spatial-channel state modeling, which highlights the effective patterns and rectifies those ineffective ones in feature channels. In SCSM, we design the Spatial Feature Modeling (SFM) module to balance the learning of spatial relationships and channel relationships, and then introduce the Channel State Modeling (CSM) module based on Mamba to learn correlation in channels. Extensive experiments on the VOC and COCO datasets show that the SCSM module enables the novel detector to improve the quality of focused feature representation in channels and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Shunsuke Yasuki, Taiki Miyanishi, Nakamasa Inoue, Shuhei Kurita, Koya Sakamoto, Daichi Azuma, Masato Taki, Yutaka Matsuo
Abstract:
The advancement of 3D language fields has enabled intuitive interactions with 3D scenes via natural language. However, existing approaches are typically limited to small-scale environments, lacking the scalability and compositional reasoning capabilities necessary for large, complex urban settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoProg3D, a visual programming framework that enables natural language-driven interactions with city-scale high-fidelity 3D scenes. GeoProg3D consists of two key components: (i) a Geography-aware City-scale 3D Language Field (GCLF) that leverages a memory-efficient hierarchical 3D model to handle large-scale data, integrated with geographic information for efficiently filtering vast urban spaces using directional cues, distance measurements, elevation data, and landmark references; and (ii) Geographical Vision APIs (GV-APIs), specialized geographic vision tools such as area segmentation and object detection. Our framework employs large language models (LLMs) as reasoning engines to dynamically combine GV-APIs and operate GCLF, effectively supporting diverse geographic vision tasks. To assess performance in city-scale reasoning, we introduce GeoEval3D, a comprehensive benchmark dataset containing 952 query-answer pairs across five challenging tasks: grounding, spatial reasoning, comparison, counting, and measurement. Experiments demonstrate that GeoProg3D significantly outperforms existing 3D language fields and vision-language models across multiple tasks. To our knowledge, GeoProg3D is the first framework enabling compositional geographic reasoning in high-fidelity city-scale 3D environments via natural language. The code is available at https://snskysk.github.io/GeoProg3D/.
Authors:Sungjune Park, Hyunjun Kim, Beomchan Park, Yong Man Ro
Abstract:
Despite recent advancements in computer vision research, object detection in aerial images still suffers from several challenges. One primary challenge to be mitigated is the presence of multiple types of variation in aerial images, for example, illumination and viewpoint changes. These variations result in highly diverse image scenes and drastic alterations in object appearance, so that it becomes more complicated to localize objects from the whole image scene and recognize their categories. To address this problem, in this paper, we introduce a novel object detection framework in aerial images, named LANGuage-guided Object detection (LANGO). Upon the proposed language-guided learning, the proposed framework is designed to alleviate the impacts from both scene and instance-level variations. First, we are motivated by the way humans understand the semantics of scenes while perceiving environmental factors in the scenes (e.g., weather). Therefore, we design a visual semantic reasoner that comprehends visual semantics of image scenes by interpreting conditions where the given images were captured. Second, we devise a training objective, named relation learning loss, to deal with instance-level variations, such as viewpoint angle and scale changes. This training objective aims to learn relations in language representations of object categories, with the help of the robust characteristics against such variations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and our method obtains noticeable detection performance improvements.
Authors:Sungjune Park, Hyunjun Kim, Junho Kim, Seongho Kim, Yong Man Ro
Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant visual understanding capabilities, yet their fine-grained visual perception in complex real-world scenarios, such as densely crowded public areas, remains limited. Inspired by the recent success of reinforcement learning (RL) in both LLMs and MLLMs, in this paper, we explore how RL can enhance visual perception ability of MLLMs. Then we develop a novel RL-based framework, Deep Inspection and Perception with RL (DIP-R1) designed to enhance the visual perception capabilities of MLLMs, by comprehending complex scenes and looking through visual instances closely. DIP-R1 guides MLLMs through detailed inspection of visual scene via three simply designed rule-based reward modelings. First, we adopt a standard reasoning reward encouraging the model to include three step-by-step processes: 1) reasoning for understanding visual scenes, 2) observing for looking through interested but ambiguous regions, and 3) decision-making for predicting answer. Second, a variance-guided looking reward is designed to examine uncertain regions for the second observing process. It explicitly enables the model to inspect ambiguous areas, improving its ability to mitigate perceptual uncertainties. Third, we model a weighted precision-recall accuracy reward enhancing accurate decision-making. We explore its effectiveness across diverse fine-grained object detection data consisting of challenging real-world environments, such as densely crowded scenes. Built upon existing MLLMs, DIP-R1 achieves consistent and significant improvement across various in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. It also outperforms various existing baseline models and supervised fine-tuning methods. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of integrating RL into MLLMs for enhancing capabilities in complex real-world perception tasks.
Authors:Nikhil Behari, Aaron Young, Akshat Dave, Ramesh Raskar
Abstract:
Imaging system design is a complex, time-consuming, and largely manual process; LiDAR design, ubiquitous in mobile devices, autonomous vehicles, and aerial imaging platforms, adds further complexity through unique spatial and temporal sampling requirements. In this work, we propose a framework for automated, task-driven LiDAR system design under arbitrary constraints. To achieve this, we represent LiDAR configurations in a continuous six-dimensional design space and learn task-specific implicit densities in this space via flow-based generative modeling. We then synthesize new LiDAR systems by modeling sensors as parametric distributions in 6D space and fitting these distributions to our learned implicit density using expectation-maximization, enabling efficient, constraint-aware LiDAR system design. We validate our method on diverse tasks in 3D vision, enabling automated LiDAR system design across real-world-inspired applications in face scanning, robotic tracking, and object detection.
Authors:Guoting Wei, Yu Liu, Xia Yuan, Xizhe Xue, Linlin Guo, Yifan Yang, Chunxia Zhao, Zongwen Bai, Haokui Zhang, Rong Xiao
Abstract:
In recent years, language-guided open-world aerial object detection has gained significant attention due to its better alignment with real-world application needs. However, due to limited datasets, most existing language-guided methods primarily focus on vocabulary, which fails to meet the demands of more fine-grained open-world detection. To address this limitation, we propose constructing a large-scale language-guided open-set aerial detection dataset, encompassing three levels of language guidance: from words to phrases, and ultimately to sentences. Centered around an open-source large vision-language model and integrating image-operation-based preprocessing with BERT-based postprocessing, we present the OS-W2S Label Engine, an automatic annotation pipeline capable of handling diverse scene annotations for aerial images. Using this label engine, we expand existing aerial detection datasets with rich textual annotations and construct a novel benchmark dataset, called Multi-instance Open-set Aerial Dataset (MI-OAD), addressing the limitations of current remote sensing grounding data and enabling effective open-set aerial detection. Specifically, MI-OAD contains 163,023 images and 2 million image-caption pairs, approximately 40 times larger than comparable datasets. We also employ state-of-the-art open-set methods from the natural image domain, trained on our proposed dataset, to validate the model's open-set detection capabilities. For instance, when trained on our dataset, Grounding DINO achieves improvements of 29.5 AP_{50} and 33.7 Recall@10 for sentence inputs under zero-shot transfer conditions. Both the dataset and the label engine will be released publicly.
Authors:Kaidong Li, Tianxiao Zhang, Kuan-Chuan Peng, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
3D object detection is crucial for autonomous driving, leveraging both LiDAR point clouds for precise depth information and camera images for rich semantic information. Therefore, the multi-modal methods that combine both modalities offer more robust detection results. However, efficiently fusing LiDAR points and images remains challenging due to the domain gaps. In addition, the performance of many models is limited by the amount of high quality labeled data, which is expensive to create. The recent advances in foundation models, which use large-scale pre-training on different modalities, enable better multi-modal fusion. Combining the prompt engineering techniques for efficient training, we propose the Prompted Foundational 3D Detector (PF3Det), which integrates foundation model encoders and soft prompts to enhance LiDAR-camera feature fusion. PF3Det achieves the state-of-the-art results under limited training data, improving NDS by 1.19% and mAP by 2.42% on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrating its efficiency in 3D detection.
Authors:Xin Zhang, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a prompt-guided video foundation model, has remarkably performed in video object segmentation, drawing significant attention in the community. Due to the high similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings, which makes them difficult to distinguish even by the human eye, the application of SAM2 for automated segmentation in real-world scenarios faces challenges in camouflage perception and reliable prompts generation. To address these issues, we propose CamoSAM2, a motion-appearance prompt inducer (MAPI) and refinement framework to automatically generate and refine prompts for SAM2, enabling high-quality automatic detection and segmentation in VCOD task. Initially, we introduce a prompt inducer that simultaneously integrates motion and appearance cues to detect camouflaged objects, delivering more accurate initial predictions than existing methods. Subsequently, we propose a video-based adaptive multi-prompts refinement (AMPR) strategy tailored for SAM2, aimed at mitigating prompt error in initial coarse masks and further producing good prompts. Specifically, we introduce a novel three-step process to generate reliable prompts by camouflaged object determination, pivotal prompting frame selection, and multi-prompts formation. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed model, CamoSAM2, significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving increases of 8.0% and 10.1% in mIoU metric. Additionally, our method achieves the fastest inference speed compared to current VCOD models.
Authors:Shenghao Fu, Junkai Yan, Qize Yang, Xihan Wei, Xiaohua Xie, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims to detect objects beyond the training annotations, where detectors are usually aligned to a pre-trained vision-language model, eg, CLIP, to inherit its generalizable recognition ability so that detectors can recognize new or novel objects. However, previous works directly align the feature space with CLIP and fail to learn the semantic knowledge effectively. In this work, we propose a hierarchical semantic distillation framework named HD-OVD to construct a comprehensive distillation process, which exploits generalizable knowledge from the CLIP model in three aspects. In the first hierarchy of HD-OVD, the detector learns fine-grained instance-wise semantics from the CLIP image encoder by modeling relations among single objects in the visual space. Besides, we introduce text space novel-class-aware classification to help the detector assimilate the highly generalizable class-wise semantics from the CLIP text encoder, representing the second hierarchy. Lastly, abundant image-wise semantics containing multi-object and their contexts are also distilled by an image-wise contrastive distillation. Benefiting from the elaborated semantic distillation in triple hierarchies, our HD-OVD inherits generalizable recognition ability from CLIP in instance, class, and image levels. Thus, we boost the novel AP on the OV-COCO dataset to 46.4% with a ResNet50 backbone, which outperforms others by a clear margin. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to analyze how each component works.
Authors:Haichao Wang, Xinyue Xi, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han
Abstract:
Existing computer vision processing pipeline acquires visual information using an image sensor that captures pixel information in the Bayer pattern. The raw sensor data are then processed using an image signal processor (ISP) that first converts Bayer pixel data to RGB on a pixel by pixel basis, followed by video convolutional network (VCN) processing on a frame by frame basis. Both ISP and VCN are computationally expensive with high power consumption and latency. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that eliminates the ISP and leverages motion estimation to accelerate video vision tasks directly in the Bayer domain. We introduce Motion Estimation-based Video Convolution (MEVC), which integrates sliding-window motion estimation into each convolutional layer, enabling prediction and residual-based refinement that reduces redundant computations across frames. This design bridges the structural gap between block-based motion estimation and spatial convolution, enabling accurate, low-cost processing. Our end-to-end pipeline supports raw Bayer input and achieves over 70\% reduction in FLOPs with minimal accuracy degradation across video semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and object detection benchmarks, using both synthetic Bayer-converted and real Bayer video datasets. This framework generalizes across convolution-based models and marks the first effective reuse of motion estimation for accelerating video computer vision directly from raw sensor data.
Authors:Zhourui Zhang, Jun Li, Jiayan Li, Jianhua Xu
Abstract:
Most of recent attention-guided feature masking distillation methods perform knowledge transfer via global teacher attention maps without delving into fine-grained clues. Instead, performing distillation at finer granularity is conducive to uncovering local details supplementary to global knowledge transfer and reconstructing comprehensive student features. In this study, we propose a Spatial-aware Adaptive Masking Knowledge Distillation (SAMKD) framework for accurate object detection. Different from previous feature distillation methods which mainly perform single-scale feature masking, we develop spatially hierarchical feature masking distillation scheme, such that the object-aware locality is encoded during coarse-to-fine distillation process for improved feature reconstruction. In addition, our spatial-aware feature distillation strategy is combined with a masking logit distillation scheme in which region-specific feature difference between teacher and student networks is utilized to adaptively guide the distillation process. Thus, it can help the student model to better learn from the teacher counterpart with improved knowledge transfer and reduced gap. Extensive experiments for detection task demonstrate the superiority of our method. For example, when FCOS is used as teacher detector with ResNet101 backbone, our method improves the student network from 35.3\% to 38.8\% mAP, outperforming state-of-the-art distillation methods including MGD, FreeKD and DMKD.
Authors:Xiang Zhang, Chenchen Fu, Yufei Cui, Lan Yi, Yuyang Sun, Weiwei Wu, Xue Liu
Abstract:
Real-time object detection takes an essential part in the decision-making process of numerous real-world applications, including collision avoidance and path planning in autonomous driving systems. This paper presents a novel real-time streaming perception method named CorrDiff, designed to tackle the challenge of delays in real-time detection systems. The main contribution of CorrDiff lies in its adaptive delay-aware detector, which is able to utilize runtime-estimated temporal cues to predict objects' locations for multiple future frames, and selectively produce predictions that matches real-world time, effectively compensating for any communication and computational delays. The proposed model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by leveraging motion estimation and feature enhancement, both for 1) single-frame detection for the current frame or the next frame, in terms of the metric mAP, and 2) the prediction for (multiple) future frame(s), in terms of the metric sAP (The sAP metric is to evaluate object detection algorithms in streaming scenarios, factoring in both latency and accuracy). It demonstrates robust performance across a range of devices, from powerful Tesla V100 to modest RTX 2080Ti, achieving the highest level of perceptual accuracy on all platforms. Unlike most state-of-the-art methods that struggle to complete computation within a single frame on less powerful devices, CorrDiff meets the stringent real-time processing requirements on all kinds of devices. The experimental results emphasize the system's adaptability and its potential to significantly improve the safety and reliability for many real-world systems, such as autonomous driving. Our code is completely open-sourced and is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CorrDiff.
Authors:Xiaoshuai Hao, Guanqun Liu, Yuting Zhao, Yuheng Ji, Mengchuan Wei, Haimei Zhao, Lingdong Kong, Rong Yin, Yu Liu
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion models play a crucial role in autonomous driving perception, particularly in tasks like 3D object detection and HD map construction. These models provide essential and comprehensive static environmental information for autonomous driving systems. While camera-LiDAR fusion methods have shown promising results by integrating data from both modalities, they often depend on complete sensor inputs. This reliance can lead to low robustness and potential failures when sensors are corrupted or missing, raising significant safety concerns. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the Multi-Sensor Corruption Benchmark (MSC-Bench), the first comprehensive benchmark aimed at evaluating the robustness of multi-sensor autonomous driving perception models against various sensor corruptions. Our benchmark includes 16 combinations of corruption types that disrupt both camera and LiDAR inputs, either individually or concurrently. Extensive evaluations of six 3D object detection models and four HD map construction models reveal substantial performance degradation under adverse weather conditions and sensor failures, underscoring critical safety issues. The benchmark toolkit and affiliated code and model checkpoints have been made publicly accessible.
Authors:Junmin Cai, Han Sun, Ningzhong Liu
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify objects in images that are well hidden in the environment due to their high similarity to the background in terms of texture and color. However, existing most boundary-guided camouflage object detection algorithms tend to generate object boundaries early in the network, and inaccurate edge priors often introduce noises in object detection. Address on this issue, we propose a novel network named B2Net aiming to enhance the accuracy of obtained boundaries by reusing boundary-aware modules at different stages of the network. Specifically, we present a Residual Feature Enhanced Module (RFEM) with the goal of integrating more discriminative feature representations to enhance detection accuracy and reliability. After that, the Boundary Aware Module (BAM) is introduced to explore edge cues twice by integrating spatial information from low-level features and semantic information from high-level features. Finally, we design the Cross-scale Boundary Fusion Module(CBFM) that integrate information across different scales in a top-down manner, merging boundary features with object features to obtain a comprehensive feature representation incorporating boundary information. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method B2Net outperforms 15 state-of-art methods under widely used evaluation metrics. Code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Bastian Jäckl, Yannick Metz, Udo Schlegel, Daniel A. Keim, Maximilian T. Fischer
Abstract:
Object-centric architectures can learn to extract distinct object representations from visual scenes, enabling downstream applications on the object level. Similarly to autoencoder-based image models, object-centric approaches have been trained on the unsupervised reconstruction loss of images encoded by RGB color spaces. In our work, we challenge the common assumption that RGB images are the optimal color space for unsupervised learning in computer vision. We discuss conceptually and empirically that other color spaces, such as HSV, bear essential characteristics for object-centric representation learning, like robustness to lighting conditions. We further show that models improve when requiring them to predict additional color channels. Specifically, we propose to transform the predicted targets to the RGB-S space, which extends RGB with HSV's saturation component and leads to markedly better reconstruction and disentanglement for five common evaluation datasets. The use of composite color spaces can be implemented with basically no computational overhead, is agnostic of the models' architecture, and is universally applicable across a wide range of visual computing tasks and training types. The findings of our approach encourage additional investigations in computer vision tasks beyond object-centric learning.
Authors:Zhihang Song, Lihui Peng, Jianming Hu, Danya Yao, Yi Zhang
Abstract:
The multi-modal perception methods are thriving in the autonomous driving field due to their better usage of complementary data from different sensors. Such methods depend on calibration and synchronization between sensors to get accurate environmental information. There have already been studies about space-alignment robustness in autonomous driving object detection process, however, the research for time-alignment is relatively few. As in reality experiments, LiDAR point clouds are more challenging for real-time data transfer, our study used historical frames of LiDAR to better align features when the LiDAR data lags exist. We designed a Timealign module to predict and combine LiDAR features with observation to tackle such time misalignment based on SOTA GraphBEV framework.
Authors:Jiwon Choi, Dongjin Cho, Gihyeon Lee, Hogyun Kim, Geonmo Yang, Joowan Kim, Younggun Cho
Abstract:
Maritime environments often present hazardous situations due to factors such as moving ships or buoys, which become obstacles under the influence of waves. In such challenging conditions, the ability to detect and track potentially hazardous objects is critical for the safe navigation of marine robots. To address the scarcity of comprehensive datasets capturing these dynamic scenarios, we introduce a new multi-modal dataset that includes image and point-wise annotations of maritime hazards. Our dataset provides detailed ground truth for obstacle detection and tracking, including objects as small as 10$\times$10 pixels, which are crucial for maritime safety. To validate the dataset's effectiveness as a reliable benchmark, we conducted evaluations using various methodologies, including \ac{SOTA} techniques for object detection and tracking. These evaluations are expected to contribute to performance improvements, particularly in the complex maritime environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset offering multi-modal annotations specifically tailored to maritime environments. Our dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/view/polaris-dataset.
Authors:Jacky Kwok, Shulu Li, Marten Lohstroh, Edward A. Lee
Abstract:
The rise of intelligent autonomous systems, especially in robotics and autonomous agents, has created a critical need for robust communication middleware that can ensure real-time processing of extensive sensor data. Current robotics middleware like Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 faces challenges with nondeterminism and high communication latency when dealing with large data across multiple subscribers on a multi-core compute platform. To address these issues, we present High-Performance Robotic Middleware (HPRM), built on top of the deterministic coordination language Lingua Franca (LF). HPRM employs optimizations including an in-memory object store for efficient zero-copy transfer of large payloads, adaptive serialization to minimize serialization overhead, and an eager protocol with real-time sockets to reduce handshake latency. Benchmarks show HPRM achieves up to 173x lower latency than ROS2 when broadcasting large messages to multiple nodes. We then demonstrate the benefits of HPRM by integrating it with the CARLA simulator and running reinforcement learning agents along with object detection workloads. In the CARLA autonomous driving application, HPRM attains 91.1% lower latency than ROS2. The deterministic coordination semantics of HPRM, combined with its optimized IPC mechanisms, enable efficient and predictable real-time communication for intelligent autonomous systems.
Authors:Francesco Taioli, Edoardo Zorzi, Gianni Franchi, Alberto Castellini, Alessandro Farinelli, Marco Cristani, Yiming Wang
Abstract:
Language-driven instance object navigation assumes that human users initiate the task by providing a detailed description of the target instance to the embodied agent. While this description is crucial for distinguishing the target from visually similar instances in a scene, providing it prior to navigation can be demanding for human. To bridge this gap, we introduce Collaborative Instance object Navigation (CoIN), a new task setting where the agent actively resolve uncertainties about the target instance during navigation in natural, template-free, open-ended dialogues with human. We propose a novel training-free method, Agent-user Interaction with UncerTainty Awareness (AIUTA), which operates independently from the navigation policy, and focuses on the human-agent interaction reasoning with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). First, upon object detection, a Self-Questioner model initiates a self-dialogue within the agent to obtain a complete and accurate observation description with a novel uncertainty estimation technique. Then, an Interaction Trigger module determines whether to ask a question to the human, continue or halt navigation, minimizing user input. For evaluation, we introduce CoIN-Bench, with a curated dataset designed for challenging multi-instance scenarios. CoIN-Bench supports both online evaluation with humans and reproducible experiments with simulated user-agent interactions. On CoIN-Bench, we show that AIUTA serves as a competitive baseline, while existing language-driven instance navigation methods struggle in complex multi-instance scenes. Code and benchmark will be available upon acceptance at https://intelligolabs.github.io/CoIN/
Authors:Leon Sick, Dominik Engel, Sebastian Hartwig, Pedro Hermosilla, Timo Ropinski
Abstract:
Traditionally, algorithms that learn to segment object instances in 2D images have heavily relied on large amounts of human-annotated data. Only recently, novel approaches have emerged tackling this problem in an unsupervised fashion. Generally, these approaches first generate pseudo-masks and then train a class-agnostic detector. While such methods deliver the current state of the art, they often fail to correctly separate instances overlapping in 2D image space since only semantics are considered. To tackle this issue, we instead propose to cut the semantic masks in 3D to obtain the final 2D instances by utilizing a point cloud representation of the scene. Furthermore, we derive a Spatial Importance function, which we use to resharpen the semantics along the 3D borders of instances. Nevertheless, these pseudo-masks are still subject to mask ambiguity. To address this issue, we further propose to augment the training of a class-agnostic detector with three Spatial Confidence components aiming to isolate a clean learning signal. With these contributions, our approach outperforms competing methods across multiple standard benchmarks for unsupervised instance segmentation and object detection.
Authors:Xavier Bou, Gabriele Facciolo, Rafael Grompone von Gioi, Jean-Michel Morel, Thibaud Ehret
Abstract:
Oriented object detection predicts orientation in addition to object location and bounding box. Precisely predicting orientation remains challenging due to angular periodicity, which introduces boundary discontinuity issues and symmetry ambiguities. Inspired by classical works on edge and corner detection, this paper proposes to represent orientation in oriented bounding boxes as a structure tensor. This representation combines the strengths of Gaussian-based methods and angle-coder solutions, providing a simple yet efficient approach that is robust to angular periodicity issues without additional hyperparameters. Extensive evaluations across five datasets demonstrate that the proposed structure tensor representation outperforms previous methods in both fully-supervised and weakly supervised tasks, achieving high precision in angular prediction with minimal computational overhead. Thus, this work establishes structure tensors as a robust and modular alternative for encoding orientation in oriented object detection. We make our code publicly available, allowing for seamless integration into existing object detectors.
Authors:Linfeng He, Yiming Sun, Sihao Wu, Jiaxu Liu, Xiaowei Huang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for enhancing visual comprehension in autonomous driving systems by integrating visual language models (VLMs) with additional visual perception module specialised in object detection. We extend the Llama-Adapter architecture by incorporating a YOLOS-based detection network alongside the CLIP perception network, addressing limitations in object detection and localisation. Our approach introduces camera ID-separators to improve multi-view processing, crucial for comprehensive environmental awareness. Experiments on the DriveLM visual question answering challenge demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models, with enhanced performance in ChatGPT scores, BLEU scores, and CIDEr metrics, indicating closeness of model answer to ground truth. Our method represents a promising step towards more capable and interpretable autonomous driving systems. Possible safety enhancement enabled by detection modality is also discussed.
Authors:Jisong Kim, Minjae Seong, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
Accurate and robust 3D object detection is a critical component in autonomous vehicles and robotics. While recent radar-camera fusion methods have made significant progress by fusing information in the bird's-eye view (BEV) representation, they often struggle to effectively capture the motion of dynamic objects, leading to limited performance in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce CRT-Fusion, a novel framework that integrates temporal information into radar-camera fusion to address this challenge. Our approach comprises three key modules: Multi-View Fusion (MVF), Motion Feature Estimator (MFE), and Motion Guided Temporal Fusion (MGTF). The MVF module fuses radar and image features within both the camera view and bird's-eye view, thereby generating a more precise unified BEV representation. The MFE module conducts two simultaneous tasks: estimation of pixel-wise velocity information and BEV segmentation. Based on the velocity and the occupancy score map obtained from the MFE module, the MGTF module aligns and fuses feature maps across multiple timestamps in a recurrent manner. By considering the motion of dynamic objects, CRT-Fusion can produce robust BEV feature maps, thereby improving detection accuracy and robustness. Extensive evaluations on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate that CRT-Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for radar-camera-based 3D object detection. Our approach outperforms the previous best method in terms of NDS by +1.7%, while also surpassing the leading approach in mAP by +1.4%. These significant improvements in both metrics showcase the effectiveness of our proposed fusion strategy in enhancing the reliability and accuracy of 3D object detection.
Authors:Zhenyu Wang, Yali Li, Hengshuang Zhao, Shengjin Wang
Abstract:
The current trend in computer vision is to utilize one universal model to address all various tasks. Achieving such a universal model inevitably requires incorporating multi-domain data for joint training to learn across multiple problem scenarios. In point cloud based 3D object detection, however, such multi-domain joint training is highly challenging, because large domain gaps among point clouds from different datasets lead to the severe domain-interference problem. In this paper, we propose \textbf{OneDet3D}, a universal one-for-all model that addresses 3D detection across different domains, including diverse indoor and outdoor scenes, within the \emph{same} framework and only \emph{one} set of parameters. We propose the domain-aware partitioning in scatter and context, guided by a routing mechanism, to address the data interference issue, and further incorporate the text modality for a language-guided classification to unify the multi-dataset label spaces and mitigate the category interference issue. The fully sparse structure and anchor-free head further accommodate point clouds with significant scale disparities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong universal ability of OneDet3D to utilize only one trained model for addressing almost all 3D object detection tasks.
Authors:Hong-fu Chou, Vu Nguyen Ha, Prabhu Thiruvasagam, Thanh-Dung Le, Geoffrey Eappen, Ti Ti Nguyen, Duc Dung Tran, Luis M. Garces-Socarras, Juan Carlos Merlano-Duncan, Symeon Chatzinotas
Abstract:
Earth observation (EO) systems are essential for mapping, catastrophe monitoring, and resource management, but they have trouble processing and sending large amounts of EO data efficiently, especially for specialized applications like agriculture and real-time disaster response. This paper presents a novel framework for semantic communication in EO satellite networks, aimed at enhancing data transmission efficiency and system performance through cognitive processing techniques. The proposed system leverages Discrete Task-Oriented Joint Source-Channel Coding (DT-JSCC) and Semantic Data Augmentation (SA) integrate cognitive semantic processing with inter-satellite links, enabling efficient analysis and transmission of multispectral imagery for improved object detection, pattern recognition, and real-time decision-making. Cognitive Semantic Augmentation (CSA) is introduced to enhance a system's capability to process and transmit semantic information, improving feature prioritization, consistency, and adaptation to changing communication and application needs. The end-to-end architecture is designed for next-generation satellite networks, such as those supporting 6G, demonstrating significant improvements in fewer communication rounds and better accuracy over federated learning.
Authors:Shenghao Fu, Junkai Yan, Qize Yang, Xihan Wei, Xiaohua Xie, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract:
Recent vision foundation models can extract universal representations and show impressive abilities in various tasks. However, their application on object detection is largely overlooked, especially without fine-tuning them. In this work, we show that frozen foundation models can be a versatile feature enhancer, even though they are not pre-trained for object detection. Specifically, we explore directly transferring the high-level image understanding of foundation models to detectors in the following two ways. First, the class token in foundation models provides an in-depth understanding of the complex scene, which facilitates decoding object queries in the detector's decoder by providing a compact context. Additionally, the patch tokens in foundation models can enrich the features in the detector's encoder by providing semantic details. Utilizing frozen foundation models as plug-and-play modules rather than the commonly used backbone can significantly enhance the detector's performance while preventing the problems caused by the architecture discrepancy between the detector's backbone and the foundation model. With such a novel paradigm, we boost the SOTA query-based detector DINO from 49.0% AP to 51.9% AP (+2.9% AP) and further to 53.8% AP (+4.8% AP) by integrating one or two foundation models respectively, on the COCO validation set after training for 12 epochs with R50 as the detector's backbone.
Authors:Bryan Bo Cao, Abhinav Sharma, Manavjeet Singh, Anshul Gandhi, Samir Das, Shubham Jain
Abstract:
Edge computing has emerged as an alternative to reduce transmission and processing delay and preserve privacy of the video streams. However, the ever-increasing complexity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) used in video-based applications (e.g. object detection) exerts pressure on memory-constrained edge devices. Model merging is proposed to reduce the DNNs' memory footprint by keeping only one copy of merged layers' weights in memory. In existing model merging techniques, (i) only architecturally identical layers can be shared; (ii) requires computationally expensive retraining in the cloud; (iii) assumes the availability of ground truth for retraining. The re-evaluation of a merged model's performance, however, requires a validation dataset with ground truth, typically runs at the cloud. Common metrics to guide the selection of shared layers include the size or computational cost of shared layers or representation size. We propose a new model merging scheme by sharing representations (i.e., outputs of layers) at the edge, guided by representation similarity S. We show that S is extremely highly correlated with merged model's accuracy with Pearson Correlation Coefficient |r| > 0.94 than other metrics, demonstrating that representation similarity can serve as a strong validation accuracy indicator without ground truth. We present our preliminary results of the newly proposed model merging scheme with identified challenges, demonstrating a promising research future direction.
Authors:Juexiao Zhang, Gao Zhu, Sihang Li, Xinhao Liu, Haorui Song, Xinran Tang, Chen Feng
Abstract:
A proper scene representation is central to the pursuit of spatial intelligence where agents can robustly reconstruct and efficiently understand 3D scenes. A scene representation is either metric, such as landmark maps in 3D reconstruction, 3D bounding boxes in object detection, or voxel grids in occupancy prediction, or topological, such as pose graphs with loop closures in SLAM or visibility graphs in SfM. In this work, we propose to build Multiview Scene Graphs (MSG) from unposed images, representing a scene topologically with interconnected place and object nodes. The task of building MSG is challenging for existing representation learning methods since it needs to jointly address both visual place recognition, object detection, and object association from images with limited fields of view and potentially large viewpoint changes. To evaluate any method tackling this task, we developed an MSG dataset and annotation based on a public 3D dataset. We also propose an evaluation metric based on the intersection-over-union score of MSG edges. Moreover, we develop a novel baseline method built on mainstream pretrained vision models, combining visual place recognition and object association into one Transformer decoder architecture. Experiments demonstrate that our method has superior performance compared to existing relevant baselines.
Authors:Jiaxin Li, Gorka Abad, Stjepan Picek, Mauro Conti
Abstract:
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), commonly mimicking neurons with non-linear functions to output floating-point numbers, consistently receive the same signals of a data point during its forward time. Unlike ANNs, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) get various input signals in the forward time of a data point and simulate neurons in a biologically plausible way, i.e., producing a spike (a binary value) if the accumulated membrane potential of a neuron is larger than a threshold. Even though ANNs have achieved remarkable success in multiple tasks, e.g., face recognition and object detection, SNNs have recently obtained attention due to their low power consumption, fast inference, and event-driven properties. While privacy threats against ANNs are widely explored, much less work has been done on SNNs. For instance, it is well-known that ANNs are vulnerable to the Membership Inference Attack (MIA), but whether the same applies to SNNs is not explored.
In this paper, we evaluate the membership privacy of SNNs by considering eight MIAs, seven of which are inspired by MIAs against ANNs. Our evaluation results show that SNNs are more vulnerable (maximum 10% higher in terms of balanced attack accuracy) than ANNs when both are trained with neuromorphic datasets (with time dimension). On the other hand, when training ANNs or SNNs with static datasets (without time dimension), the vulnerability depends on the dataset used. If we convert ANNs trained with static datasets to SNNs, the accuracy of MIAs drops (maximum 11.5% with a reduction of 7.6% on the test accuracy of the target model). Next, we explore the impact factors of MIAs on SNNs by conducting a hyperparameter study. Finally, we show that the basic data augmentation method for static data and two recent data augmentation methods for neuromorphic data can considerably (maximum reduction of 25.7%) decrease MIAs' performance on SNNs.
Authors:Xiang Zhang, Yufei Cui, Chenchen Fu, Weiwei Wu, Zihao Wang, Yuyang Sun, Xue Liu
Abstract:
Real-time object detection is critical for the decision-making process for many real-world applications, such as collision avoidance and path planning in autonomous driving. This work presents an innovative real-time streaming perception method, Transtreaming, which addresses the challenge of real-time object detection with dynamic computational delay. The core innovation of Transtreaming lies in its adaptive delay-aware transformer, which can concurrently predict multiple future frames and select the output that best matches the real-world present time, compensating for any system-induced computation delays. The proposed model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, even in single-frame detection scenarios, by leveraging a transformer-based methodology. It demonstrates robust performance across a range of devices, from powerful V100 to modest 2080Ti, achieving the highest level of perceptual accuracy on all platforms. Unlike most state-of-the-art methods that struggle to complete computation within a single frame on less powerful devices, Transtreaming meets the stringent real-time processing requirements on all kinds of devices. The experimental results emphasize the system's adaptability and its potential to significantly improve the safety and reliability for many real-world systems, such as autonomous driving.
Authors:Jiahui Liu, Xin Wen, Shizhen Zhao, Yingxian Chen, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is a challenging task due to the absence of open-set OOD data. Inspired by recent advancements in text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion, we study the potential of generative models trained on large-scale open-set data to synthesize OOD samples, thereby enhancing OOD object detection. We introduce SyncOOD, a simple data curation method that capitalizes on the capabilities of large foundation models to automatically extract meaningful OOD data from text-to-image generative models. This offers the model access to open-world knowledge encapsulated within off-the-shelf foundation models. The synthetic OOD samples are then employed to augment the training of a lightweight, plug-and-play OOD detector, thus effectively optimizing the in-distribution (ID)/OOD decision boundaries. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SyncOOD significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing new state-of-the-art performance with minimal synthetic data usage.
Authors:Chengjie Lu, Jiahui Wu, Shaukat Ali, Mikkel Labori Olsen
Abstract:
Refurbishing laptops extends their lives while contributing to reducing electronic waste, which promotes building a sustainable future. To this end, the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) focuses on the research and development of several robotic applications empowered with software, including laptop refurbishing. Cleaning represents a major step in refurbishing and involves identifying and removing stickers from laptop surfaces. Software plays a crucial role in the cleaning process. For instance, the software integrates various object detection models to identify and remove stickers from laptops automatically. However, given the diversity in types of stickers (e.g., shapes, colors, locations), identification of the stickers is highly uncertain, thereby requiring explicit quantification of uncertainty associated with the identified stickers. Such uncertainty quantification can help reduce risks in removing stickers, which, for example, could otherwise result in software faults damaging laptop surfaces. For uncertainty quantification, we adopted the Monte Carlo Dropout method to evaluate six sticker detection models (SDMs) from DTI using three datasets: the original image dataset from DTI and two datasets generated with vision language models, i.e., DALL-E-3 and Stable Diffusion-3. In addition, we presented novel robustness metrics concerning detection accuracy and uncertainty to assess the robustness of the SDMs based on adversarial datasets generated from the three datasets using a dense adversary method.
Our evaluation results show that different SDMs perform differently regarding different metrics. Based on the results, we provide SDM selection guidelines and lessons learned from various perspectives.
Authors:Fangcen Liu, Chenqiang Gao, Fang Chen, Pengcheng Li, Junjie Guo, Deyu Meng
Abstract:
Infrared and visible dual-modality tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection can achieve robust performance even in extreme scenes by fusing complementary information. Most current methods design task-specific frameworks, which are limited in generalization across multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a fusion-guided infrared and visible general framework, IVGF, which can be easily extended to many high-level vision tasks. Firstly, we adopt the SOTA infrared and visible foundation models to extract the general representations. Then, to enrich the semantics information of these general representations for high-level vision tasks, we design the feature enhancement module and token enhancement module for feature maps and tokens, respectively. Besides, the attention-guided fusion module is proposed for effectively fusing by exploring the complementary information of two modalities. Moreover, we also adopt the cutout&mix augmentation strategy to conduct the data augmentation, which further improves the ability of the model to mine the regional complementary between the two modalities. Extensive experiments show that the IVGF outperforms state-of-the-art dual-modality methods in the semantic segmentation and object detection tasks. The detailed ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each module, and another experiment explores the anti-missing modality ability of the proposed method in the dual-modality semantic segmentation task.
Authors:Vinit Hegiste, Snehal Walunj, Jibinraj Antony, Tatjana Legler, Martin Ruskowski
Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) has garnered significant attention in manufacturing for its robust model development and privacy-preserving capabilities. This paper contributes to research focused on the robustness of FL models in object detection, hereby presenting a comparative study with conventional techniques using a hybrid dataset for small object detection. Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of FL over centralized training models and different deep learning techniques when tested on test data recorded in a different environment with a variety of object viewpoints, lighting conditions, cluttered backgrounds, etc. These results highlight the potential of FL in achieving robust global models that perform efficiently even in unseen environments. The study provides valuable insights for deploying resilient object detection models in manufacturing environments.
Authors:Ke Zhou, Zhongwei Qiu, Dongmei Fu
Abstract:
Foundational vision models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have achieved significant breakthroughs through extensive pre-training on large-scale visual datasets. Despite their general success, these models may fall short in specialized tasks with limited data, and fine-tuning such large-scale models is often not feasible. Current strategies involve incorporating adaptors into the pre-trained SAM to facilitate downstream task performance with minimal model adjustment. However, these strategies can be hampered by suboptimal learning approaches for the adaptors. In this paper, we introduce a novel Multi-scale Contrastive Adaptor learning method named MCA-SAM, which enhances adaptor performance through a meticulously designed contrastive learning framework at both token and sample levels. Our Token-level Contrastive adaptor (TC-adaptor) focuses on refining local representations by improving the discriminability of patch tokens, while the Sample-level Contrastive adaptor (SC-adaptor) amplifies global understanding across different samples. Together, these adaptors synergistically enhance feature comparison within and across samples, bolstering the model's representational strength and its ability to adapt to new tasks. Empirical results demonstrate that MCA-SAM sets new benchmarks, outperforming existing methods in three challenging domains: camouflage object detection, shadow segmentation, and polyp segmentation. Specifically, MCA-SAM exhibits substantial relative performance enhancements, achieving a 20.0% improvement in MAE on the COD10K dataset, a 6.0% improvement in MAE on the CAMO dataset, a 15.4% improvement in BER on the ISTD dataset, and a 7.9% improvement in mDice on the Kvasir-SEG dataset.
Authors:Yifan Feng, Jiangang Huang, Shaoyi Du, Shihui Ying, Jun-Hai Yong, Yipeng Li, Guiguang Ding, Rongrong Ji, Yue Gao
Abstract:
We introduce Hyper-YOLO, a new object detection method that integrates hypergraph computations to capture the complex high-order correlations among visual features. Traditional YOLO models, while powerful, have limitations in their neck designs that restrict the integration of cross-level features and the exploitation of high-order feature interrelationships. To address these challenges, we propose the Hypergraph Computation Empowered Semantic Collecting and Scattering (HGC-SCS) framework, which transposes visual feature maps into a semantic space and constructs a hypergraph for high-order message propagation. This enables the model to acquire both semantic and structural information, advancing beyond conventional feature-focused learning. Hyper-YOLO incorporates the proposed Mixed Aggregation Network (MANet) in its backbone for enhanced feature extraction and introduces the Hypergraph-Based Cross-Level and Cross-Position Representation Network (HyperC2Net) in its neck. HyperC2Net operates across five scales and breaks free from traditional grid structures, allowing for sophisticated high-order interactions across levels and positions. This synergy of components positions Hyper-YOLO as a state-of-the-art architecture in various scale models, as evidenced by its superior performance on the COCO dataset. Specifically, Hyper-YOLO-N significantly outperforms the advanced YOLOv8-N and YOLOv9-T with 12\% $\text{AP}^{val}$ and 9\% $\text{AP}^{val}$ improvements. The source codes are at ttps://github.com/iMoonLab/Hyper-YOLO.
Authors:Youqian Zhang, Chunxi Yang, Eugene Y. Fu, Qinhong Jiang, Chen Yan, Sze-Yiu Chau, Grace Ngai, Hong-Va Leong, Xiapu Luo, Wenyuan Xu
Abstract:
Object detection can localize and identify objects in images, and it is extensively employed in critical multimedia applications such as security surveillance and autonomous driving. Despite the success of existing object detection models, they are often evaluated in ideal scenarios where captured images guarantee the accurate and complete representation of the detecting scenes. However, images captured by image sensors may be affected by different factors in real applications, including cyber-physical attacks. In particular, attackers can exploit hardware properties within the systems to inject electromagnetic interference so as to manipulate the images. Such attacks can cause noisy or incomplete information about the captured scene, leading to incorrect detection results, potentially granting attackers malicious control over critical functions of the systems. This paper presents a research work that comprehensively quantifies and analyzes the impacts of such attacks on state-of-the-art object detection models in practice. It also sheds light on the underlying reasons for the incorrect detection outcomes.
Authors:Zhourui Zhang, Jun Li, Zhijian Wu, Jifeng Shen, Jianhua Xu
Abstract:
In recent years, current mainstream feature masking distillation methods mainly function by reconstructing selectively masked regions of a student network from the feature maps of a teacher network. In these methods, attention mechanisms can help to identify spatially important regions and crucial object-aware channel clues, such that the reconstructed features are encoded with sufficient discriminative and representational power similar to teacher features. However, previous feature-masking distillation methods mainly address homogeneous knowledge distillation without fully taking into account the heterogeneous knowledge distillation scenario. In particular, the huge discrepancy between the teacher and the student frameworks within the heterogeneous distillation paradigm is detrimental to feature masking, leading to deteriorating reconstructed student features. In this study, a novel dual feature-masking heterogeneous distillation framework termed DFMSD is proposed for object detection. More specifically, a stage-wise adaptation learning module is incorporated into the dual feature-masking framework, and thus the student model can be progressively adapted to the teacher models for bridging the gap between heterogeneous networks. Furthermore, a masking enhancement strategy is combined with stage-wise learning such that object-aware masking regions are adaptively strengthened to improve feature-masking reconstruction. In addition, semantic alignment is performed at each Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) layer between the teacher and the student networks for generating consistent feature distributions. Our experiments for the object detection task demonstrate the promise of our approach, suggesting that DFMSD outperforms both the state-of-the-art heterogeneous and homogeneous distillation methods.
Authors:Trupti Mahendrakar, Ryan T. White, Madhur Tiwari
Abstract:
This paper focuses on autonomously characterizing components such as solar panels, body panels, antennas, and thrusters of an unknown resident space object (RSO) using camera feed to aid autonomous on-orbit servicing (OOS) and active debris removal. Significant research has been conducted in this area using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). While CNNs are powerful at learning patterns and performing object detection, they struggle with missed detections and misclassifications in environments different from the training data, making them unreliable for safety in high-stakes missions like OOS. Additionally, failures exhibited by CNNs are often easily rectifiable by humans using commonsense reasoning and contextual knowledge. Embedding such reasoning in an object detector could improve detection accuracy. To validate this hypothesis, this paper presents an end-to-end object detector called SpaceYOLOv2 (SpY), which leverages the generalizability of CNNs while incorporating contextual knowledge using traditional computer vision techniques. SpY consists of two main components: a shape detector and the SpaceYOLO classifier (SYC). The shape detector uses CNNs to detect primitive shapes of RSOs and SYC associates these shapes with contextual knowledge, such as color and texture, to classify them as spacecraft components or "unknown" if the detected shape is uncertain. SpY's modular architecture allows customizable usage of contextual knowledge to improve detection performance, or SYC as a secondary fail-safe classifier with an existing spacecraft component detector. Performance evaluations on hardware-in-the-loop images of a mock-up spacecraft demonstrate that SpY is accurate and an ensemble of SpY with YOLOv5 trained for satellite component detection improved the performance by 23.4% in recall, demonstrating enhanced safety for vision-based navigation tasks.
Authors:Nikolas Koutsoubis, Yasin Yilmaz, Ravi P. Ramachandran, Matthew Schabath, Ghulam Rasool
Abstract:
Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have fueled remarkable advancements, particularly in healthcare. Within medical imaging, ML models hold the promise of improving disease diagnoses, treatment planning, and post-treatment monitoring. Various computer vision tasks like image classification, object detection, and image segmentation are poised to become routine in clinical analysis. However, privacy concerns surrounding patient data hinder the assembly of large training datasets needed for developing and training accurate, robust, and generalizable models. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a compelling solution, enabling organizations to collaborate on ML model training by sharing model training information (gradients) rather than data (e.g., medical images). FL's distributed learning framework facilitates inter-institutional collaboration while preserving patient privacy. However, FL, while robust in privacy preservation, faces several challenges. Sensitive information can still be gleaned from shared gradients that are passed on between organizations during model training. Additionally, in medical imaging, quantifying model confidence\uncertainty accurately is crucial due to the noise and artifacts present in the data. Uncertainty estimation in FL encounters unique hurdles due to data heterogeneity across organizations. This paper offers a comprehensive review of FL, privacy preservation, and uncertainty estimation, with a focus on medical imaging. Alongside a survey of current research, we identify gaps in the field and suggest future directions for FL research to enhance privacy and address noisy medical imaging data challenges.
Authors:Peixi Wu, Bosong Chai, Xuan Nie, Longquan Yan, Zeyu Wang, Qifan Zhou, Boning Wang, Yansong Peng, Hebei Li
Abstract:
In this technical report, we present our findings from the research conducted on the Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection (V3Det) dataset for Supervised Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection task. How to deal with complex categories and detection boxes has become a difficulty in this track. The original supervised detector is not suitable for this task. We have designed a series of improvements, including adjustments to the network structure, changes to the loss function, and design of training strategies. Our model has shown improvement over the baseline and achieved excellent rankings on the Leaderboard for both the Vast Vocabulary Object Detection (Supervised) track and the Open Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) track of the V3Det Challenge 2024.
Authors:Van Minh Nguyen, Emma Sandidge, Trupti Mahendrakar, Ryan T. White
Abstract:
On-orbit servicing (OOS), inspection of spacecraft, and active debris removal (ADR). Such missions require precise rendezvous and proximity operations in the vicinity of non-cooperative, possibly unknown, resident space objects. Safety concerns with manned missions and lag times with ground-based control necessitate complete autonomy. In this article, we present an approach for mapping geometries and high-confidence detection of components of unknown, non-cooperative satellites on orbit. We implement accelerated 3D Gaussian splatting to learn a 3D representation of the satellite, render virtual views of the target, and ensemble the YOLOv5 object detector over the virtual views, resulting in reliable, accurate, and precise satellite component detections. The full pipeline capable of running on-board and stand to enable downstream machine intelligence tasks necessary for autonomous guidance, navigation, and control tasks.
Authors:Yu Tian, Tianqi Shao, Tsukasa Demizu, Xuyang Wu, Hsin-Tai Wu
Abstract:
Head pose estimation (HPE) requires a sophisticated understanding of 3D spatial relationships to generate precise yaw, pitch, and roll angles. Previous HPE models, primarily CNN-based, rely on cropped close-up human head images as inputs and often lack robustness in real-world scenario. Vision Language Models (VLMs) can analyze entire images while focusing on specific objects through their attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve the HPE accuracy by leveraging the object detection grounding capability of a VLM, referred to as CogVLM. We empirically find that directly LoRA fine-tuning of this VLM for the HPE task fails to achieve desirable HPE accuracy, while some model merging methods can improve accuracy but frequently produce blended invalid response formats, struggling to handle both object detection and HPE tasks simultaneously. To integrate HPE capability into CogVLM effectively, we develop a novel LoRA layer-based model merging method. This merging approach applies a high cosine similarity threshold and a winner-takes-all layer selection strategy, aligning attention to the HPE task while preserving original object detection knowledge. It successfully resolves issues with blended invalid response formats and improves accuracy. Results show that our HPE-CogVLM achieves a 31.5\% reduction in Mean Absolute Error over the current state-of-the-art CNN model, 6DRepNet, in cross-dataset evaluation. Furthermore, HPE-CogVLM outperforms both directly LoRA fine-tuned and task arithmetic-based merged VLMs across all HPE metrics.
Authors:Fangyi Chen, Han Zhang, Zhantao Yang, Hao Chen, Kai Hu, Marios Savvides
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) requires solid modeling of the region-semantic relationship, which could be learned from massive region-text pairs. However, such data is limited in practice due to significant annotation costs. In this work, we propose RTGen to generate scalable open-vocabulary region-text pairs and demonstrate its capability to boost the performance of open-vocabulary object detection. RTGen includes both text-to-region and region-to-text generation processes on scalable image-caption data. The text-to-region generation is powered by image inpainting, directed by our proposed scene-aware inpainting guider for overall layout harmony. For region-to-text generation, we perform multiple region-level image captioning with various prompts and select the best matching text according to CLIP similarity. To facilitate detection training on region-text pairs, we also introduce a localization-aware region-text contrastive loss that learns object proposals tailored with different localization qualities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RTGen can serve as a scalable, semantically rich, and effective source for open-vocabulary object detection and continue to improve the model performance when more data is utilized, delivering superior performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Tingwei Liu, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Takahiro Komamizu, Ichiro Ide
Abstract:
This paper focuses on tracking birds that appear small in a panoramic video. When the size of the tracked object is small in the image (small object tracking) and move quickly, object detection and association suffers. To address these problems, we propose Adaptive Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (Adaptive SAHI), which reduces the candidate regions to apply detection, and Detection History-aware Similarity Criterion (DHSC), which accurately associates objects in consecutive frames based on the detection history. Experiments on the NUBird2022 dataset verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method by showing improvements in both accuracy and speed.
Authors:Sunyuan Qiang, Xianfei Li, Yanyan Liang, Wenlong Liao, Tao He, Pai Peng
Abstract:
The nature of diversity in real-world environments necessitates neural network models to expand from closed category settings to accommodate novel emerging categories. In this paper, we study the open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), which facilitates the detection of novel object classes under the supervision of only base annotations and open-vocabulary knowledge. However, we find that the inadequacy of neighboring relationships between regions during the alignment process inevitably constrains the performance on recent distillation-based OVD strategies. To this end, we propose Neighboring Region Attention Alignment (NRAA), which performs alignment within the attention mechanism of a set of neighboring regions to boost the open-vocabulary inference. Specifically, for a given proposal region, we randomly explore the neighboring boxes and conduct our proposed neighboring region attention (NRA) mechanism to extract relationship information. Then, this interaction information is seamlessly provided into the distillation procedure to assist the alignment between the detector and the pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). Extensive experiments validate that our proposed model exhibits superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks.
Authors:Thomas Pöllabauer, Volker Knauthe, André Boller, Arjan Kuijper, Dieter Fellner
Abstract:
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) require large amounts of annotated training data for a good performance. Often this data is generated using manual labeling (error-prone and time-consuming) or rendering (requiring geometry and material information). Both approaches make it difficult or uneconomic to apply them to many small-scale applications. A fast and straightforward approach of acquiring the necessary training data would allow the adoption of deep learning to even the smallest of applications. Chroma keying is the process of replacing a color (usually blue or green) with another background. Instead of chroma keying, we propose luminance keying for fast and straightforward training image acquisition. We deploy a black screen with high light absorption (99.99\%) to record roughly 1-minute long videos of our target objects, circumventing typical problems of chroma keying, such as color bleeding or color overlap between background color and object color. Next we automatically mask our objects using simple brightness thresholding, saving the need for manual annotation. Finally, we automatically place the objects on random backgrounds and train a 2D object detector. We do extensive evaluation of the performance on the widely-used YCB-V object set and compare favourably to other conventional techniques such as rendering, without needing 3D meshes, materials or any other information of our target objects and in a fraction of the time needed for other approaches. Our work demonstrates highly accurate training data acquisition allowing to start training state-of-the-art networks within minutes.
Authors:Raiyan Rahman, Christopher Indris, Goetz Bramesfeld, Tianxiao Zhang, Kaidong Li, Xiangyu Chen, Ivan Grijalva, Brian McCornack, Daniel Flippo, Ajay Sharda, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
Aphid infestations are one of the primary causes of extensive damage to wheat and sorghum fields and are one of the most common vectors for plant viruses, resulting in significant agricultural yield losses. To address this problem, farmers often employ the inefficient use of harmful chemical pesticides that have negative health and environmental impacts. As a result, a large amount of pesticide is wasted on areas without significant pest infestation. This brings to attention the urgent need for an intelligent autonomous system that can locate and spray sufficiently large infestations selectively within the complex crop canopies. We have developed a large multi-scale dataset for aphid cluster detection and segmentation, collected from actual sorghum fields and meticulously annotated to include clusters of aphids. Our dataset comprises a total of 54,742 image patches, showcasing a variety of viewpoints, diverse lighting conditions, and multiple scales, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world applications. In this study, we trained and evaluated four real-time semantic segmentation models and three object detection models specifically for aphid cluster segmentation and detection. Considering the balance between accuracy and efficiency, Fast-SCNN delivered the most effective segmentation results, achieving 80.46% mean precision, 81.21% mean recall, and 91.66 frames per second (FPS). For object detection, RT-DETR exhibited the best overall performance with a 61.63% mean average precision (mAP), 92.6% mean recall, and 72.55 on an NVIDIA V100 GPU. Our experiments further indicate that aphid cluster segmentation is more suitable for assessing aphid infestations than using detection models.
Authors:Saket S. Chaturvedi, Lan Zhang, Wenbin Zhang, Pan He, Xiaoyong Yuan
Abstract:
3D object detection plays an important role in autonomous driving; however, its vulnerability to backdoor attacks has become evident. By injecting ''triggers'' to poison the training dataset, backdoor attacks manipulate the detector's prediction for inputs containing these triggers. Existing backdoor attacks against 3D object detection primarily poison 3D LiDAR signals, where large-sized 3D triggers are injected to ensure their visibility within the sparse 3D space, rendering them easy to detect and impractical in real-world scenarios.
In this paper, we delve into the robustness of 3D object detection, exploring a new backdoor attack surface through 2D cameras. Given the prevalent adoption of camera and LiDAR signal fusion for high-fidelity 3D perception, we investigate the latent potential of camera signals to disrupt the process. Although the dense nature of camera signals enables the use of nearly imperceptible small-sized triggers to mislead 2D object detection, realizing 2D-oriented backdoor attacks against 3D object detection is non-trivial. The primary challenge emerges from the fusion process that transforms camera signals into a 3D space, compromising the association with the 2D trigger to the target output. To tackle this issue, we propose an innovative 2D-oriented backdoor attack against LiDAR-camera fusion methods for 3D object detection, named BadFusion, for preserving trigger effectiveness throughout the entire fusion process. The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of BadFusion, achieving a significantly higher attack success rate compared to existing 2D-oriented attacks.
Authors:Quoc Khanh Nguyen, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Van Binh Truong, Tuong Phan, Hung Cao
Abstract:
To address the challenges of providing quick and plausible explanations in Explainable AI (XAI) for object detection models, we introduce the Gaussian Class Activation Mapping Explainer (G-CAME). Our method efficiently generates concise saliency maps by utilizing activation maps from selected layers and applying a Gaussian kernel to emphasize critical image regions for the predicted object. Compared with other Region-based approaches, G-CAME significantly reduces explanation time to 0.5 seconds without compromising the quality. Our evaluation of G-CAME, using Faster-RCNN and YOLOX on the MS-COCO 2017 dataset, demonstrates its ability to offer highly plausible and faithful explanations, especially in reducing the bias on tiny object detection.
Authors:Aakash Kumar, Chen Chen, Ajmal Mian, Neils Lobo, Mubarak Shah
Abstract:
3D detection is a critical task that enables machines to identify and locate objects in three-dimensional space. It has a broad range of applications in several fields, including autonomous driving, robotics and augmented reality. Monocular 3D detection is attractive as it requires only a single camera, however, it lacks the accuracy and robustness required for real world applications. High resolution LiDAR on the other hand, can be expensive and lead to interference problems in heavy traffic given their active transmissions. We propose a balanced approach that combines the advantages of monocular and point cloud-based 3D detection. Our method requires only a small number of 3D points, that can be obtained from a low-cost, low-resolution sensor. Specifically, we use only 512 points, which is just 1% of a full LiDAR frame in the KITTI dataset. Our method reconstructs a complete 3D point cloud from this limited 3D information combined with a single image. The reconstructed 3D point cloud and corresponding image can be used by any multi-modal off-the-shelf detector for 3D object detection. By using the proposed network architecture with an off-the-shelf multi-modal 3D detector, the accuracy of 3D detection improves by 20% compared to the state-of-the-art monocular detection methods and 6% to 9% compare to the baseline multi-modal methods on KITTI and JackRabbot datasets.
Authors:Anas Gouda, Max Schwarz, Christopher Reining, Sven Behnke, Alice Kirchheim
Abstract:
Foundation models are a strong trend in deep learning and computer vision. These models serve as a base for applications as they require minor or no further fine-tuning by developers to integrate into their applications. Foundation models for zero-shot object segmentation such as Segment Anything (SAM) output segmentation masks from images without any further object information. When they are followed in a pipeline by an object identification model, they can perform object detection without training. Here, we focus on training such an object identification model. A crucial practical aspect for an object identification model is to be flexible in input size. As object identification is an image retrieval problem, a suitable method should handle multi-query multi-gallery situations without constraining the number of input images (e.g. by having fixed-size aggregation layers). The key solution to train such a model is the centroid triplet loss (CTL), which aggregates image features to their centroids. CTL yields high accuracy, avoids misleading training signals and keeps the model input size flexible. In our experiments, we establish a new state of the art on the ArmBench object identification task, which shows general applicability of our model. We furthermore demonstrate an integrated unseen object detection pipeline on the challenging HOPE dataset, which requires fine-grained detection. There, our pipeline matches and surpasses related methods which have been trained on dataset-specific data.
Authors:Zhimeng Xin, Shiming Chen, Tianxu Wu, Yuanjie Shao, Weiping Ding, Xinge You
Abstract:
Object detection as a subfield within computer vision has achieved remarkable progress, which aims to accurately identify and locate a specific object from images or videos. Such methods rely on large-scale labeled training samples for each object category to ensure accurate detection, but obtaining extensive annotated data is a labor-intensive and expensive process in many real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, researchers have explored few-shot object detection (FSOD) that combines few-shot learning and object detection techniques to rapidly adapt to novel objects with limited annotated samples. This paper presents a comprehensive survey to review the significant advancements in the field of FSOD in recent years and summarize the existing challenges and solutions. Specifically, we first introduce the background and definition of FSOD to emphasize potential value in advancing the field of computer vision. We then propose a novel FSOD taxonomy method and survey the plentifully remarkable FSOD algorithms based on this fact to report a comprehensive overview that facilitates a deeper understanding of the FSOD problem and the development of innovative solutions. Finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of these algorithms to summarize the challenges, potential research direction, and development trend of object detection in the data scarcity scenario.
Authors:Zaid Khan, Vijay Kumar BG, Samuel Schulter, Yun Fu, Manmohan Chandraker
Abstract:
Visual program synthesis is a promising approach to exploit the reasoning abilities of large language models for compositional computer vision tasks. Previous work has used few-shot prompting with frozen LLMs to synthesize visual programs. Training an LLM to write better visual programs is an attractive prospect, but it is unclear how to accomplish this. No dataset of visual programs for training exists, and acquisition of a visual program dataset cannot be easily crowdsourced due to the need for expert annotators. To get around the lack of direct supervision, we explore improving the program synthesis abilities of an LLM using feedback from interactive experience. We propose a method where we exploit existing annotations for a vision-language task to improvise a coarse reward signal for that task, treat the LLM as a policy, and apply reinforced self-training to improve the visual program synthesis ability of the LLM for that task. We describe a series of experiments on object detection, compositional visual question answering, and image-text retrieval, and show that in each case, the self-trained LLM outperforms or performs on par with few-shot frozen LLMs that are an order of magnitude larger. Website: https://zaidkhan.me/ViReP
Authors:Zhenyu Wang, Yali Li, Taichi Liu, Hengshuang Zhao, Shengjin Wang
Abstract:
In the current state of 3D object detection research, the severe scarcity of annotated 3D data, substantial disparities across different data modalities, and the absence of a unified architecture, have impeded the progress towards the goal of universality. In this paper, we propose \textbf{OV-Uni3DETR}, a unified open-vocabulary 3D detector via cycle-modality propagation. Compared with existing 3D detectors, OV-Uni3DETR offers distinct advantages: 1) Open-vocabulary 3D detection: During training, it leverages various accessible data, especially extensive 2D detection images, to boost training diversity. During inference, it can detect both seen and unseen classes. 2) Modality unifying: It seamlessly accommodates input data from any given modality, effectively addressing scenarios involving disparate modalities or missing sensor information, thereby supporting test-time modality switching. 3) Scene unifying: It provides a unified multi-modal model architecture for diverse scenes collected by distinct sensors. Specifically, we propose the cycle-modality propagation, aimed at propagating knowledge bridging 2D and 3D modalities, to support the aforementioned functionalities. 2D semantic knowledge from large-vocabulary learning guides novel class discovery in the 3D domain, and 3D geometric knowledge provides localization supervision for 2D detection images. OV-Uni3DETR achieves the state-of-the-art performance on various scenarios, surpassing existing methods by more than 6\% on average. Its performance using only RGB images is on par with or even surpasses that of previous point cloud based methods. Code and pre-trained models will be released later.
Authors:Mingfu Liang, Jong-Chyi Su, Samuel Schulter, Sparsh Garg, Shiyu Zhao, Ying Wu, Manmohan Chandraker
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicle (AV) systems rely on robust perception models as a cornerstone of safety assurance. However, objects encountered on the road exhibit a long-tailed distribution, with rare or unseen categories posing challenges to a deployed perception model. This necessitates an expensive process of continuously curating and annotating data with significant human effort. We propose to leverage recent advances in vision-language and large language models to design an Automatic Data Engine (AIDE) that automatically identifies issues, efficiently curates data, improves the model through auto-labeling, and verifies the model through generation of diverse scenarios. This process operates iteratively, allowing for continuous self-improvement of the model. We further establish a benchmark for open-world detection on AV datasets to comprehensively evaluate various learning paradigms, demonstrating our method's superior performance at a reduced cost.
Authors:Hannah Schieber, Shiyu Li, Niklas Corell, Philipp Beckerle, Julian Kreimeier, Daniel Roth
Abstract:
In medical and industrial domains, providing guidance for assembly processes can be critical to ensure efficiency and safety. Errors in assembly can lead to significant consequences such as extended surgery times and prolonged manufacturing or maintenance times in industry. Assembly scenarios can benefit from in-situ augmented reality visualization, i.e., augmentations in close proximity to the target object, to provide guidance, reduce assembly times, and minimize errors. In order to enable in-situ visualization, 6D pose estimation can be leveraged to identify the correct location for an augmentation. Existing 6D pose estimation techniques primarily focus on individual objects and static captures. However, assembly scenarios have various dynamics, including occlusion during assembly and dynamics in the appearance of assembly objects. Existing work focus either on object detection combined with state detection, or focus purely on the pose estimation. To address the challenges of 6D pose estimation in combination with assembly state detection, our approach ASDF builds upon the strengths of YOLOv8, a real-time capable object detection framework. We extend this framework, refine the object pose, and fuse pose knowledge with network-detected pose information. Utilizing our late fusion in our Pose2State module results in refined 6D pose estimation and assembly state detection. By combining both pose and state information, our Pose2State module predicts the final assembly state with precision. The evaluation of our ASDF dataset shows that our Pose2State module leads to an improved assembly state detection and that the improvement of the assembly state further leads to a more robust 6D pose estimation. Moreover, on the GBOT dataset, we outperform the pure deep learning-based network and even outperform the hybrid and pure tracking-based approaches.
Authors:Novel Certad, Enrico del Re, Helena Korndörfer, Gregory Schröder, Walter Morales-Alvarez, Sebastian Tschernuth, Delgermaa Gankhuyag, Luigi del Re, Cristina Olaverri-Monreal
Abstract:
The acquisition and analysis of high-quality sensor data constitute an essential requirement in shaping the development of fully autonomous driving systems. This process is indispensable for enhancing road safety and ensuring the effectiveness of the technological advancements in the automotive industry. This study introduces the Interaction of Autonomous and Manually-Controlled Vehicles (IAMCV) dataset, a novel and extensive dataset focused on inter-vehicle interactions. The dataset, enriched with a sophisticated array of sensors such as Light Detection and Ranging, cameras, Inertial Measurement Unit/Global Positioning System, and vehicle bus data acquisition, provides a comprehensive representation of real-world driving scenarios that include roundabouts, intersections, country roads, and highways, recorded across diverse locations in Germany. Furthermore, the study shows the versatility of the IAMCV dataset through several proof-of-concept use cases. Firstly, an unsupervised trajectory clustering algorithm illustrates the dataset's capability in categorizing vehicle movements without the need for labeled training data. Secondly, we compare an online camera calibration method with the Robot Operating System-based standard, using images captured in the dataset. Finally, a preliminary test employing the YOLOv8 object-detection model is conducted, augmented by reflections on the transferability of object detection across various LIDAR resolutions. These use cases underscore the practical utility of the collected dataset, emphasizing its potential to advance research and innovation in the area of intelligent vehicles.
Authors:Xavier Bou, Gabriele Facciolo, Rafael Grompone von Gioi, Jean-Michel Morel, Thibaud Ehret
Abstract:
The goal of this paper is to perform object detection in satellite imagery with only a few examples, thus enabling users to specify any object class with minimal annotation. To this end, we explore recent methods and ideas from open-vocabulary detection for the remote sensing domain. We develop a few-shot object detector based on a traditional two-stage architecture, where the classification block is replaced by a prototype-based classifier. A large-scale pre-trained model is used to build class-reference embeddings or prototypes, which are compared to region proposal contents for label prediction. In addition, we propose to fine-tune prototypes on available training images to boost performance and learn differences between similar classes, such as aircraft types. We perform extensive evaluations on two remote sensing datasets containing challenging and rare objects. Moreover, we study the performance of both visual and image-text features, namely DINOv2 and CLIP, including two CLIP models specifically tailored for remote sensing applications. Results indicate that visual features are largely superior to vision-language models, as the latter lack the necessary domain-specific vocabulary. Lastly, the developed detector outperforms fully supervised and few-shot methods evaluated on the SIMD and DIOR datasets, despite minimal training parameters.
Authors:Nabil Ibtehaz, Ning Yan, Masood Mortazavi, Daisuke Kihara
Abstract:
Transformers have elevated to the state-of-the-art vision architectures through innovations in attention mechanism inspired from visual perception. At present two classes of attentions prevail in vision transformers, regional and sparse attention. The former bounds the pixel interactions within a region; the latter spreads them across sparse grids. The opposing natures of them have resulted in a dilemma between either preserving hierarchical relation or attaining a global context. In this work, taking inspiration from atrous convolution, we introduce Atrous Attention, a fusion of regional and sparse attention, which can adaptively consolidate both local and global information, while maintaining hierarchical relations. As a further tribute to atrous convolution, we redesign the ubiquitous inverted residual convolution blocks with atrous convolution. Finally, we propose a generalized, hybrid vision transformer backbone, named ACC-ViT, following conventional practices for standard vision tasks. Our tiny version model achieves $\sim 84 \%$ accuracy on ImageNet-1K, with less than $28.5$ million parameters, which is $0.42\%$ improvement over state-of-the-art MaxViT while having $8.4\%$ less parameters. In addition, we have investigated the efficacy of ACC-ViT backbone under different evaluation settings, such as finetuning, linear probing, and zero-shot learning on tasks involving medical image analysis, object detection, and language-image contrastive learning. ACC-ViT is therefore a strong vision backbone, which is also competitive in mobile-scale versions, ideal for niche applications with small datasets.
Authors:Jisong Kim, Geonho Bang, Kwangjin Choi, Minjae Seong, Jaechang Yoo, Eunjong Pyo, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a novel point generation model, referred to as Pillar-based Point Generation Network (PillarGen), which facilitates the transformation of point clouds from one domain into another. PillarGen can produce synthetic point clouds with enhanced density and quality based on the provided input point clouds. The PillarGen model performs the following three steps: 1) pillar encoding, 2) Occupied Pillar Prediction (OPP), and 3) Pillar to Point Generation (PPG). The input point clouds are encoded using a pillar grid structure to generate pillar features. Then, OPP determines the active pillars used for point generation and predicts the center of points and the number of points to be generated for each active pillar. PPG generates the synthetic points for each active pillar based on the information provided by OPP. We evaluate the performance of PillarGen using our proprietary radar dataset, focusing on enhancing the density and quality of short-range radar data using the long-range radar data as supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that PillarGen outperforms traditional point upsampling methods in quantitative and qualitative measures. We also confirm that when PillarGen is incorporated into bird's eye view object detection, a significant improvement in detection accuracy is achieved.
Authors:Jenny Seidenschwarz, Aljoša Ošep, Francesco Ferroni, Simon Lucey, Laura Leal-Taixé
Abstract:
We tackle semi-supervised object detection based on motion cues. Recent results suggest that heuristic-based clustering methods in conjunction with object trackers can be used to pseudo-label instances of moving objects and use these as supervisory signals to train 3D object detectors in Lidar data without manual supervision. We re-think this approach and suggest that both, object detection, as well as motion-inspired pseudo-labeling, can be tackled in a data-driven manner. We leverage recent advances in scene flow estimation to obtain point trajectories from which we extract long-term, class-agnostic motion patterns. Revisiting correlation clustering in the context of message passing networks, we learn to group those motion patterns to cluster points to object instances. By estimating the full extent of the objects, we obtain per-scan 3D bounding boxes that we use to supervise a Lidar object detection network. Our method not only outperforms prior heuristic-based approaches (57.5 AP, +14 improvement over prior work), more importantly, we show we can pseudo-label and train object detectors across datasets.
Authors:Khalil Sabri, Célia Djilali, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier, Wassim Bouachir
Abstract:
Urban traffic environments present unique challenges for object detection, particularly with the increasing presence of micromobility vehicles like e-scooters and bikes. To address this object detection problem, this work introduces an adapted detection model that combines the accuracy and speed of single-frame object detection with the richer features offered by video object detection frameworks. This is done by applying aggregated feature maps from consecutive frames processed through motion flow to the YOLOX architecture. This fusion brings a temporal perspective to YOLOX detection abilities, allowing for a better understanding of urban mobility patterns and substantially improving detection reliability. Tested on a custom dataset curated for urban micromobility scenarios, our model showcases substantial improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the need to consider spatio-temporal information for detecting such small and thin objects. Our approach enhances detection in challenging conditions, including occlusions, ensuring temporal consistency, and effectively mitigating motion blur.
Authors:Hongcheng Yang, Dingkang Liang, Dingyuan Zhang, Zhe Liu, Zhikang Zou, Xingyu Jiang, Yingying Zhu
Abstract:
The recent advancements in point cloud learning have enabled intelligent vehicles and robots to comprehend 3D environments better. However, processing large-scale 3D scenes remains a challenging problem, such that efficient downsampling methods play a crucial role in point cloud learning. Existing downsampling methods either require a huge computational burden or sacrifice fine-grained geometric information. For such purpose, this paper presents an advanced sampler that achieves both high accuracy and efficiency. The proposed method utilizes voxel centroid sampling as a foundation but effectively addresses the challenges regarding voxel size determination and the preservation of critical geometric cues. Specifically, we propose a Voxel Adaptation Module that adaptively adjusts voxel sizes with the reference of point-based downsampling ratio. This ensures that the sampling results exhibit a favorable distribution for comprehending various 3D objects or scenes. Meanwhile, we introduce a network compatible with arbitrary voxel sizes for sampling and feature extraction while maintaining high efficiency. The proposed approach is demonstrated with 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves better accuracy on outdoor and indoor large-scale datasets, e.g. Waymo and ScanNet, with promising efficiency.
Authors:Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Tobias Clement, Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen, Nils Kemmerzell, Van Binh Truong, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Mohamed Abdelaal, Hung Cao
Abstract:
LangXAI is a framework that integrates Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) with advanced vision models to generate textual explanations for visual recognition tasks. Despite XAI advancements, an understanding gap persists for end-users with limited domain knowledge in artificial intelligence and computer vision. LangXAI addresses this by furnishing text-based explanations for classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation model outputs to end-users. Preliminary results demonstrate LangXAI's enhanced plausibility, with high BERTScore across tasks, fostering a more transparent and reliable AI framework on vision tasks for end-users.
Authors:Matteo Paiano, Stefano Martina, Carlotta Giannelli, Filippo Caruso
Abstract:
The availability of data is limited in some fields, especially for object detection tasks, where it is necessary to have correctly labeled bounding boxes around each object. A notable example of such data scarcity is found in the domain of marine biology, where it is useful to develop methods to automatically detect submarine species for environmental monitoring. To address this data limitation, the state-of-the-art machine learning strategies employ two main approaches. The first involves pretraining models on existing datasets before generalizing to the specific domain of interest. The second strategy is to create synthetic datasets specifically tailored to the target domain using methods like copy-paste techniques or ad-hoc simulators. The first strategy often faces a significant domain shift, while the second demands custom solutions crafted for the specific task. In response to these challenges, here we propose a transfer learning framework that is valid for a generic scenario. In this framework, generated images help to improve the performances of an object detector in a few-real data regime. This is achieved through a diffusion-based generative model that was pretrained on large generic datasets. With respect to the state-of-the-art, we find that it is not necessary to fine tune the generative model on the specific domain of interest. We believe that this is an important advance because it mitigates the labor-intensive task of manual labeling the images in object detection tasks. We validate our approach focusing on fishes in an underwater environment, and on the more common domain of cars in an urban setting. Our method achieves detection performance comparable to models trained on thousands of images, using only a few hundreds of input data. Our results pave the way for new generative AI-based protocols for machine learning applications in various domains.
Authors:Hao Li, Wei Wang, Cong Wang, Zhigang Luo, Xinwang Liu, Kenli Li, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
Single-domain generalized object detection aims to enhance a model's generalizability to multiple unseen target domains using only data from a single source domain during training. This is a practical yet challenging task as it requires the model to address domain shift without incorporating target domain data into training. In this paper, we propose a novel phrase grounding-based style transfer (PGST) approach for the task. Specifically, we first define textual prompts to describe potential objects for each unseen target domain. Then, we leverage the grounded language-image pre-training (GLIP) model to learn the style of these target domains and achieve style transfer from the source to the target domain. The style-transferred source visual features are semantically rich and could be close to imaginary counterparts in the target domain. Finally, we employ these style-transferred visual features to fine-tune GLIP. By introducing imaginary counterparts, the detector could be effectively generalized to unseen target domains using only a single source domain for training. Extensive experimental results on five diverse weather driving benchmarks demonstrate our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing some domain adaptive methods that incorporate target domain images into the training process.The source codes and pre-trained models will be made available.
Authors:Jibinraj Antony, Vinit Hegiste, Ali Nazeri, Hooman Tavakoli, Snehal Walunj, Christiane Plociennik, Martin Ruskowski
Abstract:
Object Detection (OD) has proven to be a significant computer vision method in extracting localized class information and has multiple applications in the industry. Although many of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) OD models perform well on medium and large sized objects, they seem to under perform on small objects. In most of the industrial use cases, it is difficult to collect and annotate data for small objects, as it is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Additionally, those datasets are likely to be unbalanced and often result in an inefficient model convergence. To tackle this challenge, this study presents a novel approach that injects additional data points to improve the performance of the OD models. Using synthetic data generation, the difficulties in data collection and annotations for small object data points can be minimized and to create a dataset with balanced distribution. This paper discusses the effects of a simple proportional class-balancing technique, to enable better anchor matching of the OD models. A comparison was carried out on the performances of the SOTA OD models: YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and SSD, for combinations of real and synthetic datasets within an industrial use case.
Authors:Pourya Shamsolmoali, Masoumeh Zareapoor, Eric Granger, Michael Felsberg
Abstract:
The dot product self-attention (DPSA) is a fundamental component of transformers. However, scaling them to long sequences, like documents or high-resolution images, becomes prohibitively expensive due to quadratic time and memory complexities arising from the softmax operation. Kernel methods are employed to simplify computations by approximating softmax but often lead to performance drops compared to softmax attention. We propose SeTformer, a novel transformer, where DPSA is purely replaced by Self-optimal Transport (SeT) for achieving better performance and computational efficiency. SeT is based on two essential softmax properties: maintaining a non-negative attention matrix and using a nonlinear reweighting mechanism to emphasize important tokens in input sequences. By introducing a kernel cost function for optimal transport, SeTformer effectively satisfies these properties. In particular, with small and basesized models, SeTformer achieves impressive top-1 accuracies of 84.7% and 86.2% on ImageNet-1K. In object detection, SeTformer-base outperforms the FocalNet counterpart by +2.2 mAP, using 38% fewer parameters and 29% fewer FLOPs. In semantic segmentation, our base-size model surpasses NAT by +3.5 mIoU with 33% fewer parameters. SeTformer also achieves state-of-the-art results in language modeling on the GLUE benchmark. These findings highlight SeTformer's applicability in vision and language tasks.
Authors:Haowen Zheng, Dong Cao, Jintao Xu, Rui Ai, Weihao Gu, Yang Yang, Yanyan Liang
Abstract:
Striking a balance between precision and efficiency presents a prominent challenge in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) 3D object detection. Although previous camera-based BEV methods achieved remarkable performance by incorporating long-term temporal information, most of them still face the problem of low efficiency. One potential solution is knowledge distillation. Existing distillation methods only focus on reconstructing spatial features, while overlooking temporal knowledge. To this end, we propose TempDistiller, a Temporal knowledge Distiller, to acquire long-term memory from a teacher detector when provided with a limited number of frames. Specifically, a reconstruction target is formulated by integrating long-term temporal knowledge through self-attention operation applied to feature teachers. Subsequently, novel features are generated for masked student features via a generator. Ultimately, we utilize this reconstruction target to reconstruct the student features. In addition, we also explore temporal relational knowledge when inputting full frames for the student model. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the nuScenes benchmark. The experimental results show our method obtain an enhancement of +1.6 mAP and +1.1 NDS compared to the baseline, a speed improvement of approximately 6 FPS after compressing temporal knowledge, and the most accurate velocity estimation.
Authors:Mahyar Pourjabar, Manuele Rusci, Luca Bompani, Lorenzo Lamberti, Vlad Niculescu, Daniele Palossi, Luca Benini
Abstract:
This work presents a multi-sensory anti-collision system design to achieve robust autonomous exploration capabilities for a swarm of 10 cm-side nano-drones operating on object detection missions. We combine lightweight single-beam laser ranging to avoid proximity collisions with a long-range vision-based obstacle avoidance deep learning model (i.e., PULP-Dronet) and an ultra-wide-band (UWB) based ranging module to prevent intra-swarm collisions. An in-field study shows that our multisensory approach can prevent collisions with static obstacles, improving the mission success rate from 20% to 80% in cluttered environments w.r.t. a State-of-the-Art (SoA) baseline. At the same time, the UWB-based sub-system shows a 92.8% success rate in preventing collisions between drones of a four-agent fleet within a safety distance of 65 cm. On a SoA robotic platform extended by a GAP8 multi-core processor, the PULP-Dronet runs interleaved with an objected detection task, which constraints its execution at 1.6 frame/s. This throughput is sufficient for avoiding obstacles with a probability of about 40% but shows a need for more capable processors for the next-generation nano-drone swarms.
Authors:Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Arthur Ouaknine, Ioannis Papoutsis, David Rolnick
Abstract:
Forests are vital to ecosystems, supporting biodiversity and essential services, but are rapidly changing due to land use and climate change. Understanding and mitigating negative effects requires parsing data on forests at global scale from a broad array of sensory modalities, and using them in diverse forest monitoring applications. Such diversity in data and applications can be effectively addressed through the development of a large, pre-trained foundation model that serves as a versatile base for various downstream tasks. However, remote sensing modalities, which are an excellent fit for several forest management tasks, are particularly challenging considering the variation in environmental conditions, object scales, image acquisition modes, spatio-temporal resolutions, etc. With that in mind, we present the first unified Forest Monitoring Benchmark (FoMo-Bench), carefully constructed to evaluate foundation models with such flexibility. FoMo-Bench consists of 15 diverse datasets encompassing satellite, aerial, and inventory data, covering a variety of geographical regions, and including multispectral, red-green-blue, synthetic aperture radar and LiDAR data with various temporal, spatial and spectral resolutions. FoMo-Bench includes multiple types of forest-monitoring tasks, spanning classification, segmentation, and object detection. To enhance task and geographic diversity in FoMo-Bench, we introduce TalloS, a global dataset combining satellite imagery with ground-based annotations for tree species classification across 1,000+ categories and hierarchical taxonomic levels. Finally, we propose FoMo-Net, a pre-training framework to develop foundation models with the capacity to process any combination of commonly used modalities and spectral bands in remote sensing.
Authors:Junyu Lu, Dixiang Zhang, Songxin Zhang, Zejian Xie, Zhuoyang Song, Cong Lin, Jiaxing Zhang, Bingyi Jing, Pingjian Zhang
Abstract:
Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in various vision-language dialogue scenarios. However, the absence of fine-grained visual object detection hinders the model from understanding the details of images, leading to irreparable visual hallucinations and factual errors. In this paper, we propose Lyrics, a novel multi-modal pre-training and instruction fine-tuning paradigm that bootstraps vision-language alignment from fine-grained cross-modal collaboration. Building on the foundation of BLIP-2, Lyrics infuses local visual features extracted from a visual refiner that includes image tagging, object detection and semantic segmentation modules into the Querying Transformer, while on the text side, the language inputs equip the boundary boxes and tags derived from the visual refiner. We further introduce a two-stage training scheme, in which the pre-training stage bridges the modality gap through explicit and comprehensive vision-language alignment targets. During the instruction fine-tuning stage, we introduce semantic-aware visual feature extraction, a crucial method that enables the model to extract informative features from concrete visual objects. Our approach achieves robust performance on 13 datasets across various vision-language tasks, and demonstrates promising multi-modal understanding, perception and conversation capabilities in 11 scenario-based benchmark toolkits.
Authors:Shaohua Dong, Yunhe Feng, Qing Yang, Yan Huang, Dongfang Liu, Heng Fan
Abstract:
Multimodal (e.g., RGB-Depth/RGB-Thermal) fusion has shown great potential for improving semantic segmentation in complex scenes (e.g., indoor/low-light conditions). Existing approaches often fully fine-tune a dual-branch encoder-decoder framework with a complicated feature fusion strategy for achieving multimodal semantic segmentation, which is training-costly due to the massive parameter updates in feature extraction and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a surprisingly simple yet effective dual-prompt learning network (dubbed DPLNet) for training-efficient multimodal (e.g., RGB-D/T) semantic segmentation. The core of DPLNet is to directly adapt a frozen pre-trained RGB model to multimodal semantic segmentation, reducing parameter updates. For this purpose, we present two prompt learning modules, comprising multimodal prompt generator (MPG) and multimodal feature adapter (MFA). MPG works to fuse the features from different modalities in a compact manner and is inserted from shadow to deep stages to generate the multi-level multimodal prompts that are injected into the frozen backbone, while MPG adapts prompted multimodal features in the frozen backbone for better multimodal semantic segmentation. Since both the MPG and MFA are lightweight, only a few trainable parameters (3.88M, 4.4% of the pre-trained backbone parameters) are introduced for multimodal feature fusion and learning. Using a simple decoder (3.27M parameters), DPLNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance or is on a par with other complex approaches on four RGB-D/T semantic segmentation datasets while satisfying parameter efficiency. Moreover, we show that DPLNet is general and applicable to other multimodal tasks such as salient object detection and video semantic segmentation. Without special design, DPLNet outperforms many complicated models. Our code will be available at github.com/ShaohuaDong2021/DPLNet.
Authors:Weixin Mao, Tiancai Wang, Diankun Zhang, Junjie Yan, Osamu Yoshie
Abstract:
This paper shows the effectiveness of 2D backbone scaling and pretraining for pillar-based 3D object detectors. Pillar-based methods mainly employ randomly initialized 2D convolution neural network (ConvNet) for feature extraction and fail to enjoy the benefits from the backbone scaling and pretraining in the image domain. To show the scaling-up capacity in point clouds, we introduce the dense ConvNet pretrained on large-scale image datasets (e.g., ImageNet) as the 2D backbone of pillar-based detectors. The ConvNets are adaptively designed based on the model size according to the specific features of point clouds, such as sparsity and irregularity. Equipped with the pretrained ConvNets, our proposed pillar-based detector, termed PillarNeSt, outperforms the existing 3D object detectors by a large margin on the nuScenes and Argoversev2 datasets. Our code shall be released upon acceptance.
Authors:Zichen Yu, Changyong Shu, Jiajun Deng, Kangjie Lu, Zongdai Liu, Jiangyong Yu, Dawei Yang, Hui Li, Yan Chen
Abstract:
Given the capability of mitigating the long-tail deficiencies and intricate-shaped absence prevalent in 3D object detection, occupancy prediction has become a pivotal component in autonomous driving systems. However, the procession of three-dimensional voxel-level representations inevitably introduces large overhead in both memory and computation, obstructing the deployment of to-date occupancy prediction approaches. In contrast to the trend of making the model larger and more complicated, we argue that a desirable framework should be deployment-friendly to diverse chips while maintaining high precision. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play paradigm, namely FlashOCC, to consolidate rapid and memory-efficient occupancy prediction while maintaining high precision. Particularly, our FlashOCC makes two improvements based on the contemporary voxel-level occupancy prediction approaches. Firstly, the features are kept in the BEV, enabling the employment of efficient 2D convolutional layers for feature extraction. Secondly, a channel-to-height transformation is introduced to lift the output logits from the BEV into the 3D space. We apply the FlashOCC to diverse occupancy prediction baselines on the challenging Occ3D-nuScenes benchmarks and conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness. The results substantiate the superiority of our plug-and-play paradigm over previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, runtime efficiency, and memory costs, demonstrating its potential for deployment. The code will be made available.
Authors:Ana RÄduÅ£oiu, Jan-Philipp Schulze, Philip Sperl, Konstantin Böttinger
Abstract:
Neural networks build the foundation of several intelligent systems, which, however, are known to be easily fooled by adversarial examples. Recent advances made these attacks possible even in air-gapped scenarios, where the autonomous system observes its surroundings by, e.g., a camera. We extend these ideas in our research and evaluate the robustness of multi-camera setups against such physical adversarial examples. This scenario becomes ever more important with the rise in popularity of autonomous vehicles, which fuse the information of several cameras for their driving decision. While we find that multi-camera setups provide some robustness towards past attack methods, we see that this advantage reduces when optimizing on multiple perspectives at once. We propose a novel attack method that we call Transcender-MC, where we incorporate online 3D renderings and perspective projections in the training process. Moreover, we motivate that certain data augmentation techniques can facilitate the generation of successful adversarial examples even further. Transcender-MC is 11% more effective in successfully attacking multi-camera setups than state-of-the-art methods. Our findings offer valuable insights regarding the resilience of object detection in a setup with multiple cameras and motivate the need of developing adequate defense mechanisms against them.
Authors:Jinpei Guo, Shaofeng Zhang, Runzhong Wang, Chang Liu, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently been used for visual matching beyond object detection and segmentation. However, the original grid dividing strategy of ViTs neglects the spatial information of the keypoints, limiting the sensitivity to local information. Therefore, we propose QueryTrans (Query Transformer), which adopts a cross-attention module and keypoints-based center crop strategy for better spatial information extraction. We further integrate the graph attention module and devise a transformer-based graph matching approach GMTR (Graph Matching TRansformers) whereby the combinatorial nature of GM is addressed by a graph transformer neural GM solver. On standard GM benchmarks, GMTR shows competitive performance against the SOTA frameworks. Specifically, on Pascal VOC, GMTR achieves $\mathbf{83.6\%}$ accuracy, $\mathbf{0.9\%}$ higher than the SOTA framework. On Spair-71k, GMTR shows great potential and outperforms most of the previous works. Meanwhile, on Pascal VOC, QueryTrans improves the accuracy of NGMv2 from $80.1\%$ to $\mathbf{83.3\%}$, and BBGM from $79.0\%$ to $\mathbf{84.5\%}$. On Spair-71k, QueryTrans improves NGMv2 from $80.6\%$ to $\mathbf{82.5\%}$, and BBGM from $82.1\%$ to $\mathbf{83.9\%}$. Source code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Robert Johanson, Christian Wilms, Ole Johannsen, Simone Frintrop
Abstract:
Crop detection is integral for precision agriculture applications such as automated yield estimation or fruit picking. However, crop detection, e.g., apple detection in orchard environments remains challenging due to a lack of large-scale datasets and the small relative size of the crops in the image. In this work, we address these challenges by reformulating the apple detection task in a semi-supervised manner. To this end, we provide the large, high-resolution dataset MAD comprising 105 labeled images with 14,667 annotated apple instances and 4,440 unlabeled images. Utilizing this dataset, we also propose a novel Semi-Supervised Small Apple Detection system S$^3$AD based on contextual attention and selective tiling to improve the challenging detection of small apples, while limiting the computational overhead. We conduct an extensive evaluation on MAD and the MSU dataset, showing that S$^3$AD substantially outperforms strong fully-supervised baselines, including several small object detection systems, by up to $14.9\%$. Additionally, we exploit the detailed annotations of our dataset w.r.t. apple properties to analyze the influence of relative size or level of occlusion on the results of various systems, quantifying current challenges.
Authors:Mackenzie J. Meni, Trupti Mahendrakar, Olivia D. M. Raney, Ryan T. White, Michael L. Mayo, Kevin Pilkiewicz
Abstract:
The escalating risk of collisions and the accumulation of space debris in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) has reached critical concern due to the ever increasing number of spacecraft. Addressing this crisis, especially in dealing with non-cooperative and unidentified space debris, is of paramount importance. This paper contributes to efforts in enabling autonomous swarms of small chaser satellites for target geometry determination and safe flight trajectory planning for proximity operations in LEO. Our research explores on-orbit use of the You Only Look Once v5 (YOLOv5) object detection model trained to detect satellite components. While this model has shown promise, its inherent lack of interpretability hinders human understanding, a critical aspect of validating algorithms for use in safety-critical missions. To analyze the decision processes, we introduce Probabilistic Explanations for Entropic Knowledge extraction (PEEK), a method that utilizes information theoretic analysis of the latent representations within the hidden layers of the model. Through both synthetic in hardware-in-the-loop experiments, PEEK illuminates the decision-making processes of the model, helping identify its strengths, limitations and biases.
Authors:Hussein Mozannar, Jimin J Lee, Dennis Wei, Prasanna Sattigeri, Subhro Das, David Sontag
Abstract:
People are relying on AI agents to assist them with various tasks. The human must know when to rely on the agent, collaborate with the agent, or ignore its suggestions. In this work, we propose to learn rules, grounded in data regions and described in natural language, that illustrate how the human should collaborate with the AI. Our novel region discovery algorithm finds local regions in the data as neighborhoods in an embedding space where prior human behavior should be corrected. Each region is then described using a large language model in an iterative and contrastive procedure. We then teach these rules to the human via an onboarding stage. Through user studies on object detection and question-answering tasks, we show that our method can lead to more accurate human-AI teams. We also evaluate our region discovery and description algorithms separately.
Authors:Chang Liu, Liguo Zhou, Yanliang Huang, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
Vehicle perception systems strive to achieve comprehensive and rapid visual interpretation of their surroundings for improved safety and navigation. We introduce YOLO-BEV, an efficient framework that harnesses a unique surrounding cameras setup to generate a 2D bird's-eye view of the vehicular environment. By strategically positioning eight cameras, each at a 45-degree interval, our system captures and integrates imagery into a coherent 3x3 grid format, leaving the center blank, providing an enriched spatial representation that facilitates efficient processing. In our approach, we employ YOLO's detection mechanism, favoring its inherent advantages of swift response and compact model structure. Instead of leveraging the conventional YOLO detection head, we augment it with a custom-designed detection head, translating the panoramically captured data into a unified bird's-eye view map of ego car. Preliminary results validate the feasibility of YOLO-BEV in real-time vehicular perception tasks. With its streamlined architecture and potential for rapid deployment due to minimized parameters, YOLO-BEV poses as a promising tool that may reshape future perspectives in autonomous driving systems.
Authors:Osman Ãlger, Yu Wang, Ysbrand Galama, Sezer Karaoglu, Theo Gevers, Martin R. Oswald
Abstract:
Humans have a remarkable ability to perceive and reason about the world around them by understanding the relationships between objects. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of using such relationships for object detection and instance segmentation. To this end, we propose a Relational Prior-based Feature Enhancement Model (RP-FEM), a graph transformer that enhances object proposal features using relational priors. The proposed architecture operates on top of scene graphs obtained from initial proposals and aims to concurrently learn relational context modeling for object detection and instance segmentation. Experimental evaluations on COCO show that the utilization of scene graphs, augmented with relational priors, offer benefits for object detection and instance segmentation. RP-FEM demonstrates its capacity to suppress improbable class predictions within the image while also preventing the model from generating duplicate predictions, leading to improvements over the baseline model on which it is built.
Authors:Ziming Wang, Shumin Han, Xiaodi Wang, Jing Hao, Xianbin Cao, Baochang Zhang
Abstract:
Small CNN-based models usually require transferring knowledge from a large model before they are deployed in computationally resource-limited edge devices. Masked image modeling (MIM) methods achieve great success in various visual tasks but remain largely unexplored in knowledge distillation for heterogeneous deep models. The reason is mainly due to the significant discrepancy between the Transformer-based large model and the CNN-based small network. In this paper, we develop the first Heterogeneous Generative Knowledge Distillation (H-GKD) based on MIM, which can efficiently transfer knowledge from large Transformer models to small CNN-based models in a generative self-supervised fashion. Our method builds a bridge between Transformer-based models and CNNs by training a UNet-style student with sparse convolution, which can effectively mimic the visual representation inferred by a teacher over masked modeling. Our method is a simple yet effective learning paradigm to learn the visual representation and distribution of data from heterogeneous teacher models, which can be pre-trained using advanced generative methods. Extensive experiments show that it adapts well to various models and sizes, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks. For example, in the Imagenet 1K dataset, H-GKD improves the accuracy of Resnet50 (sparse) from 76.98% to 80.01%.
Authors:Zhimeng Xin, Tianxu Wu, Shiming Chen, Yixiong Zou, Ling Shao, Xinge You
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) identifies objects from extremely few annotated samples. Most existing FSOD methods, recently, apply the two-stage learning paradigm, which transfers the knowledge learned from abundant base classes to assist the few-shot detectors by learning the global features. However, such existing FSOD approaches seldom consider the localization of objects from local to global. Limited by the scarce training data in FSOD, the training samples of novel classes typically capture part of objects, resulting in such FSOD methods cannot detect the completely unseen object during testing. To tackle this problem, we propose an Extensible Co-Existing Attention (ECEA) module to enable the model to infer the global object according to the local parts. Essentially, the proposed module continuously learns the extensible ability on the base stage with abundant samples and transfers it to the novel stage, which can assist the few-shot model to quickly adapt in extending local regions to co-existing regions. Specifically, we first devise an extensible attention mechanism that starts with a local region and extends attention to co-existing regions that are similar and adjacent to the given local region. We then implement the extensible attention mechanism in different feature scales to progressively discover the full object in various receptive fields. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets show that our ECEA module can assist the few-shot detector to completely predict the object despite some regions failing to appear in the training samples and achieve the new state of the art compared with existing FSOD methods.
Authors:Derek Gloudemans, Xinxuan Lu, Shepard Xia, Daniel B. Work
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is a challenging task because depth information is difficult to obtain from 2D images. A subset of viewpoint-agnostic monocular 3D detection methods also do not explicitly leverage scene homography or geometry during training, meaning that a model trained thusly can detect objects in images from arbitrary viewpoints. Such works predict the projections of the 3D bounding boxes on the image plane to estimate the location of the 3D boxes, but these projections are not rectangular so the calculation of IoU between these projected polygons is not straightforward. This work proposes an efficient, fully differentiable algorithm for the calculation of IoU between two convex polygons, which can be utilized to compute the IoU between two 3D bounding box footprints viewed from an arbitrary angle. We test the performance of the proposed polygon IoU loss (PIoU loss) on three state-of-the-art viewpoint-agnostic 3D detection models. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed PIoU loss converges faster than L1 loss and that in 3D detection models, a combination of PIoU loss and L1 loss gives better results than L1 loss alone (+1.64% AP70 for MonoCon on cars, +0.18% AP70 for RTM3D on cars, and +0.83%/+2.46% AP50/AP25 for MonoRCNN on cyclists).
Authors:Luping Rao, Chuan Ma, Ming Ding, Yuwen Qian, Lu Zhou, Zhe Liu
Abstract:
As an essential component part of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) plays a vital role in alleviating traffic issues. Object detection is one of the key technologies in the IoV, which has been widely used to provide traffic management services by analyzing timely and sensitive vehicle-related information. However, the current object detection methods are mostly based on centralized deep training, that is, the sensitive data obtained by edge devices need to be uploaded to the server, which raises privacy concerns. To mitigate such privacy leakage, we first propose a federated learning-based framework, where well-trained local models are shared in the central server. However, since edge devices usually have limited computing power, plus a strict requirement of low latency in IoVs, we further propose a sparse training process on edge devices, which can effectively lighten the model, and ensure its training efficiency on edge devices, thereby reducing communication overheads. In addition, due to the diverse computing capabilities and dynamic environment, different sparsity rates are applied to edge devices. To further guarantee the performance, we propose, FedWeg, an improved aggregation scheme based on FedAvg, which is designed by the inverse ratio of sparsity rates. Experiments on the real-life dataset using YOLO show that the proposed scheme can achieve the required object detection rate while saving considerable communication costs.
Authors:Guang Yang, Yin Tang, Zhijian Wu, Jun Li, Jianhua Xu, Xili Wan
Abstract:
Recent mainstream masked distillation methods function by reconstructing selectively masked areas of a student network from the feature map of its teacher counterpart. In these methods, the masked regions need to be properly selected, such that reconstructed features encode sufficient discrimination and representation capability like the teacher feature. However, previous masked distillation methods only focus on spatial masking, making the resulting masked areas biased towards spatial importance without encoding informative channel clues. In this study, we devise a Dual Masked Knowledge Distillation (DMKD) framework which can capture both spatially important and channel-wise informative clues for comprehensive masked feature reconstruction. More specifically, we employ dual attention mechanism for guiding the respective masking branches, leading to reconstructed feature encoding dual significance. Furthermore, fusing the reconstructed features is achieved by self-adjustable weighting strategy for effective feature distillation. Our experiments on object detection task demonstrate that the student networks achieve performance gains of 4.1% and 4.3% with the help of our method when RetinaNet and Cascade Mask R-CNN are respectively used as the teacher networks, while outperforming the other state-of-the-art distillation methods.
Authors:Bryan Bo Cao, Lawrence O'Gorman, Michael Coss, Shubham Jain
Abstract:
We examine how the choice of data-side attributes for two important visual tasks of image classification and object detection can aid in the choice or design of lightweight convolutional neural networks. We show by experimentation how four data attributes - number of classes, object color, image resolution, and object scale affect neural network model size and efficiency. Intra- and inter-class similarity metrics, based on metric learning, are defined to guide the evaluation of these attributes toward achieving lightweight models. Evaluations made using these metrics are shown to require 30x less computation than running full inference tests. We provide, as an example, applying the metrics and methods to choose a lightweight model for a robot path planning application and achieve computation reduction of 66% and accuracy gain of 3.5% over the pre-method model.
Authors:Wenqi Liang, Gan Sun, Chenxi Liu, Jiahua Dong, Kangru Wang
Abstract:
3D object detection has achieved significant performance in many fields, e.g., robotics system, autonomous driving, and augmented reality. However, most existing methods could cause catastrophic forgetting of old classes when performing on the class-incremental scenarios. Meanwhile, the current class-incremental 3D object detection methods neglect the relationships between the object localization information and category semantic information and assume all the knowledge of old model is reliable. To address the above challenge, we present a novel Incremental 3D Object Detection framework with the guidance of prompting, i.e., I3DOD. Specifically, we propose a task-shared prompts mechanism to learn the matching relationships between the object localization information and category semantic information. After training on the current task, these prompts will be stored in our prompt pool, and perform the relationship of old classes in the next task. Moreover, we design a reliable distillation strategy to transfer knowledge from two aspects: a reliable dynamic distillation is developed to filter out the negative knowledge and transfer the reliable 3D knowledge to new detection model; the relation feature is proposed to capture the responses relation in feature space and protect plasticity of the model when learning novel 3D classes. To the end, we conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art object detection methods by 0.6% - 2.7% in terms of mAP@0.25.
Authors:Shuman Fang, Zhiwen Lin, Ke Yan, Jie Li, Xianming Lin, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
The task of Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is to detect humans and their interactions with surrounding objects, where transformer-based methods show dominant advances currently. However, these methods ignore the relationship among humans, objects, and interactions: 1) human features are more contributive than object ones to interaction prediction; 2) interactive information disturbs the detection of objects but helps human detection. In this paper, we propose a Human and Object Disentangling Network (HODN) to model the HOI relationships explicitly, where humans and objects are first detected by two disentangling decoders independently and then processed by an interaction decoder. Considering that human features are more contributive to interaction, we propose a Human-Guide Linking method to make sure the interaction decoder focuses on the human-centric regions with human features as the positional embeddings. To handle the opposite influences of interactions on humans and objects, we propose a Stop-Gradient Mechanism to stop interaction gradients from optimizing the object detection but to allow them to optimize the human detection. Our proposed method achieves competitive performance on both the V-COCO and the HICO-Det datasets. It can be combined with existing methods easily for state-of-the-art results.
Authors:Alexander Kyuroson, Anton Koval, George Nikolakopoulos
Abstract:
Search and Rescue (SAR) missions in harsh and unstructured Sub-Terranean (Sub-T) environments in the presence of aerosol particles have recently become the main focus in the field of robotics. Aerosol particles such as smoke and dust directly affect the performance of any mobile robotic platform due to their reliance on their onboard perception systems for autonomous navigation and localization in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. Although obstacle avoidance and object detection algorithms are robust to the presence of noise to some degree, their performance directly relies on the quality of captured data by onboard sensors such as Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and camera. Thus, this paper proposes a novel modular agnostic filtration pipeline based on intensity and spatial information such as local point density for removal of detected smoke particles from Point Cloud (PCL) prior to its utilization for collision detection. Furthermore, the efficacy of the proposed framework in the presence of smoke during multiple frontier exploration missions is investigated while the experimental results are presented to facilitate comparison with other methodologies and their computational impact. This provides valuable insight to the research community for better utilization of filtration schemes based on available computation resources while considering the safe autonomous navigation of mobile robots.
Authors:Tianxiao Zhang, Kaidong Li, Xiangyu Chen, Cuncong Zhong, Bo Luo, Ivan Grijalva, Brian McCornack, Daniel Flippo, Ajay Sharda, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
Aphid infestation poses a significant threat to crop production, rural communities, and global food security. While chemical pest control is crucial for maximizing yields, applying chemicals across entire fields is both environmentally unsustainable and costly. Hence, precise localization and management of aphids are essential for targeted pesticide application. The paper primarily focuses on using deep learning models for detecting aphid clusters. We propose a novel approach for estimating infection levels by detecting aphid clusters. To facilitate this research, we have captured a large-scale dataset from sorghum fields, manually selected 5,447 images containing aphids, and annotated each individual aphid cluster within these images. To facilitate the use of machine learning models, we further process the images by cropping them into patches, resulting in a labeled dataset comprising 151,380 image patches. Then, we implemented and compared the performance of four state-of-the-art object detection models (VFNet, GFLV2, PAA, and ATSS) on the aphid dataset. Extensive experimental results show that all models yield stable similar performance in terms of average precision and recall. We then propose to merge close neighboring clusters and remove tiny clusters caused by cropping, and the performance is further boosted by around 17%. The study demonstrates the feasibility of automatically detecting and managing insects using machine learning models. The labeled dataset will be made openly available to the research community.
Authors:George Retsinas, Giorgos Sfikas, Christophoros Nikou
Abstract:
Recent advances in segmentation-free keyword spotting treat this problem w.r.t. an object detection paradigm and borrow from state-of-the-art detection systems to simultaneously propose a word bounding box proposal mechanism and compute a corresponding representation. Contrary to the norm of such methods that rely on complex and large DNN models, we propose a novel segmentation-free system that efficiently scans a document image to find rectangular areas that include the query information. The underlying model is simple and compact, predicting character occurrences over rectangular areas through an implicitly learned scale map, trained on word-level annotated images. The proposed document scanning is then performed using this character counting in a cost-effective manner via integral images and binary search. Finally, the retrieval similarity by character counting is refined by a pyramidal representation and a CTC-based re-scoring algorithm, fully utilizing the trained CNN model. Experimental validation on two widely-used datasets shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming the more complex alternatives, despite the simplicity of the underlying model.
Authors:Jisong Kim, Minjae Seong, Geonho Bang, Dongsuk Kum, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
While LiDAR sensors have been successfully applied to 3D object detection, the affordability of radar and camera sensors has led to a growing interest in fusing radars and cameras for 3D object detection. However, previous radar-camera fusion models were unable to fully utilize the potential of radar information. In this paper, we propose Radar-Camera Multi-level fusion (RCM-Fusion), which attempts to fuse both modalities at both feature and instance levels. For feature-level fusion, we propose a Radar Guided BEV Encoder which transforms camera features into precise BEV representations using the guidance of radar Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features and combines the radar and camera BEV features. For instance-level fusion, we propose a Radar Grid Point Refinement module that reduces localization error by accounting for the characteristics of the radar point clouds. The experiments conducted on the public nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our proposed RCM-Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performances among single frame-based radar-camera fusion methods in the nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Zewei Lin, Yanqing Shen, Sanping Zhou, Shitao Chen, Nanning Zheng
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel and effective Multi-Level Fusion network, named as MLF-DET, for high-performance cross-modal 3D object DETection, which integrates both the feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion to fully utilize the information in the image. For the feature-level fusion, we present the Multi-scale Voxel Image fusion (MVI) module, which densely aligns multi-scale voxel features with image features. For the decision-level fusion, we propose the lightweight Feature-cued Confidence Rectification (FCR) module which further exploits image semantics to rectify the confidence of detection candidates. Besides, we design an effective data augmentation strategy termed Occlusion-aware GT Sampling (OGS) to reserve more sampled objects in the training scenes, so as to reduce overfitting. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on the extremely competitive KITTI car 3D object detection benchmark, our method reaches 82.89% moderate AP and achieves state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles.
Authors:Yuki Kondo, Norimichi Ukita, Takayuki Yamaguchi, Hao-Yu Hou, Mu-Yi Shen, Chia-Chi Hsu, En-Ming Huang, Yu-Chen Huang, Yu-Cheng Xia, Chien-Yao Wang, Chun-Yi Lee, Da Huo, Marc A. Kastner, Tingwei Liu, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Takatsugu Hirayama, Takahiro Komamizu, Ichiro Ide, Yosuke Shinya, Xinyao Liu, Guang Liang, Syusuke Yasui
Abstract:
Small Object Detection (SOD) is an important machine vision topic because (i) a variety of real-world applications require object detection for distant objects and (ii) SOD is a challenging task due to the noisy, blurred, and less-informative image appearances of small objects. This paper proposes a new SOD dataset consisting of 39,070 images including 137,121 bird instances, which is called the Small Object Detection for Spotting Birds (SOD4SB) dataset. The detail of the challenge with the SOD4SB dataset is introduced in this paper. In total, 223 participants joined this challenge. This paper briefly introduces the award-winning methods. The dataset, the baseline code, and the website for evaluation on the public testset are publicly available.
Authors:Tianxiao Zhang, Kaidong Li, Xiangyu Chen, Cuncong Zhong, Bo Luo, Ivan Grijalva Teran, Brian McCornack, Daniel Flippo, Ajay Sharda, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
Aphids are one of the main threats to crops, rural families, and global food security. Chemical pest control is a necessary component of crop production for maximizing yields, however, it is unnecessary to apply the chemical approaches to the entire fields in consideration of the environmental pollution and the cost. Thus, accurately localizing the aphid and estimating the infestation level is crucial to the precise local application of pesticides. Aphid detection is very challenging as each individual aphid is really small and all aphids are crowded together as clusters. In this paper, we propose to estimate the infection level by detecting aphid clusters. We have taken millions of images in the sorghum fields, manually selected 5,447 images that contain aphids, and annotated each aphid cluster in the image. To use these images for machine learning models, we crop the images into patches and created a labeled dataset with over 151,000 image patches. Then, we implement and compare the performance of four state-of-the-art object detection models.
Authors:Mingze Wang, Huixin Sun, Jun Shi, Xuhui Liu, Baochang Zhang, Xianbin Cao
Abstract:
Real-time object detection plays a vital role in various computer vision applications. However, deploying real-time object detectors on resource-constrained platforms poses challenges due to high computational and memory requirements. This paper describes a low-bit quantization method to build a highly efficient one-stage detector, dubbed as Q-YOLO, which can effectively address the performance degradation problem caused by activation distribution imbalance in traditional quantized YOLO models. Q-YOLO introduces a fully end-to-end Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) pipeline with a well-designed Unilateral Histogram-based (UH) activation quantization scheme, which determines the maximum truncation values through histogram analysis by minimizing the Mean Squared Error (MSE) quantization errors. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of Q-YOLO, outperforming other PTQ methods while achieving a more favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. This research contributes to advancing the efficient deployment of object detection models on resource-limited edge devices, enabling real-time detection with reduced computational and memory overhead.
Authors:William Guimont-Martin, Jean-Michel Fortin, François Pomerleau, Philippe Giguère
Abstract:
Recent works in object detection in LiDAR point clouds mostly focus on predicting bounding boxes around objects. This prediction is commonly achieved using anchor-based or anchor-free detectors that predict bounding boxes, requiring significant explicit prior knowledge about the objects to work properly. To remedy these limitations, we propose MaskBEV, a bird's-eye view (BEV) mask-based object detector neural architecture. MaskBEV predicts a set of BEV instance masks that represent the footprints of detected objects. Moreover, our approach allows object detection and footprint completion in a single pass. MaskBEV also reformulates the detection problem purely in terms of classification, doing away with regression usually done to predict bounding boxes. We evaluate the performance of MaskBEV on both SemanticKITTI and KITTI datasets while analyzing the architecture advantages and limitations.
Authors:Vinit Hegiste, Tatjana Legler, Martin Ruskowski
Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) has gained significant traction as a privacy-preserving algorithm, but the underlying resemblances of federated learning algorithms like Federated averaging (FedAvg) or Federated SGD (Fed SGD) to ensemble learning algorithms have not been fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to examine the application of FL to object detection as a method to enhance generalizability, and to compare its performance against a centralized training approach for an object detection algorithm. Specifically, we investigate the performance of a YOLOv5 model trained using FL across multiple clients and employ a random sampling strategy without replacement, so each client holds a portion of the same dataset used for centralized training. Our experimental results showcase the superior efficiency of the FL object detector's global model in generating accurate bounding boxes for unseen objects, with the test set being a mixture of objects from two distinct clients not represented in the training dataset. These findings suggest that FL can be viewed from an ensemble algorithm perspective, akin to a synergistic blend of Bagging and Boosting techniques. As a result, FL can be seen not only as a method to enhance privacy, but also as a method to enhance the performance of a machine learning model.
Authors:Vinit Hegiste, Tatjana Legler, Martin Ruskowski
Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach for training machine learning models on decentralized data without compromising data privacy. In this paper, we propose a FL algorithm for object detection in quality inspection tasks using YOLOv5 as the object detection algorithm and Federated Averaging (FedAvg) as the FL algorithm. We apply this approach to a manufacturing use-case where multiple factories/clients contribute data for training a global object detection model while preserving data privacy on a non-IID dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that our FL approach achieves better generalization performance on the overall clients' test dataset and generates improved bounding boxes around the objects compared to models trained using local clients' datasets. This work showcases the potential of FL for quality inspection tasks in the manufacturing industry and provides valuable insights into the performance and feasibility of utilizing YOLOv5 and FedAvg for federated object detection.
Authors:Duy M. H. Nguyen, Hoang Nguyen, Nghiem T. Diep, Tan N. Pham, Tri Cao, Binh T. Nguyen, Paul Swoboda, Nhat Ho, Shadi Albarqouni, Pengtao Xie, Daniel Sonntag, Mathias Niepert
Abstract:
Obtaining large pre-trained models that can be fine-tuned to new tasks with limited annotated samples has remained an open challenge for medical imaging data. While pre-trained deep networks on ImageNet and vision-language foundation models trained on web-scale data are prevailing approaches, their effectiveness on medical tasks is limited due to the significant domain shift between natural and medical images. To bridge this gap, we introduce LVM-Med, the first family of deep networks trained on large-scale medical datasets. We have collected approximately 1.3 million medical images from 55 publicly available datasets, covering a large number of organs and modalities such as CT, MRI, X-ray, and Ultrasound. We benchmark several state-of-the-art self-supervised algorithms on this dataset and propose a novel self-supervised contrastive learning algorithm using a graph-matching formulation. The proposed approach makes three contributions: (i) it integrates prior pair-wise image similarity metrics based on local and global information; (ii) it captures the structural constraints of feature embeddings through a loss function constructed via a combinatorial graph-matching objective; and (iii) it can be trained efficiently end-to-end using modern gradient-estimation techniques for black-box solvers. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed LVM-Med on 15 downstream medical tasks ranging from segmentation and classification to object detection, and both for the in and out-of-distribution settings. LVM-Med empirically outperforms a number of state-of-the-art supervised, self-supervised, and foundation models. For challenging tasks such as Brain Tumor Classification or Diabetic Retinopathy Grading, LVM-Med improves previous vision-language models trained on 1 billion masks by 6-7% while using only a ResNet-50.
Authors:Alexander Raistrick, Lahav Lipson, Zeyu Ma, Lingjie Mei, Mingzhe Wang, Yiming Zuo, Karhan Kayan, Hongyu Wen, Beining Han, Yihan Wang, Alejandro Newell, Hei Law, Ankit Goyal, Kaiyu Yang, Jia Deng
Abstract:
We introduce Infinigen, a procedural generator of photorealistic 3D scenes of the natural world. Infinigen is entirely procedural: every asset, from shape to texture, is generated from scratch via randomized mathematical rules, using no external source and allowing infinite variation and composition. Infinigen offers broad coverage of objects and scenes in the natural world including plants, animals, terrains, and natural phenomena such as fire, cloud, rain, and snow. Infinigen can be used to generate unlimited, diverse training data for a wide range of computer vision tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation, optical flow, and 3D reconstruction. We expect Infinigen to be a useful resource for computer vision research and beyond. Please visit https://infinigen.org for videos, code and pre-generated data.
Authors:Jaehyun Park, Jaegyun Im, Sanha Hwang, Mintaek Lim, Sabina Ualibekova, Sejin Kim, Sundong Kim
Abstract:
In the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), we tackle Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) tasks using a novel two-pronged approach. We employ the Decision Transformer in an imitation learning paradigm to model human problem-solving, and introduce an object detection algorithm, the Push and Pull clustering method. This dual strategy enhances AI's ARC problem-solving skills and provides insights for AGI progression. Yet, our work reveals the need for advanced data collection tools, robust training datasets, and refined model structures. This study highlights potential improvements for Decision Transformers and propels future AGI research.
Authors:Quoc Khanh Nguyen, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Van Binh Truong, Quoc Hung Cao
Abstract:
Nowadays, deep neural networks for object detection in images are very prevalent. However, due to the complexity of these networks, users find it hard to understand why these objects are detected by models. We proposed Gaussian Class Activation Mapping Explainer (G-CAME), which generates a saliency map as the explanation for object detection models. G-CAME can be considered a CAM-based method that uses the activation maps of selected layers combined with the Gaussian kernel to highlight the important regions in the image for the predicted box. Compared with other Region-based methods, G-CAME can transcend time constraints as it takes a very short time to explain an object. We also evaluated our method qualitatively and quantitatively with YOLOX on the MS-COCO 2017 dataset and guided to apply G-CAME into the two-stage Faster-RCNN model.
Authors:Van Binh Truong, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Quoc Khanh Nguyen, Quoc Hung Cao
Abstract:
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have promoted their use in almost every field. The growing complexity of deep neural networks (DNNs) makes it increasingly difficult and important to explain the inner workings and decisions of the network. However, most current techniques for explaining DNNs focus mainly on interpreting classification tasks. This paper proposes a method to explain the decision for any object detection model called D-CLOSE. To closely track the model's behavior, we used multiple levels of segmentation on the image and a process to combine them. We performed tests on the MS-COCO dataset with the YOLOX model, which shows that our method outperforms D-RISE and can give a better quality and less noise explanation.
Authors:Zhongxi Chen, Ke Sun, Xianming Lin, Rongrong Ji
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is a challenging task in computer vision due to the high similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. Existing COD methods primarily employ semantic segmentation, which suffers from overconfident incorrect predictions. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm that treats COD as a conditional mask-generation task leveraging diffusion models. Our method, dubbed CamoDiffusion, employs the denoising process of diffusion models to iteratively reduce the noise of the mask. Due to the stochastic sampling process of diffusion, our model is capable of sampling multiple possible predictions from the mask distribution, avoiding the problem of overconfident point estimation. Moreover, we develop specialized learning strategies that include an innovative ensemble approach for generating robust predictions and tailored forward diffusion methods for efficient training, specifically for the COD task. Extensive experiments on three COD datasets attest the superior performance of our model compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly on the most challenging COD10K dataset, where our approach achieves 0.019 in terms of MAE.
Authors:Munkhjargal Gochoo, Munkh-Erdene Otgonbold, Erkhembayar Ganbold, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Ming-Ching Chang, Ping-Yang Chen, Byambaa Dorj, Hamad Al Jassmi, Ganzorig Batnasan, Fady Alnajjar, Mohammed Abduljabbar, Fang-Pang Lin
Abstract:
With the advance of AI, road object detection has been a prominent topic in computer vision, mostly using perspective cameras. Fisheye lens provides omnidirectional wide coverage for using fewer cameras to monitor road intersections, however with view distortions. To our knowledge, there is no existing open dataset prepared for traffic surveillance on fisheye cameras. This paper introduces an open FishEye8K benchmark dataset for road object detection tasks, which comprises 157K bounding boxes across five classes (Pedestrian, Bike, Car, Bus, and Truck). In addition, we present benchmark results of State-of-The-Art (SoTA) models, including variations of YOLOv5, YOLOR, YOLO7, and YOLOv8. The dataset comprises 8,000 images recorded in 22 videos using 18 fisheye cameras for traffic monitoring in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at resolutions of 1080$\times$1080 and 1280$\times$1280. The data annotation and validation process were arduous and time-consuming, due to the ultra-wide panoramic and hemispherical fisheye camera images with large distortion and numerous road participants, particularly people riding scooters. To avoid bias, frames from a particular camera were assigned to either the training or test sets, maintaining a ratio of about 70:30 for both the number of images and bounding boxes in each class. Experimental results show that YOLOv8 and YOLOR outperform on input sizes 640$\times$640 and 1280$\times$1280, respectively. The dataset will be available on GitHub with PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and YOLO annotation formats. The FishEye8K benchmark will provide significant contributions to the fisheye video analytics and smart city applications.
Authors:Zerun Wang, Ling Xiao, Liuyu Xiang, Zhaotian Weng, Toshihiko Yamasaki
Abstract:
Open-set semi-supervised object detection (OSSOD) task leverages practical open-set unlabeled datasets that comprise both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) instances for conducting semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). The main challenge in OSSOD is distinguishing and filtering the OOD instances (i.e., outliers) during pseudo-labeling since OODs will affect the performance. The only OSSOD work employs an additional offline OOD detection network trained solely with labeled data to solve this problem. However, the limited labeled data restricts the potential for improvement. Meanwhile, the offline strategy results in low efficiency. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes an end-to-end online OSSOD framework that improves performance and efficiency: 1) We propose a semi-supervised outlier filtering method that more effectively filters the OOD instances using both labeled and unlabeled data. 2) We propose a threshold-free Dual Competing OOD head that further improves the performance by suppressing the error accumulation during semi-supervised outlier filtering. 3) Our proposed method is an online end-to-end trainable OSSOD framework. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several OSSOD benchmarks compared to existing methods. Moreover, additional experiments show that our method is more efficient and can be easily applied to different SSOD frameworks to boost their performance.
Authors:Bo Yuan, Yao Jiang, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract:
Light field salient object detection (SOD) is an emerging research direction attributed to the richness of light field data. However, most existing methods lack effective handling of focal stacks, therefore making the latter involved in a lot of interfering information and degrade the performance of SOD. To address this limitation, we propose to utilize multi-modal features to refine focal stacks in a guided manner, resulting in a novel guided focal stack refinement network called GFRNet. To this end, we propose a guided refinement and fusion module (GRFM) to refine focal stacks and aggregate multi-modal features. In GRFM, all-in-focus (AiF) and depth modalities are utilized to refine focal stacks separately, leading to two novel sub-modules for different modalities, namely AiF-based refinement module (ARM) and depth-based refinement module (DRM). Such refinement modules enhance structural and positional information of salient objects in focal stacks, and are able to improve SOD accuracy. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our GFRNet model against 12 state-of-the-art models.
Authors:Yu Zhang, Huaming Chen, Wei Bao, Zhongzheng Lai, Zao Zhang, Dong Yuan
Abstract:
With the rapid development of deep learning, object detection and tracking play a vital role in today's society. Being able to identify and track all the pedestrians in the dense crowd scene with computer vision approaches is a typical challenge in this field, also known as the Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) challenge. Modern trackers are required to operate on more and more complicated scenes. According to the MOT20 challenge result, the pedestrian is 4 times denser than the MOT17 challenge. Hence, improving the ability to detect and track in extremely crowded scenes is the aim of this work. In light of the occlusion issue with the human body, the heads are usually easier to identify. In this work, we have designed a joint head and body detector in an anchor-free style to boost the detection recall and precision performance of pedestrians in both small and medium sizes. Innovatively, our model does not require information on the statistical head-body ratio for common pedestrians detection for training. Instead, the proposed model learns the ratio dynamically. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we evaluate the model with extensive experiments on different datasets, including MOT20, Crowdhuman, and HT21 datasets. As a result, our proposed method significantly improves both the recall and precision rate on small & medium sized pedestrians and achieves state-of-the-art results in these challenging datasets.
Authors:Yuhao Huang, Sanping Zhou, Junjie Zhang, Jinpeng Dong, Nanning Zheng
Abstract:
Efficient representation of point clouds is fundamental for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. While recent grid-based detectors often encode point clouds into either voxels or pillars, the distinctions between these approaches remain underexplored. In this paper, we quantify the differences between the current encoding paradigms and highlight the limited vertical learning within. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a hybrid Voxel-Pillar Fusion network (VPF), which synergistically combines the unique strengths of both voxels and pillars. Specifically, we first develop a sparse voxel-pillar encoder that encodes point clouds into voxel and pillar features through 3D and 2D sparse convolutions respectively, and then introduce the Sparse Fusion Layer (SFL), facilitating bidirectional interaction between sparse voxel and pillar features. Our efficient, fully sparse method can be seamlessly integrated into both dense and sparse detectors. Leveraging this powerful yet straightforward framework, VPF delivers competitive performance, achieving real-time inference speeds on the nuScenes and Waymo Open Dataset. The code will be available.
Authors:Zhengzhong Tu, Peyman Milanfar, Hossein Talebi
Abstract:
Image resizing operation is a fundamental preprocessing module in modern computer vision. Throughout the deep learning revolution, researchers have overlooked the potential of alternative resizing methods beyond the commonly used resizers that are readily available, such as nearest-neighbors, bilinear, and bicubic. The key question of our interest is whether the front-end resizer affects the performance of deep vision models? In this paper, we present an extremely lightweight multilayer Laplacian resizer with only a handful of trainable parameters, dubbed MULLER resizer. MULLER has a bandpass nature in that it learns to boost details in certain frequency subbands that benefit the downstream recognition models. We show that MULLER can be easily plugged into various training pipelines, and it effectively boosts the performance of the underlying vision task with little to no extra cost. Specifically, we select a state-of-the-art vision Transformer, MaxViT, as the baseline, and show that, if trained with MULLER, MaxViT gains up to 0.6% top-1 accuracy, and meanwhile enjoys 36% inference cost saving to achieve similar top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k, as compared to the standard training scheme. Notably, MULLER's performance also scales with model size and training data size such as ImageNet-21k and JFT, and it is widely applicable to multiple vision tasks, including image classification, object detection and segmentation, as well as image quality assessment.
Authors:Yihao Ding, Siqu Long, Jiabin Huang, Kaixuan Ren, Xingxiang Luo, Hyunsuk Chung, Soyeon Caren Han
Abstract:
Compared to general document analysis tasks, form document structure understanding and retrieval are challenging. Form documents are typically made by two types of authors; A form designer, who develops the form structure and keys, and a form user, who fills out form values based on the provided keys. Hence, the form values may not be aligned with the form designer's intention (structure and keys) if a form user gets confused. In this paper, we introduce Form-NLU, the first novel dataset for form structure understanding and its key and value information extraction, interpreting the form designer's intent and the alignment of user-written value on it. It consists of 857 form images, 6k form keys and values, and 4k table keys and values. Our dataset also includes three form types: digital, printed, and handwritten, which cover diverse form appearances and layouts. We propose a robust positional and logical relation-based form key-value information extraction framework. Using this dataset, Form-NLU, we first examine strong object detection models for the form layout understanding, then evaluate the key information extraction task on the dataset, providing fine-grained results for different types of forms and keys. Furthermore, we examine it with the off-the-shelf pdf layout extraction tool and prove its feasibility in real-world cases.
Authors:Wenbo Hu, Hongjian Zhan, Xinchen Ma, Cong Liu, Bing Yin, Yue Lu
Abstract:
In the field of historical manuscript research, scholars frequently encounter novel symbols in ancient texts, investing considerable effort in their identification and documentation. Although existing object detection methods achieve impressive performance on known categories, they struggle to recognize novel symbols without retraining. To address this limitation, we propose a Visually Guided Text Spotting (VGTS) approach that accurately spots novel characters using just one annotated support sample. The core of VGTS is a spatial alignment module consisting of a Dual Spatial Attention (DSA) block and a Geometric Matching (GM) block. The DSA block aims to identify, focus on, and learn discriminative spatial regions in the support and query images, mimicking the human visual spotting process. It first refines the support image by analyzing inter-channel relationships to identify critical areas, and then refines the query image by focusing on informative key points. The GM block, on the other hand, establishes the spatial correspondence between the two images, enabling accurate localization of the target character in the query image. To tackle the example imbalance problem in low-resource spotting tasks, we develop a novel torus loss function that enhances the discriminative power of the embedding space for distance metric learning. To further validate our approach, we introduce a new dataset featuring ancient Dongba hieroglyphics (DBH) associated with the Naxi minority of China. Extensive experiments on the DBH dataset and other public datasets, including EGY, VML-HD, TKH, and NC, show that VGTS consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods. The proposed framework exhibits great potential for application in historical manuscript text spotting, enabling scholars to efficiently identify and document novel symbols with minimal annotation effort.
Authors:Hongsuk Choi, Hyeongjin Nam, Taeryung Lee, Gyeongsik Moon, Kyoung Mu Lee
Abstract:
Recently, a few self-supervised representation learning (SSL) methods have outperformed the ImageNet classification pre-training for vision tasks such as object detection. However, its effects on 3D human body pose and shape estimation (3DHPSE) are open to question, whose target is fixed to a unique class, the human, and has an inherent task gap with SSL. We empirically study and analyze the effects of SSL and further compare it with other pre-training alternatives for 3DHPSE. The alternatives are 2D annotation-based pre-training and synthetic data pre-training, which share the motivation of SSL that aims to reduce the labeling cost. They have been widely utilized as a source of weak-supervision or fine-tuning, but have not been remarked as a pre-training source. SSL methods underperform the conventional ImageNet classification pre-training on multiple 3DHPSE benchmarks by 7.7% on average. In contrast, despite a much less amount of pre-training data, the 2D annotation-based pre-training improves accuracy on all benchmarks and shows faster convergence during fine-tuning. Our observations challenge the naive application of the current SSL pre-training to 3DHPSE and relight the value of other data types in the pre-training aspect.
Authors:Lotfi Abdelkrim Mecharbat, Hadjer Benmeziane, Hamza Ouarnoughi, Smail Niar
Abstract:
Vision Transformers have enabled recent attention-based Deep Learning (DL) architectures to achieve remarkable results in Computer Vision (CV) tasks. However, due to the extensive computational resources required, these architectures are rarely implemented on resource-constrained platforms. Current research investigates hybrid handcrafted convolution-based and attention-based models for CV tasks such as image classification and object detection. In this paper, we propose HyT-NAS, an efficient Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) including hybrid architectures targeting vision tasks on tiny devices. HyT-NAS improves state-of-the-art HW-NAS by enriching the search space and enhancing the search strategy as well as the performance predictors. Our experiments show that HyT-NAS achieves a similar hypervolume with less than ~5x training evaluations. Our resulting architecture outperforms MLPerf MobileNetV1 by 6.3% accuracy improvement with 3.5x less number of parameters on Visual Wake Words.
Authors:Kun Yang, Jing Liu, Dingkang Yang, Hanqi Wang, Peng Sun, Yanni Zhang, Yan Liu, Liang Song
Abstract:
With the rapid development of intelligent transportation system applications, a tremendous amount of multi-view video data has emerged to enhance vehicle perception. However, performing video analytics efficiently by exploiting the spatial-temporal redundancy from video data remains challenging. Accordingly, we propose a novel traffic-related framework named CEVAS to achieve efficient object detection using multi-view video data. Briefly, a fine-grained input filtering policy is introduced to produce a reasonable region of interest from the captured images. Also, we design a sharing object manager to manage the information of objects with spatial redundancy and share their results with other vehicles. We further derive a content-aware model selection policy to select detection methods adaptively. Experimental results show that our framework significantly reduces response latency while achieving the same detection accuracy as the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Xuxiang Sun, Gong Cheng, Lei Pei, Hongda Li, Junwei Han
Abstract:
Advanced Patch Attacks (PAs) on object detection in natural images have pointed out the great safety vulnerability in methods based on deep neural networks. However, little attention has been paid to this topic in Optical Remote Sensing Images (O-RSIs). To this end, we focus on this research, i.e., PAs on object detection in O-RSIs, and propose a more Threatening PA without the scarification of the visual quality, dubbed TPA. Specifically, to address the problem of inconsistency between local and global landscapes in existing patch selection schemes, we propose leveraging the First-Order Difference (FOD) of the objective function before and after masking to select the sub-patches to be attacked. Further, considering the problem of gradient inundation when applying existing coordinate-based loss to PAs directly, we design an IoU-based objective function specific for PAs, dubbed Bounding box Drifting Loss (BDL), which pushes the detected bounding boxes far from the initial ones until there are no intersections between them. Finally, on two widely used benchmarks, i.e., DIOR and DOTA, comprehensive evaluations of our TPA with four typical detectors (Faster R-CNN, FCOS, RetinaNet, and YOLO-v4) witness its remarkable effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the PAs on object detection in O-RSIs, and we hope this work can get our readers interested in studying this topic.
Authors:Yixuan Xu, Hamidreza Fazlali, Yuan Ren, Bingbing Liu
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation are two crucial tasks in the perception systems of autonomous vehicles and robots. In this paper, we propose All-in-One Perception Network (AOP-Net), a LiDAR-based multi-task framework that combines 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation. In this method, a dual-task 3D backbone is developed to extract both panoptic- and detection-level features from the input LiDAR point cloud. Also, a new 2D backbone that intertwines Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and convolution layers is designed to further improve the detection task performance. Finally, a novel module is proposed to guide the detection head by recovering useful features discarded during down-sampling operations in the 3D backbone. This module leverages estimated instance segmentation masks to recover detailed information from each candidate object. The AOP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance for published works on the nuScenes benchmark for both 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation tasks. Also, experiments show that our method easily adapts to and significantly improves the performance of any BEV-based 3D object detection method.
Authors:Guang Yang, Yin Tang, Jun Li, Jianhua Xu, Xili Wan
Abstract:
As a general model compression paradigm, feature-based knowledge distillation allows the student model to learn expressive features from the teacher counterpart. In this paper, we mainly focus on designing an effective feature-distillation framework and propose a spatial-channel adaptive masked distillation (AMD) network for object detection. More specifically, in order to accurately reconstruct important feature regions, we first perform attention-guided feature masking on the feature map of the student network, such that we can identify the important features via spatially adaptive feature masking instead of random masking in the previous methods. In addition, we employ a simple and efficient module to allow the student network channel to be adaptive, improving its model capability in object perception and detection. In contrast to the previous methods, more crucial object-aware features can be reconstructed and learned from the proposed network, which is conducive to accurate object detection. The empirical experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method: with the help of our proposed distillation method, the student networks report 41.3%, 42.4%, and 42.7% mAP scores when RetinaNet, Cascade Mask-RCNN and RepPoints are respectively used as the teacher framework for object detection, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art distillation methods including FGD and MGD.
Authors:Jin Fang, Dingfu Zhou, Jingjing Zhao, Chenming Wu, Chulin Tang, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Liangjun Zhang
Abstract:
Over the past few years, there has been remarkable progress in research on 3D point clouds and their use in autonomous driving scenarios has become widespread. However, deep learning methods heavily rely on annotated data and often face domain generalization issues. Unlike 2D images whose domains usually pertain to the texture information present in them, the features derived from a 3D point cloud are affected by the distribution of the points. The lack of a 3D domain adaptation benchmark leads to the common practice of training a model on one benchmark (e.g. Waymo) and then assessing it on another dataset (e.g. KITTI). This setting results in two distinct domain gaps: scenarios and sensors, making it difficult to analyze and evaluate the method accurately. To tackle this problem, this paper presents LiDAR Dataset with Cross Sensors (LiDAR-CS Dataset), which contains large-scale annotated LiDAR point cloud under six groups of different sensors but with the same corresponding scenarios, captured from hybrid realistic LiDAR simulator. To our knowledge, LiDAR-CS Dataset is the first dataset that addresses the sensor-related gaps in the domain of 3D object detection in real traffic. Furthermore, we evaluate and analyze the performance using various baseline detectors and demonstrated its potential applications. Project page: https://opendriving.github.io/lidar-cs.
Authors:Lorenzo Lamberti, Luca Bompani, Victor Javier Kartsch, Manuele Rusci, Daniele Palossi, Luca Benini
Abstract:
Nano-sized drones, with palm-sized form factor, are gaining relevance in the Internet-of-Things ecosystem. Achieving a high degree of autonomy for complex multi-objective missions (e.g., safe flight, exploration, object detection) is extremely challenging for the onboard chip-set due to tight size, payload (<10g), and power envelope constraints, which strictly limit both memory and computation. Our work addresses this complex problem by combining bio-inspired navigation policies, which rely on time-of-flight distance sensor data, with a vision-based convolutional neural network (CNN) for object detection. Our field-proven nano-drone is equipped with two microcontroller units (MCUs), a single-core ARM Cortex-M4 (STM32) for safe navigation and exploration policies, and a parallel ultra-low power octa-core RISC-V (GAP8) for onboard CNN inference, with a power envelope of just 134mW, including image sensors and external memories. The object detection task achieves a mean average precision of 50% (at 1.6 frame/s) on an in-field collected dataset. We compare four bio-inspired exploration policies and identify a pseudo-random policy to achieve the highest coverage area of 83% in a ~36m^2 unknown room in a 3 minutes flight. By combining the detection CNN and the exploration policy, we show an average detection rate of 90% on six target objects in a never-seen-before environment.
Authors:Trupti Mahendrakar, Andrew Ekblad, Nathan Fischer, Ryan T. White, Markus Wilde, Brian Kish, Isaac Silver
Abstract:
Autonomous navigation and path-planning around non-cooperative space objects is an enabling technology for on-orbit servicing and space debris removal systems. The navigation task includes the determination of target object motion, the identification of target object features suitable for grasping, and the identification of collision hazards and other keep-out zones. Given this knowledge, chaser spacecraft can be guided towards capture locations without damaging the target object or without unduly the operations of a servicing target by covering up solar arrays or communication antennas. One way to autonomously achieve target identification, characterization and feature recognition is by use of artificial intelligence algorithms. This paper discusses how the combination of cameras and machine learning algorithms can achieve the relative navigation task. The performance of two deep learning-based object detection algorithms, Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN) and You Only Look Once (YOLOv5), is tested using experimental data obtained in formation flight simulations in the ORION Lab at Florida Institute of Technology. The simulation scenarios vary the yaw motion of the target object, the chaser approach trajectory, and the lighting conditions in order to test the algorithms in a wide range of realistic and performance limiting situations. The data analyzed include the mean average precision metrics in order to compare the performance of the object detectors. The paper discusses the path to implementing the feature recognition algorithms and towards integrating them into the spacecraft Guidance Navigation and Control system.
Authors:Andrew Ekblad, Trupti Mahendrakar, Ryan T. White, Markus Wilde, Isaac Silver, Brooke Wheeler
Abstract:
The effective use of computer vision and machine learning for on-orbit applications has been hampered by limited computing capabilities, and therefore limited performance. While embedded systems utilizing ARM processors have been shown to meet acceptable but low performance standards, the recent availability of larger space-grade field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) show potential to exceed the performance of microcomputer systems. This work proposes use of neural network-based object detection algorithm that can be deployed on a comparably resource-constrained FPGA to automatically detect components of non-cooperative, satellites on orbit. Hardware-in-the-loop experiments were performed on the ORION Maneuver Kinematics Simulator at Florida Tech to compare the performance of the new model deployed on a small, resource-constrained FPGA to an equivalent algorithm on a microcomputer system. Results show the FPGA implementation increases the throughput and decreases latency while maintaining comparable accuracy. These findings suggest future missions should consider deploying computer vision algorithms on space-grade FPGAs.
Authors:Wei Cao, Liguo Zhou, Yuhong Huang, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
There are many artificial intelligence algorithms for autonomous driving, but directly installing these algorithms on vehicles is unrealistic and expensive. At the same time, many of these algorithms need an environment to train and optimize. Simulation is a valuable and meaningful solution with training and testing functions, and it can say that simulation is a critical link in the autonomous driving world. There are also many different applications or systems of simulation from companies or academies such as SVL and Carla. These simulators flaunt that they have the closest real-world simulation, but their environment objects, such as pedestrians and other vehicles around the agent-vehicle, are already fixed programmed. They can only move along the pre-setting trajectory, or random numbers determine their movements. What is the situation when all environmental objects are also installed by Artificial Intelligence, or their behaviors are like real people or natural reactions of other drivers? This problem is a blind spot for most of the simulation applications, or these applications cannot be easy to solve this problem. The Neurorobotics Platform from the TUM team of Prof. Alois Knoll has the idea about "Engines" and "Transceiver Functions" to solve the multi-agents problem. This report will start with a little research on the Neurorobotics Platform and analyze the potential and possibility of developing a new simulator to achieve the true real-world simulation goal. Then based on the NRP-Core Platform, this initial development aims to construct an initial demo experiment. The consist of this report starts with the basic knowledge of NRP-Core and its installation, then focus on the explanation of the necessary components for a simulation experiment, at last, about the details of constructions for the autonomous driving system, which is integrated object detection and autonomous control.
Authors:Zhihao Li, Ming Lu, Xu Zhang, Xin Feng, M. Salman Asif, Zhan Ma
Abstract:
Conventional cameras capture image irradiance on a sensor and convert it to RGB images using an image signal processor (ISP). The images can then be used for photography or visual computing tasks in a variety of applications, such as public safety surveillance and autonomous driving. One can argue that since RAW images contain all the captured information, the conversion of RAW to RGB using an ISP is not necessary for visual computing. In this paper, we propose a novel $Ï$-Vision framework to perform high-level semantic understanding and low-level compression using RAW images without the ISP subsystem used for decades. Considering the scarcity of available RAW image datasets, we first develop an unpaired CycleR2R network based on unsupervised CycleGAN to train modular unrolled ISP and inverse ISP (invISP) models using unpaired RAW and RGB images. We can then flexibly generate simulated RAW images (simRAW) using any existing RGB image dataset and finetune different models originally trained for the RGB domain to process real-world camera RAW images. We demonstrate object detection and image compression capabilities in RAW-domain using RAW-domain YOLOv3 and RAW image compressor (RIC) on snapshots from various cameras. Quantitative results reveal that RAW-domain task inference provides better detection accuracy and compression compared to RGB-domain processing. Furthermore, the proposed \r{ho}-Vision generalizes across various camera sensors and different task-specific models. Additional advantages of the proposed $Ï$-Vision that eliminates the ISP are the potential reductions in computations and processing times.
Authors:Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Ziying Song, Jin Fang, Sifen Wang, Zhi-Xin Yang
Abstract:
LiDAR and camera fusion techniques are promising for achieving 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Most multi-modal 3D object detection frameworks integrate semantic knowledge from 2D images into 3D LiDAR point clouds to enhance detection accuracy. Nevertheless, the restricted resolution of 2D feature maps impedes accurate re-projection and often induces a pronounced boundary-blurring effect, which is primarily attributed to erroneous semantic segmentation. To well handle this limitation, we propose a general multi-modal fusion framework Multi-Sem Fusion (MSF) to fuse the semantic information from both the 2D image and 3D points scene parsing results. Specifically, we employ 2D/3D semantic segmentation methods to generate the parsing results for 2D images and 3D point clouds. The 2D semantic information is further reprojected into the 3D point clouds with calibration parameters. To handle the misalignment between the 2D and 3D parsing results, we propose an Adaptive Attention-based Fusion (AAF) module to fuse them by learning an adaptive fusion score. Then the point cloud with the fused semantic label is sent to the following 3D object detectors. Furthermore, we propose a Deep Feature Fusion (DFF) module to aggregate deep features at different levels to boost the final detection performance. The effectiveness of the framework has been verified on two public large-scale 3D object detection benchmarks by comparing them with different baselines. The experimental results show that the proposed fusion strategies can significantly improve the detection performance compared to the methods using only point clouds and the methods using only 2D semantic information. Most importantly, the proposed approach significantly outperforms other approaches and sets state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes testing benchmark.
Authors:Yang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yixin Wang, Yang Zhang, Jiang Tian, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Zhiqiang He
Abstract:
Recently, the dominant DETR-based approaches apply central-concept spatial prior to accelerate Transformer detector convergency. These methods gradually refine the reference points to the center of target objects and imbue object queries with the updated central reference information for spatially conditional attention. However, centralizing reference points may severely deteriorate queries' saliency and confuse detectors due to the indiscriminative spatial prior. To bridge the gap between the reference points of salient queries and Transformer detectors, we propose SAlient Point-based DETR (SAP-DETR) by treating object detection as a transformation from salient points to instance objects. In SAP-DETR, we explicitly initialize a query-specific reference point for each object query, gradually aggregate them into an instance object, and then predict the distance from each side of the bounding box to these points. By rapidly attending to query-specific reference region and other conditional extreme regions from the image features, SAP-DETR can effectively bridge the gap between the salient point and the query-based Transformer detector with a significant convergency speed. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that SAP-DETR achieves 1.4 times convergency speed with competitive performance. Under the standard training scheme, SAP-DETR stably promotes the SOTA approaches by 1.0 AP. Based on ResNet-DC-101, SAP-DETR achieves 46.9 AP.
Authors:Pourya Shamsolmoali, Masoumeh Zareapoor, Swagatam Das, Eric Granger, Salvador Garcia
Abstract:
Capsule networks (CapsNets) aim to parse images into a hierarchy of objects, parts, and their relations using a two-step process involving part-whole transformation and hierarchical component routing. However, this hierarchical relationship modeling is computationally expensive, which has limited the wider use of CapsNet despite its potential advantages. The current state of CapsNet models primarily focuses on comparing their performance with capsule baselines, falling short of achieving the same level of proficiency as deep CNN variants in intricate tasks. To address this limitation, we present an efficient approach for learning capsules that surpasses canonical baseline models and even demonstrates superior performance compared to high-performing convolution models. Our contribution can be outlined in two aspects: firstly, we introduce a group of subcapsules onto which an input vector is projected. Subsequently, we present the Hybrid Gromov-Wasserstein framework, which initially quantifies the dissimilarity between the input and the components modeled by the subcapsules, followed by determining their alignment degree through optimal transport. This innovative mechanism capitalizes on new insights into defining alignment between the input and subcapsules, based on the similarity of their respective component distributions. This approach enhances CapsNets' capacity to learn from intricate, high-dimensional data while retaining their interpretability and hierarchical structure. Our proposed model offers two distinct advantages: (i) its lightweight nature facilitates the application of capsules to more intricate vision tasks, including object detection; (ii) it outperforms baseline approaches in these demanding tasks.
Authors:Ou Zheng, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Lishengsa Yue, Amr Abdelraouf, Zijin Wang, Nada Mahmoud
Abstract:
The development of safety-oriented research and applications requires fine-grain vehicle trajectories that not only have high accuracy, but also capture substantial safety-critical events. However, it would be challenging to satisfy both these requirements using the available vehicle trajectory datasets do not have the capacity to satisfy both.This paper introduces the CitySim dataset that has the core objective of facilitating safety-oriented research and applications. CitySim has vehicle trajectories extracted from 1140 minutes of drone videos recorded at 12 locations. It covers a variety of road geometries including freeway basic segments, signalized intersections, stop-controlled intersections, and control-free intersections. CitySim was generated through a five-step procedure that ensured trajectory accuracy. The five-step procedure included video stabilization, object filtering, multi-video stitching, object detection and tracking, and enhanced error filtering. Furthermore, CitySim provides the rotated bounding box information of a vehicle, which was demonstrated to improve safety evaluations. Compared with other video-based critical events, including cut-in, merge, and diverge events, which were validated by distributions of both minimum time-to-collision and minimum post-encroachment time. In addition, CitySim had the capability to facilitate digital-twin-related research by providing relevant assets, such as the recording locations' three-dimensional base maps and signal timings.
Authors:Gong Cheng, Xiang Yuan, Xiwen Yao, Kebing Yan, Qinghua Zeng, Xingxing Xie, Junwei Han
Abstract:
With the rise of deep convolutional neural networks, object detection has achieved prominent advances in past years. However, such prosperity could not camouflage the unsatisfactory situation of Small Object Detection (SOD), one of the notoriously challenging tasks in computer vision, owing to the poor visual appearance and noisy representation caused by the intrinsic structure of small targets. In addition, large-scale dataset for benchmarking small object detection methods remains a bottleneck. In this paper, we first conduct a thorough review of small object detection. Then, to catalyze the development of SOD, we construct two large-scale Small Object Detection dAtasets (SODA), SODA-D and SODA-A, which focus on the Driving and Aerial scenarios respectively. SODA-D includes 24828 high-quality traffic images and 278433 instances of nine categories. For SODA-A, we harvest 2513 high resolution aerial images and annotate 872069 instances over nine classes. The proposed datasets, as we know, are the first-ever attempt to large-scale benchmarks with a vast collection of exhaustively annotated instances tailored for multi-category SOD. Finally, we evaluate the performance of mainstream methods on SODA. We expect the released benchmarks could facilitate the development of SOD and spawn more breakthroughs in this field. Datasets and codes are available at: \url{https://shaunyuan22.github.io/SODA}.
Authors:Lei Zhang, Yuxuan Sun, Wei Wei
Abstract:
Exploiting pseudo labels (e.g., categories and bounding boxes) of unannotated objects produced by a teacher detector have underpinned much of recent progress in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, due to the limited generalization capacity of the teacher detector caused by the scarce annotations, the produced pseudo labels often deviate from ground truth, especially those with relatively low classification confidences, thus limiting the generalization performance of SSOD. To mitigate this problem, we propose a dual pseudo-label polishing framework for SSOD. Instead of directly exploiting the pseudo labels produced by the teacher detector, we take the first attempt at reducing their deviation from ground truth using dual polishing learning, where two differently structured polishing networks are elaborately developed and trained using synthesized paired pseudo labels and the corresponding ground truth for categories and bounding boxes on the given annotated objects, respectively. By doing this, both polishing networks can infer more accurate pseudo labels for unannotated objects through sufficiently exploiting their context knowledge based on the initially produced pseudo labels, and thus improve the generalization performance of SSOD. Moreover, such a scheme can be seamlessly plugged into the existing SSOD framework for joint end-to-end learning. In addition, we propose to disentangle the polished pseudo categories and bounding boxes of unannotated objects for separate category classification and bounding box regression in SSOD, which enables introducing more unannotated objects during model training and thus further improve the performance. Experiments on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors:Johannes Betz, Tobias Betz, Felix Fent, Maximilian Geisslinger, Alexander Heilmeier, Leonhard Hermansdorfer, Thomas Herrmann, Sebastian Huch, Phillip Karle, Markus Lienkamp, Boris Lohmann, Felix Nobis, Levent Ãgretmen, Matthias Rowold, Florian Sauerbeck, Tim Stahl, Rainer Trauth, Frederik Werner, Alexander Wischnewski
Abstract:
For decades, motorsport has been an incubator for innovations in the automotive sector and brought forth systems like disk brakes or rearview mirrors. Autonomous racing series such as Roborace, F1Tenth, or the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) are envisioned as playing a similar role within the autonomous vehicle sector, serving as a proving ground for new technology at the limits of the autonomous systems capabilities. This paper outlines the software stack and approach of the TUM Autonomous Motorsport team for their participation in the Indy Autonomous Challenge, which holds two competitions: A single-vehicle competition on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a passing competition at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Nine university teams used an identical vehicle platform: A modified Indy Lights chassis equipped with sensors, a computing platform, and actuators. All the teams developed different algorithms for object detection, localization, planning, prediction, and control of the race cars. The team from TUM placed first in Indianapolis and secured second place in Las Vegas. During the final of the passing competition, the TUM team reached speeds and accelerations close to the limit of the vehicle, peaking at around 270 km/h and 28 ms2. This paper will present details of the vehicle hardware platform, the developed algorithms, and the workflow to test and enhance the software applied during the two-year project. We derive deep insights into the autonomous vehicle's behavior at high speed and high acceleration by providing a detailed competition analysis. Based on this, we deduce a list of lessons learned and provide insights on promising areas of future work based on the real-world evaluation of the displayed concepts.
Authors:Walter Zimmer, Marcus Grabler, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
This work aims to address the challenges in domain adaptation of 3D object detection using infrastructure LiDARs. We design a model DASE-ProPillars that can detect vehicles in infrastructure-based LiDARs in real-time. Our model uses PointPillars as the baseline model with additional modules to improve the 3D detection performance. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed modules in DASE-ProPillars, we train and evaluate the model on two datasets, the open source A9-Dataset and a semi-synthetic infrastructure dataset created within the Regensburg Next project. We do several sets of experiments for each module in the DASE-ProPillars detector that show that our model outperforms the SE-ProPillars baseline on the real A9 test set and a semi-synthetic A9 test set, while maintaining an inference speed of 45 Hz (22 ms). We apply domain adaptation from the semi-synthetic A9-Dataset to the semi-synthetic dataset from the Regensburg Next project by applying transfer learning and achieve a 3D mAP@0.25 of 93.49% on the Car class of the target test set using 40 recall positions.
Authors:Vibashan VS, Poojan Oza, Vishal M. Patel
Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is an effective approach to tackle the issue of domain shift. Specifically, UDA methods try to align the source and target representations to improve the generalization on the target domain. Further, UDA methods work under the assumption that the source data is accessible during the adaptation process. However, in real-world scenarios, the labelled source data is often restricted due to privacy regulations, data transmission constraints, or proprietary data concerns. The Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) setting aims to alleviate these concerns by adapting a source-trained model for the target domain without requiring access to the source data. In this paper, we explore the SFDA setting for the task of adaptive object detection. To this end, we propose a novel training strategy for adapting a source-trained object detector to the target domain without source data. More precisely, we design a novel contrastive loss to enhance the target representations by exploiting the objects relations for a given target domain input. These object instance relations are modelled using an Instance Relation Graph (IRG) network, which are then used to guide the contrastive representation learning. In addition, we utilize a student-teacher based knowledge distillation strategy to avoid overfitting to the noisy pseudo-labels generated by the source-trained model. Extensive experiments on multiple object detection benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach is able to efficiently adapt source-trained object detectors to the target domain, outperforming previous state-of-the-art domain adaptive detection methods. Code and models are provided in \href{https://viudomain.github.io/irg-sfda-web/}{https://viudomain.github.io/irg-sfda-web/}.
Authors:Chong Xiang, Alexander Valtchanov, Saeed Mahloujifar, Prateek Mittal
Abstract:
Object detectors, which are widely deployed in security-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles, have been found vulnerable to patch hiding attacks. An attacker can use a single physically-realizable adversarial patch to make the object detector miss the detection of victim objects and undermine the functionality of object detection applications. In this paper, we propose ObjectSeeker for certifiably robust object detection against patch hiding attacks. The key insight in ObjectSeeker is patch-agnostic masking: we aim to mask out the entire adversarial patch without knowing the shape, size, and location of the patch. This masking operation neutralizes the adversarial effect and allows any vanilla object detector to safely detect objects on the masked images. Remarkably, we can evaluate ObjectSeeker's robustness in a certifiable manner: we develop a certification procedure to formally determine if ObjectSeeker can detect certain objects against any white-box adaptive attack within the threat model, achieving certifiable robustness. Our experiments demonstrate a significant (~10%-40% absolute and ~2-6x relative) improvement in certifiable robustness over the prior work, as well as high clean performance (~1% drop compared with undefended models).
Authors:Hanbo Zhang, Yunfan Lu, Cunjun Yu, David Hsu, Xuguang Lan, Nanning Zheng
Abstract:
This paper presents INVIGORATE, a robot system that interacts with human through natural language and grasps a specified object in clutter. The objects may occlude, obstruct, or even stack on top of one another. INVIGORATE embodies several challenges: (i) infer the target object among other occluding objects, from input language expressions and RGB images, (ii) infer object blocking relationships (OBRs) from the images, and (iii) synthesize a multi-step plan to ask questions that disambiguate the target object and to grasp it successfully. We train separate neural networks for object detection, for visual grounding, for question generation, and for OBR detection and grasping. They allow for unrestricted object categories and language expressions, subject to the training datasets. However, errors in visual perception and ambiguity in human languages are inevitable and negatively impact the robot's performance. To overcome these uncertainties, we build a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) that integrates the learned neural network modules. Through approximate POMDP planning, the robot tracks the history of observations and asks disambiguation questions in order to achieve a near-optimal sequence of actions that identify and grasp the target object. INVIGORATE combines the benefits of model-based POMDP planning and data-driven deep learning. Preliminary experiments with INVIGORATE on a Fetch robot show significant benefits of this integrated approach to object grasping in clutter with natural language interactions. A demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/zYakh80SGcU.
Authors:Dan Liu, Xi Chen, Jie Fu, Chen Ma, Xue Liu
Abstract:
Inference time, model size, and accuracy are three key factors in deep model compression. Most of the existing work addresses these three key factors separately as it is difficult to optimize them all at the same time. For example, low-bit quantization aims at obtaining a faster model; weight sharing quantization aims at improving compression ratio and accuracy; and mixed-precision quantization aims at balancing accuracy and inference time. To simultaneously optimize bit-width, model size, and accuracy, we propose pruning ternary quantization (PTQ): a simple, effective, symmetric ternary quantization method. We integrate L2 normalization, pruning, and the weight decay term to reduce the weight discrepancy in the gradient estimator during quantization, thus producing highly compressed ternary weights. Our method brings the highest test accuracy and the highest compression ratio. For example, it produces a 939kb (49$\times$) 2bit ternary ResNet-18 model with only 4\% accuracy drop on the ImageNet dataset. It compresses 170MB Mask R-CNN to 5MB (34$\times$) with only 2.8\% average precision drop. Our method is verified on image classification, object detection/segmentation tasks with different network structures such as ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and MobileNetV2.
Authors:Hua Zhang, Changjiang Luo, Ruoyu Chen
Abstract:
Video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) is challenging due to dynamic environments. Existing methods face two main issues: (1) SAM-based methods struggle to separate camouflaged object edges due to model freezing, and (2) MLLM-based methods suffer from poor object separability as large language models merge foreground and background. To address these issues, we propose a novel VCOD method based on SAM and MLLM, called Phantom-Insight. To enhance the separability of object edge details, we represent video sequences with temporal and spatial clues and perform feature fusion via LLM to increase information density. Next, multiple cues are generated through the dynamic foreground visual token scoring module and the prompt network to adaptively guide and fine-tune the SAM model, enabling it to adapt to subtle textures. To enhance the separability of objects and background, we propose a decoupled foreground-background learning strategy. By generating foreground and background cues separately and performing decoupled training, the visual token can effectively integrate foreground and background information independently, enabling SAM to more accurately segment camouflaged objects in the video. Experiments on the MoCA-Mask dataset show that Phantom-Insight achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics. Additionally, its ability to detect unseen camouflaged objects on the CAD2016 dataset highlights its strong generalization ability.
Authors:Zhicheng Tang, Jinwen Tang, Yi Shang
Abstract:
In the realm of aerial imaging, the ability to detect small objects is pivotal for a myriad of applications, encompassing environmental surveillance, urban design, and crisis management. Leveraging RetinaNet, this work unveils DDR-Net: a data-driven, deep-learning model devised to enhance the detection of diminutive objects. DDR-Net introduces novel, data-driven techniques to autonomously ascertain optimal feature maps and anchor estimations, cultivating a tailored and proficient training process while maintaining precision. Additionally, this paper presents an innovative sampling technique to bolster model efficacy under limited data training constraints. The model's enhanced detection capabilities support critical applications including wildlife and habitat monitoring, traffic flow optimization, and public safety improvements through accurate identification of small objects like vehicles and pedestrians. DDR-Net significantly reduces the cost and time required for data collection and training, offering efficient performance even with limited data. Empirical assessments over assorted aerial avian imagery datasets demonstrate that DDR-Net markedly surpasses RetinaNet and alternative contemporary models. These innovations advance current aerial image analysis technologies and promise wide-ranging impacts across multiple sectors including agriculture, security, and archaeology.
Authors:Marzi Heidari, Yuhong Guo
Abstract:
Deep models trained on a single source domain often fail catastrophically under distribution shifts, a critical challenge in Single Domain Generalization (SDG). While existing methods focus on augmenting source data or learning invariant features, they neglect a readily available resource: textual descriptions of the target deployment environment. We propose Target-Oriented Single Domain Generalization (TO-SDG), a novel problem setup that leverages the textual description of the target domain, without requiring any target data, to guide model generalization. To address TO-SDG, we introduce Spectral TARget Alignment (STAR), a lightweight module that injects target semantics into source features by exploiting visual-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. STAR uses a target-anchored subspace derived from the text embedding of the target description to recenter image features toward the deployment domain, then utilizes spectral projection to retain directions aligned with target cues while discarding source-specific noise. Moreover, we use a vision-language distillation to align backbone features with VLM's semantic geometry. STAR further employs feature-space Mixup to ensure smooth transitions between source and target-oriented representations. Experiments across various image classification and object detection benchmarks demonstrate STAR's superiority. This work establishes that minimal textual metadata, which is a practical and often overlooked resource, significantly enhances generalization under severe data constraints, opening new avenues for deploying robust models in target environments with unseen data.
Authors:Zixuan Hu, Dongxiao Li, Xinzhu Ma, Shixiang Tang, Xiaotong Li, Wenhan Yang, Ling-Yu Duan
Abstract:
Accurate monocular 3D object detection (M3OD) is pivotal for safety-critical applications like autonomous driving, yet its reliability deteriorates significantly under real-world domain shifts caused by environmental or sensor variations. To address these shifts, Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods have emerged, enabling models to adapt to target distributions during inference. While prior TTA approaches recognize the positive correlation between low uncertainty and high generalization ability, they fail to address the dual uncertainty inherent to M3OD: semantic uncertainty (ambiguous class predictions) and geometric uncertainty (unstable spatial localization). To bridge this gap, we propose Dual Uncertainty Optimization (DUO), the first TTA framework designed to jointly minimize both uncertainties for robust M3OD. Through a convex optimization lens, we introduce an innovative convex structure of the focal loss and further derive a novel unsupervised version, enabling label-agnostic uncertainty weighting and balanced learning for high-uncertainty objects. In parallel, we design a semantic-aware normal field constraint that preserves geometric coherence in regions with clear semantic cues, reducing uncertainty from the unstable 3D representation. This dual-branch mechanism forms a complementary loop: enhanced spatial perception improves semantic classification, and robust semantic predictions further refine spatial understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DUO over existing methods across various datasets and domain shift types.
Authors:Qifeng Liu, Dawei Zhao, Yabo Dong, Linzhi Shang, Liang Xiao, Juan Wang, Kunkong Zhao, Dongming Lu, Qi Zhu
Abstract:
Recent advances in point cloud object detection have increasingly adopted Transformer-based and State Space Models (SSMs), demonstrating strong performance. However, voxelbased representations in these models require strict consistency in input and output dimensions due to their serialized processing, which limits the spatial diffusion capability typically offered by convolutional operations. This limitation significantly affects detection accuracy. Inspired by CNN-based object detection architectures, we propose a novel Voxel Diffusion Module (VDM) to enhance voxel-level representation and diffusion in point cloud data. VDM is composed of sparse 3D convolutions, submanifold sparse convolutions, and residual connections. To ensure computational efficiency, the output feature maps are downsampled to one-fourth of the original input resolution. VDM serves two primary functions: (1) diffusing foreground voxel features through sparse 3D convolutions to enrich spatial context, and (2) aggregating fine-grained spatial information to strengthen voxelwise feature representation. The enhanced voxel features produced by VDM can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream Transformer- or SSM-based detection models for accurate object classification and localization, highlighting the generalizability of our method. We evaluate VDM on several benchmark datasets by embedding it into both Transformerbased and SSM-based models. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves detection accuracy over baseline models. Specifically, VDM-SSMs achieve 74.7 mAPH (L2) on Waymo, 72.9 NDS on nuScenes, 42.3 mAP on Argoverse 2, and 67.6 mAP on ONCE, setting new stateof-the-art performance across all datasets. Our code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Ziqi Ye, Shuran Ma, Jie Yang, Xiaoyi Yang, Ziyang Gong, Xue Yang, Haipeng Wang
Abstract:
High-precision controllable remote sensing image generation is both meaningful and challenging. Existing diffusion models often produce low-fidelity images due to their inability to adequately capture morphological details, which may affect the robustness and reliability of object detection models. To enhance the accuracy and fidelity of generated objects in remote sensing, this paper proposes Object Fidelity Diffusion (OF-Diff), which effectively improves the fidelity of generated objects. Specifically, we are the first to extract the prior shapes of objects based on the layout for diffusion models in remote sensing. Then, we introduce a dual-branch diffusion model with diffusion consistency loss, which can generate high-fidelity remote sensing images without providing real images during the sampling phase. Furthermore, we introduce DDPO to fine-tune the diffusion process, making the generated remote sensing images more diverse and semantically consistent. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OF-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the remote sensing across key quality metrics. Notably, the performance of several polymorphic and small object classes shows significant improvement. For instance, the mAP increases by 8.3%, 7.7%, and 4.0% for airplanes, ships, and vehicles, respectively.
Authors:Yushen Xu, Xiaosong Li, Zhenyu Kuang, Xiaoqi Cheng, Haishu Tan, Huafeng Li
Abstract:
The goal of multimodal image fusion is to integrate complementary information from infrared and visible images, generating multimodal fused images for downstream tasks. Existing downstream pre-training models are typically trained on visible images. However, the significant pixel distribution differences between visible and multimodal fusion images can degrade downstream task performance, sometimes even below that of using only visible images. This paper explores adapting multimodal fused images with significant modality differences to object detection and semantic segmentation models trained on visible images. To address this, we propose MambaTrans, a novel multimodal fusion image modality translator. MambaTrans uses descriptions from a multimodal large language model and masks from semantic segmentation models as input. Its core component, the Multi-Model State Space Block, combines mask-image-text cross-attention and a 3D-Selective Scan Module, enhancing pure visual capabilities. By leveraging object detection prior knowledge, MambaTrans minimizes detection loss during training and captures long-term dependencies among text, masks, and images. This enables favorable results in pre-trained models without adjusting their parameters. Experiments on public datasets show that MambaTrans effectively improves multimodal image performance in downstream tasks.
Authors:Sandro Papais, Letian Wang, Brian Cheong, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
We introduce ForeSight, a novel joint detection and forecasting framework for vision-based 3D perception in autonomous vehicles. Traditional approaches treat detection and forecasting as separate sequential tasks, limiting their ability to leverage temporal cues. ForeSight addresses this limitation with a multi-task streaming and bidirectional learning approach, allowing detection and forecasting to share query memory and propagate information seamlessly. The forecast-aware detection transformer enhances spatial reasoning by integrating trajectory predictions from a multiple hypothesis forecast memory queue, while the streaming forecast transformer improves temporal consistency using past forecasts and refined detections. Unlike tracking-based methods, ForeSight eliminates the need for explicit object association, reducing error propagation with a tracking-free model that efficiently scales across multi-frame sequences. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that ForeSight achieves state-of-the-art performance, achieving an EPA of 54.9%, surpassing previous methods by 9.3%, while also attaining the best mAP and minADE among multi-view detection and forecasting models.
Authors:Jiayuan Wang, Farhad Pourpanah, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Ning Zhang
Abstract:
Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) must simultaneously perform multiple tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, trajectory prediction, motion prediction, and behaviour prediction, to ensure safe and reliable navigation in complex environments. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication enables cooperative driving among CAVs, thereby mitigating the limitations of individual sensors, reducing occlusions, and improving perception over long distances. Traditionally, these tasks are addressed using distinct models, which leads to high deployment costs, increased computational overhead, and challenges in achieving real-time performance. Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently emerged as a promising solution that enables the joint learning of multiple tasks within a single unified model. This offers improved efficiency and resource utilization. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first comprehensive review focused on MTL in the context of CAVs. We begin with an overview of CAVs and MTL to provide foundational background. We then explore the application of MTL across key functional modules, including perception, prediction, planning, control, and multi-agent collaboration. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limitations of existing methods, identify key research gaps, and provide directions for future research aimed at advancing MTL methodologies for CAV systems.
Authors:Levente Tempfli, Esteban Rivera, Markus Lienkamp
Abstract:
Data collection for autonomous driving is rapidly accelerating, but manual annotation, especially for 3D labels, remains a major bottleneck due to its high cost and labor intensity. Autolabeling has emerged as a scalable alternative, allowing the generation of labels for point clouds with minimal human intervention. While LiDAR-based autolabeling methods leverage geometric information, they struggle with inherent limitations of lidar data, such as sparsity, occlusions, and incomplete object observations. Furthermore, these methods typically operate in a class-agnostic manner, offering limited semantic granularity. To address these challenges, we introduce VESPA, a multimodal autolabeling pipeline that fuses the geometric precision of LiDAR with the semantic richness of camera images. Our approach leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to enable open-vocabulary object labeling and to refine detection quality directly in the point cloud domain. VESPA supports the discovery of novel categories and produces high-quality 3D pseudolabels without requiring ground-truth annotations or HD maps. On Nuscenes dataset, VESPA achieves an AP of 52.95% for object discovery and up to 46.54% for multiclass object detection, demonstrating strong performance in scalable 3D scene understanding. Code will be available upon acceptance.
Authors:Mingfeng Yuan, Letian Wang, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong common-sense reasoning abilities, making them promising for robotic navigation and planning tasks. However, despite recent progress, bridging the gap between language descriptions and actual robot actions in the open-world, beyond merely invoking limited predefined motion primitives, remains an open challenge. In this work, we aim to enable robots to interpret and decompose complex language instructions, ultimately synthesizing a sequence of trajectory points to complete diverse navigation tasks given open-set instructions and open-set objects. We observe that multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong cross-modal understanding when processing free-form language instructions, demonstrating robust scene comprehension. More importantly, leveraging their code-generation capability, MLLMs can interact with vision-language perception models to generate compositional 2D bird-eye-view value maps, effectively integrating semantic knowledge from MLLMs with spatial information from maps to reinforce the robot's spatial understanding. To further validate our approach, we effectively leverage large-scale autonomous vehicle datasets (AVDs) to validate our proposed zero-shot vision-language navigation framework in outdoor navigation tasks, demonstrating its capability to execute a diverse range of free-form natural language navigation instructions while maintaining robustness against object detection errors and linguistic ambiguities. Furthermore, we validate our system on a Husky robot in both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrating its real-world robustness and applicability. Supplementary videos are available at https://trailab.github.io/OpenNav-website/
Authors:Arsen Yermukan, Pedro Machado, Feliciano Domingos, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle, Jordan J. Bird, Stefano S. K. Kaburu, Samantha J. Ward
Abstract:
Traditional monitoring of bearded dragon (Pogona Viticeps) behaviour is time-consuming and prone to errors. This project introduces an automated system for real-time video analysis, using You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection models to identify two key behaviours: basking and hunting. We trained five YOLO variants (v5, v7, v8, v11, v12) on a custom, publicly available dataset of 1200 images, encompassing bearded dragons (600), heating lamps (500), and crickets (100). YOLOv8s was selected as the optimal model due to its superior balance of accuracy (mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.855) and speed. The system processes video footage by extracting per-frame object coordinates, applying temporal interpolation for continuity, and using rule-based logic to classify specific behaviours. Basking detection proved reliable. However, hunting detection was less accurate, primarily due to weak cricket detection (mAP@0.5 = 0.392). Future improvements will focus on enhancing cricket detection through expanded datasets or specialised small-object detectors. This automated system offers a scalable solution for monitoring reptile behaviour in controlled environments, significantly improving research efficiency and data quality.
Authors:Xavier Diaz, Gianluca D'Amico, Raul Dominguez-Sanchez, Federico Nesti, Max Ronecker, Giorgio Buttazzo
Abstract:
In recent years, interest in automatic train operations has significantly increased. To enable advanced functionalities, robust vision-based algorithms are essential for perceiving and understanding the surrounding environment. However, the railway sector suffers from a lack of publicly available real-world annotated datasets, making it challenging to test and validate new perception solutions in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce SynDRA-BBox, a synthetic dataset designed to support object detection and other vision-based tasks in realistic railway scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, is the first synthetic dataset specifically tailored for 2D and 3D object detection in the railway domain, the dataset is publicly available at https://syndra.retis.santannapisa.it. In the presented evaluation, a state-of-the-art semi-supervised domain adaptation method, originally developed for automotive perception, is adapted to the railway context, enabling the transferability of synthetic data to 3D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate promising performance, highlighting the effectiveness of synthetic datasets and domain adaptation techniques in advancing perception capabilities for railway environments.
Authors:Sven Teufel, Dominique Mayer, Jörg Gamerdinger, Oliver Bringmann
Abstract:
While automated vehicles hold the potential to significantly reduce traffic accidents, their perception systems remain vulnerable to sensor degradation caused by adverse weather and environmental occlusions. Collective perception, which enables vehicles to share information, offers a promising approach to overcoming these limitations. However, to this date collective perception in adverse weather is mostly unstudied. Therefore, we conduct the first study of LiDAR-based collective perception under diverse weather conditions and present a novel multi-task architecture for LiDAR-based collective perception under adverse weather. Adverse weather conditions can not only degrade perception capabilities, but also negatively affect bandwidth requirements and latency due to the introduced noise that is also transmitted and processed. Denoising prior to communication can effectively mitigate these issues. Therefore, we propose DenoiseCP-Net, a novel multi-task architecture for LiDAR-based collective perception under adverse weather conditions. DenoiseCP-Net integrates voxel-level noise filtering and object detection into a unified sparse convolution backbone, eliminating redundant computations associated with two-stage pipelines. This design not only reduces inference latency and computational cost but also minimizes communication overhead by removing non-informative noise. We extended the well-known OPV2V dataset by simulating rain, snow, and fog using our realistic weather simulation models. We demonstrate that DenoiseCP-Net achieves near-perfect denoising accuracy in adverse weather, reduces the bandwidth requirements by up to 23.6% while maintaining the same detection accuracy and reducing the inference latency for cooperative vehicles.
Authors:Johanna Orsholm, John Quinto, Hannu Autto, Gaia Banelyte, Nicolas Chazot, Jeremy deWaard, Stephanie deWaard, Arielle Farrell, Brendan Furneaux, Bess Hardwick, Nao Ito, Amlan Kar, Oula Kalttopää, Deirdre Kerdraon, Erik Kristensen, Jaclyn McKeown, Tommi Mononen, Ellen Nein, Hanna Rogers, Tomas Roslin, Paula Schmitz, Jayme Sones, Maija Sujala, Amy Thompson, Evgeny V. Zakharov, Iuliia Zarubiieva, Akshita Gupta, Scott C. Lowe, Graham W. Taylor
Abstract:
Insects comprise millions of species, many experiencing severe population declines under environmental and habitat changes. High-throughput approaches are crucial for accelerating our understanding of insect diversity, with DNA barcoding and high-resolution imaging showing strong potential for automatic taxonomic classification. However, most image-based approaches rely on individual specimen data, unlike the unsorted bulk samples collected in large-scale ecological surveys. We present the Mixed Arthropod Sample Segmentation and Identification (MassID45) dataset for training automatic classifiers of bulk insect samples. It uniquely combines molecular and imaging data at both the unsorted sample level and the full set of individual specimens. Human annotators, supported by an AI-assisted tool, performed two tasks on bulk images: creating segmentation masks around each individual arthropod and assigning taxonomic labels to over 17 000 specimens. Combining the taxonomic resolution of DNA barcodes with precise abundance estimates of bulk images holds great potential for rapid, large-scale characterization of insect communities. This dataset pushes the boundaries of tiny object detection and instance segmentation, fostering innovation in both ecological and machine learning research.
Authors:Paul Hill, Alin Achim, Dave Bull, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract:
Atmospheric Turbulence (AT) degrades the clarity and accuracy of surveillance imagery, posing challenges not only for visualization quality but also for object classification and scene tracking. Deep learning-based methods have been proposed to improve visual quality, but spatio-temporal distortions remain a significant issue. Although deep learning-based object detection performs well under normal conditions, it struggles to operate effectively on sequences distorted by atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that learns to compensate for distorted features while simultaneously improving visualization and object detection. This end-to-end framework leverages and exchanges knowledge of low-level distorted features in the AT mitigator with semantic features extracted in the object detector. Specifically, in the AT mitigator a 3D Mamba-based structure is used to handle the spatio-temporal displacements and blurring caused by turbulence. Features are extracted in a pyramid manner during the mitigation stage and passed to the detector. Optimization is achieved through back-propagation in both the AT mitigator and object detector. Our proposed DMAT outperforms state-of-the-art AT mitigation and object detection systems up to a 15% improvement on datasets corrupted by generated turbulence.
Authors:Yitong Quan, Benjamin Kiefer, Martin Messmer, Andreas Zell
Abstract:
Modern image-based object detection models, such as YOLOv7, primarily process individual frames independently, thus ignoring valuable temporal context naturally present in videos. Meanwhile, existing video-based detection methods often introduce complex temporal modules, significantly increasing model size and computational complexity. In practical applications such as surveillance and autonomous driving, transient challenges including motion blur, occlusions, and abrupt appearance changes can severely degrade single-frame detection performance. To address these issues, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective strategy: stacking multiple consecutive frames as input to a YOLO-based detector while supervising only the output corresponding to a single target frame. This approach leverages temporal information with minimal modifications to existing architectures, preserving simplicity, computational efficiency, and real-time inference capability. Extensive experiments on the challenging MOT20Det and our BOAT360 datasets demonstrate that our method improves detection robustness, especially for lightweight models, effectively narrowing the gap between compact and heavy detection networks. Additionally, we contribute the BOAT360 benchmark dataset, comprising annotated fisheye video sequences captured from a boat, to support future research in multi-frame video object detection in challenging real-world scenarios.
Authors:Mei Qi Tang, Sean Sedwards, Chengjie Huang, Krzysztof Czarnecki
Abstract:
The impact of snowfall on 3D object detection performance remains underexplored. Conducting such an evaluation requires a dataset with sufficient labelled data from both weather conditions, ideally captured in the same driving environment. Current driving datasets with LiDAR point clouds either do not provide enough labelled data in both snowy and clear weather conditions, or rely on de-snowing methods to generate synthetic clear weather. Synthetic data often lacks realism and introduces an additional domain shift that confounds accurate evaluations. To address these challenges, we present CADC+, the first paired weather domain adaptation dataset for autonomous driving in winter conditions. CADC+ extends the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions dataset (CADC) using clear weather data that was recorded on the same roads and in the same period as CADC. To create CADC+, we pair each CADC sequence with a clear weather sequence that matches the snowy sequence as closely as possible. CADC+ thus minimizes the domain shift resulting from factors unrelated to the presence of snow. We also present some preliminary results using CADC+ to evaluate the effect of snow on 3D object detection performance. We observe that snow introduces a combination of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, acting as both noise and a distinct data domain.
Authors:Yuxiang Wang, Xuecheng Bai, Boyu Hu, Chuanzhi Xu, Haodong Chen, Vera Chung, Tingxue Li, Xiaoming Chen
Abstract:
Small object detection in UAV imagery is crucial for applications such as search-and-rescue, traffic monitoring, and environmental surveillance, but it is hampered by tiny object size, low signal-to-noise ratios, and limited feature extraction. Existing multi-scale fusion methods help, but add computational burden and blur fine details, making small object detection in cluttered scenes difficult. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Multi-scale Global-detail Feature Integration Strategy (MGDFIS), a unified fusion framework that tightly couples global context with local detail to boost detection performance while maintaining efficiency. MGDFIS comprises three synergistic modules: the FusionLock-TSS Attention Module, which marries token-statistics self-attention with DynamicTanh normalization to highlight spectral and spatial cues at minimal cost; the Global-detail Integration Module, which fuses multi-scale context via directional convolution and parallel attention while preserving subtle shape and texture variations; and the Dynamic Pixel Attention Module, which generates pixel-wise weighting maps to rebalance uneven foreground and background distributions and sharpen responses to true object regions. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone benchmark demonstrate that MGDFIS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse backbone architectures and detection frameworks, achieving superior precision and recall with low inference time. By striking an optimal balance between accuracy and resource usage, MGDFIS provides a practical solution for small-object detection on resource-constrained UAV platforms.
Authors:Dheeraj Khanna, Jerrin Bright, Yuhao Chen, John S. Zelek
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) in team sports is particularly challenging due to the fast-paced motion and frequent occlusions resulting in motion blur and identity switches, respectively. Predicting player positions in such scenarios is particularly difficult due to the observed highly non-linear motion patterns. Current methods are heavily reliant on object detection and appearance-based tracking, which struggle to perform in complex team sports scenarios, where appearance cues are ambiguous and motion patterns do not necessarily follow a linear pattern. To address these challenges, we introduce SportMamba, an adaptive hybrid MOT technique specifically designed for tracking in dynamic team sports. The technical contribution of SportMamba is twofold. First, we introduce a mamba-attention mechanism that models non-linear motion by implicitly focusing on relevant embedding dependencies. Second, we propose a height-adaptive spatial association metric to reduce ID switches caused by partial occlusions by accounting for scale variations due to depth changes. Additionally, we extend the detection search space with adaptive buffers to improve associations in fast-motion scenarios. Our proposed technique, SportMamba, demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on various metrics in the SportsMOT dataset, which is characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion. Furthermore, we demonstrate its generalization capability through zero-shot transfer to VIP-HTD, an ice hockey dataset.
Authors:Bo Li, Haoke Xiao, Lv Tang
Abstract:
Vision Mamba has recently emerged as a promising alternative to Transformer-based architectures, offering linear complexity in sequence length while maintaining strong modeling capacity. However, its adaptation to visual inputs is hindered by challenges in 2D-to-1D patch serialization and weak scalability across input resolutions. Existing serialization strategies such as raster scanning disrupt local spatial continuity and limit the model's ability to generalize across scales. In this paper, we propose FractalMamba++, a robust vision backbone that leverages fractal-based patch serialization via Hilbert curves to preserve spatial locality and enable seamless resolution adaptability. To address long-range dependency fading in high-resolution inputs, we further introduce a Cross-State Routing (CSR) mechanism that enhances global context propagation through selective state reuse. Additionally, we propose a Positional-Relation Capture (PRC) module to recover local adjacency disrupted by curve inflection points. Extensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection, demonstrate that FractalMamba++ consistently outperforms previous Mamba-based backbones, with particularly notable gains under high-resolution settings.
Authors:Aditya Taparia, Noel Ngu, Mario Leiva, Joshua Shay Kricheli, John Corcoran, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Gerardo Simari, Paulo Shakarian, Ransalu Senanayake
Abstract:
Although fusing multiple sensor modalities can enhance object detection performance, existing fusion approaches often overlook subtle variations in environmental conditions and sensor inputs. As a result, they struggle to adaptively weight each modality under such variations. To address this challenge, we introduce Vision-Language Conditioned Fusion (VLC Fusion), a novel fusion framework that leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to condition the fusion process on nuanced environmental cues. By capturing high-level environmental context such as as darkness, rain, and camera blurring, the VLM guides the model to dynamically adjust modality weights based on the current scene. We evaluate VLC Fusion on real-world autonomous driving and military target detection datasets that include image, LIDAR, and mid-wave infrared modalities. Our experiments show that VLC Fusion consistently outperforms conventional fusion baselines, achieving improved detection accuracy in both seen and unseen scenarios.
Authors:Esteban Rivera, Loic Stratil, Markus Lienkamp
Abstract:
Deep learning models for object detection in autonomous driving have recently achieved impressive performance gains and are already being deployed in vehicles worldwide. However, current models require increasingly large datasets for training. Acquiring and labeling such data is costly, necessitating the development of new strategies to optimize this process. Active learning is a promising approach that has been extensively researched in the image domain. In our work, we extend this concept to the LiDAR domain by developing several inconsistency-based sample selection strategies and evaluate their effectiveness in various settings. Our results show that using a naive inconsistency approach based on the number of detected boxes, we achieve the same mAP as the random sampling strategy with 50% of the labeled data.
Authors:Esteban Rivera, Surya Prabhakaran, Markus Lienkamp
Abstract:
Active Learning has proved to be a relevant approach to perform sample selection for training models for Autonomous Driving. Particularly, previous works on active learning for 3D object detection have shown that selection of samples in uncontrolled scenarios is challenging. Furthermore, current approaches focus exclusively on the theoretical aspects of the sample selection problem but neglect the practical insights that can be obtained from the extensive literature and application of 3D detection models. In this paper, we introduce HeAL (Heuristical-enhanced Active Learning for 3D Object Detection) which integrates those heuristical features together with Localization and Classification to deliver the most contributing samples to the model's training. In contrast to previous works, our approach integrates heuristical features such as object distance and point-quantity to estimate the uncertainty, which enhance the usefulness of selected samples to train detection models. Our quantitative evaluation on KITTI shows that HeAL presents competitive mAP with respect to the State-of-the-Art, and achieves the same mAP as the full-supervised baseline with only 24% of the samples.
Authors:Jinyue Zhang, Xiangrong Zhang, Zhongjian Huang, Tianyang Zhang, Yifei Jiang, Licheng Jiao
Abstract:
Moving object detection (MOD) in remote sensing is significantly challenged by low resolution, extremely small object sizes, and complex noise interference. Current deep learning-based MOD methods rely on probability density estimation, which restricts flexible information interaction between objects and across temporal frames. To flexibly capture high-order inter-object and temporal relationships, we propose a point-based MOD in remote sensing. Inspired by diffusion models, the network optimization is formulated as a progressive denoising process that iteratively recovers moving object centers from sparse noisy points. Specifically, we sample scattered features from the backbone outputs as atomic units for subsequent processing, while global feature embeddings are aggregated to compensate for the limited coverage of sparse point features. By modeling spatial relative positions and semantic affinities, Spatial Relation Aggregation Attention is designed to enable high-order interactions among point-level features for enhanced object representation. To enhance temporal consistency, the Temporal Propagation and Global Fusion module is designed, which leverages an implicit memory reasoning mechanism for robust cross-frame feature integration. To align with the progressive denoising process, we propose a progressive MinK optimal transport assignment strategy that establishes specialized learning objectives at each denoising level. Additionally, we introduce a missing loss function to counteract the clustering tendency of denoised points around salient objects. Experiments on the RsData remote sensing MOD dataset show that our MOD method based on scattered point denoising can more effectively explore potential relationships between sparse moving objects and improve the detection capability and temporal consistency.
Authors:Ruoyu Chen, Hua Zhang, Jingzhi Li, Li Liu, Zhen Huang, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract:
The objective of few-shot object detection (FSOD) is to detect novel objects with few training samples. The core challenge of this task is how to construct a generalized feature space for novel categories with limited data on the basis of the base category space, which could adapt the learned detection model to unknown scenarios. However, limited by insufficient samples for novel categories, two issues still exist: (1) the features of the novel category are easily implicitly represented by the features of the base category, leading to inseparable classifier boundaries, (2) novel categories with fewer data are not enough to fully represent the distribution, where the model fine-tuning is prone to overfitting. To address these issues, we introduce the side information to alleviate the negative influences derived from the feature space and sample viewpoints and formulate a novel generalized feature representation learning method for FSOD. Specifically, we first utilize embedding side information to construct a knowledge matrix to quantify the semantic relationship between the base and novel categories. Then, to strengthen the discrimination between semantically similar categories, we further develop contextual semantic supervised contrastive learning which embeds side information. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting problems caused by sparse samples, a side-information guided region-aware masked module is introduced to augment the diversity of samples, which finds and abandons biased information that discriminates between similar categories via counterfactual explanation, and refines the discriminative representation space further. Extensive experiments using ResNet and ViT backbones on PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, LVIS V1, FSOD-1K, and FSVOD-500 benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving the ability of FSOD in most shots/splits.
Authors:Tohid Kargar Tasooji, Sakineh Khodadadi, Guangjun Liu, Richard Wang
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel methodology for the cooperative control of multiple quadrotors transporting cablesuspended payloads, emphasizing obstacle-aware planning and event-based Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). Our approach integrates trajectory planning with real-time control through a combination of the A* algorithm for global path planning and NMPC for local control, enhancing trajectory adaptability and obstacle avoidance. We propose an advanced event-triggered control system that updates based on events identified through dynamically generated environmental maps. These maps are constructed using a dual-camera setup, which includes multi-camera systems for static obstacle detection and event cameras for high-resolution, low-latency detection of dynamic obstacles. This design is crucial for addressing fast-moving and transient obstacles that conventional cameras may overlook, particularly in environments with rapid motion and variable lighting conditions. When new obstacles are detected, the A* algorithm recalculates waypoints based on the updated map, ensuring safe and efficient navigation. This real-time obstacle detection and map updating integration allows the system to adaptively respond to environmental changes, markedly improving safety and navigation efficiency. The system employs SLAM and object detection techniques utilizing data from multi-cameras, event cameras, and IMUs for accurate localization and comprehensive environmental mapping. The NMPC framework adeptly manages the complex dynamics of multiple quadrotors and suspended payloads, incorporating safety constraints to maintain dynamic feasibility and stability. Extensive simulations validate the proposed approach, demonstrating significant enhancements in energy efficiency, computational resource management, and responsiveness.
Authors:Boyuan Zheng, Shouyi Lu, Renbo Huang, Minqing Huang, Fan Lu, Wei Tian, Guirong Zhuo, Lu Xiong
Abstract:
We introduce R2LDM, an innovative approach for generating dense and accurate 4D radar point clouds, guided by corresponding LiDAR point clouds. Instead of utilizing range images or bird's eye view (BEV) images, we represent both LiDAR and 4D radar point clouds using voxel features, which more effectively capture 3D shape information. Subsequently, we propose the Latent Voxel Diffusion Model (LVDM), which performs the diffusion process in the latent space. Additionally, a novel Latent Point Cloud Reconstruction (LPCR) module is utilized to reconstruct point clouds from high-dimensional latent voxel features. As a result, R2LDM effectively generates LiDAR-like point clouds from paired raw radar data. We evaluate our approach on two different datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves 6- to 10-fold densification of radar point clouds, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in 4D radar point cloud super-resolution. Furthermore, the enhanced radar point clouds generated by our method significantly improve downstream tasks, achieving up to 31.7% improvement in point cloud registration recall rate and 24.9% improvement in object detection accuracy.
Authors:Yang Zhou, Shiyu Zhao, Yuxiao Chen, Zhenting Wang, Can Jin, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Abstract:
Large foundation models trained on large-scale vision-language data can boost Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) via synthetic training data, yet the hand-crafted pipelines often introduce bias and overfit to specific prompts. We sidestep this issue by directly fusing hidden states from Large Language Models (LLMs) into detectors-an avenue surprisingly under-explored. This paper presents a systematic method to enhance visual grounding by utilizing decoder layers of the LLM of an MLLM. We introduce a zero-initialized cross-attention adapter to enable efficient knowledge fusion from LLMs to object detectors, a new approach called LED (LLM Enhanced Open-Vocabulary Object Detection). We find that intermediate LLM layers already encode rich spatial semantics; adapting only the early layers yields most of the gain. With Swin-T as the vision encoder, Qwen2-0.5B + LED lifts GroundingDINO by 3.82 % on OmniLabel at just 8.7 % extra GFLOPs, and a larger vision backbone pushes the improvement to 6.22 %. Extensive ablations on adapter variants, LLM scales and fusion depths further corroborate our design.
Authors:Henry Senior, Luca Rossi, Gregory Slabaugh, Shanxin Yuan
Abstract:
It has been a longstanding goal within image captioning to move beyond a dependence on object detection. We investigate using superpixels coupled with Vision Language Models (VLMs) to bridge the gap between detector-based captioning architectures and those that solely pretrain on large datasets. Our novel superpixel approach ensures that the model receives object-like features whilst the use of VLMs provides our model with open set object understanding. Furthermore, we extend our architecture to make use of multi-resolution inputs, allowing our model to view images in different levels of detail, and use an attention mechanism to determine which parts are most relevant to the caption. We demonstrate our model's performance with multiple VLMs and through a range of ablations detailing the impact of different architectural choices. Our full model achieves a competitive CIDEr score of $136.9$ on the COCO Karpathy split.
Authors:Adrian Chow, Evelien Riddell, Yimu Wang, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D object detection for autonomous driving aims to detect novel objects beyond the predefined training label sets in point cloud scenes. Existing approaches achieve this by connecting traditional 3D object detectors with vision-language models (VLMs) to regress 3D bounding boxes for novel objects and perform open-vocabulary classification through cross-modal alignment between 3D and 2D features. However, achieving robust cross-modal alignment remains a challenge due to semantic inconsistencies when generating corresponding 3D and 2D feature pairs. To overcome this challenge, we present OV-SCAN, an Open-Vocabulary 3D framework that enforces Semantically Consistent Alignment for Novel object discovery. OV-SCAN employs two core strategies: discovering precise 3D annotations and filtering out low-quality or corrupted alignment pairs (arising from 3D annotation, occlusion-induced, or resolution-induced noise). Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OV-SCAN achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Qizhen Lan, Qing Tian
Abstract:
Dense visual prediction tasks, such as detection and segmentation, are crucial for time-critical applications (e.g., autonomous driving and video surveillance). While deep models achieve strong performance, their efficiency remains a challenge. Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective model compression technique, but existing feature-based KD methods rely on static, teacher-driven feature selection, failing to adapt to the student's evolving learning state or leverage dynamic student-teacher interactions. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive student-teacher Cooperative Attention Masking for Knowledge Distillation (ACAM-KD), which introduces two key components: (1) Student-Teacher Cross-Attention Feature Fusion (STCA-FF), which adaptively integrates features from both models for a more interactive distillation process, and (2) Adaptive Spatial-Channel Masking (ASCM), which dynamically generates importance masks to enhance both spatial and channel-wise feature selection. Unlike conventional KD methods, ACAM-KD adapts to the student's evolving needs throughout the entire distillation process. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate its effectiveness. For instance, on COCO2017, ACAM-KD improves object detection performance by up to 1.4 mAP over the state-of-the-art when distilling a ResNet-50 student from a ResNet-101 teacher. For semantic segmentation on Cityscapes, it boosts mIoU by 3.09 over the baseline with DeepLabV3-MobileNetV2 as the student model.
Authors:Jiaming Liu, Linghe Kong, Guihai Chen
Abstract:
Segment anything model (SAM) has shown impressive general-purpose segmentation performance on natural images, but its performance on camouflaged object detection (COD) is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose SAM-COD that performs camouflaged object detection for RGB-D inputs. While keeping the SAM architecture intact, dual stream adapters are expanded on the image encoder to learn potential complementary information from RGB images and depth images, and fine-tune the mask decoder and its depth replica to perform dual-stream mask prediction. In practice, the dual stream adapters are embedded into the attention block of the image encoder in a parallel manner to facilitate the refinement and correction of the two types of image embeddings. To mitigate channel discrepancies arising from dual stream embeddings that do not directly interact with each other, we augment the association of dual stream embeddings using bidirectional knowledge distillation including a model distiller and a modal distiller. In addition, to predict the masks for RGB and depth attention maps, we hybridize the two types of image embeddings which are jointly learned with the prompt embeddings to update the initial prompt, and then feed them into the mask decoders to synchronize the consistency of image embeddings and prompt embeddings. Experimental results on four COD benchmarks show that our SAM-COD achieves excellent detection performance gains over SAM and achieves state-of-the-art results with a given fine-tuning paradigm.
Authors:Masoumeh Zareapoor, Pourya Shamsolmoali, Huiyu Zhou, Yue Lu, Salvador GarcÃa
Abstract:
The Detection Transformer (DETR), by incorporating the Hungarian algorithm, has significantly simplified the matching process in object detection tasks. This algorithm facilitates optimal one-to-one matching of predicted bounding boxes to ground-truth annotations during training. While effective, this strict matching process does not inherently account for the varying densities and distributions of objects, leading to suboptimal correspondences such as failing to handle multiple detections of the same object or missing small objects. To address this, we propose the Regularized Transport Plan (RTP). RTP introduces a flexible matching strategy that captures the cost of aligning predictions with ground truths to find the most accurate correspondences between these sets. By utilizing the differentiable Sinkhorn algorithm, RTP allows for soft, fractional matching rather than strict one-to-one assignments. This approach enhances the model's capability to manage varying object densities and distributions effectively. Our extensive evaluations on the MS-COCO and VOC benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. RTP-DETR, surpassing the performance of the Deform-DETR and the recently introduced DINO-DETR, achieving absolute gains in mAP of +3.8% and +1.7%, respectively.
Authors:Xin Ye, Burhaneddin Yaman, Sheng Cheng, Feng Tao, Abhirup Mallik, Liu Ren
Abstract:
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations play a crucial role in autonomous driving tasks. Despite recent advancements in BEV generation, inherent noise, stemming from sensor limitations and the learning process, remains largely unaddressed, resulting in suboptimal BEV representations that adversely impact the performance of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose BEVDiffuser, a novel diffusion model that effectively denoises BEV feature maps using the ground-truth object layout as guidance. BEVDiffuser can be operated in a plug-and-play manner during training time to enhance existing BEV models without requiring any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate BEVDiffuser's exceptional denoising and generation capabilities, which enable significant enhancement to existing BEV models, as evidenced by notable improvements of 12.3\% in mAP and 10.1\% in NDS achieved for 3D object detection without introducing additional computational complexity. Moreover, substantial improvements in long-tail object detection and under challenging weather and lighting conditions further validate BEVDiffuser's effectiveness in denoising and enhancing BEV representations.
Authors:Noel Ngu, Aditya Taparia, Gerardo I. Simari, Mario Leiva, Jack Corcoran, Ransalu Senanayake, Paulo Shakarian, Nathaniel D. Bastian
Abstract:
Machine learning models assume that training and test samples are drawn from the same distribution. As such, significant differences between training and test distributions often lead to degradations in performance. We introduce Multiple Distribution Shift -- Aerial (MDS-A) -- a collection of inter-related datasets of the same aerial domain that are perturbed in different ways to better characterize the effects of out-of-distribution performance. Specifically, MDS-A is a set of simulated aerial datasets collected under different weather conditions. We include six datasets under different simulated weather conditions along with six baseline object-detection models, as well as several test datasets that are a mix of weather conditions that we show have significant differences from the training data. In this paper, we present characterizations of MDS-A, provide performance results for the baseline machine learning models (on both their specific training datasets and the test data), as well as results of the baselines after employing recent knowledge-engineering error-detection techniques (EDR) thought to improve out-of-distribution performance. The dataset is available at https://lab-v2.github.io/mdsa-dataset-website.
Authors:Qizhen Lan, Qing Tian
Abstract:
Object detection has advanced significantly with Detection Transformers (DETRs). However, these models are computationally demanding, posing challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments (e.g., self-driving cars). Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective compression method widely applied to CNN detectors, but its application to DETR models has been limited. Most KD methods for DETRs fail to distill transformer-specific global context. Also, they blindly believe in the teacher model, which can sometimes be misleading. To bridge the gaps, this paper proposes Consistent Location-and-Context-aware Knowledge Distillation (CLoCKDistill) for DETR detectors, which includes both feature distillation and logit distillation components. For feature distillation, instead of distilling backbone features like existing KD methods, we distill the transformer encoder output (i.e., memory) that contains valuable global context and long-range dependencies. Also, we enrich this memory with object location details during feature distillation so that the student model can prioritize relevant regions while effectively capturing the global context. To facilitate logit distillation, we create target-aware queries based on the ground truth, allowing both the student and teacher decoders to attend to consistent and accurate parts of encoder memory. Experiments on the KITTI and COCO datasets show our CLoCKDistill method's efficacy across various DETRs, e.g., single-scale DAB-DETR, multi-scale deformable DETR, and denoising-based DINO. Our method boosts student detector performance by 2.2% to 6.4%.
Authors:Mia Tang, Yael Vinker, Chuan Yan, Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala
Abstract:
Sketch segmentation involves grouping pixels within a sketch that belong to the same object or instance. It serves as a valuable tool for sketch editing tasks, such as moving, scaling, or removing specific components. While image segmentation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in recent years, sketches present unique challenges for these models due to their sparse nature and wide variation in styles. We introduce InkLayer, a method for instance segmentation of raster scene sketches. Our approach adapts state-of-the-art image segmentation and object detection models to the sketch domain by employing class-agnostic fine-tuning and refining segmentation masks using depth cues. Furthermore, our method organizes sketches into sorted layers, where occluded instances are inpainted, enabling advanced sketch editing applications. As existing datasets in this domain lack variation in sketch styles, we construct a synthetic scene sketch segmentation dataset, InkScenes, featuring sketches with diverse brush strokes and varying levels of detail. We use this dataset to demonstrate the robustness of our approach.
Authors:Peng Jiang, Kasi Viswanath, Akhil Nagariya, George Chustz, Maggie Wigness, Philip Osteen, Timothy Overbye, Christian Ellis, Long Quang, Srikanth Saripalli
Abstract:
The Great Outdoors (GO) dataset is a multi-modal annotated data resource aimed at advancing ground robotics research in unstructured environments. This dataset provides the most comprehensive set of data modalities and annotations compared to existing off-road datasets. In total, the GO dataset includes six unique sensor types with high-quality semantic annotations and GPS traces to support tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and SLAM. The diverse environmental conditions represented in the dataset present significant real-world challenges that provide opportunities to develop more robust solutions to support the continued advancement of field robotics, autonomous exploration, and perception systems in natural environments. The dataset can be downloaded at: https://www.unmannedlab.org/the-great-outdoors-dataset/
Authors:Yongjie Fu, Mehmet K. Turkcan, Mahshid Ghasemi, Zhaobin Mo, Chengbo Zang, Abhishek Adhikari, Zoran Kostic, Gil Zussman, Xuan Di
Abstract:
We present methods and applications for the development of digital twins (DT) for urban traffic management. While the majority of studies on the DT focus on its ``eyes," which is the emerging sensing and perception like object detection and tracking, what really distinguishes the DT from a traditional simulator lies in its ``brain," the prediction and decision making capabilities of extracting patterns and making informed decisions from what has been seen and perceived. In order to add value to urban transportation management, DTs need to be powered by artificial intelligence and complement with low-latency high-bandwidth sensing and networking technologies, in other words, cyberphysical systems (CPS). We will first review the DT pipeline enabled by CPS and propose our DT architecture deployed on a real-world testbed in New York City. This paper can be a pointer to help researchers and practitioners identify challenges and opportunities for the development of DTs; a bridge to initiate conversations across disciplines; and a road map to exploiting potentials of DTs for diverse urban transportation applications.
Authors:Yijie Li, Hewei Wang, Aggelos Katsaggelos
Abstract:
Most of the current salient object detection approaches use deeper networks with large backbones to produce more accurate predictions, which results in a significant increase in computational complexity. A great number of network designs follow the pure UNet and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) architecture which has limited feature extraction and aggregation ability which motivated us to design a lightweight post-decoder refinement module, the crossed post-decoder refinement (CPDR) to enhance the feature representation of a standard FPN or U-Net framework. Specifically, we introduce the Attention Down Sample Fusion (ADF), which employs channel attention mechanisms with attention maps generated by high-level representation to refine the low-level features, and Attention Up Sample Fusion (AUF), leveraging the low-level information to guide the high-level features through spatial attention. Additionally, we proposed the Dual Attention Cross Fusion (DACF) upon ADFs and AUFs, which reduces the number of parameters while maintaining the performance. Experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors:Benjamin Kiefer, Yitong Quan, Andreas Zell
Abstract:
Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and boats are increasingly important in maritime operations, yet their deployment is limited due to costly sensors and complexity. LiDAR, radar, and depth cameras are either costly, yield sparse point clouds or are noisy, and require extensive calibration. Here, we introduce a novel approach for approximate distance estimation in USVs using supervised object detection. We collected a dataset comprising images with manually annotated bounding boxes and corresponding distance measurements. Leveraging this data, we propose a specialized branch of an object detection model, not only to detect objects but also to predict their distances from the USV. This method offers a cost-efficient and intuitive alternative to conventional distance measurement techniques, aligning more closely with human estimation capabilities. We demonstrate its application in a marine assistance system that alerts operators to nearby objects such as boats, buoys, or other waterborne hazards.
Authors:Aneesha Guna, Parth Ganeriwala, Siddhartha Bhattacharyya
Abstract:
With the advancement of deep learning methods it is imperative that autonomous systems will increasingly become intelligent with the inclusion of advanced machine learning algorithms to execute a variety of autonomous operations. One such task involves the design and evaluation for a subsystem of the perception system for object detection and tracking. The challenge in the creation of software to solve the task is in discovering the need for a dataset, annotation of the dataset, selection of features, integration and refinement of existing algorithms, while evaluating performance metrics through training and testing. This research effort focuses on the development of a machine learning pipeline emphasizing the inclusion of assurance methods with increasing automation. In the process, a new dataset was created by collecting videos of moving object such as Roomba vacuum cleaner, emulating search and rescue (SAR) for indoor environment. Individual frames were extracted from the videos and labeled using a combination of manual and automated techniques. This annotated dataset was refined for accuracy by initially training it on YOLOv4. After the refinement of the dataset it was trained on a second YOLOv4 and a Mask R-CNN model, which is deployed on a Parrot Mambo drone to perform real-time object detection and tracking. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the models in accurately detecting and tracking the Roomba across multiple trials, achieving an average loss of 0.1942 and 96% accuracy.
Authors:Vladislav Li, Ilias Siniosoglou, Thomai Karamitsou, Anastasios Lytos, Ioannis D. Moscholios, Sotirios K. Goudos, Jyoti S. Banerjee, Panagiotis Sarigiannidi, Vasileios Argyriou
Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) use natural images and videos as input to understand the real world by overlaying and inferring digital elements, facilitating proactive detection in an effort to assure safety. A crucial aspect of this process is real-time, accurate object recognition through automatic scene analysis. While traditional methods primarily concentrate on 2D object detection, exploring 3D object detection, which involves projecting 3D bounding boxes into the three-dimensional environment, holds significance and can be notably enhanced using the AR ecosystem. This study examines an AI model's ability to deduce 3D bounding boxes in the context of real-time scene analysis while producing and evaluating the model's performance and processing time, in the virtual domain, which is then applied to AVs. This work also employs a synthetic dataset that includes artificially generated images mimicking various environmental, lighting, and spatiotemporal states. This evaluation is oriented in handling images featuring objects in diverse weather conditions, captured with varying camera settings. These variations pose more challenging detection and recognition scenarios, which the outcomes of this work can help achieve competitive results under most of the tested conditions.
Authors:Jicheng Yuan, Anh Le-Tuan, Ali Ganbarov, Manfred Hauswirth, Danh Le-Phuoc
Abstract:
Recently, deep learning has experienced rapid expansion, contributing significantly to the progress of supervised learning methodologies. However, acquiring labeled data in real-world settings can be costly, labor-intensive, and sometimes scarce. This challenge inhibits the extensive use of neural networks for practical tasks due to the impractical nature of labeling vast datasets for every individual application. To tackle this, semi-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising solution by using both labeled and unlabeled data to train object detectors, potentially enhancing detection efficacy and reducing annotation costs. Nevertheless, SSL faces several challenges, including pseudo-target inconsistencies, disharmony between classification and regression tasks, and efficient use of abundant unlabeled data, especially on edge devices, such as roadside cameras. Thus, we developed a teacher-student-based SSL framework, Co-Learning, which employs mutual learning and annotation-alignment strategies to adeptly navigate these complexities and achieves comparable performance as fully-supervised solutions using 10\% labeled data.
Authors:Chengjie Huang, Vahdat Abdelzad, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
Abstract:
Input aggregation is a simple technique used by state-of-the-art LiDAR 3D object detectors to improve detection. However, increasing aggregation is known to have diminishing returns and even performance degradation, due to objects responding differently to the number of aggregated frames. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient adaptive method, which we call Variable Aggregation Detection (VADet). Instead of aggregating the entire scene using a fixed number of frames, VADet performs aggregation per object, with the number of frames determined by an object's observed properties, such as speed and point density. VADet thus reduces the inherent trade-offs of fixed aggregation and is not architecture specific. To demonstrate its benefits, we apply VADet to three popular single-stage detectors and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo dataset.
Authors:Ali K. AlShami, Terrance Boult, Jugal Kalita
Abstract:
Tracking the trajectory of tennis players can help camera operators in production. Predicting future movement enables cameras to automatically track and predict a player's future trajectory without human intervention. Predicting future human movement in the context of complex physical tasks is also intellectually satisfying. Swift advancements in sports analytics and the wide availability of videos for tennis have inspired us to propose a novel method called Pose2Trajectory, which predicts a tennis player's future trajectory as a sequence derived from their body joints' data and ball position. Demonstrating impressive accuracy, our approach capitalizes on body joint information to provide a comprehensive understanding of the human body's geometry and motion, thereby enhancing the prediction of the player's trajectory. We use encoder-decoder Transformer architecture trained on the joints and trajectory information of the players with ball positions. The predicted sequence can provide information to help close-up cameras to keep tracking the tennis player, following centroid coordinates. We generate a high-quality dataset from multiple videos to assist tennis player movement prediction using object detection and human pose estimation methods. It contains bounding boxes and joint information for tennis players and ball positions in singles tennis games. Our method shows promising results in predicting the tennis player's movement trajectory with different sequence prediction lengths using the joints and trajectory information with the ball position.
Authors:Mehdi Sefidgar Dilmaghani, Waseem Shariff, Cian Ryan, Joseph Lemley, Peter Corcoran
Abstract:
This paper presents an autonomous method to address challenges arising from severe lighting conditions in machine vision applications that use event cameras. To manage these conditions, the research explores the built in potential of these cameras to adjust pixel functionality, named bias settings. As cars are driven at various times and locations, shifts in lighting conditions are unavoidable. Consequently, this paper utilizes the neuromorphic YOLO-based face tracking module of a driver monitoring system as the event-based application to study. The proposed method uses numerical metrics to continuously monitor the performance of the event-based application in real-time. When the application malfunctions, the system detects this through a drop in the metrics and automatically adjusts the event cameras bias values. The Nelder-Mead simplex algorithm is employed to optimize this adjustment, with finetuning continuing until performance returns to a satisfactory level. The advantage of bias optimization lies in its ability to handle conditions such as flickering or darkness without requiring additional hardware or software. To demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed system, it was tested under conditions where detecting human faces with default bias values was impossible. These severe conditions were simulated using dim ambient light and various flickering frequencies. Following the automatic and dynamic process of bias modification, the metrics for face detection significantly improved under all conditions. Autobiasing resulted in an increase in the YOLO confidence indicators by more than 33 percent for object detection and 37 percent for face detection highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Nikita Durasov, Rafid Mahmood, Jiwoong Choi, Marc T. Law, James Lucas, Pascal Fua, Jose M. Alvarez
Abstract:
3D object detection is an essential task for computer vision applications in autonomous vehicles and robotics. However, models often struggle to quantify detection reliability, leading to poor performance on unfamiliar scenes. We introduce a framework for quantifying uncertainty in 3D object detection by leveraging an evidential learning loss on Bird's Eye View representations in the 3D detector. These uncertainty estimates require minimal computational overhead and are generalizable across different architectures. We demonstrate both the efficacy and importance of these uncertainty estimates on identifying out-of-distribution scenes, poorly localized objects, and missing (false negative) detections; our framework consistently improves over baselines by 10-20% on average. Finally, we integrate this suite of tasks into a system where a 3D object detector auto-labels driving scenes and our uncertainty estimates verify label correctness before the labels are used to train a second model. Here, our uncertainty-driven verification results in a 1% improvement in mAP and a 1-2% improvement in NDS.
Authors:Ritvik Singh, Jingzhou Liu, Karl Van Wyk, Yu-Wei Chao, Jean-Francois Lafleche, Florian Shkurti, Nathan Ratliff, Ankur Handa
Abstract:
Vision-based object detectors are a crucial basis for robotics applications as they provide valuable information about object localisation in the environment. These need to ensure high reliability in different lighting conditions, occlusions, and visual artifacts, all while running in real-time. Collecting and annotating real-world data for these networks is prohibitively time consuming and costly, especially for custom assets, such as industrial objects, making it untenable for generalization to in-the-wild scenarios. To this end, we present Synthetica, a method for large-scale synthetic data generation for training robust state estimators. This paper focuses on the task of object detection, an important problem which can serve as the front-end for most state estimation problems, such as pose estimation. Leveraging data from a photorealistic ray-tracing renderer, we scale up data generation, generating 2.7 million images, to train highly accurate real-time detection transformers. We present a collection of rendering randomization and training-time data augmentation techniques conducive to robust sim-to-real performance for vision tasks. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the task of object detection while having detectors that run at 50-100Hz which is 9 times faster than the prior SOTA. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our training methodology for robotics applications by showcasing a pipeline for use in the real world with custom objects for which there do not exist prior datasets. Our work highlights the importance of scaling synthetic data generation for robust sim-to-real transfer while achieving the fastest real-time inference speeds. Videos and supplementary information can be found at this URL: https://sites.google.com/view/synthetica-vision.
Authors:Manjunath D, Prajwal Gurunath, Sumanth Udupa, Aditya Gandhamal, Shrikar Madhu, Aniruddh Sikdar, Suresh Sundaram
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown exceptional performance when trained on well-illuminated images captured by Electro-Optical (EO) cameras, which provide rich texture details. However, in critical applications like aerial perception, it is essential for DNNs to maintain consistent reliability across all conditions, including low-light scenarios where EO cameras often struggle to capture sufficient detail. Additionally, UAV-based aerial object detection faces significant challenges due to scale variability from varying altitudes and slant angles, adding another layer of complexity. Existing methods typically address only illumination changes or style variations as domain shifts, but in aerial perception, correlation shifts also impact DNN performance. In this paper, we introduce the IndraEye dataset, a multi-sensor (EO-IR) dataset designed for various tasks. It includes 5,612 images with 145,666 instances, encompassing multiple viewing angles, altitudes, seven backgrounds, and different times of the day across the Indian subcontinent. The dataset opens up several research opportunities, such as multimodal learning, domain adaptation for object detection and segmentation, and exploration of sensor-specific strengths and weaknesses. IndraEye aims to advance the field by supporting the development of more robust and accurate aerial perception systems, particularly in challenging conditions. IndraEye dataset is benchmarked with object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Dataset and source codes are available at https://bit.ly/indraeye.
Authors:Aayush Agrawal, Aniruddh Sikdar, Rajini Makam, Suresh Sundaram, Suresh Kumar Besai, Mahesh Gopi
Abstract:
Underwater mine detection with deep learning suffers from limitations due to the scarcity of real-world data.
This scarcity leads to overfitting, where models perform well on training data but poorly on unseen data. This paper proposes a Syn2Real (Synthetic to Real) domain generalization approach using diffusion models to address this challenge. We demonstrate that synthetic data generated with noise by DDPM and DDIM models, even if not perfectly realistic, can effectively augment real-world samples for training. The residual noise in the final sampled images improves the model's ability to generalize to real-world data with inherent noise and high variation. The baseline Mask-RCNN model when trained on a combination of synthetic and original training datasets, exhibited approximately a 60% increase in Average Precision (AP) compared to being trained solely on the original training data. This significant improvement highlights the potential of Syn2Real domain generalization for underwater mine detection tasks.
Authors:Niloufar Mehrabi, Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni, Jenna Hofseth, Abolfazl Razi, Long Cheng, Manveen Kaur, James Martin, Rahul Amin
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play an increasingly critical role in Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions such as border patrolling and criminal detection, thanks to their ability to access remote areas and transmit real-time imagery to processing servers. However, UAVs are highly constrained by payload size, power limits, and communication bandwidth, necessitating the development of highly selective and efficient data transmission strategies. This has driven the development of various compression and optimal transmission technologies for UAVs. Nevertheless, most methods strive to preserve maximal information in transferred video frames, missing the fact that only certain parts of images/video frames might offer meaningful contributions to the ultimate mission objectives in the ISR scenarios involving moving object detection and tracking (OD/OT). This paper adopts a different perspective, and offers an alternative AI-driven scheduling policy that prioritizes selecting regions of the image that significantly contributes to the mission objective. The key idea is tiling the image into small patches and developing a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that assigns higher transmission probabilities to patches that present higher overlaps with the detected object of interest, while penalizing sharp transitions over consecutive frames to promote smooth scheduling shifts. Although we used Yolov-8 object detection and UDP transmission protocols as a benchmark testing scenario the idea is general and applicable to different transmission protocols and OD/OT methods. To further boost the system's performance and avoid OD errors for cluttered image patches, we integrate it with interframe interpolations.
Authors:Zekun Qian, Ruize Han, Junhui Hou, Linqi Song, Wei Feng
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary multi-object tracking (OVMOT) represents a critical new challenge involving the detection and tracking of diverse object categories in videos, encompassing both seen categories (base classes) and unseen categories (novel classes). This issue amalgamates the complexities of open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) and multi-object tracking (MOT). Existing approaches to OVMOT often merge OVD and MOT methodologies as separate modules, predominantly focusing on the problem through an image-centric lens. In this paper, we propose VOVTrack, a novel method that integrates object states relevant to MOT and video-centric training to address this challenge from a video object tracking standpoint. First, we consider the tracking-related state of the objects during tracking and propose a new prompt-guided attention mechanism for more accurate localization and classification (detection) of the time-varying objects. Subsequently, we leverage raw video data without annotations for training by formulating a self-supervised object similarity learning technique to facilitate temporal object association (tracking). Experimental results underscore that VOVTrack outperforms existing methods, establishing itself as a state-of-the-art solution for open-vocabulary tracking task.
Authors:Stefan Stefanache, LluÃs Pastor Pérez, Julen Costa Watanabe, Ernesto Sanchez Tejedor, Thomas Hofmann, Enis Simsar
Abstract:
Evaluating diffusion-based image-editing models is a crucial task in the field of Generative AI. Specifically, it is imperative to assess their capacity to execute diverse editing tasks while preserving the image content and realism. While recent developments in generative models have opened up previously unheard-of possibilities for image editing, conducting a thorough evaluation of these models remains a challenging and open task. The absence of a standardized evaluation benchmark, primarily due to the inherent need for a post-edit reference image for evaluation, further complicates this issue. Currently, evaluations often rely on established models such as CLIP or require human intervention for a comprehensive understanding of the performance of these image editing models. Our benchmark, PixLens, provides a comprehensive evaluation of both edit quality and latent representation disentanglement, contributing to the advancement and refinement of existing methodologies in the field.
Authors:King-Siong Si, Lu Sun, Weizhan Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Jiahao Wang, Jiang Liu, Hao Sun
Abstract:
Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an indispensable post-processing step in object detection. With the continuous optimization of network models, NMS has become the ``last mile'' to enhance the efficiency of object detection. This paper systematically analyzes NMS from a graph theory perspective for the first time, revealing its intrinsic structure. Consequently, we propose two optimization methods, namely QSI-NMS and BOE-NMS. The former is a fast recursive divide-and-conquer algorithm with negligible mAP loss, and its extended version (eQSI-NMS) achieves optimal complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. The latter, concentrating on the locality of NMS, achieves an optimization at a constant level without an mAP loss penalty. Moreover, to facilitate rapid evaluation of NMS methods for researchers, we introduce NMS-Bench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively assess various NMS methods. Taking the YOLOv8-N model on MS COCO 2017 as the benchmark setup, our method QSI-NMS provides $6.2\times$ speed of original NMS on the benchmark, with a $0.1\%$ decrease in mAP. The optimal eQSI-NMS, with only a $0.3\%$ mAP decrease, achieves $10.7\times$ speed. Meanwhile, BOE-NMS exhibits $5.1\times$ speed with no compromise in mAP.
Authors:Ce Zhou, Qiben Yan, Sijia Liu
Abstract:
Object detection is a crucial task in autonomous driving. While existing research has proposed various attacks on object detection, such as those using adversarial patches or stickers, the exploration of projection attacks on 3D surfaces remains largely unexplored. Compared to adversarial patches or stickers, which have fixed adversarial patterns, projection attacks allow for transient modifications to these patterns, enabling a more flexible attack. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial 3D projection attack specifically targeting object detection in autonomous driving scenarios. We frame the attack formulation as an optimization problem, utilizing a combination of color mapping and geometric transformation models. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack in deceiving YOLOv3 and Mask R-CNN in physical settings. Evaluations conducted in an indoor environment show an attack success rate of up to 100% under low ambient light conditions, highlighting the potential damage of our attack in real-world driving scenarios.
Authors:Yifan Xu, Ziming Luo, Qianwei Wang, Vineet Kamat, Carol Menassa
Abstract:
Current open-vocabulary scene graph generation algorithms highly rely on both 3D scene point cloud data and posed RGB-D images and thus have limited applications in scenarios where RGB-D images or camera poses are not readily available. To solve this problem, we propose Point2Graph, a novel end-to-end point cloud-based 3D open-vocabulary scene graph generation framework in which the requirement of posed RGB-D image series is eliminated. This hierarchical framework contains room and object detection/segmentation and open-vocabulary classification. For the room layer, we leverage the advantage of merging the geometry-based border detection algorithm with the learning-based region detection to segment rooms and create a "Snap-Lookup" framework for open-vocabulary room classification. In addition, we create an end-to-end pipeline for the object layer to detect and classify 3D objects based solely on 3D point cloud data. Our evaluation results show that our framework can outperform the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-vocabulary object and room segmentation and classification algorithm on widely used real-scene datasets.
Authors:Sourav Sanyal, Kaushik Roy
Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving field of vision-language navigation (VLN), ensuring safety for physical agents remains an open challenge. For a human-in-the-loop language-operated drone to navigate safely, it must understand natural language commands, perceive the environment, and simultaneously avoid hazards in real time. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are formal methods that enforce safe operating conditions. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an optimization framework that plans a sequence of future actions over a prediction horizon, ensuring smooth trajectory tracking while obeying constraints. In this work, we consider a VLN-operated drone platform and enhance its safety by formulating a novel scene-aware CBF that leverages ego-centric observations from a camera which has both Red-Green-Blue as well as Depth (RGB-D) channels. A CBF-less baseline system uses a Vision-Language Encoder with cross-modal attention to convert commands into an ordered sequence of landmarks. An object detection model identifies and verifies these landmarks in the captured images to generate a planned path. To further enhance safety, an Adaptive Safety Margin Algorithm (ASMA) is proposed. ASMA tracks moving objects and performs scene-aware CBF evaluation on-the-fly, which serves as an additional constraint within the MPC framework. By continuously identifying potentially risky observations, the system performs prediction in real time about unsafe conditions and proactively adjusts its control actions to maintain safe navigation throughout the trajectory. Deployed on a Parrot Bebop2 quadrotor in the Gazebo environment using the Robot Operating System (ROS), ASMA achieves 64%-67% increase in success rates with only a slight increase (1.4%-5.8%) in trajectory lengths compared to the baseline CBF-less VLN.
Authors:Ryan Wen Liu, Yuxu Lu, Yuan Gao, Yu Guo, Wenqi Ren, Fenghua Zhu, Fei-Yue Wang
Abstract:
The visible-light camera, which is capable of environment perception and navigation assistance, has emerged as an essential imaging sensor for marine surface vessels in intelligent waterborne transportation systems (IWTS). However, the visual imaging quality inevitably suffers from several kinds of degradations (e.g., limited visibility, low contrast, color distortion, etc.) under complex weather conditions (e.g., haze, rain, and low-lightness). The degraded visual information will accordingly result in inaccurate environment perception and delayed operations for navigational risk. To promote the navigational safety of vessels, many computational methods have been presented to perform visual quality enhancement under poor weather conditions. However, most of these methods are essentially specific-purpose implementation strategies, only available for one specific weather type. To overcome this limitation, we propose to develop a general-purpose multi-scene visibility enhancement method, i.e., edge reparameterization- and attention-guided neural network (ERANet), to adaptively restore the degraded images captured under different weather conditions. In particular, our ERANet simultaneously exploits the channel attention, spatial attention, and reparameterization technology to enhance the visual quality while maintaining low computational cost. Extensive experiments conducted on standard and IWTS-related datasets have demonstrated that our ERANet could outperform several representative visibility enhancement methods in terms of both imaging quality and computational efficiency. The superior performance of IWTS-related object detection and scene segmentation could also be steadily obtained after ERANet-based visibility enhancement under complex weather conditions.
Authors:Zhaoxuan Wang, Xu Han, Hongxin Liu, Xianzhi Li
Abstract:
The rotation robustness property has drawn much attention to point cloud analysis, whereas it still poses a critical challenge in 3D object detection. When subjected to arbitrary rotation, most existing detectors fail to produce expected outputs due to the poor rotation robustness. In this paper, we present RIDE, a pioneering exploration of Rotation-Invariance for the 3D LiDAR-point-based object DEtector, with the key idea of designing rotation-invariant features from LiDAR scenes and then effectively incorporating them into existing 3D detectors. Specifically, we design a bi-feature extractor that extracts (i) object-aware features though sensitive to rotation but preserve geometry well, and (ii) rotation-invariant features, which lose geometric information to a certain extent but are robust to rotation. These two kinds of features complement each other to decode 3D proposals that are robust to arbitrary rotations. Particularly, our RIDE is compatible and easy to plug into the existing one-stage and two-stage 3D detectors, and boosts both detection performance and rotation robustness. Extensive experiments on the standard benchmarks showcase that the mean average precision (mAP) and rotation robustness can be significantly boosted by integrating with our RIDE, with +5.6% mAP and 53% rotation robustness improvement on KITTI, +5.1% and 28% improvement correspondingly on nuScenes. The code will be available soon.
Authors:Bao Gia Doan, Dang Quang Nguyen, Callum Lindquist, Paul Montague, Tamas Abraham, Olivier De Vel, Seyit Camtepe, Salil S. Kanhere, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Damith C. Ranasinghe
Abstract:
Object detectors are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. In contrast to classifiers, detectors possess unique characteristics, architecturally and in task execution; often operating in challenging conditions, for instance, detecting traffic signs in autonomous cars. But, our knowledge dominates attacks against classifiers and tests in the "digital domain".
To address this critical gap, we conducted an extensive empirical study targeting multiple detector architectures and two challenging detection tasks in real-world settings: traffic signs and vehicles. Using the diverse, methodically collected videos captured from driving cars and flying drones, incorporating physical object trigger deployments in authentic scenes, we investigated the viability of physical object-triggered backdoor attacks in application settings.
Our findings revealed 8 key insights. Importantly, the prevalent "digital" data poisoning method for injecting backdoors into models does not lead to effective attacks against detectors in the real world, although proven effective in classification tasks. We construct a new, cost-efficient attack method, dubbed MORPHING, incorporating the unique nature of detection tasks; ours is remarkably successful in injecting physical object-triggered backdoors, even capable of poisoning triggers with clean label annotations or invisible triggers without diminishing the success of physical object triggered backdoors. We discovered that the defenses curated are ill-equipped to safeguard detectors against such attacks. To underscore the severity of the threat and foster further research, we, for the first time, release an extensive video test set of real-world backdoor attacks. Our study not only establishes the credibility and seriousness of this threat but also serves as a clarion call to the research community to advance backdoor defenses in the context of object detection.
Authors:Johannes Meier, Luca Scalerandi, Oussema Dhaouadi, Jacques Kaiser, Nikita Araslanov, Daniel Cremers
Abstract:
Existing techniques for monocular 3D detection have a serious restriction. They tend to perform well only on a limited set of benchmarks, faring well either on ego-centric car views or on traffic camera views, but rarely on both. To encourage progress, this work advocates for an extended evaluation of 3D detection frameworks across different camera perspectives. We make two key contributions. First, we introduce the CARLA Drone dataset, CDrone. Simulating drone views, it substantially expands the diversity of camera perspectives in existing benchmarks. Despite its synthetic nature, CDrone represents a real-world challenge. To show this, we confirm that previous techniques struggle to perform well both on CDrone and a real-world 3D drone dataset. Second, we develop an effective data augmentation pipeline called GroundMix. Its distinguishing element is the use of the ground for creating 3D-consistent augmentation of a training image. GroundMix significantly boosts the detection accuracy of a lightweight one-stage detector. In our expanded evaluation, we achieve the average precision on par with or substantially higher than the previous state of the art across all tested datasets.
Authors:Qi Song, Qingyong Hu, Chi Zhang, Yongquan Chen, Rui Huang
Abstract:
3D perception tasks, such as 3D object detection and Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) segmentation using multi-camera images, have drawn significant attention recently. Despite the fact that accurately estimating both semantic and 3D scene layouts are crucial for this task, existing techniques often neglect the synergistic effects of semantic and depth cues, leading to the occurrence of classification and position estimation errors. Additionally, the input-independent nature of initial queries also limits the learning capacity of Transformer-based models. To tackle these challenges, we propose an input-aware Transformer framework that leverages Semantics and Depth as priors (named SDTR). Our approach involves the use of an S-D Encoder that explicitly models semantic and depth priors, thereby disentangling the learning process of object categorization and position estimation. Moreover, we introduce a Prior-guided Query Builder that incorporates the semantic prior into the initial queries of the Transformer, resulting in more effective input-aware queries. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Lyft benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in both 3D object detection and BEV segmentation tasks.
Authors:Brendan Reidy, Sepehr Tabrizchi, Mohamadreza Mohammadi, Shaahin Angizi, Arman Roohi, Ramtin Zand
Abstract:
With the rise of tiny IoT devices powered by machine learning (ML), many researchers have directed their focus toward compressing models to fit on tiny edge devices. Recent works have achieved remarkable success in compressing ML models for object detection and image classification on microcontrollers with small memory, e.g., 512kB SRAM. However, there remain many challenges prohibiting the deployment of ML systems that require high-resolution images. Due to fundamental limits in memory capacity for tiny IoT devices, it may be physically impossible to store large images without external hardware. To this end, we propose a high-resolution image scaling system for edge ML, called HiRISE, which is equipped with selective region-of-interest (ROI) capability leveraging analog in-sensor image scaling. Our methodology not only significantly reduces the peak memory requirements, but also achieves up to 17.7x reduction in data transfer and energy consumption.
Authors:Prahlad Anand, Qiranul Saadiyean, Aniruddh Sikdar, Nalini N, Suresh Sundaram
Abstract:
This study aims to learn a translation from visible to infrared imagery, bridging the domain gap between the two modalities so as to improve accuracy on downstream tasks including object detection. Previous approaches attempt to perform bi-domain feature fusion through iterative optimization or end-to-end deep convolutional networks. However, we pose the problem as similar to that of image translation, adopting a two-stage training strategy with a Generative Adversarial Network and an object detection model. The translation model learns a conversion that preserves the structural detail of visible images while preserving the texture and other characteristics of infrared images. Images so generated are used to train standard object detection frameworks including Yolov5, Mask and Faster RCNN. We also investigate the usefulness of integrating a super-resolution step into our pipeline to further improve model accuracy, and achieve an improvement of as high as 5.3% mAP.
Authors:Pascal Spiegler, Amirhossein Rasoulian, Yiming Xiao
Abstract:
Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is a life-threatening condition that requires rapid and accurate diagnosis to improve treatment outcomes and patient survival rates. Recent advancements in supervised deep learning have greatly improved the analysis of medical images, but often rely on extensive datasets with high-quality annotations, which are costly, time-consuming, and require medical expertise to prepare. To mitigate the need for large amounts of expert-prepared segmentation data, we have developed a novel weakly supervised ICH segmentation method that utilizes the YOLO object detection model and an uncertainty-rectified Segment Anything Model (SAM). In addition, we have proposed a novel point prompt generator for this model to further improve segmentation results with YOLO-predicted bounding box prompts. Our approach achieved a high accuracy of 0.933 and an AUC of 0.796 in ICH detection, along with a mean Dice score of 0.629 for ICH segmentation, outperforming existing weakly supervised and popular supervised (UNet and Swin-UNETR) approaches. Overall, the proposed method provides a robust and accurate alternative to the more commonly used supervised techniques for ICH quantification without requiring refined segmentation ground truths during model training.
Authors:Shijie Wang, Dahun Kim, Ali Taalimi, Chen Sun, Weicheng Kuo
Abstract:
Visual grounding tasks aim to localize image regions based on natural language references. In this work, we explore whether generative VLMs predominantly trained on image-text data could be leveraged to scale up the text annotation of visual grounding data. We find that grounding knowledge already exists in generative VLM and can be elicited by proper prompting. We thus prompt a VLM to generate object-level descriptions by feeding it object regions from existing object detection datasets. We further propose attribute modeling to explicitly capture the important object attributes, and spatial relation modeling to capture inter-object relationship, both of which are common linguistic pattern in referring expression. Our constructed dataset (500K images, 1M objects, 16M referring expressions) is one of the largest grounding datasets to date, and the first grounding dataset with purely model-generated queries and human-annotated objects. To verify the quality of this data, we conduct zero-shot transfer experiments to the popular RefCOCO benchmarks for both referring expression comprehension (REC) and segmentation (RES) tasks. On both tasks, our model significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches without using human annotated visual grounding data. Our results demonstrate the promise of generative VLM to scale up visual grounding in the real world. Code and models will be released.
Authors:Jin Zhang, Ruiheng Zhang, Yanjiao Shi, Zhe Cao, Nian Liu, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Abstract:
Existing Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) methods rely heavily on large-scale pixel-annotated training sets, which are both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Although weakly supervised methods offer higher annotation efficiency, their performance is far behind due to the unclear visual demarcations between foreground and background in camouflaged images. In this paper, we explore the potential of using boxes as prompts in camouflaged scenes and introduce the first weakly semi-supervised COD method, aiming for budget-efficient and high-precision camouflaged object segmentation with an extremely limited number of fully labeled images. Critically, learning from such limited set inevitably generates pseudo labels with serious noisy pixels. To address this, we propose a noise correction loss that facilitates the model's learning of correct pixels in the early learning stage, and corrects the error risk gradients dominated by noisy pixels in the memorization stage, ultimately achieving accurate segmentation of camouflaged objects from noisy labels. When using only 20% of fully labeled data, our method shows superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Rohit Gupta, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan, Ashish Tawari, Son Tran, Mubarak Shah, Benjamin Yao, Trishul Chilimbi
Abstract:
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled significant progress in open vocabulary computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and image segmentation. Some recent works have focused on extending VLMs to open vocabulary single label action classification in videos. However, previous methods fall short in holistic video understanding which requires the ability to simultaneously recognize multiple actions and entities e.g., objects in the video in an open vocabulary setting. We formulate this problem as open vocabulary multilabel video classification and propose a method to adapt a pre-trained VLM such as CLIP to solve this task. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to provide semantic guidance to the VLM about class labels to improve its open vocabulary performance with two key contributions. First, we propose an end-to-end trainable architecture that learns to prompt an LLM to generate soft attributes for the CLIP text-encoder to enable it to recognize novel classes. Second, we integrate a temporal modeling module into CLIP's vision encoder to effectively model the spatio-temporal dynamics of video concepts as well as propose a novel regularized finetuning technique to ensure strong open vocabulary classification performance in the video domain. Our extensive experimentation showcases the efficacy of our approach on multiple benchmark datasets.
Authors:Jörg Gamerdinger, Sven Teufel, Stephan Amann, Georg Volk, Oliver Bringmann
Abstract:
Comprehensive perception of the vehicle's environment and correct interpretation of the environment are crucial for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. The perception of surrounding objects is the main component for further tasks such as trajectory planning. However, safe trajectory planning requires not only object detection, but also the detection of drivable areas and lane corridors. While first approaches consider an advanced safety evaluation of object detection, the evaluation of lane detection still lacks sufficient safety metrics. Similar to the safety metrics for object detection, additional factors such as the semantics of the scene with road type and road width, the detection range as well as the potential causes of missing detections, incorporated by vehicle speed, should be considered for the evaluation of lane detection. Therefore, we propose the Lane Safety Metric (LSM), which takes these factors into account and allows to evaluate the safety of lane detection systems by determining an easily interpretable safety score. We evaluate our offline safety metric on various virtual scenarios using different lane detection approaches and compare it with state-of-the-art performance metrics.
Authors:El Hassane Ettifouri, Jessica López Espejel, Laura Minkova, Tassnim Dardouri, Walid Dahhane
Abstract:
Most visual grounding solutions primarily focus on realistic images. However, applications involving synthetic images, such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), remain limited. This restricts the development of autonomous computer vision-powered artificial intelligence (AI) agents for automatic application interaction. Enabling AI to effectively understand and interact with GUIs is crucial to advancing automation in software testing, accessibility, and human-computer interaction. In this work, we explore Instruction Visual Grounding (IVG), a multi-modal approach to object identification within a GUI. More precisely, given a natural language instruction and a GUI screen, IVG locates the coordinates of the element on the screen where the instruction should be executed. We propose two main methods: (1) IVGocr, which combines a Large Language Model (LLM), an object detection model, and an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module; and (2) IVGdirect, which uses a multimodal architecture for end-to-end grounding. For each method, we introduce a dedicated dataset. In addition, we propose the Central Point Validation (CPV) metric, a relaxed variant of the classical Central Proximity Score (CPS) metric. Our final test dataset is publicly released to support future research.
Authors:Amogh Joshi, Sourav Sanyal, Kaushik Roy
Abstract:
In autonomous aerial navigation, real-time and energy-efficient obstacle avoidance remains a significant challenge, especially in dynamic and complex indoor environments. This work presents a novel integration of neuromorphic event cameras with physics-driven planning algorithms implemented on a Parrot Bebop2 quadrotor. Neuromorphic event cameras, characterized by their high dynamic range and low latency, offer significant advantages over traditional frame-based systems, particularly in poor lighting conditions or during high-speed maneuvers. We use a DVS camera with a shallow Spiking Neural Network (SNN) for event-based object detection of a moving ring in real-time in an indoor lab. Further, we enhance drone control with physics-guided empirical knowledge inside a neural network training mechanism, to predict energy-efficient flight paths to fly through the moving ring. This integration results in a real-time, low-latency navigation system capable of dynamically responding to environmental changes while minimizing energy consumption. We detail our hardware setup, control loop, and modifications necessary for real-world applications, including the challenges of sensor integration without burdening the flight capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving robust, collision-free, and energy-efficient flight paths, showcasing the potential of neuromorphic vision and physics-driven planning in enhancing autonomous navigation systems.
Authors:Zhuolin He, Xinrun Li, Heng Gao, Jiachen Tang, Shoumeng Qiu, Wenfu Wang, Lvjian Lu, Xuchong Qiu, Xiangyang Xue, Jian Pu
Abstract:
Traditional camera 3D object detectors are typically trained to recognize a predefined set of known object classes. In real-world scenarios, these detectors may encounter unknown objects outside the training categories and fail to identify them correctly. To address this gap, we present OS-Det3D (Open-set Camera 3D Object Detection), a two-stage training framework enhancing the ability of camera 3D detectors to identify both known and unknown objects. The framework involves our proposed 3D Object Discovery Network (ODN3D), which is specifically trained using geometric cues such as the location and scale of 3D boxes to discover general 3D objects. ODN3D is trained in a class-agnostic manner, and the provided 3D object region proposals inherently come with data noise. To boost accuracy in identifying unknown objects, we introduce a Joint Objectness Selection (JOS) module. JOS selects the pseudo ground truth for unknown objects from the 3D object region proposals of ODN3D by combining the ODN3D objectness and camera feature attention objectness. Experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in enabling camera 3D detectors to successfully identify unknown objects while also improving their performance on known objects.
Authors:Shuyang Lin, Tong Jia, Hao Wang, Bowen Ma, Mingyuan Li, Dongyue Chen
Abstract:
X-ray prohibited item detection is an essential component of security check and categories of prohibited item are continuously increasing in accordance with the latest laws. Previous works all focus on close-set scenarios, which can only recognize known categories used for training and often require time-consuming as well as labor-intensive annotations when learning novel categories, resulting in limited real-world applications. Although the success of vision-language models (e.g. CLIP) provides a new perspectives for open-set X-ray prohibited item detection, directly applying CLIP to X-ray domain leads to a sharp performance drop due to domain shift between X-ray data and general data used for pre-training CLIP. To address aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we introduce distillation-based open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) task into X-ray security inspection domain by extending CLIP to learn visual representations in our specific X-ray domain, aiming to detect novel prohibited item categories beyond base categories on which the detector is trained. Specifically, we propose X-ray feature adapter and apply it to CLIP within OVOD framework to develop OVXD model. X-ray feature adapter containing three adapter submodules of bottleneck architecture, which is simple but can efficiently integrate new knowledge of X-ray domain with original knowledge, further bridge domain gap and promote alignment between X-ray images and textual concepts. Extensive experiments conducted on PIXray and PIDray datasets demonstrate that proposed method performs favorably against other baseline OVOD methods in detecting novel categories in X-ray scenario. It outperforms previous best result by 15.2 AP50 and 1.5 AP50 on PIXray and PIDray with achieving 21.0 AP50 and 27.8 AP50 respectively.
Authors:Shan Li, Lu Yang, Pu Cao, Liulei Li, Huadong Ma
Abstract:
The successful application of semantic segmentation technology in the real world has been among the most exciting achievements in the computer vision community over the past decade. Although the long-tailed phenomenon has been investigated in many fields, e.g., classification and object detection, it has not received enough attention in semantic segmentation and has become a non-negligible obstacle to applying semantic segmentation technology in autonomous driving and virtual reality. Therefore, in this work, we focus on a relatively under-explored task setting, long-tailed semantic segmentation (LTSS). We first establish three representative datasets from different aspects, i.e., scene, object, and human. We further propose a dual-metric evaluation system and construct the LTSS benchmark to demonstrate the performance of semantic segmentation methods and long-tailed solutions. We also propose a transformer-based algorithm to improve LTSS, frequency-based matcher, which solves the oversuppression problem by one-to-many matching and automatically determines the number of matching queries for each class. Given the comprehensiveness of this work and the importance of the issues revealed, this work aims to promote the empirical study of semantic segmentation tasks. Our datasets, codes, and models will be publicly available.
Authors:Sven Teufel, Jörg Gamerdinger, Jan-Patrick Kirchner, Georg Volk, Oliver Bringmann
Abstract:
To ensure safe operation of autonomous vehicles in complex urban environments, complete perception of the environment is necessary. However, due to environmental conditions, sensor limitations, and occlusions, this is not always possible from a single point of view. To address this issue, collective perception is an effective method. Realistic and large-scale datasets are essential for training and evaluating collective perception methods. This paper provides the first comprehensive technical review of collective perception datasets in the context of autonomous driving. The survey analyzes existing V2V and V2X datasets, categorizing them based on different criteria such as sensor modalities, environmental conditions, and scenario variety. The focus is on their applicability for the development of connected automated vehicles. This study aims to identify the key criteria of all datasets and to present their strengths, weaknesses, and anomalies. Finally, this survey concludes by making recommendations regarding which dataset is most suitable for collective 3D object detection, tracking, and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Jingyuan Zhu, Shiyu Li, Yuxuan Liu, Ping Huang, Jiulong Shan, Huimin Ma, Jian Yuan
Abstract:
Modern diffusion-based image generative models have made significant progress and become promising to enrich training data for the object detection task. However, the generation quality and the controllability for complex scenes containing multi-class objects and dense objects with occlusions remain limited. This paper presents ODGEN, a novel method to generate high-quality images conditioned on bounding boxes, thereby facilitating data synthesis for object detection. Given a domain-specific object detection dataset, we first fine-tune a pre-trained diffusion model on both cropped foreground objects and entire images to fit target distributions. Then we propose to control the diffusion model using synthesized visual prompts with spatial constraints and object-wise textual descriptions. ODGEN exhibits robustness in handling complex scenes and specific domains. Further, we design a dataset synthesis pipeline to evaluate ODGEN on 7 domain-specific benchmarks to demonstrate its effectiveness. Adding training data generated by ODGEN improves up to 25.3% mAP@.50:.95 with object detectors like YOLOv5 and YOLOv7, outperforming prior controllable generative methods. In addition, we design an evaluation protocol based on COCO-2014 to validate ODGEN in general domains and observe an advantage up to 5.6% in mAP@.50:.95 against existing methods.
Authors:Kai Liu, Ruohui Wang, Jianfei Gao, Kai Chen
Abstract:
Over the past few years, as large language models have ushered in an era of intelligence emergence, there has been an intensified focus on scaling networks. Currently, many network architectures are designed manually, often resulting in sub-optimal configurations. Although Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods have been proposed to automate this process, they suffer from low search efficiency. This study introduces Differentiable Model Scaling (DMS), increasing the efficiency for searching optimal width and depth in networks. DMS can model both width and depth in a direct and fully differentiable way, making it easy to optimize. We have evaluated our DMS across diverse tasks, ranging from vision tasks to NLP tasks and various network architectures, including CNNs and Transformers. Results consistently indicate that our DMS can find improved structures and outperforms state-of-the-art NAS methods. Specifically, for image classification on ImageNet, our DMS improves the top-1 accuracy of EfficientNet-B0 and Deit-Tiny by 1.4% and 0.6%, respectively, and outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot NAS method, ZiCo, by 1.3% while requiring only 0.4 GPU days for searching. For object detection on COCO, DMS improves the mAP of Yolo-v8-n by 2.0%. For language modeling, our pruned Llama-7B outperforms the prior method with lower perplexity and higher zero-shot classification accuracy. We will release our code in the future.
Authors:Anastasios Arsenos, Vasileios Karampinis, Evangelos Petrongonas, Christos Skliros, Dimitrios Kollias, Stefanos Kollias, Athanasios Voulodimos
Abstract:
The main barrier to achieving fully autonomous flights lies in autonomous aircraft navigation. Managing non-cooperative traffic presents the most important challenge in this problem. The most efficient strategy for handling non-cooperative traffic is based on monocular video processing through deep learning models. This study contributes to the vision-based deep learning aircraft detection and tracking literature by investigating the impact of data corruption arising from environmental and hardware conditions on the effectiveness of these methods. More specifically, we designed $7$ types of common corruptions for camera inputs taking into account real-world flight conditions. By applying these corruptions to the Airborne Object Tracking (AOT) dataset we constructed the first robustness benchmark dataset named AOT-C for air-to-air aerial object detection. The corruptions included in this dataset cover a wide range of challenging conditions such as adverse weather and sensor noise. The second main contribution of this letter is to present an extensive experimental evaluation involving $8$ diverse object detectors to explore the degradation in the performance under escalating levels of corruptions (domain shifts). Based on the evaluation results, the key observations that emerge are the following: 1) One-stage detectors of the YOLO family demonstrate better robustness, 2) Transformer-based and multi-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN are extremely vulnerable to corruptions, 3) Robustness against corruptions is related to the generalization ability of models. The third main contribution is to present that finetuning on our augmented synthetic data results in improvements in the generalisation ability of the object detector in real-world flight experiments.
Authors:Vasileios Karampinis, Anastasios Arsenos, Orfeas Filippopoulos, Evangelos Petrongonas, Christos Skliros, Dimitrios Kollias, Stefanos Kollias, Athanasios Voulodimos
Abstract:
In the last twenty years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have garnered growing interest due to their expanding applications in both military and civilian domains. Detecting non-cooperative aerial vehicles with efficiency and estimating collisions accurately are pivotal for achieving fully autonomous aircraft and facilitating Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). This paper presents a deep-learning framework that utilizes optical sensors for the detection, tracking, and distance estimation of non-cooperative aerial vehicles. In implementing this comprehensive sensing framework, the availability of depth information is essential for enabling autonomous aerial vehicles to perceive and navigate around obstacles. In this work, we propose a method for estimating the distance information of a detected aerial object in real time using only the input of a monocular camera. In order to train our deep learning components for the object detection, tracking and depth estimation tasks we utilize the Amazon Airborne Object Tracking (AOT) Dataset. In contrast to previous approaches that integrate the depth estimation module into the object detector, our method formulates the problem as image-to-image translation. We employ a separate lightweight encoder-decoder network for efficient and robust depth estimation. In a nutshell, the object detection module identifies and localizes obstacles, conveying this information to both the tracking module for monitoring obstacle movement and the depth estimation module for calculating distances. Our approach is evaluated on the Airborne Object Tracking (AOT) dataset which is the largest (to the best of our knowledge) air-to-air airborne object dataset.
Authors:Zhaoqi Leng, Pei Sun, Tong He, Dragomir Anguelov, Mingxing Tan
Abstract:
3D object detectors for point clouds often rely on a pooling-based PointNet to encode sparse points into grid-like voxels or pillars. In this paper, we identify that the common PointNet design introduces an information bottleneck that limits 3D object detection accuracy and scalability. To address this limitation, we propose PVTransformer: a transformer-based point-to-voxel architecture for 3D detection. Our key idea is to replace the PointNet pooling operation with an attention module, leading to a better point-to-voxel aggregation function. Our design respects the permutation invariance of sparse 3D points while being more expressive than the pooling-based PointNet. Experimental results show our PVTransformer achieves much better performance compared to the latest 3D object detectors. On the widely used Waymo Open Dataset, our PVTransformer achieves state-of-the-art 76.5 mAPH L2, outperforming the prior art of SWFormer by +1.7 mAPH L2.
Authors:Ahmad Sarlak, Hazim Alzorgan, Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni, Abolfazl Razi, Rahul Amin
Abstract:
Sharing and joint processing of camera feeds and sensor measurements, known as Cooperative Perception (CP), has emerged as a new technique to achieve higher perception qualities. CP can enhance the safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) where their individual visual perception quality is compromised by adverse weather conditions (haze as foggy weather), low illumination, winding roads, and crowded traffic. To cover the limitations of former methods, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to realize an optimized CP under constrained communications. At the core of our approach is recruiting the best helper from the available list of front vehicles to augment the visual range and enhance the Object Detection (OD) accuracy of the ego vehicle. In this two-step process, we first select the helper vehicles that contribute the most to CP based on their visual range and lowest motion blur. Next, we implement a radio block optimization among the candidate vehicles to further improve communication efficiency. We specifically focus on pedestrian detection as an exemplary scenario. To validate our approach, we used the CARLA simulator to create a dataset of annotated videos for different driving scenarios where pedestrian detection is challenging for an AV with compromised vision. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our two-step optimization process in improving the overall performance of cooperative perception in challenging scenarios, substantially improving driving safety under adverse conditions. Finally, we note that the networking assumptions are adopted from LTE Release 14 Mode 4 side-link communication, commonly used for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. Nonetheless, our method is flexible and applicable to arbitrary V2V communications.
Authors:Jorgen Cani, Ioannis Mademlis, Adamantia Anna Rebolledo Chrysochoou, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos
Abstract:
Illicit object detection is a critical task performed at various high-security locations, including airports, train stations, subways, and ports. The continuous and tedious work of examining thousands of X-ray images per hour can be mentally taxing. Thus, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be used to automate the X-ray image analysis process, improve efficiency and alleviate the security officers' inspection burden. The neural architectures typically utilized in relevant literature are Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), with Vision Transformers (ViTs) rarely employed. In order to address this gap, this paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of relevant ViT architectures on illicit item detection in X-ray images. This study utilizes both Transformer and hybrid backbones, such as SWIN and NextViT, and detectors, such as DINO and RT-DETR. The results demonstrate the remarkable accuracy of the DINO Transformer detector in the low-data regime, the impressive real-time performance of YOLOv8, and the effectiveness of the hybrid NextViT backbone.
Authors:Jinrae Kim, Sunggoo Jung, Sung-Kyun Kim, Youdan Kim, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi
Abstract:
A staircase localization method is proposed for robots to explore urban environments autonomously. The proposed method employs a modular design in the form of a cascade pipeline consisting of three modules of stair detection, line segment detection, and stair localization modules. The stair detection module utilizes an object detection algorithm based on deep learning to generate a region of interest (ROI). From the ROI, line segment features are extracted using a deep line segment detection algorithm. The extracted line segments are used to localize a staircase in terms of position, orientation, and stair direction. The stair detection and localization are performed only with a single RGB-D camera. Each component of the proposed pipeline does not need to be designed particularly for staircases, which makes it easy to maintain the whole pipeline and replace each component with state-of-the-art deep learning detection techniques. The results of real-world experiments show that the proposed method can perform accurate stair detection and localization during autonomous exploration for various structured and unstructured upstairs and downstairs with shadows, dirt, and occlusions by artificial and natural objects.
Authors:Chenyao Yu, Yingfeng Cai, Jiaxin Zhang, Hui Kong, Wei Sui, Cong Yang
Abstract:
As a part of the perception results of intelligent driving systems, static object detection (SOD) in 3D space provides crucial cues for driving environment understanding. With the rapid deployment of deep neural networks for SOD tasks, the demand for high-quality training samples soars. The traditional, also reliable, way is manual labelling over the dense LiDAR point clouds and reference images. Though most public driving datasets adopt this strategy to provide SOD ground truth (GT), it is still expensive and time-consuming in practice. This paper introduces VRSO, a visual-centric approach for static object annotation. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset show that the mean reprojection error from VRSO annotation is only 2.6 pixels, around four times lower than the Waymo Open Dataset labels (10.6 pixels). VRSO is distinguished in low cost, high efficiency, and high quality: (1) It recovers static objects in 3D space with only camera images as input, and (2) manual annotation is barely involved since GT for SOD tasks is generated based on an automatic reconstruction and annotation pipeline.
Authors:Martin Messmer, Benjamin Kiefer, Leon Amadeus Varga, Andreas Zell
Abstract:
In this paper, we explore the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in maritime search and rescue (mSAR) missions, focusing on medium-sized fixed-wing drones and quadcopters. We address the challenges and limitations inherent in operating some of the different classes of UAVs, particularly in search operations. Our research includes the development of a comprehensive software framework designed to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of SAR operations. This framework combines preliminary detection onboard UAVs with advanced object detection at ground stations, aiming to reduce visual strain and improve decision-making for operators. It will be made publicly available upon publication. We conduct experiments to evaluate various Region of Interest (RoI) proposal methods, especially by imposing simulated limited bandwidth on them, an important consideration when flying remote or offshore operations. This forces the algorithm to prioritize some predictions over others.
Authors:Yuwei Zhang, Yan Wu, Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng
Abstract:
Object detection methods under known single degradations have been extensively investigated. However, existing approaches require prior knowledge of the degradation type and train a separate model for each, limiting their practical applications in unpredictable environments. To address this challenge, we propose a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompted adaptive enhancer, CPA-Enhancer, for object detection under unknown degradations. Specifically, CPA-Enhancer progressively adapts its enhancement strategy under the step-by-step guidance of CoT prompts, that encode degradation-related information. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first work that exploits CoT prompting for object detection tasks. Overall, CPA-Enhancer is a plug-and-play enhancement model that can be integrated into any generic detectors to achieve substantial gains on degraded images, without knowing the degradation type priorly. Experimental results demonstrate that CPA-Enhancer not only sets the new state of the art for object detection but also boosts the performance of other downstream vision tasks under unknown degradations.
Authors:Soikat Hasan Ahmed, Jan Finkbeiner, Emre Neftci
Abstract:
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and dynamic range with minimal motion blur, making them promising for robust object detection. While Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware are often considered for energy-efficient and low latency event-based data processing, they often fall short of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in accuracy and flexibility. Here, we introduce Attention-based Hybrid SNN-ANN backbones for event-based object detection to leverage the strengths of both SNN and ANN architectures. A novel Attention-based SNN-ANN bridge module captures sparse spatial and temporal relations from the SNN layer and converts them into dense feature maps for the ANN part of the backbone. Additionally, we present a variant that integrates DWConvL-STMs to the ANN blocks to capture slower dynamics. This multi-timescale network combines fast SNN processing for short timesteps with long-term dense RNN processing, effectively capturing both fast and slow dynamics. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses SNN-based approaches by significant margins, with results comparable to existing ANN and RNN-based methods. Unlike ANN-only networks, the hybrid setup allows us to implement the SNN blocks on digital neuromorphic hardware to investigate the feasibility of our approach. Extensive ablation studies and implementation on neuromorphic hardware confirm the effectiveness of our proposed modules and architectural choices. Our hybrid SNN-ANN architectures pave the way for ANN-like performance at a drastically reduced parameter, latency, and power budget.
Authors:Chenbin Pan, Burhaneddin Yaman, Senem Velipasalar, Liu Ren
Abstract:
Autonomous driving stands as a pivotal domain in computer vision, shaping the future of transportation. Within this paradigm, the backbone of the system plays a crucial role in interpreting the complex environment. However, a notable challenge has been the loss of clear supervision when it comes to Bird's Eye View elements. To address this limitation, we introduce CLIP-BEVFormer, a novel approach that leverages the power of contrastive learning techniques to enhance the multi-view image-derived BEV backbones with ground truth information flow. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging nuScenes dataset and showcase significant and consistent improvements over the SOTA. Specifically, CLIP-BEVFormer achieves an impressive 8.5\% and 9.2\% enhancement in terms of NDS and mAP, respectively, over the previous best BEV model on the 3D object detection task.
Authors:Xinhao Cai, Qiuxia Lai, Yuwei Wang, Wenguan Wang, Zeren Sun, Yazhou Yao
Abstract:
Object detection in remote sensing images (RSIs) often suffers from several increasing challenges, including the large variation in object scales and the diverse-ranging context. Prior methods tried to address these challenges by expanding the spatial receptive field of the backbone, either through large-kernel convolution or dilated convolution. However, the former typically introduces considerable background noise, while the latter risks generating overly sparse feature representations. In this paper, we introduce the Poly Kernel Inception Network (PKINet) to handle the above challenges. PKINet employs multi-scale convolution kernels without dilation to extract object features of varying scales and capture local context. In addition, a Context Anchor Attention (CAA) module is introduced in parallel to capture long-range contextual information. These two components work jointly to advance the performance of PKINet on four challenging remote sensing detection benchmarks, namely DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5, HRSC2016, and DIOR-R.
Authors:Junsu Kim, Yunhoe Ku, Jihyeon Kim, Junuk Cha, Seungryul Baek
Abstract:
In the field of Class Incremental Object Detection (CIOD), creating models that can continuously learn like humans is a major challenge. Pseudo-labeling methods, although initially powerful, struggle with multi-scenario incremental learning due to their tendency to forget past knowledge. To overcome this, we introduce a new approach called Vision-Language Model assisted Pseudo-Labeling (VLM-PL). This technique uses Vision-Language Model (VLM) to verify the correctness of pseudo ground-truths (GTs) without requiring additional model training. VLM-PL starts by deriving pseudo GTs from a pre-trained detector. Then, we generate custom queries for each pseudo GT using carefully designed prompt templates that combine image and text features. This allows the VLM to classify the correctness through its responses. Furthermore, VLM-PL integrates refined pseudo and real GTs from upcoming training, effectively combining new and old knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on the Pascal VOC and MS COCO datasets not only highlight VLM-PL's exceptional performance in multi-scenario but also illuminate its effectiveness in dual-scenario by achieving state-of-the-art results in both.
Authors:Jiawei Hou, Xiaoyan Li, Wenhao Guan, Gang Zhang, Di Feng, Yuheng Du, Xiangyang Xue, Jian Pu
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, 3D occupancy prediction outputs voxel-wise status and semantic labels for more comprehensive understandings of 3D scenes compared with traditional perception tasks, such as 3D object detection and bird's-eye view (BEV) semantic segmentation. Recent researchers have extensively explored various aspects of this task, including view transformation techniques, ground-truth label generation, and elaborate network design, aiming to achieve superior performance. However, the inference speed, crucial for running on an autonomous vehicle, is neglected. To this end, a new method, dubbed FastOcc, is proposed. By carefully analyzing the network effect and latency from four parts, including the input image resolution, image backbone, view transformation, and occupancy prediction head, it is found that the occupancy prediction head holds considerable potential for accelerating the model while keeping its accuracy. Targeted at improving this component, the time-consuming 3D convolution network is replaced with a novel residual-like architecture, where features are mainly digested by a lightweight 2D BEV convolution network and compensated by integrating the 3D voxel features interpolated from the original image features. Experiments on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that our FastOcc achieves state-of-the-art results with a fast inference speed.
Authors:Xiang Chen, Wenjie Zhu, Jiayuan Chen, Tong Zhang, Changyan Yi, Jun Cai
Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel edge computing enabled real-time video analysis system for intelligent visual devices. The proposed system consists of a tracking-assisted object detection module (TAODM) and a region of interesting module (ROIM). TAODM adaptively determines the offloading decision to process each video frame locally with a tracking algorithm or to offload it to the edge server inferred by an object detection model. ROIM determines each offloading frame's resolution and detection model configuration to ensure that the analysis results can return in time. TAODM and ROIM interact jointly to filter the repetitive spatial-temporal semantic information to maximize the processing rate while ensuring high video analysis accuracy. Unlike most existing works, this paper investigates the real-time video analysis systems where the intelligent visual device connects to the edge server through a wireless network with fluctuating network conditions. We decompose the real-time video analysis problem into the offloading decision and configurations selection sub-problems. To solve these two sub-problems, we introduce a double deep Q network (DDQN) based offloading approach and a contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) based adaptive configurations selection approach, respectively. A DDQN-CMAB reinforcement learning (DCRL) training framework is further developed to integrate these two approaches to improve the overall video analyzing performance. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.
Authors:Mo Zhou, Yiding Yang, Haoxiang Li, Vishal M. Patel, Gang Hua
Abstract:
With a strong alignment between the training and test distributions, object relation as a context prior facilitates object detection. Yet, it turns into a harmful but inevitable training set bias upon test distributions that shift differently across space and time. Nevertheless, the existing detectors cannot incorporate deployment context prior during the test phase without parameter update. Such kind of capability requires the model to explicitly learn disentangled representations with respect to context prior. To achieve this, we introduce an additional graph input to the detector, where the graph represents the deployment context prior, and its edge values represent object relations. Then, the detector behavior is trained to bound to the graph with a modified training objective. As a result, during the test phase, any suitable deployment context prior can be injected into the detector via graph edits, hence calibrating, or "re-biasing" the detector towards the given prior at run-time without parameter update. Even if the deployment prior is unknown, the detector can self-calibrate using deployment prior approximated using its own predictions. Comprehensive experimental results on the COCO dataset, as well as cross-dataset testing on the Objects365 dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the run-time calibratable detector.
Authors:Junchen Deng, Samhita Marri, Jonathan Klein, Wojtek PaÅubicki, Sören Pirk, Girish Chowdhary, Dominik L. Michels
Abstract:
Robotic harvesting has the potential to positively impact agricultural productivity, reduce costs, improve food quality, enhance sustainability, and to address labor shortage. In the rapidly advancing field of agricultural robotics, the necessity of training robots in a virtual environment has become essential. Generating training data to automatize the underlying computer vision tasks such as image segmentation, object detection and classification, also heavily relies on such virtual environments as synthetic data is often required to overcome the shortage and lack of variety of real data sets. However, physics engines commonly employed within the robotics community, such as ODE, Simbody, Bullet, and DART, primarily support motion and collision interaction of rigid bodies. This inherent limitation hinders experimentation and progress in handling non-rigid objects such as plants and crops. In this contribution, we present a plugin for the Gazebo simulation platform based on Cosserat rods to model plant motion. It enables the simulation of plants and their interaction with the environment. We demonstrate that, using our plugin, users can conduct harvesting simulations in Gazebo by simulating a robotic arm picking fruits and achieve results comparable to real-world experiments.
Authors:Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Haishu Tan
Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion has emerged as a prominent research in computer vision. However, little attention has been paid on complex scenes fusion, causing existing techniques to produce sub-optimal results when suffers from real interferences. To fill this gap, we propose a decomposition-based and interference perception image fusion method. Specifically, we classify the pixels of visible image from the degree of scattering of light transmission, based on which we then separate the detail and energy information of the image. This refined decomposition facilitates the proposed model in identifying more interfering pixels that are in complex scenes. To strike a balance between denoising and detail preservation, we propose an adaptive denoising scheme for fusing detail components. Meanwhile, we propose a new weighted fusion rule by considering the distribution of image energy information from the perspective of multiple directions. Extensive experiments in complex scenes fusions cover adverse weathers, noise, blur, overexposure, fire, as well as downstream tasks including semantic segmentation, object detection, salient object detection and depth estimation, consistently indicate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method compared with the recent representative methods.
Authors:Yuchan Jie, Yushen Xu, Xiaosong Li, Haishu Tan
Abstract:
Multi-modality image fusion involves integrating complementary information from different modalities into a single image. Current methods primarily focus on enhancing image fusion with a single advanced task such as incorporating semantic or object-related information into the fusion process. This method creates challenges in achieving multiple objectives simultaneously. We introduce a target and semantic awareness joint-driven fusion network called TSJNet. TSJNet comprises fusion, detection, and segmentation subnetworks arranged in a series structure. It leverages object and semantically relevant information derived from dual high-level tasks to guide the fusion network. Additionally, We propose a local significant feature extraction module with a double parallel branch structure to fully capture the fine-grained features of cross-modal images and foster interaction among modalities, targets, and segmentation information. We conducted extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets (MSRS, M3FD, RoadScene, and LLVIP). The results demonstrate that TSJNet can generate visually pleasing fused results, achieving an average increase of 2.84% and 7.47% in object detection and segmentation mAP @0.5 and mIoU, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Ragib Amin Nihal, Benjamin Yen, Takeshi Ashizawa, Katsutoshi Itoyama, Kazuhiro Nakadai
Abstract:
Aerial object detection presents challenges from small object sizes, high density clustering, and image quality degradation from distance and motion blur. These factors create an information bottleneck where limited pixel representation cannot encode sufficient discriminative features. B2BDet addresses this with a two-stage framework that applies domain-specific super-resolution during inference, followed by detection using an enhanced YOLOv5 architecture. Unlike training-time super-resolution approaches that enhance learned representations, our method recovers visual information from each input image. The approach combines aerial-optimized SRGAN fine-tuning with architectural innovations including an Efficient Attention Module (EAM) and Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Network (CLFPN). Evaluation across four aerial datasets shows performance gains, with VisDrone achieving 52.5% mAP using only 27.7M parameters. Ablation studies show that super-resolution preprocessing contributes +2.6% mAP improvement while architectural enhancements add +2.9%, yielding +5.5% total improvement over baseline YOLOv5. The method achieves computational efficiency with 53.8% parameter reduction compared to recent approaches while achieving strong small object detection performance.
Authors:Jiawei Wang, Kai Hu, Zhuoyao Zhong, Lei Sun, Qiang Huo
Abstract:
Document structure analysis (aka document layout analysis) is crucial for understanding the physical layout and logical structure of documents, with applications in information retrieval, document summarization, knowledge extraction, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis (HDSA) to explore hierarchical relationships within structured documents created using authoring software employing hierarchical schemas, such as LaTeX, Microsoft Word, and HTML. To comprehensively analyze hierarchical document structures, we propose a tree construction based approach that addresses multiple subtasks concurrently, including page object detection (Detect), reading order prediction of identified objects (Order), and the construction of intended hierarchical structure (Construct). We present an effective end-to-end solution based on this framework to demonstrate its performance. To assess our approach, we develop a comprehensive benchmark called Comp-HRDoc, which evaluates the above subtasks simultaneously. Our end-to-end system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two large-scale document layout analysis datasets (PubLayNet and DocLayNet), a high-quality hierarchical document structure reconstruction dataset (HRDoc), and our Comp-HRDoc benchmark. The Comp-HRDoc benchmark will be released to facilitate further research in this field.
Authors:Fengyang Xiao, Pan Zhang, Chunming He, Runze Hu, Yutao Liu
Abstract:
Concealed object segmentation (COS) is a challenging task that involves localizing and segmenting those concealed objects that are visually blended with their surrounding environments. Despite achieving remarkable success, existing COS segmenters still struggle to achieve complete segmentation results in extremely concealed scenarios. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Coherence Modeling (HCM) segmenter for COS, aiming to address this incomplete segmentation limitation. In specific, HCM promotes feature coherence by leveraging the intra-stage coherence and cross-stage coherence modules, exploring feature correlations at both the single-stage and contextual levels. Additionally, we introduce the reversible re-calibration decoder to detect previously undetected parts in low-confidence regions, resulting in further enhancing segmentation performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three COS tasks, including camouflaged object detection, polyp image segmentation, and transparent object detection, demonstrate the promising results achieved by the proposed HCM segmenter.
Authors:Chengjie Huang, Vahdat Abdelzad, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
Abstract:
We consider the problem of cross-sensor domain adaptation in the context of LiDAR-based 3D object detection and propose Stationary Object Aggregation Pseudo-labelling (SOAP) to generate high quality pseudo-labels for stationary objects. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art in-domain practice of aggregating just a few input scans, SOAP aggregates entire sequences of point clouds at the input level to reduce the sensor domain gap. Then, by means of what we call quasi-stationary training and spatial consistency post-processing, the SOAP model generates accurate pseudo-labels for stationary objects, closing a minimum of 30.3% domain gap compared to few-frame detectors. Our results also show that state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches can achieve even greater performance in combination with SOAP, in both the unsupervised and semi-supervised settings.
Authors:Wenyi Tan, Yang Li, Chenxing Zhao, Zhunga Liu, Quan Pan
Abstract:
Object detection is a fundamental task in various applications ranging from autonomous driving to intelligent security systems. However, recognition of a person can be hindered when their clothing is decorated with carefully designed graffiti patterns, leading to the failure of object detection. To achieve greater attack potential against unknown black-box models, adversarial patches capable of affecting the outputs of multiple-object detection models are required. While ensemble models have proven effective, current research in the field of object detection typically focuses on the simple fusion of the outputs of all models, with limited attention being given to developing general adversarial patches that can function effectively in the physical world. In this paper, we introduce the concept of energy and treat the adversarial patches generation process as an optimization of the adversarial patches to minimize the total energy of the ``person'' category. Additionally, by adopting adversarial training, we construct a dynamically optimized ensemble model. During training, the weight parameters of the attacked target models are adjusted to find the balance point at which the generated adversarial patches can effectively attack all target models. We carried out six sets of comparative experiments and tested our algorithm on five mainstream object detection models. The adversarial patches generated by our algorithm can reduce the recognition accuracy of YOLOv2 and YOLOv3 to 13.19\% and 29.20\%, respectively. In addition, we conducted experiments to test the effectiveness of T-shirts covered with our adversarial patches in the physical world and could achieve that people are not recognized by the object detection model. Finally, leveraging the Grad-CAM tool, we explored the attack mechanism of adversarial patches from an energetic perspective.
Authors:Chen Ma, Ningfei Wang, Qi Alfred Chen, Chao Shen
Abstract:
In Autonomous Driving (AD), real-time perception is a critical component responsible for detecting surrounding objects to ensure safe driving. While researchers have extensively explored the integrity of AD perception due to its safety and security implications, the aspect of availability (real-time performance) or latency has received limited attention. Existing works on latency-based attack have focused mainly on object detection, i.e., a component in camera-based AD perception, overlooking the entire camera-based AD perception, which hinders them to achieve effective system-level effects, such as vehicle crashes. In this paper, we propose SlowTrack, a novel framework for generating adversarial attacks to increase the execution time of camera-based AD perception. We propose a novel two-stage attack strategy along with the three new loss function designs. Our evaluation is conducted on four popular camera-based AD perception pipelines, and the results demonstrate that SlowTrack significantly outperforms existing latency-based attacks while maintaining comparable imperceptibility levels. Furthermore, we perform the evaluation on Baidu Apollo, an industry-grade full-stack AD system, and LGSVL, a production-grade AD simulator, with two scenarios to compare the system-level effects of SlowTrack and existing attacks. Our evaluation results show that the system-level effects can be significantly improved, i.e., the vehicle crash rate of SlowTrack is around 95% on average while existing works only have around 30%.
Authors:Jian Hu, Jiayi Lin, Weitong Cai, Shaogang Gong
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) approaches heavily rely on pixel-level annotated datasets. Weakly-supervised COD (WSCOD) approaches use sparse annotations like scribbles or points to reduce annotation effort, but this can lead to decreased accuracy. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) shows remarkable segmentation ability with sparse prompts like points. However, manual prompt is not always feasible, as it may not be accessible in real-world application. Additionally, it only provides localization information instead of semantic one, which can intrinsically cause ambiguity in interpreting the targets. In this work, we aim to eliminate the need for manual prompt. The key idea is to employ Cross-modal Chains of Thought Prompting (CCTP) to reason visual prompts using the semantic information given by a generic text prompt. To that end, we introduce a test-time adaptation per-instance mechanism called Generalizable SAM (GenSAM) to automatically enerate and optimize visual prompts the generic task prompt for WSCOD. In particular, CCTP maps a single generic text prompt onto image-specific consensus foreground and background heatmaps using vision-language models, acquiring reliable visual prompts. Moreover, to test-time adapt the visual prompts, we further propose Progressive Mask Generation (PMG) to iteratively reweight the input image, guiding the model to focus on the targets in a coarse-to-fine manner. Crucially, all network parameters are fixed, avoiding the need for additional training. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of GenSAM. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that GenSAM outperforms point supervision approaches and achieves comparable results to scribble supervision ones, solely relying on general task descriptions as prompts. our codes is in: https://lwpyh.github.io/GenSAM/.
Authors:Teodora Popordanoska, Aleksei Tiulpin, Matthew B. Blaschko
Abstract:
Despite their impressive predictive performance in various computer vision tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to make overly confident predictions, which hinders their widespread use in safety-critical applications. While there have been recent attempts to calibrate DNNs, most of these efforts have primarily been focused on classification tasks, thus neglecting DNN-based object detectors. Although several recent works addressed calibration for object detection and proposed differentiable penalties, none of them are consistent estimators of established concepts in calibration. In this work, we tackle the challenge of defining and estimating calibration error specifically for this task. In particular, we adapt the definition of classification calibration error to handle the nuances associated with object detection, and predictions in structured output spaces more generally. Furthermore, we propose a consistent and differentiable estimator of the detection calibration error, utilizing kernel density estimation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our estimator against competing train-time and post-hoc calibration methods, while maintaining similar detection performance.
Authors:Saksham Suri, Fanyi Xiao, Animesh Sinha, Sean Chang Culatana, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Chenchen Zhu, Abhinav Shrivastava
Abstract:
Recently diffusion models have shown improvement in synthetic image quality as well as better control in generation. We motivate and present Gen2Det, a simple modular pipeline to create synthetic training data for object detection for free by leveraging state-of-the-art grounded image generation methods. Unlike existing works which generate individual object instances, require identifying foreground followed by pasting on other images, we simplify to directly generating scene-centric images. In addition to the synthetic data, Gen2Det also proposes a suite of techniques to best utilize the generated data, including image-level filtering, instance-level filtering, and better training recipe to account for imperfections in the generation. Using Gen2Det, we show healthy improvements on object detection and segmentation tasks under various settings and agnostic to detection methods. In the long-tailed detection setting on LVIS, Gen2Det improves the performance on rare categories by a large margin while also significantly improving the performance on other categories, e.g. we see an improvement of 2.13 Box AP and 1.84 Mask AP over just training on real data on LVIS with Mask R-CNN. In the low-data regime setting on COCO, Gen2Det consistently improves both Box and Mask AP by 2.27 and 1.85 points. In the most general detection setting, Gen2Det still demonstrates robust performance gains, e.g. it improves the Box and Mask AP on COCO by 0.45 and 0.32 points.
Authors:Xiang Li, Jian Ding, Zhaoyang Chen, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Abstract:
In this work, we present Uni3DL, a unified model for 3D and Language understanding. Distinct from existing unified vision-language models in 3D which are limited in task variety and predominantly dependent on projected multi-view images, Uni3DL operates directly on point clouds. This approach significantly expands the range of supported tasks in 3D, encompassing both vision and vision-language tasks in 3D. At the core of Uni3DL, a query transformer is designed to learn task-agnostic semantic and mask outputs by attending to 3D visual features, and a task router is employed to selectively generate task-specific outputs required for diverse tasks. With a unified architecture, our Uni3DL model enjoys seamless task decomposition and substantial parameter sharing across tasks. Uni3DL has been rigorously evaluated across diverse 3D vision-language understanding tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, visual grounding, 3D captioning, and text-3D cross-modal retrieval. It demonstrates performance on par with or surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. We hope our benchmark and Uni3DL model will serve as a solid step to ease future research in unified models in the realm of 3D and language understanding. Project page: https://uni3dl.github.io.
Authors:Christoph Hümmer, Manuel Schwonberg, Liangwei Zhou, Hu Cao, Alois Knoll, Hanno Gottschalk
Abstract:
Domain generalization (DG) remains a significant challenge for perception based on deep neural networks (DNNs), where domain shifts occur due to synthetic data, lighting, weather, or location changes. Vision-language models (VLMs) marked a large step for the generalization capabilities and have been already applied to various tasks. Very recently, first approaches utilized VLMs for domain generalized segmentation and object detection and obtained strong generalization. However, all these approaches rely on complex modules, feature augmentation frameworks or additional models. Surprisingly and in contrast to that, we found that simple fine-tuning of vision-language pre-trained models yields competitive or even stronger generalization results while being extremely simple to apply. Moreover, we found that vision-language pre-training consistently provides better generalization than the previous standard of vision-only pre-training. This challenges the standard of using ImageNet-based transfer learning for domain generalization. Fully fine-tuning a vision-language pre-trained model is capable of reaching the domain generalization SOTA when training on the synthetic GTA5 dataset. Moreover, we confirm this observation for object detection on a novel synthetic-to-real benchmark. We further obtain superior generalization capabilities by reaching 77.9% mIoU on the popular Cityscapes-to-ACDC benchmark. We also found improved in-domain generalization, leading to an improved SOTA of 86.4% mIoU on the Cityscapes test set marking the first place on the leaderboard.
Authors:Lorenzo Bianchi, Fabio Carrara, Nicola Messina, Claudio Gennaro, Fabrizio Falchi
Abstract:
Recent advancements in large vision-language models enabled visual object detection in open-vocabulary scenarios, where object classes are defined in free-text formats during inference. In this paper, we aim to probe the state-of-the-art methods for open-vocabulary object detection to determine to what extent they understand fine-grained properties of objects and their parts. To this end, we introduce an evaluation protocol based on dynamic vocabulary generation to test whether models detect, discern, and assign the correct fine-grained description to objects in the presence of hard-negative classes. We contribute with a benchmark suite of increasing difficulty and probing different properties like color, pattern, and material. We further enhance our investigation by evaluating several state-of-the-art open-vocabulary object detectors using the proposed protocol and find that most existing solutions, which shine in standard open-vocabulary benchmarks, struggle to accurately capture and distinguish finer object details. We conclude the paper by highlighting the limitations of current methodologies and exploring promising research directions to overcome the discovered drawbacks. Data and code are available at https://lorebianchi98.github.io/FG-OVD/.
Authors:Yanan Jian, Fuxun Yu, Simranjit Singh, Dimitrios Stamoulis
Abstract:
Aerial object detection is a challenging task, in which one major obstacle lies in the limitations of large-scale data collection and the long-tail distribution of certain classes. Synthetic data offers a promising solution, especially with recent advances in diffusion-based methods like stable diffusion (SD). However, the direct application of diffusion methods to aerial domains poses unique challenges: stable diffusion's optimization for rich ground-level semantics doesn't align with the sparse nature of aerial objects, and the extraction of post-synthesis object coordinates remains problematic. To address these challenges, we introduce a synthetic data augmentation framework tailored for aerial images. It encompasses sparse-to-dense region of interest (ROI) extraction to bridge the semantic gap, fine-tuning the diffusion model with low-rank adaptation (LORA) to circumvent exhaustive retraining, and finally, a Copy-Paste method to compose synthesized objects with backgrounds, providing a nuanced approach to aerial object detection through synthetic data.
Authors:Yuehai Chen, Qingzhong Wang, Jing Yang, Badong Chen, Haoyi Xiong, Shaoyi Du
Abstract:
Crowd counting models in highly congested areas confront two main challenges: weak localization ability and difficulty in differentiating between foreground and background, leading to inaccurate estimations. The reason is that objects in highly congested areas are normally small and high level features extracted by convolutional neural networks are less discriminative to represent small objects. To address these problems, we propose a learning discriminative features framework for crowd counting, which is composed of a masked feature prediction module (MPM) and a supervised pixel-level contrastive learning module (CLM). The MPM randomly masks feature vectors in the feature map and then reconstructs them, allowing the model to learn about what is present in the masked regions and improving the model's ability to localize objects in high density regions. The CLM pulls targets close to each other and pushes them far away from background in the feature space, enabling the model to discriminate foreground objects from background. Additionally, the proposed modules can be beneficial in various computer vision tasks, such as crowd counting and object detection, where dense scenes or cluttered environments pose challenges to accurate localization. The proposed two modules are plug-and-play, incorporating the proposed modules into existing models can potentially boost their performance in these scenarios.
Authors:Torben Teepe, Philipp Wolters, Johannes Gilg, Fabian Herzog, Gerhard Rigoll
Abstract:
Multi-view aggregation promises to overcome the occlusion and missed detection challenge in multi-object detection and tracking. Recent approaches in multi-view detection and 3D object detection made a huge performance leap by projecting all views to the ground plane and performing the detection in the Bird's Eye View (BEV). In this paper, we investigate if tracking in the BEV can also bring the next performance breakthrough in Multi-Target Multi-Camera (MTMC) tracking. Most current approaches in multi-view tracking perform the detection and tracking task in each view and use graph-based approaches to perform the association of the pedestrian across each view. This spatial association is already solved by detecting each pedestrian once in the BEV, leaving only the problem of temporal association. For the temporal association, we show how to learn strong Re-Identification (re-ID) features for each detection. The results show that early-fusion in the BEV achieves high accuracy for both detection and tracking. EarlyBird outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and improves the current state-of-the-art on Wildtrack by +4.6 MOTA and +5.6 IDF1.
Authors:Xinrui Ye, Yanzan Sun, Dingzhu Wen, Guanjin Pan, Shunqing Zhang
Abstract:
Cooperative inference in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), achieved by deploying partitioned Deep Neural Network (DNN) models between resource-constrained user equipments (UEs) and edge servers (ESs), has emerged as a promising paradigm. Firstly, we consider scenarios of continuous Artificial Intelligence (AI) task arrivals, like the object detection for video streams, and utilize a serial queuing model for the accurate evaluation of End-to-End (E2E) delay in cooperative edge inference. Secondly, to enhance the long-term performance of inference systems, we formulate a multi-slot stochastic E2E delay optimization problem that jointly considers model partitioning and multi-dimensional resource allocation. Finally, to solve this problem, we introduce a Lyapunov-guided Multi-Dimensional Optimization algorithm (LyMDO) that decouples the original problem into per-slot deterministic problems, where Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and convex optimization are used for joint optimization of partitioning decisions and complementary resource allocation. Simulation results show that our approach effectively improves E2E delay while balancing long-term resource constraints.
Authors:Michael G. Adam, Sebastian Eger, Martin Piccolrovazzi, Maged Iskandar, Joern Vogel, Alexander Dietrich, Seongjien Bien, Jon Skerlj, Abdeldjallil Naceri, Eckehard Steinbach, Alin Albu-Schaeffer, Sami Haddadin, Wolfram Burgard
Abstract:
As labor shortage increases in the health sector, the demand for assistive robotics grows. However, the needed test data to develop those robots is scarce, especially for the application of active 3D object detection, where no real data exists at all. This short paper counters this by introducing such an annotated dataset of real environments. The captured environments represent areas which are already in use in the field of robotic health care research. We further provide ground truth data within one room, for assessing SLAM algorithms running directly on a health care robot.
Authors:Nanqing Liu, Xun Xu, Yingjie Gao, Heng-Chao Li
Abstract:
Annotating remote sensing images (RSIs) presents a notable challenge due to its labor-intensive nature. Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) methods tackle this issue by generating pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data, assuming that all classes found in the unlabeled dataset are also represented in the labeled data. However, real-world situations introduce the possibility of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples being mixed with in-distribution (ID) samples within the unlabeled dataset. In this paper, we delve into techniques for conducting SSOD directly on uncurated unlabeled data, which is termed Open-Set Semi-Supervised Object Detection (OSSOD). Our approach commences by employing labeled in-distribution data to dynamically construct a class-wise feature bank (CFB) that captures features specific to each class. Subsequently, we compare the features of predicted object bounding boxes with the corresponding entries in the CFB to calculate OOD scores. We design an adaptive threshold based on the statistical properties of the CFB, allowing us to filter out OOD samples effectively. The effectiveness of our proposed method is substantiated through extensive experiments on two widely used remote sensing object detection datasets: DIOR and DOTA. These experiments showcase the superior performance and efficacy of our approach for OSSOD on RSIs.
Authors:Tong He, Pei Sun, Zhaoqi Leng, Chenxi Liu, Dragomir Anguelov, Mingxing Tan
Abstract:
We propose a late-to-early recurrent feature fusion scheme for 3D object detection using temporal LiDAR point clouds. Our main motivation is fusing object-aware latent embeddings into the early stages of a 3D object detector. This feature fusion strategy enables the model to better capture the shapes and poses for challenging objects, compared with learning from raw points directly. Our method conducts late-to-early feature fusion in a recurrent manner. This is achieved by enforcing window-based attention blocks upon temporally calibrated and aligned sparse pillar tokens. Leveraging bird's eye view foreground pillar segmentation, we reduce the number of sparse history features that our model needs to fuse into its current frame by 10$\times$. We also propose a stochastic-length FrameDrop training technique, which generalizes the model to variable frame lengths at inference for improved performance without retraining. We evaluate our method on the widely adopted Waymo Open Dataset and demonstrate improvement on 3D object detection against the baseline model, especially for the challenging category of large objects.
Authors:Xinyu Zhang, Yuhan Liu, Yuting Wang, Abdeslam Boularias
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection aims at detecting novel categories given only a few example images. It is a basic skill for a robot to perform tasks in open environments. Recent methods focus on finetuning strategies, with complicated procedures that prohibit a wider application. In this paper, we introduce DE-ViT, a few-shot object detector without the need for finetuning. DE-ViT's novel architecture is based on a new region-propagation mechanism for localization. The propagated region masks are transformed into bounding boxes through a learnable spatial integral layer. Instead of training prototype classifiers, we propose to use prototypes to project ViT features into a subspace that is robust to overfitting on base classes. We evaluate DE-ViT on few-shot, and one-shot object detection benchmarks with Pascal VOC, COCO, and LVIS. DE-ViT establishes new state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks. Notably, for COCO, DE-ViT surpasses the few-shot SoTA by 15 mAP on 10-shot and 7.2 mAP on 30-shot and one-shot SoTA by 2.8 AP50. For LVIS, DE-ViT outperforms few-shot SoTA by 17 box APr. Further, we evaluate DE-ViT with a real robot by building a pick-and-place system for sorting novel objects based on example images. The videos of our robot demonstrations, the source code and the models of DE-ViT can be found at https://mlzxy.github.io/devit.
Authors:Jingxiang Qu, Ryan Wen Liu, Yuan Gao, Yu Guo, Fenghua Zhu, Fei-yue Wang
Abstract:
Real-time transportation surveillance is an essential part of the intelligent transportation system (ITS). However, images captured under low-light conditions often suffer the poor visibility with types of degradation, such as noise interference and vague edge features, etc. With the development of imaging devices, the quality of the visual surveillance data is continually increasing, like 2K and 4K, which has more strict requirements on the efficiency of image processing. To satisfy the requirements on both enhancement quality and computational speed, this paper proposes a double domain guided real-time low-light image enhancement network (DDNet) for ultra-high-definition (UHD) transportation surveillance. Specifically, we design an encoder-decoder structure as the main architecture of the learning network. In particular, the enhancement processing is divided into two subtasks (i.e., color enhancement and gradient enhancement) via the proposed coarse enhancement module (CEM) and LoG-based gradient enhancement module (GEM), which are embedded in the encoder-decoder structure. It enables the network to enhance the color and edge features simultaneously. Through the decomposition and reconstruction on both color and gradient domains, our DDNet can restore the detailed feature information concealed by the darkness with better visual quality and efficiency. The evaluation experiments on standard and transportation-related datasets demonstrate that our DDNet provides superior enhancement quality and efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, the object detection and scene segmentation experiments indicate the practical benefits for higher-level image analysis under low-light environments in ITS.
Authors:Xiangrong Zhang, Tianyang Zhang, Guanchun Wang, Peng Zhu, Xu Tang, Xiuping Jia, Licheng Jiao
Abstract:
Remote sensing object detection (RSOD), one of the most fundamental and challenging tasks in the remote sensing field, has received longstanding attention. In recent years, deep learning techniques have demonstrated robust feature representation capabilities and led to a big leap in the development of RSOD techniques. In this era of rapid technical evolution, this review aims to present a comprehensive review of the recent achievements in deep learning based RSOD methods. More than 300 papers are covered in this review. We identify five main challenges in RSOD, including multi-scale object detection, rotated object detection, weak object detection, tiny object detection, and object detection with limited supervision, and systematically review the corresponding methods developed in a hierarchical division manner. We also review the widely used benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics within the field of RSOD, as well as the application scenarios for RSOD. Future research directions are provided for further promoting the research in RSOD.
Authors:Alexander Montgomerie-Corcoran, Petros Toupas, Zhewen Yu, Christos-Savvas Bouganis
Abstract:
AI has led to significant advancements in computer vision and image processing tasks, enabling a wide range of applications in real-life scenarios, from autonomous vehicles to medical imaging. Many of those applications require efficient object detection algorithms and complementary real-time, low latency hardware to perform inference of these algorithms. The YOLO family of models is considered the most efficient for object detection, having only a single model pass. Despite this, the complexity and size of YOLO models can be too computationally demanding for current edge-based platforms. To address this, we present SATAY: a Streaming Architecture Toolflow for Accelerating YOLO. This work tackles the challenges of deploying stateof-the-art object detection models onto FPGA devices for ultralow latency applications, enabling real-time, edge-based object detection. We employ a streaming architecture design for our YOLO accelerators, implementing the complete model on-chip in a deeply pipelined fashion. These accelerators are generated using an automated toolflow, and can target a range of suitable FPGA devices. We introduce novel hardware components to support the operations of YOLO models in a dataflow manner, and off-chip memory buffering to address the limited on-chip memory resources. Our toolflow is able to generate accelerator designs which demonstrate competitive performance and energy characteristics to GPU devices, and which outperform current state-of-the-art FPGA accelerators.
Authors:Jiajin Tang, Ge Zheng, Jingyi Yu, Sibei Yang
Abstract:
Task driven object detection aims to detect object instances suitable for affording a task in an image. Its challenge lies in object categories available for the task being too diverse to be limited to a closed set of object vocabulary for traditional object detection. Simply mapping categories and visual features of common objects to the task cannot address the challenge. In this paper, we propose to explore fundamental affordances rather than object categories, i.e., common attributes that enable different objects to accomplish the same task. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-level chain-of-thought prompting (MLCoT) to extract the affordance knowledge from large language models, which contains multi-level reasoning steps from task to object examples to essential visual attributes with rationales. Furthermore, to fully exploit knowledge to benefit object recognition and localization, we propose a knowledge-conditional detection framework, namely CoTDet. It conditions the detector from the knowledge to generate object queries and regress boxes. Experimental results demonstrate that our CoTDet outperforms state-of-the-art methods consistently and significantly (+15.6 box AP and +14.8 mask AP) and can generate rationales for why objects are detected to afford the task.
Authors:Jincheng Li, Chunyu Xie, Xiaoyu Wu, Bin Wang, Dawei Leng
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) is a new object detection paradigm, aiming to localize and recognize unseen objects defined by an unbounded vocabulary. This is challenging since traditional detectors can only learn from pre-defined categories and thus fail to detect and localize objects out of pre-defined vocabulary. To handle the challenge, OVD leverages pre-trained cross-modal VLM, such as CLIP, ALIGN, etc. Previous works mainly focus on the open vocabulary classification part, with less attention on the localization part. We argue that for a good OVD detector, both classification and localization should be parallelly studied for the novel object categories. We show in this work that improving localization as well as cross-modal classification complement each other, and compose a good OVD detector jointly. We analyze three families of OVD methods with different design emphases. We first propose a vanilla method,i.e., cropping a bounding box obtained by a localizer and resizing it into the CLIP. We next introduce another approach, which combines a standard two-stage object detector with CLIP. A two-stage object detector includes a visual backbone, a region proposal network (RPN), and a region of interest (RoI) head. We decouple RPN and ROI head (DRR) and use RoIAlign to extract meaningful features. In this case, it avoids resizing objects. To further accelerate the training time and reduce the model parameters, we couple RPN and ROI head (CRR) as the third approach. We conduct extensive experiments on these three types of approaches in different settings. On the OVD-COCO benchmark, DRR obtains the best performance and achieves 35.8 Novel AP$_{50}$, an absolute 2.8 gain over the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA). For OVD-LVIS, DRR surpasses the previous SOTA by 1.9 AP$_{50}$ in rare categories. We also provide an object detection dataset called PID and provide a baseline on PID.
Authors:Shengcao Cao, Mengtian Li, James Hays, Deva Ramanan, Yi-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
Abstract:
Resource-constrained perception systems such as edge computing and vision-for-robotics require vision models to be both accurate and lightweight in computation and memory usage. While knowledge distillation is a proven strategy to enhance the performance of lightweight classification models, its application to structured outputs like object detection and instance segmentation remains a complicated task, due to the variability in outputs and complex internal network modules involved in the distillation process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet surprisingly effective sequential approach to knowledge distillation that progressively transfers the knowledge of a set of teacher detectors to a given lightweight student. To distill knowledge from a highly accurate but complex teacher model, we construct a sequence of teachers to help the student gradually adapt. Our progressive strategy can be easily combined with existing detection distillation mechanisms to consistently maximize student performance in various settings. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to successfully distill knowledge from Transformer-based teacher detectors to convolution-based students, and unprecedentedly boost the performance of ResNet-50 based RetinaNet from 36.5% to 42.0% AP and Mask R-CNN from 38.2% to 42.5% AP on the MS COCO benchmark.
Authors:Sourav Sanyal, Rohan Kumar Manna, Kaushik Roy
Abstract:
Vision-based object tracking is an essential precursor to performing autonomous aerial navigation in order to avoid obstacles. Biologically inspired neuromorphic event cameras are emerging as a powerful alternative to frame-based cameras, due to their ability to asynchronously detect varying intensities (even in poor lighting conditions), high dynamic range, and robustness to motion blur. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained traction for processing events asynchronously in an energy-efficient manner. On the other hand, physics-based artificial intelligence (AI) has gained prominence recently, as they enable embedding system knowledge via physical modeling inside traditional analog neural networks (ANNs). In this letter, we present an event-based physics-guided neuromorphic planner (EV-Planner) to perform obstacle avoidance using neuromorphic event cameras and physics-based AI. We consider the task of autonomous drone navigation where the mission is to detect moving gates and fly through them while avoiding a collision. We use event cameras to perform object detection using a shallow spiking neural network in an unsupervised fashion. Utilizing the physical equations of the brushless DC motors present in the drone rotors, we train a lightweight energy-aware physics-guided neural network (PgNN) with depth inputs. This predicts the optimal flight time responsible for generating near-minimum energy paths. We spawn the drone in the Gazebo simulator and implement a sensor-fused vision-to-planning neuro-symbolic framework using Robot Operating System (ROS). Simulation results for safe collision-free flight trajectories are presented with performance analysis, ablation study and potential future research directions
Authors:Hengcan Shi, Munawar Hayat, Jianfei Cai
Abstract:
In recent years, open-vocabulary (OV) dense visual prediction (such as OV object detection, semantic, instance and panoptic segmentations) has attracted increasing research attention. However, most of existing approaches are task-specific and individually tackle each task. In this paper, we propose a Unified Open-Vocabulary Network (UOVN) to jointly address four common dense prediction tasks. Compared with separate models, a unified network is more desirable for diverse industrial applications. Moreover, OV dense prediction training data is relatively less. Separate networks can only leverage task-relevant training data, while a unified approach can integrate diverse training data to boost individual tasks. We address two major challenges in unified OV prediction. Firstly, unlike unified methods for fixed-set predictions, OV networks are usually trained with multi-modal data. Therefore, we propose a multi-modal, multi-scale and multi-task (MMM) decoding mechanism to better leverage multi-modal data. Secondly, because UOVN uses data from different tasks for training, there are significant domain and task gaps. We present a UOVN training mechanism to reduce such gaps. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our UOVN.
Authors:Junghyun Kim, Gi-Cheon Kang, Jaein Kim, Suyeon Shin, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Abstract:
Language-Guided Robotic Manipulation (LGRM) is a challenging task as it requires a robot to understand human instructions to manipulate everyday objects. Recent approaches in LGRM rely on pre-trained Visual Grounding (VG) models to detect objects without adapting to manipulation environments. This results in a performance drop due to a substantial domain gap between the pre-training and real-world data. A straightforward solution is to collect additional training data, but the cost of human-annotation is extortionate. In this paper, we propose Grounding Vision to Ceaselessly Created Instructions (GVCCI), a lifelong learning framework for LGRM, which continuously learns VG without human supervision. GVCCI iteratively generates synthetic instruction via object detection and trains the VG model with the generated data. We validate our framework in offline and online settings across diverse environments on different VG models. Experimental results show that accumulating synthetic data from GVCCI leads to a steady improvement in VG by up to 56.7% and improves resultant LGRM by up to 29.4%. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis shows that the unadapted VG model often fails to find correct objects due to a strong bias learned from the pre-training data. Finally, we introduce a novel VG dataset for LGRM, consisting of nearly 252k triplets of image-object-instruction from diverse manipulation environments.
Authors:Hengcan Shi, Munawar Hayat, Jianfei Cai
Abstract:
In recent years, open-vocabulary (OV) object detection has attracted increasing research attention. Unlike traditional detection, which only recognizes fixed-category objects, OV detection aims to detect objects in an open category set. Previous works often leverage vision-language (VL) training data (e.g., referring grounding data) to recognize OV objects. However, they only use pairs of nouns and individual objects in VL data, while these data usually contain much more information, such as scene graphs, which are also crucial for OV detection. In this paper, we propose a novel Scene-Graph-Based Discovery Network (SGDN) that exploits scene graph cues for OV detection. Firstly, a scene-graph-based decoder (SGDecoder) including sparse scene-graph-guided attention (SSGA) is presented. It captures scene graphs and leverages them to discover OV objects. Secondly, we propose scene-graph-based prediction (SGPred), where we build a scene-graph-based offset regression (SGOR) mechanism to enable mutual enhancement between scene graph extraction and object localization. Thirdly, we design a cross-modal learning mechanism in SGPred. It takes scene graphs as bridges to improve the consistency between cross-modal embeddings for OV object classification. Experiments on COCO and LVIS demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we show the ability of our model for OV scene graph detection, while previous OV scene graph generation methods cannot tackle this task.
Authors:Weixin Mao, Jinrong Yang, Zheng Ge, Lin Song, Hongyu Zhou, Tiezheng Mao, Zeming Li, Osamu Yoshie
Abstract:
Depth perception is a crucial component of monoc-ular 3D detection tasks that typically involve ill-posed problems. In light of the success of sample mining techniques in 2D object detection, we propose a simple yet effective mining strategy for improving depth perception in 3D object detection. Concretely, we introduce a plain metric to evaluate the quality of depth predictions, which chooses the mined sample for the model. Moreover, we propose a Gradient-aware and Model-perceive Mining strategy (GMM) for depth learning, which exploits the predicted depth quality for better depth learning through easy mining. GMM is a general strategy that can be readily applied to several state-of-the-art monocular 3D detectors, improving the accuracy of depth prediction. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly improve the performance of 3D object detection while outperforming other state-of-the-art sample mining techniques by a considerable margin. On the nuScenes benchmark, GMM achieved the state-of-the-art (42.1% mAP and 47.3% NDS) performance in monocular object detection.
Authors:Shaohui Mei, Jiawei Lian, Xiaofei Wang, Yuru Su, Mingyang Ma, Lap-Pui Chau
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found widespread applications in interpreting remote sensing (RS) imagery. However, it has been demonstrated in previous works that DNNs are vulnerable to different types of noises, particularly adversarial noises. Surprisingly, there has been a lack of comprehensive studies on the robustness of RS tasks, prompting us to undertake a thorough survey and benchmark on the robustness of image classification and object detection in RS. To our best knowledge, this study represents the first comprehensive examination of both natural robustness and adversarial robustness in RS tasks. Specifically, we have curated and made publicly available datasets that contain natural and adversarial noises. These datasets serve as valuable resources for evaluating the robustness of DNNs-based models. To provide a comprehensive assessment of model robustness, we conducted meticulous experiments with numerous different classifiers and detectors, encompassing a wide range of mainstream methods. Through rigorous evaluation, we have uncovered insightful and intriguing findings, which shed light on the relationship between adversarial noise crafting and model training, yielding a deeper understanding of the susceptibility and limitations of various models, and providing guidance for the development of more resilient and robust models
Authors:Xianhui Cheng, Shoumeng Qiu, Zhikang Zou, Jian Pu, Xiangyang Xue
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection aims to locate objects in different scenes with just a single image. Due to the absence of depth information, several monocular 3D detection techniques have emerged that rely on auxiliary depth maps from the depth estimation task. There are multiple approaches to understanding the representation of depth maps, including treating them as pseudo-LiDAR point clouds, leveraging implicit end-to-end learning of depth information, or considering them as an image input. However, these methods have certain drawbacks, such as their reliance on the accuracy of estimated depth maps and suboptimal utilization of depth maps due to their image-based nature. While LiDAR-based methods and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be utilized for pseudo point clouds and depth maps, respectively, it is always an alternative. In this paper, we propose a framework named the Adaptive Distance Interval Separation Network (ADISN) that adopts a novel perspective on understanding depth maps, as a form that lies between LiDAR and images. We utilize an adaptive separation approach that partitions the depth map into various subgraphs based on distance and treats each of these subgraphs as an individual image for feature extraction. After adaptive separations, each subgraph solely contains pixels within a learned interval range. If there is a truncated object within this range, an evident curved edge will appear, which we can leverage for texture extraction using CNNs to obtain rich depth information in pixels. Meanwhile, to mitigate the inaccuracy of depth estimation, we designed an uncertainty module. To take advantage of both images and depth maps, we use different branches to learn localization detection tasks and appearance tasks separately.
Authors:Sruthi Sudhakar, Viraj Prabhu, Olga Russakovsky, Judy Hoffman
Abstract:
As computer vision systems are being increasingly deployed at scale in high-stakes applications like autonomous driving, concerns about social bias in these systems are rising. Analysis of fairness in real-world vision systems, such as object detection in driving scenes, has been limited to observing predictive inequity across attributes such as pedestrian skin tone, and lacks a consistent methodology to disentangle the role of confounding variables e.g. does my model perform worse for a certain skin tone, or are such scenes in my dataset more challenging due to occlusion and crowds? In this work, we introduce ICON$^2$, a framework for robustly answering this question. ICON$^2$ leverages prior knowledge on the deficiencies of object detection systems to identify performance discrepancies across sub-populations, compute correlations between these potential confounders and a given sensitive attribute, and control for the most likely confounders to obtain a more reliable estimate of model bias. Using our approach, we conduct an in-depth study on the performance of object detection with respect to income from the BDD100K driving dataset, revealing useful insights.
Authors:Yingwei Li, Charles R. Qi, Yin Zhou, Chenxi Liu, Dragomir Anguelov
Abstract:
Occluded and long-range objects are ubiquitous and challenging for 3D object detection. Point cloud sequence data provide unique opportunities to improve such cases, as an occluded or distant object can be observed from different viewpoints or gets better visibility over time. However, the efficiency and effectiveness in encoding long-term sequence data can still be improved. In this work, we propose MoDAR, using motion forecasting outputs as a type of virtual modality, to augment LiDAR point clouds. The MoDAR modality propagates object information from temporal contexts to a target frame, represented as a set of virtual points, one for each object from a waypoint on a forecasted trajectory. A fused point cloud of both raw sensor points and the virtual points can then be fed to any off-the-shelf point-cloud based 3D object detector. Evaluated on the Waymo Open Dataset, our method significantly improves prior art detectors by using motion forecasting from extra-long sequences (e.g. 18 seconds), achieving new state of the arts, while not adding much computation overhead.
Authors:Jiachen Sun, Haizhong Zheng, Qingzhao Zhang, Atul Prakash, Z. Morley Mao, Chaowei Xiao
Abstract:
Perception is crucial in the realm of autonomous driving systems, where bird's eye view (BEV)-based architectures have recently reached state-of-the-art performance. The desirability of self-supervised representation learning stems from the expensive and laborious process of annotating 2D and 3D data. Although previous research has investigated pretraining methods for both LiDAR and camera-based 3D object detection, a unified pretraining framework for multimodal BEV perception is missing. In this study, we introduce CALICO, a novel framework that applies contrastive objectives to both LiDAR and camera backbones. Specifically, CALICO incorporates two stages: point-region contrast (PRC) and region-aware distillation (RAD). PRC better balances the region- and scene-level representation learning on the LiDAR modality and offers significant performance improvement compared to existing methods. RAD effectively achieves contrastive distillation on our self-trained teacher model. CALICO's efficacy is substantiated by extensive evaluations on 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks, where it delivers significant performance improvements. Notably, CALICO outperforms the baseline method by 10.5% and 8.6% on NDS and mAP. Moreover, CALICO boosts the robustness of multimodal 3D object detection against adversarial attacks and corruption. Additionally, our framework can be tailored to different backbones and heads, positioning it as a promising approach for multimodal BEV perception.
Authors:Wenhao Cheng, Junbo Yin, Wei Li, Ruigang Yang, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
This paper addresses the problem of 3D referring expression comprehension (REC) in autonomous driving scenario, which aims to ground a natural language to the targeted region in LiDAR point clouds. Previous approaches for REC usually focus on the 2D or 3D-indoor domain, which is not suitable for accurately predicting the location of the queried 3D region in an autonomous driving scene. In addition, the upper-bound limitation and the heavy computation cost motivate us to explore a better solution. In this work, we propose a new multi-modal visual grounding task, termed LiDAR Grounding. Then we devise a Multi-modal Single Shot Grounding (MSSG) approach with an effective token fusion strategy. It jointly learns the LiDAR-based object detector with the language features and predicts the targeted region directly from the detector without any post-processing. Moreover, the image feature can be flexibly integrated into our approach to provide rich texture and color information. The cross-modal learning enforces the detector to concentrate on important regions in the point cloud by considering the informative language expressions, thus leading to much better accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments on the Talk2Car dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Our work offers a deeper insight into the LiDAR-based grounding task and we expect it presents a promising direction for the autonomous driving community.
Authors:Georgios Batsis, Ioannis Mademlis, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos
Abstract:
Automated detection of contraband items in X-ray images can significantly increase public safety, by enhancing the productivity and alleviating the mental load of security officers in airports, subways, customs/post offices, etc. The large volume and high throughput of passengers, mailed parcels, etc., during rush hours make it a Big Data analysis task. Modern computer vision algorithms relying on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have proven capable of undertaking this task even under resource-constrained and embedded execution scenarios, e.g., as is the case with fast, single-stage, anchor-based object detectors. This paper proposes a two-fold improvement of such algorithms for the X-ray analysis domain, introducing two complementary novelties. Firstly, more efficient anchors are obtained by hierarchical clustering the sizes of the ground-truth training set bounding boxes; thus, the resulting anchors follow a natural hierarchy aligned with the semantic structure of the data. Secondly, the default Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) algorithm at the end of the object detection pipeline is modified to better handle occluded object detection and to reduce the number of false predictions, by inserting the Efficient Intersection over Union (E-IoU) metric into the Weighted Cluster NMS method. E-IoU provides more discriminative geometrical correlations between the candidate bounding boxes/Regions-of-Interest (RoIs). The proposed method is implemented on a common single-stage object detector (YOLOv5) and its experimental evaluation on a relevant public dataset indicates significant accuracy gains over both the baseline and competing approaches. This highlights the potential of Big Data analysis in enhancing public safety.
Authors:Kyle Harlow, Hyesu Jang, Timothy D. Barfoot, Ayoung Kim, Christoffer Heckman
Abstract:
We survey the current state of millimeterwave (mmWave) radar applications in robotics with a focus on unique capabilities, and discuss future opportunities based on the state of the art. Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) mmWave radars operating in the 76--81GHz range are an appealing alternative to lidars, cameras and other sensors operating in the near visual spectrum. Radar has been made more widely available in new packaging classes, more convenient for robotics and its longer wavelengths have the ability to bypass visual clutter such as fog, dust, and smoke. We begin by covering radar principles as they relate to robotics. We then review the relevant new research across a broad spectrum of robotics applications beginning with motion estimation, localization, and mapping. We then cover object detection and classification, and then close with an analysis of current datasets and calibration techniques that provide entry points into radar research.
Authors:Yian Zhao, Wenyu Lv, Shangliang Xu, Jinman Wei, Guanzhong Wang, Qingqing Dang, Yi Liu, Jie Chen
Abstract:
The YOLO series has become the most popular framework for real-time object detection due to its reasonable trade-off between speed and accuracy. However, we observe that the speed and accuracy of YOLOs are negatively affected by the NMS. Recently, end-to-end Transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have provided an alternative to eliminating NMS. Nevertheless, the high computational cost limits their practicality and hinders them from fully exploiting the advantage of excluding NMS. In this paper, we propose the Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR), the first real-time end-to-end object detector to our best knowledge that addresses the above dilemma. We build RT-DETR in two steps, drawing on the advanced DETR: first we focus on maintaining accuracy while improving speed, followed by maintaining speed while improving accuracy. Specifically, we design an efficient hybrid encoder to expeditiously process multi-scale features by decoupling intra-scale interaction and cross-scale fusion to improve speed. Then, we propose the uncertainty-minimal query selection to provide high-quality initial queries to the decoder, thereby improving accuracy. In addition, RT-DETR supports flexible speed tuning by adjusting the number of decoder layers to adapt to various scenarios without retraining. Our RT-DETR-R50 / R101 achieves 53.1% / 54.3% AP on COCO and 108 / 74 FPS on T4 GPU, outperforming previously advanced YOLOs in both speed and accuracy. We also develop scaled RT-DETRs that outperform the lighter YOLO detectors (S and M models). Furthermore, RT-DETR-R50 outperforms DINO-R50 by 2.2% AP in accuracy and about 21 times in FPS. After pre-training with Objects365, RT-DETR-R50 / R101 achieves 55.3% / 56.2% AP. The project page: https://zhao-yian.github.io/RTDETR.
Authors:Xianpeng Liu, Ce Zheng, Kelvin Cheng, Nan Xue, Guo-Jun Qi, Tianfu Wu
Abstract:
The main challenge of monocular 3D object detection is the accurate localization of 3D center. Motivated by a new and strong observation that this challenge can be remedied by a 3D-space local-grid search scheme in an ideal case, we propose a stage-wise approach, which combines the information flow from 2D-to-3D (3D bounding box proposal generation with a single 2D image) and 3D-to-2D (proposal verification by denoising with 3D-to-2D contexts) in a top-down manner. Specifically, we first obtain initial proposals from off-the-shelf backbone monocular 3D detectors. Then, we generate a 3D anchor space by local-grid sampling from the initial proposals. Finally, we perform 3D bounding box denoising at the 3D-to-2D proposal verification stage. To effectively learn discriminative features for denoising highly overlapped proposals, this paper presents a method of using the Perceiver I/O model to fuse the 3D-to-2D geometric information and the 2D appearance information. With the encoded latent representation of a proposal, the verification head is implemented with a self-attention module. Our method, named as MonoXiver, is generic and can be easily adapted to any backbone monocular 3D detectors. Experimental results on the well-established KITTI dataset and the challenging large-scale Waymo dataset show that MonoXiver consistently achieves improvement with limited computation overhead.
Authors:Shengchao Zhou, Weizhou Liu, Chen Hu, Shuchang Zhou, Chao Ma
Abstract:
In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving, the sensor portfolio including multi-modality and single-modality is diverse and complex. Since the multi-modal methods have system complexity while the accuracy of single-modal ones is relatively low, how to make a tradeoff between them is difficult. In this work, we propose a universal cross-modality knowledge distillation framework (UniDistill) to improve the performance of single-modality detectors. Specifically, during training, UniDistill projects the features of both the teacher and the student detector into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV), which is a friendly representation for different modalities. Then, three distillation losses are calculated to sparsely align the foreground features, helping the student learn from the teacher without introducing additional cost during inference. Taking advantage of the similar detection paradigm of different detectors in BEV, UniDistill easily supports LiDAR-to-camera, camera-to-LiDAR, fusion-to-LiDAR and fusion-to-camera distillation paths. Furthermore, the three distillation losses can filter the effect of misaligned background information and balance between objects of different sizes, improving the distillation effectiveness. Extensive experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that UniDistill effectively improves the mAP and NDS of student detectors by 2.0%~3.2%.
Authors:Nanqing Liu, Xun Xu, Turgay Celik, Zongxin Gan, Heng-Chao Li
Abstract:
Object detection in remote sensing images relies on a large amount of labeled data for training. However, the increasing number of new categories and class imbalance make exhaustive annotation impractical. Few-shot object detection (FSOD) addresses this issue by leveraging meta-learning on seen base classes and fine-tuning on novel classes with limited labeled samples. Nonetheless, the substantial scale and orientation variations of objects in remote sensing images pose significant challenges to existing few-shot object detection methods. To overcome these challenges, we propose integrating a feature pyramid network and utilizing prototype features to enhance query features, thereby improving existing FSOD methods. We refer to this modified FSOD approach as a Strong Baseline, which has demonstrated significant performance improvements compared to the original baselines. Furthermore, we tackle the issue of spatial misalignment caused by orientation variations between the query and support images by introducing a Transformation-Invariant Network (TINet). TINet ensures geometric invariance and explicitly aligns the features of the query and support branches, resulting in additional performance gains while maintaining the same inference speed as the Strong Baseline. Extensive experiments on three widely used remote sensing object detection datasets, i.e., NWPU VHR-10.v2, DIOR, and HRRSD demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Qizhen Lan, Qing Tian
Abstract:
Deep learning models have demonstrated remarkable success in object detection, yet their complexity and computational intensity pose a barrier to deploying them in real-world applications (e.g., self-driving perception). Knowledge Distillation (KD) is an effective way to derive efficient models. However, only a small number of KD methods tackle object detection. Also, most of them focus on mimicking the plain features of the teacher model but rarely consider how the features contribute to the final detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for knowledge distillation in object detection, named Gradient-guided Knowledge Distillation (GKD). Our GKD uses gradient information to identify and assign more weights to features that significantly impact the detection loss, allowing the student to learn the most relevant features from the teacher. Furthermore, we present bounding-box-aware multi-grained feature imitation (BMFI) to further improve the KD performance. Experiments on the KITTI and COCO-Traffic datasets demonstrate our method's efficacy in knowledge distillation for object detection. On one-stage and two-stage detectors, our GKD-BMFI leads to an average of 5.1% and 3.8% mAP improvement, respectively, beating various state-of-the-art KD methods.
Authors:Benjamin Kiefer, Yitong Quan, Andreas Zell
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel approach to video object detection detection and tracking on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). By incorporating metadata, the proposed approach creates a memory map of object locations in actual world coordinates, providing a more robust and interpretable representation of object locations in both, image space and the real world. We use this representation to boost confidences, resulting in improved performance for several temporal computer vision tasks, such as video object detection, short and long-term single and multi-object tracking, and video anomaly detection. These findings confirm the benefits of metadata in enhancing the capabilities of UAVs in the field of temporal computer vision and pave the way for further advancements in this area.
Authors:Sebastian Huch, Luca Scalerandi, Esteban Rivera, Markus Lienkamp
Abstract:
LiDAR object detection algorithms based on neural networks for autonomous driving require large amounts of data for training, validation, and testing. As real-world data collection and labeling are time-consuming and expensive, simulation-based synthetic data generation is a viable alternative. However, using simulated data for the training of neural networks leads to a domain shift of training and testing data due to differences in scenes, scenarios, and distributions. In this work, we quantify the sim-to-real domain shift by means of LiDAR object detectors trained with a new scenario-identical real-world and simulated dataset. In addition, we answer the questions of how well the simulated data resembles the real-world data and how well object detectors trained on simulated data perform on real-world data. Further, we analyze point clouds at the target-level by comparing real-world and simulated point clouds within the 3D bounding boxes of the targets. Our experiments show that a significant sim-to-real domain shift exists even for our scenario-identical datasets. This domain shift amounts to an average precision reduction of around 14 % for object detectors trained with simulated data. Additional experiments reveal that this domain shift can be lowered by introducing a simple noise model in simulation. We further show that a simple downsampling method to model real-world physics does not influence the performance of the object detectors.
Authors:Illia Oleksiienko, Alexandros Iosifidis
Abstract:
Autonomous driving needs to rely on high-quality 3D object detection to ensure safe navigation in the world. Uncertainty estimation is an effective tool to provide statistically accurate predictions, while the associated detection uncertainty can be used to implement a more safe navigation protocol or include the user in the loop. In this paper, we propose a Variational Neural Network-based TANet 3D object detector to generate 3D object detections with uncertainty and introduce these detections to an uncertainty-aware AB3DMOT tracker. This is done by applying a linear transformation to the estimated uncertainty matrix, which is subsequently used as a measurement noise for the adopted Kalman filter. We implement two ways to estimate output uncertainty, i.e., internally, by computing the variance of the CNN outputs and then propagating the uncertainty through the post-processing, and externally, by associating the final predictions of different samples and computing the covariance of each predicted box. In experiments, we show that the external uncertainty estimation leads to better results, outperforming both internal uncertainty estimation and classical tracking approaches. Furthermore, we propose a method to initialize the Variational 3D object detector with a pretrained TANet model, which leads to the best performing models.
Authors:Viraj Prabhu, David Acuna, Andrew Liao, Rafid Mahmood, Marc T. Law, Judy Hoffman, Sanja Fidler, James Lucas
Abstract:
Sim2Real domain adaptation (DA) research focuses on the constrained setting of adapting from a labeled synthetic source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled real target domain. However, for high-stakes applications (e.g. autonomous driving), it is common to have a modest amount of human-labeled real data in addition to plentiful auto-labeled source data (e.g. from a driving simulator). We study this setting of supervised sim2real DA applied to 2D object detection. We propose Domain Translation via Conditional Alignment and Reweighting (CARE) a novel algorithm that systematically exploits target labels to explicitly close the sim2real appearance and content gaps. We present an analytical justification of our algorithm and demonstrate strong gains over competing methods on standard benchmarks.
Authors:Tiancheng Zhao, Peng Liu, Kyusong Lee
Abstract:
The advancement of object detection (OD) in open-vocabulary and open-world scenarios is a critical challenge in computer vision. This work introduces OmDet, a novel language-aware object detection architecture, and an innovative training mechanism that harnesses continual learning and multi-dataset vision-language pre-training. Leveraging natural language as a universal knowledge representation, OmDet accumulates a "visual vocabulary" from diverse datasets, unifying the task as a language-conditioned detection framework. Our multimodal detection network (MDN) overcomes the challenges of multi-dataset joint training and generalizes to numerous training datasets without manual label taxonomy merging. We demonstrate superior performance of OmDet over strong baselines in object detection in the wild, open-vocabulary detection, and phrase grounding, achieving state-of-the-art results. Ablation studies reveal the impact of scaling the pre-training visual vocabulary, indicating a promising direction for further expansion to larger datasets. The effectiveness of our deep fusion approach is underscored by its ability to learn jointly from multiple datasets, enhancing performance through knowledge sharing.
Authors:Guanchun Wang, Xiangrong Zhang, Zelin Peng, Xu Tang, Huiyu Zhou, Licheng Jiao
Abstract:
Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) is a challenging task, in which image-level labels (e.g., categories of the instances in the whole image) are used to train an object detector. Many existing methods follow the standard multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm and have achieved promising performance. However, the lack of deterministic information leads to part domination and missing instances. To address these issues, this paper focuses on identifying and fully exploiting the deterministic information in WSOD. We discover that negative instances (i.e. absolutely wrong instances), ignored in most of the previous studies, normally contain valuable deterministic information. Based on this observation, we here propose a negative deterministic information (NDI) based method for improving WSOD, namely NDI-WSOD. Specifically, our method consists of two stages: NDI collecting and exploiting. In the collecting stage, we design several processes to identify and distill the NDI from negative instances online. In the exploiting stage, we utilize the extracted NDI to construct a novel negative contrastive learning mechanism and a negative guided instance selection strategy for dealing with the issues of part domination and missing instances, respectively. Experimental results on several public benchmarks including VOC 2007, VOC 2012 and MS COCO show that our method achieves satisfactory performance.
Authors:Guangxing Han, Long Chen, Jiawei Ma, Shiyuan Huang, Rama Chellappa, Shih-Fu Chang
Abstract:
We study multi-modal few-shot object detection (FSOD) in this paper, using both few-shot visual examples and class semantic information for detection, which are complementary to each other by definition. Most of the previous works on multi-modal FSOD are fine-tuning-based which are inefficient for online applications. Moreover, these methods usually require expertise like class names to extract class semantic embedding, which are hard to get for rare classes. Our approach is motivated by the high-level conceptual similarity of (metric-based) meta-learning and prompt-based learning to learn generalizable few-shot and zero-shot object detection models respectively without fine-tuning. Specifically, we combine the few-shot visual classifier and text classifier learned via meta-learning and prompt-based learning respectively to build the multi-modal classifier and detection models. In addition, to fully exploit the pre-trained language models, we propose meta-learning-based cross-modal prompting to generate soft prompts for novel classes present in few-shot visual examples, which are then used to learn the text classifier. Knowledge distillation is introduced to learn the soft prompt generator without using human prior knowledge of class names, which may not be available for rare classes. Our insight is that the few-shot support images naturally include related context information and semantics of the class. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed multi-modal FSOD models on multiple few-shot object detection benchmarks, achieving promising results.
Authors:Qizhen Lan, Qing Tian
Abstract:
In recent years, knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely used to derive efficient models. Through imitating a large teacher model, a lightweight student model can achieve comparable performance with more efficiency. However, most existing knowledge distillation methods are focused on classification tasks. Only a limited number of studies have applied knowledge distillation to object detection, especially in time-sensitive autonomous driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Instance Distillation (AID) to selectively impart teacher's knowledge to the student to improve the performance of knowledge distillation. Unlike previous KD methods that treat all instances equally, our AID can attentively adjust the distillation weights of instances based on the teacher model's prediction loss. We verified the effectiveness of our AID method through experiments on the KITTI and the COCO traffic datasets. The results show that our method improves the performance of state-of-the-art attention-guided and non-local distillation methods and achieves better distillation results on both single-stage and two-stage detectors. Compared to the baseline, our AID led to an average of 2.7% and 2.1% mAP increases for single-stage and two-stage detectors, respectively. Furthermore, our AID is also shown to be useful for self-distillation to improve the teacher model's performance.
Authors:Saksham Suri, Sai Saketh Rambhatla, Rama Chellappa, Abhinav Shrivastava
Abstract:
Training with sparse annotations is known to reduce the performance of object detectors. Previous methods have focused on proxies for missing ground truth annotations in the form of pseudo-labels for unlabeled boxes. We observe that existing methods suffer at higher levels of sparsity in the data due to noisy pseudo-labels. To prevent this, we propose an end-to-end system that learns to separate the proposals into labeled and unlabeled regions using Pseudo-positive mining. While the labeled regions are processed as usual, self-supervised learning is used to process the unlabeled regions thereby preventing the negative effects of noisy pseudo-labels. This novel approach has multiple advantages such as improved robustness to higher sparsity when compared to existing methods. We conduct exhaustive experiments on five splits on the PASCAL-VOC and COCO datasets achieving state-of-the-art performance. We also unify various splits used across literature for this task and present a standardized benchmark. On average, we improve by $2.6$, $3.9$ and $9.6$ mAP over previous state-of-the-art methods on three splits of increasing sparsity on COCO. Our project is publicly available at https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/SparseDet.
Authors:Yingjie Zhai, Deng-Ping Fan, Jufeng Yang, Ali Borji, Ling Shao, Junwei Han, Liang Wang
Abstract:
Multi-level feature fusion is a fundamental topic in computer vision. It has been exploited to detect, segment and classify objects at various scales. When multi-level features meet multi-modal cues, the optimal feature aggregation and multi-modal learning strategy become a hot potato. In this paper, we leverage the inherent multi-modal and multi-level nature of RGB-D salient object detection to devise a novel cascaded refinement network. In particular, first, we propose to regroup the multi-level features into teacher and student features using a bifurcated backbone strategy (BBS). Second, we introduce a depth-enhanced module (DEM) to excavate informative depth cues from the channel and spatial views. Then, RGB and depth modalities are fused in a complementary way. Our architecture, named Bifurcated Backbone Strategy Network (BBS-Net), is simple, efficient, and backbone-independent. Extensive experiments show that BBS-Net significantly outperforms eighteen SOTA models on eight challenging datasets under five evaluation measures, demonstrating the superiority of our approach ($\sim 4 \%$ improvement in S-measure $vs.$ the top-ranked model: DMRA-iccv2019). In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis on the generalization ability of different RGB-D datasets and provide a powerful training set for future research.
Authors:Reza Akhavian, Mani Amani, Johannes Mootz, Robert Ashe, Behrad Beheshti
Abstract:
The adoption of cyber-physical systems and jobsite intelligence that connects design models, real-time site sensing, and autonomous field operations can dramatically enhance digital management in the construction industry. This paper introduces BIM2RDT (Building Information Models to Robot-Ready Site Digital Twins), an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework designed to transform static Building Information Modeling (BIM) into dynamic, robot-ready digital twins (DTs) that prioritize safety during execution. The framework bridges the gap between pre-existing BIM data and real-time site conditions by integrating three key data streams: geometric and semantic information from BIM models, activity data from IoT sensor networks, and visual-spatial data collected by robots during site traversal. The methodology introduces Semantic-Gravity ICP (SG-ICP), a point cloud registration algorithm that leverages large language model (LLM) reasoning. Unlike traditional methods, SG-ICP utilizes an LLM to infer object-specific, plausible orientation priors based on BIM semantics, improving alignment accuracy by avoiding convergence on local minima. This creates a feedback loop where robot-collected data updates the DT, which in turn optimizes paths for missions. The framework employs YOLOE object detection and Shi-Tomasi corner detection to identify and track construction elements while using BIM geometry as a priori maps. The framework also integrates real-time Hand-Arm Vibration (HAV) monitoring, mapping sensor-detected safety events to the digital twin using IFC standards for intervention. Experiments demonstrate SG-ICP's superiority over standard ICP, achieving RMSE reductions of 64.3%--88.3% in alignment across scenarios with occluded features, ensuring plausible orientations. HAV integration triggers warnings upon exceeding exposure limits, enhancing compliance with ISO 5349-1.
Authors:Chun Liu, Panpan Ding, Zheng Zheng, Hailong Wang, Bingqian Zhu, Tao Xu, Zhigang Han, Jiayao Wang
Abstract:
Current ship detection techniques based on remote sensing imagery primarily rely on the object detection capabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial patch attacks, which can lead to misclassification by the detection model or complete evasion of the targets. Numerous studies have demonstrated that data transformation-based methods can improve the transferability of adversarial examples. However, excessive augmentation of image backgrounds or irrelevant regions may introduce unnecessary interference, resulting in false detections of the object detection model. These errors are not caused by the adversarial patches themselves but rather by the over-augmentation of background and non-target areas. This paper proposes a localized augmentation method that applies augmentation only to the target regions, avoiding any influence on non-target areas. By reducing background interference, this approach enables the loss function to focus more directly on the impact of the adversarial patch on the detection model, thereby improving the attack success rate. Experiments conducted on the HRSC2016 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method effectively increases the success rate of adversarial patch attacks and enhances their transferability.
Authors:Chun Liu, Panpan Ding, Zheng Zheng, Hailong Wang, Bingqian Zhu, Tao Xu, Zhigang Han, Jiayao Wang
Abstract:
Current ship detection techniques based on remote sensing imagery primarily rely on the object detection capabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial patch attacks, which can lead to misclassification by the detection model or complete evasion of the targets. Numerous studies have demonstrated that data transformation-based methods can improve the transferability of adversarial examples. However, excessive augmentation of image backgrounds or irrelevant regions may introduce unnecessary interference, resulting in false detections of the object detection model. These errors are not caused by the adversarial patches themselves but rather by the over-augmentation of background and non-target areas. This paper proposes a localized augmentation method that applies augmentation only to the target regions, avoiding any influence on non-target areas. By reducing background interference, this approach enables the loss function to focus more directly on the impact of the adversarial patch on the detection model, thereby improving the attack success rate. Experiments conducted on the HRSC2016 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method effectively increases the success rate of adversarial patch attacks and enhances their transferability.
Authors:Melanie Wille, Tobias Fischer, Scarlett Raine
Abstract:
Underwater object detection is critical for monitoring marine ecosystems but poses unique challenges, including degraded image quality, imbalanced class distribution, and distinct visual characteristics. Not every species is detected equally well, yet underlying causes remain unclear. We address two key research questions: 1) What factors beyond data quantity drive class-specific performance disparities? 2) How can we systematically improve detection of under-performing marine species? We manipulate the DUO dataset to separate the object detection task into localization and classification and investigate the under-performance of the scallop class. Localization analysis using YOLO11 and TIDE finds that foreground-background discrimination is the most problematic stage regardless of data quantity. Classification experiments reveal persistent precision gaps even with balanced data, indicating intrinsic feature-based challenges beyond data scarcity and inter-class dependencies. We recommend imbalanced distributions when prioritizing precision, and balanced distributions when prioritizing recall. Improving under-performing classes should focus on algorithmic advances, especially within localization modules. We publicly release our code and datasets.
Authors:Honghao Fu, Junlong Ren, Qi Chai, Deheng Ye, Yujun Cai, Hao Wang
Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in embodied decision-making tasks within virtual open-world environments. Nonetheless, their performance is hindered by the absence of domain-specific knowledge. Methods that finetune on large-scale domain-specific data entail prohibitive development costs. This paper introduces VistaWise, a cost-effective agent framework that integrates cross-modal domain knowledge and finetunes a dedicated object detection model for visual analysis. It reduces the requirement for domain-specific training data from millions of samples to a few hundred. VistaWise integrates visual information and textual dependencies into a cross-modal knowledge graph (KG), enabling a comprehensive and accurate understanding of multimodal environments. We also equip the agent with a retrieval-based pooling strategy to extract task-related information from the KG, and a desktop-level skill library to support direct operation of the Minecraft desktop client via mouse and keyboard inputs. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaWise achieves state-of-the-art performance across various open-world tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in reducing development costs while enhancing agent performance.
Authors:Pengzhi Zhong, Xinzhe Wang, Dan Zeng, Qihua Zhou, Feixiang He, Shuiwang Li
Abstract:
Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit significant potential for low-power computation, yet their application in visual tasks remains largely confined to image classification, object detection, and event-based tracking. In contrast, real-world vision systems still widely use conventional RGB video streams, where the potential of directly-trained SNNs for complex temporal tasks such as multi-object tracking (MOT) remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we propose SMTrack-the first directly trained deep SNN framework for end-to-end multi-object tracking on standard RGB videos. SMTrack introduces an adaptive and scale-aware Normalized Wasserstein Distance loss (Asa-NWDLoss) to improve detection and localization performance under varying object scales and densities. Specifically, the method computes the average object size within each training batch and dynamically adjusts the normalization factor, thereby enhancing sensitivity to small objects. For the association stage, we incorporate the TrackTrack identity module to maintain robust and consistent object trajectories. Extensive evaluations on BEE24, MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack show that SMTrack achieves performance on par with leading ANN-based MOT methods, advancing robust and accurate SNN-based tracking in complex scenarios.
Authors:Wentao Qu, Guofeng Mei, Jing Wang, Yujiao Wu, Xiaoshui Huang, Liang Xiao
Abstract:
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have shown success in robust 3D object detection tasks. Existing methods often rely on the score matching from 3D boxes or pre-trained diffusion priors. However, they typically require multi-step iterations in inference, which limits efficiency. To address this, we propose a Robust single-stage fully Sparse 3D object Detection Network with a Detachable Latent Framework (DLF) of DDPMs, named RSDNet. Specifically, RSDNet learns the denoising process in latent feature spaces through lightweight denoising networks like multi-level denoising autoencoders (DAEs). This enables RSDNet to effectively understand scene distributions under multi-level perturbations, achieving robust and reliable detection. Meanwhile, we reformulate the noising and denoising mechanisms of DDPMs, enabling DLF to construct multi-type and multi-level noise samples and targets, enhancing RSDNet robustness to multiple perturbations. Furthermore, a semantic-geometric conditional guidance is introduced to perceive the object boundaries and shapes, alleviating the center feature missing problem in sparse representations, enabling RSDNet to perform in a fully sparse detection pipeline. Moreover, the detachable denoising network design of DLF enables RSDNet to perform single-step detection in inference, further enhancing detection efficiency. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that RSDNet can outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art detection.
Authors:Yuexiong Ding, Qiong Liu, Ankang Ji, Xiaowei Luo, Wen Yi, Albert P. C. Chan
Abstract:
Various technologies have been applied to monitor the proximity between two construction entities, preventing struck-by accidents and thereby enhancing onsite safety. This study comprehensively reviews related efforts dedicated to proximity monitoring and warning (PMW) based on 97 relevant articles published between 2010 and 2024. The bibliometric analysis reveals the technical roadmap over time, as well as the five most influential leaders and the two largest research networks they have established. The qualitative review is then conducted from four perspectives: influencing factor study, hazard level definition and determination, proximity perception, and alarm issuing and receiving. Finally, the limitations and challenges of current proximity perception are discussed, along with corresponding future research directions, including end-to-end three-dimensional (3D) object detection, real-time 3D reconstruction and updating for dynamic construction scenes, and multimodal fusion. This review presents the current research status, limitations, and future directions of PMW, guiding the future development of PMW systems.
Authors:Adhemar de Senneville, Xavier Bou, Thibaud Ehret, Rafael Grompone, Jean Louis Bonne, Nicolas Dumelie, Thomas Lauvaux, Gabriele Facciolo
Abstract:
Object detection is one of the main applications of computer vision in remote sensing imagery. Despite its increasing availability, the sheer volume of remote sensing data poses a challenge when detecting rare objects across large geographic areas. Paradoxically, this common challenge is crucial to many applications, such as estimating environmental impact of certain human activities at scale. In this paper, we propose to address the problem by investigating the methane production and emissions of bio-digesters in France. We first introduce a novel dataset containing bio-digesters, with small training and validation sets, and a large test set with a high imbalance towards observations without objects since such sites are rare. We develop a part-based method that considers essential bio-digester sub-elements to boost initial detections. To this end, we apply our method to new, unseen regions to build an inventory of bio-digesters. We then compute geostatistical estimates of the quantity of methane produced that can be attributed to these infrastructures in a given area at a given time.
Authors:Haodong Zhu, Wenhao Dong, Linlin Yang, Hong Li, Yuguang Yang, Yangyang Ren, Qingcheng Zhu, Zichao Feng, Changbai Li, Shaohui Lin, Runqi Wang, Xiaoyan Luo, Baochang Zhang
Abstract:
Leveraging the complementary characteristics of visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) imagery offers significant potential for improving object detection. In this paper, we propose WaveMamba, a cross-modality fusion method that efficiently integrates the unique and complementary frequency features of RGB and IR decomposed by Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). An improved detection head incorporating the Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform (IDWT) is also proposed to reduce information loss and produce the final detection results. The core of our approach is the introduction of WaveMamba Fusion Block (WMFB), which facilitates comprehensive fusion across low-/high-frequency sub-bands. Within WMFB, the Low-frequency Mamba Fusion Block (LMFB), built upon the Mamba framework, first performs initial low-frequency feature fusion with channel swapping, followed by deep fusion with an advanced gated attention mechanism for enhanced integration. High-frequency features are enhanced using a strategy that applies an ``absolute maximum" fusion approach. These advancements lead to significant performance gains, with our method surpassing state-of-the-art approaches and achieving average mAP improvements of 4.5% on four benchmarks.
Authors:Junhao Su, Feiyu Zhu, Hengyu Shi, Tianyang Han, Yurui Qiu, Junfeng Luo, Xiaoming Wei, Jialin Gao
Abstract:
Deep learning typically relies on end-to-end backpropagation for training, a method that inherently suffers from issues such as update locking during parameter optimization, high GPU memory consumption, and a lack of biological plausibility. In contrast, supervised local learning seeks to mitigate these challenges by partitioning the network into multiple local blocks and designing independent auxiliary networks to update each block separately. However, because gradients are propagated solely within individual local blocks, performance degradation occurs, preventing supervised local learning from supplanting end-to-end backpropagation. To address these limitations and facilitate inter-block information flow, we propose the Momentum Auxiliary Network++ (MAN++). MAN++ introduces a dynamic interaction mechanism by employing the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of parameters from adjacent blocks to enhance communication across the network. The auxiliary network, updated via EMA, effectively bridges the information gap between blocks. Notably, we observed that directly applying EMA parameters can be suboptimal due to feature discrepancies between local blocks. To resolve this issue, we introduce a learnable scaling bias that balances feature differences, thereby further improving performance. We validate MAN++ through extensive experiments on tasks that include image classification, object detection, and image segmentation, utilizing multiple network architectures. The experimental results demonstrate that MAN++ achieves performance comparable to end-to-end training while significantly reducing GPU memory usage. Consequently, MAN++ offers a novel perspective for supervised local learning and presents a viable alternative to conventional training methods.
Authors:Joonhyung Park, Peng Tang, Sagnik Das, Srikar Appalaraju, Kunwar Yashraj Singh, R. Manmatha, Shabnam Ghadar
Abstract:
Visual agent models for automating human activities on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have emerged as a promising research direction, driven by advances in large Vision Language Models (VLMs). A critical challenge in GUI automation is the precise grounding of interface elements across diverse platforms. Existing vision-only GUI agents directly ground elements from large and cluttered screenshots, requiring them to process substantial irrelevant information that compromises their accuracy. In addition, these approaches typically employ basic cross-entropy loss for learning grounding objectives, which fails to effectively capture grounding quality compared to established object detection metrics like Intersection-over-Union (IoU). To address these issues, we introduce R-VLM, a novel GUI grounding approach that leverages zoomed-in region proposals for precise element localization. We also propose an IoU-aware objective function that facilitates model convergence toward high IoU predictions. Our approach bridges the gap between VLMs and conventional object detection techniques, improving the state-of-the-art grounding accuracy by 13% across diverse GUI platforms on the GUI grounding benchmarks ScreenSpot and AgentStudio. In addition, our R-VLM approach shows 3.2-9.7% absolute accuracy improvements in GUI navigation tasks on the AITW and Mind2Web benchmarks.
Authors:Weiwei Duan, Luping Ji, Shengjia Chen, Sicheng Zhu, Jianghong Huang, Mao Ye
Abstract:
Different from general object detection, moving infrared small target detection faces huge challenges due to tiny target size and weak background contrast.Currently, most existing methods are fully-supervised, heavily relying on a large number of manual target-wise annotations. However, manually annotating video sequences is often expensive and time-consuming, especially for low-quality infrared frame images. Inspired by general object detection, non-fully supervised strategies ($e.g.$, weakly supervised) are believed to be potential in reducing annotation requirements. To break through traditional fully-supervised frameworks, as the first exploration work, this paper proposes a new weakly-supervised contrastive learning (WeCoL) scheme, only requires simple target quantity prompts during model training.Specifically, in our scheme, based on the pretrained segment anything model (SAM), a potential target mining strategy is designed to integrate target activation maps and multi-frame energy accumulation.Besides, contrastive learning is adopted to further improve the reliability of pseudo-labels, by calculating the similarity between positive and negative samples in feature subspace.Moreover, we propose a long-short term motion-aware learning scheme to simultaneously model the local motion patterns and global motion trajectory of small targets.The extensive experiments on two public datasets (DAUB and ITSDT-15K) verify that our weakly-supervised scheme could often outperform early fully-supervised methods. Even, its performance could reach over 90\% of state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully-supervised ones.
Authors:Rahul Ramachandran, Ali Garjani, Roman Bachmann, Andrei Atanov, OÄuzhan Fatih Kar, Amir Zamir
Abstract:
Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc).
The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework.
We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.
Authors:Munish Monga, Vishal Chudasama, Pankaj Wasnik, Biplab Banerjee
Abstract:
Real-world object detection systems, such as those in autonomous driving and surveillance, must continuously learn new object categories and simultaneously adapt to changing environmental conditions. Existing approaches, Class Incremental Object Detection (CIOD) and Domain Incremental Object Detection (DIOD) only address one aspect of this challenge. CIOD struggles in unseen domains, while DIOD suffers from catastrophic forgetting when learning new classes, limiting their real-world applicability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Dual Incremental Object Detection (DuIOD), a more practical setting that simultaneously handles class and domain shifts in an exemplar-free manner. We propose DuET, a Task Arithmetic-based model merging framework that enables stable incremental learning while mitigating sign conflicts through a novel Directional Consistency Loss. Unlike prior methods, DuET is detector-agnostic, allowing models like YOLO11 and RT-DETR to function as real-time incremental object detectors. To comprehensively evaluate both retention and adaptation, we introduce the Retention-Adaptability Index (RAI), which combines the Average Retention Index (Avg RI) for catastrophic forgetting and the Average Generalization Index for domain adaptability into a common ground. Extensive experiments on the Pascal Series and Diverse Weather Series demonstrate DuET's effectiveness, achieving a +13.12% RAI improvement while preserving 89.3% Avg RI on the Pascal Series (4 tasks), as well as a +11.39% RAI improvement with 88.57% Avg RI on the Diverse Weather Series (3 tasks), outperforming existing methods.
Authors:Jagadeswara PKV Pothuri, Aditya Bhatt, Prajit KrisshnaKumar, Manaswin Oddiraju, Souma Chowdhury
Abstract:
Autonomous tracking of flying aerial objects has important civilian and defense applications, ranging from search and rescue to counter-unmanned aerial systems (counter-UAS). Ground based tracking requires setting up infrastructure, could be range limited, and may not be feasible in remote areas, crowded cities or in dense vegetation areas. Vision based active tracking of aerial objects from another airborne vehicle, e.g., a chaser unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), promises to fill this important gap, along with serving aerial coordination use cases. Vision-based active tracking by a UAV entails solving two coupled problems: 1) compute-efficient and accurate (target) object detection and target state estimation; and 2) maneuver decisions to ensure that the target remains in the field of view in the future time-steps and favorably positioned for continued detection. As a solution to the first problem, this paper presents a novel integration of standard deep learning based architectures with Kernelized Correlation Filter (KCF) to achieve compute-efficient object detection without compromising accuracy, unlike standalone learning or filtering approaches. The proposed perception framework is validated using a lab-scale setup. For the second problem, to obviate the linearity assumptions and background variations limiting effectiveness of the traditional controllers, we present the use of reinforcement learning to train a neuro-controller for fast computation of velocity maneuvers. New state space, action space and reward formulations are developed for this purpose, and training is performed in simulation using AirSim. The trained model is also tested in AirSim with respect to complex target maneuvers, and is found to outperform a baseline PID control in terms of tracking up-time and average distance maintained (from the target) during tracking.
Authors:Jun Wang, Lixing Zhu, Xiaohan Yu, Abhir Bhalerao, Yulan He
Abstract:
Learning medical visual representations from image-report pairs through joint learning has garnered increasing research attention due to its potential to alleviate the data scarcity problem in the medical domain. The primary challenges stem from the lengthy reports that feature complex discourse relations and semantic pathologies. Previous works have predominantly focused on instance-wise or token-wise cross-modal alignment, often neglecting the importance of pathological-level consistency. This paper presents a novel framework PLACE that promotes the Pathological-Level Alignment and enriches the fine-grained details via Correlation Exploration without additional human annotations. Specifically, we propose a novel pathological-level cross-modal alignment (PCMA) approach to maximize the consistency of pathology observations from both images and reports. To facilitate this, a Visual Pathology Observation Extractor is introduced to extract visual pathological observation representations from localized tokens. The PCMA module operates independently of any external disease annotations, enhancing the generalizability and robustness of our methods. Furthermore, we design a proxy task that enforces the model to identify correlations among image patches, thereby enriching the fine-grained details crucial for various downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks, including classification, image-to-text retrieval, semantic segmentation, object detection and report generation.
Authors:Woojin Shin, Donghwa Kang, Byeongyun Park, Brent Byunghoon Kang, Jinkyu Lee, Hyeongboo Baek
Abstract:
Detection Transformers (DETR) are increasingly adopted in autonomous vehicle (AV) perception systems due to their superior accuracy over convolutional networks. However, concurrently executing multiple DETR tasks presents significant challenges in meeting firm real-time deadlines (R1) and high accuracy requirements (R2), particularly for safety-critical objects, while navigating the inherent latency-accuracy trade-off under resource constraints. Existing real-time DNN scheduling approaches often treat models generically, failing to leverage Transformer-specific properties for efficient resource allocation. To address these challenges, we propose CF-DETR, an integrated system featuring a novel coarse-to-fine Transformer architecture and a dedicated real-time scheduling framework NPFP**. CF-DETR employs three key strategies (A1: coarse-to-fine inference, A2: selective fine inference, A3: multi-level batch inference) that exploit Transformer properties to dynamically adjust patch granularity and attention scope based on object criticality, aiming to satisfy R2. The NPFP** scheduling framework (A4) orchestrates these adaptive mechanisms A1-A3. It partitions each DETR task into a safety-critical coarse subtask for guaranteed critical object detection within its deadline (ensuring R1), and an optional fine subtask for enhanced overall accuracy (R2), while managing individual and batched execution. Our extensive evaluations on server, GPU-enabled embedded platforms, and actual AV platforms demonstrate that CF-DETR, under an NPFP** policy, successfully meets strict timing guarantees for critical operations and achieves significantly higher overall and critical object detection accuracy compared to existing baselines across diverse AV workloads.
Authors:Guoan Xu, Wenfeng Huang, Wenjing Jia, Jiamao Li, Guangwei Gao, Guo-Jun Qi
Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) has made significant advancements in computer vision, thanks to its token mixer's sophisticated ability to capture global dependencies between all tokens. However, the quadratic growth in computational demands as the number of tokens increases limits its practical efficiency. Although recent methods have combined the strengths of convolutions and self-attention to achieve better trade-offs, the expensive pairwise token affinity and complex matrix operations inherent in self-attention remain a bottleneck. To address this challenge, we propose S2AFormer, an efficient Vision Transformer architecture featuring novel Strip Self-Attention (SSA). We design simple yet effective Hybrid Perception Blocks (HPBs) to effectively integrate the local perception capabilities of CNNs with the global context modeling of Transformer's attention mechanisms. A key innovation of SSA lies in its reducing the spatial dimensions of $K$ and $V$ while compressing the channel dimensions of $Q$ and $K$. This design significantly reduces computational overhead while preserving accuracy, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and effectiveness. We evaluate the robustness and efficiency of S2AFormer through extensive experiments on multiple vision benchmarks, including ImageNet-1k for image classification, ADE20k for semantic segmentation, and COCO for object detection and instance segmentation. Results demonstrate that S2AFormer achieves significant accuracy gains with superior efficiency in both GPU and non-GPU environments, making it a strong candidate for efficient vision Transformers.
Authors:Sahil Shah, Harsh Goel, Sai Shankar Narasimhan, Minkyu Choi, S P Sharan, Oguzhan Akcin, Sandeep Chinchali
Abstract:
Modern video understanding systems excel at tasks such as scene classification, object detection, and short video retrieval. However, as video analysis becomes increasingly central to real-world applications, there is a growing need for proactive video agents for the systems that not only interpret video streams but also reason about events and take informed actions. A key obstacle in this direction is temporal reasoning: while deep learning models have made remarkable progress in recognizing patterns within individual frames or short clips, they struggle to understand the sequencing and dependencies of events over time, which is critical for action-driven decision-making. Addressing this limitation demands moving beyond conventional deep learning approaches. We posit that tackling this challenge requires a neuro-symbolic perspective, where video queries are decomposed into atomic events, structured into coherent sequences, and validated against temporal constraints. Such an approach can enhance interpretability, enable structured reasoning, and provide stronger guarantees on system behavior, all key properties for advancing trustworthy video agents. To this end, we present a grand challenge to the research community: developing the next generation of intelligent video agents that integrate three core capabilities: (1) autonomous video search and analysis, (2) seamless real-world interaction, and (3) advanced content generation. By addressing these pillars, we can transition from passive perception to intelligent video agents that reason, predict, and act, pushing the boundaries of video understanding.
Authors:Jiancheng Pan, Shiye Lei, Yuqian Fu, Jiahao Li, Yanxing Liu, Yuze Sun, Xiao He, Long Peng, Xiaomeng Huang, Bo Zhao
Abstract:
Remote sensing image (RSI) interpretation typically faces challenges due to the scarcity of labeled data, which limits the performance of RSI interpretation tasks. To tackle this challenge, we propose EarthSynth, a diffusion-based generative foundation model that enables synthesizing multi-category, cross-satellite labeled Earth observation for downstream RSI interpretation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, EarthSynth is the first to explore multi-task generation for remote sensing, tackling the challenge of limited generalization in task-oriented synthesis for RSI interpretation. EarthSynth, trained on the EarthSynth-180K dataset, employs the Counterfactual Composition training strategy with a three-dimensional batch-sample selection mechanism to improve training data diversity and enhance category control. Furthermore, a rule-based method of R-Filter is proposed to filter more informative synthetic data for downstream tasks. We evaluate our EarthSynth on scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation in open-world scenarios. There are significant improvements in open-vocabulary understanding tasks, offering a practical solution for advancing RSI interpretation.
Authors:Zhengyang Lu, Bingjie Lu, Weifan Wang, Feng Wang
Abstract:
Fabric defect detection confronts two fundamental challenges. First, conventional non-maximum suppression disrupts gradient flow, which hinders genuine end-to-end learning. Second, acquiring pixel-level annotations at industrial scale is prohibitively costly. Addressing these limitations, we propose a differentiable NMS framework for fabric defect detection that achieves superior localization precision through end-to-end optimization. We reformulate NMS as a differentiable bipartite matching problem solved through the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, maintaining uninterrupted gradient flow throughout the network. This approach specifically targets the irregular morphologies and ambiguous boundaries of fabric defects by integrating proposal quality, feature similarity, and spatial relationships. Our entropy-constrained mask refinement mechanism further enhances localization precision through principled uncertainty modeling. Extensive experiments on the Tianchi fabric defect dataset demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing methods while maintaining real-time speeds suitable for industrial deployment. The framework exhibits remarkable adaptability across different architectures and generalizes effectively to general object detection tasks.
Authors:Zhihao Zhang, Abhinav Kumar, Girish Chandar Ganesan, Xiaoming Liu
Abstract:
Accurately predicting 3D attributes is crucial for monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D), with depth estimation posing the greatest challenge due to the inherent ambiguity in mapping 2D images to 3D space. While existing methods leverage multiple depth cues (e.g., estimating depth uncertainty, modeling depth error) to improve depth accuracy, they overlook that accurate depth prediction requires conditioning on other 3D attributes, as these attributes are intrinsically inter-correlated through the 3D to 2D projection, which ultimately limits overall accuracy and stability. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in large language models (LLMs), this paper proposes MonoCoP, which leverages a Chain-of-Prediction (CoP) to predict attributes sequentially and conditionally via three key designs. First, it employs a lightweight AttributeNet (AN) for each 3D attribute to learn attribute-specific features. Next, MonoCoP constructs an explicit chain to propagate these learned features from one attribute to the next. Finally, MonoCoP uses a residual connection to aggregate features for each attribute along the chain, ensuring that later attribute predictions are conditioned on all previously processed attributes without forgetting the features of earlier ones. Experimental results show that our MonoCoP achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on the KITTI leaderboard without requiring additional data and further surpasses existing methods on the Waymo and nuScenes frontal datasets.
Authors:Xinyuan Zhang, Yonglin Tian, Fei Lin, Yue Liu, Jing Ma, Kornélia Sára Szatmáry, Fei-Yue Wang
Abstract:
The growing demand for intelligent logistics, particularly fine-grained terminal delivery, underscores the need for autonomous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle)-based delivery systems. However, most existing last-mile delivery studies rely on ground robots, while current UAV-based Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks primarily focus on coarse-grained, long-range goals, making them unsuitable for precise terminal delivery. To bridge this gap, we propose LogisticsVLN, a scalable aerial delivery system built on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for autonomous terminal delivery. LogisticsVLN integrates lightweight Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual-Language Models (VLMs) in a modular pipeline for request understanding, floor localization, object detection, and action-decision making. To support research and evaluation in this new setting, we construct the Vision-Language Delivery (VLD) dataset within the CARLA simulator. Experimental results on the VLD dataset showcase the feasibility of the LogisticsVLN system. In addition, we conduct subtask-level evaluations of each module of our system, offering valuable insights for improving the robustness and real-world deployment of foundation model-based vision-language delivery systems.
Authors:Nikolaos Louloudakis, Ajitha Rajan
Abstract:
With over 700 stars on GitHub and being part of the official ONNX repository, the ONNX Optimizer is the default tool for applying graph-based optimizations to ONNX models. Despite its widespread use, its ability to maintain model accuracy during optimization has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we present OODTE, a utility designed to automatically and comprehensively evaluate the correctness of the ONNX Optimizer. OODTE adopts a straightforward yet powerful differential testing and evaluation methodology, which can be readily adapted for use with other compiler optimizers. Specifically, OODTE takes a collection of ONNX models, applies optimizations, and executes both the original and optimized versions across a user-defined input set, automatically capturing any issues encountered during optimization. When discrepancies in accuracy arise, OODTE iteratively isolates the responsible optimization pass by repeating the process at a finer granularity. We applied OODTE to 130 well-known models from the official ONNX Model Hub, spanning diverse tasks including classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, text summarization, question answering, and sentiment analysis. Our evaluation revealed that 9.2% of the model instances either caused the optimizer to crash or led to the generation of invalid models using default optimization strategies. Additionally, 30% of classification models and 16.6% of object detection and segmentation models exhibited differing outputs across original and optimized versions, whereas models focused on text-related tasks were generally robust to optimization. OODTE uncovered 15 issues-14 previously unknown-affecting 9 of 47 optimization passes and the optimizer overall. All issues were reported to the ONNX Optimizer team. OODTE offers a simple but effective framework for validating AI model optimizers, applicable beyond the ONNX ecosystem.
Authors:Haoteng Li, Zhao Yang, Zezhong Qian, Gongpeng Zhao, Yuqi Huang, Jun Yu, Huazheng Zhou, Longjun Liu
Abstract:
Accurate and high-fidelity driving scene reconstruction relies on fully leveraging scene information as conditioning. However, existing approaches, which primarily use 3D bounding boxes and binary maps for foreground and background control, fall short in capturing the complexity of the scene and integrating multi-modal information. In this paper, we propose DualDiff, a dual-branch conditional diffusion model designed to enhance multi-view driving scene generation. We introduce Occupancy Ray Sampling (ORS), a semantic-rich 3D representation, alongside numerical driving scene representation, for comprehensive foreground and background control. To improve cross-modal information integration, we propose a Semantic Fusion Attention (SFA) mechanism that aligns and fuses features across modalities. Furthermore, we design a foreground-aware masked (FGM) loss to enhance the generation of tiny objects. DualDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in FID score, as well as consistently better results in downstream BEV segmentation and 3D object detection tasks.
Authors:Carlo Sgaravatti, Roberto Basla, Riccardo Pieroni, Matteo Corno, Sergio M. Savaresi, Luca Magri, Giacomo Boracchi
Abstract:
We present a new way to detect 3D objects from multimodal inputs, leveraging both LiDAR and RGB cameras in a hybrid late-cascade scheme, that combines an RGB detection network and a 3D LiDAR detector. We exploit late fusion principles to reduce LiDAR False Positives, matching LiDAR detections with RGB ones by projecting the LiDAR bounding boxes on the image. We rely on cascade fusion principles to recover LiDAR False Negatives leveraging epipolar constraints and frustums generated by RGB detections of separate views. Our solution can be plugged on top of any underlying single-modal detectors, enabling a flexible training process that can take advantage of pre-trained LiDAR and RGB detectors, or train the two branches separately. We evaluate our results on the KITTI object detection benchmark, showing significant performance improvements, especially for the detection of Pedestrians and Cyclists.
Authors:Long Li, Jiajia Li, Dong Chen, Lina Pu, Haibo Yao, Yanbo Huang
Abstract:
In modern smart agriculture, object detection plays a crucial role by enabling automation, precision farming, and monitoring of resources. From identifying crop health and pest infestations to optimizing harvesting processes, accurate object detection enhances both productivity and sustainability. However, training object detection models often requires large-scale data collection and raises privacy concerns, particularly when sensitive agricultural data is distributed across farms. To address these challenges, we propose VLLFL, a vision-language model-based lightweight federated learning framework (VLLFL). It harnesses the generalization and context-aware detection capabilities of the vision-language model (VLM) and leverages the privacy-preserving nature of federated learning. By training a compact prompt generator to boost the performance of the VLM deployed across different farms, VLLFL preserves privacy while reducing communication overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that VLLFL achieves 14.53% improvement in the performance of VLM while reducing 99.3% communication overhead. Spanning tasks from identifying a wide variety of fruits to detecting harmful animals in agriculture, the proposed framework offers an efficient, scalable, and privacy-preserving solution specifically tailored to agricultural applications.
Authors:Qishun Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Chenglong Li, Bo Jiang
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal Video Object Detection (RGBT VOD) can address the limitation of traditional RGB-based VOD in challenging lighting conditions, making it more practical and effective in many applications.
However, similar to most RGBT fusion tasks, it still mainly relies on manually aligned multimodal image pairs.
In this paper, we propose a novel Multimodal Spatio-temporal Graph learning Network (MSGNet) for alignment-free RGBT VOD problem by leveraging the robust graph representation learning model.
Specifically, we first design an Adaptive Partitioning Layer (APL) to estimate the corresponding regions of the Thermal image within the RGB image (high-resolution), achieving a preliminary inexact alignment.
Then, we introduce the Spatial Sparse Graph Learning Module (S-SGLM) which employs a sparse information passing mechanism on the estimated inexact alignment to achieve reliable information interaction between different modalities.
Moreover, to fully exploit the temporal cues for RGBT VOD problem, we introduce Hybrid Structured Temporal Modeling (HSTM), which involves a Temporal Sparse Graph Learning Module (T-SGLM) and Temporal Star Block (TSB). T-SGLM aims to filter out some redundant information between adjacent frames by employing the sparse aggregation mechanism on the temporal graph. Meanwhile, TSB is dedicated to achieving the complementary learning of local spatial relationships.
Extensive comparative experiments conducted on both the aligned dataset VT-VOD50 and the unaligned dataset UVT-VOD2024 demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. Our project will be made available on our website for free public access.
Authors:Hanxue Zhang, Haoran Jiang, Qingsong Yao, Yanan Sun, Renrui Zhang, Hao Zhao, Hongyang Li, Hongzi Zhu, Zetong Yang
Abstract:
Despite the success of deep learning in close-set 3D object detection, existing approaches struggle with zero-shot generalization to novel objects and camera configurations. We introduce DetAny3D, a promptable 3D detection foundation model capable of detecting any novel object under arbitrary camera configurations using only monocular inputs. Training a foundation model for 3D detection is fundamentally constrained by the limited availability of annotated 3D data, which motivates DetAny3D to leverage the rich prior knowledge embedded in extensively pre-trained 2D foundation models to compensate for this scarcity. To effectively transfer 2D knowledge to 3D, DetAny3D incorporates two core modules: the 2D Aggregator, which aligns features from different 2D foundation models, and the 3D Interpreter with Zero-Embedding Mapping, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting in 2D-to-3D knowledge transfer. Experimental results validate the strong generalization of our DetAny3D, which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on unseen categories and novel camera configurations, but also surpasses most competitors on in-domain data.DetAny3D sheds light on the potential of the 3D foundation model for diverse applications in real-world scenarios, e.g., rare object detection in autonomous driving, and demonstrates promise for further exploration of 3D-centric tasks in open-world settings. More visualization results can be found at DetAny3D project page.
Authors:Xingyuan Li, Ruichao Hou, Tongwei Ren, Gangshan Wu
Abstract:
Existing RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) methods aim to identify visually significant objects by leveraging both RGB and thermal modalities to enable robust performance in complex scenarios, but they often suffer from limited generalization due to the constrained diversity of available datasets and the inefficiencies in constructing multi-modal representations. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning-based RGB-T SOD method, named KAN-SAM, which reveals the potential of visual foundational models for RGB-T SOD tasks. Specifically, we extend Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for RGB-T SOD by introducing thermal features as guiding prompts through efficient and accurate Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) adapters, which effectively enhance RGB representations and improve robustness. Furthermore, we introduce a mutually exclusive random masking strategy to reduce reliance on RGB data and improve generalization. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Masakazu Yoshimura, Junji Otsuka, Radu Berdan, Takeshi Ohashi
Abstract:
DNN-based methods have been successful in Image Signal Processor (ISP) and image enhancement (IE) tasks. However, the cost of creating training data for these tasks is considerably higher than for other tasks, making it difficult to prepare large-scale datasets. Also, creating personalized ISP and IE with minimal training data can lead to new value streams since preferred image quality varies depending on the person and use case. While semi-supervised learning could be a potential solution in such cases, it has rarely been utilized for these tasks. In this paper, we realize semi-supervised learning for ISP and IE leveraging a RAW image reconstruction (sRGB-to-RAW) method. Although existing sRGB-to-RAW methods can generate pseudo-RAW image datasets that improve the accuracy of RAW-based high-level computer vision tasks such as object detection, their quality is not sufficient for ISP and IE tasks that require precise image quality definition. Therefore, we also propose a sRGB-to-RAW method that can improve the image quality of these tasks. The proposed semi-supervised learning with the proposed sRGB-to-RAW method successfully improves the image quality of various models on various datasets.
Authors:Jee Won Lee, Hansol Lim, SooYeun Yang, Jongseong Brad Choi
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel masked attention-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approach to enhance robotic perception and object detection in industrial and smart factory environments. U2-Net is employed for background removal to isolate target objects from raw images, thereby minimizing clutter and ensuring that the model processes only relevant data. Additionally, a Sobel filter-based attention mechanism is integrated into the 3DGS framework to enhance fine details - capturing critical features such as screws, wires, and intricate textures essential for high-precision tasks. We validate our approach using quantitative metrics, including L1 loss, SSIM, PSNR, comparing the performance of the background-removed and attention-incorporated 3DGS model against the ground truth images and the original 3DGS training baseline. The results demonstrate significant improves in visual fidelity and detail preservation, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in enhancing robotic vision for object recognition and manipulation in complex industrial settings.
Authors:Ruidan Xing, Runyi Huang, Qing Xu, Lei He
Abstract:
End-to-end autonomous driving solutions, which process multi-modal sensory data to directly generate refined control commands, have become a dominant paradigm in autonomous driving research. However, these approaches predominantly depend on single-vehicle data collection for model training and optimization, resulting in significant challenges such as high data acquisition and annotation costs, the scarcity of critical driving scenarios, and fragmented datasets that impede model generalization. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce RS2AD, a novel framework for reconstructing and synthesizing vehicle-mounted LiDAR data from roadside sensor observations. Specifically, our method transforms roadside LiDAR point clouds into the vehicle-mounted LiDAR coordinate system by leveraging the target vehicle's relative pose. Subsequently, high-fidelity vehicle-mounted LiDAR data is synthesized through virtual LiDAR modeling, point cloud classification, and resampling techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to reconstruct vehicle-mounted LiDAR data from roadside sensor inputs. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that incorporating the data generated by the RS2AD method (the RS2V-L dataset) into model training as a supplement to the KITTI dataset can significantly enhance the accuracy of 3D object detection and greatly improve the efficiency of end-to-end autonomous driving data generation. These findings strongly validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and underscore its potential in reducing dependence on costly vehicle-mounted data collection while improving the robustness of autonomous driving models.
Authors:Hiep Truong Cong, Ajay Kumar Sigatapu, Arindam Das, Yashwanth Sharma, Venkatesh Satagopan, Ganesh Sistu, Ciaran Eising
Abstract:
Accurate motion understanding of the dynamic objects within the scene in bird's-eye-view (BEV) is critical to ensure a reliable obstacle avoidance system and smooth path planning for autonomous vehicles. However, this task has received relatively limited exploration when compared to object detection and segmentation with only a few recent vision-based approaches presenting preliminary findings that significantly deteriorate in low-light, nighttime, and adverse weather conditions such as rain. Conversely, LiDAR and radar sensors remain almost unaffected in these scenarios, and radar provides key velocity information of the objects. Therefore, we introduce BEVMOSNet, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end multimodal fusion leveraging cameras, LiDAR, and radar to precisely predict the moving objects in BEV. In addition, we perform a deeper analysis to find out the optimal strategy for deformable cross-attention-guided sensor fusion for cross-sensor knowledge sharing in BEV. While evaluating BEVMOSNet on the nuScenes dataset, we show an overall improvement in IoU score of 36.59% compared to the vision-based unimodal baseline BEV-MoSeg (Sigatapu et al., 2023), and 2.35% compared to the multimodel SimpleBEV (Harley et al., 2022), extended for the motion segmentation task, establishing this method as the state-of-the-art in BEV motion segmentation.
Authors:Weiyi Xiong, Zean Zou, Qiuchi Zhao, Fengchun He, Bing Zhu
Abstract:
As the previous state-of-the-art 4D radar-camera fusion-based 3D object detection method, LXL utilizes the predicted image depth distribution maps and radar 3D occupancy grids to assist the sampling-based image view transformation. However, the depth prediction lacks accuracy and consistency, and the concatenation-based fusion in LXL impedes the model robustness. In this work, we propose LXLv2, where modifications are made to overcome the limitations and improve the performance. Specifically, considering the position error in radar measurements, we devise a one-to-many depth supervision strategy via radar points, where the radar cross section (RCS) value is further exploited to adjust the supervision area for object-level depth consistency. Additionally, a channel and spatial attention-based fusion module named CSAFusion is introduced to improve feature adaptiveness. Experimental results on the View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet datasets show that the proposed LXLv2 can outperform LXL in detection accuracy, inference speed and robustness, demonstrating the effectiveness of the model.
Authors:Ang Jia Ning Shermaine, Michalis Lazarou, Tania Stathaki
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of various data augmentation techniques on the performance of object detection models. Specifically, we explore classical augmentation methods, image compositing, and advanced generative models such as Stable Diffusion XL and ControlNet. The objective of this work is to enhance model robustness and improve detection accuracy, particularly when working with limited annotated data. Using YOLOv8, we fine-tune the model on a custom dataset consisting of commercial and military aircraft, applying different augmentation strategies. Our experiments show that image compositing offers the highest improvement in detection performance, as measured by precision, recall, and mean Average Precision (mAP@0.50). Other methods, including Stable Diffusion XL and ControlNet, also demonstrate significant gains, highlighting the potential of advanced data augmentation techniques for object detection tasks. The results underline the importance of dataset diversity and augmentation in achieving better generalization and performance in real-world applications. Future work will explore the integration of semi-supervised learning methods and further optimizations to enhance model performance across larger and more complex datasets.
Authors:Md. Jahin Alam, Muhammad Zubair Hasan, Md Maisoon Rahman, Md Awsafur Rahman, Najibul Haque Sarker, Shariar Azad, Tasnim Nishat Islam, Bishmoy Paul, Tanvir Anjum, Barproda Halder, Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
Abstract:
Real time vehicle detection is a challenging task for urban traffic surveillance. Increase in urbanization leads to increase in accidents and traffic congestion in junction areas resulting in delayed travel time. In order to solve these problems, an intelligent system utilizing automatic detection and tracking system is significant. But this becomes a challenging task at road intersection areas which require a wide range of field view. For this reason, fish eye cameras are widely used in real time vehicle detection purpose to provide large area coverage and 360 degree view at junctions. However, it introduces challenges such as light glare from vehicles and street lights, shadow, non-linear distortion, scaling issues of vehicles and proper localization of small vehicles. To overcome each of these challenges, a modified YOLOv5 object detection scheme is proposed. YOLOv5 is a deep learning oriented convolutional neural network (CNN) based object detection method. The proposed scheme for detecting vehicles in fish-eye images consists of a light-weight day-night CNN classifier so that two different solutions can be implemented to address the day-night detection issues. Furthurmore, challenging instances are upsampled in the dataset for proper localization of vehicles and later on the detection model is ensembled and trained in different combination of vehicle datasets for better generalization, detection and accuracy. For testing, a real world fisheye dataset provided by the Video and Image Processing (VIP) Cup organizer ISSD has been used which includes images from video clips of different fisheye cameras at junction of different cities during day and night time. Experimental results show that our proposed model has outperformed the YOLOv5 model on the dataset by 13.7% mAP @ 0.5.
Authors:Yiqi Huang, Travis Davies, Jiahuan Yan, Xiang Chen, Yu Tian, Luhui Hu
Abstract:
Imitation learning and world models have shown significant promise in advancing generalizable robotic learning, with robotic grasping remaining a critical challenge for achieving precise manipulation. Existing methods often rely heavily on robot arm state data and RGB images, leading to overfitting to specific object shapes or positions. To address these limitations, we propose RoboGrasp, a universal grasping policy framework that integrates pretrained grasp detection models with robotic learning. By leveraging robust visual guidance from object detection and segmentation tasks, RoboGrasp significantly enhances grasp precision, stability, and generalizability, achieving up to 34% higher success rates in few-shot learning and grasping box prompt tasks. Built on diffusion-based methods, RoboGrasp is adaptable to various robotic learning paradigms, enabling precise and reliable manipulation across diverse and complex scenarios. This framework represents a scalable and versatile solution for tackling real-world challenges in robotic grasping.
Authors:Donghwa Kang, Woojin Shin, Cheol-Ho Hong, Minsuk Koo, Brent ByungHoon Kang, Jinkyu Lee, Hyeongboo Baek
Abstract:
Given the energy constraints in autonomous mobile agents (AMAs), such as unmanned vehicles, spiking neural networks (SNNs) are increasingly favored as a more efficient alternative to traditional artificial neural networks. AMAs employ multi-object detection (MOD) from multiple cameras to identify nearby objects while ensuring two essential objectives, (R1) timing guarantee and (R2) high accuracy for safety. In this paper, we propose RT-SNN, the first system design, aiming at achieving R1 and R2 in SNN-based MOD systems on AMAs. Leveraging the characteristic that SNNs gather feature data of input image termed as membrane potential, through iterative computation over multiple timesteps, RT-SNN provides multiple execution options with adjustable timesteps and a novel method for reusing membrane potential to support R1. Then, it captures how these execution strategies influence R2 by introducing a novel notion of mean absolute error and membrane confidence. Further, RT-SNN develops a new scheduling framework consisting of offline schedulability analysis for R1 and a run-time scheduling algorithm for R2 using the notion of membrane confidence. We deployed RT-SNN to Spiking-YOLO, the SNN-based MOD model derived from ANN-to-SNN conversion, and our experimental evaluation confirms its effectiveness in meeting the R1 and R2 requirements while providing significant energy efficiency.
Authors:Adarsh Kumar Kosta, Amogh Joshi, Arjun Roy, Rohan Kumar Manna, Manish Nagaraj, Kaushik Roy
Abstract:
Object detection and tracking is an essential perception task for enabling fully autonomous navigation in robotic systems. Edge robot systems such as small drones need to execute complex maneuvers at high-speeds with limited resources, which places strict constraints on the underlying algorithms and hardware. Traditionally, frame-based cameras are used for vision-based perception due to their rich spatial information and simplified synchronous sensing capabilities. However, obtaining detailed information across frames incurs high energy consumption and may not even be required. In addition, their low temporal resolution renders them ineffective in high-speed motion scenarios. Event-based cameras offer a biologically-inspired solution to this by capturing only changes in intensity levels at exceptionally high temporal resolution and low power consumption, making them ideal for high-speed motion scenarios. However, their asynchronous and sparse outputs are not natively suitable with conventional deep learning methods. In this work, we propose TOFFE, a lightweight hybrid framework for performing event-based object motion estimation (including pose, direction, and speed estimation), referred to as Object Flow. TOFFE integrates bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and conventional Analog Neural Networks (ANNs), to efficiently process events at high temporal resolutions while being simple to train. Additionally, we present a novel event-based synthetic dataset involving high-speed object motion to train TOFFE. Our experimental results show that TOFFE achieves 5.7x/8.3x reduction in energy consumption and 4.6x/5.8x reduction in latency on edge GPU(Jetson TX2)/hybrid hardware(Loihi-2 and Jetson TX2), compared to previous event-based object detection baselines.
Authors:Xinyu Wang, Hong-Shuo Chen, Zhiruo Zhou, Suya You, Azad M. Madni, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to distinguish hidden objects embedded in an environment highly similar to the object. Conventional video-based COD (VCOD) methods explicitly extract motion cues or employ complex deep learning networks to handle the temporal information, which is limited by high complexity and unstable performance. In this work, we propose a green VCOD method named GreenVCOD. Built upon a green ICOD method, GreenVCOD uses long- and short-term temporal neighborhoods (TN) to capture joint spatial/temporal context information for decision refinement. Experimental results show that GreenVCOD offers competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art VCOD benchmarks.
Authors:Mehdi Benallegue, Guillaume Lorthioir, Antonin Dallard, Rafael Cisneros-Limón, Iori Kumagai, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Hiroshi Kaminaga, Masaki Murooka, Antoine Andre, Pierre Gergondet, Kenji Kaneko, Guillaume Caron, Fumio Kanehiro, Abderrahmane Kheddar, Soh Yukizaki, Junichi Karasuyama, Junichi Murakami, Masayuki Kamon
Abstract:
This paper describes RHP Friends, a social humanoid robot developed to enable assistive robotic deployments in human-coexisting environments. As a use-case application, we present its potential use in nursing by extending its capabilities to operate human devices and tools according to the task and by enabling remote assistance operations. To meet a wide variety of tasks and situations in environments designed by and for humans, we developed a system that seamlessly integrates the slim and lightweight robot and several technologies: locomanipulation, multi-contact motion, teleoperation, and object detection and tracking. We demonstrated the system's usage in a nursing application. The robot efficiently performed the daily task of patient transfer and a non-routine task, represented by a request to operate a circuit breaker. This demonstration, held at the 2023 International Robot Exhibition (IREX), conducted three times a day over three days.
Authors:Hiran Sarkar, Vishal Chudasama, Naoyuki Onoe, Pankaj Wasnik, Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Abstract:
Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) has emerged as a contemporary research direction to address the detection of unknown objects. Recently, few works have achieved remarkable performance in the OSOD task by employing contrastive clustering to separate unknown classes. In contrast, we propose a new semantic clustering-based approach to facilitate a meaningful alignment of clusters in semantic space and introduce a class decorrelation module to enhance inter-cluster separation. Our approach further incorporates an object focus module to predict objectness scores, which enhances the detection of unknown objects. Further, we employ i) an evaluation technique that penalizes low-confidence outputs to mitigate the risk of misclassification of the unknown objects and ii) a new metric called HMP that combines known and unknown precision using harmonic mean. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant improvement on the MS-COCO & PASCAL VOC dataset for the OSOD task.
Authors:Shuaiting Li, Chengxuan Wang, Juncan Deng, Zeyu Wang, Zewen Ye, Zongsheng Wang, Haibin Shen, Kejie Huang
Abstract:
Vector quantization(VQ) is a hardware-friendly DNN compression method that can reduce the storage cost and weight-loading datawidth of hardware accelerators. However, conventional VQ techniques lead to significant accuracy loss because the important weights are not well preserved. To tackle this problem, a novel approach called MVQ is proposed, which aims at better approximating important weights with a limited number of codewords. At the algorithm level, our approach removes the less important weights through N:M pruning and then minimizes the vector clustering error between the remaining weights and codewords by the masked k-means algorithm. Only distances between the unpruned weights and the codewords are computed, which are then used to update the codewords. At the architecture level, our accelerator implements vector quantization on an EWS (Enhanced weight stationary) CNN accelerator and proposes a sparse systolic array design to maximize the benefits brought by masked vector quantization.\\ Our algorithm is validated on various models for image classification, object detection, and segmentation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that MVQ not only outperforms conventional vector quantization methods at comparable compression ratios but also reduces FLOPs. Under ASIC evaluation, our MVQ accelerator boosts energy efficiency by 2.3$\times$ and reduces the size of the systolic array by 55\% when compared with the base EWS accelerator. Compared to the previous sparse accelerators, MVQ achieves 1.73$\times$ higher energy efficiency.
Authors:Saheli Hazra, Sudip Das, Rohit Choudhary, Arindam Das, Ganesh Sistu, Ciaran Eising, Ujjwal Bhattacharya
Abstract:
Applying pseudo labeling techniques has been found to be advantageous in semi-supervised 3D object detection (SSOD) in Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) for autonomous driving, particularly where labeled data is limited. In the literature, Exponential Moving Average (EMA) has been used for adjustments of the weights of teacher network by the student network. However, the same induces catastrophic forgetting in the teacher network. In this work, we address this issue by introducing a novel concept of Reflective Teacher where the student is trained by both labeled and pseudo labeled data while its knowledge is progressively passed to the teacher through a regularizer to ensure retention of previous knowledge. Additionally, we propose Geometry Aware BEV Fusion (GA-BEVFusion) for efficient alignment of multi-modal BEV features, thus reducing the disparity between the modalities - camera and LiDAR. This helps to map the precise geometric information embedded among LiDAR points reliably with the spatial priors for extraction of semantic information from camera images. Our experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo datasets demonstrate: 1) improved performance over state-of-the-art methods in both fully supervised and semi-supervised settings; 2) Reflective Teacher achieves equivalent performance with only 25% and 22% of labeled data for nuScenes and Waymo datasets respectively, in contrast to other fully supervised methods that utilize the full labeled dataset.
Authors:Seokju Yun, Seunghye Chae, Dongheon Lee, Youngmin Ro
Abstract:
Domain generalization (DG) aims to adapt a model using one or multiple source domains to ensure robust performance in unseen target domains. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of foundation models has shown promising results in the context of DG problem. Nevertheless, existing PEFT methods still struggle to strike a balance between preserving generalizable components of the pre-trained model and learning task-specific features. To gain insights into the distribution of generalizable components, we begin by analyzing the pre-trained weights through the lens of singular value decomposition. Building on these insights, we introduce Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation (SoMA), an approach that selectively tunes minor singular components while keeping the residual parts frozen. SoMA effectively retains the generalization ability of the pre-trained model while efficiently acquiring task-specific skills. Moreover, we freeze domain-generalizable blocks and employ an annealing weight decay strategy, thereby achieving an optimal balance in the delicate trade-off between generalizability and discriminability. SoMA attains state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks that span both domain generalized semantic segmentation to domain generalized object detection. In addition, our methods introduce no additional inference overhead or regularization loss, maintain compatibility with any backbone or head, and are designed to be versatile, allowing easy integration into a wide range of tasks.
Authors:Hao Jin, Hengyuan Chang, Xiaoxuan Xie, Zhengyang Wang, Xusheng Du, Shaojun Hu, Haoran Xie
Abstract:
Designing stylized cinemagraphs is challenging due to the difficulty in customizing complex and expressive flow motions. To achieve intuitive and detailed control of the generated cinemagraphs, freehand sketches can provide a better solution to convey personalized design requirements than only text inputs. In this paper, we propose Sketch2Cinemagraph, a sketch-guided framework that enables the conditional generation of stylized cinemagraphs from freehand sketches. Sketch2Cinemagraph adopts text prompts for initial content generation and provides hand-drawn sketch controls for both spatial and motion cues. The latent diffusion model is adopted to generate target stylized landscape images along with realistic versions. Then, a pre-trained object detection model is utilized to segment and obtain masks for the flow regions. We proposed a novel latent motion diffusion model to estimate the motion field in the fluid regions of the generated landscape images. The input motion sketches serve as the conditions to control the generated vector fields in the masked fluid regions with the prompt. To synthesize the cinemagraph frames, the pixels within fluid regions are subsequently warped to the target locations for each timestep using a frame generator. The results verified that Sketch2Cinemagraph can generate high-fidelity and aesthetically appealing stylized cinemagraphs with continuous temporal flow from intuitive sketch inputs. We showcase the advantages of Sketch2Cinemagraph through quantitative comparisons against the state-of-the-art generation approaches.
Authors:Tsun-Hin Cheung, Ka-Chun Fung, Songjiang Lai, Kwan-Ho Lin, Vincent Ng, Kin-Man Lam
Abstract:
Identifying defects and anomalies in industrial products is a critical quality control task. Traditional manual inspection methods are slow, subjective, and error-prone. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot training-free approach for automated industrial image anomaly detection using a multimodal machine learning pipeline, consisting of three foundation models. Our method first uses a large language model, i.e., GPT-3. generate text prompts describing the expected appearances of normal and abnormal products. We then use a grounding object detection model, called Grounding DINO, to locate the product in the image. Finally, we compare the cropped product image patches to the generated prompts using a zero-shot image-text matching model, called CLIP, to identify any anomalies. Our experiments on two datasets of industrial product images, namely MVTec-AD and VisA, demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, achieving high accuracy in detecting various types of defects and anomalies without the need for model training. Our proposed model enables efficient, scalable, and objective quality control in industrial manufacturing settings.
Authors:Haoyu Wang, Renshuai Tao, Wei Wang, Yunchao Wei
Abstract:
Detecting prohibited items in X-ray security imagery is a challenging yet crucial task. With the rapid advancement of deep learning, object detection algorithms have been widely applied in this area. However, the distribution of object classes in real-world prohibited item detection scenarios often exhibits a distinct long-tailed distribution. Due to the unique principles of X-ray imaging, conventional methods for long-tailed object detection are often ineffective in this domain. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Prior-Aware Debiasing Framework (PAD-F), a novel approach that employs a two-pronged strategy leveraging both material and co-occurrence priors. At the data level, our Explicit Material-Aware Augmentation (EMAA) component generates numerous challenging training samples for tail classes. It achieves this through a placement strategy guided by material-specific absorption rates and a gradient-based Poisson blending technique. At the feature level, the Implicit Co-occurrence Aggregator (ICA) acts as a plug-in module that enhances features for ambiguous objects by implicitly learning and aggregating statistical co-occurrence relationships within the image. Extensive experiments on the HiXray and PIDray datasets demonstrate that PAD-F significantly boosts the performance of multiple popular detectors. It achieves an absolute improvement of up to +17.2% in AP50 for tail classes and comprehensively outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides an effective and versatile solution to the critical problem of long-tailed detection in X-ray security.
Authors:Zhiying Li, Zhi Liu, Guanggang Geng, Shreyank N Gowda, Shuyuan Lin, Jian Weng, Xiaobo Jin
Abstract:
Object detectors, which are widely used in real-world applications, are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. This vulnerability arises because many users rely on datasets or pre-trained models provided by third parties due to constraints on data and resources. However, most research on backdoor attacks has focused on image classification, with limited investigation into object detection. Furthermore, the triggers for most existing backdoor attacks on object detection are manually generated, requiring prior knowledge and consistent patterns between the training and inference stages. This approach makes the attacks either easy to detect or difficult to adapt to various scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose novel twin trigger generative networks in the frequency domain to generate invisible triggers for implanting stealthy backdoors into models during training, and visible triggers for steady activation during inference, making the attack process difficult to trace. Specifically, for the invisible trigger generative network, we deploy a Gaussian smoothing layer and a high-frequency artifact classifier to enhance the stealthiness of backdoor implantation in object detectors. For the visible trigger generative network, we design a novel alignment loss to optimize the visible triggers so that they differ from the original patterns but still align with the malicious activation behavior of the invisible triggers. Extensive experimental results and analyses prove the possibility of using different triggers in the training stage and the inference stage, and demonstrate the attack effectiveness of our proposed visible trigger and invisible trigger generative networks, significantly reducing the mAP_0.5 of the object detectors by 70.0% and 84.5%, including YOLOv5 and YOLOv7 with different settings, respectively.
Authors:Xiang Zhang, Senyu Li, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, Zijun Wu, Grzegorz Kondrak, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
Abstract:
Recent developments in multimodal methodologies have marked the beginning of an exciting era for models adept at processing diverse data types, encompassing text, audio, and visual content. Models like GPT-4V, which merge computer vision with advanced language processing, exhibit extraordinary proficiency in handling intricate tasks that require a simultaneous understanding of both textual and visual information. Prior research efforts have meticulously evaluated the efficacy of these Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) in various domains, including object detection, image captioning, and other related fields. However, existing analyses have often suffered from limitations, primarily centering on the isolated evaluation of each modality's performance while neglecting to explore their intricate cross-modal interactions. Specifically, the question of whether these models achieve the same level of accuracy when confronted with identical task instances across different modalities remains unanswered. In this study, we take the initiative to delve into the interaction and comparison among these modalities of interest by introducing a novel concept termed cross-modal consistency. Furthermore, we propose a quantitative evaluation framework founded on this concept. Our experimental findings, drawn from a curated collection of parallel vision-language datasets developed by us, unveil a pronounced inconsistency between the vision and language modalities within GPT-4V, despite its portrayal as a unified multimodal model. Our research yields insights into the appropriate utilization of such models and hints at potential avenues for enhancing their design.
Authors:Tianyu Sun, Jianhao Li, Xueqian Zhang, Zhongdao Wang, Bailan Feng, Hengshuang Zhao
Abstract:
This paper studies point cloud perception within outdoor environments. Existing methods face limitations in recognizing objects located at a distance or occluded, due to the sparse nature of outdoor point clouds. In this work, we observe a significant mitigation of this problem by accumulating multiple temporally consecutive point cloud sweeps, resulting in a remarkable improvement in perception accuracy. However, the computation cost also increases, hindering previous approaches from utilizing a large number of point cloud sweeps. To tackle this challenge, we find that a considerable portion of points in the accumulated point cloud is redundant, and discarding these points has minimal impact on perception accuracy. We introduce a simple yet effective Gumbel Spatial Pruning (GSP) layer that dynamically prunes points based on a learned end-to-end sampling. The GSP layer is decoupled from other network components and thus can be seamlessly integrated into existing point cloud network architectures. Without incurring additional computational overhead, we increase the number of point cloud sweeps from 10, a common practice, to as many as 40. Consequently, there is a significant enhancement in perception performance. For instance, in nuScenes 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks, our pruning strategy improves several 3D perception baseline methods.
Authors:Yuka Ogino, Yuho Shoji, Takahiro Toizumi, Atsushi Ito
Abstract:
We propose an image-adaptive object detection method for adverse weather conditions such as fog and low-light. Our framework employs differentiable preprocessing filters to perform image enhancement suitable for later-stage object detections. Our framework introduces two differentiable filters: a Bézier curve-based pixel-wise (BPW) filter and a kernel-based local (KBL) filter. These filters unify the functions of classical image processing filters and improve performance of object detection. We also propose a domain-agnostic data augmentation strategy using the BPW filter. Our method does not require data-specific customization of the filter combinations, parameter ranges, and data augmentation. We evaluate our proposed approach, called Enhanced Robustness by Unified Image Processing (ERUP)-YOLO, by applying it to the YOLOv3 detector. Experiments on adverse weather datasets demonstrate that our proposed filters match or exceed the expressiveness of conventional methods and our ERUP-YOLO achieved superior performance in a wide range of adverse weather conditions, including fog and low-light conditions.
Authors:Salman Khan, Izzeddin Teeti, Reza Javanmard Alitappeh, Mihaela C. Stoian, Eleonora Giunchiglia, Gurkirt Singh, Andrew Bradley, Fabio Cuzzolin
Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicle (AV) perception systems require more than simply seeing, via e.g., object detection or scene segmentation. They need a holistic understanding of what is happening within the scene for safe interaction with other road users. Few datasets exist for the purpose of developing and training algorithms to comprehend the actions of other road users. This paper presents ROAD-Waymo, an extensive dataset for the development and benchmarking of techniques for agent, action, location and event detection in road scenes, provided as a layer upon the (US) Waymo Open dataset. Considerably larger and more challenging than any existing dataset (and encompassing multiple cities), it comes with 198k annotated video frames, 54k agent tubes, 3.9M bounding boxes and a total of 12.4M labels. The integrity of the dataset has been confirmed and enhanced via a novel annotation pipeline designed for automatically identifying violations of requirements specifically designed for this dataset. As ROAD-Waymo is compatible with the original (UK) ROAD dataset, it provides the opportunity to tackle domain adaptation between real-world road scenarios in different countries within a novel benchmark: ROAD++.
Authors:Tengfei Zhang, Heng Zhang, Ruyang Li, Qi Deng, Yaqian Zhao, Rengang Li
Abstract:
This report presents our team's solutions for the Track 1 of the 2024 ECCV ROAD++ Challenge. The task of Track 1 is spatiotemporal agent detection, which aims to construct an "agent tube" for road agents in consecutive video frames. Our solutions focus on the challenges in this task, including extreme-size objects, low-light scenarios, class imbalance, and fine-grained classification. Firstly, the extreme-size object detection heads are introduced to improve the detection performance of large and small objects. Secondly, we design a dual-stream detection model with a low-light enhancement stream to improve the performance of spatiotemporal agent detection in low-light scenes, and the feature fusion module to integrate features from different branches. Subsequently, we develop a multi-branch detection framework to mitigate the issues of class imbalance and fine-grained classification, and we design a pre-training and fine-tuning approach to optimize the above multi-branch framework. Besides, we employ some common data augmentation techniques, and improve the loss function and upsampling operation. We rank first in the test set of Track 1 for the ROAD++ Challenge 2024, and achieve 30.82% average video-mAP.
Authors:Qishun Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Kunpeng Wang, Le Gu, Chuanwang Guo
Abstract:
Existing RGB-Thermal Video Object Detection (RGBT VOD) methods predominantly rely on the manual alignment of image pairs, that is both labor-intensive and time-consuming. This dependency significantly restricts the scalability and practical applicability of these methods in real-world scenarios. To address this critical limitation, we propose a novel framework termed the Mixture of Scale Experts Network (MSENet). MSENet integrates multiple experts trained at different perceptual scales, enabling the capture of scale discrepancies between RGB and thermal image pairs without the need for explicit alignment. Specifically, to address the issue of unaligned scales, MSENet introduces a set of experts designed to perceive the correlation between RGBT image pairs across various scales. These experts are capable of identifying and quantifying the scale differences inherent in the image pairs. Subsequently, a dynamic routing mechanism is incorporated to assign adaptive weights to each expert, allowing the network to dynamically select the most appropriate experts based on the specific characteristics of the input data. Furthermore, to address the issue of weakly unaligned positions, we integrate deformable convolution into the network. Deformable convolution is employed to learn position displacements between the RGB and thermal modalities, thereby mitigating the impact of spatial misalignment. To provide a comprehensive evaluation platform for alignment-free RGBT VOD, we introduce a new benchmark dataset. This dataset includes eleven common object categories, with a total of 60,988 images and 271,835 object instances. The dataset encompasses a wide range of scenes from both daily life and natural environments, ensuring high content diversity and complexity.
Authors:Xinlong Hou, Sen Shen, Xueshen Li, Xinran Gao, Ziyi Huang, Steven J. Holiday, Matthew R. Cribbet, Susan W. White, Edward Sazonov, Yu Gan
Abstract:
Being able to accurately monitor the screen exposure of young children is important for research on phenomena linked to screen use such as childhood obesity, physical activity, and social interaction. Most existing studies rely upon self-report or manual measures from bulky wearable sensors, thus lacking efficiency and accuracy in capturing quantitative screen exposure data. In this work, we developed a novel sensor informatics framework that utilizes egocentric images from a wearable sensor, termed the screen time tracker (STT), and a vision language model (VLM). In particular, we devised a multi-view VLM that takes multiple views from egocentric image sequences and interprets screen exposure dynamically. We validated our approach by using a dataset of children's free-living activities, demonstrating significant improvement over existing methods in plain vision language models and object detection models. Results supported the promise of this monitoring approach, which could optimize behavioral research on screen exposure in children's naturalistic settings.
Authors:Xuejing Li, Weijia Zhang, Chao Ma
Abstract:
Few-shot point cloud 3D object detection (FS3D) aims to identify and localise objects of novel classes from point clouds, using knowledge learnt from annotated base classes and novel classes with very few annotations. Thus far, this challenging task has been approached using prototype learning, but the performance remains far from satisfactory. We find that in existing methods, the prototypes are only loosely constrained and lack of fine-grained awareness of the semantic and geometrical correlation embedded within the point cloud space. To mitigate these issues, we propose to leverage the inherent contrastive relationship within the semantic and geometrical subspaces to learn more refined and generalisable prototypical representations. To this end, we first introduce contrastive semantics mining, which enables the network to extract discriminative categorical features by constructing positive and negative pairs within training batches. Meanwhile, since point features representing local patterns can be clustered into geometric components, we further propose to impose contrastive relationship at the primitive level. Through refined primitive geometric structures, the transferability of feature encoding from base to novel classes is significantly enhanced. The above designs and insights lead to our novel Contrastive Prototypical VoteNet (CP-VoteNet). Extensive experiments on two FS3D benchmarks FS-ScanNet and FS-SUNRGBD demonstrate that CP-VoteNet surpasses current state-of-the-art methods by considerable margins across different FS3D settings. Further ablation studies conducted corroborate the rationale and effectiveness of our designs.
Authors:Binbin Xu, Allen Tao, Hugues Thomas, Jian Zhang, Timothy D. Barfoot
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a LiDAR-based robot navigation system, based on novel object-aware affordance-based costmaps. Utilizing a 3D object detection network, our system identifies objects of interest in LiDAR keyframes, refines their 3D poses with the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, and tracks them via Kalman filters and the Hungarian algorithm for data association. It then updates existing object poses with new associated detections and creates new object maps for unmatched detections. Using the maintained object-level mapping system, our system creates affordance-driven object costmaps for proactive collision avoidance in path planning. Additionally, we address the scarcity of indoor semantic LiDAR data by introducing an automated labeling technique. This method utilizes a CAD model database for accurate ground-truth annotations, encompassing bounding boxes, positions, orientations, and point-wise semantics of each object in LiDAR sequences. Our extensive evaluations, conducted in both simulated and real-world robot platforms, highlights the effectiveness of proactive object avoidance by using object affordance costmaps, enhancing robotic navigation safety and efficiency. The system can operate in real-time onboard and we intend to release our code and data for public use.
Authors:Jens Bayer, Stefan Becker, David Münch, Michael Arens
Abstract:
Adversarial patches in computer vision can be used, to fool deep neural networks and manipulate their decision-making process. One of the most prominent examples of adversarial patches are evasion attacks for object detectors. By covering parts of objects of interest, these patches suppress the detections and thus make the target object 'invisible' to the object detector. Since these patches are usually optimized on a specific network with a specific train dataset, the transferability across multiple networks and datasets is not given. This paper addresses these issues and investigates the transferability across numerous object detector architectures. Our extensive evaluation across various models on two distinct datasets indicates that patches optimized with larger models provide better network transferability than patches that are optimized with smaller models.
Authors:Vishal Chudasama, Hiran Sarkar, Pankaj Wasnik, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Jayateja Kalla
Abstract:
Object detection is a critical field in computer vision focusing on accurately identifying and locating specific objects in images or videos. Traditional methods for object detection rely on large labeled training datasets for each object category, which can be time-consuming and expensive to collect and annotate. To address this issue, researchers have introduced few-shot object detection (FSOD) approaches that merge few-shot learning and object detection principles. These approaches allow models to quickly adapt to new object categories with only a few annotated samples. While traditional FSOD methods have been studied before, this survey paper comprehensively reviews FSOD research with a specific focus on covering different FSOD settings such as standard FSOD, generalized FSOD, incremental FSOD, open-set FSOD, and domain adaptive FSOD. These approaches play a vital role in reducing the reliance on extensive labeled datasets, particularly as the need for efficient machine learning models continues to rise. This survey paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the above-mentioned few-shot settings and explore the methodologies for each FSOD task. It thoroughly compares state-of-the-art methods across different FSOD settings, analyzing them in detail based on their evaluation protocols. Additionally, it offers insights into their applications, challenges, and potential future directions in the evolving field of object detection with limited data.
Authors:Seongmin Park, Minjae Lee, Junwon Choi, Jungwook Choi
Abstract:
Pillar-based 3D object detection has gained traction in self-driving technology due to its speed and accuracy facilitated by the artificial densification of pillars for GPU-friendly processing. However, dense pillar processing fundamentally wastes computation since it ignores the inherent sparsity of pillars derived from scattered point cloud data. Motivated by recent embedded accelerators with native sparsity support, sparse pillar convolution methods like submanifold convolution (SubM-Conv) aimed to reduce these redundant computations by applying convolution only on active pillars but suffered considerable accuracy loss. Our research identifies that this accuracy loss is due to the restricted fine-grained spatial information flow (fSIF) of SubM-Conv in sparse pillar networks. To overcome this restriction, we propose a selectively dilated (SD-Conv) convolution that evaluates the importance of encoded pillars and selectively dilates the convolution output, enhancing the receptive field for critical pillars and improving object detection accuracy. To facilitate actual acceleration with this novel convolution approach, we designed SPADE+ as a cost-efficient augmentation to existing embedded sparse convolution accelerators. This design supports the SD-Conv without significant demands in area and SRAM size, realizing superior trade-off between the speedup and model accuracy. This strategic enhancement allows our method to achieve extreme pillar sparsity, leading to up to 18.1x computational savings and 16.2x speedup on the embedded accelerators, without compromising object detection accuracy.
Authors:Seamie Hayes, Sushil Sharma, Ciarán Eising
Abstract:
Fusing different sensor modalities can be a difficult task, particularly if they are asynchronous. Asynchronisation may arise due to long processing times or improper synchronisation during calibration, and there must exist a way to still utilise this previous information for the purpose of safe driving, and object detection in ego vehicle/ multi-agent trajectory prediction. Difficulties arise in the fact that the sensor modalities have captured information at different times and also at different positions in space. Therefore, they are not spatially nor temporally aligned. This paper will investigate the challenge of radar and LiDAR sensors being asynchronous relative to the camera sensors, for various time latencies. The spatial alignment will be resolved before lifting into BEV space via the transformation of the radar/LiDAR point clouds into the new ego frame coordinate system. Only after this can we concatenate the radar/LiDAR point cloud and lifted camera features. Temporal alignment will be remedied for radar data only, we will implement a novel method of inferring the future radar point positions using the velocity information. Our approach to resolving the issue of sensor asynchrony yields promising results. We demonstrate velocity information can drastically improve IoU for asynchronous datasets, as for a time latency of 360 milliseconds (ms), IoU improves from 49.54 to 53.63. Additionally, for a time latency of 550ms, the camera+radar (C+R) model outperforms the camera+LiDAR (C+L) model by 0.18 IoU. This is an advancement in utilising the often-neglected radar sensor modality, which is less favoured than LiDAR for autonomous driving purposes.
Authors:Soojin Woo, Donghwi Jung, Seong-Woo Kim
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an algorithm to generate a static point cloud map based on LiDAR point cloud data. Our proposed pipeline detects dynamic objects using 3D object detectors and projects points of dynamic objects onto the ground. Typically, point cloud data acquired in real-time serves as a snapshot of the surrounding areas containing both static objects and dynamic objects. The static objects include buildings and trees, otherwise, the dynamic objects contain objects such as parked cars that change their position over time. Removing dynamic objects from the point cloud map is crucial as they can degrade the quality and localization accuracy of the map. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an algorithm that creates a map only consisting of static objects. We apply a 3D object detection algorithm to the point cloud data which are obtained from LiDAR to implement our pipeline. We then stack the points to create the map after performing ground segmentation and projection. As a result, not only we can eliminate currently dynamic objects at the time of map generation but also potentially dynamic objects such as parked vehicles. We validate the performance of our method using two kinds of datasets collected on real roads: KITTI and our dataset. The result demonstrates the capability of our proposal to create an accurate static map excluding dynamic objects from input point clouds. Also, we verified the improved performance of localization using a generated map based on our method.
Authors:Yanan Zhang, Chao Zhou, Di Huang
Abstract:
Existing 3D object detection suffers from expensive annotation costs and poor transferability to unknown data due to the domain gap, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to generalize detection models trained in labeled source domains to perform robustly on unexplored target domains, providing a promising solution for cross-domain 3D object detection. Although Self-Training (ST) based cross-domain 3D detection methods with the assistance of pseudo-labeling techniques have achieved remarkable progress, they still face the issue of low-quality pseudo-labels when there are significant domain disparities due to the absence of a process for feature distribution alignment. While Adversarial Learning (AL) based methods can effectively align the feature distributions of the source and target domains, the inability to obtain labels in the target domain forces the adoption of asymmetric optimization losses, resulting in a challenging issue of source domain bias. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework for 3D object detection via collaborating ST and AL, dubbed as STAL3D, unleashing the complementary advantages of pseudo labels and feature distribution alignment. Additionally, a Background Suppression Adversarial Learning (BS-AL) module and a Scale Filtering Module (SFM) are designed tailored for 3D cross-domain scenes, effectively alleviating the issues of the large proportion of background interference and source domain size bias. Our STAL3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple cross-domain tasks and even surpasses the Oracle results on Waymo $\rightarrow$ KITTI and Waymo $\rightarrow$ KITTI-rain.
Authors:Yuexiong Ding, Xiaowei Luo
Abstract:
Though current object detection models based on deep learning have achieved excellent results on many conventional benchmark datasets, their performance will dramatically decline on real-world images taken under extreme conditions. Existing methods either used image augmentation based on traditional image processing algorithms or applied customized and scene-limited image adaptation technologies for robust modeling. This study thus proposes a stylization data-driven neural-image-adaptive YOLO (SDNIA-YOLO), which improves the model's robustness by enhancing image quality adaptively and learning valuable information related to extreme weather conditions from images synthesized by neural style transfer (NST). Experiments show that the developed SDNIA-YOLOv3 achieves significant mAP@.5 improvements of at least 15% on the real-world foggy (RTTS) and lowlight (ExDark) test sets compared with the baseline model. Besides, the experiments also highlight the outstanding potential of stylization data in simulating extreme weather conditions. The developed SDNIA-YOLO remains excellent characteristics of the native YOLO to a great extent, such as end-to-end one-stage, data-driven, and fast.
Authors:Yunsong Wang, Na Zhao, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract:
The use of synthetic data in indoor 3D object detection offers the potential of greatly reducing the manual labor involved in 3D annotations and training effective zero-shot detectors. However, the complicated domain shifts across syn-to-real indoor datasets remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Object-wise Hierarchical Domain Alignment (OHDA) framework for syn-to-real unsupervised domain adaptation in indoor 3D object detection. Our approach includes an object-aware augmentation strategy to effectively diversify the source domain data, and we introduce a two-branch adaptation framework consisting of an adversarial training branch and a pseudo labeling branch, in order to simultaneously reach holistic-level and class-level domain alignment. The pseudo labeling is further refined through two proposed schemes specifically designed for indoor UDA. Our adaptation results from synthetic dataset 3D-FRONT to real-world datasets ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D demonstrate remarkable mAP25 improvements of 9.7% and 9.1% over Source-Only baselines, respectively, and consistently outperform the methods adapted from 2D and 3D outdoor scenarios. The code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.
Authors:Yunsong Wang, Na Zhao, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract:
The field of self-supervised 3D representation learning has emerged as a promising solution to alleviate the challenge presented by the scarcity of extensive, well-annotated datasets. However, it continues to be hindered by the lack of diverse, large-scale, real-world 3D scene datasets for source data. To address this shortfall, we propose Generalizable Representation Learning (GRL), where we devise a generative Bayesian network to produce diverse synthetic scenes with real-world patterns, and conduct pre-training with a joint objective. By jointly learning a coarse-to-fine contrastive learning task and an occlusion-aware reconstruction task, the model is primed with transferable, geometry-informed representations. Post pre-training on synthetic data, the acquired knowledge of the model can be seamlessly transferred to two principal downstream tasks associated with 3D scene understanding, namely 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation, using real-world benchmark datasets. A thorough series of experiments robustly display our method's consistent superiority over existing state-of-the-art pre-training approaches.
Authors:Taqwa Alhadidi, Ahmed Jaber, Shadi Jaradat, Huthaifa I Ashqar, Mohammed Elhenawy
Abstract:
Object detection is a critical component of transportation systems, particularly for applications such as autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance. Traditional object detection methods often struggle with limited data and variability in object appearance. The Oriented Window Learning Vision Transformer (OWL-ViT) offers a novel approach by adapting window orientations to the geometry and existence of objects, making it highly suitable for detecting diverse roadway assets. This study leverages OWL-ViT within a one-shot learning framework to recognize transportation infrastructure components, such as traffic signs, poles, pavement, and cracks. This study presents a novel method for roadway asset detection using OWL-ViT. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of the model in terms of detection consistency, semantic flexibility, visual context adaptability, resolution robustness, and impact of non-max suppression. The results demonstrate the high efficiency and reliability of the OWL-ViT across various scenarios, underscoring its potential to enhance the safety and efficiency of intelligent transportation systems.
Authors:Venkanna Babu Guthula, Stefan Oehmcke, Remigio Chilaule, Hui Zhang, Nico Lang, Ankit Kariryaa, Johan Mottelson, Christian Igel
Abstract:
As low-quality housing and in particular certain roof characteristics are associated with an increased risk of malaria, classification of roof types based on remote sensing imagery can support the assessment of malaria risk and thereby help prevent the disease. To support research in this area, we release the Nacala-Roof-Material dataset, which contains high-resolution drone images from Mozambique with corresponding labels delineating houses and specifying their roof types. The dataset defines a multi-task computer vision problem, comprising object detection, classification, and segmentation. In addition, we benchmarked various state-of-the-art approaches on the dataset. Canonical U-Nets, YOLOv8, and a custom decoder on pretrained DINOv2 served as baselines. We show that each of the methods has its advantages but none is superior on all tasks, which highlights the potential of our dataset for future research in multi-task learning. While the tasks are closely related, accurate segmentation of objects does not necessarily imply accurate instance separation, and vice versa. We address this general issue by introducing a variant of the deep ordinal watershed (DOW) approach that additionally separates the interior of objects, allowing for improved object delineation and separation. We show that our DOW variant is a generic approach that improves the performance of both U-Net and DINOv2 backbones, leading to a better trade-off between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation.
Authors:Feiyu Zhu, Yuming Zhang, Xiuyuan Guo, Hengyu Shi, Junfeng Luo, Junhao Su, Jialin Gao
Abstract:
Local learning offers an alternative to traditional end-to-end back-propagation in deep neural networks, significantly reducing GPU memory consumption. Although it has shown promise in image classification tasks, its extension to other visual tasks has been limited. This limitation arises primarily from two factors: 1) architectures designed specifically for classification are not readily adaptable to other tasks, which prevents the effective reuse of task-specific knowledge from architectures tailored to different problems; 2) these classification-focused architectures typically lack cross-scale feature communication, leading to degraded performance in tasks like object detection and super-resolution. To address these challenges, we propose the Feature Bank Augmented auxiliary network (FBA), which introduces a simplified design principle and incorporates a feature bank to enhance cross-task adaptability and communication. This work represents the first successful application of local learning methods beyond classification, demonstrating that FBA not only conserves GPU memory but also achieves performance on par with end-to-end approaches across multiple datasets for various visual tasks.
Authors:Hong-Shuo Chen, Yao Zhu, Suya You, Azad M. Madni, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Abstract:
We introduce GreenCOD, a green method for detecting camouflaged objects, distinct in its avoidance of backpropagation techniques. GreenCOD leverages gradient boosting and deep features extracted from pre-trained Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Traditional camouflaged object detection (COD) approaches often rely on complex deep neural network architectures, seeking performance improvements through backpropagation-based fine-tuning. However, such methods are typically computationally demanding and exhibit only marginal performance variations across different models. This raises the question of whether effective training can be achieved without backpropagation. Addressing this, our work proposes a new paradigm that utilizes gradient boosting for COD. This approach significantly simplifies the model design, resulting in a system that requires fewer parameters and operations and maintains high performance compared to state-of-the-art deep learning models. Remarkably, our models are trained without backpropagation and achieve the best performance with fewer than 20G Multiply-Accumulate Operations (MACs). This new, more efficient paradigm opens avenues for further exploration in green, backpropagation-free model training.
Authors:Adrian Azzarelli, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, David R Bull
Abstract:
This paper offers the first comprehensive review of artificial intelligence (AI) research in the context of real camera content acquisition for entertainment purposes and is aimed at both researchers and cinematographers. Addressing the lack of review papers in the field of intelligent cinematography} (IC) and the breadth of related computer vision research, we present a holistic view of the IC landscape while providing technical insight, important for experts across disciplines. We provide technical background on generative AI, object detection, automated camera calibration and 3-D content acquisition, with references to assist non-technical readers. The application sections categorize work in terms of four production types: General Production, Virtual Production, Live Production and Aerial Production. Within each application section, we (1) sub-classify work according to research topic and (2) describe the trends and challenges relevant to each type of production. In the final chapter, we address the greater scope of IC research and summarize the significant potential of this area to influence the creative industries sector. We suggest that work relating to virtual production has the greatest potential to impact other mediums of production, driven by the growing interest in LED volumes/stages for in-camera virtual effects (ICVFX) and automated 3-D capture for virtual modeling of real world scenes and actors. We also address ethical and legal concerns regarding the use of creative AI that impact on artists, actors, technologists and the general public.
Authors:Ricardo Pereira, LuÃs Garrote, Tiago Barros, Ana Lopes, Urbano J. Nunes
Abstract:
Indoor scenes are usually characterized by scattered objects and their relationships, which turns the indoor scene classification task into a challenging computer vision task. Despite the significant performance boost in classification tasks achieved in recent years, provided by the use of deep-learning-based methods, limitations such as inter-category ambiguity and intra-category variation have been holding back their performance. To overcome such issues, gathering semantic information has been shown to be a promising source of information towards a more complete and discriminative feature representation of indoor scenes. Therefore, the work described in this paper uses both semantic information, obtained from object detection, and semantic segmentation techniques. While object detection techniques provide the 2D location of objects allowing to obtain spatial distributions between objects, semantic segmentation techniques provide pixel-level information that allows to obtain, at a pixel-level, a spatial distribution and shape-related features of the segmentation categories. Hence, a novel approach that uses a semantic segmentation mask to provide Hu-moments-based segmentation categories' shape characterization, designated by Segmentation-based Hu-Moments Features (SHMFs), is proposed. Moreover, a three-main-branch network, designated by GOS$^2$F$^2$App, that exploits deep-learning-based global features, object-based features, and semantic segmentation-based features is also proposed. GOS$^2$F$^2$App was evaluated in two indoor scene benchmark datasets: SUN RGB-D and NYU Depth V2, where, to the best of our knowledge, state-of-the-art results were achieved on both datasets, which present evidences of the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Authors:Gengming Zhang, Hao Cao, Kewei Hu, Yaoqiang Pan, Yuqin Deng, Hongjun Wang, Hanwen Kang
Abstract:
Accurately identifying lychee-picking points in unstructured orchard environments and obtaining their coordinate locations is critical to the success of lychee-picking robots. However, traditional two-dimensional (2D) image-based object detection methods often struggle due to the complex geometric structures of branches, leaves and fruits, leading to incorrect determination of lychee picking points. In this study, we propose a Fcaf3d-lychee network model specifically designed for the accurate localisation of lychee picking points. Point cloud data of lychee picking points in natural environments are acquired using Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK time-of-flight (TOF) camera through multi-view stitching. We augment the Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection (Fcaf3d) model with a squeeze-and-excitation(SE) module, which exploits human visual attention mechanisms for improved feature extraction of lychee picking points. The trained network model is evaluated on a test set of lychee-picking locations and achieves an impressive F1 score of 88.57%, significantly outperforming existing models. Subsequent three-dimensional (3D) position detection of picking points in real lychee orchard environments yields high accuracy, even under varying degrees of occlusion. Localisation errors of lychee picking points are within 1.5 cm in all directions, demonstrating the robustness and generality of the model.
Authors:Armen Avetisyan, Christopher Xie, Henry Howard-Jenkins, Tsun-Yi Yang, Samir Aroudj, Suvam Patra, Fuyang Zhang, Duncan Frost, Luke Holland, Campbell Orme, Jakob Engel, Edward Miller, Richard Newcombe, Vasileios Balntas
Abstract:
We introduce SceneScript, a method that directly produces full scene models as a sequence of structured language commands using an autoregressive, token-based approach. Our proposed scene representation is inspired by recent successes in transformers & LLMs, and departs from more traditional methods which commonly describe scenes as meshes, voxel grids, point clouds or radiance fields. Our method infers the set of structured language commands directly from encoded visual data using a scene language encoder-decoder architecture. To train SceneScript, we generate and release a large-scale synthetic dataset called Aria Synthetic Environments consisting of 100k high-quality in-door scenes, with photorealistic and ground-truth annotated renders of egocentric scene walkthroughs. Our method gives state-of-the art results in architectural layout estimation, and competitive results in 3D object detection. Lastly, we explore an advantage for SceneScript, which is the ability to readily adapt to new commands via simple additions to the structured language, which we illustrate for tasks such as coarse 3D object part reconstruction.
Authors:Micheli Nayara de Oliveira Vicente, Gabriel Toshio Hirokawa Higa, João Vitor de Andrade Porto, Higor Henrique, Picoli Nucci, Asser Botelho Santana, Karla Rejane de Andrade Porto, Antonia Railda Roel, Hemerson Pistori
Abstract:
Aedes aegypti is still one of the main concerns when it comes to disease vectors. Among the many ways to deal with it, there are important protocols that make use of egg numbers in ovitraps to calculate indices, such as the LIRAa and the Breteau Index, which can provide information on predictable outbursts and epidemics. Also, there are many research lines that require egg numbers, specially when mass production of mosquitoes is needed. Egg counting is a laborious and error-prone task that can be automated via computer vision-based techniques, specially deep learning-based counting with object detection. In this work, we propose a new dataset comprising field and laboratory eggs, along with test results of three neural networks applied to the task: Faster R-CNN, Side-Aware Boundary Localization and FoveaBox.
Authors:Wonhyeok Choi, Mingyu Shin, Hyukzae Lee, Jaehoon Cho, Jaehyeon Park, Sunghoon Im
Abstract:
Real-time processing is crucial in autonomous driving systems due to the imperative of instantaneous decision-making and rapid response. In real-world scenarios, autonomous vehicles are continuously tasked with interpreting their surroundings, analyzing intricate sensor data, and making decisions within split seconds to ensure safety through numerous computer vision tasks. In this paper, we present a new real-time multi-task network adept at three vital autonomous driving tasks: monocular 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and dense depth estimation. To counter the challenge of negative transfer, which is the prevalent issue in multi-task learning, we introduce a task-adaptive attention generator. This generator is designed to automatically discern interrelations across the three tasks and arrange the task-sharing pattern, all while leveraging the efficiency of the hard-parameter sharing approach. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is pioneering in its capability to concurrently handle multiple tasks, notably 3D object detection, while maintaining real-time processing speeds. Our rigorously optimized network, when tested on the Cityscapes-3D datasets, consistently outperforms various baseline models. Moreover, an in-depth ablation study substantiates the efficacy of the methodologies integrated into our framework.
Authors:Huijie Guo, Ying Ba, Jie Hu, Lingyu Si, Wenwen Qiang, Lei Shi
Abstract:
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods harness the concept of semantic invariance by utilizing data augmentation strategies to produce similar representations for different deformations of the same input. Essentially, the model captures the shared information among multiple augmented views of samples, while disregarding the non-shared information that may be beneficial for downstream tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a module called CompMod with Meta Comprehensive Regularization (MCR), embedded into existing self-supervised frameworks, to make the learned representations more comprehensive. Specifically, we update our proposed model through a bi-level optimization mechanism, enabling it to capture comprehensive features. Additionally, guided by the constrained extraction of features using maximum entropy coding, the self-supervised learning model learns more comprehensive features on top of learning consistent features. In addition, we provide theoretical support for our proposed method from information theory and causal counterfactual perspective. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvement in classification, object detection and instance segmentation tasks on multiple benchmark datasets.
Authors:Junsu Kim, Hoseong Cho, Jihyeon Kim, Yihalem Yimolal Tiruneh, Seungryul Baek
Abstract:
In the field of class incremental learning (CIL), generative replay has become increasingly prominent as a method to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting, alongside the continuous improvements in generative models. However, its application in class incremental object detection (CIOD) has been significantly limited, primarily due to the complexities of scenes involving multiple labels. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called stable diffusion deep generative replay (SDDGR) for CIOD. Our method utilizes a diffusion-based generative model with pre-trained text-to-diffusion networks to generate realistic and diverse synthetic images. SDDGR incorporates an iterative refinement strategy to produce high-quality images encompassing old classes. Additionally, we adopt an L2 knowledge distillation technique to improve the retention of prior knowledge in synthetic images. Furthermore, our approach includes pseudo-labeling for old objects within new task images, preventing misclassification as background elements. Extensive experiments on the COCO 2017 dataset demonstrate that SDDGR significantly outperforms existing algorithms, achieving a new state-of-the-art in various CIOD scenarios. The source code will be made available to the public.
Authors:Alberto Corpas, Luis Costero, Guillermo Botella, Francisco D. Igual, Carlos GarcÃa, Manuel RodrÃguez
Abstract:
This paper proposes a mechanism to accelerate and optimize the energy consumption of a face detection software based on Haar-like cascading classifiers, taking advantage of the features of low-cost Asymmetric Multicore Processors (AMPs) with limited power budget. A modelling and task scheduling/allocation is proposed in order to efficiently make use of the existing features on big.LITTLE ARM processors, including: (I) source-code adaptation for parallel computing, which enables code acceleration by applying the OmpSs programming model, a task-based programming model that handles data-dependencies between tasks in a transparent fashion; (II) different OmpSs task allocation policies which take into account the processor asymmetry and can dynamically set processing resources in a more efficient way based on their particular features. The proposed mechanism can be efficiently applied to take advantage of the processing elements existing on low-cost and low-energy multi-core embedded devices executing object detection algorithms based on cascading classifiers. Although these classifiers yield the best results for detection algorithms in the field of computer vision, their high computational requirements prevent them from being used on these devices under real-time requirements. Finally, we compare the energy efficiency of a heterogeneous architecture based on asymmetric multicore processors with a suitable task scheduling, with that of a homogeneous symmetric architecture.
Authors:Li Meng, Morten Goodwin, Anis Yazidi, Paal Engelstad
Abstract:
Vision Transformers implement multi-head self-attention via stacking multiple attention blocks. The query, key, and value are often intertwined and generated within those blocks via a single, shared linear transformation. This paper explores the concept of disentangling the key from the query and value, and adopting a manifold representation for the key. Our experiments reveal that decoupling and endowing the key with a manifold structure can enhance the model's performance. Specifically, ViT-B exhibits a 0.87% increase in top-1 accuracy, while Swin-T sees a boost of 0.52% in top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset, with eight charts in the manifold key. Our approach also yields positive results in object detection and instance segmentation tasks on the COCO dataset. We establish that these performance gains are not merely due to the simplicity of adding more parameters and computations. Future research may investigate strategies for cutting the budget of such representations and aim for further performance improvements based on our findings.
Authors:Sven de Witte, Ombretta Strafforello, Jan van Gemert
Abstract:
Bounding boxes are often used to communicate automatic object detection results to humans, aiding humans in a multitude of tasks. We investigate the relationship between bounding box localization errors and human task performance. We use observer performance studies on a visual multi-object counting task to measure both human trust and performance with different levels of bounding box accuracy. The results show that localization errors have no significant impact on human accuracy or trust in the system. Recall and precision errors impact both human performance and trust, suggesting that optimizing algorithms based on the F1 score is more beneficial in human-computer tasks. Lastly, the paper offers an improvement on bounding boxes in multi-object counting tasks with center dots, showing improved performance and better resilience to localization inaccuracy.
Authors:Ross Greer, Bjørk Antoniussen, Mathias V. Andersen, Andreas Møgelmose, Mohan M. Trivedi
Abstract:
Active learning strategies for 3D object detection in autonomous driving datasets may help to address challenges of data imbalance, redundancy, and high-dimensional data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of entropy querying to select informative samples, aiming to reduce annotation costs and improve model performance. We experiment using the BEVFusion model for 3D object detection on the nuScenes dataset, comparing active learning to random sampling and demonstrating that entropy querying outperforms in most cases. The method is particularly effective in reducing the performance gap between majority and minority classes. Class-specific analysis reveals efficient allocation of annotated resources for limited data budgets, emphasizing the importance of selecting diverse and informative data for model training. Our findings suggest that entropy querying is a promising strategy for selecting data that enhances model learning in resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Seokju Yun, Youngmin Ro
Abstract:
Recently, efficient Vision Transformers have shown great performance with low latency on resource-constrained devices. Conventionally, they use 4x4 patch embeddings and a 4-stage structure at the macro level, while utilizing sophisticated attention with multi-head configuration at the micro level. This paper aims to address computational redundancy at all design levels in a memory-efficient manner. We discover that using larger-stride patchify stem not only reduces memory access costs but also achieves competitive performance by leveraging token representations with reduced spatial redundancy from the early stages. Furthermore, our preliminary analyses suggest that attention layers in the early stages can be substituted with convolutions, and several attention heads in the latter stages are computationally redundant. To handle this, we introduce a single-head attention module that inherently prevents head redundancy and simultaneously boosts accuracy by parallelly combining global and local information. Building upon our solutions, we introduce SHViT, a Single-Head Vision Transformer that obtains the state-of-the-art speed-accuracy tradeoff. For example, on ImageNet-1k, our SHViT-S4 is 3.3x, 8.1x, and 2.4x faster than MobileViTv2 x1.0 on GPU, CPU, and iPhone12 mobile device, respectively, while being 1.3% more accurate. For object detection and instance segmentation on MS COCO using Mask-RCNN head, our model achieves performance comparable to FastViT-SA12 while exhibiting 3.8x and 2.0x lower backbone latency on GPU and mobile device, respectively.
Authors:Mathias Ramm Haugland, Hemin Ali Qadir, Ilangko Balasingham
Abstract:
To cope with the growing prevalence of colorectal cancer (CRC), screening programs for polyp detection and removal have proven their usefulness. Colonoscopy is considered the best-performing procedure for CRC screening. To ease the examination, deep learning based methods for automatic polyp detection have been developed for conventional white-light imaging (WLI). Compared with WLI, narrow-band imaging (NBI) can improve polyp classification during colonoscopy but requires special equipment. We propose a CycleGAN-based framework to convert images captured with regular WLI to synthetic NBI (SNBI) as a pre-processing method for improving object detection on WLI when NBI is unavailable. This paper first shows that better results for polyp detection can be achieved on NBI compared to a relatively similar dataset of WLI. Secondly, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed modality translation can achieve improved polyp detection on SNBI images generated from WLI compared to the original WLI. This is because our WLI-to-SNBI translation model can enhance the observation of polyp surface patterns in the generated SNBI images.
Authors:Rui Huang, Qingyi Zhao, Yan Xing, Sihua Gao, Weifeng Xu, Yuxiang Zhang, Wei Fan
Abstract:
Multiscale convolutional neural network (CNN) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving various vision problems. However, fusing features of different scales alwaysresults in large model sizes, impeding the application of multiscale CNNs in RGB-D saliency detection. In this paper, we propose a customized feature fusion module, called Saliency Enhanced Feature Fusion (SEFF), for RGB-D saliency detection. SEFF utilizes saliency maps of the neighboring scales to enhance the necessary features for fusing, resulting in more representative fused features. Our multiscale RGB-D saliency detector uses SEFF and processes images with three different scales. SEFF is used to fuse the features of RGB and depth images, as well as the features of decoders at different scales. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our method over ten SOTA saliency detectors.
Authors:Linlin Zhang, Xiang Yu, Armstrong Aboah, Yaw Adu-Gyamfi
Abstract:
Traffic volume data collection is a crucial aspect of transportation engineering and urban planning, as it provides vital insights into traffic patterns, congestion, and infrastructure efficiency. Traditional manual methods of traffic data collection are both time-consuming and costly. However, the emergence of modern technologies, particularly Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), has revolutionized the process by enabling efficient and accurate data collection. Despite the benefits of using LiDAR for traffic data collection, previous studies have identified two major limitations that have impeded its widespread adoption. These are the need for multiple LiDAR systems to obtain complete point cloud information of objects of interest, as well as the labor-intensive process of annotating 3D bounding boxes for object detection tasks. In response to these challenges, the current study proposes an innovative framework that alleviates the need for multiple LiDAR systems and simplifies the laborious 3D annotation process. To achieve this goal, the study employed a single LiDAR system, that aims at reducing the data acquisition cost and addressed its accompanying limitation of missing point cloud information by developing a Point Cloud Completion (PCC) framework to fill in missing point cloud information using point density. Furthermore, we also used zero-shot learning techniques to detect vehicles and pedestrians, as well as proposed a unique framework for extracting low to high features from the object of interest, such as height, acceleration, and speed. Using the 2D bounding box detection and extracted height information, this study is able to generate 3D bounding boxes automatically without human intervention.
Authors:Kamil Jeziorek, Piotr Wzorek, Krzysztof Blachut, Andrea Pinna, Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract:
Event-based vision is an emerging research field involving processing data generated by Dynamic Vision Sensors (neuromorphic cameras). One of the latest proposals in this area are Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), which allow to process events in its original sparse form while maintaining high detection and classification performance. In this paper, we present the hardware implementation of a~graph generation process from an event camera data stream, taking into account both the advantages and limitations of FPGAs. We propose various ways to simplify the graph representation and use scaling and quantisation of values. We consider both undirected and directed graphs that enable the use of PointNet convolution. The results obtained show that by appropriately modifying the graph representation, it is possible to create a~hardware module for graph generation. Moreover, the proposed modifications have no significant impact on object detection performance, only 0.08% mAP less for the base model and the N-Caltech data set.Finally, we describe the proposed hardware architecture of the graph generation module.
Authors:Wonhyeok Choi, Mingyu Shin, Sunghoon Im
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection poses a significant challenge due to the lack of depth information in RGB images. Many existing methods strive to enhance the object depth estimation performance by allocating additional parameters for object depth estimation, utilizing extra modules or data. In contrast, we introduce a novel metric learning scheme that encourages the model to extract depth-discriminative features regardless of the visual attributes without increasing inference time and model size. Our method employs the distance-preserving function to organize the feature space manifold in relation to ground-truth object depth. The proposed (K, B, eps)-quasi-isometric loss leverages predetermined pairwise distance restriction as guidance for adjusting the distance among object descriptors without disrupting the non-linearity of the natural feature manifold. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary head for object-wise depth estimation, which enhances depth quality while maintaining the inference time. The broad applicability of our method is demonstrated through experiments that show improvements in overall performance when integrated into various baselines. The results show that our method consistently improves the performance of various baselines by 23.51% and 5.78% on average across KITTI and Waymo, respectively.
Authors:Lin Sun, Weijun Wang, Tingting Yuan, Liang Mi, Haipeng Dai, Yunxin Liu, Xiaoming Fu
Abstract:
High-definition (HD) cameras for surveillance and road traffic have experienced tremendous growth, demanding intensive computation resources for real-time analytics. Recently, offloading frames from the front-end device to the back-end edge server has shown great promise. In multi-stream competitive environments, efficient bandwidth management and proper scheduling are crucial to ensure both high inference accuracy and high throughput. To achieve this goal, we propose BiSwift, a bi-level framework that scales the concurrent real-time video analytics by a novel adaptive hybrid codec integrated with multi-level pipelines, and a global bandwidth controller for multiple video streams. The lower-level front-back-end collaborative mechanism (called adaptive hybrid codec) locally optimizes the accuracy and accelerates end-to-end video analytics for a single stream. The upper-level scheduler aims to accuracy fairness among multiple streams via the global bandwidth controller. The evaluation of BiSwift shows that BiSwift is able to real-time object detection on 9 streams with an edge device only equipped with an NVIDIA RTX3070 (8G) GPU. BiSwift improves 10%$\sim$21% accuracy and presents 1.2$\sim$9$\times$ throughput compared with the state-of-the-art video analytics pipelines.
Authors:Laya Das, Blazhe Gjorgiev, Giovanni Sansavini
Abstract:
Inspection of insulators is important to ensure reliable operation of the power system. Deep learning is being increasingly exploited to automate the inspection process by leveraging object detection models to analyse aerial images captured by drones. A purely object detection-based approach, however, suffers from class imbalance-induced poor performance, which can be accentuated for infrequent and hard-to-detect incipient faults. This article proposes the use of anomaly detection along with object detection in a two-stage approach for incipient fault detection in a data-efficient manner. An explainable convolutional one-class classifier is adopted for anomaly detection. The one-class formulation reduces the reliance on plentifully available images of faulty insulators, while the explainability of the model is expected to promote adoption by the industry. A modified loss function is developed that addresses computational and interpretability issues with the existing model, also allowing for the integration of other losses. The superiority of the novel loss function is demonstrated with MVTec-AD dataset. The models are trained for insulator inspection with two datasets -- representing data-abundant and data-scarce scenarios -- in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. The results suggest that including as few as five real anomalies in the training dataset significantly improves the model's performance and enables reliable detection of rarely occurring incipient faults in insulators.
Authors:Grant Rosario, David Noever
Abstract:
With the growing capabilities of modern object detection networks and datasets to train them, it has gotten more straightforward and, importantly, less laborious to get up and running with a model that is quite adept at detecting any number of various objects. However, while image datasets for object detection have grown and continue to proliferate (the current most extensive public set, ImageNet, contains over 14m images with over 14m instances), the same cannot be said for textual caption datasets. While they have certainly been growing in recent years, caption datasets present a much more difficult challenge due to language differences, grammar, and the time it takes for humans to generate them. Current datasets have certainly provided many instances to work with, but it becomes problematic when a captioner may have a more limited vocabulary, one may not be adequately fluent in the language, or there are simple grammatical mistakes. These difficulties are increased when the images get more specific, such as remote sensing images. This paper aims to address this issue of potential information and communication shortcomings in caption datasets. To provide a more precise analysis, we specify our domain of images to be remote sensing images in the RSICD dataset and experiment with the captions provided here. Our findings indicate that ChatGPT grammar correction is a simple and effective way to increase the performance accuracy of caption models by making data captions more diverse and grammatically correct.
Authors:Junsu Kim, Sumin Hong, Chanwoo Kim, Jihyeon Kim, Yihalem Yimolal Tiruneh, Jeongwan On, Jihyun Song, Sunhwa Choi, Seungryul Baek
Abstract:
Class incremental learning aims to solve a problem that arises when continuously adding unseen class instances to an existing model This approach has been extensively studied in the context of image classification; however its applicability to object detection is not well established yet. Existing frameworks using replay methods mainly collect replay data without considering the model being trained and tend to rely on randomness or the number of labels of each sample. Also, despite the effectiveness of the replay, it was not yet optimized for the object detection task. In this paper, we introduce an effective buffer training strategy (eBTS) that creates the optimized replay buffer on object detection. Our approach incorporates guarantee minimum and hierarchical sampling to establish the buffer customized to the trained model. %These methods can facilitate effective retrieval of prior knowledge. Furthermore, we use the circular experience replay training to optimally utilize the accumulated buffer data. Experiments on the MS COCO dataset demonstrate that our eBTS achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to the existing replay schemes.
Authors:Amirhosein Chahe, Chenan Wang, Abhishek Jeyapratap, Kaidi Xu, Lifeng Zhou
Abstract:
This paper introduces an attacking mechanism to challenge the resilience of autonomous driving systems. Specifically, we manipulate the decision-making processes of an autonomous vehicle by dynamically displaying adversarial patches on a screen mounted on another moving vehicle. These patches are optimized to deceive the object detection models into misclassifying targeted objects, e.g., traffic signs. Such manipulation has significant implications for critical multi-vehicle interactions such as intersection crossing and lane changing, which are vital for safe and efficient autonomous driving systems. Particularly, we make four major contributions. First, we introduce a novel adversarial attack approach where the patch is not co-located with its target, enabling more versatile and stealthy attacks. Moreover, our method utilizes dynamic patches displayed on a screen, allowing for adaptive changes and movement, enhancing the flexibility and performance of the attack. To do so, we design a Screen Image Transformation Network (SIT-Net), which simulates environmental effects on the displayed images, narrowing the gap between simulated and real-world scenarios. Further, we integrate a positional loss term into the adversarial training process to increase the success rate of the dynamic attack. Finally, we shift the focus from merely attacking perceptual systems to influencing the decision-making algorithms of self-driving systems. Our experiments demonstrate the first successful implementation of such dynamic adversarial attacks in real-world autonomous driving scenarios, paving the way for advancements in the field of robust and secure autonomous driving.
Authors:Shuli Jiang, Swanand Ravindra Kadhe, Yi Zhou, Ling Cai, Nathalie Baracaldo
Abstract:
Growing applications of large language models (LLMs) trained by a third party raise serious concerns on the security vulnerability of LLMs.It has been demonstrated that malicious actors can covertly exploit these vulnerabilities in LLMs through poisoning attacks aimed at generating undesirable outputs. While poisoning attacks have received significant attention in the image domain (e.g., object detection), and classification tasks, their implications for generative models, particularly in the realm of natural language generation (NLG) tasks, remain poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we perform a comprehensive exploration of various poisoning techniques to assess their effectiveness across a range of generative tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a range of metrics designed to quantify the success and stealthiness of poisoning attacks specifically tailored to NLG tasks. Through extensive experiments on multiple NLG tasks, LLMs and datasets, we show that it is possible to successfully poison an LLM during the fine-tuning stage using as little as 1\% of the total tuning data samples. Our paper presents the first systematic approach to comprehend poisoning attacks targeting NLG tasks considering a wide range of triggers and attack settings. We hope our findings will assist the AI security community in devising appropriate defenses against such threats.
Authors:Bilel Tarchoun, Quazi Mishkatul Alam, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Ihsen Alouani
Abstract:
Adversarial patches exemplify the tangible manifestation of the threat posed by adversarial attacks on Machine Learning (ML) models in real-world scenarios. Robustness against these attacks is of the utmost importance when designing computer vision applications, especially for safety-critical domains such as CCTV systems. In most practical situations, monitoring open spaces requires multi-view systems to overcome acquisition challenges such as occlusion handling. Multiview object systems are able to combine data from multiple views, and reach reliable detection results even in difficult environments. Despite its importance in real-world vision applications, the vulnerability of multiview systems to adversarial patches is not sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we raise the following question: Does the increased performance and information sharing across views offer as a by-product robustness to adversarial patches? We first conduct a preliminary analysis showing promising robustness against off-the-shelf adversarial patches, even in an extreme setting where we consider patches applied to all views by all persons in Wildtrack benchmark. However, we challenged this observation by proposing two new attacks: (i) In the first attack, targeting a multiview CNN, we maximize the global loss by proposing gradient projection to the different views and aggregating the obtained local gradients. (ii) In the second attack, we focus on a Transformer-based multiview framework. In addition to the focal loss, we also maximize the transformer-specific loss by dissipating its attention blocks. Our results show a large degradation in the detection performance of victim multiview systems with our first patch attack reaching an attack success rate of 73% , while our second proposed attack reduced the performance of its target detector by 62%
Authors:Aritra Bhowmik, Pascal Mettes, Martin R. Oswald, Cees G. M. Snoek
Abstract:
This paper revisits the problem of predicting box locations in object detection architectures. Typically, each box proposal or box query aims to directly maximize the intersection-over-union score with the ground truth, followed by a winner-takes-all non-maximum suppression where only the highest scoring box in each region is retained. We observe that both steps are sub-optimal: the first involves regressing proposals to the entire ground truth, which is a difficult task even with large receptive fields, and the second neglects valuable information from boxes other than the top candidate. Instead of regressing proposals to the whole ground truth, we propose a simpler approach: regress only to the area of intersection between the proposal and the ground truth. This avoids the need for proposals to extrapolate beyond their visual scope, improving localization accuracy. Rather than adopting a winner-takes-all strategy, we take the union over the regressed intersections of all boxes in a region to generate the final box outputs. Our plug-and-play method integrates seamlessly into proposal-based, grid-based, and query-based detection architectures with minimal modifications, consistently improving object localization and instance segmentation. We demonstrate its broad applicability and versatility across various detection and segmentation tasks.
Authors:Quazi Mishkatul Alam, Bilel Tarchoun, Ihsen Alouani, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh
Abstract:
The latest generation of transformer-based vision models has proven to be superior to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models across several vision tasks, largely attributed to their remarkable prowess in relation modeling. Deformable vision transformers significantly reduce the quadratic complexity of attention modeling by using sparse attention structures, enabling them to incorporate features across different scales and be used in large-scale applications, such as multi-view vision systems. Recent work has demonstrated adversarial attacks against conventional vision transformers; we show that these attacks do not transfer to deformable transformers due to their sparse attention structure. Specifically, attention in deformable transformers is modeled using pointers to the most relevant other tokens. In this work, we contribute for the first time adversarial attacks that manipulate the attention of deformable transformers, redirecting it to focus on irrelevant parts of the image. We also develop new collaborative attacks where a source patch manipulates attention to point to a target patch, which contains the adversarial noise to fool the model. In our experiments, we observe that altering less than 1% of the patched area in the input field results in a complete drop to 0% AP in single-view object detection using MS COCO and a 0% MODA in multi-view object detection using Wildtrack.
Authors:Stefan Becker, Jens Bayer, Ronny Hug, Wolfgang Hübner, Michael Arens
Abstract:
Data pooling offers various advantages, such as increasing the sample size, improving generalization, reducing sampling bias, and addressing data sparsity and quality, but it is not straightforward and may even be counterproductive. Assessing the effectiveness of pooling datasets in a principled manner is challenging due to the difficulty in estimating the overall information content of individual datasets. Towards this end, we propose incorporating a data source prediction module into standard object detection pipelines. The module runs with minimal overhead during inference time, providing additional information about the data source assigned to individual detections. We show the benefits of the so-called dataset affinity score by automatically selecting samples from a heterogeneous pool of vehicle datasets. The results show that object detectors can be trained on a significantly sparser set of training samples without losing detection accuracy.
Authors:Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Haris Khan, M. Saquib Sarfraz, Mohsen Ali
Abstract:
Deep learning based object detectors struggle generalizing to a new target domain bearing significant variations in object and background. Most current methods align domains by using image or instance-level adversarial feature alignment. This often suffers due to unwanted background and lacks class-specific alignment. A straightforward approach to promote class-level alignment is to use high confidence predictions on unlabeled domain as pseudo-labels. These predictions are often noisy since model is poorly calibrated under domain shift. In this paper, we propose to leverage model's predictive uncertainty to strike the right balance between adversarial feature alignment and class-level alignment. We develop a technique to quantify predictive uncertainty on class assignments and bounding-box predictions. Model predictions with low uncertainty are used to generate pseudo-labels for self-training, whereas the ones with higher uncertainty are used to generate tiles for adversarial feature alignment. This synergy between tiling around uncertain object regions and generating pseudo-labels from highly certain object regions allows capturing both image and instance-level context during the model adaptation. We report thorough ablation study to reveal the impact of different components in our approach. Results on five diverse and challenging adaptation scenarios show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods with noticeable margins.
Authors:Nicolas Gorlo, Kenneth Blomqvist, Francesco Milano, Roland Siegwart
Abstract:
Most object-level mapping systems in use today make use of an upstream learned object instance segmentation model. If we want to teach them about a new object or segmentation class, we need to build a large dataset and retrain the system. To build spatial AI systems that can quickly be taught about new objects, we need to effectively solve the problem of single-shot object detection, instance segmentation and re-identification. So far there is neither a method fulfilling all of these requirements in unison nor a benchmark that could be used to test such a method. Addressing this, we propose ISAR, a benchmark and baseline method for single- and few-shot object Instance Segmentation And Re-identification, in an effort to accelerate the development of algorithms that can robustly detect, segment, and re-identify objects from a single or a few sparse training examples. We provide a semi-synthetic dataset of video sequences with ground-truth semantic annotations, a standardized evaluation pipeline, and a baseline method. Our benchmark aligns with the emerging research trend of unifying Multi-Object Tracking, Video Object Segmentation, and Re-identification.
Authors:Jen-Hao Cheng, Sheng-Yao Kuan, Hugo Latapie, Gaowen Liu, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Abstract:
Robust perception is a vital component for ensuring safe autonomous and assisted driving. Automotive radar (77 to 81 GHz), which offers weather-resilient sensing, provides a complementary capability to the vision- or LiDAR-based autonomous driving systems. Raw radio-frequency (RF) radar tensors contain rich spatiotemporal semantics besides 3D location information. The majority of previous methods take in 3D (Doppler-range-azimuth) RF radar tensors, allowing prediction of an object's location, heading angle, and size in bird's-eye-view (BEV). However, they lack the ability to at the same time infer objects' size, orientation, and identity in the 3D space. To overcome this limitation, we propose an efficient joint architecture called CenterRadarNet, designed to facilitate high-resolution representation learning from 4D (Doppler-range-azimuth-elevation) radar data for 3D object detection and re-identification (re-ID) tasks. As a single-stage 3D object detector, CenterRadarNet directly infers the BEV object distribution confidence maps, corresponding 3D bounding box attributes, and appearance embedding for each pixel. Moreover, we build an online tracker utilizing the learned appearance embedding for re-ID. CenterRadarNet achieves the state-of-the-art result on the K-Radar 3D object detection benchmark. In addition, we present the first 3D object-tracking result using radar on the K-Radar dataset V2. In diverse driving scenarios, CenterRadarNet shows consistent, robust performance, emphasizing its wide applicability.
Authors:Mohammad Azizmalayeri, Reza Abbasi, Amir Hosein Haji Mohammad rezaie, Reihaneh Zohrabi, Mahdi Amiri, Mohammad Taghi Manzuri, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
Abstract:
Deep neural networks have exhibited remarkable performance in various domains. However, the reliance of these models on spurious features has raised concerns about their reliability. A promising solution to this problem is last-layer retraining, which involves retraining the linear classifier head on a small subset of data without spurious cues. Nevertheless, selecting this subset requires human supervision, which reduces its scalability. Moreover, spurious cues may still exist in the selected subset. As a solution to this problem, we propose a novel ranking framework that leverages an open vocabulary object detection technique to identify images without spurious cues. More specifically, we use the object detector as a measure to score the presence of the target object in the images. Next, the images are sorted based on this score, and the last-layer of the model is retrained on a subset of the data with the highest scores. Our experiments on the ImageNet-1k dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of this ranking framework in sorting images based on spuriousness and using them for last-layer retraining.
Authors:Aldi Piroli, Vinzenz Dallabetta, Johannes Kopp, Marc Walessa, Daniel Meissner, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detectors have achieved unprecedented speed and accuracy in autonomous driving applications. However, similar to other neural networks, they are often biased toward high-confidence predictions or return detections where no real object is present. These types of detections can lead to a less reliable environment perception, severely affecting the functionality and safety of autonomous vehicles. We address this problem by proposing LS-VOS, a framework for identifying outliers in 3D object detections. Our approach builds on the idea of Virtual Outlier Synthesis (VOS), which incorporates outlier knowledge during training, enabling the model to learn more compact decision boundaries. In particular, we propose a new synthesis approach that relies on the latent space of an auto-encoder network to generate outlier features with a parametrizable degree of similarity to in-distribution features. In extensive experiments, we show that our approach improves the outlier detection capabilities of a state-of-the-art object detector while maintaining high 3D object detection performance.
Authors:Aldi Piroli, Vinzenz Dallabetta, Johannes Kopp, Marc Walessa, Daniel Meissner, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
LiDAR sensors are used in autonomous driving applications to accurately perceive the environment. However, they are affected by adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain. These everyday phenomena introduce unwanted noise into the measurements, severely degrading the performance of LiDAR-based perception systems. In this work, we propose a framework for improving the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors against road spray. Our approach uses a state-of-the-art adverse weather detection network to filter out spray from the LiDAR point cloud, which is then used as input for the object detector. In this way, the detected objects are less affected by the adverse weather in the scene, resulting in a more accurate perception of the environment. In addition to adverse weather filtering, we explore the use of radar targets to further filter false positive detections. Tests on real-world data show that our approach improves the robustness to road spray of several popular 3D object detectors.
Authors:Anju Rani, Daniel O. Arroyo, Petar Durdevic
Abstract:
Automatic visual inspection of synthetic fibre ropes (SFRs) is a challenging task in the field of offshore, wind turbine industries, etc. The presence of any defect in SFRs can compromise their structural integrity and pose significant safety risks. Due to the large size and weight of these ropes, it is often impractical to detach and inspect them frequently. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop efficient defect detection methods to assess their remaining useful life (RUL). To address this challenge, a comprehensive dataset has been generated, comprising a total of 6,942 raw images representing both normal and defective SFRs. The dataset encompasses a wide array of defect scenarios which may occur throughout their operational lifespan, including but not limited to placking defects, cut strands, chafings, compressions, core outs and normal. This dataset serves as a resource to support computer vision applications, including object detection, classification, and segmentation, aimed at detecting and analyzing defects in SFRs. The availability of this dataset will facilitate the development and evaluation of robust defect detection algorithms. The aim of generating this dataset is to assist in the development of automated defect detection systems that outperform traditional visual inspection methods, thereby paving the way for safer and more efficient utilization of SFRs across a wide range of applications.
Authors:Lukas Stäcker, Philipp Heidenreich, Jason Rambach, Didier Stricker
Abstract:
By exploiting complementary sensor information, radar and camera fusion systems have the potential to provide a highly robust and reliable perception system for advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving functions. Recent advances in camera-based object detection offer new radar-camera fusion possibilities with bird's eye view feature maps. In this work, we propose a novel and flexible fusion network and evaluate its performance on two datasets: nuScenes and View-of-Delft. Our experiments reveal that while the camera branch needs large and diverse training data, the radar branch benefits more from a high-performance radar. Using transfer learning, we improve the camera's performance on the smaller dataset. Our results further demonstrate that the radar-camera fusion approach significantly outperforms the camera-only and radar-only baselines.
Authors:Zizhang Wu, Yuanzhu Gan, Tianhao Xu, Rui Tang, Jian Pu
Abstract:
We aim for accurate and efficient line landmark detection for valet parking, which is a long-standing yet unsolved problem in autonomous driving. To this end, we present a deep line landmark detection system where we carefully design the modules to be lightweight. Specifically, we first empirically design four general line landmarks including three physical lines and one novel mental line. The four line landmarks are effective for valet parking. We then develop a deep network (LineMarkNet) to detect line landmarks from surround-view cameras where we, via the pre-calibrated homography, fuse context from four separate cameras into the unified bird-eye-view (BEV) space, specifically we fuse the surroundview features and BEV features, then employ the multi-task decoder to detect multiple line landmarks where we apply the center-based strategy for object detection task, and design our graph transformer to enhance the vision transformer with hierarchical level graph reasoning for semantic segmentation task. At last, we further parameterize the detected line landmarks (e.g., intercept-slope form) whereby a novel filtering backend incorporates temporal and multi-view consistency to achieve smooth and stable detection. Moreover, we annotate a large-scale dataset to validate our method. Experimental results show that our framework achieves the enhanced performance compared with several line detection methods and validate the multi-task network's efficiency about the real-time line landmark detection on the Qualcomm 820A platform while meantime keeps superior accuracy, with our deep line landmark detection system.
Authors:Tanvir Mahmud, Chun-Hao Liu, Burhaneddin Yaman, Diana Marculescu
Abstract:
Despite significant progress in semi-supervised learning for image object detection, several key issues are yet to be addressed for video object detection: (1) Achieving good performance for supervised video object detection greatly depends on the availability of annotated frames. (2) Despite having large inter-frame correlations in a video, collecting annotations for a large number of frames per video is expensive, time-consuming, and often redundant. (3) Existing semi-supervised techniques on static images can hardly exploit the temporal motion dynamics inherently present in videos. In this paper, we introduce SSVOD, an end-to-end semi-supervised video object detection framework that exploits motion dynamics of videos to utilize large-scale unlabeled frames with sparse annotations. To selectively assemble robust pseudo-labels across groups of frames, we introduce \textit{flow-warped predictions} from nearby frames for temporal-consistency estimation. In particular, we introduce cross-IoU and cross-divergence based selection methods over a set of estimated predictions to include robust pseudo-labels for bounding boxes and class labels, respectively. To strike a balance between confirmation bias and uncertainty noise in pseudo-labels, we propose confidence threshold based combination of hard and soft pseudo-labels. Our method achieves significant performance improvements over existing methods on ImageNet-VID, Epic-KITCHENS, and YouTube-VIS datasets. Code and pre-trained models will be released.
Authors:Shuai Wang, Yao Teng, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Query-based object detectors directly decode image features into object instances with a set of learnable queries. These query vectors are progressively refined to stable meaningful representations through a sequence of decoder layers, and then used to directly predict object locations and categories with simple FFN heads. In this paper, we present a new query-based object detector (DEQDet) by designing a deep equilibrium decoder. Our DEQ decoder models the query vector refinement as the fixed point solving of an {implicit} layer and is equivalent to applying {infinite} steps of refinement. To be more specific to object decoding, we use a two-step unrolled equilibrium equation to explicitly capture the query vector refinement. Accordingly, we are able to incorporate refinement awareness into the DEQ training with the inexact gradient back-propagation (RAG). In addition, to stabilize the training of our DEQDet and improve its generalization ability, we devise the deep supervision scheme on the optimization path of DEQ with refinement-aware perturbation~(RAP). Our experiments demonstrate DEQDet converges faster, consumes less memory, and achieves better results than the baseline counterpart (AdaMixer). In particular, our DEQDet with ResNet50 backbone and 300 queries achieves the $49.5$ mAP and $33.0$ AP$_s$ on the MS COCO benchmark under $2\times$ training scheme (24 epochs).
Authors:Nikolas Ebert, Didier Stricker, Oliver Wasenmüller
Abstract:
Many medical or pharmaceutical processes have strict guidelines regarding continuous hygiene monitoring. This often involves the labor-intensive task of manually counting microorganisms in Petri dishes by trained personnel. Automation attempts often struggle due to major challenges: significant scaling differences, low separation, low contrast, etc. To address these challenges, we introduce AttnPAFPN, a high-resolution detection pipeline that leverages a novel transformer variation, the efficient-global self-attention mechanism. Our streamlined approach can be easily integrated in almost any multi-scale object detection pipeline. In a comprehensive evaluation on the publicly available AGAR dataset, we demonstrate the superior accuracy of our network over the current state-of-the-art. In order to demonstrate the task-independent performance of our approach, we perform further experiments on COCO and LIVECell datasets.
Authors:Haichao Zhang, Can Qin, Yu Yin, Yun Fu
Abstract:
Camouflaged objects that blend into natural scenes pose significant challenges for deep-learning models to detect and synthesize. While camouflaged object detection is a crucial task in computer vision with diverse real-world applications, this research topic has been constrained by limited data availability. We propose a framework for synthesizing camouflage data to enhance the detection of camouflaged objects in natural scenes. Our approach employs a generative model to produce realistic camouflage images, which can be used to train existing object detection models. Specifically, we use a camouflage environment generator supervised by a camouflage distribution classifier to synthesize the camouflage images, which are then fed into our generator to expand the dataset. Our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art method on three datasets (COD10k, CAMO, and CHAMELEON), demonstrating its effectiveness in improving camouflaged object detection. This approach can serve as a plug-and-play data generation and augmentation module for existing camouflaged object detection tasks and provides a novel way to introduce more diversity and distributions into current camouflage datasets.
Authors:Khurram Azeem Hashmi, Goutham Kallempudi, Didier Stricker, Muhammamd Zeshan Afzal
Abstract:
Extracting useful visual cues for the downstream tasks is especially challenging under low-light vision. Prior works create enhanced representations by either correlating visual quality with machine perception or designing illumination-degrading transformation methods that require pre-training on synthetic datasets. We argue that optimizing enhanced image representation pertaining to the loss of the downstream task can result in more expressive representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel module, FeatEnHancer, that hierarchically combines multiscale features using multiheaded attention guided by task-related loss function to create suitable representations. Furthermore, our intra-scale enhancement improves the quality of features extracted at each scale or level, as well as combines features from different scales in a way that reflects their relative importance for the task at hand. FeatEnHancer is a general-purpose plug-and-play module and can be incorporated into any low-light vision pipeline. We show with extensive experimentation that the enhanced representation produced with FeatEnHancer significantly and consistently improves results in several low-light vision tasks, including dark object detection (+5.7 mAP on ExDark), face detection (+1.5 mAPon DARK FACE), nighttime semantic segmentation (+5.1 mIoU on ACDC ), and video object detection (+1.8 mAP on DarkVision), highlighting the effectiveness of enhancing hierarchical features under low-light vision.
Authors:Zhengzheng Tu, Qishun Wang, Hongshun Wang, Kunpeng Wang, Chenglong Li
Abstract:
Recently, many breakthroughs are made in the field of Video Object Detection (VOD), but the performance is still limited due to the imaging limitations of RGB sensors in adverse illumination conditions. To alleviate this issue, this work introduces a new computer vision task called RGB-thermal (RGBT) VOD by introducing the thermal modality that is insensitive to adverse illumination conditions. To promote the research and development of RGBT VOD, we design a novel Erasure-based Interaction Network (EINet) and establish a comprehensive benchmark dataset (VT-VOD50) for this task. Traditional VOD methods often leverage temporal information by using many auxiliary frames, and thus have large computational burden. Considering that thermal images exhibit less noise than RGB ones, we develop a negative activation function that is used to erase the noise of RGB features with the help of thermal image features. Furthermore, with the benefits from thermal images, we rely only on a small temporal window to model the spatio-temporal information to greatly improve efficiency while maintaining detection accuracy.
VT-VOD50 dataset consists of 50 pairs of challenging RGBT video sequences with complex backgrounds, various objects and different illuminations, which are collected in real traffic scenarios. Extensive experiments on VT-VOD50 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method against existing mainstream VOD methods. The code of EINet and the dataset will be released to the public for free academic usage.
Authors:Cong Zhang, Honggang Qi, Shuhui Wang, Yuezun Li, Siwei Lyu
Abstract:
DeepFakes have raised serious societal concerns, leading to a great surge in detection-based forensics methods in recent years. Face forgery recognition is a standard detection method that usually follows a two-phase pipeline. While those methods perform well in ideal experimental environment, they face challenges when dealing with DeepFakes in the wild involving complex background and multiple faces of varying sizes. Moreover, most face forgery recognition methods can only process one face at a time. One straightforward way to address this issue is to simultaneous process multi-face by integrating face extraction and forgery detection in an end-to-end fashion by adapting advanced object detection architectures. However, as these object detection architectures are designed to capture the discriminative features of different object categories rather than the subtle forgery traces among the faces, the direct adaptation suffers from limited representation ability. In this paper, we propose COMICS, an end-to-end framework for multi-face forgery detection. COMICS integrates face extraction and forgery detection in a seamless manner and adapts to advanced object detection architectures. The proposed bi-grained contrastive learning approach explores face forgery traces at both the coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, coarse-grained level contrastive learning captures the discriminative features among positive and negative proposal pairs at multiple layers produced by the proposal generator, and fine-grained level contrastive learning captures the pixel-wise discrepancy between the forged and original areas of the same face and the pixel-wise content inconsistency among different faces. Extensive experiments on the OpenForensics and FFIW datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other counterparts and shows great potential for being integrated into various architectures.
Authors:Kamil Jeziorek, Andrea Pinna, Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract:
Recent advances in event camera research emphasize processing data in its original sparse form, which allows the use of its unique features such as high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low latency, and resistance to image blur. One promising approach for analyzing event data is through graph convolutional networks (GCNs). However, current research in this domain primarily focuses on optimizing computational costs, neglecting the associated memory costs. In this paper, we consider both factors together in order to achieve satisfying results and relatively low model complexity. For this purpose, we performed a comparative analysis of different graph convolution operations, considering factors such as execution time, the number of trainable model parameters, data format requirements, and training outcomes. Our results show a 450-fold reduction in the number of parameters for the feature extraction module and a 4.5-fold reduction in the size of the data representation while maintaining a classification accuracy of 52.3%, which is 6.3% higher compared to the operation used in state-of-the-art approaches. To further evaluate performance, we implemented the object detection architecture and evaluated its performance on the N-Caltech101 dataset. The results showed an accuracy of 53.7 % mAP@0.5 and reached an execution rate of 82 graphs per second.
Authors:Kexuan Zhang, Qiyu Sun, Chaoqiang Zhao, Yang Tang
Abstract:
Deep learning has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. Based on the statistical correlations uncovered by deep learning-based methods, computer vision has contributed to tremendous growth in areas like autonomous driving and robotics. Despite being the basis of deep learning, such correlation is not stable and is susceptible to uncontrolled factors. In the absence of the guidance of prior knowledge, statistical correlations can easily turn into spurious correlations and cause confounders. As a result, researchers are now trying to enhance deep learning methods with causal theory. Causal theory models the intrinsic causal structure unaffected by data bias and is effective in avoiding spurious correlations. This paper aims to comprehensively review the existing causal methods in typical vision and vision-language tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and image captioning. The advantages of causality and the approaches for building causal paradigms will be summarized. Future roadmaps are also proposed, including facilitating the development of causal theory and its application in other complex scenes and systems.
Authors:Yuexiong Ding, Xiaowei Luo
Abstract:
Object detection has been widely applied for construction safety management, especially personal protective equipment (PPE) detection. Though the existing PPE detection models trained on conventional datasets have achieved excellent results, their performance dramatically declines in extreme construction conditions. A robust detection model NST-YOLOv5 is developed by combining the neural style transfer (NST) and YOLOv5 technologies. Five extreme conditions are considered and simulated via the NST module to endow the detection model with excellent robustness, including low light, intense light, sand dust, fog, and rain. Experiments show that the NST has great potential as a tool for extreme data synthesis since it is better at simulating extreme conditions than other traditional image processing algorithms and helps the NST-YOLOv5 achieve 0.141 and 0.083 mAP_(05:95) improvements in synthesized and real-world extreme data. This study provides a new feasible way to obtain a more robust detection model for extreme construction conditions.
Authors:Weifeng Lin, Ziheng Wu, Jiayu Chen, Jun Huang, Lianwen Jin
Abstract:
This paper presents a new vision Transformer, Scale-Aware Modulation Transformer (SMT), that can handle various downstream tasks efficiently by combining the convolutional network and vision Transformer. The proposed Scale-Aware Modulation (SAM) in the SMT includes two primary novel designs. Firstly, we introduce the Multi-Head Mixed Convolution (MHMC) module, which can capture multi-scale features and expand the receptive field. Secondly, we propose the Scale-Aware Aggregation (SAA) module, which is lightweight but effective, enabling information fusion across different heads. By leveraging these two modules, convolutional modulation is further enhanced. Furthermore, in contrast to prior works that utilized modulations throughout all stages to build an attention-free network, we propose an Evolutionary Hybrid Network (EHN), which can effectively simulate the shift from capturing local to global dependencies as the network becomes deeper, resulting in superior performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a wide range of visual tasks. Specifically, SMT with 11.5M / 2.4GFLOPs and 32M / 7.7GFLOPs can achieve 82.2% and 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, respectively. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224^2 resolution, it attains 87.1% and 88.1% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224^2 and 384^2, respectively. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, the SMT base trained with 1x and 3x schedule outperforms the Swin Transformer counterpart by 4.2 and 1.3 mAP on COCO, respectively. For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, the SMT base test at single- and multi-scale surpasses Swin by 2.0 and 1.1 mIoU respectively on the ADE20K.
Authors:Dongwei Wang, Zhi Han, Yanmei Wang, Xiai Chen, Baichen Liu, Yandong Tang
Abstract:
Reviewing plays an important role when learning knowledge. The knowledge acquisition at a certain time point may be strongly inspired with the help of previous experience. Thus the knowledge growing procedure should show strong relationship along the temporal dimension. In our research, we find that during the network training, the evolution of feature map follows temporal sequence property. A proper temporal supervision may further improve the network training performance. Inspired by this observation, we propose Temporal Supervised Knowledge Distillation (TSKD). Specifically, we extract the spatiotemporal features in the different training phases of student by convolutional Long Short-term memory network (Conv-LSTM). Then, we train the student net through a dynamic target, rather than static teacher network features. This process realizes the refinement of old knowledge in student network, and utilizes it to assist current learning. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and advantages of our method over existing knowledge distillation methods, including various network architectures and different tasks (image classification and object detection) .
Authors:Yushan Han, Hui Zhang, Honglei Zhang, Yidong Li
Abstract:
Collaborative 3D object detection, with its improved interaction advantage among multiple agents, has been widely explored in autonomous driving. However, existing collaborative 3D object detectors in a fully supervised paradigm heavily rely on large-scale annotated 3D bounding boxes, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To tackle this issue, we propose a sparsely supervised collaborative 3D object detection framework SSC3OD, which only requires each agent to randomly label one object in the scene. Specifically, this model consists of two novel components, i.e., the pillar-based masked autoencoder (Pillar-MAE) and the instance mining module. The Pillar-MAE module aims to reason over high-level semantics in a self-supervised manner, and the instance mining module generates high-quality pseudo labels for collaborative detectors online. By introducing these simple yet effective mechanisms, the proposed SSC3OD can alleviate the adverse impacts of incomplete annotations. We generate sparse labels based on collaborative perception datasets to evaluate our method. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets reveal that our proposed SSC3OD can effectively improve the performance of sparsely supervised collaborative 3D object detectors.
Authors:Yang Zhang, Huilin Pan, Yang Zhou, Mingying Li, Guodong Sun
Abstract:
Efficient visual fault detection of freight trains is a critical part of ensuring the safe operation of railways under the restricted hardware environment. Although deep learning-based approaches have excelled in object detection, the efficiency of freight train fault detection is still insufficient to apply in real-world engineering. This paper proposes a heterogeneous self-distillation framework to ensure detection accuracy and speed while satisfying low resource requirements. The privileged information in the output feature knowledge can be transferred from the teacher to the student model through distillation to boost performance. We first adopt a lightweight backbone to extract features and generate a new heterogeneous knowledge neck. Such neck models positional information and long-range dependencies among channels through parallel encoding to optimize feature extraction capabilities. Then, we utilize the general distribution to obtain more credible and accurate bounding box estimates. Finally, we employ a novel loss function that makes the network easily concentrate on values near the label to improve learning efficiency. Experiments on four fault datasets reveal that our framework can achieve over 37 frames per second and maintain the highest accuracy in comparison with traditional distillation approaches. Moreover, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our framework demonstrates more competitive performance with lower memory usage and the smallest model size.
Authors:Apratim Bhattacharyya, Sunny Panchal, Mingu Lee, Reza Pourreza, Pulkit Madan, Roland Memisevic
Abstract:
Multi-modal language models (LM) have recently shown promising performance in high-level reasoning tasks on videos. However, existing methods still fall short in tasks like causal or compositional spatiotemporal reasoning over actions, in which model predictions need to be grounded in fine-grained low-level details, such as object motions and object interactions. In this work, we propose training an LM end-to-end on low-level surrogate tasks, including object detection, re-identification, and tracking, to endow the model with the required low-level visual capabilities. We show that a two-stream video encoder with spatiotemporal attention is effective at capturing the required static and motion-based cues in the video. By leveraging the LM's ability to perform the low-level surrogate tasks, we can cast reasoning in videos as the three-step process of Look, Remember, Reason wherein visual information is extracted using low-level visual skills step-by-step and then integrated to arrive at a final answer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the ACRE, CATER, Something-Else and STAR datasets. Our approach is trainable end-to-end and surpasses state-of-the-art task-specific methods across these tasks by a large margin.
Authors:Matthias Minderer, Alexey Gritsenko, Neil Houlsby
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection has benefited greatly from pretrained vision-language models, but is still limited by the amount of available detection training data. While detection training data can be expanded by using Web image-text pairs as weak supervision, this has not been done at scales comparable to image-level pretraining. Here, we scale up detection data with self-training, which uses an existing detector to generate pseudo-box annotations on image-text pairs. Major challenges in scaling self-training are the choice of label space, pseudo-annotation filtering, and training efficiency. We present the OWLv2 model and OWL-ST self-training recipe, which address these challenges. OWLv2 surpasses the performance of previous state-of-the-art open-vocabulary detectors already at comparable training scales (~10M examples). However, with OWL-ST, we can scale to over 1B examples, yielding further large improvement: With an L/14 architecture, OWL-ST improves AP on LVIS rare classes, for which the model has seen no human box annotations, from 31.2% to 44.6% (43% relative improvement). OWL-ST unlocks Web-scale training for open-world localization, similar to what has been seen for image classification and language modelling.
Authors:Hanwen Jiang, Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan, Kristen Grauman
Abstract:
Visual Query Localization on long-form egocentric videos requires spatio-temporal search and localization of visually specified objects and is vital to build episodic memory systems. Prior work develops complex multi-stage pipelines that leverage well-established object detection and tracking methods to perform VQL. However, each stage is independently trained and the complexity of the pipeline results in slow inference speeds. We propose VQLoC, a novel single-stage VQL framework that is end-to-end trainable. Our key idea is to first build a holistic understanding of the query-video relationship and then perform spatio-temporal localization in a single shot manner. Specifically, we establish the query-video relationship by jointly considering query-to-frame correspondences between the query and each video frame and frame-to-frame correspondences between nearby video frames. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior VQL methods by 20% accuracy while obtaining a 10x improvement in inference speed. VQLoC is also the top entry on the Ego4D VQ2D challenge leaderboard. Project page: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/VQLoC/
Authors:Siming Yan, Chen Song, Youkang Kong, Qixing Huang
Abstract:
A promising direction for pre-training 3D point clouds is to leverage the massive amount of data in 2D, whereas the domain gap between 2D and 3D creates a fundamental challenge. This paper proposes a novel approach to point-cloud pre-training that learns 3D representations by leveraging pre-trained 2D networks. Different from the popular practice of predicting 2D features first and then obtaining 3D features through dimensionality lifting, our approach directly uses a 3D network for feature extraction. We train the 3D feature extraction network with the help of the novel 2D knowledge transfer loss, which enforces the 2D projections of the 3D feature to be consistent with the output of pre-trained 2D networks. To prevent the feature from discarding 3D signals, we introduce the multi-view consistency loss that additionally encourages the projected 2D feature representations to capture pixel-wise correspondences across different views. Such correspondences induce 3D geometry and effectively retain 3D features in the projected 2D features. Experimental results demonstrate that our pre-trained model can be successfully transferred to various downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification, part segmentation, 3D object detection, and semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Purbayan Kar, Vishal Chudasama, Naoyuki Onoe, Pankaj Wasnik
Abstract:
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) has made significant progress with the development of pseudo-label-based end-to-end methods. However, many of these methods face challenges due to class imbalance, which hinders the effectiveness of the pseudo-label generator. Furthermore, in the literature, it has been observed that low-quality pseudo-labels severely limit the performance of SSOD. In this paper, we examine the root causes of low-quality pseudo-labels and present novel learning mechanisms to improve the label generation quality. To cope with high false-negative and low precision rates, we introduce an adaptive thresholding mechanism that helps the proposed network to filter out optimal bounding boxes. We further introduce a Jitter-Bagging module to provide accurate information on localization to help refine the bounding boxes. Additionally, two new losses are introduced using the background and foreground scores predicted by the teacher and student networks to improvise the pseudo-label recall rate. Furthermore, our method applies strict supervision to the teacher network by feeding strong & weak augmented data to generate robust pseudo-labels so that it can detect small and complex objects. Finally, the extensive experiments show that the proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets and allows the baseline network to achieve 100% supervised performance with much less (i.e., 20%) labeled data.
Authors:Linhui Dai, Hong Liu, Pinhao Song, Hao Tang, Runwei Ding, Shengquan Li
Abstract:
Underwater object detection (UOD) is crucial for marine economic development, environmental protection, and the planet's sustainable development. The main challenges of this task arise from low-contrast, small objects, and mimicry of aquatic organisms. The key to addressing these challenges is to focus the model on obtaining more discriminative information. We observe that the edges of underwater objects are highly unique and can be distinguished from low-contrast or mimicry environments based on their edges. Motivated by this observation, we propose an Edge-guided Representation Learning Network, termed ERL-Net, that aims to achieve discriminative representation learning and aggregation under the guidance of edge cues. Firstly, we introduce an edge-guided attention module to model the explicit boundary information, which generates more discriminative features. Secondly, a feature aggregation module is proposed to aggregate the multi-scale discriminative features by regrouping them into three levels, effectively aggregating global and local information for locating and recognizing underwater objects. Finally, we propose a wide and asymmetric receptive field block to enable features to have a wider receptive field, allowing the model to focus on more small object information. Comprehensive experiments on three challenging underwater datasets show that our method achieves superior performance on the UOD task.
Authors:Georg Novtony, Walter Morales-Alvarez, Nikita Smirnov, Cristina Olaverri-Monreal
Abstract:
This paper presents the development of the JKU-ITS Last Mile Delivery Robot. The proposed approach utilizes a combination of one 3D LIDAR, RGB-D camera, IMU and GPS sensor on top of a mobile robot slope mower. An embedded computer, running ROS1, is utilized to process the sensor data streams to enable 2D and 3D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, 2D localization and object detection using a convolutional neural network.
Authors:Yuexiong Ding, Xiaowei Luo
Abstract:
Accident of struck-by machines is one of the leading causes of casualties on construction sites. Monitoring workers' proximities to avoid human-machine collisions has aroused great concern in construction safety management. Existing methods are either too laborious and costly to apply extensively, or lacking spatial perception for accurate monitoring. Therefore, this study proposes a novel framework for proximity monitoring using only an ordinary 2D camera to realize real-time human-machine collision warning, which is designed to integrate a monocular 3D object detection model to perceive spatial information from 2D images and a post-processing classification module to identify the proximity as four predefined categories: Dangerous, Potentially Dangerous, Concerned, and Safe. A virtual dataset containing 22000 images with 3D annotations is constructed and publicly released to facilitate the system development and evaluation. Experimental results show that the trained 3D object detection model achieves 75% loose AP within 20 meters. Besides, the implemented system is real-time and camera carrier-independent, achieving an F1 of roughly 0.8 within 50 meters under specified settings for machines of different sizes. This study preliminarily reveals the potential and feasibility of proximity monitoring using only a 2D camera, providing a new promising and economical way for early warning of human-machine collisions.
Authors:Yuexiong Ding, Xiaowei Luo
Abstract:
Currently, object detection applications in construction are almost based on pure 2D data (both image and annotation are 2D-based), resulting in the developed artificial intelligence (AI) applications only applicable to some scenarios that only require 2D information. However, most advanced applications usually require AI agents to perceive 3D spatial information, which limits the further development of the current computer vision (CV) in construction. The lack of 3D annotated datasets for construction object detection worsens the situation. Therefore, this study creates and releases a virtual dataset with 3D annotations named VCVW-3D, which covers 15 construction scenes and involves ten categories of construction vehicles and workers. The VCVW-3D dataset is characterized by multi-scene, multi-category, multi-randomness, multi-viewpoint, multi-annotation, and binocular vision. Several typical 2D and monocular 3D object detection models are then trained and evaluated on the VCVW-3D dataset to provide a benchmark for subsequent research. The VCVW-3D is expected to bring considerable economic benefits and practical significance by reducing the costs of data construction, prototype development, and exploration of space-awareness applications, thus promoting the development of CV in construction, especially those of 3D applications.
Authors:Lukas Stäcker, Shashank Mishra, Philipp Heidenreich, Jason Rambach, Didier Stricker
Abstract:
Radars and cameras belong to the most frequently used sensors for advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving research. However, there has been surprisingly little research on radar-camera fusion with neural networks. One of the reasons is a lack of large-scale automotive datasets with radar and unmasked camera data, with the exception of the nuScenes dataset. Another reason is the difficulty of effectively fusing the sparse radar point cloud on the bird's eye view (BEV) plane with the dense images on the perspective plane. The recent trend of camera-based 3D object detection using BEV features has enabled a new type of fusion, which is better suited for radars. In this work, we present RC-BEVFusion, a modular radar-camera fusion network on the BEV plane. We propose BEVFeatureNet, a novel radar encoder branch, and show that it can be incorporated into several state-of-the-art camera-based architectures. We show significant performance gains of up to 28% increase in the nuScenes detection score, which is an important step in radar-camera fusion research. Without tuning our model for the nuScenes benchmark, we achieve the best result among all published methods in the radar-camera fusion category.
Authors:Amogh Joshi, Adarsh Kosta, Wachirawit Ponghiran, Manish Nagaraj, Kaushik Roy
Abstract:
The ability of resource-constrained biological systems such as fruitflies to perform complex and high-speed maneuvers in cluttered environments has been one of the prime sources of inspiration for developing vision-based autonomous systems. To emulate this capability, the perception pipeline of such systems must integrate information cues from tasks including optical flow and depth estimation, object detection and tracking, and segmentation, among others. However, the conventional approach of employing slow, synchronous inputs from standard frame-based cameras constrains these perception capabilities, particularly during high-speed maneuvers. Recently, event-based sensors have emerged as low latency and low energy alternatives to standard frame-based cameras for capturing high-speed motion, effectively speeding up perception and hence navigation. For coherence, all the perception tasks must be trained on the same input data. However, present-day datasets are curated mainly for a single or a handful of tasks and are limited in the rate of the provided ground truths. To address these limitations, we present Flying Event Dataset fOr Reactive behAviour (FEDORA) - a fully synthetic dataset for perception tasks, with raw data from frame-based cameras, event-based cameras, and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), along with ground truths for depth, pose, and optical flow at a rate much higher than existing datasets.
Authors:Minjae Lee, Seongmin Park, Hyungmin Kim, Minyong Yoon, Janghwan Lee, Jun Won Choi, Nam Sung Kim, Mingu Kang, Jungwook Choi
Abstract:
3D object detection using point cloud (PC) data is essential for perception pipelines of autonomous driving, where efficient encoding is key to meeting stringent resource and latency requirements. PointPillars, a widely adopted bird's-eye view (BEV) encoding, aggregates 3D point cloud data into 2D pillars for fast and accurate 3D object detection. However, the state-of-the-art methods employing PointPillars overlook the inherent sparsity of pillar encoding where only a valid pillar is encoded with a vector of channel elements, missing opportunities for significant computational reduction. Meanwhile, current sparse convolution accelerators are designed to handle only element-wise activation sparsity and do not effectively address the vector sparsity imposed by pillar encoding.
In this paper, we propose SPADE, an algorithm-hardware co-design strategy to maximize vector sparsity in pillar-based 3D object detection and accelerate vector-sparse convolution commensurate with the improved sparsity. SPADE consists of three components: (1) a dynamic vector pruning algorithm balancing accuracy and computation savings from vector sparsity, (2) a sparse coordinate management hardware transforming 2D systolic array into a vector-sparse convolution accelerator, and (3) sparsity-aware dataflow optimization tailoring sparse convolution schedules for hardware efficiency. Taped-out with a commercial technology, SPADE saves the amount of computation by 36.3--89.2\% for representative 3D object detection networks and benchmarks, leading to 1.3--10.9$\times$ speedup and 1.5--12.6$\times$ energy savings compared to the ideal dense accelerator design. These sparsity-proportional performance gains equate to 4.1--28.8$\times$ speedup and 90.2--372.3$\times$ energy savings compared to the counterpart server and edge platforms.
Authors:Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang
Abstract:
Current large-scale generative models have impressive efficiency in generating high-quality images based on text prompts. However, they lack the ability to precisely control the size and position of objects in the generated image. In this study, we analyze the generative mechanism of the stable diffusion model and propose a new interactive generation paradigm that allows users to specify the position of generated objects without additional training. Moreover, we propose an object detection-based evaluation metric to assess the control capability of location aware generation task. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both control capacity and image quality.
Authors:Haitao Yang, Zaiwei Zhang, Xiangru Huang, Min Bai, Chen Song, Bo Sun, Li Erran Li, Qixing Huang
Abstract:
Bird's-Eye View (BEV) features are popular intermediate scene representations shared by the 3D backbone and the detector head in LiDAR-based object detectors. However, little research has been done to investigate how to incorporate additional supervision on the BEV features to improve proposal generation in the detector head, while still balancing the number of powerful 3D layers and efficient 2D network operations. This paper proposes a novel scene representation that encodes both the semantics and geometry of the 3D environment in 2D, which serves as a dense supervision signal for better BEV feature learning. The key idea is to use auxiliary networks to predict a combination of explicit and implicit semantic probabilities by exploiting their complementary properties. Extensive experiments show that our simple yet effective design can be easily integrated into most state-of-the-art 3D object detectors and consistently improves upon baseline models.
Authors:Haotian Hu, Fanyi Wang, Jingwen Su, Yaonong Wang, Laifeng Hu, Weiye Fang, Jingwei Xu, Zhiwang Zhang
Abstract:
In recent years, great progress has been made in the Lift-Splat-Shot-based (LSS-based) 3D object detection method. However, inaccurate depth estimation remains an important constraint to the accuracy of camera-only and multi-model 3D object detection models, especially in regions where the depth changes significantly (i.e., the "depth jump" problem). In this paper, we proposed a novel Edge-aware Lift-splat-shot (EA-LSS) framework. Specifically, edge-aware depth fusion (EADF) module is proposed to alleviate the "depth jump" problem and fine-grained depth (FGD) module to further enforce refined supervision on depth. Our EA-LSS framework is compatible for any LSS-based 3D object detection models, and effectively boosts their performances with negligible increment of inference time. Experiments on nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that EA-LSS is effective in either camera-only or multi-model models. It is worth mentioning that EA-LSS achieved the state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes test benchmarks with mAP and NDS of 76.5% and 77.6%, respectively.
Authors:Hieu H. Pham, Khiem H. Le, Tuan V. Tran, Ha Q. Nguyen
Abstract:
The work discusses the use of machine learning algorithms for anomaly detection in medical image analysis and how the performance of these algorithms depends on the number of annotators and the quality of labels. To address the issue of subjectivity in labeling with a single annotator, we introduce a simple and effective approach that aggregates annotations from multiple annotators with varying levels of expertise. We then aim to improve the efficiency of predictive models in abnormal detection tasks by estimating hidden labels from multiple annotations and using a re-weighted loss function to improve detection performance. Our method is evaluated on a real-world medical imaging dataset and outperforms relevant baselines that do not consider disagreements among annotators.
Authors:Zhaofei Wang, Weijia Zhang, Min-Ling Zhang
Abstract:
Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) enables the training of object detection models using only image-level annotations. State-of-the-art WSOD detectors commonly rely on multi-instance learning (MIL) as the backbone of their detectors and assume that the bounding box proposals of an image are independent of each other. However, since such approaches only utilize the highest score proposal and discard the potentially useful information from other proposals, their independent MIL backbone often limits models to salient parts of an object or causes them to detect only one object per class. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel backbone for WSOD based on our tailored Vision Transformer named Weakly Supervised Transformer Detection Network (WSTDN). Our algorithm is not only the first to demonstrate that self-attention modules that consider inter-instance relationships are effective backbones for WSOD, but also we introduce a novel bounding box mining method (BBM) integrated with a memory transfer refinement (MTR) procedure to utilize the instance dependencies for facilitating instance refinements. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC2007 and VOC2012 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed WSTDN and modified instance refinement modules.
Authors:Junji Otsuka, Masakazu Yoshimura, Takeshi Ohashi
Abstract:
Unprocessed sensor outputs (RAW images) potentially improve both low-level and high-level computer vision algorithms, but the lack of large-scale RAW image datasets is a barrier to research. Thus, reversed Image Signal Processing (ISP) which converts existing RGB images into RAW images has been studied. However, most existing methods require camera-specific metadata or paired RGB and RAW images to model the conversion, and they are not always available. In addition, there are issues in handling diverse ISPs and recovering global illumination. To tackle these limitations, we propose a self-supervised reversed ISP method that does not require metadata and paired images. The proposed method converts a RGB image into a RAW-like image taken in the same environment with the same sensor as a reference RAW image by dynamically selecting parameters of the reversed ISP pipeline based on the reference RAW image. The parameter selection is trained via pseudo paired data created from unpaired RGB and RAW images. We show that the proposed method is able to learn various reversed ISPs with comparable accuracy to other state-of-the-art supervised methods and convert unknown RGB images from COCO and Flickr1M to target RAW-like images more accurately in terms of pixel distribution. We also demonstrate that our generated RAW images improve performance on real RAW image object detection task.
Authors:Johannes Kopp, Dominik Kellner, Aldi Piroli, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
Radar sensors employed for environment perception, e.g. in autonomous vehicles, output a lot of unwanted clutter. These points, for which no corresponding real objects exist, are a major source of errors in following processing steps like object detection or tracking. We therefore present two novel neural network setups for identifying clutter. The input data, network architectures and training configuration are adjusted specifically for this task. Special attention is paid to the downsampling of point clouds composed of multiple sensor scans. In an extensive evaluation, the new setups display substantially better performance than existing approaches. Because there is no suitable public data set in which clutter is annotated, we design a method to automatically generate the respective labels. By applying it to existing data with object annotations and releasing its code, we effectively create the first freely available radar clutter data set representing real-world driving scenarios. Code and instructions are accessible at www.github.com/kopp-j/clutter-ds.
Authors:Zizhang Wu, Yuanzhu Gan, Lei Wang, Guilian Chen, Jian Pu
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection reveals an economical but challenging task in autonomous driving. Recently center-based monocular methods have developed rapidly with a great trade-off between speed and accuracy, where they usually depend on the object center's depth estimation via 2D features. However, the visual semantic features without sufficient pixel geometry information, may affect the performance of clues for spatial 3D detection tasks. To alleviate this, we propose MonoPGC, a novel end-to-end Monocular 3D object detection framework with rich Pixel Geometry Contexts. We introduce the pixel depth estimation as our auxiliary task and design depth cross-attention pyramid module (DCPM) to inject local and global depth geometry knowledge into visual features. In addition, we present the depth-space-aware transformer (DSAT) to integrate 3D space position and depth-aware features efficiently. Besides, we design a novel depth-gradient positional encoding (DGPE) to bring more distinct pixel geometry contexts into the transformer for better object detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI dataset.
Authors:Zizhang Wu, Guilian Chen, Yuanzhu Gan, Lei Wang, Jian Pu
Abstract:
Multi-view radar-camera fused 3D object detection provides a farther detection range and more helpful features for autonomous driving, especially under adverse weather. The current radar-camera fusion methods deliver kinds of designs to fuse radar information with camera data. However, these fusion approaches usually adopt the straightforward concatenation operation between multi-modal features, which ignores the semantic alignment with radar features and sufficient correlations across modals. In this paper, we present MVFusion, a novel Multi-View radar-camera Fusion method to achieve semantic-aligned radar features and enhance the cross-modal information interaction. To achieve so, we inject the semantic alignment into the radar features via the semantic-aligned radar encoder (SARE) to produce image-guided radar features. Then, we propose the radar-guided fusion transformer (RGFT) to fuse our radar and image features to strengthen the two modals' correlation from the global scope via the cross-attention mechanism. Extensive experiments show that MVFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance (51.7% NDS and 45.3% mAP) on the nuScenes dataset. We shall release our code and trained networks upon publication.
Authors:William Ljungbergh, Joakim Johnander, Christoffer Petersson, Michael Felsberg
Abstract:
Images fed to a deep neural network have in general undergone several handcrafted image signal processing (ISP) operations, all of which have been optimized to produce visually pleasing images. In this work, we investigate the hypothesis that the intermediate representation of visually pleasing images is sub-optimal for downstream computer vision tasks compared to the RAW image representation. We suggest that the operations of the ISP instead should be optimized towards the end task, by learning the parameters of the operations jointly during training. We extend previous works on this topic and propose a new learnable operation that enables an object detector to achieve superior performance when compared to both previous works and traditional RGB images. In experiments on the open PASCALRAW dataset, we empirically confirm our hypothesis.
Authors:Matthew Ciolino, Grant Rosario, David Noever
Abstract:
Soft labels in image classification are vector representations of an image's true classification. In this paper, we investigate soft labels in the context of satellite object detection. We propose using detections as the basis for a new dataset of soft labels. Much of the effort in creating a high-quality model is gathering and annotating the training data. If we could use a model to generate a dataset for us, we could not only rapidly create datasets, but also supplement existing open-source datasets. Using a subset of the xView dataset, we train a YOLOv5 model to detect cars, planes, and ships. We then use that model to generate soft labels for the second training set which we then train and compare to the original model. We show that soft labels can be used to train a model that is almost as accurate as a model trained on the original data.
Authors:Mengmi Zhang, Elisa Pavarino, Xiao Liu, Giorgia Dellaferrera, Ankur Sikarwar, Caishun Chen, Marcelo Armendariz, Noga Mudrik, Prachi Agrawal, Spandan Madan, Mranmay Shetty, Andrei Barbu, Haochen Yang, Tanishq Kumar, Shui'Er Han, Aman Raj Singh, Meghna Sadwani, Stella Dellaferrera, Michele Pizzochero, Brandon Tang, Yew Soon Ong, Hanspeter Pfister, Gabriel Kreiman
Abstract:
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in daily life, ascertaining whether an agent is human is critical. We systematically benchmark AI's ability to imitate humans in three language tasks (image captioning, word association, conversation) and three vision tasks (color estimation, object detection, attention prediction), collecting data from 636 humans and 37 AI agents. Next, we conducted 72,191 Turing-like tests with 1,916 human judges and 10 AI judges. Current AIs are approaching the ability to convincingly impersonate humans and deceive human judges in both language and vision. Even simple AI judges outperformed humans in distinguishing AI from human responses. Imitation ability showed minimal correlation with conventional AI performance metrics, suggesting that passing as human is an important independent evaluation criterion. The large-scale Turing datasets and metrics introduced here offer valuable benchmarks for assessing human-likeness in AI and highlight the importance of rigorous, quantitative imitation tests for AI development.
Authors:Masakazu Yoshimura, Junji Otsuka, Atsushi Irie, Takeshi Ohashi
Abstract:
Image Signal Processors (ISPs) play important roles in image recognition tasks as well as in the perceptual quality of captured images. In most cases, experts make a lot of effort to manually tune many parameters of ISPs, but the parameters are sub-optimal. In the literature, two types of techniques have been actively studied: a machine learning-based parameter tuning technique and a DNN-based ISP technique. The former is lightweight but lacks expressive power. The latter has expressive power, but the computational cost is too heavy on edge devices. To solve these problems, we propose "DynamicISP," which consists of multiple classical ISP functions and dynamically controls the parameters of each frame according to the recognition result of the previous frame. We show our method successfully controls the parameters of multiple ISP functions and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with low computational cost in single and multi-category object detection tasks.
Authors:Efstathia Soufleri, Gobinda Saha, Kaushik Roy
Abstract:
Machine Learning (ML) has achieved enormous success in solving a variety of problems in computer vision, speech recognition, object detection, to name a few. The principal reason for this success is the availability of huge datasets for training deep neural networks (DNNs). However, datasets can not be publicly released if they contain sensitive information such as medical or financial records. In such cases, data privacy becomes a major concern. Encryption methods offer a possible solution to this issue, however their deployment on ML applications is non-trivial, as they seriously impact the classification accuracy and result in substantial computational overhead.Alternatively, obfuscation techniques can be used, but maintaining a good balance between visual privacy and accuracy is challenging. In this work, we propose a method to generate secure synthetic datasets from the original private datasets. In our method, given a network with Batch Normalization (BN) layers pre-trained on the original dataset, we first record the layer-wise BN statistics. Next, using the BN statistics and the pre-trained model, we generate the synthetic dataset by optimizing random noises such that the synthetic data match the layer-wise statistical distribution of the original model. We evaluate our method on image classification dataset (CIFAR10) and show that our synthetic data can be used for training networks from scratch, producing reasonable classification performance.
Authors:Grant Rosario, David Noever, Matt Ciolino
Abstract:
The challenge of labeling large example datasets for computer vision continues to limit the availability and scope of image repositories. This research provides a new method for automated data collection, curation, labeling, and iterative training with minimal human intervention for the case of overhead satellite imagery and object detection. The new operational scale effectively scanned an entire city (68 square miles) in grid search and yielded a prediction of car color from space observations. A partially trained yolov5 model served as an initial inference seed to output further, more refined model predictions in iterative cycles. Soft labeling here refers to accepting label noise as a potentially valuable augmentation to reduce overfitting and enhance generalized predictions to previously unseen test data. The approach takes advantage of a real-world instance where a cropped image of a car can automatically receive sub-type information as white or colorful from pixel values alone, thus completing an end-to-end pipeline without overdependence on human labor.
Authors:Hongshan Liu, Colin Aderon, Noah Wagon, Abdul Latif Bamba, Xueshen Li, Huapu Liu, Steven MacCall, Yu Gan
Abstract:
American football games attract significant worldwide attention every year. Identifying players from videos in each play is also essential for the indexing of player participation. Processing football game video presents great challenges such as crowded settings, distorted objects, and imbalanced data for identifying players, especially jersey numbers. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based player tracking system to automatically track players and index their participation per play in American football games. It is a two-stage network design to highlight areas of interest and identify jersey number information with high accuracy. First, we utilize an object detection network, a detection transformer, to tackle the player detection problem in a crowded context. Second, we identify players using jersey number recognition with a secondary convolutional neural network, then synchronize it with a game clock subsystem. Finally, the system outputs a complete log in a database for play indexing. We demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of player tracking system by analyzing the qualitative and quantitative results on football videos. The proposed system shows great potential for implementation in and analysis of football broadcast video.
Authors:Keenan Burnett, David J. Yoon, Yuchen Wu, Andrew Zou Li, Haowei Zhang, Shichen Lu, Jingxing Qian, Wei-Kang Tseng, Andrew Lambert, Keith Y. K. Leung, Angela P. Schoellig, Timothy D. Barfoot
Abstract:
The Boreas dataset was collected by driving a repeated route over the course of one year, resulting in stark seasonal variations and adverse weather conditions such as rain and falling snow. In total, the Boreas dataset includes over 350km of driving data featuring a 128-channel Velodyne Alpha Prime lidar, a 360$^\circ$ Navtech CIR304-H scanning radar, a 5MP FLIR Blackfly S camera, and centimetre-accurate post-processed ground truth poses. Our dataset will support live leaderboards for odometry, metric localization, and 3D object detection. The dataset and development kit are available at https://www.boreas.utias.utoronto.ca
Authors:Shyam Venkatasubramanian, Chayut Wongkamthong, Mohammadreza Soltani, Bosung Kang, Sandeep Gogineni, Ali Pezeshki, Muralidhar Rangaswamy, Vahid Tarokh
Abstract:
Using an amalgamation of techniques from classical radar, computer vision, and deep learning, we characterize our ongoing data-driven approach to space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radar. We generate a rich example dataset of received radar signals by randomly placing targets of variable strengths in a predetermined region using RFView, a site-specific radio frequency modeling and simulation tool developed by ISL Inc. For each data sample within this region, we generate heatmap tensors in range, azimuth, and elevation of the output power of a minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer, which can be replaced with a desired test statistic. These heatmap tensors can be thought of as stacked images, and in an airborne scenario, the moving radar creates a sequence of these time-indexed image stacks, resembling a video. Our goal is to use these images and videos to detect targets and estimate their locations, a procedure reminiscent of computer vision algorithms for object detection$-$namely, the Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN). The Faster R-CNN consists of a proposal generating network for determining regions of interest (ROI), a regression network for positioning anchor boxes around targets, and an object classification algorithm; it is developed and optimized for natural images. Our ongoing research will develop analogous tools for heatmap images of radar data. In this regard, we will generate a large, representative adaptive radar signal processing database for training and testing, analogous in spirit to the COCO dataset for natural images. As a preliminary example, we present a regression network in this paper for estimating target locations to demonstrate the feasibility of and significant improvements provided by our data-driven approach.
Authors:Aduen Benjumea, Izzeddin Teeti, Fabio Cuzzolin, Andrew Bradley
Abstract:
As autonomous vehicles and autonomous racing rise in popularity, so does the need for faster and more accurate detectors. While our naked eyes are able to extract contextual information almost instantly, even from far away, image resolution and computational resources limitations make detecting smaller objects (that is, objects that occupy a small pixel area in the input image) a genuinely challenging task for machines and a wide-open research field. This study explores how the popular YOLOv5 object detector can be modified to improve its performance in detecting smaller objects, with a particular application in autonomous racing. To achieve this, we investigate how replacing certain structural elements of the model (as well as their connections and other parameters) can affect performance and inference time. In doing so, we propose a series of models at different scales, which we name `YOLO-Z', and which display an improvement of up to 6.9% in mAP when detecting smaller objects at 50% IOU, at the cost of just a 3ms increase in inference time compared to the original YOLOv5. Our objective is to inform future research on the potential of adjusting a popular detector such as YOLOv5 to address specific tasks and provide insights on how specific changes can impact small object detection. Such findings, applied to the broader context of autonomous vehicles, could increase the amount of contextual information available to such systems.
Authors:Yang Chen, Pinhao Song, Hong Liu, Linhui Dai, Xiaochuan Zhang, Runwei Ding, Shengquan Li
Abstract:
The performance of existing underwater object detection methods degrades seriously when facing domain shift caused by complicated underwater environments. Due to the limitation of the number of domains in the dataset, deep detectors easily memorize a few seen domains, which leads to low generalization ability. There are two common ideas to improve the domain generalization performance. First, it can be inferred that the detector trained on as many domains as possible is domain-invariant. Second, for the images with the same semantic content in different domains, their hidden features should be equivalent. This paper further excavates these two ideas and proposes a domain generalization framework (named DMC) that learns how to generalize across domains from Domain Mixup and Contrastive Learning. First, based on the formation of underwater images, an image in an underwater environment is the linear transformation of another underwater environment. Thus, a style transfer model, which outputs a linear transformation matrix instead of the whole image, is proposed to transform images from one source domain to another, enriching the domain diversity of the training data. Second, mixup operation interpolates different domains on the feature level, sampling new domains on the domain manifold. Third, contrastive loss is selectively applied to features from different domains to force the model to learn domain invariant features but retain the discriminative capacity. With our method, detectors will be robust to domain shift. Also, a domain generalization benchmark S-UODAC2020 for detection is set up to measure the performance of our method. Comprehensive experiments on S-UODAC2020 and two object recognition benchmarks (PACS and VLCS) demonstrate that the proposed method is able to learn domain-invariant representations, and outperforms other domain generalization methods.
Authors:Yuan Yuan, Zhitong Xiong, Qi Wang
Abstract:
Although traffic sign detection has been studied for years and great progress has been made with the rise of deep learning technique, there are still many problems remaining to be addressed. For complicated real-world traffic scenes, there are two main challenges. Firstly, traffic signs are usually small size objects, which makes it more difficult to detect than large ones; Secondly, it is hard to distinguish false targets which resemble real traffic signs in complex street scenes without context information. To handle these problems, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning method for traffic sign detection in complex environments. Our contributions are as follows: 1) We propose a multi-resolution feature fusion network architecture which exploits densely connected deconvolution layers with skip connections, and can learn more effective features for the small size object; 2) We frame the traffic sign detection as a spatial sequence classification and regression task, and propose a vertical spatial sequence attention (VSSA) module to gain more context information for better detection performance. To comprehensively evaluate the proposed method, we do experiments on several traffic sign datasets as well as the general object detection dataset and the results have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors:Zhicheng Ding, Zhixin Lai, Siyang Li, Panfeng Li, Qikai Yang, Edward Wong
Abstract:
Real-time object tracking necessitates a delicate balance between speed and accuracy, a challenge exacerbated by the computational demands of deep learning methods. In this paper, we propose Confidence-Triggered Detection (CTD), an innovative approach that strategically bypasses object detection for frames closely resembling intermediate states, leveraging tracker confidence scores. CTD not only enhances tracking speed but also preserves accuracy, surpassing existing tracking algorithms. Through extensive evaluation across various tracker confidence thresholds, we identify an optimal trade-off between tracking speed and accuracy, providing crucial insights for parameter fine-tuning and enhancing CTD's practicality in real-world scenarios. Our experiments across diverse detection models underscore the robustness and versatility of the CTD framework, demonstrating its potential to enable real-time tracking in resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Wei Liao, Chunyan Xu, Chenxu Wang, Zhen Cui
Abstract:
Sparse annotation in remote sensing object detection poses significant challenges due to dense object distributions and category imbalances. Although existing Dense Pseudo-Label methods have demonstrated substantial potential in pseudo-labeling tasks, they remain constrained by selection ambiguities and inconsistencies in confidence estimation.In this paper, we introduce an LLM-assisted semantic guidance framework tailored for sparsely annotated remote sensing object detection, exploiting the advanced semantic reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to distill high-confidence pseudo-labels.By integrating LLM-generated semantic priors, we propose a Class-Aware Dense Pseudo-Label Assignment mechanism that adaptively assigns pseudo-labels for both unlabeled and sparsely labeled data, ensuring robust supervision across varying data distributions. Additionally, we develop an Adaptive Hard-Negative Reweighting Module to stabilize the supervised learning branch by mitigating the influence of confounding background information. Extensive experiments on DOTA and HRSC2016 demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing single-stage detector-based frameworks, significantly improving detection performance under sparse annotations.
Authors:Lu Cai, Fei Xu, Min Xian, Yalei Tang, Shoukun Sun, John Stempien
Abstract:
During irradiation, phenomena such as kernel swelling and buffer densification may impact the performance of tristructural isotropic (TRISO) particle fuel. Post-irradiation microscopy is often used to identify these irradiation-induced morphologic changes. However, each fuel compact generally contains thousands of TRISO particles. Manually performing the work to get statistical information on these phenomena is cumbersome and subjective. To reduce the subjectivity inherent in that process and to accelerate data analysis, we used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to automatically segment cross-sectional images of microscopic TRISO layers. CNNs are a class of machine-learning algorithms specifically designed for processing structured grid data. They have gained popularity in recent years due to their remarkable performance in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. In this research, we generated a large irradiated TRISO layer dataset with more than 2,000 microscopic images of cross-sectional TRISO particles and the corresponding annotated images. Based on these annotated images, we used different CNNs to automatically segment different TRISO layers. These CNNs include RU-Net (developed in this study), as well as three existing architectures: U-Net, Residual Network (ResNet), and Attention U-Net. The preliminary results show that the model based on RU-Net performs best in terms of Intersection over Union (IoU). Using CNN models, we can expedite the analysis of TRISO particle cross sections, significantly reducing the manual labor involved and improving the objectivity of the segmentation results.
Authors:Tianyao Sun, Dawei Xiang, Tianqi Ding, Xiang Fang, Yijiashun Qi, Zunduo Zhao
Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is a fundamental task in multi-modal perception that aims to integrate complementary structural and textural cues from different spectral domains. In this paper, we propose FusionNet, a novel end-to-end fusion framework that explicitly models inter-modality interaction and enhances task-critical regions. FusionNet introduces a modality-aware attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts the contribution of infrared and visible features based on their discriminative capacity. To achieve fine-grained, interpretable fusion, we further incorporate a pixel-wise alpha blending module, which learns spatially-varying fusion weights in an adaptive and content-aware manner. Moreover, we formulate a target-aware loss that leverages weak ROI supervision to preserve semantic consistency in regions containing important objects (e.g., pedestrians, vehicles). Experiments on the public M3FD dataset demonstrate that FusionNet generates fused images with enhanced semantic preservation, high perceptual quality, and clear interpretability. Our framework provides a general and extensible solution for semantic-aware multi-modal image fusion, with benefits for downstream tasks such as object detection and scene understanding.
Authors:Yalei Yu, Matthew Coombes, Wen-Hua Chen, Cong Sun, Myles Flanagan, Jingjing Jiang, Pramod Pashupathy, Masoud Sotoodeh-Bahraini, Peter Kinnell, Niels Lohse
Abstract:
Active object detection, which aims to identify objects of interest through controlled camera movements, plays a pivotal role in real-world visual perception for autonomous robotic applications, such as manufacturing tasks (e.g., assembly operations) performed in unknown environments. A dual control for exploration and exploitation (DCEE) algorithm is presented within goal-oriented control systems to achieve efficient active object detection, leveraging active learning by incorporating variance-based uncertainty estimation in the cost function. This novel method employs an exploration-exploitation balanced cost function to actively guide the selection of the next viewpoint. Specifically, active object detection is achieved through the development of a reward function that encodes knowledge about the confidence variation of objects as a function of viewpoint position within a given domain. By identifying the unknown parameters of this function, the system generates an optimal viewpoint planning strategy. DCEE integrates parameter estimation of the reward function and view planning, ensuring a balanced trade-off between the exploitation of learned knowledge and active exploration during the planning process. Moreover, it demonstrates remarkable adaptability across diverse scenarios, effectively handling LEGO brick detection at varying locations. Importantly, the algorithm maintains consistent configuration settings and a fixed number of parameters across various scenarios, underscoring its efficiency and robustness. To validate the proposed approach, extensive numerical studies, high-fidelity virtual simulations, and real-world experiments under various scenarios were conducted. The results confirm the effectiveness of DCEE in active object detection, showcasing superior performance compared to existing methods, including model predictive control (MPC) and entropy approaches.
Authors:Zhongyu Xia, Hansong Yang, Yongtao Wang
Abstract:
Three-dimensional Object Detection from multi-view cameras and LiDAR is a crucial component for autonomous driving and smart transportation. However, in the process of basic feature extraction, perspective transformation, and feature fusion, noise and error will gradually accumulate. To address this issue, we propose InsFusion, which can extract proposals from both raw and fused features and utilizes these proposals to query the raw features, thereby mitigating the impact of accumulated errors. Additionally, by incorporating attention mechanisms applied to the raw features, it thereby mitigates the impact of accumulated errors. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that InsFusion is compatible with various advanced baseline methods and delivers new state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection.
Authors:Jongyoun Noh, Junghyup Lee, Hyekang Park, Bumsub Ham
Abstract:
PointPillars is the fastest 3D object detector that exploits pseudo image representations to encode features for 3D objects in a scene. Albeit efficient, PointPillars is typically outperformed by state-of-the-art 3D detection methods due to the following limitations: 1) The pseudo image representations fail to preserve precise 3D structures, and 2) they make it difficult to adopt a two-stage detection pipeline using 3D object proposals that typically shows better performance than a single-stage approach. We introduce in this paper the first two-stage 3D detection framework exploiting pseudo image representations, narrowing the performance gaps between PointPillars and state-of-the-art methods, while retaining its efficiency. Our framework consists of two novel components that overcome the aforementioned limitations of PointPillars: First, we introduce a new CNN architecture, dubbed 3DPillars, that enables learning 3D voxel-based features from the pseudo image representation efficiently using 2D convolutions. The basic idea behind 3DPillars is that 3D features from voxels can be viewed as a stack of pseudo images. To implement this idea, we propose a separable voxel feature module that extracts voxel-based features without using 3D convolutions. Second, we introduce an RoI head with a sparse scene context feature module that aggregates multi-scale features from 3DPillars to obtain a sparse scene feature. This enables adopting a two-stage pipeline effectively, and fully leveraging contextual information of a scene to refine 3D object proposals. Experimental results on the KITTI and Waymo Open datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, achieving a good compromise in terms of speed and accuracy.
Authors:Ronan Docherty, Antonis Vamvakeros, Samuel J. Cooper
Abstract:
Feature foundation models - usually vision transformers - offer rich semantic descriptors of images, useful for downstream tasks such as (interactive) segmentation and object detection. For computational efficiency these descriptors are often patch-based, and so struggle to represent the fine features often present in micrographs; they also struggle with the large image sizes present in materials and biological image analysis. In this work, we train a convolutional neural network to upsample low-resolution (i.e, large patch size) foundation model features with reference to the input image. We apply this upsampler network (without any further training) to efficiently featurise and then segment a variety of microscopy images, including plant cells, a lithium-ion battery cathode and organic crystals. The richness of these upsampled features admits separation of hard to segment phases, like hairline cracks. We demonstrate that interactive segmentation with these deep features produces high-quality segmentations far faster and with far fewer labels than training or finetuning a more traditional convolutional network.
Authors:Ronan Docherty, Antonis Vamvakeros, Samuel J. Cooper
Abstract:
Feature foundation models - usually vision transformers - offer rich semantic descriptors of images, useful for downstream tasks such as (interactive) segmentation and object detection. For computational efficiency these descriptors are often patch-based, and so struggle to represent the fine features often present in micrographs; they also struggle with the large image sizes present in materials and biological image analysis. In this work, we train a convolutional neural network to upsample low-resolution (i.e, large patch size) foundation model features with reference to the input image. We apply this upsampler network (without any further training) to efficiently featurise and then segment a variety of microscopy images, including plant cells, a lithium-ion battery cathode and organic crystals. The richness of these upsampled features admits separation of hard to segment phases, like hairline cracks. We demonstrate that interactive segmentation with these deep features produces high-quality segmentations far faster and with far fewer labels than training or finetuning a more traditional convolutional network.
Authors:Mingqian Ji, Jian Yang, Shanshan Zhang
Abstract:
Existing LiDAR-based 3D object detectors typically rely on manually annotated labels for training to achieve good performance. However, obtaining high-quality 3D labels is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, recent works explore unsupervised 3D object detection by introducing RGB images as an auxiliary modal to assist pseudo-box generation. However, these methods simply integrate pseudo-boxes generated by LiDAR point clouds and RGB images. Yet, such a label-level fusion strategy brings limited improvements to the quality of pseudo-boxes, as it overlooks the complementary nature in terms of LiDAR and RGB image data. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a novel data-level fusion framework that integrates RGB images and LiDAR data at an early stage. Specifically, we utilize vision foundation models for instance segmentation and depth estimation on images and introduce a bi-directional fusion method, where real points acquire category labels from the 2D space, while 2D pixels are projected onto 3D to enhance real point density. To mitigate noise from depth and segmentation estimations, we propose a local and global filtering method, which applies local radius filtering to suppress depth estimation errors and global statistical filtering to remove segmentation-induced outliers. Furthermore, we propose a data-level fusion based dynamic self-evolution strategy, which iteratively refines pseudo-boxes under a dense representation, significantly improving localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that the detector trained by our method significantly outperforms that trained by previous state-of-the-art methods with 28.4$\%$ mAP on the nuScenes validation benchmark.
Authors:Moussa Kassem Sbeyti, Nadja Klein, Michelle Karg, Christian Wirth, Sahin Albayrak
Abstract:
Active learning (AL) for real-world object detection faces computational and reliability challenges that limit practical deployment. Developing new AL methods requires training multiple detectors across iterations to compare against existing approaches. This creates high costs for autonomous driving datasets where the training of one detector requires up to 282 GPU hours. Additionally, AL method rankings vary substantially across validation sets, compromising reliability in safety-critical transportation systems. We introduce object-based set similarity ($\mathrm{OSS}$), a metric that addresses these challenges. $\mathrm{OSS}$ (1) quantifies AL method effectiveness without requiring detector training by measuring similarity between training sets and target domains using object-level features. This enables the elimination of ineffective AL methods before training. Furthermore, $\mathrm{OSS}$ (2) enables the selection of representative validation sets for robust evaluation. We validate our similarity-based approach on three autonomous driving datasets (KITTI, BDD100K, CODA) using uncertainty-based AL methods as a case study with two detector architectures (EfficientDet, YOLOv3). This work is the first to unify AL training and evaluation strategies in object detection based on object similarity. $\mathrm{OSS}$ is detector-agnostic, requires only labeled object crops, and integrates with existing AL pipelines. This provides a practical framework for deploying AL in real-world applications where computational efficiency and evaluation reliability are critical. Code is available at https://mos-ks.github.io/publications/.
Authors:Bálint Mészáros, Ahmet Firintepe, Sebastian Schmidt, Stephan Günnemann
Abstract:
AI tasks in the car interior like identifying and localizing externally introduced objects is crucial for response quality of personal assistants. However, computational resources of on-board systems remain highly constrained, restricting the deployment of such solutions directly within the vehicle. To address this limitation, we propose the novel Object Detection and Localization (ODAL) framework for interior scene understanding. Our approach leverages vision foundation models through a distributed architecture, splitting computational tasks between on-board and cloud. This design overcomes the resource constraints of running foundation models directly in the car. To benchmark model performance, we introduce ODALbench, a new metric for comprehensive assessment of detection and localization.Our analysis demonstrates the framework's potential to establish new standards in this domain. We compare the state-of-the-art GPT-4o vision foundation model with the lightweight LLaVA 1.5 7B model and explore how fine-tuning enhances the lightweight models performance. Remarkably, our fine-tuned ODAL-LLaVA model achieves an ODAL$_{score}$ of 89%, representing a 71% improvement over its baseline performance and outperforming GPT-4o by nearly 20%. Furthermore, the fine-tuned model maintains high detection accuracy while significantly reducing hallucinations, achieving an ODAL$_{SNR}$ three times higher than GPT-4o.
Authors:Jingyi Liao, Xun Xu, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Lile Cai
Abstract:
Training deep object detectors demands expensive bounding box annotation. Active learning (AL) is a promising technique to alleviate the annotation burden. Performing AL at box-level for object detection, i.e., selecting the most informative boxes to label and supplementing the sparsely-labelled image with pseudo labels, has been shown to be more cost-effective than selecting and labelling the entire image. In box-level AL for object detection, we observe that models at early stage can only perform well on majority classes, making the pseudo labels severely class-imbalanced. We propose a class-balanced sampling strategy to select more objects from minority classes for labelling, so as to make the final training data, \ie, ground truth labels obtained by AL and pseudo labels, more class-balanced to train a better model. We also propose a task-aware soft pseudo labelling strategy to increase the accuracy of pseudo labels. We evaluate our method on public benchmarking datasets and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Xinhao Xiang, Kuan-Chuan Peng, Suhas Lohit, Michael J. Jones, Jiawei Zhang
Abstract:
3D object detection plays a crucial role in autonomous systems, yet existing methods are limited by closed-set assumptions and struggle to recognize novel objects and their attributes in real-world scenarios. We propose OVODA, a novel framework enabling both open-vocabulary 3D object and attribute detection with no need to know the novel class anchor size. OVODA uses foundation models to bridge the semantic gap between 3D features and texts while jointly detecting attributes, e.g., spatial relationships, motion states, etc. To facilitate such research direction, we propose OVAD, a new dataset that supplements existing 3D object detection benchmarks with comprehensive attribute annotations. OVODA incorporates several key innovations, including foundation model feature concatenation, prompt tuning strategies, and specialized techniques for attribute detection, including perspective-specified prompts and horizontal flip augmentation. Our results on both the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets show that under the condition of no given anchor sizes of novel classes, OVODA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in open-vocabulary 3D object detection while successfully recognizing object attributes. Our OVAD dataset is released here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16904069 .
Authors:Rahul Marchand, Lucas Schorling, Cornelius Carlsson, Jonas Schuff, Barnaby van Straaten, Taylor L. Patti, Federico Fedele, Joshua Ziegler, Parth Girdhar, Pranav Vaidhyanathan, Natalia Ares
Abstract:
Transformer models and end-to-end learning frameworks are rapidly revolutionizing the field of artificial intelligence. In this work, we apply object detection transformers to analyze charge stability diagrams in semiconductor quantum dot arrays, a key task for achieving scalability with spin-based quantum computing. Specifically, our model identifies triple points and their connectivity, which is crucial for virtual gate calibration, charge state initialization, drift correction, and pulse sequencing. We show that it surpasses convolutional neural networks in performance on three different spin qubit architectures, all without the need for retraining. In contrast to existing approaches, our method significantly reduces complexity and runtime, while enhancing generalizability. The results highlight the potential of transformer-based end-to-end learning frameworks as a foundation for a scalable, device- and architecture-agnostic tool for control and tuning of quantum dot devices.
Authors:Yuxin Cao, Yedi Zhang, Wentao He, Yifan Liao, Yan Xiao, Chang Li, Zhiyong Huang, Jin Song Dong
Abstract:
Learning-based autonomous driving systems remain critically vulnerable to adversarial patches, posing serious safety and security risks in their real-world deployment. Black-box attacks, notable for their high attack success rate without model knowledge, are especially concerning, with their transferability extensively studied to reduce computational costs compared to query-based attacks. Previous transferability-based black-box attacks typically adopt mean Average Precision (mAP) as the evaluation metric and design training loss accordingly. However, due to the presence of multiple detected bounding boxes and the relatively lenient Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds, the attack effectiveness of these approaches is often overestimated, resulting in reduced success rates in practical attacking scenarios. Furthermore, patches trained on low-resolution data often fail to maintain effectiveness on high-resolution images, limiting their transferability to autonomous driving datasets. To fill this gap, we propose P$^3$A, a Powerful and Practical Patch Attack framework for 2D object detection in autonomous driving, specifically optimized for high-resolution datasets. First, we introduce a novel metric, Practical Attack Success Rate (PASR), to more accurately quantify attack effectiveness with greater relevance for pedestrian safety. Second, we present a tailored Localization-Confidence Suppression Loss (LCSL) to improve attack transferability under PASR. Finally, to maintain the transferability for high-resolution datasets, we further incorporate the Probabilistic Scale-Preserving Padding (PSPP) into the patch attack pipeline as a data preprocessing step. Extensive experiments show that P$^3$A outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on unseen models and unseen high-resolution datasets, both under the proposed practical IoU-based evaluation metric and the previous mAP-based metrics.
Authors:Ayushman Sarkar, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Zhenyu Yu
Abstract:
Visual reasoning is critical for a wide range of computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite notable advances in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys often address these directions in isolation, lacking a unified analysis and comparison across reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols. This survey aims to address this gap by categorizing visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and systematically examining their implementation through architectures such as graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems. We review evaluation protocols designed to assess functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and critically analyze their limitations in terms of generalizability, reproducibility, and explanatory power. Beyond evaluation, we identify key open challenges in visual reasoning, including scalability to complex scenes, deeper integration of symbolic and neural paradigms, the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we outline a forward-looking research agenda for next-generation vision systems, emphasizing that bridging perception and reasoning is essential for building transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain adaptive AI systems, particularly in critical domains such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.
Authors:Hannah Kniesel, Leon Sick, Tristan Payer, Tim Bergner, Kavitha Shaga Devan, Clarissa Read, Paul Walther, Timo Ropinski
Abstract:
Current state-of-the-art methods for object detection rely on annotated bounding boxes of large data sets for training. However, obtaining such annotations is expensive and can require up to hundreds of hours of manual labor. This poses a challenge, especially since such annotations can only be provided by experts, as they require knowledge about the scientific domain. To tackle this challenge, we propose a domain-specific weakly supervised object detection algorithm that only relies on image-level annotations, which are significantly easier to acquire. Our method distills the knowledge of a pre-trained model, on the task of predicting the presence or absence of a virus in an image, to obtain a set of pseudo-labels that can be used to later train a state-of-the-art object detection model. To do so, we use an optimization approach with a shrinking receptive field to extract virus particles directly without specific network architectures. Through a set of extensive studies, we show how the proposed pseudo-labels are easier to obtain, and, more importantly, are able to outperform other existing weak labeling methods, and even ground truth labels, in cases where the time to obtain the annotation is limited.
Authors:Xiaokai Bai, Chenxu Zhou, Lianqing Zheng, Si-Yuan Cao, Jianan Liu, Xiaohan Zhang, Zhengzhuang Zhang, Hui-liang Shen
Abstract:
4D millimeter-wave radar has emerged as a promising sensor for autonomous driving, but effective 3D object detection from both 4D radar and monocular images remains a challenge. Existing fusion approaches typically rely on either instance-based proposals or dense BEV grids, which either lack holistic scene understanding or are limited by rigid grid structures. To address these, we propose RaGS, the first framework to leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) as representation for fusing 4D radar and monocular cues in 3D object detection. 3D GS naturally suits 3D object detection by modeling the scene as a field of Gaussians, dynamically allocating resources on foreground objects and providing a flexible, resource-efficient solution. RaGS uses a cascaded pipeline to construct and refine the Gaussian field. It starts with the Frustum-based Localization Initiation (FLI), which unprojects foreground pixels to initialize coarse 3D Gaussians positions. Then, the Iterative Multimodal Aggregation (IMA) fuses semantics and geometry, refining the limited Gaussians to the regions of interest. Finally, the Multi-level Gaussian Fusion (MGF) renders the Gaussians into multi-level BEV features for 3D object detection. By dynamically focusing on sparse objects within scenes, RaGS enable object concentrating while offering comprehensive scene perception. Extensive experiments on View-of-Delft, TJ4DRadSet, and OmniHD-Scenes benchmarks demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released.
Authors:Keon-Hee Park, Seun-An Choe, Gyeong-Moon Park
Abstract:
Source-free object detection adapts a detector pre-trained on a source domain to an unlabeled target domain without requiring access to labeled source data. While this setting is practical as it eliminates the need for the source dataset during domain adaptation, it operates under the restrictive assumption that only pre-defined objects from the source domain exist in the target domain. This closed-set setting prevents the detector from detecting undefined objects. To ease this assumption, we propose Source-Free Unknown Object Detection (SFUOD), a novel scenario which enables the detector to not only recognize known objects but also detect undefined objects as unknown objects. To this end, we propose CollaPAUL (Collaborative tuning and Principal Axis-based Unknown Labeling), a novel framework for SFUOD. Collaborative tuning enhances knowledge adaptation by integrating target-dependent knowledge from the auxiliary encoder with source-dependent knowledge from the pre-trained detector through a cross-domain attention mechanism. Additionally, principal axes-based unknown labeling assigns pseudo-labels to unknown objects by estimating objectness via principal axes projection and confidence scores from model predictions. The proposed CollaPAUL achieves state-of-the-art performances on SFUOD benchmarks, and extensive experiments validate its effectiveness.
Authors:Xiaozheng Jiang, Wei Zhang, Xuerui Mao
Abstract:
Detecting tiny objects in remote sensing (RS) imagery has been a long-standing challenge due to their extremely limited spatial information, weak feature representations, and dense distributions across complex backgrounds. Despite numerous efforts devoted, mainstream detectors still underperform in such scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce RS-TinyNet, a multi-stage feature fusion and enhancement model explicitly tailored for RS tiny object detection in various RS scenarios. RS-TinyNet comes with two novel designs: tiny object saliency modeling and feature integrity reconstruction. Guided by these principles, we design three step-wise feature enhancement modules. Among them, the multi-dimensional collaborative attention (MDCA) module employs multi-dimensional attention to enhance the saliency of tiny objects. Additionally, the auxiliary reversible branch (ARB) and a progressive fusion detection head (PFDH) module are introduced to preserve information flow and fuse multi-level features to bridge semantic gaps and retain structural detail. Comprehensive experiments on public RS dataset AI-TOD show that our RS-TinyNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) detectors by 4.0% AP and 6.5% AP75. Evaluations on DIOR benchmark dataset further validate its superior detection performance in diverse RS scenarios. These results demonstrate that the proposed multi-stage feature fusion strategy offers an effective and practical solution for tiny object detection in complex RS environments.
Authors:Riadul Islam, Joey Mulé, Dhandeep Challagundla, Shahmir Rizvi, Sean Carson
Abstract:
High-speed vision sensing is essential for real-time perception in applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and industrial automation. Traditional frame-based vision systems suffer from motion blur, high latency, and redundant data processing, limiting their performance in dynamic environments. Event cameras, which capture asynchronous brightness changes at the pixel level, offer a promising alternative but pose challenges in object detection due to sparse and noisy event streams. To address this, we propose an event autoencoder architecture that efficiently compresses and reconstructs event data while preserving critical spatial and temporal features. The proposed model employs convolutional encoding and incorporates adaptive threshold selection and a lightweight classifier to enhance recognition accuracy while reducing computational complexity. Experimental results on the existing Smart Event Face Dataset (SEFD) demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable accuracy to the YOLO-v4 model while utilizing up to $35.5\times$ fewer parameters. Implementations on embedded platforms, including Raspberry Pi 4B and NVIDIA Jetson Nano, show high frame rates ranging from 8 FPS up to 44.8 FPS. The proposed classifier exhibits up to 87.84x better FPS than the state-of-the-art and significantly improves event-based vision performance, making it ideal for low-power, high-speed applications in real-time edge computing.
Authors:Haochen Huang, Jiahuan Pei, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Xin Sun, Moonisa Ahsan, Chuang Yu, Zhaochun Ren, Pablo Cesar, Junxiao Wang
Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) are facing the challenges of understanding and following multimodal assembly instructions, particularly when fine-grained spatial reasoning and precise object state detection are required. In this work, we explore LEGO Co-builder, a hybrid benchmark combining real-world LEGO assembly logic with programmatically generated multimodal scenes. The dataset captures stepwise visual states and procedural instructions, allowing controlled evaluation of instruction-following, object detection, and state detection. We introduce a unified framework and assess leading VLMs such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and Qwen-VL, under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Our results reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o struggle with fine-grained assembly tasks, with a maximum F1 score of just 40.54\% on state detection, highlighting gaps in fine-grained visual understanding. We release the benchmark, codebase, and generation pipeline to support future research on multimodal assembly assistants grounded in real-world workflows.
Authors:Yi-Chun Chen, Arnav Jhala
Abstract:
GameTileNet is a dataset designed to provide semantic labels for low-resolution digital game art, advancing procedural content generation (PCG) and related AI research as a vision-language alignment task. Large Language Models (LLMs) and image-generative AI models have enabled indie developers to create visual assets, such as sprites, for game interactions. However, generating visuals that align with game narratives remains challenging due to inconsistent AI outputs, requiring manual adjustments by human artists. The diversity of visual representations in automatically generated game content is also limited because of the imbalance in distributions across styles for training data. GameTileNet addresses this by collecting artist-created game tiles from OpenGameArt.org under Creative Commons licenses and providing semantic annotations to support narrative-driven content generation. The dataset introduces a pipeline for object detection in low-resolution tile-based game art (e.g., 32x32 pixels) and annotates semantics, connectivity, and object classifications. GameTileNet is a valuable resource for improving PCG methods, supporting narrative-rich game content, and establishing a baseline for object detection in low-resolution, non-photorealistic images.
TL;DR: GameTileNet is a semantic dataset of low-resolution game tiles designed to support narrative-driven procedural content generation through visual-language alignment.
Authors:Seokyeong Lee, Sithu Aung, Junyong Choi, Seungryong Kim, Ig-Jae Kim, Junghyun Cho
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection (M3OD) has long faced challenges due to data scarcity caused by high annotation costs and inherent 2D-to-3D ambiguity. Although various weakly supervised methods and pseudo-labeling methods have been proposed to address these issues, they are mostly limited by domain-specific learning or rely solely on shape information from a single observation. In this paper, we propose a novel pseudo-labeling framework that uses only video data and is more robust to occlusion, without requiring a multi-view setup, additional sensors, camera poses, or domain-specific training. Specifically, we explore a technique for aggregating the pseudo-LiDARs of both static and dynamic objects across temporally adjacent frames using object point tracking, enabling 3D attribute extraction in scenarios where 3D data acquisition is infeasible. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method ensures reliable accuracy and strong scalability, making it a practical and effective solution for M3OD.
Authors:Klaudia Ropel, Krzysztof Kutt, Luiz do Valle Miranda, Grzegorz J. Nalepa
Abstract:
We developed a proof-of-concept method for the automatic analysis of the structure and content of incunabula pages. A custom dataset comprising 500 annotated pages from five different incunabula was created using resources from the Jagiellonian Digital Library. Each page was manually labeled with five predefined classes: Text, Title, Picture, Table, and Handwriting. Additionally, the publicly available DocLayNet dataset was utilized as supplementary training data. To perform object detection, YOLO11n and YOLO11s models were employed and trained using two strategies: a combined dataset (DocLayNet and the custom dataset) and the custom dataset alone. The highest performance (F1 = 0.94) was achieved by the YOLO11n model trained exclusively on the custom data. Optical character recognition was then conducted on regions classified as Text, using both Tesseract and Kraken OCR, with Tesseract demonstrating superior results. Subsequently, image classification was applied to the Picture class using a ResNet18 model, achieving an accuracy of 98.7% across five subclasses: Decorative_letter, Illustration, Other, Stamp, and Wrong_detection. Furthermore, the CLIP model was utilized to generate semantic descriptions of illustrations. The results confirm the potential of machine learning in the analysis of early printed books, while emphasizing the need for further advancements in OCR performance and visual content interpretation.
Authors:Wei Zhang, Yuantao Wang, Haowei Yang, Yin Zhuang, Shijian Lu, Xuerui Mao
Abstract:
Real-world object detection is a challenging task where the captured images/videos often suffer from complex degradations due to various adverse weather conditions such as rain, fog, snow, low-light, etc. Despite extensive prior efforts, most existing methods are designed for one specific type of adverse weather with constraints of poor generalization, under-utilization of visual features while handling various image degradations. Leveraging a theoretical analysis on how critical visual details are lost in adverse-weather images, we design UniDet-D, a unified framework that tackles the challenge of object detection under various adverse weather conditions, and achieves object detection and image restoration within a single network. Specifically, the proposed UniDet-D incorporates a dynamic spectral attention mechanism that adaptively emphasizes informative spectral components while suppressing irrelevant ones, enabling more robust and discriminative feature representation across various degradation types. Extensive experiments show that UniDet-D achieves superior detection accuracy across different types of adverse-weather degradation. Furthermore, UniDet-D demonstrates superior generalization towards unseen adverse weather conditions such as sandstorms and rain-fog mixtures, highlighting its great potential for real-world deployment.
Authors:Yuyang Dong, Nobuhiro Ueda, Krisztián Boros, Daiki Ito, Takuya Sera, Masafumi Oyamada
Abstract:
With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), rich document analysis technologies for applications like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and visual RAG are gaining significant attention. Recent research indicates that using VLMs can achieve better RAG performance, but processing rich documents still remains a challenge since a single page contains large amounts of information. In this paper, we present SCAN (\textbf{S}emanti\textbf{C} Document Layout \textbf{AN}alysis), a novel approach enhancing both textual and visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems working with visually rich documents. It is a VLM-friendly approach that identifies document components with appropriate semantic granularity, balancing context preservation with processing efficiency. SCAN uses a coarse-grained semantic approach that divides documents into coherent regions covering continuous components. We trained the SCAN model by fine-tuning object detection models with sophisticated annotation datasets. Our experimental results across English and Japanese datasets demonstrate that applying SCAN improves end-to-end textual RAG performance by up to 9.0\% and visual RAG performance by up to 6.4\%, outperforming conventional approaches and even commercial document processing solutions.
Authors:Mingqian Ji, Jian Yang, Shanshan Zhang
Abstract:
State-of-the-art LiDAR-camera 3D object detectors usually focus on feature fusion. However, they neglect the factor of depth while designing the fusion strategy. In this work, we are the first to observe that different modalities play different roles as depth varies via statistical analysis and visualization. Based on this finding, we propose a Depth-Aware Hybrid Feature Fusion (DepthFusion) strategy that guides the weights of point cloud and RGB image modalities by introducing depth encoding at both global and local levels. Specifically, the Depth-GFusion module adaptively adjusts the weights of image Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features in multi-modal global features via depth encoding. Furthermore, to compensate for the information lost when transferring raw features to the BEV space, we propose a Depth-LFusion module, which adaptively adjusts the weights of original voxel features and multi-view image features in multi-modal local features via depth encoding. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our DepthFusion method surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our DepthFusion is more robust to various kinds of corruptions, outperforming previous methods on the nuScenes-C dataset.
Authors:Yongqi Wang, Xinxiao Wu, Shuo Yang
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary video visual relationship detection aims to detect objects and their relationships in videos without being restricted by predefined object or relationship categories. Existing methods leverage the rich semantic knowledge of pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP to identify novel categories. They typically adopt a cascaded pipeline to first detect objects and then classify relationships based on the detected objects, which may lead to error propagation and thus suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose Mutual EnhancemenT of Objects and Relationships (METOR), a query-based unified framework to jointly model and mutually enhance object detection and relationship classification in open-vocabulary scenarios. Under this framework, we first design a CLIP-based contextual refinement encoding module that extracts visual contexts of objects and relationships to refine the encoding of text features and object queries, thus improving the generalization of encoding to novel categories. Then we propose an iterative enhancement module to alternatively enhance the representations of objects and relationships by fully exploiting their interdependence to improve recognition performance. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, VidVRD and VidOR, demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Alex Dytso, Martina Cardone
Abstract:
Focal loss has recently gained significant popularity, particularly in tasks like object detection where it helps to address class imbalance by focusing more on hard-to-classify examples. This work proposes the focal loss as a distortion measure for lossy source coding. The paper provides single-shot converse and achievability bounds. These bounds are then used to characterize the distortion-rate trade-off in the infinite blocklength, which is shown to be the same as that for the log loss case. In the non-asymptotic case, the difference between focal loss and log loss is illustrated through a series of simulations.
Authors:Raul David Dominguez Sanchez, Xavier Diaz Ortiz, Xingcheng Zhou, Max Peter Ronecker, Michael Karner, Daniel Watzenig, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
Railway systems, particularly in Germany, require high levels of automation to address legacy infrastructure challenges and increase train traffic safely. A key component of automation is robust long-range perception, essential for early hazard detection, such as obstacles at level crossings or pedestrians on tracks. Unlike automotive systems with braking distances of ~70 meters, trains require perception ranges exceeding 1 km. This paper presents an deep-learning-based approach for long-range 3D object detection tailored for autonomous trains. The method relies solely on monocular images, inspired by the Faraway-Frustum approach, and incorporates LiDAR data during training to improve depth estimation. The proposed pipeline consists of four key modules: (1) a modified YOLOv9 for 2.5D object detection, (2) a depth estimation network, and (3-4) dedicated short- and long-range 3D detection heads. Evaluations on the OSDaR23 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in detecting objects up to 250 meters. Results highlight its potential for railway automation and outline areas for future improvement.
Authors:Phillip Y. Lee, Jihyeon Je, Chanho Park, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Leonidas Guibas, Minhyuk Sung
Abstract:
We present a framework for perspective-aware reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) through mental imagery simulation. Perspective-taking, the ability to perceive an environment or situation from an alternative viewpoint, is a key benchmark for human-level visual understanding, essential for environmental interaction and collaboration with autonomous agents. Despite advancements in spatial reasoning within VLMs, recent research has shown that modern VLMs significantly lack perspective-aware reasoning capabilities and exhibit a strong bias toward egocentric interpretations. To bridge the gap between VLMs and human perception, we focus on the role of mental imagery, where humans perceive the world through abstracted representations that facilitate perspective shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for perspective-aware reasoning, named Abstract Perspective Change (APC), that effectively leverages vision foundation models, such as object detection, segmentation, and orientation estimation, to construct scene abstractions and enable perspective transformations. Our experiments on synthetic and real-image benchmarks, compared with various VLMs, demonstrate significant improvements in perspective-aware reasoning with our framework, further outperforming fine-tuned spatial reasoning models and novel-view-synthesis-based approaches.
Authors:Hang Ji, Tao Ni, Xufeng Huang, Zhan Shi, Tao Luo, Xin Zhan, Junbo Chen
Abstract:
This technical report introduces a targeted improvement to the StreamPETR framework, specifically aimed at enhancing velocity estimation, a critical factor influencing the overall NuScenes Detection Score. While StreamPETR exhibits strong 3D bounding box detection performance as reflected by its high mean Average Precision our analysis identified velocity estimation as a substantial bottleneck when evaluated on the NuScenes dataset. To overcome this limitation, we propose a customized positional embedding strategy tailored to enhance temporal modeling capabilities. Experimental evaluations conducted on the NuScenes test set demonstrate that our improved approach achieves a state-of-the-art NDS of 70.86% using the ViT-L backbone, setting a new benchmark for camera-only 3D object detection.
Authors:Huilin Yin, Pengyu Wang, Senmao Li, Jun Yan, Daniel Watzenig
Abstract:
Robust object detection for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) in complex water environments is essential for reliable navigation and operation. Specifically, water surface object detection faces challenges from blurred edges and diverse object scales. Although vision-radar fusion offers a feasible solution, existing approaches suffer from cross-modal feature conflicts, which negatively affect model robustness. To address this problem, we propose a robust vision-radar fusion model WS-DETR. In particular, we first introduce a Multi-Scale Edge Information Integration (MSEII) module to enhance edge perception and a Hierarchical Feature Aggregator (HiFA) to boost multi-scale object detection in the encoder. Then, we adopt self-moving point representations for continuous convolution and residual connection to efficiently extract irregular features under the scenarios of irregular point cloud data. To further mitigate cross-modal conflicts, an Adaptive Feature Interactive Fusion (AFIF) module is introduced to integrate visual and radar features through geometric alignment and semantic fusion. Extensive experiments on the WaterScenes dataset demonstrate that WS-DETR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, maintaining its superiority even under adverse weather and lighting conditions.
Authors:Jianhua Sun, Cewu Lu
Abstract:
Reviewing the progress in artificial intelligence over the past decade, various significant advances (e.g. object detection, image generation, large language models) have enabled AI systems to produce more semantically meaningful outputs and achieve widespread adoption in internet scenarios. Nevertheless, AI systems still struggle when it comes to understanding and interacting with the physical world. This reveals an important issue: relying solely on semantic-level concepts learned from internet data (e.g. texts, images) to understand the physical world is far from sufficient -- machine intelligence currently lacks an effective way to learn about the physical world. This research introduces the idea of analytic concept -- representing the concepts related to the physical world through programs of mathematical procedures, providing machine intelligence a portal to perceive, reason about, and interact with the physical world. Except for detailing the design philosophy and providing guidelines for the application of analytic concepts, this research also introduce about the infrastructure that has been built around analytic concepts. I aim for my research to contribute to addressing these questions: What is a proper abstraction of general concepts in the physical world for machine intelligence? How to systematically integrate structured priors with neural networks to constrain AI systems to comply with physical laws?
Authors:Luke Chen, Junyao Wang, Trier Mortlock, Pramod Khargonekar, Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque
Abstract:
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of machine learning models deployed in real-world autonomous systems. However, existing approaches typically quantify task-level output prediction uncertainty without considering epistemic uncertainty at the multimodal feature fusion level, leading to sub-optimal outcomes. Additionally, popular uncertainty quantification methods, e.g., Bayesian approximations, remain challenging to deploy in practice due to high computational costs in training and inference. In this paper, we propose HyperDUM, a novel deterministic uncertainty method (DUM) that efficiently quantifies feature-level epistemic uncertainty by leveraging hyperdimensional computing. Our method captures the channel and spatial uncertainties through channel and patch -wise projection and bundling techniques respectively. Multimodal sensor features are then adaptively weighted to mitigate uncertainty propagation and improve feature fusion. Our evaluations show that HyperDUM on average outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms by up to 2.01%/1.27% in 3D Object Detection and up to 1.29% improvement over baselines in semantic segmentation tasks under various types of uncertainties. Notably, HyperDUM requires 2.36x less Floating Point Operations and up to 38.30x less parameters than SOTA methods, providing an efficient solution for real-world autonomous systems.
Authors:Joey Mulé, Dhandeep Challagundla, Rachit Saini, Riadul Islam
Abstract:
Event-based vision revolutionizes traditional image sensing by capturing asynchronous intensity variations rather than static frames, enabling ultrafast temporal resolution, sparse data encoding, and enhanced motion perception. While this paradigm offers significant advantages, conventional event-based datasets impose a fixed thresholding constraint to determine pixel activations, severely limiting adaptability to real-world environmental fluctuations. Lower thresholds retain finer details but introduce pervasive noise, whereas higher thresholds suppress extraneous activations at the expense of crucial object information. To mitigate these constraints, we introduce the Event-Based Crossing Dataset (EBCD), a comprehensive dataset tailored for pedestrian and vehicle detection in dynamic outdoor environments, incorporating a multi-thresholding framework to refine event representations. By capturing event-based images at ten distinct threshold levels (4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 75), this dataset facilitates an extensive assessment of object detection performance under varying conditions of sparsity and noise suppression. We benchmark state-of-the-art detection architectures-including YOLOv4, YOLOv7, EfficientDet-b0, MobileNet-v1, and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)-to experiment upon the nuanced impact of threshold selection on detection performance. By offering a systematic approach to threshold variation, we foresee that EBCD fosters a more adaptive evaluation of event-based object detection, aligning diverse neuromorphic vision with real-world scene dynamics. We present the dataset as publicly available to propel further advancements in low-latency, high-fidelity neuromorphic imaging: https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/event-based-crossing-dataset-ebcd
Authors:Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Mennatullah Siam, Leonid Sigal, James J. Little
Abstract:
Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), trained on extensive datasets of image-text pairs, exhibit strong multimodal understanding capabilities by implicitly learning associations between textual descriptions and image regions. This emergent ability enables zero-shot object detection and segmentation, using techniques that rely on text-image attention maps, without necessarily training on abundant labeled segmentation datasets. However, performance of such methods depends heavily on prompt engineering and manually selected layers or head choices for the attention layers. In this work, we demonstrate that, rather than relying solely on textual prompts, providing a single visual example for each category and fine-tuning the text-to-image attention layers and embeddings significantly improves the performance. Additionally, we propose learning an ensemble through few-shot fine-tuning across multiple layers and/or prompts. An entropy-based ranking and selection mechanism for text-to-image attention layers is proposed to identify the top-performing layers without the need for segmentation labels. This eliminates the need for hyper-parameter selection of text-to-image attention layers, providing a more flexible and scalable solution for open-vocabulary segmentation. We show that this approach yields strong zero-shot performance, further enhanced through fine-tuning with a single visual example. Moreover, we demonstrate that our method and findings are general and can be applied across various vision-language models (VLMs).
Authors:Chaoqun Wang, Xiaobin Hong, Wenzhong Li, Ruimao Zhang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection presents significant challenges due to the inherent sparsity of LiDAR points. A common solution involves long-term temporal LiDAR data to densify the inputs. However, efficiently leveraging spatial-temporal information remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic-Supervised Spatial-Temporal Fusion (ST-Fusion) method, which introduces a novel fusion module to relieve the spatial misalignment caused by the object motion over time and a feature-level semantic supervision to sufficiently unlock the capacity of the proposed fusion module. Specifically, the ST-Fusion consists of a Spatial Aggregation (SA) module and a Temporal Merging (TM) module. The SA module employs a convolutional layer with progressively expanding receptive fields to aggregate the object features from the local regions to alleviate the spatial misalignment, the TM module dynamically extracts object features from the preceding frames based on the attention mechanism for a comprehensive sequential presentation. Besides, in the semantic supervision, we propose a Semantic Injection method to enrich the sparse LiDAR data via injecting the point-wise semantic labels, using it for training a teacher model and providing a reconstruction target at the feature level supervised by the proposed object-aware loss. Extensive experiments on various LiDAR-based detectors demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our proposal, yielding an improvement of approximately +2.8% in NDS based on the nuScenes benchmark.
Authors:DuÅ¡an MaliÄ, Christian Fruhwirth-Reisinger, Samuel Schulter, Horst Possegger
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D detectors need large datasets for training, yet they struggle to generalize to novel domains. Domain Generalization (DG) aims to mitigate this by training detectors that are invariant to such domain shifts. Current DG approaches exclusively rely on global geometric features (point cloud Cartesian coordinates) as input features. Over-reliance on these global geometric features can, however, cause 3D detectors to prioritize object location and absolute position, resulting in poor cross-domain performance. To mitigate this, we propose to exploit explicit local point cloud structure for DG, in particular by encoding point cloud neighborhoods with Gaussian blobs, GBlobs. Our proposed formulation is highly efficient and requires no additional parameters. Without any bells and whistles, simply by integrating GBlobs in existing detectors, we beat the current state-of-the-art in challenging single-source DG benchmarks by over 21 mAP (Waymo->KITTI), 13 mAP (KITTI->Waymo), and 12 mAP (nuScenes->KITTI), without sacrificing in-domain performance. Additionally, GBlobs demonstrate exceptional performance in multi-source DG, surpassing the current state-of-the-art by 17, 12, and 5 mAP on Waymo, KITTI, and ONCE, respectively.
Authors:Milin Patel, Rolf Jung
Abstract:
Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) addresses sensor performance limitations and deep learning-based object detection insufficiencies to ensure the intended functionality of Automated Driving Systems (ADS). This paper presents a methodology examining the adaptability and performance evaluation of the 3D object detection methods on a LiDAR point cloud dataset generated by simulating a SOTIF-related Use Case. The major contributions of this paper include defining and modelling a SOTIF-related Use Case with 21 diverse weather conditions and generating a LiDAR point cloud dataset suitable for application of 3D object detection methods. The dataset consists of 547 frames, encompassing clear, cloudy, rainy weather conditions, corresponding to different times of the day, including noon, sunset, and night. Employing MMDetection3D and OpenPCDET toolkits, the performance of State-of-the-Art (SOTA) 3D object detection methods is evaluated and compared by testing the pre-trained Deep Learning (DL) models on the generated dataset using Average Precision (AP) and Recall metrics.
Authors:Nimra Dilawar, Sara Nadeem, Javed Iqbal, Waqas Sultani, Mohsen Ali
Abstract:
Existing generic unsupervised domain adaptation approaches require access to both a large labeled source dataset and a sufficient unlabeled target dataset during adaptation. However, collecting a large dataset, even if unlabeled, is a challenging and expensive endeavor, especially in medical imaging. In addition, constraints such as privacy issues can result in cases where source data is unavailable. Taking in consideration these challenges, we propose MIAdapt, an adaptive approach for Microscopic Imagery Adaptation as a solution for Source-free Few-shot Domain Adaptive Object detection (SF-FSDA). We also define two competitive baselines (1) Faster-FreeShot and (2) MT-FreeShot. Extensive experiments on the challenging M5-Malaria and Raabin-WBC datasets validate the effectiveness of MIAdapt. Without using any image from the source domain MIAdapt surpasses state-of-the-art source-free UDA (SF-UDA) methods by +21.3% mAP and few-shot domain adaptation (FSDA) approaches by +4.7% mAP on Raabin-WBC. Our code and models will be publicly available.
Authors:Miao Zhang, Sherif Abdulatif, Benedikt Loesch, Marco Altmann, Bin Yang
Abstract:
Due to the significant effort required for data collection and annotation in 3D perception tasks, mixed sample data augmentation (MSDA) has been widely studied to generate diverse training samples by mixing existing data. Recently, many MSDA techniques have been developed for point clouds, but they mainly target LiDAR data, leaving their application to radar point clouds largely unexplored. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of applying existing MSDA methods to radar point clouds and identify several challenges in adapting these techniques. These obstacles stem from the radar's irregular angular distribution, deviations from a single-sensor polar layout in multi-radar setups, and point sparsity. To address these issues, we propose Class-Aware PillarMix (CAPMix), a novel MSDA approach that applies MixUp at the pillar level in 3D point clouds, guided by class labels. Unlike methods that rely a single mix ratio to the entire sample, CAPMix assigns an independent ratio to each pillar, boosting sample diversity. To account for the density of different classes, we use class-specific distributions: for dense objects (e.g., large vehicles), we skew ratios to favor points from another sample, while for sparse objects (e.g., pedestrians), we sample more points from the original. This class-aware mixing retains critical details and enriches each sample with new information, ultimately generating more diverse training data. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only significantly boosts performance but also outperforms existing MSDA approaches across two datasets (Bosch Street and K-Radar). We believe that this straightforward yet effective approach will spark further investigation into MSDA techniques for radar data.
Authors:Louis Mahon, Benjamin Hoffman, Logan James, Maddie Cusimano, Masato Hagiwara, Sarah C Woolley, Felix Effenberger, Sara Keen, Jen-Yu Liu, Olivier Pietquin
Abstract:
We propose a method for accurately detecting bioacoustic sound events that is robust to overlapping events, a common issue in domains such as ethology, ecology and conservation. While standard methods employ a frame-based, multi-label approach, we introduce an onset-based detection method which we name Voxaboxen. It takes inspiration from object detection methods in computer vision, but simultaneously takes advantage of recent advances in self-supervised audio encoders. For each time window, Voxaboxen predicts whether it contains the start of a vocalization and how long the vocalization is. It also does the same in reverse, predicting whether each window contains the end of a vocalization, and how long ago it started. The two resulting sets of bounding boxes are then fused using a graph-matching algorithm. We also release a new dataset designed to measure performance on detecting overlapping vocalizations. This consists of recordings of zebra finches annotated with temporally-strong labels and showing frequent overlaps. We test Voxaboxen on seven existing data sets and on our new data set. We compare Voxaboxen to natural baselines and existing sound event detection methods and demonstrate SotA results. Further experiments show that improvements are robust to frequent vocalization overlap.
Authors:Milin Patel, Rolf Jung
Abstract:
Uncertainty in LiDAR sensor-based object detection arises from environmental variability and sensor performance limitations. Representing these uncertainties is essential for ensuring the Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF), which focuses on preventing hazards in automated driving scenarios. This paper presents a systematic approach to identifying, classifying, and representing uncertainties in LiDAR-based object detection within a SOTIF-related scenario. Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) is employed to construct a Frame of Discernment (FoD) to represent detection outcomes. Conditional Basic Probability Assignments (BPAs) are applied based on dependencies among identified uncertainty sources. Yager's Rule of Combination is used to resolve conflicting evidence from multiple sources, providing a structured framework to evaluate uncertainties' effects on detection accuracy. The study applies variance-based sensitivity analysis (VBSA) to quantify and prioritize uncertainties, detailing their specific impact on detection performance.
Authors:Arash Nasr Esfahani, Hamed Hosseini, Mehdi Tale Masouleh, Ahmad Kalhor, Hedieh Sajedi
Abstract:
As smart homes become more prevalent in daily life, the ability to understand dynamic environments is essential which is increasingly dependent on AI systems. This study focuses on developing an intelligent algorithm which can navigate a robot through a kitchen, recognizing objects, and tracking their relocation. The kitchen was chosen as the testing ground due to its dynamic nature as objects are frequently moved, rearranged and replaced. Various techniques, such as SLAM feature-based tracking and deep learning-based object detection (e.g., Faster R-CNN), are commonly used for object tracking. Additionally, methods such as optical flow analysis and 3D reconstruction have also been used to track the relocation of objects. These approaches often face challenges when it comes to problems such as lighting variations and partial occlusions, where parts of the object are hidden in some frames but visible in others. The proposed method in this study leverages the YOLOv5 architecture, initialized with pre-trained weights and subsequently fine-tuned on a custom dataset. A novel method was developed, introducing a frame-scoring algorithm which calculates a score for each object based on its location and features within all frames. This scoring approach helps to identify changes by determining the best-associated frame for each object and comparing the results in each scene, overcoming limitations seen in other methods while maintaining simplicity in design. The experimental results demonstrate an accuracy of 97.72%, a precision of 95.83% and a recall of 96.84% for this algorithm, which highlights the efficacy of the model in detecting spatial changes.
Authors:Tianxiao Gao, Mingle Zhao, Chengzhong Xu, Hui Kong
Abstract:
Accurate and robust state estimation at nighttime is essential for autonomous robotic navigation to achieve nocturnal or round-the-clock tasks. An intuitive question arises: Can low-cost standard cameras be exploited for nocturnal state estimation? Regrettably, most existing visual methods may fail under adverse illumination conditions, even with active lighting or image enhancement. A pivotal insight, however, is that streetlights in most urban scenarios act as stable and salient prior visual cues at night, reminiscent of stars in deep space aiding spacecraft voyage in interstellar navigation. Inspired by this, we propose Night-Voyager, an object-level nocturnal vision-aided state estimation framework that leverages prior object maps and keypoints for versatile localization. We also find that the primary limitation of conventional visual methods under poor lighting conditions stems from the reliance on pixel-level metrics. In contrast, metric-agnostic, non-pixel-level object detection serves as a bridge between pixel-level and object-level spaces, enabling effective propagation and utilization of object map information within the system. Night-Voyager begins with a fast initialization to solve the global localization problem. By employing an effective two-stage cross-modal data association, the system delivers globally consistent state updates using map-based observations. To address the challenge of significant uncertainties in visual observations at night, a novel matrix Lie group formulation and a feature-decoupled multi-state invariant filter are introduced, ensuring consistent and efficient estimation. Through comprehensive experiments in both simulation and diverse real-world scenarios (spanning approximately 12.3 km), Night-Voyager showcases its efficacy, robustness, and efficiency, filling a critical gap in nocturnal vision-aided state estimation.
Authors:Taminul Islam, Toqi Tahamid Sarker, Khaled R Ahmed, Cristiana Bernardi Rankrape, Karla Gage
Abstract:
Weed management remains a critical challenge in agriculture, where weeds compete with crops for essential resources, leading to significant yield losses. Accurate detection of weeds at various growth stages is crucial for effective management yet challenging for farmers, as it requires identifying different species at multiple growth phases. This research addresses these challenges by utilizing advanced object detection models, specifically, the Detection Transformer (DETR) with a ResNet50 backbone and RetinaNet with a ResNeXt101 backbone, to identify and classify 16 weed species of economic concern across 174 classes, spanning their 11 weeks growth stages from seedling to maturity. A robust dataset comprising 203,567 images was developed, meticulously labeled by species and growth stage. The models were rigorously trained and evaluated, with RetinaNet demonstrating superior performance, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.907 on the training set and 0.904 on the test set, compared to DETR's mAP of 0.854 and 0.840, respectively. RetinaNet also outperformed DETR in recall and inference speed of 7.28 FPS, making it more suitable for real time applications. Both models showed improved accuracy as plants matured. This research provides crucial insights for developing precise, sustainable, and automated weed management strategies, paving the way for real time species specific detection systems and advancing AI-assisted agriculture through continued innovation in model development and early detection accuracy.
Authors:Yueming Huang, Chenrui Ma, Hao Zhou, Hao Wu, Guowu Yuan
Abstract:
Dense object detection is widely used in automatic driving, video surveillance, and other fields. This paper focuses on the challenging task of dense object detection. Currently, detection methods based on greedy algorithms, such as non-maximum suppression (NMS), often produce many repetitive predictions or missed detections in dense scenarios, which is a common problem faced by NMS-based algorithms. Through the end-to-end DETR (DEtection TRansformer), as a type of detector that can incorporate the post-processing de-duplication capability of NMS, etc., into the network, we found that homogeneous queries in the query-based detector lead to a reduction in the de-duplication capability of the network and the learning efficiency of the encoder, resulting in duplicate prediction and missed detection problems. To solve this problem, we propose learnable differentiated encoding to de-homogenize the queries, and at the same time, queries can communicate with each other via differentiated encoding information, replacing the previous self-attention among the queries. In addition, we used joint loss on the output of the encoder that considered both location and confidence prediction to give a higher-quality initialization for queries. Without cumbersome decoder stacking and guaranteeing accuracy, our proposed end-to-end detection framework was more concise and reduced the number of parameters by about 8% compared to deformable DETR. Our method achieved excellent results on the challenging CrowdHuman dataset with 93.6% average precision (AP), 39.2% MR-2, and 84.3% JI. The performance overperformed previous SOTA methods, such as Iter-E2EDet (Progressive End-to-End Object Detection) and MIP (One proposal, Multiple predictions). In addition, our method is more robust in various scenarios with different densities.
Authors:Zhenyue Wang, Guowu Yuan, Hao Zhou, Yi Ma, Yutang Ma
Abstract:
The safe operation of high-voltage transmission lines ensures the power grid's security. Various foreign objects attached to the transmission lines, such as balloons, kites and nesting birds, can significantly affect the safe and stable operation of high-voltage transmission lines. With the advancement of computer vision technology, periodic automatic inspection of foreign objects is efficient and necessary. Existing detection methods have low accuracy because foreign objects at-tached to the transmission lines are complex, including occlusions, diverse object types, significant scale variations, and complex backgrounds. In response to the practical needs of the Yunnan Branch of China Southern Power Grid Co., Ltd., this paper proposes an improved YOLOv8m-based model for detecting foreign objects on transmission lines. Experiments are conducted on a dataset collected from Yunnan Power Grid. The proposed model enhances the original YOLOv8m by in-corporating a Global Attention Module (GAM) into the backbone to focus on occluded foreign objects, replacing the SPPF module with the SPPCSPC module to augment the model's multiscale feature extraction capability, and introducing the Focal-EIoU loss function to address the issue of high- and low-quality sample imbalances. These improvements accelerate model convergence and enhance detection accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves a 2.7% increase in mAP_0.5, a 4% increase in mAP_0.5:0.95, and a 6% increase in recall.
Authors:Pedro Santos, Tânia Carvalho, Filipe Magalhães, LuÃs Antunes
Abstract:
As the demand for privacy in visual data management grows, safeguarding sensitive information has become a critical challenge. This paper addresses the need for privacy-preserving solutions in large-scale visual data processing by leveraging federated learning. Although there have been developments in this field, previous research has mainly focused on integrating object detection with either anonymization or federated learning. However, these pairs often fail to address complex privacy concerns. On the one hand, object detection with anonymization alone can be vulnerable to reverse techniques. On the other hand, federated learning may not provide sufficient privacy guarantees. Therefore, we propose a new approach that combines object detection, federated learning and anonymization. Combining these three components aims to offer a robust privacy protection strategy by addressing different vulnerabilities in visual data. Our solution is evaluated against traditional centralized models, showing that while there is a slight trade-off in accuracy, the privacy benefits are substantial, making it well-suited for privacy sensitive applications.
Authors:Chen Chen, Guowu Yuan, Hao Zhou, Yi Ma
Abstract:
High-voltage transmission lines are located far from the road, resulting in inconvenient inspection work and rising maintenance costs. Intelligent inspection of power transmission lines has become increasingly important. However, subsequent intelligent inspection relies on accurately detecting various key components. Due to the low detection accuracy of key components in transmission line image inspection, this paper proposed an improved object detection model based on the YOLOv5s (You Only Look Once Version 5 Small) model to improve the detection accuracy of key components of transmission lines. According to the characteristics of the power grid inspection image, we first modify the distance measurement in the k-means clustering to improve the anchor matching of the YOLOv5s model. Then, we add the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) attention mechanism to the backbone network to improve accuracy. Finally, we apply the focal loss function to reduce the impact of class imbalance. Our improved method's mAP (mean average precision) reached 98.1%, the precision reached 97.5%, the recall reached 94.4%, and the detection rate reached 84.8 FPS (frames per second). The experimental results show that our improved model improves detection accuracy and has performance advantages over other models.
Authors:Lei Yang, Guowu Yuan, Hao Zhou, Hongyu Liu, Jian Chen, Hao Wu
Abstract:
Automatic object detection by satellite remote sensing images is of great significance for resource exploration and natural disaster assessment. To solve existing problems in remote sensing image detection, this article proposes an improved YOLOX model for satellite remote sensing image automatic detection. This model is named RS-YOLOX. To strengthen the feature learning ability of the network, we used Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) in the backbone network of YOLOX and combined the Adaptively Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) with the neck network of YOLOX. To balance the numbers of positive and negative samples in training, we used the Varifocal Loss function. Finally, to obtain a high-performance remote sensing object detector, we combined the trained model with an open-source framework called Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI). This work evaluated models on three aerial remote sensing datasets (DOTA-v1.5, TGRS-HRRSD, and RSOD). Our comparative experiments demonstrate that our model has the highest accuracy in detecting objects in remote sensing image datasets.
Authors:Yinqi Chen, Meiying Zhang, Qi Hao, Guang Zhou
Abstract:
Vehicle detection and localization in complex traffic scenarios pose significant challenges due to the interference of moving objects. Traditional methods often rely on outlier exclusions or semantic segmentations, which suffer from low computational efficiency and accuracy. The proposed SSF-PAN can achieve the functionalities of LiDAR point cloud based object detection/localization and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) with high computational efficiency and accuracy, enabling map-free navigation frameworks. The novelty of this work is threefold: 1) developing a neural network which can achieve segmentation among static and dynamic objects within the scene flows with different motion features, that is, semantic scene flow (SSF); 2) developing an iterative framework which can further optimize the quality of input scene flows and output segmentation results; 3) developing a scene flow-based navigation platform which can test the performance of the SSF perception system in the simulation environment. The proposed SSF-PAN method is validated using the SUScape-CARLA and the KITTI datasets, as well as on the CARLA simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional methods in terms of scene flow computation accuracy, moving object detection accuracy, computational efficiency, and autonomous navigation effectiveness.
Authors:Lianqing Zheng, Jianan Liu, Runwei Guan, Long Yang, Shouyi Lu, Yuanzhe Li, Xiaokai Bai, Jie Bai, Zhixiong Ma, Hui-Liang Shen, Xichan Zhu
Abstract:
3D object detection and occupancy prediction are critical tasks in autonomous driving, attracting significant attention. Despite the potential of recent vision-based methods, they encounter challenges under adverse conditions. Thus, integrating cameras with next-generation 4D imaging radar to achieve unified multi-task perception is highly significant, though research in this domain remains limited. In this paper, we propose Doracamom, the first framework that fuses multi-view cameras and 4D radar for joint 3D object detection and semantic occupancy prediction, enabling comprehensive environmental perception. Specifically, we introduce a novel Coarse Voxel Queries Generator that integrates geometric priors from 4D radar with semantic features from images to initialize voxel queries, establishing a robust foundation for subsequent Transformer-based refinement. To leverage temporal information, we design a Dual-Branch Temporal Encoder that processes multi-modal temporal features in parallel across BEV and voxel spaces, enabling comprehensive spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-Modal BEV-Voxel Fusion module that adaptively fuses complementary features through attention mechanisms while employing auxiliary tasks to enhance feature quality. Extensive experiments on the OmniHD-Scenes, View-of-Delft (VoD), and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate that Doracamom achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tasks, establishing new benchmarks for multi-modal 3D perception. Code and models will be publicly available.
Authors:Josh Bruegger, Diana Ioana Catana, Vanja Macovaz, Matias Valdenegro-Toro, Matthia Sabatelli, Marco Zullich
Abstract:
The attribution of the author of an art piece is typically a laborious manual process, usually relying on subjective evaluations of expert figures. However, there are some situations in which quantitative features of the artwork can support these evaluations. The extraction of these features can sometimes be automated, for instance, with the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. An example of these features is represented by repeated, mechanically impressed patterns, called punches, present chiefly in 13th and 14th-century panel paintings from Tuscany. Previous research in art history showcased a strong connection between the shapes of punches and specific artists or workshops, suggesting the possibility of using these quantitative cues to support the attribution. In the present work, we first collect a dataset of large-scale images of these panel paintings. Then, using YOLOv10, a recent and popular object detection model, we train a ML pipeline to perform object detection on the punches contained in the images. Due to the large size of the images, the detection procedure is split across multiple frames by adopting a sliding-window approach with overlaps, after which the predictions are combined for the whole image using a custom non-maximal suppression routine. Our results indicate how art historians working in the field can reliably use our method for the identification and extraction of punches.
Authors:Wonjun Jo, Kwon Byung-Ki, Kim Ji-Yeon, Hawook Jeong, Kyungdon Joo, Tae-Hyun Oh
Abstract:
LiDAR is a crucial sensor in autonomous driving, commonly used alongside cameras. By exploiting this camera-LiDAR setup and recent advances in image representation learning, prior studies have shown the promising potential of image-to-LiDAR distillation. These prior arts focus on the designs of their own losses to effectively distill the pre-trained 2D image representations into a 3D model. However, the other parts of the designs have been surprisingly unexplored. We find that fundamental design elements, e.g., the LiDAR coordinate system, quantization according to the existing input interface, and data utilization, are more critical than developing loss functions, which have been overlooked in prior works. In this work, we show that simple fixes to these designs notably outperform existing methods by 16% in 3D semantic segmentation on the nuScenes dataset and 13% in 3D object detection on the KITTI dataset in downstream task performance. We focus on overlooked design choices along the spatial and temporal axes. Spatially, prior work has used cylindrical coordinate and voxel sizes without considering their side effects yielded with a commonly deployed sparse convolution layer input interface, leading to spatial quantization errors in 3D models. Temporally, existing work has avoided cumbersome data curation by discarding unsynced data, limiting the use to only the small portion of data that is temporally synced across sensors. We analyze these effects and propose simple solutions for each overlooked aspect.
Authors:Haoxiang Yu, Javier Berrocal, Christine Julien
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence has been integrated into nearly every aspect of daily life, powering applications from object detection with computer vision to large language models for writing emails and compact models for use in smart homes. These machine learning models at times cater to the needs of individual users but are often detached from them, as they are typically stored and processed in centralized data centers. This centralized approach raises privacy concerns, incurs high infrastructure costs, and struggles to provide real time, personalized experiences. Federated and fully decentralized learning methods have been proposed to address these issues, but they still depend on centralized servers or face slow convergence due to communication constraints. We propose ML Mule, an approach that utilizes individual mobile devices as 'mules' to train and transport model snapshots as the mules move through physical spaces, sharing these models with the physical 'spaces' the mules inhabit. This method implicitly forms affinity groups among devices associated with users who share particular spaces, enabling collaborative model evolution and protecting users' privacy. Our approach addresses several major shortcomings of traditional, federated, and fully decentralized learning systems. ML Mule represents a new class of machine learning methods that are more robust, distributed, and personalized, bringing the field closer to realizing the original vision of intelligent, adaptive, and genuinely context-aware smart environments. Our results show that ML Mule converges faster and achieves higher model accuracy compared to other existing methods.
Authors:Hui Lin, Nan Li, Pengjuan Yao, Kexin Dong, Yuhan Guo, Danfeng Hong, Ying Zhang, Congcong Wen
Abstract:
Remote sensing object detection is particularly challenging due to the high resolution, multi-scale features, and diverse ground object characteristics inherent in satellite and UAV imagery. These challenges necessitate more advanced approaches for effective object detection in such environments. While deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in remote sensing object detection, they typically rely on large amounts of labeled data. Acquiring sufficient labeled data, particularly for novel or rare objects, is both challenging and time-consuming in remote sensing scenarios, limiting the generalization capabilities of existing models. To address these challenges, few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as a promising approach, aiming to enable models to learn new classes from limited labeled examples. Building on this concept, few-shot object detection (FSOD) specifically targets object detection challenges in data-limited conditions. However, the generalization capability of FSOD models, particularly in remote sensing, is often constrained by the complex and diverse characteristics of the objects present in such environments. In this paper, we propose the Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection (GE-FSOD) model to improve the generalization capability in remote sensing FSOD tasks. Our model introduces three key innovations: the Cross-Level Fusion Pyramid Attention Network (CFPAN) for enhanced multi-scale feature representation, the Multi-Stage Refinement Region Proposal Network (MRRPN) for more accurate region proposals, and the Generalized Classification Loss (GCL) for improved classification performance in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments on the DIOR and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for few-shot object detection in remote sensing.
Authors:Chenyang Lei, Weiyuan Peng, Guang Zhou, Meiying Zhang, Qi Hao, Chunlin Ji, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract:
Most autonomous driving (AD) datasets incur substantial costs for collection and labeling, inevitably yielding a plethora of low-quality and redundant data instances, thereby compromising performance and efficiency. Many applications in AD systems necessitate high-quality training datasets using both existing datasets and newly collected data. In this paper, we propose a traffic scene joint active learning (TSceneJAL) framework that can efficiently sample the balanced, diverse, and complex traffic scenes from both labeled and unlabeled data. The novelty of this framework is threefold: 1) a scene sampling scheme based on a category entropy, to identify scenes containing multiple object classes, thus mitigating class imbalance for the active learner; 2) a similarity sampling scheme, estimated through the directed graph representation and a marginalize kernel algorithm, to pick sparse and diverse scenes; 3) an uncertainty sampling scheme, predicted by a mixture density network, to select instances with the most unclear or complex regression outcomes for the learner. Finally, the integration of these three schemes in a joint selection strategy yields an optimal and valuable subdataset. Experiments on the KITTI, Lyft, nuScenes and SUScape datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on 3D object detection tasks with up to 12% improvements.
Authors:Jiaqi Wu, Shihao Zhang, Simin Chen, Lixu Wang, Zehua Wang, Wei Chen, Fangyuan He, Zijian Tian, F. Richard Yu, Victor C. M. Leung
Abstract:
Edge computing has emerged as a key paradigm for deploying deep learning-based object detection in time-sensitive scenarios. However, existing edge detection methods face challenges: 1) difficulty balancing detection precision with lightweight models, 2) limited adaptability of generalized deployment designs, and 3) insufficient real-world validation. To address these issues, we propose the Edge Detection Toolbox (ED-TOOLBOX), which utilizes generalizable plug-and-play components to adapt object detection models for edge environments. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Reparameterized Dynamic Convolutional Network (Rep-DConvNet) featuring weighted multi-shape convolutional branches to enhance detection performance. Additionally, we design a Sparse Cross-Attention (SC-A) network with a localized-mapping-assisted self-attention mechanism, enabling a well-crafted joint module for adaptive feature transfer. For real-world applications, we incorporate an Efficient Head into the YOLO framework to accelerate edge model optimization. To demonstrate practical impact, we identify a gap in helmet detection -- overlooking band fastening, a critical safety factor -- and create the Helmet Band Detection Dataset (HBDD). Using ED-TOOLBOX-optimized models, we address this real-world task. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ED-TOOLBOX, with edge detection models outperforming six state-of-the-art methods in visual surveillance simulations, achieving real-time and accurate performance. These results highlight ED-TOOLBOX as a superior solution for edge object detection.
Authors:Thanh Thi Nguyen, Campbell Wilson, Imad Khan, Janis Dalins
Abstract:
Forensic science plays a crucial role in legal investigations, and the use of advanced technologies, such as object detection based on machine learning methods, can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of forensic analysis. Human hands are unique and can leave distinct patterns, marks, or prints that can be utilized for forensic examinations. This paper compares various machine learning approaches to hand detection and presents the application results of employing the best-performing model to identify images of significant importance in forensic contexts. We fine-tune YOLOv8 and vision transformer-based object detection models on four hand image datasets, including the 11k hands dataset with our own bounding boxes annotated by a semi-automatic approach. Two YOLOv8 variants, i.e., YOLOv8 nano (YOLOv8n) and YOLOv8 extra-large (YOLOv8x), and two vision transformer variants, i.e., DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and Detection Transformers with Assignment (DETA), are employed for the experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the YOLOv8 models outperform DETR and DETA on all datasets. The experiments also show that YOLOv8 approaches result in superior performance compared with existing hand detection methods, which were based on YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 models. Applications of our fine-tuned YOLOv8 models for identifying hand images (or frames in a video) with high forensic values produce excellent results, significantly reducing the time required by forensic experts. This implies that our approaches can be implemented effectively for real-world applications in forensics or related fields.
Authors:Chuang Yang, Bingxuan Zhao, Qing Zhou, Qi Wang
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of deep generative models (DGMs) has significantly advanced research in computer vision, providing a cost-effective alternative to acquiring vast quantities of expensive imagery. However, existing methods predominantly focus on synthesizing remote sensing (RS) images aligned with real images in a global layout view, which limits their applicability in RS image object detection (RSIOD) research. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-class and multi-scale object image generator based on DGMs, termed MMO-IG, designed to generate RS images with supervised object labels from global and local aspects simultaneously. Specifically, from the local view, MMO-IG encodes various RS instances using an iso-spacing instance map (ISIM). During the generation process, it decodes each instance region with iso-spacing value in ISIM-corresponding to both background and foreground instances-to produce RS images through the denoising process of diffusion models. Considering the complex interdependencies among MMOs, we construct a spatial-cross dependency knowledge graph (SCDKG). This ensures a realistic and reliable multidirectional distribution among MMOs for region embedding, thereby reducing the discrepancy between source and target domains. Besides, we propose a structured object distribution instruction (SODI) to guide the generation of synthesized RS image content from a global aspect with SCDKG-based ISIM together. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our MMO-IG exhibits superior generation capabilities for RS images with dense MMO-supervised labels, and RS detectors pre-trained with MMO-IG show excellent performance on real-world datasets.
Authors:Yuan Sun, Zhao Zhang, Jorge Ortiz
Abstract:
In current multimodal tasks, models typically freeze the encoder and decoder while adapting intermediate layers to task-specific goals, such as region captioning. Region-level visual understanding presents significant challenges for large-scale vision-language models. While limited spatial awareness is a known issue, coarse-grained pretraining, in particular, exacerbates the difficulty of optimizing latent representations for effective encoder-decoder alignment. We propose AlignCap, a framework designed to enhance region-level understanding through fine-grained alignment of latent spaces. Our approach introduces a novel latent feature refinement module that enhances conditioned latent space representations to improve region-level captioning performance. We also propose an innovative alignment strategy, the semantic space alignment module, which boosts the quality of multimodal representations. Additionally, we incorporate contrastive learning in a novel manner within both modules to further enhance region-level captioning performance. To address spatial limitations, we employ a General Object Detection (GOD) method as a data preprocessing pipeline that enhances spatial reasoning at the regional level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves region-level captioning performance across various tasks
Authors:Chen Li, Rui Zhao, Zeyu Wang, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu
Abstract:
Object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images has emerged as a focal area of research, which presents two significant challenges: i) objects are typically small and dense within vast images; ii) computational resource constraints render most models unsuitable for real-time deployment. Current real-time object detectors are not optimized for UAV images, and complex methods designed for small object detection often lack real-time capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel detector, RemDet (Reparameter efficient multiplication Detector). Our contributions are as follows: 1) Rethinking the challenges of existing detectors for small and dense UAV images, and proposing information loss as a design guideline for efficient models. 2) We introduce the ChannelC2f module to enhance small object detection performance, demonstrating that high-dimensional representations can effectively mitigate information loss. 3) We design the GatedFFN module to provide not only strong performance but also low latency, effectively addressing the challenges of real-time detection. Our research reveals that GatedFFN, through the use of multiplication, is more cost-effective than feed-forward networks for high-dimensional representation. 4) We propose the CED module, which combines the advantages of ViT and CNN downsampling to effectively reduce information loss. It specifically enhances context information for small and dense objects. Extensive experiments on large UAV datasets, Visdrone and UAVDT, validate the real-time efficiency and superior performance of our methods. On the challenging UAV dataset VisDrone, our methods not only provided state-of-the-art results, improving detection by more than 3.4%, but also achieve 110 FPS on a single 4090.
Authors:Yizhou Wang, Tim Meinhardt, Orcun Cetintas, Cheng-Yen Yang, Sameer Satish Pusegaonkar, Benjamin Missaoui, Sujit Biswas, Zheng Tang, Laura Leal-Taixé
Abstract:
Object perception from multi-view cameras is crucial for intelligent systems, particularly in indoor environments, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, and hospitals. Most traditional multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) detection and tracking methods rely on 2D object detection, single-view multi-object tracking (MOT), and cross-view re-identification (ReID) techniques, without properly handling important 3D information by multi-view image aggregation. In this paper, we propose a 3D object detection and tracking framework, named MCBLT, which first aggregates multi-view images with necessary camera calibration parameters to obtain 3D object detections in bird's-eye view (BEV). Then, we introduce hierarchical graph neural networks (GNNs) to track these 3D detections in BEV for MTMC tracking results. Unlike existing methods, MCBLT has impressive generalizability across different scenes and diverse camera settings, with exceptional capability for long-term association handling. As a result, our proposed MCBLT establishes a new state-of-the-art on the AICity'24 dataset with $81.22$ HOTA, and on the WildTrack dataset with $95.6$ IDF1.
Authors:Jin Yao, Hao Gu, Xuweiyi Chen, Jiayun Wang, Zezhou Cheng
Abstract:
In this work, we pioneer the study of open-vocabulary monocular 3D object detection, a novel task that aims to detect and localize objects in 3D space from a single RGB image without limiting detection to a predefined set of categories. We formalize this problem, establish baseline methods, and introduce a class-agnostic approach that leverages open-vocabulary 2D detectors and lifts 2D bounding boxes into 3D space. Our approach decouples the recognition and localization of objects in 2D from the task of estimating 3D bounding boxes, enabling generalization across unseen categories. Additionally, we propose a target-aware evaluation protocol to address inconsistencies in existing datasets, improving the reliability of model performance assessment. Extensive experiments on the Omni3D dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in zero-shot 3D detection for novel object categories, validating its robust generalization capabilities. Our method and evaluation protocols contribute towards the development of open-vocabulary object detection models that can effectively operate in real-world, category-diverse environments.
Authors:Tong Ning, Ke Lu, Xirui Jiang, Jian Xue
Abstract:
Utilizing temporal information to improve the performance of 3D detection has made great progress recently in the field of autonomous driving. Traditional transformer-based temporal fusion methods suffer from quadratic computational cost and information decay as the length of the frame sequence increases. In this paper, we propose a novel method called MambaDETR, whose main idea is to implement temporal fusion in the efficient state space. Moreover, we design a Motion Elimination module to remove the relatively static objects for temporal fusion. On the standard nuScenes benchmark, our proposed MambaDETR achieves remarkable result in the 3D object detection task, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance among existing temporal fusion methods.
Authors:Aitor Martinez-Seras, Javier Del Ser, Aitzol Olivares-Rad, Alain Andres, Pablo Garcia-Bringas
Abstract:
Robustness is a fundamental aspect for developing safe and trustworthy models, particularly when they are deployed in the open world. In this work we analyze the inherent capability of one-stage object detectors to robustly operate in the presence of out-of-distribution (OoD) data. Specifically, we propose a novel detection algorithm for detecting unknown objects in image data, which leverages the features extracted by the model from each sample. Differently from other recent approaches in the literature, our proposal does not require retraining the object detector, thereby allowing for the use of pretrained models. Our proposed OoD detector exploits the application of supervised dimensionality reduction techniques to mitigate the effects of the curse of dimensionality on the features extracted by the model. Furthermore, it utilizes high-resolution feature maps to identify potential unknown objects in an unsupervised fashion. Our experiments analyze the Pareto trade-off between the performance detecting known and unknown objects resulting from different algorithmic configurations and inference confidence thresholds. We also compare the performance of our proposed algorithm to that of logits-based post-hoc OoD methods, as well as possible fusion strategies. Finally, we discuss on the competitiveness of all tested methods against state-of-the-art OoD approaches for object detection models over the recently published Unknown Object Detection benchmark. The obtained results verify that the performance of avant-garde post-hoc OoD detectors can be further improved when combined with our proposed algorithm.
Authors:Alain Andres, Aitor Martinez-Seras, Ibai Laña, Javier Del Ser
Abstract:
In the realm of human-machine interaction, artificial intelligence has become a powerful tool for accelerating data modeling tasks. Object detection methods have achieved outstanding results and are widely used in critical domains like autonomous driving and video surveillance. However, their adoption in high-risk applications, where errors may cause severe consequences, remains limited. Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods aim to address this issue, but many existing techniques are model-specific and designed for classification tasks, making them less effective for object detection and difficult for non-specialists to interpret. In this work we focus on model-agnostic explainability methods for object detection models and propose D-MFPP, an extension of the Morphological Fragmental Perturbation Pyramid (MFPP) technique based on segmentation-based masks to generate explanations. Additionally, we introduce D-Deletion, a novel metric combining faithfulness and localization, adapted specifically to meet the unique demands of object detectors. We evaluate these methods on real-world industrial and robotic datasets, examining the influence of parameters such as the number of masks, model size, and image resolution on the quality of explanations. Our experiments use single-stage object detection models applied to two safety-critical robotic environments: i) a shared human-robot workspace where safety is of paramount importance, and ii) an assembly area of battery kits, where safety is critical due to the potential for damage among high-risk components. Our findings evince that D-Deletion effectively gauges the performance of explanations when multiple elements of the same class appear in a scene, while D-MFPP provides a promising alternative to D-RISE when fewer masks are used.
Authors:Yuchen Zheng, Yuxin Jing, Jufeng Zhao, Guangmang Cui
Abstract:
Drone-based target detection presents inherent challenges, such as the high density and overlap of targets in drone-based images, as well as the blurriness of targets under varying lighting conditions, which complicates identification. Traditional methods often struggle to recognize numerous densely packed small targets under complex background. To address these challenges, we propose LAM-YOLO, an object detection model specifically designed for drone-based. First, we introduce a light-occlusion attention mechanism to enhance the visibility of small targets under different lighting conditions. Meanwhile, we incroporate incorporate Involution modules to improve interaction among feature layers. Second, we utilize an improved SIB-IoU as the regression loss function to accelerate model convergence and enhance localization accuracy. Finally, we implement a novel detection strategy that introduces two auxiliary detection heads for identifying smaller-scale targets.Our quantitative results demonstrate that LAM-YOLO outperforms methods such as Faster R-CNN, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10 in terms of mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 on the VisDrone2019 public dataset. Compared to the original YOLOv8, the average precision increases by 7.1\%. Additionally, the proposed SIB-IoU loss function shows improved faster convergence speed during training and improved average precision over the traditional loss function.
Authors:Ibne Hassan, Aman Mujahid, Abdullah Al Hasib, Andalib Rahman Shagoto, Joyanta Jyoti Mondal, Meem Arafat Manab, Jannatun Noor
Abstract:
Countries in South Asia experience many catastrophic flooding events regularly. Through image classification, it is possible to expedite search and rescue initiatives by classifying flood zones, including houses and humans. We create a new dataset collecting aerial imagery of flooding events across South Asian countries. For the classification, we propose a fine-tuned Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) based approach and some other cutting-edge transformer-based and Convolutional Neural Network-based architectures (CNN). We also implement the YOLOv8 object detection model and detect houses and humans within the imagery of our proposed dataset, and then compare the performance with our classification-based approach. Since the countries in South Asia have similar topography, housing structure, the color of flood water, and vegetation, this work can be more applicable to such a region as opposed to the rest of the world. The images are divided evenly into four classes: 'flood', 'flood with domicile', 'flood with humans', and 'no flood'. After experimenting with our proposed dataset on our fine-tuned CCT model, which has a comparatively lower number of weight parameters than many other transformer-based architectures designed for computer vision, it exhibits an accuracy and macro average precision of 98.62% and 98.50%. The other transformer-based architectures that we implement are the Vision Transformer (ViT), Swin Transformer, and External Attention Transformer (EANet), which give an accuracy of 88.66%, 84.74%, and 66.56% respectively. We also implement DCECNN (Deep Custom Ensembled Convolutional Neural Network), which is a custom ensemble model that we create by combining MobileNet, InceptionV3, and EfficientNetB0, and we obtain an accuracy of 98.78%. The architectures we implement are fine-tuned to achieve optimal performance on our dataset.
Authors:Thinh Phan, Isaac Phillips, Andrew Lockett, Michael T. Kidd, Ngan Le
Abstract:
Object tracking, especially animal tracking, is one of the key topics that attract a lot of attention due to its benefits of animal behavior understanding and monitoring. Recent state-of-the-art tracking methods are founded on deep learning architectures for object detection, appearance feature extraction and track association. Despite the good tracking performance, these methods are trained and evaluated on common objects such as human and cars. To perform on the animal, there is a need to create large datasets of different types in multiple conditions. The dataset construction comprises of data collection and data annotation. In this work, we put more focus on the latter task. Particularly, we renovate the well-known tool, LabelMe, so as to assist common user with or without in-depth knowledge about computer science to annotate the data with less effort. The new tool named as TrackMe inherits the simplicity, high compatibility with varied systems, minimal hardware requirement and convenient feature utilization from the predecessor. TrackMe is an upgraded version with essential features for multiple object tracking annotation.
Authors:Kosuke Tatsumura, Yohei Hamakawa, Masaya Yamasaki, Koji Oya, Hiroshi Fujimoto
Abstract:
A cognitive function of tracking multiple objects, needed in autonomous mobile vehicles, comprises object detection and their temporal association. While great progress owing to machine learning has been recently seen for elaborating the similarity matrix between the objects that have been recognized and the objects detected in a current video frame, less for the assignment problem that finally determines the temporal association, which is a combinatorial optimization problem. Here we show an in-vehicle multiple object tracking system with a flexible assignment function for tracking through multiple long-term occlusion events. To solve the flexible assignment problem formulated as a nondeterministic polynomial time-hard problem, the system relies on an embeddable Ising machine based on a quantum-inspired algorithm called simulated bifurcation. Using a vehicle-mountable computing platform, we demonstrate a realtime system-wide throughput (23 frames per second on average) with the enhanced functionality.
Authors:Yong Zhang, Rui Zhu, Shifeng Zhang, Xu Zhou, Shifeng Chen, Xiaofan Chen
Abstract:
Self-supervised contrastive learning heavily relies on the view variance brought by data augmentation, so that it can learn a view-invariant pre-trained representation. Beyond increasing the view variance for contrast, this work focuses on improving the diversity of training data, to improve the generalization and robustness of the pre-trained models. To this end, we propose a unified framework to conduct data augmentation in the feature space, known as feature augmentation. This strategy is domain-agnostic, which augments similar features to the original ones and thus improves the data diversity. We perform a systematic investigation of various feature augmentation architectures, the gradient-flow skill, and the relationship between feature augmentation and traditional data augmentation. Our study reveals some practical principles for feature augmentation in self-contrastive learning. By integrating feature augmentation on the instance discrimination or the instance similarity paradigm, we consistently improve the performance of pre-trained feature learning and gain better generalization over the downstream image classification and object detection task.
Authors:Sudhakar Sah, Ravish Kumar, Honnesh Rohmetra, Ehsan Saboori
Abstract:
High runtime memory and high latency puts significant constraint on Vision Transformer training and inference, especially on edge devices. Token pruning reduces the number of input tokens to the ViT based on importance criteria of each token. We present a Background Aware Vision Transformer (BAViT) model, a pre-processing block to object detection models like DETR/YOLOS aimed to reduce runtime memory and increase throughput by using a novel approach to identify background tokens in the image. The background tokens can be pruned completely or partially before feeding to a ViT based object detector. We use the semantic information provided by segmentation map and/or bounding box annotation to train a few layers of ViT to classify tokens to either foreground or background. Using 2 layers and 10 layers of BAViT, background and foreground tokens can be separated with 75% and 88% accuracy on VOC dataset and 71% and 80% accuracy on COCO dataset respectively. We show a 2 layer BAViT-small model as pre-processor to YOLOS can increase the throughput by 30% - 40% with a mAP drop of 3% without any sparse fine-tuning and 2% with sparse fine-tuning. Our approach is specifically targeted for Edge AI use cases.
Authors:Riadul Islam, Sri Ranga Sai Krishna Tummala, Joey Mulé, Rohith Kankipati, Suraj Jalapally, Dhandeep Challagundla, Chad Howard, Ryan Robucci
Abstract:
Smart focal-plane and in-chip image processing has emerged as a crucial technology for vision-enabled embedded systems with energy efficiency and privacy. However, the lack of special datasets providing examples of the data that these neuromorphic sensors compute to convey visual information has hindered the adoption of these promising technologies. Neuromorphic imager variants, including event-based sensors, produce various representations such as streams of pixel addresses representing time and locations of intensity changes in the focal plane, temporal-difference data, data sifted/thresholded by temporal differences, image data after applying spatial transformations, optical flow data, and/or statistical representations. To address the critical barrier to entry, we provide an annotated, temporal-threshold-based vision dataset specifically designed for face detection tasks derived from the same videos used for Aff-Wild2. By offering multiple threshold levels (e.g., 4, 8, 12, and 16), this dataset allows for comprehensive evaluation and optimization of state-of-the-art neural architectures under varying conditions and settings compared to traditional methods. The accompanying tool flow for generating event data from raw videos further enhances accessibility and usability. We anticipate that this resource will significantly support the development of robust vision systems based on smart sensors that can process based on temporal-difference thresholds, enabling more accurate and efficient object detection and localization and ultimately promoting the broader adoption of low-power, neuromorphic imaging technologies. To support further research, we publicly released the dataset at \url{https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/bw2e-dj78}.
Authors:Seraj Ghasemi, Hamed Hosseini, MohammadHossein Koosheshi, Mehdi Tale Masouleh, Ahmad Kalhor
Abstract:
With robots increasingly collaborating with humans in everyday tasks, it is important to take steps toward robotic systems capable of understanding the environment. This work focuses on scene understanding to detect pick and place tasks given initial and final images from the scene. To this end, a dataset is collected for object detection and pick and place task detection. A YOLOv5 network is subsequently trained to detect the objects in the initial and final scenes. Given the detected objects and their bounding boxes, two methods are proposed to detect the pick and place tasks which transform the initial scene into the final scene. A geometric method is proposed which tracks objects' movements in the two scenes and works based on the intersection of the bounding boxes which moved within scenes. Contrarily, the CNN-based method utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network to classify objects with intersected bounding boxes into 5 classes, showing the spatial relationship between the involved objects. The performed pick and place tasks are then derived from analyzing the experiments with both scenes. Results show that the CNN-based method, using a VGG16 backbone, outscores the geometric method by roughly 12 percentage points in certain scenarios, with an overall success rate of 84.3%.
Authors:Rajlaxmi Patil, Aditya Ashutosh Kulkarni, Ruturaj Ghatage, Sharvi Endait, Geetanjali Kale, Raviraj Joshi
Abstract:
In the domain of education, the integration of,technology has led to a transformative era, reshaping traditional,learning paradigms. Central to this evolution is the automation,of grading processes, particularly within the STEM domain encompassing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.,While efforts to automate grading have been made in subjects,like Literature, the multifaceted nature of STEM assessments,presents unique challenges, ranging from quantitative analysis,to the interpretation of handwritten diagrams. To address these,challenges, this research endeavors to develop efficient and reliable grading methods through the implementation of automated,assessment techniques using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our,contributions lie in two key areas: firstly, the development of a,robust system for evaluating textual answers in STEM, leveraging,sample answers for precise comparison and grading, enabled by,advanced algorithms and natural language processing techniques.,Secondly, a focus on enhancing diagram evaluation, particularly,flowcharts, within the STEM context, by transforming diagrams,into textual representations for nuanced assessment using a,Large Language Model (LLM). By bridging the gap between,visual representation and semantic meaning, our approach ensures accurate evaluation while minimizing manual intervention.,Through the integration of models such as CRAFT for text,extraction and YoloV5 for object detection, coupled with LLMs,like Mistral-7B for textual evaluation, our methodology facilitates,comprehensive assessment of multimodal answer sheets. This,paper provides a detailed account of our methodology, challenges,encountered, results, and implications, emphasizing the potential,of AI-driven approaches in revolutionizing grading practices in,STEM education.
Authors:Mao Ye, Gregory P. Meyer, Zaiwei Zhang, Dennis Park, Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Yuning Chai, Eric M Wolff
Abstract:
Ensuring robust performance on long-tail examples is an important problem for many real-world applications of machine learning, such as autonomous driving. This work focuses on the problem of identifying rare examples within a corpus of unlabeled data. We propose a simple and scalable data mining approach that leverages the knowledge contained within a large vision language model (VLM). Our approach utilizes a VLM to summarize the content of an image into a set of keywords, and we identify rare examples based on keyword frequency. We find that the VLM offers a distinct signal for identifying long-tail examples when compared to conventional methods based on model uncertainty. Therefore, we propose a simple and general approach for integrating signals from multiple mining algorithms. We evaluate the proposed method on two diverse tasks: 2D image classification, in which inter-class variation is the primary source of data diversity, and on 3D object detection, where intra-class variation is the main concern. Furthermore, through the detection task, we demonstrate that the knowledge extracted from 2D images is transferable to the 3D domain. Our experiments consistently show large improvements (between 10\% and 50\%) over the baseline techniques on several representative benchmarks: ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, and the Waymo Open Dataset.
Authors:Md. Atiqur Rahman, Nahian Ibn Asad, Md. Mushfiqul Haque Omi, Md. Bakhtiar Hasan, Sabbir Ahmed, Md. Hasanul Kabir
Abstract:
Automatic Traffic Sign Recognition is paramount in modern transportation systems, motivating several research endeavors to focus on performance improvement by utilizing large-scale datasets. As the appearance of traffic signs varies across countries, curating large-scale datasets is often impractical; and requires efficient models that can produce satisfactory performance using limited data. In this connection, we present 'FUSED-Net', built-upon Faster RCNN for traffic sign detection, enhanced by Unfrozen Parameters, Pseudo-Support Sets, Embedding Normalization, and Domain Adaptation while reducing data requirement. Unlike traditional approaches, we keep all parameters unfrozen during training, enabling FUSED-Net to learn from limited samples. The generation of a Pseudo-Support Set through data augmentation further enhances performance by compensating for the scarcity of target domain data. Additionally, Embedding Normalization is incorporated to reduce intra-class variance, standardizing feature representation. Domain Adaptation, achieved by pre-training on a diverse traffic sign dataset distinct from the target domain, improves model generalization. Evaluating FUSED-Net on the BDTSD dataset, we achieved 2.4x, 2.2x, 1.5x, and 1.3x improvements of mAP in 1-shot, 3-shot, 5-shot, and 10-shot scenarios, respectively compared to the state-of-the-art Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) models. Additionally, we outperform state-of-the-art works on the cross-domain FSOD benchmark under several scenarios.
Authors:Reihaneh Mirjalili, Michael Krawez, Florian Walter, Wolfram Burgard
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose VLM-Vac, a novel framework designed to enhance the autonomy of smart robot vacuum cleaners. Our approach integrates the zero-shot object detection capabilities of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a Knowledge Distillation (KD) strategy. By leveraging the VLM, the robot can categorize objects into actionable classes -- either to avoid or to suck -- across diverse backgrounds. However, frequently querying the VLM is computationally expensive and impractical for real-world deployment. To address this issue, we implement a KD process that gradually transfers the essential knowledge of the VLM to a smaller, more efficient model. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that this smaller model progressively learns from the VLM and requires significantly fewer queries over time. Additionally, we tackle the challenge of continual learning in dynamic home environments by exploiting a novel experience replay method based on language-guided sampling. Our results show that this approach is not only energy-efficient but also surpasses conventional vision-based clustering methods, particularly in detecting small objects across diverse backgrounds.
Authors:Yongqi Wang, Xinxiao Wu, Shuo Yang, Jiebo Luo
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary video visual relationship detection aims to expand video visual relationship detection beyond annotated categories by detecting unseen relationships between both seen and unseen objects in videos. Existing methods usually use trajectory detectors trained on closed datasets to detect object trajectories, and then feed these trajectories into large-scale pre-trained vision-language models to achieve open-vocabulary classification. Such heavy dependence on the pre-trained trajectory detectors limits their ability to generalize to novel object categories, leading to performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose to unify object trajectory detection and relationship classification into an end-to-end open-vocabulary framework. Under this framework, we propose a relationship-aware open-vocabulary trajectory detector. It primarily consists of a query-based Transformer decoder, where the visual encoder of CLIP is distilled for frame-wise open-vocabulary object detection, and a trajectory associator. To exploit relationship context during trajectory detection, a relationship query is embedded into the Transformer decoder, and accordingly, an auxiliary relationship loss is designed to enable the decoder to perceive the relationships between objects explicitly. Moreover, we propose an open-vocabulary relationship classifier that leverages the rich semantic knowledge of CLIP to discover novel relationships. To adapt CLIP well to relationship classification, we design a multi-modal prompting method that employs spatio-temporal visual prompting for visual representation and vision-guided language prompting for language input. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, VidVRD and VidOR, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Our framework is also applied to a more difficult cross-dataset scenario to further demonstrate its generalization ability.
Authors:Yangguang Chen, Tong Wang, Guanzhou Chen, Kun Zhu, Xiaoliang Tan, Jiaqi Wang, Wenchao Guo, Qing Wang, Xiaolong Luo, Xiaodong Zhang
Abstract:
The detection of façade elements on buildings, such as doors, windows, balconies, air conditioning units, billboards, and glass curtain walls, is a critical step in automating the creation of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Yet, this field faces significant challenges, including the uneven distribution of façade elements, the presence of small objects, and substantial background noise, which hamper detection accuracy. To address these issues, we develop the BFA-YOLO model and the BFA-3D dataset in this study. The BFA-YOLO model is an advanced architecture designed specifically for analyzing multi-view images of façade attachments. It integrates three novel components: the Feature Balanced Spindle Module (FBSM) that tackles the issue of uneven object distribution; the Target Dynamic Alignment Task Detection Head (TDATH) that enhances the detection of small objects; and the Position Memory Enhanced Self-Attention Mechanism (PMESA), aimed at reducing the impact of background noise. These elements collectively enable BFA-YOLO to effectively address each challenge, thereby improving model robustness and detection precision. The BFA-3D dataset, offers multi-view images with precise annotations across a wide range of façade attachment categories. This dataset is developed to address the limitations present in existing façade detection datasets, which often feature a single perspective and insufficient category coverage. Through comparative analysis, BFA-YOLO demonstrated improvements of 1.8\% and 2.9\% in mAP$_{50}$ on the BFA-3D dataset and the public Façade-WHU dataset, respectively, when compared to the baseline YOLOv8 model. These results highlight the superior performance of BFA-YOLO in façade element detection and the advancement of intelligent BIM technologies.
Authors:Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Yuyang Li, Chengbo Zang, Javad Ghaderi, Gil Zussman, Zoran Kostic
Abstract:
We introduce Boundless, a photo-realistic synthetic data generation system for enabling highly accurate object detection in dense urban streetscapes. Boundless can replace massive real-world data collection and manual ground-truth object annotation (labeling) with an automated and configurable process. Boundless is based on the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) City Sample project with improvements enabling accurate collection of 3D bounding boxes across different lighting and scene variability conditions.
We evaluate the performance of object detection models trained on the dataset generated by Boundless when used for inference on a real-world dataset acquired from medium-altitude cameras. We compare the performance of the Boundless-trained model against the CARLA-trained model and observe an improvement of 7.8 mAP. The results we achieved support the premise that synthetic data generation is a credible methodology for training/fine-tuning scalable object detection models for urban scenes.
Authors:Yukang Huo, Mingyuan Yao, Qingbin Tian, Tonghao Wang, Ruifeng Wang, Haihua Wang
Abstract:
Over the past few years, the YOLO series of models has emerged as one of the dominant methodologies in the realm of object detection. Many studies have advanced these baseline models by modifying their architectures, enhancing data quality, and developing new loss functions. However, current models still exhibit deficiencies in processing feature maps, such as overlooking the fusion of cross-scale features and a static fusion approach that lacks the capability for dynamic feature adjustment. To address these issues, this paper introduces an efficient Fine-grained Multi-scale Dynamic Selection Module (FMDS Module), which applies a more effective dynamic feature selection and fusion method on fine-grained multi-scale feature maps, significantly enhancing the detection accuracy of small, medium, and large-sized targets in complex environments. Furthermore, this paper proposes an Adaptive Gated Multi-branch Focus Fusion Module (AGMF Module), which utilizes multiple parallel branches to perform complementary fusion of various features captured by the gated unit branch, FMDS Module branch, and TripletAttention branch. This approach further enhances the comprehensiveness, diversity, and integrity of feature fusion. This paper has integrated the FMDS Module, AGMF Module, into Yolov9 to develop a novel object detection model named FA-YOLO. Extensive experimental results show that under identical experimental conditions, FA-YOLO achieves an outstanding 66.1% mean Average Precision (mAP) on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset, representing 1.0% improvement over YOLOv9's 65.1%. Additionally, the detection accuracies of FA-YOLO for small, medium, and large targets are 44.1%, 54.6%, and 70.8%, respectively, showing improvements of 2.0%, 3.1%, and 0.9% compared to YOLOv9's 42.1%, 51.5%, and 69.9%.
Authors:Jihwan Kim, Jaehyun Choi, Yerim Jeon, Jae-Pil Heo
Abstract:
Temporal action detection (TAD) is challenging, yet fundamental for real-world video applications. Large temporal scale variation of actions is one of the most primary difficulties in TAD. Naturally, multi-scale features have potential in localizing actions of diverse lengths as widely used in object detection. Nevertheless, unlike objects in images, actions have more ambiguity in their boundaries. That is, small neighboring objects are not considered as a large one while short adjoining actions can be misunderstood as a long one. In the coarse-to-fine feature pyramid via pooling, these vague action boundaries can fade out, which we call 'vanishing boundary problem'. To this end, we propose Boundary-Recovering Network (BRN) to address the vanishing boundary problem. BRN constructs scale-time features by introducing a new axis called scale dimension by interpolating multi-scale features to the same temporal length. On top of scale-time features, scale-time blocks learn to exchange features across scale levels, which can effectively settle down the issue. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the two challenging benchmarks, ActivityNet-v1.3 and THUMOS14, with remarkably reduced degree of the vanishing boundary problem.
Authors:Chien-Yao Wang, Hong-Yuan Mark Liao
Abstract:
This is a comprehensive review of the YOLO series of systems. Different from previous literature surveys, this review article re-examines the characteristics of the YOLO series from the latest technical point of view. At the same time, we also analyzed how the YOLO series continued to influence and promote real-time computer vision-related research and led to the subsequent development of computer vision and language models.We take a closer look at how the methods proposed by the YOLO series in the past ten years have affected the development of subsequent technologies and show the applications of YOLO in various fields. We hope this article can play a good guiding role in subsequent real-time computer vision development.
Authors:Lei Hei, Ning An, Tingjing Liao, Qi Ma, Jiaqi Wang, Feiliang Ren
Abstract:
Multimodal Relation Extraction is crucial for constructing flexible and realistic knowledge graphs. Recent studies focus on extracting the relation type with entity pairs present in different modalities, such as one entity in the text and another in the image. However, existing approaches require entities and objects given beforehand, which is costly and impractical. To address the limitation, we propose a novel task, Multimodal Entity-Object Relational Triple Extraction, which aims to extract all triples (entity span, relation, object region) from image-text pairs. To facilitate this study, we modified a multimodal relation extraction dataset MORE, which includes 21 relation types, to create a new dataset containing 20,264 triples, averaging 5.75 triples per image-text pair. Moreover, we propose QEOT, a query-based model with a selective attention mechanism, to dynamically explore the interaction and fusion of textual and visual information. In particular, the proposed method can simultaneously accomplish entity extraction, relation classification, and object detection with a set of queries. Our method is suitable for downstream applications and reduces error accumulation due to the pipeline-style approaches. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the existing baselines by 8.06% and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Miao Zhang, Sherif Abdulatif, Benedikt Loesch, Marco Altmann, Marius Schwarz, Bin Yang
Abstract:
The rapid evolution of deep learning and its integration with autonomous driving systems have led to substantial advancements in 3D perception using multimodal sensors. Notably, radar sensors show greater robustness compared to cameras and lidar under adverse weather and varying illumination conditions. This study delves into the often-overlooked yet crucial issue of domain shift in 4D radar-based object detection, examining how varying environmental conditions, such as different weather patterns and road types, impact 3D object detection performance. Our findings highlight distinct domain shifts across various weather scenarios, revealing unique dataset sensitivities that underscore the critical role of radar point cloud generation. Additionally, we demonstrate that transitioning between different road types, especially from highways to urban settings, introduces notable domain shifts, emphasizing the necessity for diverse data collection across varied road environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of domain shift effects on 4D radar-based object detection. We believe this empirical study contributes to understanding the complex nature of domain shifts in radar data and suggests paths forward for data collection strategy in the face of environmental variability.
Authors:Zichao Dong, Yilin Zhang, Xufeng Huang, Hang Ji, Zhan Shi, Xin Zhan, Junbo Chen
Abstract:
We introduce a novel MV-DETR pipeline which is effective while efficient transformer based detection method. Given input RGBD data, we notice that there are super strong pretraining weights for RGB data while less effective works for depth related data. First and foremost , we argue that geometry and texture cues are both of vital importance while could be encoded separately. Secondly, we find that visual texture feature is relatively hard to extract compared with geometry feature in 3d space. Unfortunately, single RGBD dataset with thousands of data is not enough for training an discriminating filter for visual texture feature extraction. Last but certainly not the least, we designed a lightweight VG module consists of a visual textual encoder, a geometry encoder and a VG connector. Compared with previous state of the art works like V-DETR, gains from pretrained visual encoder could be seen. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 dataset shows the effectiveness of our method. It is worth mentioned that our method achieve 78\% AP which create new state of the art on ScanNetv2 benchmark.
Authors:Alexander Musiat, Laurenz Reichardt, Michael Schulze, Oliver Wasenmüller
Abstract:
Automotive radar systems have evolved to provide not only range, azimuth and Doppler velocity, but also elevation data. This additional dimension allows for the representation of 4D radar as a 3D point cloud. As a result, existing deep learning methods for 3D object detection, which were initially developed for LiDAR data, are often applied to these radar point clouds. However, this neglects the special characteristics of 4D radar data, such as the extreme sparsity and the optimal utilization of velocity information. To address these gaps in the state-of-the-art, we present RadarPillars, a pillar-based object detection network.
By decomposing radial velocity data, introducing PillarAttention for efficient feature extraction, and studying layer scaling to accommodate radar sparsity, RadarPillars significantly outperform state-of-the-art detection results on the View-of-Delft dataset. Importantly, this comes at a significantly reduced parameter count, surpassing existing methods in terms of efficiency and enabling real-time performance on edge devices.
Authors:Ruiyang Zhang, Hu Zhang, Hang Yu, Zhedong Zheng
Abstract:
Unsupervised 3D object detection aims to identify objects of interest from unlabeled raw data, such as LiDAR points. Recent approaches usually adopt pseudo 3D bounding boxes (3D bboxes) from clustering algorithm to initialize the model training. However, pseudo bboxes inevitably contain noise, and such inaccuracies accumulate to the final model, compromising the performance. Therefore, in an attempt to mitigate the negative impact of inaccurate pseudo bboxes, we introduce a new uncertainty-aware framework for unsupervised 3D object detection, dubbed UA3D. In particular, our method consists of two phases: uncertainty estimation and uncertainty regularization. (1) In the uncertainty estimation phase, we incorporate an extra auxiliary detection branch alongside the original primary detector. The prediction disparity between the primary and auxiliary detectors could reflect fine-grained uncertainty at the box coordinate level. (2) Based on the assessed uncertainty, we adaptively adjust the weight of every 3D bbox coordinate via uncertainty regularization, refining the training process on pseudo bboxes. For pseudo bbox coordinate with high uncertainty, we assign a relatively low loss weight. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed method is robust against the noisy pseudo bboxes, yielding substantial improvements on nuScenes and Lyft compared to existing approaches, with increases of +6.9% AP$_{BEV}$ and +2.5% AP$_{3D}$ on nuScenes, and +4.1% AP$_{BEV}$ and +2.0% AP$_{3D}$ on Lyft.
Authors:Gang Pan, Chen Wang, Zhijie Sui, Shuai Guo, Yaozhi Lv, Honglie Li, Di Sun, Zixia Xia
Abstract:
The Quick-view (QV) technique serves as a primary method for detecting defects within sewerage systems. However, the effectiveness of QV is impeded by the limited visual range of its hardware, resulting in suboptimal image quality for distant portions of the sewer network. Image super-resolution is an effective way to improve image quality and has been applied in a variety of scenes. However, research on super-resolution for sewer images remains considerably unexplored. In response, this study leverages the inherent depth relationships present within QV images and introduces a novel Depth-guided, Reference-based Super-Resolution framework denoted as DSRNet. It comprises two core components: a depth extraction module and a depth information matching module (DMM). DSRNet utilizes the adjacent frames of the low-resolution image as reference images and helps them recover texture information based on the correlation. By combining these modules, the integration of depth priors significantly enhances both visual quality and performance benchmarks. Besides, in pursuit of computational efficiency and compactness, a super-resolution knowledge distillation model based on an attention mechanism is introduced. This mechanism facilitates the acquisition of feature similarity between a more complex teacher model and a streamlined student model, with the latter being a lightweight version of DSRNet. Experimental results demonstrate that DSRNet significantly improves PSNR and SSIM compared with other methods. This study also conducts experiments on sewer defect semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification on the Pipe dataset and Sewer-ML dataset. Experiments show that the method can improve the performance of low-resolution sewer images in these tasks.
Authors:Dohyung Kim, Junghyup Lee, Jeimin Jeon, Jaehyeon Moon, Bumsub Ham
Abstract:
Network quantization generally converts full-precision weights and/or activations into low-bit fixed-point values in order to accelerate an inference process. Recent approaches to network quantization further discretize the gradients into low-bit fixed-point values, enabling an efficient training. They typically set a quantization interval using a min-max range of the gradients or adjust the interval such that the quantization error for entire gradients is minimized. In this paper, we analyze the quantization error of gradients for the low-bit fixed-point training, and show that lowering the error for large-magnitude gradients boosts the quantization performance significantly. Based on this, we derive an upper bound of quantization error for the large gradients in terms of the quantization interval, and obtain an optimal condition for the interval minimizing the quantization error for large gradients. We also introduce an interval update algorithm that adjusts the quantization interval adaptively to maintain a small quantization error for large gradients. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our quantization method for various combinations of network architectures and bit-widths on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and super-resolution.
Authors:Ammar Ahmed, Ali Shariq Imran, Abdul Manaf, Zenun Kastrati, Sher Muhammad Daudpota
Abstract:
Diagnosing and treating abnormalities in the wrist, specifically distal radius, and ulna fractures, is a crucial concern among children, adolescents, and young adults, with a higher incidence rate during puberty. However, the scarcity of radiologists and the lack of specialized training among medical professionals pose a significant risk to patient care. This problem is further exacerbated by the rising number of imaging studies and limited access to specialist reporting in certain regions. This highlights the need for innovative solutions to improve the diagnosis and treatment of wrist abnormalities. Automated wrist fracture detection using object detection has shown potential, but current studies mainly use two-stage detection methods with limited evidence for single-stage effectiveness. This study employs state-of-the-art single-stage deep neural network-based detection models YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 to detect wrist abnormalities. Through extensive experimentation, we found that these YOLO models outperform the commonly used two-stage detection algorithm, Faster R-CNN, in fracture detection. Additionally, compound-scaled variants of each YOLO model were compared, with YOLOv8m demonstrating a highest fracture detection sensitivity of 0.92 and mean average precision (mAP) of 0.95. On the other hand, YOLOv6m achieved the highest sensitivity across all classes at 0.83. Meanwhile, YOLOv8x recorded the highest mAP of 0.77 for all classes on the GRAZPEDWRI-DX pediatric wrist dataset, highlighting the potential of single-stage models for enhancing pediatric wrist imaging.
Authors:Nazmul Karim, Abdullah Al Arafat, Umar Khalid, Zhishan Guo, Nazanin Rahnavard
Abstract:
Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) to various backdoor attacks, where the behavior of DNNs can be compromised by utilizing certain types of triggers or poisoning mechanisms. State-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses employ too-sophisticated mechanisms that require either a computationally expensive adversarial search module for reverse-engineering the trigger distribution or an over-sensitive hyper-parameter selection module. Moreover, they offer sub-par performance in challenging scenarios, e.g., limited validation data and strong attacks. In this paper, we propose Neural mask Fine-Tuning (NFT) with an aim to optimally re-organize the neuron activities in a way that the effect of the backdoor is removed. Utilizing a simple data augmentation like MixUp, NFT relaxes the trigger synthesis process and eliminates the requirement of the adversarial search module. Our study further reveals that direct weight fine-tuning under limited validation data results in poor post-purification clean test accuracy, primarily due to overfitting issue. To overcome this, we propose to fine-tune neural masks instead of model weights. In addition, a mask regularizer has been devised to further mitigate the model drift during the purification process. The distinct characteristics of NFT render it highly efficient in both runtime and sample usage, as it can remove the backdoor even when a single sample is available from each class. We validate the effectiveness of NFT through extensive experiments covering the tasks of image classification, object detection, video action recognition, 3D point cloud, and natural language processing. We evaluate our method against 14 different attacks (LIRA, WaNet, etc.) on 11 benchmark data sets such as ImageNet, UCF101, Pascal VOC, ModelNet, OpenSubtitles2012, etc.
Authors:Ruiyang Zhang, Hu Zhang, Hang Yu, Zhedong Zheng
Abstract:
The unsupervised 3D object detection is to accurately detect objects in unstructured environments with no explicit supervisory signals. This task, given sparse LiDAR point clouds, often results in compromised performance for detecting distant or small objects due to the inherent sparsity and limited spatial resolution. In this paper, we are among the early attempts to integrate LiDAR data with 2D images for unsupervised 3D detection and introduce a new method, dubbed LiDAR-2D Self-paced Learning (LiSe). We argue that RGB images serve as a valuable complement to LiDAR data, offering precise 2D localization cues, particularly when scarce LiDAR points are available for certain objects. Considering the unique characteristics of both modalities, our framework devises a self-paced learning pipeline that incorporates adaptive sampling and weak model aggregation strategies. The adaptive sampling strategy dynamically tunes the distribution of pseudo labels during training, countering the tendency of models to overfit easily detected samples, such as nearby and large-sized objects. By doing so, it ensures a balanced learning trajectory across varying object scales and distances. The weak model aggregation component consolidates the strengths of models trained under different pseudo label distributions, culminating in a robust and powerful final model. Experimental evaluations validate the efficacy of our proposed LiSe method, manifesting significant improvements of +7.1% AP$_{BEV}$ and +3.4% AP$_{3D}$ on nuScenes, and +8.3% AP$_{BEV}$ and +7.4% AP$_{3D}$ on Lyft compared to existing techniques.
Authors:Sumayya Inayat, Nimra Dilawar, Waqas Sultani, Mohsen Ali
Abstract:
In recent years, numerous domain adaptive strategies have been proposed to help deep learning models overcome the challenges posed by domain shift. However, even unsupervised domain adaptive strategies still require a large amount of target data. Medical imaging datasets are often characterized by class imbalance and scarcity of labeled and unlabeled data. Few-shot domain adaptive object detection (FSDAOD) addresses the challenge of adapting object detectors to target domains with limited labeled data. Existing works struggle with randomly selected target domain images that may not accurately represent the real population, resulting in overfitting to small validation sets and poor generalization to larger test sets. Medical datasets exhibit high class imbalance and background similarity, leading to increased false positives and lower mean Average Precision (map) in target domains. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel FSDAOD strategy for microscopic imaging. Our contributions include a domain adaptive class balancing strategy for few-shot scenarios, multi-layer instance-level inter and intra-domain alignment to enhance similarity between class instances regardless of domain, and an instance-level classification loss applied in the middle layers of the object detector to enforce feature retention necessary for correct classification across domains. Extensive experimental results with competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results on two public microscopic datasets. Code available at https://github.co/intelligentMachinesLab/few-shot-domain-adaptive-microscopy
Authors:Chenxu Wang, Chunyan Xu, Ziqi Gu, Zhen Cui
Abstract:
While existing semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) methods perform well in general scenes, they encounter challenges in handling oriented objects in aerial images. We experimentally find three gaps between general and oriented object detection in semi-supervised learning: 1) Sampling inconsistency: the common center sampling is not suitable for oriented objects with larger aspect ratios when selecting positive labels from labeled data. 2) Assignment inconsistency: balancing the precision and localization quality of oriented pseudo-boxes poses greater challenges which introduces more noise when selecting positive labels from unlabeled data. 3) Confidence inconsistency: there exists more mismatch between the predicted classification and localization qualities when considering oriented objects, affecting the selection of pseudo-labels. Therefore, we propose a Multi-clue Consistency Learning (MCL) framework to bridge gaps between general and oriented objects in semi-supervised detection. Specifically, considering various shapes of rotated objects, the Gaussian Center Assignment is specially designed to select the pixel-level positive labels from labeled data. We then introduce the Scale-aware Label Assignment to select pixel-level pseudo-labels instead of unreliable pseudo-boxes, which is a divide-and-rule strategy suited for objects with various scales. The Consistent Confidence Soft Label is adopted to further boost the detector by maintaining the alignment of the predicted results. Comprehensive experiments on DOTA-v1.5 and DOTA-v1.0 benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed MCL can achieve state-of-the-art performance in the semi-supervised oriented object detection task.
Authors:Yanfeng Jiang, Ning Sun, Xueshuo Xie, Fei Yang, Tao Li
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have exhibited exceptional performance across diverse computer vision tasks, while their substantial parameter size incurs significantly increased memory and computational demands, impeding effective inference on resource-constrained devices. Quantization has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate these challenges, yet existing methods still suffer from significant accuracy loss at low-bit. We attribute this issue to the distinctive distributions of post-LayerNorm and post-GELU activations within ViTs, rendering conventional hardware-friendly quantizers ineffective, particularly in low-bit scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework called Activation-Distribution-Friendly post-training Quantization for Vision Transformers, ADFQ-ViT. Concretely, we introduce the Per-Patch Outlier-aware Quantizer to tackle irregular outliers in post-LayerNorm activations. This quantizer refines the granularity of the uniform quantizer to a per-patch level while retaining a minimal subset of values exceeding a threshold at full-precision. To handle the non-uniform distributions of post-GELU activations between positive and negative regions, we design the Shift-Log2 Quantizer, which shifts all elements to the positive region and then applies log2 quantization. Moreover, we present the Attention-score enhanced Module-wise Optimization which adjusts the parameters of each quantizer by reconstructing errors to further mitigate quantization error. Extensive experiments demonstrate ADFQ-ViT provides significant improvements over various baselines in image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks at 4-bit. Specifically, when quantizing the ViT-B model to 4-bit, we achieve a 10.23% improvement in Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet dataset.
Authors:Xu Yin, Fei Pan, Guoyuan An, Yuchi Huo, Zixuan Xie, Sung-Eui Yoon
Abstract:
Existing open-set recognition (OSR) studies typically assume that each image contains only one class label, with the unknown test set (negative) having a disjoint label space from the known test set (positive), a scenario referred to as full-label shift. This paper introduces the mixed OSR problem, where test images contain multiple class semantics, with both known and unknown classes co-occurring in the negatives, leading to a more complex super-label shift that better reflects real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose the OpenSlot framework, based on object-centric learning, which uses slot features to represent diverse class semantics and generate class predictions. The proposed anti-noise slot (ANS) technique helps mitigate the impact of noise (invalid or background) slots during classification training, addressing the semantic misalignment between class predictions and ground truth. We evaluate OpenSlot on both mixed and conventional OSR benchmarks. Without elaborate designs, our method not only excels existing approaches in detecting super-label shifts across OSR tasks, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on conventional benchmarks. Meanwhile, OpenSlot can localize class objects without using bounding boxes during training, demonstrating competitive performance in open-set object detection and potential for generalization.
Authors:Zhengbo Zhang, Yuxi Zhou, Jia Gong, Jun Liu, Zhigang Tu
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) enhances the performance of a student network by allowing it to learn the knowledge transferred from a teacher network incrementally. Existing methods dynamically adjust the temperature to enable the student network to adapt to the varying learning difficulties at different learning stages of KD. KD is a continuous process, but when adjusting the temperature, these methods consider only the immediate benefits of the operation in the current learning phase and fail to take into account its future returns. To address this issue, we formulate the adjustment of temperature as a sequential decision-making task and propose a method based on reinforcement learning, termed RLKD. Importantly, we design a novel state representation to enable the agent to make more informed action (i.e. instance temperature adjustment). To handle the problem of delayed rewards in our method due to the KD setting, we explore an instance reward calibration approach. In addition,we devise an efficient exploration strategy that enables the agent to learn valuable instance temperature adjustment policy more efficiently. Our framework can serve as a plug-and-play technique to be inserted into various KD methods easily, and we validate its effectiveness on both image classification and object detection tasks. Our project is at https://www.zayx.me/ITKD.github.io/.
Authors:Fuseini Mumuni, Alhassan Mumuni
Abstract:
Grounding DINO and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved impressive performance in zero-shot object detection and image segmentation, respectively. Together, they have a great potential to revolutionize applications in zero-shot semantic segmentation or data annotation. Yet, in specialized domains like medical image segmentation, objects of interest (e.g., organs, tissues, and tumors) may not fall in existing class names. To address this problem, the referring expression comprehension (REC) ability of Grounding DINO is leveraged to detect arbitrary targets by their language descriptions. However, recent studies have highlighted severe limitation of the REC framework in this application setting owing to its tendency to make false positive predictions when the target is absent in the given image. And, while this bottleneck is central to the prospect of open-set semantic segmentation, it is still largely unknown how much improvement can be achieved by studying the prediction errors. To this end, we perform empirical studies on six publicly available datasets across different domains and reveal that these errors consistently follow a predictable pattern and can, thus, be mitigated by a simple strategy. Specifically, we show that false positive detections with appreciable confidence scores generally occupy large image areas and can usually be filtered by their relative sizes. More importantly, we expect these observations to inspire future research in improving REC-based detection and automated segmentation. Meanwhile, we evaluate the performance of SAM on multiple datasets from various specialized domains and report significant improvements in segmentation performance and annotation time savings over manual approaches.
Authors:Meiying Zhang, Weiyuan Peng, Guangyao Ding, Chenyang Lei, Chunlin Ji, Qi Hao
Abstract:
Simulation data can be accurately labeled and have been expected to improve the performance of data-driven algorithms, including object detection. However, due to the various domain inconsistencies from simulation to reality (sim-to-real),cross-domain object detection algorithms usually suffer from dramatic performance drops. While numerous unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have been developed to address cross-domain tasks between real-world datasets, progress in sim-to-real remains limited. This paper presents a novel Complex-to-Simple (CTS) framework to transfer models from labeled simulation (source) to unlabeled reality (target) domains. Based on a two-stage detector, the novelty of this work is threefold: 1) developing fixed-size anchor heads and RoI augmentation to address size bias and feature diversity between two domains, thereby improving the quality of pseudo-label; 2) developing a novel corner-format representation of aleatoric uncertainty (AU) for the bounding box, to uniformly quantify pseudo-label quality; 3) developing a noise-aware mean teacher domain adaptation method based on AU, as well as object-level and frame-level sampling strategies, to migrate the impact of noisy labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly enhances the sim-to-real domain adaptation capability of 3D object detection models, outperforming state-of-the-art cross-domain algorithms, which are usually developed for real-to-real UDA tasks.
Authors:Xinglong Sun, Barath Lakshmanan, Maying Shen, Shiyi Lan, Jingde Chen, Jose Alvarez
Abstract:
As we push the boundaries of performance in various vision tasks, the models grow in size correspondingly. To keep up with this growth, we need very aggressive pruning techniques for efficient inference and deployment on edge devices. Existing pruning approaches are limited to channel pruning and struggle with aggressive parameter reductions. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-dimensional pruning framework that jointly optimizes pruning across channels, layers, and blocks while adhering to latency constraints. We develop a latency modeling technique that accurately captures model-wide latency variations during pruning, which is crucial for achieving an optimal latency-accuracy trade-offs at high pruning ratio. We reformulate pruning as a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Program (MINLP) to efficiently determine the optimal pruned structure with only a single pass. Our extensive results demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods, particularly at large pruning ratios. In classification, our method significantly outperforms prior art HALP with a Top-1 accuracy of 70.0(v.s. 68.6) and an FPS of 5262 im/s(v.s. 4101 im/s). In 3D object detection, we establish a new state-of-the-art by pruning StreamPETR at a 45% pruning ratio, achieving higher FPS (37.3 vs. 31.7) and mAP (0.451 vs. 0.449) than the dense baseline.
Authors:Julian Straub, Daniel DeTone, Tianwei Shen, Nan Yang, Chris Sweeney, Richard Newcombe
Abstract:
The advent of wearable computers enables a new source of context for AI that is embedded in egocentric sensor data. This new egocentric data comes equipped with fine-grained 3D location information and thus presents the opportunity for a novel class of spatial foundation models that are rooted in 3D space. To measure progress on what we term Egocentric Foundation Models (EFMs) we establish EFM3D, a benchmark with two core 3D egocentric perception tasks. EFM3D is the first benchmark for 3D object detection and surface regression on high quality annotated egocentric data of Project Aria. We propose Egocentric Voxel Lifting (EVL), a baseline for 3D EFMs. EVL leverages all available egocentric modalities and inherits foundational capabilities from 2D foundation models. This model, trained on a large simulated dataset, outperforms existing methods on the EFM3D benchmark.
Authors:Jinyuan Li, Ziyan Li, Han Li, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia, Di Sun, Gang Pan
Abstract:
Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) task aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging attributes: 1) The tenuous correlation between images and text on social media contributes to a notable proportion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained noun phrases used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as connecting bridges. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It enables us to optimize the MNER module for optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need to pre-extract region features using object detection methods, thus naturally addressing the two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of Entity Expansion Expression module and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). This endows the proposed framework with unlimited data and model scalability. Furthermore, to address the potential ambiguity stemming from the coarse-grained bounding box output in GMNER, we further construct the new Segmented Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (SMNER) task and corresponding Twitter-SMNER dataset aimed at generating fine-grained segmentation masks, and experimentally demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of using box prompt-based Segment Anything Model (SAM) to empower any GMNER model with the ability to accomplish the SMNER task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG significantly outperforms SoTA methods on four datasets across the MNER, GMNER, and SMNER tasks.
Authors:Zhihang Song, Dingyi Yao, Ruibo Ming, Lihui Peng, Danya Yao, Yi Zhang
Abstract:
Multi-modal object detection in autonomous driving has achieved great breakthroughs due to the usage of fusing complementary information from different sensors. The calibration in fusion between sensors such as LiDAR and camera was always supposed to be precise in previous work. However, in reality, calibration matrices are fixed when the vehicles leave the factory, but mechanical vibration, road bumps, and data lags may cause calibration bias. As there is relatively limited research on the impact of calibration on fusion detection performance, multi-sensor detection methods with flexible calibration dependency have remained a key objective. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the sensitivity of the SOTA EPNet++ detection framework and prove that even slight bias on calibration can reduce the performance seriously. To address this vulnerability, we propose a re-calibration model to re-calibrate the misalignment in detection tasks. This model integrates LiDAR point cloud, camera image, and initial calibration matrix as inputs, generating re-calibrated bias through semantic segmentation guidance and a tailored loss function design. The re-calibration model can operate with existing detection algorithms, enhancing both robustness against calibration bias and overall object detection performance. Our approach establishes a foundational methodology for maintaining reliability in multi-modal perception systems under real-world calibration uncertainties.
Authors:Hoà ng-Ãn Lê, Minh-Tan Pham
Abstract:
Partial multi-task learning where training examples are annotated for one of the target tasks is a promising idea in remote sensing as it allows combining datasets annotated for different tasks and predicting more tasks with fewer network parameters. The naïve approach to partial multi-task learning is sub-optimal due to the lack of all-task annotations for learning joint representations. This paper proposes using knowledge distillation to replace the need of ground truths for the alternate task and enhance the performance of such approach. Experiments conducted on the public ISPRS 2D Semantic Labeling Contest dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed idea on partial multi-task learning for semantic tasks including object detection and semantic segmentation in aerial images.
Authors:Max Peter Ronecker, Xavier Diaz, Michael Karner, Daniel Watzenig
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel hybrid architecture that enhances radar-based Dynamic Occupancy Grid Mapping (DOGM) for autonomous vehicles, integrating deep learning for state-classification. Traditional radar-based DOGM often faces challenges in accurately distinguishing between static and dynamic objects. Our approach addresses this limitation by introducing a neural network-based DOGM state correction mechanism, designed as a semantic segmentation task, to refine the accuracy of the occupancy grid. Additionally a heuristic fusion approach is proposed which allows to enhance performance without compromising on safety. We extensively evaluate this hybrid architecture on the NuScenes Dataset, focusing on its ability to improve dynamic object detection as well grid quality. The results show clear improvements in the detection capabilities of dynamic objects, highlighting the effectiveness of the deep learning-enhanced state correction in radar-based DOGM.
Authors:Mingxuan Liu, Tyler L. Hayes, Elisa Ricci, Gabriela Csurka, Riccardo Volpi
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OvOD) has transformed detection into a language-guided task, empowering users to freely define their class vocabularies of interest during inference. However, our initial investigation indicates that existing OvOD detectors exhibit significant variability when dealing with vocabularies across various semantic granularities, posing a concern for real-world deployment. To this end, we introduce Semantic Hierarchy Nexus (SHiNe), a novel classifier that uses semantic knowledge from class hierarchies. It runs offline in three steps: i) it retrieves relevant super-/sub-categories from a hierarchy for each target class; ii) it integrates these categories into hierarchy-aware sentences; iii) it fuses these sentence embeddings to generate the nexus classifier vector. Our evaluation on various detection benchmarks demonstrates that SHiNe enhances robustness across diverse vocabulary granularities, achieving up to +31.9% mAP50 with ground truth hierarchies, while retaining improvements using hierarchies generated by large language models. Moreover, when applied to open-vocabulary classification on ImageNet-1k, SHiNe improves the CLIP zero-shot baseline by +2.8% accuracy. SHiNe is training-free and can be seamlessly integrated with any off-the-shelf OvOD detector, without incurring additional computational overhead during inference. The code is open source.
Authors:Liuxin Bao, Xiaofei Zhou, Xiankai Lu, Yaoqi Sun, Haibing Yin, Zhenghui Hu, Jiyong Zhang, Chenggang Yan
Abstract:
Depth images and thermal images contain the spatial geometry information and surface temperature information, which can act as complementary information for the RGB modality. However, the quality of the depth and thermal images is often unreliable in some challenging scenarios, which will result in the performance degradation of the two-modal based salient object detection (SOD). Meanwhile, some researchers pay attention to the triple-modal SOD task, where they attempt to explore the complementarity of the RGB image, the depth image, and the thermal image. However, existing triple-modal SOD methods fail to perceive the quality of depth maps and thermal images, which leads to performance degradation when dealing with scenes with low-quality depth and thermal images. Therefore, we propose a quality-aware selective fusion network (QSF-Net) to conduct VDT salient object detection, which contains three subnets including the initial feature extraction subnet, the quality-aware region selection subnet, and the region-guided selective fusion subnet. Firstly, except for extracting features, the initial feature extraction subnet can generate a preliminary prediction map from each modality via a shrinkage pyramid architecture. Then, we design the weakly-supervised quality-aware region selection subnet to generate the quality-aware maps. Concretely, we first find the high-quality and low-quality regions by using the preliminary predictions, which further constitute the pseudo label that can be used to train this subnet. Finally, the region-guided selective fusion subnet purifies the initial features under the guidance of the quality-aware maps, and then fuses the triple-modal features and refines the edge details of prediction maps through the intra-modality and inter-modality attention (IIA) module and the edge refinement (ER) module, respectively. Extensive experiments are performed on VDT-2048
Authors:Moussa Kassem Sbeyti, Michelle Karg, Christian Wirth, Nadja Klein, Sahin Albayrak
Abstract:
Object detectors in real-world applications often fail to detect objects due to varying factors such as weather conditions and noisy input. Therefore, a process that mitigates false detections is crucial for both safety and accuracy. While uncertainty-based thresholding shows promise, previous works demonstrate an imperfect correlation between uncertainty and detection errors. This hinders ideal thresholding, prompting us to further investigate the correlation and associated cost with different types of uncertainty. We therefore propose a cost-sensitive framework for object detection tailored to user-defined budgets on the two types of errors, missing and false detections. We derive minimum thresholding requirements to prevent performance degradation and define metrics to assess the applicability of uncertainty for failure recognition. Furthermore, we automate and optimize the thresholding process to maximize the failure recognition rate w.r.t. the specified budget. Evaluation on three autonomous driving datasets demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances safety, particularly in challenging scenarios. Leveraging localization aleatoric uncertainty and softmax-based entropy only, our method boosts the failure recognition rate by 36-60\% compared to conventional approaches. Code is available at https://mos-ks.github.io/publications.
Authors:Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Sanjeev Narasimhan, Chengbo Zang, Gyung Hyun Je, Bo Yu, Mahshid Ghasemi, Javad Ghaderi, Gil Zussman, Zoran Kostic
Abstract:
We introduce Constellation, a dataset of 13K images suitable for research on detection of objects in dense urban streetscapes observed from high-elevation cameras, collected for a variety of temporal conditions. The dataset addresses the need for curated data to explore problems in small object detection exemplified by the limited pixel footprint of pedestrians observed tens of meters from above. It enables the testing of object detection models for variations in lighting, building shadows, weather, and scene dynamics. We evaluate contemporary object detection architectures on the dataset, observing that state-of-the-art methods have lower performance in detecting small pedestrians compared to vehicles, corresponding to a 10% difference in average precision (AP). Using structurally similar datasets for pretraining the models results in an increase of 1.8% mean AP (mAP). We further find that incorporating domain-specific data augmentations helps improve model performance. Using pseudo-labeled data, obtained from inference outcomes of the best-performing models, improves the performance of the models. Finally, comparing the models trained using the data collected in two different time intervals, we find a performance drift in models due to the changes in intersection conditions over time. The best-performing model achieves a pedestrian AP of 92.0% with 11.5 ms inference time on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and an mAP of 95.4%.
Authors:Erh-Chung Chen, Pin-Yu Chen, I-Hsin Chung, Che-Rung Lee
Abstract:
Latency attacks against object detection represent a variant of adversarial attacks that aim to inflate the inference time by generating additional ghost objects in a target image. However, generating ghost objects in the black-box scenario remains a challenge since information about these unqualified objects remains opaque. In this study, we demonstrate the feasibility of generating ghost objects in adversarial examples by extending the concept of "steal now, decrypt later" attacks. These adversarial examples, once produced, can be employed to exploit potential vulnerabilities in the AI service, giving rise to significant security concerns. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attack achieves successful attacks across various commonly used models and Google Vision API without any prior knowledge about the target model. Additionally, the average cost of each attack is less than \$ 1 dollars, posing a significant threat to AI security.
Authors:Manyi Yao, Abhishek Aich, Yumin Suh, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Christian Shelton, Manmohan Chandraker
Abstract:
Vision transformer based models bring significant improvements for image segmentation tasks. Although these architectures offer powerful capabilities irrespective of specific segmentation tasks, their use of computational resources can be taxing on deployed devices. One way to overcome this challenge is by adapting the computation level to the specific needs of the input image rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach. To this end, we introduce ECO-M2F or EffiCient TransfOrmer Encoders for Mask2Former-style models. Noting that the encoder module of M2F-style models incur high resource-intensive computations, ECO-M2F provides a strategy to self-select the number of hidden layers in the encoder, conditioned on the input image. To enable this self-selection ability for providing a balance between performance and computational efficiency, we present a three step recipe. The first step is to train the parent architecture to enable early exiting from the encoder. The second step is to create an derived dataset of the ideal number of encoder layers required for each training example. The third step is to use the aforementioned derived dataset to train a gating network that predicts the number of encoder layers to be used, conditioned on the input image. Additionally, to change the computational-accuracy tradeoff, only steps two and three need to be repeated which significantly reduces retraining time. Experiments on the public datasets show that the proposed approach reduces expected encoder computational cost while maintaining performance, adapts to various user compute resources, is flexible in architecture configurations, and can be extended beyond the segmentation task to object detection.
Authors:Atom Scott, Ikuma Uchida, Ning Ding, Rikuhei Umemoto, Rory Bunker, Ren Kobayashi, Takeshi Koyama, Masaki Onishi, Yoshinari Kameda, Keisuke Fujii
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a critical and challenging task in computer vision, particularly in situations involving objects with similar appearances but diverse movements, as seen in team sports. Current methods, largely reliant on object detection and appearance, often fail to track targets in such complex scenarios accurately. This limitation is further exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive and diverse datasets covering the full view of sports pitches. Addressing these issues, we introduce TeamTrack, a pioneering benchmark dataset specifically designed for MOT in sports. TeamTrack is an extensive collection of full-pitch video data from various sports, including soccer, basketball, and handball. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis and benchmarking effort to underscore TeamTrack's utility and potential impact. Our work signifies a crucial step forward, promising to elevate the precision and effectiveness of MOT in complex, dynamic settings such as team sports. The dataset, project code and competition is released at: https://atomscott.github.io/TeamTrack/.
Authors:Thomas Monninger, Vandana Dokkadi, Md Zafar Anwar, Steffen Staab
Abstract:
Autonomous driving requires an accurate representation of the environment. A strategy toward high accuracy is to fuse data from several sensors. Learned Bird's-Eye View (BEV) encoders can achieve this by mapping data from individual sensors into one joint latent space. For cost-efficient camera-only systems, this provides an effective mechanism to fuse data from multiple cameras with different views. Accuracy can further be improved by aggregating sensor information over time. This is especially important in monocular camera systems to account for the lack of explicit depth and velocity measurements. Thereby, the effectiveness of developed BEV encoders crucially depends on the operators used to aggregate temporal information and on the used latent representation spaces. We analyze BEV encoders proposed in the literature and compare their effectiveness, quantifying the effects of aggregation operators and latent representations. While most existing approaches aggregate temporal information either in image or in BEV latent space, our analyses and performance comparisons suggest that these latent representations exhibit complementary strengths. Therefore, we develop a novel temporal BEV encoder, TempBEV, which integrates aggregated temporal information from both latent spaces. We consider subsequent image frames as stereo through time and leverage methods from optical flow estimation for temporal stereo encoding. Empirical evaluation on the NuScenes dataset shows a significant improvement by TempBEV over the baseline for 3D object detection and BEV segmentation. The ablation uncovers a strong synergy of joint temporal aggregation in the image and BEV latent space. These results indicate the overall effectiveness of our approach and make a strong case for aggregating temporal information in both image and BEV latent spaces.
Authors:Deepti Hegde, Suhas Lohit, Kuan-Chuan Peng, Michael J. Jones, Vishal M. Patel
Abstract:
LiDAR datasets for autonomous driving exhibit biases in properties such as point cloud density, range, and object dimensions. As a result, object detection networks trained and evaluated in different environments often experience performance degradation. Domain adaptation approaches assume access to unannotated samples from the test distribution to address this problem. However, in the real world, the exact conditions of deployment and access to samples representative of the test dataset may be unavailable while training. We argue that the more realistic and challenging formulation is to require robustness in performance to unseen target domains. We propose to address this problem in a two-pronged manner. First, we leverage paired LiDAR-image data present in most autonomous driving datasets to perform multimodal object detection. We suggest that working with multimodal features by leveraging both images and LiDAR point clouds for scene understanding tasks results in object detectors more robust to unseen domain shifts. Second, we train a 3D object detector to learn multimodal object features across different distributions and promote feature invariance across these source domains to improve generalizability to unseen target domains. To this end, we propose CLIX$^\text{3D}$, a multimodal fusion and supervised contrastive learning framework for 3D object detection that performs alignment of object features from same-class samples of different domains while pushing the features from different classes apart. We show that CLIX$^\text{3D}$ yields state-of-the-art domain generalization performance under multiple dataset shifts.
Authors:Deepti Hegde, Suhas Lohit, Kuan-Chuan Peng, Michael J. Jones, Vishal M. Patel
Abstract:
Popular representation learning methods encourage feature invariance under transformations applied at the input. However, in 3D perception tasks like object localization and segmentation, outputs are naturally equivariant to some transformations, such as rotation. Using pre-training loss functions that encourage equivariance of features under certain transformations provides a strong self-supervision signal while also retaining information of geometric relationships between transformed feature representations. This can enable improved performance in downstream tasks that are equivariant to such transformations. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal equivariant learning framework by considering both spatial and temporal augmentations jointly. Our experiments show that the best performance arises with a pre-training approach that encourages equivariance to translation, scaling, and flip, rotation and scene flow. For spatial augmentations, we find that depending on the transformation, either a contrastive objective or an equivariance-by-classification objective yields best results. To leverage real-world object deformations and motion, we consider sequential LiDAR scene pairs and develop a novel 3D scene flow-based equivariance objective that leads to improved performance overall. We show our pre-training method for 3D object detection which outperforms existing equivariant and invariant approaches in many settings.
Authors:Hojun Lee, Suyoung Kim, Junhoo Lee, Jaeyoung Yoo, Nojun Kwak
Abstract:
Coreset selection is a method for selecting a small, representative subset of an entire dataset. It has been primarily researched in image classification, assuming there is only one object per image. However, coreset selection for object detection is more challenging as an image can contain multiple objects. As a result, much research has yet to be done on this topic. Therefore, we introduce a new approach, Coreset Selection for Object Detection (CSOD). CSOD generates imagewise and classwise representative feature vectors for multiple objects of the same class within each image. Subsequently, we adopt submodular optimization for considering both representativeness and diversity and utilize the representative vectors in the submodular optimization process to select a subset. When we evaluated CSOD on the Pascal VOC dataset, CSOD outperformed random selection by +6.4%p in AP$_{50}$ when selecting 200 images.
Authors:Fanjie Kong, Yanbei Chen, Jiarui Cai, Davide Modolo
Abstract:
Open-world detection poses significant challenges, as it requires the detection of any object using either object class labels or free-form texts. Existing related works often use large-scale manual annotated caption datasets for training, which are extremely expensive to collect. Instead, we propose to transfer knowledge from vision-language models (VLMs) to enrich the open-vocabulary descriptions automatically. Specifically, we bootstrap dense synthetic captions using pre-trained VLMs to provide rich descriptions on different regions in images, and incorporate these captions to train a novel detector that generalizes to novel concepts. To mitigate the noise caused by hallucination in synthetic captions, we also propose a novel hyperbolic vision-language learning approach to impose a hierarchy between visual and caption embeddings. We call our detector ``HyperLearner''. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide variety of open-world detection benchmarks (COCO, LVIS, Object Detection in the Wild, RefCOCO) and our results show that our model consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, such as GLIP, GLIPv2 and Grounding DINO, when using the same backbone.
Authors:Lingjun Zhao, Jingyu Song, Katherine A. Skinner
Abstract:
In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving, LiDAR-Camera (LC) fusion is the top-performing sensor configuration. Still, LiDAR is relatively high cost, which hinders adoption of this technology for consumer automobiles. Alternatively, camera and radar are commonly deployed on vehicles already on the road today, but performance of Camera-Radar (CR) fusion falls behind LC fusion. In this work, we propose Camera-Radar Knowledge Distillation (CRKD) to bridge the performance gap between LC and CR detectors with a novel cross-modality KD framework. We use the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation as the shared feature space to enable effective knowledge distillation. To accommodate the unique cross-modality KD path, we propose four distillation losses to help the student learn crucial features from the teacher model. We present extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CRKD framework. The project page for CRKD is https://song-jingyu.github.io/CRKD.
Authors:Ting-Kang Yen, Igor Morawski, Shusil Dangi, Kai He, Chung-Yi Lin, Jia-Fong Yeh, Hung-Ting Su, Winston Hsu
Abstract:
Event-based object detection has recently garnered attention in the computer vision community due to the exceptional properties of event cameras, such as high dynamic range and no motion blur. However, feature asynchronism and sparsity cause invisible objects due to no relative motion to the camera, posing a significant challenge in the task. Prior works have studied various implicit-learned memories to retain as many temporal cues as possible. However, implicit memories still struggle to preserve long-term features effectively. In this paper, we consider those invisible objects as pseudo-occluded objects and aim to detect them by tracking through occlusions. Firstly, we introduce the visibility attribute of objects and contribute an auto-labeling algorithm to not only clean the existing event camera dataset but also append additional visibility labels to it. Secondly, we exploit tracking strategies for pseudo-occluded objects to maintain their permanence and retain their bounding boxes, even when features have not been available for a very long time. These strategies can be treated as an explicit-learned memory guided by the tracking objective to record the displacements of objects across frames. Lastly, we propose a spatio-temporal feature aggregation module to enrich the latent features and a consistency loss to increase the robustness of the overall pipeline. We conduct comprehensive experiments to verify our method's effectiveness where still objects are retained, but real occluded objects are discarded. The results demonstrate that (1) the additional visibility labels can assist in supervised training, and (2) our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with a significant improvement of 7.9% absolute mAP.
Authors:Xinhao Xiang, Simon Dräger, Jiawei Zhang
Abstract:
The accuracy-speed-memory trade-off is always the priority to consider for several computer vision perception tasks.
Previous methods mainly focus on a single or small couple of these tasks, such as creating effective data augmentation, feature extractor, learning strategies, etc. These approaches, however, could be inherently task-specific: their proposed model's performance may depend on a specific perception task or a dataset.
Targeting to explore common learning patterns and increasing the module robustness, we propose the EffiPerception framework.
It could achieve great accuracy-speed performance with relatively low memory cost under several perception tasks: 2D Object Detection, 3D Object Detection, 2D Instance Segmentation, and 3D Point Cloud Segmentation.
Overall, the framework consists of three parts:
(1) Efficient Feature Extractors, which extract the input features for each modality. (2) Efficient Layers, plug-in plug-out layers that further process the feature representation, aggregating core learned information while pruning noisy proposals. (3) The EffiOptim, an 8-bit optimizer to further cut down the computational cost and facilitate performance stability.
Extensive experiments on the KITTI, semantic-KITTI, and COCO datasets revealed that EffiPerception could show great accuracy-speed-memory overall performance increase within the four detection and segmentation tasks, in comparison to earlier, well-respected methods.
Authors:Jakub Mandula, Jonas Kühne, Luca Pascarella, Michele Magno
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity in civil and military applications. However, uncontrolled access to restricted areas threatens privacy and security. Thus, prevention and detection of UAVs are pivotal to guarantee confidentiality and safety. Although active scanning, mainly based on radars, is one of the most accurate technologies, it can be expensive and less versatile than passive inspections, e.g., object recognition. Dynamic vision sensors (DVS) are bio-inspired event-based vision models that leverage timestamped pixel-level brightness changes in fast-moving scenes that adapt well to low-latency object detection. This paper presents F-UAV-D (Fast Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detector), an embedded system that enables fast-moving drone detection. In particular, we propose a setup to exploit DVS as an alternative to RGB cameras in a real-time and low-power configuration. Our approach leverages the high-dynamic range (HDR) and background suppression of DVS and, when trained with various fast-moving drones, outperforms RGB input in suboptimal ambient conditions such as low illumination and fast-moving scenes. Our results show that F-UAV-D can (i) detect drones by using less than <15 W on average and (ii) perform real-time inference (i.e., <50 ms) by leveraging the CPU and GPU nodes of our edge computer.
Authors:Al Amin, Deo Chimba, Kamrul Hasan, Emmanuel Samson
Abstract:
Crashes and delays at Railroad Highway Grade Crossings (RHGC), where highways and railroads intersect, pose significant safety concerns for the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). Despite the critical importance of addressing accidents and traffic delays at highway-railroad intersections, there is a notable dearth of research on practical solutions for managing these issues. In response to this gap in the literature, our study introduces an intelligent system that leverages machine learning and computer vision techniques to enhance safety at Railroad Highway Grade crossings (RHGC). This research proposed a Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS)- based ensemble model that integrates a variety of YOLO variants, specifically YOLOv5S, YOLOv5M, and YOLOv5L, for grade-crossing object detection, utilizes segmentation techniques from the UNet architecture for detecting approaching rail at a grade crossing. Both methods are implemented on a Raspberry Pi. Moreover, the strategy employs high-definition cameras installed at the RHGC. This framework enables the system to monitor objects within the Region of Interest (ROI) at crossings, detect the approach of trains, and clear the crossing area before a train arrives. Regarding accuracy, precision, recall, and Intersection over Union (IoU), the proposed state-of-the-art NMS-based object detection ensemble model achieved 96% precision. In addition, the UNet segmentation model obtained a 98% IoU value. This automated railroad grade crossing system powered by artificial intelligence represents a promising solution for enhancing safety at highway-railroad intersections.
Authors:Toqi Tahamid Sarker, Taminul Islam, Khaled R Ahmed
Abstract:
Analyzing and detecting cannabis seed variants is crucial for the agriculture industry. It enables precision breeding, allowing cultivators to selectively enhance desirable traits. Accurate identification of seed variants also ensures regulatory compliance, facilitating the cultivation of specific cannabis strains with defined characteristics, ultimately improving agricultural productivity and meeting diverse market demands. This paper presents a study on cannabis seed variant detection by employing a state-of-the-art object detection model Faster R-CNN. This study implemented the model on a locally sourced cannabis seed dataset in Thailand, comprising 17 distinct classes. We evaluate six Faster R-CNN models by comparing performance on various metrics and achieving a mAP score of 94.08\% and an F1 score of 95.66\%. This paper presents the first known application of deep neural network object detection models to the novel task of visually identifying cannabis seed types.
Authors:Zhuohang Jiang, Bingkui Tong, Xia Du, Ahmed Alhammadi, Jizhe Zhou
Abstract:
With the rise of social platforms, protecting privacy has become an important issue. Privacy object detection aims to accurately locate private objects in images. It is the foundation of safeguarding individuals' privacy rights and ensuring responsible data handling practices in the digital age. Since privacy of object is not shift-invariant, the essence of the privacy object detection task is inferring object privacy based on scene information. However, privacy object detection has long been studied as a subproblem of common object detection tasks. Therefore, existing methods suffer from serious deficiencies in accuracy, generalization, and interpretability. Moreover, creating large-scale privacy datasets is difficult due to legal constraints and existing privacy datasets lack label granularity. The granularity of existing privacy detection methods remains limited to the image level. To address the above two issues, we introduce two benchmark datasets for object-level privacy detection and propose SHAN, Scene Heterogeneous graph Attention Network, a model constructs a scene heterogeneous graph from an image and utilizes self-attention mechanisms for scene inference to obtain object privacy. Through experiments, we demonstrated that SHAN performs excellently in privacy object detection tasks, with all metrics surpassing those of the baseline model.
Authors:Mohammad Alkhalefi, Georgios Leontidis, Mingjun Zhong
Abstract:
Contrastive instance discrimination methods outperform supervised learning in downstream tasks such as image classification and object detection. However, these methods rely heavily on data augmentation during representation learning, which can lead to suboptimal results if not implemented carefully. A common augmentation technique in contrastive learning is random cropping followed by resizing. This can degrade the quality of representation learning when the two random crops contain distinct semantic content. To tackle this issue, we introduce LeOCLR (Leveraging Original Images for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations), a framework that employs a novel instance discrimination approach and an adapted loss function. This method prevents the loss of important semantic features caused by mapping different object parts during representation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that LeOCLR consistently improves representation learning across various datasets, outperforming baseline models. For instance, LeOCLR surpasses MoCo-v2 by 5.1% on ImageNet-1K in linear evaluation and outperforms several other methods on transfer learning and object detection tasks.
Authors:Hamed Hosseini, Mehdi Tale Masouleh, Ahmad Kalhor
Abstract:
Robotic grasp should be carried out in a real-time manner by proper accuracy. Perception is the first and significant step in this procedure. This paper proposes an improved pipeline model trying to detect grasp as a rectangle representation for different seen or unseen objects. It helps the robot to start control procedures from nearer to the proper part of the object. The main idea consists in pre-processing, output normalization, and data augmentation to improve accuracy by 4.3 percent without making the system slow. Also, a comparison has been conducted over different pre-trained models like AlexNet, ResNet, Vgg19, which are the most famous feature extractors for image processing in object detection. Although AlexNet has less complexity than other ones, it outperformed them, which helps the real-time property.
Authors:Juexiao Feng, Yuhong Yang, Yanchun Xie, Yaqian Li, Yandong Guo, Yuchen Guo, Yuwei He, Liuyu Xiang, Guiguang Ding
Abstract:
In recent years, object detection in deep learning has experienced rapid development. However, most existing object detection models perform well only on closed-set datasets, ignoring a large number of potential objects whose categories are not defined in the training set. These objects are often identified as background or incorrectly classified as pre-defined categories by the detectors. In this paper, we focus on the challenging problem of Novel Class Discovery and Localization (NCDL), aiming to train detectors that can detect the categories present in the training data, while also actively discover, localize, and cluster new categories. We analyze existing NCDL methods and identify the core issue: object detectors tend to be biased towards seen objects, and this leads to the neglect of unseen targets. To address this issue, we first propose an Debiased Region Mining (DRM) approach that combines class-agnostic Region Proposal Network (RPN) and class-aware RPN in a complementary manner. Additionally, we suggest to improve the representation network through semi-supervised contrastive learning by leveraging unlabeled data. Finally, we adopt a simple and efficient mini-batch K-means clustering method for novel class discovery. We conduct extensive experiments on the NCDL benchmark, and the results demonstrate that the proposed DRM approach significantly outperforms previous methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art.
Authors:Qi Bi, Beichen Zhou, Jingjun Yi, Wei Ji, Haolan Zhan, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract:
Oriented object detection has been rapidly developed in the past few years, but most of these methods assume the training and testing images are under the same statistical distribution, which is far from reality. In this paper, we propose the task of domain generalized oriented object detection, which intends to explore the generalization of oriented object detectors on arbitrary unseen target domains. Learning domain generalized oriented object detectors is particularly challenging, as the cross-domain style variation not only negatively impacts the content representation, but also leads to unreliable orientation predictions. To address these challenges, we propose a generalized oriented object detector (GOOD). After style hallucination by the emerging contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), it consists of two key components, namely, rotation-aware content consistency learning (RAC) and style consistency learning (SEC). The proposed RAC allows the oriented object detector to learn stable orientation representation from style-diversified samples. The proposed SEC further stabilizes the generalization ability of content representation from different image styles. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain settings show the state-of-the-art performance of GOOD. Source code will be publicly available.
Authors:Jingyu Song, Lingjun Zhao, Katherine A. Skinner
Abstract:
We propose LiRaFusion to tackle LiDAR-radar fusion for 3D object detection to fill the performance gap of existing LiDAR-radar detectors. To improve the feature extraction capabilities from these two modalities, we design an early fusion module for joint voxel feature encoding, and a middle fusion module to adaptively fuse feature maps via a gated network. We perform extensive evaluation on nuScenes to demonstrate that LiRaFusion leverages the complementary information of LiDAR and radar effectively and achieves notable improvement over existing methods.
Authors:Jinyuan Li, Han Li, Di Sun, Jiahao Wang, Wenkun Zhang, Zan Wang, Gang Pan
Abstract:
Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.
Authors:Jie Mei, Mingyuan Jiu, Hichem Sahbi, Xiaoheng Jiang, Mingliang Xu
Abstract:
Few-shot detection is a major task in pattern recognition which seeks to localize objects using models trained with few labeled data. One of the mainstream few-shot methods is transfer learning which consists in pretraining a detection model in a source domain prior to its fine-tuning in a target domain. However, it is challenging for fine-tuned models to effectively identify new classes in the target domain, particularly when the underlying labeled training data are scarce. In this paper, we devise a novel sparse context transformer (SCT) that effectively leverages object knowledge in the source domain, and automatically learns a sparse context from only few training images in the target domain. As a result, it combines different relevant clues in order to enhance the discrimination power of the learned detectors and reduce class confusion. We evaluate the proposed method on two challenging few-shot object detection benchmarks, and empirical results show that the proposed method obtains competitive performance compared to the related state-of-the-art.
Authors:Pouria Yazdian Anari, Fiona Obiezu, Nathan Lay, Fatemeh Dehghani Firouzabadi, Aditi Chaurasia, Mahshid Golagha, Shiva Singh, Fatemeh Homayounieh, Aryan Zahergivar, Stephanie Harmon, Evrim Turkbey, Rabindra Gautam, Kevin Ma, Maria Merino, Elizabeth C. Jones, Mark W. Ball, W. Marston Linehan, Baris Turkbey, Ashkan A. Malayeri
Abstract:
Introduction This study explores the use of the latest You Only Look Once (YOLO V7) object detection method to enhance kidney detection in medical imaging by training and testing a modified YOLO V7 on medical image formats. Methods Study includes 878 patients with various subtypes of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and 206 patients with normal kidneys. A total of 5657 MRI scans for 1084 patients were retrieved. 326 patients with 1034 tumors recruited from a retrospective maintained database, and bounding boxes were drawn around their tumors. A primary model was trained on 80% of annotated cases, with 20% saved for testing (primary test set). The best primary model was then used to identify tumors in the remaining 861 patients and bounding box coordinates were generated on their scans using the model. Ten benchmark training sets were created with generated coordinates on not-segmented patients. The final model used to predict the kidney in the primary test set. We reported the positive predictive value (PPV), sensitivity, and mean average precision (mAP). Results The primary training set showed an average PPV of 0.94 +/- 0.01, sensitivity of 0.87 +/- 0.04, and mAP of 0.91 +/- 0.02. The best primary model yielded a PPV of 0.97, sensitivity of 0.92, and mAP of 0.95. The final model demonstrated an average PPV of 0.95 +/- 0.03, sensitivity of 0.98 +/- 0.004, and mAP of 0.95 +/- 0.01. Conclusion Using a semi-supervised approach with a medical image library, we developed a high-performing model for kidney detection. Further external validation is required to assess the model's generalizability.
Authors:Max Peter Ronecker, Markus Schratter, Lukas Kuschnig, Daniel Watzenig
Abstract:
Dynamic Occupancy Grid Mapping is a technique used to generate a local map of the environment containing both static and dynamic information. Typically, these maps are primarily generated using lidar measurements. However, with improvements in radar sensing, resulting in better accuracy and higher resolution, radar is emerging as a viable alternative to lidar as the primary sensor for mapping. In this paper, we propose a radar-centric dynamic occupancy grid mapping algorithm with adaptations to the state computation, inverse sensor model, and field-of-view computation tailored to the specifics of radar measurements. We extensively evaluate our approach using real data to demonstrate its effectiveness and establish the first benchmark for radar-based dynamic occupancy grid mapping using the publicly available Radarscenes dataset.
Authors:Tianxiao Gao, Mingle Zhao, Chengzhong Xu, Hui Kong
Abstract:
Vision-aided localization for low-cost mobile robots in diverse environments has attracted widespread attention recently. Although many current systems are applicable in daytime environments, nocturnal visual localization is still an open problem owing to the lack of stable visual information. An insight from most nocturnal scenes is that the static and bright streetlights are reliable visual information for localization. Hence we propose a nocturnal vision-aided localization system in streetlight maps with a novel data association and matching scheme using object detection methods. We leverage the Invariant Extended Kalman Filter (InEKF) to fuse IMU, odometer, and camera measurements for consistent state estimation at night. Furthermore, a tracking recovery module is also designed for tracking failures. Experimental results indicate that our proposed system achieves accurate and robust localization with less than $0.2\%$ relative error of trajectory length in four nocturnal environments.
Authors:Zian Ning, Yin Zhang, Jianan Li, Zhang Chen, Shiyu Zhao
Abstract:
Vision-based estimation of the motion of a moving target is usually formulated as a bearing-only estimation problem where the visual measurement is modeled as a bearing vector. Although the bearing-only approach has been studied for decades, a fundamental limitation of this approach is that it requires extra lateral motion of the observer to enhance the target's observability. Unfortunately, the extra lateral motion conflicts with the desired motion of the observer in many tasks. It is well-known that, once a target has been detected in an image, a bounding box that surrounds the target can be obtained. Surprisingly, this common visual measurement especially its size information has not been well explored up to now. In this paper, we propose a new bearing-angle approach to estimate the motion of a target by modeling its image bounding box as bearing-angle measurements. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this approach can significantly enhance the observability without relying on additional lateral motion of the observer. The benefit of the bearing-angle approach comes with no additional cost because a bounding box is a standard output of object detection algorithms. The approach simply exploits the information that has not been fully exploited in the past. No additional sensing devices or special detection algorithms are required.
Authors:Tianyi Zhao, Maoxun Yuan, Feng Jiang, Nan Wang, Xingxing Wei
Abstract:
In recent years, object detection utilizing both visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (IR) imagery has garnered extensive attention and has been widely implemented across a diverse array of fields. By leveraging the complementary properties between RGB and IR images, the object detection task can achieve reliable and robust object localization across a variety of lighting conditions, from daytime to nighttime environments. Most existing multi-modal object detection methods directly input the RGB and IR images into deep neural networks, resulting in inferior detection performance. We believe that this issue arises not only from the challenges associated with effectively integrating multimodal information but also from the presence of redundant features in both the RGB and IR modalities. The redundant information of each modality will exacerbates the fusion imprecision problems during propagation. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the human brain's mechanism for processing multimodal information and propose a novel coarse-to-fine perspective to purify and fuse features from both modalities. Specifically, following this perspective, we design a Redundant Spectrum Removal module to remove interfering information within each modality coarsely and a Dynamic Feature Selection module to finely select the desired features for feature fusion. To verify the effectiveness of the coarse-to-fine fusion strategy, we construct a new object detector called the Removal then Selection Detector (RSDet). Extensive experiments on three RGB-IR object detection datasets verify the superior performance of our method.
Authors:Raphael van Kempen, Tim Rehbronn, Abin Jose, Johannes Stegmaier, Bastian Lampe, Timo Woopen, Lutz Eckstein
Abstract:
Automated vehicles require an accurate perception of their surroundings for safe and efficient driving. Lidar-based object detection is a widely used method for environment perception, but its performance is significantly affected by adverse weather conditions such as rain and fog. In this work, we investigate various strategies for enhancing the robustness of lidar-based object detection by processing sequential data samples generated by lidar sensors. Our approaches leverage temporal information to improve a lidar object detection model, without the need for additional filtering or pre-processing steps. We compare $10$ different neural network architectures that process point cloud sequences including a novel augmentation strategy introducing a temporal offset between frames of a sequence during training and evaluate the effectiveness of all strategies on lidar point clouds under adverse weather conditions through experiments. Our research provides a comprehensive study of effective methods for mitigating the effects of adverse weather on the reliability of lidar-based object detection using sequential data that are evaluated using public datasets such as nuScenes, Dense, and the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions Dataset. Our findings demonstrate that our novel method, involving temporal offset augmentation through randomized frame skipping in sequences, enhances object detection accuracy compared to both the baseline model (Pillar-based Object Detection) and no augmentation.
Authors:Jianping Jiang, Xinyu Zhou, Peiqi Duan, Boxin Shi
Abstract:
Event cameras and RGB cameras exhibit complementary characteristics in imaging: the former possesses high dynamic range (HDR) and high temporal resolution, while the latter provides rich texture and color information. This makes the integration of event cameras into middle- and high-level RGB-based vision tasks highly promising. However, challenges arise in multi-modal fusion, data annotation, and model architecture design. In this paper, we propose EvPlug, which learns a plug-and-play event and image fusion module from the supervision of the existing RGB-based model. The learned fusion module integrates event streams with image features in the form of a plug-in, endowing the RGB-based model to be robust to HDR and fast motion scenes while enabling high temporal resolution inference. Our method only requires unlabeled event-image pairs (no pixel-wise alignment required) and does not alter the structure or weights of the RGB-based model. We demonstrate the superiority of EvPlug in several vision tasks such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and 3D hand pose estimation
Authors:Haolin Liu, Chongjie Ye, Yinyu Nie, Yingfan He, Xiaoguang Han
Abstract:
Instance shape reconstruction from a 3D scene involves recovering the full geometries of multiple objects at the semantic instance level. Many methods leverage data-driven learning due to the intricacies of scene complexity and significant indoor occlusions. Training these methods often requires a large-scale, high-quality dataset with aligned and paired shape annotations with real-world scans. Existing datasets are either synthetic or misaligned, restricting the performance of data-driven methods on real data. To this end, we introduce LASA, a Large-scale Aligned Shape Annotation Dataset comprising 10,412 high-quality CAD annotations aligned with 920 real-world scene scans from ArkitScenes, created manually by professional artists. On this top, we propose a novel Diffusion-based Cross-Modal Shape Reconstruction (DisCo) method. It is empowered by a hybrid feature aggregation design to fuse multi-modal inputs and recover high-fidelity object geometries. Besides, we present an Occupancy-Guided 3D Object Detection (OccGOD) method and demonstrate that our shape annotations provide scene occupancy clues that can further improve 3D object detection. Supported by LASA, extensive experiments show that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in both instance-level scene reconstruction and 3D object detection tasks.
Authors:Bernhard Jaeger, Andreas Geiger
Abstract:
Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is differentiable. For many interesting problems, this is however not the case. Common objectives like intersection over union (IoU), bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score or rewards cannot be optimized with supervised learning. A common workaround is to define differentiable surrogate losses, leading to suboptimal solutions with respect to the actual objective. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising alternative for optimizing deep neural networks to maximize non-differentiable objectives in recent years. Examples include aligning large language models via human feedback, code generation, object detection or control problems. This makes RL techniques relevant to the larger machine learning audience. The subject is, however, time intensive to approach due to the large range of methods, as well as the often very theoretical presentation. In this introduction, we take an alternative approach, different from classic reinforcement learning textbooks. Rather than focusing on tabular problems, we introduce reinforcement learning as a generalization of supervised learning, which we first apply to non-differentiable objectives and later to temporal problems. Assuming only basic knowledge of supervised learning, the reader will be able to understand state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms like proximal policy optimization (PPO) after reading this tutorial.
Authors:Aitor Martinez Seras, Javier Del Ser, Pablo Garcia-Bringas
Abstract:
Besides performance, efficiency is a key design driver of technologies supporting vehicular perception. Indeed, a well-balanced trade-off between performance and energy consumption is crucial for the sustainability of autonomous vehicles. In this context, the diversity of real-world contexts in which autonomous vehicles can operate motivates the need for empowering perception models with the capability to detect, characterize and identify newly appearing objects by themselves. In this manuscript we elaborate on this threefold conundrum (performance, efficiency and open-world learning) for object detection modeling tasks over image data collected from vehicular scenarios. Specifically, we show that well-performing and efficient models can be realized by virtue of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), reaching competitive levels of detection performance when compared to their non-spiking counterparts at dramatic energy consumption savings (up to 85%) and a slightly improved robustness against image noise. Our experiments herein offered also expose qualitatively the complexity of detecting new objects based on the preliminary results of a simple approach to discriminate potential object proposals in the captured image.
Authors:Peng Liu, Fanyi Wang, Jingwen Su, Yanhao Zhang, Guojun Qi
Abstract:
Existing saliency object detection (SOD) methods struggle to satisfy fast inference and accurate results simultaneously in high resolution scenes. They are limited by the quality of public datasets and efficient network modules for high-resolution images. To alleviate these issues, we propose to construct a saliency object matting dataset HRSOM and a lightweight network PSUNet. Considering efficient inference of mobile depolyment framework, we design a symmetric pixel shuffle module and a lightweight module TRSU. Compared to 13 SOD methods, the proposed PSUNet has the best objective performance on the high-resolution benchmark dataset. Evaluation results of objective assessment are superior compared to U$^2$Net that has 10 times of parameter amount of our network. On Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform, inference a single 640$\times$640 image only takes 113ms. And on the subjective assessment, evaluation results are better than the industry benchmark IOS16 (Lift subject from background).
Authors:Son The Nguyen, Theja Tulabandhula, Mary Beth Watson-Manheim
Abstract:
While there is significant interest in using generative AI tools as general-purpose models for specific ML applications, discriminative models are much more widely deployed currently. One of the key shortcomings of these discriminative AI tools that have been already deployed is that they are not adaptable and user-friendly compared to generative AI tools (e.g., GPT4, Stable Diffusion, Bard, etc.), where a non-expert user can iteratively refine model inputs and give real-time feedback that can be accounted for immediately, allowing users to build trust from the start. Inspired by this emerging collaborative workflow, we develop a new system architecture that enables users to work with discriminative models (such as for object detection, sentiment classification, etc.) in a fashion similar to generative AI tools, where they can easily provide immediate feedback as well as adapt the deployed models as desired. Our approach has implications on improving trust, user-friendliness, and adaptability of these versatile but traditional prediction models.
Authors:Aditya Prakash, Arjun Gupta, Saurabh Gupta
Abstract:
Objects undergo varying amounts of perspective distortion as they move across a camera's field of view. Models for predicting 3D from a single image often work with crops around the object of interest and ignore the location of the object in the camera's field of view. We note that ignoring this location information further exaggerates the inherent ambiguity in making 3D inferences from 2D images and can prevent models from even fitting to the training data. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose Intrinsics-Aware Positional Encoding (KPE), which incorporates information about the location of crops in the image and camera intrinsics. Experiments on three popular 3D-from-a-single-image benchmarks: depth prediction on NYU, 3D object detection on KITTI & nuScenes, and predicting 3D shapes of articulated objects on ARCTIC, show the benefits of KPE.
Authors:Raphael Schäfer, Till Nicke, Henning Höfener, Annkristin Lange, Dorit Merhof, Friedrich Feuerhake, Volkmar Schulz, Johannes Lotz, Fabian Kiessling
Abstract:
Foundational models, pretrained on a large scale, have demonstrated substantial success across non-medical domains. However, training these models typically requires large, comprehensive datasets, which contrasts with the smaller and more heterogeneous datasets common in biomedical imaging. Here, we propose a multi-task learning strategy that decouples the number of training tasks from memory requirements. We trained a Universal bioMedical PreTrained model (UMedPT) on a multi-task database including tomographic, microscopic, and X-ray images, with various labelling strategies such as classification, segmentation, and object detection. The UMedPT foundational model outperformed ImageNet pretraining and the previous state-of-the-art models. For tasks related to the pretraining database, it maintained its performance with only 1% of the original training data and without fine-tuning. For out-of-domain tasks it required not more than 50% of the original training data. In an external independent validation imaging features extracted using UMedPT proved to be a new standard for cross-center transferability.
Authors:Jianxiang Feng, Jongseok Lee, Simon Geisler, Stephan Gunnemann, Rudolph Triebel
Abstract:
To facilitate reliable deployments of autonomous robots in the real world, Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection capabilities are often required. A powerful approach for OOD detection is based on density estimation with Normalizing Flows (NFs). However, we find that prior work with NFs attempts to match the complex target distribution topologically with naive base distributions leading to adverse implications. In this work, we circumvent this topological mismatch using an expressive class-conditional base distribution trained with an information-theoretic objective to match the required topology. The proposed method enjoys the merits of wide compatibility with existing learned models without any performance degradation and minimum computation overhead while enhancing OOD detection capabilities. We demonstrate superior results in density estimation and 2D object detection benchmarks in comparison with extensive baselines. Moreover, we showcase the applicability of the method with a real-robot deployment.
Authors:Calvin Luo, Boqing Gong, Ting Chen, Chen Sun
Abstract:
Recognition and reasoning are two pillars of visual understanding. However, these tasks have an imbalance in focus; whereas recent advances in neural networks have shown strong empirical performance in visual recognition, there has been comparably much less success in solving visual reasoning. Intuitively, unifying these two tasks under a singular framework is desirable, as they are mutually dependent and beneficial. Motivated by the recent success of multi-task transformers for visual recognition and language understanding, we propose a unified neural architecture for visual recognition and reasoning with a generic interface (e.g., tokens) for both. Our framework enables the principled investigation of how different visual recognition tasks, datasets, and inductive biases can help enable spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities. Noticeably, we find that object detection, which requires spatial localization of individual objects, is the most beneficial recognition task for reasoning. We further demonstrate via probing that implicit object-centric representations emerge automatically inside our framework. Intriguingly, we discover that certain architectural choices such as the backbone model of the visual encoder have a significant impact on visual reasoning, but little on object detection. Given the results of our experiments, we believe that visual reasoning should be considered as a first-class citizen alongside visual recognition, as they are strongly correlated but benefit from potentially different design choices.
Authors:Xinhao Xiang, Simon Dräger, Jiawei Zhang
Abstract:
Good 3D object detection performance from LiDAR-Camera sensors demands seamless feature alignment and fusion strategies. We propose the 3DifFusionDet framework in this paper, which structures 3D object detection as a denoising diffusion process from noisy 3D boxes to target boxes. In this framework, ground truth boxes diffuse in a random distribution for training, and the model learns to reverse the noising process. During inference, the model gradually refines a set of boxes that were generated at random to the outcomes. Under the feature align strategy, the progressive refinement method could make a significant contribution to robust LiDAR-Camera fusion. The iterative refinement process could also demonstrate great adaptability by applying the framework to various detecting circumstances where varying levels of accuracy and speed are required. Extensive experiments on KITTI, a benchmark for real-world traffic object identification, revealed that 3DifFusionDet is able to perform favorably in comparison to earlier, well-respected detectors.
Authors:Xinhao Xiang, Jiawei Zhang
Abstract:
For 3D object detection, both camera and lidar have been demonstrated to be useful sensory devices for providing complementary information about the same scenery with data representations in different modalities, e.g., 2D RGB image vs 3D point cloud. An effective representation learning and fusion of such multi-modal sensor data is necessary and critical for better 3D object detection performance. To solve the problem, in this paper, we will introduce a novel vision transformer-based 3D object detection model, namely FusionViT. Different from the existing 3D object detection approaches, FusionViT is a pure-ViT based framework, which adopts a hierarchical architecture by extending the transformer model to embed both images and point clouds for effective representation learning. Such multi-modal data embedding representations will be further fused together via a fusion vision transformer model prior to feeding the learned features to the object detection head for both detection and localization of the 3D objects in the input scenery. To demonstrate the effectiveness of FusionViT, extensive experiments have been done on real-world traffic object detection benchmark datasets KITTI and Waymo Open. Notably, our FusionViT model can achieve state-of-the-art performance and outperforms not only the existing baseline methods that merely rely on camera images or lidar point clouds, but also the latest multi-modal image-point cloud deep fusion approaches.
Authors:Teyun Kwon, Norman Di Palo, Edward Johns
Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise as high-level planners for robots when given access to a selection of low-level skills. However, it is often assumed that LLMs do not possess sufficient knowledge to be used for the low-level trajectories themselves. In this work, we address this assumption thoroughly, and investigate if an LLM (GPT-4) can directly predict a dense sequence of end-effector poses for manipulation tasks, when given access to only object detection and segmentation vision models. We designed a single, task-agnostic prompt, without any in-context examples, motion primitives, or external trajectory optimisers. Then we studied how well it can perform across 30 real-world language-based tasks, such as "open the bottle cap" and "wipe the plate with the sponge", and we investigated which design choices in this prompt are the most important. Our conclusions raise the assumed limit of LLMs for robotics, and we reveal for the first time that LLMs do indeed possess an understanding of low-level robot control sufficient for a range of common tasks, and that they can additionally detect failures and then re-plan trajectories accordingly. Videos, prompts, and code are available at: https://www.robot-learning.uk/language-models-trajectory-generators.
Authors:Yutian Lei, Jun Liu, Dong Huang
Abstract:
The flourishing success of Deep Neural Networks(DNNs) on RGB-input perception tasks has opened unbounded possibilities for non-RGB-input perception tasks, such as object detection from wireless signals, lidar scans, and infrared images. Compared to the matured development pipeline of RGB-input (source modality) models, developing non-RGB-input (target-modality) models from scratch poses excessive challenges in the modality-specific network design/training tricks and labor in the target-modality annotation. In this paper, we propose ModAlity Calibration (MAC), an efficient pipeline for calibrating target-modality inputs to the DNN object detection models developed on the RGB (source) modality. We compose a target-modality-input model by adding a small calibrator module ahead of a source-modality model and introduce MAC training techniques to impose dense supervision on the calibrator. By leveraging (1) prior knowledge synthesized from the source-modality model and (2) paired {target, source} data with zero manual annotations, our target-modality models reach comparable or better metrics than baseline models that require 100% manual annotations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MAC by composing the WiFi-input, Lidar-input, and Thermal-Infrared-input models upon the pre-trained RGB-input models respectively.
Authors:Zichao Dong, Hang Ji, Xufeng Huang, Weikun Zhang, Xin Zhan, Junbo Chen
Abstract:
Point encoder is of vital importance for point cloud recognition. As the very beginning step of whole model pipeline, adding features from diverse sources and providing stronger feature encoding mechanism would provide better input for downstream modules. In our work, we proposed a novel PeP module to tackle above issue. PeP contains two main parts, a refined point painting method and a LM-based point encoder. Experiments results on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets validate the superior performance of our PeP. The advantages leads to strong performance on both semantic segmentation and object detection, in both lidar and multi-modal settings. Notably, our PeP module is model agnostic and plug-and-play. Our code will be publicly available soon.
Authors:Marius Schubert, Tobias Riedlinger, Karsten Kahl, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Obtaining annotations for complex computer vision tasks such as object detection is an expensive and time-intense endeavor involving a large number of human workers or expert opinions. Reducing the amount of annotations required while maintaining algorithm performance is, therefore, desirable for machine learning practitioners and has been successfully achieved by active learning algorithms. However, it is not merely the amount of annotations which influences model performance but also the annotation quality. In practice, the oracles that are queried for new annotations frequently contain significant amounts of noise. Therefore, cleansing procedures are oftentimes necessary to review and correct given labels. This process is subject to the same budget as the initial annotation itself since it requires human workers or even domain experts. Here, we propose a composite active learning framework including a label review module for deep object detection. We show that utilizing part of the annotation budget to correct the noisy annotations partially in the active dataset leads to early improvements in model performance, especially when coupled with uncertainty-based query strategies. The precision of the label error proposals has a significant influence on the measured effect of the label review. In our experiments we achieve improvements of up to 4.5 mAP points of object detection performance by incorporating label reviews at equal annotation budget.
Authors:Hung-Shuo Chang, Chien-Yao Wang, Richard Robert Wang, Gene Chou, Hong-Yuan Mark Liao
Abstract:
Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to learn multiple tasks using a single model and jointly improve all of them assuming generalization and shared semantics. Reducing conflicts between tasks during joint learning is difficult and generally requires careful network design and extremely large models. We propose building on You Only Learn One Representation (YOLOR), a network architecture specifically designed for multitasking. YOLOR leverages both explicit and implicit knowledge, from data observations and learned latents, respectively, to improve a shared representation while minimizing the number of training parameters. However, YOLOR and its follow-up, YOLOv7, only trained two tasks at once. In this paper, we jointly train object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and image captioning. We analyze tradeoffs and attempt to maximize sharing of semantic information. Through our architecture and training strategies, we find that our method achieves competitive performance on all tasks while maintaining a low parameter count and without any pre-training. We will release code soon.
Authors:Manish Sharma, Moitreya Chatterjee, Kuan-Chuan Peng, Suhas Lohit, Michael Jones
Abstract:
The primary bottleneck towards obtaining good recognition performance in IR images is the lack of sufficient labeled training data, owing to the cost of acquiring such data. Realizing that object detection methods for the RGB modality are quite robust (at least for some commonplace classes, like person, car, etc.), thanks to the giant training sets that exist, in this work we seek to leverage cues from the RGB modality to scale object detectors to the IR modality, while preserving model performance in the RGB modality. At the core of our method, is a novel tensor decomposition method called TensorFact which splits the convolution kernels of a layer of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) into low-rank factor matrices, with fewer parameters than the original CNN. We first pretrain these factor matrices on the RGB modality, for which plenty of training data are assumed to exist and then augment only a few trainable parameters for training on the IR modality to avoid over-fitting, while encouraging them to capture complementary cues from those trained only on the RGB modality. We validate our approach empirically by first assessing how well our TensorFact decomposed network performs at the task of detecting objects in RGB images vis-a-vis the original network and then look at how well it adapts to IR images of the FLIR ADAS v1 dataset. For the latter, we train models under scenarios that pose challenges stemming from data paucity. From the experiments, we observe that: (i) TensorFact shows performance gains on RGB images; (ii) further, this pre-trained model, when fine-tuned, outperforms a standard state-of-the-art object detector on the FLIR ADAS v1 dataset by about 4% in terms of mAP 50 score.
Authors:Son The Nguyen, Theja Tulabandhula, Duy Nguyen
Abstract:
We introduce Dynamic Tiling, a model-agnostic, adaptive, and scalable approach for small object detection, anchored in our inference-data-centric philosophy. Dynamic Tiling starts with non-overlapping tiles for initial detections and utilizes dynamic overlapping rates along with a tile minimizer. This dual approach effectively resolves fragmented objects, improves detection accuracy, and minimizes computational overhead by reducing the number of forward passes through the object detection model. Adaptable to a variety of operational environments, our method negates the need for laborious recalibration. Additionally, our large-small filtering mechanism boosts the detection quality across a range of object sizes. Overall, Dynamic Tiling outperforms existing model-agnostic uniform cropping methods, setting new benchmarks for efficiency and accuracy.
Authors:Yupeng Jia, Jie He, Runze Chen, Fang Zhao, Haiyong Luo
Abstract:
Visual-based 3D semantic occupancy perception is a key technology for robotics, including autonomous vehicles, offering an enhanced understanding of the environment by 3D. This approach, however, typically requires more computational resources than BEV or 2D methods. We propose a novel 3D semantic occupancy perception method, OccupancyDETR, which utilizes a DETR-like object detection, a mixed dense-sparse 3D occupancy decoder. Our approach distinguishes between foreground and background within a scene. Initially, foreground objects are detected using the DETR-like object detection. Subsequently, queries for both foreground and background objects are fed into the mixed dense-sparse 3D occupancy decoder, performing upsampling in dense and sparse methods, respectively. Finally, a MaskFormer is utilized to infer the semantics of the background voxels. Our approach strikes a balance between efficiency and accuracy, achieving faster inference times, lower resource consumption, and improved performance for small object detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on the SemanticKITTI dataset, showcasing an mIoU of 14 and a processing speed of 10 FPS, thereby presenting a promising solution for real-time 3D semantic occupancy perception.
Authors:Hoà ng-Ãn Lê, Minh-Tan Pham
Abstract:
Self-training allows a network to learn from the predictions of a more complicated model, thus often requires well-trained teacher models and mixture of teacher-student data while multi-task learning jointly optimizes different targets to learn salient interrelationship and requires multi-task annotations for each training example. These frameworks, despite being particularly data demanding have potentials for data exploitation if such assumptions can be relaxed. In this paper, we compare self-training object detection under the deficiency of teacher training data where students are trained on unseen examples by the teacher, and multi-task learning with partially annotated data, i.e. single-task annotation per training example. Both scenarios have their own limitation but potentially helpful with limited annotated data. Experimental results show the improvement of performance when using a weak teacher with unseen data for training a multi-task student. Despite the limited setup we believe the experimental results show the potential of multi-task knowledge distillation and self-training, which could be beneficial for future study. Source code is at https://lhoangan.github.io/multas.
Authors:Kin Wai Lau, Lai-Man Po, Yasar Abbas Ur Rehman
Abstract:
Visual Attention Networks (VAN) with Large Kernel Attention (LKA) modules have been shown to provide remarkable performance, that surpasses Vision Transformers (ViTs), on a range of vision-based tasks. However, the depth-wise convolutional layer in these LKA modules incurs a quadratic increase in the computational and memory footprints with increasing convolutional kernel size. To mitigate these problems and to enable the use of extremely large convolutional kernels in the attention modules of VAN, we propose a family of Large Separable Kernel Attention modules, termed LSKA. LSKA decomposes the 2D convolutional kernel of the depth-wise convolutional layer into cascaded horizontal and vertical 1-D kernels. In contrast to the standard LKA design, the proposed decomposition enables the direct use of the depth-wise convolutional layer with large kernels in the attention module, without requiring any extra blocks. We demonstrate that the proposed LSKA module in VAN can achieve comparable performance with the standard LKA module and incur lower computational complexity and memory footprints. We also find that the proposed LSKA design biases the VAN more toward the shape of the object than the texture with increasing kernel size. Additionally, we benchmark the robustness of the LKA and LSKA in VAN, ViTs, and the recent ConvNeXt on the five corrupted versions of the ImageNet dataset that are largely unexplored in the previous works. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed LSKA module in VAN provides a significant reduction in computational complexity and memory footprints with increasing kernel size while outperforming ViTs, ConvNeXt, and providing similar performance compared to the LKA module in VAN on object recognition, object detection, semantic segmentation, and robustness tests.
Authors:Cristina González, Nicolás Ayobi, Felipe Escallón, Laura Baldovino-Chiquillo, Maria Wilches-Mogollón, Donny Pasos, Nicole RamÃrez, Jose Pinzón, Olga Sarmiento, D Alex Quistberg, Pablo Arbeláez
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel benchmark to study the impact and relationship of built environment elements on pedestrian collision prediction, intending to enhance environmental awareness in autonomous driving systems to prevent pedestrian injuries actively. We introduce a built environment detection task in large-scale panoramic images and a detection-based pedestrian collision frequency prediction task. We propose a baseline method that incorporates a collision prediction module into a state-of-the-art detection model to tackle both tasks simultaneously. Our experiments demonstrate a significant correlation between object detection of built environment elements and pedestrian collision frequency prediction. Our results are a stepping stone towards understanding the interdependencies between built environment conditions and pedestrian safety.
Authors:Jose A. Solano-Castellanos, Won Kyung Do, Monroe Kennedy
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the location of the embedded objects is built using a Bayesian approach. The exploration phase is then followed by a mapping phase which exploits the probabilistic map to reconstruct the underlying topography of the workspace by sampling in more detail regions where there is expected to be embedded objects. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we tested our approach on an experimental setup that consists of a series of quartz beads located underneath a polyethylene foam that prevents direct observation of the configuration and requires the use of tactile exploration to recover the location of the beads. We show the performance of our methodology using ten different configurations of the beads where the proposed approach is able to approximate the underlying configuration. We benchmark our results against a random sampling policy.
Authors:Jinghua Zhang, Li Liu, Olli Silvén, Matti Pietikäinen, Dewen Hu
Abstract:
Few-shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) presents a unique challenge in Machine Learning (ML), as it necessitates the Incremental Learning (IL) of new classes from sparsely labeled training samples without forgetting previous knowledge. While this field has seen recent progress, it remains an active exploration area. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of FSCIL. In our in-depth examination, we delve into various facets of FSCIL, encompassing the problem definition, the discussion of the primary challenges of unreliable empirical risk minimization and the stability-plasticity dilemma, general schemes, and relevant problems of IL and Few-shot Learning (FSL). Besides, we offer an overview of benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we introduce the Few-shot Class-incremental Classification (FSCIC) methods from data-based, structure-based, and optimization-based approaches and the Few-shot Class-incremental Object Detection (FSCIOD) methods from anchor-free and anchor-based approaches. Beyond these, we present several promising research directions within FSCIL that merit further investigation.
Authors:Harshit Shah, Aravindhan G, Pavan Kulkarni, Yuvaraj Govidarajulu, Manojkumar Parmar
Abstract:
A significant number of machine learning models are vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which focus on stealing the models by using specially curated queries against the target model. This task is well accomplished by using part of the training data or a surrogate dataset to train a new model that mimics a target model in a white-box environment. In pragmatic situations, however, the target models are trained on private datasets that are inaccessible to the adversary. The data-free model extraction technique replaces this problem when it comes to using queries artificially curated by a generator similar to that used in Generative Adversarial Nets. We propose for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, an adversary black box attack extending to a regression problem for predicting bounding box coordinates in object detection. As part of our study, we found that defining a loss function and using a novel generator setup is one of the key aspects in extracting the target model. We find that the proposed model extraction method achieves significant results by using reasonable queries. The discovery of this object detection vulnerability will support future prospects for securing such models.
Authors:Hao Cheng, Mengmeng Liu, Lin Chen
Abstract:
Perception that involves multi-object detection and tracking, and trajectory prediction are two major tasks of autonomous driving. However, they are currently mostly studied separately, which results in most trajectory prediction modules being developed based on ground truth trajectories without taking into account that trajectories extracted from the detection and tracking modules in real-world scenarios are noisy. These noisy trajectories can have a significant impact on the performance of the trajectory predictor and can lead to serious prediction errors. In this paper, we build an end-to-end framework for detection, tracking, and trajectory prediction called ODTP (Online Detection, Tracking and Prediction). It adopts the state-of-the-art online multi-object tracking model, QD-3DT, for perception and trains the trajectory predictor, DCENet++, directly based on the detection results without purely relying on ground truth trajectories. We evaluate the performance of ODTP on the widely used nuScenes dataset for autonomous driving. Extensive experiments show that ODPT achieves high performance end-to-end trajectory prediction. DCENet++, with the enhanced dynamic maps, predicts more accurate trajectories than its base model. It is also more robust when compared with other generative and deterministic trajectory prediction models trained on noisy detection results.
Authors:Yue Hu, Xinan Ye, Yifei Liu, Souvik Kundu, Gourav Datta, Srikar Mutnuri, Namo Asavisanu, Nora Ayanian, Konstantinos Psounis, Peter Beerel
Abstract:
This paper presents "FireFly", a synthetic dataset for ember detection created using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), designed to overcome the current lack of ember-specific training resources. To create the dataset, we present a tool that allows the automated generation of the synthetic labeled dataset with adjustable parameters, enabling data diversity from various environmental conditions, making the dataset both diverse and customizable based on user requirements. We generated a total of 19,273 frames that have been used to evaluate FireFly on four popular object detection models. Further to minimize human intervention, we leveraged a trained model to create a semi-automatic labeling process for real-life ember frames. Moreover, we demonstrated an up to 8.57% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) in real-world wildfire scenarios compared to models trained exclusively on a small real dataset.
Authors:Yan Ma, Weicong Liang, Bohan Chen, Yiduo Hao, Bojian Hou, Xiangyu Yue, Chao Zhang, Yuhui Yuan
Abstract:
Motivated by the remarkable achievements of DETR-based approaches on COCO object detection and segmentation benchmarks, recent endeavors have been directed towards elevating their performance through self-supervised pre-training of Transformers while preserving a frozen backbone. Noteworthy advancements in accuracy have been documented in certain studies. Our investigation delved deeply into a representative approach, DETReg, and its performance assessment in the context of emerging models like $\mathcal{H}$-Deformable-DETR. Regrettably, DETReg proves inadequate in enhancing the performance of robust DETR-based models under full data conditions. To dissect the underlying causes, we conduct extensive experiments on COCO and PASCAL VOC probing elements such as the selection of pre-training datasets and strategies for pre-training target generation. By contrast, we employ an optimized approach named Simple Self-training which leads to marked enhancements through the combination of an improved box predictor and the Objects$365$ benchmark. The culmination of these endeavors results in a remarkable AP score of $59.3\%$ on the COCO val set, outperforming $\mathcal{H}$-Deformable-DETR + Swin-L without pre-training by $1.4\%$. Moreover, a series of synthetic pre-training datasets, generated by merging contemporary image-to-text(LLaVA) and text-to-image (SDXL) models, significantly amplifies object detection capabilities.
Authors:Hoà ng-Ãn Lê, Minh-Tan Pham
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation, a well-known model compression technique, is an active research area in both computer vision and remote sensing communities. In this paper, we evaluate in a remote sensing context various off-the-shelf object detection knowledge distillation methods which have been originally developed on generic computer vision datasets such as Pascal VOC. In particular, methods covering both logit mimicking and feature imitation approaches are applied for vehicle detection using the well-known benchmarks such as xView and VEDAI datasets. Extensive experiments are performed to compare the relative performance and interrelationships of the methods. Experimental results show high variations and confirm the importance of result aggregation and cross validation on remote sensing datasets.
Authors:Aral Hekimoglu, Michael Schmidt, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro
Abstract:
We propose a novel semi-supervised active learning (SSAL) framework for monocular 3D object detection with LiDAR guidance (MonoLiG), which leverages all modalities of collected data during model development. We utilize LiDAR to guide the data selection and training of monocular 3D detectors without introducing any overhead in the inference phase. During training, we leverage the LiDAR teacher, monocular student cross-modal framework from semi-supervised learning to distill information from unlabeled data as pseudo-labels. To handle the differences in sensor characteristics, we propose a data noise-based weighting mechanism to reduce the effect of propagating noise from LiDAR modality to monocular. For selecting which samples to label to improve the model performance, we propose a sensor consistency-based selection score that is also coherent with the training objective. Extensive experimental results on KITTI and Waymo datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed framework. In particular, our selection strategy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art active learning baselines, yielding up to 17% better saving rate in labeling costs. Our training strategy attains the top place in KITTI 3D and birds-eye-view (BEV) monocular object detection official benchmarks by improving the BEV Average Precision (AP) by 2.02.
Authors:Aral Hekimoglu, Adrian Brucker, Alper Kagan Kayali, Michael Schmidt, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro
Abstract:
Curating an informative and representative dataset is essential for enhancing the performance of 2D object detectors. We present a novel active learning sampling strategy that addresses both the informativeness and diversity of the selections. Our strategy integrates uncertainty and diversity-based selection principles into a joint selection objective by measuring the collective information score of the selected samples. Specifically, our proposed NORIS algorithm quantifies the impact of training with a sample on the informativeness of other similar samples. By exclusively selecting samples that are simultaneously informative and distant from other highly informative samples, we effectively avoid redundancy while maintaining a high level of informativeness. Moreover, instead of utilizing whole image features to calculate distances between samples, we leverage features extracted from detected object regions within images to define object features. This allows us to construct a dataset encompassing diverse object types, shapes, and angles. Extensive experiments on object detection and image classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy over the state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, our selection strategy achieves a 20% and 30% reduction in labeling costs compared to random selection for PASCAL-VOC and KITTI, respectively.
Authors:Mohammad Alkhalefi, Georgios Leontidis, Mingjun Zhong
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning algorithms (SSL) based on instance discrimination have shown promising results, performing competitively or even outperforming supervised learning counterparts in some downstream tasks. Such approaches employ data augmentation to create two views of the same instance (i.e., positive pairs) and encourage the model to learn good representations by attracting these views closer in the embedding space without collapsing to the trivial solution. However, data augmentation is limited in representing positive pairs, and the repulsion process between the instances during contrastive learning may discard important features for instances that have similar categories. To address this issue, we propose an approach to identify those images with similar semantic content and treat them as positive instances, thereby reducing the chance of discarding important features during representation learning and increasing the richness of the latent representation. Our approach is generic and could work with any self-supervised instance discrimination frameworks such as MoCo and SimSiam. To evaluate our method, we run experiments on three benchmark datasets: ImageNet, STL-10 and CIFAR-10 with different instance discrimination SSL approaches. The experimental results show that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline methods across all three datasets; for instance, we improve upon the vanilla MoCo-v2 by 4.1% on ImageNet under a linear evaluation protocol over 800 epochs. We also report results on semi-supervised learning, transfer learning on downstream tasks, and object detection.
Authors:Xirui Li, Feng Wang, Naiyan Wang, Chao Ma
Abstract:
In LiDAR-based 3D detection, history point clouds contain rich temporal information helpful for future prediction. In the same way, history detections should contribute to future detections. In this paper, we propose a detection enhancement method, namely FrameFusion, which improves 3D object detection results by fusing history frames. In FrameFusion, we ''forward'' history frames to the current frame and apply weighted Non-Maximum-Suppression on dense bounding boxes to obtain a fused frame with merged boxes. To ''forward'' frames, we use vehicle motion models to estimate the future pose of the bounding boxes. However, the commonly used constant velocity model fails naturally on turning vehicles, so we explore two vehicle motion models to address this issue. On Waymo Open Dataset, our FrameFusion method consistently improves the performance of various 3D detectors by about $2$ vehicle level 2 APH with negligible latency and slightly enhances the performance of the temporal fusion method MPPNet. We also conduct extensive experiments on motion model selection.
Authors:Tobias Riedlinger, Marius Schubert, Sarina Penquitt, Jan-Marcel Kezmann, Pascal Colling, Karsten Kahl, Lutz Roese-Koerner, Michael Arnold, Urs Zimmermann, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Object detection on Lidar point cloud data is a promising technology for autonomous driving and robotics which has seen a significant rise in performance and accuracy during recent years. Particularly uncertainty estimation is a crucial component for down-stream tasks and deep neural networks remain error-prone even for predictions with high confidence. Previously proposed methods for quantifying prediction uncertainty tend to alter the training scheme of the detector or rely on prediction sampling which results in vastly increased inference time. In order to address these two issues, we propose LidarMetaDetect (LMD), a light-weight post-processing scheme for prediction quality estimation. Our method can easily be added to any pre-trained Lidar object detector without altering anything about the base model and is purely based on post-processing, therefore, only leading to a negligible computational overhead. Our experiments show a significant increase of statistical reliability in separating true from false predictions. We propose and evaluate an additional application of our method leading to the detection of annotation errors. Explicit samples and a conservative count of annotation error proposals indicates the viability of our method for large-scale datasets like KITTI and nuScenes. On the widely-used nuScenes test dataset, 43 out of the top 100 proposals of our method indicate, in fact, erroneous annotations.
Authors:Xiaqing Pan, Nicholas Charron, Yongqian Yang, Scott Peters, Thomas Whelan, Chen Kong, Omkar Parkhi, Richard Newcombe, Carl Yuheng Ren
Abstract:
We introduce the Aria Digital Twin (ADT) - an egocentric dataset captured using Aria glasses with extensive object, environment, and human level ground truth. This ADT release contains 200 sequences of real-world activities conducted by Aria wearers in two real indoor scenes with 398 object instances (324 stationary and 74 dynamic). Each sequence consists of: a) raw data of two monochrome camera streams, one RGB camera stream, two IMU streams; b) complete sensor calibration; c) ground truth data including continuous 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) poses of the Aria devices, object 6DoF poses, 3D eye gaze vectors, 3D human poses, 2D image segmentations, image depth maps; and d) photo-realistic synthetic renderings. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing egocentric dataset with a level of accuracy, photo-realism and comprehensiveness comparable to ADT. By contributing ADT to the research community, our mission is to set a new standard for evaluation in the egocentric machine perception domain, which includes very challenging research problems such as 3D object detection and tracking, scene reconstruction and understanding, sim-to-real learning, human pose prediction - while also inspiring new machine perception tasks for augmented reality (AR) applications. To kick start exploration of the ADT research use cases, we evaluated several existing state-of-the-art methods for object detection, segmentation and image translation tasks that demonstrate the usefulness of ADT as a benchmarking dataset.
Authors:Yanbei Chen, Manchen Wang, Abhay Mittal, Zhenlin Xu, Paolo Favaro, Joseph Tighe, Davide Modolo
Abstract:
Multi-dataset training provides a viable solution for exploiting heterogeneous large-scale datasets without extra annotation cost. In this work, we propose a scalable multi-dataset detector (ScaleDet) that can scale up its generalization across datasets when increasing the number of training datasets. Unlike existing multi-dataset learners that mostly rely on manual relabelling efforts or sophisticated optimizations to unify labels across datasets, we introduce a simple yet scalable formulation to derive a unified semantic label space for multi-dataset training. ScaleDet is trained by visual-textual alignment to learn the label assignment with label semantic similarities across datasets. Once trained, ScaleDet can generalize well on any given upstream and downstream datasets with seen and unseen classes. We conduct extensive experiments using LVIS, COCO, Objects365, OpenImages as upstream datasets, and 13 datasets from Object Detection in the Wild (ODinW) as downstream datasets. Our results show that ScaleDet achieves compelling strong model performance with an mAP of 50.7 on LVIS, 58.8 on COCO, 46.8 on Objects365, 76.2 on OpenImages, and 71.8 on ODinW, surpassing state-of-the-art detectors with the same backbone.
Authors:Matthew Chang, Aditya Prakash, Saurabh Gupta
Abstract:
The analysis and use of egocentric videos for robotic tasks is made challenging by occlusion due to the hand and the visual mismatch between the human hand and a robot end-effector. In this sense, the human hand presents a nuisance. However, often hands also provide a valuable signal, e.g. the hand pose may suggest what kind of object is being held. In this work, we propose to extract a factored representation of the scene that separates the agent (human hand) and the environment. This alleviates both occlusion and mismatch while preserving the signal, thereby easing the design of models for downstream robotics tasks. At the heart of this factorization is our proposed Video Inpainting via Diffusion Model (VIDM) that leverages both a prior on real-world images (through a large-scale pre-trained diffusion model) and the appearance of the object in earlier frames of the video (through attention). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VIDM at improving inpainting quality on egocentric videos and the power of our factored representation for numerous tasks: object detection, 3D reconstruction of manipulated objects, and learning of reward functions, policies, and affordances from videos.
Authors:Georgii Mikriukov, Gesina Schwalbe, Christian Hellert, Korinna Bade
Abstract:
Analysis of how semantic concepts are represented within Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is a widely used approach in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for interpreting CNNs. A motivation is the need for transparency in safety-critical AI-based systems, as mandated in various domains like automated driving. However, to use the concept representations for safety-relevant purposes, like inspection or error retrieval, these must be of high quality and, in particular, stable. This paper focuses on two stability goals when working with concept representations in computer vision CNNs: stability of concept retrieval and of concept attribution. The guiding use-case is a post-hoc explainability framework for object detection (OD) CNNs, towards which existing concept analysis (CA) methods are successfully adapted. To address concept retrieval stability, we propose a novel metric that considers both concept separation and consistency, and is agnostic to layer and concept representation dimensionality. We then investigate impacts of concept abstraction level, number of concept training samples, CNN size, and concept representation dimensionality on stability. For concept attribution stability we explore the effect of gradient instability on gradient-based explainability methods. The results on various CNNs for classification and object detection yield the main findings that (1) the stability of concept retrieval can be enhanced through dimensionality reduction via data aggregation, and (2) in shallow layers where gradient instability is more pronounced, gradient smoothing techniques are advised. Finally, our approach provides valuable insights into selecting the appropriate layer and concept representation dimensionality, paving the way towards CA in safety-critical XAI applications.
Authors:Samuel Schulter, Vijay Kumar B G, Yumin Suh, Konstantinos M. Dafnis, Zhixing Zhang, Shiyu Zhao, Dimitris Metaxas
Abstract:
Language-based object detection is a promising direction towards building a natural interface to describe objects in images that goes far beyond plain category names. While recent methods show great progress in that direction, proper evaluation is lacking. With OmniLabel, we propose a novel task definition, dataset, and evaluation metric. The task subsumes standard- and open-vocabulary detection as well as referring expressions. With more than 28K unique object descriptions on over 25K images, OmniLabel provides a challenging benchmark with diverse and complex object descriptions in a naturally open-vocabulary setting. Moreover, a key differentiation to existing benchmarks is that our object descriptions can refer to one, multiple or even no object, hence, providing negative examples in free-form text. The proposed evaluation handles the large label space and judges performance via a modified average precision metric, which we validate by evaluating strong language-based baselines. OmniLabel indeed provides a challenging test bed for future research on language-based detection.
Authors:Sai Saketh Rambhatla, Ishan Misra, Rama Chellappa, Abhinav Shrivastava
Abstract:
We tackle the challenging task of unsupervised object localization in this work. Recently, transformers trained with self-supervised learning have been shown to exhibit object localization properties without being trained for this task. In this work, we present Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers (MOST) that uses features of transformers trained using self-supervised learning to localize multiple objects in real world images. MOST analyzes the similarity maps of the features using box counting; a fractal analysis tool to identify tokens lying on foreground patches. The identified tokens are then clustered together, and tokens of each cluster are used to generate bounding boxes on foreground regions. Unlike recent state-of-the-art object localization methods, MOST can localize multiple objects per image and outperforms SOTA algorithms on several object localization and discovery benchmarks on PASCAL-VOC 07, 12 and COCO20k datasets. Additionally, we show that MOST can be used for self-supervised pre-training of object detectors, and yields consistent improvements on fully, semi-supervised object detection and unsupervised region proposal generation.
Authors:Erh-Chung Chen, Pin-Yu Chen, I-Hsin Chung, Che-rung Lee
Abstract:
Nowadays, the deployment of deep learning-based applications is an essential task owing to the increasing demands on intelligent services. In this paper, we investigate latency attacks on deep learning applications. Unlike common adversarial attacks for misclassification, the goal of latency attacks is to increase the inference time, which may stop applications from responding to the requests within a reasonable time. This kind of attack is ubiquitous for various applications, and we use object detection to demonstrate how such kind of attacks work. We also design a framework named Overload to generate latency attacks at scale. Our method is based on a newly formulated optimization problem and a novel technique, called spatial attention. This attack serves to escalate the required computing costs during the inference time, consequently leading to an extended inference time for object detection. It presents a significant threat, especially to systems with limited computing resources. We conducted experiments using YOLOv5 models on Nvidia NX. Compared to existing methods, our method is simpler and more effective. The experimental results show that with latency attacks, the inference time of a single image can be increased ten times longer in reference to the normal setting. Moreover, our findings pose a potential new threat to all object detection tasks requiring non-maximum suppression (NMS), as our attack is NMS-agnostic.
Authors:Yao Teng, Haisong Liu, Sheng Guo, Limin Wang
Abstract:
Previous object detectors make predictions based on dense grid points or numerous preset anchors. Most of these detectors are trained with one-to-many label assignment strategies. On the contrary, recent query-based object detectors depend on a sparse set of learnable queries and a series of decoder layers. The one-to-one label assignment is independently applied on each layer for the deep supervision during training. Despite the great success of query-based object detection, however, this one-to-one label assignment strategy demands the detectors to have strong fine-grained discrimination and modeling capacity. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a new query-based object detector with cross-stage interaction, coined as StageInteractor. During the forward propagation, we come up with an efficient way to improve this modeling ability by reusing dynamic operators with lightweight adapters. As for the label assignment, a cross-stage label assigner is applied subsequent to the one-to-one label assignment. With this assigner, the training target class labels are gathered across stages and then reallocated to proper predictions at each decoder layer. On MS COCO benchmark, our model improves the baseline by 2.2 AP, and achieves 44.8 AP with ResNet-50 as backbone, 100 queries and 12 training epochs. With longer training time and 300 queries, StageInteractor achieves 51.1 AP and 52.2 AP with ResNeXt-101-DCN and Swin-S, respectively.
Authors:Shanglin Zhou, Mikhail A. Bragin, Lynn Pepin, Deniz Gurevin, Fei Miao, Caiwen Ding
Abstract:
Network pruning is a widely used technique to reduce computation cost and model size for deep neural networks. However, the typical three-stage pipeline significantly increases the overall training time. In this paper, we develop a systematic weight-pruning optimization approach based on Surrogate Lagrangian relaxation, which is tailored to overcome difficulties caused by the discrete nature of the weight-pruning problem. We prove that our method ensures fast convergence of the model compression problem, and the convergence of the SLR is accelerated by using quadratic penalties. Model parameters obtained by SLR during the training phase are much closer to their optimal values as compared to those obtained by other state-of-the-art methods. We evaluate our method on image classification tasks using CIFAR-10 and ImageNet with state-of-the-art MLP-Mixer, Swin Transformer, and VGG-16, ResNet-18, ResNet-50 and ResNet-110, MobileNetV2. We also evaluate object detection and segmentation tasks on COCO, KITTI benchmark, and TuSimple lane detection dataset using a variety of models. Experimental results demonstrate that our SLR-based weight-pruning optimization approach achieves a higher compression rate than state-of-the-art methods under the same accuracy requirement and also can achieve higher accuracy under the same compression rate requirement. Under classification tasks, our SLR approach converges to the desired accuracy $3\times$ faster on both of the datasets. Under object detection and segmentation tasks, SLR also converges $2\times$ faster to the desired accuracy. Further, our SLR achieves high model accuracy even at the hard-pruning stage without retraining, which reduces the traditional three-stage pruning into a two-stage process. Given a limited budget of retraining epochs, our approach quickly recovers the model's accuracy.
Authors:Fenggang Liu, Yangguang Li, Feng Liang, Jilan Xu, Bin Huang, Jing Shao
Abstract:
This paper shows that Masking the Deep hierarchical features is an efficient self-supervised method, denoted as MaskDeep. MaskDeep treats each patch in the representation space as an independent instance. We mask part of patches in the representation space and then utilize sparse visible patches to reconstruct high semantic image representation. The intuition of MaskDeep lies in the fact that models can reason from sparse visible patches semantic to the global semantic of the image. We further propose three designs in our framework: 1) a Hierarchical Deep-Masking module to concern the hierarchical property of patch representations, 2) a multi-group strategy to improve the efficiency without any extra computing consumption of the encoder and 3) a multi-target strategy to provide more description of the global semantic. Our MaskDeep brings decent improvements. Trained on ResNet50 with 200 epochs, MaskDeep achieves state-of-the-art results of 71.2% Top1 accuracy linear classification on ImageNet. On COCO object detection tasks, MaskDeep outperforms the self-supervised method SoCo, which specifically designed for object detection. When trained with 100 epochs, MaskDeep achieves 69.6% Top1 accuracy, which surpasses current methods trained with 200 epochs, such as HCSC, by 0.4% .
Authors:Julia Hindel, Nikhil Gosala, Kevin Bregler, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Perception datasets for agriculture are limited both in quantity and diversity which hinders effective training of supervised learning approaches. Self-supervised learning techniques alleviate this problem, however, existing methods are not optimized for dense prediction tasks in agriculture domains which results in degraded performance. In this work, we address this limitation with our proposed Injected Noise Discriminator (INoD) which exploits principles of feature replacement and dataset discrimination for self-supervised representation learning. INoD interleaves feature maps from two disjoint datasets during their convolutional encoding and predicts the dataset affiliation of the resultant feature map as a pretext task. Our approach enables the network to learn unequivocal representations of objects seen in one dataset while observing them in conjunction with similar features from the disjoint dataset. This allows the network to reason about higher-level semantics of the entailed objects, thus improving its performance on various downstream tasks. Additionally, we introduce the novel Fraunhofer Potato 2022 dataset consisting of over 16,800 images for object detection in potato fields. Extensive evaluations of our proposed INoD pretraining strategy for the tasks of object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation on the Sugar Beets 2016 and our potato dataset demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Chittesh Thavamani, Mengtian Li, Francesco Ferroni, Deva Ramanan
Abstract:
Many perception systems in mobile computing, autonomous navigation, and AR/VR face strict compute constraints that are particularly challenging for high-resolution input images. Previous works propose nonuniform downsamplers that "learn to zoom" on salient image regions, reducing compute while retaining task-relevant image information. However, for tasks with spatial labels (such as 2D/3D object detection and semantic segmentation), such distortions may harm performance. In this work (LZU), we "learn to zoom" in on the input image, compute spatial features, and then "unzoom" to revert any deformations. To enable efficient and differentiable unzooming, we approximate the zooming warp with a piecewise bilinear mapping that is invertible. LZU can be applied to any task with 2D spatial input and any model with 2D spatial features, and we demonstrate this versatility by evaluating on a variety of tasks and datasets: object detection on Argoverse-HD, semantic segmentation on Cityscapes, and monocular 3D object detection on nuScenes. Interestingly, we observe boosts in performance even when high-resolution sensor data is unavailable, implying that LZU can be used to "learn to upsample" as well.
Authors:Hwanjun Song, Jihwan Bang
Abstract:
Prompt-OVD is an efficient and effective framework for open-vocabulary object detection that utilizes class embeddings from CLIP as prompts, guiding the Transformer decoder to detect objects in both base and novel classes. Additionally, our novel RoI-based masked attention and RoI pruning techniques help leverage the zero-shot classification ability of the Vision Transformer-based CLIP, resulting in improved detection performance at minimal computational cost. Our experiments on the OV-COCO and OVLVIS datasets demonstrate that Prompt-OVD achieves an impressive 21.2 times faster inference speed than the first end-to-end open-vocabulary detection method (OV-DETR), while also achieving higher APs than four two-stage-based methods operating within similar inference time ranges. Code will be made available soon.
Authors:Yang Hai, Rui Song, Jiaojiao Li, Mathieu Salzmann, Yinlin Hu
Abstract:
Most recent 6D object pose estimation methods first use object detection to obtain 2D bounding boxes before actually regressing the pose. However, the general object detection methods they use are ill-suited to handle cluttered scenes, thus producing poor initialization to the subsequent pose network. To address this, we propose a rigidity-aware detection method exploiting the fact that, in 6D pose estimation, the target objects are rigid. This lets us introduce an approach to sampling positive object regions from the entire visible object area during training, instead of naively drawing samples from the bounding box center where the object might be occluded. As such, every visible object part can contribute to the final bounding box prediction, yielding better detection robustness. Key to the success of our approach is a visibility map, which we propose to build using a minimum barrier distance between every pixel in the bounding box and the box boundary. Our results on seven challenging 6D pose estimation datasets evidence that our method outperforms general detection frameworks by a large margin. Furthermore, combined with a pose regression network, we obtain state-of-the-art pose estimation results on the challenging BOP benchmark.
Authors:Shuailei Ma, Yuefeng Wang, Ying Wei, Peihao Chen, Zhixiang Ye, Jiaqi Fan, Enming Zhang, Thomas H. Li
Abstract:
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a novel computer vision task with a considerable challenge, bridging the gap between classic object detection (OD) benchmarks and real-world object detection. In addition to detecting and classifying seen/known objects, OWOD algorithms are expected to detect unseen/unknown objects and incrementally learn them. The natural instinct of humans to identify unknown objects in their environments mainly depends on their brains' knowledge base. It is difficult for a model to do this only by learning from the annotation of several tiny datasets. The large pre-trained grounded language-image models - VL (\ie GLIP) have rich knowledge about the open world but are limited to the text prompt. We propose leveraging the VL as the ``Brain'' of the open-world detector by simply generating unknown labels. Leveraging it is non-trivial because the unknown labels impair the model's learning of known objects. In this paper, we alleviate these problems by proposing the down-weight loss function and decoupled detection structure. Moreover, our detector leverages the ``Brain'' to learn novel objects beyond VL through our pseudo-labeling scheme.
Authors:Ãyvind Meinich-Bache, Kjersti Engan, Ivar Austvoll, Trygve Eftestøl, Helge Myklebust, Ladislaus Blacy Yarrot, Hussein Kidanto, Hege Ersdal
Abstract:
Birth asphyxia is a major newborn mortality problem in low-resource countries. International guideline provides treatment recommendations; however, the importance and effect of the different treatments are not fully explored. The available data is collected in Tanzania, during newborn resuscitation, for analysis of the resuscitation activities and the response of the newborn. An important step in the analysis is to create activity timelines of the episodes, where activities include ventilation, suction, stimulation etc. Methods: The available recordings are noisy real-world videos with large variations. We propose a two-step process in order to detect activities possibly overlapping in time. The first step is to detect and track the relevant objects, like bag-mask resuscitator, heart rate sensors etc., and the second step is to use this information to recognize the resuscitation activities. The topic of this paper is the first step, and the object detection and tracking are based on convolutional neural networks followed by post processing. Results: The performance of the object detection during activities were 96.97 % (ventilations), 100 % (attaching/removing heart rate sensor) and 75 % (suction) on a test set of 20 videos. The system also estimate the number of health care providers present with a performance of 71.16 %. Conclusion: The proposed object detection and tracking system provides promising results in noisy newborn resuscitation videos. Significance: This is the first step in a thorough analysis of newborn resuscitation episodes, which could provide important insight about the importance and effect of different newborn resuscitation activities
Authors:Ãyvind Meinich-Bache, Simon Lennart Austnes, Kjersti Engan, Ivar Austvoll, Trygve Eftestøl, Helge Myklebust, Simeon Kusulla, Hussein Kidanto, Hege Ersdal
Abstract:
Objective: Birth asphyxia is one of the leading causes of neonatal deaths. A key for survival is performing immediate and continuous quality newborn resuscitation. A dataset of recorded signals during newborn resuscitation, including videos, has been collected in Haydom, Tanzania, and the aim is to analyze the treatment and its effect on the newborn outcome. An important step is to generate timelines of relevant resuscitation activities, including ventilation, stimulation, suction, etc., during the resuscitation episodes. Methods: We propose a two-step deep neural network system, ORAA-net, utilizing low-quality video recordings of resuscitation episodes to do activity recognition during newborn resuscitation. The first step is to detect and track relevant objects using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and post-processing, and the second step is to analyze the proposed activity regions from step 1 to do activity recognition using 3D CNNs. Results: The system recognized the activities newborn uncovered, stimulation, ventilation and suction with a mean precision of 77.67 %, a mean recall of 77,64 %, and a mean accuracy of 92.40 %. Moreover, the accuracy of the estimated number of Health Care Providers (HCPs) present during the resuscitation episodes was 68.32 %. Conclusion: The results indicate that the proposed CNN-based two-step ORAAnet could be used for object detection and activity recognition in noisy low-quality newborn resuscitation videos. Significance: A thorough analysis of the effect the different resuscitation activities have on the newborn outcome could potentially allow us to optimize treatment guidelines, training, debriefing, and local quality improvement in newborn resuscitation.
Authors:Marius Schubert, Tobias Riedlinger, Karsten Kahl, Daniel Kröll, Sebastian Schoenen, SiniÅ¡a Å egviÄ, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Labeling datasets for supervised object detection is a dull and time-consuming task. Errors can be easily introduced during annotation and overlooked during review, yielding inaccurate benchmarks and performance degradation of deep neural networks trained on noisy labels. In this work, we for the first time introduce a benchmark for label error detection methods on object detection datasets as well as a label error detection method and a number of baselines. We simulate four different types of randomly introduced label errors on train and test sets of well-labeled object detection datasets. For our label error detection method we assume a two-stage object detector to be given and consider the sum of both stages' classification and regression losses. The losses are computed with respect to the predictions and the noisy labels including simulated label errors, aiming at detecting the latter. We compare our method to three baselines: a naive one without deep learning, the object detector's score and the entropy of the classification softmax distribution. We outperform all baselines and demonstrate that among the considered methods, ours is the only one that detects label errors of all four types efficiently. Furthermore, we detect real label errors a) on commonly used test datasets in object detection and b) on a proprietary dataset. In both cases we achieve low false positives rates, i.e., we detect label errors with a precision for a) of up to 71.5% and for b) with 97%.
Authors:Mao Ye, Gregory P. Meyer, Yuning Chai, Qiang Liu
Abstract:
Balancing efficiency and accuracy is a long-standing problem for deploying deep learning models. The trade-off is even more important for real-time safety-critical systems like autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose an effective approach for accelerating transformer-based 3D object detectors by dynamically halting tokens at different layers depending on their contribution to the detection task. Although halting a token is a non-differentiable operation, our method allows for differentiable end-to-end learning by leveraging an equivalent differentiable forward-pass. Furthermore, our framework allows halted tokens to be reused to inform the model's predictions through a straightforward token recycling mechanism. Our method significantly improves the Pareto frontier of efficiency versus accuracy when compared with the existing approaches. By halting tokens and increasing model capacity, we are able to improve the baseline model's performance without increasing the model's latency on the Waymo Open Dataset.
Authors:Jieren Deng, Xin Zhou, Hao Tian, Zhihong Pan, Derek Aguiar
Abstract:
Distilling the structured information captured in feature maps has contributed to improved results for object detection tasks, but requires careful selection of baseline architectures and substantial pre-training. Self-distillation addresses these limitations and has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance for object detection despite making several simplifying architectural assumptions. Building on this work, we propose Smooth and Stepwise Self-Distillation (SSSD) for object detection. Our SSSD architecture forms an implicit teacher from object labels and a feature pyramid network backbone to distill label-annotated feature maps using Jensen-Shannon distance, which is smoother than distillation losses used in prior work. We additionally add a distillation coefficient that is adaptively configured based on the learning rate. We extensively benchmark SSSD against a baseline and two state-of-the-art object detector architectures on the COCO dataset by varying the coefficients and backbone and detector networks. We demonstrate that SSSD achieves higher average precision in most experimental settings, is robust to a wide range of coefficients, and benefits from our stepwise distillation procedure.
Authors:Karim Guirguis, Johannes Meier, George Eskandar, Matthias Kayser, Bin Yang, Juergen Beyerer
Abstract:
Privacy and memory are two recurring themes in a broad conversation about the societal impact of AI. These concerns arise from the need for huge amounts of data to train deep neural networks. A promise of Generalized Few-shot Object Detection (G-FSOD), a learning paradigm in AI, is to alleviate the need for collecting abundant training samples of novel classes we wish to detect by leveraging prior knowledge from old classes (i.e., base classes). G-FSOD strives to learn these novel classes while alleviating catastrophic forgetting of the base classes. However, existing approaches assume that the base images are accessible, an assumption that does not hold when sharing and storing data is problematic. In this work, we propose the first data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) approach for G-FSOD that leverages the statistics of the region of interest (RoI) features from the base model to forge instance-level features without accessing the base images. Our contribution is three-fold: (1) we design a standalone lightweight generator with (2) class-wise heads (3) to generate and replay diverse instance-level base features to the RoI head while finetuning on the novel data. This stands in contrast to standard DFKD approaches in image classification, which invert the entire network to generate base images. Moreover, we make careful design choices in the novel finetuning pipeline to regularize the model. We show that our approach can dramatically reduce the base memory requirements, all while setting a new standard for G-FSOD on the challenging MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC benchmarks.
Authors:Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, James F. Mullen, Dinesh Manocha
Abstract:
We present LGX (Language-guided Exploration), a novel algorithm for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation (L-ZSON), where an embodied agent navigates to a uniquely described target object in a previously unseen environment. Our approach makes use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task by leveraging the LLM's commonsense reasoning capabilities for making sequential navigational decisions. Simultaneously, we perform generalized target object detection using a pre-trained Vision-Language grounding model. We achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot object navigation results on RoboTHOR with a success rate (SR) improvement of over 27% over the current baseline of the OWL-ViT CLIP on Wheels (OWL CoW). Furthermore, we study the usage of LLMs for robot navigation and present an analysis of various prompting strategies affecting the model output. Finally, we showcase the benefits of our approach via \textit{real-world} experiments that indicate the superior performance of LGX in detecting and navigating to visually unique objects.
Authors:Yi Ru Wang, Yuchi Zhao, Haoping Xu, Saggi Eppel, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Florian Shkurti, Animesh Garg
Abstract:
Transparent object perception is a crucial skill for applications such as robot manipulation in household and laboratory settings. Existing methods utilize RGB-D or stereo inputs to handle a subset of perception tasks including depth and pose estimation. However, transparent object perception remains to be an open problem. In this paper, we forgo the unreliable depth map from RGB-D sensors and extend the stereo based method. Our proposed method, MVTrans, is an end-to-end multi-view architecture with multiple perception capabilities, including depth estimation, segmentation, and pose estimation. Additionally, we establish a novel procedural photo-realistic dataset generation pipeline and create a large-scale transparent object detection dataset, Syn-TODD, which is suitable for training networks with all three modalities, RGB-D, stereo and multi-view RGB. Project Site: https://ac-rad.github.io/MVTrans/
Authors:Sangnie Bhardwaj, Willie McClinton, Tongzhou Wang, Guillaume Lajoie, Chen Sun, Phillip Isola, Dilip Krishnan
Abstract:
Pre-trained deep image representations are useful for post-training tasks such as classification through transfer learning, image retrieval, and object detection. Data augmentations are a crucial aspect of pre-training robust representations in both supervised and self-supervised settings. Data augmentations explicitly or implicitly promote invariance in the embedding space to the input image transformations. This invariance reduces generalization to those downstream tasks which rely on sensitivity to these particular data augmentations. In this paper, we propose a method of learning representations that are instead equivariant to data augmentations. We achieve this equivariance through the use of steerable representations. Our representations can be manipulated directly in embedding space via learned linear maps. We demonstrate that our resulting steerable and equivariant representations lead to better performance on transfer learning and robustness: e.g. we improve linear probe top-1 accuracy by between 1% to 3% for transfer; and ImageNet-C accuracy by upto 3.4%. We further show that the steerability of our representations provides significant speedup (nearly 50x) for test-time augmentations; by applying a large number of augmentations for out-of-distribution detection, we significantly improve OOD AUC on the ImageNet-C dataset over an invariant representation.
Authors:Andrew Choi, Dezhong Tong, Brian Park, Demetri Terzopoulos, Jungseock Joo, Mohammad Khalid Jawed
Abstract:
Robotic manipulation of deformable materials is a challenging task that often requires realtime visual feedback. This is especially true for deformable linear objects (DLOs) or "rods", whose slender and flexible structures make proper tracking and detection nontrivial. To address this challenge, we present mBEST, a robust algorithm for the realtime detection of DLOs that is capable of producing an ordered pixel sequence of each DLO's centerline along with segmentation masks. Our algorithm obtains a binary mask of the DLOs and then thins it to produce a skeleton pixel representation. After refining the skeleton to ensure topological correctness, the pixels are traversed to generate paths along each unique DLO. At the core of our algorithm, we postulate that intersections can be robustly handled by choosing the combination of paths that minimizes the cumulative bending energy of the DLO(s). We show that this simple and intuitive formulation outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for detecting DLOs with large numbers of sporadic crossings ranging from curvatures with high variance to nearly-parallel configurations. Furthermore, our method achieves a significant performance improvement of approximately 50% faster runtime and better scaling over the state of the art.
Authors:Aria Khoshsirat, Giovanni Perin, Michele Rossi
Abstract:
The increasing demand for edge computing is leading to a rise in energy consumption from edge devices, which can have significant environmental and financial implications. To address this, in this paper we present a novel method to enhance the energy efficiency while speeding up computations by distributing the workload among multiple containers in an edge device. Experiments are conducted on two Nvidia Jetson edge boards, the TX2 and the AGX Orin, exploring how using a different number of containers can affect the energy consumption and the computational time for an inference task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our splitting approach, a video object detection task is conducted using an embedded version of the state-of-the-art YOLO algorithm, quantifying the energy and the time savings achieved compared to doing the computations on a single container. The proposed method can help mitigate the environmental and economic consequences of high energy consumption in edge computing, by providing a more sustainable approach to managing the workload of edge devices.
Authors:Jiawei Liu, Xingping Dong, Sanyuan Zhao, Jianbing Shen
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed huge successes in 3D object detection to recognize common objects for autonomous driving (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians). However, most methods rely heavily on a large amount of well-labeled training data. This limits their capability of detecting rare fine-grained objects (e.g., police cars and ambulances), which is important for special cases, such as emergency rescue, and so on. To achieve simultaneous detection for both common and rare objects, we propose a novel task, called generalized few-shot 3D object detection, where we have a large amount of training data for common (base) objects, but only a few data for rare (novel) classes. Specifically, we analyze in-depth differences between images and point clouds, and then present a practical principle for the few-shot setting in the 3D LiDAR dataset. To solve this task, we propose a simple and effective detection framework, including (1) an incremental fine-tuning method to extend existing 3D detection models to recognize both common and rare objects, and (2) a sample adaptive balance loss to alleviate the issue of long-tailed data distribution in autonomous driving scenarios. On the nuScenes dataset, we conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate that our approach can successfully detect the rare (novel) classes that contain only a few training data, while also maintaining the detection accuracy of common objects.
Authors:Shuailei Ma, Yuefeng Wang, Jiaqi Fan, Ying Wei, Thomas H. Li, Hongli Liu, Fanbing Lv
Abstract:
Open-world object detection (OWOD), as a more general and challenging goal, requires the model trained from data on known objects to detect both known and unknown objects and incrementally learn to identify these unknown objects. The existing works which employ standard detection framework and fixed pseudo-labelling mechanism (PLM) have the following problems: (i) The inclusion of detecting unknown objects substantially reduces the model's ability to detect known ones. (ii) The PLM does not adequately utilize the priori knowledge of inputs. (iii) The fixed selection manner of PLM cannot guarantee that the model is trained in the right direction. We observe that humans subconsciously prefer to focus on all foreground objects and then identify each one in detail, rather than localize and identify a single object simultaneously, for alleviating the confusion. This motivates us to propose a novel solution called CAT: LoCalization and IdentificAtion Cascade Detection Transformer which decouples the detection process via the shared decoder in the cascade decoding way. In the meanwhile, we propose the self-adaptive pseudo-labelling mechanism which combines the model-driven with input-driven PLM and self-adaptively generates robust pseudo-labels for unknown objects, significantly improving the ability of CAT to retrieve unknown objects. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC, show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of all metrics in the task of OWOD, incremental object detection (IOD) and open-set detection.
Authors:Aritra Bhowmik, Yu Wang, Nora Baka, Martin R. Oswald, Cees G. M. Snoek
Abstract:
The goal of this paper is to detect objects by exploiting their interrelationships. Contrary to existing methods, which learn objects and relations separately, our key idea is to learn the object-relation distribution jointly. We first propose a novel way of creating a graphical representation of an image from inter-object relation priors and initial class predictions, we call a context-likelihood graph. We then learn the joint distribution with an energy-based modeling technique which allows to sample and refine the context-likelihood graph iteratively for a given image. Our formulation of jointly learning the distribution enables us to generate a more accurate graph representation of an image which leads to a better object detection performance. We demonstrate the benefits of our context-likelihood graph formulation and the energy-based graph refinement via experiments on the Visual Genome and MS-COCO datasets where we achieve a consistent improvement over object detectors like DETR and Faster-RCNN, as well as alternative methods modeling object interrelationships separately. Our method is detector agnostic, end-to-end trainable, and especially beneficial for rare object classes.
Authors:Fangyi Chen, Han Zhang, Kai Hu, Yu-kai Huang, Chenchen Zhu, Marios Savvides
Abstract:
This paper investigates a phenomenon where query-based object detectors mispredict at the last decoding stage while predicting correctly at an intermediate stage. We review the training process and attribute the overlooked phenomenon to two limitations: lack of training emphasis and cascading errors from decoding sequence. We design and present Selective Query Recollection (SQR), a simple and effective training strategy for query-based object detectors. It cumulatively collects intermediate queries as decoding stages go deeper and selectively forwards the queries to the downstream stages aside from the sequential structure. Such-wise, SQR places training emphasis on later stages and allows later stages to work with intermediate queries from earlier stages directly. SQR can be easily plugged into various query-based object detectors and significantly enhances their performance while leaving the inference pipeline unchanged. As a result, we apply SQR on Adamixer, DAB-DETR, and Deformable-DETR across various settings (backbone, number of queries, schedule) and consistently brings 1.4-2.8 AP improvement.
Authors:Renaud Vandeghen, Gilles Louppe, Marc Van Droogenbroeck
Abstract:
Deep learning has emerged as an effective solution for solving the task of object detection in images but at the cost of requiring large labeled datasets. To mitigate this cost, semi-supervised object detection methods, which consist in leveraging abundant unlabeled data, have been proposed and have already shown impressive results. However, most of these methods require linking a pseudo-label to a ground-truth object by thresholding. In previous works, this threshold value is usually determined empirically, which is time consuming, and only done for a single data distribution. When the domain, and thus the data distribution, changes, a new and costly parameter search is necessary. In this work, we introduce our method Adaptive Self-Training for Object Detection (ASTOD), which is a simple yet effective teacher-student method. ASTOD determines without cost a threshold value based directly on the ground value of the score histogram. To improve the quality of the teacher predictions, we also propose a novel pseudo-labeling procedure. We use different views of the unlabeled images during the pseudo-labeling step to reduce the number of missed predictions and thus obtain better candidate labels. Our teacher and our student are trained separately, and our method can be used in an iterative fashion by replacing the teacher by the student. On the MS-COCO dataset, our method consistently performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods that do not require a threshold parameter, and shows competitive results with methods that require a parameter sweep search. Additional experiments with respect to a supervised baseline on the DIOR dataset containing satellite images lead to similar conclusions, and prove that it is possible to adapt the score threshold automatically in self-training, regardless of the data distribution. The code is available at https:// github.com/rvandeghen/ASTOD
Authors:Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Leonid Sigal, James J. Little
Abstract:
Recent advances in pixel-level tasks (e.g. segmentation) illustrate the benefit of of long-range interactions between aggregated region-based representations that can enhance local features. However, such aggregated representations, often in the form of attention, fail to model the underlying semantics of the scene (e.g. individual objects and, by extension, their interactions). In this work, we address the issue by proposing a component that learns to project image features into latent representations and reason between them using a transformer encoder to generate contextualized and scene-consistent representations which are fused with original image features. Our design encourages the latent regions to represent semantic concepts by ensuring that the activated regions are spatially disjoint and the union of such regions corresponds to a connected object segment. The proposed semantic global reasoning (SGR) component is end-to-end trainable and can be easily added to a wide variety of backbones (CNN or transformer-based) and segmentation heads (per-pixel or mask classification) to consistently improve the segmentation results on different datasets. In addition, our latent tokens are semantically interpretable and diverse and provide a rich set of features that can be transferred to downstream tasks like object detection and segmentation, with improved performance. Furthermore, we also proposed metrics to quantify the semantics of latent tokens at both class \& instance level.
Authors:Jieqi Shi, Peiliang Li, Xiaozhi Chen, Shaojie Shen
Abstract:
The image-based 3D object detection task expects that the predicted 3D bounding box has a ``tightness'' projection (also referred to as cuboid), which fits the object contour well on the image while still keeping the geometric attribute on the 3D space, e.g., physical dimension, pairwise orthogonal, etc. These requirements bring significant challenges to the annotation. Simply projecting the Lidar-labeled 3D boxes to the image leads to non-trivial misalignment, while directly drawing a cuboid on the image cannot access the original 3D information. In this work, we propose a learning-based 3D box adaptation approach that automatically adjusts minimum parameters of the 360$^{\circ}$ Lidar 3D bounding box to perfectly fit the image appearance of panoramic cameras. With only a few 2D boxes annotation as guidance during the training phase, our network can produce accurate image-level cuboid annotations with 3D properties from Lidar boxes. We call our method ``you only label once'', which means labeling on the point cloud once and automatically adapting to all surrounding cameras. As far as we know, we are the first to focus on image-level cuboid refinement, which balances the accuracy and efficiency well and dramatically reduces the labeling effort for accurate cuboid annotation. Extensive experiments on the public Waymo and NuScenes datasets show that our method can produce human-level cuboid annotation on the image without needing manual adjustment.
Authors:Jinoh Cho, Minguk Kang, Vibhav Vineet, Jaesik Park
Abstract:
Image completion is a task that aims to fill in the missing region of a masked image with plausible contents. However, existing image completion methods tend to fill in the missing region with the surrounding texture instead of hallucinating a visual instance that is suitable in accordance with the context of the scene. In this work, we propose a novel image completion model, dubbed ImComplete, that hallucinates the missing instance that harmonizes well with - and thus preserves - the original context. ImComplete first adopts a transformer architecture that considers the visible instances and the location of the missing region. Then, ImComplete completes the semantic segmentation masks within the missing region, providing pixel-level semantic and structural guidance. Finally, the image synthesis blocks generate photo-realistic content. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the results in terms of visual quality (LPIPS and FID) and contextual preservation scores (CLIPscore and object detection accuracy) with COCO-panoptic and Visual Genome datasets. Experimental results show the superiority of ImComplete on various natural images.
Authors:Jongseok Lee, Ribin Balachandran, Konstantin Kondak, Andre Coelho, Marco De Stefano, Matthias Humt, Jianxiang Feng, Tamim Asfour, Rudolph Triebel
Abstract:
This article presents a novel telepresence system for advancing aerial manipulation in dynamic and unstructured environments. The proposed system not only features a haptic device, but also a virtual reality (VR) interface that provides real-time 3D displays of the robot's workspace as well as a haptic guidance to its remotely located operator. To realize this, multiple sensors namely a LiDAR, cameras and IMUs are utilized. For processing of the acquired sensory data, pose estimation pipelines are devised for industrial objects of both known and unknown geometries. We further propose an active learning pipeline in order to increase the sample efficiency of a pipeline component that relies on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based object detection. All these algorithms jointly address various challenges encountered during the execution of perception tasks in industrial scenarios. In the experiments, exhaustive ablation studies are provided to validate the proposed pipelines. Methodologically, these results commonly suggest how an awareness of the algorithms' own failures and uncertainty (`introspection') can be used tackle the encountered problems. Moreover, outdoor experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the overall system in enhancing aerial manipulation capabilities. In particular, with flight campaigns over days and nights, from spring to winter, and with different users and locations, we demonstrate over 70 robust executions of pick-and-place, force application and peg-in-hole tasks with the DLR cable-Suspended Aerial Manipulator (SAM). As a result, we show the viability of the proposed system in future industrial applications.
Authors:Teru Nagamori, Hiroki Ito, AprilPyone MaungMaung, Hitoshi Kiya
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an access control method with a secret key for object detection models for the first time so that unauthorized users without a secret key cannot benefit from the performance of trained models. The method enables us not only to provide a high detection performance to authorized users but to also degrade the performance for unauthorized users. The use of transformed images was proposed for the access control of image classification models, but these images cannot be used for object detection models due to performance degradation. Accordingly, in this paper, selected feature maps are encrypted with a secret key for training and testing models, instead of input images. In an experiment, the protected models allowed authorized users to obtain almost the same performance as that of non-protected models but also with robustness against unauthorized access without a key.
Authors:Yi-Ting Shen, Yaesop Lee, Heesung Kwon, Damon M. Conover, Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya, Nikolas Vale, Joshua D. Gray, G. Jeremy Leong, Kenneth Evensen, Frank Skirlo
Abstract:
Learning to detect objects, such as humans, in imagery captured by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) usually suffers from tremendous variations caused by the UAV's position towards the objects. In addition, existing UAV-based benchmark datasets do not provide adequate dataset metadata, which is essential for precise model diagnosis and learning features invariant to those variations. In this paper, we introduce Archangel, the first UAV-based object detection dataset composed of real and synthetic subsets captured with similar imagining conditions and UAV position and object pose metadata. A series of experiments are carefully designed with a state-of-the-art object detector to demonstrate the benefits of leveraging the metadata during model evaluation. Moreover, several crucial insights involving both real and synthetic data during model optimization are presented. In the end, we discuss the advantages, limitations, and future directions regarding Archangel to highlight its distinct value for the broader machine learning community.
Authors:Zhongping Zhang, Huiwen He, Bryan A. Plummer, Zhenyu Liao, Huayan Wang
Abstract:
Conditional diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance on various tasks like text-guided semantic image editing. Prior work requires image regions to be identified manually by human users or use an object detector that only perform well for object-centric manipulations. For example, if an input image contains multiple objects with the same semantic meaning (such as a group of birds), object detectors may struggle to recognize and localize the target object, let alone accurately manipulate it. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage method for achieving complex scene image editing by Scene Graph Comprehension (SGC-Net). In the first stage, we train a Region of Interest (RoI) prediction network that uses scene graphs and predict the locations of the target objects. Unlike object detection methods based solely on object category, our method can accurately recognize the target object by comprehending the objects and their semantic relationships within a complex scene. The second stage uses a conditional diffusion model to edit the image based on our RoI predictions. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on the CLEVR and Visual Genome datasets. We report an 8 point improvement in SSIM on CLEVR and our edited images were preferred by human users by 9-33% over prior work on Visual Genome, validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at github.com/Zhongping-Zhang/SGC_Net.
Authors:Yuren Cong, Michael Ying Yang, Bodo Rosenhahn
Abstract:
Different objects in the same scene are more or less related to each other, but only a limited number of these relationships are noteworthy. Inspired by DETR, which excels in object detection, we view scene graph generation as a set prediction problem and propose an end-to-end scene graph generation model RelTR which has an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder reasons about the visual feature context while the decoder infers a fixed-size set of triplets subject-predicate-object using different types of attention mechanisms with coupled subject and object queries. We design a set prediction loss performing the matching between the ground truth and predicted triplets for the end-to-end training. In contrast to most existing scene graph generation methods, RelTR is a one-stage method that predicts a set of relationships directly only using visual appearance without combining entities and labeling all possible predicates. Extensive experiments on the Visual Genome and Open Images V6 datasets demonstrate the superior performance and fast inference of our model.
Authors:Shihua Huang, Yongjie Hou, Longfei Liu, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
Abstract:
Benefiting from the simplicity and effectiveness of Dense O2O and MAL, DEIM has become the mainstream training framework for real-time DETRs, significantly outperforming the YOLO series. In this work, we extend it with DINOv3 features, resulting in DEIMv2. DEIMv2 spans eight model sizes from X to Atto, covering GPU, edge, and mobile deployment. For the X, L, M, and S variants, we adopt DINOv3-pretrained or distilled backbones and introduce a Spatial Tuning Adapter (STA), which efficiently converts DINOv3's single-scale output into multi-scale features and complements strong semantics with fine-grained details to enhance detection. For ultra-lightweight models (Nano, Pico, Femto, and Atto), we employ HGNetv2 with depth and width pruning to meet strict resource budgets. Together with a simplified decoder and an upgraded Dense O2O, this unified design enables DEIMv2 to achieve a superior performance-cost trade-off across diverse scenarios, establishing new state-of-the-art results. Notably, our largest model, DEIMv2-X, achieves 57.8 AP with only 50.3 million parameters, surpassing prior X-scale models that require over 60 million parameters for just 56.5 AP. On the compact side, DEIMv2-S is the first sub-10 million model (9.71 million) to exceed the 50 AP milestone on COCO, reaching 50.9 AP. Even the ultra-lightweight DEIMv2-Pico, with just 1.5 million parameters, delivers 38.5 AP, matching YOLOv10-Nano (2.3 million) with around 50 percent fewer parameters.
Authors:Yunqing Hu, Zheming Yang, Chang Zhao, Wen Ji
Abstract:
Traditional object detection methods face performance degradation challenges in complex scenarios such as low-light conditions and heavy occlusions due to a lack of high-level semantic understanding. To address this, this paper proposes an adaptive guidance-based semantic enhancement edge-cloud collaborative object detection method leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), achieving an effective balance between accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, the method first employs instruction fine-tuning to enable the MLLM to generate structured scene descriptions. It then designs an adaptive mapping mechanism that dynamically converts semantic information into parameter adjustment signals for edge detectors, achieving real-time semantic enhancement. Within an edge-cloud collaborative inference framework, the system automatically selects between invoking cloud-based semantic guidance or directly outputting edge detection results based on confidence scores. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively enhances detection accuracy and efficiency in complex scenes. Specifically, it can reduce latency by over 79% and computational cost by 70% in low-light and highly occluded scenes while maintaining accuracy.
Authors:Yuzhi Wu, Li Xiao, Jun Liu, Guangfeng Jiang, XiangGen Xia
Abstract:
The emerging 4D millimeter-wave radar, measuring the range, azimuth, elevation, and Doppler velocity of objects, is recognized for its cost-effectiveness and robustness in autonomous driving. Nevertheless, its point clouds exhibit significant sparsity and noise, restricting its standalone application in 3D object detection. Recent 4D radar-camera fusion methods have provided effective perception. Most existing approaches, however, adopt explicit Bird's-Eye-View fusion paradigms originally designed for LiDAR-camera fusion, neglecting radar's inherent drawbacks. Specifically, they overlook the sparse and incomplete geometry of radar point clouds and restrict fusion to coarse scene-level integration. To address these problems, we propose MLF-4DRCNet, a novel two-stage framework for 3D object detection via multi-level fusion of 4D radar and camera images. Our model incorporates the point-, scene-, and proposal-level multi-modal information, enabling comprehensive feature representation. It comprises three crucial components: the Enhanced Radar Point Encoder (ERPE) module, the Hierarchical Scene Fusion Pooling (HSFP) module, and the Proposal-Level Fusion Enhancement (PLFE) module. Operating at the point-level, ERPE densities radar point clouds with 2D image instances and encodes them into voxels via the proposed Triple-Attention Voxel Feature Encoder. HSFP dynamically integrates multi-scale voxel features with 2D image features using deformable attention to capture scene context and adopts pooling to the fused features. PLFE refines region proposals by fusing image features, and further integrates with the pooled features from HSFP. Experimental results on the View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate that MLF-4DRCNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it attains performance comparable to LiDAR-based models on the VoD dataset.
Authors:Wenhuan Lu, Xinyue Song, Wenjun Ke, Zhizhi Yu, Wenhao Yang, Jianguo Wei
Abstract:
Audio grounding, or speech-driven open-set object detection, aims to localize and identify objects directly from speech, enabling generalization beyond predefined categories. This task is crucial for applications like human-robot interaction where textual input is impractical. However, progress in this domain faces a fundamental bottleneck from the scarcity of large-scale, paired audio-image data, and is further constrained by previous methods that rely on indirect, text-mediated pipelines. In this paper, we introduce Speech-to-See (Speech2See), an end-to-end approach built on a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. Specifically, in the pre-training stage, we design a Query-Guided Semantic Aggregation module that employs learnable queries to condense redundant speech embeddings into compact semantic representations. During fine-tuning, we incorporate a parameter-efficient Mixture-of-LoRA-Experts (MoLE) architecture to achieve deeper and more nuanced cross-modal adaptation. Extensive experiments show that Speech2See achieves robust and adaptable performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating its strong generalization ability and broad applicability.
Authors:Guoyi Zhang, Siyang Chen, Guangsheng Xu, Zhihua Shen, Han Wang, Xiaohu Zhang
Abstract:
Small moving target detection is crucial for many defense applications but remains highly challenging due to low signal-to-noise ratios, ambiguous visual cues, and cluttered backgrounds. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning framework that differs fundamentally from existing approaches, which often rely on target-specific features or motion cues and tend to lack robustness in complex environments. Our key insight is that small target detection and background discrimination are inherently coupled, even cluttered video backgrounds often exhibit strong low-rank structures that can serve as stable priors for detection. We reformulate the task as a tensor-based low-rank and sparse decomposition problem and conduct a theoretical analysis of the background, target, and noise components to guide model design. Building on these insights, we introduce TenRPCANet, a deep neural network that requires minimal assumptions about target characteristics. Specifically, we propose a tokenization strategy that implicitly enforces multi-order tensor low-rank priors through a self-attention mechanism. This mechanism captures both local and non-local self-similarity to model the low-rank background without relying on explicit iterative optimization. In addition, inspired by the sparse component update in tensor RPCA, we design a feature refinement module to enhance target saliency. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two highly distinct and challenging tasks: multi-frame infrared small target detection and space object detection. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness and the generalizability of our approach.
Authors:Muhammad Shahbaz, Shaurya Agarwal
Abstract:
This article presents UrbanTwin datasets - high-fidelity, realistic replicas of three public roadside lidar datasets: LUMPI, V2X-Real-IC, and TUMTraf-I. Each UrbanTwin dataset contains 10K annotated frames corresponding to one of the public datasets. Annotations include 3D bounding boxes, instance segmentation labels, and tracking IDs for six object classes, along with semantic segmentation labels for nine classes. These datasets are synthesized using emulated lidar sensors within realistic digital twins, modeled based on surrounding geometry, road alignment at lane level, and the lane topology and vehicle movement patterns at intersections of the actual locations corresponding to each real dataset. Due to the precise digital twin modeling, the synthetic datasets are well aligned with their real counterparts, offering strong standalone and augmentative value for training deep learning models on tasks such as 3D object detection, tracking, and semantic and instance segmentation. We evaluate the alignment of the synthetic replicas through statistical and structural similarity analysis with real data, and further demonstrate their utility by training 3D object detection models solely on synthetic data and testing them on real, unseen data. The high similarity scores and improved detection performance, compared to the models trained on real data, indicate that the UrbanTwin datasets effectively enhance existing benchmark datasets by increasing sample size and scene diversity. In addition, the digital twins can be adapted to test custom scenarios by modifying the design and dynamics of the simulations. To our knowledge, these are the first digitally synthesized datasets that can replace in-domain real-world datasets for lidar perception tasks. UrbanTwin datasets are publicly available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/ucf-ut.
Authors:In-Jae Lee, Sihwan Hwang, Youngseok Kim, Wonjune Kim, Sanmin Kim, Dongsuk Kum
Abstract:
Recently, camera-radar fusion-based 3D object detection methods in bird's eye view (BEV) have gained attention due to the complementary characteristics and cost-effectiveness of these sensors. Previous approaches using forward projection struggle with sparse BEV feature generation, while those employing backward projection overlook depth ambiguity, leading to false positives. In this paper, to address the aforementioned limitations, we propose a novel camera-radar fusion-based 3D object detection and segmentation model named CRAB (Camera-Radar fusion for reducing depth Ambiguity in Backward projection-based view transformation), using a backward projection that leverages radar to mitigate depth ambiguity. During the view transformation, CRAB aggregates perspective view image context features into BEV queries. It improves depth distinction among queries along the same ray by combining the dense but unreliable depth distribution from images with the sparse yet precise depth information from radar occupancy. We further introduce spatial cross-attention with a feature map containing radar context information to enhance the comprehension of the 3D scene. When evaluated on the nuScenes open dataset, our proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art performance among backward projection-based camera-radar fusion methods with 62.4\% NDS and 54.0\% mAP in 3D object detection.
Authors:Chenhao Wang, Yingrui Ji, Yu Meng, Yunjian Zhang, Yao Zhu
Abstract:
Extracting small objects from remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in various applications, including urban planning, environmental monitoring, and disaster management. While current research primarily focuses on small object detection, instance segmentation for small objects remains underexplored, with no dedicated datasets available. This gap stems from the technical challenges and high costs of pixel-level annotation for small objects. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates impressive zero-shot generalization, its performance on small-object segmentation deteriorates significantly, largely due to the coarse 1/16 feature resolution that causes severe loss of fine spatial details. To this end, we propose SOPSeg, a prompt-based framework specifically designed for small object segmentation in remote sensing imagery. It incorporates a region-adaptive magnification strategy to preserve fine-grained details, and employs a customized decoder that integrates edge prediction and progressive refinement for accurate boundary delineation. Moreover, we introduce a novel prompting mechanism tailored to the oriented bounding boxes widely adopted in remote sensing applications. SOPSeg outperforms existing methods in small object segmentation and facilitates efficient dataset construction for remote sensing tasks. We further construct a comprehensive small object instance segmentation dataset based on SODA-A, and will release both the model and dataset to support future research.
Authors:Muhammad Shahbaz, Shaurya Agarwal
Abstract:
Sim2Real domain transfer offers a cost-effective and scalable approach for developing LiDAR-based perception (e.g., object detection, tracking, segmentation) in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, perception models trained in simulation often under perform on real-world data due to distributional shifts. To address this Sim2Real gap, this paper proposes a high-fidelity digital twin (HiFi DT) framework that incorporates real-world background geometry, lane-level road topology, and sensor-specific specifications and placement. We formalize the domain adaptation challenge underlying Sim2Real learning and present a systematic method for constructing simulation environments that yield in-domain synthetic data. An off-the-shelf 3D object detector is trained on HiFi DT-generated synthetic data and evaluated on real data. Our experiments show that the DT-trained model outperforms the equivalent model trained on real data by 4.8%. To understand this gain, we quantify distributional alignment between synthetic and real data using multiple metrics, including Chamfer Distance (CD), Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), and Fr'echet Distance (FD), at both raw-input and latent-feature levels. Results demonstrate that HiFi DTs substantially reduce domain shift and improve generalization across diverse evaluation scenarios. These findings underscore the significant role of digital twins in enabling reliable, simulation-based LiDAR perception for real-world ITS applications.
Authors:Muhammad Shahbaz, Shaurya Agarwal
Abstract:
LiDAR-based perception in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), for tasks such as object detection, tracking, and semantic and instance segmentation, is predominantly solved by deep neural network models which often require large-scale labeled datasets during training to achieve generalization. However, creating these datasets is costly. time consuming and require human labor before the datasets are ready for training models. This hinders scalability of the LiDAR-based perception systems in ITS. Sim2Real learning offers scalable alternative, however, its effectiveness is dependent on the fidelity of the source simulation(s) to real-world, in terms of environment structure, actor dynamics, and sensor emulations. In response, this paper introduces a rigorous and reproducible methodology for creating large-scale, high-quality synthetic datasets using High-Fidelity Digital Twins (HiFi DTs). The proposed workflow outlines the steps, tools, and best practices for digitally replicating real-world environments, encompassing static geometry modeling, road infrastructure replication, and dynamic traffic scenario generation. Leveraging open-source and readily available resources such as satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap data, alongside specific sensor configurations, this paper provides practical, detailed guidance for constructing robust synthetic environments. These environments subsequently facilitate scalable, cost-effective, and diverse dataset generation, forming a reliable foundation for robust Sim2Real learning.
Authors:Abdellah Zakaria Sellam, Ilyes Benaissa, Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Abdenour Hadid, Vito Renó, Cosimo Distante
Abstract:
Fine-grained object detection in challenging visual domains, such as vehicle damage assessment, presents a formidable challenge even for human experts to resolve reliably. While DiffusionDet has advanced the state-of-the-art through conditional denoising diffusion, its performance remains limited by local feature conditioning in context-dependent scenarios. We address this fundamental limitation by introducing Context-Aware Fusion (CAF), which leverages cross-attention mechanisms to integrate global scene context with local proposal features directly. The global context is generated using a separate dedicated encoder that captures comprehensive environmental information, enabling each object proposal to attend to scene-level understanding. Our framework significantly enhances the generative detection paradigm by enabling each object proposal to attend to comprehensive environmental information. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement over state-of-the-art models on the CarDD benchmark, establishing new performance benchmarks for context-aware object detection in fine-grained domains
Authors:Alvaro Patricio, Atabak Dehban, Rodrigo Ventura
Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated significant potential in augmenting scarce datasets for object detection tasks. Nevertheless, most recent models rely on resource-intensive full fine-tuning of large-scale diffusion models, requiring enterprise-grade GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA V100) and thousands of synthetic images. To address these limitations, we propose Flux LoRA Augmentation (FLORA), a lightweight synthetic data generation pipeline. Our approach uses the Flux 1.1 Dev diffusion model, fine-tuned exclusively through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). This dramatically reduces computational requirements, enabling synthetic dataset generation with a consumer-grade GPU (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 4090). We empirically evaluate our approach on seven diverse object detection datasets. Our results demonstrate that training object detectors with just 500 synthetic images generated by our approach yields superior detection performance compared to models trained on 5000 synthetic images from the ODGEN baseline, achieving improvements of up to 21.3% in mAP@.50:.95. This work demonstrates that it is possible to surpass state-of-the-art performance with far greater efficiency, as FLORA achieves superior results using only 10% of the data and a fraction of the computational cost. This work demonstrates that a quality and efficiency-focused approach is more effective than brute-force generation, making advanced synthetic data creation more practical and accessible for real-world scenarios.
Authors:Alvaro Patricio, Atabak Dehban, Rodrigo Ventura
Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated significant potential in augmenting scarce datasets for object detection tasks. Nevertheless, most recent models rely on resource-intensive full fine-tuning of large-scale diffusion models, requiring enterprise-grade GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA V100) and thousands of synthetic images. To address these limitations, we propose Flux LoRA Augmentation (FLORA), a lightweight synthetic data generation pipeline. Our approach uses the Flux 1.1 Dev diffusion model, fine-tuned exclusively through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). This dramatically reduces computational requirements, enabling synthetic dataset generation with a consumer-grade GPU (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 4090). We empirically evaluate our approach on seven diverse object detection datasets. Our results demonstrate that training object detectors with just 500 synthetic images generated by our approach yields superior detection performance compared to models trained on 5000 synthetic images from the ODGEN baseline, achieving improvements of up to 21.3% in mAP@.50:.95. This work demonstrates that it is possible to surpass state-of-the-art performance with far greater efficiency, as FLORA achieves superior results using only 10% of the data and a fraction of the computational cost. This work demonstrates that a quality and efficiency-focused approach is more effective than brute-force generation, making advanced synthetic data creation more practical and accessible for real-world scenarios.
Authors:Viktor Valadi, Mattias Ã
kesson, Johan Ãstman, Salman Toor, Andreas Hellander
Abstract:
Gradient inversion attacks have garnered attention for their ability to compromise privacy in federated learning. However, many studies consider attacks with the model in inference mode, where training-time behaviors like dropout are disabled and batch normalization relies on fixed statistics. In this work, we systematically analyze how architecture and training behavior affect vulnerability, including the first in-depth study of inference-mode clients, which we show dramatically simplifies inversion. To assess attack feasibility under more realistic conditions, we turn to clients operating in standard training mode. In this setting, we find that successful attacks are only possible when several architectural conditions are met simultaneously: models must be shallow and wide, use skip connections, and, critically, employ pre-activation normalization. We introduce two novel attacks against models in training-mode with varying attacker knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance under realistic training conditions. We extend these efforts by presenting the first attack on a production-grade object-detection model. Here, to enable any visibly identifiable leakage, we revert to the lenient inference mode setting and make multiple architectural modifications to increase model vulnerability, with the extent of required changes highlighting the strong inherent robustness of such architectures. We conclude this work by offering the first comprehensive mapping of settings, clarifying which combinations of architectural choices and operational modes meaningfully impact privacy. Our analysis provides actionable insight into when models are likely vulnerable, when they appear robust, and where subtle leakage may persist. Together, these findings reframe how gradient inversion risk should be assessed in future research and deployment scenarios.
Authors:Pedro Antonio Rabelo Saraiva, Enzo Ferreira de Souza, Joao Manoel Herrera Pinheiro, Thiago H. Segreto, Ricardo V. Godoy, Marcelo Becker
Abstract:
This work addresses the challenges of data scarcity and high acquisition costs for training robust object detection models in complex industrial environments, such as offshore oil platforms. The practical and economic barriers to collecting real-world data in these hazardous settings often hamper the development of autonomous inspection systems. To overcome this, in this work we propose and validate a hybrid data synthesis pipeline that combines procedural rendering with AI-driven video generation. Our methodology leverages BlenderProc to create photorealistic images with precise annotations and controlled domain randomization, and integrates NVIDIA's Cosmos-Predict2 world-foundation model to synthesize physically plausible video sequences with temporal diversity, capturing rare viewpoints and adverse conditions. We demonstrate that a YOLO-based detection network trained on a composite dataset, blending real images with our synthetic data, achieves superior performance compared to models trained exclusively on real-world data. Notably, a 1:1 mixture of real and synthetic data yielded the highest accuracy, surpassing the real-only baseline. These findings highlight the viability of a synthetic-first approach as an efficient, cost-effective, and safe alternative for developing reliable perception systems in safety-critical and resource-constrained industrial applications.
Authors:Jinyue Song, Hansol Ku, Jayneel Vora, Nelson Lee, Ahmad Kamari, Prasant Mohapatra, Parth Pathak
Abstract:
Automotive FMCW radars remain reliable in rain and glare, yet their sparse, noisy point clouds constrain 3-D object detection. We therefore release CoVeRaP, a 21 k-frame cooperative dataset that time-aligns radar, camera, and GPS streams from multiple vehicles across diverse manoeuvres. Built on this data, we propose a unified cooperative-perception framework with middle- and late-fusion options. Its baseline network employs a multi-branch PointNet-style encoder enhanced with self-attention to fuse spatial, Doppler, and intensity cues into a common latent space, which a decoder converts into 3-D bounding boxes and per-point depth confidence. Experiments show that middle fusion with intensity encoding boosts mean Average Precision by up to 9x at IoU 0.9 and consistently outperforms single-vehicle baselines. CoVeRaP thus establishes the first reproducible benchmark for multi-vehicle FMCW-radar perception and demonstrates that affordable radar sharing markedly improves detection robustness. Dataset and code are publicly available to encourage further research.
Authors:NÃcolas Roque dos Santos, Dawon Ahn, Diego Minatel, Alneu de Andrade Lopes, Evangelos E. Papalexakis
Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in various real-world applications, including drug discovery, object detection, social media analysis, recommender systems, and text classification. In contrast to their vast potential, training them on large-scale graphs presents significant computational challenges due to the resources required for their storage and processing. Graph Condensation has emerged as a promising solution to reduce these demands by learning a synthetic compact graph that preserves the essential information of the original one while maintaining the GNN's predictive performance. Despite their efficacy, current graph condensation approaches frequently rely on a computationally intensive bi-level optimization. Moreover, they fail to maintain a mapping between synthetic and original nodes, limiting the interpretability of the model's decisions. In this sense, a wide range of decomposition techniques have been applied to learn linear or multi-linear functions from graph data, offering a more transparent and less resource-intensive alternative. However, their applicability to graph condensation remains unexplored. This paper addresses this gap and proposes a novel method called Multi-view Graph Condensation via Tensor Decomposition (GCTD) to investigate to what extent such techniques can synthesize an informative smaller graph and achieve comparable downstream task performance. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that GCTD effectively reduces graph size while preserving GNN performance, achieving up to a 4.0\ improvement in accuracy on three out of six datasets and competitive performance on large graphs compared to existing approaches. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/gctd-345A.
Authors:Dhruv Dosi, Rohit Meena, Param Rajpura, Yogesh Kumar Meena
Abstract:
Legacy floor plans, often preserved only as scanned documents, remain essential resources for architecture, urban planning, and facility management in the construction industry. However, the lack of machine-readable floor plans render large-scale interpretation both time-consuming and error-prone. Automated symbol spotting offers a scalable solution by enabling the identification of service key symbols directly from floor plans, supporting workflows such as cost estimation, infrastructure maintenance, and regulatory compliance. This work introduces a labelled Digitised Electrical Layout Plans (DELP) dataset comprising 45 scanned electrical layout plans annotated with 2,450 instances across 34 distinct service key classes. A systematic evaluation framework is proposed using pretrained object detection models for DELP dataset. Among the models benchmarked, YOLOv8 achieves the highest performance with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 82.5\%. Using YOLOv8, we develop SkeySpot, a lightweight, open-source toolkit for real-time detection, classification, and quantification of electrical symbols. SkeySpot produces structured, standardised outputs that can be scaled up for interoperable building information workflows, ultimately enabling compatibility across downstream applications and regulatory platforms. By lowering dependency on proprietary CAD systems and reducing manual annotation effort, this approach makes the digitisation of electrical layouts more accessible to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the construction industry, while supporting broader goals of standardisation, interoperability, and sustainability in the built environment.
Authors:Conor Wallace, Isaac Corley, Jonathan Lwowski
Abstract:
Unified vision-language models (VLMs) promise to streamline computer vision pipelines by reframing multiple visual tasks such as classification, detection, and keypoint localization within a single language-driven interface. This architecture is particularly appealing in industrial inspection, where managing disjoint task-specific models introduces complexity, inefficiency, and maintenance overhead. In this paper, we critically evaluate the viability of this unified paradigm using InspectVLM, a Florence-2-based VLM trained on InspectMM, our new large-scale multimodal, multitask inspection dataset. While InspectVLM performs competitively on image-level classification and structured keypoint tasks, we find that it fails to match traditional ResNet-based models in core inspection metrics. Notably, the model exhibits brittle behavior under low prompt variability, produces degenerate outputs for fine-grained object detection, and frequently defaults to memorized language responses regardless of visual input. Our findings suggest that while language-driven unification offers conceptual elegance, current VLMs lack the visual grounding and robustness necessary for deployment in precision critical industrial inspections.
Authors:Kaiyan Zhao, Zhongtao Miao, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
Abstract:
Multimodal sentence embedding models typically leverage image-caption pairs in addition to textual data during training. However, such pairs often contain noise, including redundant or irrelevant information on either the image or caption side. To mitigate this issue, we propose MCSEO, a method that enhances multimodal sentence embeddings by incorporating fine-grained object-phrase alignment alongside traditional image-caption alignment. Specifically, MCSEO utilizes existing segmentation and object detection models to extract accurate object-phrase pairs, which are then used to optimize a contrastive learning objective tailored to object-phrase correspondence. Experimental results on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks across different backbone models demonstrate that MCSEO consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the significance of precise object-phrase alignment in multimodal representation learning.
Authors:Matthias WeiÃ, Anish Navalgund, Johannes Stümpfle, Falk Dettinger, Michael Weyrich
Abstract:
Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) offer a wide range of connected functionalities, including enhanced driving behavior and fleet management. These features are continuously updated via over-the-air (OTA) mechanisms, resulting in a growing number of software versions and variants due to the diversity of vehicles, cloud/edge environments, and stakeholders involved. The lack of a unified integration environment further complicates development, as connected mobility solutions are often built in isolation. To ensure reliable operations across heterogeneous systems, a dynamic orchestration of functions that considers hardware and software variability is essential. This paper presents an open-source CI/CD pipeline tailored for SDVs. It automates the build, test, and deployment phases using a combination of containerized open-source tools, creating a standardized, portable, and scalable ecosystem accessible to all stakeholders. Additionally, a custom OTA middleware distributes software updates and supports rollbacks across vehicles and backend services. Update variants are derived based on deployment target dependencies and hardware configurations. The pipeline also supports continuous development and deployment of AI models for autonomous driving features. Its effectiveness is evaluated using an automated valet parking (AVP) scenario involving TurtleBots and a coordinating backend server. Two object detection variants are developed and deployed to match hardware-specific requirements. Results demonstrate seamless OTA updates, correct variant selection, and successful orchestration across all targets. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides a scalable and efficient solution for managing software variants and OTA updates in SDVs, contributing to the advancement of future mobility technologies.
Authors:Melih Yazgan, Allen Xavier Arasan, J. Marius Zöllner
Abstract:
Collaborative perception allows connected vehicles to exchange sensor information and overcome each vehicle's blind spots. Yet transmitting raw point clouds or full feature maps overwhelms Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, causing latency and scalability problems. We introduce EffiComm, an end-to-end framework that transmits less than 40% of the data required by prior art while maintaining state-of-the-art 3D object detection accuracy. EffiComm operates on Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature maps from any modality and applies a two-stage reduction pipeline: (1) Selective Transmission (ST) prunes low-utility regions with a confidence mask; (2) Adaptive Grid Reduction (AGR) uses a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to assign vehicle-specific keep ratios according to role and network load. The remaining features are fused with a soft-gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) attention layer, offering greater capacity and specialization for effective feature integration. On the OPV2V benchmark, EffiComm reaches 0.84 mAP@0.7 while sending only an average of approximately 1.5 MB per frame, outperforming previous methods on the accuracy-per-bit curve. These results highlight the value of adaptive, learned communication for scalable Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) perception.
Authors:Youcef Sklab, Florian Castanet, Hanane Ariouat, Souhila Arib, Jean-Daniel Zucker, Eric Chenin, Edi Prifti
Abstract:
Deep learning-based classification of herbarium images is hampered by background heterogeneity, which introduces noise and artifacts that can potentially mislead models and reduce classification accuracy. Addressing these background-related challenges is critical to improving model performance. We introduce PlantSAM, an automated segmentation pipeline that integrates YOLOv10 for plant region detection and the Segment Anything Model (SAM2) for segmentation. YOLOv10 generates bounding box prompts to guide SAM2, enhancing segmentation accuracy. Both models were fine-tuned on herbarium images and evaluated using Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice coefficient metrics. PlantSAM achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance, with an IoU of 0.94 and a Dice coefficient of 0.97. Incorporating segmented images into classification models led to consistent performance improvements across five tested botanical traits, with accuracy gains of up to 4.36% and F1-score improvements of 4.15%. Our findings highlight the importance of background removal in herbarium image analysis, as it significantly enhances classification accuracy by allowing models to focus more effectively on the foreground plant structures.
Authors:Hayat Ullah, Abbas Khan, Arslan Munir, Hari Kalva
Abstract:
Realistic human surveillance datasets are crucial for training and evaluating computer vision models under real-world conditions, facilitating the development of robust algorithms for human and human-interacting object detection in complex environments. These datasets need to offer diverse and challenging data to enable a comprehensive assessment of model performance and the creation of more reliable surveillance systems for public safety. To this end, we present two visual object detection benchmarks named OD-VIRAT Large and OD-VIRAT Tiny, aiming at advancing visual understanding tasks in surveillance imagery. The video sequences in both benchmarks cover 10 different scenes of human surveillance recorded from significant height and distance. The proposed benchmarks offer rich annotations of bounding boxes and categories, where OD-VIRAT Large has 8.7 million annotated instances in 599,996 images and OD-VIRAT Tiny has 288,901 annotated instances in 19,860 images. This work also focuses on benchmarking state-of-the-art object detection architectures, including RETMDET, YOLOX, RetinaNet, DETR, and Deformable-DETR on this object detection-specific variant of VIRAT dataset. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to examine the performance of these recently published state-of-the-art object detection architectures on realistic surveillance imagery under challenging conditions such as complex backgrounds, occluded objects, and small-scale objects. The proposed benchmarking and experimental settings will help in providing insights concerning the performance of selected object detection models and set the base for developing more efficient and robust object detection architectures.
Authors:Saadat Behzadi, Danial Sharifrazi, Bita Mesbahzadeh, Javad Hassannataj Joloudari, Roohallah Alizadehsani
Abstract:
Objectives: Timely and accurate detection of colorectal polyps plays a crucial role in diagnosing and preventing colorectal cancer, a major cause of mortality worldwide. This study introduces a new, lightweight, and efficient framework for polyp detection that combines the Local Outlier Factor (LOF) algorithm for filtering noisy data with the YOLO-v11n deep learning model.
Study design: An experimental study leveraging deep learning and outlier removal techniques across multiple public datasets.
Methods: The proposed approach was tested on five diverse and publicly available datasets: CVC-ColonDB, CVC-ClinicDB, Kvasir-SEG, ETIS, and EndoScene. Since these datasets originally lacked bounding box annotations, we converted their segmentation masks into suitable detection labels. To enhance the robustness and generalizability of our model, we apply 5-fold cross-validation and remove anomalous samples using the LOF method configured with 30 neighbors and a contamination ratio of 5%. Cleaned data are then fed into YOLO-v11n, a fast and resource-efficient object detection architecture optimized for real-time applications. We train the model using a combination of modern augmentation strategies to improve detection accuracy under diverse conditions.
Results: Our approach significantly improves polyp localization performance, achieving a precision of 95.83%, recall of 91.85%, F1-score of 93.48%, mAP@0.5 of 96.48%, and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 77.75%. Compared to previous YOLO-based methods, our model demonstrates enhanced accuracy and efficiency.
Conclusions: These results suggest that the proposed method is well-suited for real-time colonoscopy support in clinical settings. Overall, the study underscores how crucial data preprocessing and model efficiency are when designing effective AI systems for medical imaging.
Authors:Furkan Mumcu, Michael J. Jones, Anoop Cherian, Yasin Yilmaz
Abstract:
Object detection traditionally relies on fixed category sets, requiring costly re-training to handle novel objects. While Open-World and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OWOD and OVOD) improve flexibility, OWOD lacks semantic labels for unknowns, and OVOD depends on user prompts, limiting autonomy. We propose an LLM-guided agentic object detection (LAOD) framework that enables fully label-free, zero-shot detection by prompting a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate scene-specific object names. These are passed to an open-vocabulary detector for localization, allowing the system to adapt its goals dynamically. We introduce two new metrics, Class-Agnostic Average Precision (CAAP) and Semantic Naming Average Precision (SNAP), to separately evaluate localization and naming. Experiments on LVIS, COCO, and COCO-OOD validate our approach, showing strong performance in detecting and naming novel objects. Our method offers enhanced autonomy and adaptability for open-world understanding.
Authors:Ofir Gordon, Ariel Lapid, Elad Cohen, Yarden Yagil, Arnon Netzer, Hai Victor Habi
Abstract:
Deploying transformer-based neural networks on resource-constrained edge devices presents a significant challenge. This challenge is often addressed through various techniques, such as low-rank approximation and mixed-precision quantization. In this work, we introduce Mixed Low-Rank and Quantization (MLoRQ), a novel method that integrates both techniques. MLoRQ employs a two-stage optimization process to determine optimal bit-width and rank assignments for each layer, adhering to predefined memory constraints. This process includes: (i) an intra-layer optimization that identifies potentially optimal compression solutions out of all low-rank and quantization combinations; (ii) an inter-layer optimization that assigns bit-width precision and rank to each layer while ensuring the memory constraint is met. An optional final step applies a sequential optimization process using a modified adaptive rounding technique to mitigate compression-induced errors in joint low-rank approximation and quantization. The method is compatible and can be seamlessly integrated with most existing quantization algorithms. MLoRQ shows state-of-the-art results with up to 15\% performance improvement, evaluated on Vision Transformers for image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks.
Authors:Haoran Sun, Haoyu Bian, Shaoning Zeng, Yunbo Rao, Xu Xu, Lin Mei, Jianping Gou
Abstract:
Common knowledge indicates that the process of constructing image datasets usually depends on the time-intensive and inefficient method of manual collection and annotation. Large models offer a solution via data generation. Nonetheless, real-world data are obviously more valuable comparing to artificially intelligence generated data, particularly in constructing image datasets. For this reason, we propose a novel method for auto-constructing datasets from real-world images by a multiagent collaborative system, named as DatasetAgent. By coordinating four different agents equipped with Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), as well as a tool package for image optimization, DatasetAgent is able to construct high-quality image datasets according to user-specified requirements. In particular, two types of experiments are conducted, including expanding existing datasets and creating new ones from scratch, on a variety of open-source datasets. In both cases, multiple image datasets constructed by DatasetAgent are used to train various vision models for image classification, object detection, and image segmentation.
Authors:Hayat Ullah, Arslan Munir, Oliver Nina
Abstract:
Inspired by the recent success of transformers and multi-stage architectures in video recognition and object detection domains. We thoroughly explore the rich spatio-temporal properties of transformers within a multi-stage architecture paradigm for the temporal action localization (TAL) task. This exploration led to the development of a hierarchical multi-stage transformer architecture called PCL-Former, where each subtask is handled by a dedicated transformer module with a specialized loss function. Specifically, the Proposal-Former identifies candidate segments in an untrimmed video that may contain actions, the Classification-Former classifies the action categories within those segments, and the Localization-Former precisely predicts the temporal boundaries (i.e., start and end) of the action instances. To evaluate the performance of our method, we have conducted extensive experiments on three challenging benchmark datasets: THUMOS-14, ActivityNet-1.3, and HACS Segments. We also conducted detailed ablation experiments to assess the impact of each individual module of our PCL-Former. The obtained quantitative results validate the effectiveness of the proposed PCL-Former, outperforming state-of-the-art TAL approaches by 2.8%, 1.2%, and 4.8% on THUMOS14, ActivityNet-1.3, and HACS datasets, respectively.
Authors:Hanzhi Zhong, Zhiyu Xiang, Ruoyu Xu, Jingyun Fu, Peng Xu, Shaohong Wang, Zhihao Yang, Tianyu Pu, Eryun Liu
Abstract:
4D radar has received significant attention in autonomous driving thanks to its robustness under adverse weathers. Due to the sparse points and noisy measurements of the 4D radar, most of the research finish the 3D object detection task by integrating images from camera and perform modality fusion in BEV space. However, the potential of the radar and the fusion mechanism is still largely unexplored, hindering the performance improvement. In this study, we propose a cross-view two-stage fusion network called CVFusion. In the first stage, we design a radar guided iterative (RGIter) BEV fusion module to generate high-recall 3D proposal boxes. In the second stage, we aggregate features from multiple heterogeneous views including points, image, and BEV for each proposal. These comprehensive instance level features greatly help refine the proposals and generate high-quality predictions. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, with 9.10% and 3.68% mAP improvements on View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadSet, respectively. Our code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Shruti Bansal, Wenshan Wang, Yifei Liu, Parv Maheshwari
Abstract:
Autonomous systems rely on sensors to estimate the environment around them. However, cameras, LiDARs, and RADARs have their own limitations. In nighttime or degraded environments such as fog, mist, or dust, thermal cameras can provide valuable information regarding the presence of objects of interest due to their heat signature. They make it easy to identify humans and vehicles that are usually at higher temperatures compared to their surroundings. In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of thermal cameras for robotics and automation, where the biggest hurdle is the lack of data. Several multi-modal datasets are available for driving robotics research in tasks such as scene segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation, which are the cornerstone of autonomous systems. However, they are found to be lacking in thermal imagery. Our paper proposes a solution to augment these datasets with synthetic thermal data to enable widespread and rapid adaptation of thermal cameras. We explore the use of conditional diffusion models to convert existing RGB images to thermal images using self-attention to learn the thermal properties of real-world objects.
Authors:Mustafa Adam, Kangfeng Ye, David A. Anisi, Ana Cavalcanti, Jim Woodcock, Robert Morris
Abstract:
Continued adoption of agricultural robots postulates the farmer's trust in the reliability, robustness and safety of the new technology. This motivates our work on safety assurance of agricultural robots, particularly their ability to detect, track and avoid obstacles and humans. This paper considers a probabilistic modelling and risk analysis framework for use in the early development phases. Starting off with hazard identification and a risk assessment matrix, the behaviour of the mobile robot platform, sensor and perception system, and any humans present are captured using three state machines. An auto-generated probabilistic model is then solved and analysed using the probabilistic model checker PRISM. The result provides unique insight into fundamental development and engineering aspects by quantifying the effect of the risk mitigation actions and risk reduction associated with distinct design concepts. These include implications of adopting a higher performance and more expensive Object Detection System or opting for a more elaborate warning system to increase human awareness. Although this paper mainly focuses on the initial concept-development phase, the proposed safety assurance framework can also be used during implementation, and subsequent deployment and operation phases.
Authors:Xuemei Chen, Huamin Wang, Hangchi Shen, Shukai Duan, Shiping Wen, Tingwen Huang
Abstract:
Low energy consumption for 3D object detection is an important research area because of the increasing energy consumption with their wide application in fields such as autonomous driving. The spiking neural networks (SNNs) with low-power consumption characteristics can provide a novel solution for this research. Therefore, we apply SNNs to monocular 3D object detection and propose the SpikeSMOKE architecture in this paper, which is a new attempt for low-power monocular 3D object detection. As we all know, discrete signals of SNNs will generate information loss and limit their feature expression ability compared with the artificial neural networks (ANNs).In order to address this issue, inspired by the filtering mechanism of biological neuronal synapses, we propose a cross-scale gated coding mechanism(CSGC), which can enhance feature representation by combining cross-scale fusion of attentional methods and gated filtering mechanisms.In addition, to reduce the computation and increase the speed of training, we present a novel light-weight residual block that can maintain spiking computing paradigm and the highest possible detection performance. Compared to the baseline SpikeSMOKE under the 3D Object Detection, the proposed SpikeSMOKE with CSGC can achieve 11.78 (+2.82, Easy), 10.69 (+3.2, Moderate), and 10.48 (+3.17, Hard) on the KITTI autonomous driving dataset by AP|R11 at 0.7 IoU threshold, respectively. It is important to note that the results of SpikeSMOKE can significantly reduce energy consumption compared to the results on SMOKE. For example,the energy consumption can be reduced by 72.2% on the hard category, while the detection performance is reduced by only 4%. SpikeSMOKE-L (lightweight) can further reduce the amount of parameters by 3 times and computation by 10 times compared to SMOKE.
Authors:Yongsen Mao, Junhao Zhong, Chuan Fang, Jia Zheng, Rui Tang, Hao Zhu, Ping Tan, Zihan Zhou
Abstract:
SpatialLM is a large language model designed to process 3D point cloud data and generate structured 3D scene understanding outputs. These outputs include architectural elements like walls, doors, windows, and oriented object boxes with their semantic categories. Unlike previous methods which exploit task-specific network designs, our model adheres to the standard multimodal LLM architecture and is fine-tuned directly from open-source LLMs.
To train SpatialLM, we collect a large-scale, high-quality synthetic dataset consisting of the point clouds of 12,328 indoor scenes (54,778 rooms) with ground-truth 3D annotations, and conduct a careful study on various modeling and training decisions. On public benchmarks, our model gives state-of-the-art performance in layout estimation and competitive results in 3D object detection. With that, we show a feasible path for enhancing the spatial understanding capabilities of modern LLMs for applications in augmented reality, embodied robotics, and more.
Authors:Mikhail Kennerley, Angelica Aviles-Rivero, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Robby T. Tan
Abstract:
Combining multiple object detection datasets offers a path to improved generalisation but is hindered by inconsistencies in class semantics and bounding box annotations. Some methods to address this assume shared label taxonomies and address only spatial inconsistencies; others require manual relabelling, or produce a unified label space, which may be unsuitable when a fixed target label space is required. We propose Label-Aligned Transfer (LAT), a label transfer framework that systematically projects annotations from diverse source datasets into the label space of a target dataset. LAT begins by training dataset-specific detectors to generate pseudo-labels, which are then combined with ground-truth annotations via a Privileged Proposal Generator (PPG) that replaces the region proposal network in two-stage detectors. To further refine region features, a Semantic Feature Fusion (SFF) module injects class-aware context and features from overlapping proposals using a confidence-weighted attention mechanism. This pipeline preserves dataset-specific annotation granularity while enabling many-to-one label space transfer across heterogeneous datasets, resulting in a semantically and spatially aligned representation suitable for training a downstream detector. LAT thus jointly addresses both class-level misalignments and bounding box inconsistencies without relying on shared label spaces or manual annotations. Across multiple benchmarks, LAT demonstrates consistent improvements in target-domain detection performance, achieving gains of up to +4.8AP over semi-supervised baselines.
Authors:Jing-En Huang, I-Sheng Fang, Tzuhsuan Huang, Chih-Yu Wang, Jun-Cheng Chen
Abstract:
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance as agents across various tasks while data scarcity and label noise remain significant challenges in computer vision tasks, such as object detection and instance segmentation. A common solution for resolving these issues is to generate synthetic data. However, current synthetic data generation methods struggle with issues, such as multiple objects per mask, inaccurate segmentation, and incorrect category labels, limiting their effectiveness. To address these issues, we introduce Gen-n-Val, a novel agentic data generation framework that leverages Layer Diffusion (LD), LLMs, and VLLMs to produce high-quality, single-object masks and diverse backgrounds. Gen-n-Val consists of two agents: (1) The LD prompt agent, an LLM, optimizes prompts for LD to generate high-quality foreground instance images and segmentation masks. These optimized prompts ensure the generation of single-object synthetic data with precise instance masks and clean backgrounds. (2) The data validation agent, a VLLM, which filters out low-quality synthetic instance images. The system prompts for both agents are refined through TextGrad. Additionally, we use image harmonization to combine multiple instances within scenes. Compared to state-of-the-art synthetic data approaches like MosaicFusion, our approach reduces invalid synthetic data from 50% to 7% and improves performance by 1% mAP on rare classes in COCO instance segmentation with YOLOv9c and YOLO11m. Furthermore, Gen-n-Val shows significant improvements (7. 1% mAP) over YOLO-Worldv2-M in open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks with YOLO11m. Moreover, Gen-n-Val improves the performance of YOLOv9 and YOLO11 families in instance segmentation and object detection.
Authors:Negin Baghbanzadeh, Sajad Ashkezari, Elham Dolatabadi, Arash Afkanpour
Abstract:
Compound figures, which are multi-panel composites containing diverse subfigures, are ubiquitous in biomedical literature, yet large-scale subfigure extraction remains largely unaddressed. Prior work on subfigure extraction has been limited in both dataset size and generalizability, leaving a critical open question: How does high-fidelity image-text alignment via large-scale subfigure extraction impact representation learning in vision-language models? We address this gap by introducing a scalable subfigure extraction pipeline based on transformer-based object detection, trained on a synthetic corpus of 500,000 compound figures, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on both ImageCLEF 2016 and synthetic benchmarks. Using this pipeline, we release OPEN-PMC-18M, a large-scale high quality biomedical vision-language dataset comprising 18 million clinically relevant subfigure-caption pairs spanning radiology, microscopy, and visible light photography. We train and evaluate vision-language models on our curated datasets and show improved performance across retrieval, zero-shot classification, and robustness benchmarks, outperforming existing baselines. We release our dataset, models, and code to support reproducible benchmarks and further study into biomedical vision-language modeling and representation learning.
Authors:Yichen Li, Qiankun Liu, Zhenchao Jin, Jiuzhe Wei, Jing Nie, Ying Fu
Abstract:
Small object detection in intricate environments has consistently represented a major challenge in the field of object detection. In this paper, we identify that this difficulty stems from the detectors' inability to effectively learn discriminative features for objects of small size, compounded by the complexity of selecting high-quality small object samples during training, which motivates the proposal of the Multi-Clue Assignment and Feature Enhancement R-CNN.Specifically, MAFE R-CNN integrates two pivotal components.The first is the Multi-Clue Sample Selection (MCSS) strategy, in which the Intersection over Union (IoU) distance, predicted category confidence, and ground truth region sizes are leveraged as informative clues in the sample selection process. This methodology facilitates the selection of diverse positive samples and ensures a balanced distribution of object sizes during training, thereby promoting effective model learning.The second is the Category-aware Feature Enhancement Mechanism (CFEM), where we propose a simple yet effective category-aware memory module to explore the relationships among object features. Subsequently, we enhance the object feature representation by facilitating the interaction between category-aware features and candidate box features.Comprehensive experiments conducted on the large-scale small object dataset SODA validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Daniel A. P. Oliveira, David Martins de Matos
Abstract:
Visual storytelling systems struggle to maintain character identity across frames and link actions to appropriate subjects, frequently leading to referential hallucinations. These issues can be addressed through grounding of characters, objects, and other entities on the visual elements. We propose StoryReasoning, a dataset containing 4,178 stories derived from 52,016 movie images, with both structured scene analyses and grounded stories. Each story maintains character and object consistency across frames while explicitly modeling multi-frame relationships through structured tabular representations. Our approach features cross-frame object re-identification using visual similarity and face recognition, chain-of-thought reasoning for explicit narrative modeling, and a grounding scheme that links textual elements to visual entities across multiple frames. We establish baseline performance by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL 7B, creating Qwen Storyteller, which performs end-to-end object detection, re-identification, and landmark detection while maintaining consistent object references throughout the story. Evaluation demonstrates a reduction from 4.06 to 3.56 (-12.3%) hallucinations on average per story and an improvement in creativity from 2.58 to 3.38 (+31.0%) when compared to a non-fine-tuned model.
Authors:Reihaneh Mirjalili, Tobias Jülg, Florian Walter, Wolfram Burgard
Abstract:
Visuomotor policies trained on human expert demonstrations have recently shown strong performance across a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks. However, these policies remain highly sensitive to domain shifts stemming from background or robot embodiment changes, which limits their generalization capabilities. In this paper, we present ARRO, a novel calibration-free visual representation that leverages zero-shot open-vocabulary segmentation and object detection models to efficiently mask out task-irrelevant regions of the scene without requiring additional training. By filtering visual distractors and overlaying virtual guides during both training and inference, ARRO improves robustness to scene variations and reduces the need for additional data collection. We extensively evaluate ARRO with Diffusion Policy on several tabletop manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world environments, and further demonstrate its compatibility and effectiveness with generalist robot policies, such as Octo and OpenVLA. Across all settings in our evaluation, ARRO yields consistent performance gains, allows for selective masking to choose between different objects, and shows robustness even to challenging segmentation conditions. Videos showcasing our results are available at: augmented-reality-for-robots.github.io
Authors:Majid Behravan, Maryam Haghani, Denis Gracanin
Abstract:
Traditional 3D modeling requires technical expertise, specialized software, and time-intensive processes, making it inaccessible for many users. Our research aims to lower these barriers by combining generative AI and augmented reality (AR) into a cohesive system that allows users to easily generate, manipulate, and interact with 3D models in real time, directly within AR environments. Utilizing cutting-edge AI models like Shap-E, we address the complex challenges of transforming 2D images into 3D representations in AR environments. Key challenges such as object isolation, handling intricate backgrounds, and achieving seamless user interaction are tackled through advanced object detection methods, such as Mask R-CNN. Evaluation results from 35 participants reveal an overall System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 69.64, with participants who engaged with AR/VR technologies more frequently rating the system significantly higher, at 80.71. This research is particularly relevant for applications in gaming, education, and AR-based e-commerce, offering intuitive, model creation for users without specialized skills.
Authors:Brian K. S. Isaac-Medina, Toby P. Breckon
Abstract:
Deep neural networks have demonstrated great generalization capabilities for tasks whose training and test sets are drawn from the same distribution. Nevertheless, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains a challenging task that has received significant attention in recent years. Specifically, OOD detection refers to the detection of instances that do not belong to the training distribution, while still having good performance on the in-distribution task (e.g., classification or object detection). Recent work has focused on generating synthetic outliers and using them to train an outlier detector, generally achieving improved OOD detection than traditional OOD methods. In this regard, outliers can be generated either in feature or pixel space. Feature space driven methods have shown strong performance on both the classification and object detection tasks, at the expense that the visualization of training outliers remains unknown, making further analysis on OOD failure modes challenging. On the other hand, pixel space outlier generation techniques enabled by diffusion models have been used for image classification using, providing improved OOD detection performance and outlier visualization, although their adaption to the object detection task is as yet unexplored. We therefore introduce Dream-Box, a method that provides a link to object-wise outlier generation in the pixel space for OOD detection. Specifically, we use diffusion models to generate object-wise outliers that are used to train an object detector for an in-distribution task and OOD detection. Our method achieves comparable performance to previous traditional methods while being the first technique to provide concrete visualization of generated OOD objects.
Authors:Yin Tang, Jiankai Li, Hongyu Yang, Xuan Dong, Lifeng Fan, Weixin Li
Abstract:
In an era where social media platforms abound, individuals frequently share images that offer insights into their intents and interests, impacting individual life quality and societal stability. Traditional computer vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation, focus on concrete visual representations, while intent recognition relies more on implicit visual clues. This poses challenges due to the wide variation and subjectivity of such clues, compounded by the problem of intra-class variety in conveying abstract concepts, e.g. "enjoy life". Existing methods seek to solve the problem by manually designing representative features or building prototypes for each class from global features. However, these methods still struggle to deal with the large visual diversity of each intent category. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach named Multi-grained Compositional visual Clue Learning (MCCL) to address these challenges for image intent recognition. Our method leverages the systematic compositionality of human cognition by breaking down intent recognition into visual clue composition and integrating multi-grained features. We adopt class-specific prototypes to alleviate data imbalance. We treat intent recognition as a multi-label classification problem, using a graph convolutional network to infuse prior knowledge through label embedding correlations. Demonstrated by a state-of-the-art performance on the Intentonomy and MDID datasets, our approach advances the accuracy of existing methods while also possessing good interpretability. Our work provides an attempt for future explorations in understanding complex and miscellaneous forms of human expression.
Authors:Jens Petersen, Davide Abati, Amirhossein Habibian, Auke Wiggers
Abstract:
Generative image models are increasingly being used for training data augmentation in vision tasks. In the context of automotive object detection, methods usually focus on producing augmented frames that look as realistic as possible, for example by replacing real objects with generated ones. Others try to maximize the diversity of augmented frames, for example by pasting lots of generated objects onto existing backgrounds. Both perspectives pay little attention to the locations of objects in the scene. Frame layouts are either reused with little or no modification, or they are random and disregard realism entirely. In this work, we argue that optimal data augmentation should also include realistic augmentation of layouts. We introduce a scene-aware probabilistic location model that predicts where new objects can realistically be placed in an existing scene. By then inpainting objects in these locations with a generative model, we obtain much stronger augmentation performance than existing approaches. We set a new state of the art for generative data augmentation on two automotive object detection tasks, achieving up to $2.8\times$ higher gains than the best competing approach ($+1.4$ vs. $+0.5$ mAP boost). We also demonstrate significant improvements for instance segmentation.
Authors:Farhad G. Zanjani, Davide Abati, Auke Wiggers, Dimitris Kalatzis, Jens Petersen, Hong Cai, Amirhossein Habibian
Abstract:
We investigate data augmentation for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. We utilize recent advancements in 3D reconstruction based on Gaussian Splatting for 3D object placement in driving scenes. Unlike existing diffusion-based methods that synthesize images conditioned on BEV layouts, our approach places 3D objects directly in the reconstructed 3D space with explicitly imposed geometric transformations. This ensures both the physical plausibility of object placement and highly accurate 3D pose and position annotations.
Our experiments demonstrate that even by integrating a limited number of external 3D objects into real scenes, the augmented data significantly enhances 3D object detection performance and outperforms existing diffusion-based 3D augmentation for object detection. Extensive testing on the nuScenes dataset reveals that imposing high geometric diversity in object placement has a greater impact compared to the appearance diversity of objects. Additionally, we show that generating hard examples, either by maximizing detection loss or imposing high visual occlusion in camera images, does not lead to more efficient 3D data augmentation for camera-based 3D object detection in autonomous driving.
Authors:Murat Bilgehan Ertan, Ronak Sahu, Phuong Ha Nguyen, Kaleel Mahmood, Marten van Dijk
Abstract:
We introduce ROAR (Robust Object Removal and Re-annotation), a scalable framework for privacy-preserving dataset obfuscation that eliminates sensitive objects instead of modifying them. Our method integrates instance segmentation with generative inpainting to remove identifiable entities while preserving scene integrity. Extensive evaluations on 2D COCO-based object detection show that ROAR achieves 87.5% of the baseline detection average precision (AP), whereas image dropping achieves only 74.2% of the baseline AP, highlighting the advantage of scrubbing in preserving dataset utility. The degradation is even more severe for small objects due to occlusion and loss of fine-grained details. Furthermore, in NeRF-based 3D reconstruction, our method incurs a PSNR loss of at most 1.66 dB while maintaining SSIM and improving LPIPS, demonstrating superior perceptual quality. Our findings establish object removal as an effective privacy framework, achieving strong privacy guarantees with minimal performance trade-offs. The results highlight key challenges in generative inpainting, occlusion-robust segmentation, and task-specific scrubbing, setting the foundation for future advancements in privacy-preserving vision systems.
Authors:Songze Li, Qixing Xu, Tonghua Su, Xu-Yao Zhang, Zhongjie Wang
Abstract:
The balance between stability and plasticity remains a fundamental challenge in pretrained model-based incremental object detection (PTMIOD). While existing PTMIOD methods demonstrate strong performance on in-domain tasks aligned with pretraining data, their plasticity to cross-domain scenarios remains underexplored. Through systematic component-wise analysis of pretrained detectors, we reveal a fundamental discrepancy: the localization modules demonstrate inherent cross-domain stability-preserving precise bounding box estimation across distribution shifts-while the classification components require enhanced plasticity to mitigate discriminability degradation in cross-domain scenarios. Motivated by these findings, we propose a dual-path framework built upon pretrained DETR-based detectors which decouples localization stability and classification plasticity: the localization path maintains stability to preserve pretrained localization knowledge, while the classification path facilitates plasticity via parameter-efficient fine-tuning and resists forgetting with pseudo-feature replay. Extensive evaluations on both in-domain (MS COCO and PASCAL VOC) and cross-domain (TT100K) benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating our method's ability to effectively balance stability and plasticity in PTMIOD, achieving robust cross-domain adaptation and strong retention of anti-forgetting capabilities.
Authors:Chenyang Zhao, Jia Wan, Antoni B. Chan
Abstract:
Compared with the generic scenes, crowded scenes contain highly-overlapped instances, which result in: 1) more ambiguous anchors during training of object detectors, and 2) more predictions are likely to be mistakenly suppressed in post-processing during inference. To address these problems, we propose two new strategies, density-guided anchors (DGA) and density-guided NMS (DG-NMS), which uses object density maps to jointly compute optimal anchor assignments and reweighing, as well as an adaptive NMS. Concretely, based on an unbalanced optimal transport (UOT) problem, the density owned by each ground-truth object is transported to each anchor position at a minimal transport cost. And density on anchors comprises an instance-specific density distribution, from which DGA decodes the optimal anchor assignment and re-weighting strategy. Meanwhile, DG-NMS utilizes the predicted density map to adaptively adjust the NMS threshold to reduce mistaken suppressions. In the UOT, a novel overlap-aware transport cost is specifically designed for ambiguous anchors caused by overlapped neighboring objects. Extensive experiments on the challenging CrowdHuman dataset with Citypersons dataset demonstrate that our proposed density-guided detector is effective and robust to crowdedness. The code and pre-trained models will be made available later.
Authors:Leiye Liu, Miao Zhang, Jihao Yin, Tingwei Liu, Wei Ji, Yongri Piao, Huchuan Lu
Abstract:
Recently, state space models (SSM), particularly Mamba, have attracted significant attention from scholars due to their ability to effectively balance computational efficiency and performance. However, most existing visual Mamba methods flatten images into 1D sequences using predefined scan orders, which results the model being less capable of utilizing the spatial structural information of the image during the feature extraction process. To address this issue, we proposed a novel visual foundation model called DefMamba. This model includes a multi-scale backbone structure and deformable mamba (DM) blocks, which dynamically adjust the scanning path to prioritize important information, thus enhancing the capture and processing of relevant input features. By combining a deformable scanning(DS) strategy, this model significantly improves its ability to learn image structures and detects changes in object details. Numerous experiments have shown that DefMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance in various visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The code is open source on DefMamba.
Authors:Ruixiao Zhang, Runwei Guan, Xiangyu Chen, Adam Prugel-Bennett, Xiaohao Cai
Abstract:
3D object detection aims to predict object centers, dimensions, and rotations from LiDAR point clouds. Despite its simplicity, LiDAR captures only the near side of objects, making center-based detectors prone to poor localization accuracy in cross-domain tasks with varying point distributions. Meanwhile, existing evaluation metrics designed for single-domain assessment also suffer from overfitting due to dataset-specific size variations. A key question arises: Do we really need models to maintain excellent performance in the entire 3D bounding boxes after being applied across domains? Actually, one of our main focuses is on preventing collisions between vehicles and other obstacles, especially in cross-domain scenarios where correctly predicting the sizes is much more difficult. To address these issues, we rethink cross-domain 3D object detection from a practical perspective. We propose two new metrics that evaluate a model's ability to detect objects' closer-surfaces to the LiDAR sensor. Additionally, we introduce EdgeHead, a refinement head that guides models to focus more on learnable closer surfaces, significantly improving cross-domain performance under both our new and traditional BEV/3D metrics. Furthermore, we argue that predicting the nearest corner rather than the object center enhances robustness. We propose a novel 3D object detector, coined as CornerPoint3D, which is built upon CenterPoint and uses heatmaps to supervise the learning and detection of the nearest corner of each object. Our proposed methods realize a balanced trade-off between the detection quality of entire bounding boxes and the locating accuracy of closer surfaces to the LiDAR sensor, outperforming the traditional center-based detector CenterPoint in multiple cross-domain tasks and providing a more practically reasonable and robust cross-domain 3D object detection solution.
Authors:Martin KiÅ¡Å¡, Michal HradiÅ¡, Martina DvoÅáková, Václav JirouÅ¡ek, Filip Kersch
Abstract:
We introduce the AnnoPage Dataset, a novel collection of 7,550 pages from historical documents, primarily in Czech and German, spanning from 1485 to the present, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dataset is designed to support research in document layout analysis and object detection. Each page is annotated with axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) representing elements of 25 categories of non-textual elements, such as images, maps, decorative elements, or charts, following the Czech Methodology of image document processing. The annotations were created by expert librarians to ensure accuracy and consistency. The dataset also incorporates pages from multiple, mainly historical, document datasets to enhance variability and maintain continuity. The dataset is divided into development and test subsets, with the test set carefully selected to maintain the category distribution. We provide baseline results using YOLO and DETR object detectors, offering a reference point for future research. The AnnoPage Dataset is publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12788419), along with ground-truth annotations in YOLO format.
Authors:Christian Steinhauser, Philipp Reis, Hubert Padusinski, Jacob Langner, Eric Sax
Abstract:
Precise perception of the environment is essential in highly automated driving systems, which rely on machine learning tasks such as object detection and segmentation. Compression of sensor data is commonly used for data handling, while virtualization is used for hardware-in-the-loop validation. Both methods can alter sensor data and degrade model performance. This necessitates a systematic approach to quantifying image validity. This paper presents a four-step framework to evaluate the impact of image modifications on machine learning tasks. First, a dataset with modified images is prepared to ensure one-to-one matching image pairs, enabling measurement of deviations resulting from compression and virtualization. Second, image deviations are quantified by comparing the effects of compression and virtualization against original camera-based sensor data. Third, the performance of state-of-the-art object detection models is analyzed to determine how altered input data affects perception tasks, including bounding box accuracy and reliability. Finally, a correlation analysis is performed to identify relationships between image quality and model performance. As a result, the LPIPS metric achieves the highest correlation between image deviation and machine learning performance across all evaluated machine learning tasks.
Authors:Davide Antonio Mura, Michela Pinna, Lorenzo Putzu, Andrea Loddo, Alessandra Perniciano, Olga Mulas, Cecilia Di Ruberto
Abstract:
The detection of blood disorders often hinges upon the quantification of specific blood cell types. Variations in cell counts may indicate the presence of pathological conditions. Thus, the significance of developing precise automatic systems for blood cell enumeration is underscored. The investigation focuses on a novel approach termed DE-ViT. This methodology is employed in a Few-Shot paradigm, wherein training relies on a limited number of images. Two distinct datasets are utilised for experimental purposes: the Raabin-WBC dataset for Leukocyte detection and a local dataset for Schistocyte identification. In addition to the DE-ViT model, two baseline models, Faster R-CNN 50 and Faster R-CNN X 101, are employed, with their outcomes being compared against those of the proposed model. While DE-ViT has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on the COCO and LVIS datasets, both baseline models surpassed its performance on the Raabin-WBC dataset. Moreover, only Faster R-CNN X 101 yielded satisfactory results on the SC-IDB. The observed disparities in performance may possibly be attributed to domain shift phenomena.
Authors:Chuanchao Gao, Arvind Easwaran
Abstract:
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising paradigm enabling vehicles to handle computation-intensive and time-sensitive applications for intelligent transportation. Due to the limited resources in MEC, effective resource management is crucial for improving system performance. While existing studies mostly focus on the job offloading problem and assume that job resource demands are fixed and given apriori, the joint consideration of job offloading (selecting the edge server for each job) and resource allocation (determining the bandwidth and computation resources for offloading and processing) remains underexplored. This paper addresses the joint problem for deadline-constrained jobs in MEC with both communication and computation resource constraints, aiming to maximize the total utility gained from jobs. To tackle this problem, we propose an approximation algorithm, $\mathtt{IDAssign}$, with an approximation bound of $\frac{1}{6}$, and experimentally evaluate the performance of $\mathtt{IDAssign}$ by comparing it to state-of-the-art heuristics using a real-world taxi trace and object detection applications.
Authors:Majid Behravan, Denis Gracanin
Abstract:
This paper presents Matrix, an advanced AI-powered framework designed for real-time 3D object generation in Augmented Reality (AR) environments. By integrating a cutting-edge text-to-3D generative AI model, multilingual speech-to-text translation, and large language models (LLMs), the system enables seamless user interactions through spoken commands. The framework processes speech inputs, generates 3D objects, and provides object recommendations based on contextual understanding, enhancing AR experiences. A key feature of this framework is its ability to optimize 3D models by reducing mesh complexity, resulting in significantly smaller file sizes and faster processing on resource-constrained AR devices. Our approach addresses the challenges of high GPU usage, large model output sizes, and real-time system responsiveness, ensuring a smoother user experience. Moreover, the system is equipped with a pre-generated object repository, further reducing GPU load and improving efficiency. We demonstrate the practical applications of this framework in various fields such as education, design, and accessibility, and discuss future enhancements including image-to-3D conversion, environmental object detection, and multimodal support. The open-source nature of the framework promotes ongoing innovation and its utility across diverse industries.
Authors:Chuhan Zhang, Chaoyang Zhu, Pingcheng Dong, Long Chen, Dong Zhang
Abstract:
In pursuit of detecting unstinted objects that extend beyond predefined categories, prior arts of open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) typically resort to pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) for base-to-novel category generalization. However, to mitigate the misalignment between upstream image-text pretraining and downstream region-level perception, additional supervisions are indispensable, eg, image-text pairs or pseudo annotations generated via self-training strategies. In this work, we propose CCKT-Det trained without any extra supervision. The proposed framework constructs a cyclic and dynamic knowledge transfer from language queries and visual region features extracted from VLMs, which forces the detector to closely align with the visual-semantic space of VLMs. Specifically, 1) we prefilter and inject semantic priors to guide the learning of queries, and 2) introduce a regional contrastive loss to improve the awareness of queries on novel objects. CCKT-Det can consistently improve performance as the scale of VLMs increases, all while requiring the detector at a moderate level of computation overhead. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance gain of +2.9% and +10.2% AP50 over previous state-of-the-arts on the challenging COCO benchmark, both without and with a stronger teacher model.
Authors:Youjun Zhao, Jiaying Lin, Rynson W. H. Lau
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary 3D object detection (OV-3DOD) aims at localizing and classifying novel objects beyond closed sets. The recent success of vision-language models (VLMs) has demonstrated their remarkable capabilities to understand open vocabularies. Existing works that leverage VLMs for 3D object detection (3DOD) generally resort to representations that lose the rich scene context required for 3D perception. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a hierarchical framework, named HCMA, to simultaneously learn local object and global scene information for OV-3DOD. Specifically, we first design a Hierarchical Data Integration (HDI) approach to obtain coarse-to-fine 3D-image-text data, which is fed into a VLM to extract object-centric knowledge. To facilitate the association of feature hierarchies, we then propose an Interactive Cross-Modal Alignment (ICMA) strategy to establish effective intra-level and inter-level feature connections. To better align features across different levels, we further propose an Object-Focusing Context Adjustment (OFCA) module to refine multi-level features by emphasizing object-related features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms SOTA methods on the existing OV-3DOD benchmarks. It also achieves promising OV-3DOD results even without any 3D annotations.
Authors:Haiyang Xie, Xi Shen, Shihua Huang, Qirui Wang, Zheng Wang
Abstract:
Most visual models are designed for sRGB images, yet RAW data offers significant advantages for object detection by preserving sensor information before ISP processing. This enables improved detection accuracy and more efficient hardware designs by bypassing the ISP. However, RAW object detection is challenging due to limited training data, unbalanced pixel distributions, and sensor noise. To address this, we propose SimROD, a lightweight and effective approach for RAW object detection. We introduce a Global Gamma Enhancement (GGE) module, which applies a learnable global gamma transformation with only four parameters, improving feature representation while keeping the model efficient. Additionally, we leverage the green channel's richer signal to enhance local details, aligning with the human eye's sensitivity and Bayer filter design. Extensive experiments on multiple RAW object detection datasets and detectors demonstrate that SimROD outperforms state-of-the-art methods like RAW-Adapter and DIAP while maintaining efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of RAW data for real-world object detection. Code is available at https://ocean146.github.io/SimROD2025/.
Authors:S M A Sharif, Abdur Rehman, Zain Ul Abidin, Fayaz Ali Dharejo, Radu Timofte, Rizwan Ali Naqvi
Abstract:
Single-shot low-light image enhancement (SLLIE) remains challenging due to the limited availability of diverse, real-world paired datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Low-Light Smartphone Dataset (LSD), a large-scale, high-resolution (4K+) dataset collected in the wild across a wide range of challenging lighting conditions (0.1 to 200 lux). LSD contains 6,425 precisely aligned low and normal-light image pairs, selected from over 8,000 dynamic indoor and outdoor scenes through multi-frame acquisition and expert evaluation. To evaluate generalization and aesthetic quality, we collect 2,117 unpaired low-light images from previously unseen devices. To fully exploit LSD, we propose TFFormer, a hybrid model that encodes luminance and chrominance (LC) separately to reduce color-structure entanglement. We further propose a cross-attention-driven joint decoder for context-aware fusion of LC representations, along with LC refinement and LC-guided supervision to significantly enhance perceptual fidelity and structural consistency. TFFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on LSD (+2.45 dB PSNR) and substantially improves downstream vision tasks, such as low-light object detection (+6.80 mAP on ExDark).
Authors:Badhan Chandra Das, M. Hadi Amini, Yanzhao Wu
Abstract:
Object detection in videos plays a crucial role in advancing applications such as public safety and anomaly detection. Existing methods have explored different techniques, including CNN, deep learning, and Transformers, for object detection and video classification. However, detecting tiny objects, e.g., guns, in videos remains challenging due to their small scale and varying appearances in complex scenes. Moreover, existing video analysis models for classification or detection often perform poorly in real-world gun detection scenarios due to limited labeled video datasets for training. Thus, developing efficient methods for effectively capturing tiny object features and designing models capable of accurate gun detection in real-world videos is imperative. To address these challenges, we make three original contributions in this paper. First, we conduct an empirical study of several existing video classification and object detection methods to identify guns in videos. Our extensive analysis shows that these methods may not accurately detect guns in videos. Second, we propose a novel two-stage gun detection method. In stage 1, we train an image-augmented model to effectively classify ``Gun'' videos. To make the detection more precise and efficient, stage 2 employs an object detection model to locate the exact region of the gun within video frames for videos classified as ``Gun'' by stage 1. Third, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed domain-specific method achieves significant performance improvements and enhances efficiency compared with existing techniques. We also discuss challenges and future research directions in gun detection tasks in computer vision.
Authors:Chupeng Liu, Runkai Zhao, Weidong Cai
Abstract:
Weakly supervised monocular 3D detection, while less annotation-intensive, often struggles to capture the global context required for reliable 3D reasoning. Conventional label-efficient methods focus on object-centric features, neglecting contextual semantic relationships that are critical in complex scenes. In this work, we propose a Context-Aware Weak Supervision for Monocular 3D object detection, namely CA-W3D, to address this limitation in a two-stage training paradigm. Specifically, we first introduce a pre-training stage employing Region-wise Object Contrastive Matching (ROCM), which aligns regional object embeddings derived from a trainable monocular 3D encoder and a frozen open-vocabulary 2D visual grounding model. This alignment encourages the monocular encoder to discriminate scene-specific attributes and acquire richer contextual knowledge. In the second stage, we incorporate a pseudo-label training process with a Dual-to-One Distillation (D2OD) mechanism, which effectively transfers contextual priors into the monocular encoder while preserving spatial fidelity and maintaining computational efficiency during inference. Extensive experiments conducted on the public KITTI benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing the SoTA method over all metrics, highlighting the importance of contextual-aware knowledge in weakly-supervised monocular 3D detection.
Authors:Gargi Panda, Soumitra Kundu, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) in RGB-D images is an essential task in computer vision, enabling applications in scene understanding, robotics, and augmented reality. However, existing methods struggle to capture global dependency across modalities, lack comprehensive saliency priors from both RGB and depth data, and are ineffective in handling low-quality depth maps. To address these challenges, we propose SSNet, a saliency-prior and state space model (SSM)-based network for the RGB-D SOD task. Unlike existing convolution- or transformer-based approaches, SSNet introduces an SSM-based multi-modal multi-scale decoder module to efficiently capture both intra- and inter-modal global dependency with linear complexity. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal selective scan SSM (CM-S6) mechanism, which effectively captures global dependency between different modalities. Furthermore, we introduce a saliency enhancement module (SEM) that integrates three saliency priors with deep features to refine feature representation and improve the localization of salient objects. To further address the issue of low-quality depth maps, we propose an adaptive contrast enhancement technique that dynamically refines depth maps, making them more suitable for the RGB-D SOD task. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that SSNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Lucas Rey, Ana M. Bernardos, Andrzej D. Dobrzycki, David Carramiñana, Luca Bergesio, Juan A. Besada, José Ramón Casar
Abstract:
Advancements in embedded systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enhanced the capabilities of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) in computer vision. However, the integration of AI techniques o-nboard drones is constrained by their processing capabilities. In this sense, this study evaluates the deployment of object detection models (YOLOv8n and YOLOv8s) on both resource-constrained edge devices and cloud environments. The objective is to carry out a comparative performance analysis using a representative real-time UAV image processing pipeline. Specifically, the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, Orin NX, and Raspberry Pi 5 (RPI5) devices have been tested to measure their detection accuracy, inference speed, and energy consumption, and the effects of post-training quantization (PTQ). The results show that YOLOv8n surpasses YOLOv8s in its inference speed, achieving 52 FPS on the Jetson Orin NX and 65 fps with INT8 quantization. Conversely, the RPI5 failed to satisfy the real-time processing needs in spite of its suitability for low-energy consumption applications. An analysis of both the cloud-based and edge-based end-to-end processing times showed that increased communication latencies hindered real-time applications, revealing trade-offs between edge (low latency) and cloud processing (quick processing). Overall, these findings contribute to providing recommendations and optimization strategies for the deployment of AI models on UAVs.
Authors:Ai Chen, Yuxu Lu, Dong Yang, Junlin Zhou, Yan Fu, Duanbing Chen
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) plays a critical role in Intelligent Imaging, facilitating the detection and segmentation of key visual elements in an image. However, adverse imaging conditions such as haze during the day, low light, and haze at night severely degrade image quality and hinder reliable object detection in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-knowledge-oriented nighttime haze imaging enhancer (MKoIE), which integrates three tasks: daytime dehazing, low-light enhancement, and nighttime dehazing. The MKoIE incorporates two key innovative components: First, the network employs a task-oriented node learning mechanism to handle three specific degradation types: day-time haze, low light, and night-time haze conditions, with an embedded self-attention module enhancing its performance in nighttime imaging. In addition, multi-receptive field enhancement module that efficiently extracts multi-scale features through three parallel depthwise separable convolution branches with different dilation rates, capturing comprehensive spatial information with minimal computational overhead to meet the requirements of real-time imaging deployment. To ensure optimal image reconstruction quality and visual characteristics, we suggest a hybrid loss function. Extensive experiments on different types of weather/imaging conditions illustrate that MKoIE surpasses existing methods, enhancing the reliability, accuracy, and operational efficiency of intelligent imaging.
Authors:Naor Cohen, Roy Orfaig, Ben-Zion Bobrovsky
Abstract:
Efforts to connect LiDAR data with text, such as LidarCLIP, have primarily focused on embedding 3D point clouds into CLIP text-image space. However, these approaches rely on 3D point clouds, which present challenges in encoding efficiency and neural network processing. With the advent of advanced LiDAR sensors like Ouster OS1, which, in addition to 3D point clouds, produce fixed resolution depth, signal, and ambient panoramic 2D images, new opportunities emerge for LiDAR based tasks. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to connect LiDAR data with text by leveraging 2D imagery generated by the OS1 sensor instead of 3D point clouds. Using the Florence 2 large model in a zero-shot setting, we perform image captioning and object detection. Our experiments demonstrate that Florence 2 generates more informative captions and achieves superior performance in object detection tasks compared to existing methods like CLIP. By combining advanced LiDAR sensor data with a large pre-trained model, our approach provides a robust and accurate solution for challenging detection scenarios, including real-time applications requiring high accuracy and robustness.
Authors:Yanbiao Ma, Wei Dai, Jiayi Chen
Abstract:
In object detection, the instance count is typically used to define whether a dataset exhibits a long-tail distribution, implicitly assuming that models will underperform on categories with fewer instances. This assumption has led to extensive research on category bias in datasets with imbalanced instance counts. However, models still exhibit category bias even in datasets where instance counts are relatively balanced, clearly indicating that instance count alone cannot explain this phenomenon. In this work, we first introduce the concept and measurement of category information amount. We observe a significant negative correlation between category information amount and accuracy, suggesting that category information amount more accurately reflects the learning difficulty of a category. Based on this observation, we propose Information Amount-Guided Angular Margin (IGAM) Loss. The core idea of IGAM is to dynamically adjust the decision space of each category based on its information amount, thereby reducing category bias in long-tail datasets. IGAM Loss not only performs well on long-tailed benchmark datasets such as LVIS v1.0 and COCO-LT but also shows significant improvement for underrepresented categories in the non-long-tailed dataset Pascal VOC. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the potential of category information amount as a tool and the generality of our proposed method.
Authors:Indrashis Das, Mahmoud Safari, Steven Adriaensen, Frank Hutter
Abstract:
Activation functions are fundamental elements of deep learning architectures as they significantly influence training dynamics. ReLU, while widely used, is prone to the dying neuron problem, which has been mitigated by variants such as LeakyReLU, PReLU, and ELU that better handle negative neuron outputs. Recently, self-gated activations like GELU and Swish have emerged as state-of-the-art alternatives, leveraging their smoothness to ensure stable gradient flow and prevent neuron inactivity. In this work, we introduce the Gompertz Linear Unit (GoLU), a novel self-gated activation function defined as $\mathrm{GoLU}(x) = x \, \mathrm{Gompertz}(x)$, where $\mathrm{Gompertz}(x) = e^{-e^{-x}}$. The GoLU activation leverages the right-skewed asymmetry in the Gompertz function to reduce variance in the latent space more effectively compared to GELU and Swish, while preserving robust gradient flow. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including Image Classification, Language Modeling, Semantic Segmentation, Object Detection, Instance Segmentation, and Diffusion, highlight GoLU's superior performance relative to state-of-the-art activation functions, establishing GoLU as a robust alternative to existing activation functions.
Authors:Conor Wallace, Isaac Corley, Jonathan Lwowski
Abstract:
Maintaining the integrity of solar power plants is a vital component in dealing with the current climate crisis. This process begins with analysts creating a detailed map of a plant with the coordinates of every solar panel, making it possible to quickly locate and mitigate potential faulty solar panels. However, this task is extremely tedious and is not scalable for the ever increasing capacity of solar power across the globe. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for detecting individual solar panels using a rotated object detection architecture. We evaluate our approach on a diverse dataset of solar power plants collected from across the United States and report a mAP score of 83.3%.
Authors:Muhammad Shahbaz, Shaurya Agarwal
Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep-learning methods for object detection in point-cloud data have enabled numerous roadside applications, fostering improvements in transportation safety and management. However, the intricate nature of point-cloud data poses significant challenges for human-supervised labeling, resulting in substantial expenditures of time and capital. This paper addresses the issue by developing an end-to-end, scalable, and self-supervised framework for training deep object detectors tailored for roadside point-cloud data. The proposed framework leverages self-supervised, statistically modeled teachers to train off-the-shelf deep object detectors, thus circumventing the need for human supervision. The teacher models follow fine-tuned set standard practices of background filtering, object clustering, bounding-box fitting, and classification to generate noisy labels. It is presented that by training the student model over the combined noisy annotations from multitude of teachers enhances its capacity to discern background/foreground more effectively and forces it to learn diverse point-cloud-representations for object categories of interest. The evaluations, involving publicly available roadside datasets and state-of-art deep object detectors, demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves comparable performance to deep object detectors trained on human-annotated labels, despite not utilizing such human-annotations in its training process.
Authors:Santiago Cepeda, Olga Esteban-Sinovas, Roberto Romero, Vikas Singh, Prakash Shetty, Aliasgar Moiyadi, Ilyess Zemmoura, Giuseppe Roberto Giammalva, Massimiliano Del Bene, Arianna Barbotti, Francesco DiMeco, Timothy R. West, Brian V. Nahed, Ignacio Arrese, Roberto Hornero, Rosario Sarabia
Abstract:
Intraoperative ultrasound (ioUS) is a valuable tool in brain tumor surgery due to its versatility, affordability, and seamless integration into the surgical workflow. However, its adoption remains limited, primarily because of the challenges associated with image interpretation and the steep learning curve required for effective use. This study aimed to enhance the interpretability of ioUS images by developing a real-time brain tumor detection system deployable in the operating room. We collected 2D ioUS images from the Brain Tumor Intraoperative Database (BraTioUS) and the public ReMIND dataset, annotated with expert-refined tumor labels. Using the YOLO11 architecture and its variants, we trained object detection models to identify brain tumors. The dataset included 1,732 images from 192 patients, divided into training, validation, and test sets. Data augmentation expanded the training set to 11,570 images. In the test dataset, YOLO11s achieved the best balance of precision and computational efficiency, with a mAP@50 of 0.95, mAP@50-95 of 0.65, and a processing speed of 34.16 frames per second. The proposed solution was prospectively validated in a cohort of 15 consecutively operated patients diagnosed with brain tumors. Neurosurgeons confirmed its seamless integration into the surgical workflow, with real-time predictions accurately delineating tumor regions. These findings highlight the potential of real-time object detection algorithms to enhance ioUS-guided brain tumor surgery, addressing key challenges in interpretation and providing a foundation for future development of computer vision-based tools for neuro-oncological surgery.
Authors:Timothy Chase, Christopher Wilson, Karthik Dantu
Abstract:
The in-situ detection of planetary, lunar, and small-body surface terrain is crucial for autonomous spacecraft applications, where learning-based computer vision methods are increasingly employed to enable intelligence without prior information or human intervention. However, many of these methods remain computationally expensive for spacecraft processors and prevent real-time operation. Training of such algorithms is additionally complex due to the scarcity of labeled data and reliance on supervised learning approaches. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) offers a promising solution by facilitating model training with disparate data sources such as simulations or synthetic scenes, although UDA is difficult to apply to celestial environments where challenging feature spaces are paramount. To alleviate such issues, You Only Crash Once (YOCOv1) has studied the integration of Visual Similarity-based Alignment (VSA) into lightweight one-stage object detection architectures to improve space terrain UDA. Although proven effective, the approach faces notable limitations, including performance degradations in multi-class and high-altitude scenarios. Building upon the foundation of YOCOv1, we propose novel additions to the VSA scheme that enhance terrain detection capabilities under UDA, and our approach is evaluated across both simulated and real-world data. Our second YOCO rendition, YOCOv2, is capable of achieving state-of-the-art UDA performance on surface terrain detection, where we showcase improvements upwards of 31% compared with YOCOv1 and terrestrial state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the practical utility of YOCOv2 with spacecraft flight hardware performance benchmarking and qualitative evaluation of NASA mission data.
Authors:Ni Li, Ryan Jacobs, Matthew Lynch, Vidit Agrawal, Kevin Field, Dane Morgan
Abstract:
Quantifying prediction uncertainty when applying object detection models to new, unlabeled datasets is critical in applied machine learning. This study introduces an approach to estimate the performance of deep learning-based object detection models for quantifying defects in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images, focusing on detecting irradiation-induced cavities in TEM images of metal alloys. We developed a random forest regression model that predicts the object detection F1 score, a statistical metric used to evaluate the ability to accurately locate and classify objects of interest. The random forest model uses features extracted from the predictions of the object detection model whose uncertainty is being quantified, enabling fast prediction on new, unlabeled images. The mean absolute error (MAE) for predicting F1 of the trained model on test data is 0.09, and the $R^2$ score is 0.77, indicating there is a significant correlation between the random forest regression model predicted and true defect detection F1 scores. The approach is shown to be robust across three distinct TEM image datasets with varying imaging and material domains. Our approach enables users to estimate the reliability of a defect detection and segmentation model predictions and assess the applicability of the model to their specific datasets, providing valuable information about possible domain shifts and whether the model needs to be fine-tuned or trained on additional data to be maximally effective for the desired use case.
Authors:Yunxiang Yang, Hao Zhen, Yongcan Huang, Jidong J. Yang
Abstract:
Existing deep learning-based object detection models perform well under daytime conditions but face significant challenges at night, primarily because they are predominantly trained on daytime images. Additionally, training with nighttime images presents another challenge: even human annotators struggle to accurately label objects in low-light conditions. This issue is particularly pronounced in transportation applications, such as detecting vehicles and other objects of interest on rural roads at night, where street lighting is often absent, and headlights may introduce undesirable glare. This study addresses these challenges by introducing a novel framework for labeling-free data augmentation, leveraging CARLA-generated synthetic data for day-to-night image style transfer. Specifically, the framework incorporates the Efficient Attention Generative Adversarial Network for realistic day-to-night style transfer and uses CARLA-generated synthetic nighttime images to help the model learn vehicle headlight effects. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework, we fine-tuned the YOLO11 model with an augmented dataset specifically curated for rural nighttime environments, achieving significant improvements in nighttime vehicle detection. This novel approach is simple yet effective, offering a scalable solution to enhance AI-based detection systems in low-visibility environments and extend the applicability of object detection models to broader real-world contexts.
Authors:Yuzhi Wu, Jun Liu, Guangfeng Jiang, Weijian Liu, Danilo Orlando
Abstract:
As a cost-effective and robust technology, automotive radar has seen steady improvement during the last years, making it an appealing complement to commonly used sensors like camera and LiDAR in autonomous driving. Radio frequency data with rich semantic information are attracting more and more attention. Most current radar-based models take radio frequency image sequences as the input. However, these models heavily rely on convolutional neural networks and leave out the spatial-temporal semantic context during the encoding stage. To solve these problems, we propose a model called Mask-RadarNet to fully utilize the hierarchical semantic features from the input radar data. Mask-RadarNet exploits the combination of interleaved convolution and attention operations to replace the traditional architecture in transformer-based models. In addition, patch shift is introduced to the Mask-RadarNet for efficient spatial-temporal feature learning. By shifting part of patches with a specific mosaic pattern in the temporal dimension, Mask-RadarNet achieves competitive performance while reducing the computational burden of the spatial-temporal modeling. In order to capture the spatial-temporal semantic contextual information, we design the class masking attention module (CMAM) in our encoder. Moreover, a lightweight auxiliary decoder is added to our model to aggregate prior maps generated from the CMAM. Experiments on the CRUW dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to some state-of-the-art radar-based object detection algorithms. With relatively lower computational complexity and fewer parameters, the proposed Mask-RadarNet achieves higher recognition accuracy for object detection in autonomous driving.
Authors:Niclas Popp, Dan Zhang, Jan Hendrik Metzen, Matthias Hein, Lukas Schott
Abstract:
While unlabeled image data is often plentiful, the costs of high-quality labels pose an important practical challenge: Which images should one select for labeling to use the annotation budget for a particular target task most effectively? To address this problem, we focus on single-pass data selection, which refers to the process of selecting all data to be annotated at once before training a downstream model. Prior methods for single-pass data selection rely on image-level representations and fail to reliably outperform random selection for object detection and segmentation. We propose Object-Focused Data Selection (OFDS) which leverages object-level features from foundation models and ensures semantic coverage of all target classes. In extensive experiments across tasks and target domains, OFDS consistently outperforms random selection and all baselines. The best results for constrained annotation budgets are obtained by combining human labels from OFDS with autolabels from foundation models. Moreover, using OFDS to select the initial labeled set for active learning yields consistent improvements
Authors:Mingda Jia, Liming Zhao, Ge Li, Yun Zheng
Abstract:
Spatial contexts, such as the backgrounds and surroundings, are considered critical in Human-Object Interaction (HOI) recognition, especially when the instance-centric foreground is blurred or occluded. Recent advancements in HOI detectors are usually built upon detection transformer pipelines. While such an object-detection-oriented paradigm shows promise in localizing objects, its exploration of spatial context is often insufficient for accurately recognizing human actions. To enhance the capabilities of object detectors for HOI detection, we present a dual-branch framework named ContextHOI, which efficiently captures both object detection features and spatial contexts. In the context branch, we train the model to extract informative spatial context without requiring additional hand-craft background labels. Furthermore, we introduce context-aware spatial and semantic supervision to the context branch to filter out irrelevant noise and capture informative contexts. ContextHOI achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HICO-DET and v-coco benchmarks. For further validation, we construct a novel benchmark, HICO-ambiguous, which is a subset of HICO-DET that contains images with occluded or impaired instance cues. Extensive experiments across all benchmarks, complemented by visualizations, underscore the enhancements provided by ContextHOI, especially in recognizing interactions involving occluded or blurred instances.
Authors:Zhuoran Yang, Xi Guo, Chenjing Ding, Chiyu Wang, Wei Wu
Abstract:
Autonomous driving requires robust perception models trained on high-quality, large-scale multi-view driving videos for tasks like 3D object detection, segmentation and trajectory prediction. While world models provide a cost-effective solution for generating realistic driving videos, challenges remain in ensuring these videos adhere to fundamental physical principles, such as relative and absolute motion, spatial relationship like occlusion and spatial consistency, and temporal consistency. To address these, we propose DrivePhysica, an innovative model designed to generate realistic multi-view driving videos that accurately adhere to essential physical principles through three key advancements: (1) a Coordinate System Aligner module that integrates relative and absolute motion features to enhance motion interpretation, (2) an Instance Flow Guidance module that ensures precise temporal consistency via efficient 3D flow extraction, and (3) a Box Coordinate Guidance module that improves spatial relationship understanding and accurately resolves occlusion hierarchies. Grounded in physical principles, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in driving video generation quality (3.96 FID and 38.06 FVD on the Nuscenes dataset) and downstream perception tasks. Our project homepage: https://metadrivescape.github.io/papers_project/DrivePhysica/page.html
Authors:Fnu Neha, Deepshikha Bhati, Deepak Kumar Shukla, Md Amiruzzaman
Abstract:
Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision and image understanding, with the goal of identifying and localizing objects of interest within an image while assigning them corresponding class labels. Traditional methods, which relied on handcrafted features and shallow models, struggled with complex visual data and showed limited performance. These methods combined low-level features with contextual information and lacked the ability to capture high-level semantics. Deep learning, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), addressed these limitations by automatically learning rich, hierarchical features directly from data. These features include both semantic and high-level representations essential for accurate object detection. This paper reviews object detection frameworks, starting with classical computer vision methods. We categorize object detection approaches into two groups: (1) classical computer vision techniques and (2) CNN-based detectors. We compare major CNN models, discussing their strengths and limitations. In conclusion, this review highlights the significant advancements in object detection through deep learning and identifies key areas for further research to improve performance.
Authors:Brian K. S. Isaac-Medina, Mauricio Che, Yona F. A. Gaus, Samet Akcay, Toby P. Breckon
Abstract:
Modern machine learning models, that excel on computer vision tasks such as classification and object detection, are often overconfident in their predictions for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) examples, resulting in unpredictable behaviour for open-set environments. Recent works have demonstrated that the free energy score is an effective measure of uncertainty for OOD detection given its close relationship to the data distribution. However, despite free energy-based methods representing a significant empirical advance in OOD detection, our theoretical analysis reveals previously unexplored and inherent vulnerabilities within the free energy score formulation such that in-distribution and OOD instances can have distinct feature representations yet identical free energy scores. This phenomenon occurs when the vector direction representing the feature space difference between the in-distribution and OOD sample lies within the null space of the last layer of a neural-based classifier. To mitigate these issues, we explore lower-dimensional feature spaces to reduce the null space footprint and introduce novel regularisation to maximize the least singular value of the final linear layer, hence enhancing inter-sample free energy separation. We refer to these techniques as Free Energy Vulnerability Elimination for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection (FEVER-OOD). Our experiments show that FEVER-OOD techniques achieve state of the art OOD detection in Imagenet-100, with average OOD false positive rate (at 95% true positive rate) of 35.83% when used with the baseline Dream-OOD model.
Authors:Jongseong Bae, Susang Kim, Minsu Cho, Ha Young Kim
Abstract:
Active research is currently underway to enhance the efficiency of vision transformers (ViTs). Most studies have focused solely on effective token mixers, overlooking the potential relationship with normalization. To boost diverse feature learning, we propose two components: a normalization module called multi-view normalization (MVN) and a token mixer called multi-view token mixer (MVTM). The MVN integrates three differently normalized features via batch, layer, and instance normalization using a learnable weighted sum. Each normalization method outputs a different distribution, generating distinct features. Thus, the MVN is expected to offer diverse pattern information to the token mixer, resulting in beneficial synergy. The MVTM is a convolution-based multiscale token mixer with local, intermediate, and global filters, and it incorporates stage specificity by configuring various receptive fields for the token mixer at each stage, efficiently capturing ranges of visual patterns. We propose a novel ViT model, multi-vision transformer (MVFormer), adopting the MVN and MVTM in the MetaFormer block, the generalized ViT scheme. Our MVFormer outperforms state-of-the-art convolution-based ViTs on image classification, object detection, and instance and semantic segmentation with the same or lower parameters and MACs. Particularly, MVFormer variants, MVFormer-T, S, and B achieve 83.4%, 84.3%, and 84.6% top-1 accuracy, respectively, on ImageNet-1K benchmark.
Authors:Klara Janouskova, Cristian Gavrus, Jiri Matas
Abstract:
In object recognition, both the subject of interest (referred to as foreground, FG, for simplicity) and its surrounding context (background, BG) may play an important role. However, standard supervised learning often leads to unintended over-reliance on the BG, limiting model robustness in real-world deployment settings. The problem is mainly addressed by suppressing the BG, sacrificing context information for improved generalization.
We propose "Localize to Recognize Robustly" (L2R2), a novel recognition approach which exploits the benefits of context-aware classification while maintaining robustness to distribution shifts. L2R2 leverages advances in zero-shot detection to localize the FG before recognition. It improves the performance of both standard recognition with supervised training, as well as multimodal zero-shot recognition with VLMs, while being robust to long-tail BGs and distribution shifts. The results confirm localization before recognition is possible for a wide range of datasets and they highlight the limits of object detection on others
Authors:Hongsi Liu, Jun Liu, Guangfeng Jiang, Xin Jin
Abstract:
As one of the automotive sensors that have emerged in recent years, 4D millimeter-wave radar has a higher resolution than conventional 3D radar and provides precise elevation measurements. But its point clouds are still sparse and noisy, making it challenging to meet the requirements of autonomous driving. Camera, as another commonly used sensor, can capture rich semantic information. As a result, the fusion of 4D radar and camera can provide an affordable and robust perception solution for autonomous driving systems. However, previous radar-camera fusion methods have not yet been thoroughly investigated, resulting in a large performance gap compared to LiDAR-based methods. Specifically, they ignore the feature-blurring problem and do not deeply interact with image semantic information. To this end, we present a simple but effective multi-stage sampling fusion (MSSF) network based on 4D radar and camera. On the one hand, we design a fusion block that can deeply interact point cloud features with image features, and can be applied to commonly used single-modal backbones in a plug-and-play manner. The fusion block encompasses two types, namely, simple feature fusion (SFF) and multiscale deformable feature fusion (MSDFF). The SFF is easy to implement, while the MSDFF has stronger fusion abilities. On the other hand, we propose a semantic-guided head to perform foreground-background segmentation on voxels with voxel feature re-weighting, further alleviating the problem of feature blurring. Extensive experiments on the View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadset datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our MSSF. Notably, compared to state-of-the-art methods, MSSF achieves a 7.0% and 4.0% improvement in 3D mean average precision on the VoD and TJ4DRadSet datasets, respectively. It even surpasses classical LiDAR-based methods on the VoD dataset.
Authors:Mizanur Rahman Jewel, Mohamed Elmahallawy, Sanjay Madria, Samuel Frimpong
Abstract:
Detecting disasters in underground mining, such as explosions and structural damage, has been a persistent challenge over the years. This problem is compounded for first responders, who often have no clear information about the extent or nature of the damage within the mine. The poor-light or even total darkness inside the mines makes rescue efforts incredibly difficult, leading to a tragic loss of life. In this paper, we propose a novel instance segmentation method called DIS-Mine, specifically designed to identify disaster-affected areas within underground mines under low-light or poor visibility conditions, aiding first responders in rescue efforts. DIS-Mine is capable of detecting objects in images, even in complete darkness, by addressing challenges such as high noise, color distortions, and reduced contrast. The key innovations of DIS-Mine are built upon four core components: i) Image brightness improvement, ii) Instance segmentation with SAM integration, iii) Mask R-CNN-based segmentation, and iv) Mask alignment with feature matching. On top of that, we have collected real-world images from an experimental underground mine, introducing a new dataset named ImageMine, specifically gathered in low-visibility conditions. This dataset serves to validate the performance of DIS-Mine in realistic, challenging environments. Our comprehensive experiments on the ImageMine dataset, as well as on various other datasets demonstrate that DIS-Mine achieves a superior F1 score of 86.0% and mIoU of 72.0%, outperforming state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods, with at least 15x improvement and up to 80% higher precision in object detection.
Authors:Lars Nieradzik, Henrike Stephani, Jördis Sieburg-Rockel, Stephanie Helmling, Andrea Olbrich, Stephanie Wrage, Janis Keuper
Abstract:
Wood species identification plays a crucial role in various industries, from ensuring the legality of timber products to advancing ecological conservation efforts. This paper introduces WoodYOLO, a novel object detection algorithm specifically designed for microscopic wood fiber analysis. Our approach adapts the YOLO architecture to address the challenges posed by large, high-resolution microscopy images and the need for high recall in localization of the cell type of interest (vessel elements). Our results show that WoodYOLO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving performance gains of 12.9% and 6.5% in F2 score over YOLOv10 and YOLOv7, respectively. This improvement in automated wood cell type localization capabilities contributes to enhancing regulatory compliance, supporting sustainable forestry practices, and promoting biodiversity conservation efforts globally.
Authors:Brian Hsuan-Cheng Liao, Yingjie Xu, Chih-Hong Cheng, Hasan Esen, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel monitoring framework that infers the level of collision risk for autonomous vehicles (AVs) based on their object detection performance. The framework takes two sets of predictions from different algorithms and associates their inconsistencies with the collision risk via fuzzy inference. The first set of predictions is obtained by retrieving safety-critical 2.5D objects from a depth map, and the second set comes from the ordinary AV's 3D object detector. We experimentally validate that, based on Intersection-over-Union (IoU) and a depth discrepancy measure, the inconsistencies between the two sets of predictions strongly correlate to the error of the 3D object detector against ground truths. This correlation allows us to construct a fuzzy inference system and map the inconsistency measures to an AV collision risk indicator. In particular, we optimize the fuzzy inference system towards an existing offline metric that matches AV collision rates well. Lastly, we validate our monitor's capability to produce relevant risk estimates with the large-scale nuScenes dataset and demonstrate that it can safeguard an AV in closed-loop simulations.
Authors:Kaixuan Lu, Ruiqian Zhang, Xiao Huang, Yuxing Xie, Xiaogang Ning, Hanchao Zhang, Mengke Yuan, Pan Zhang, Tao Wang, Tongkui Liao
Abstract:
Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have demonstrated impressive results in learning visual representations from unlabeled remote sensing images. However, most remote sensing images predominantly consist of scenographic scenes containing multiple ground objects without explicit foreground targets, which limits the performance of existing SSL methods that focus on foreground targets. This raises the question: Is there a method that can automatically aggregate similar objects within scenographic remote sensing images, thereby enabling models to differentiate knowledge embedded in various geospatial patterns for improved feature representation? In this work, we present the Pattern Integration and Enhancement Vision Transformer (PIEViT), a novel self-supervised learning framework designed specifically for remote sensing imagery. PIEViT utilizes a teacher-student architecture to address both image-level and patch-level tasks. It employs the Geospatial Pattern Cohesion (GPC) module to explore the natural clustering of patches, enhancing the differentiation of individual features. The Feature Integration Projection (FIP) module further refines masked token reconstruction using geospatially clustered patches. We validated PIEViT across multiple downstream tasks, including object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. Experiments demonstrated that PIEViT enhances the representation of internal patch features, providing significant improvements over existing self-supervised baselines. It achieves excellent results in object detection, land cover classification, and change detection, underscoring its robustness, generalization, and transferability for remote sensing image interpretation tasks.
Authors:Gargi Panda, Soumitra Kundu, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray
Abstract:
Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) enhances the information content of the fused image by combining the unique as well as common features obtained from different modality sensor images, improving visualization, object detection, and many more tasks. In this work, we introduce an interpretable network for the MMIF task, named FNet, based on an l0-regularized multi-modal convolutional sparse coding (MCSC) model. Specifically, for solving the l0-regularized CSC problem, we develop an algorithm unrolling-based l0-regularized sparse coding (LZSC) block. Given different modality source images, FNet first separates the unique and common features from them using the LZSC block and then these features are combined to generate the final fused image. Additionally, we propose an l0-regularized MCSC model for the inverse fusion process. Based on this model, we introduce an interpretable inverse fusion network named IFNet, which is utilized during FNet's training. Extensive experiments show that FNet achieves high-quality fusion results across five different MMIF tasks. Furthermore, we show that FNet enhances downstream object detection in visible-thermal image pairs. We have also visualized the intermediate results of FNet, which demonstrates the good interpretability of our network.
Authors:He-Yen Hsieh, Ziyun Li, Sai Qian Zhang, Wei-Te Mark Ting, Kao-Den Chang, Barbara De Salvo, Chiao Liu, H. T. Kung
Abstract:
We present GazeGen, a user interaction system that generates visual content (images and videos) for locations indicated by the user's eye gaze. GazeGen allows intuitive manipulation of visual content by targeting regions of interest with gaze. Using advanced techniques in object detection and generative AI, GazeGen performs gaze-controlled image adding/deleting, repositioning, and surface style changes of image objects, and converts static images into videos. Central to GazeGen is the DFT Gaze (Distilled and Fine-Tuned Gaze) agent, an ultra-lightweight model with only 281K parameters, performing accurate real-time gaze predictions tailored to individual users' eyes on small edge devices. GazeGen is the first system to combine visual content generation with real-time gaze estimation, made possible exclusively by DFT Gaze. This real-time gaze estimation enables various visual content generation tasks, all controlled by the user's gaze. The input for DFT Gaze is the user's eye images, while the inputs for visual content generation are the user's view and the predicted gaze point from DFT Gaze. To achieve efficient gaze predictions, we derive the small model from a large model (10x larger) via novel knowledge distillation and personal adaptation techniques. We integrate knowledge distillation with a masked autoencoder, developing a compact yet powerful gaze estimation model. This model is further fine-tuned with Adapters, enabling highly accurate and personalized gaze predictions with minimal user input. DFT Gaze ensures low-latency and precise gaze tracking, supporting a wide range of gaze-driven tasks. We validate the performance of DFT Gaze on AEA and OpenEDS2020 benchmarks, demonstrating low angular gaze error and low latency on the edge device (Raspberry Pi 4). Furthermore, we describe applications of GazeGen, illustrating its versatility and effectiveness in various usage scenarios.
Authors:Luigi Penco, Kazuhiko Momose, Stephen McCrory, Dexton Anderson, Nicholas Kitchel, Duncan Calvert, Robert J. Griffin
Abstract:
Teleoperation plays a crucial role in enabling robot operations in challenging environments, yet existing limitations in effectiveness and accuracy necessitate the development of innovative strategies for improving teleoperated tasks. This article introduces a novel approach that utilizes mixed reality and assistive autonomy to enhance the efficiency and precision of humanoid robot teleoperation. By leveraging Probabilistic Movement Primitives, object detection, and Affordance Templates, the assistance combines user motion with autonomous capabilities, achieving task efficiency while maintaining human-like robot motion. Experiments and feasibility studies on the Nadia robot confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Authors:Lior Dikstein, Ariel Lapid, Arnon Netzer, Hai Victor Habi
Abstract:
Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) using synthetic data is a key approach for post-training quantization (PTQ) under privacy and security constraints. However, existing data generation methods often struggle to effectively generate data suitable for hardware-friendly quantization, where all model layers are quantized. We analyze existing data generation methods based on batch normalization (BN) matching and identify several gaps between synthetic and real data: 1) Current generation algorithms do not optimize the entire synthetic dataset simultaneously; 2) Data augmentations applied during training are often overlooked; and 3) A distribution shift occurs in the final model layers due to the absence of BN in those layers. These gaps negatively impact ZSQ performance, particularly in hardware-friendly quantization scenarios. In this work, we propose Data Generation for Hardware-friendly quantization (DGH), a novel method that addresses these gaps. DGH jointly optimizes all generated images, regardless of the image set size or GPU memory constraints. To address data augmentation mismatches, DGH includes a preprocessing stage that mimics the augmentation process and enhances image quality by incorporating natural image priors. Finally, we propose a new distribution-stretching loss that aligns the support of the feature map distribution between real and synthetic data. This loss is applied to the model's output and can be adapted to various tasks. DGH demonstrates significant improvements in quantization performance across multiple tasks, achieving up to a 30% increase in accuracy for hardware-friendly ZSQ in both classification and object detection, often performing on par with real data.
Authors:Dmytro Humeniuk, Houssem Ben Braiek, Thomas Reid, Foutse Khomh
Abstract:
Testing autonomous robotic manipulators is challenging due to the complex software interactions between vision and control components. A crucial element of modern robotic manipulators is the deep learning based object detection model. The creation and assessment of this model requires real world data, which can be hard to label and collect, especially when the hardware setup is not available. The current techniques primarily focus on using synthetic data to train deep neural networks (DDNs) and identifying failures through offline or online simulation-based testing. However, the process of exploiting the identified failures to uncover design flaws early on, and leveraging the optimized DNN within the simulation to accelerate the engineering of the DNN for real-world tasks remains unclear. To address these challenges, we propose the MARTENS (Manipulator Robot Testing and Enhancement in Simulation) framework, which integrates a photorealistic NVIDIA Isaac Sim simulator with evolutionary search to identify critical scenarios aiming at improving the deep learning vision model and uncovering system design flaws. Evaluation of two industrial case studies demonstrated that MARTENS effectively reveals robotic manipulator system failures, detecting 25 % to 50 % more failures with greater diversity compared to random test generation. The model trained and repaired using the MARTENS approach achieved mean average precision (mAP) scores of 0.91 and 0.82 on real-world images with no prior retraining. Further fine-tuning on real-world images for a few epochs (less than 10) increased the mAP to 0.95 and 0.89 for the first and second use cases, respectively. In contrast, a model trained solely on real-world data achieved mAPs of 0.8 and 0.75 for use case 1 and use case 2 after more than 25 epochs.
Authors:Zhouyang Chi, Qingyuan Jiang, Yang Yang
Abstract:
This report provide a detailed description of the method that we explored and proposed in the ECCV OOD-CV UNICORN Challenge 2024, which focusing on the robustness of responses from large language models. The dataset of this competition are OODCA-VQA and SketchyQA. In order to test the robustness of the model. The organizer extended two variants of the dataset OODCV-Counterfactual and Sketchy-Challenging. There are several difficulties with these datasets. Firstly, the Sketchy-Challenging dataset uses some rarer item categories to test the model's generalization ability. Secondly, in the OODCV-Counterfactual dataset, the given problems often have inflection points and computational steps, requiring the model to recognize them during the inference process. In order to address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Object Detection Assistance Large Language Model(LLM) Counting Ability Improvement(ODAC), which focuses on using the object detection model to assist the LLM. To clarify, our approach contains two main blocks: (1)Object Detection Assistance. (2) Counterfactual Specific prompt. Our approach ranked second in the final test with a score of 0.86.
Authors:Maximilian Ulmer, Leonard Klüpfel, Maximilian Durner, Rudolph Triebel
Abstract:
We investigate the efficacy of data augmentations to close the domain gap in spaceborne computer vision, crucial for autonomous operations like on-orbit servicing. As the use of computer vision in space increases, challenges such as hostile illumination and low signal-to-noise ratios significantly hinder performance. While learning-based algorithms show promising results, their adoption is limited by the need for extensive annotated training data and the domain gap that arises from differences between synthesized and real-world imagery. This study explores domain generalization in terms of data augmentations -- classical color and geometric transformations, corruptions, and noise -- to enhance model performance across the domain gap. To this end, we conduct an large scale experiment using a hyperparameter optimization pipeline that samples hundreds of different configurations and searches for the best set to bridge the domain gap. As a reference task, we use 2D object detection and evaluate on the SPEED+ dataset that contains real hardware-in-the-loop satellite images in its test set. Moreover, we evaluate four popular object detectors, including Mask R-CNN, Faster R-CNN, YOLO-v7, and the open set detector GroundingDINO, and highlight their trade-offs between performance, inference speed, and training time. Our results underscore the vital role of data augmentations in bridging the domain gap, improving model performance, robustness, and reliability for critical space applications. As a result, we propose two novel data augmentations specifically developed to emulate the visual effects observed in orbital imagery. We conclude by recommending the most effective augmentations for advancing computer vision in challenging orbital environments. Code for training detectors and hyperparameter search will be made publicly available.
Authors:Mohamed R. Elshamy, Heba M. Emara, Mohamed R. Shoaib, Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy
Abstract:
Distracted driving is a critical safety issue that leads to numerous fatalities and injuries worldwide. This study addresses the urgent need for efficient and real-time machine learning models to detect distracted driving behaviors. Leveraging the Pretrained YOLOv8 (P-YOLOv8) model, a real-time object detection system is introduced, optimized for both speed and accuracy. This approach addresses the computational constraints and latency limitations commonly associated with conventional detection models. The study demonstrates P-YOLOv8 versatility in both object detection and image classification tasks using the Distracted Driver Detection dataset from State Farm, which includes 22,424 images across ten behavior categories. Our research explores the application of P-YOLOv8 for image classification, evaluating its performance compared to deep learning models such as VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet. Some traditional models often struggle with low accuracy, while others achieve high accuracy but come with high computational costs and slow detection speeds, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. P-YOLOv8 addresses these issues by achieving competitive accuracy with significant computational cost and efficiency advantages. In particular, P-YOLOv8 generates a lightweight model with a size of only 2.84 MB and a lower number of parameters, totaling 1,451,098, due to its innovative architecture. It achieves a high accuracy of 99.46 percent with this small model size, opening new directions for deployment on inexpensive and small embedded devices using Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). The experimental results show robust performance, making P-YOLOv8 a cost-effective solution for real-time deployment. This study provides a detailed analysis of P-YOLOv8's architecture, training, and performance benchmarks, highlighting its potential for real-time use in detecting distracted driving.
Authors:Zhimin Chen, Liang Yang, Yingwei Li, Longlong Jing, Bing Li
Abstract:
Foundation models have significantly enhanced 2D task performance, and recent works like Bridge3D have successfully applied these models to improve 3D scene understanding through knowledge distillation, marking considerable advancements. Nonetheless, challenges such as the misalignment between 2D and 3D representations and the persistent long-tail distribution in 3D datasets still restrict the effectiveness of knowledge distillation from 2D to 3D using foundation models. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel SAM-guided tokenization method that seamlessly aligns 3D transformer structures with region-level knowledge distillation, replacing the traditional KNN-based tokenization techniques. Additionally, we implement a group-balanced re-weighting strategy to effectively address the long-tail problem in knowledge distillation. Furthermore, inspired by the recent success of masked feature prediction, our framework incorporates a two-stage masked token prediction process in which the student model predicts both the global embeddings and the token-wise local embeddings derived from the teacher models trained in the first stage. Our methodology has been validated across multiple datasets, including SUN RGB-D, ScanNet, and S3DIS, for tasks like 3D object detection and semantic segmentation. The results demonstrate significant improvements over current State-of-the-art self-supervised methods, establishing new benchmarks in this field.
Authors:Giacomo May, Emanuele Dalsasso, Benjamin Kellenberger, Devis Tuia
Abstract:
Automated wildlife surveys based on drone imagery and object detection technology are a powerful and increasingly popular tool in conservation biology. Most detectors require training images with annotated bounding boxes, which are tedious, expensive, and not always unambiguous to create. To reduce the annotation load associated with this practice, we develop POLO, a multi-class object detection model that can be trained entirely on point labels. POLO is based on simple, yet effective modifications to the YOLOv8 architecture, including alterations to the prediction process, training losses, and post-processing. We test POLO on drone recordings of waterfowl containing up to multiple thousands of individual birds in one image and compare it to a regular YOLOv8. Our experiments show that at the same annotation cost, POLO achieves improved accuracy in counting animals in aerial imagery.
Authors:Everest Z. Kuang, Kushal Raj Bhandari, Jianxi Gao
Abstract:
Garbage production and littering are persistent global issues that pose significant environmental challenges. Despite large-scale efforts to manage waste through collection and sorting, existing approaches remain inefficient, leading to inadequate recycling and disposal. Therefore, developing advanced AI-based systems is less labor intensive approach for addressing the growing waste problem more effectively. These models can be applied to sorting systems or possibly waste collection robots that may produced in the future. AI models have grown significantly at identifying objects through object detection. This paper reviews the implementation of AI models for classifying trash through object detection, specifically focusing on using YOLO V5 for training and testing. The study demonstrates how YOLO V5 can effectively identify various types of waste, including plastic, paper, glass, metal, cardboard, and biodegradables.
Authors:Jishnu Jaykumar P, Cole Salvato, Vinaya Bomnale, Jikai Wang, Yu Xiang
Abstract:
We introduce iTeach, a human-in-the-loop Mixed Reality (MR) system that enhances robot perception through interactive teaching. Our system enables users to visualize robot perception outputs such as object detection and segmentation results using a MR device. Therefore, users can inspect failures of perception models using the system on real robots. Moreover, iTeach facilitates real-time, informed data collection and annotation, where users can use hand gesture, eye gaze and voice commands to annotate images collected from robots. The annotated images can be used to fine-tune perception models to improve their accuracy and adaptability. The system continually improves perception models by collecting annotations of failed examples from users. When applied to object detection and unseen object instance segmentation (UOIS) tasks, iTeach demonstrates encouraging results in improving pre-trained vision models for these two tasks. These results highlight the potential of MR to make robotic perception systems more capable and adaptive in real-world environments. Project page at https://irvlutd.github.io/iTeach.
Authors:Ruizhe Zeng, Lu Zhang, Xu Yang, Zhiyong Liu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection is the task of accurately detecting objects from a candidate vocabulary list that includes both base and novel categories. Currently, numerous open-vocabulary detectors have achieved success by leveraging the impressive zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. However, we observe that CLIP models struggle to effectively handle background images (i.e. images without corresponding labels) due to their language-image learning methodology. This limitation results in suboptimal performance for open-vocabulary detectors that rely on CLIP when processing background samples. In this paper, we propose Background Information Representation for open-vocabulary Detector (BIRDet), a novel approach to address the limitations of CLIP in handling background samples. Specifically, we design Background Information Modeling (BIM) to replace the single, fixed background embedding in mainstream open-vocabulary detectors with dynamic scene information, and prompt it into image-related background representations. This method effectively enhances the ability to classify oversized regions as background. Besides, we introduce Partial Object Suppression (POS), an algorithm that utilizes the ratio of overlap area to address the issue of misclassifying partial regions as foreground. Experiments on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of achieving performance enhancements across various open-vocabulary detectors.
Authors:Pei Liu, Zihao Zhang, Haipeng Liu, Nanfang Zheng, Meixin Zhu, Ziyuan Pu
Abstract:
The on-board 3D object detection technology has received extensive attention as a critical technology for autonomous driving, while few studies have focused on applying roadside sensors in 3D traffic object detection. Existing studies achieve the projection of 2D image features to 3D features through height estimation based on the frustum. However, they did not consider the height alignment and the extraction efficiency of bird's-eye-view features. We propose a novel 3D object detection framework integrating Spatial Former and Voxel Pooling Former to enhance 2D-to-3D projection based on height estimation. Extensive experiments were conducted using the Rope3D and DAIR-V2X-I dataset, and the results demonstrated the outperformance of the proposed algorithm in the detection of both vehicles and cyclists. These results indicate that the algorithm is robust and generalized under various detection scenarios. Improving the accuracy of 3D object detection on the roadside is conducive to building a safe and trustworthy intelligent transportation system of vehicle-road coordination and promoting the large-scale application of autonomous driving. The code and pre-trained models will be released on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HeightFormer.
Authors:Danai Triantafyllidou, Sarah Parisot, Ales Leonardis, Steven McDonagh
Abstract:
Visual domain gaps often impact object detection performance. Image-to-image translation can mitigate this effect, where contrastive approaches enable learning of the image-to-image mapping under unsupervised regimes. However, existing methods often fail to handle content-rich scenes with multiple object instances, which manifests in unsatisfactory detection performance. Sensitivity to such instance-level content is typically only gained through object annotations, which can be expensive to obtain. Towards addressing this issue, we present a novel image-to-image translation method that specifically targets cross-domain object detection. We formulate our approach as a contrastive learning framework with an inductive prior that optimises the appearance of object instances through spatial attention masks, implicitly delineating the scene into foreground regions associated with the target object instances and background non-object regions. Instead of relying on object annotations to explicitly account for object instances during translation, our approach learns to represent objects by contrasting local-global information. This affords investigation of an under-explored challenge: obtaining performant detection, under domain shifts, without relying on object annotations nor detector model fine-tuning. We experiment with multiple cross-domain object detection settings across three challenging benchmarks and report state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://local-global-detection.github.io
Authors:Hongru Yan, Yu Zheng, Yueqi Duan
Abstract:
Skins wrapping around our bodies, leathers covering over the sofa, sheet metal coating the car - it suggests that objects are enclosed by a series of continuous surfaces, which provides us with informative geometry prior for objectness deduction. In this paper, we propose Gaussian-Det which leverages Gaussian Splatting as surface representation for multi-view based 3D object detection. Unlike existing monocular or NeRF-based methods which depict the objects via discrete positional data, Gaussian-Det models the objects in a continuous manner by formulating the input Gaussians as feature descriptors on a mass of partial surfaces. Furthermore, to address the numerous outliers inherently introduced by Gaussian splatting, we accordingly devise a Closure Inferring Module (CIM) for the comprehensive surface-based objectness deduction. CIM firstly estimates the probabilistic feature residuals for partial surfaces given the underdetermined nature of Gaussian Splatting, which are then coalesced into a holistic representation on the overall surface closure of the object proposal. In this way, the surface information Gaussian-Det exploits serves as the prior on the quality and reliability of objectness and the information basis of proposal refinement. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that Gaussian-Det outperforms various existing approaches, in terms of both average precision and recall.
Authors:Thomas H. Schmitt, Maximilian Bundscherer, Tobias Bocklet
Abstract:
In the food industry, reprocessing returned product is a vital step to increase resource efficiency. [SBB23] presented an AI application that automates the tracking of returned bread buns. We extend their work by creating an expanded dataset comprising 2432 images and a wider range of baked goods. To increase model robustness, we use generative models pix2pix and CycleGAN to create synthetic images. We train state-of-the-art object detection model YOLOv9 and YOLOv8 on our detection task. Our overall best-performing model achieved an average precision AP@0.5 of 90.3% on our test set.
Authors:Rinor Cakaj, Jens Mehnert, Bin Yang
Abstract:
Regularization techniques help prevent overfitting and therefore improve the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generalize. One reason for overfitting is the complex co-adaptations among different parts of the network, which make the CNN dependent on their joint response rather than encouraging each part to learn a useful feature representation independently. Frequency domain manipulation is a powerful strategy for modifying data that has temporal and spatial coherence by utilizing frequency decomposition. This work introduces Spectral Wavelet Dropout (SWD), a novel regularization method that includes two variants: 1D-SWD and 2D-SWD. These variants improve CNN generalization by randomly dropping detailed frequency bands in the discrete wavelet decomposition of feature maps. Our approach distinguishes itself from the pre-existing Spectral "Fourier" Dropout (2D-SFD), which eliminates coefficients in the Fourier domain. Notably, SWD requires only a single hyperparameter, unlike the two required by SFD. We also extend the literature by implementing a one-dimensional version of Spectral "Fourier" Dropout (1D-SFD), setting the stage for a comprehensive comparison. Our evaluation shows that both 1D and 2D SWD variants have competitive performance on CIFAR-10/100 benchmarks relative to both 1D-SFD and 2D-SFD. Specifically, 1D-SWD has a significantly lower computational complexity compared to 1D/2D-SFD. In the Pascal VOC Object Detection benchmark, SWD variants surpass 1D-SFD and 2D-SFD in performance and demonstrate lower computational complexity during training.
Authors:Uddhav Bhattarai, Santosh Bhusal, Qin Zhang, Manoj Karkee
Abstract:
One of the major challenges for the agricultural industry today is the uncertainty in manual labor availability and the associated cost. Automated flower and fruit density estimation, localization, and counting could help streamline harvesting, yield estimation, and crop-load management strategies such as flower and fruitlet thinning. This article proposes a deep regression-based network, AgRegNet, to estimate density, count, and location of flower and fruit in tree fruit canopies without explicit object detection or polygon annotation. Inspired by popular U-Net architecture, AgRegNet is a U-shaped network with an encoder-to-decoder skip connection and modified ConvNeXt-T as an encoder feature extractor. AgRegNet can be trained based on information from point annotation and leverages segmentation information and attention modules (spatial and channel) to highlight relevant flower and fruit features while suppressing non-relevant background features. Experimental evaluation in apple flower and fruit canopy images under an unstructured orchard environment showed that AgRegNet achieved promising accuracy as measured by Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), percentage Mean Absolute Error (pMAE) and mean Average Precision (mAP) to estimate flower and fruit density, count, and centroid location, respectively. Specifically, the SSIM, pMAE, and mAP values for flower images were 0.938, 13.7%, and 0.81, respectively. For fruit images, the corresponding values were 0.910, 5.6%, and 0.93. Since the proposed approach relies on information from point annotation, it is suitable for sparsely and densely located objects. This simplified technique will be highly applicable for growers to accurately estimate yields and decide on optimal chemical and mechanical flower thinning practices.
Authors:Yunhao Zou, Ying Fu, Tsuyoshi Takatani, Yinqiang Zheng
Abstract:
Event cameras are innovative neuromorphic sensors that asynchronously capture the scene dynamics. Due to the event-triggering mechanism, such cameras record event streams with much shorter response latency and higher intensity sensitivity compared to conventional cameras. On the basis of these features, previous works have attempted to reconstruct high dynamic range (HDR) videos from events, but have either suffered from unrealistic artifacts or failed to provide sufficiently high frame rates. In this paper, we present a recurrent convolutional neural network that reconstruct high-speed HDR videos from event sequences, with a key frame guidance to prevent potential error accumulation caused by the sparse event data. Additionally, to address the problem of severely limited real dataset, we develop a new optical system to collect a real-world dataset with paired high-speed HDR videos and event streams, facilitating future research in this field. Our dataset provides the first real paired dataset for event-to-HDR reconstruction, avoiding potential inaccuracies from simulation strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality, high-speed HDR videos. We further explore the potential of our work in cross-camera reconstruction and downstream computer vision tasks, including object detection, panoramic segmentation, optical flow estimation, and monocular depth estimation under HDR scenarios.
Authors:Sunoh Lee, Minsik Jeon, Jihong Min, Junwon Seo
Abstract:
Open World Object Detection(OWOD) addresses realistic scenarios where unseen object classes emerge, enabling detectors trained on known classes to detect unknown objects and incrementally incorporate the knowledge they provide. While existing OWOD methods primarily focus on detecting unknown objects, they often overlook the rich semantic relationships between detected objects, which are essential for scene understanding and applications in open-world environments (e.g., open-world tracking and novel class discovery). In this paper, we extend the OWOD framework to jointly detect unknown objects and learn semantically rich instance embeddings, enabling the detector to capture fine-grained semantic relationships between instances. To this end, we propose two modules that leverage the rich and generalizable knowledge of Vision Foundation Models(VFM). First, the Unknown Box Refine Module uses instance masks from the Segment Anything Model to accurately localize unknown objects. The Embedding Transfer Module then distills instance-wise semantic similarities from VFM features to the detector's embeddings via a relaxed contrastive loss, enabling the detector to learn a semantically meaningful and generalizable instance feature. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves both unknown object detection and instance embedding quality, while also enhancing performance in downstream tasks such as open-world tracking.
Authors:Minseung Lee, Seokha Moon, Seung Joon Lee, Jinkyu Kim
Abstract:
Accurately detecting objects at long distances remains a critical challenge in 3D object detection when relying solely on LiDAR sensors due to the inherent limitations of data sparsity. To address this issue, we propose the LiDAR-Camera Augmentation Network (LCANet), a novel framework that reconstructs LiDAR point cloud data by fusing 2D image features, which contain rich semantic information, generating additional points to improve detection accuracy. LCANet fuses data from LiDAR sensors and cameras by projecting image features into the 3D space, integrating semantic information into the point cloud data. This fused data is then encoded to produce 3D features that contain both semantic and spatial information, which are further refined to reconstruct final points before bounding box prediction. This fusion effectively compensates for LiDAR's weakness in detecting objects at long distances, which are often represented by sparse points. Additionally, due to the sparsity of many objects in the original dataset, which makes effective supervision for point generation challenging, we employ a point cloud completion network to create a complete point cloud dataset that supervises the generation of dense point clouds in our network. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that LCANet significantly outperforms existing models, particularly in detecting sparse and distant objects.
Authors:Xu Wu, Zhihui Lai, Zhou Jie, Can Gao, Xianxu Hou, Ya-nan Zhang, Linlin Shen
Abstract:
Low-light images are commonly encountered in real-world scenarios, and numerous low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods have been proposed to improve the visibility of these images. The primary goal of LLIE is to generate clearer images that are more visually pleasing to humans. However, the impact of LLIE methods in high-level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection, which rely on high-quality image datasets, is not well {explored}. To explore the impact, we comprehensively evaluate LLIE methods on these high-level vision tasks by utilizing an empirical investigation comprising image classification and object detection experiments. The evaluation reveals a dichotomy: {\textit{While Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) methods enhance human visual interpretation, their effect on computer vision tasks is inconsistent and can sometimes be harmful. }} Our findings suggest a disconnect between image enhancement for human visual perception and for machine analysis, indicating a need for LLIE methods tailored to support high-level vision tasks effectively. This insight is crucial for the development of LLIE techniques that align with the needs of both human and machine vision.
Authors:Anastasia Anichenko, Frank Guerin, Andrew Gilbert
Abstract:
We investigate a human-like interpretable model of video understanding. Humans recognise complex activities in video by recognising critical spatio-temporal relations among explicitly recognised objects and parts, for example, an object entering the aperture of a container. To mimic this we build on a model which uses positions of objects and hands, and their motions, to recognise the activity taking place. To improve this model we focussed on three of the most confused classes (for this model) and identified that the lack of 3D information was the major problem. To address this we extended our basic model by adding 3D awareness in two ways: (1) A state-of-the-art object detection model was fine-tuned to determine the difference between "Container" and "NotContainer" in order to integrate object shape information into the existing object features. (2) A state-of-the-art depth estimation model was used to extract depth values for individual objects and calculate depth relations to expand the existing relations used our interpretable model. These 3D extensions to our basic model were evaluated on a subset of three superficially similar "Putting" actions from the Something-Something-v2 dataset. The results showed that the container detector did not improve performance, but the addition of depth relations made a significant improvement to performance.
Authors:Zichen Yu, Changyong Shu
Abstract:
Occupancy and 3D object detection are characterized as two standard tasks in modern autonomous driving system. In order to deploy them on a series of edge chips with better precision and time-consuming trade-off, contemporary approaches either deploy standalone models for individual tasks, or design a multi-task paradigm with separate heads. However, they might suffer from deployment difficulties (i.e., 3D convolution, transformer and so on) or deficiencies in task coordination. Instead, we argue that a favorable framework should be devised in pursuit of ease deployment on diverse chips and high precision with little time-consuming. Oriented at this, we revisit the paradigm for interaction between 3D object detection and occupancy prediction, reformulate the model with 2D convolution and prioritize the tasks such that each contributes to other. Thus, we propose a method to achieve fast 3D object detection and occupancy prediction (UltimateDO), wherein the light occupancy prediction head in FlashOcc is married to 3D object detection network, with negligible additional timeconsuming of only 1.1ms while facilitating each other. We instantiate UltimateDO on the challenging nuScenes-series benchmarks.
Authors:Moritz Nottebaum, Matteo Dunnhofer, Christian Micheloni
Abstract:
Research in efficient vision backbones is evolving into models that are a mixture of convolutions and transformer blocks. A smart combination of both, architecture-wise and component-wise is mandatory to excel in the speedaccuracy trade-off. Most publications focus on maximizing accuracy and utilize MACs (multiply accumulate operations) as an efficiency metric. The latter however often do not measure accurately how fast a model actually is due to factors like memory access cost and degree of parallelism. We analyzed common modules and architectural design choices for backbones not in terms of MACs, but rather in actual throughput and latency, as the combination of the latter two is a better representation of the efficiency of models in real applications. We applied the conclusions taken from that analysis to create a recipe for increasing hardware-efficiency in macro design. Additionally we introduce a simple slimmed-down version of MultiHead Self-Attention, that aligns with our analysis. We combine both macro and micro design to create a new family of hardware-efficient backbone networks called LowFormer. LowFormer achieves a remarkable speedup in terms of throughput and latency, while achieving similar or better accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient backbones. In order to prove the generalizability of our hardware-efficient design, we evaluate our method on GPU, mobile GPU and ARM CPU. We further show that the downstream tasks object detection and semantic segmentation profit from our hardware-efficient architecture. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ altair199797/LowFormer.
Authors:Weichao Pan, Xu Wang, Wenqing Huan
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based Road Damage Detection (RDD) is important for daily maintenance and safety in cities, especially in terms of significantly reducing labor costs. However, current UAV-based RDD research is still faces many challenges. For example, the damage with irregular size and direction, the masking of damage by the background, and the difficulty of distinguishing damage from the background significantly affect the ability of UAV to detect road damage in daily inspection. To solve these problems and improve the performance of UAV in real-time road damage detection, we design and propose three corresponding modules: a feature extraction module that flexibly adapts to shape and background; a module that fuses multiscale perception and adapts to shape and background ; an efficient downsampling module. Based on these modules, we designed a multi-scale, adaptive road damage detection model with the ability to automatically remove background interference, called Dynamic Scale-Aware Fusion Detection Model (RT-DSAFDet). Experimental results on the UAV-PDD2023 public dataset show that our model RT-DSAFDet achieves a mAP50 of 54.2%, which is 11.1% higher than that of YOLOv10-m, an efficient variant of the latest real-time object detection model YOLOv10, while the amount of parameters is reduced to 1.8M and FLOPs to 4.6G, with a decreased by 88% and 93%, respectively. Furthermore, on the large generalized object detection public dataset MS COCO2017 also shows the superiority of our model with mAP50-95 is the same as YOLOv9-t, but with 0.5% higher mAP50, 10% less parameters volume, and 40% less FLOPs.
Authors:Deyuan Qu, Qi Chen, Yongqi Zhu, Yihao Zhu, Sergei S. Avedisov, Song Fu, Qing Yang
Abstract:
In cooperative perception studies, there is often a trade-off between communication bandwidth and perception performance. While current feature fusion solutions are known for their excellent object detection performance, transmitting the entire sets of intermediate feature maps requires substantial bandwidth. Furthermore, these fusion approaches are typically limited to vehicles that use identical detection models. Our goal is to develop a solution that supports cooperative perception across vehicles equipped with different modalities of sensors. This method aims to deliver improved perception performance compared to late fusion techniques, while achieving precision similar to the state-of-art intermediate fusion, but requires an order of magnitude less bandwidth. We propose HEAD, a method that fuses features from the classification and regression heads in 3D object detection networks. Our method is compatible with heterogeneous detection networks such as LiDAR PointPillars, SECOND, VoxelNet, and camera Bird's-eye View (BEV) Encoder. Given the naturally smaller feature size in the detection heads, we design a self-attention mechanism to fuse the classification head and a complementary feature fusion layer to fuse the regression head. Our experiments, comprehensively evaluated on the V2V4Real and OPV2V datasets, demonstrate that HEAD is a fusion method that effectively balances communication bandwidth and perception performance.
Authors:Xiongwei Zhao, Congcong Wen, Xu Zhu, Yang Wang, Haojie Bai, Wenhao Dou
Abstract:
Adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain pose significant challenges to LiDAR-based perception models by introducing noise and corrupting point cloud measurements. To address this issue, we propose TripleMixer, a robust and efficient point cloud denoising network that integrates spatial, frequency, and channel-wise processing through three specialized mixer modules. TripleMixer effectively suppresses high-frequency noise while preserving essential geometric structures and can be seamlessly deployed as a plug-and-play module within existing LiDAR perception pipelines. To support the development and evaluation of denoising methods, we construct two large-scale simulated datasets, Weather-KITTI and Weather-NuScenes, covering diverse weather scenarios with dense point-wise semantic and noise annotations. Based on these datasets, we establish four benchmarks: Denoising, Semantic Segmentation (SS), Place Recognition (PR), and Object Detection (OD). These benchmarks enable systematic evaluation of denoising generalization, transferability, and downstream impact under both simulated and real-world adverse weather conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TripleMixer achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance and yields substantial improvements across all downstream tasks without requiring retraining. Our results highlight the potential of denoising as a task-agnostic preprocessing strategy to enhance LiDAR robustness in real-world autonomous driving applications.
Authors:Ivan Karpukhin, Andrey Savchenko
Abstract:
Long-horizon event forecasting is critical across various domains, including retail, finance, healthcare, and social networks. Traditional methods, such as Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPP), often rely on autoregressive models to predict multiple future events. However, these models frequently suffer from issues like converging to constant or repetitive outputs, which limits their effectiveness and general applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce DeTPP (Detection-based Temporal Point Processes), a novel approach inspired by object detection techniques from computer vision. DeTPP employs a unique matching-based loss function that selectively prioritizes reliably predictable events, improving the accuracy and diversity of predictions during inference. Our method establishes a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon event forecasting, achieving up to a 77% relative improvement over existing MTPP and next-K methods. The proposed hybrid approach enhances the accuracy of next event prediction by up to 2.7% on a large transactional dataset. Notably, DeTPP is also among the fastest methods for inference. The implementation of DeTPP is publicly available on GitHub.
Authors:Ruixiao Zhang, Juheon Lee, Xiaohao Cai, Adam Prugel-Bennett
Abstract:
Deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks and transformers have been widely applied to solve 3D object detection problems in the domain of autonomous driving. While existing models have achieved outstanding performance on most open benchmarks, the generalization ability of these deep networks is still in doubt. To adapt models to other domains including different cities, countries, and weather, retraining with the target domain data is currently necessary, which hinders the wide application of autonomous driving. In this paper, we deeply analyze the cross-domain performance of the state-of-the-art models. We observe that most models will overfit the training domains and it is challenging to adapt them to other domains directly. Existing domain adaptation methods for 3D object detection problems are actually shifting the models' knowledge domain instead of improving their generalization ability. We then propose additional evaluation metrics -- the side-view and front-view AP -- to better analyze the core issues of the methods' heavy drops in accuracy levels. By using the proposed metrics and further evaluating the cross-domain performance in each dimension, we conclude that the overfitting problem happens more obviously on the front-view surface and the width dimension which usually faces the sensor and has more 3D points surrounding it. Meanwhile, our experiments indicate that the density of the point cloud data also significantly influences the models' cross-domain performance.
Authors:Huafeng Chen, Dian Shao, Guangqian Guo, Shan Gao
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) demands models to expeditiously and accurately distinguish objects which conceal themselves seamlessly in the environment. Owing to the subtle differences and ambiguous boundaries, COD is not only a remarkably challenging task for models but also for human annotators, requiring huge efforts to provide pixel-wise annotations. To alleviate the heavy annotation burden, we propose to fulfill this task with the help of only one point supervision. Specifically, by swiftly clicking on each object, we first adaptively expand the original point-based annotation to a reasonable hint area. Then, to avoid partial localization around discriminative parts, we propose an attention regulator to scatter model attention to the whole object through partially masking labeled regions. Moreover, to solve the unstable feature representation of camouflaged objects under only point-based annotation, we perform unsupervised contrastive learning based on differently augmented image pairs (e.g. changing color or doing translation). On three mainstream COD benchmarks, experimental results show that our model outperforms several weakly-supervised methods by a large margin across various metrics.
Authors:Antoine P. Sanner, Nils F. Grauhan, Marc A. Brockmann, Ahmed E. Othman, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Abstract:
Whole-body CT is used for multi-trauma patients in the search of any and all injuries. Since an initial assessment needs to be rapid and the search for lesions is done for the whole body, very little time can be allocated for the inspection of a specific anatomy. In particular, intracranial hemorrhages are still missed, especially by clinical students. In this work, we present a Deep Learning approach for highlighting such lesions to improve the diagnostic accuracy. While most works on intracranial hemorrhages perform segmentation, detection only requires bounding boxes for the localization of the bleeding. In this paper, we propose a novel Voxel-Complete IoU (VC-IoU) loss that encourages the network to learn the 3D aspect ratios of bounding boxes and leads to more precise detections. We extensively experiment on brain bleeding detection using a publicly available dataset, and validate it on a private cohort, where we achieve 0.877 AR30, 0.728 AP30, and 0.653 AR30, 0.514 AP30 respectively. These results constitute a relative +5% improvement in Average Recall for both datasets compared to other loss functions. Finally, as there is little data currently publicly available for 3D object detection and as annotation resources are limited in the clinical setting, we evaluate the cost of different annotation methods, as well as the impact of imprecise bounding boxes in the training data on the detection performance.
Authors:Huafeng Chen, Pengxu Wei, Guangqian Guo, Shan Gao
Abstract:
Most Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) methods heavily rely on mask annotations, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire. Existing weakly-supervised COD approaches exhibit significantly inferior performance compared to fully-supervised methods and struggle to simultaneously support all the existing types of camouflaged object labels, including scribbles, bounding boxes, and points. Even for Segment Anything Model (SAM), it is still problematic to handle the weakly-supervised COD and it typically encounters challenges of prompt compatibility of the scribble labels, extreme response, semantically erroneous response, and unstable feature representations, producing unsatisfactory results in camouflaged scenes. To mitigate these issues, we propose a unified COD framework in this paper, termed SAM-COD, which is capable of supporting arbitrary weakly-supervised labels. Our SAM-COD employs a prompt adapter to handle scribbles as prompts based on SAM. Meanwhile, we introduce response filter and semantic matcher modules to improve the quality of the masks obtained by SAM under COD prompts. To alleviate the negative impacts of inaccurate mask predictions, a new strategy of prompt-adaptive knowledge distillation is utilized to ensure a reliable feature representation. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted extensive empirical experiments on three mainstream COD benchmarks. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art weakly-supervised and even fully-supervised methods.
Authors:Zhonglin Chen, Anyu Geng, Jianan Jiang, Jiwu Lu, Di Wu
Abstract:
Although convolutional neural networks have made outstanding achievements in visible light target detection, there are still many challenges in infrared small object detection because of the low signal-to-noise ratio, incomplete object structure, and a lack of reliable infrared small object dataset. To resolve limitations of the infrared small object dataset, a new dataset named InfraTiny was constructed, and more than 85% bounding box is less than 32x32 pixels (3218 images and a total of 20,893 bounding boxes). A multi-scale attention mechanism module (MSAM) and a Feature Fusion Augmentation Pyramid Module (FFAFPM) were proposed and deployed onto embedded devices. The MSAM enables the network to obtain scale perception information by acquiring different receptive fields, while the background noise information is suppressed to enhance feature extraction ability. The proposed FFAFPM can enrich semantic information, and enhance the fusion of shallow feature and deep feature, thus false positive results have been significantly reduced. By integrating the proposed methods into the YOLO model, which is named Infra-YOLO, infrared small object detection performance has been improved. Compared to yolov3, mAP@0.5 has been improved by 2.7%; and compared to yolov4, that by 2.5% on the InfraTiny dataset. The proposed Infra-YOLO was also transferred onto the embedded device in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for real application scenarios, where the channel pruning method is adopted to reduce FLOPs and to achieve a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Even if the parameters of Infra-YOLO are reduced by 88% with the pruning method, a gain of 0.7% is still achieved on mAP@0.5 compared to yolov3, and a gain of 0.5% compared to yolov4. Experimental results show that the proposed MSAM and FFAFPM method can improve infrared small object detection performance compared with the previous benchmark method.
Authors:Blessing Agyei Kyem, Eugene Kofi Okrah Denteh, Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Kenneth Adomako Tutu, Armstrong Aboah
Abstract:
Road infrastructure maintenance in developing countries faces unique challenges due to resource constraints and diverse environmental factors. This study addresses the critical need for efficient, accurate, and locally-relevant pavement distress detection methods in these regions. We present a novel deep learning approach combining YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection models with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to simultaneously detect and classify multiple pavement distress types. The model demonstrates robust performance in detecting and classifying potholes, longitudinal cracks, alligator cracks, and raveling, with confidence scores ranging from 0.46 to 0.93. While some misclassifications occur in complex scenarios, these provide insights into unique challenges of pavement assessment in developing countries. Additionally, we developed a web-based application for real-time distress detection from images and videos. This research advances automated pavement distress detection and provides a tailored solution for developing countries, potentially improving road safety, optimizing maintenance strategies, and contributing to sustainable transportation infrastructure development.
Authors:Blessing Agyei Kyem, Eugene Kofi Okrah Denteh, Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Armstrong Aboah
Abstract:
This research introduces the first multimodal approach for pavement condition assessment, providing both quantitative Pavement Condition Index (PCI) predictions and qualitative descriptions. We introduce PaveCap, a novel framework for automated pavement condition assessment. The framework consists of two main parts: a Single-Shot PCI Estimation Network and a Dense Captioning Network. The PCI Estimation Network uses YOLOv8 for object detection, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for zero-shot segmentation, and a four-layer convolutional neural network to predict PCI. The Dense Captioning Network uses a YOLOv8 backbone, a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture, and a convolutional feed-forward module to generate detailed descriptions of pavement conditions. To train and evaluate these networks, we developed a pavement dataset with bounding box annotations, textual annotations, and PCI values. The results of our PCI Estimation Network showed a strong positive correlation (0.70) between predicted and actual PCIs, demonstrating its effectiveness in automating condition assessment. Also, the Dense Captioning Network produced accurate pavement condition descriptions, evidenced by high BLEU (0.7445), GLEU (0.5893), and METEOR (0.7252) scores. Additionally, the dense captioning model handled complex scenarios well, even correcting some errors in the ground truth data. The framework developed here can greatly improve infrastructure management and decision18 making in pavement maintenance.
Authors:Gongjin Lan, Yang Peng, Qi Hao, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract:
Autonomous driving significantly benefits from data-driven deep neural networks. However, the data in autonomous driving typically fits the long-tailed distribution, in which the critical driving data in adverse conditions is hard to collect. Although generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been applied to augment data for autonomous driving, generating driving images in adverse conditions is still challenging. In this work, we propose a novel framework, SUSTechGAN, with customized dual attention modules, multi-scale generators, and a novel loss function to generate driving images for improving object detection of autonomous driving in adverse conditions. We test the SUSTechGAN and the well-known GANs to generate driving images in adverse conditions of rain and night and apply the generated images to retrain object detection networks. Specifically, we add generated images into the training datasets to retrain the well-known YOLOv5 and evaluate the improvement of the retrained YOLOv5 for object detection in adverse conditions. The experimental results show that the generated driving images by our SUSTechGAN significantly improved the performance of retrained YOLOv5 in rain and night conditions, which outperforms the well-known GANs. The open-source code, video description and datasets are available on the page 1 to facilitate image generation development in autonomous driving under adverse conditions.
Authors:Antoine P. Sanner, Nils F. Grauhan, Marc A. Brockmann, Ahmed E. Othman, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Abstract:
Patients with Intracranial Hemorrhage (ICH) face a potentially life-threatening condition, and patient-centered individualized treatment remains challenging due to possible clinical complications. Deep-Learning-based methods can efficiently analyze the routinely acquired head CTs to support the clinical decision-making. The majority of early work focuses on the detection and segmentation of ICH, but do not model the complex relations between ICH and adjacent brain structures. In this work, we design a tailored object detection method for ICH, which we unite with segmentation-grounded Scene Graph Generation (SGG) methods to learn a holistic representation of the clinical cerebral scene. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of SGG for 3D voxel images. We evaluate our method on two head-CT datasets and demonstrate that our model can recall up to 74% of clinically relevant relations. This work lays the foundation towards SGG for 3D voxel data. The generated Scene Graphs can already provide insights for the clinician, but are also valuable for all downstream tasks as a compact and interpretable representation.
Authors:Kohei Iwano, Shogo Shibuya, Satoshi Kagiwada, Hitoshi Iyatomi
Abstract:
Recently, object detection methods (OD; e.g., YOLO-based models) have been widely utilized in plant disease diagnosis. These methods demonstrate robustness to distance variations and excel at detecting small lesions compared to classification methods (CL; e.g., CNN models). However, there are issues such as low diagnostic performance for hard-to-detect diseases and high labeling costs. Additionally, since healthy cases cannot be explicitly trained, there is a risk of false positives. We propose the Hierarchical object detection and recognition framework (HODRF), a sophisticated and highly integrated two-stage system that combines the strengths of both OD and CL for plant disease diagnosis. In the first stage, HODRF uses OD to identify regions of interest (ROIs) without specifying the disease. In the second stage, CL diagnoses diseases surrounding the ROIs. HODRF offers several advantages: (1) Since OD detects only one type of ROI, HODRF can detect diseases with limited training images by leveraging its ability to identify other lesions. (2) While OD over-detects healthy cases, HODRF significantly reduces these errors by using CL in the second stage. (3) CL's accuracy improves in HODRF as it identifies diagnostic targets given as ROIs, making it less vulnerable to size changes. (4) HODRF benefits from CL's lower annotation costs, allowing it to learn from a larger number of images. We implemented HODRF using YOLOv7 for OD and EfficientNetV2 for CL and evaluated its performance on a large-scale dataset (4 crops, 20 diseased and healthy classes, 281K images). HODRF outperformed YOLOv7 alone by 5.8 to 21.5 points on healthy data and 0.6 to 7.5 points on macro F1 scores, and it improved macro F1 by 1.1 to 7.2 points over EfficientNetV2.
Authors:Anusha Verma, Ghazal Ghajari, K M Tawsik Jawad, Hugh P. Salehi, Fathi Amsaad
Abstract:
Maintaining patient safety and the safety of healthcare workers (HCWs) in hospitals and clinics highly depends on following the proper protocol for donning and taking off personal protective equipment (PPE). HCWs can benefit from a feedback system during the putting on and removal process because the process is cognitively demanding and errors are common. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided guidelines for correct PPE use which should be followed. A real time object detection along with a unique sequencing algorithms are used to identify and determine the donning and doffing process in real time. The purpose of this technical research is two-fold: The user gets real time alert to the step they missed in the sequence if they don't follow the proper procedure during donning or doffing. Secondly, the use of tiny machine learning (yolov4-tiny) in embedded system architecture makes it feasible and cost-effective to deploy in different healthcare settings.
Authors:Karim Armanious, Maurice Quach, Michael Ulrich, Timo Winterling, Johannes Friesen, Sascha Braun, Daniel Jenet, Yuri Feldman, Eitan Kosman, Philipp Rapp, Volker Fischer, Marc Sons, Lukas Kohns, Daniel Eckstein, Daniela Egbert, Simone Letsch, Corinna Voege, Felix Huttner, Alexander Bartler, Robert Maiwald, Yancong Lin, Ulf Rüegg, Claudius Gläser, Bastian Bischoff, Jascha Freess, Karsten Haug, Kathrin Klee, Holger Caesar
Abstract:
This paper introduces the Bosch street dataset (BSD), a novel multi-modal large-scale dataset aimed at promoting highly automated driving (HAD) and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) research. Unlike existing datasets, BSD offers a unique integration of high-resolution imaging radar, lidar, and camera sensors, providing unprecedented 360-degree coverage to bridge the current gap in high-resolution radar data availability. Spanning urban, rural, and highway environments, BSD enables detailed exploration into radar-based object detection and sensor fusion techniques. The dataset is aimed at facilitating academic and research collaborations between Bosch and current and future partners. This aims to foster joint efforts in developing cutting-edge HAD and ADAS technologies. The paper describes the dataset's key attributes, including its scalability, radar resolution, and labeling methodology. Key offerings also include initial benchmarks for sensor modalities and a development kit tailored for extensive data analysis and performance evaluation, underscoring our commitment to contributing valuable resources to the HAD and ADAS research community.
Authors:Yunling Zheng, Zeyi Xu, Fanghui Xue, Biao Yang, Jiancheng Lyu, Shuai Zhang, Yingyong Qi, Jack Xin
Abstract:
We propose and demonstrate an alternating Fourier and image domain filtering approach for feature extraction as an efficient alternative to build a vision backbone without using the computationally intensive attention. The performance among the lightweight models reaches the state-of-the-art level on ImageNet-1K classification, and improves downstream tasks on object detection and segmentation consistently as well. Our approach also serves as a new tool to compress vision transformers (ViTs).
Authors:Lovis Justin Immanuel Zenz, Erik Heiland, Peter Hillmann, Andreas Karcher
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a method for aligning models with their realization through the application of model-based systems engineering. Our approach is divided into three steps. (1) Firstly, we leverage domain expertise and the Unified Architecture Framework to establish a reference model that fundamentally describes some domain. (2) Subsequently, we instantiate the reference model as specific models tailored to different scenarios within the domain. (3) Finally, we incorporate corresponding run logic directly into both the reference model and the specific models. In total, we thus provide a practical means to ensure that every implementation result is justified by business demand. We demonstrate our approach using the example of maritime object detection as a specific application (specific model / implementation element) of automatic target recognition as a service reoccurring in various forms (reference model element). Our approach facilitates a more seamless integration of models and implementation, fostering enhanced Business-IT alignment.
Authors:Shuang Hao, Chunlin Zhong, He Tang
Abstract:
The depth/thermal information is beneficial for detecting salient object with conventional RGB images. However, in dual-modal salient object detection (SOD) model, the robustness against noisy inputs and modality missing is crucial but rarely studied. To tackle this problem, we introduce \textbf{Co}nditional Dropout and \textbf{LA}nguage-driven(\textbf{CoLA}) framework comprising two core components. 1) Language-driven Quality Assessment (LQA): Leveraging a pretrained vision-language model with a prompt learner, the LQA recalibrates image contributions without requiring additional quality annotations. This approach effectively mitigates the impact of noisy inputs. 2) Conditional Dropout (CD): A learning method to strengthen the model's adaptability in scenarios with missing modalities, while preserving its performance under complete modalities. The CD serves as a plug-in training scheme that treats modality-missing as conditions, strengthening the overall robustness of various dual-modal SOD models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art dual-modal SOD models, under both modality-complete and modality-missing conditions. We will release source code upon acceptance.
Authors:Ruixiao Zhang, Yihong Wu, Juheon Lee, Adam Prugel-Bennett, Xiaohao Cai
Abstract:
The performance of domain adaptation technologies has not yet reached an ideal level in the current 3D object detection field for autonomous driving, which is mainly due to significant differences in the size of vehicles, as well as the environments they operate in when applied across domains. These factors together hinder the effective transfer and application of knowledge learned from specific datasets. Since the existing evaluation metrics are initially designed for evaluation on a single domain by calculating the 2D or 3D overlap between the prediction and ground-truth bounding boxes, they often suffer from the overfitting problem caused by the size differences among datasets. This raises a fundamental question related to the evaluation of the 3D object detection models' cross-domain performance: Do we really need models to maintain excellent performance in their original 3D bounding boxes after being applied across domains? From a practical application perspective, one of our main focuses is actually on preventing collisions between vehicles and other obstacles, especially in cross-domain scenarios where correctly predicting the size of vehicles is much more difficult. In other words, as long as a model can accurately identify the closest surfaces to the ego vehicle, it is sufficient to effectively avoid obstacles. In this paper, we propose two metrics to measure 3D object detection models' ability of detecting the closer surfaces to the sensor on the ego vehicle, which can be used to evaluate their cross-domain performance more comprehensively and reasonably. Furthermore, we propose a refinement head, named EdgeHead, to guide models to focus more on the learnable closer surfaces, which can greatly improve the cross-domain performance of existing models not only under our new metrics, but even also under the original BEV/3D metrics.
Authors:Yuming Zhang, Dongzhi Guan, Shouxin Zhang, Junhao Su, Yunzhi Han, Jiabin Liu
Abstract:
Safety issues at construction sites have long plagued the industry, posing risks to worker safety and causing economic damage due to potential hazards. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, particularly in the field of computer vision, the automation of safety monitoring on construction sites has emerged as a solution to this longstanding issue. Despite achieving impressive performance, advanced object detection methods like YOLOv8 still face challenges in handling the complex conditions found at construction sites. To solve these problems, this study presents the Global Stability Optimization YOLO (GSO-YOLO) model to address challenges in complex construction sites. The model integrates the Global Optimization Module (GOM) and Steady Capture Module (SCM) to enhance global contextual information capture and detection stability. The innovative AIoU loss function, which combines CIoU and EIoU, improves detection accuracy and efficiency. Experiments on datasets like SODA, MOCS, and CIS show that GSO-YOLO outperforms existing methods, achieving SOTA performance.
Authors:Maged Badawi, Mohammedyahia Abushanab, Sheethal Bhat, Andreas Maier
Abstract:
In this paper, different techniques of few-shot, zero-shot, and regular object detection have been investigated. The need for few-shot learning and zero-shot learning techniques is crucial and arises from the limitations and challenges in traditional machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision methods where they require large amounts of data, plus the poor generalization of those traditional methods.
Those techniques can give us prominent results by using only a few training sets reducing the required amounts of data and improving the generalization.
This survey will highlight the recent papers of the last three years that introduce the usage of few-shot learning and zero-shot learning techniques in addressing the challenges mentioned earlier. In this paper we reviewed the Zero-shot, few-shot and regular object detection methods and categorized them in an understandable manner. Based on the comparison made within each category. It been found that the approaches are quite impressive.
This integrated review of diverse papers on few-shot, zero-shot, and regular object detection reveals a shared focus on advancing the field through novel frameworks and techniques. A noteworthy observation is the scarcity of detailed discussions regarding the difficulties encountered during the development phase. Contributions include the introduction of innovative models, such as ZSD-YOLO and GTNet, often showcasing improvements with various metrics such as mean average precision (mAP),Recall@100 (RE@100), the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and precision. These findings underscore a collective move towards leveraging vision-language models for versatile applications, with potential areas for future research including a more thorough exploration of limitations and domain-specific adaptations.
Authors:Shuaixin Liu, Kunqian Li, Yilin Ding, Kuangwei Xu, Qianli Jiang, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Dalei Song
Abstract:
We introduce a novel vision-based framework for in-situ trunk identification and length measurement of sea cucumbers, which plays a crucial role in the monitoring of marine ranching resources and mechanized harvesting. To model sea cucumber trunk curves with varying degrees of bending, we utilize the parametric Bézier curve due to its computational simplicity, stability, and extensive range of transformation possibilities. Then, we propose an end-to-end unified framework that combines parametric Bézier curve modeling with the widely used You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) pipeline, abbreviated as TISC-Net, and incorporates effective funnel activation and efficient multi-scale attention modules to enhance curve feature perception and learning. Furthermore, we propose incorporating trunk endpoint loss as an additional constraint to effectively mitigate the impact of endpoint deviations on the overall curve. Finally, by utilizing the depth information of pixels located along the trunk curve captured by a binocular camera, we propose accurately estimating the in-situ length of sea cucumbers through space curve integration. We established two challenging benchmark datasets for curve-based in-situ sea cucumber trunk identification. These datasets consist of over 1,000 real-world marine environment images of sea cucumbers, accompanied by Bézier format annotations. We conduct evaluation on SC-ISTI, for which our method achieves mAP50 above 0.9 on both object detection and trunk identification tasks. Extensive length measurement experiments demonstrate that the average absolute relative error is around 0.15.
Authors:Maria Tzelepi, Vasileios Mezaris
Abstract:
In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of a deep learning model towards image classification tasks, proposing a novel anchor-based training methodology, named \textit{Online Anchor-based Training} (OAT). The OAT method, guided by the insights provided in the anchor-based object detection methodologies, instead of learning directly the class labels, proposes to train a model to learn percentage changes of the class labels with respect to defined anchors. We define as anchors the batch centers at the output of the model. Then, during the test phase, the predictions are converted back to the original class label space, and the performance is evaluated. The effectiveness of the OAT method is validated on four datasets.
Authors:Hongpeng Pan, Shifeng Yi, Shouwei Yang, Lei Qi, Bing Hu, Yi Xu, Yang Yang
Abstract:
This report introduces an enhanced method for the Foundational Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) task, leveraging the vision-language model (VLM) for object detection. However, on specific datasets, VLM may encounter the problem where the detected targets are misaligned with the target concepts of interest. This misalignment hinders the zero-shot performance of VLM and the application of fine-tuning methods based on pseudo-labels. To address this issue, we propose the VLM+ framework, which integrates the multimodal large language model (MM-LLM). Specifically, we use MM-LLM to generate a series of referential expressions for each category. Based on the VLM predictions and the given annotations, we select the best referential expression for each category by matching the maximum IoU. Subsequently, we use these referential expressions to generate pseudo-labels for all images in the training set and then combine them with the original labeled data to fine-tune the VLM. Additionally, we employ iterative pseudo-label generation and optimization to further enhance the performance of the VLM. Our approach achieve 32.56 mAP in the final test.
Authors:Yaoteng Tan, Zikui Cai, M. Salman Asif
Abstract:
Deep networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, yet conventional attack methods utilize static adversarial perturbations that induce fixed mispredictions. In this work, we exploit an overlooked property of adversarial perturbations--their dependence on image transforms--and introduce transform-dependent adversarial attacks. Unlike traditional attacks, our perturbations exhibit metamorphic properties, enabling diverse adversarial effects as a function of transformation parameters. We demonstrate that this transform-dependent vulnerability exists across different architectures (e.g., CNN and transformer), vision tasks (e.g., image classification and object detection), and a wide range of image transforms. Additionally, we show that transform-dependent perturbations can serve as a defense mechanism, preventing sensitive information disclosure when image enhancement transforms pose a risk of revealing private content. Through analysis in blackbox and defended model settings, we show that transform-dependent perturbations achieve high targeted attack success rates, outperforming state-of-the-art transfer attacks by 17-31% in blackbox scenarios. Our work introduces novel, controllable paradigm for adversarial attack deployment, revealing a previously overlooked vulnerability in deep networks.
Authors:Xian Sun, Qiwei Yan, Chubo Deng, Chenglong Liu, Yi Jiang, Zhongyan Hou, Wanxuan Lu, Fanglong Yao, Xiaoyu Liu, Lingxiang Hao, Hongfeng Yu
Abstract:
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) is a high-level visual understanding and reasoning task aimed at extracting entities (such as objects) and their interrelationships from images. Significant progress has been made in the study of SGG in natural images in recent years, but its exploration in the domain of remote sensing images remains very limited. The complex characteristics of remote sensing images necessitate higher time and manual interpretation costs for annotation compared to natural images. The lack of a large-scale public SGG benchmark is a major impediment to the advancement of SGG-related research in aerial imagery. In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available large-scale, million-level relation dataset in the field of remote sensing images which is named as ReCon1M. Specifically, our dataset is built upon Fair1M and comprises 21,392 images. It includes annotations for 859,751 object bounding boxes across 60 different categories, and 1,149,342 relation triplets across 64 categories based on these bounding boxes. We provide a detailed description of the dataset's characteristics and statistical information. We conducted two object detection tasks and three sub-tasks within SGG on this dataset, assessing the performance of mainstream methods on these tasks.
Authors:Jinwoo Ahn, Junhyeok Park, Min-Jun Kim, Kang-Hyeon Kim, So-Yeong Sohn, Yun-Ji Lee, Du-Seong Chang, Yu-Jung Heo, Eun-Sol Kim
Abstract:
In this paper, the solution of HYU MLLAB KT Team to the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning Task: SMART-101 CVPR 2024 Challenge is presented. Beyond conventional visual question-answering problems, the SMART-101 challenge aims to achieve human-level multimodal understanding by tackling complex visio-linguistic puzzles designed for children in the 6-8 age group. To solve this problem, we suggest two main ideas. First, to utilize the reasoning ability of a large-scale language model (LLM), the given visual cues (images) are grounded in the text modality. For this purpose, we generate highly detailed text captions that describe the context of the image and use these captions as input for the LLM. Second, due to the nature of puzzle images, which often contain various geometric visual patterns, we utilize an object detection algorithm to ensure these patterns are not overlooked in the captioning process. We employed the SAM algorithm, which can detect various-size objects, to capture the visual features of these geometric patterns and used this information as input for the LLM. Under the puzzle split configuration, we achieved an option selection accuracy Oacc of 29.5 on the test set and a weighted option selection accuracy (WOSA) of 27.1 on the challenge set.
Authors:Thomas H. Schmitt, Maximilian Bundscherer, Tobias Bocklet
Abstract:
The Semmeldetector, is a machine learning application that utilizes object detection models to detect, classify and count baked goods in images. Our application allows commercial bakers to track unsold baked goods, which allows them to optimize production and increase resource efficiency. We compiled a dataset comprising 1151 images that distinguishes between 18 different types of baked goods to train our detection models. To facilitate model training, we used a Copy-Paste augmentation pipeline to expand our dataset. We trained the state-of-the-art object detection model YOLOv8 on our detection task. We tested the impact of different training data, model scale, and online image augmentation pipelines on model performance. Our overall best performing model, achieved an AP@0.5 of 89.1% on our test set. Based on our results, we conclude that machine learning can be a valuable tool even for unforeseen industries like bakeries, even with very limited datasets.
Authors:Patrick Palmer, Martin Krüger, Richard Altendorfer, Torsten Bertram
Abstract:
Effective tracking of surrounding traffic participants allows for an accurate state estimation as a necessary ingredient for prediction of future behavior and therefore adequate planning of the ego vehicle trajectory. One approach for detecting and tracking surrounding traffic participants is the combination of a learning based object detector with a classical tracking algorithm. Learning based object detectors have been shown to work adequately on lidar and camera data, while learning based object detectors using standard radar data input have proven to be inferior. Recently, with the improvements to radar sensor technology in the form of imaging radars, the object detection performance on radar was greatly improved but is still limited compared to lidar sensors due to the sparsity of the radar point cloud. This presents a unique challenge for the task of multi-object tracking. The tracking algorithm must overcome the limited detection quality while generating consistent tracks. To this end, a comparison between different multi-object tracking methods on imaging radar data is required to investigate its potential for downstream tasks. The work at hand compares multiple approaches and analyzes their limitations when applied to imaging radar data. Furthermore, enhancements to the presented approaches in the form of probabilistic association algorithms are considered for this task.
Authors:Dejie Yang, Yang Liu
Abstract:
Accurately detecting active objects undergoing state changes is essential for comprehending human interactions and facilitating decision-making. The existing methods for active object detection (AOD) primarily rely on visual appearance of the objects within input, such as changes in size, shape and relationship with hands. However, these visual changes can be subtle, posing challenges, particularly in scenarios with multiple distracting no-change instances of the same category. We observe that the state changes are often the result of an interaction being performed upon the object, thus propose to use informed priors about object related plausible interactions (including semantics and visual appearance) to provide more reliable cues for AOD. Specifically, we propose a knowledge aggregation procedure to integrate the aforementioned informed priors into oracle queries within the teacher decoder, offering more object affordance commonsense to locate the active object. To streamline the inference process and reduce extra knowledge inputs, we propose a knowledge distillation approach that encourages the student decoder to mimic the detection capabilities of the teacher decoder using the oracle query by replicating its predictions and attention. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets, namely Ego4D, Epic-Kitchens, MECCANO, and 100DOH, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in improving AOD.
Authors:Mingxiang Fu, Yu Song, Jiameng Lv, Liang Cao, Peng Jia, Nan Li, Xiangru Li, Jifeng Liu, A-Li Luo, Bo Qiu, Shiyin Shen, Liangping Tu, Lili Wang, Shoulin Wei, Haifeng Yang, Zhenping Yi, Zhiqiang Zou
Abstract:
The exponential growth of astronomical datasets provides an unprecedented opportunity for humans to gain insight into the Universe. However, effectively analyzing this vast amount of data poses a significant challenge. Astronomers are turning to deep learning techniques to address this, but the methods are limited by their specific training sets, leading to considerable duplicate workloads too. Hence, as an example to present how to overcome the issue, we built a framework for general analysis of galaxy images, based on a large vision model (LVM) plus downstream tasks (DST), including galaxy morphological classification, image restoration, object detection, parameter extraction, and more. Considering the low signal-to-noise ratio of galaxy images and the imbalanced distribution of galaxy categories, we have incorporated a Human-in-the-loop (HITL) module into our large vision model, which leverages human knowledge to enhance the reliability and interpretability of processing galaxy images interactively. The proposed framework exhibits notable few-shot learning capabilities and versatile adaptability to all the abovementioned tasks on galaxy images in the DESI legacy imaging surveys. Expressly, for object detection, trained by 1000 data points, our DST upon the LVM achieves an accuracy of 96.7%, while ResNet50 plus Mask R-CNN gives an accuracy of 93.1%; for morphology classification, to obtain AUC ~0.9, LVM plus DST and HITL only requests 1/50 training sets compared to ResNet18. Expectedly, multimodal data can be integrated similarly, which opens up possibilities for conducting joint analyses with datasets spanning diverse domains in the era of multi-message astronomy.
Authors:Federico Zocco, Daniel R. Lake, Seán McLoone, Shahin Rahimifard
Abstract:
The circular economy paradigm is gaining interest as a solution to reducing both material supply uncertainties and waste generation. One of the main challenges in realizing this paradigm is monitoring materials, since in general, something that is not measured cannot be effectively managed. In this paper, we propose a real-time synchronized object detection framework that enables, at the same time, autonomous sorting, mapping, and quantification of solid materials. We begin by introducing the general framework for real-time wide-area material monitoring, and then, we illustrate it using a numerical example. Finally, we develop a first prototype whose working principle is underpinned by the proposed framework. The prototype detects 4 materials from 5 different models of inhalers and, through a synchronization mechanism, it combines the detection outputs of 2 vision units running at 12-22 frames per second (Fig. 1). This led us to introduce the notion of synchromaterial and to conceive a robotic waste sorter as a node compartment of a material network. Dataset, code, and demo videos are publicly available.
Authors:Nick Nikzad, Yongsheng Gao, Jun Zhou
Abstract:
In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with channel-wise feature refining mechanisms have brought noticeable benefits to modelling channel dependencies. However, current attention paradigms fail to infer an optimal channel descriptor capable of simultaneously exploiting statistical and spatial relationships among feature maps. In this paper, to overcome this shortcoming, we present a novel channel-wise spatially autocorrelated (CSA) attention mechanism. Inspired by geographical analysis, the proposed CSA exploits the spatial relationships between channels of feature maps to produce an effective channel descriptor. To the best of our knowledge, this is the f irst time that the concept of geographical spatial analysis is utilized in deep CNNs. The proposed CSA imposes negligible learning parameters and light computational overhead to the deep model, making it a powerful yet efficient attention module of choice. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed CSA networks (CSA-Nets) through extensive experiments and analysis on ImageNet, and MS COCO benchmark datasets for image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. The experimental results demonstrate that CSA-Nets are able to consistently achieve competitive performance and superior generalization than several state-of-the-art attention-based CNNs over different benchmark tasks and datasets.
Authors:Zhipeng Yuan, Nasamu Musa, Katarzyna Dybal, Matthew Back, Daniel Leybourne, Po Yang
Abstract:
Every year, plant parasitic nematodes, one of the major groups of plant pathogens, cause a significant loss of crops worldwide. To mitigate crop yield losses caused by nematodes, an efficient nematode monitoring method is essential for plant and crop disease management. In other respects, efficient nematode detection contributes to medical research and drug discovery, as nematodes are model organisms. With the rapid development of computer technology, computer vision techniques provide a feasible solution for quantifying nematodes or nematode infections. In this paper, we survey and categorise the studies and available datasets on nematode detection through deep-learning models. To stimulate progress in related research, this survey presents the potential state-of-the-art object detection models, training techniques, optimisation techniques, and evaluation metrics for deep learning beginners. Moreover, seven state-of-the-art object detection models are validated on three public datasets and the AgriNema dataset for plant parasitic nematodes to construct a baseline for nematode detection.
Authors:Yu-Hsuan Ho, Longxiang Li, Ali Mostafavi
Abstract:
Street view imagery, aided by advancements in image quality and accessibility, has emerged as a valuable resource for urban analytics research. Recent studies have explored its potential for estimating lowest floor elevation (LFE), offering a scalable alternative to traditional on-site measurements, crucial for assessing properties' flood risk and damage extent. While existing methods rely on object detection, the introduction of image segmentation has broadened street view images' utility for LFE estimation, although challenges still remain in segmentation quality and capability to distinguish front doors from other doors. To address these challenges in LFE estimation, this study integrates the Segment Anything model, a segmentation foundation model, with vision language models to conduct text-prompt image segmentation on street view images for LFE estimation. By evaluating various vision language models, integration methods, and text prompts, we identify the most suitable model for street view image analytics and LFE estimation tasks, thereby improving the availability of the current LFE estimation model based on image segmentation from 33% to 56% of properties. Remarkably, our proposed method significantly enhances the availability of LFE estimation to almost all properties in which the front door is visible in the street view image. Also the findings present the first baseline and comparison of various vision models of street view image-based LFE estimation. The model and findings not only contribute to advancing street view image segmentation for urban analytics but also provide a novel approach for image segmentation tasks for other civil engineering and infrastructure analytics tasks.
Authors:Munkh-Erdene Otgonbold, Ganzorig Batnasan, Munkhjargal Gochoo
Abstract:
Motivated by the need to improve model performance in traffic monitoring tasks with limited labeled samples, we propose a straightforward augmentation technique tailored for object detection datasets, specifically designed for stationary camera-based applications. Our approach focuses on placing objects in the same positions as the originals to ensure its effectiveness. By applying in-place augmentation on objects from the same camera input image, we address the challenge of overlapping with original and previously selected objects. Through extensive testing on two traffic monitoring datasets, we illustrate the efficacy of our augmentation strategy in improving model performance, particularly in scenarios with limited labeled samples and imbalanced class distributions. Notably, our method achieves comparable performance to models trained on the entire dataset while utilizing only 8.5 percent of the original data. Moreover, we report significant improvements, with mAP@.5 increasing from 0.4798 to 0.5025, and the mAP@.5:.95 rising from 0.29 to 0.3138 on the FishEye8K dataset. These results highlight the potential of our augmentation approach in enhancing object detection models for traffic monitoring applications.
Authors:Valentyn Boreiko, Matthias Hein, Jan Hendrik Metzen
Abstract:
Many safety-critical applications, especially in autonomous driving, require reliable object detectors. They can be very effectively assisted by a method to search for and identify potential failures and systematic errors before these detectors are deployed. Systematic errors are characterized by combinations of attributes such as object location, scale, orientation, and color, as well as the composition of their respective backgrounds. To identify them, one must rely on something other than real images from a test set because they do not account for very rare but possible combinations of attributes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a pipeline for generating realistic synthetic scenes with fine-grained control, allowing the creation of complex scenes with multiple objects. Our approach, BEV2EGO, allows for a realistic generation of the complete scene with road-contingent control that maps 2D bird's-eye view (BEV) scene configurations to a first-person view (EGO). In addition, we propose a benchmark for controlled scene generation to select the most appropriate generative outpainting model for BEV2EGO. We further use it to perform a systematic analysis of multiple state-of-the-art object detection models and discover differences between them.
Authors:Botao Ren, Botian Xu, Xue Yang, Yifan Pu, Jingyi Wang, Zhidong Deng
Abstract:
In most modern object detection pipelines, the detection proposals are processed independently given the feature map. Therefore, they overlook the underlying relationships between objects and the surrounding background, which could have provided additional context for accurate detection. Because aerial imagery is almost orthographic, the spatial relations in image space closely align with those in the physical world, and inter-object and object-background relationships become particularly significant. To address this oversight, we propose a framework that leverages the strengths of Transformer-based models and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) features to capture such relationships. Specifically, Building on two-stage detectors, we treat Region of Interest (RoI) proposals as tokens, accompanied by CLIP Tokens obtained from multi-level image segments. These tokens are then passed through a Transformer encoder, where specific spatial and geometric relations are incorporated into the attention weights, which are adaptively modulated and regularized. Additionally, we introduce self-supervised constraints on CLIP Tokens to ensure consistency. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent improvements, setting new state-of-the-art results with increases of 1.37 mAP$_{50}$ on DOTA-v1.0, 5.30 mAP$_{50}$ on DOTA-v1.5, 2.30 mAP$_{50}$ on DOTA-v2.0 and 3.23 mAP$_{50}$ on DIOR-R.
Authors:Seokha Moon, Hongbeen Park, Jungphil Kwon, Jaekoo Lee, Jinkyu Kim
Abstract:
In autonomous driving and robotics, there is a growing interest in utilizing short-term historical data to enhance multi-camera 3D object detection, leveraging the continuous and correlated nature of input video streams. Recent work has focused on spatially aligning BEV-based features over timesteps. However, this is often limited as its gain does not scale well with long-term past observations. To address this, we advocate for supervising a model to predict objects' poses given past observations, thus explicitly guiding to learn objects' temporal cues. To this end, we propose a model called DAP (Detection After Prediction), consisting of a two-branch network: (i) a branch responsible for forecasting the current objects' poses given past observations and (ii) another branch that detects objects based on the current and past observations. The features predicting the current objects from branch (i) is fused into branch (ii) to transfer predictive knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments with the large-scale nuScenes datasets, and we observe that utilizing such predictive information significantly improves the overall detection performance. Our model can be used plug-and-play, showing consistent performance gain.
Authors:Jaehyeon Moon, Dohyung Kim, Junyong Cheon, Bumsub Ham
Abstract:
Post-training quantization (PTQ) is an efficient model compression technique that quantizes a pretrained full-precision model using only a small calibration set of unlabeled samples without retraining. PTQ methods for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide quantization results comparable to full-precision counterparts. Directly applying them to vision transformers (ViTs), however, incurs severe performance degradation, mainly due to the differences in architectures between CNNs and ViTs. In particular, the distribution of activations for each channel vary drastically according to input instances, making PTQ methods for CNNs inappropriate for ViTs. To address this, we introduce instance-aware group quantization for ViTs (IGQ-ViT). To this end, we propose to split the channels of activation maps into multiple groups dynamically for each input instance, such that activations within each group share similar statistical properties. We also extend our scheme to quantize softmax attentions across tokens. In addition, the number of groups for each layer is adjusted to minimize the discrepancies between predictions from quantized and full-precision models, under a bit-operation (BOP) constraint. We show extensive experimental results on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation, with various transformer architectures, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Qian Wan, Xiang Xiang, Qinhao Zhou
Abstract:
Because of its use in practice, open-world object detection (OWOD) has gotten a lot of attention recently. The challenge is how can a model detect novel classes and then incrementally learn them without forgetting previously known classes. Previous approaches hinge on strongly-supervised or weakly-supervised novel-class data for novel-class detection, which may not apply to real applications. We construct a new benchmark that novel classes are only encountered at the inference stage. And we propose a new OWOD detector YOLOOC, based on the YOLO architecture yet for the Open-Class setup. We introduce label smoothing to prevent the detector from over-confidently mapping novel classes to known classes and to discover novel classes. Extensive experiments conducted on our more realistic setup demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for discovering novel classes in our new benchmark.
Authors:Louie Søs Meyer, Johanne Engel Aaen, Anitamalina Regitse Tranberg, Peter Kun, Matthias Freiberger, Sebastian Risi, Anders Sundnes Løvlie
Abstract:
This Research through Design paper explores how object detection may be applied to a large digital art museum collection to facilitate new ways of encountering and experiencing art. We present the design and evaluation of an interactive application called SMKExplore, which allows users to explore a museum's digital collection of paintings by browsing through objects detected in the images, as a novel form of open-ended exploration. We provide three contributions. First, we show how an object detection pipeline can be integrated into a design process for visual exploration. Second, we present the design and development of an app that enables exploration of an art museum's collection. Third, we offer reflections on future possibilities for museums and HCI researchers to incorporate object detection techniques into the digitalization of museums.
Authors:Haonan Xu, Yurui Huang, Sishun Pan, Zhihao Guan, Yi Xu, Yang Yang
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a solution for cross-modal transportation retrieval. Due to the cross-domain problem of traffic images, we divide the problem into two sub-tasks of pedestrian retrieval and vehicle retrieval through a simple strategy. In pedestrian retrieval tasks, we use IRRA as the base model and specifically design an Attribute Classification to mine the knowledge implied by attribute labels. More importantly, We use the strategy of Inclusion Relation Matching to make the image-text pairs with inclusion relation have similar representation in the feature space. For the vehicle retrieval task, we use BLIP as the base model. Since aligning the color attributes of vehicles is challenging, we introduce attribute-based object detection techniques to add color patch blocks to vehicle images for color data augmentation. This serves as strong prior information, helping the model perform the image-text alignment. At the same time, we incorporate labeled attributes into the image-text alignment loss to learn fine-grained alignment and prevent similar images and texts from being incorrectly separated. Our approach ranked first in the final B-board test with a score of 70.9.
Authors:Michele Antonazzi, Matteo Luperto, N. Alberto Borghese, Nicola Basilico
Abstract:
We introduce a novel approach for scalable domain adaptation in cloud robotics scenarios where robots rely on third-party AI inference services powered by large pre-trained deep neural networks. Our method is based on a downstream proposal-refinement stage running locally on the robots, exploiting a new lightweight DNN architecture, R2SNet. This architecture aims to mitigate performance degradation from domain shifts by adapting the object detection process to the target environment, focusing on relabeling, rescoring, and suppression of bounding-box proposals. Our method allows for local execution on robots, addressing the scalability challenges of domain adaptation without incurring significant computational costs. Real-world results on mobile service robots performing door detection show the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving scalable domain adaptation.
Authors:Souradeep Chakraborty, Dimitris Samaras
Abstract:
Our paper introduces a novel two-stage self-supervised approach for detecting co-occurring salient objects (CoSOD) in image groups without requiring segmentation annotations. Unlike existing unsupervised methods that rely solely on patch-level information (e.g. clustering patch descriptors) or on computation heavy off-the-shelf components for CoSOD, our lightweight model leverages feature correspondences at both patch and region levels, significantly improving prediction performance. In the first stage, we train a self-supervised network that detects co-salient regions by computing local patch-level feature correspondences across images. We obtain the segmentation predictions using confidence-based adaptive thresholding. In the next stage, we refine these intermediate segmentations by eliminating the detected regions (within each image) whose averaged feature representations are dissimilar to the foreground feature representation averaged across all the cross-attention maps (from the previous stage). Extensive experiments on three CoSOD benchmark datasets show that our self-supervised model outperforms the corresponding state-of-the-art models by a huge margin (e.g. on the CoCA dataset, our model has a 13.7% F-measure gain over the SOTA unsupervised CoSOD model). Notably, our self-supervised model also outperforms several recent fully supervised CoSOD models on the three test datasets (e.g., on the CoCA dataset, our model has a 4.6% F-measure gain over a recent supervised CoSOD model).
Authors:Zhili Chen, Kien T. Pham, Maosheng Ye, Zhiqiang Shen, Qifeng Chen
Abstract:
We present a new 3D point-based detector model, named Shift-SSD, for precise 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Traditional point-based 3D object detectors often employ architectures that rely on a progressive downsampling of points. While this method effectively reduces computational demands and increases receptive fields, it will compromise the preservation of crucial non-local information for accurate 3D object detection, especially in the complex driving scenarios. To address this, we introduce an intriguing Cross-Cluster Shifting operation to unleash the representation capacity of the point-based detector by efficiently modeling longer-range inter-dependency while including only a negligible overhead. Concretely, the Cross-Cluster Shifting operation enhances the conventional design by shifting partial channels from neighboring clusters, which enables richer interaction with non-local regions and thus enlarges the receptive field of clusters. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes datasets, and the results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Shift-SSD in both detection accuracy and runtime efficiency.
Authors:Ashish Kumar, Laxmidhar Behera
Abstract:
Autonomous aerial harvesting is a highly complex problem because it requires numerous interdisciplinary algorithms to be executed on mini low-powered computing devices. Object detection is one such algorithm that is compute-hungry. In this context, we make the following contributions: (i) Fast Fruit Detector (FFD), a resource-efficient, single-stage, and postprocessing-free object detector based on our novel latent object representation (LOR) module, query assignment, and prediction strategy. FFD achieves 100FPS@FP32 precision on the latest 10W NVIDIA Jetson-NX embedded device while co-existing with other time-critical sub-systems such as control, grasping, SLAM, a major achievement of this work. (ii) a method to generate vast amounts of training data without exhaustive manual labelling of fruit images since they consist of a large number of instances, which increases the labelling cost and time. (iii) an open-source fruit detection dataset having plenty of very small-sized instances that are difficult to detect. Our exhaustive evaluations on our and MinneApple dataset show that FFD, being only a single-scale detector, is more accurate than many representative detectors, e.g. FFD is better than single-scale Faster-RCNN by 10.7AP, multi-scale Faster-RCNN by 2.3AP, and better than latest single-scale YOLO-v8 by 8AP and multi-scale YOLO-v8 by 0.3 while being considerably faster.
Authors:Zihao Zhan, Yirui Yang, Haoqi Shan, Hanqiu Wang, Yier Jin, Shuo Wang
Abstract:
Wireless charging is becoming an increasingly popular charging solution in portable electronic products for a more convenient and safer charging experience than conventional wired charging. However, our research identified new vulnerabilities in wireless charging systems, making them susceptible to intentional electromagnetic interference. These vulnerabilities facilitate a set of novel attack vectors, enabling adversaries to manipulate the charger and perform a series of attacks.
In this paper, we propose VoltSchemer, a set of innovative attacks that grant attackers control over commercial-off-the-shelf wireless chargers merely by modulating the voltage from the power supply. These attacks represent the first of its kind, exploiting voltage noises from the power supply to manipulate wireless chargers without necessitating any malicious modifications to the chargers themselves. The significant threats imposed by VoltSchemer are substantiated by three practical attacks, where a charger can be manipulated to: control voice assistants via inaudible voice commands, damage devices being charged through overcharging or overheating, and bypass Qi-standard specified foreign-object-detection mechanism to damage valuable items exposed to intense magnetic fields.
We demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the VoltSchemer attacks with successful attacks on 9 top-selling COTS wireless chargers. Furthermore, we discuss the security implications of our findings and suggest possible countermeasures to mitigate potential threats.
Authors:Anxhelo Diko, Danilo Avola, Marco Cascio, Luigi Cinque
Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) self-attention mechanism is characterized by feature collapse in deeper layers, resulting in the vanishing of low-level visual features. However, such features can be helpful to accurately represent and identify elements within an image and increase the accuracy and robustness of vision-based recognition systems. Following this rationale, we propose a novel residual attention learning method for improving ViT-based architectures, increasing their visual feature diversity and model robustness. In this way, the proposed network can capture and preserve significant low-level features, providing more details about the elements within the scene being analyzed. The effectiveness and robustness of the presented method are evaluated on five image classification benchmarks, including ImageNet1k, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Oxford Flowers-102, and Oxford-IIIT Pet, achieving improved performances. Additionally, experiments on the COCO2017 dataset show that the devised approach discovers and incorporates semantic and spatial relationships for object detection and instance segmentation when implemented into spatial-aware transformer models.
Authors:Kei Iino, Shunsuke Akamatsu, Hiroshi Watanabe, Shohei Enomoto, Akira Sakamoto, Takeharu Eda
Abstract:
Image coding for machines (ICM) aims to compress images for machine analysis using recognition models rather than human vision. Hence, in ICM, it is important for the encoder to recognize and compress the information necessary for the machine recognition task. There are two main approaches in learned ICM; optimization of the compression model based on task loss, and Region of Interest (ROI) based bit allocation. These approaches provide the encoder with the recognition capability. However, optimization with task loss becomes difficult when the recognition model is deep, and ROI-based methods often involve extra overhead during evaluation. In this study, we propose a novel training method for learned ICM models that applies auxiliary loss to the encoder to improve its recognition capability and rate-distortion performance. Our method achieves Bjontegaard Delta rate improvements of 27.7% and 20.3% in object detection and semantic segmentation tasks, compared to the conventional training method.
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Authors:Shrutika Vishal Thengane, Yu Xiang Tan, Marcel Bartholomeus Prasetyo, Malika Meghjani
Abstract:
The underwater world remains largely unexplored, with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) playing a crucial role in sub-sea explorations. However, continuous monitoring of underwater environments using AUVs can generate a significant amount of data. In addition, sending live data feed from an underwater environment requires dedicated on-board data storage options for AUVs which can hinder requirements of other higher priority tasks. Informative sampling techniques offer a solution by condensing observations. In this paper, we present a semantically-aware online informative sampling (ON-IS) approach which samples an AUV's visual experience in real-time. Specifically, we obtain visual features from a fine-tuned object detection model to align the sampling outcomes with the desired semantic information. Our contributions are (a) a novel Semantic Online Informative Sampling (SON-IS) algorithm, (b) a user study to validate the proposed approach and (c) a novel evaluation metric to score our proposed algorithm with respect to the suggested samples by human subjects
Authors:Karolina Seweryn, Gabriel ChÄÄ, Szymon Åukasik, Anna Wróblewska
Abstract:
This study explores the potential of super-resolution techniques in enhancing object detection accuracy in football. Given the sport's fast-paced nature and the critical importance of precise object (e.g. ball, player) tracking for both analysis and broadcasting, super-resolution could offer significant improvements. We investigate how advanced image processing through super-resolution impacts the accuracy and reliability of object detection algorithms in processing football match footage.
Our methodology involved applying state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques to a diverse set of football match videos from SoccerNet, followed by object detection using Faster R-CNN. The performance of these algorithms, both with and without super-resolution enhancement, was rigorously evaluated in terms of detection accuracy.
The results indicate a marked improvement in object detection accuracy when super-resolution preprocessing is applied. The improvement of object detection through the integration of super-resolution techniques yields significant benefits, especially for low-resolution scenarios, with a notable 12\% increase in mean Average Precision (mAP) at an IoU (Intersection over Union) range of 0.50:0.95 for 320x240 size images when increasing the resolution fourfold using RLFN. As the dimensions increase, the magnitude of improvement becomes more subdued; however, a discernible improvement in the quality of detection is consistently evident. Additionally, we discuss the implications of these findings for real-time sports analytics, player tracking, and the overall viewing experience. The study contributes to the growing field of sports technology by demonstrating the practical benefits and limitations of integrating super-resolution techniques in football analytics and broadcasting.
Authors:Rodrigo Aldana-López, Rosario Aragüés, Carlos Sagüés
Abstract:
Target tracking is a popular problem with many potential applications. There has been a lot of effort on improving the quality of the detection of targets using cameras through different techniques. In general, with higher computational effort applied, i.e., a longer perception-latency, a better detection accuracy is obtained. However, it is not always useful to apply the longest perception-latency allowed, particularly when the environment doesn't require to and when the computational resources are shared between other tasks. In this work, we propose a new Perception-LATency aware Estimator (PLATE), which uses different perception configurations in different moments of time in order to optimize a certain performance measure. This measure takes into account a perception-latency and accuracy trade-off aiming for a good compromise between quality and resource usage. Compared to other heuristic frame-skipping techniques, PLATE comes with a formal complexity and optimality analysis. The advantages of PLATE are verified by several experiments including an evaluation over a standard benchmark with real data and using state of the art deep learning object detection methods for the perception stage.
Authors:Chanho Lee, Jinsu Son, Hyounguk Shon, Yunho Jeon, Junmo Kim
Abstract:
Rotation-equivariance is an essential yet challenging property in oriented object detection. While general object detectors naturally leverage robustness to spatial shifts due to the translation-equivariance of the conventional CNNs, achieving rotation-equivariance remains an elusive goal. Current detectors deploy various alignment techniques to derive rotation-invariant features, but still rely on high capacity models and heavy data augmentation with all possible rotations. In this paper, we introduce a Fully Rotation-Equivariant Oriented Object Detector (FRED), whose entire process from the image to the bounding box prediction is strictly equivariant. Specifically, we decouple the invariant task (object classification) and the equivariant task (object localization) to achieve end-to-end equivariance. We represent the bounding box as a set of rotation-equivariant vectors to implement rotation-equivariant localization. Moreover, we utilized these rotation-equivariant vectors as offsets in the deformable convolution, thereby enhancing the existing advantages of spatial adaptation. Leveraging full rotation-equivariance, our FRED demonstrates higher robustness to image-level rotation compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we show that FRED is one step closer to non-axis aligned learning through our experiments. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method delivers comparable performance on DOTA-v1.0 and outperforms by 1.5 mAP on DOTA-v1.5, all while significantly reducing the model parameters to 16%.
Authors:Zheng Zhou, Hongbo Zhao, Ju Liu, Qiaosheng Zhang, Liwei Geng, Shuchang Lyu, Wenquan Feng
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that Adversarial Patches (APs) can effectively manipulate object detection models. However, the conspicuous patterns often associated with these patches tend to attract human attention, posing a significant challenge. Existing research has primarily focused on enhancing attack efficacy in the physical domain while often neglecting the optimization of stealthiness and transferability. Furthermore, applying APs in real-world scenarios faces major challenges related to transferability, stealthiness, and practicality. To address these challenges, we introduce generalization theory into the context of APs, enabling our iterative process to simultaneously enhance transferability and refine visual correlation with realistic images. We propose a Dual-Perception-Based Framework (DPBF) to generate the More Vivid Patch (MVPatch), which enhances transferability, stealthiness, and practicality. The DPBF integrates two key components: the Model-Perception-Based Module (MPBM) and the Human-Perception-Based Module (HPBM), along with regularization terms. The MPBM employs ensemble strategy to reduce object confidence scores across multiple detectors, thereby improving AP transferability with robust theoretical support. Concurrently, the HPBM introduces a lightweight method for achieving visual similarity, creating natural and inconspicuous adversarial patches without relying on additional generative models. The regularization terms further enhance the practicality of the generated APs in the physical domain. Additionally, we introduce naturalness and transferability scores to provide an unbiased assessment of APs. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that MVPatch achieves superior transferability and a natural appearance in both digital and physical domains, underscoring its effectiveness and stealthiness.
Authors:Sudip Dhakal, Dominic Carrillo, Deyuan Qu, Michael Nutt, Qing Yang, Song Fu
Abstract:
In recent times, there has been a notable surge in multimodal approaches that decorates raw LiDAR point clouds with camera-derived features to improve object detection performance. However, we found that these methods still grapple with the inherent sparsity of LiDAR point cloud data, primarily because fewer points are enriched with camera-derived features for sparsely distributed objects. We present an innovative approach that involves the generation of virtual LiDAR points using camera images and enhancing these virtual points with semantic labels obtained from image-based segmentation networks to tackle this issue and facilitate the detection of sparsely distributed objects, particularly those that are occluded or distant. Furthermore, we integrate a distance aware data augmentation (DADA) technique to enhance the models capability to recognize these sparsely distributed objects by generating specialized training samples. Our approach offers a versatile solution that can be seamlessly integrated into various 3D frameworks and 2D semantic segmentation methods, resulting in significantly improved overall detection accuracy. Evaluation on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrates substantial enhancements in both 3D and birds eye view (BEV) detection benchmarks
Authors:Till Beemelmanns, Wassim Zahr, Lutz Eckstein
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on various computer vision tasks, including 3D object detection. However, their end-to-end implementation also makes ViTs less explainable, which can be a challenge for deploying them in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, where it is important for authorities, developers, and users to understand the model's reasoning behind its predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating saliency maps for a DetR-like ViT with multiple camera inputs used for 3D object detection. Our method is based on the raw attention and is more efficient than gradient-based methods. We evaluate the proposed method on the nuScenes dataset using extensive perturbation tests and show that it outperforms other explainability methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative metrics. We also demonstrate the importance of aggregating attention across different layers of the transformer. Our work contributes to the development of explainable AI for ViTs, which can help increase trust in AI applications by establishing more transparency regarding the inner workings of AI models.
Authors:Seungjun An, Seonghoon Park, Gyeongnyeon Kim, Jeongyeol Baek, Byeongwon Lee, Seungryong Kim
Abstract:
With the increasing importance of video data in real-world applications, there is a rising need for efficient object detection methods that utilize temporal information. While existing video object detection (VOD) techniques employ various strategies to address this challenge, they typically depend on locally adjacent frames or randomly sampled images within a clip. Although recent Transformer-based VOD methods have shown promising results, their reliance on multiple inputs and additional network complexity to incorporate temporal information limits their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to single image object detection, called Context Enhanced TRansformer (CETR), by incorporating temporal context into DETR using a newly designed memory module. To efficiently store temporal information, we construct a class-wise memory that collects contextual information across data. Additionally, we present a classification-based sampling technique to selectively utilize the relevant memory for the current image. In the testing, We introduce a test-time memory adaptation method that updates individual memory functions by considering the test distribution. Experiments with CityCam and ImageNet VID datasets exhibit the efficiency of the framework on various video systems. The project page and code will be made available at: https://ku-cvlab.github.io/CETR.
Authors:Edward Humes, Mozhgan Navardi, Tinoosh Mohsenin
Abstract:
Demand for efficient onboard object detection is increasing due to its key role in autonomous navigation. However, deploying object detection models such as YOLO on resource constrained edge devices is challenging due to the high computational requirements of such models. In this paper, an compressed object detection model named Squeezed Edge YOLO is examined. This model is compressed and optimized to kilobytes of parameters in order to fit onboard such edge devices. To evaluate Squeezed Edge YOLO, two use cases - human and shape detection - are used to show the model accuracy and performance. Moreover, the model is deployed onboard a GAP8 processor with 8 RISC-V cores and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with 4GB of memory. Experimental results show Squeezed Edge YOLO model size is optimized by a factor of 8x which leads to 76% improvements in energy efficiency and 3.3x faster throughout.
Authors:Jayeon Yoo, Dongkwan Lee, Inseop Chung, Donghyun Kim, Nojun Kwak
Abstract:
It is a well-known fact that the performance of deep learning models deteriorates when they encounter a distribution shift at test time. Test-time adaptation (TTA) algorithms have been proposed to adapt the model online while inferring test data. However, existing research predominantly focuses on classification tasks through the optimization of batch normalization layers or classification heads, but this approach limits its applicability to various model architectures like Transformers and makes it challenging to apply to other tasks, such as object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel online adaption approach for object detection in continually changing test domains, considering which part of the model to update, how to update it, and when to perform the update. By introducing architecture-agnostic and lightweight adaptor modules and only updating these while leaving the pre-trained backbone unchanged, we can rapidly adapt to new test domains in an efficient way and prevent catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, we present a practical and straightforward class-wise feature aligning method for object detection to resolve domain shifts. Additionally, we enhance efficiency by determining when the model is sufficiently adapted or when additional adaptation is needed due to changes in the test distribution. Our approach surpasses baselines on widely used benchmarks, achieving improvements of up to 4.9\%p and 7.9\%p in mAP for COCO $\rightarrow$ COCO-corrupted and SHIFT, respectively, while maintaining about 20 FPS or higher.
Authors:Deyuan Qu, Qi Chen, Tianyu Bai, Hongsheng Lu, Heng Fan, Hao Zhang, Song Fu, Qing Yang
Abstract:
Cooperative perception for connected and automated vehicles is traditionally achieved through the fusion of feature maps from two or more vehicles. However, the absence of feature maps shared from other vehicles can lead to a significant decline in 3D object detection performance for cooperative perception models compared to standalone 3D detection models. This drawback impedes the adoption of cooperative perception as vehicle resources are often insufficient to concurrently employ two perception models. To tackle this issue, we present Simultaneous Individual and Cooperative Perception (SiCP), a generic framework that supports a wide range of the state-of-the-art standalone perception backbones and enhances them with a novel Dual-Perception Network (DP-Net) designed to facilitate both individual and cooperative perception. In addition to its lightweight nature with only 0.13M parameters, DP-Net is robust and retains crucial gradient information during feature map fusion. As demonstrated in a comprehensive evaluation on the V2V4Real and OPV2V datasets, thanks to DP-Net, SiCP surpasses state-of-the-art cooperative perception solutions while preserving the performance of standalone perception solutions.
Authors:Sunghun Kang, Junbum Cha, Jonghwan Mun, Byungseok Roh, Chang D. Yoo
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) has recently gained significant attention as a crucial step toward achieving human-like visual intelligence. Existing OVOD methods extend target vocabulary from pre-defined categories to open-world by transferring knowledge of arbitrary concepts from vision-language pre-training models to the detectors. While previous methods have shown remarkable successes, they suffer from indirect supervision or limited transferable concepts. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to directly learn region-text alignment for arbitrary concepts. Specifically, the proposed method aims to learn arbitrary image-to-text mapping for pseudo-labeling of arbitrary concepts, named Pseudo-Labeling for Arbitrary Concepts (PLAC). The proposed method shows competitive performance on the standard OVOD benchmark for noun concepts and a large improvement on referring expression comprehension benchmark for arbitrary concepts.
Authors:Mohammad Aminul Islam, Wangzhi Xing, Jun Zhou, Yongsheng Gao, Kuldip K. Paliwal
Abstract:
Hyperspectral object tracking has recently emerged as a topic of great interest in the remote sensing community. The hyperspectral image, with its many bands, provides a rich source of material information of an object that can be effectively used for object tracking. While most hyperspectral trackers are based on detection-based techniques, no one has yet attempted to employ YOLO for detecting and tracking the object. This is due to the presence of multiple spectral bands, the scarcity of annotated hyperspectral videos, and YOLO's performance limitation in managing occlusions, and distinguishing object in cluttered backgrounds. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework called Hy-Tracker, which aims to bridge the gap between hyperspectral data and state-of-the-art object detection methods to leverage the strengths of YOLOv7 for object tracking in hyperspectral videos. Hy-Tracker not only introduces YOLOv7 but also innovatively incorporates a refined tracking module on top of YOLOv7. The tracker refines the initial detections produced by YOLOv7, leading to improved object-tracking performance. Furthermore, we incorporate Kalman-Filter into the tracker, which addresses the challenges posed by scale variation and occlusion. The experimental results on hyperspectral benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hy-Tracker in accurately tracking objects across frames.
Authors:Ji Hun Wang, Jeremy Irvin, Beri Kohen Behar, Ha Tran, Raghav Samavedam, Quentin Hsu, Andrew Y. Ng
Abstract:
Deep learning for detecting objects in remotely sensed imagery can enable new technologies for important applications including mitigating climate change. However, these models often require large datasets labeled with bounding box annotations which are expensive to curate, prohibiting the development of models for new tasks and geographies. To address this challenge, we develop weakly-semi-supervised object detection (WSSOD) models on remotely sensed imagery which can leverage a small amount of bounding boxes together with a large amount of point labels that are easy to acquire at scale in geospatial data. We train WSSOD models which use large amounts of point-labeled images with varying fractions of bounding box labeled images in FAIR1M and a wind turbine detection dataset, and demonstrate that they substantially outperform fully supervised models trained with the same amount of bounding box labeled images on both datasets. Furthermore, we find that the WSSOD models trained with 2-10x fewer bounding box labeled images can perform similarly to or outperform fully supervised models trained on the full set of bounding-box labeled images. We believe that the approach can be extended to other remote sensing tasks to reduce reliance on bounding box labels and increase development of models for impactful applications.
Authors:Botao Ren, Botian Xu, Tengyu Liu, Jingyi Wang, Zhidong Deng
Abstract:
Neuroscience studies have shown that the human visual system utilizes high-level feedback information to guide lower-level perception, enabling adaptation to signals of different characteristics. In light of this, we propose Feedback multi-Level feature Extractor (Flex) to incorporate a similar mechanism for object detection. Flex refines feature selection based on image-wise and instance-level feedback information in response to image quality variation and classification uncertainty. Experimental results show that Flex offers consistent improvement to a range of existing SOTA methods on the challenging aerial object detection datasets including DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5, and HRSC2016. Although the design originates in aerial image detection, further experiments on MS COCO also reveal our module's efficacy in general detection models. Quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that the improvements are closely related to image qualities, which match our motivation.
Authors:Jiepan Li, Fangxiao Lu, Nan Xue, Zhuohong Li, Hongyan Zhang, Wei He
Abstract:
Camouflaged objects adaptively fit their color and texture with the environment, which makes them indistinguishable from the surroundings. Current methods revealed that high-level semantic features can highlight the differences between camouflaged objects and the backgrounds. Consequently, they integrate high-level semantic features with low-level detailed features for accurate camouflaged object detection (COD). Unlike previous designs for multi-level feature fusion, we state that enhancing low-level features is more impending for COD. In this paper, we propose an overlapped window cross-level attention (OWinCA) to achieve the low-level feature enhancement guided by the highest-level features. By sliding an aligned window pair on both the highest- and low-level feature maps, the high-level semantics are explicitly integrated into the low-level details via cross-level attention. Additionally, it employs an overlapped window partition strategy to alleviate the incoherence among windows, which prevents the loss of global information. These adoptions enable the proposed OWinCA to enhance low-level features by promoting the separability of camouflaged objects. The associated proposed OWinCANet fuses these enhanced multi-level features by simple convolution operation to achieve the final COD. Experiments conducted on three large-scale COD datasets demonstrate that our OWinCANet significantly surpasses the current state-of-the-art COD methods.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Lian Huai, Tong Liu, Xingqun Jiang
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD), an efficient method for addressing the severe data-hungry problem, has been extensively discussed. Current works have significantly advanced the problem in terms of model and data. However, the overall performance of most FSOD methods still does not fulfill the desired accuracy. In this paper we improve the FSOD model to address the severe issue of sample imbalance and weak feature propagation. To alleviate modeling bias from data-sufficient base classes, we examine the effect of decoupling the parameters for classes with sufficient data and classes with few samples in various ways. We design a base-novel categories decoupled DETR (DeDETR) for FSOD. We also explore various types of skip connection between the encoder and decoder for DETR. Besides, we notice that the best outputs could come from the intermediate layer of the decoder instead of the last layer; therefore, we build a unified decoder module that could dynamically fuse the decoder layers as the output feature. We evaluate our model on commonly used datasets such as PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO. Our results indicate that our proposed module could achieve stable improvements of 5% to 10% in both fine-tuning and meta-learning paradigms and has outperformed the highest score in recent works.
Authors:Zhimin Chen, Xuewei Chen, Xiao Guo, Yingwei Li, Longlong Jing, Liang Yang, Bing Li
Abstract:
Recently, multi-modal masked autoencoders (MAE) has been introduced in 3D self-supervised learning, offering enhanced feature learning by leveraging both 2D and 3D data to capture richer cross-modal representations. However, these approaches have two limitations: (1) they inefficiently require both 2D and 3D modalities as inputs, even though the inherent multi-view properties of 3D point clouds already contain 2D modality. (2) input 2D modality causes the reconstruction learning to unnecessarily rely on visible 2D information, hindering 3D geometric representation learning. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D to Multi-View Learner (Multi-View ML) that only utilizes 3D modalities as inputs and effectively capture rich spatial information in 3D point clouds. Specifically, we first project 3D point clouds to multi-view 2D images at the feature level based on 3D-based pose. Then, we introduce two components: (1) a 3D to multi-view autoencoder that reconstructs point clouds and multi-view images from 3D and projected 2D features; (2) a multi-scale multi-head (MSMH) attention mechanism that facilitates local-global information interactions in each decoder transformer block through attention heads at various scales. Additionally, a novel two-stage self-training strategy is proposed to align 2D and 3D representations. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts across various downstream tasks, including 3D classification, part segmentation, and object detection.
Authors:Yimeng Li, Navid Rajabi, Sulabh Shrestha, Md Alimoor Reza, Jana Kosecka
Abstract:
The image annotation stage is a critical and often the most time-consuming part required for training and evaluating object detection and semantic segmentation models. Deployment of the existing models in novel environments often requires detecting novel semantic classes not present in the training data. Furthermore, indoor scenes contain significant viewpoint variations, which need to be handled properly by trained perception models. We propose to leverage the recent advancements in state-of-the-art models for bottom-up segmentation (SAM), object detection (Detic), and semantic segmentation (MaskFormer), all trained on large-scale datasets. We aim to develop a cost-effective labeling approach to obtain pseudo-labels for semantic segmentation and object instance detection in indoor environments, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the training of lightweight models for various downstream tasks. We also propose a multi-view labeling fusion stage, which considers the setting where multiple views of the scenes are available and can be used to identify and rectify single-view inconsistencies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the Active Vision dataset and the ADE20K dataset. We evaluate the quality of our labeling process by comparing it with human annotations. Also, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained labels in downstream tasks such as object goal navigation and part discovery. In the context of object goal navigation, we depict enhanced performance using this fusion approach compared to a zero-shot baseline that utilizes large monolithic vision-language pre-trained models.
Authors:Souradeep Chakraborty, Shujon Naha, Muhammet Bastan, Amit Kumar K C, Dimitris Samaras
Abstract:
In this paper, we address the detection of co-occurring salient objects (CoSOD) in an image group using frequency statistics in an unsupervised manner, which further enable us to develop a semi-supervised method. While previous works have mostly focused on fully supervised CoSOD, less attention has been allocated to detecting co-salient objects when limited segmentation annotations are available for training. Our simple yet effective unsupervised method US-CoSOD combines the object co-occurrence frequency statistics of unsupervised single-image semantic segmentations with salient foreground detections using self-supervised feature learning. For the first time, we show that a large unlabeled dataset e.g. ImageNet-1k can be effectively leveraged to significantly improve unsupervised CoSOD performance. Our unsupervised model is a great pre-training initialization for our semi-supervised model SS-CoSOD, especially when very limited labeled data is available for training. To avoid propagating erroneous signals from predictions on unlabeled data, we propose a confidence estimation module to guide our semi-supervised training. Extensive experiments on three CoSOD benchmark datasets show that both of our unsupervised and semi-supervised models outperform the corresponding state-of-the-art models by a significant margin (e.g., on the Cosal2015 dataset, our US-CoSOD model has an 8.8% F-measure gain over a SOTA unsupervised co-segmentation model and our SS-CoSOD model has an 11.81% F-measure gain over a SOTA semi-supervised CoSOD model).
Authors:Fabiha Bushra, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury, Rusab Sarmun, Saidul Kabir, Menatalla Said, Sohaib Bassam Zoghoul, Adam Mushtak, Israa Al-Hashimi, Abdulrahman Alqahtani, Anwarul Hasan
Abstract:
The increasing reliance on Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA) for Pulmonary Embolism (PE) diagnosis presents challenges and a pressing need for improved diagnostic solutions. The primary objective of this study is to leverage deep learning techniques to enhance the Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) of PE. With this aim, we propose a classifier-guided detection approach that effectively leverages the classifier's probabilistic inference to direct the detection predictions, marking a novel contribution in the domain of automated PE diagnosis. Our classification system includes an Attention-Guided Convolutional Neural Network (AG-CNN) that uses local context by employing an attention mechanism. This approach emulates a human expert's attention by looking at both global appearances and local lesion regions before making a decision. The classifier demonstrates robust performance on the FUMPE dataset, achieving an AUROC of 0.927, sensitivity of 0.862, specificity of 0.879, and an F1-score of 0.805 with the Inception-v3 backbone architecture. Moreover, AG-CNN outperforms the baseline DenseNet-121 model, achieving an 8.1% AUROC gain. While previous research has mostly focused on finding PE in the main arteries, our use of cutting-edge object detection models and ensembling techniques greatly improves the accuracy of detecting small embolisms in the peripheral arteries. Finally, our proposed classifier-guided detection approach further refines the detection metrics, contributing new state-of-the-art to the community: mAP$_{50}$, sensitivity, and F1-score of 0.846, 0.901, and 0.779, respectively, outperforming the former benchmark with a significant 3.7% improvement in mAP$_{50}$. Our research aims to elevate PE patient care by integrating AI solutions into clinical workflows, highlighting the potential of human-AI collaboration in medical diagnostics.
Authors:Hasan Esen, Brian Hsuan-Cheng Liao
Abstract:
There have been major developments in Automated Driving (AD) and Driving Assist Systems (ADAS) in recent years. However, their safety assurance, thus methodologies for testing, verification and validation AD/ADAS safety-critical applications remain as one the main challenges. Inevitably AI also penetrates into AD/ADAS applications, such as object detection. Despite important benefits, adoption of such learned-enabled components and systems in safety-critical scenarios causes that conventional testing approaches (e.g., distance-based testing in automotive) quickly become infeasible. Similarly, safety engineering approaches usually assume model-based components and do not handle learning-enabled ones well. The authors have participated in the public-funded project FOCETA , and developed an Automated Valet Parking (AVP) use case. As the nature of the baseline implementation is imperfect, it offers a space for continuous improvement based on modelling, verification, validation, and monitoring techniques. In this publication, we explain the simulation-based development platform that is designed to verify and validate safety-critical learning-enabled systems in continuous engineering loops.
Authors:Quentin Bouniot, Angélique Loesch, Romaric Audigier, Amaury Habrard
Abstract:
For specialized and dense downstream tasks such as object detection, labeling data requires expertise and can be very expensive, making few-shot and semi-supervised models much more attractive alternatives. While in the few-shot setup we observe that transformer-based object detectors perform better than convolution-based two-stage models for a similar amount of parameters, they are not as effective when used with recent approaches in the semi-supervised setting. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised method tailored for the current state-of-the-art object detector Deformable DETR in the few-annotation learning setup using a student-teacher architecture, which avoids relying on a sensitive post-processing of the pseudo-labels generated by the teacher model. We evaluate our method on the semi-supervised object detection benchmarks COCO and Pascal VOC, and it outperforms previous methods, especially when annotations are scarce. We believe that our contributions open new possibilities to adapt similar object detection methods in this setup as well.
Authors:Farzeen Munir, Shoaib Azam, Tomasz Kucner, Ville Kyrki, Moongu Jeon
Abstract:
Object detection is a core component of perception systems, providing the ego vehicle with information about its surroundings to ensure safe route planning. While cameras and Lidar have significantly advanced perception systems, their performance can be limited in adverse weather conditions. In contrast, millimeter-wave technology enables radars to function effectively in such conditions. However, relying solely on radar for building a perception system doesn't fully capture the environment due to the data's sparse nature. To address this, sensor fusion strategies have been introduced. We propose a dual-branch framework to integrate radar and Lidar data for enhanced object detection. The primary branch focuses on extracting radar features, while the auxiliary branch extracts Lidar features. These are then combined using additive attention. Subsequently, the integrated features are processed through a novel Parallel Forked Structure (PFS) to manage scale variations. A region proposal head is then utilized for object detection. We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed method on the Radiate dataset using COCO metrics. The results show that it surpasses state-of-the-art methods by $1.89\%$ and $2.61\%$ in favorable and adverse weather conditions, respectively. This underscores the value of radar-Lidar fusion in achieving precise object detection and localization, especially in challenging weather conditions.
Authors:Qianqian Shen, Yunhan Zhao, Nahyun Kwon, Jeeeun Kim, Yanan Li, Shu Kong
Abstract:
Instance detection (InsDet) is a long-lasting problem in robotics and computer vision, aiming to detect object instances (predefined by some visual examples) in a cluttered scene. Despite its practical significance, its advancement is overshadowed by Object Detection, which aims to detect objects belonging to some predefined classes. One major reason is that current InsDet datasets are too small in scale by today's standards. For example, the popular InsDet dataset GMU (published in 2016) has only 23 instances, far less than COCO (80 classes), a well-known object detection dataset published in 2014. We are motivated to introduce a new InsDet dataset and protocol. First, we define a realistic setup for InsDet: training data consists of multi-view instance captures, along with diverse scene images allowing synthesizing training images by pasting instance images on them with free box annotations. Second, we release a real-world database, which contains multi-view capture of 100 object instances, and high-resolution (6k x 8k) testing images. Third, we extensively study baseline methods for InsDet on our dataset, analyze their performance and suggest future work. Somewhat surprisingly, using the off-the-shelf class-agnostic segmentation model (Segment Anything Model, SAM) and the self-supervised feature representation DINOv2 performs the best, achieving >10 AP better than end-to-end trained InsDet models that repurpose object detectors (e.g., FasterRCNN and RetinaNet).
Authors:Pourya Shamsolmoali, Jocelyn Chanussot, Huiyu Zhou, Yue Lu
Abstract:
Efficient object detection methods have recently received great attention in remote sensing. Although deep convolutional networks often have excellent detection accuracy, their deployment on resource-limited edge devices is difficult. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a strategy for addressing this issue since it makes models lightweight while maintaining accuracy. However, existing KD methods for object detection have encountered two constraints. First, they discard potentially important background information and only distill nearby foreground regions. Second, they only rely on the global context, which limits the student detector's ability to acquire local information from the teacher detector. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose Attention-based Feature Distillation (AFD), a new KD approach that distills both local and global information from the teacher detector. To enhance local distillation, we introduce a multi-instance attention mechanism that effectively distinguishes between background and foreground elements. This approach prompts the student detector to focus on the pertinent channels and pixels, as identified by the teacher detector. Local distillation lacks global information, thus attention global distillation is proposed to reconstruct the relationship between various pixels and pass it from teacher to student detector. The performance of AFD is evaluated on two public aerial image benchmarks, and the evaluation results demonstrate that AFD in object detection can attain the performance of other state-of-the-art models while being efficient.
Authors:Taehyeon Kim, Eric Lin, Junu Lee, Christian Lau, Vaikkunth Mugunthan
Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a potent framework for training models across distributed data sources while maintaining data privacy. Nevertheless, it faces challenges with limited high-quality labels and non-IID client data, particularly in applications like autonomous driving. To address these hurdles, we navigate the uncharted waters of Semi-Supervised Federated Object Detection (SSFOD). We present a pioneering SSFOD framework, designed for scenarios where labeled data reside only at the server while clients possess unlabeled data. Notably, our method represents the inaugural implementation of SSFOD for clients with 0% labeled non-IID data, a stark contrast to previous studies that maintain some subset of labels at each client. We propose FedSTO, a two-stage strategy encompassing Selective Training followed by Orthogonally enhanced full-parameter training, to effectively address data shift (e.g. weather conditions) between server and clients. Our contributions include selectively refining the backbone of the detector to avert overfitting, orthogonality regularization to boost representation divergence, and local EMA-driven pseudo label assignment to yield high-quality pseudo labels. Extensive validation on prominent autonomous driving datasets (BDD100K, Cityscapes, and SODA10M) attests to the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating state-of-the-art results. Remarkably, FedSTO, using just 20-30% of labels, performs nearly as well as fully-supervised centralized training methods.
Authors:Quentin Bouniot, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch, Amaury Habrard
Abstract:
The use of pretrained deep neural networks represents an attractive way to achieve strong results with few data available. When specialized in dense problems such as object detection, learning local rather than global information in images has proven to be more efficient. However, for unsupervised pretraining, the popular contrastive learning requires a large batch size and, therefore, a lot of resources. To address this problem, we are interested in transformer-based object detectors that have recently gained traction in the community with good performance and with the particularity of generating many diverse object proposals.
In this work, we present Proposal Selection Contrast (ProSeCo), a novel unsupervised overall pretraining approach that leverages this property. ProSeCo uses the large number of object proposals generated by the detector for contrastive learning, which allows the use of a smaller batch size, combined with object-level features to learn local information in the images. To improve the effectiveness of the contrastive loss, we introduce the object location information in the selection of positive examples to take into account multiple overlapping object proposals. When reusing pretrained backbone, we advocate for consistency in learning local information between the backbone and the detection head.
We show that our method outperforms state of the art in unsupervised pretraining for object detection on standard and novel benchmarks in learning with fewer data.
Authors:Jules Sanchez, Louis Soum-Fontez, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud, Francois Goulette
Abstract:
LiDAR is an essential sensor for autonomous driving by collecting precise geometric information regarding a scene. %Exploiting this information for perception is interesting as the amount of available data increases. As the performance of various LiDAR perception tasks has improved, generalizations to new environments and sensors has emerged to test these optimized models in real-world conditions.
This paper provides a novel dataset, ParisLuco3D, specifically designed for cross-domain evaluation to make it easier to evaluate the performance utilizing various source datasets. Alongside the dataset, online benchmarks for LiDAR semantic segmentation, LiDAR object detection, and LiDAR tracking are provided to ensure a fair comparison across methods.
The ParisLuco3D dataset, evaluation scripts, and links to benchmarks can be found at the following website:https://npm3d.fr/parisluco3d
Authors:Qiao Yan, Yihan Wang
Abstract:
4D radar is recognized for its resilience and cost-effectiveness under adverse weather conditions, thus playing a pivotal role in autonomous driving. While cameras and LiDAR are typically the primary sensors used in perception modules for autonomous vehicles, radar serves as a valuable supplementary sensor. Unlike LiDAR and cameras, radar remains unimpaired by harsh weather conditions, thereby offering a dependable alternative in challenging environments. Developing radar-based 3D object detection not only augments the competency of autonomous vehicles but also provides economic benefits. In response, we propose the Multi-View Feature Assisted Network (\textit{MVFAN}), an end-to-end, anchor-free, and single-stage framework for 4D-radar-based 3D object detection for autonomous vehicles. We tackle the issue of insufficient feature utilization by introducing a novel Position Map Generation module to enhance feature learning by reweighing foreground and background points, and their features, considering the irregular distribution of radar point clouds. Additionally, we propose a pioneering backbone, the Radar Feature Assisted backbone, explicitly crafted to fully exploit the valuable Doppler velocity and reflectivity data provided by the 4D radar sensor. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies carried out on Astyx and VoD datasets attest to the efficacy of our framework. The incorporation of Doppler velocity and RCS reflectivity dramatically improves the detection performance for small moving objects such as pedestrians and cyclists. Consequently, our approach culminates in a highly optimized 4D-radar-based 3D object detection capability for autonomous driving systems, setting a new standard in the field.
Authors:David Liu, Zhengkun Li, Zihao Wu, Changying Li
Abstract:
Robotic crop phenotyping has emerged as a key technology to assess crops' morphological and physiological traits at scale. These phenotypical measurements are essential for developing new crop varieties with the aim of increasing productivity and dealing with environmental challenges such as climate change. However, developing and deploying crop phenotyping robots face many challenges such as complex and variable crop shapes that complicate robotic object detection, dynamic and unstructured environments that baffle robotic control, and real-time computing and managing big data that challenge robotic hardware/software. This work specifically tackles the first challenge by proposing a novel Digital-Twin(DT)MARS-CycleGAN model for image augmentation to improve our Modular Agricultural Robotic System (MARS)'s crop object detection from complex and variable backgrounds. Our core idea is that in addition to the cycle consistency losses in the CycleGAN model, we designed and enforced a new DT-MARS loss in the deep learning model to penalize the inconsistency between real crop images captured by MARS and synthesized images sensed by DT MARS. Therefore, the generated synthesized crop images closely mimic real images in terms of realism, and they are employed to fine-tune object detectors such as YOLOv8. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our new DT/MARS-CycleGAN framework significantly boosts our MARS' crop object/row detector's performance, contributing to the field of robotic crop phenotyping.
Authors:Daniel Raviv, Juan D. Yepes, Ayush Gowda
Abstract:
This paper focuses on a novel approach for detecting moving objects during camera motion. We present an optical-flow-based transformation that yields a consistent 2D invariant image output regardless of time instants, range of points in 3D, and the speed of the camera. In other words, this transformation generates a lookup image that remains invariant despite the changing projection of the 3D scene and camera motion. In the new domain, projections of 3D points that deviate from the values of the predefined lookup image can be clearly identified as moving relative to the stationary 3D environment, making them seamlessly detectable. The method does not require prior knowledge of the direction of motion or speed of the camera, nor does it necessitate 3D point range information. It is well-suited for real-time parallel processing, rendering it highly practical for implementation. We have validated the effectiveness of the new domain through simulations and experiments, demonstrating its robustness in scenarios involving rectilinear camera motion, both in simulations and with real-world data. This approach introduces new ways for moving objects detection during camera motion, and also lays the foundation for future research in the context of moving object detection during six-degrees-of-freedom camera motion.
Authors:Ajinkya Khoche, Laura Pereira Sánchez, Nazre Batool, Sina Sharif Mansouri, Patric Jensfelt
Abstract:
3D object detection at long range is crucial for ensuring the safety and efficiency of self driving vehicles, allowing them to accurately perceive and react to objects, obstacles, and potential hazards from a distance. But most current state of the art LiDAR based methods are range limited due to sparsity at long range, which generates a form of domain gap between points closer to and farther away from the ego vehicle. Another related problem is the label imbalance for faraway objects, which inhibits the performance of Deep Neural Networks at long range. To address the above limitations, we investigate two ways to improve long range performance of current LiDAR based 3D detectors. First, we combine two 3D detection networks, referred to as range experts, one specializing at near to mid range objects, and one at long range 3D detection. To train a detector at long range under a scarce label regime, we further weigh the loss according to the labelled point's distance from ego vehicle. Second, we augment LiDAR scans with virtual points generated using Multimodal Virtual Points (MVP), a readily available image-based depth completion algorithm. Our experiments on the long range Argoverse2 (AV2) dataset indicate that MVP is more effective in improving long range performance, while maintaining a straightforward implementation. On the other hand, the range experts offer a computationally efficient and simpler alternative, avoiding dependency on image-based segmentation networks and perfect camera-LiDAR calibration.
Authors:Kemal Oksuz, Selim Kuzucu, Tom Joy, Puneet K. Dokania
Abstract:
Combining the strengths of many existing predictors to obtain a Mixture of Experts which is superior to its individual components is an effective way to improve the performance without having to develop new architectures or train a model from scratch. However, surprisingly, we find that naïvely combining expert object detectors in a similar way to Deep Ensembles, can often lead to degraded performance. We identify that the primary cause of this issue is that the predictions of the experts do not match their performance, a term referred to as miscalibration. Consequently, the most confident detector dominates the final predictions, preventing the mixture from leveraging all the predictions from the experts appropriately. To address this, when constructing the Mixture of Experts, we propose to combine their predictions in a manner which reflects the individual performance of the experts; an objective we achieve by first calibrating the predictions before filtering and refining them. We term this approach the Mixture of Calibrated Experts and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on 5 different detection tasks using a variety of detectors, showing that it: (i) improves object detectors on COCO and instance segmentation methods on LVIS by up to $\sim 2.5$ AP; (ii) reaches state-of-the-art on COCO test-dev with $65.1$ AP and on DOTA with $82.62$ $\mathrm{AP_{50}}$; (iii) outperforms single models consistently on recent detection tasks such as Open Vocabulary Object Detection.
Authors:Kartikeya Bhardwaj, Hsin-Pai Cheng, Sweta Priyadarshi, Zhuojin Li
Abstract:
Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches propose novel training-free metrics called zero-shot proxies to substantially reduce the search time compared to the traditional training-based NAS. Despite the success on image classification, the effectiveness of zero-shot proxies is rarely evaluated on complex vision tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection. Moreover, existing zero-shot proxies are shown to be biased towards certain model characteristics which restricts their broad applicability. In this paper, we empirically study the bias of state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot proxy ZiCo across multiple vision tasks and observe that ZiCo is biased towards thinner and deeper networks, leading to sub-optimal architectures. To solve the problem, we propose a novel bias correction on ZiCo, called ZiCo-BC. Our extensive experiments across various vision tasks (image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation) show that our approach can successfully search for architectures with higher accuracy and significantly lower latency on Samsung Galaxy S10 devices.
Authors:Ofir Gordon, Elad Cohen, Hai Victor Habi, Arnon Netzer
Abstract:
Quantization is a key method for deploying deep neural networks on edge devices with limited memory and computation resources. Recent improvements in Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) methods were achieved by an additional local optimization process for learning the weight quantization rounding policy. However, a gap exists when employing network-wise optimization with small representative datasets. In this paper, we propose a new method for enhanced PTQ (EPTQ) that employs a network-wise quantization optimization process, which benefits from considering cross-layer dependencies during optimization. EPTQ enables network-wise optimization with a small representative dataset using a novel sample-layer attention score based on a label-free Hessian matrix upper bound. The label-free approach makes our method suitable for the PTQ scheme. We give a theoretical analysis for the said bound and use it to construct a knowledge distillation loss that guides the optimization to focus on the more sensitive layers and samples. In addition, we leverage the Hessian upper bound to improve the weight quantization parameters selection by focusing on the more sensitive elements in the weight tensors. Empirically, by employing EPTQ we achieve state-of-the-art results on various models, tasks, and datasets, including ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and Pascal-VOC for semantic segmentation.
Authors:Alex C. Stutts, Danilo Erricolo, Sathya Ravi, Theja Tulabandhula, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
Abstract:
In the expanding landscape of AI-enabled robotics, robust quantification of predictive uncertainties is of great importance. Three-dimensional (3D) object detection, a critical robotics operation, has seen significant advancements; however, the majority of current works focus only on accuracy and ignore uncertainty quantification. Addressing this gap, our novel study integrates the principles of conformal inference (CI) with information theoretic measures to perform lightweight, Monte Carlo-free uncertainty estimation within a multimodal framework. Through a multivariate Gaussian product of the latent variables in a Variational Autoencoder (VAE), features from RGB camera and LiDAR sensor data are fused to improve the prediction accuracy. Normalized mutual information (NMI) is leveraged as a modulator for calibrating uncertainty bounds derived from CI based on a weighted loss function. Our simulation results show an inverse correlation between inherent predictive uncertainty and NMI throughout the model's training. The framework demonstrates comparable or better performance in KITTI 3D object detection benchmarks to similar methods that are not uncertainty-aware, making it suitable for real-time edge robotics.
Authors:Junwen Xiong, Peng Zhang, Chuanyue Li, Wei Huang, Yufei Zha, Tao You
Abstract:
Video saliency prediction and detection are thriving research domains that enable computers to simulate the distribution of visual attention akin to how humans perceiving dynamic scenes. While many approaches have crafted task-specific training paradigms for either video saliency prediction or video salient object detection tasks, few attention has been devoted to devising a generalized saliency modeling framework that seamlessly bridges both these distinct tasks. In this study, we introduce the Unified Saliency Transformer (UniST) framework, which comprehensively utilizes the essential attributes of video saliency prediction and video salient object detection. In addition to extracting representations of frame sequences, a saliency-aware transformer is designed to learn the spatio-temporal representations at progressively increased resolutions, while incorporating effective cross-scale saliency information to produce a robust representation. Furthermore, a task-specific decoder is proposed to perform the final prediction for each task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores designing a transformer structure for both saliency modeling tasks. Convincible experiments demonstrate that the proposed UniST achieves superior performance across seven challenging benchmarks for two tasks, and significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Minsik Jeon, Junwon Seo, Jihong Min
Abstract:
Despite the success of deep learning-based object detection methods in recent years, it is still challenging to make the object detector reliable in adverse weather conditions such as rain and snow. For the robust performance of object detectors, unsupervised domain adaptation has been utilized to adapt the detection network trained on clear weather images to adverse weather images. While previous methods do not explicitly address weather corruption during adaptation, the domain gap between clear and adverse weather can be decomposed into two factors with distinct characteristics: a style gap and a weather gap. In this paper, we present an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for object detection that can more effectively adapt to real-world environments with adverse weather conditions by addressing these two gaps separately. Our method resolves the style gap by concentrating on style-related information of high-level features using an attention module. Using self-supervised contrastive learning, our framework then reduces the weather gap and acquires instance features that are robust to weather corruption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods for object detection in adverse weather conditions.
Authors:Amr Gomaa, Michael Feld
Abstract:
Recent advances in machine learning, particularly deep learning, have enabled autonomous systems to perceive and comprehend objects and their environments in a perceptual subsymbolic manner. These systems can now perform object detection, sensor data fusion, and language understanding tasks. However, there is a growing need to enhance these systems to understand objects and their environments more conceptually and symbolically. It is essential to consider both the explicit teaching provided by humans (e.g., describing a situation or explaining how to act) and the implicit teaching obtained by observing human behavior (e.g., through the system's sensors) to achieve this level of powerful artificial intelligence. Thus, the system must be designed with multimodal input and output capabilities to support implicit and explicit interaction models. In this position paper, we argue for considering both types of inputs, as well as human-in-the-loop and incremental learning techniques, for advancing the field of artificial intelligence and enabling autonomous systems to learn like humans. We propose several hypotheses and design guidelines and highlight a use case from related work to achieve this goal.
Authors:Jin Heo, Gregorie Phillips, Per-Erik Brodin, Ada Gavrilovska
Abstract:
Real-time light detection and ranging (LiDAR) perceptions, e.g., 3D object detection and simultaneous localization and mapping are computationally intensive to mobile devices of limited resources and often offloaded on the edge. Offloading LiDAR perceptions requires compressing the raw sensor data, and lossy compression is used for efficiently reducing the data volume. Lossy compression degrades the quality of LiDAR point clouds, and the perception performance is decreased consequently. In this work, we present an interpolation algorithm improving the quality of a LiDAR point cloud to mitigate the perception performance loss due to lossy compression. The algorithm targets the range image (RI) representation of a point cloud and interpolates points at the RI based on depth gradients. Compared to existing image interpolation algorithms, our algorithm shows a better qualitative result when the point cloud is reconstructed from the interpolated RI. With the preliminary results, we also describe the next steps of the current work.
Authors:Quan Huu Cap, Atsushi Fukuda, Satoshi Kagiwada, Hiroyuki Uga, Nobusuke Iwasaki, Hitoshi Iyatomi
Abstract:
With rich annotation information, object detection-based automated plant disease diagnosis systems (e.g., YOLO-based systems) often provide advantages over classification-based systems (e.g., EfficientNet-based), such as the ability to detect disease locations and superior classification performance. One drawback of these detection systems is dealing with unannotated healthy data with no real symptoms present. In practice, healthy plant data appear to be very similar to many disease data. Thus, those models often produce mis-detected boxes on healthy images. In addition, labeling new data for detection models is typically time-consuming. Hard-sample mining (HSM) is a common technique for re-training a model by using the mis-detected boxes as new training samples. However, blindly selecting an arbitrary amount of hard-sample for re-training will result in the degradation of diagnostic performance for other diseases due to the high similarity between disease and healthy data. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective training strategy called hard-sample re-mining (HSReM), which is designed to enhance the diagnostic performance of healthy data and simultaneously improve the performance of disease data by strategically selecting hard-sample training images at an appropriate level. Experiments based on two practical in-field eight-class cucumber and ten-class tomato datasets (42.7K and 35.6K images) show that our HSReM training strategy leads to a substantial improvement in the overall diagnostic performance on large-scale unseen data. Specifically, the object detection model trained using the HSReM strategy not only achieved superior results as compared to the classification-based state-of-the-art EfficientNetV2-Large model and the original object detection model, but also outperformed the model using the HSM strategy in multiple evaluation metrics.
Authors:Leheng Li, Qing Lian, Ying-Cong Chen
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven extremely susceptible to adversarial examples, which raises special safety-critical concerns for DNN-based autonomous driving stacks (i.e., 3D object detection). Although there are extensive works on image-level attacks, most are restricted to 2D pixel spaces, and such attacks are not always physically realistic in our 3D world. Here we present Adv3D, the first exploration of modeling adversarial examples as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Advances in NeRF provide photorealistic appearances and 3D accurate generation, yielding a more realistic and realizable adversarial example. We train our adversarial NeRF by minimizing the surrounding objects' confidence predicted by 3D detectors on the training set. Then we evaluate Adv3D on the unseen validation set and show that it can cause a large performance reduction when rendering NeRF in any sampled pose. To generate physically realizable adversarial examples, we propose primitive-aware sampling and semantic-guided regularization that enable 3D patch attacks with camouflage adversarial texture. Experimental results demonstrate that the trained adversarial NeRF generalizes well to different poses, scenes, and 3D detectors. Finally, we provide a defense method to our attacks that involves adversarial training through data augmentation. Project page: https://len-li.github.io/adv3d-web
Authors:Chenyao Jiang, Shiyao Zhai, Hengrui Song, Yuqing Ma, Yachen Fan, Yancheng Fang, Dongmei Yu, Canyang Zhang, Sanyang Han, Runming Wang, Yong Liu, Jianbo Li, Peiwu Qin
Abstract:
Dental caries is one of the most common oral diseases that, if left untreated, can lead to a variety of oral problems. It mainly occurs inside the pits and fissures on the occlusal/buccal/palatal surfaces of molars and children are a high-risk group for pit and fissure caries in permanent molars. Pit and fissure sealing is one of the most effective methods that is widely used in prevention of pit and fissure caries. However, current detection of pits and fissures or caries depends primarily on the experienced dentists, which ordinary parents do not have, and children may miss the remedial treatment without timely detection. To address this issue, we present a method to autodetect caries and pit and fissure sealing requirements using oral photos taken by smartphones. We use the YOLOv5 and YOLOX models and adopt a tiling strategy to reduce information loss during image pre-processing. The best result for YOLOXs model with tiling strategy is 72.3 mAP.5, while the best result without tiling strategy is 71.2. YOLOv5s6 model with/without tiling attains 70.9/67.9 mAP.5, respectively. We deploy the pre-trained network to mobile devices as a WeChat applet, allowing in-home detection by parents or children guardian.
Authors:Qiao Yan, Yihan Wang
Abstract:
Robust 3D object detection in extreme weather and illumination conditions is a challenging task. While radars and thermal cameras are known for their resilience to these conditions, few studies have been conducted on radar-thermal fusion due to the lack of corresponding datasets. To address this gap, we first present a new multi-modal dataset called ThermRad, which includes a 3D LiDAR, a 4D radar, an RGB camera and a thermal camera. This dataset is unique because it includes data from all four sensors in extreme weather conditions, providing a valuable resource for future research in this area. To validate the robustness of 4D radars and thermal cameras for 3D object detection in challenging weather conditions, we propose a new multi-modal fusion method called RTDF-RCNN, which leverages the complementary strengths of 4D radars and thermal cameras to boost object detection performance. To further prove the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we re-implement state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D detectors on our dataset as benchmarks for evaluation. Our method achieves significant enhancements in detecting cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, with improvements of over 7.98%, 24.27%, and 27.15%, respectively, while achieving comparable results to LiDAR-based approaches. Our contributions in both the ThermRad dataset and the new multi-modal fusion method provide a new approach to robust 3D object detection in adverse weather and illumination conditions. The ThermRad dataset will be released.
Authors:Zixuan He, Salik Ram Khanal, Xin Zhang, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang
Abstract:
This study proposed a YOLOv5-based custom object detection model to detect strawberries in an outdoor environment. The original architecture of the YOLOv5s was modified by replacing the C3 module with the C2f module in the backbone network, which provided a better feature gradient flow. Secondly, the Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast in the final layer of the backbone network of YOLOv5s was combined with Cross Stage Partial Net to improve the generalization ability over the strawberry dataset in this study. The proposed architecture was named YOLOv5s-Straw. The RGB images dataset of the strawberry canopy with three maturity classes (immature, nearly mature, and mature) was collected in open-field environment and augmented through a series of operations including brightness reduction, brightness increase, and noise adding. To verify the superiority of the proposed method for strawberry detection in open-field environment, four competitive detection models (YOLOv3-tiny, YOLOv5s, YOLOv5s-C2f, and YOLOv8s) were trained, and tested under the same computational environment and compared with YOLOv5s-Straw. The results showed that the highest mean average precision of 80.3% was achieved using the proposed architecture whereas the same was achieved with YOLOv3-tiny, YOLOv5s, YOLOv5s-C2f, and YOLOv8s were 73.4%, 77.8%, 79.8%, 79.3%, respectively. Specifically, the average precision of YOLOv5s-Straw was 82.1% in the immature class, 73.5% in the nearly mature class, and 86.6% in the mature class, which were 2.3% and 3.7%, respectively, higher than that of the latest YOLOv8s. The model included 8.6*10^6 network parameters with an inference speed of 18ms per image while the inference speed of YOLOv8s had a slower inference speed of 21.0ms and heavy parameters of 11.1*10^6, which indicates that the proposed model is fast enough for real time strawberry detection and localization for the robotic picking.
Authors:Runyang Feng, Yixing Gao, Tze Ho Elden Tse, Xueqing Ma, Hyung Jin Chang
Abstract:
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.
Authors:Jin Heo, Christopher Phillips, Ada Gavrilovska
Abstract:
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors are becoming available on modern mobile devices and provide a 3D sensing capability. This new capability is beneficial for perceptions in various use cases, but it is challenging for resource-constrained mobile devices to use the perceptions in real-time because of their high computational complexity. In this context, edge computing can be used to enable LiDAR online perceptions, but offloading the perceptions on the edge server requires a low-latency, lightweight, and efficient compression due to the large volume of LiDAR point clouds data.
This paper presents FLiCR, a fast and lightweight LiDAR point cloud compression method for enabling edge-assisted online perceptions. FLiCR is based on range images (RI) as an intermediate representation (IR), and dictionary coding for compressing RIs. FLiCR achieves its benefits by leveraging lossy RIs, and we show the efficiency of bytestream compression is largely improved with quantization and subsampling. In addition, we identify the limitation of current quality metrics for presenting the entropy of a point cloud, and introduce a new metric that reflects both point-wise and entropy-wise qualities for lossy IRs. The evaluation results show FLiCR is more suitable for edge-assisted real-time perceptions than the existing LiDAR compressions, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our compression and metric with the evaluations on 3D object detection and LiDAR SLAM.
Authors:Yihan Wang, Qiao Yan, Yi Wang
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection is of paramount importance for autonomous driving. Recent trends show a remarkable improvement for bird's-eye-view (BEV) based and point-based methods as they demonstrate superior performance compared to range-view counterparts. This paper presents an insight that leverages range-view representation to enhance 3D points for accurate 3D object detection. Specifically, we introduce a Redemption from Range-view Module (R2M), a plug-and-play approach for 3D surface texture enhancement from the 2D range view to the 3D point view. R2M comprises BasicBlock for 2D feature extraction, Hierarchical-dilated (HD) Meta Kernel for expanding the 3D receptive field, and Feature Points Redemption (FPR) for recovering 3D surface texture information. R2M can be seamlessly integrated into state-of-the-art LiDAR-based 3D object detectors as preprocessing and achieve appealing improvement, e.g., 1.39%, 1.67%, and 1.97% mAP improvement on easy, moderate, and hard difficulty level of KITTI val set, respectively. Based on R2M, we further propose R2Detector (R2Det) with the Synchronous-Grid RoI Pooling for accurate box refinement. R2Det outperforms existing range-view-based methods by a significant margin on both the KITTI benchmark and the Waymo Open Dataset. Codes will be made publicly available.
Authors:Maciej Baczmanski, Mateusz Wasala, Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract:
Perception and control systems for autonomous vehicles are an active area of scientific and industrial research. These solutions should be characterised by high efficiency in recognising obstacles and other environmental elements in different road conditions, real-time capability, and energy efficiency. Achieving such functionality requires an appropriate algorithm and a suitable computing platform. In this paper, we have used the MultiTaskV3 detection-segmentation network as the basis for a perception system that can perform both functionalities within a single architecture. It was appropriately trained, quantised, and implemented on the AMD Xilinx Kria KV260 Vision AI embedded platform. By using this device, it was possible to parallelise and accelerate the computations. Furthermore, the whole system consumes relatively little power compared to a CPU-based implementation (an average of 5 watts, compared to the minimum of 55 watts for weaker CPUs, and the small size (119mm x 140mm x 36mm) of the platform allows it to be used in devices where the amount of space available is limited. It also achieves an accuracy higher than 97% of the mAP (mean average precision) for object detection and above 90% of the mIoU (mean intersection over union) for image segmentation. The article also details the design of the Mecanum wheel vehicle, which was used to test the proposed solution in a mock-up city.
Authors:Francesca Palermo, Bukeikhan Omarali, Changae Oh, Kaspar Althoefer, Ildar Farkhatdinov
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel algorithm for crack localisation and detection based on visual and tactile analysis via fibre-optics. A finger-shaped sensor based on fibre-optics is employed for the data acquisition to collect data for the analysis and the experiments. To detect the possible locations of cracks a camera is used to scan an environment while running an object detection algorithm. Once the crack is detected, a fully-connected graph is created from a skeletonised version of the crack. A minimum spanning tree is then employed for calculating the shortest path to explore the crack which is then used to develop the motion planner for the robotic manipulator. The motion planner divides the crack into multiple nodes which are then explored individually. Then, the manipulator starts the exploration and performs the tactile data classification to confirm if there is indeed a crack in that location or just a false positive from the vision algorithm. If a crack is detected, also the length, width, orientation and number of branches are calculated. This is repeated until all the nodes of the crack are explored.
In order to validate the complete algorithm, various experiments are performed: comparison of exploration of cracks through full scan and motion planning algorithm, implementation of frequency-based features for crack classification and geometry analysis using a combination of vision and tactile data. From the results of the experiments, it is shown that the proposed algorithm is able to detect cracks and improve the results obtained from vision to correctly classify cracks and their geometry with minimal cost thanks to the motion planning algorithm.
Authors:Libin Wang, Han Hu, Qisen Shang, Bo Xu, Qing Zhu
Abstract:
The lack of façade structures in photogrammetric mesh models renders them inadequate for meeting the demands of intricate applications. Moreover, these mesh models exhibit irregular surfaces with considerable geometric noise and texture quality imperfections, making the restoration of structures challenging. To address these shortcomings, we present StructuredMesh, a novel approach for reconstructing façade structures conforming to the regularity of buildings within photogrammetric mesh models. Our method involves capturing multi-view color and depth images of the building model using a virtual camera and employing a deep learning object detection pipeline to semi-automatically extract the bounding boxes of façade components such as windows, doors, and balconies from the color image. We then utilize the depth image to remap these boxes into 3D space, generating an initial façade layout. Leveraging architectural knowledge, we apply binary integer programming (BIP) to optimize the 3D layout's structure, encompassing the positions, orientations, and sizes of all components. The refined layout subsequently informs façade modeling through instance replacement. We conducted experiments utilizing building mesh models from three distinct datasets, demonstrating the adaptability, robustness, and noise resistance of our proposed methodology. Furthermore, our 3D layout evaluation metrics reveal that the optimized layout enhances precision, recall, and F-score by 6.5%, 4.5%, and 5.5%, respectively, in comparison to the initial layout.
Authors:Xiaoyuan Guo, Kezhen Chen, Jinmeng Rao, Yawen Zhang, Baochen Sun, Jie Yang
Abstract:
We present LOWA, a novel method for localizing objects with attributes effectively in the wild. It aims to address the insufficiency of current open-vocabulary object detectors, which are limited by the lack of instance-level attribute classification and rare class names. To train LOWA, we propose a hybrid vision-language training strategy to learn object detection and recognition with class names as well as attribute information. With LOWA, users can not only detect objects with class names, but also able to localize objects by attributes. LOWA is built on top of a two-tower vision-language architecture and consists of a standard vision transformer as the image encoder and a similar transformer as the text encoder. To learn the alignment between visual and text inputs at the instance level, we train LOWA with three training steps: object-level training, attribute-aware learning, and free-text joint training of objects and attributes. This hybrid training strategy first ensures correct object detection, then incorporates instance-level attribute information, and finally balances the object class and attribute sensitivity. We evaluate our model performance of attribute classification and attribute localization on the Open-Vocabulary Attribute Detection (OVAD) benchmark and the Visual Attributes in the Wild (VAW) dataset, and experiments indicate strong zero-shot performance. Ablation studies additionally demonstrate the effectiveness of each training step of our approach.
Authors:Emanuele Bugliarello, Aida Nematzadeh, Lisa Anne Hendricks
Abstract:
Recent work in vision-and-language pretraining has investigated supervised signals from object detection data to learn better, fine-grained multimodal representations. In this work, we take a step further and explore how we can tap into supervision from small-scale visual relation data. In particular, we propose two pretraining approaches to contextualise visual entities in a multimodal setup. With verbalised scene graphs, we transform visual relation triplets into structured captions, and treat them as additional image descriptions. With masked relation prediction, we further encourage relating entities from image regions with visually masked contexts. When applied to strong baselines pretrained on large amounts of Web data, zero-shot evaluations on both coarse-grained and fine-grained tasks show the efficacy of our methods in learning multimodal representations from weakly-supervised relations data.
Authors:Binglin Li, Jie Liang, Haisheng Fu, Jingning Han
Abstract:
Encoding the Region Of Interest (ROI) with better quality than the background has many applications including video conferencing systems, video surveillance and object-oriented vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a ROI-based image compression framework with Swin transformers as main building blocks for the autoencoder network. The binary ROI mask is integrated into different layers of the network to provide spatial information guidance. Based on the ROI mask, we can control the relative importance of the ROI and non-ROI by modifying the corresponding Lagrange multiplier $ λ$ for different regions. Experimental results show our model achieves higher ROI PSNR than other methods and modest average PSNR for human evaluation. When tested on models pre-trained with original images, it has superior object detection and instance segmentation performance on the COCO validation dataset.
Authors:Sebastian Huch, Florian Sauerbeck, Johannes Betz
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles demand high accuracy and robustness of perception algorithms. To develop efficient and scalable perception algorithms, the maximum information should be extracted from the available sensor data. In this work, we present our concept for an end-to-end perception architecture, named DeepSTEP. The deep learning-based architecture processes raw sensor data from the camera, LiDAR, and RaDAR, and combines the extracted data in a deep fusion network. The output of this deep fusion network is a shared feature space, which is used by perception head networks to fulfill several perception tasks, such as object detection or local mapping. DeepSTEP incorporates multiple ideas to advance state of the art: First, combining detection and localization into a single pipeline allows for efficient processing to reduce computational overhead and further improves overall performance. Second, the architecture leverages the temporal domain by using a self-attention mechanism that focuses on the most important features. We believe that our concept of DeepSTEP will advance the development of end-to-end perception systems. The network will be deployed on our research vehicle, which will be used as a platform for data collection, real-world testing, and validation. In conclusion, DeepSTEP represents a significant advancement in the field of perception for autonomous vehicles. The architecture's end-to-end design, time-aware attention mechanism, and integration of multiple perception tasks make it a promising solution for real-world deployment. This research is a work in progress and presents the first concept of establishing a novel perception pipeline.
Authors:Farhin Farhad Riya, Shahinul Hoque, Md Saif Hassan Onim, Edward Michaud, Edmon Begoli, Jinyuan Stella Sun
Abstract:
The widespread adoption of Image Processing has propelled Object Recognition (OR) models into essential roles across various applications, demonstrating the power of AI and enabling crucial services. Among the applications, traffic sign recognition stands out as a popular research topic, given its critical significance in the development of autonomous vehicles. Despite their significance, real-world challenges, such as alterations to traffic signs, can negatively impact the performance of OR models. This study investigates the influence of altered traffic signs on the accuracy and effectiveness of object recognition, employing a publicly available dataset to introduce alterations in shape, color, content, visibility, angles and background. Focusing on the YOLOv7 (You Only Look Once) model, the study demonstrates a notable decline in detection and classification accuracy when confronted with traffic signs in unusual conditions including the altered traffic signs. Notably, the alterations explored in this study are benign examples and do not involve algorithms used for generating adversarial machine learning samples. This study highlights the significance of enhancing the robustness of object detection models in real-life scenarios and the need for further investigation in this area to improve their accuracy and reliability.
Authors:Ramneet Kaur, Yiannis Kantaros, Wenwen Si, James Weimer, Insup Lee
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNN) have become a common sensing modality in autonomous systems as they allow for semantically perceiving the ambient environment given input images. Nevertheless, DNN models have proven to be vulnerable to adversarial digital and physical attacks. To mitigate this issue, several detection frameworks have been proposed to detect whether a single input image has been manipulated by adversarial digital noise or not. In our prior work, we proposed a real-time detector, called VisionGuard (VG), for adversarial physical attacks against single input images to DNN models. Building upon that work, we propose VisionGuard* (VG), which couples VG with majority-vote methods, to detect adversarial physical attacks in time-series image data, e.g., videos. This is motivated by autonomous systems applications where images are collected over time using onboard sensors for decision-making purposes. We emphasize that majority-vote mechanisms are quite common in autonomous system applications (among many other applications), as e.g., in autonomous driving stacks for object detection. In this paper, we investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, how this widely used mechanism can be leveraged to enhance the performance of adversarial detectors. We have evaluated VG* on videos of both clean and physically attacked traffic signs generated by a state-of-the-art robust physical attack. We provide extensive comparative experiments against detectors that have been designed originally for out-of-distribution data and digitally attacked images.
Authors:Yucheng Zhang, Masaki Fukuda, Yasunori Ishii, Kyoko Ohshima, Takayoshi Yamashita
Abstract:
3D object detection has become indispensable in the field of autonomous driving. To date, gratifying breakthroughs have been recorded in 3D object detection research, attributed to deep learning. However, deep learning algorithms are data-driven and require large amounts of annotated point cloud data for training and evaluation. Unlike 2D image labels, annotating point cloud data is difficult due to the limitations of sparsity, irregularity, and low resolution, which requires more manual work, and the annotation efficiency is much lower than 2D image.Therefore, we propose an annotation algorithm for point cloud data, which is pre-annotation and camera-LiDAR late fusion algorithm to easily and accurately annotate. The contributions of this study are as follows. We propose (1) a pre-annotation algorithm that employs 3D object detection and auto fitting for the easy annotation of point clouds, (2) a camera-LiDAR late fusion algorithm using 2D and 3D results for easily error checking, which helps annotators easily identify missing objects, and (3) a point cloud annotation evaluation pipeline to evaluate our experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the annotating speed by 6.5 times and the annotation quality in terms of the 3D Intersection over Union and precision by 8.2 points and 5.6 points, respectively; additionally, the miss rate is reduced by 31.9 points.
Authors:Songsong Tian, Lusi Li, Weijun Li, Hang Ran, Xin Ning, Prayag Tiwari
Abstract:
Large deep learning models are impressive, but they struggle when real-time data is not available. Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) poses a significant challenge for deep neural networks to learn new tasks from just a few labeled samples without forgetting the previously learned ones. This setup easily leads to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting problems, severely affecting model performance. Studying FSCIL helps overcome deep learning model limitations on data volume and acquisition time, while improving practicality and adaptability of machine learning models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on FSCIL. Unlike previous surveys, we aim to synthesize few-shot learning and incremental learning, focusing on introducing FSCIL from two perspectives, while reviewing over 30 theoretical research studies and more than 20 applied research studies. From the theoretical perspective, we provide a novel categorization approach that divides the field into five subcategories, including traditional machine learning methods, meta-learning based methods, feature and feature space-based methods, replay-based methods, and dynamic network structure-based methods. We also evaluate the performance of recent theoretical research on benchmark datasets of FSCIL. From the application perspective, FSCIL has achieved impressive achievements in various fields of computer vision such as image classification, object detection, and image segmentation, as well as in natural language processing and graph. We summarize the important applications. Finally, we point out potential future research directions, including applications, problem setups, and theory development. Overall, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the latest advances in FSCIL from a methodological, performance, and application perspective.
Authors:Sarah Parisot, Yongxin Yang, Steven McDonagh
Abstract:
Large scale vision and language models can achieve impressive zero-shot recognition performance by mapping class specific text queries to image content. Two distinct challenges that remain however, are high sensitivity to the choice of handcrafted class names that define queries, and the difficulty of adaptation to new, smaller datasets. Towards addressing these problems, we propose to leverage available data to learn, for each class, an optimal word embedding as a function of the visual content. By learning new word embeddings on an otherwise frozen model, we are able to retain zero-shot capabilities for new classes, easily adapt models to new datasets, and adjust potentially erroneous, non-descriptive or ambiguous class names. We show that our solution can easily be integrated in image classification and object detection pipelines, yields significant performance gains in multiple scenarios and provides insights into model biases and labelling errors.
Authors:David Pershouse, Feras Dayoub, Dimity Miller, Niko Sünderhauf
Abstract:
We address the challenging problem of open world object detection (OWOD), where object detectors must identify objects from known classes while also identifying and continually learning to detect novel objects. Prior work has resulted in detectors that have a relatively low ability to detect novel objects, and a high likelihood of classifying a novel object as one of the known classes. We approach the problem by identifying the three main challenges that OWOD presents and introduce OW-RCNN, an open world object detector that addresses each of these three challenges. OW-RCNN establishes a new state of the art using the open-world evaluation protocol on MS-COCO, showing a drastically increased ability to detect novel objects (16-21% absolute increase in U-Recall), to avoid their misclassification as one of the known classes (up to 52% reduction in A-OSE), and to incrementally learn to detect them while maintaining performance on previously known classes (1-6% absolute increase in mAP).
Authors:Han-Cheol Cho, Won Young Jhoo, Wooyoung Kang, Byungseok Roh
Abstract:
Recent open-vocabulary detection methods aim to detect novel objects by distilling knowledge from vision-language models (VLMs) trained on a vast amount of image-text pairs. To improve the effectiveness of these methods, researchers have utilized datasets with a large vocabulary that contains a large number of object classes, under the assumption that such data will enable models to extract comprehensive knowledge on the relationships between various objects and better generalize to unseen object classes. In this study, we argue that more fine-grained labels are necessary to extract richer knowledge about novel objects, including object attributes and relationships, in addition to their names. To address this challenge, we propose a simple and effective method named Pseudo Caption Labeling (PCL), which utilizes an image captioning model to generate captions that describe object instances from diverse perspectives. The resulting pseudo caption labels offer dense samples for knowledge distillation. On the LVIS benchmark, our best model trained on the de-duplicated VisualGenome dataset achieves an AP of 34.5 and an APr of 30.6, comparable to the state-of-the-art performance. PCL's simplicity and flexibility are other notable features, as it is a straightforward pre-processing technique that can be used with any image captioning model without imposing any restrictions on model architecture or training process.
Authors:Shuxin Wang, Zhichao Zheng, Yanhui Gu, Junsheng Zhou, Yi Chen
Abstract:
Single-branch object detection methods use shared features for localization and classification, yet the shared features are not fit for the two different tasks simultaneously. Multi-branch object detection methods usually use different features for localization and classification separately, ignoring the relevance between different tasks. Therefore, we propose multi-semantic interactive learning (MSIL) to mine the semantic relevance between different branches and extract multi-semantic enhanced features of objects. MSIL first performs semantic alignment of regression and classification branches, then merges the features of different branches by semantic fusion, finally extracts relevant information by semantic separation and passes it back to the regression and classification branches respectively. More importantly, MSIL can be integrated into existing object detection nets as a plug-and-play component. Experiments on the MS COCO, and Pascal VOC datasets show that the integration of MSIL with existing algorithms can utilize the relevant information between semantics of different tasks and achieve better performance.
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Xiaoshen Huang, Guanghui Zhang, Xianyong Fang, Linbo Wang, Bin Tang
Abstract:
Salient object detection segments attractive objects in scenes. RGB and thermal modalities provide complementary information and scribble annotations alleviate large amounts of human labor. Based on the above facts, we propose a scribble-supervised RGB-T salient object detection model. By a four-step solution (expansion, prediction, aggregation, and supervision), label-sparse challenge of scribble-supervised method is solved. To expand scribble annotations, we collect the superpixels that foreground scribbles pass through in RGB and thermal images, respectively. The expanded multi-modal labels provide the coarse object boundary. To further polish the expanded labels, we propose a prediction module to alleviate the sharpness of boundary. To play the complementary roles of two modalities, we combine the two into aggregated pseudo labels. Supervised by scribble annotations and pseudo labels, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the relabeled RGBT-S dataset. Furthermore, the model is applied to RGB-D and video scribble-supervised applications, achieving consistently excellent performance.
Authors:Timothy Chase, Chris Gnam, John Crassidis, Karthik Dantu
Abstract:
The detection of hazardous terrain during the planetary landing of spacecraft plays a critical role in assuring vehicle safety and mission success. A cheap and effective way of detecting hazardous terrain is through the use of visual cameras, which ensure operational ability from atmospheric entry through touchdown. Plagued by resource constraints and limited computational power, traditional techniques for visual hazardous terrain detection focus on template matching and registration to pre-built hazard maps. Although successful on previous missions, this approach is restricted to the specificity of the templates and limited by the fidelity of the underlying hazard map, which both require extensive pre-flight cost and effort to obtain and develop. Terrestrial systems that perform a similar task in applications such as autonomous driving utilize state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to successfully localize and classify navigation hazards. Advancements in spacecraft co-processors aimed at accelerating deep learning inference enable the application of these methods in space for the first time. In this work, we introduce You Only Crash Once (YOCO), a deep learning-based visual hazardous terrain detection and classification technique for autonomous spacecraft planetary landings. Through the use of unsupervised domain adaptation we tailor YOCO for training by simulation, removing the need for real-world annotated data and expensive mission surveying phases. We further improve the transfer of representative terrain knowledge between simulation and the real world through visual similarity clustering. We demonstrate the utility of YOCO through a series of terrestrial and extraterrestrial simulation-to-real experiments and show substantial improvements toward the ability to both detect and accurately classify instances of planetary terrain.
Authors:Siqi Zhang, Lu Zhang, Zhiyong Liu
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) assumes that both labeled source data and unlabeled target data are available for training, but this assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios. Thus, source-free DAOD is proposed to adapt the source-trained detectors to target domains with only unlabeled target data. Existing source-free DAOD methods typically utilize pseudo labeling, where the performance heavily relies on the selection of confidence threshold. However, most prior works adopt a single fixed threshold for all classes to generate pseudo labels, which ignore the imbalanced class distribution, resulting in biased pseudo labels. In this work, we propose a refined pseudo labeling framework for source-free DAOD. First, to generate unbiased pseudo labels, we present a category-aware adaptive threshold estimation module, which adaptively provides the appropriate threshold for each category. Second, to alleviate incorrect box regression, a localization-aware pseudo label assignment strategy is introduced to divide labels into certain and uncertain ones and optimize them separately. Finally, extensive experiments on four adaptation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Siqi Zhang, Lu Zhang, Zhiyong Liu, Hangtao Feng
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to adapt the detector from a labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. In recent years, DAOD has attracted massive attention since it can alleviate performance degradation due to the large shift of data distributions in the wild. To align distributions between domains, adversarial learning is widely used in existing DAOD methods. However, the decision boundary for the adversarial domain discriminator may be inaccurate, causing the model biased towards the source domain. To alleviate this bias, we propose a novel Frequency-based Image Translation (FIT) framework for DAOD. First, by keeping domain-invariant frequency components and swapping domain-specific ones, we conduct image translation to reduce domain shift at the input level. Second, hierarchical adversarial feature learning is utilized to further mitigate the domain gap at the feature level. Finally, we design a joint loss to train the entire network in an end-to-end manner without extra training to obtain translated images. Extensive experiments on three challenging DAOD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Jannatun Noor, Rizwanul Haque Ratul, Mir Rownak Ali Uday, Joyanta Jyoti Mondal, Md. Sadiqul Islam Sakif, A. B. M. Alim Al Islam
Abstract:
Object Storage Systems (OSS) inside a cloud promise scalability, durability, availability, and concurrency. However, open-source OSS does not have a specific approach to letting users and administrators search based on the data, which is contained inside the object storage, without involving the entire cloud infrastructure. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Sherlock, a novel Content-Based Searching (CoBS) architecture to extract additional information from images and documents. Here, we store the additional information in an Elasticsearch-enabled database, which helps us to search for our desired data based on its contents. This approach works in two sequential stages. First, the data will be uploaded to a classifier that will determine the data type and send it to the specific model for the data. Here, the images that are being uploaded are sent to our trained model for object detection, and the documents are sent for keyword extraction. Next, the extracted information is sent to Elasticsearch, which enables searching based on the contents. Because the precision of the models is so fundamental to the search's correctness, we train our models with comprehensive datasets (Microsoft COCO Dataset for multimedia data and SemEval2017 Dataset for document data). Furthermore, we put our designed architecture to the test with a real-world implementation of an open-source OSS called OpenStack Swift. We upload images into the dataset of our implementation in various segments to find out the efficacy of our proposed model in real-life Swift object storage.
Authors:Jiayuan Zhuang, Zheng Qin, Hao Yu, Xucan Chen
Abstract:
Classification and localization are two main sub-tasks in object detection. Nonetheless, these two tasks have inconsistent preferences for feature context, i.e., localization expects more boundary-aware features to accurately regress the bounding box, while more semantic context is preferred for object classification. Exsiting methods usually leverage disentangled heads to learn different feature context for each task. However, the heads are still applied on the same input features, which leads to an imperfect balance between classifcation and localization. In this work, we propose a novel Task-Specific COntext DEcoupling (TSCODE) head which further disentangles the feature encoding for two tasks. For classification, we generate spatially-coarse but semantically-strong feature encoding. For localization, we provide high-resolution feature map containing more edge information to better regress object boundaries. TSCODE is plug-and-play and can be easily incorperated into existing detection pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method stably improves different detectors by over 1.0 AP with less computational cost. Our code and models will be publicly released.
Authors:Buyu Liu, BaoJun, Jianping Fan, Xi Peng, Kui Ren, Jun Yu
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks aim to perturb images such that a predictor outputs incorrect results. Due to the limited research in structured attacks, imposing consistency checks on natural multi-object scenes is a promising yet practical defense against conventional adversarial attacks. More desired attacks, to this end, should be able to fool defenses with such consistency checks. Therefore, we present the first approach GLOW that copes with various attack requests by generating global layout-aware adversarial attacks, in which both categorical and geometric layout constraints are explicitly established. Specifically, we focus on object detection task and given a victim image, GLOW first localizes victim objects according to target labels. And then it generates multiple attack plans, together with their context-consistency scores. Our proposed GLOW, on the one hand, is capable of handling various types of requests, including single or multiple victim objects, with or without specified victim objects. On the other hand, it produces a consistency score for each attack plan, reflecting the overall contextual consistency that both semantic category and global scene layout are considered. In experiment, we design multiple types of attack requests and validate our ideas on MS COCO and Pascal. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve about 30$\%$ average relative improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods in conventional single object attack request; Moreover, our method outperforms SOTAs significantly on more generic attack requests by about 20$\%$ in average; Finally, our method produces superior performance under challenging zero-query black-box setting, or 20$\%$ better than SOTAs. Our code, model and attack requests would be made available.
Authors:Kun Wang, Zi Wang, Zhang Li, Ang Su, Xichao Teng, Erting Pan, Minhao Liu, Qifeng Yu
Abstract:
Oriented object detection is a fundamental yet challenging task in remote sensing (RS), aiming to locate and classify objects with arbitrary orientations. Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the capabilities of oriented object detection methods. Given the rapid development of this field, a comprehensive survey of the recent advances in oriented object detection is presented in this paper. Specifically, we begin by tracing the technical evolution from horizontal object detection to oriented object detection and highlighting the specific related challenges, including feature misalignment, spatial misalignment, oriented bounding box (OBB) regression problems, and common issues encountered in RS. Subsequently, we further categorize the existing methods into detection frameworks, OBB regression techniques, feature representation approaches, and solutions to common issues and provide an in-depth discussion of how these methods address the above challenges. In addition, we cover several publicly available datasets and evaluation protocols. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive comparison and analysis involving the state-of-the-art methods. Toward the end of this paper, we identify several future directions for oriented object detection research.
Authors:Zhichao Lu, Chuntao Ding, Felix Juefei-Xu, Vishnu Naresh Boddeti, Shangguang Wang, Yun Yang
Abstract:
Deploying high-performance vision transformer (ViT) models on ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) devices to provide high-quality vision services will revolutionize the way we live, work, and interact with the world. Due to the contradiction between the limited resources of IoT devices and resource-intensive ViT models, the use of cloud servers to assist ViT model training has become mainstream. However, due to the larger number of parameters and floating-point operations (FLOPs) of the existing ViT models, the model parameters transmitted by cloud servers are large and difficult to run on resource-constrained IoT devices. To this end, this paper proposes a transmission-friendly ViT model, TFormer, for deployment on resource-constrained IoT devices with the assistance of a cloud server. The high performance and small number of model parameters and FLOPs of TFormer are attributed to the proposed hybrid layer and the proposed partially connected feed-forward network (PCS-FFN). The hybrid layer consists of nonlearnable modules and a pointwise convolution, which can obtain multitype and multiscale features with only a few parameters and FLOPs to improve the TFormer performance. The PCS-FFN adopts group convolution to reduce the number of parameters. The key idea of this paper is to propose TFormer with few model parameters and FLOPs to facilitate applications running on resource-constrained IoT devices to benefit from the high performance of the ViT models. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K, MS COCO, and ADE20K datasets for image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art models. Specifically, TFormer-S achieves 5% higher accuracy on ImageNet-1K than ResNet18 with 1.4$\times$ fewer parameters and FLOPs.
Authors:Davide Sapienza, Elena Govi, Sara Aldhaheri, Marko Bertogna, Eloy Roura, Ãric Pairet, Micaela Verucchi, Paola Ardón
Abstract:
Object pose estimation underwater allows an autonomous system to perform tracking and intervention tasks. Nonetheless, underwater target pose estimation is remarkably challenging due to, among many factors, limited visibility, light scattering, cluttered environments, and constantly varying water conditions. An approach is to employ sonar or laser sensing to acquire 3D data, however, the data is not clear and the sensors expensive. For this reason, the community has focused on extracting pose estimates from RGB input. In this work, we propose an approach that leverages 2D object detection to reliably compute 6D pose estimates in different underwater scenarios. We test our proposal with 4 objects with symmetrical shapes and poor texture spanning across 33,920 synthetic and 10 real scenes. All objects and scenes are made available in an open-source dataset that includes annotations for object detection and pose estimation. When benchmarking against similar end-to-end methodologies for 6D object pose estimation, our pipeline provides estimates that are 8% more accurate. We also demonstrate the real world usability of our pose estimation pipeline on an underwater robotic manipulator in a reaching task.
Authors:Qi Chen, Chao Li, Jia Ning, Stephen Lin, Kun He
Abstract:
In convolutional neural networks, the convolutions are conventionally performed using a square kernel with a fixed N $\times$ N receptive field (RF). However, what matters most to the network is the effective receptive field (ERF) that indicates the extent with which input pixels contribute to an output pixel. Inspired by the property that ERFs typically exhibit a Gaussian distribution, we propose a Gaussian Mask convolutional kernel (GMConv) in this work. Specifically, GMConv utilizes the Gaussian function to generate a concentric symmetry mask that is placed over the kernel to refine the RF. Our GMConv can directly replace the standard convolutions in existing CNNs and can be easily trained end-to-end by standard back-propagation. We evaluate our approach through extensive experiments on image classification and object detection tasks. Over several tasks and standard base models, our approach compares favorably against the standard convolution. For instance, using GMConv for AlexNet and ResNet-50, the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification is boosted by 0.98% and 0.85%, respectively.
Authors:Tiago Mendes-Neves, LuÃs Meireles, João Mendes-Moreira
Abstract:
Computer Vision developments are enabling significant advances in many fields, including sports. Many applications built on top of Computer Vision technologies, such as tracking data, are nowadays essential for every top-level analyst, coach, and even player. In this paper, we survey Computer Vision techniques that can help many sports-related studies gather vast amounts of data, such as Object Detection and Pose Estimation. We provide a use case for such data: building a model for shot speed estimation with pose data obtained using only Computer Vision models. Our model achieves a correlation of 67%. The possibility of estimating shot speeds enables much deeper studies about enabling the creation of new metrics and recommendation systems that will help athletes improve their performance, in any sport. The proposed methodology is easily replicable for many technical movements and is only limited by the availability of video data.
Authors:Zongwei Wu, Guillaume Allibert, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Chao Ma, Cédric Demonceaux
Abstract:
RGB-D saliency detection aims to fuse multi-modal cues to accurately localize salient regions. Existing works often adopt attention modules for feature modeling, with few methods explicitly leveraging fine-grained details to merge with semantic cues. Thus, despite the auxiliary depth information, it is still challenging for existing models to distinguish objects with similar appearances but at distinct camera distances. In this paper, from a new perspective, we propose a novel Hierarchical Depth Awareness network (HiDAnet) for RGB-D saliency detection. Our motivation comes from the observation that the multi-granularity properties of geometric priors correlate well with the neural network hierarchies. To realize multi-modal and multi-level fusion, we first use a granularity-based attention scheme to strengthen the discriminatory power of RGB and depth features separately. Then we introduce a unified cross dual-attention module for multi-modal and multi-level fusion in a coarse-to-fine manner. The encoded multi-modal features are gradually aggregated into a shared decoder. Further, we exploit a multi-scale loss to take full advantage of the hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our HiDAnet performs favorably over the state-of-the-art methods by large margins.
Authors:Dongseok Shim, H. Jin Kim
Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation plays a critical role in various computer vision and robotics applications such as localization, mapping, and 3D object detection. Recently, learning-based algorithms achieve huge success in depth estimation by training models with a large amount of data in a supervised manner. However, it is challenging to acquire dense ground truth depth labels for supervised training, and the unsupervised depth estimation using monocular sequences emerges as a promising alternative. Unfortunately, most studies on unsupervised depth estimation explore loss functions or occlusion masks, and there is little change in model architecture in that ConvNet-based encoder-decoder structure becomes a de-facto standard for depth estimation. In this paper, we employ a convolution-free Swin Transformer as an image feature extractor so that the network can capture both local geometric features and global semantic features for depth estimation. Also, we propose a Densely Cascaded Multi-scale Network (DCMNet) that connects every feature map directly with another from different scales via a top-down cascade pathway. This densely cascaded connectivity reinforces the interconnection between decoding layers and produces high-quality multi-scale depth outputs. The experiments on two different datasets, KITTI and Make3D, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art unsupervised algorithms.
Authors:Irena Gao, Gabriel Ilharco, Scott Lundberg, Marco Tulio Ribeiro
Abstract:
Vision models often fail systematically on groups of data that share common semantic characteristics (e.g., rare objects or unusual scenes), but identifying these failure modes is a challenge. We introduce AdaVision, an interactive process for testing vision models which helps users identify and fix coherent failure modes. Given a natural language description of a coherent group, AdaVision retrieves relevant images from LAION-5B with CLIP. The user then labels a small amount of data for model correctness, which is used in successive retrieval rounds to hill-climb towards high-error regions, refining the group definition. Once a group is saturated, AdaVision uses GPT-3 to suggest new group descriptions for the user to explore. We demonstrate the usefulness and generality of AdaVision in user studies, where users find major bugs in state-of-the-art classification, object detection, and image captioning models. These user-discovered groups have failure rates 2-3x higher than those surfaced by automatic error clustering methods. Finally, finetuning on examples found with AdaVision fixes the discovered bugs when evaluated on unseen examples, without degrading in-distribution accuracy, and while also improving performance on out-of-distribution datasets.
Authors:Misha Urooj Khan, Mahnoor Dil, Muhammad Zeshan Alam, Farooq Alam Orakazi, Abdullah M. Almasoud, Zeeshan Kaleem, Chau Yuen
Abstract:
The increasing prevalence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, has generated a demand for reliable detection systems. The inappropriate use of drones presents potential security and privacy hazards, particularly concerning sensitive facilities. To overcome those obstacles, we proposed the concept of MultiFeatureNet (MFNet), a solution that enhances feature representation by capturing the most concentrated feature maps. Additionally, we present MultiFeatureNet-Feature Attention (MFNet-FA), a technique that adaptively weights different channels of the input feature maps. To meet the requirements of multi-scale detection, we presented the versions of MFNet and MFNet-FA, namely the small (S), medium (M), and large (L). The outcomes reveal notable performance enhancements. For optimal bird detection, MFNet-M (Ablation study 2) achieves an impressive precision of 99.8\%, while for UAV detection, MFNet-L (Ablation study 2) achieves a precision score of 97.2\%. Among the options, MFNet-FA-S (Ablation study 3) emerges as the most resource-efficient alternative, considering its small feature map size, computational demands (GFLOPs), and operational efficiency (in frame per second). This makes it particularly suitable for deployment on hardware with limited capabilities. Additionally, MFNet-FA-S (Ablation study 3) stands out for its swift real-time inference and multiple-object detection due to the incorporation of the FA module. The proposed MFNet-L with the focus module (Ablation study 2) demonstrates the most remarkable classification outcomes, boasting an average precision of 98.4\%, average recall of 96.6\%, average mean average precision (mAP) of 98.3\%, and average intersection over union (IoU) of 72.8\%. To encourage reproducible research, the dataset, and code for MFNet are freely available as an open-source project: github.com/ZeeshanKaleem/MultiFeatureNet.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Lian Huai, Tong Liu, Xingqun Jiang
Abstract:
Due to the scarcity of sampling data in reality, few-shot object detection (FSOD) has drawn more and more attention because of its ability to quickly train new detection concepts with less data. However, there are still failure identifications due to the difficulty in distinguishing confusable classes. We also notice that the high standard deviation of average precision reveals the inconsistent detection performance. To this end, we propose a novel FSOD method with Refined Contrastive Learning (FSRC). A pre-determination component is introduced to find out the Resemblance Group from novel classes which contains confusable classes. Afterwards, Refined Contrastive Learning (RCL) is pointedly performed on this group of classes in order to increase the inter-class distances among them. In the meantime, the detection results distribute more uniformly which further improve the performance. Experimental results based on PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets demonstrate our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art research.
Authors:Peirong Liu, Rui Wang, Pengchuan Zhang, Omid Poursaeed, Yipin Zhou, Xuefei Cao, Sreya Dutta Roy, Ashish Shah, Ser-Nam Lim
Abstract:
Objection detection (OD) has been one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision. Recent developments in deep learning have pushed the performance of image OD to new heights by learning-based, data-driven approaches. On the other hand, video OD remains less explored, mostly due to much more expensive data annotation needs. At the same time, multi-object tracking (MOT) which requires reasoning about track identities and spatio-temporal trajectories, shares similar spirits with video OD. However, most MOT datasets are class-specific (e.g., person-annotated only), which constrains a model's flexibility to perform tracking on other objects. We propose TrIVD (Tracking and Image-Video Detection), the first framework that unifies image OD, video OD, and MOT within one end-to-end model. To handle the discrepancies and semantic overlaps of category labels across datasets, TrIVD formulates detection/tracking as grounding and reasons about object categories via visual-text alignments. The unified formulation enables cross-dataset, multi-task training, and thus equips TrIVD with the ability to leverage frame-level features, video-level spatio-temporal relations, as well as track identity associations. With such joint training, we can now extend the knowledge from OD data, that comes with much richer object category annotations, to MOT and achieve zero-shot tracking capability. Experiments demonstrate that multi-task co-trained TrIVD outperforms single-task baselines across all image/video OD and MOT tasks. We further set the first baseline on the new task of zero-shot tracking.
Authors:Nanqing Dong, Linus Ericsson, Yongxin Yang, Ales Leonardis, Steven McDonagh
Abstract:
Self-supervised pre-training, based on the pretext task of instance discrimination, has fueled the recent advance in label-efficient object detection. However, existing studies focus on pre-training only a feature extractor network to learn transferable representations for downstream detection tasks. This leads to the necessity of training multiple detection-specific modules from scratch in the fine-tuning phase. We argue that the region proposal network (RPN), a common detection-specific module, can additionally be pre-trained towards reducing the localization error of multi-stage detectors. In this work, we propose a simple pretext task that provides an effective pre-training for the RPN, towards efficiently improving downstream object detection performance. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach on benchmark object detection tasks and additional downstream tasks, including instance segmentation and few-shot detection. In comparison with multi-stage detectors without RPN pre-training, our approach is able to consistently improve downstream task performance, with largest gains found in label-scarce settings.
Authors:Franz Scherr, Qinghai Guo, Timoleon Moraitis
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods aim to exploit the abundance of unlabelled data for machine learning (ML), however the underlying principles are often method-specific. An SSL framework derived from biological first principles of embodied learning could unify the various SSL methods, help elucidate learning in the brain, and possibly improve ML. SSL commonly transforms each training datapoint into a pair of views, uses the knowledge of this pairing as a positive (i.e. non-contrastive) self-supervisory sign, and potentially opposes it to unrelated, (i.e. contrastive) negative examples. Here, we show that this type of self-supervision is an incomplete implementation of a concept from neuroscience, the Efference Copy (EC). Specifically, the brain also transforms the environment through efference, i.e. motor commands, however it sends to itself an EC of the full commands, i.e. more than a mere SSL sign. In addition, its action representations are likely egocentric. From such a principled foundation we formally recover and extend SSL methods such as SimCLR, BYOL, and ReLIC under a common theoretical framework, i.e. Self-supervision Through Efference Copies (S-TEC). Empirically, S-TEC restructures meaningfully the within- and between-class representations. This manifests as improvement in recent strong SSL baselines in image classification, segmentation, object detection, and in audio. These results hypothesize a testable positive influence from the brain's motor outputs onto its sensory representations.
Authors:Shraman Pramanick, Li Jing, Sayan Nag, Jiachen Zhu, Hardik Shah, Yann LeCun, Rama Chellappa
Abstract:
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) has recently proven highly effective for various uni- and multi-modal downstream applications. However, most existing end-to-end VLP methods use high-resolution image-text box data to perform well on fine-grained region-level tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and referring expression comprehension. Unfortunately, such high-resolution images with accurate bounding box annotations are expensive to collect and use for supervision at scale. In this work, we propose VoLTA (Vision-Language Transformer with weakly-supervised local-feature Alignment), a new VLP paradigm that only utilizes image-caption data but achieves fine-grained region-level image understanding, eliminating the use of expensive box annotations. VoLTA adopts graph optimal transport-based weakly-supervised alignment on local image patches and text tokens to germinate an explicit, self-normalized, and interpretable low-level matching criterion. In addition, VoLTA pushes multi-modal fusion deep into the uni-modal backbones during pre-training and removes fusion-specific transformer layers, further reducing memory requirements. Extensive experiments on a wide range of vision- and vision-language downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of VoLTA on fine-grained applications without compromising the coarse-grained downstream performance, often outperforming methods using significantly more caption and box annotations.
Authors:Heng Zhou, Chunna Tian, Zhenxi Zhang, Chengyang Li, Yuxuan Ding, Yongqiang Xie, Zhongbo Li
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal salient object detection (SOD) combines two spectra to segment visually conspicuous regions in images. Most existing methods use boundary maps to learn the sharp boundary. These methods ignore the interactions between isolated boundary pixels and other confident pixels, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem,we propose a position-aware relation learning network (PRLNet) for RGB-T SOD based on swin transformer. PRLNet explores the distance and direction relationships between pixels to strengthen intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, generating salient object masks with clear boundaries and homogeneous regions. Specifically, we develop a novel signed distance map auxiliary module (SDMAM) to improve encoder feature representation, which takes into account the distance relation of different pixels in boundary neighborhoods. Then, we design a feature refinement approach with directional field (FRDF), which rectifies features of boundary neighborhood by exploiting the features inside salient objects. FRDF utilizes the directional information between object pixels to effectively enhance the intra-class compactness of salient regions. In addition, we constitute a pure transformer encoder-decoder network to enhance multispectral feature representation for RGB-T SOD. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three public benchmark datasets.The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Zhanchao Huang, Wei Li, Xiang-Gen Xia, Hao Wang, Ran Tao
Abstract:
Arbitrary-oriented object detection (AOOD) has been widely applied to locate and classify objects with diverse orientations in remote sensing images. However, the inconsistent features for the localization and classification tasks in AOOD models may lead to ambiguity and low-quality object predictions, which constrains the detection performance. In this article, an AOOD method called task-wise sampling convolutions (TS-Conv) is proposed. TS-Conv adaptively samples task-wise features from respective sensitive regions and maps these features together in alignment to guide a dynamic label assignment for better predictions. Specifically, sampling positions of the localization convolution in TS-Conv are supervised by the oriented bounding box (OBB) prediction associated with spatial coordinates, while sampling positions and convolutional kernel of the classification convolution are designed to be adaptively adjusted according to different orientations for improving the orientation robustness of features. Furthermore, a dynamic task-consistent-aware label assignment (DTLA) strategy is developed to select optimal candidate positions and assign labels dynamically according to ranked task-aware scores obtained from TS-Conv. Extensive experiments on several public datasets covering multiple scenes, multimodal images, and multiple categories of objects demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and superior performance of the proposed TS-Conv.
Authors:Samuel Wilson, Tobias Fischer, Feras Dayoub, Dimity Miller, Niko Sünderhauf
Abstract:
We address the problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for the task of object detection. We show that residual convolutional layers with batch normalisation produce Sensitivity-Aware FEatures (SAFE) that are consistently powerful for distinguishing in-distribution from out-of-distribution detections. We extract SAFE vectors for every detected object, and train a multilayer perceptron on the surrogate task of distinguishing adversarially perturbed from clean in-distribution examples. This circumvents the need for realistic OOD training data, computationally expensive generative models, or retraining of the base object detector. SAFE outperforms the state-of-the-art OOD object detectors on multiple benchmarks by large margins, e.g. reducing the FPR95 by an absolute 30.6% from 48.3% to 17.7% on the OpenImages dataset.
Authors:Morgan Heisler, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi, Yong Zhang
Abstract:
Data augmentation is an essential technique in improving the generalization of deep neural networks. The majority of existing image-domain augmentations either rely on geometric and structural transformations, or apply different kinds of photometric distortions. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for image augmentation by injecting contextually meaningful knowledge into the scenes. Our method of semantically meaningful image augmentation for object detection via language grounding, SemAug, starts by calculating semantically appropriate new objects that can be placed into relevant locations in the image (the what and where problems). Then it embeds these objects into their relevant target locations, thereby promoting diversity of object instance distribution. Our method allows for introducing new object instances and categories that may not even exist in the training set. Furthermore, it does not require the additional overhead of training a context network, so it can be easily added to existing architectures. Our comprehensive set of evaluations showed that the proposed method is very effective in improving the generalization, while the overhead is negligible. In particular, for a wide range of model architectures, our method achieved ~2-4% and ~1-2% mAP improvements for the task of object detection on the Pascal VOC and COCO datasets, respectively.
Authors:Awet Haileslassie Gebrehiwot, Patrik Vacek, David Hurych, Karel Zimmermann, Patrick Perez, Tomáš Svoboda
Abstract:
Automatic pseudo-labeling is a powerful tool to tap into large amounts of sequential unlabeled data. It is specially appealing in safety-critical applications of autonomous driving, where performance requirements are extreme, datasets are large, and manual labeling is very challenging. We propose to leverage sequences of point clouds to boost the pseudolabeling technique in a teacher-student setup via training multiple teachers, each with access to different temporal information. This set of teachers, dubbed Concordance, provides higher quality pseudo-labels for student training than standard methods. The output of multiple teachers is combined via a novel pseudo label confidence-guided criterion. Our experimental evaluation focuses on the 3D point cloud domain and urban driving scenarios. We show the performance of our method applied to 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection on three benchmark datasets. Our approach, which uses only 20% manual labels, outperforms some fully supervised methods. A notable performance boost is achieved for classes rarely appearing in training data.
Authors:Yang Luo, Zhineng Chen, Shengtian Zhou, Xieping Gao
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has drawn increasing attention in histopathological image analysis in recent years. Compared to contrastive learning which is troubled with the false negative problem, i.e., semantically similar images are selected as negative samples, masked autoencoders (MAE) building SSL from a generative paradigm is probably a more appropriate pre-training. In this paper, we introduce MAE and verify the effect of visible patches for histopathological image understanding. Moreover, a novel SD-MAE model is proposed to enable a self-distillation augmented MAE. Besides the reconstruction loss on masked image patches, SD-MAE further imposes the self-distillation loss on visible patches to enhance the representational capacity of the encoder located shallow layer. We apply SD-MAE to histopathological image classification, cell segmentation and object detection. Experiments demonstrate that SD-MAE shows highly competitive performance when compared with other SSL methods in these tasks.
Authors:Daniel Weber, Wolfgang Fuhl, Andreas Zell, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract:
In human-robot collaboration, one challenging task is to teach a robot new yet unknown objects enabling it to interact with them. Thereby, gaze can contain valuable information. We investigate if it is possible to detect objects (object or no object) merely from gaze data and determine their bounding box parameters. For this purpose, we explore different sizes of temporal windows, which serve as a basis for the computation of heatmaps, i.e., the spatial distribution of the gaze data. Additionally, we analyze different grid sizes of these heatmaps, and demonstrate the functionality in a proof of concept using different machine learning techniques. Our method is characterized by its speed and resource efficiency compared to conventional object detectors. In order to generate the required data, we conducted a study with five subjects who could move freely and thus, turn towards arbitrary objects. This way, we chose a scenario for our data collection that is as realistic as possible. Since the subjects move while facing objects, the heatmaps also contain gaze data trajectories, complicating the detection and parameter regression. We make our data set publicly available to the research community for download.
Authors:Michele Antonazzi, Matteo Luperto, Nicola Basilico, N. Alberto Borghese
Abstract:
Door-status detection, namely recognizing the presence of a door and its status (open or closed), can induce a remarkable impact on a mobile robot's navigation performance, especially for dynamic settings where doors can enable or disable passages, changing the topology of the map. In this work, we address the problem of building a door-status detector module for a mobile robot operating in the same environment for a long time, thus observing the same set of doors from different points of view. First, we show how to improve the mainstream approach based on object detection by considering the constrained perception setup typical of a mobile robot. Hence, we devise a method to build a dataset of images taken from a robot's perspective and we exploit it to obtain a door-status detector based on deep learning. We then leverage the typical working conditions of a robot to qualify the model for boosting its performance in the working environment via fine-tuning with additional data. Our experimental analysis shows the effectiveness of this method with results obtained both in simulation and in the real-world, that also highlight a trade-off between costs and benefits of the fine-tuning approach.
Authors:Peng Zhi, Haoran Zhou, Hang Huang, Rui Zhao, Rui Zhou, Qingguo Zhou
Abstract:
In the field of state-of-the-art object detection, the task of object localization is typically accomplished through a dedicated subnet that emphasizes bounding box regression. This subnet traditionally predicts the object's position by regressing the box's center position and scaling factors. Despite the widespread adoption of this approach, we have observed that the localization results often suffer from defects, leading to unsatisfactory detector performance. In this paper, we address the shortcomings of previous methods through theoretical analysis and experimental verification and present an innovative solution for precise object detection. Instead of solely focusing on the object's center and size, our approach enhances the accuracy of bounding box localization by refining the box edges based on the estimated distribution at the object's boundary. Experimental results demonstrate the potential and generalizability of our proposed method.
Authors:Abdur Rehman, S M A Sharif, Md Abdur Rahaman, Mohamed Jismy Aashik Rasool, Seongwan Kim, Jaeho Lee
Abstract:
Quantization-aware training (QAT) combined with knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising strategy for compressing Artificial Intelligence (AI) models for deployment on resource-constrained hardware. However, existing QAT-KD methods often struggle to balance task-specific (TS) and distillation losses due to heterogeneous gradient magnitudes, especially under low-bit quantization. We propose Game of Regularizer (GoR), a novel learnable regularization method that adaptively balances TS and KD objectives using only two trainable parameters for dynamic loss weighting. GoR reduces conflict between supervision signals, improves convergence, and boosts the performance of small quantized models (SQMs). Experiments on image classification, object detection (OD), and large language model (LLM) compression show that GoR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art QAT-KD methods. On low-power edge devices, it delivers faster inference while maintaining full-precision accuracy. We also introduce QAT-EKD-GoR, an ensemble distillation framework that uses multiple heterogeneous teacher models. Under optimal conditions, the proposed EKD-GoR can outperform full-precision models, providing a robust solution for real-world deployment.
Authors:Haobo Yang, Shiyan Zhang, Zhuoyi Yang, Jilong Guo, Jun Yang, Xinyu Zhang
Abstract:
Deep perception networks in autonomous driving traditionally rely on data-intensive training regimes and post-hoc anomaly detection, often disregarding fundamental information-theoretic constraints governing stable information processing. We reconceptualize deep neural encoders as hierarchical communication chains that incrementally compress raw sensory inputs into task-relevant latent features. Within this framework, we establish two theoretically justified design principles for robust perception: (D1) smooth variation of mutual information between consecutive layers, and (D2) monotonic decay of latent entropy with network depth. Our analysis shows that, under realistic architectural assumptions, particularly blocks comprising repeated layers of similar capacity, enforcing smooth information flow (D1) naturally encourages entropy decay (D2), thus ensuring stable compression. Guided by these insights, we propose Eloss, a novel entropy-based regularizer designed as a lightweight, plug-and-play training objective. Rather than marginal accuracy improvements, this approach represents a conceptual shift: it unifies information-theoretic stability with standard perception tasks, enabling explicit, principled detection of anomalous sensor inputs through entropy deviations. Experimental validation on large-scale 3D object detection benchmarks (KITTI and nuScenes) demonstrates that incorporating Eloss consistently achieves competitive or improved accuracy while dramatically enhancing sensitivity to anomalies, amplifying distribution-shift signals by up to two orders of magnitude. This stable information-compression perspective not only improves interpretability but also establishes a solid theoretical foundation for safer, more robust autonomous driving perception systems.
Authors:Jonas Werheid, Shengjie He, Aymen Gannouni, Anas Abdelrazeq, Robert H. Schmitt
Abstract:
Quality control of assembly processes is essential in manufacturing to ensure not only the quality of individual components but also their proper integration into the final product. To assist in this matter, automated assembly control using computer vision methods has been widely implemented. However, the costs associated with image acquisition, annotation, and training of computer vision algorithms pose challenges for integration, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which often lack the resources for extensive training, data collection, and manual image annotation. Synthetic data offers the potential to reduce manual data collection and labeling. Nevertheless, its practical application in the context of assembly quality remains limited. In this work, we present a novel approach for easily integrable and data-efficient visual assembly control. Our approach leverages simulated scene generation based on computer-aided design (CAD) data and object detection algorithms. The results demonstrate a time-saving pipeline for generating image data in manufacturing environments, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5:0.95) up to 99,5% for correctly identifying instances of synthetic planetary gear system components within our simulated training data, and up to 93% when transferred to real-world camera-captured testing data. This research highlights the effectiveness of synthetic data generation within an adaptable pipeline and underscores its potential to support SMEs in implementing resource-efficient visual assembly control solutions.
Authors:Spyridon Loukovitis, Anastasios Arsenos, Vasileios Karampinis, Athanasios Voulodimos
Abstract:
Open-set detection is crucial for robust UAV autonomy in air-to-air object detection under real-world conditions. Traditional closed-set detectors degrade significantly under domain shifts and flight data corruption, posing risks to safety-critical applications. We propose a novel, model-agnostic open-set detection framework designed specifically for embedding-based detectors. The method explicitly handles unknown object rejection while maintaining robustness against corrupted flight data. It estimates semantic uncertainty via entropy modeling in the embedding space and incorporates spectral normalization and temperature scaling to enhance open-set discrimination. We validate our approach on the challenging AOT aerial benchmark and through extensive real-world flight tests. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline methods, achieving up to a 10\% relative AUROC gain compared to standard YOLO-based detectors. Additionally, we show that background rejection further strengthens robustness without compromising detection accuracy, making our solution particularly well-suited for reliable UAV perception in dynamic air-to-air environments.
Authors:Juneyoung Ro, Namwoo Kim, Yoonjin Yoon
Abstract:
Effectively understanding urban scenes requires fine-grained spatial reasoning about objects, layouts, and depth cues. However, how well current vision-language models (VLMs), pretrained on general scenes, transfer these abilities to urban domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a comparative study of three off-the-shelf VLMs-BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA-1.5-evaluating both zero-shot performance and the effects of fine-tuning with a synthetic VQA dataset specific to urban scenes. We construct such dataset from segmentation, depth, and object detection predictions of street-view images, pairing each question with LLM-generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) answers for step-by-step reasoning supervision. Results show that while VLMs perform reasonably well in zero-shot settings, fine-tuning with our synthetic CoT-supervised dataset substantially boosts performance, especially for challenging question types such as negation and counterfactuals. This study introduces urban spatial reasoning as a new challenge for VLMs and demonstrates synthetic dataset construction as a practical path for adapting general-purpose models to specialized domains.
Authors:Juneyoung Ro, Namwoo Kim, Yoonjin Yoon
Abstract:
Effectively understanding urban scenes requires fine-grained spatial reasoning about objects, layouts, and depth cues. However, how well current vision-language models (VLMs), pretrained on general scenes, transfer these abilities to urban domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a comparative study of three off-the-shelf VLMs-BLIP-2, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA-1.5-evaluating both zero-shot performance and the effects of fine-tuning with a synthetic VQA dataset specific to urban scenes. We construct such dataset from segmentation, depth, and object detection predictions of street-view images, pairing each question with LLM-generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) answers for step-by-step reasoning supervision. Results show that while VLMs perform reasonably well in zero-shot settings, fine-tuning with our synthetic CoT-supervised dataset substantially boosts performance, especially for challenging question types such as negation and counterfactuals. This study introduces urban spatial reasoning as a new challenge for VLMs and demonstrates synthetic dataset construction as a practical path for adapting general-purpose models to specialized domains.
Authors:Ahmed Emam, Mohamed Elbassiouny, Julius Miller, Patrick Donworth, Sabine Seidel, Ribana Roscher
Abstract:
Pollinator insects such as honeybees and bumblebees are vital to global food production and ecosystem stability, yet their populations are declining due to anthropogenic and environmental stressors. Scalable, automated monitoring in agricultural environments remains an open challenge due to the difficulty of detecting small, fast-moving, and often camouflaged insects. To address this, we present BuzzSet v1.0, a large-scale dataset of high-resolution pollinator images collected under real field conditions. BuzzSet contains 7,856 manually verified images with more than 8,000 annotated instances across three classes: honeybees, bumblebees, and unidentified insects. Initial annotations were produced using a YOLOv12 model trained on external data and refined through human verification with open-source tools. All images were preprocessed into 256 x 256 tiles to improve the detection of small insects. We provide baselines using the RF-DETR transformer-based object detector. The model achieves strong classification accuracy with F1 scores of 0.94 and 0.92 for honeybees and bumblebees, with minimal confusion between these categories. The unidentified class remains more difficult due to label ambiguity and fewer samples, yet still contributes insights for robustness evaluation. Overall detection performance (mAP at 0.50 of 0.559) illustrates the challenging nature of the dataset and its potential to drive advances in small object detection under realistic ecological conditions. Future work focuses on expanding the dataset to version 2.0 with additional annotations and evaluating further detection strategies. BuzzSet establishes a benchmark for ecological computer vision, with the primary challenge being reliable detection of insects frequently camouflaged within natural vegetation, highlighting an open problem for future research.
Authors:Joshua Lee, Ali Arastehfard, Weiran Liu, Xuegang Ban, Yuan Hong
Abstract:
Autonomous driving and V2X technologies have developed rapidly in the past decade, leading to improved safety and efficiency in modern transportation. These systems interact with extensive networks of vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and cloud resources to support their machine learning capabilities. However, the widespread use of machine learning in V2X systems raises issues over the privacy of the data involved. This is particularly concerning for smart-transit and driver safety applications which can implicitly reveal user locations or explicitly disclose medical data such as EEG signals. To resolve these issues, we propose SecureV2X, a scalable, multi-agent system for secure neural network inferences deployed between the server and each vehicle. Under this setting, we study two multi-agent V2X applications: secure drowsiness detection, and secure red-light violation detection. Our system achieves strong performance relative to baselines, and scales efficiently to support a large number of secure computation interactions simultaneously. For instance, SecureV2X is $9.4 \times$ faster, requires $143\times$ fewer computational rounds, and involves $16.6\times$ less communication on drowsiness detection compared to other secure systems. Moreover, it achieves a runtime nearly $100\times$ faster than state-of-the-art benchmarks in object detection tasks for red light violation detection.
Authors:M. Salman Shaukat, Yannik Käckenmeister, Sebastian Bader, Thomas Kirste
Abstract:
Underwater 3D object detection remains one of the most challenging frontiers in computer vision, where traditional approaches struggle with the harsh acoustic environment and scarcity of training data. While deep learning has revolutionized terrestrial 3D detection, its application underwater faces a critical bottleneck: obtaining sufficient annotated sonar data is prohibitively expensive and logistically complex, often requiring specialized vessels, expert surveyors, and favorable weather conditions. This work addresses a fundamental question: Can we achieve reliable underwater 3D object detection without real-world training data? We tackle this challenge by developing and comparing two paradigms for training-free detection of artificial structures in multibeam echo-sounder point clouds. Our dual approach combines a physics-based sonar simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training data for state-of-the-art neural networks, with a robust model-based template matching system that leverages geometric priors of target objects. Evaluation on real bathymetry surveys from the Baltic Sea reveals surprising insights: while neural networks trained on synthetic data achieve 98% mean Average Precision (mAP) on simulated scenes, they drop to 40% mAP on real sonar data due to domain shift. Conversely, our template matching approach maintains 83% mAP on real data without requiring any training, demonstrating remarkable robustness to acoustic noise and environmental variations. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom about data-hungry deep learning in underwater domains and establish the first large-scale benchmark for training-free underwater 3D detection. This work opens new possibilities for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation, marine archaeology, and offshore infrastructure monitoring in data-scarce environments where traditional machine learning approaches fail.
Authors:Md Shahi Amran Hossain, Abu Shad Ahammed, Sayeri Mukherjee, Roman Obermaisser
Abstract:
The use of computer vision in automotive is a trending research in which safety and security are a primary concern. In particular, for autonomous driving, preventing road accidents requires highly accurate object detection under diverse conditions. To address this issue, recently the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released the 8800 norm, providing structured frameworks for managing associated AI relevant risks. However, challenging scenarios such as adverse weather or low lighting often introduce data drift, leading to degraded model performance and potential safety violations. In this work, we present a novel hybrid computer vision architecture trained with thousands of synthetic image data from the road environment to improve robustness in unseen drifted environments. Our dual mode framework utilized YOLO version 8 for swift detection and incorporated a five-layer CNN for verification. The system functioned in sequence and improved the detection accuracy by more than 90\% when tested with drift-augmented road images. The focus was to demonstrate how such a hybrid model can provide better road safety when working together in a hybrid structure.
Authors:Sarina Penquitt, Tobias Riedlinger, Timo Heller, Markus Reischl, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Recently, detection of label errors and improvement of label quality in datasets for supervised learning tasks has become an increasingly important goal in both research and industry. The consequences of incorrectly annotated data include reduced model performance, biased benchmark results, and lower overall accuracy. Current state-of-the-art label error detection methods often focus on a single computer vision task and, consequently, a specific type of dataset, containing, for example, either bounding boxes or pixel-wise annotations. Furthermore, previous methods are not learning-based. In this work, we overcome this research gap. We present a unified method for detecting label errors in object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation datasets. In a nutshell, our approach - learning to detect label errors by making them - works as follows: we inject different kinds of label errors into the ground truth. Then, the detection of label errors, across all mentioned primary tasks, is framed as an instance segmentation problem based on a composite input. In our experiments, we compare the label error detection performance of our method with various baselines and state-of-the-art approaches of each task's domain on simulated label errors across multiple tasks, datasets, and base models. This is complemented by a generalization study on real-world label errors. Additionally, we release 459 real label errors identified in the Cityscapes dataset and provide a benchmark for real label error detection in Cityscapes.
Authors:Hakjin Lee, Junghoon Seo, Jaehoon Sim
Abstract:
Accurately recovering the full 9-DoF pose of unseen instances within specific categories from a single RGB image remains a core challenge for robotics and automation. Most existing solutions still rely on pseudo-depth, CAD models, or multi-stage cascades that separate 2D detection from pose estimation. Motivated by the need for a simpler, RGB-only alternative that learns directly at the category level, we revisit a longstanding question: Can object detection and 9-DoF pose estimation be unified with high performance, without any additional data? We show that they can with our method, YOPO, a single-stage, query-based framework that treats category-level 9-DoF estimation as a natural extension of 2D detection. YOPO augments a transformer detector with a lightweight pose head, a bounding-box-conditioned translation module, and a 6D-aware Hungarian matching cost. The model is trained end-to-end only with RGB images and category-level pose labels. Despite its minimalist design, YOPO sets a new state of the art on three benchmarks. On the REAL275 dataset, it achieves 79.6% $\rm{IoU}_{50}$ and 54.1% under the $10^\circ$$10{\rm{cm}}$ metric, surpassing prior RGB-only methods and closing much of the gap to RGB-D systems. The code, models, and additional qualitative results can be found on our project.
Authors:Tong Xiang, Hongxia Zhao, Fenghua Zhu, Yuanyuan Chen, Yisheng Lv
Abstract:
Achieving top-notch performance in Intelligent Transportation detection is a critical research area. However, many challenges still need to be addressed when it comes to detecting in a cross-domain scenario. In this paper, we propose a Self-Aware Adaptive Alignment (SA3), by leveraging an efficient alignment mechanism and recognition strategy. Our proposed method employs a specified attention-based alignment module trained on source and target domain datasets to guide the image-level features alignment process, enabling the local-global adaptive alignment between the source domain and target domain. Features from both domains, whose channel importance is re-weighted, are fed into the region proposal network, which facilitates the acquisition of salient region features. Also, we introduce an instance-to-image level alignment module specific to the target domain to adaptively mitigate the domain gap. To evaluate the proposed method, extensive experiments have been conducted on popular cross-domain object detection benchmarks. Experimental results show that SA3 achieves superior results to the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Jakub Åucki, Jonathan Becktor, Georgios Georgakis, Rob Royce, Shehryar Khattak
Abstract:
Deploying multiple machine learning models on resource-constrained robotic platforms for different perception tasks often results in redundant computations, large memory footprints, and complex integration challenges. In response, this work presents Visual Perception Engine (VPEngine), a modular framework designed to enable efficient GPU usage for visual multitasking while maintaining extensibility and developer accessibility. Our framework architecture leverages a shared foundation model backbone that extracts image representations, which are efficiently shared, without any unnecessary GPU-CPU memory transfers, across multiple specialized task-specific model heads running in parallel. This design eliminates the computational redundancy inherent in feature extraction component when deploying traditional sequential models while enabling dynamic task prioritization based on application demands. We demonstrate our framework's capabilities through an example implementation using DINOv2 as the foundation model with multiple task (depth, object detection and semantic segmentation) heads, achieving up to 3x speedup compared to sequential execution. Building on CUDA Multi-Process Service (MPS), VPEngine offers efficient GPU utilization and maintains a constant memory footprint while allowing per-task inference frequencies to be adjusted dynamically during runtime. The framework is written in Python and is open source with ROS2 C++ (Humble) bindings for ease of use by the robotics community across diverse robotic platforms. Our example implementation demonstrates end-to-end real-time performance at $\geq$50 Hz on NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX for TensorRT optimized models.
Authors:Vishakha Lall, Yisi Liu
Abstract:
In many real-world applications involving static environments, the spatial layout of objects remains consistent across instances. However, state-of-the-art object detection models often fail to leverage this spatial prior, resulting in inconsistent predictions, missed detections, or misclassifications, particularly in cluttered or occluded scenes. In this work, we propose a graph-based post-processing pipeline that explicitly models the spatial relationships between objects to correct detection anomalies in egocentric frames. Using a graph neural network (GNN) trained on manually annotated data, our model identifies invalid object class labels and predicts corrected class labels based on their neighbourhood context. We evaluate our approach both as a standalone anomaly detection and correction framework and as a post-processing module for standard object detectors such as YOLOv7 and RT-DETR. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating this spatial reasoning significantly improves detection performance, with mAP@50 gains of up to 4%. This method highlights the potential of leveraging the environment's spatial structure to improve reliability in object detection systems.
Authors:Ludan Zhang, Sihan Wang, Yuqi Dai, Shuofei Qiao, Qinyue Luo, Lei He
Abstract:
End-to-end models are emerging as the mainstream in autonomous driving perception and planning. However, the lack of explicit supervision signals for intermediate functional modules leads to opaque operational mechanisms and limited interpretability, making it challenging for traditional methods to independently evaluate and train these modules. Pioneering in the issue, this study builds upon the feature map-truth representation similarity-based evaluation framework and proposes an independent evaluation method based on Feature Map Convergence Score (FMCS). A Dual-Granularity Dynamic Weighted Scoring System (DG-DWSS) is constructed, formulating a unified quantitative metric - Feature Map Quality Score - to enable comprehensive evaluation of the quality of feature maps generated by functional modules. A CLIP-based Feature Map Quality Evaluation Network (CLIP-FMQE-Net) is further developed, combining feature-truth encoders and quality score prediction heads to enable real-time quality analysis of feature maps generated by functional modules. Experimental results on the NuScenes dataset demonstrate that integrating our evaluation module into the training improves 3D object detection performance, achieving a 3.89 percent gain in NDS. These results verify the effectiveness of our method in enhancing feature representation quality and overall model performance.
Authors:Xuyang Wang, Lingjuan Miao, Zhiqiang Zhou
Abstract:
In recent years, large-scale visual backbones have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in learning general-purpose features from images via extensive pre-training. Concurrently, many efficient architectures have emerged that have performance comparable to that of larger models on in-domain benchmarks. However, we observe that for smaller models, the performance drop on out-of-distribution (OOD) data is disproportionately larger, indicating a deficiency in the generalization performance of existing efficient models. To address this, we identify key architectural bottlenecks and inappropriate design choices that contribute to this issue, retaining robustness for smaller models. To restore the global field of pure window attention, we further introduce a Coordinator-patch Cross Attention (CoCA) mechanism, featuring dynamic, domain-aware global tokens that enhance local-global feature modeling and adaptively capture robust patterns across domains with minimal computational overhead. Integrating these advancements, we present CoCAViT, a novel visual backbone designed for robust real-time visual representation. Extensive experiments empirically validate our design. At a resolution of 224*224, CoCAViT-28M achieves 84.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, with significant gains on multiple OOD benchmarks, compared to competing models. It also attains 52.2 mAP on COCO object detection and 51.3 mIOU on ADE20K semantic segmentation, while maintaining low latency.
Authors:Md Iftekharul Islam Sakib, Yigong Hu, Tarek Abdelzaher
Abstract:
Real-time perception on edge platforms faces a core challenge: executing high-resolution object detection under stringent latency constraints on limited computing resources. Canvas-based attention scheduling was proposed in earlier work as a mechanism to reduce the resource demands of perception subsystems. It consolidates areas of interest in an input data frame onto a smaller area, called a canvas frame, that can be processed at the requisite frame rate. This paper extends prior canvas-based attention scheduling literature by (i) allowing for variable-size canvas frames and (ii) employing selectable canvas frame rates that may depart from the original data frame rate. We evaluate our solution by running YOLOv11, as the perception module, on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano to inspect video frames from the Waymo Open Dataset. Our results show that the additional degrees of freedom improve the attainable quality/cost trade-offs, thereby allowing for a consistently higher mean average precision (mAP) and recall with respect to the state of the art.
Authors:Daniel Killough, Justin Feng, Zheng Xue "ZX" Ching, Daniel Wang, Rithvik Dyava, Yapeng Tian, Yuhang Zhao
Abstract:
Virtual Reality (VR) is inaccessible to blind people. While research has investigated many techniques to enhance VR accessibility, they require additional developer effort to integrate. As such, most mainstream VR apps remain inaccessible as the industry de-prioritizes accessibility. We present VRSight, an end-to-end system that recognizes VR scenes post hoc through a set of AI models (e.g., object detection, depth estimation, LLM-based atmosphere interpretation) and generates tone-based, spatial audio feedback, empowering blind users to interact in VR without developer intervention. To enable virtual element detection, we further contribute DISCOVR, a VR dataset consisting of 30 virtual object classes from 17 social VR apps, substituting real-world datasets that remain not applicable to VR contexts. Nine participants used VRSight to explore an off-the-shelf VR app (Rec Room), demonstrating its effectiveness in facilitating social tasks like avatar awareness and available seat identification.
Authors:Peng Hu, Wenxuan Zhang
Abstract:
The growing density of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) presents serious challenges to space sustainability, primarily due to the increased risk of in-orbit collisions. Traditional ground-based tracking systems are constrained by latency and coverage limitations, underscoring the need for onboard, vision-based space object detection (SOD) capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel satellite clustering framework that enables the collaborative execution of deep learning (DL)-based SOD tasks across multiple satellites. To support this approach, we construct a high-fidelity dataset simulating imaging scenarios for clustered satellite formations. A distance-aware viewpoint selection strategy is introduced to optimize detection performance, and recent DL models are used for evaluation. Experimental results show that the clustering-based method achieves competitive detection accuracy compared to single-satellite and existing approaches, while maintaining a low size, weight, and power (SWaP) footprint. These findings underscore the potential of distributed, AI-enabled in-orbit systems to enhance space situational awareness and contribute to long-term space sustainability.
Authors:Bhavya Goyal, Felipe Gutierrez-Barragan, Wei Lin, Andreas Velten, Yin Li, Mohit Gupta
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D sensors provide point clouds, a canonical 3D representation used in various scene understanding tasks. Modern LiDARs face key challenges in several real-world scenarios, such as long-distance or low-albedo objects, producing sparse or erroneous point clouds. These errors, which are rooted in the noisy raw LiDAR measurements, get propagated to downstream perception models, resulting in potentially severe loss of accuracy. This is because conventional 3D processing pipelines do not retain any uncertainty information from the raw measurements when constructing point clouds.
We propose Probabilistic Point Clouds (PPC), a novel 3D scene representation where each point is augmented with a probability attribute that encapsulates the measurement uncertainty (or confidence) in the raw data. We further introduce inference approaches that leverage PPC for robust 3D object detection; these methods are versatile and can be used as computationally lightweight drop-in modules in 3D inference pipelines. We demonstrate, via both simulations and real captures, that PPC-based 3D inference methods outperform several baselines using LiDAR as well as camera-LiDAR fusion models, across challenging indoor and outdoor scenarios involving small, distant, and low-albedo objects, as well as strong ambient light.
Our project webpage is at https://bhavyagoyal.github.io/ppc .
Authors:Fei Kong, Xiaohan Shan, Yanwei Hu, Jianmin Li
Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is challenged by the trade-off between search space exploration and efficiency, especially for complex tasks. While recent LLM-based NAS methods have shown promise, they often suffer from static search strategies and ambiguous architecture representations. We propose PhaseNAS, an LLM-based NAS framework with dynamic phase transitions guided by real-time score thresholds and a structured architecture template language for consistent code generation. On the NAS-Bench-Macro benchmark, PhaseNAS consistently discovers architectures with higher accuracy and better rank. For image classification (CIFAR-10/100), PhaseNAS reduces search time by up to 86% while maintaining or improving accuracy. In object detection, it automatically produces YOLOv8 variants with higher mAP and lower resource cost. These results demonstrate that PhaseNAS enables efficient, adaptive, and generalizable NAS across diverse vision tasks.
Authors:Zhiming Liu, Paul Hill, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract:
Atmospheric turbulence (AT) introduces severe degradations, such as rippling, blur, and intensity fluctuations, that hinder both image quality and downstream vision tasks like target detection. While recent deep learning-based approaches have advanced AT mitigation using transformer and Mamba architectures, their high complexity and computational cost make them unsuitable for real-time applications, especially in resource-constrained settings such as remote surveillance. Moreover, the common practice of separating turbulence mitigation and object detection leads to inefficiencies and suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose JDATT, a Joint Distillation framework for Atmospheric Turbulence mitigation and Target detection. JDATT integrates state-of-the-art AT mitigation and detection modules and introduces a unified knowledge distillation strategy that compresses both components while minimizing performance loss. We employ a hybrid distillation scheme: feature-level distillation via Channel-Wise Distillation (CWD) and Masked Generative Distillation (MGD), and output-level distillation via Kullback-Leibler divergence. Experiments on synthetic and real-world turbulence datasets demonstrate that JDATT achieves superior visual restoration and detection accuracy while significantly reducing model size and inference time, making it well-suited for real-time deployment.
Authors:João Luzio, Alexandre Bernardino, Plinio Moreno
Abstract:
In goal-directed visual tasks, human perception is guided by both top-down and bottom-up cues. At the same time, foveal vision plays a crucial role in directing attention efficiently. Modern research on bio-inspired computational attention models has taken advantage of advancements in deep learning by utilizing human scanpath data to achieve new state-of-the-art performance. In this work, we assess the performance of SemBA-FAST, i.e. Semantic-based Bayesian Attention for Foveal Active visual Search Tasks, a top-down framework designed for predicting human visual attention in target-present visual search. SemBA-FAST integrates deep object detection with a probabilistic semantic fusion mechanism to generate attention maps dynamically, leveraging pre-trained detectors and artificial foveation to update top-down knowledge and improve fixation prediction sequentially. We evaluate SemBA-FAST on the COCO-Search18 benchmark dataset, comparing its performance against other scanpath prediction models. Our methodology achieves fixation sequences that closely match human ground-truth scanpaths. Notably, it surpasses baseline and other top-down approaches and competes, in some cases, with scanpath-informed models. These findings provide valuable insights into the capabilities of semantic-foveal probabilistic frameworks for human-like attention modelling, with implications for real-time cognitive computing and robotics.
Authors:Luo Cheng, Hanwei Zhang, Lijun Zhang, Holger Hermanns
Abstract:
Adversarial robustness in LiDAR-based 3D object detection is a critical research area due to its widespread application in real-world scenarios. While many digital attacks manipulate point clouds or meshes, they often lack physical realizability, limiting their practical impact. Physical adversarial object attacks remain underexplored and suffer from poor reproducibility due to inconsistent setups and hardware differences. To address this, we propose a device-agnostic, standardized framework that abstracts key elements of physical adversarial object attacks, supports diverse methods, and provides open-source code with benchmarking protocols in simulation and real-world settings. Our framework enables fair comparison, accelerates research, and is validated by successfully transferring simulated attacks to a physical LiDAR system. Beyond the framework, we offer insights into factors influencing attack success and advance understanding of adversarial robustness in real-world LiDAR perception.
Authors:Santosh Vasa, Aditi Ramadwar, Jnana Rama Krishna Darabattula, Md Zafar Anwar, Stanislaw Antol, Andrei Vatavu, Thomas Monninger, Sihao Ding
Abstract:
Training of autonomous driving systems requires extensive datasets with precise annotations to attain robust performance. Human annotations suffer from imperfections, and multiple iterations are often needed to produce high-quality datasets. However, manually reviewing large datasets is laborious and expensive. In this paper, we introduce AutoVDC (Automated Vision Data Cleaning) framework and investigate the utilization of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to automatically identify erroneous annotations in vision datasets, thereby enabling users to eliminate these errors and enhance data quality. We validate our approach using the KITTI and nuImages datasets, which contain object detection benchmarks for autonomous driving. To test the effectiveness of AutoVDC, we create dataset variants with intentionally injected erroneous annotations and observe the error detection rate of our approach. Additionally, we compare the detection rates using different VLMs and explore the impact of VLM fine-tuning on our pipeline. The results demonstrate our method's high performance in error detection and data cleaning experiments, indicating its potential to significantly improve the reliability and accuracy of large-scale production datasets in autonomous driving.
Authors:Ahmet OÄuz Saltık, Max Voigt, Sourav Modak, Mike Beckworth, Anthony Stein
Abstract:
Weed detection is a critical component of precision agriculture, facilitating targeted herbicide application and reducing environmental impact. However, deploying accurate object detection models on resource-limited platforms remains challenging, particularly when differentiating visually similar weed species commonly encountered in plant phenotyping applications. In this work, we investigate Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation (CWD) and Masked Generative Distillation (MGD) to enhance the performance of lightweight models for real-time smart spraying systems. Utilizing YOLO11x as the teacher model and YOLO11n as both reference and student, both CWD and MGD effectively transfer knowledge from the teacher to the student model. Our experiments, conducted on a real-world dataset comprising sugar beet crops and four weed types (Cirsium, Convolvulus, Fallopia, and Echinochloa), consistently show increased AP50 across all classes. The distilled CWD student model achieves a notable improvement of 2.5% and MGD achieves 1.9% in mAP50 over the baseline without increasing model complexity. Additionally, we validate real-time deployment feasibility by evaluating the student YOLO11n model on Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi 5 embedded devices, performing five independent runs to evaluate performance stability across random seeds. These findings confirm CWD and MGD as an effective, efficient, and practical approach for improving deep learning-based weed detection accuracy in precision agriculture and plant phenotyping scenarios.
Authors:Junho Koh, Youngwoo Lee, Jungho Kim, Dongyoung Lee, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
Multi-view camera-based 3D perception can be conducted using bird's eye view (BEV) features obtained through perspective view-to-BEV transformations. Several studies have shown that the performance of these 3D perception methods can be further enhanced by combining sequential BEV features obtained from multiple camera frames. However, even after compensating for the ego-motion of an autonomous agent, the performance gain from temporal aggregation is limited when combining a large number of image frames. This limitation arises due to dynamic changes in BEV features over time caused by object motion. In this paper, we introduce a novel temporal 3D perception method called OnlineBEV, which combines BEV features over time using a recurrent structure. This structure increases the effective number of combined features with minimal memory usage. However, it is critical to spatially align the features over time to maintain strong performance. OnlineBEV employs the Motion-guided BEV Fusion Network (MBFNet) to achieve temporal feature alignment. MBFNet extracts motion features from consecutive BEV frames and dynamically aligns historical BEV features with current ones using these motion features. To enforce temporal feature alignment explicitly, we use Temporal Consistency Learning Loss, which captures discrepancies between historical and target BEV features. Experiments conducted on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that OnlineBEV achieves significant performance gains over the current best method, SOLOFusion. OnlineBEV achieves 63.9% NDS on the nuScenes test set, recording state-of-the-art performance in the camera-only 3D object detection task.
Authors:Rafic Nader, Vincent L'Allinec, Romain Bourcier, Florent Autrusseau
Abstract:
Intracranial aneurysms (ICA) commonly occur in specific segments of the Circle of Willis (CoW), primarily, onto thirteen major arterial bifurcations. An accurate detection of these critical landmarks is necessary for a prompt and efficient diagnosis. We introduce a fully automated landmark detection approach for CoW bifurcations using a two-step neural networks process. Initially, an object detection network identifies regions of interest (ROIs) proximal to the landmark locations. Subsequently, a modified U-Net with deep supervision is exploited to accurately locate the bifurcations. This two-step method reduces various problems, such as the missed detections caused by two landmarks being close to each other and having similar visual characteristics, especially when processing the complete MRA Time-of-Flight (TOF). Additionally, it accounts for the anatomical variability of the CoW, which affects the number of detectable landmarks per scan. We assessed the effectiveness of our approach using two cerebral MRA datasets: our In-House dataset which had varying numbers of landmarks, and a public dataset with standardized landmark configuration. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the highest level of performance on a bifurcation detection task.
Authors:Zuyao You, Zuxuan Wu
Abstract:
We present Seg-R1, a preliminary exploration of using reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the pixel-level understanding and reasoning capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). Starting with foreground segmentation tasks, specifically camouflaged object detection (COD) and salient object detection (SOD), our approach enables the LMM to generate point and bounding box prompts in the next-token fashion, which are then used to guide SAM2 in producing segmentation masks. We introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into the segmentation domain, equipping the LMM with pixel-level comprehension through a carefully designed training strategy. Notably, Seg-R1 achieves remarkable performance with purely RL-based training, achieving .873 S-measure on COD10K without complex model modification. Moreover, we found that pure RL training demonstrates strong open-world generalization. Despite being trained solely on foreground segmentation image-mask pairs without text supervision, Seg-R1 achieves impressive zero-shot performance on referring segmentation and reasoning segmentation tasks, with 71.4 cIoU on RefCOCOg test and 56.7 gIoU on ReasonSeg test, outperforming models fully supervised on these datasets.
Authors:Xiangyu Shi, Yanyuan Qiao, Lingqiao Liu, Feras Dayoub
Abstract:
Mobile robots rely on object detectors for perception and object localization in indoor environments. However, standard closed-set methods struggle to handle the diverse objects and dynamic conditions encountered in real homes and labs. Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD), driven by Vision Language Models (VLMs), extends beyond fixed labels but still struggles with domain shifts in indoor environments. We introduce a Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) approach that adapts a pre-trained model without accessing source data. We refine pseudo labels via temporal clustering, employ multi-scale threshold fusion, and apply a Mean Teacher framework with contrastive learning. Our Embodied Domain Adaptation for Object Detection (EDAOD) benchmark evaluates adaptation under sequential changes in lighting, layout, and object diversity. Our experiments show significant gains in zero-shot detection performance and flexible adaptation to dynamic indoor conditions.
Authors:Sai Sri Teja, Sreevidya Chintalapati, Vinayak Gupta, Mukund Varma T, Haejoon Lee, Aswin Sankaranarayanan, Kaushik Mitra
Abstract:
Advances in 3D reconstruction using neural rendering have enabled high-quality 3D capture. However, they often fail when the input imagery is corrupted by motion blur, due to fast motion of the camera or the objects in the scene. This work advances neural rendering techniques in such scenarios by using single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays, an emerging sensing technology capable of sensing images at extremely high speeds. However, the use of SPADs presents its own set of unique challenges in the form of binary images, that are driven by stochastic photon arrivals. To address this, we introduce PhotonSplat, a framework designed to reconstruct 3D scenes directly from SPAD binary images, effectively navigating the noise vs. blur trade-off. Our approach incorporates a novel 3D spatial filtering technique to reduce noise in the renderings. The framework also supports both no-reference using generative priors and reference-based colorization from a single blurry image, enabling downstream applications such as segmentation, object detection and appearance editing tasks. Additionally, we extend our method to incorporate dynamic scene representations, making it suitable for scenes with moving objects. We further contribute PhotonScenes, a real-world multi-view dataset captured with the SPAD sensors.
Authors:Tajamul Ashraf, Janibul Bashir
Abstract:
We focus on the source-free domain adaptive object detection (SF-DAOD) problem when source data is unavailable during adaptation and the model must adapt to an unlabeled target domain. The majority of approaches for the problem employ a self-supervised approach using a student-teacher (ST) framework where pseudo-labels are generated via a source-pretrained model for further fine-tuning. We observe that the performance of a student model often degrades drastically, due to the collapse of the teacher model, primarily caused by high noise in pseudo-labels, resulting from domain bias, discrepancies, and a significant domain shift across domains. To obtain reliable pseudo-labels, we propose a Target-based Iterative Query-Token Adversarial Network (TITAN), which separates the target images into two subsets: those similar to the source (easy) and those dissimilar (hard). We propose a strategy to estimate variance to partition the target domain. This approach leverages the insight that higher detection variances correspond to higher recall and greater similarity to the source domain. Also, we incorporate query-token-based adversarial modules into a student-teacher baseline framework to reduce the domain gaps between two feature representations. Experiments conducted on four natural imaging datasets and two challenging medical datasets have substantiated the superior performance of TITAN compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methodologies. We report an mAP improvement of +22.7, +22.2, +21.1, and +3.7 percent over the current SOTA on C2F, C2B, S2C, and K2C benchmarks, respectively.
Authors:Chenrui Ma, Zechang Sun, Tao Jing, Zheng Cai, Yuan-Sen Ting, Song Huang, Mingyu Li
Abstract:
Observational astronomy relies on visual feature identification to detect critical astrophysical phenomena. While machine learning (ML) increasingly automates this process, models often struggle with generalization in large-scale surveys due to the limited representativeness of labeled datasets -- whether from simulations or human annotation -- a challenge pronounced for rare yet scientifically valuable objects. To address this, we propose a conditional diffusion model to synthesize realistic galaxy images for augmenting ML training data. Leveraging the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset which contains visual feature -- galaxy image pairs from volunteer annotation, we demonstrate that our model generates diverse, high-fidelity galaxy images closely adhere to the specified morphological feature conditions. Moreover, this model enables generative extrapolation to project well-annotated data into unseen domains and advancing rare object detection. Integrating synthesized images into ML pipelines improves performance in standard morphology classification, boosting completeness and purity by up to 30\% across key metrics. For rare object detection, using early-type galaxies with prominent dust lane features ( $\sim$0.1\% in GZ2 dataset) as a test case, our approach doubled the number of detected instances from 352 to 872, compared to previous studies based on visual inspection. This study highlights the power of generative models to bridge gaps between scarce labeled data and the vast, uncharted parameter space of observational astronomy and sheds insight for future astrophysical foundation model developments. Our project homepage is available at https://galaxysd-webpage.streamlit.app/.
Authors:Filippo Bragato, Michael Neri, Paolo Testolina, Marco Giordani, Federica Battisti
Abstract:
In recent years, the development of interconnected devices has expanded in many fields, from infotainment to education and industrial applications. This trend has been accelerated by the increased number of sensors and accessibility to powerful hardware and software. One area that significantly benefits from these advancements is Teleoperated Driving (TD). In this scenario, a controller drives safely a vehicle from remote leveraging sensors data generated onboard the vehicle, and exchanged via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. In this work, we tackle the problem of detecting the presence of cars and pedestrians from point cloud data to enable safe TD operations. More specifically, we exploit the SELMA dataset, a multimodal, open-source, synthetic dataset for autonomous driving, that we expanded by including the ground-truth bounding boxes of 3D objects to support object detection. We analyze the performance of state-of-the-art compression algorithms and object detectors under several metrics, including compression efficiency, (de)compression and inference time, and detection accuracy. Moreover, we measure the impact of compression and detection on the V2X network in terms of data rate and latency with respect to 3GPP requirements for TD applications.
Authors:Guang Liang, Xinyao Liu, Jianxin Wu
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) are essential in computer vision but are computationally intensive, too. Model quantization, particularly to low bit-widths like 4-bit, aims to alleviate this difficulty, yet existing Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) and Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) methods exhibit significant limitations. PTQ often incurs substantial accuracy drop, while QAT achieves high accuracy but suffers from prohibitive computational costs, limited generalization to downstream tasks, training instability, and lacking of open-source codebase. To address these challenges, this paper introduces General, Practical, and Lightning Quantization (GPLQ), a novel framework designed for efficient and effective ViT quantization. GPLQ is founded on two key empirical insights: the paramount importance of activation quantization and the necessity of preserving the model's original optimization ``basin'' to maintain generalization. Consequently, GPLQ employs a sequential ``activation-first, weights-later'' strategy. Stage 1 keeps weights in FP32 while quantizing activations with a feature mimicking loss in only 1 epoch to keep it stay in the same ``basin'', thereby preserving generalization. Stage 2 quantizes weights using a PTQ method. As a result, GPLQ is 100x faster than existing QAT methods, lowers memory footprint to levels even below FP32 training, and achieves 4-bit model performance that is highly competitive with FP32 models in terms of both accuracy on ImageNet and generalization to diverse downstream tasks, including fine-grained visual classification and object detection. We will release an easy-to-use open-source toolkit supporting multiple vision tasks.
Authors:Yangjie Cui, Boyang Gao, Yiwei Zhang, Xin Dong, Jinwu Xiang, Daochun Li, Zhan Tu
Abstract:
Previous studies on event camera sensing have demonstrated certain detection performance using dense event representations. However, the accumulated noise in such dense representations has received insufficient attention, which degrades the representation quality and increases the likelihood of missed detections. To address this challenge, we propose the Wavelet Denoising-enhanced DEtection TRansformer, i.e., WD-DETR network, for event cameras. In particular, a dense event representation is presented first, which enables real-time reconstruction of events as tensors. Then, a wavelet transform method is designed to filter noise in the event representations. Such a method is integrated into the backbone for feature extraction. The extracted features are subsequently fed into a transformer-based network for object prediction. To further reduce inference time, we incorporate the Dynamic Reorganization Convolution Block (DRCB) as a fusion module within the hybrid encoder. The proposed method has been evaluated on three event-based object detection datasets, i.e., DSEC, Gen1, and 1Mpx. The results demonstrate that WD-DETR outperforms tested state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we implement our approach on a common onboard computer for robots, the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, achieving a high frame rate of approximately 35 FPS using TensorRT FP16, which is exceptionally well-suited for real-time perception of onboard robotic systems.
Authors:Justin Lazarow, Kai Kang, Afshin Dehghan
Abstract:
We revisit scene-level 3D object detection as the output of an object-centric framework capable of both localization and mapping using 3D oriented boxes as the underlying geometric primitive. While existing 3D object detection approaches operate globally and implicitly rely on the a priori existence of metric camera poses, our method, Rooms from Motion (RfM) operates on a collection of un-posed images. By replacing the standard 2D keypoint-based matcher of structure-from-motion with an object-centric matcher based on image-derived 3D boxes, we estimate metric camera poses, object tracks, and finally produce a global, semantic 3D object map. When a priori pose is available, we can significantly improve map quality through optimization of global 3D boxes against individual observations. RfM shows strong localization performance and subsequently produces maps of higher quality than leading point-based and multi-view 3D object detection methods on CA-1M and ScanNet++, despite these global methods relying on overparameterization through point clouds or dense volumes. Rooms from Motion achieves a general, object-centric representation which not only extends the work of Cubify Anything to full scenes but also allows for inherently sparse localization and parametric mapping proportional to the number of objects in a scene.
Authors:Bhanuka Gamage, Thanh-Toan Do, Nicholas Seow Chiang Price, Arthur Lowery, Kim Marriott
Abstract:
Over the last decade there has been considerable research into how artificial intelligence (AI), specifically computer vision, can assist people who are blind or have low-vision (BLV) to understand their environment. However, there has been almost no research into whether the tasks (object detection, image captioning, text recognition etc.) and devices (smartphones, smart-glasses etc.) investigated by researchers align with the needs and preferences of BLV people. We identified 646 studies published in the last two and a half years that have investigated such assistive AI techniques. We analysed these papers to determine the task, device and participation by BLV individuals. We then interviewed 24 BLV people and asked for their top five AI-based applications and to rank the applications found in the literature. We found only a weak positive correlation between BLV participants' perceived importance of tasks and researchers' focus and that participants prefer conversational agent interface and head-mounted devices.
Authors:Gefei Shen, Yung-Hong Sun, Yu Hen Hu, Hongrui Jiang
Abstract:
Two sampling strategies are investigated to enhance efficiency in training a deep learning object detection model. These sampling strategies are employed under the assumption of Lipschitz continuity of deep learning models. The first strategy is uniform sampling which seeks to obtain samples evenly yet randomly through the state space of the object dynamics. The second strategy of frame difference sampling is developed to explore the temporal redundancy among successive frames in a video. Experiment result indicates that these proposed sampling strategies provide a dataset that yields good training performance while requiring relatively few manually labelled samples.
Authors:Jiangning Zhu, Yuxing Zhou, Zheng Wang, Juntao Yao, Yima Gu, Yuhui Yuan, Shixia Liu
Abstract:
Given the central role of charts in scientific, business, and communication contexts, enhancing the chart understanding capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) has become increasingly critical. A key limitation of existing VLMs lies in their inaccurate visual grounding of infographic elements, including charts and human-recognizable objects (HROs) such as icons and images. However, chart understanding often requires identifying relevant elements and reasoning over them. To address this limitation, we introduce OrionBench, a benchmark designed to support the development of accurate object detection models for charts and HROs in infographics. It contains 26,250 real and 78,750 synthetic infographics, with over 6.9 million bounding box annotations. These annotations are created by combining the model-in-the-loop and programmatic methods. We demonstrate the usefulness of OrionBench through three applications: 1) constructing a Thinking-with-Boxes scheme to boost the chart understanding performance of VLMs, 2) comparing existing object detection models, and 3) applying the developed detection model to document layout and UI element detection.
Authors:Alya Zouzou, Léo andéol, Mélanie Ducoffe, Ryma Boumazouza
Abstract:
We explore the use of conformal prediction to provide statistical uncertainty guarantees for runway detection in vision-based landing systems (VLS). Using fine-tuned YOLOv5 and YOLOv6 models on aerial imagery, we apply conformal prediction to quantify localization reliability under user-defined risk levels. We also introduce Conformal mean Average Precision (C-mAP), a novel metric aligning object detection performance with conformal guarantees. Our results show that conformal prediction can improve the reliability of runway detection by quantifying uncertainty in a statistically sound way, increasing safety on-board and paving the way for certification of ML system in the aerospace domain.
Authors:Wenxuan Zhang, Peng Hu
Abstract:
Effective Edge AI for space object detection (SOD) tasks that can facilitate real-time collision assessment and avoidance is essential with the increasing space assets in near-Earth orbits. In SOD, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites must detect other objects with high precision and minimal delay. We explore an Edge AI solution based on deep-learning-based vision sensing for SOD tasks and propose a deep learning model based on Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) layers, Vision Transformers (ViT), and YOLOv9 framework. We evaluate the performance of these models across various realistic SOD scenarios, demonstrating their ability to detect multiple satellites with high accuracy and very low latency.
Authors:Shrutarv Awasthi, Anas Gouda, Sven Franke, Jérôme Rutinowski, Frank Hoffmann, Moritz Roidl
Abstract:
Mobile robots are reaching unprecedented speeds, with platforms like Unitree B2, and Fraunhofer O3dyn achieving maximum speeds between 5 and 10 m/s. However, effectively utilizing such speeds remains a challenge due to the limitations of RGB cameras, which suffer from motion blur and fail to provide real-time responsiveness. Event cameras, with their asynchronous operation, and low-latency sensing, offer a promising alternative for high-speed robotic perception. In this work, we introduce MTevent, a dataset designed for 6D pose estimation and moving object detection in highly dynamic environments with large detection distances. Our setup consists of a stereo-event camera and an RGB camera, capturing 75 scenes, each on average 16 seconds, and featuring 16 unique objects under challenging conditions such as extreme viewing angles, varying lighting, and occlusions. MTevent is the first dataset to combine high-speed motion, long-range perception, and real-world object interactions, making it a valuable resource for advancing event-based vision in robotics. To establish a baseline, we evaluate the task of 6D pose estimation using NVIDIA's FoundationPose on RGB images, achieving an Average Recall of 0.22 with ground-truth masks, highlighting the limitations of RGB-based approaches in such dynamic settings. With MTevent, we provide a novel resource to improve perception models and foster further research in high-speed robotic vision. The dataset is available for download https://huggingface.co/datasets/anas-gouda/MTevent
Authors:Lucas Choi, Ross Greer
Abstract:
Vision-language models (VLMs) offer flexible object detection through natural language prompts but suffer from performance variability depending on prompt phrasing. In this paper, we introduce a method for automated prompt refinement using a novel metric called the Contrastive Class Alignment Score (CCAS), which ranks prompts based on their semantic alignment with a target object class while penalizing similarity to confounding classes. Our method generates diverse prompt candidates via a large language model and filters them through CCAS, computed using prompt embeddings from a sentence transformer. We evaluate our approach on challenging object categories, demonstrating that our automatic selection of high-precision prompts improves object detection accuracy without the need for additional model training or labeled data. This scalable and model-agnostic pipeline offers a principled alternative to manual prompt engineering for VLM-based detection systems.
Authors:Lei Wan, Prabesh Gupta, Andreas Eich, Marcel Kettelgerdes, Hannan Ejaz Keen, Michael Klöppel-Gersdorf, Alexey Vinel
Abstract:
Perception is a core capability of automated vehicles and has been significantly advanced through modern sensor technologies and artificial intelligence. However, perception systems still face challenges in complex real-world scenarios. To improve robustness against various external factors, multi-sensor fusion techniques are essential, combining the strengths of different sensor modalities. With recent developments in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X communication, sensor fusion can now extend beyond a single vehicle to a cooperative multi-agent system involving Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV) and intelligent infrastructure. This paper presents VALISENS, an innovative multi-sensor system distributed across multiple agents. It integrates onboard and roadside LiDARs, radars, thermal cameras, and RGB cameras to enhance situational awareness and support cooperative automated driving. The thermal camera adds critical redundancy for perceiving Vulnerable Road User (VRU), while fusion with roadside sensors mitigates visual occlusions and extends the perception range beyond the limits of individual vehicles. We introduce the corresponding perception module built on this sensor system, which includes object detection, tracking, motion forecasting, and high-level data fusion. The proposed system demonstrates the potential of cooperative perception in real-world test environments and lays the groundwork for future Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) applications.
Authors:Zhang Zhang, Chao Sun, Chao Yue, Da Wen, Tianze Wang, Jianghao Leng
Abstract:
Serving the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) tasks, roadside perception has received increasing attention in recent years, as it can extend the perception range of connected vehicles and improve traffic safety. However, roadside point cloud oriented 3D object detection has not been effectively explored. To some extent, the key to the performance of a point cloud detector lies in the receptive field of the network and the ability to effectively utilize the scene context. The recent emergence of Mamba, based on State Space Model (SSM), has shaken up the traditional convolution and transformers that have long been the foundational building blocks, due to its efficient global receptive field. In this work, we introduce Mamba to pillar-based roadside point cloud perception and propose a framework based on Cross-stage State-space Group (CSG), called PillarMamba. It enhances the expressiveness of the network and achieves efficient computation through cross-stage feature fusion. However, due to the limitations of scan directions, state space model faces local connection disrupted and historical relationship forgotten. To address this, we propose the Hybrid State-space Block (HSB) to obtain the local-global context of roadside point cloud. Specifically, it enhances neighborhood connections through local convolution and preserves historical memory through residual attention. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the popular large scale roadside benchmark: DAIR-V2X-I. The code will be released soon.
Authors:Navin Ranjan, Andreas Savakis
Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a popular vision foundation model; however, its high computational and memory demands make deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging. While Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is a practical approach for reducing computational overhead, existing PTQ methods rely on fixed bit-width quantization, leading to suboptimal accuracy and efficiency. To address this limitation, we propose Mix-QSAM, a mixed-precision PTQ framework for SAM. First, we introduce a layer-wise importance score, derived using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, to quantify each layer's contribution to the model's output. Second, we introduce cross-layer synergy, a novel metric based on causal mutual information, to capture dependencies between adjacent layers. This ensures that highly interdependent layers maintain similar bit-widths, preventing abrupt precision mismatches that degrade feature propagation and numerical stability. Using these metrics, we formulate an Integer Quadratic Programming (IQP) problem to determine optimal bit-width allocation under model size and bit-operation constraints, assigning higher precision to critical layers while minimizing bit-width in less influential layers. Experimental results demonstrate that Mix-QSAM consistently outperforms existing PTQ methods on instance segmentation and object detection tasks, achieving up to 20% higher average precision under 6-bit and 4-bit mixed-precision settings, while maintaining computational efficiency.
Authors:Sainath Dey, Mitul Goswami, Jashika Sethi, Prasant Kumar Pattnaik
Abstract:
This study addresses the inherent limitations of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) in Vision Transformers (ViTs) by introducing Hybrid Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN)-ViT (Hyb-KAN ViT), a novel framework that integrates wavelet-based spectral decomposition and spline-optimized activation functions, prior work has failed to focus on the prebuilt modularity of the ViT architecture and integration of edge detection capabilities of Wavelet functions. We propose two key modules: Efficient-KAN (Eff-KAN), which replaces MLP layers with spline functions and Wavelet-KAN (Wav-KAN), leveraging orthogonal wavelet transforms for multi-resolution feature extraction. These modules are systematically integrated in ViT encoder layers and classification heads to enhance spatial-frequency modeling while mitigating computational bottlenecks. Experiments on ImageNet-1K (Image Recognition), COCO (Object Detection and Instance Segmentation), and ADE20K (Semantic Segmentation) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with Hyb-KAN ViT. Ablation studies validate the efficacy of wavelet-driven spectral priors in segmentation and spline-based efficiency in detection tasks. The framework establishes a new paradigm for balancing parameter efficiency and multi-scale representation in vision architectures.
Authors:Wenxuan Zhang, Peng Hu
Abstract:
The rapid expansion of advanced low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in large constellations is positioning space assets as key to the future, enabling global internet access and relay systems for deep space missions. A solution to the challenge is effective space object detection (SOD) for collision assessment and avoidance. In SOD, an LEO satellite must detect other satellites and objects with high precision and minimal delay. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of employing vision sensors for SOD tasks based on deep learning (DL) models. It introduces models based on the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) layer, Vision Transformer (ViT), and the Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN) and evaluates their performance under SOD scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed models achieve mean average precision at intersection over union threshold 0.5 (mAP50) scores of up to 0.751 and mean average precision averaged over intersection over union thresholds from 0.5 to 0.95 (mAP50:95) scores of up to 0.280. Compared to the baseline GELAN-t model, the proposed GELAN-ViT-SE model increases the average mAP50 from 0.721 to 0.751, improves the mAP50:95 from 0.266 to 0.274, reduces giga floating point operations (GFLOPs) from 7.3 to 5.6, and lowers peak power consumption from 2080.7 mW to 2028.7 mW by 2.5\%.
Authors:Boyuan Meng, Xiaohan Zhang, Peilin Li, Zhe Wu, Yiming Li, Wenkai Zhao, Beinan Yu, Hui-Liang Shen
Abstract:
Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to detect novel objects across different domains with limited class instances. Feature confusion, including object-background confusion and object-object confusion, presents significant challenges in both cross-domain and few-shot settings. In this work, we introduce CDFormer, a cross-domain few-shot object detection transformer against feature confusion, to address these challenges. The method specifically tackles feature confusion through two key modules: object-background distinguishing (OBD) and object-object distinguishing (OOD). The OBD module leverages a learnable background token to differentiate between objects and background, while the OOD module enhances the distinction between objects of different classes. Experimental results demonstrate that CDFormer outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 12.9% mAP, 11.0% mAP, and 10.4% mAP improvements under the 1/5/10 shot settings, respectively, when fine-tuned.
Authors:Connor Blais, Md Abdul Baset Sarker, Masudul H. Imtiaz
Abstract:
This paper presents the design and implementation of an AI vision-controlled orthotic hand exoskeleton to enhance rehabilitation and assistive functionality for individuals with hand mobility impairments. The system leverages a Google Coral Dev Board Micro with an Edge TPU to enable real-time object detection using a customized MobileNet\_V2 model trained on a six-class dataset. The exoskeleton autonomously detects objects, estimates proximity, and triggers pneumatic actuation for grasp-and-release tasks, eliminating the need for user-specific calibration needed in traditional EMG-based systems. The design prioritizes compactness, featuring an internal battery. It achieves an 8-hour runtime with a 1300 mAh battery. Experimental results demonstrate a 51ms inference speed, a significant improvement over prior iterations, though challenges persist in model robustness under varying lighting conditions and object orientations. While the most recent YOLO model (YOLOv11) showed potential with 15.4 FPS performance, quantization issues hindered deployment. The prototype underscores the viability of vision-controlled exoskeletons for real-world assistive applications, balancing portability, efficiency, and real-time responsiveness, while highlighting future directions for model optimization and hardware miniaturization.
Authors:Md Abdul Baset Sarker, Art Nguyen, Sigmond Kukla, Kevin Fite, Masudul H. Imtiaz
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel AI vision-enabled pediatric prosthetic hand designed to assist children aged 10-12 with upper limb disabilities. The prosthesis features an anthropomorphic appearance, multi-articulating functionality, and a lightweight design that mimics a natural hand, making it both accessible and affordable for low-income families. Using 3D printing technology and integrating advanced machine vision, sensing, and embedded computing, the prosthetic hand offers a low-cost, customizable solution that addresses the limitations of current myoelectric prostheses. A micro camera is interfaced with a low-power FPGA for real-time object detection and assists with precise grasping. The onboard DL-based object detection and grasp classification models achieved accuracies of 96% and 100% respectively. In the force prediction, the mean absolute error was found to be 0.018. The features of the proposed prosthetic hand can thus be summarized as: a) a wrist-mounted micro camera for artificial sensing, enabling a wide range of hand-based tasks; b) real-time object detection and distance estimation for precise grasping; and c) ultra-low-power operation that delivers high performance within constrained power and resource limits.
Authors:Kebin Contreras, Brayan Monroy, Jorge Bacca
Abstract:
Object detection precision is crucial for ensuring the safety and efficacy of autonomous driving systems. The quality of acquired images directly influences the ability of autonomous driving systems to correctly recognize and respond to other vehicles, pedestrians, and obstacles in real-time. However, real environments present extreme variations in lighting, causing saturation problems and resulting in the loss of crucial details for detection. Traditionally, High Dynamic Range (HDR) images have been preferred for their ability to capture a broad spectrum of light intensities, but the need for multiple captures to construct HDR images is inefficient for real-time applications in autonomous vehicles. To address these issues, this work introduces the use of modulo sensors for robust object detection. The modulo sensor allows pixels to `reset/wrap' upon reaching saturation level by acquiring an irradiance encoding image which can then be recovered using unwrapping algorithms. The applied reconstruction techniques enable HDR recovery of color intensity and image details, ensuring better visual quality even under extreme lighting conditions at the cost of extra time. Experiments with the YOLOv10 model demonstrate that images processed using modulo images achieve performance comparable to HDR images and significantly surpass saturated images in terms of object detection accuracy. Moreover, the proposed modulo imaging step combined with HDR image reconstruction is shorter than the time required for conventional HDR image acquisition.
Authors:Rayan Bahrami, Hamidreza Jafarnejadsani
Abstract:
This paper investigates the resilience of perception-based multi-robot coordination with wireless communication to online adversarial perception. A systematic study of this problem is essential for many safety-critical robotic applications that rely on the measurements from learned perception modules. We consider a (small) team of quadrotor robots that rely only on an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and the visual data measurements obtained from a learned multi-task perception module (e.g., object detection) for downstream tasks, including relative localization and coordination. We focus on a class of adversarial perception attacks that cause misclassification, mislocalization, and latency. We propose that the effects of adversarial misclassification and mislocalization can be modeled as sporadic (intermittent) and spurious measurement data for the downstream tasks. To address this, we present a framework for resilience analysis of multi-robot coordination with adversarial measurements. The framework integrates data from Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) and the learned perception model for robust relative localization and state estimation in the presence of adversarially sporadic and spurious measurements. The framework allows for quantifying the degradation in system observability and stability in relation to the success rate of adversarial perception. Finally, experimental results on a multi-robot platform demonstrate the real-world applicability of our methodology for resource-constrained robotic platforms.
Authors:Brayan Monroy, Kebin Contreras, Jorge Bacca
Abstract:
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is vital for capturing the full range of light tones in scenes, essential for computer vision tasks such as autonomous driving. Standard commercial imaging systems face limitations in capacity for well depth, and quantization precision, hindering their HDR capabilities. Modulo imaging, based on unlimited sampling (US) theory, addresses these limitations by using a modulo analog-to-digital approach that resets signals upon saturation, enabling estimation of pixel resets through neighboring pixel intensities. Despite the effectiveness of (US) algorithms in one-dimensional signals, their optimization problem for two-dimensional signals remains unclear. This work formulates the US framework as an autoregressive $\ell_2$ phase unwrapping problem, providing computationally efficient solutions in the discrete cosine domain jointly with a stride removal algorithm also based on spatial differences. By leveraging higher-order finite differences for two-dimensional images, our approach enhances HDR image reconstruction from modulo images, demonstrating its efficacy in improving object detection in autonomous driving scenes without retraining.
Authors:Keondo Park, You Rim Choi, Inhoe Lee, Hyung-Sin Kim
Abstract:
Running deep learning models on resource-constrained edge devices has drawn significant attention due to its fast response, privacy preservation, and robust operation regardless of Internet connectivity. While these devices already cope with various intelligent tasks, the latest edge devices that are equipped with multiple types of low-power accelerators (i.e., both mobile GPU and NPU) can bring another opportunity; a task that used to be too heavy for an edge device in the single-accelerator world might become viable in the upcoming heterogeneous-accelerator world.To realize the potential in the context of 3D object detection, we identify several technical challenges and propose PointSplit, a novel 3D object detection framework for multi-accelerator edge devices that addresses the problems. Specifically, our PointSplit design includes (1) 2D semantics-aware biased point sampling, (2) parallelized 3D feature extraction, and (3) role-based group-wise quantization. We implement PointSplit on TensorFlow Lite and evaluate it on a customized hardware platform comprising both mobile GPU and EdgeTPU. Experimental results on representative RGB-D datasets, SUN RGB-D and Scannet V2, demonstrate that PointSplit on a multi-accelerator device is 24.7 times faster with similar accuracy compared to the full-precision, 2D-3D fusion-based 3D detector on a GPU-only device.
Authors:Lucas Choi, Ross Greer
Abstract:
In this paper, we address a novel image restoration problem relevant to machine learning dataset curation: the detection and removal of noisy mirrored padding artifacts. While data augmentation techniques like padding are necessary for standardizing image dimensions, they can introduce artifacts that degrade model evaluation when datasets are repurposed across domains. We propose a systematic algorithm to precisely delineate the reflection boundary through a minimum mean squared error approach with thresholding and remove reflective padding. Our method effectively identifies the transition between authentic content and its mirrored counterpart, even in the presence of compression or interpolation noise. We demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy on the SHEL5k dataset, showing significant performance improvements in zero-shot object detection tasks using OWLv2, with average precision increasing from 0.47 to 0.61 for hard hat detection and from 0.68 to 0.73 for person detection. By addressing annotation inconsistencies and distorted objects in padded regions, our approach enhances dataset integrity, enabling more reliable model evaluation across computer vision tasks.
Authors:Mahan Rafidashti, Ji Lan, Maryam Fatemi, Junsheng Fu, Lars Hammarstrand, Lennart Svensson
Abstract:
Radar is an important sensor for autonomous driving (AD) systems due to its robustness to adverse weather and different lighting conditions. Novel view synthesis using neural radiance fields (NeRFs) has recently received considerable attention in AD due to its potential to enable efficient testing and validation but remains unexplored for radar point clouds. In this paper, we present NeuRadar, a NeRF-based model that jointly generates radar point clouds, camera images, and lidar point clouds. We explore set-based object detection methods such as DETR, and propose an encoder-based solution grounded in the NeRF geometry for improved generalizability. We propose both a deterministic and a probabilistic point cloud representation to accurately model the radar behavior, with the latter being able to capture radar's stochastic behavior. We achieve realistic reconstruction results for two automotive datasets, establishing a baseline for NeRF-based radar point cloud simulation models. In addition, we release radar data for ZOD's Sequences and Drives to enable further research in this field. To encourage further development of radar NeRFs, we release the source code for NeuRadar.
Authors:Moussa Kassem Sbeyti, Nadja Klein, Azarm Nowzad, Fikret Sivrikaya, Sahin Albayrak
Abstract:
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) based on pseudo-labeling significantly reduces dependence on large labeled datasets by effectively leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data. However, real-world applications of SSOD often face critical challenges, including class imbalance, label noise, and labeling errors. We present an in-depth analysis of SSOD under real-world conditions, uncovering causes of suboptimal pseudo-labeling and key trade-offs between label quality and quantity. Based on our findings, we propose four building blocks that can be seamlessly integrated into an SSOD framework. Rare Class Collage (RCC): a data augmentation method that enhances the representation of rare classes by creating collages of rare objects. Rare Class Focus (RCF): a stratified batch sampling strategy that ensures a more balanced representation of all classes during training. Ground Truth Label Correction (GLC): a label refinement method that identifies and corrects false, missing, and noisy ground truth labels by leveraging the consistency of teacher model predictions. Pseudo-Label Selection (PLS): a selection method for removing low-quality pseudo-labeled images, guided by a novel metric estimating the missing detection rate while accounting for class rarity. We validate our methods through comprehensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets, resulting in up to 6% increase in SSOD performance. Overall, our investigation and novel, data-centric, and broadly applicable building blocks enable robust and effective SSOD in complex, real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://mos-ks.github.io/publications.
Authors:Paul Hill, Zhiming Liu, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract:
Restoration and enhancement are essential for improving the quality of videos captured under atmospheric turbulence conditions, aiding visualization, object detection, classification, and tracking in surveillance systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Mamba-based method, the 3D Mamba-Based Atmospheric Turbulence Removal (MAMAT), which employs a dual-module strategy to mitigate these distortions. The first module utilizes deformable 3D convolutions for non-rigid registration to minimize spatial shifts, while the second module enhances contrast and detail. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of the 3D Mamba architecture, experimental results demonstrate that MAMAT outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based methods, achieving up to a 3\% improvement in visual quality and a 15\% boost in object detection. It not only enhances visualization but also significantly improves object detection accuracy, bridging the gap between visual restoration and the effectiveness of surveillance applications.
Authors:Jonas Mirlach, Lei Wan, Andreas Wiedholz, Hannan Ejaz Keen, Andreas Eich
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, the integration of roadside perception systems is essential for overcoming occlusion challenges and enhancing the safety of Vulnerable Road Users(VRUs). While LiDAR and visual (RGB) sensors are commonly used, thermal imaging remains underrepresented in datasets, despite its acknowledged advantages for VRU detection in extreme lighting conditions. In this paper, we present R-LiViT, the first dataset to combine LiDAR, RGB, and thermal imaging from a roadside perspective, with a strong focus on VRUs. R-LiViT captures three intersections during both day and night, ensuring a diverse dataset. It includes 10,000 LiDAR frames and 2,400 temporally and spatially aligned RGB and thermal images across 150 traffic scenarios, with 7 and 8 annotated classes respectively, providing a comprehensive resource for tasks such as object detection and tracking. The dataset and the code for reproducing our evaluation results are made publicly available.
Authors:Seung Woo Ko, Joopyo Hong, Suyoung Kim, Seungjai Bang, Sungzoon Cho, Nojun Kwak, Hyung-Sin Kim, Joonseok Lee
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to generate a fine-grained segmentation map of camouflaged objects hidden in their background. Due to the hidden nature of camouflaged objects, it is essential for the decoder to be tailored to effectively extract proper features of camouflaged objects and extra-carefully generate their complex boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that augments the prevalent decoding strategy in COD with Enrich Decoder and Retouch Decoder, which help to generate a fine-grained segmentation map. Specifically, the Enrich Decoder amplifies the channels of features that are important for COD using channel-wise attention. Retouch Decoder further refines the segmentation maps by spatially attending to important pixels, such as the boundary regions. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ENTO shows superior performance using various encoders, with the two novel components playing their unique roles that are mutually complementary.
Authors:Xin Jin, Haisheng Su, Kai Liu, Cong Ma, Wei Wu, Fei Hui, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Recent advances in LiDAR 3D detection have demonstrated the effectiveness of Transformer-based frameworks in capturing the global dependencies from point cloud spaces, which serialize the 3D voxels into the flattened 1D sequence for iterative self-attention. However, the spatial structure of 3D voxels will be inevitably destroyed during the serialization process. Besides, due to the considerable number of 3D voxels and quadratic complexity of Transformers, multiple sequences are grouped before feeding to Transformers, leading to a limited receptive field. Inspired by the impressive performance of State Space Models (SSM) achieved in the field of 2D vision tasks, in this paper, we propose a novel Unified Mamba (UniMamba), which seamlessly integrates the merits of 3D convolution and SSM in a concise multi-head manner, aiming to perform "local and global" spatial context aggregation efficiently and simultaneously. Specifically, a UniMamba block is designed which mainly consists of spatial locality modeling, complementary Z-order serialization and local-global sequential aggregator. The spatial locality modeling module integrates 3D submanifold convolution to capture the dynamic spatial position embedding before serialization. Then the efficient Z-order curve is adopted for serialization both horizontally and vertically. Furthermore, the local-global sequential aggregator adopts the channel grouping strategy to efficiently encode both "local and global" spatial inter-dependencies using multi-head SSM. Additionally, an encoder-decoder architecture with stacked UniMamba blocks is formed to facilitate multi-scale spatial learning hierarchically. Extensive experiments are conducted on three popular datasets: nuScenes, Waymo and Argoverse 2. Particularly, our UniMamba achieves 70.2 mAP on the nuScenes dataset.
Authors:Zhang Zhang, Chao Sun, Chao Yue, Da Wen, Yujie Chen, Tianze Wang, Jianghao Leng
Abstract:
Roadside vision centric 3D object detection has received increasing attention in recent years. It expands the perception range of autonomous vehicles, enhances the road safety. Previous methods focused on predicting per-pixel height rather than depth, making significant gains in roadside visual perception. While it is limited by the perspective property of near-large and far-small on image features, making it difficult for network to understand real dimension of objects in the 3D world. BEV features and voxel features present the real distribution of objects in 3D world compared to the image features. However, BEV features tend to lose details due to the lack of explicit height information, and voxel features are computationally expensive. Inspired by this insight, an efficient framework learning height prediction in voxel features via transformer is proposed, dubbed HeightFormer. It groups the voxel features into local height sequences, and utilize attention mechanism to obtain height distribution prediction. Subsequently, the local height sequences are reassembled to generate accurate 3D features. The proposed method is applied to two large-scale roadside benchmarks, DAIR-V2X-I and Rope3D. Extensive experiments are performed and the HeightFormer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in roadside vision centric 3D object detection task.
Authors:Hariprasath Govindarajan, Maciej K. Wozniak, Marvin Klingner, Camille Maurice, B Ravi Kiran, Senthil Yogamani
Abstract:
Vision foundation models (VFMs) such as DINO have led to a paradigm shift in 2D camera-based perception towards extracting generalized features to support many downstream tasks. Recent works introduce self-supervised cross-modal knowledge distillation (KD) as a way to transfer these powerful generalization capabilities into 3D LiDAR-based models. However, they either rely on highly complex distillation losses, pseudo-semantic maps, or limit KD to features useful for semantic segmentation only. In this work, we propose CleverDistiller, a self-supervised, cross-modal 2D-to-3D KD framework introducing a set of simple yet effective design choices: Unlike contrastive approaches relying on complex loss design choices, our method employs a direct feature similarity loss in combination with a multi layer perceptron (MLP) projection head to allow the 3D network to learn complex semantic dependencies throughout the projection. Crucially, our approach does not depend on pseudo-semantic maps, allowing for direct knowledge transfer from a VFM without explicit semantic supervision. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary self-supervised spatial task of occupancy prediction to enhance the semantic knowledge, obtained from a VFM through KD, with 3D spatial reasoning capabilities. Experiments on standard autonomous driving benchmarks for 2D-to-3D KD demonstrate that CleverDistiller achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and 3D object detection (3DOD) by up to 10% mIoU, especially when fine tuning on really low data amounts, showing the effectiveness of our simple yet powerful KD strategy
Authors:Qingwu Liu, Nicolas Saunier, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau
Abstract:
Image-based multi-object detection (MOD) and multi-object tracking (MOT) are advancing at a fast pace. A variety of 2D and 3D MOD and MOT methods have been developed for monocular and stereo cameras. Road safety analysis can benefit from those advancements. As crashes are rare events, surrogate measures of safety (SMoS) have been developed for safety analyses. (Semi-)Automated safety analysis methods extract road user trajectories to compute safety indicators, for example, Time-to-Collision (TTC) and Post-encroachment Time (PET). Inspired by the success of deep learning in MOD and MOT, we investigate three MOT methods, including one based on a stereo-camera, using the annotated KITTI traffic video dataset. Two post-processing steps, IDsplit and SS, are developed to improve the tracking results and investigate the factors influencing the TTC. The experimental results show that, despite some advantages in terms of the numbers of interactions or similarity to the TTC distributions, all the tested methods systematically over-estimate the number of interactions and under-estimate the TTC: they report more interactions and more severe interactions, making the road user interactions appear less safe than they are. Further efforts will be directed towards testing more methods and more data, in particular from roadside sensors, to verify the results and improve the performance.
Authors:Xuzhong Hu, Zaipeng Duan, Pei An, Jun zhang, Jie Ma
Abstract:
Fusing LiDAR and image features in a homogeneous BEV domain has become popular for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, this paradigm is constrained by the excessive feature compression. While some works explore dense voxel fusion to enable better feature interaction, they face high computational costs and challenges in query generation. Additionally, feature misalignment in both domains results in suboptimal detection accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose a Dual-Domain Homogeneous Fusion network (DDHFusion), which leverages the complementarily of both BEV and voxel domains while mitigating their drawbacks. Specifically, we first transform image features into BEV and sparse voxel representations using lift-splat-shot and our proposed Semantic-Aware Feature Sampling (SAFS) module. The latter significantly reduces computational overhead by discarding unimportant voxels. Next, we introduce Homogeneous Voxel and BEV Fusion (HVF and HBF) networks for multi-modal fusion within respective domains. They are equipped with novel cross-modal Mamba blocks to resolve feature misalignment and enable comprehensive scene perception. The output voxel features are injected into the BEV space to compensate for the information loss brought by direct height compression. During query selection, the Progressive Query Generation (PQG) mechanism is implemented in the BEV domain to reduce false negatives caused by feature compression. Furthermore, we propose a Progressive Decoder (QD) that sequentially aggregates not only context-rich BEV features but also geometry-aware voxel features with deformable attention and the Multi-Modal Voxel Feature Mixing (MMVFM) block for precise classification and box regression.
Authors:Hyeongseok Son, Jia He, Seung-In Park, Ying Min, Yunhao Zhang, ByungIn Yoo
Abstract:
Most previous 3D object detection methods that leverage the multi-modality of LiDAR and cameras utilize the Bird's Eye View (BEV) space for intermediate feature representation. However, this space uses a low x, y-resolution and sacrifices z-axis information to reduce the overall feature resolution, which may result in declined accuracy. To tackle the problem of using low-resolution features, this paper focuses on the sparse nature of LiDAR point cloud data. From our observation, the number of occupied cells in the 3D voxels constructed from a LiDAR data can be even fewer than the number of total cells in the BEV map, despite the voxels' significantly higher resolution. Based on this, we introduce a novel sparse voxel-based transformer network for 3D object detection, dubbed as SparseVoxFormer. Instead of performing BEV feature extraction, we directly leverage sparse voxel features as the input for a transformer-based detector. Moreover, with regard to the camera modality, we introduce an explicit modality fusion approach that involves projecting 3D voxel coordinates onto 2D images and collecting the corresponding image features. Thanks to these components, our approach can leverage geometrically richer multi-modal features while even reducing the computational cost. Beyond the proof-of-concept level, we further focus on facilitating better multi-modal fusion and flexible control over the number of sparse features. Finally, thorough experimental results demonstrate that utilizing a significantly smaller number of sparse features drastically reduces computational costs in a 3D object detector while enhancing both overall and long-range performance.
Authors:Peili Song, Dezhen Song, Yifan Yang, Enfan Lan, Jingtai Liu
Abstract:
Low-cost millimeter automotive radar has received more and more attention due to its ability to handle adverse weather and lighting conditions in autonomous driving. However, the lack of quality datasets hinders research and development. We report a new method that is able to simulate 4D millimeter wave radar signals including pitch, yaw, range, and Doppler velocity along with radar signal strength (RSS) using camera image, light detection and ranging (lidar) point cloud, and ego-velocity. The method is based on two new neural networks: 1) DIS-Net, which estimates the spatial distribution and number of radar signals, and 2) RSS-Net, which predicts the RSS of the signal based on appearance and geometric information. We have implemented and tested our method using open datasets from 3 different models of commercial automotive radar. The experimental results show that our method can successfully generate high-fidelity radar signals. Moreover, we have trained a popular object detection neural network with data augmented by our synthesized radar. The network outperforms the counterpart trained only on raw radar data, a promising result to facilitate future radar-based research and development.
Authors:Jialin Lu, Junjie Shan, Ziqi Zhao, Ka-Ho Chow
Abstract:
As object detection becomes integral to many safety-critical applications, understanding its vulnerabilities is essential. Backdoor attacks, in particular, pose a serious threat by implanting hidden triggers in victim models, which adversaries can later exploit to induce malicious behaviors during inference. However, current understanding is limited to single-target attacks, where adversaries must define a fixed malicious behavior (target) before training, making inference-time adaptability impossible. Given the large output space of object detection (including object existence prediction, bounding box estimation, and classification), the feasibility of flexible, inference-time model control remains unexplored. This paper introduces AnywhereDoor, a multi-target backdoor attack for object detection. Once implanted, AnywhereDoor allows adversaries to make objects disappear, fabricate new ones, or mislabel them, either across all object classes or specific ones, offering an unprecedented degree of control. This flexibility is enabled by three key innovations: (i) objective disentanglement to scale the number of supported targets; (ii) trigger mosaicking to ensure robustness even against region-based detectors; and (iii) strategic batching to address object-level data imbalances that hinder manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnywhereDoor grants attackers a high degree of control, improving attack success rates by 26% compared to adaptations of existing methods for such flexible control.
Authors:Sourav Modak, Ahmet OÄuz Saltık, Anthony Stein
Abstract:
Deep learning-based weed control systems often suffer from limited training data diversity and constrained on-board computation, impacting their real-world performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose a framework that leverages Stable Diffusion-based inpainting to augment training data progressively in 10% increments -- up to an additional 200%, thus enhancing both the volume and diversity of samples. Our approach is evaluated on two state-of-the-art object detection models, YOLO11(l) and RT-DETR(l), using the mAP50 metric to assess detection performance. We explore quantization strategies (FP16 and INT8) for both the generative inpainting and detection models to strike a balance between inference speed and accuracy. Deployment of the downstream models on the Jetson Orin Nano demonstrates the practical viability of our framework in resource-constrained environments, ultimately improving detection accuracy and computational efficiency in intelligent weed management systems.
Authors:Lin Huang, Yujuan Tan, Weisheng Li, Shitai Shan, Liu Liu, Linlin Shen, Jing Yu, Yue Niu
Abstract:
This paper addresses the inherent limitations of conventional bottleneck structures (diminished instance discriminability due to overemphasis on batch statistics) and decoupled heads (computational redundancy) in object detection frameworks by proposing two novel modules: the Instance-Specific Bottleneck with full-channel global self-attention (ISB) and the Instance-Specific Asymmetric Decoupled Head (ISADH). The ISB module innovatively reconstructs feature maps to establish an efficient full-channel global attention mechanism through synergistic fusion of batch-statistical and instance-specific features. Complementing this, the ISADH module pioneers an asymmetric decoupled architecture enabling hierarchical multi-dimensional feature integration via dual-stream batch-instance representation fusion. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO benchmark demonstrate that the coordinated deployment of ISB and ISADH in the YOLO-PRO framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across all computational scales. Specifically, YOLO-PRO surpasses YOLOv8 by 1.0-1.6% AP (N/S/M/L/X scales) and outperforms YOLO11 by 0.1-0.5% AP in critical N/M/L/X groups, while maintaining competitive computational efficiency. This work provides practical insights for developing high-precision detectors deployable on edge devices.
Authors:Zhixiong Nan, Xianghong Li, Jifeng Dai, Tao Xiang
Abstract:
Based on analyzing the character of cascaded decoder architecture commonly adopted in existing DETR-like models, this paper proposes a new decoder architecture. The cascaded decoder architecture constrains object queries to update in the cascaded direction, only enabling object queries to learn relatively-limited information from image features. However, the challenges for object detection in natural scenes (e.g., extremely-small, heavily-occluded, and confusingly mixed with the background) require an object detection model to fully utilize image features, which motivates us to propose a new decoder architecture with the parallel Multi-time Inquiries (MI) mechanism. MI enables object queries to learn more comprehensive information, and our MI based model, MI-DETR, outperforms all existing DETR-like models on COCO benchmark under different backbones and training epochs, achieving +2.3 AP and +0.6 AP improvements compared to the most representative model DINO and SOTA model Relation-DETR under ResNet-50 backbone. In addition, a series of diagnostic and visualization experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, rationality, and interpretability of MI.
Authors:Huimin Yan, Xian Yang, Liang Bai, Jiye Liang
Abstract:
Local alignment between medical images and text is essential for accurate diagnosis, though it remains challenging due to the absence of natural local pairings and the limitations of rigid region recognition methods. Traditional approaches rely on hard boundaries, which introduce uncertainty, whereas medical imaging demands flexible soft region recognition to handle irregular structures. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Progressive Local Alignment Network (PLAN), which designs a novel contrastive learning-based approach for local alignment to establish meaningful word-pixel relationships and introduces a progressive learning strategy to iteratively refine these relationships, enhancing alignment precision and robustness. By combining these techniques, PLAN effectively improves soft region recognition while suppressing noise interference. Extensive experiments on multiple medical datasets demonstrate that PLAN surpasses state-of-the-art methods in phrase grounding, image-text retrieval, object detection, and zero-shot classification, setting a new benchmark for medical image-text alignment.
Authors:Chen Wang, Liyuan Zhang, Le Hui, Qi Liu, Yuchao Dai
Abstract:
Point cloud salient object detection has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. Since existing works do not fully utilize the geometry context of 3D objects, blurry boundaries are generated when segmenting objects with complex backgrounds. In this paper, we propose a geometry-aware 3D salient object detection network that explicitly clusters points into superpoints to enhance the geometric boundaries of objects, thereby segmenting complete objects with clear boundaries. Specifically, we first propose a simple yet effective superpoint partition module to cluster points into superpoints. In order to improve the quality of superpoints, we present a point cloud class-agnostic loss to learn discriminative point features for clustering superpoints from the object. After obtaining superpoints, we then propose a geometry enhancement module that utilizes superpoint-point attention to aggregate geometric information into point features for predicting the salient map of the object with clear boundaries. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the PCSOD dataset.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Daniel Seita, Mohammad Rostami
Abstract:
Advancements in cross-modal feature extraction and integration have significantly enhanced performance in few-shot learning tasks. However, current multi-modal object detection (MM-OD) methods often experience notable performance degradation when encountering substantial domain shifts. We propose that incorporating rich textual information can enable the model to establish a more robust knowledge relationship between visual instances and their corresponding language descriptions, thereby mitigating the challenges of domain shift. Specifically, we focus on the problem of Cross-Domain Multi-Modal Few-Shot Object Detection (CDMM-FSOD) and introduce a meta-learning-based framework designed to leverage rich textual semantics as an auxiliary modality to achieve effective domain adaptation. Our new architecture incorporates two key components: (i) A multi-modal feature aggregation module, which aligns visual and linguistic feature embeddings to ensure cohesive integration across modalities. (ii) A rich text semantic rectification module, which employs bidirectional text feature generation to refine multi-modal feature alignment, thereby enhancing understanding of language and its application in object detection. We evaluate the proposed method on common cross-domain object detection benchmarks and demonstrate that it significantly surpasses existing few-shot object detection approaches.
Authors:Novendra Setyawan, Ghufron Wahyu Kurniawan, Chi-Chia Sun, Wen-Kai Kuo, Jun-Wei Hsieh
Abstract:
The perception system is a a critical role of an autonomous driving system for ensuring safety. The driving scene perception system fundamentally represents an object detection task that requires achieving a balance between accuracy and processing speed. Many contemporary methods focus on improving detection accuracy but often overlook the importance of real-time detection capabilities when computational resources are limited. Thus, it is vital to investigate efficient object detection strategies for driving scenes. This paper introduces Fast-COS, a novel single-stage object detection framework crafted specifically for driving scene applications. The research initiates with an analysis of the backbone, considering both macro and micro architectural designs, yielding the Reparameterized Attention Vision Transformer (RAViT). RAViT utilizes Reparameterized Multi-Scale Depth-Wise Convolution (RepMSDW) and Reparameterized Self-Attention (RepSA) to enhance computational efficiency and feature extraction. In extensive tests across GPU, edge, and mobile platforms, RAViT achieves 81.4% Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset, demonstrating significant throughput improvements over comparable backbone models such as ResNet, FastViT, RepViT, and EfficientFormer. Additionally, integrating RepMSDW into a feature pyramid network forms RepFPN, enabling fast and multi-scale feature fusion. Fast-COS enhances object detection in driving scenes, attaining an AP50 score of 57.2% on the BDD100K dataset and 80.0% on the TJU-DHD Traffic dataset. It surpasses leading models in efficiency, delivering up to 75.9% faster GPU inference and 1.38 higher throughput on edge devices compared to FCOS, YOLOF, and RetinaNet. These findings establish Fast-COS as a highly scalable and reliable solution suitable for real-time applications, especially in resource-limited environments like autonomous driving systems
Authors:Zhengjian Kang, Ye Zhang, Xiaoyu Deng, Xintao Li, Yongzhe Zhang
Abstract:
This paper presents LP-DETR (Layer-wise Progressive DETR), a novel approach that enhances DETR-based object detection through multi-scale relation modeling. Our method introduces learnable spatial relationships between object queries through a relation-aware self-attention mechanism, which adaptively learns to balance different scales of relations (local, medium and global) across decoder layers. This progressive design enables the model to effectively capture evolving spatial dependencies throughout the detection pipeline. Extensive experiments on COCO 2017 dataset demonstrate that our method improves both convergence speed and detection accuracy compared to standard self-attention module. The proposed method achieves competitive results, reaching 52.3\% AP with 12 epochs and 52.5\% AP with 24 epochs using ResNet-50 backbone, and further improving to 58.0\% AP with Swin-L backbone. Furthermore, our analysis reveals an interesting pattern: the model naturally learns to prioritize local spatial relations in early decoder layers while gradually shifting attention to broader contexts in deeper layers, providing valuable insights for future research in object detection.
Authors:Kai Van Brunt, Justin Kay, Timm Haucke, Pietro Perona, Grant Van Horn, Sara Beery
Abstract:
Accurate estimates of salmon escapement - the number of fish migrating upstream to spawn - are key data for conservation and fishery management. Existing methods for salmon counting using high-resolution imaging sonar hardware are non-invasive and compatible with computer vision processing. Prior work in this area has utilized object detection and tracking based methods for automated salmon counting. However, these techniques remain inaccessible to many sonar deployment sites due to limited compute and connectivity in the field. We propose an alternative lightweight computer vision method for fish counting based on analyzing echograms - temporal representations that compress several hundred frames of imaging sonar video into a single image. We predict upstream and downstream counts within 200-frame time windows directly from echograms using a ResNet-18 model, and propose a set of domain-specific image augmentations and a weakly-supervised training protocol to further improve results. We achieve a count error of 23% on representative data from the Kenai River in Alaska, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach.
Authors:Mingxuan Yan, Ruijie Zhang, Xuedou Xiao, Wei Wang
Abstract:
While MPEG-standardized video-based point cloud compression (VPCC) achieves high compression efficiency for human perception, it struggles with a poor trade-off between bitrate savings and detection accuracy when supporting 3D object detectors. This limitation stems from VPCC's inability to prioritize regions of different importance within point clouds. To address this issue, we propose DetVPCC, a novel method integrating region-of-interest (RoI) encoding with VPCC for efficient point cloud sequence compression while preserving the 3D object detection accuracy. Specifically, we augment VPCC to support RoI-based compression by assigning spatially non-uniform quality levels. Then, we introduce a lightweight RoI detector to identify crucial regions that potentially contain objects. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the detection accuracy. The code and demo video are available in supplementary materials.
Authors:Alicia Allmendinger, Ahmet OÄuz Saltık, Gerassimos G. Peteinatos, Anthony Stein, Roland Gerhards
Abstract:
Spot spraying represents an efficient and sustainable method for reducing the amount of pesticides, particularly herbicides, used in agricultural fields. To achieve this, it is of utmost importance to reliably differentiate between crops and weeds, and even between individual weed species in situ and under real-time conditions. To assess suitability for real-time application, different object detection models that are currently state-of-the-art are compared. All available models of YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and RT-DETR are trained and evaluated with images from a real field situation. The images are separated into two distinct datasets: In the initial data set, each species of plants is trained individually; in the subsequent dataset, a distinction is made between monocotyledonous weeds, dicotyledonous weeds, and three chosen crops. The results demonstrate that while all models perform equally well in the metrics evaluated, the YOLOv9 models, particularly the YOLOv9s and YOLOv9e, stand out in terms of their strong recall scores (66.58 % and 72.36 %), as well as mAP50 (73.52 % and 79.86 %), and mAP50-95 (43.82 % and 47.00 %) in dataset 2. However, the RT-DETR models, especially RT-DETR-l, excel in precision with reaching 82.44 \% on dataset 1 and 81.46 % in dataset 2, making them particularly suitable for scenarios where minimizing false positives is critical. In particular, the smallest variants of the YOLO models (YOLOv8n, YOLOv9t, and YOLOv10n) achieve substantially faster inference times down to 7.58 ms for dataset 2 on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU for analyzing one frame, while maintaining competitive accuracy, highlighting their potential for deployment in resource-constrained embedded computing devices as typically used in productive setups.
Authors:Akash Kumar, Zsolt Kira, Yogesh Singh Rawat
Abstract:
In this work, we focus on Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG). It is a multimodal task aimed at localizing specific subjects spatio-temporally based on textual queries without bounding box supervision. Motivated by recent advancements in multi-modal foundation models for grounding tasks, we first explore the potential of state-of-the-art object detection models for WSTVG. Despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, our adaptation reveals significant limitations, including inconsistent temporal predictions, inadequate understanding of complex queries, and challenges in adapting to difficult scenarios. We propose CoSPaL (Contextual Self-Paced Learning), a novel approach which is designed to overcome these limitations. CoSPaL integrates three core components: (1) Tubelet Phrase Grounding (TPG), which introduces spatio-temporal prediction by linking textual queries to tubelets; (2) Contextual Referral Grounding (CRG), which improves comprehension of complex queries by extracting contextual information to refine object identification over time; and (3) Self-Paced Scene Understanding (SPS), a training paradigm that progressively increases task difficulty, enabling the model to adapt to complex scenarios by transitioning from coarse to fine-grained understanding.
Authors:Muxi Chen, Chenchen Zhao, Qiang Xu
Abstract:
Despite the significant success of deep learning models in computer vision, they often exhibit systematic failures on specific data subsets, known as error slices. Identifying and mitigating these error slices is crucial to enhancing model robustness and reliability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce HiBug2, an automated framework for error slice discovery and model repair. HiBug2 first generates task-specific visual attributes to highlight instances prone to errors through an interpretable and structured process. It then employs an efficient slice enumeration algorithm to systematically identify error slices, overcoming the combinatorial challenges that arise during slice exploration. Additionally, HiBug2 extends its capabilities by predicting error slices beyond the validation set, addressing a key limitation of prior approaches. Extensive experiments across multiple domains, including image classification, pose estimation, and object detection - show that HiBug2 not only improves the coherence and precision of identified error slices but also significantly enhances the model repair capabilities.
Authors:Yimeng Fan, Changsong Liu, Mingyang Li, Dongze Liu, Yanyan Liu, Wei Zhang
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are the third generation of neural networks. They have gained widespread attention in object detection due to their low power consumption and biological interpretability. However, existing SNN-based object detection methods suffer from local firing saturation, where neurons in information-concentrated regions fire continuously throughout all time steps. This abnormal neuron firing pattern reduces the feature discrimination capability and detection accuracy, while also increasing the firing rates that prevent SNNs from achieving their potential energy efficiency. To address this problem, we propose SpikeDet, a novel spiking object detector that optimizes firing patterns for accurate and energy-efficient detection. Specifically, we design a spiking backbone network, MDSNet, which effectively adjusts the membrane synaptic input distribution at each layer, achieving better neuron firing patterns during spiking feature extraction. Additionally, to better utilize and preserve these high-quality backbone features, we introduce the Spiking Multi-direction Fusion Module (SMFM), which realizes multi-direction fusion of spiking features, enhancing the multi-scale detection capability of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that SpikeDet achieves superior performance. On the COCO 2017 dataset, it achieves 51.4% AP, outperforming previous SNN-based methods by 2.5% AP while requiring only half the power consumption. On object detection sub-tasks, including the GEN1 event-based dataset and the URPC 2019 underwater dataset, SpikeDet also achieves the best performance. Notably, on GEN1, our method achieves 47.6% AP, outperforming previous SNN-based methods by 7.2% AP with better energy efficiency.
Authors:Iñaki Erregue, Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera
Abstract:
We introduce YOLO11-JDE, a fast and accurate multi-object tracking (MOT) solution that combines real-time object detection with self-supervised Re-Identification (Re-ID). By incorporating a dedicated Re-ID branch into YOLO11s, our model performs Joint Detection and Embedding (JDE), generating appearance features for each detection. The Re-ID branch is trained in a fully self-supervised setting while simultaneously training for detection, eliminating the need for costly identity-labeled datasets. The triplet loss, with hard positive and semi-hard negative mining strategies, is used for learning discriminative embeddings. Data association is enhanced with a custom tracking implementation that successfully integrates motion, appearance, and location cues. YOLO11-JDE achieves competitive results on MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks, surpassing existing JDE methods in terms of FPS and using up to ten times fewer parameters. Thus, making our method a highly attractive solution for real-world applications.
Authors:Taegyeong Lee, Jinsik Bang, Soyeong Kwon, Taehwan Kim
Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly improved performance on computer vision tasks. Previous image classification methods primarily modify model architectures or add features, and they optimize models using cross-entropy loss on class logits. Since they focus on classifying images with considering class labels, these methods may struggle to learn various \emph{aspects} of classes (e.g., natural positions and shape changes). Rethinking the previous approach from a novel view, we propose a multi-aspect knowledge distillation method using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Our approach involves: 1) querying Large Language Model with multi-aspect questions relevant to the knowledge we want to transfer to the model, 2) extracting corresponding logits from MLLM, and 3) expanding the model's output dimensions to distill these multi-aspect logits. We then apply cross-entropy loss to class logits and binary cross-entropy loss to multi-aspect logits. Through our method, the model can learn not only the knowledge about visual aspects but also the abstract and complex aspects that require a deeper understanding. We primarily apply our method to image classification, and to explore the potential for extending our model, such as object detection. In all experimental results, our method improves the performance of the baselines. Additionally, we analyze the effect of multi-aspect knowledge distillation. These results demonstrate that our method can transfer knowledge about various aspects to the model and the aspect knowledge can enhance model performance in computer vision tasks.
Authors:Xinyang Pu, Feng Xu
Abstract:
Supervised fine-tuning methods (SFT) perform great efficiency on artificial intelligence interpretation in SAR images, leveraging the powerful representation knowledge from pre-training models. Due to the lack of domain-specific pre-trained backbones in SAR images, the traditional strategies are loading the foundation pre-train models of natural scenes such as ImageNet, whose characteristics of images are extremely different from SAR images. This may hinder the model performance on downstream tasks when adopting SFT on small-scale annotated SAR data. In this paper, an self-supervised learning (SSL) method of masked image modeling based on Masked Auto-Encoders (MAE) is proposed to learn feature representations of SAR images during the pre-training process and benefit the object detection task in SAR images of SFT. The evaluation experiments on the large-scale SAR object detection benchmark named SARDet-100k verify that the proposed method captures proper latent representations of SAR images and improves the model generalization in downstream tasks by converting the pre-trained domain from natural scenes to SAR images through SSL. The proposed method achieves an improvement of 1.3 mAP on the SARDet-100k benchmark compared to only the SFT strategies.
Authors:Keita Miwa, Kento Sasaki, Hidehisa Arai, Tsubasa Takahashi, Yu Yamaguchi
Abstract:
Current image tokenization methods require a large number of tokens to capture the information contained within images. Although the amount of information varies across images, most image tokenizers only support fixed-length tokenization, leading to inefficiency in token allocation. In this study, we introduce One-D-Piece, a discrete image tokenizer designed for variable-length tokenization, achieving quality-controllable mechanism. To enable variable compression rate, we introduce a simple but effective regularization mechanism named "Tail Token Drop" into discrete one-dimensional image tokenizers. This method encourages critical information to concentrate at the head of the token sequence, enabling support of variadic tokenization, while preserving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. We evaluate our tokenizer across multiple reconstruction quality metrics and find that it delivers significantly better perceptual quality than existing quality-controllable compression methods, including JPEG and WebP, at smaller byte sizes. Furthermore, we assess our tokenizer on various downstream computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation, confirming its adaptability to numerous applications compared to other variable-rate methods. Our approach demonstrates the versatility of variable-length discrete image tokenization, establishing a new paradigm in both compression efficiency and reconstruction performance. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of tail token drop via detailed analysis of tokenizers.
Authors:Zhe Chen, Zijing Chen
Abstract:
Object Referring Analysis (ORA), commonly known as referring expression comprehension, requires the identification and localization of specific objects in an image based on natural descriptions. Unlike generic object detection, ORA requires both accurate language understanding and precise visual localization, making it inherently more complex. Although recent pre-trained large visual grounding detectors have achieved significant progress, they heavily rely on extensively labeled data and time-consuming learning. To address these, we introduce a novel, training-free framework for zero-shot ORA, termed FLORA (Formal Language for Object Referring and Analysis). FLORA harnesses the inherent reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and integrates a formal language model - a logical framework that regulates language within structured, rule-based descriptions - to provide effective zero-shot ORA. More specifically, our formal language model (FLM) enables an effective, logic-driven interpretation of object descriptions without necessitating any training processes. Built upon FLM-regulated LLM outputs, we further devise a Bayesian inference framework and employ appropriate off-the-shelf interpretive models to finalize the reasoning, delivering favorable robustness against LLM hallucinations and compelling ORA performance in a training-free manner. In practice, our FLORA boosts the zero-shot performance of existing pretrained grounding detectors by up to around 45%. Our comprehensive evaluation across different challenging datasets also confirms that FLORA consistently surpasses current state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in both detection and segmentation tasks associated with zero-shot ORA. We believe our probabilistic parsing and reasoning of the LLM outputs elevate the reliability and interpretability of zero-shot ORA. We shall release codes upon publication.
Authors:Alok Ranjan Sahoo, Satya Sangram Sahoo, Pavan Chakraborty
Abstract:
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers all over the world. It starts as a polyp in the inner lining of the colon. To prevent CRC, early polyp detection is required. Colonosopy is used for the inspection of the colon. Generally, the images taken by the camera placed at the tip of the endoscope are analyzed by the experts manually. Various traditional machine learning models have been used with the rise of machine learning. Recently, deep learning models have shown more effectiveness in polyp detection due to their superiority in generalizing and learning small features. These deep learning models for object detection can be segregated into two different types: single-stage and two-stage. Generally, two stage models have higher accuracy than single stage ones but the single stage models have low inference time. Hence, single stage models are easy to use for quick object detection. YOLO is one of the singlestage models used successfully for polyp detection. It has drawn the attention of researchers because of its lower inference time. The researchers have used Different versions of YOLO so far, and with each newer version, the accuracy of the model is increasing. This paper aims to see the effectiveness of the recently released YOLOv11 to detect polyp. We analyzed the performance for all five models of YOLOv11 (YOLO11n, YOLO11s, YOLO11m, YOLO11l, YOLO11x) with Kvasir dataset for the training and testing. Two different versions of the dataset were used. The first consisted of the original dataset, and the other was created using augmentation techniques. The performance of all the models with these two versions of the dataset have been analysed.
Authors:Youbing Hu, Yun Cheng, Olga Saukh, Firat Ozdemir, Anqi Lu, Zhiqiang Cao, Zhijun Li
Abstract:
Dataset distillation has emerged as a strategy to compress real-world datasets for efficient training. However, it struggles with large-scale and high-resolution datasets, limiting its practicality. This paper introduces a novel resolution-independent dataset distillation method Focus ed Dataset Distillation (FocusDD), which achieves diversity and realism in distilled data by identifying key information patches, thereby ensuring the generalization capability of the distilled dataset across different network architectures. Specifically, FocusDD leverages a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) to extract key image patches, which are then synthesized into a single distilled image. These distilled images, which capture multiple targets, are suitable not only for classification tasks but also for dense tasks such as object detection. To further improve the generalization of the distilled dataset, each synthesized image is augmented with a downsampled view of the original image. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that, with 100 images per class (IPC), ResNet50 and MobileNet-v2 achieve validation accuracies of 71.0% and 62.6%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 2.8% and 4.7%. Notably, FocusDD is the first method to use distilled datasets for object detection tasks. On the COCO2017 dataset, with an IPC of 50, YOLOv11n and YOLOv11s achieve 24.4% and 32.1% mAP, respectively, further validating the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Chan Lee, Seungho Shin, Gyeong-Moon Park, Jung Uk Kim
Abstract:
Although existing Sparsely Annotated Object Detection (SAOD) approches have made progress in handling sparsely annotated environments in multispectral domain, where only some pedestrians are annotated, they still have the following limitations: (i) they lack considerations for improving the quality of pseudo-labels for missing annotations, and (ii) they rely on fixed ground truth annotations, which leads to learning only a limited range of pedestrian visual appearances in the multispectral domain. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Sparsely Annotated Multispectral Pedestrian Detection (SAMPD). For limitation (i), we introduce Multispectral Pedestrian-aware Adaptive Weight (MPAW) and Positive Pseudo-label Enhancement (PPE) module. Utilizing multispectral knowledge, these modules ensure the generation of high-quality pseudo-labels and enable effective learning by increasing weights for high-quality pseudo-labels based on modality characteristics. To address limitation (ii), we propose an Adaptive Pedestrian Retrieval Augmentation (APRA) module, which adaptively incorporates pedestrian patches from ground-truth and dynamically integrates high-quality pseudo-labels with the ground-truth, facilitating a more diverse learning pool of pedestrians. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our SAMPD significantly enhances performance in sparsely annotated environments within the multispectral domain.
Authors:Yuzhi Lai, Shenghai Yuan, Youssef Nassar, Mingyu Fan, Atmaraaj Gopal, Arihiro Yorita, Naoyuki Kubota, Matthias Rätsch
Abstract:
Translating human intent into robot commands is crucial for the future of service robots in an aging society. Existing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems relying on gestures or verbal commands are impractical for the elderly due to difficulties with complex syntax or sign language. To address the challenge, this paper introduces a multi-modal interaction framework that combines voice and deictic posture information to create a more natural HRI system. The visual cues are first processed by the object detection model to gain a global understanding of the environment, and then bounding boxes are estimated based on depth information. By using a large language model (LLM) with voice-to-text commands and temporally aligned selected bounding boxes, robot action sequences can be generated, while key control syntax constraints are applied to avoid potential LLM hallucination issues. The system is evaluated on real-world tasks with varying levels of complexity using a Universal Robots UR3e manipulator. Our method demonstrates significantly better performance in HRI in terms of accuracy and robustness. To benefit the research community and the general public, we will make our code and design open-source.
Authors:Lujia Lv, Di Wu, Yangyi Xia, Jia Wu, Xiaojing Liu, Yi He
Abstract:
With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and fast-paced working conditions, pre-made dishes are becoming increasingly popular among families and restaurants due to their advantages of time-saving, convenience, variety, cost-effectiveness, standard quality, etc. Object detection is a key technology for selecting ingredients and evaluating the quality of dishes in the pre-made dishes industry. To date, many object detection approaches have been proposed. However, accurate object detection of pre-made dishes is extremely difficult because of overlapping occlusion of ingredients, similarity of ingredients, and insufficient light in the processing environment. As a result, the recognition scene is relatively complex and thus leads to poor object detection by a single model. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Differential Evolution Integrated Hybrid Deep Learning (DEIHDL) model. The main idea of DEIHDL is three-fold: 1) three YOLO-based and transformer-based base models are developed respectively to increase diversity for detecting objects of pre-made dishes, 2) the three base models are integrated by differential evolution optimized self-adjusting weights, and 3) weighted boxes fusion strategy is employed to score the confidence of the three base models during the integration. As such, DEIHDL possesses the multi-performance originating from the three base models to achieve accurate object detection in complex pre-made dish scenes. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed DEIHDL model significantly outperforms the base models in detecting objects of pre-made dishes.
Authors:Amirhossein Nazeri, Chunheng Zhao, Pierluigi Pisu
Abstract:
Robust object detection is critical for autonomous driving and mobile robotics, where accurate detection of vehicles, pedestrians, and obstacles is essential for ensuring safety. Despite the advancements in object detection transformers (DETRs), their robustness against adversarial attacks remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of DETR model and its variants under both white-box and black-box adversarial attacks, using the MS-COCO and KITTI datasets to cover general and autonomous driving scenarios. We extend prominent white-box attack methods (FGSM, PGD, and CW) to assess DETR vulnerability, demonstrating that DETR models are significantly susceptible to adversarial attacks, similar to traditional CNN-based detectors. Our extensive transferability analysis reveals high intra-network transferability among DETR variants, but limited cross-network transferability to CNN-based models. Additionally, we propose a novel untargeted attack designed specifically for DETR, exploiting its intermediate loss functions to induce misclassification with minimal perturbations. Visualizations of self-attention feature maps provide insights into how adversarial attacks affect the internal representations of DETR models. These findings reveal critical vulnerabilities in detection transformers under standard adversarial attacks, emphasizing the need for future research to enhance the robustness of transformer-based object detectors in safety-critical applications.
Authors:Ahmet OÄuz Saltık, Alicia Allmendinger, Anthony Stein
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art object detection models, including YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and RT-DETR, for the task of weed detection in smart-spraying applications focusing on three classes: Sugarbeet, Monocot, and Dicot. The performance of these models is compared based on mean Average Precision (mAP) scores and inference times on different GPU and CPU devices. We consider various model variations, such as nano, small, medium, large alongside different image resolutions (320px, 480px, 640px, 800px, 960px). The results highlight the trade-offs between inference time and detection accuracy, providing valuable insights for selecting the most suitable model for real-time weed detection. This study aims to guide the development of efficient and effective smart spraying systems, enhancing agricultural productivity through precise weed management.
Authors:Joonmo Ahna, Taehong Jang, Quan Fengnyu, Hyungil Lee, Jaehyuk Lee, Sojung Lucia Kim
Abstract:
We implemented a high-performance optical character recognition model for classical handwritten documents using data augmentation with highly variable cropping within the document region. Optical character recognition in handwritten documents, especially classical documents, has been a challenging topic in many countries and research organizations due to its difficulty. Although many researchers have conducted research on this topic, the quality of classical texts over time and the unique stylistic characteristics of various authors have made it difficult, and it is clear that the recognition of hanja handwritten documents is a meaningful and special challenge, especially since hanja, which has been developed by reflecting the vocabulary, semantic, and syntactic features of the Joseon Dynasty, is different from classical Chinese characters. To study this challenge, we used 1100 cursive documents, which are small in size, and augmented 100 documents per document by cropping a randomly sized region within each document for training, and trained them using a two-stage object detection model, High resolution neural network (HRNet), and applied the resulting model to achieve a high inference recognition rate of 90% for cursive documents. Through this study, we also confirmed that the performance of OCR is affected by the simplified characters, variants, variant characters, common characters, and alternators of Chinese characters that are difficult to see in other studies, and we propose that the results of this study can be applied to optical character recognition of modern documents in multiple languages as well as other typefaces in classical documents.
Authors:Silin Cheng, Yuanpei Liu, Kai Han
Abstract:
We tackle the challenging problem of Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD), which aims to detect both known and unknown objects in unlabelled images. The main difficulty arises from the absence of supervision for these unknown classes, making it challenging to distinguish them from the background. Existing OSOD detectors either fail to properly exploit or inadequately leverage the abundant unlabeled unknown objects in training data, restricting their performance. To address these limitations, we propose UADet, an Uncertainty-Aware Open-Set Object Detector that considers appearance and geometric uncertainty. By integrating these uncertainty measures, UADet effectively reduces the number of unannotated instances incorrectly utilized or omitted by previous methods. Extensive experiments on OSOD benchmarks demonstrate that UADet substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in detecting both known and unknown objects, achieving a 1.8x improvement in unknown recall while maintaining high performance on known classes. When extended to Open World Object Detection (OWOD), our method shows significant advantages over the current SOTA method, with average improvements of 13.8% and 6.9% in unknown recall on M-OWODB and S-OWODB benchmarks, respectively. Extensive results validate the effectiveness of our uncertainty-aware approach across different open-set scenarios.
Authors:Wenxuan Zhang, Peng Hu
Abstract:
The rapid increase of space assets represented by small satellites in low Earth orbit can enable ubiquitous digital services for everyone. However, due to the dynamic space environment, numerous space objects, complex atmospheric conditions, and unexpected events can easily introduce adverse conditions affecting space safety, operations, and sustainability of the outer space environment. This challenge calls for responsive, effective satellite object detection (SOD) solutions that allow a small satellite to assess and respond to collision risks, with the consideration of constrained resources on a small satellite platform. This paper discusses the SOD tasks and onboard deep learning (DL) approach to the tasks. Two new DL models are proposed, called GELAN-ViT and GELAN-RepViT, which incorporate vision transformer (ViT) into the Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN) architecture and address limitations by separating the convolutional neural network and ViT paths. These models outperform the state-of-the-art YOLOv9-t in terms of mean average precision (mAP) and computational costs. On the SOD dataset, our proposed models can achieve around 95% mAP50 with giga-floating point operations (GFLOPs) reduced by over 5.0. On the VOC 2012 dataset, they can achieve $\geq$ 60.7% mAP50 with GFLOPs reduced by over 5.2.
Authors:Zeshun Li, Fuhao Li, Wanting Zhang, Zijie Zheng, Xueping Liu, Yongjin Liu, Long Zeng
Abstract:
Most existing mobile robotic datasets primarily capture static scenes, limiting their utility for evaluating robotic performance in dynamic environments. To address this, we present a mobile robot oriented large-scale indoor dataset, denoted as THUD++ (TsingHua University Dynamic) robotic dataset, for dynamic scene understanding. Our current dataset includes 13 large-scale dynamic scenarios, combining both real-world and synthetic data collected with a real robot platform and a physical simulation platform, respectively. The RGB-D dataset comprises over 90K image frames, 20M 2D/3D bounding boxes of static and dynamic objects, camera poses, and IMU. The trajectory dataset covers over 6,000 pedestrian trajectories in indoor scenes. Additionally, the dataset is augmented with a Unity3D-based simulation platform, allowing researchers to create custom scenes and test algorithms in a controlled environment. We evaluate state-of-the-art methods on THUD++ across mainstream indoor scene understanding tasks, e.g., 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, relocalization, pedestrian trajectory prediction, and navigation. Our experiments highlight the challenges mobile robots encounter in indoor environments, especially when navigating in complex, crowded, and dynamic scenes. By sharing this dataset, we aim to accelerate the development and testing of mobile robot algorithms, contributing to real-world robotic applications.
Authors:Justin Lazarow, David Griffiths, Gefen Kohavi, Francisco Crespo, Afshin Dehghan
Abstract:
We consider indoor 3D object detection with respect to a single RGB(-D) frame acquired from a commodity handheld device. We seek to significantly advance the status quo with respect to both data and modeling. First, we establish that existing datasets have significant limitations to scale, accuracy, and diversity of objects. As a result, we introduce the Cubify-Anything 1M (CA-1M) dataset, which exhaustively labels over 400K 3D objects on over 1K highly accurate laser-scanned scenes with near-perfect registration to over 3.5K handheld, egocentric captures. Next, we establish Cubify Transformer (CuTR), a fully Transformer 3D object detection baseline which rather than operating in 3D on point or voxel-based representations, predicts 3D boxes directly from 2D features derived from RGB(-D) inputs. While this approach lacks any 3D inductive biases, we show that paired with CA-1M, CuTR outperforms point-based methods - accurately recalling over 62% of objects in 3D, and is significantly more capable at handling noise and uncertainty present in commodity LiDAR-derived depth maps while also providing promising RGB only performance without architecture changes. Furthermore, by pre-training on CA-1M, CuTR can outperform point-based methods on a more diverse variant of SUN RGB-D - supporting the notion that while inductive biases in 3D are useful at the smaller sizes of existing datasets, they fail to scale to the data-rich regime of CA-1M. Overall, this dataset and baseline model provide strong evidence that we are moving towards models which can effectively Cubify Anything.
Authors:Serhii Svystun, Oleksandr Melnychenko, Pavlo Radiuk, Oleg Savenko, Anatoliy Sachenko, Andrii Lysyi
Abstract:
The inspection of wind turbine blades (WTBs) is crucial for ensuring their structural integrity and operational efficiency. Traditional inspection methods can be dangerous and inefficient, prompting the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that access hard-to-reach areas and capture high-resolution imagery. In this study, we address the challenge of enhancing defect detection on WTBs by integrating thermal and RGB images obtained from UAVs. We propose a multispectral image composition method that combines thermal and RGB imagery through spatial coordinate transformation, key point detection, binary descriptor creation, and weighted image overlay. Using a benchmark dataset of WTB images annotated for defects, we evaluated several state-of-the-art object detection models. Our results show that composite images significantly improve defect detection efficiency. Specifically, the YOLOv8 model's accuracy increased from 91% to 95%, precision from 89% to 94%, recall from 85% to 92%, and F1-score from 87% to 93%. The number of false positives decreased from 6 to 3, and missed defects reduced from 5 to 2. These findings demonstrate that integrating thermal and RGB imagery enhances defect detection on WTBs, contributing to improved maintenance and reliability.
Authors:Zeel B Patel, Rishabh Mondal, Shataxi Dubey, Suraj Jaiswal, Sarath Guttikunda, Nipun Batra
Abstract:
Air pollution kills 7 million people annually. The brick kiln sector significantly contributes to economic development but also accounts for 8-14\% of air pollution in India. Policymakers have implemented compliance measures to regulate brick kilns. Emission inventories are critical for air quality modeling and source apportionment studies. However, the largely unorganized nature of the brick kiln sector necessitates labor-intensive survey efforts for monitoring. Recent efforts by air quality researchers have relied on manual annotation of brick kilns using satellite imagery to build emission inventories, but this approach lacks scalability. Machine-learning-based object detection methods have shown promise for detecting brick kilns; however, previous studies often rely on costly high-resolution imagery and fail to integrate with governmental policies. In this work, we developed a scalable machine-learning pipeline that detected and classified 30638 brick kilns across five states in the Indo-Gangetic Plain using free, moderate-resolution satellite imagery from Planet Labs. Our detections have a high correlation with on-ground surveys. We performed automated compliance analysis based on government policies. In the Delhi airshed, stricter policy enforcement has led to the adoption of efficient brick kiln technologies. This study highlights the need for inclusive policies that balance environmental sustainability with the livelihoods of workers.
Authors:Young-Jin Park, Carson Sobolewski, Navid Azizan
Abstract:
DEtection TRansformer (DETR) has emerged as a promising architecture for object detection, offering an end-to-end prediction pipeline. In practice, however, DETR generates hundreds of predictions that far outnumber the actual number of objects present in an image. This raises the question: can we trust and use all of these predictions? Addressing this concern, we present empirical evidence highlighting how different predictions within the same image play distinct roles, resulting in varying reliability levels across those predictions. More specifically, while multiple predictions are often made for a single object, our findings show that most often one such prediction is well-calibrated, and the others are poorly calibrated. Based on these insights, we demonstrate that identifying a reliable subset of DETR's predictions is crucial for accurately assessing the reliability of the model at both object and image levels.
Building on this viewpoint, we first address the shortcomings of widely used performance and calibration metrics, such as average precision and various forms of expected calibration error. Specifically, they are inadequate for determining which subset of DETR's predictions should be trusted and utilized. In response, we present Object-level Calibration Error (OCE), which assesses the calibration quality more effectively and is suitable for both ranking different models and identifying the most reliable predictions within a specific model. As a final contribution, we introduce a post hoc uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework that predicts the accuracy of the model on a per-image basis. By contrasting the average confidence scores of positive (i.e., likely to be matched) and negative predictions determined by OCE, our framework assesses the reliability of the DETR model for each test image.
Authors:Nitish Mital, Simon Malzard, Richard Walters, Celso M. De Melo, Raghuveer Rao, Victoria Nockles
Abstract:
Limited real-world data severely impacts model performance in many computer vision domains, particularly for samples that are underrepresented in training. Synthetically generated images are a promising solution, but 1) it remains unclear how to design synthetic training data to optimally improve model performance (e.g, whether and where to introduce more realism or more abstraction) and 2) the domain expertise, time and effort required from human operators for this design and optimisation process represents a major practical challenge. Here we propose a novel conceptual approach to improve the efficiency of designing synthetic images, by using robust Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to guide a human-in-the-loop process of modifying 3D mesh models used to generate these images. Importantly, this framework allows both modifications that increase and decrease realism in synthetic data, which can both improve model performance. We illustrate this concept using a real-world example where data are sparse; detection of vehicles in infrared imagery. We fine-tune an initial YOLOv8 model on the ATR DSIAC infrared dataset and synthetic images generated from 3D mesh models in the Unity gaming engine, and then use XAI saliency maps to guide modification of our Unity models. We show that synthetic data can improve detection of vehicles in orientations unseen in training by 4.6% (to mAP50 = 94.6%). We further improve performance by an additional 1.5% (to 96.1%) through our new XAI-guided approach, which reduces misclassifications through both increasing and decreasing the realism of different parts of the synthetic data. Our proof-of-concept results pave the way for fine, XAI-controlled curation of synthetic datasets tailored to improve object detection performance, whilst simultaneously reducing the burden on human operators in designing and optimising these datasets.
Authors:Weilin Xu, Sebastian Szyller, Cory Cornelius, Luis Murillo Rojas, Marius Arvinte, Alvaro Velasquez, Jason Martin, Nageen Himayat
Abstract:
Adversarial examples in the digital domain against deep learning-based computer vision models allow for perturbations that are imperceptible to human eyes. However, producing similar adversarial examples in the physical world has been difficult due to the non-differentiable image distortion functions in visual sensing systems. The existing algorithms for generating physically realizable adversarial examples often loosen their definition of adversarial examples by allowing unbounded perturbations, resulting in obvious or even strange visual patterns. In this work, we make adversarial examples imperceptible in the physical world using a straight-through estimator (STE, a.k.a. BPDA). We employ STE to overcome the non-differentiability -- applying exact, non-differentiable distortions in the forward pass of the backpropagation step, and using the identity function in the backward pass. Our differentiable rendering extension to STE also enables imperceptible adversarial patches in the physical world. Using printout photos, and experiments in the CARLA simulator, we show that STE enables fast generation of $\ell_\infty$ bounded adversarial examples despite the non-differentiable distortions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating imperceptible adversarial examples bounded by small $\ell_\infty$ norms in the physical world that force zero classification accuracy in the global perturbation threat model and cause near-zero ($4.22\%$) AP50 in object detection in the patch perturbation threat model. We urge the community to re-evaluate the threat of adversarial examples in the physical world.
Authors:Jialin Lu, Junjie Shan, Ziqi Zhao, Ka-Ho Chow
Abstract:
As object detection becomes integral to many safety-critical applications, understanding its vulnerabilities is essential. Backdoor attacks, in particular, pose a serious threat by implanting hidden triggers in victim models, which adversaries can later exploit to induce malicious behaviors during inference. However, current understanding is limited to single-target attacks, where adversaries must define a fixed malicious behavior (target) before training, making inference-time adaptability impossible. Given the large output space of object detection (including object existence prediction, bounding box estimation, and classification), the feasibility of flexible, inference-time model control remains unexplored. This paper introduces AnywhereDoor, a multi-target backdoor attack for object detection. Once implanted, AnywhereDoor allows adversaries to make objects disappear, fabricate new ones, or mislabel them, either across all object classes or specific ones, offering an unprecedented degree of control. This flexibility is enabled by three key innovations: (i) objective disentanglement to scale the number of supported targets; (ii) trigger mosaicking to ensure robustness even against region-based detectors; and (iii) strategic batching to address object-level data imbalances that hinder manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnywhereDoor grants attackers a high degree of control, improving attack success rates by 26% compared to adaptations of existing methods for such flexible control.
Authors:Chen-Long Duan, Yong Li, Xiu-Shen Wei, Lin Zhao
Abstract:
Pre-training plays a vital role in various vision tasks, such as object recognition and detection. Commonly used pre-training methods, which typically rely on randomized approaches like uniform or Gaussian distributions to initialize model parameters, often fall short when confronted with long-tailed distributions, especially in detection tasks. This is largely due to extreme data imbalance and the issue of simplicity bias. In this paper, we introduce a novel pre-training framework for object detection, called Dynamic Rebalancing Contrastive Learning with Dual Reconstruction (2DRCL). Our method builds on a Holistic-Local Contrastive Learning mechanism, which aligns pre-training with object detection by capturing both global contextual semantics and detailed local patterns. To tackle the imbalance inherent in long-tailed data, we design a dynamic rebalancing strategy that adjusts the sampling of underrepresented instances throughout the pre-training process, ensuring better representation of tail classes. Moreover, Dual Reconstruction addresses simplicity bias by enforcing a reconstruction task aligned with the self-consistency principle, specifically benefiting underrepresented tail classes. Experiments on COCO and LVIS v1.0 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, particularly in improving the mAP/AP scores for tail classes.
Authors:Yawen Xiang, Heng Zhou, Chengyang Li, Zhongbo Li, Yongqiang Xie
Abstract:
Image deblurring is an essential image preprocessing technique, aiming to recover clear and detailed images form blurry ones. However, existing algorithms often fail to effectively integrate multi-scale feature extraction with frequency enhancement, limiting their ability to reconstruct fine textures. Additionally, non-uniform blur in images also restricts the effectiveness of image restoration. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale frequency enhancement network (MFENet) for blind image deblurring. To capture the multi-scale spatial and channel information of blurred images, we introduce a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS-FE) based on depthwise separable convolutions, which provides rich target features for deblurring. We propose a frequency enhanced blur perception module (FEBP) that employs wavelet transforms to extract high-frequency details and utilizes multi-strip pooling to perceive non-uniform blur, combining multi-scale information with frequency enhancement to improve the restoration of image texture details. Experimental results on the GoPro and HIDE datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior deblurring performance in both visual quality and objective evaluation metrics. Furthermore, in downstream object detection tasks, the proposed blind image deblurring algorithm significantly improves detection accuracy, further validating its effectiveness androbustness in the field of image deblurring.
Authors:Ryoma Yataka, Pu Perry Wang, Petros Boufounos, Ryuhei Takahashi
Abstract:
Conventional radar feature extraction faces limitations due to low spatial resolution, noise, multipath reflection, the presence of ghost targets, and motion blur. Such limitations can be exacerbated by nonlinear object motion, particularly from an ego-centric viewpoint. It becomes evident that to address these challenges, the key lies in exploiting temporal feature relation over an extended horizon and enforcing spatial motion consistency for effective association. To this end, this paper proposes SIRA (Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association) with two designs. First, inspired by Swin Transformer, we introduce extended temporal relation, generalizing the existing temporal relation layer from two consecutive frames to multiple inter-frames with temporally regrouped window attention for scalability. Second, we propose motion consistency track with the concept of a pseudo-tracklet generated from observational data for better trajectory prediction and subsequent object association. Our approach achieves 58.11 mAP@0.5 for oriented object detection and 47.79 MOTA for multiple object tracking on the Radiate dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art by a margin of +4.11 mAP@0.5 and +9.94 MOTA, respectively.
Authors:Sourav Modak, Anthony Stein
Abstract:
In automated crop protection tasks such as weed control, disease diagnosis, and pest monitoring, deep learning has demonstrated significant potential. However, these advanced models rely heavily on high-quality, diverse datasets, often limited and costly in agricultural settings. Traditional data augmentation can increase dataset volume but usually lacks the real-world variability needed for robust training. This study presents a new approach for generating synthetic images to improve deep learning-based object detection models for intelligent weed control. Our GenAI-based image generation pipeline integrates the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for zero-shot domain adaptation with a text-to-image Stable Diffusion Model, enabling the creation of synthetic images that capture diverse real-world conditions. We evaluate these synthetic datasets using lightweight YOLO models, measuring data efficiency with mAP50 and mAP50-95 scores across varying proportions of real and synthetic data. Notably, YOLO models trained on datasets with 10% synthetic and 90% real images generally demonstrate superior mAP50 and mAP50-95 scores compared to those trained solely on real images. This approach not only reduces dependence on extensive real-world datasets but also enhances predictive performance. The integration of this approach opens opportunities for achieving continual self-improvement of perception modules in intelligent technical systems.
Authors:Xiaotian Li, Baojie Fan, Jiandong Tian, Huijie Fan
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed the remarkable progress of 3D multi-modality object detection methods based on the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perspective. However, most of them overlook the complementary interaction and guidance between LiDAR and camera. In this work, we propose a novel multi-modality 3D objection detection method, named GAFusion, with LiDAR-guided global interaction and adaptive fusion. Specifically, we introduce sparse depth guidance (SDG) and LiDAR occupancy guidance (LOG) to generate 3D features with sufficient depth information. In the following, LiDAR-guided adaptive fusion transformer (LGAFT) is developed to adaptively enhance the interaction of different modal BEV features from a global perspective. Meanwhile, additional downsampling with sparse height compression and multi-scale dual-path transformer (MSDPT) are designed to enlarge the receptive fields of different modal features. Finally, a temporal fusion module is introduced to aggregate features from previous frames. GAFusion achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results with 73.6$\%$ mAP and 74.9$\%$ NDS on the nuScenes test set.
Authors:Vasileios Tzouras, Lazaros Nalpantidis, Ronja Güldenring
Abstract:
In precision agriculture, vision models often struggle with new, unseen fields where crops and weeds have been influenced by external factors, resulting in compositions and appearances that differ from the learned distribution. This paper aims to adapt to specific fields at low cost using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). We explore a novel domain shift from a diverse, large pool of internet-sourced data to a small set of data collected by a robot at specific locations, minimizing the need for extensive on-field data collection. Additionally, we introduce a novel module -- the Multi-level Attention-based Adversarial Discriminator (MAAD) -- which can be integrated at the feature extractor level of any detection model. In this study, we incorporate MAAD with CenterNet to simultaneously detect leaf, stem, and vein instances. Our results show significant performance improvements in the unlabeled target domain compared to baseline models, with a 7.5% increase in object detection accuracy and a 5.1% improvement in keypoint detection.
Authors:Tianyi Zhang, Baoxin Li, Jae-sun Seo, Yu Cao
Abstract:
In recent years, the long-range attention mechanism of vision transformers has driven significant performance breakthroughs across various computer vision tasks. However, the traditional self-attention mechanism, which processes both informative and non-informative tokens, suffers from inefficiency and inaccuracies. While sparse attention mechanisms have been introduced to mitigate these issues by pruning tokens involved in attention, they often lack context-awareness and intelligence. These mechanisms frequently apply a uniform token selection strategy across different inputs for batch training or optimize efficiency only for the inference stage. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm: Select and Pack Attention (SPA). SPA dynamically selects informative tokens using a low-cost gating layer supervised by selection labels and packs these tokens into new batches, enabling a variable number of tokens to be used in parallelized GPU batch training and inference. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and computer vision tasks demonstrate that SPA delivers superior performance and efficiency, including a 0.6 mAP improvement in object detection and a 16.4% reduction in computational costs.
Authors:Maciej K. Wozniak, Hariprasath Govindarajan, Marvin Klingner, Camille Maurice, B Ravi Kiran, Senthil Yogamani
Abstract:
Recent self-supervised clustering-based pre-training techniques like DINO and Cribo have shown impressive results for downstream detection and segmentation tasks. However, real-world applications such as autonomous driving face challenges with imbalanced object class and size distributions and complex scene geometries. In this paper, we propose S3PT a novel scene semantics and structure guided clustering to provide more scene-consistent objectives for self-supervised training. Specifically, our contributions are threefold: First, we incorporate semantic distribution consistent clustering to encourage better representation of rare classes such as motorcycles or animals. Second, we introduce object diversity consistent spatial clustering, to handle imbalanced and diverse object sizes, ranging from large background areas to small objects such as pedestrians and traffic signs. Third, we propose a depth-guided spatial clustering to regularize learning based on geometric information of the scene, thus further refining region separation on the feature level. Our learned representations significantly improve performance in downstream semantic segmentation and 3D object detection tasks on the nuScenes, nuImages, and Cityscapes datasets and show promising domain translation properties.
Authors:Jiaming Qiu, Ruiqi Wang, Brooks Hu, Roch Guerin, Chenyang Lu
Abstract:
Recent advances in machine learning and hardware have produced embedded devices capable of performing real-time object detection with commendable accuracy. We consider a scenario in which embedded devices rely on an onboard object detector, but have the option to offload detection to a more powerful edge server when local accuracy is deemed too low. Resource constraints, however, limit the number of images that can be offloaded to the edge. Our goal is to identify which images to offload to maximize overall detection accuracy under those constraints. To that end, the paper introduces a reward metric designed to quantify potential accuracy improvements from offloading individual images, and proposes an efficient approach to make offloading decisions by estimating this reward based only on local detection results. The approach is computationally frugal enough to run on embedded devices, and empirical findings indicate that it outperforms existing alternatives in improving detection accuracy even when the fraction of offloaded images is small.
Authors:Zhixiong Nan, Xianghong Li, Tao Xiang, Jifeng Dai
Abstract:
This paper is motivated by an interesting phenomenon: the performance of object detection lags behind that of instance segmentation (i.e., performance imbalance) when investigating the intermediate results from the beginning transformer decoder layer of MaskDINO (i.e., the SOTA model for joint detection and segmentation). This phenomenon inspires us to think about a question: will the performance imbalance at the beginning layer of transformer decoder constrain the upper bound of the final performance? With this question in mind, we further conduct qualitative and quantitative pre-experiments, which validate the negative impact of detection-segmentation imbalance issue on the model performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes DI-MaskDINO model, the core idea of which is to improve the final performance by alleviating the detection-segmentation imbalance. DI-MaskDINO is implemented by configuring our proposed De-Imbalance (DI) module and Balance-Aware Tokens Optimization (BATO) module to MaskDINO. DI is responsible for generating balance-aware query, and BATO uses the balance-aware query to guide the optimization of the initial feature tokens. The balance-aware query and optimized feature tokens are respectively taken as the Query and Key&Value of transformer decoder to perform joint object detection and instance segmentation. DI-MaskDINO outperforms existing joint object detection and instance segmentation models on COCO and BDD100K benchmarks, achieving +1.2 $AP^{box}$ and +0.9 $AP^{mask}$ improvements compared to SOTA joint detection and segmentation model MaskDINO. In addition, DI-MaskDINO also obtains +1.0 $AP^{box}$ improvement compared to SOTA object detection model DINO and +3.0 $AP^{mask}$ improvement compared to SOTA segmentation model Mask2Former.
Authors:Alina Ciocarlan, Sidonie Lefebvre, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Arnaud Woiselle
Abstract:
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising approach in computer vision, enabling networks to learn meaningful representations from large unlabeled datasets. SSL methods fall into two main categories: instance discrimination and Masked Image Modeling (MIM). While instance discrimination is fundamental to SSL, it was originally designed for classification and may be less effective for object detection, particularly for small objects. In this survey, we focus on SSL methods specifically tailored for real-world object detection, with an emphasis on detecting small objects in complex environments. Unlike previous surveys, we offer a detailed comparison of SSL strategies, including object-level instance discrimination and MIM methods, and assess their effectiveness for small object detection using both CNN and ViT-based architectures. Specifically, our benchmark is performed on the widely-used COCO dataset, as well as on a specialized real-world dataset focused on vehicle detection in infrared remote sensing imagery. We also assess the impact of pre-training on custom domain-specific datasets, highlighting how certain SSL strategies are better suited for handling uncurated data.
Our findings highlight that instance discrimination methods perform well with CNN-based encoders, while MIM methods are better suited for ViT-based architectures and custom dataset pre-training. This survey provides a practical guide for selecting optimal SSL strategies, taking into account factors such as backbone architecture, object size, and custom pre-training requirements. Ultimately, we show that choosing an appropriate SSL pre-training strategy, along with a suitable encoder, significantly enhances performance in real-world object detection, particularly for small object detection in frugal settings.
Authors:Alina Ciocarlan, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Sidonie Lefebvre, Arnaud Woiselle
Abstract:
Detecting small targets in infrared images poses significant challenges in defense applications due to the presence of complex backgrounds and the small size of the targets. Traditional object detection methods often struggle to balance high detection rates with low false alarm rates, especially when dealing with small objects. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that combines a contrario paradigm with Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to improve Infrared Small Target Detection (IRSTD). On the one hand, the integration of an a contrario criterion into a YOLO detection head enhances feature map responses for small and unexpected objects while effectively controlling false alarms. On the other hand, we explore SSL techniques to overcome the challenges of limited annotated data, common in IRSTD tasks. Specifically, we benchmark several representative SSL strategies for their effectiveness in improving small object detection performance. Our findings show that instance discrimination methods outperform masked image modeling strategies when applied to YOLO-based small object detection. Moreover, the combination of the a contrario and SSL paradigms leads to significant performance improvements, narrowing the gap with state-of-the-art segmentation methods and even outperforming them in frugal settings. This two-pronged approach offers a robust solution for improving IRSTD performance, particularly under challenging conditions.
Authors:Zichen Tian, Zhaozheng Chen, Qianru Sun
Abstract:
Remote sensing (RS) imagery, requiring specialized satellites to collect and being difficult to annotate, suffers from data scarcity and class imbalance in certain spectrums. Due to data scarcity, training any large-scale RS models from scratch is unrealistic, and the alternative is to transfer pre-trained models by fine-tuning or a more data-efficient method LoRA. Due to class imbalance, transferred models exhibit strong bias, where features of the major class dominate over those of the minor class. In this paper, we propose debLoRA, a generic training approach that works with any LoRA variants to yield debiased features. It is an unsupervised learning approach that can diversify minor class features based on the shared attributes with major classes, where the attributes are obtained by a simple step of clustering. To evaluate it, we conduct extensive experiments in two transfer learning scenarios in the RS domain: from natural to optical RS images, and from optical RS to multi-spectrum RS images. We perform object classification and oriented object detection tasks on the optical RS dataset DOTA and the SAR dataset FUSRS. Results show that our debLoRA consistently surpasses prior arts across these RS adaptation settings, yielding up to 3.3 and 4.7 percentage points gains on the tail classes for natural to optical RS and optical RS to multi-spectrum RS adaptations, respectively, while preserving the performance on head classes, substantiating its efficacy and adaptability.
Authors:Jer Pelhan, Alan LukežiÄ, Vitjan Zavrtanik, Matej Kristan
Abstract:
Low-shot object counters estimate the number of objects in an image using few or no annotated exemplars. Objects are localized by matching them to prototypes, which are constructed by unsupervised image-wide object appearance aggregation. Due to potentially diverse object appearances, the existing approaches often lead to overgeneralization and false positive detections. Furthermore, the best-performing methods train object localization by a surrogate loss, that predicts a unit Gaussian at each object center. This loss is sensitive to annotation error, hyperparameters and does not directly optimize the detection task, leading to suboptimal counts. We introduce GeCo, a novel low-shot counter that achieves accurate object detection, segmentation, and count estimation in a unified architecture. GeCo robustly generalizes the prototypes across objects appearances through a novel dense object query formulation. In addition, a novel counting loss is proposed, that directly optimizes the detection task and avoids the issues of the standard surrogate loss. GeCo surpasses the leading few-shot detection-based counters by $\sim$25\% in the total count MAE, achieves superior detection accuracy and sets a new solid state-of-the-art result across all low-shot counting setups.
Authors:Muhammad Mohsin, Stefano Rovetta, Francesco Masulli, Alberto Cabri
Abstract:
Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) such as copper, manganese, gallium, and various rare earths have great importance for the electronic industry. To increase the concentration of individual CRMs and thus make their extraction from Waste Printed Circuit Boards (WPCBs) convenient, we have proposed a practical approach that involves selective disassembling of the different types of electronic components from WPCBs using mechatronic systems guided by artificial vision techniques. In this paper we evaluate the real-time accuracy of electronic component detection and localization of the Real-Time DEtection TRansformer model architecture. Transformers have recently become very popular for the extraordinary results obtained in natural language processing and machine translation. Also in this case, the transformer model achieves very good performances, often superior to those of the latest state of the art object detection and localization models YOLOv8 and YOLOv9.
Authors:Yuqi Ma, Mengyin Liu, Chao Zhu, Xu-Cheng Yin
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) models are considered to be Large Multi-modal Models (LMM), due to their extensive training data and a large number of parameters. Mainstream OVD models prioritize object coarse-grained category rather than focus on their fine-grained attributes, e.g., colors or materials, thus failed to identify objects specified with certain attributes. However, OVD models are pretrained on large-scale image-text pairs with rich attribute words, whose latent feature space can represent the global text feature as a linear composition of fine-grained attribute tokens without highlighting them. Therefore, we propose in this paper a universal and explicit approach for frozen mainstream OVD models that boosts their attribute-level detection capabilities by highlighting fine-grained attributes in explicit linear space. Firstly, a LLM is leveraged to highlight attribute words within the input text as a zero-shot prompted task. Secondly, by strategically adjusting the token masks, the text encoders of OVD models extract both global text and attribute-specific features, which are then explicitly composited as two vectors in linear space to form the new attribute-highlighted feature for detection tasks, where corresponding scalars are hand-crafted or learned to reweight both two vectors. Notably, these scalars can be seamlessly transferred among different OVD models, which proves that such an explicit linear composition is universal. Empirical evaluation on the FG-OVD dataset demonstrates that our proposed method uniformly improves fine-grained attribute-level OVD of various mainstream models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Vanshika Vats, Marzia Binta Nizam, James Davis
Abstract:
Vehicle object detection benefits from both LiDAR and camera data, with LiDAR offering superior performance in many scenarios. Fusion of these modalities further enhances accuracy, but existing methods often introduce complexity or dataset-specific dependencies. In our study, we propose a model-adaptive late-fusion method, VaLID, which validates whether each predicted bounding box is acceptable or not. Our method verifies the higher-performing, yet overly optimistic LiDAR model detections using camera detections that are obtained from either specially trained, general, or open-vocabulary models. VaLID uses a lightweight neural verification network trained with a high recall bias to reduce the false predictions made by the LiDAR detector, while still preserving the true ones. Evaluating with multiple combinations of LiDAR and camera detectors on the KITTI dataset, we reduce false positives by an average of 63.9%, thus outperforming the individual detectors on 3D average precision (3DAP). Our approach is model-adaptive and demonstrates state-of-the-art competitive performance even when using generic camera detectors that were not trained specifically for this dataset.
Authors:Ruoyu Song, Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Hyungsub Kim, Antonio Bianchi, Z. Berkay Celik
Abstract:
There is a growing interest in integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with autonomous driving (AD) systems. However, AD systems are vulnerable to attacks against their object detection and tracking (ODT) functions. Unfortunately, our evaluation of four recent LLM agents against ODT attacks shows that the attacks are 63.26% successful in causing them to crash or violate traffic rules due to (1) misleading memory modules that provide past experiences for decision making, (2) limitations of prompts in identifying inconsistencies, and (3) reliance on ground truth perception data.
In this paper, we introduce Hudson, a driving reasoning agent that extends prior LLM-based driving systems to enable safer decision making during perception attacks while maintaining effectiveness under benign conditions. Hudson achieves this by first instrumenting the AD software to collect real-time perception results and contextual information from the driving scene. This data is then formalized into a domain-specific language (DSL). To guide the LLM in detecting and making safe control decisions during ODT attacks, Hudson translates the DSL into natural language, along with a list of custom attack detection instructions. Following query execution, Hudson analyzes the LLM's control decision to understand its causal reasoning process.
We evaluate the effectiveness of Hudson using a proprietary LLM (GPT-4) and two open-source LLMs (Llama and Gemma) in various adversarial driving scenarios. GPT-4, Llama, and Gemma achieve, on average, an attack detection accuracy of 83. 3%, 63. 6%, and 73. 6%. Consequently, they make safe control decisions in 86.4%, 73.9%, and 80% of the attacks. Our results, following the growing interest in integrating LLMs into AD systems, highlight the strengths of LLMs and their potential to detect and mitigate ODT attacks.
Authors:Xiaoyu Li, Peidong Li, Lijun Zhao, Dedong Liu, Jinghan Gao, Xian Wu, Yitao Wu, Dixiao Cui
Abstract:
3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) obtains significant performance improvements with the rapid advancements in 3D object detection, particularly in cost-effective multi-camera setups. However, the prevalent end-to-end training approach for multi-camera trackers results in detector-specific models, limiting their versatility. Moreover, current generic trackers overlook the unique features of multi-camera detectors, i.e., the unreliability of motion observations and the feasibility of visual information. To address these challenges, we propose RockTrack, a 3D MOT method for multi-camera detectors. Following the Tracking-By-Detection framework, RockTrack is compatible with various off-the-shelf detectors. RockTrack incorporates a confidence-guided preprocessing module to extract reliable motion and image observations from distinct representation spaces from a single detector. These observations are then fused in an association module that leverages geometric and appearance cues to minimize mismatches. The resulting matches are propagated through a staged estimation process, forming the basis for heuristic noise modeling. Additionally, we introduce a novel appearance similarity metric for explicitly characterizing object affinities in multi-camera settings. RockTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes vision-only tracking leaderboard with 59.1% AMOTA while demonstrating impressive computational efficiency.
Authors:Yanan Jian, Fuxun Yu, Qi Zhang, William Levine, Brandon Dubbs, Nikolaos Karianakis
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel way of online adapting any off-the-shelf object detection model to a novel domain without retraining the detector model. Inspired by how humans quickly learn knowledge of a new subject (e.g., memorization), we allow the detector to look up similar object concepts from memory during test time. This is achieved through a retrieval augmented classification (RAC) module together with a memory bank that can be flexibly updated with new domain knowledge. We experimented with various off-the-shelf open-set detector and close-set detectors. With only a tiny memory bank (e.g., 10 images per category) and being training-free, our online learning method could significantly outperform baselines in adapting a detector to novel domains.
Authors:Cagri Gungor, Adriana Kovashka
Abstract:
While motion has garnered attention in various tasks, its potential as a modality for weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) in static images remains unexplored. Our study introduces an approach to enhance WSOD methods by integrating motion information. This method involves leveraging hallucinated motion from static images to improve WSOD on image datasets, utilizing a Siamese network for enhanced representation learning with motion, addressing camera motion through motion normalization, and selectively training images based on object motion. Experimental validation on the COCO and YouTube-BB datasets demonstrates improvements over a state-of-the-art method.
Authors:Yechan Kim, SooYeon Kim, Moongu Jeon
Abstract:
Data augmentation has shown significant advancements in computer vision to improve model performance over the years, particularly in scenarios with limited and insufficient data. Currently, most studies focus on adjusting the image or its features to expand the size, quality, and variety of samples during training in various tasks including object detection. However, we argue that it is necessary to investigate bounding box transformations as a data augmentation technique rather than image-level transformations, especially in aerial imagery due to potentially inconsistent bounding box annotations. Hence, this letter presents a thorough investigation of bounding box transformation in terms of scaling, rotation, and translation for remote sensing object detection. We call this augmentation strategy NBBOX (Noise Injection into Bounding Box). We conduct extensive experiments on DOTA and DIOR-R, both well-known datasets that include a variety of rotated generic objects in aerial images. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves remote sensing object detection without whistles and bells and it is more time-efficient than other state-of-the-art augmentation strategies.
Authors:David Tschirschwitz, Volker Rodehorst
Abstract:
Annotation errors are a challenge not only during training of machine learning models, but also during their evaluation. Label variations and inaccuracies in datasets often manifest as contradictory examples that deviate from established labeling conventions. Such inconsistencies, when significant, prevent models from achieving optimal performance on metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP). We introduce the notion of "label convergence" to describe the highest achievable performance under the constraint of contradictory test annotations, essentially defining an upper bound on model accuracy.
Recognizing that noise is an inherent characteristic of all data, our study analyzes five real-world datasets, including the LVIS dataset, to investigate the phenomenon of label convergence. We approximate that label convergence is between 62.63-67.52 mAP@[0.5:0.95:0.05] for LVIS with 95% confidence, attributing these bounds to the presence of real annotation errors. With current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models at the upper end of the label convergence interval for the well-studied LVIS dataset, we conclude that model capacity is sufficient to solve current object detection problems. Therefore, future efforts should focus on three key aspects: (1) updating the problem specification and adjusting evaluation practices to account for unavoidable label noise, (2) creating cleaner data, especially test data, and (3) including multi-annotated data to investigate annotation variation and make these issues visible from the outset.
Authors:Rui Yu, Runkai Zhao, Cong Nie, Heng Wang, HuaiCheng Yan, Meng Wang
Abstract:
Accurate and robust LiDAR 3D object detection is essential for comprehensive scene understanding in autonomous driving. Despite its importance, LiDAR detection performance is limited by inherent constraints of point cloud data, particularly under conditions of extended distances and occlusions. Recently, temporal aggregation has been proven to significantly enhance detection accuracy by fusing multi-frame viewpoint information and enriching the spatial representation of objects. In this work, we introduce a novel LiDAR 3D object detection framework, namely LiSTM, to facilitate spatial-temporal feature learning with cross-frame motion forecasting information. We aim to improve the spatial-temporal interpretation capabilities of the LiDAR detector by incorporating a dynamic prior, generated from a non-learnable motion estimation model. Specifically, Motion-Guided Feature Aggregation (MGFA) is proposed to utilize the object trajectory from previous and future motion states to model spatial-temporal correlations into gaussian heatmap over a driving sequence. This motion-based heatmap then guides the temporal feature fusion, enriching the proposed object features. Moreover, we design a Dual Correlation Weighting Module (DCWM) that effectively facilitates the interaction between past and prospective frames through scene- and channel-wise feature abstraction. In the end, a cascade cross-attention-based decoder is employed to refine the 3D prediction. We have conducted experiments on the Waymo and nuScenes datasets to demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior 3D detection performance with effective spatial-temporal feature learning.
Authors:Sanjita Prajapati, Tanu Singh, Chinmay Hegde, Pranamesh Chakraborty
Abstract:
Recent developments in vision language models (VLM) have shown great potential for diverse applications related to image understanding. In this study, we have explored state-of-the-art VLM models for vision-based transportation engineering tasks such as image classification and object detection. The image classification task involves congestion detection and crack identification, whereas, for object detection, helmet violations were identified. We have applied open-source models such as CLIP, BLIP, OWL-ViT, Llava-Next, and closed-source GPT-4o to evaluate the performance of these state-of-the-art VLM models to harness the capabilities of language understanding for vision-based transportation tasks. These tasks were performed by applying zero-shot prompting to the VLM models, as zero-shot prompting involves performing tasks without any training on those tasks. It eliminates the need for annotated datasets or fine-tuning for specific tasks. Though these models gave comparative results with benchmark Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models in the image classification tasks, for object localization tasks, it still needs improvement. Therefore, this study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art VLM models highlighting the advantages and limitations of the models, which can be taken as the baseline for future improvement and wide-scale implementation.
Authors:Nazmul Karim, Abdullah Al Arafat, Adnan Siraj Rakin, Zhishan Guo, Nazanin Rahnavard
Abstract:
Studies on backdoor attacks in recent years suggest that an adversary can compromise the integrity of a deep neural network (DNN) by manipulating a small set of training samples. Our analysis shows that such manipulation can make the backdoor model converge to a bad local minima, i.e., sharper minima as compared to a benign model. Intuitively, the backdoor can be purified by re-optimizing the model to smoother minima. However, a naïve adoption of any optimization targeting smoother minima can lead to sub-optimal purification techniques hampering the clean test accuracy. Hence, to effectively obtain such re-optimization, inspired by our novel perspective establishing the connection between backdoor removal and loss smoothness, we propose Fisher Information guided Purification (FIP), a novel backdoor purification framework. Proposed FIP consists of a couple of novel regularizers that aid the model in suppressing the backdoor effects and retaining the acquired knowledge of clean data distribution throughout the backdoor removal procedure through exploiting the knowledge of Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). In addition, we introduce an efficient variant of FIP, dubbed as Fast FIP, which reduces the number of tunable parameters significantly and obtains an impressive runtime gain of almost $5\times$. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on a wide range of backdoor defense benchmarks: 5 different tasks -- Image Recognition, Object Detection, Video Action Recognition, 3D point Cloud, Language Generation; 11 different datasets including ImageNet, PASCAL VOC, UCF101; diverse model architectures spanning both CNN and vision transformer; 14 different backdoor attacks, e.g., Dynamic, WaNet, LIRA, ISSBA, etc.
Authors:Eden Ship, Eitan Spivak, Shubham Agarwal, Raz Birman, Ofer Hadar
Abstract:
Accurate classification of weather conditions in images is essential for enhancing the performance of object detection and classification models under varying weather conditions. This paper presents a comprehensive study on classifying weather conditions in images into four categories: rainy, low light, haze, and clear. The motivation for this work stems from the need to improve the reliability and efficiency of automated systems, such as autonomous vehicles and surveillance, which must operate under diverse weather conditions. Misclassification of weather conditions can lead to significant performance degradation in these systems, making robust weather classification crucial. Utilizing the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm, our approach leverages a robust set of features, including brightness, saturation, noise level, blur metric, edge strength, motion blur, Local Binary Patterns (LBP) mean and variance for radii 1, 2, and 3, edges mean and variance, and color histogram mean and variance for blue, green, and red channels. Our SVM-based method achieved a notable accuracy of 92.8%, surpassing typical benchmarks in the literature, which range from 80% to 90% for classical machine learning methods. While deep learning methods can achieve up to 94% accuracy, our approach offers a competitive advantage in terms of computational efficiency and real-time classification capabilities. Detailed analysis of each feature's contribution highlights the effectiveness of texture, color, and edge-related features in capturing the unique characteristics of different weather conditions. This research advances the state-of-the-art in weather image classification and provides insights into the critical features necessary for accurate weather condition differentiation, underscoring the potential of SVMs in practical applications where accuracy is paramount.
Authors:Mark Deutel, Christopher Mutschler, Jürgen Teich
Abstract:
This work-in-progress paper presents results on the feasibility of single-shot object detection on microcontrollers using YOLO. Single-shot object detectors like YOLO are widely used, however due to their complexity mainly on larger GPU-based platforms. We present microYOLO, which can be used on Cortex-M based microcontrollers, such as the OpenMV H7 R2, achieving about 3.5 FPS when classifying 128x128 RGB images while using less than 800 KB Flash and less than 350 KB RAM. Furthermore, we share experimental results for three different object detection tasks, analyzing the accuracy of microYOLO on them.
Authors:Mohammad Hossein Amini, Shiva Nejati
Abstract:
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) are typically trained on real-world images and tested using synthetic simulator images. This approach results in training and test datasets with dissimilar distributions, which can potentially lead to erroneously decreased test accuracy. To address this issue, the literature suggests applying domain-to-domain translators to test datasets to bring them closer to the training datasets. However, translating images used for testing may unpredictably affect the reliability, effectiveness and efficiency of the testing process. Hence, this paper investigates the following questions in the context of ADS: Could translators reduce the effectiveness of images used for ADS-DNN testing and their ability to reveal faults in ADS-DNNs? Can translators result in excessive time overhead during simulation-based testing? To address these questions, we consider three domain-to-domain translators: CycleGAN and neural style transfer, from the literature, and SAEVAE, our proposed translator. Our results for two critical ADS tasks -- lane keeping and object detection -- indicate that translators significantly narrow the gap in ADS test accuracy caused by distribution dissimilarities between training and test data, with SAEVAE outperforming the other two translators. We show that, based on the recent diversity, coverage, and fault-revealing ability metrics for testing deep-learning systems, translators do not compromise the diversity and the coverage of test data, nor do they lead to revealing fewer faults in ADS-DNNs. Further, among the translators considered, SAEVAE incurs a negligible overhead in simulation time and can be efficiently integrated into simulation-based testing. Finally, we show that translators increase the correlation between offline and simulation-based testing results, which can help reduce the cost of simulation-based testing.
Authors:Wenjing Bian, Zirui Wang, Andrea Vedaldi
Abstract:
Image-based 3D object detection is widely employed in applications such as autonomous vehicles and robotics, yet current systems struggle with generalisation due to complex problem setup and limited training data. We introduce a novel pipeline that decouples 3D detection from 2D detection and depth prediction, using a diffusion-based approach to improve accuracy and support category-agnostic detection. Additionally, we introduce the Normalised Hungarian Distance (NHD) metric for an accurate evaluation of 3D detection results, addressing the limitations of traditional IoU and GIoU metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalisation across various object categories and datasets.
Authors:Zhanyun Lu, Renshu Gu, Huimin Cheng, Siyu Pang, Mingyu Xu, Peifang Xu, Yaqi Wang, Yuichiro Kinoshita, Juan Ye, Gangyong Jia, Qing Wu
Abstract:
Medical image datasets in the real world are often unlabeled and imbalanced, and Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) can utilize unlabeled data to improve an object detector. However, existing approaches predominantly assumed that the unlabeled data and test data do not contain out-of-distribution (OOD) classes. The few open-set semi-supervised object detection methods have two weaknesses: first, the class imbalance is not considered; second, the OOD instances are distinguished and simply discarded during pseudo-labeling. In this paper, we consider the open-set semi-supervised object detection problem which leverages unlabeled data that contain OOD classes to improve object detection for medical images. Our study incorporates two key innovations: Category Control Embed (CCE) and out-of-distribution Detection Fusion Classifier (OODFC). CCE is designed to tackle dataset imbalance by constructing a Foreground information Library, while OODFC tackles open-set challenges by integrating the ``unknown'' information into basic pseudo-labels. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art SSOD performance, achieving a 4.25 mAP improvement on the public Parasite dataset.
Authors:Hans Aoyang Zhou, Dominik Wolfschläger, Constantinos Florides, Jonas Werheid, Hannes Behnen, Jan-Henrick Woltersmann, Tiago C. Pinto, Marco Kemmerling, Anas Abdelrazeq, Robert H. Schmitt
Abstract:
Machine vision enhances automation, quality control, and operational efficiency in industrial applications by enabling machines to interpret and act on visual data. While traditional computer vision algorithms and approaches remain widely utilized, machine learning has become pivotal in current research activities. In particular, generative AI demonstrates promising potential by improving pattern recognition capabilities, through data augmentation, increasing image resolution, and identifying anomalies for quality control. However, the application of generative AI in machine vision is still in its early stages due to challenges in data diversity, computational requirements, and the necessity for robust validation methods. A comprehensive literature review is essential to understand the current state of generative AI in industrial machine vision, focusing on recent advancements, applications, and research trends. Thus, a literature review based on the PRISMA guidelines was conducted, analyzing over 1,200 papers on generative AI in industrial machine vision. Our findings reveal various patterns in current research, with the primary use of generative AI being data augmentation, for machine vision tasks such as classification and object detection. Furthermore, we gather a collection of application challenges together with data requirements to enable a successful application of generative AI in industrial machine vision. This overview aims to provide researchers with insights into the different areas and applications within current research, highlighting significant advancements and identifying opportunities for future work.
Authors:Wiktor Mucha, Michael Wray, Martin Kampel
Abstract:
Hand pose represents key information for action recognition in the egocentric perspective, where the user is interacting with objects. We propose to improve egocentric 3D hand pose estimation based on RGB frames only by using pseudo-depth images. Incorporating state-of-the-art single RGB image depth estimation techniques, we generate pseudo-depth representations of the frames and use distance knowledge to segment irrelevant parts of the scene. The resulting depth maps are then used as segmentation masks for the RGB frames. Experimental results on H2O Dataset confirm the high accuracy of the estimated pose with our method in an action recognition task. The 3D hand pose, together with information from object detection, is processed by a transformer-based action recognition network, resulting in an accuracy of 91.73%, outperforming all state-of-the-art methods. Estimations of 3D hand pose result in competitive performance with existing methods with a mean pose error of 28.66 mm. This method opens up new possibilities for employing distance information in egocentric 3D hand pose estimation without relying on depth sensors.
Authors:Hadi Hadizadeh, Ivan V. BajiÄ
Abstract:
Autonomous driving sensors generate an enormous amount of data. In this paper, we explore learned multimodal compression for autonomous driving, specifically targeted at 3D object detection. We focus on camera and LiDAR modalities and explore several coding approaches. One approach involves joint coding of fused modalities, while others involve coding one modality first, followed by conditional coding of the other modality. We evaluate the performance of these coding schemes on the nuScenes dataset. Our experimental results indicate that joint coding of fused modalities yields better results compared to the alternatives.
Authors:Gousia Habib, Damandeep Singh, Ishfaq Ahmad Malik, Brejesh Lall
Abstract:
The groundbreaking performance of transformers in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks has led to their replacement of traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), owing to the efficiency and accuracy achieved through the self-attention mechanism. This success has inspired researchers to explore the use of transformers in computer vision tasks to attain enhanced long-term semantic awareness. Vision transformers (ViTs) have excelled in various computer vision tasks due to their superior ability to capture long-distance dependencies using the self-attention mechanism. Contemporary ViTs like Data Efficient Transformers (DeiT) can effectively learn both global semantic information and local texture information from images, achieving performance comparable to traditional CNNs. However, their impressive performance comes with a high computational cost due to very large number of parameters, hindering their deployment on devices with limited resources like smartphones, cameras, drones etc. Additionally, ViTs require a large amount of data for training to achieve performance comparable to benchmark CNN models. Therefore, we identified two key challenges in deploying ViTs on smaller form factor devices: the high computational requirements of large models and the need for extensive training data. As a solution to these challenges, we propose compressing large ViT models using Knowledge Distillation (KD), which is implemented data-free to circumvent limitations related to data availability. Additionally, we conducted experiments on object detection within the same environment in addition to classification tasks. Based on our analysis, we found that datafree knowledge distillation is an effective method to overcome both issues, enabling the deployment of ViTs on less resourceconstrained devices.
Authors:Diana-Alexandra Sas, Leandro Di Bella, Yangxintong Lyu, Florin Oniga, Adrian Munteanu
Abstract:
Since the introduction of the self-attention mechanism and the adoption of the Transformer architecture for Computer Vision tasks, the Vision Transformer-based architectures gained a lot of popularity in the field, being used for tasks such as image classification, object detection and image segmentation. However, efficiently leveraging the attention mechanism in vision transformers for the Monocular 3D Object Detection task remains an open question. In this paper, we present LAM3D, a framework that Leverages self-Attention mechanism for Monocular 3D object Detection. To do so, the proposed method is built upon a Pyramid Vision Transformer v2 (PVTv2) as feature extraction backbone and 2D/3D detection machinery. We evaluate the proposed method on the KITTI 3D Object Detection Benchmark, proving the applicability of the proposed solution in the autonomous driving domain and outperforming reference methods. Moreover, due to the usage of self-attention, LAM3D is able to systematically outperform the equivalent architecture that does not employ self-attention.
Authors:Yu Xie, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Tianxiang Wu, Jiaqing Fan, Yue Zhang, Jielei Zhang, Huyang Sun
Abstract:
More and more end-to-end text spotting methods based on Transformer architecture have demonstrated superior performance. These methods utilize a bipartite graph matching algorithm to perform one-to-one optimal matching between predicted objects and actual objects. However, the instability of bipartite graph matching can lead to inconsistent optimization targets, thereby affecting the training performance of the model. Existing literature applies denoising training to solve the problem of bipartite graph matching instability in object detection tasks. Unfortunately, this denoising training method cannot be directly applied to text spotting tasks, as these tasks need to perform irregular shape detection tasks and more complex text recognition tasks than classification. To address this issue, we propose a novel denoising training method (DNTextSpotter) for arbitrary-shaped text spotting. Specifically, we decompose the queries of the denoising part into noised positional queries and noised content queries. We use the four Bezier control points of the Bezier center curve to generate the noised positional queries. For the noised content queries, considering that the output of the text in a fixed positional order is not conducive to aligning position with content, we employ a masked character sliding method to initialize noised content queries, thereby assisting in the alignment of text content and position. To improve the model's perception of the background, we further utilize an additional loss function for background characters classification in the denoising training part.Although DNTextSpotter is conceptually simple, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks (Total-Text, SCUT-CTW1500, ICDAR15, and Inverse-Text), especially yielding an improvement of 11.3% against the best approach in Inverse-Text dataset.
Authors:Guiqiu Liao, Matjaz Jogan, Sai Koushik, Eric Eaton, Daniel A. Hashimoto
Abstract:
Weakly supervised video object segmentation (WSVOS) enables the identification of segmentation maps without requiring an extensive training dataset of object masks, relying instead on coarse video labels indicating object presence. Current state-of-the-art methods either require multiple independent stages of processing that employ motion cues or, in the case of end-to-end trainable networks, lack in segmentation accuracy, in part due to the difficulty of learning segmentation maps from videos with transient object presence. This limits the application of WSVOS for semantic annotation of surgical videos where multiple surgical tools frequently move in and out of the field of view, a problem that is more difficult than typically encountered in WSVOS. This paper introduces Video Spatio-Temporal Disentanglement Networks (VDST-Net), a framework to disentangle spatiotemporal information using semi-decoupled knowledge distillation to predict high-quality class activation maps (CAMs). A teacher network designed to resolve temporal conflicts when specifics about object location and timing in the video are not provided works with a student network that integrates information over time by leveraging temporal dependencies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on a public reference dataset and on a more challenging surgical video dataset where objects are, on average, present in less than 60\% of annotated frames. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques and generates superior segmentation masks under video-level weak supervision.
Authors:Daniel Jakab, Alexander Braun, Cathaoir Agnew, Reenu Mohandas, Brian Michael Deegan, Dara Molloy, Enda Ward, Tony Scanlan, Ciarán Eising
Abstract:
Automotive simulation can potentially compensate for a lack of training data in computer vision applications. However, there has been little to no image quality evaluation of automotive simulation and the impact of optical degradations on simulation is little explored. In this work, we investigate Virtual KITTI and the impact of applying variations of Gaussian blur on image sharpness. Furthermore, we consider object detection, a common computer vision application on three different state-of-the-art models, thus allowing us to characterize the relationship between object detection and sharpness. It was found that while image sharpness (MTF50) degrades from an average of 0.245cy/px to approximately 0.119cy/px; object detection performance stays largely robust within 0.58\%(Faster RCNN), 1.45\%(YOLOF) and 1.93\%(DETR) across all respective held-out test sets.
Authors:Kwanyong Park, Kuniaki Saito, Donghyun Kim
Abstract:
Vision-language (VL) models often exhibit a limited understanding of complex expressions of visual objects (e.g., attributes, shapes, and their relations), given complex and diverse language queries. Traditional approaches attempt to improve VL models using hard negative synthetic text, but their effectiveness is limited. In this paper, we harness the exceptional compositional understanding capabilities of generative foundational models. We introduce a novel method for structured synthetic data generation aimed at enhancing the compositional understanding of VL models in language-based object detection. Our framework generates densely paired positive and negative triplets (image, text descriptions, and bounding boxes) in both image and text domains. By leveraging these synthetic triplets, we transform 'weaker' VL models into 'stronger' models in terms of compositional understanding, a process we call "Weak-to-Strong Compositional Learning" (WSCL). To achieve this, we propose a new compositional contrastive learning formulation that discovers semantics and structures in complex descriptions from synthetic triplets. As a result, VL models trained with our synthetic data generation exhibit a significant performance boost in the Omnilabel benchmark by up to +5AP and the D3 benchmark by +6.9AP upon existing baselines.
Authors:Majedaldein Almahasneh, Adeline Paiement, Xianghua Xie, Jean Aboudarham
Abstract:
Precisely localising solar Active Regions (AR) from multi-spectral images is a challenging but important task in understanding solar activity and its influence on space weather. A main challenge comes from each modality capturing a different location of the 3D objects, as opposed to typical multi-spectral imaging scenarios where all image bands observe the same scene. Thus, we refer to this special multi-spectral scenario as multi-layer. We present a multi-task deep learning framework that exploits the dependencies between image bands to produce 3D AR localisation (segmentation and detection) where different image bands (and physical locations) have their own set of results. Furthermore, to address the difficulty of producing dense AR annotations for training supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms, we adapt a training strategy based on weak labels (i.e. bounding boxes) in a recursive manner. We compare our detection and segmentation stages against baseline approaches for solar image analysis (multi-channel coronal hole detection, SPOCA for ARs) and state-of-the-art deep learning methods (Faster RCNN, U-Net). Additionally, both detection a nd segmentation stages are quantitatively validated on artificially created data of similar spatial configurations made from annotated multi-modal magnetic resonance images. Our framework achieves an average of 0.72 IoU (segmentation) and 0.90 F1 score (detection) across all modalities, comparing to the best performing baseline methods with scores of 0.53 and 0.58, respectively, on the artificial dataset, and 0.84 F1 score in the AR detection task comparing to baseline of 0.82 F1 score. Our segmentation results are qualitatively validated by an expert on real ARs.
Authors:Natalia Konovalova, Aniket Tolpadi, Felix Liu, Zehra Akkaya, Felix Gassert, Paula Giesler, Johanna Luitjens, Misung Han, Emma Bahroos, Sharmila Majumdar, Valentina Pedoia
Abstract:
This study investigates the relationship between deep learning (DL) image reconstruction quality and anomaly detection performance, and evaluates the efficacy of an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant in enhancing radiologists' interpretation of meniscal anomalies on reconstructed images. A retrospective study was conducted using an in-house reconstruction and anomaly detection pipeline to assess knee MR images from 896 patients. The original and 14 sets of DL-reconstructed images were evaluated using standard reconstruction and object detection metrics, alongside newly developed box-based reconstruction metrics. Two clinical radiologists reviewed a subset of 50 patients' images, both original and AI-assisted reconstructed, with subsequent assessment of their accuracy and performance characteristics. Results indicated that the structural similarity index (SSIM) showed a weaker correlation with anomaly detection metrics (mAP, r=0.64, p=0.01; F1 score, r=0.38, p=0.18), while box-based SSIM had a stronger association with detection performance (mAP, r=0.81, p<0.01; F1 score, r=0.65, p=0.01). Minor SSIM fluctuations did not affect detection outcomes, but significant changes reduced performance. Radiologists' AI-assisted evaluations demonstrated improved accuracy (86.0% without assistance vs. 88.3% with assistance, p<0.05) and interrater agreement (Cohen's kappa, 0.39 without assistance vs. 0.57 with assistance). An additional review led to the incorporation of 17 more lesions into the dataset. The proposed anomaly detection method shows promise in evaluating reconstruction algorithms for automated tasks and aiding radiologists in interpreting DL-reconstructed MR images.
Authors:Xuan Wang, Hao Tang, Zhigang Zhu
Abstract:
Various contextual information has been employed by many approaches for visual detection tasks. However, most of the existing approaches only focus on specific context for specific tasks. In this paper, GMC, a general framework is proposed for multistage context learning and utilization, with various deep network architectures for various visual detection tasks. The GMC framework encompasses three stages: preprocessing, training, and post-processing. In the preprocessing stage, the representation of local context is enhanced by utilizing commonly used labeling standards. During the training stage, semantic context information is fused with visual information, leveraging prior knowledge from the training dataset to capture semantic relationships. In the post-processing stage, general topological relations and semantic masks for stuff are incorporated to enable spatial context reasoning between objects. The proposed framework provides a comprehensive and adaptable solution for context learning and utilization in visual detection scenarios. The framework offers flexibility with user-defined configurations and provide adaptability to diverse network architectures and visual detection tasks, offering an automated and streamlined solution that minimizes user effort and inference time in context learning and reasoning. Experimental results on the visual detection tasks, for storefront object detection, pedestrian detection and COCO object detection, demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art detectors and transformer architectures. The experiments also demonstrate that three contextual learning components can not only be applied individually and in combination, but can also be applied to various network architectures, and its flexibility and effectiveness in various detection scenarios.
Authors:Yifan Tang, Cong Tai, Fangxing Chen, Wanting Zhang, Tao Zhang, Xueping Liu, Yongjin Liu, Long Zeng
Abstract:
Most existing robotic datasets capture static scene data and thus are limited in evaluating robots' dynamic performance. To address this, we present a mobile robot oriented large-scale indoor dataset, denoted as THUD (Tsinghua University Dynamic) robotic dataset, for training and evaluating their dynamic scene understanding algorithms. Specifically, the THUD dataset construction is first detailed, including organization, acquisition, and annotation methods. It comprises both real-world and synthetic data, collected with a real robot platform and a physical simulation platform, respectively. Our current dataset includes 13 larges-scale dynamic scenarios, 90K image frames, 20M 2D/3D bounding boxes of static and dynamic objects, camera poses, and IMU. The dataset is still continuously expanding. Then, the performance of mainstream indoor scene understanding tasks, e.g. 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and robot relocalization, is evaluated on our THUD dataset. These experiments reveal serious challenges for some robot scene understanding tasks in dynamic scenes. By sharing this dataset, we aim to foster and iterate new mobile robot algorithms quickly for robot actual working dynamic environment, i.e. complex crowded dynamic scenes.
Authors:Yu Zhang, Chuang Zhu, Guoqing Yang, Siqi Chen
Abstract:
Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) with only image-level annotation has recently attracted wide attention. Many existing methods ignore the inter-image relationship of instances which share similar characteristics while can certainly be determined not to belong to the same category. Therefore, in order to make full use of the weak label, we propose the Negative Prototypes Guided Contrastive learning (NPGC) architecture. Firstly, we define Negative Prototype as the proposal with the highest confidence score misclassified for the category that does not appear in the label. Unlike other methods that only utilize category positive feature, we construct an online updated global feature bank to store both positive prototypes and negative prototypes. Meanwhile, we propose a pseudo label sampling module to mine reliable instances and discard the easily misclassified instances based on the feature similarity with corresponding prototypes in global feature bank. Finally, we follow the contrastive learning paradigm to optimize the proposal's feature representation by attracting same class samples closer and pushing different class samples away in the embedding space. Extensive experiments have been conducted on VOC07, VOC12 datasets, which shows that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:M. Mahbubur Rahman, Ryoma Yataka, Sorachi Kato, Pu Perry Wang, Peizhao Li, Adriano Cardace, Petros Boufounos
Abstract:
Compared with an extensive list of automotive radar datasets that support autonomous driving, indoor radar datasets are scarce at a smaller scale in the format of low-resolution radar point clouds and usually under an open-space single-room setting. In this paper, we scale up indoor radar data collection using multi-view high-resolution radar heatmap in a multi-day, multi-room, and multi-subject setting, with an emphasis on the diversity of environment and subjects. Referred to as the millimeter-wave multi-view radar (MMVR) dataset, it consists of $345$K multi-view radar frames collected from $25$ human subjects over $6$ different rooms, $446$K annotated bounding boxes/segmentation instances, and $7.59$ million annotated keypoints to support three major perception tasks of object detection, pose estimation, and instance segmentation, respectively. For each task, we report performance benchmarks under two protocols: a single subject in an open space and multiple subjects in several cluttered rooms with two data splits: random split and cross-environment split over $395$ 1-min data segments. We anticipate that MMVR facilitates indoor radar perception development for indoor vehicle (robot/humanoid) navigation, building energy management, and elderly care for better efficiency, user experience, and safety. The MMVR dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12611978.
Authors:Zijin Lin, Yue Zhao, Kai Chen, Jinwen He
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have revolutionized the field of computer vision like object detection with their unparalleled performance. However, existing research has shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In the physical world, an adversary could exploit adversarial patches to implement a Hiding Attack (HA) which patches the target object to make it disappear from the detector, and an Appearing Attack (AA) which fools the detector into misclassifying the patch as a specific object. Recently, many defense methods for detectors have been proposed to mitigate the potential threats of adversarial patches. However, such methods still have limitations in generalization, robustness and efficiency. Most defenses are only effective against the HA, leaving the detector vulnerable to the AA.
In this paper, we propose \textit{NutNet}, an innovative model for detecting adversarial patches, with high generalization, robustness and efficiency. With experiments for six detectors including YOLOv2-v4, SSD, Faster RCNN and DETR on both digital and physical domains, the results show that our proposed method can effectively defend against both the HA and AA, with only 0.4\% sacrifice of the clean performance. We compare NutNet with four baseline defense methods for detectors, and our method exhibits an average defense performance that is over 2.4 times and 4.7 times higher than existing approaches for HA and AA, respectively. In addition, NutNet only increases the inference time by 8\%, which can meet the real-time requirements of the detection systems. Demos of NutNet are available at: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/nutnet}.
Authors:Heather Doig, Oscar Pizarro, Jacquomo Monk, Stefan Williams
Abstract:
One use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is the monitoring of habitats associated with threatened, endangered and protected marine species, such as the handfish of Tasmania, Australia. Seafloor imagery collected by AUVs can be used to identify individuals within their broader habitat context, but the sheer volume of imagery collected can overwhelm efforts to locate rare or cryptic individuals. Machine learning models can be used to identify the presence of a particular species in images using a trained object detector, but the lack of training examples reduces detection performance, particularly for rare species that may only have a small number of examples in the wild. In this paper, inspired by recent work in few-shot learning, images and annotations of common marine species are exploited to enhance the ability of the detector to identify rare and cryptic species. Annotated images of six common marine species are used in two ways. Firstly, the common species are used in a pre-training step to allow the backbone to create rich features for marine species. Secondly, a copy-paste operation is used with the common species images to augment the training data. While annotations for more common marine species are available in public datasets, they are often in point format, which is unsuitable for training an object detector. A popular semantic segmentation model efficiently generates bounding box annotations for training from the available point annotations. Our proposed framework is applied to AUV images of handfish, increasing average precision by up to 48\% compared to baseline object detection training. This approach can be applied to other objects with low numbers of annotations and promises to increase the ability to actively monitor threatened, endangered and protected species.
Authors:Di Wu, Feng Yang, Benlian Xu, Pan Liao, Bo Liu
Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, there is a growing need for enhanced safety and efficiency in the automatic environmental perception of vehicles during their operation. In modern vehicle setups, cameras and mmWave radar (radar), being the most extensively employed sensors, demonstrate complementary characteristics, inherently rendering them conducive to fusion and facilitating the achievement of both robust performance and cost-effectiveness. This paper focuses on a comprehensive survey of radar-vision (RV) fusion based on deep learning methods for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. We offer a comprehensive overview of each RV fusion category, specifically those employing region of interest (ROI) fusion and end-to-end fusion strategies. As the most promising fusion strategy at present, we provide a deeper classification of end-to-end fusion methods, including those 3D bounding box prediction based and BEV based approaches. Moreover, aligning with recent advancements, we delineate the latest information on 4D radar and its cutting-edge applications in autonomous vehicles (AVs). Finally, we present the possible future trends of RV fusion and summarize this paper.
Authors:Yanqi Xu, Yiqiu Shen, Carlos Fernandez-Granda, Laura Heacock, Krzysztof J. Geras
Abstract:
Transformer-based detectors have shown success in computer vision tasks with natural images. These models, exemplified by the Deformable DETR, are optimized through complex engineering strategies tailored to the typical characteristics of natural scenes. However, medical imaging data presents unique challenges such as extremely large image sizes, fewer and smaller regions of interest, and object classes which can be differentiated only through subtle differences. This study evaluates the applicability of these transformer-based design choices when applied to a screening mammography dataset that represents these distinct medical imaging data characteristics. Our analysis reveals that common design choices from the natural image domain, such as complex encoder architectures, multi-scale feature fusion, query initialization, and iterative bounding box refinement, do not improve and sometimes even impair object detection performance in medical imaging. In contrast, simpler and shallower architectures often achieve equal or superior results. This finding suggests that the adaptation of transformer models for medical imaging data requires a reevaluation of standard practices, potentially leading to more efficient and specialized frameworks for medical diagnosis.
Authors:Yajing Liu, Shijun Zhou, Xiyao Liu, Chunhui Hao, Baojie Fan, Jiandong Tian
Abstract:
Single-source domain generalization (SDG) for object detection is a challenging yet essential task as the distribution bias of the unseen domain degrades the algorithm performance significantly. However, existing methods attempt to extract domain-invariant features, neglecting that the biased data leads the network to learn biased features that are non-causal and poorly generalizable. To this end, we propose an Unbiased Faster R-CNN (UFR) for generalizable feature learning. Specifically, we formulate SDG in object detection from a causal perspective and construct a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to analyze the data bias and feature bias in the task, which are caused by scene confounders and object attribute confounders. Based on the SCM, we design a Global-Local Transformation module for data augmentation, which effectively simulates domain diversity and mitigates the data bias. Additionally, we introduce a Causal Attention Learning module that incorporates a designed attention invariance loss to learn image-level features that are robust to scene confounders. Moreover, we develop a Causal Prototype Learning module with an explicit instance constraint and an implicit prototype constraint, which further alleviates the negative impact of object attribute confounders. Experimental results on five scenes demonstrate the prominent generalization ability of our method, with an improvement of 3.9% mAP on the Night-Clear scene.
Authors:Pan Liao, Feng Yang, Di Wu, Wenhui Zhao, Jinwen Yu
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection has vast application potential across various fields. DETR-type models have shown remarkable performance in different areas, but there is still considerable room for improvement in monocular 3D detection, especially with the existing DETR-based method, MonoDETR. After addressing the query initialization issues in MonoDETR, we explored several performance enhancement strategies, such as incorporating a more efficient encoder and utilizing a more powerful depth estimator. Ultimately, we proposed MonoDETRNext, a model that comes in two variants based on the choice of depth estimator: MonoDETRNext-E, which prioritizes speed, and MonoDETRNext-A, which focuses on accuracy. We posit that MonoDETRNext establishes a new benchmark in monocular 3D object detection and opens avenues for future research. We conducted an exhaustive evaluation demonstrating the model's superior performance against existing solutions. Notably, MonoDETRNext-A demonstrated a 3.52$\%$ improvement in the $AP_{3D}$ metric on the KITTI test benchmark over MonoDETR, while MonoDETRNext-E showed a 2.35$\%$ increase. Additionally, the computational efficiency of MonoDETRNext-E slightly exceeds that of its predecessor.
Authors:Diogo Lavado, Cláudia Soares, Alessandra Micheletti, Ricardo Santos, André Coelho, João Santos
Abstract:
Research on supervised learning algorithms in 3D scene understanding has risen in prominence and witness great increases in performance across several datasets. The leading force of this research is the problem of autonomous driving followed by indoor scene segmentation. However, openly available 3D data on these tasks mainly focuses on urban scenarios. In this paper, we propose TS40K, a 3D point cloud dataset that encompasses more than 40,000 Km on electrical transmission systems situated in European rural terrain. This is not only a novel problem for the research community that can aid in the high-risk mission of power-grid inspection, but it also offers 3D point clouds with distinct characteristics from those in self-driving and indoor 3D data, such as high point-density and no occlusion. In our dataset, each 3D point is labeled with 1 out of 22 annotated classes. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art methods on our dataset concerning 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. Finally, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the results along with key challenges such as using labels that were not originally intended for learning tasks.
Authors:Hadi Hadizadeh, S. Faegheh Yeganli, Bahador Rashidi, Ivan V. BajiÄ
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in applications of multimodal signal processing and analysis, largely driven by the increased availability of multimodal datasets and the rapid progress in multimodal learning systems. Well-known examples include autonomous vehicles, audiovisual generative systems, vision-language systems, and so on. Such systems integrate multiple signal modalities: text, speech, images, video, LiDAR, etc., to perform various tasks. A key issue for understanding such systems is the relationship between various modalities and how it impacts task performance. In this paper, we employ the concept of mutual information (MI) to gain insight into this issue. Taking advantage of the recent progress in entropy modeling and estimation, we develop a system called InfoMeter to estimate MI between modalities in a multimodal learning system. We then apply InfoMeter to analyze a multimodal 3D object detection system over a large-scale dataset for autonomous driving. Our experiments on this system suggest that a lower MI between modalities is beneficial for detection accuracy. This new insight may facilitate improvements in the development of future multimodal learning systems.
Authors:Guozhang Liu, Ting Liu, Mengke Yuan, Tao Pang, Guangxing Yang, Hao Fu, Tao Wang, Tongkui Liao
Abstract:
The ambiguous appearance, tiny scale, and fine-grained classes of objects in remote sensing imagery inevitably lead to the noisy annotations in category labels of detection dataset. However, the effects and treatments of the label noises are underexplored in modern oriented remote sensing object detectors. To address this issue, we propose a robust oriented remote sensing object detection method through dynamic loss decay (DLD) mechanism, inspired by the two phase ``early-learning'' and ``memorization'' learning dynamics of deep neural networks on clean and noisy samples. To be specific, we first observe the end point of early learning phase termed as EL, after which the models begin to memorize the false labels that significantly degrade the detection accuracy. Secondly, under the guidance of the training indicator, the losses of each sample are ranked in descending order, and we adaptively decay the losses of the top K largest ones (bad samples) in the following epochs. Because these large losses are of high confidence to be calculated with wrong labels. Experimental results show that the method achieves excellent noise resistance performance tested on multiple public datasets such as HRSC2016 and DOTA-v1.0/v2.0 with synthetic category label noise. Our solution also has won the 2st place in the "fine-grained object detection based on sub-meter remote sensing imagery" track with noisy labels of 2023 National Big Data and Computing Intelligence Challenge.
Authors:Xianlei Long, Hui Zhao, Chao Chen, Fuqiang Gu, Qingyi Gu
Abstract:
In recent years, wide-area visual surveillance systems have been widely applied in various industrial and transportation scenarios. These systems, however, face significant challenges when implementing multi-object detection due to conflicts arising from the need for high-resolution imaging, efficient object searching, and accurate localization. To address these challenges, this paper presents a hybrid system that incorporates a wide-angle camera, a high-speed search camera, and a galvano-mirror. In this system, the wide-angle camera offers panoramic images as prior information, which helps the search camera capture detailed images of the targeted objects. This integrated approach enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of wide-area visual detection systems. Specifically, in this study, we introduce a wide-angle camera-based method to generate a panoramic probability map (PPM) for estimating high-probability regions of target object presence. Then, we propose a probability searching module that uses the PPM-generated prior information to dynamically adjust the sampling range and refine target coordinates based on uncertainty variance computed by the object detector. Finally, the integration of PPM and the probability searching module yields an efficient hybrid vision system capable of achieving 120 fps multi-object search and detection. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the system's effectiveness and robustness.
Authors:Wenbin Guan, Zijiu Yang, Xiaohong Wu, Liqiong Chen, Feng Huang, Xiaohai He, Honggang Chen
Abstract:
Presently, the task of few-shot object detection (FSOD) in remote sensing images (RSIs) has become a focal point of attention. Numerous few-shot detectors, particularly those based on two-stage detectors, face challenges when dealing with the multiscale complexities inherent in RSIs. Moreover, these detectors present impractical characteristics in real-world applications, mainly due to their unwieldy model parameters when handling large amount of data. In contrast, we recognize the advantages of one-stage detectors, including high detection speed and a global receptive field. Consequently, we choose the YOLOv7 one-stage detector as a baseline and subject it to a novel meta-learning training framework. This transformation allows the detector to adeptly address FSOD tasks while capitalizing on its inherent advantage of lightweight. Additionally, we thoroughly investigate the samples generated by the meta-learning strategy and introduce a novel meta-sampling approach to retain samples produced by our designed meta-detection head. Coupled with our devised meta-cross loss, we deliberately utilize "negative samples" that are often overlooked to extract valuable knowledge from them. This approach serves to enhance detection accuracy and efficiently refine the overall meta-learning strategy. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed detector, we conducted performance comparisons with current state-of-the-art detectors using the DIOR and NWPU VHR-10.v2 datasets, yielding satisfactory results.
Authors:Mingi Jeong, Arihant Chadda, Ziang Ren, Luyang Zhao, Haowen Liu, Monika Roznere, Aiwei Zhang, Yitao Jiang, Sabriel Achong, Samuel Lensgraf, Alberto Quattrini Li
Abstract:
This paper introduces the first publicly accessible labeled multi-modal perception dataset for autonomous maritime navigation, focusing on in-water obstacles within the aquatic environment to enhance situational awareness for Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs). This dataset, collected over 4 years and consisting of diverse objects encountered under varying environmental conditions, aims to bridge the research gap in autonomous surface vehicles by providing a multi-modal, annotated, and ego-centric perception dataset, for object detection and classification. We also show the applicability of the proposed dataset by training deep learning-based open-source perception algorithms that have shown success. We expect that our dataset will contribute to development of the marine autonomy pipelines and marine (field) robotics. This dataset is opensource and can be found at https://seepersea.github.io/.
Authors:Hanwei Zhang, Ying Zhu, Dan Wang, Lijun Zhang, Tianxiang Chen, Zi Ye
Abstract:
State space models (SSMs) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently demonstrated significant promise in long-sequence modeling. Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers has quadratic complexity with image size and increasing computational demands, the researchers are now exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey aiming to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models in the field of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba's success, including the state space model framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Next, we review these vision mamba models by categorizing them into foundational ones and enhancing them with techniques such as convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. We further delve into the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, Medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D / 3D segmentation, classification, and image registration, etc.), and Remote Sensing visual tasks. We specially introduce general visual tasks from two levels: High/Mid-level vision (e.g., Object detection, Segmentation, Video classification, etc.) and Low-level vision (e.g., Image super-resolution, Image restoration, Visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.
Authors:Wen Liang, Peipei Ran, Mengchao Bai, Xiao Liu, P. Bilha Githinji, Wei Zhao, Peiwu Qin
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) aims at finding the most salient objects in images and outputs pixel-level binary masks. Transformer-based methods achieve promising performance due to their global semantic understanding, crucial for identifying salient objects. However, these models tend to be large and require numerous training parameters. To better harness the potential of transformers for SOD, we propose a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning method aimed at reducing the number of training parameters while enhancing the salient object detection capability. Our model, termed EXternal Prompt features Enhanced adapteR Tuning (ExPert), features an encoder-decoder structure with adapters and injectors interspersed between the layers of a frozen transformer encoder. The adapter modules adapt the pretrained backbone to SOD while the injector modules incorporate external prompt features to enhance the awareness of salient objects. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. Surpassing former state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across five SOD datasets, ExPert achieves 0.215 mean absolute error (MAE) in the ECSSD dataset with 80.2M trained parameters, 21% better than SelfReformer and 47% better than EGNet.
Authors:Meghana Tedla, Shubham Kulkarni, Karthik Vaidhyanathan
Abstract:
The sustainability of Machine Learning-Enabled Systems (MLS), particularly with regard to energy efficiency, is an important challenge in their development and deployment. Self-adaptation techniques, recognized for their potential in energy savings within software systems, have yet to be extensively explored in Machine Learning-Enabled Systems (MLS), where runtime uncertainties can significantly impact model performance and energy consumption. This variability, alongside the fluctuating energy demands of ML models during operation, necessitates a dynamic approach. Addressing these challenges, we introduce EcoMLS approach, which leverages the Machine Learning Model Balancer concept to enhance the sustainability of MLS through runtime ML model switching. By adapting to monitored runtime conditions, EcoMLS optimally balances energy consumption with model confidence, demonstrating a significant advancement towards sustainable, energy-efficient machine learning solutions. Through an object detection exemplar, we illustrate the application of EcoMLS, showcasing its ability to reduce energy consumption while maintaining high model accuracy throughout its use. This research underscores the feasibility of enhancing MLS sustainability through intelligent runtime adaptations, contributing a valuable perspective to the ongoing discourse on energy-efficient machine learning.
Authors:Aswini Kumar Patra, Lingaraj Sahoo
Abstract:
Early identification of drought stress in crops is vital for implementing effective mitigation measures and reducing yield loss. Non-invasive imaging techniques hold immense potential by capturing subtle physiological changes in plants under water deficit. Sensor based imaging data serves as a rich source of information for machine learning and deep learning algorithms, facilitating further analysis aimed at identifying drought stress. While these approaches yield favorable results, real-time field applications requires algorithms specifically designed for the complexities of natural agricultural conditions. Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for classifying drought stress in potato crops captured by UAVs in natural settings. The novelty lies in the synergistic combination of a pre-trained network with carefully designed custom layers. This architecture leverages feature extraction capabilities of the pre-trained network while the custom layers enable targeted dimensionality reduction and enhanced regularization, ultimately leading to improved performance. A key innovation of our work involves the integration of Gradient-Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), an explainability technique. Grad-CAM sheds light on the internal workings of the deep learning model, typically referred to as a black box. By visualizing the focus areas of the model within the images, Grad-CAM fosters interpretability and builds trust in the decision-making process of the model. Our proposed framework achieves superior performance, particularly with the DenseNet121 pre-trained network, reaching a precision of 97% to identify the stressed class with an overall accuracy of 91%. Comparative analysis of existing state-of-the-art object detection algorithms reveals the superiority of our approach in significantly higher precision and accuracy.
Authors:Wiktor Mucha, Florin Cuconasu, Naome A. Etori, Valia Kalokyri, Giovanni Trappolini
Abstract:
The ability to read, understand and find important information from written text is a critical skill in our daily lives for our independence, comfort and safety. However, a significant part of our society is affected by partial vision impairment, which leads to discomfort and dependency in daily activities. To address the limitations of this part of society, we propose an intelligent reading assistant based on smart glasses with embedded RGB cameras and a Large Language Model (LLM), whose functionality goes beyond corrective lenses. The video recorded from the egocentric perspective of a person wearing the glasses is processed to localise text information using object detection and optical character recognition methods. The LLM processes the data and allows the user to interact with the text and responds to a given query, thus extending the functionality of corrective lenses with the ability to find and summarize knowledge from the text. To evaluate our method, we create a chat-based application that allows the user to interact with the system. The evaluation is conducted in a real-world setting, such as reading menus in a restaurant, and involves four participants. The results show robust accuracy in text retrieval. The system not only provides accurate meal suggestions but also achieves high user satisfaction, highlighting the potential of smart glasses and LLMs in assisting people with special needs.
Authors:Beomyoung Kim, Donghyun Kim, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract:
This paper presents a fresh perspective on the role of saliency maps in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) and offers new insights and research directions based on our empirical findings. We conduct comprehensive experiments and observe that the quality of the saliency map is a critical factor in saliency-guided WSSS approaches. Nonetheless, we find that the saliency maps used in previous works are often arbitrarily chosen, despite their significant impact on WSSS. Additionally, we observe that the choice of the threshold, which has received less attention before, is non-trivial in WSSS. To facilitate more meaningful and rigorous research for saliency-guided WSSS, we introduce \texttt{WSSS-BED}, a standardized framework for conducting research under unified conditions. \texttt{WSSS-BED} provides various saliency maps and activation maps for seven WSSS methods, as well as saliency maps from unsupervised salient object detection models.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Daniel Seita, Mohammad Rostami
Abstract:
Cross-modal feature extraction and integration have led to steady performance improvements in few-shot learning tasks due to generating richer features. However, existing multi-modal object detection (MM-OD) methods degrade when facing significant domain-shift and are sample insufficient. We hypothesize that rich text information could more effectively help the model to build a knowledge relationship between the vision instance and its language description and can help mitigate domain shift. Specifically, we study the Cross-Domain few-shot generalization of MM-OD (CDMM-FSOD) and propose a meta-learning based multi-modal few-shot object detection method that utilizes rich text semantic information as an auxiliary modality to achieve domain adaptation in the context of FSOD. Our proposed network contains (i) a multi-modal feature aggregation module that aligns the vision and language support feature embeddings and (ii) a rich text semantic rectify module that utilizes bidirectional text feature generation to reinforce multi-modal feature alignment and thus to enhance the model's language understanding capability. We evaluate our model on common standard cross-domain object detection datasets and demonstrate that our approach considerably outperforms existing FSOD methods.
Authors:Novendra Setyawan, Ghufron Wahyu Kurniawan, Chi-Chia Sun, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Jing-Ming Guo, Wen-Kai Kuo
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. However, their deep architectures often lead to high computational redundancy, making them less suitable for resource-constrained environments, such as edge devices. This paper introduces ParFormer, a novel vision transformer that addresses this challenge by incorporating a Parallel Mixer and a Sparse Channel Attention Patch Embedding (SCAPE). By combining convolutional and attention mechanisms, ParFormer improves feature extraction. This makes spatial feature extraction more efficient and cuts down on unnecessary computation. The SCAPE module further reduces computational redundancy while preserving essential feature information during down-sampling. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K dataset show that ParFormer-T achieves 78.9\% Top-1 accuracy with a high throughput on a GPU that outperforms other small models with 2.56$\times$ higher throughput than MobileViT-S, 0.24\% faster than FasterNet-T2, and 1.79$\times$ higher than EdgeNeXt-S. For edge device deployment, ParFormer-T excels with a throughput of 278.1 images/sec, which is 1.38 $\times$ higher than EdgeNeXt-S and 2.36$\times$ higher than MobileViT-S, making it highly suitable for real-time applications in resource-constrained settings. The larger variant, ParFormer-L, reaches 83.5\% Top-1 accuracy, offering a balanced trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, surpassing many state-of-the-art models. In COCO object detection, ParFormer-M achieves 40.7 AP for object detection and 37.6 AP for instance segmentation, surpassing models like ResNet-50, PVT-S and PoolFormer-S24 with significantly higher efficiency. These results validate ParFormer as a highly efficient and scalable model for both high-performance and resource-constrained scenarios, making it an ideal solution for edge-based AI applications.
Authors:Tim Salzmann, Markus Ryll, Alex Bewley, Matthias Minderer
Abstract:
Visual relationship detection aims to identify objects and their relationships in images. Prior methods approach this task by adding separate relationship modules or decoders to existing object detection architectures. This separation increases complexity and hinders end-to-end training, which limits performance. We propose a simple and highly efficient decoder-free architecture for open-vocabulary visual relationship detection. Our model consists of a Transformer-based image encoder that represents objects as tokens and models their relationships implicitly. To extract relationship information, we introduce an attention mechanism that selects object pairs likely to form a relationship. We provide a single-stage recipe to train this model on a mixture of object and relationship detection data. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art relationship detection performance on Visual Genome and on the large-vocabulary GQA benchmark at real-time inference speeds. We provide ablations, real-world qualitative examples, and analyses of zero-shot performance.
Authors:Roie Kazoom, Raz Birman, Ofer Hadar
Abstract:
The widespread adoption of computer vision systems has underscored their susceptibility to adversarial attacks, particularly adversarial patch attacks on object detectors. This study evaluates defense mechanisms for the YOLOv5 model against such attacks. Optimized adversarial patches were generated and placed in sensitive image regions, by applying EigenCAM and grid search to determine optimal placement. We tested several defenses, including Segment and Complete (SAC), Inpainting, and Latent Diffusion Models. Our pipeline comprises three main stages: patch application, object detection, and defense analysis. Results indicate that adversarial patches reduce average detection confidence by 22.06\%. Defenses restored confidence levels by 3.45\% (SAC), 5.05\% (Inpainting), and significantly improved them by 26.61\%, which even exceeds the original accuracy levels, when using the Latent Diffusion Model, highlighting its superior effectiveness in mitigating the effects of adversarial patches.
Authors:Noémie Cohen, Mélanie Ducoffe, Ryma Boumazouza, Christophe Gabreau, Claire Pagetti, Xavier Pucel, Audrey Galametz
Abstract:
We introduce a novel Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) approach for the formal verification of object detection models, specifically targeting the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric. The approach has been implemented in an open source code, named IBP IoU, compatible with popular abstract interpretation based verification tools. The resulting verifier is evaluated on landing approach runway detection and handwritten digit recognition case studies. Comparisons against a baseline (Vanilla IBP IoU) highlight the superior performance of IBP IoU in ensuring accuracy and stability, contributing to more secure and robust machine learning applications.
Authors:Sota Moriyama, Koji Watanabe, Katsumi Inoue, Akihiro Takemura
Abstract:
We introduce MOD-CL, a multi-label object detection framework that utilizes constrained loss in the training process to produce outputs that better satisfy the given requirements. In this paper, we use $\mathrm{MOD_{YOLO}}$, a multi-label object detection model built upon the state-of-the-art object detection model YOLOv8, which has been published in recent years. In Task 1, we introduce the Corrector Model and Blender Model, two new models that follow after the object detection process, aiming to generate a more constrained output. For Task 2, constrained losses have been incorporated into the $\mathrm{MOD_{YOLO}}$ architecture using Product T-Norm. The results show that these implementations are instrumental to improving the scores for both Task 1 and Task 2.
Authors:Honghao Chen, Xiangxiang Chu, Yongjian Ren, Xin Zhao, Kaiqi Huang
Abstract:
Recently, some large kernel convnets strike back with appealing performance and efficiency. However, given the square complexity of convolution, scaling up kernels can bring about an enormous amount of parameters and the proliferated parameters can induce severe optimization problem. Due to these issues, current CNNs compromise to scale up to 51x51 in the form of stripe convolution (i.e., 51x5 + 5x51) and start to saturate as the kernel size continues growing. In this paper, we delve into addressing these vital issues and explore whether we can continue scaling up kernels for more performance gains. Inspired by human vision, we propose a human-like peripheral convolution that efficiently reduces over 90% parameter count of dense grid convolution through parameter sharing, and manage to scale up kernel size to extremely large. Our peripheral convolution behaves highly similar to human, reducing the complexity of convolution from O(K^2) to O(logK) without backfiring performance. Built on this, we propose Parameter-efficient Large Kernel Network (PeLK). Our PeLK outperforms modern vision Transformers and ConvNet architectures like Swin, ConvNeXt, RepLKNet and SLaK on various vision tasks including ImageNet classification, semantic segmentation on ADE20K and object detection on MS COCO. For the first time, we successfully scale up the kernel size of CNNs to an unprecedented 101x101 and demonstrate consistent improvements.
Authors:Bram Vanherle, Nick Michiels, Frank Van Reeth
Abstract:
Data augmentations are useful in closing the sim-to-real domain gap when training on synthetic data. This is because they widen the training data distribution, thus encouraging the model to generalize better to other domains. Many image augmentation techniques exist, parametrized by different settings, such as strength and probability. This leads to a large space of different possible augmentation policies. Some policies work better than others for overcoming the sim-to-real gap for specific datasets, and it is unclear why. This paper presents two different interpretable metrics that can be combined to predict how well a certain augmentation policy will work for a specific sim-to-real setting, focusing on object detection. We validate our metrics by training many models with different augmentation policies and showing a strong correlation with performance on real data. Additionally, we introduce GeneticAugment, a genetic programming method that can leverage these metrics to automatically design an augmentation policy for a specific dataset without needing to train a model.
Authors:Konyul Park, Yecheol Kim, Junho Koh, Byungwoo Park, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
Developing high-performance, real-time architectures for LiDAR-based 3D object detectors is essential for the successful commercialization of autonomous vehicles. Pillar-based methods stand out as a practical choice for onboard deployment due to their computational efficiency. However, despite their efficiency, these methods can sometimes underperform compared to alternative point encoding techniques such as Voxel-encoding or PointNet++. We argue that current pillar-based methods have not sufficiently captured the fine-grained distributions of LiDAR points within each pillar structure. Consequently, there exists considerable room for improvement in pillar feature encoding. In this paper, we introduce a novel pillar encoding architecture referred to as Fine-Grained Pillar Feature Encoding (FG-PFE). FG-PFE utilizes Spatio-Temporal Virtual (STV) grids to capture the distribution of point clouds within each pillar across vertical, temporal, and horizontal dimensions. Through STV grids, points within each pillar are individually encoded using Vertical PFE (V-PFE), Temporal PFE (T-PFE), and Horizontal PFE (H-PFE). These encoded features are then aggregated through an Attentive Pillar Aggregation method. Our experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that FG-PFE achieves significant performance improvements over baseline models such as PointPillar, CenterPoint-Pillar, and PillarNet, with only a minor increase in computational overhead.
Authors:Yu Chen, Liyan Ma, Liping Jing, Jian Yu
Abstract:
Humans can easily distinguish the known and unknown categories and can recognize the unknown object by learning it once instead of repeating it many times without forgetting the learned object. Hence, we aim to make deep learning models simulate the way people learn. We refer to such a learning manner as OnLine Open World Object Detection(OLOWOD). Existing OWOD approaches pay more attention to the identification of unknown categories, while the incremental learning part is also very important. Besides, some neuroscience research shows that specific noises allow the brain to form new connections and neural pathways which may improve learning speed and efficiency. In this paper, we take the dual-level information of old samples as perturbations on new samples to make the model good at learning new knowledge without forgetting the old knowledge. Therefore, we propose a simple plug-and-play method, called Brain-inspired Streaming Dual-level Perturbations(BSDP), to solve the OLOWOD problem. Specifically, (1) we first calculate the prototypes of previous categories and use the distance between samples and the prototypes as the sample selecting strategy to choose old samples for replay; (2) then take the prototypes as the streaming feature-level perturbations of new samples, so as to improve the plasticity of the model through revisiting the old knowledge; (3) and also use the distribution of the features of the old category samples to generate adversarial data in the form of streams as the data-level perturbations to enhance the robustness of the model to new categories. We empirically evaluate BSDP on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, and the excellent results demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed method and learning manner.
Authors:Yangbo Jiang, Zhiwei Jiang, Le Han, Zenan Huang, Nenggan Zheng
Abstract:
Channel attention mechanisms endeavor to recalibrate channel weights to enhance representation abilities of networks. However, mainstream methods often rely solely on global average pooling as the feature squeezer, which significantly limits the overall potential of models. In this paper, we investigate the statistical moments of feature maps within a neural network. Our findings highlight the critical role of high-order moments in enhancing model capacity. Consequently, we introduce a flexible and comprehensive mechanism termed Extensive Moment Aggregation (EMA) to capture the global spatial context. Building upon this mechanism, we propose the Moment Channel Attention (MCA) framework, which efficiently incorporates multiple levels of moment-based information while minimizing additional computation costs through our Cross Moment Convolution (CMC) module. The CMC module via channel-wise convolution layer to capture multiple order moment information as well as cross channel features. The MCA block is designed to be lightweight and easily integrated into a variety of neural network architectures. Experimental results on classical image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming existing channel attention methods.
Authors:Yunusa Haruna, Shiyin Qin, Abdulrahman Hamman Adama Chukkol, Isah Bello, Adamu Lawan
Abstract:
Detecting objects across varying scales is still a challenge in computer vision, particularly in agricultural applications like Rice Leaf Disease (RLD) detection, where objects exhibit significant scale variations (SV). Conventional object detection (OD) like Faster R-CNN, SSD, and YOLO methods often fail to effectively address SV, leading to reduced accuracy and missed detections. To tackle this, we propose SaRPFF (Self-Attention with Register-based Pyramid Feature Fusion), a novel module designed to enhance multi-scale object detection. SaRPFF integrates 2D-Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) with Register tokens, improving feature interpretability by mitigating artifacts within MHSA. Additionally, it integrates efficient attention atrous convolutions into the pyramid feature fusion and introduce a deconvolutional layer for refined up-sampling. We evaluate SaRPFF on YOLOv7 using the MRLD and COCO datasets. Our approach demonstrates a +2.61% improvement in Average Precision (AP) on the MRLD dataset compared to the baseline FPN method in YOLOv7. Furthermore, SaRPFF outperforms other FPN variants, including BiFPN, NAS-FPN, and PANET, showcasing its versatility and potential to advance OD techniques. This study highlights SaRPFF effectiveness in addressing SV challenges and its adaptability across FPN-based OD models.
Authors:Khandaker Foysal Haque, Francesca Meneghello, Md. Ebtidaul Karim, Francesco Restuccia
Abstract:
Emerging mobile virtual reality (VR) systems will require to continuously perform complex computer vision tasks on ultra-high-resolution video frames through the execution of deep neural networks (DNNs)-based algorithms. Since state-of-the-art DNNs require computational power that is excessive for mobile devices, techniques based on wireless edge computing (WEC) have been recently proposed. However, existing WEC methods require the transmission and processing of a high amount of video data which may ultimately saturate the wireless link. In this paper, we propose a novel Sensing-Assisted Wireless Edge Computing (SAWEC) paradigm to address this issue. SAWEC leverages knowledge about the physical environment to reduce the end-to-end latency and overall computational burden by transmitting to the edge server only the relevant data for the delivery of the service. Our intuition is that the transmission of the portion of the video frames where there are no changes with respect to previous frames can be avoided. Specifically, we leverage wireless sensing techniques to estimate the location of objects in the environment and obtain insights about the environment dynamics. Hence, only the part of the frames where any environmental change is detected is transmitted and processed. We evaluated SAWEC by using a 10K 360$^{\circ}$ with a Wi-Fi 6 sensing system operating at 160 MHz and performing localization and tracking. We considered instance segmentation and object detection as benchmarking tasks for performance evaluation. We carried out experiments in an anechoic chamber and an entrance hall with two human subjects in six different setups. Experimental results show that SAWEC reduces both the channel occupation and end-to-end latency by more than 90% while improving the instance segmentation and object detection performance with respect to state-of-the-art WEC approaches.
Authors:Yifan Zhu, Lingjuan Miao, Haitao Wu, Zhiqiang Zhou, Weiyi Chen, Longwen Wu
Abstract:
Visual relocalization is crucial for autonomous visual localization and navigation of mobile robotics. Due to the improvement of CNN-based object detection algorithm, the robustness of visual relocalization is greatly enhanced especially in viewpoints where classical methods fail. However, ellipsoids (quadrics) generated by axis-aligned object detection may limit the accuracy of the object-level representation and degenerate the performance of visual relocalization system. In this paper, we propose a novel method of automatic object-level voxel modeling for accurate ellipsoidal representations of objects. As for visual relocalization, we design a better pose optimization strategy for camera pose recovery, to fully utilize the projection characteristics of 2D fitted ellipses and the 3D accurate ellipsoids. All of these modules are entirely intergrated into visual SLAM system. Experimental results show that our semantic object-level mapping and object-based visual relocalization methods significantly enhance the performance of visual relocalization in terms of robustness to new viewpoints.
Authors:Arya Marda, Shubham Kulkarni, Karthik Vaidhyanathan
Abstract:
Addressing runtime uncertainties in Machine Learning-Enabled Systems (MLS) is crucial for maintaining Quality of Service (QoS). The Machine Learning Model Balancer is a concept that addresses these uncertainties by facilitating dynamic ML model switching, showing promise in improving QoS in MLS. Leveraging this concept, this paper introduces SWITCH, an exemplar developed to enhance self-adaptive capabilities in such systems through dynamic model switching in runtime. SWITCH is designed as a comprehensive web service catering to a broad range of ML scenarios, with its implementation demonstrated through an object detection use case. SWITCH provides researchers with a flexible platform to apply and evaluate their ML model switching strategies, aiming to enhance QoS in MLS. SWITCH features advanced input handling, real-time data processing, and logging for adaptation metrics supplemented with an interactive real-time dashboard for enhancing system observability. This paper details SWITCH's architecture, self-adaptation strategies through ML model switching, and its empirical validation through a case study, illustrating its potential to improve QoS in MLS. By enabling a hands-on approach to explore adaptive behaviors in ML systems, SWITCH contributes a valuable tool to the SEAMS community for research into self-adaptive mechanisms for MLS and their practical applications.
Authors:Alina Ciocarlan, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Sidonie Lefebvre, Arnaud Woiselle, Clara Barbanson
Abstract:
Detecting small to tiny targets in infrared images is a challenging task in computer vision, especially when it comes to differentiating these targets from noisy or textured backgrounds. Traditional object detection methods such as YOLO struggle to detect tiny objects compared to segmentation neural networks, resulting in weaker performance when detecting small targets. To reduce the number of false alarms while maintaining a high detection rate, we introduce an $\textit{a contrario}$ decision criterion into the training of a YOLO detector. The latter takes advantage of the $\textit{unexpectedness}$ of small targets to discriminate them from complex backgrounds. Adding this statistical criterion to a YOLOv7-tiny bridges the performance gap between state-of-the-art segmentation methods for infrared small target detection and object detection networks. It also significantly increases the robustness of YOLO towards few-shot settings.
Authors:Weixing Liu, Jun Liu, Xin Su, Han Nie, Bin Luo
Abstract:
Recent studies have used unsupervised domain adaptive object detection (UDAOD) methods to bridge the domain gap in remote sensing (RS) images. However, UDAOD methods typically assume that the source domain data can be accessed during the domain adaptation process. This setting is often impractical in the real world due to RS data privacy and transmission difficulty. To address this challenge, we propose a practical source-free object detection (SFOD) setting for RS images, which aims to perform target domain adaptation using only the source pre-trained model. We propose a new SFOD method for RS images consisting of two parts: perturbed domain generation and alignment. The proposed multilevel perturbation constructs the perturbed domain in a simple yet efficient form by perturbing the domain-variant features at the image level and feature level according to the color and style bias. The proposed multilevel alignment calculates feature and label consistency between the perturbed domain and the target domain across the teacher-student network, and introduces the distillation of feature prototype to mitigate the noise of pseudo-labels. By requiring the detector to be consistent in the perturbed domain and the target domain, the detector is forced to focus on domaininvariant features. Extensive results of three synthetic-to-real experiments and three cross-sensor experiments have validated the effectiveness of our method which does not require access to source domain RS images. Furthermore, experiments on computer vision datasets show that our method can be extended to other fields as well. Our code will be available at: https://weixliu.github.io/ .
Authors:Leichao Cui, Xiuxian Li, Min Meng, Guangyu Jia
Abstract:
The enhancement of 3D object detection is pivotal for precise environmental perception and improved task execution capabilities in autonomous driving. LiDAR point clouds, offering accurate depth information, serve as a crucial information for this purpose. Our study focuses on key challenges in 3D target detection. To tackle the challenge of expanding the receptive field of a 3D convolutional kernel, we introduce the Dynamic Feature Fusion Module (DFFM). This module achieves adaptive expansion of the 3D convolutional kernel's receptive field, balancing the expansion with acceptable computational loads. This innovation reduces operations, expands the receptive field, and allows the model to dynamically adjust to different object requirements. Simultaneously, we identify redundant information in 3D features. Employing the Feature Selection Module (FSM) quantitatively evaluates and eliminates non-important features, achieving the separation of output box fitting and feature extraction. This innovation enables the detector to focus on critical features, resulting in model compression, reduced computational burden, and minimized candidate frame interference. Extensive experiments confirm that both DFFM and FSM not only enhance current benchmarks, particularly in small target detection, but also accelerate network performance. Importantly, these modules exhibit effective complementarity.
Authors:Juwita juwita, Ghulam Mubashar Hassan, Naveed Akhtar, Amitava Datta
Abstract:
Segmenting organs in CT scan images is a necessary process for multiple downstream medical image analysis tasks. Currently, manual CT scan segmentation by radiologists is prevalent, especially for organs like the pancreas, which requires a high level of domain expertise for reliable segmentation due to factors like small organ size, occlusion, and varying shapes. When resorting to automated pancreas segmentation, these factors translate to limited reliable labeled data to train effective segmentation models. Consequently, the performance of contemporary pancreas segmentation models is still not within acceptable ranges. To improve that, we propose M3BUNet, a fusion of MobileNet and U-Net neural networks, equipped with a novel Mean-Max (MM) attention that operates in two stages to gradually segment pancreas CT images from coarse to fine with mask guidance for object detection. This approach empowers the network to surpass segmentation performance achieved by similar network architectures and achieve results that are on par with complex state-of-the-art methods, all while maintaining a low parameter count. Additionally, we introduce external contour segmentation as a preprocessing step for the coarse stage to assist in the segmentation process through image standardization. For the fine segmentation stage, we found that applying a wavelet decomposition filter to create multi-input images enhances pancreas segmentation performance. We extensively evaluate our approach on the widely known NIH pancreas dataset and MSD pancreas dataset. Our approach demonstrates a considerable performance improvement, achieving an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) value of up to 89.53% and an Intersection Over Union (IOU) score of up to 81.16 for the NIH pancreas dataset, and 88.60% DSC and 79.90% IOU for the MSD Pancreas dataset.
Authors:Hyeonjae Jeon, Junghyun Seo, Taesoo Kim, Sungho Son, Jungki Lee, Gyeungho Choi, Yongseob Lim
Abstract:
Autonomous driving technology nowadays targets to level 4 or beyond, but the researchers are faced with some limitations for developing reliable driving algorithms in diverse challenges. To promote the autonomous vehicles to spread widely, it is important to address safety issues on this technology. Among various safety concerns, the sensor blockage problem by severe weather conditions can be one of the most frequent threats for multi-task learning based perception algorithms during autonomous driving. To handle this problem, the importance of the generation of proper datasets is becoming more significant. In this paper, a synthetic road dataset with sensor blockage generated from real road dataset BDD100K is suggested in the format of BDD100K annotation. Rain streaks for each frame were made by an experimentally established equation and translated utilizing the image-to-image translation network based on style transfer. Using this dataset, the degradation of the diverse multi-task networks for autonomous driving, such as lane detection, driving area segmentation, and traffic object detection, has been thoroughly evaluated and analyzed. The tendency of the performance degradation of deep neural network-based perception systems for autonomous vehicle has been analyzed in depth. Finally, we discuss the limitation and the future directions of the deep neural network-based perception algorithms and autonomous driving dataset generation based on image-to-image translation.
Authors:Dongmin Choi, Wonwoo Cho, Kangyeol Kim, Jaegul Choo
Abstract:
Accurately annotating multiple 3D objects in LiDAR scenes is laborious and challenging. While a few previous studies have attempted to leverage semi-automatic methods for cost-effective bounding box annotation, such methods have limitations in efficiently handling numerous multi-class objects. To effectively accelerate 3D annotation pipelines, we propose iDet3D, an efficient interactive 3D object detector. Supporting a user-friendly 2D interface, which can ease the cognitive burden of exploring 3D space to provide click interactions, iDet3D enables users to annotate the entire objects in each scene with minimal interactions. Taking the sparse nature of 3D point clouds into account, we design a negative click simulation (NCS) to improve accuracy by reducing false-positive predictions. In addition, iDet3D incorporates two click propagation techniques to take full advantage of user interactions: (1) dense click guidance (DCG) for keeping user-provided information throughout the network and (2) spatial click propagation (SCP) for detecting other instances of the same class based on the user-specified objects. Through our extensive experiments, we present that our method can construct precise annotations in a few clicks, which shows the practicality as an efficient annotation tool for 3D object detection.
Authors:James Gunn, Zygmunt Lenyk, Anuj Sharma, Andrea Donati, Alexandru Buburuzan, John Redford, Romain Mueller
Abstract:
Combining complementary sensor modalities is crucial to providing robust perception for safety-critical robotics applications such as autonomous driving (AD). Recent state-of-the-art camera-lidar fusion methods for AD rely on monocular depth estimation which is a notoriously difficult task compared to using depth information from the lidar directly. Here, we find that this approach does not leverage depth as expected and show that naively improving depth estimation does not lead to improvements in object detection performance. Strikingly, we also find that removing depth estimation altogether does not degrade object detection performance substantially, suggesting that relying on monocular depth could be an unnecessary architectural bottleneck during camera-lidar fusion. In this work, we introduce a novel fusion method that bypasses monocular depth estimation altogether and instead selects and fuses camera and lidar features in a bird's-eye-view grid using a simple attention mechanism. We show that our model can modulate its use of camera features based on the availability of lidar features and that it yields better 3D object detection on the nuScenes dataset than baselines relying on monocular depth estimation.
Authors:Zhenjia Li, Jinrang Jia, Yifeng Shi
Abstract:
In the field of autonomous driving, monocular 3D detection is a critical task which estimates 3D properties (depth, dimension, and orientation) of objects in a single RGB image. Previous works have used features in a heuristic way to learn 3D properties, without considering that inappropriate features could have adverse effects. In this paper, sample selection is introduced that only suitable samples should be trained to regress the 3D properties. To select samples adaptively, we propose a Learnable Sample Selection (LSS) module, which is based on Gumbel-Softmax and a relative-distance sample divider. The LSS module works under a warm-up strategy leading to an improvement in training stability. Additionally, since the LSS module dedicated to 3D property sample selection relies on object-level features, we further develop a data augmentation method named MixUp3D to enrich 3D property samples which conforms to imaging principles without introducing ambiguity. As two orthogonal methods, the LSS module and MixUp3D can be utilized independently or in conjunction. Sufficient experiments have shown that their combined use can lead to synergistic effects, yielding improvements that transcend the mere sum of their individual applications. Leveraging the LSS module and the MixUp3D, without any extra data, our method named MonoLSS ranks 1st in all three categories (Car, Cyclist, and Pedestrian) on KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, and achieves competitive results on both the Waymo dataset and KITTI-nuScenes cross-dataset evaluation. The code is included in the supplementary material and will be released to facilitate related academic and industrial studies.
Authors:Bo Liu, Liqiang Yu, Chang Che, Qunwei Lin, Hao Hu, Xinyu Zhao
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the analysis of the application effectiveness of the integration of deep learning and computer vision technologies. Deep learning achieves a historic breakthrough by constructing hierarchical neural networks, enabling end-to-end feature learning and semantic understanding of images. The successful experiences in the field of computer vision provide strong support for training deep learning algorithms. The tight integration of these two fields has given rise to a new generation of advanced computer vision systems, significantly surpassing traditional methods in tasks such as machine vision image classification and object detection. In this paper, typical image classification cases are combined to analyze the superior performance of deep neural network models while also pointing out their limitations in generalization and interpretability, proposing directions for future improvements. Overall, the efficient integration and development trend of deep learning with massive visual data will continue to drive technological breakthroughs and application expansion in the field of computer vision, making it possible to build truly intelligent machine vision systems. This deepening fusion paradigm will powerfully promote unprecedented tasks and functions in computer vision, providing stronger development momentum for related disciplines and industries.
Authors:Heming Yao, Jérôme Lüscher, Benjamin Gutierrez Becker, Josep Arús-Pous, Tommaso Biancalani, Amelie Bigorgne, David Richmond
Abstract:
Colonoscopy plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and prognosis of various gastrointestinal diseases. Due to the challenges of collecting large-scale high-quality ground truth annotations for colonoscopy images, and more generally medical images, we explore using self-supervised features from vision transformers in three challenging tasks for colonoscopy images. Our results indicate that image-level features learned from DINO models achieve image classification performance comparable to fully supervised models, and patch-level features contain rich semantic information for object detection. Furthermore, we demonstrate that self-supervised features combined with unsupervised segmentation can be used to discover multiple clinically relevant structures in a fully unsupervised manner, demonstrating the tremendous potential of applying these methods in medical image analysis.
Authors:Guo-Ye Yang, George Kiyohiro Nakayama, Zi-Kai Xiao, Tai-Jiang Mu, Xiaolei Huang, Shi-Min Hu
Abstract:
Great progress has been made in learning-based object detection methods in the last decade. Two-stage detectors often have higher detection accuracy than one-stage detectors, due to the use of region of interest (RoI) feature extractors which extract transformation-invariant RoI features for different RoI proposals, making refinement of bounding boxes and prediction of object categories more robust and accurate. However, previous RoI feature extractors can only extract invariant features under limited transformations. In this paper, we propose a novel RoI feature extractor, termed Semantic RoI Align (SRA), which is capable of extracting invariant RoI features under a variety of transformations for two-stage detectors. Specifically, we propose a semantic attention module to adaptively determine different sampling areas by leveraging the global and local semantic relationship within the RoI. We also propose a Dynamic Feature Sampler which dynamically samples features based on the RoI aspect ratio to enhance the efficiency of SRA, and a new position embedding, \ie Area Embedding, to provide more accurate position information for SRA through an improved sampling area representation. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms baseline models with slight computational overhead. In addition, it shows excellent generalization ability and can be used to improve performance with various state-of-the-art backbones and detection methods.
Authors:Orr Zohar, Alejandro Lozano, Shelly Goel, Serena Yeung, Kuan-Chieh Wang
Abstract:
Object detection is integral to a bevy of real-world applications, from robotics to medical image analysis. To be used reliably in such applications, models must be capable of handling unexpected - or novel - objects. The open world object detection (OWD) paradigm addresses this challenge by enabling models to detect unknown objects and learn discovered ones incrementally. However, OWD method development is hindered due to the stringent benchmark and task definitions. These definitions effectively prohibit foundation models. Here, we aim to relax these definitions and investigate the utilization of pre-trained foundation models in OWD. First, we show that existing benchmarks are insufficient in evaluating methods that utilize foundation models, as even naive integration methods nearly saturate these benchmarks. This result motivated us to curate a new and challenging benchmark for these models. Therefore, we introduce a new benchmark that includes five real-world application-driven datasets, including challenging domains such as aerial and surgical images, and establish baselines. We exploit the inherent connection between classes in application-driven datasets and introduce a novel method, Foundation Object detection Model for the Open world, or FOMO, which identifies unknown objects based on their shared attributes with the base known objects. FOMO has ~3x unknown object mAP compared to baselines on our benchmark. However, our results indicate a significant place for improvement - suggesting a great research opportunity in further scaling object detection methods to real-world domains. Our code and benchmark are available at https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/fomo/.
Authors:Syed Hammad Ahmed, Shengnan Hu, Gita Sukthankar
Abstract:
Natural language supervision has been shown to be effective for zero-shot learning in many computer vision tasks, such as object detection and activity recognition. However, generating informative prompts can be challenging for more subtle tasks, such as video content moderation. This can be difficult, as there are many reasons why a video might be inappropriate, beyond violence and obscenity. For example, scammers may attempt to create junk content that is similar to popular educational videos but with no meaningful information. This paper evaluates the performance of several CLIP variations for content moderation of children's cartoons in both the supervised and zero-shot setting. We show that our proposed model (Vanilla CLIP with Projection Layer) outperforms previous work conducted on the Malicious or Benign (MOB) benchmark for video content moderation. This paper presents an in depth analysis of how context-specific language prompts affect content moderation performance. Our results indicate that it is important to include more context in content moderation prompts, particularly for cartoon videos as they are not well represented in the CLIP training data.
Authors:Ryan Rubel, Andrew Dudash, Mohammad Goli, James O'Hara, Karl Wunderlich
Abstract:
Learned object detection methods based on fusion of LiDAR and camera data require labeled training samples, but niche applications, such as warehouse robotics or automated infrastructure, require semantic classes not available in large existing datasets. Therefore, to facilitate the rapid creation of multimodal object detection datasets and alleviate the burden of human labeling, we propose a novel automated annotation pipeline. Our method uses an indoor positioning system (IPS) to produce accurate detection labels for both point clouds and images and eliminates manual annotation entirely. In an experiment, the system annotates objects of interest 261.8 times faster than a human baseline and speeds up end-to-end dataset creation by 61.5%.
Authors:G. Sharma, A. Angleraud, R. Pieters
Abstract:
Deep learning requires large amounts of data, and a well-defined pipeline for labeling and augmentation. Current solutions support numerous computer vision tasks with dedicated annotation types and formats, such as bounding boxes, polygons, and key points. These annotations can be combined into a single data format to benefit approaches such as multi-task models. However, to our knowledge, no available labeling tool supports the export functionality for a combined benchmark format, and no augmentation library supports transformations for the combination of all. In this work, these functionalities are presented, with visual data annotation and augmentation to train a multi-task model (object detection, segmentation, and key point extraction). The tools are demonstrated in two robot perception use cases.
Authors:Shaobo Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Dongrui Liu, Junchi Yan
Abstract:
Batch Normalization (BN) has become an essential technique in contemporary neural network design, enhancing training stability. Specifically, BN employs centering and scaling operations to standardize features along the batch dimension and uses an affine transformation to recover features. Although standard BN has shown its capability to improve deep neural network training and convergence, it still exhibits inherent limitations in certain cases. Current enhancements to BN typically address only isolated aspects of its mechanism. In this work, we critically examine BN from a feature perspective, identifying feature condensation during BN as a detrimental factor to test performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a two-stage unified framework called Unified Batch Normalization (UBN). In the first stage, we employ a straightforward feature condensation threshold to mitigate condensation effects, thereby preventing improper updates of statistical norms. In the second stage, we unify various normalization variants to boost each component of BN. Our experimental results reveal that UBN significantly enhances performance across different visual backbones and different vision tasks, and notably expedites network training convergence, particularly in early training stages. Notably, our method improved about 3% in accuracy on ImageNet classification and 4% in mean average precision on both Object Detection and Instance Segmentation on COCO dataset, showing the effectiveness of our approach in real-world scenarios.
Authors:Jiageng Zhong, Ming Li, Yinliang Chen, Zihang Wei, Fan Yang, Haoran Shen
Abstract:
For intelligent quadcopter UAVs, a robust and reliable autonomous planning system is crucial. Most current trajectory planning methods for UAVs are suitable for static environments but struggle to handle dynamic obstacles, which can pose challenges and even dangers to flight. To address this issue, this paper proposes a vision-based planning system that combines tracking and trajectory prediction of dynamic obstacles to achieve efficient and reliable autonomous flight. We use a lightweight object detection algorithm to identify dynamic obstacles and then use Kalman Filtering to track and estimate their motion states. During the planning phase, we not only consider static obstacles but also account for the potential movements of dynamic obstacles. For trajectory generation, we use a B-spline-based trajectory search algorithm, which is further optimized with various constraints to enhance safety and alignment with the UAV's motion characteristics. We conduct experiments in both simulation and real-world environments, and the results indicate that our approach can successfully detect and avoid obstacles in dynamic environments in real-time, offering greater reliability compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, with the advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology demonstrating exceptional zero-shot generalization capabilities, more user-friendly human-machine interactions have become feasible, and this study also explores the integration of autonomous planning systems with Large Language Models (LLMs).
Authors:Pierre-François De Plaen, Nicola Marinello, Marc Proesmans, Tinne Tuytelaars, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) opened new possibilities for object detection by modeling it as a translation task: converting image features into object-level representations. Previous works typically add expensive modules to DETR to perform Multi-Object Tracking (MOT), resulting in more complicated architectures. We instead show how DETR can be turned into a MOT model by employing an instance-level contrastive loss, a revised sampling strategy and a lightweight assignment method. Our training scheme learns object appearances while preserving detection capabilities and with little overhead. Its performance surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by +2.6 mMOTA on the challenging BDD100K dataset and is comparable to existing transformer-based methods on the MOT17 dataset.
Authors:Lei Li, Alexander Liniger, Mario Millhaeusler, Vagia Tsiminaki, Yuanyou Li, Dengxin Dai
Abstract:
Event cameras are gaining popularity due to their unique properties, such as their low latency and high dynamic range. One task where these benefits can be crucial is real-time object detection. However, RGB detectors still outperform event-based detectors due to the sparsity of the event data and missing visual details. In this paper, we develop a novel knowledge distillation approach to shrink the performance gap between these two modalities. To this end, we propose a cross-modality object detection distillation method that by design can focus on regions where the knowledge distillation works best. We achieve this by using an object-centric slot attention mechanism that can iteratively decouple features maps into object-centric features and corresponding pixel-features used for distillation. We evaluate our novel distillation approach on a synthetic and a real event dataset with aligned grayscale images as a teacher modality. We show that object-centric distillation allows to significantly improve the performance of the event-based student object detector, nearly halving the performance gap with respect to the teacher.
Authors:Zhen Zhou, Yunkai Ma, Junfeng Fan, Zhaoyang Liu, Fengshui Jing, Min Tan
Abstract:
In oriented object detection, current representations of oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) often suffer from boundary discontinuity problem. Methods of designing continuous regression losses do not essentially solve this problem. Although Gaussian bounding box (GBB) representation avoids this problem, directly regressing GBB is susceptible to numerical instability. We propose linear GBB (LGBB), a novel OBB representation. By linearly transforming the elements of GBB, LGBB avoids the boundary discontinuity problem and has high numerical stability. In addition, existing convolution-based rotation-sensitive feature extraction methods only have local receptive fields, resulting in slow feature aggregation. We propose ring-shaped rotated convolution (RRC), which adaptively rotates feature maps to arbitrary orientations to extract rotation-sensitive features under a ring-shaped receptive field, rapidly aggregating features and contextual information. Experimental results demonstrate that LGBB and RRC achieve state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, integrating LGBB and RRC into various models effectively improves detection accuracy.
Authors:Kartik Gupta, Akshay Asthana
Abstract:
Quantized networks use less computational and memory resources and are suitable for deployment on edge devices. While quantization-aware training QAT is the well-studied approach to quantize the networks at low precision, most research focuses on over-parameterized networks for classification with limited studies on popular and edge device friendly single-shot object detection and semantic segmentation methods like YOLO. Moreover, majority of QAT methods rely on Straight-through Estimator (STE) approximation which suffers from an oscillation phenomenon resulting in sub-optimal network quantization. In this paper, we show that it is difficult to achieve extremely low precision (4-bit and lower) for efficient YOLO models even with SOTA QAT methods due to oscillation issue and existing methods to overcome this problem are not effective on these models. To mitigate the effect of oscillation, we first propose Exponentially Moving Average (EMA) based update to the QAT model. Further, we propose a simple QAT correction method, namely QC, that takes only a single epoch of training after standard QAT procedure to correct the error induced by oscillating weights and activations resulting in a more accurate quantized model. With extensive evaluation on COCO dataset using various YOLO5 and YOLO7 variants, we show that our correction method improves quantized YOLO networks consistently on both object detection and segmentation tasks at low-precision (4-bit and 3-bit).
Authors:Zifan Yu, Erfan Bank Tavakoli, Meida Chen, Suya You, Raghuveer Rao, Sanjeev Agarwal, Fengbo Ren
Abstract:
The area of Video Camouflaged Object Detection (VCOD) presents unique challenges in the field of computer vision due to texture similarities between target objects and their surroundings, as well as irregular motion patterns caused by both objects and camera movement. In this paper, we introduce TokenMotion (TMNet), which employs a transformer-based model to enhance VCOD by extracting motion-guided features using a learnable token selection. Evaluated on the challenging MoCA-Mask dataset, TMNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in VCOD. It outperforms the existing state-of-the-art method by a 12.8% improvement in weighted F-measure, an 8.4% enhancement in S-measure, and a 10.7% boost in mean IoU. The results demonstrate the benefits of utilizing motion-guided features via learnable token selection within a transformer-based framework to tackle the intricate task of VCOD.
Authors:Shih-Min Yang, Martin Magnusson, Johannes A. Stork, Todor Stoyanov
Abstract:
Many practically relevant robot grasping problems feature a target object for which all grasps are occluded, e.g., by the environment. Single-shot grasp planning invariably fails in such scenarios. Instead, it is necessary to first manipulate the object into a configuration that affords a grasp. We solve this problem by learning a sequence of actions that utilize the environment to change the object's pose. Concretely, we employ hierarchical reinforcement learning to combine a sequence of learned parameterized manipulation primitives. By learning the low-level manipulation policies, our approach can control the object's state through exploiting interactions between the object, the gripper, and the environment. Designing such a complex behavior analytically would be infeasible under uncontrolled conditions, as an analytic approach requires accurate physical modeling of the interaction and contact dynamics. In contrast, we learn a hierarchical policy model that operates directly on depth perception data, without the need for object detection, pose estimation, or manual design of controllers. We evaluate our approach on picking box-shaped objects of various weight, shape, and friction properties from a constrained table-top workspace. Our method transfers to a real robot and is able to successfully complete the object picking task in 98\% of experimental trials. Supplementary information and videos can be found at https://shihminyang.github.io/ED-PMP/.
Authors:Shwetang Dubey, Alok Ranjan Sahoo, Pavan Chakraborty
Abstract:
Visually impaired persons find it difficult to know about their surroundings while walking on a road. Walking sticks used by them can only give them information about the obstacles in the stick's proximity. Moreover, it is mostly effective in static or very slow-paced environments. Hence, this paper introduces a method to guide them in a busy street. To create such a system it is very important to know about the approaching object and its direction of approach. To achieve this objective we created a method in which the image frame received from the video is divided into three parts i.e. center, left, and right to know the direction of approach of the approaching object. Object detection is done using YOLOv3. Lucas Kanade's optical flow estimation method is used for the optical flow estimation and Depth-net is used for depth estimation. Using the depth information, object motion trajectory, and object category information, the model provides necessary information/warning to the person. This model has been tested in the real world to show its effectiveness.
Authors:Zhihong Chen, Zilei Wang, Yixin Zhang
Abstract:
Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain without access to the labeled source data. Current SFOD methods utilize a threshold-based pseudo-label approach in the adaptation phase, which is typically limited to high-confidence pseudo-labels and results in a loss of information. To address this issue, we propose a new approach to take full advantage of pseudo-labels by introducing high and low confidence thresholds. Specifically, the pseudo-labels with confidence scores above the high threshold are used conventionally, while those between the low and high thresholds are exploited using the Low-confidence Pseudo-labels Utilization (LPU) module. The LPU module consists of Proposal Soft Training (PST) and Local Spatial Contrastive Learning (LSCL). PST generates soft labels of proposals for soft training, which can mitigate the label mismatch problem. LSCL exploits the local spatial relationship of proposals to improve the model's ability to differentiate between spatially adjacent proposals, thereby optimizing representational features further. Combining the two components overcomes the challenges faced by traditional methods in utilizing low-confidence pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on five cross-domain object detection benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the previous SFOD methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:François Hélénon, Johann Huber, Faïz Ben Amar, Stéphane Doncieux
Abstract:
Despite recent advancements in AI for robotics, grasping remains a partially solved challenge, hindered by the lack of benchmarks and reproducibility constraints. This paper introduces a vision-based grasping framework that can easily be transferred across multiple manipulators. Leveraging Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, the framework generates diverse repertoires of open-loop grasping trajectories, enhancing adaptability while maintaining a diversity of grasps. This framework addresses two main issues: the lack of an off-the-shelf vision module for detecting object pose and the generalization of QD trajectories to the whole robot operational space. The proposed solution combines multiple vision modules for 6DoF object detection and tracking while rigidly transforming QD-generated trajectories into the object frame. Experiments on a Franka Research 3 arm and a UR5 arm with a SIH Schunk hand demonstrate comparable performance when the real scene aligns with the simulation used for grasp generation. This work represents a significant stride toward building a reliable vision-based grasping module transferable to new platforms, while being adaptable to diverse scenarios without further training iterations.
Authors:Jia Syuen Lim, Ziwei Wang, Jiajun Liu, Abdelwahed Khamis, Reza Arablouei, Robert Barlow, Ryan McAllister
Abstract:
Regulatory compliance auditing across diverse industrial domains requires heightened quality assurance and traceability. Present manual and intermittent approaches to such auditing yield significant challenges, potentially leading to oversights in the monitoring process. To address these issues, we introduce a real-time, multi-modal sensing system employing 3D time-of-flight and RGB cameras, coupled with unsupervised learning techniques on edge AI devices. This enables continuous object tracking thereby enhancing efficiency in record-keeping and minimizing manual interventions. While we validate the system in a knife sanitization context within agrifood facilities, emphasizing its prowess against occlusion and low-light issues with RGB cameras, its potential spans various industrial monitoring settings.
Authors:Yuchen Dong, Heng Zhou, Chengyang Li, Junjie Xie, Yongqiang Xie, Zhongbo Li
Abstract:
Camouflage object detection (COD) poses a significant challenge due to the high resemblance between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. Although current deep learning methods have made significant progress in detecting camouflaged objects, many of them heavily rely on additional prior information. However, acquiring such additional prior information is both expensive and impractical in real-world scenarios. Therefore, there is a need to develop a network for camouflage object detection that does not depend on additional priors. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive feature aggregation method that effectively combines multi-layer feature information to generate guidance information. In contrast to previous approaches that rely on edge or ranking priors, our method directly leverages information extracted from image features to guide model training. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate that our proposed method achieves comparable or superior performance when compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors:Anay Majee, Suraj Kothawade, Krishnateja Killamsetty, Rishabh Iyer
Abstract:
In this paper we introduce the SCoRe (Submodular Combinatorial Representation Learning) framework, a novel approach in representation learning that addresses inter-class bias and intra-class variance. SCoRe provides a new combinatorial viewpoint to representation learning, by introducing a family of loss functions based on set-based submodular information measures. We develop two novel combinatorial formulations for loss functions, using the Total Information and Total Correlation, that naturally minimize intra-class variance and inter-class bias. Several commonly used metric/contrastive learning loss functions like supervised contrastive loss, orthogonal projection loss, and N-pairs loss, are all instances of SCoRe, thereby underlining the versatility and applicability of SCoRe in a broad spectrum of learning scenarios. Novel objectives in SCoRe naturally model class-imbalance with up to 7.6\% improvement in classification on CIFAR-10-LT, CIFAR-100-LT, MedMNIST, 2.1% on ImageNet-LT, and 19.4% in object detection on IDD and LVIS (v1.0), demonstrating its effectiveness over existing approaches.
Authors:Gianni Franchi, Marwane Hariat, Xuanlong Yu, Nacim Belkhir, Antoine Manzanera, David Filliat
Abstract:
Current deep neural networks (DNNs) for autonomous driving computer vision are typically trained on specific datasets that only involve a single type of data and urban scenes. Consequently, these models struggle to handle new objects, noise, nighttime conditions, and diverse scenarios, which is essential for safety-critical applications. Despite ongoing efforts to enhance the resilience of computer vision DNNs, progress has been sluggish, partly due to the absence of benchmarks featuring multiple modalities. We introduce a novel and versatile dataset named InfraParis that supports multiple tasks across three modalities: RGB, depth, and infrared. We assess various state-of-the-art baseline techniques, encompassing models for the tasks of semantic segmentation, object detection, and depth estimation. More visualizations and the download link for InfraParis are available at \href{https://ensta-u2is.github.io/infraParis/}{https://ensta-u2is.github.io/infraParis/}.
Authors:Sweta Priyadarshi, Tianyu Jiang, Hsin-Pai Cheng, Sendil Krishna, Viswanath Ganapathy, Chirag Patel
Abstract:
With the growing demand for vision applications and deployment across edge devices, the development of hardware-friendly architectures that maintain performance during device deployment becomes crucial. Neural architecture search (NAS) techniques explore various approaches to discover efficient architectures for diverse learning tasks in a computationally efficient manner. In this paper, we present the next-generation neural architecture design for computationally efficient neural architecture distillation - DONNAv2 . Conventional NAS algorithms rely on a computationally extensive stage where an accuracy predictor is learned to estimate model performance within search space. This building of accuracy predictors helps them predict the performance of models that are not being finetuned. Here, we have developed an elegant approach to eliminate building the accuracy predictor and extend DONNA to a computationally efficient setting. The loss metric of individual blocks forming the network serves as the surrogate performance measure for the sampled models in the NAS search stage. To validate the performance of DONNAv2 we have performed extensive experiments involving a range of diverse vision tasks including classification, object detection, image denoising, super-resolution, and panoptic perception network (YOLOP). The hardware-in-the-loop experiments were carried out using the Samsung Galaxy S10 mobile platform. Notably, DONNAv2 reduces the computational cost of DONNA by 10x for the larger datasets. Furthermore, to improve the quality of NAS search space, DONNAv2 leverages a block knowledge distillation filter to remove blocks with high inference costs.
Authors:Arthur Zhang, Chaitanya Eranki, Christina Zhang, Ji-Hwan Park, Raymond Hong, Pranav Kalyani, Lochana Kalyanaraman, Arsh Gamare, Arnav Bagad, Maria Esteva, Joydeep Biswas
Abstract:
We introduce the UT Campus Object Dataset (CODa), a mobile robot egocentric perception dataset collected on the University of Texas Austin Campus. Our dataset contains 8.5 hours of multimodal sensor data: synchronized 3D point clouds and stereo RGB video from a 128-channel 3D LiDAR and two 1.25MP RGB cameras at 10 fps; RGB-D videos from an additional 0.5MP sensor at 7 fps, and a 9-DOF IMU sensor at 40 Hz. We provide 58 minutes of ground-truth annotations containing 1.3 million 3D bounding boxes with instance IDs for 53 semantic classes, 5000 frames of 3D semantic annotations for urban terrain, and pseudo-ground truth localization. We repeatedly traverse identical geographic locations for a wide range of indoor and outdoor areas, weather conditions, and times of the day. Using CODa, we empirically demonstrate that: 1) 3D object detection performance in urban settings is significantly higher when trained using CODa compared to existing datasets even when employing state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches, 2) sensor-specific fine-tuning improves 3D object detection accuracy and 3) pretraining on CODa improves cross-dataset 3D object detection performance in urban settings compared to pretraining on AV datasets. Using our dataset and annotations, we release benchmarks for 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation using established metrics. In the future, the CODa benchmark will include additional tasks like unsupervised object discovery and re-identification. We publicly release CODa on the Texas Data Repository, pre-trained models, dataset development package, and interactive dataset viewer on our website at https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/coda. We expect CODa to be a valuable dataset for research in egocentric 3D perception and planning for autonomous navigation in urban environments.
Authors:Sina Malakouti, Adriana Kovashka
Abstract:
Existing domain adaptation (DA) and generalization (DG) methods in object detection enforce feature alignment in the visual space but face challenges like object appearance variability and scene complexity, which make it difficult to distinguish between objects and achieve accurate detection. In this paper, we are the first to address the problem of semi-supervised domain generalization by exploring vision-language pre-training and enforcing feature alignment through the language space. We employ a novel Cross-Domain Descriptive Multi-Scale Learning (CDDMSL) aiming to maximize the agreement between descriptions of an image presented with different domain-specific characteristics in the embedding space. CDDMSL significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 11.7% and 7.5% improvement in DG and DA settings, respectively. Comprehensive analysis and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our method, positioning CDDMSL as a promising approach for domain generalization in object detection tasks.
Authors:Guotian Zeng, Bi Zeng, Hong Zhang, Jianqi Liu, Qingmao Wei
Abstract:
Single object tracking (SOT) heavily relies on the representation of the target object as a bounding box. However, due to the potential deformation and rotation experienced by the tracked targets, the genuine bounding box fails to capture the appearance information explicitly and introduces cluttered background. This paper proposes RTrack, a novel object representation baseline tracker that utilizes a set of sample points to get a pseudo bounding box. RTrack automatically arranges these points to define the spatial extents and highlight local areas. Building upon the baseline, we conducted an in-depth exploration of the training potential and introduced a one-to-many leading assignment strategy. It is worth noting that our approach achieves competitive performance to the state-of-the-art trackers on the GOT-10k dataset while reducing training time to just 10% of the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers' training costs. The substantial reduction in training costs brings single-object tracking (SOT) closer to the object detection (OD) task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed RTrack achieves SOTA results with faster convergence.
Authors:David Tschirschwitz, Christian Benz, Morris Florek, Henrik Norderhus, Benno Stein, Volker Rodehorst
Abstract:
The reliability of supervised machine learning systems depends on the accuracy and availability of ground truth labels. However, the process of human annotation, being prone to error, introduces the potential for noisy labels, which can impede the practicality of these systems. While training with noisy labels is a significant consideration, the reliability of test data is also crucial to ascertain the dependability of the results. A common approach to addressing this issue is repeated labeling, where multiple annotators label the same example, and their labels are combined to provide a better estimate of the true label. In this paper, we propose a novel localization algorithm that adapts well-established ground truth estimation methods for object detection and instance segmentation tasks. The key innovation of our method lies in its ability to transform combined localization and classification tasks into classification-only problems, thus enabling the application of techniques such as Expectation-Maximization (EM) or Majority Voting (MJV). Although our main focus is the aggregation of unique ground truth for test data, our algorithm also shows superior performance during training on the TexBiG dataset, surpassing both noisy label training and label aggregation using Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF). Our experiments indicate that the benefits of repeated labels emerge under specific dataset and annotation configurations. The key factors appear to be (1) dataset complexity, the (2) annotator consistency, and (3) the given annotation budget constraints.
Authors:Yaguan Qian, Boyuan Ji, Shuke He, Shenhui Huang, Xiang Ling, Bin Wang, Wei Wang
Abstract:
Deep learning models are widely deployed in many applications, such as object detection in various security fields. However, these models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Most backdoor attacks were intensively studied on classified models, but little on object detection. Previous works mainly focused on the backdoor attack in the digital world, but neglect the real world. Especially, the backdoor attack's effect in the real world will be easily influenced by physical factors like distance and illumination. In this paper, we proposed a variable-size backdoor trigger to adapt to the different sizes of attacked objects, overcoming the disturbance caused by the distance between the viewing point and attacked object. In addition, we proposed a backdoor training named malicious adversarial training, enabling the backdoor object detector to learn the feature of the trigger with physical noise. The experiment results show this robust backdoor attack (RBA) could enhance the attack success rate in the real world.
Authors:Josiah W. Smith, Murat Torlak
Abstract:
Accelerated by the increasing attention drawn by 5G, 6G, and Internet of Things applications, communication and sensing technologies have rapidly evolved from millimeter-wave (mmWave) to terahertz (THz) in recent years. Enabled by significant advancements in electromagnetic (EM) hardware, mmWave and THz frequency regimes spanning 30 GHz to 300 GHz and 300 GHz to 3000 GHz, respectively, can be employed for a host of applications. The main feature of THz systems is high-bandwidth transmission, enabling ultra-high-resolution imaging and high-throughput communications; however, challenges in both the hardware and algorithmic arenas remain for the ubiquitous adoption of THz technology. Spectra comprising mmWave and THz frequencies are well-suited for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging at sub-millimeter resolutions for a wide spectrum of tasks like material characterization and nondestructive testing (NDT). This article provides a tutorial review of systems and algorithms for THz SAR in the near-field with an emphasis on emerging algorithms that combine signal processing and machine learning techniques. As part of this study, an overview of classical and data-driven THz SAR algorithms is provided, focusing on object detection for security applications and SAR image super-resolution. We also discuss relevant issues, challenges, and future research directions for emerging algorithms and THz SAR, including standardization of system and algorithm benchmarking, adoption of state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, signal processing-optimized machine learning, and hybrid data-driven signal processing algorithms...
Authors:Yue Hu, Gourav Datta, Kira Beerel, Peter Beerel
Abstract:
Computer vision (CV) pipelines are typically evaluated on datasets processed by image signal processing (ISP) pipelines even though, for resource-constrained applications, an important research goal is to avoid as many ISP steps as possible. In particular, most CV datasets consist of global shutter (GS) images even though most cameras today use a rolling shutter (RS). This paper studies the impact of different shutter mechanisms on machine learning (ML) object detection models on a synthetic dataset that we generate using the advanced simulation capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). In particular, we train and evaluate mainstream detection models with our synthetically-generated paired GS and RS datasets to ascertain whether there exists a significant difference in detection accuracy between these two shutter modalities, especially when capturing low-speed objects (e.g., pedestrians). The results of this emulation framework indicate the performance between them are remarkably congruent for coarse-grained detection (mean average precision (mAP) for IOU=0.5), but have significant differences for fine-grained measures of detection accuracy (mAP for IOU=0.5:0.95). This implies that ML pipelines might not need explicit correction for RS for many object detection applications, but mitigating RS effects in ISP-less ML pipelines that target fine-grained location of the objects may need additional research.
Authors:Soumen Basu, Ashish Papanai, Mayank Gupta, Pankaj Gupta, Chetan Arora
Abstract:
Automated detection of Gallbladder Cancer (GBC) from Ultrasound (US) images is an important problem, which has drawn increased interest from researchers. However, most of these works use difficult-to-acquire information such as bounding box annotations or additional US videos. In this paper, we focus on GBC detection using only image-level labels. Such annotation is usually available based on the diagnostic report of a patient, and do not require additional annotation effort from the physicians. However, our analysis reveals that it is difficult to train a standard image classification model for GBC detection. This is due to the low inter-class variance (a malignant region usually occupies only a small portion of a US image), high intra-class variance (due to the US sensor capturing a 2D slice of a 3D object leading to large viewpoint variations), and low training data availability. We posit that even when we have only the image level label, still formulating the problem as object detection (with bounding box output) helps a deep neural network (DNN) model focus on the relevant region of interest. Since no bounding box annotations is available for training, we pose the problem as weakly supervised object detection (WSOD). Motivated by the recent success of transformer models in object detection, we train one such model, DETR, using multi-instance-learning (MIL) with self-supervised instance selection to suit the WSOD task. Our proposed method demonstrates an improvement of AP and detection sensitivity over the SOTA transformer-based and CNN-based WSOD methods. Project page is at https://gbc-iitd.github.io/wsod-gbc
Authors:Dudi Biton, Aditi Misra, Efrat Levy, Jaidip Kotak, Ron Bitton, Roei Schuster, Nicolas Papernot, Yuval Elovici, Ben Nassi
Abstract:
Machine learning (ML) models are known to be vulnerable to a number of attacks that target the integrity of their predictions or the privacy of their training data. To carry out these attacks, a black-box adversary must typically possess the ability to query the model and observe its outputs (e.g., labels). In this work, we demonstrate, for the first time, the ability to enhance such decision-based attacks. To accomplish this, we present an approach that exploits a novel side channel in which the adversary simply measures the execution time of the algorithm used to post-process the predictions of the ML model under attack. The leakage of inference-state elements into algorithmic timing side channels has never been studied before, and we have found that it can contain rich information that facilitates superior timing attacks that significantly outperform attacks based solely on label outputs. In a case study, we investigate leakage from the non-maximum suppression (NMS) algorithm, which plays a crucial role in the operation of object detectors. In our examination of the timing side-channel vulnerabilities associated with this algorithm, we identified the potential to enhance decision-based attacks. We demonstrate attacks against the YOLOv3 detector, leveraging the timing leakage to successfully evade object detection using adversarial examples, and perform dataset inference. Our experiments show that our adversarial examples exhibit superior perturbation quality compared to a decision-based attack. In addition, we present a new threat model in which dataset inference based solely on timing leakage is performed. To address the timing leakage vulnerability inherent in the NMS algorithm, we explore the potential and limitations of implementing constant-time inference passes as a mitigation strategy.
Authors:Alessandro Tundo, Marco Mobilio, Shashikant Ilager, Ivona BrandiÄ, Ezio Bartocci, Leonardo Mariani
Abstract:
The advent of edge devices dedicated to machine learning tasks enabled the execution of AI-based applications that efficiently process and classify the data acquired by the resource-constrained devices populating the Internet of Things. The proliferation of such applications (e.g., critical monitoring in smart cities) demands new strategies to make these systems also sustainable from an energetic point of view.
In this paper, we present an energy-aware approach for the design and deployment of self-adaptive AI-based applications that can balance application objectives (e.g., accuracy in object detection and frames processing rate) with energy consumption. We address the problem of determining the set of configurations that can be used to self-adapt the system with a meta-heuristic search procedure that only needs a small number of empirical samples. The final set of configurations are selected using weighted gray relational analysis, and mapped to the operation modes of the self-adaptive application.
We validate our approach on an AI-based application for pedestrian detection. Results show that our self-adaptive application can outperform non-adaptive baseline configurations by saving up to 81\% of energy while loosing only between 2% and 6% in accuracy.
Authors:Patrick Palmer, Martin Krueger, Richard Altendorfer, Torsten Bertram
Abstract:
New 3+1D high-resolution radar sensors are gaining importance for 3D object detection in the automotive domain due to their relative affordability and improved detection compared to classic low-resolution radar sensors. One limitation of high-resolution radar sensors, compared to lidar sensors, is the sparsity of the generated point cloud. This sparsity could be partially overcome by accumulating radar point clouds of subsequent time steps. This contribution analyzes limitations of accumulating radar point clouds on the View-of-Delft dataset. By employing different ego-motion estimation approaches, the dataset's inherent constraints, and possible solutions are analyzed. Additionally, a learning-based instance motion estimation approach is deployed to investigate the influence of dynamic motion on the accumulated point cloud for object detection. Experiments document an improved object detection performance by applying an ego-motion estimation and dynamic motion correction approach.
Authors:Matthew Dutson, Yin Li, Mohit Gupta
Abstract:
Vision Transformers achieve impressive accuracy across a range of visual recognition tasks. Unfortunately, their accuracy frequently comes with high computational costs. This is a particular issue in video recognition, where models are often applied repeatedly across frames or temporal chunks. In this work, we exploit temporal redundancy between subsequent inputs to reduce the cost of Transformers for video processing. We describe a method for identifying and re-processing only those tokens that have changed significantly over time. Our proposed family of models, Eventful Transformers, can be converted from existing Transformers (often without any re-training) and give adaptive control over the compute cost at runtime. We evaluate our method on large-scale datasets for video object detection (ImageNet VID) and action recognition (EPIC-Kitchens 100). Our approach leads to significant computational savings (on the order of 2-4x) with only minor reductions in accuracy.
Authors:Deguo Ma, Chen Li, Lin Qiao, Tianming Du, Dechao Tang, Zhiyu Ma, Marcin Grzegorzek Hongzan, Hongzan Sun
Abstract:
Intracerebral hemorrhage is one of the diseases with the highest mortality and poorest prognosis worldwide. Spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (SICH) typically presents acutely, prompt and expedited radiological examination is crucial for diagnosis, localization, and quantification of the hemorrhage. Early detection and accurate segmentation of perihematomal edema (PHE) play a critical role in guiding appropriate clinical intervention and enhancing patient prognosis. However, the progress and assessment of computer-aided diagnostic methods for PHE segmentation and detection face challenges due to the scarcity of publicly accessible brain CT image datasets. This study establishes a publicly available CT dataset named PHE-SICH-CT-IDS for perihematomal edema in spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage. The dataset comprises 120 brain CT scans and 7,022 CT images, along with corresponding medical information of the patients. To demonstrate its effectiveness, classical algorithms for semantic segmentation, object detection, and radiomic feature extraction are evaluated. The experimental results confirm the suitability of PHE-SICH-CT-IDS for assessing the performance of segmentation, detection and radiomic feature extraction methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available dataset for PHE in SICH, comprising various data formats suitable for applications across diverse medical scenarios. We believe that PHE-SICH-CT-IDS will allure researchers to explore novel algorithms, providing valuable support for clinicians and patients in the clinical setting. PHE-SICH-CT-IDS is freely published for non-commercial purpose at: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/PHE-SICH-CT-IDS/23957937.
Authors:Shubham Kulkarni, Arya Marda, Karthik Vaidhyanathan
Abstract:
Machine Learning (ML), particularly deep learning, has seen vast advancements, leading to the rise of Machine Learning-Enabled Systems (MLS). However, numerous software engineering challenges persist in propelling these MLS into production, largely due to various run-time uncertainties that impact the overall Quality of Service (QoS). These uncertainties emanate from ML models, software components, and environmental factors. Self-adaptation techniques present potential in managing run-time uncertainties, but their application in MLS remains largely unexplored. As a solution, we propose the concept of a Machine Learning Model Balancer, focusing on managing uncertainties related to ML models by using multiple models. Subsequently, we introduce AdaMLS, a novel self-adaptation approach that leverages this concept and extends the traditional MAPE-K loop for continuous MLS adaptation. AdaMLS employs lightweight unsupervised learning for dynamic model switching, thereby ensuring consistent QoS. Through a self-adaptive object detection system prototype, we demonstrate AdaMLS's effectiveness in balancing system and model performance. Preliminary results suggest AdaMLS surpasses naive and single state-of-the-art models in QoS guarantees, heralding the advancement towards self-adaptive MLS with optimal QoS in dynamic environments.
Authors:Dechao Tang, Tianming Du, Deguo Ma, Zhiyu Ma, Hongzan Sun, Marcin Grzegorzek, Huiyan Jiang, Chen Li
Abstract:
Endometrial cancer is one of the most common tumors in the female reproductive system and is the third most common gynecological malignancy that causes death after ovarian and cervical cancer. Early diagnosis can significantly improve the 5-year survival rate of patients. With the development of artificial intelligence, computer-assisted diagnosis plays an increasingly important role in improving the accuracy and objectivity of diagnosis, as well as reducing the workload of doctors. However, the absence of publicly available endometrial cancer image datasets restricts the application of computer-assisted diagnostic techniques.In this paper, a publicly available Endometrial Cancer PET/CT Image Dataset for Evaluation of Semantic Segmentation and Detection of Hypermetabolic Regions (ECPC-IDS) are published. Specifically, the segmentation section includes PET and CT images, with a total of 7159 images in multiple formats. In order to prove the effectiveness of segmentation methods on ECPC-IDS, five classical deep learning semantic segmentation methods are selected to test the image segmentation task. The object detection section also includes PET and CT images, with a total of 3579 images and XML files with annotation information. Six deep learning methods are selected for experiments on the detection task.This study conduct extensive experiments using deep learning-based semantic segmentation and object detection methods to demonstrate the differences between various methods on ECPC-IDS. As far as we know, this is the first publicly available dataset of endometrial cancer with a large number of multiple images, including a large amount of information required for image and target detection. ECPC-IDS can aid researchers in exploring new algorithms to enhance computer-assisted technology, benefiting both clinical doctors and patients greatly.
Authors:Chaorui Deng, Da Chen, Qi Wu
Abstract:
In Video Object Detection (VID), a common practice is to leverage the rich temporal contexts from the video to enhance the object representations in each frame. Existing methods treat the temporal contexts obtained from different objects indiscriminately and ignore their different identities. While intuitively, aggregating local views of the same object in different frames may facilitate a better understanding of the object. Thus, in this paper, we aim to enable the model to focus on the identity-consistent temporal contexts of each object to obtain more comprehensive object representations and handle the rapid object appearance variations such as occlusion, motion blur, etc. However, realizing this goal on top of existing VID models faces low-efficiency problems due to their redundant region proposals and nonparallel frame-wise prediction manner. To aid this, we propose ClipVID, a VID model equipped with Identity-Consistent Aggregation (ICA) layers specifically designed for mining fine-grained and identity-consistent temporal contexts. It effectively reduces the redundancies through the set prediction strategy, making the ICA layers very efficient and further allowing us to design an architecture that makes parallel clip-wise predictions for the whole video clip. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method: a state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance (84.7% mAP) on the ImageNet VID dataset while running at a speed about 7x faster (39.3 fps) than previous SOTAs.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Mohammad Rostami
Abstract:
Despite significant success of deep learning in object detection tasks, the standard training of deep neural networks requires access to a substantial quantity of annotated images across all classes. Data annotation is an arduous and time-consuming endeavor, particularly when dealing with infrequent objects. Few-shot object detection (FSOD) methods have emerged as a solution to the limitations of classic object detection approaches based on deep learning. FSOD methods demonstrate remarkable performance by achieving robust object detection using a significantly smaller amount of training data. A challenge for FSOD is that instances from novel classes that do not belong to the fixed set of training classes appear in the background and the base model may pick them up as potential objects. These objects behave similarly to label noise because they are classified as one of the training dataset classes, leading to FSOD performance degradation. We develop a semi-supervised algorithm to detect and then utilize these unlabeled novel objects as positive samples during the FSOD training stage to improve FSOD performance. Specifically, we develop a hierarchical ternary classification region proposal network (HTRPN) to localize the potential unlabeled novel objects and assign them new objectness labels to distinguish these objects from the base training dataset classes. Our improved hierarchical sampling strategy for the region proposal network (RPN) also boosts the perception ability of the object detection model for large objects. We test our approach and COCO and PASCAL VOC baselines that are commonly used in FSOD literature. Our experimental results indicate that our method is effective and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) FSOD methods. Our implementation is provided as a supplement to support reproducibility of the results.
Authors:Patrick Palmer, Martin Krueger, Richard Altendorfer, Ganesh Adam, Torsten Bertram
Abstract:
Recent developments and the beginning market introduction of high-resolution imaging 4D (3+1D) radar sensors have initialized deep learning-based radar perception research. We investigate deep learning-based models operating on radar point clouds for 3D object detection. 3D object detection on lidar point cloud data is a mature area of 3D vision. Many different architectures have been proposed, each with strengths and weaknesses. Due to similarities between 3D lidar point clouds and 3+1D radar point clouds, those existing 3D object detectors are a natural basis to start deep learning-based 3D object detection on radar data. Thus, the first step is to analyze the detection performance of the existing models on the new data modality and evaluate them in depth. In order to apply existing 3D point cloud object detectors developed for lidar point clouds to the radar domain, they need to be adapted first. While some detectors, such as PointPillars, have already been adapted to be applicable to radar data, we have adapted others, e.g., Voxel R-CNN, SECOND, PointRCNN, and PV-RCNN. To this end, we conduct a cross-model validation (evaluating a set of models on one particular data set) as well as a cross-data set validation (evaluating all models in the model set on several data sets). The high-resolution radar data used are the View-of-Delft and Astyx data sets. Finally, we evaluate several adaptations of the models and their training procedures. We also discuss major factors influencing the detection performance on radar data and propose possible solutions indicating potential future research avenues.
Authors:Ruikai Cui, Siyuan He, Shi Qiu
Abstract:
Foundation models, such as OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4, Meta's LLaMA, and Google's PaLM2, have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. A notable paradigm shift has been the advent of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which has exhibited a remarkable capability to segment real-world objects, trained on 1 billion masks and 11 million images. Although SAM excels in general object segmentation, it lacks the intrinsic ability to detect salient objects, resulting in suboptimal performance in this domain. To address this challenge, we present the Segment Salient Object Model (SSOM), an innovative approach that adaptively fine-tunes SAM for salient object detection by harnessing the low-rank structure inherent in deep learning. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations across five challenging RGB benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Guruprasad Parasnis, Anmol Chokshi, Vansh Jain, Kailas Devadkar
Abstract:
This research paper presents a novel approach to pothole detection using Deep Learning and Image Processing techniques. The proposed system leverages the VGG16 model for feature extraction and utilizes a custom Siamese network with triplet loss, referred to as RoadScan. The system aims to address the critical issue of potholes on roads, which pose significant risks to road users. Accidents due to potholes on the roads have led to numerous accidents. Although it is necessary to completely remove potholes, it is a time-consuming process. Hence, a general road user should be able to detect potholes from a safe distance in order to avoid damage. Existing methods for pothole detection heavily rely on object detection algorithms which tend to have a high chance of failure owing to the similarity in structures and textures of a road and a pothole. Additionally, these systems utilize millions of parameters thereby making the model difficult to use in small-scale applications for the general citizen. By analyzing diverse image processing methods and various high-performing networks, the proposed model achieves remarkable performance in accurately detecting potholes. Evaluation metrics such as accuracy, EER, precision, recall, and AUROC validate the effectiveness of the system. Additionally, the proposed model demonstrates computational efficiency and cost-effectiveness by utilizing fewer parameters and data for training. The research highlights the importance of technology in the transportation sector and its potential to enhance road safety and convenience. The network proposed in this model performs with a 96.12 % accuracy, 3.89 % EER, and a 0.988 AUROC value, which is highly competitive with other state-of-the-art works.
Authors:Lin Huang, Weisheng Li, Yujuan Tan, Linlin Shen, Jing Yu
Abstract:
In this study, the structural problems of the YOLOv5 model were analyzed emphatically. Based on the characteristics of fine defects in artificial leather, four innovative structures, namely DFP, IFF, AMP, and EOS, were designed. These advancements led to the proposal of a high-performance artificial leather fine defect detection model named YOLOD. YOLOD demonstrated outstanding performance on the artificial leather defect dataset, achieving an impressive increase of 11.7% - 13.5% in AP_50 compared to YOLOv5, along with a significant reduction of 5.2% - 7.2% in the error detection rate. Moreover, YOLOD also exhibited remarkable performance on the general MS-COCO dataset, with an increase of 0.4% - 2.6% in AP compared to YOLOv5, and a rise of 2.5% - 4.1% in AP_S compared to YOLOv5. These results demonstrate the superiority of YOLOD in both artificial leather defect detection and general object detection tasks, making it a highly efficient and effective model for real-world applications.
Authors:Yang Lou, Qun Song, Qian Xu, Rui Tan, Jianping Wang
Abstract:
Multi-modal fusion has shown initial promising results for object detection of autonomous driving perception. However, many existing fusion schemes do not consider the quality of each fusion input and may suffer from adverse conditions on one or more sensors. While predictive uncertainty has been applied to characterize single-modal object detection performance at run time, incorporating uncertainties into the multi-modal fusion still lacks effective solutions due primarily to the uncertainty's cross-modal incomparability and distinct sensitivities to various adverse conditions. To fill this gap, this paper proposes Uncertainty-Encoded Mixture-of-Experts (UMoE) that explicitly incorporates single-modal uncertainties into LiDAR-camera fusion. UMoE uses individual expert network to process each sensor's detection result together with encoded uncertainty. Then, the expert networks' outputs are analyzed by a gating network to determine the fusion weights. The proposed UMoE module can be integrated into any proposal fusion pipeline. Evaluation shows that UMoE achieves a maximum of 10.67%, 3.17%, and 5.40% performance gain compared with the state-of-the-art proposal-level multi-modal object detectors under extreme weather, adversarial, and blinding attack scenarios.
Authors:Seyed Mojtaba Marvasti-Zadeh, Nilanjan Ray, Nadir Erbilgin
Abstract:
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to improve the performance and generalization of existing object detectors by utilizing limited labeled data and extensive unlabeled data. Despite many advances, recent SSOD methods are still challenged by inadequate model refinement using the classical exponential moving average (EMA) strategy, the consensus of Teacher-Student models in the latter stages of training (i.e., losing their distinctiveness), and noisy/misleading pseudo-labels. This paper proposes a novel training-based model refinement (TMR) stage and a simple yet effective representation disagreement (RD) strategy to address the limitations of classical EMA and the consensus problem. The TMR stage of Teacher-Student models optimizes the lightweight scaling operation to refine the model's weights and prevent overfitting or forgetting learned patterns from unlabeled data. Meanwhile, the RD strategy helps keep these models diverged to encourage the student model to explore additional patterns in unlabeled data. Our approach can be integrated into established SSOD methods and is empirically validated using two baseline methods, with and without cascade regression, to generate more reliable pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art SSOD methods. Specifically, the proposed approach outperforms the baseline Unbiased-Teacher-v2 (& Unbiased-Teacher-v1) method by an average mAP margin of 2.23, 2.1, and 3.36 (& 2.07, 1.9, and 3.27) on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and Pascal VOC datasets, respectively.
Authors:Yiming Wu, Ruixiang Li, Zequn Qin, Xinhai Zhao, Xi Li
Abstract:
Vision-based Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation is an emerging perception formulation for autonomous driving. The core challenge is to construct BEV space with multi-camera features, which is a one-to-many ill-posed problem. Diving into all previous BEV representation generation methods, we found that most of them fall into two types: modeling depths in image views or modeling heights in the BEV space, mostly in an implicit way. In this work, we propose to explicitly model heights in the BEV space, which needs no extra data like LiDAR and can fit arbitrary camera rigs and types compared to modeling depths. Theoretically, we give proof of the equivalence between height-based methods and depth-based methods. Considering the equivalence and some advantages of modeling heights, we propose HeightFormer, which models heights and uncertainties in a self-recursive way. Without any extra data, the proposed HeightFormer could estimate heights in BEV accurately. Benchmark results show that the performance of HeightFormer achieves SOTA compared with those camera-only methods.
Authors:Abdelbadie Belmouhcine, Jean-Christophe Burnel, Luc Courtrai, Minh-Tan Pham, Sébastien Lefèvre
Abstract:
Object detection in remote sensing is a crucial computer vision task that has seen significant advancements with deep learning techniques. However, most existing works in this area focus on the use of generic object detection and do not leverage the potential of multimodal data fusion. In this paper, we present a comparison of methods for multimodal object detection in remote sensing, survey available multimodal datasets suitable for evaluation, and discuss future directions.
Authors:Yalda Foroutan, Alon Harell, Anderson de Andrade, Ivan V. BajiÄ
Abstract:
A basic premise in scalable human-machine coding is that the base layer is intended for automated machine analysis and is therefore more compressible than the same content would be for human viewing. Use cases for such coding include video surveillance and traffic monitoring, where the majority of the content will never be seen by humans. Therefore, base layer efficiency is of paramount importance because the system would most frequently operate at the base-layer rate. In this paper, we analyze the coding efficiency of the base layer in a state-of-the-art scalable human-machine image codec, and show that it can be improved. In particular, we demonstrate that gains of 20-40% in BD-Rate compared to the currently best results on object detection and instance segmentation are possible.
Authors:Henri De Plaen, Pierre-François De Plaen, Johan A. K. Suykens, Marc Proesmans, Tinne Tuytelaars, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
During training, supervised object detection tries to correctly match the predicted bounding boxes and associated classification scores to the ground truth. This is essential to determine which predictions are to be pushed towards which solutions, or to be discarded. Popular matching strategies include matching to the closest ground truth box (mostly used in combination with anchors), or matching via the Hungarian algorithm (mostly used in anchor-free methods). Each of these strategies comes with its own properties, underlying losses, and heuristics. We show how Unbalanced Optimal Transport unifies these different approaches and opens a whole continuum of methods in between. This allows for a finer selection of the desired properties. Experimentally, we show that training an object detection model with Unbalanced Optimal Transport is able to reach the state-of-the-art both in terms of Average Precision and Average Recall as well as to provide a faster initial convergence. The approach is well suited for GPU implementation, which proves to be an advantage for large-scale models.
Authors:Renato Sortino, Thomas Cecconello, Andrea DeMarco, Giuseppe Fiameni, Andrea Pilzer, Andrew M. Hopkins, Daniel Magro, Simone Riggi, Eva Sciacca, Adriano Ingallinera, Cristobal Bordiu, Filomena Bufano, Concetto Spampinato
Abstract:
Along with the nearing completion of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), comes an increasing demand for accurate and reliable automated solutions to extract valuable information from the vast amount of data it will allow acquiring. Automated source finding is a particularly important task in this context, as it enables the detection and classification of astronomical objects. Deep-learning-based object detection and semantic segmentation models have proven to be suitable for this purpose. However, training such deep networks requires a high volume of labeled data, which is not trivial to obtain in the context of radio astronomy. Since data needs to be manually labeled by experts, this process is not scalable to large dataset sizes, limiting the possibilities of leveraging deep networks to address several tasks. In this work, we propose RADiff, a generative approach based on conditional diffusion models trained over an annotated radio dataset to generate synthetic images, containing radio sources of different morphologies, to augment existing datasets and reduce the problems caused by class imbalances. We also show that it is possible to generate fully-synthetic image-annotation pairs to automatically augment any annotated dataset. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach by training a semantic segmentation model on a real dataset augmented in two ways: 1) using synthetic images obtained from real masks, and 2) generating images from synthetic semantic masks. We show an improvement in performance when applying augmentation, gaining up to 18% in performance when using real masks and 4% when augmenting with synthetic masks. Finally, we employ this model to generate large-scale radio maps with the objective of simulating Data Challenges.
Authors:Federico Rollo, Gennaro Raiola, Andrea Zunino, Nikolaos Tsagarakis, Arash Ajoudani
Abstract:
Geometric navigation is nowadays a well-established field of robotics and the research focus is shifting towards higher-level scene understanding, such as Semantic Mapping. When a robot needs to interact with its environment, it must be able to comprehend the contextual information of its surroundings. This work focuses on classifying and localising objects within a map, which is under construction (SLAM) or already built. To further explore this direction, we propose a framework that can autonomously detect and localize predefined objects in a known environment using a multi-modal sensor fusion approach (combining RGB and depth data from an RGB-D camera and a lidar). The framework consists of three key elements: understanding the environment through RGB data, estimating depth through multi-modal sensor fusion, and managing artifacts (i.e., filtering and stabilizing measurements). The experiments show that the proposed framework can accurately detect 98% of the objects in the real sample environment, without post-processing, while 85% and 80% of the objects were mapped using the single RGBD camera or RGB + lidar setup respectively. The comparison with single-sensor (camera or lidar) experiments is performed to show that sensor fusion allows the robot to accurately detect near and far obstacles, which would have been noisy or imprecise in a purely visual or laser-based approach.
Authors:Marzieh Haghighi, Mario C. Cruz, Erin Weisbart, Beth A. Cimini, Avtar Singh, Julia Bauman, Maria E. Lozada, Sanam L. Kavari, James T. Neal, Paul C. Blainey, Anne E. Carpenter, Shantanu Singh
Abstract:
Various strategies for label-scarce object detection have been explored by the computer vision research community. These strategies mainly rely on assumptions that are specific to natural images and not directly applicable to the biological and biomedical vision domains. For example, most semi-supervised learning strategies rely on a small set of labeled data as a confident source of ground truth. In many biological vision applications, however, the ground truth is unknown and indirect information might be available in the form of noisy estimations or orthogonal evidence. In this work, we frame a crucial problem in spatial transcriptomics - decoding barcodes from In-Situ-Sequencing (ISS) images - as a semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) problem. Our proposed framework incorporates additional available sources of information into a semi-supervised learning framework in the form of privileged information. The privileged information is incorporated into the teacher's pseudo-labeling in a teacher-student self-training iteration. Although the available privileged information could be data domain specific, we have introduced a general strategy of pseudo-labeling enhanced by privileged information (PLePI) and exemplified the concept using ISS images, as well on the COCO benchmark using extra evidence provided by CLIP.
Authors:Subash Gautam, Prabin Sharma, Kisan Thapa, Mala Deep Upadhaya, Dikshya Thapa, Salik Ram Khanal, VÃtor Manuel de Jesus Filipe
Abstract:
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental condition that presents significant challenges in social interaction, communication, and behavior. Early intervention plays a pivotal role in enhancing cognitive abilities and reducing autistic symptoms in children with ASD. Numerous clinical studies have highlighted distinctive facial characteristics that distinguish ASD children from typically developing (TD) children. In this study, we propose a practical solution for ASD screening using facial images using YoloV8 model. By employing YoloV8, a deep learning technique, on a dataset of Kaggle, we achieved exceptional results. Our model achieved a remarkable 89.64% accuracy in classification and an F1-score of 0.89. Our findings provide support for the clinical observations regarding facial feature discrepancies between children with ASD. The high F1-score obtained demonstrates the potential of deep learning models in screening children with ASD. We conclude that the newest version of YoloV8 which is usually used for object detection can be used for classification problem of Austistic and Non-autistic images.
Authors:Maciej K. Wozniak, Viktor Karefjards, Marko Thiel, Patric Jensfelt
Abstract:
Multimodal sensor fusion methods for 3D object detection have been revolutionizing the autonomous driving research field. Nevertheless, most of these methods heavily rely on dense LiDAR data and accurately calibrated sensors which is often not the case in real-world scenarios. Data from LiDAR and cameras often come misaligned due to the miscalibration, decalibration, or different frequencies of the sensors. Additionally, some parts of the LiDAR data may be occluded and parts of the data may be missing due to hardware malfunction or weather conditions. This work presents a novel fusion step that addresses data corruptions and makes sensor fusion for 3D object detection more robust. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method performs on par with state-of-the-art approaches on normal data and outperforms them on misaligned data.
Authors:Han Sun, Rui Gong, Konrad Schindler, Luc Van Gool
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection aims to leverage the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to improve the performance on an unlabeled target domain. Prior works typically require the access to the source domain data for adaptation, and the availability of sufficient data on the target domain. However, these assumptions may not hold due to data privacy and rare data collection. In this paper, we propose and investigate a more practical and challenging domain adaptive object detection problem under both source-free and few-shot conditions, named as SF-FSDA. To overcome this problem, we develop an efficient labeled data factory based approach. Without accessing the source domain, the data factory renders i) infinite amount of synthesized target-domain like images, under the guidance of the few-shot image samples and text description from the target domain; ii) corresponding bounding box and category annotations, only demanding minimum human effort, i.e., a few manually labeled examples. On the one hand, the synthesized images mitigate the knowledge insufficiency brought by the few-shot condition. On the other hand, compared to the popular pseudo-label technique, the generated annotations from data factory not only get rid of the reliance on the source pretrained object detection model, but also alleviate the unavoidably pseudo-label noise due to domain shift and source-free condition. The generated dataset is further utilized to adapt the source pretrained object detection model, realizing the robust object detection under SF-FSDA. The experiments on different settings showcase that our proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on SF-FSDA problem. Our codes and models will be made publicly available.
Authors:Yulin He, Wei Chen, Yusong Tan, Siqi Wang
Abstract:
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a novel and challenging computer vision task that enables object detection with the ability to detect unknown objects. Existing methods typically estimate the object likelihood with an additional objectness branch, but ignore the conflict in learning objectness and classification boundaries, which oppose each other on the semantic manifold and training objective. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective learning strategy, namely Decoupled Objectness Learning (DOL), which divides the learning of these two boundaries into suitable decoder layers. Moreover, detecting unknown objects comprehensively requires a large amount of annotations, but labeling all unknown objects is both difficult and expensive. Therefore, we propose to take advantage of the recent Large Vision Model (LVM), specifically the Segment Anything Model (SAM), to enhance the detection of unknown objects. Nevertheless, the output results of SAM contain noise, including backgrounds and fragments, so we introduce an Auxiliary Supervision Framework (ASF) that uses a pseudo-labeling and a soft-weighting strategies to alleviate the negative impact of noise. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks, including Pascal VOC and MS COCO, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our proposed Unknown Sensitive Detector (USD) outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods in terms of Unknown Recall, achieving significant improvements of 14.3\%, 15.5\%, and 8.9\% on the M-OWODB, and 27.1\%, 29.1\%, and 25.1\% on the S-OWODB.
Authors:Hammad A. Ayyubi, Rahul Lokesh, Alireza Zareian, Bo Wu, Shih-Fu Chang
Abstract:
Image-caption pretraining has been quite successfully used for downstream vision tasks like zero-shot image classification and object detection. However, image-caption pretraining is still a hard problem -- it requires multiple concepts (nouns) from captions to be aligned to several objects in images. To tackle this problem, we go to the roots -- the best learner, children. We take inspiration from cognitive science studies dealing with children's language learning to propose a curriculum learning framework. The learning begins with easy-to-align image caption pairs containing one concept per caption. The difficulty is progressively increased with each new phase by adding one more concept per caption. Correspondingly, the knowledge acquired in each learning phase is utilized in subsequent phases to effectively constrain the learning problem to aligning one new concept-object pair in each phase. We show that this learning strategy improves over vanilla image-caption training in various settings -- pretraining from scratch, using a pretrained image or/and pretrained text encoder, low data regime etc.
Authors:Alon Harell, Yalda Foroutan, Nilesh Ahuja, Parual Datta, Bhavya Kanzariya, V. Srinivasa Somayazulu, Omesh Tickoo, Anderson de Andrade, Ivan V. Bajic
Abstract:
Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in both the capability and popularity of automatic machine analysis of images and video. As a result, a growing need for efficient compression methods optimized for machine vision, rather than human vision, has emerged. To meet this growing demand, several methods have been developed for image and video coding for machines. Unfortunately, while there is a substantial body of knowledge regarding rate-distortion theory for human vision, the same cannot be said of machine analysis. In this paper, we extend the current rate-distortion theory for machines, providing insight into important design considerations of machine-vision codecs. We then utilize this newfound understanding to improve several methods for learnable image coding for machines. Our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance on several computer vision tasks such as classification, instance segmentation, and object detection.
Authors:Xue Zhang, Xiaohan Zhang, Jiangtao Wang, Jiacheng Ying, Zehua Sheng, Heng Yu, Chunguang Li, Hui-Liang Shen
Abstract:
Pedestrian detection plays a critical role in computer vision as it contributes to ensuring traffic safety. Existing methods that rely solely on RGB images suffer from performance degradation under low-light conditions due to the lack of useful information. To address this issue, recent multispectral detection approaches have combined thermal images to provide complementary information and have obtained enhanced performances. Nevertheless, few approaches focus on the negative effects of false positives caused by noisy fused feature maps. Different from them, we comprehensively analyze the impacts of false positives on the detection performance and find that enhancing feature contrast can significantly reduce these false positives. In this paper, we propose a novel target-aware fusion strategy for multispectral pedestrian detection, named TFDet. TFDet achieves state-of-the-art performance on two multispectral pedestrian benchmarks, KAIST and LLVIP. TFDet can easily extend to multi-class object detection scenarios. It outperforms the previous best approaches on two multispectral object detection benchmarks, FLIR and M3FD. Importantly, TFDet has comparable inference efficiency to the previous approaches, and has remarkably good detection performance even under low-light conditions, which is a significant advancement for ensuring road safety.
Authors:Yuhang Zang, Kaiyang Zhou, Chen Huang, Chen Change Loy
Abstract:
This paper focuses on long-tailed object detection in the semi-supervised learning setting, which poses realistic challenges, but has rarely been studied in the literature. We propose a novel pseudo-labeling-based detector called CascadeMatch. Our detector features a cascade network architecture, which has multi-stage detection heads with progressive confidence thresholds. To avoid manually tuning the thresholds, we design a new adaptive pseudo-label mining mechanism to automatically identify suitable values from data. To mitigate confirmation bias, where a model is negatively reinforced by incorrect pseudo-labels produced by itself, each detection head is trained by the ensemble pseudo-labels of all detection heads. Experiments on two long-tailed datasets, i.e., LVIS and COCO-LT, demonstrate that CascadeMatch surpasses existing state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches -- across a wide range of detection architectures -- in handling long-tailed object detection. For instance, CascadeMatch outperforms Unbiased Teacher by 1.9 AP Fix on LVIS when using a ResNet50-based Cascade R-CNN structure, and by 1.7 AP Fix when using Sparse R-CNN with a Transformer encoder. We also show that CascadeMatch can even handle the challenging sparsely annotated object detection problem.
Authors:Nathan Beck, Suraj Kothawade, Pradeep Shenoy, Rishabh Iyer
Abstract:
Deep neural networks have consistently shown great performance in several real-world use cases like autonomous vehicles, satellite imaging, etc., effectively leveraging large corpora of labeled training data. However, learning unbiased models depends on building a dataset that is representative of a diverse range of realistic scenarios for a given task. This is challenging in many settings where data comes from high-volume streams, with each scenario occurring in random interleaved episodes at varying frequencies. We study realistic streaming settings where data instances arrive in and are sampled from an episodic multi-distributional data stream. Using submodular information measures, we propose STREAMLINE, a novel streaming active learning framework that mitigates scenario-driven slice imbalance in the working labeled data via a three-step procedure of slice identification, slice-aware budgeting, and data selection. We extensively evaluate STREAMLINE on real-world streaming scenarios for image classification and object detection tasks. We observe that STREAMLINE improves the performance on infrequent yet critical slices of the data over current baselines by up to $5\%$ in terms of accuracy on our image classification tasks and by up to $8\%$ in terms of mAP on our object detection tasks.
Authors:Abanoub Ghobrial, Samuel Budgett, Dieter Balemans, Hamid Asgari, Phil Reiter, Kerstin Eder
Abstract:
There is a lot of ongoing research effort into developing different techniques for neural networks compression. However, the community lacks standardised evaluation metrics, which are key to identifying the most suitable compression technique for different applications. This paper reviews existing neural network compression evaluation metrics and implements them into a standardisation framework called NetZIP. We introduce two novel metrics to cover existing gaps of evaluation in the literature: 1) Compression and Hardware Agnostic Theoretical Speed (CHATS) and 2) Overall Compression Success (OCS). We demonstrate the use of NetZIP using two case studies on two different hardware platforms (a PC and a Raspberry Pi 4) focusing on object classification and object detection.
Authors:Hakjin Lee, Minki Song, Jamyoung Koo, Junghoon Seo
Abstract:
Detection Transformers (DETR) have recently set new benchmarks in object detection. However, their performance in detecting rotated objects lags behind established oriented object detectors. Our analysis identifies a key observation: the boundary discontinuity and square-like problem in bipartite matching poses an issue with assigning appropriate ground truths to predictions, leading to duplicate low-confidence predictions. To address this, we introduce a Hausdorff distance-based cost for bipartite matching, which more accurately quantifies the discrepancy between predictions and ground truths. Additionally, we find that a static denoising approach impedes the training of rotated DETR, especially as the quality of the detector's predictions begins to exceed that of the noised ground truths. To overcome this, we propose an adaptive query denoising method that employs bipartite matching to selectively eliminate noised queries that detract from model improvement. When compared to models adopting a ResNet-50 backbone, our proposed model yields remarkable improvements, achieving $\textbf{+4.18}$ AP$_{50}$, $\textbf{+4.59}$ AP$_{50}$, and $\textbf{+4.99}$ AP$_{50}$ on DOTA-v2.0, DOTA-v1.5, and DIOR-R, respectively.
Authors:Aboli Marathe, Deva Ramanan, Rahee Walambe, Ketan Kotecha
Abstract:
The open road poses many challenges to autonomous perception, including poor visibility from extreme weather conditions. Models trained on good-weather datasets frequently fail at detection in these out-of-distribution settings. To aid adversarial robustness in perception, we introduce WEDGE (WEather images by DALL-E GEneration): a synthetic dataset generated with a vision-language generative model via prompting. WEDGE consists of 3360 images in 16 extreme weather conditions manually annotated with 16513 bounding boxes, supporting research in the tasks of weather classification and 2D object detection. We have analyzed WEDGE from research standpoints, verifying its effectiveness for extreme-weather autonomous perception. We establish baseline performance for classification and detection with 53.87% test accuracy and 45.41 mAP. Most importantly, WEDGE can be used to fine-tune state-of-the-art detectors, improving SOTA performance on real-world weather benchmarks (such as DAWN) by 4.48 AP for well-generated classes like trucks. WEDGE has been collected under OpenAI's terms of use and is released for public use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The repository for this work and dataset is available at https://infernolia.github.io/WEDGE.
Authors:Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Mai Gamal, Eman Ehab, Gbetondji Dovonon, Zainab Akinjobi, Ismaila Lukman, Houcemeddine Turki, Mahmod Abdien, Idriss Tondji, Abigail Oppong, Yvan Pimi, Karim Gamal, Ro'ya-CV4Africa, Mennatullah Siam
Abstract:
Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks (e.g., object detection). Although computer vision is relevant to the African communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is under-explored in the continent and constructs only 0.06% of top-tier publications in the last ten years. In this paper, our goal is to have a better understanding of the computer vision research conducted in Africa and provide pointers on whether there is equity in research or not. We do this through an empirical analysis of the African computer vision publications that are Scopus indexed, where we collect around 63,000 publications over the period 2012-2022. We first study the opportunities available for African institutions to publish in top-tier computer vision venues. We show that African publishing trends in top-tier venues over the years do not exhibit consistent growth, unlike other continents such as North America or Asia. Moreover, we study all computer vision publications beyond top-tier venues in different African regions to find that mainly Northern and Southern Africa are publishing in computer vision with 68.5% and 15.9% of publications, resp. Nonetheless, we highlight that both Eastern and Western Africa are exhibiting a promising increase with the last two years closing the gap with Southern Africa. Additionally, we study the collaboration patterns in these publications to find that most of these exhibit international collaborations rather than African ones. We also show that most of these publications include an African author that is a key contributor as the first or last author. Finally, we present the most recurring keywords in computer vision publications per African region.
Authors:Lin Huang, Weisheng Li, Yujuan Tan, Linlin Shen, Jing Yu, Haojie Fu
Abstract:
In this study, we examine the associations between channel features and convolutional kernels during the processes of feature purification and gradient backpropagation, with a focus on the forward and backward propagation within the network. Consequently, we propose a method called Dense Channel Compression for Feature Spatial Solidification. Drawing upon the central concept of this method, we introduce two innovative modules for backbone and head networks: the Dense Channel Compression for Feature Spatial Solidification Structure (DCFS) and the Asymmetric Multi-Level Compression Decoupled Head (ADH). When integrated into the YOLOv5 model, these two modules demonstrate exceptional performance, resulting in a modified model referred to as YOLOCS. Evaluated on the MSCOCO dataset, the large, medium, and small YOLOCS models yield AP of 50.1%, 47.6%, and 42.5%, respectively. Maintaining inference speeds remarkably similar to those of the YOLOv5 model, the large, medium, and small YOLOCS models surpass the YOLOv5 model's AP by 1.1%, 2.3%, and 5.2%, respectively.
Authors:Anderson de Andrade, Alon Harell, Yalda Foroutan, Ivan V. BajiÄ
Abstract:
We present methods for conditional and residual coding in the context of scalable coding for humans and machines. Our focus is on optimizing the rate-distortion performance of the reconstruction task using the information available in the computer vision task. We include an information analysis of both approaches to provide baselines and also propose an entropy model suitable for conditional coding with increased modelling capacity and similar tractability as previous work. We apply these methods to image reconstruction, using, in one instance, representations created for semantic segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset, and in another instance, representations created for object detection on the COCO dataset. In both experiments, we obtain similar performance between the conditional and residual methods, with the resulting rate-distortion curves contained within our baselines.
Authors:Faranak Shamsafar, Sunil Jaiswal, Benjamin Kelkel, Kireeti Bodduna, Klaus Illgner-Fehns
Abstract:
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are essential components of electronic devices, and ensuring their quality is crucial in their production. However, the vast variety of components and PCBs manufactured by different companies makes it challenging to adapt to production lines with speed demands. To address this challenge, we present a multi-view object detection framework that offers a fast and precise solution. We introduce a novel multi-view dataset with semi-automatic ground-truth data, which results in significant labeling resource savings. Labeling PCB boards for object detection is a challenging task due to the high density of components and the small size of the objects, which makes it difficult to identify and label them accurately. By training an object detector model with multi-view data, we achieve improved performance over single-view images. To further enhance the accuracy, we develop a multi-view inference method that aggregates results from different viewpoints. Our experiments demonstrate a 15% improvement in mAP for detecting components that range in size from 0.5 to 27.0 mm.
Authors:Chenyang Zhao, Antoni B. Chan
Abstract:
We propose the gradient-weighted Object Detector Activation Maps (ODAM), a visualized explanation technique for interpreting the predictions of object detectors. Utilizing the gradients of detector targets flowing into the intermediate feature maps, ODAM produces heat maps that show the influence of regions on the detector's decision for each predicted attribute. Compared to previous works classification activation maps (CAM), ODAM generates instance-specific explanations rather than class-specific ones. We show that ODAM is applicable to both one-stage detectors and two-stage detectors with different types of detector backbones and heads, and produces higher-quality visual explanations than the state-of-the-art both effectively and efficiently. We next propose a training scheme, Odam-Train, to improve the explanation ability on object discrimination of the detector through encouraging consistency between explanations for detections on the same object, and distinct explanations for detections on different objects. Based on the heat maps produced by ODAM with Odam-Train, we propose Odam-NMS, which considers the information of the model's explanation for each prediction to distinguish the duplicate detected objects. We present a detailed analysis of the visualized explanations of detectors and carry out extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ODAM.
Authors:Akshay Gadi Patil, Supriya Gadi Patil, Manyi Li, Matthew Fisher, Manolis Savva, Hao Zhang
Abstract:
This report surveys advances in deep learning-based modeling techniques that address four different 3D indoor scene analysis tasks, as well as synthesis of 3D indoor scenes. We describe different kinds of representations for indoor scenes, various indoor scene datasets available for research in the aforementioned areas, and discuss notable works employing machine learning models for such scene modeling tasks based on these representations. Specifically, we focus on the analysis and synthesis of 3D indoor scenes. With respect to analysis, we focus on four basic scene understanding tasks -- 3D object detection, 3D scene segmentation, 3D scene reconstruction and 3D scene similarity. And for synthesis, we mainly discuss neural scene synthesis works, though also highlighting model-driven methods that allow for human-centric, progressive scene synthesis. We identify the challenges involved in modeling scenes for these tasks and the kind of machinery that needs to be developed to adapt to the data representation, and the task setting in general. For each of these tasks, we provide a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art works across different axes such as the choice of data representation, backbone, evaluation metric, input, output, etc., providing an organized review of the literature. Towards the end, we discuss some interesting research directions that have the potential to make a direct impact on the way users interact and engage with these virtual scene models, making them an integral part of the metaverse.
Authors:Sian Jin, Pu Perry Wang, Petros Boufounos, Philip V. Orlik, Ryuhei Takahashi, Sumit Roy
Abstract:
This paper considers mutual interference mitigation among automotive radars using frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) signal and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) virtual arrays. For the first time, we derive a general interference signal model that fully accounts for not only the time-frequency incoherence, e.g., different FMCW configuration parameters and time offsets, but also the slow-time code MIMO incoherence and array configuration differences between the victim and interfering radars. Along with a standard MIMO-FMCW object signal model, we turn the interference mitigation into a spatial-domain object detection under incoherent MIMO-FMCW interference described by the explicit interference signal model, and propose a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector. More specifically, the proposed detector exploits the structural property of the derived interference model at both \emph{transmit} and \emph{receive} steering vector space. We also derive analytical closed-form expressions for probabilities of detection and false alarm. Performance evaluation using both synthetic-level and phased array system-level simulation confirms the effectiveness of our proposed detector over selected baseline methods.
Authors:Gary Sarwin, Alessandro Carretta, Victor Staartjes, Matteo Zoli, Diego Mazzatenta, Luca Regli, Carlo Serra, Ender Konukoglu
Abstract:
Advanced minimally invasive neurosurgery navigation relies mainly on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) guidance. MRI guidance, however, only provides pre-operative information in the majority of the cases. Once the surgery begins, the value of this guidance diminishes to some extent because of the anatomical changes due to surgery. Guidance with live image feedback coming directly from the surgical device, e.g., endoscope, can complement MRI-based navigation or be an alternative if MRI guidance is not feasible. With this motivation, we present a method for live image-only guidance leveraging a large data set of annotated neurosurgical videos.First, we report the performance of a deep learning-based object detection method, YOLO, on detecting anatomical structures in neurosurgical images. Second, we present a method for generating neurosurgical roadmaps using unsupervised embedding without assuming exact anatomical matches between patients, presence of an extensive anatomical atlas, or the need for simultaneous localization and mapping. A generated roadmap encodes the common anatomical paths taken in surgeries in the training set. At inference, the roadmap can be used to map a surgeon's current location using live image feedback on the path to provide guidance by being able to predict which structures should appear going forward or backward, much like a mapping application. Even though the embedding is not supervised by position information, we show that it is correlated to the location inside the brain and on the surgical path. We trained and evaluated the proposed method with a data set of 166 transsphenoidal adenomectomy procedures.
Authors:Cagri Gungor, Adriana Kovashka
Abstract:
Despite recent attention and exploration of depth for various tasks, it is still an unexplored modality for weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD). We propose an amplifier method for enhancing the performance of WSOD by integrating depth information. Our approach can be applied to any WSOD method based on multiple-instance learning, without necessitating additional annotations or inducing large computational expenses. Our proposed method employs a monocular depth estimation technique to obtain hallucinated depth information, which is then incorporated into a Siamese WSOD network using contrastive loss and fusion. By analyzing the relationship between language context and depth, we calculate depth priors to identify the bounding box proposals that may contain an object of interest. These depth priors are then utilized to update the list of pseudo ground-truth boxes, or adjust the confidence of per-box predictions. Our proposed method is evaluated on six datasets (COCO, PASCAL VOC, Conceptual Captions, Clipart1k, Watercolor2k, and Comic2k) by implementing it on top of two state-of-the-art WSOD methods, and we demonstrate a substantial enhancement in performance.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Mohammad Rostami
Abstract:
Conventional training of deep neural networks requires a large number of the annotated image which is a laborious and time-consuming task, particularly for rare objects. Few-shot object detection (FSOD) methods offer a remedy by realizing robust object detection using only a few training samples per class. An unexplored challenge for FSOD is that instances from unlabeled novel classes that do not belong to the fixed set of training classes appear in the background. These objects behave similarly to label noise, leading to FSOD performance degradation. We develop a semi-supervised algorithm to detect and then utilize these unlabeled novel objects as positive samples during training to improve FSOD performance. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical ternary classification region proposal network (HTRPN) to localize the potential unlabeled novel objects and assign them new objectness labels. Our improved hierarchical sampling strategy for the region proposal network (RPN) also boosts the perception ability of the object detection model for large objects. Our experimental results indicate that our method is effective and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) FSOD methods.
Authors:Kyle Buettner, Adriana Kovashka
Abstract:
Vision-language alignment learned from image-caption pairs has been shown to benefit tasks like object recognition and detection. Methods are mostly evaluated in terms of how well object class names are learned, but captions also contain rich attribute context that should be considered when learning object alignment. It is unclear how methods use this context in learning, as well as whether models succeed when tasks require attribute and object understanding. To address this gap, we conduct extensive analysis of the role of attributes in vision-language models. We specifically measure model sensitivity to the presence and meaning of attribute context, gauging influence on object embeddings through unsupervised phrase grounding and classification via description methods. We further evaluate the utility of attribute context in training for open-vocabulary object detection, fine-grained text-region retrieval, and attribution tasks. Our results show that attribute context can be wasted when learning alignment for detection, attribute meaning is not adequately considered in embeddings, and describing classes by only their attributes is ineffective. A viable strategy that we find to increase benefits from attributes is contrastive training with adjective-based negative captions.
Authors:Jiayi Lin, Shaogang Gong
Abstract:
A vision-language foundation model pretrained on very large-scale image-text paired data has the potential to provide generalizable knowledge representation for downstream visual recognition and detection tasks, especially on supplementing the undersampled categories in downstream model training. Recent studies utilizing CLIP for object detection have shown that a two-stage detector design typically outperforms a one-stage detector, while requiring more expensive training resources and longer inference time. In this work, we propose a one-stage detector GridCLIP that narrows its performance gap to those of two-stage detectors, with approximately 43 and 5 times faster than its two-stage counterpart (ViLD) in the training and test process respectively. GridCLIP learns grid-level representations to adapt to the intrinsic principle of one-stage detection learning by expanding the conventional CLIP image-text holistic mapping to a more fine-grained, grid-text alignment. This differs from the region-text mapping in two-stage detectors that apply CLIP directly by treating regions as images. Specifically, GridCLIP performs Grid-level Alignment to adapt the CLIP image-level representations to grid-level representations by aligning to CLIP category representations to learn the annotated (especially frequent) categories. To learn generalizable visual representations of broader categories, especially undersampled ones, we perform Image-level Alignment during training to propagate broad pre-learned categories in the CLIP image encoder from the image-level to the grid-level representations. Experiments show that the learned CLIP-based grid-level representations boost the performance of undersampled (infrequent and novel) categories, reaching comparable detection performance on the LVIS benchmark.
Authors:Renato Sortino, Daniel Magro, Giuseppe Fiameni, Eva Sciacca, Simone Riggi, Andrea DeMarco, Concetto Spampinato, Andrew M. Hopkins, Filomena Bufano, Francesco Schillirò, Cristobal Bordiu, Carmelo Pino
Abstract:
In recent years, deep learning has been successfully applied in various scientific domains. Following these promising results and performances, it has recently also started being evaluated in the domain of radio astronomy. In particular, since radio astronomy is entering the Big Data era, with the advent of the largest telescope in the world - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the task of automatic object detection and instance segmentation is crucial for source finding and analysis. In this work, we explore the performance of the most affirmed deep learning approaches, applied to astronomical images obtained by radio interferometric instrumentation, to solve the task of automatic source detection. This is carried out by applying models designed to accomplish two different kinds of tasks: object detection and semantic segmentation. The goal is to provide an overview of existing techniques, in terms of prediction performance and computational efficiency, to scientists in the astrophysics community who would like to employ machine learning in their research.
Authors:Yulin He, Wei Chen, Ke Liang, Yusong Tan, Zhengfa Liang, Yulan Guo
Abstract:
Pseudo-Labeling has emerged as a simple yet effective technique for semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, the inevitable noise problem in pseudo-labels significantly degrades the performance of SSOD methods. Recent advances effectively alleviate the classification noise in SSOD, while the localization noise which is a non-negligible part of SSOD is not well-addressed. In this paper, we analyse the localization noise from the generation and learning phases, and propose two strategies, namely pseudo-label correction and noise-unaware learning. For pseudo-label correction, we introduce a multi-round refining method and a multi-vote weighting method. The former iteratively refines the pseudo boxes to improve the stability of predictions, while the latter smoothly self-corrects pseudo boxes by weighing the scores of surrounding jittered boxes. For noise-unaware learning, we introduce a loss weight function that is negatively correlated with the Intersection over Union (IoU) in the regression task, which pulls the predicted boxes closer to the object and improves localization accuracy. Our proposed method, Pseudo-label Correction and Learning (PCL), is extensively evaluated on the MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. On MS COCO, PCL outperforms the supervised baseline by 12.16, 12.11, and 9.57 mAP and the recent SOTA (SoftTeacher) by 3.90, 2.54, and 2.43 mAP under 1\%, 5\%, and 10\% labeling ratios, respectively. On PASCAL VOC, PCL improves the supervised baseline by 5.64 mAP and the recent SOTA (Unbiased Teacherv2) by 1.04 mAP on AP$^{50}$.
Authors:Alina Ciocarlan, Sylvie Le Hegarat-Mascle, Sidonie Lefebvre, Arnaud Woiselle
Abstract:
The detection of small objects is a challenging task in computer vision. Conventional object detection methods have difficulty in finding the balance between high detection and low false alarm rates. In the literature, some methods have addressed this issue by enhancing the feature map responses, but without guaranteeing robustness with respect to the number of false alarms induced by background elements. To tackle this problem, we introduce an $\textit{a contrario}$ decision criterion into the learning process to take into account the unexpectedness of small objects. This statistic criterion enhances the feature map responses while controlling the number of false alarms (NFA) and can be integrated into any semantic segmentation neural network. Our add-on NFA module not only allows us to obtain competitive results for small target and crack detection tasks respectively, but also leads to more robust and interpretable results.
Authors:Chintan Tundia, Rajiv Kumar, Om Damani, G. Sivakumar
Abstract:
Change detection for aerial imagery involves locating and identifying changes associated with the areas of interest between co-registered bi-temporal or multi-temporal images of a geographical location. Farm ponds are man-made structures belonging to the category of minor irrigation structures used to collect surface run-off water for future irrigation purposes. Detection of farm ponds from aerial imagery and their evolution over time helps in land surveying to analyze the agricultural shifts, policy implementation, seasonal effects and climate changes. In this paper, we introduce a publicly available object detection and instance segmentation (OD/IS) dataset for localizing farm ponds from aerial imagery. We also collected and annotated the bi-temporal data over a time-span of 14 years across 17 villages, resulting in a binary change detection dataset called \textbf{F}arm \textbf{P}ond \textbf{C}hange \textbf{D}etection Dataset (\textbf{FPCD}). We have benchmarked and analyzed the performance of various object detection and instance segmentation methods on our OD/IS dataset and the change detection methods over the FPCD dataset. The datasets are publicly accessible at this page: \textit{\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/ctundia/FPCD}}
Authors:Binwei Xu, Haoran Liang, Weihua Gong, Ronghua Liang, Peng Chen
Abstract:
Fully supervised salient object detection (SOD) methods have made considerable progress in performance, yet these models rely heavily on expensive pixel-wise labels. Recently, to achieve a trade-off between labeling burden and performance, scribble-based SOD methods have attracted increasing attention. Previous scribble-based models directly implement the SOD task only based on SOD training data with limited information, it is extremely difficult for them to understand the image and further achieve a superior SOD task. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework guided by general visual representations with rich contextual semantic knowledge for scribble-based SOD. These general visual representations are generated by self-supervised learning based on large-scale unlabeled datasets. Our framework consists of a task-related encoder, a general visual module, and an information integration module to efficiently combine the general visual representations with task-related features to perform the SOD task based on understanding the contextual connections of images. Meanwhile, we propose a novel global semantic affinity loss to guide the model to perceive the global structure of the salient objects. Experimental results on five public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, which only utilizes scribble annotations without introducing any extra label, outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly supervised SOD methods. Specifically, it outperforms the previous best scribble-based method on all datasets with an average gain of 5.5% for max f-measure, 5.8% for mean f-measure, 24% for MAE, and 3.1% for E-measure. Moreover, our method achieves comparable or even superior performance to the state-of-the-art fully supervised models.
Authors:Tae-Min Choi, Jong-Hwan Kim
Abstract:
In this paper, we explore incremental few-shot object detection (iFSD), which incrementally learns novel classes using only a few examples without revisiting base classes. Previous iFSD works achieved the desired results by applying meta-learning. However, meta-learning approaches show insufficient performance that is difficult to apply to practical problems. In this light, we propose a simple fine-tuning-based approach, the Incremental Two-stage Fine-tuning Approach (iTFA) for iFSD, which contains three steps: 1) base training using abundant base classes with the class-agnostic box regressor, 2) separation of the RoI feature extractor and classifier into the base and novel class branches for preserving base knowledge, and 3) fine-tuning the novel branch using only a few novel class examples. We evaluate our iTFA on the real-world datasets PASCAL VOC, COCO, and LVIS. iTFA achieves competitive performance in COCO and shows a 30% higher AP accuracy than meta-learning methods in the LVIS dataset. Experimental results show the effectiveness and applicability of our proposed method.
Authors:Gousia Habib, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Brejesh Lall
Abstract:
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), Transformers have already revolutionized the field by utilizing an attention-based encoder-decoder model. Recently, some pioneering works have employed Transformer-like architectures in Computer Vision (CV) and they have reported outstanding performance of these architectures in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated impressive performance improvements over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) due to their competitive modelling capabilities. However, these architectures demand massive computational resources which makes these models difficult to be deployed in the resource-constrained applications. Many solutions have been developed to combat this issue, such as compressive transformers and compression functions such as dilated convolution, min-max pooling, 1D convolution, etc. Model compression has recently attracted considerable research attention as a potential remedy. A number of model compression methods have been proposed in the literature such as weight quantization, weight multiplexing, pruning and Knowledge Distillation (KD). However, techniques like weight quantization, pruning and weight multiplexing typically involve complex pipelines for performing the compression. KD has been found to be a simple and much effective model compression technique that allows a relatively simple model to perform tasks almost as accurately as a complex model. This paper discusses various approaches based upon KD for effective compression of ViT models. The paper elucidates the role played by KD in reducing the computational and memory requirements of these models. The paper also presents the various challenges faced by ViTs that are yet to be resolved.
Authors:Liya Wang, Alex Tien
Abstract:
The past few years have seen an increased interest in aerial image object detection due to its critical value to large-scale geo-scientific research like environmental studies, urban planning, and intelligence monitoring. However, the task is very challenging due to the birds-eye view perspective, complex backgrounds, large and various image sizes, different appearances of objects, and the scarcity of well-annotated datasets. Recent advances in computer vision have shown promise tackling the challenge. Specifically, Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet) was proposed to extract multi-scale features for object detection. The empirical study shows that ViTDet's simple design achieves good performance on natural scene images and can be easily embedded into any detector architecture. To date, ViTDet's potential benefit to challenging aerial image object detection has not been explored. Therefore, in our study, 25 experiments were carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of ViTDet for aerial image object detection on three well-known datasets: Airbus Aircraft, RarePlanes, and Dataset of Object DeTection in Aerial images (DOTA). Our results show that ViTDet can consistently outperform its convolutional neural network counterparts on horizontal bounding box (HBB) object detection by a large margin (up to 17% on average precision) and that it achieves the competitive performance for oriented bounding box (OBB) object detection. Our results also establish a baseline for future research.
Authors:Hamza Riaz, Alan F. Smeaton
Abstract:
There are many computer vision applications including object segmentation, classification, object detection, and reconstruction for which machine learning (ML) shows state-of-the-art performance. Nowadays, we can build ML tools for such applications with real-world accuracy. However, each tool works well within the domain in which it has been trained and developed. Often, when we train a model on a dataset in one specific domain and test on another unseen domain known as an out of distribution (OOD) dataset, models or ML tools show a decrease in performance. For instance, when we train a simple classifier on real-world images and apply that model on the same classes but with a different domain like cartoons, paintings or sketches then the performance of ML tools disappoints. This presents serious challenges of domain generalisation (DG), domain adaptation (DA), and domain shifting. To enhance the power of ML tools, we can rebuild and retrain models from scratch or we can perform transfer learning. In this paper, we present a comparison study between vision-based technologies for domain-specific and domain-generalised methods. In this research we highlight that simple convolutional neural network (CNN) based deep learning methods perform poorly when they have to tackle domain shifting. Experiments are conducted on two popular vision-based benchmarks, PACS and Office-Home. We introduce an implementation pipeline for domain generalisation methods and conventional deep learning models. The outcome confirms that CNN-based deep learning models show poor generalisation compare to other extensive methods.
Authors:Andrea Coletta, Flavio Giorgi, Gaia Maselli, Matteo Prata, Domenicomichele Silvestri, Jonathan Ashdown, Francesco Restuccia
Abstract:
To perform advanced surveillance, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) require the execution of edge-assisted computer vision (CV) tasks. In multi-hop UAV networks, the successful transmission of these tasks to the edge is severely challenged due to severe bandwidth constraints. For this reason, we propose a novel A$^2$-UAV framework to optimize the number of correctly executed tasks at the edge. In stark contrast with existing art, we take an application-aware approach and formulate a novel pplication-Aware Task Planning Problem (A$^2$-TPP) that takes into account (i) the relationship between deep neural network (DNN) accuracy and image compression for the classes of interest based on the available dataset, (ii) the target positions, (iii) the current energy/position of the UAVs to optimize routing, data pre-processing and target assignment for each UAV. We demonstrate A$^2$-TPP is NP-Hard and propose a polynomial-time algorithm to solve it efficiently. We extensively evaluate A$^2$-UAV through real-world experiments with a testbed composed by four DJI Mavic Air 2 UAVs. We consider state-of-the-art image classification tasks with four different DNN models (i.e., DenseNet, ResNet152, ResNet50 and MobileNet-V2) and object detection tasks using YoloV4 trained on the ImageNet dataset. Results show that A$^2$-UAV attains on average around 38% more accomplished tasks than the state-of-the-art, with 400% more accomplished tasks when the number of targets increases significantly. To allow full reproducibility, we pledge to share datasets and code with the research community.
Authors:Hyung-Jin Yoon, Hamidreza Jafarnejadsani, Petros Voulgaris
Abstract:
The deep neural network (DNN) models for object detection using camera images are widely adopted in autonomous vehicles. However, DNN models are shown to be susceptible to adversarial image perturbations. In the existing methods of generating the adversarial image perturbations, optimizations take each incoming image frame as the decision variable to generate an image perturbation. Therefore, given a new image, the typically computationally-expensive optimization needs to start over as there is no learning between the independent optimizations. Very few approaches have been developed for attacking online image streams while considering the underlying physical dynamics of autonomous vehicles, their mission, and the environment. We propose a multi-level stochastic optimization framework that monitors an attacker's capability of generating the adversarial perturbations. Based on this capability level, a binary decision attack/not attack is introduced to enhance the effectiveness of the attacker. We evaluate our proposed multi-level image attack framework using simulations for vision-guided autonomous vehicles and actual tests with a small indoor drone in an office environment. The results show our method's capability to generate the image attack in real-time while monitoring when the attacker is proficient given state estimates.
Authors:Evelyn A. Stump, Francesco Luzi, Leslie M. Collins, Jordan M. Malof
Abstract:
Recent object detection models for infrared (IR) imagery are based upon deep neural networks (DNNs) and require large amounts of labeled training imagery. However, publicly available datasets that can be used for such training are limited in their size and diversity. To address this problem, we explore cross-modal style transfer (CMST) to leverage large and diverse color imagery datasets so that they can be used to train DNN-based IR image-based object detectors. We evaluate six contemporary stylization methods on four publicly-available IR datasets - the first comparison of its kind - and find that CMST is highly effective for DNN-based detectors. Surprisingly, we find that existing data-driven methods are outperformed by a simple grayscale stylization (an average of the color channels). Our analysis reveals that existing data-driven methods are either too simplistic or introduce significant artifacts into the imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose meta-learning style transfer (MLST), which learns a stylization by composing and tuning well-behaved analytic functions. We find that MLST leads to more complex stylizations without introducing significant image artifacts and achieves the best overall detector performance on our benchmark datasets.
Authors:Corrado Puligheddu, Jonathan Ashdown, Carla Fabiana Chiasserini, Francesco Restuccia
Abstract:
5G and beyond cellular networks (NextG) will support the continuous execution of resource-expensive edge-assisted deep learning (DL) tasks. To this end, Radio Access Network (RAN) resources will need to be carefully "sliced" to satisfy heterogeneous application requirements while minimizing RAN usage. Existing slicing frameworks treat each DL task as equal and inflexibly define the resources to assign to each task, which leads to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose SEM-O-RAN, the first semantic and flexible slicing framework for NextG Open RANs. Our key intuition is that different DL classifiers can tolerate different levels of image compression, due to the semantic nature of the target classes. Therefore, compression can be semantically applied so that the networking load can be minimized. Moreover, flexibility allows SEM-O-RAN to consider multiple edge allocations leading to the same task-related performance, which significantly improves system-wide performance as more tasks can be allocated. First, we mathematically formulate the Semantic Flexible Edge Slicing Problem (SF-ESP), demonstrate that it is NP-hard, and provide an approximation algorithm to solve it efficiently. Then, we evaluate the performance of SEM-O-RAN through extensive numerical analysis with state-of-the-art multi-object detection (YOLOX) and image segmentation (BiSeNet V2), as well as real-world experiments on the Colosseum testbed. Our results show that SEM-O-RAN improves the number of allocated tasks by up to 169% with respect to the state of the art.
Authors:Haiwen Huang, Andreas Geiger, Dan Zhang
Abstract:
We address the task of open-world class-agnostic object detection, i.e., detecting every object in an image by learning from a limited number of base object classes. State-of-the-art RGB-based models suffer from overfitting the training classes and often fail at detecting novel-looking objects. This is because RGB-based models primarily rely on appearance similarity to detect novel objects and are also prone to overfitting short-cut cues such as textures and discriminative parts. To address these shortcomings of RGB-based object detectors, we propose incorporating geometric cues such as depth and normals, predicted by general-purpose monocular estimators. Specifically, we use the geometric cues to train an object proposal network for pseudo-labeling unannotated novel objects in the training set. Our resulting Geometry-guided Open-world Object Detector (GOOD) significantly improves detection recall for novel object categories and already performs well with only a few training classes. Using a single "person" class for training on the COCO dataset, GOOD surpasses SOTA methods by 5.0% AR@100, a relative improvement of 24%.
Authors:Xiaopin Zhong, Guankun Wang, Weixiang Liu, Zongze Wu, Yuanlong Deng
Abstract:
As a fundamental computer vision task, crowd counting plays an important role in public safety. Currently, deep learning based head detection is a promising method for crowd counting. However, the highly concerned object detection networks cannot be well applied to this problem for three reasons: (1) Existing loss functions fail to address sample imbalance in highly dense and complex scenes; (2) Canonical object detectors lack spatial coherence in loss calculation, disregarding the relationship between object location and background region; (3) Most of the head detection datasets are only annotated with the center points, i.e. without bounding boxes. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel Mask Focal Loss (MFL) based on heatmap via the Gaussian kernel. MFL provides a unifying framework for the loss functions based on both heatmap and binary feature map ground truths. Additionally, we introduce GTA_Head, a synthetic dataset with comprehensive annotations, for evaluation and comparison. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our MFL across various detectors and datasets, and it can reduce MAE and RMSE by up to 47.03% and 61.99%, respectively. Therefore, our work presents a strong foundation for advancing crowd counting methods based on density estimation.
Authors:Weihong Ren, Denglu Wu, Hui Cao, Xi'ai Chen, Zhi Han, Honghai Liu
Abstract:
The recent trend in 2D multiple object tracking (MOT) is jointly solving detection and tracking, where object detection and appearance feature (or motion) are learned simultaneously. Despite competitive performance, in crowded scenes, joint detection and tracking usually fail to find accurate object associations due to missed or false detections. In this paper, we jointly model counting, detection and re-identification in an end-to-end framework, named CountingMOT, tailored for crowded scenes. By imposing mutual object-count constraints between detection and counting, the CountingMOT tries to find a balance between object detection and crowd density map estimation, which can help it to recover missed detections or reject false detections. Our approach is an attempt to bridge the gap of object detection, counting, and re-Identification. This is in contrast to prior MOT methods that either ignore the crowd density and thus are prone to failure in crowded scenes,or depend on local correlations to build a graphical relationship for matching targets. The proposed MOT tracker can perform online and real-time tracking, and achieves the state-of-the-art results on public benchmarks MOT16 (MOTA of 79.7), MOT17 (MOTA of 81.3%) and MOT20 (MOTA of 78.9%).
Authors:Baokai Liu, Fengjie He, Shiqiang Du, Jiacheng Li, Wenjie Liu
Abstract:
Small object detection has important application value in the fields of autonomous driving and drone scene analysis. As one of the most advanced object detection algorithms, YOLOv3 suffers some challenges when detecting small objects, such as the problem of detection failure of small objects and occluded objects. To solve these problems, an improved YOLOv3 algorithm for small object detection is proposed. In the proposed method, the dilated convolutions mish (DCM) module is introduced into the backbone network of YOLOv3 to improve the feature expression ability by fusing the feature maps of different receptive fields. In the neck network of YOLOv3, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) and multi-level fusion module are introduced to select the important information for small object detection in the shallow network, suppress the uncritical information, and use the fusion module to fuse the feature maps of different scales, so as to improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm. In addition, the Soft-NMS and Complete-IoU (CloU) strategies are applied to candidate frame screening, which improves the accuracy of the algorithm for the detection of occluded objects. The ablation experiment of the MS COCO2017 object detection task proves the effectiveness of several modules introduced in this paper for small object detection. The experimental results on the MS COCO2017, VOC2007, and VOC2012 datasets show that the Average Precision (AP) of this method is 16.5%, 8.71%, and 9.68% higher than that of YOLOv3, respectively.
Authors:Binwei Xu, Haoran Liang, Ronghua Liang, Peng Chen
Abstract:
Fully supervised salient object detection (SOD) has made considerable progress based on expensive and time-consuming data with pixel-wise annotations. Recently, to relieve the labeling burden while maintaining performance, some scribble-based SOD methods have been proposed. However, learning precise boundary details from scribble annotations that lack edge information is still difficult. In this paper, we propose to learn precise boundaries from our designed synthetic images and labels without introducing any extra auxiliary data. The synthetic image creates boundary information by inserting synthetic concave regions that simulate the real concave regions of salient objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel self-consistent framework that consists of a global integral branch (GIB) and a boundary-aware branch (BAB) to train a saliency detector. GIB aims to identify integral salient objects, whose input is the original image. BAB aims to help predict accurate boundaries, whose input is the synthetic image. These two branches are connected through a self-consistent loss to guide the saliency detector to predict precise boundaries while identifying salient objects. Experimental results on five benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly supervised SOD methods and further narrows the gap with the fully supervised methods.
Authors:Yecheol Kim, Konyul Park, Minwook Kim, Dongsuk Kum, Jun Won Choi
Abstract:
Fusing data from cameras and LiDAR sensors is an essential technique to achieve robust 3D object detection. One key challenge in camera-LiDAR fusion involves mitigating the large domain gap between the two sensors in terms of coordinates and data distribution when fusing their features. In this paper, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion architecture called, 3D Dual-Fusion, which is designed to mitigate the gap between the feature representations of camera and LiDAR data. The proposed method fuses the features of the camera-view and 3D voxel-view domain and models their interactions through deformable attention. We redesign the transformer fusion encoder to aggregate the information from the two domains. Two major changes include 1) dual query-based deformable attention to fuse the dual-domain features interactively and 2) 3D local self-attention to encode the voxel-domain queries prior to dual-query decoding. The results of an experimental evaluation show that the proposed camera-LiDAR fusion architecture achieved competitive performance on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets, with state-of-the-art performances in some 3D object detection benchmarks categories.
Authors:Zeyu Shangguan, Bocheng Hu, Guohua Dai, Yuyu Liu, Darun Tang, Xingqun Jiang
Abstract:
Deep learning-based object detection has demonstrated a significant presence in the practical applications of artificial intelligence. However, objects such as fire and smoke, pose challenges to object detection because of their non-solid and various shapes, and consequently difficult to truly meet requirements in practical fire prevention and control. In this paper, we propose that the distinctive fractal feature of self-similar in fire and smoke can relieve us from struggling with their various shapes. To our best knowledge, we are the first to discuss this problem. In order to evaluate the self-similarity of the fire and smoke and improve the precision of object detection, we design a semi-supervised method that use Hausdorff distance to describe the resemblance between instances. Besides, based on the concept of self-similar, we have devised a novel methodology for evaluating this particular task in a more equitable manner. We have meticulously designed our network architecture based on well-established and representative baseline networks such as YOLO and Faster R-CNN. Our experiments have been conducted on publicly available fire and smoke detection datasets, which we have thoroughly verified to ensure the validity of our approach. As a result, we have observed significant improvements in the detection accuracy.
Authors:Zhuoxu Huang, Zhiyou Zhao, Banghuai Li, Jungong Han
Abstract:
Transformer with its underlying attention mechanism and the ability to capture long-range dependencies makes it become a natural choice for unordered point cloud data. However, separated local regions from the general sampling architecture corrupt the structural information of the instances, and the inherent relationships between adjacent local regions lack exploration, while local structural information is crucial in a transformer-based 3D point cloud model. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel module named Local Context Propagation (LCP) to exploit the message passing between neighboring local regions and make their representations more informative and discriminative. More specifically, we use the overlap points of adjacent local regions (which statistically show to be prevalent) as intermediaries, then re-weight the features of these shared points from different local regions before passing them to the next layers. Inserting the LCP module between two transformer layers results in a significant improvement in network expressiveness. Finally, we design a flexible LCPFormer architecture equipped with the LCP module. The proposed method is applicable to different tasks and outperforms various transformer-based methods in benchmarks including 3D shape classification and dense prediction tasks such as 3D object detection and semantic segmentation. Code will be released for reproduction.
Authors:Shivom Bhargava, Sanjita Prajapati, Pranamesh Chakraborty
Abstract:
Vehicle detection accuracy is fairly accurate in good-illumination conditions but susceptible to poor detection accuracy under low-light conditions. The combined effect of low-light and glare from vehicle headlight or tail-light results in misses in vehicle detection more likely by state-of-the-art object detection models. However, thermal infrared images are robust to illumination changes and are based on thermal radiation. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been extensively used in image domain transfer tasks. State-of-the-art GAN models have attempted to improve vehicle detection accuracy in night-time by converting infrared images to day-time RGB images. However, these models have been found to under-perform during night-time conditions compared to day-time conditions, as day-time infrared images looks different than night-time infrared images. Therefore, this study attempts to alleviate this shortcoming by proposing three different approaches based on combination of GAN models at two different levels that try to reduce the feature distribution gap between day-time and night-time infrared images. Quantitative analysis to compare the performance of the proposed models with the state-of-the-art models has been done by testing the models using state-of-the-art object detection models. Both the quantitative and qualitative analyses have shown that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art GAN models for vehicle detection in night-time conditions, showing the efficacy of the proposed models.
Authors:Han Wu, Syed Yunas, Sareh Rowlands, Wenjie Ruan, Johan Wahlstrom
Abstract:
Intelligent robots rely on object detection models to perceive the environment. Following advances in deep learning security it has been revealed that object detection models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, prior research primarily focuses on attacking static images or offline videos. Therefore, it is still unclear if such attacks could jeopardize real-world robotic applications in dynamic environments. This paper bridges this gap by presenting the first real-time online attack against object detection models. We devise three attacks that fabricate bounding boxes for nonexistent objects at desired locations. The attacks achieve a success rate of about 90% within about 20 iterations. The demo video is available at https://youtu.be/zJZ1aNlXsMU.
Authors:Han Wu, Sareh Rowlands, Johan Wahlstrom
Abstract:
Object detection systems using deep learning models have become increasingly popular in robotics thanks to the rising power of CPUs and GPUs in embedded systems. However, these models are susceptible to adversarial attacks. While some attacks are limited by strict assumptions on access to the detection system, we propose a novel hardware attack inspired by Man-in-the-Middle attacks in cryptography. This attack generates a Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAP) and injects the perturbation between the USB camera and the detection system via a hardware attack. Besides, prior research is misled by an evaluation metric that measures the model accuracy rather than the attack performance. In combination with our proposed evaluation metrics, we significantly increased the strength of adversarial perturbations. These findings raise serious concerns for applications of deep learning models in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving.
Authors:Xing Zhao, Haoran Liang, Peipei Li, Guodao Sun, Dongdong Zhao, Ronghua Liang, Xiaofei He
Abstract:
Previous methods based on 3DCNN, convLSTM, or optical flow have achieved great success in video salient object detection (VSOD). However, they still suffer from high computational costs or poor quality of the generated saliency maps. To solve these problems, we design a space-time memory (STM)-based network, which extracts useful temporal information of the current frame from adjacent frames as the temporal branch of VSOD. Furthermore, previous methods only considered single-frame prediction without temporal association. As a result, the model may not focus on the temporal information sufficiently. Thus, we initially introduce object motion prediction between inter-frame into VSOD. Our model follows standard encoder--decoder architecture. In the encoding stage, we generate high-level temporal features by using high-level features from the current and its adjacent frames. This approach is more efficient than the optical flow-based methods. In the decoding stage, we propose an effective fusion strategy for spatial and temporal branches. The semantic information of the high-level features is used to fuse the object details in the low-level features, and then the spatiotemporal features are obtained step by step to reconstruct the saliency maps. Moreover, inspired by the boundary supervision commonly used in image salient object detection (ISOD), we design a motion-aware loss for predicting object boundary motion and simultaneously perform multitask learning for VSOD and object motion prediction, which can further facilitate the model to extract spatiotemporal features accurately and maintain the object integrity. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our method and can achieve state-of-the-art metrics on some datasets. The proposed model does not require optical flow or other preprocessing, and can reach a speed of nearly 100 FPS during inference.
Authors:Weisheng Li, Lin Huang
Abstract:
We analyzed the network structure of real-time object detection models and found that the features in the feature concatenation stage are very rich. Applying an attention module here can effectively improve the detection accuracy of the model. However, the commonly used attention module or self-attention module shows poor performance in detection accuracy and inference efficiency. Therefore, we propose a novel self-attention module, called 2D local feature superimposed self-attention, for the feature concatenation stage of the neck network. This self-attention module reflects global features through local features and local receptive fields. We also propose and optimize an efficient decoupled head and AB-OTA, and achieve SOTA results. Average precisions of 49.0% (71FPS, 14ms), 46.1% (85FPS, 11.7ms), and 39.1% (107FPS, 9.3ms) were obtained for large, medium, and small-scale models built using our proposed improvements. Our models exceeded YOLOv5 by 0.8% -- 3.1% in average precision.
Authors:R. Austin McEver, Bowen Zhang, Connor Levenson, A S M Iftekhar, B. S. Manjunath
Abstract:
Each year, underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) collect thousands of hours of video of unexplored ocean habitats revealing a plethora of information regarding biodiversity on Earth. However, fully utilizing this information remains a challenge as proper annotations and analysis require trained scientists time, which is both limited and costly. To this end, we present a Dataset for Underwater Substrate and Invertebrate Analysis (DUSIA), a benchmark suite and growing large-scale dataset to train, validate, and test methods for temporally localizing four underwater substrates as well as temporally and spatially localizing 59 underwater invertebrate species. DUSIA currently includes over ten hours of footage across 25 videos captured in 1080p at 30 fps by an ROV following pre planned transects across the ocean floor near the Channel Islands of California. Each video includes annotations indicating the start and end times of substrates across the video in addition to counts of species of interest. Some frames are annotated with precise bounding box locations for invertebrate species of interest, as seen in Figure 1. To our knowledge, DUSIA is the first dataset of its kind for deep sea exploration, with video from a moving camera, that includes substrate annotations and invertebrate species that are present at significant depths where sunlight does not penetrate. Additionally, we present the novel context-driven object detector (CDD) where we use explicit substrate classification to influence an object detection network to simultaneously predict a substrate and species class influenced by that substrate. We also present a method for improving training on partially annotated bounding box frames. Finally, we offer a baseline method for automating the counting of invertebrate species of interest.
Authors:Aboli Marathe, Rahee Walambe, Ketan Kotecha
Abstract:
Several popular computer vision (CV) datasets, specifically employed for Object Detection (OD) in autonomous driving tasks exhibit biases due to a range of factors including weather and lighting conditions. These biases may impair a model's generalizability, rendering it ineffective for OD in novel and unseen datasets. Especially, in autonomous driving, it may prove extremely high risk and unsafe for the vehicle and its surroundings. This work focuses on understanding these datasets better by identifying such "good-weather" bias. Methods to mitigate such bias which allows the OD models to perform better and improve the robustness are also demonstrated. A simple yet effective OD framework for studying bias mitigation is proposed. Using this framework, the performance on popular datasets is analyzed and a significant difference in model performance is observed. Additionally, a knowledge transfer technique and a synthetic image corruption technique are proposed to mitigate the identified bias. Finally, using the DAWN dataset, the findings are validated on the OD task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our techniques in mitigating real-world "good-weather" bias. The experiments show that the proposed techniques outperform baseline methods by averaged fourfold improvement.
Authors:Ce Zhang, Azim Eskandarian
Abstract:
Reliable object detection using cameras plays a crucial role in enabling autonomous vehicles to perceive their surroundings. However, existing camera-based object detection approaches for autonomous driving lack the ability to provide comprehensive feedback on detection performance for individual frames. To address this limitation, we propose a novel evaluation metric, named as the detection quality index (DQI), which assesses the performance of camera-based object detection algorithms and provides frame-by-frame feedback on detection quality. The DQI is generated by combining the intensity of the fine-grained saliency map with the output results of the object detection algorithm. Additionally, we have developed a superpixel-based attention network (SPA-NET) that utilizes raw image pixels and superpixels as input to predict the proposed DQI evaluation metric. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on three open-source datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed evaluation metric accurately assesses the detection quality of camera-based systems in autonomous driving environments. Furthermore, the proposed SPA-NET outperforms other popular image-based quality regression models. This highlights the effectiveness of the DQI in evaluating a camera's ability to perceive visual scenes. Overall, our work introduces a valuable self-evaluation tool for camera-based object detection in autonomous vehicles.
Authors:Fengze Li, Jieming Ma, Zhongbei Tian, Ji Ge, Hai-Ning Liang, Yungang Zhang, Tianxi Wen
Abstract:
Mirrors can degrade the performance of computer vision models, but research into detecting them is in the preliminary phase. YOLOv4 achieves phenomenal results in terms of object detection accuracy and speed, but it still fails in detecting mirrors. Thus, we propose Mirror-YOLO, which targets mirror detection, containing a novel attention focus mechanism for features acquisition, a hypercolumn-stairstep approach to better fusion the feature maps, and the mirror bounding polygons for instance segmentation. Compared to the existing mirror detection networks and YOLO series, our proposed network achieves superior performance in average accuracy on our proposed mirror dataset and another state-of-art mirror dataset, which demonstrates the validity and effectiveness of Mirror-YOLO.
Authors:Chintan Tundia, Rajiv Kumar, Om Damani, G. Sivakumar
Abstract:
Deep learning has led to many recent advances in object detection and instance segmentation, among other computer vision tasks. These advancements have led to wide application of deep learning based methods and related methodologies in object detection tasks for satellite imagery. In this paper, we introduce MIS Check-Dam, a new dataset of check-dams from satellite imagery for building an automated system for the detection and mapping of check-dams, focusing on the importance of irrigation structures used for agriculture. We review some of the most recent object detection and instance segmentation methods and assess their performance on our new dataset. We evaluate several single stage, two-stage and attention based methods under various network configurations and backbone architectures. The dataset and the pre-trained models are available at https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/gramdrishti/.
Authors:Mehdi Miah, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier
Abstract:
We propose a method for multi-object tracking and segmentation based on a novel memory-based mechanism to associate tracklets. The proposed tracker, MeNToS, addresses particularly the long-term data association problem, when objects are not observable for long time intervals. Indeed, the recently introduced HOTA metric (High Order Tracking Accuracy), which has a better alignment than the formerly established MOTA (Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy) with the human visual assessment of tracking, has shown that improvements are still needed for data association, despite the recent improvement in object detection. In MeNToS, after creating tracklets using instance segmentation and optical flow, the proposed method relies on a space-time memory network originally developed for one-shot video object segmentation to improve the association of sequence of detections (tracklets) with temporal gaps. We evaluate our tracker on KITTIMOTS and MOTSChallenge and we show the benefit of our data association strategy with the HOTA metric. Additional ablation studies demonstrate that our approach using a space-time memory network gives better and more robust long-term association than those based on a re-identification network. Our project page is at \url{www.mehdimiah.com/mentos+}.
Authors:Zhengyi Liu, Yuan Wang, Zhengzheng Tu, Yun Xiao, Bin Tang
Abstract:
Salient object detection is the pixel-level dense prediction task which can highlight the prominent object in the scene. Recently U-Net framework is widely used, and continuous convolution and pooling operations generate multi-level features which are complementary with each other. In view of the more contribution of high-level features for the performance, we propose a triplet transformer embedding module to enhance them by learning long-range dependencies across layers. It is the first to use three transformer encoders with shared weights to enhance multi-level features. By further designing scale adjustment module to process the input, devising three-stream decoder to process the output and attaching depth features to color features for the multi-modal fusion, the proposed triplet transformer embedding network (TriTransNet) achieves the state-of-the-art performance in RGB-D salient object detection, and pushes the performance to a new level. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules and the competition of TriTransNet.
Authors:Nicolas M. Müller, Karla Pizzi, Jennifer Williams
Abstract:
The recent emergence of deepfakes has brought manipulated and generated content to the forefront of machine learning research. Automatic detection of deepfakes has seen many new machine learning techniques, however, human detection capabilities are far less explored. In this paper, we present results from comparing the abilities of humans and machines for detecting audio deepfakes used to imitate someone's voice. For this, we use a web-based application framework formulated as a game. Participants were asked to distinguish between real and fake audio samples. In our experiment, 472 unique users competed against a state-of-the-art AI deepfake detection algorithm for 14912 total of rounds of the game. We find that humans and deepfake detection algorithms share similar strengths and weaknesses, both struggling to detect certain types of attacks. This is in contrast to the superhuman performance of AI in many application areas such as object detection or face recognition. Concerning human success factors, we find that IT professionals have no advantage over non-professionals but native speakers have an advantage over non-native speakers. Additionally, we find that older participants tend to be more susceptible than younger ones. These insights may be helpful when designing future cybersecurity training for humans as well as developing better detection algorithms.
Authors:Jingbo Jiang, Xizi Chen, Chi-Ying Tsui
Abstract:
Recent literature has shown that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with large kernels outperform vision transformers (ViTs) and CNNs with stacked small kernels in many computer vision tasks, such as object detection and image restoration. The Winograd transformation helps reduce the number of repetitive multiplications in convolution and is widely supported by many commercial AI processors. Researchers have proposed accelerating large kernel convolutions by linearly decomposing them into many small kernel convolutions and then sequentially accelerating each small kernel convolution with the Winograd algorithm. This work proposes a nested Winograd algorithm that iteratively decomposes a large kernel convolution into small kernel convolutions and proves it to be more effective than the linear decomposition Winograd transformation algorithm. Experiments show that compared to the linear decomposition Winograd algorithm, the proposed algorithm reduces the total number of multiplications by 1.4 to 10.5 times for computing 4x4 to 31x31 convolutions.
Authors:Hongyang Li, Huchuan Lu, Zhe Lin, Xiaohui Shen, Brian Price
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel label propagation based method for saliency detection. A key observation is that saliency in an image can be estimated by propagating the labels extracted from the most certain background and object regions. For most natural images, some boundary superpixels serve as the background labels and the saliency of other superpixels are determined by ranking their similarities to the boundary labels based on an inner propagation scheme. For images of complex scenes, we further deploy a 3-cue-center-biased objectness measure to pick out and propagate foreground labels. A co-transduction algorithm is devised to fuse both boundary and objectness labels based on an inter propagation scheme. The compactness criterion decides whether the incorporation of objectness labels is necessary, thus greatly enhancing computational efficiency. Results on five benchmark datasets with pixel-wise accurate annotations show that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with the newest state-of-the-arts in terms of different evaluation metrics.
Authors:Xian Li, Suzhi Bi, Ying-Jun Angela Zhang
Abstract:
Edge intelligence (EI) allows resource-constrained edge devices (EDs) to offload computation-intensive AI tasks (e.g., visual object detection) to edge servers (ESs) for fast execution. However, transmitting high-volume raw task data (e.g., 4K video) over bandwidth-limited wireless networks incurs significant latency. While EDs can reduce transmission latency by degrading data before transmission (e.g., reducing resolution from 4K to 720p or 480p), it often deteriorates inference accuracy, creating a critical accuracy-latency tradeoff. The difficulty in balancing this tradeoff stems from the absence of closed-form models capturing content-dependent accuracy-latency relationships. Besides, under bandwidth sharing constraints, the discrete degradation decisions among the EDs demonstrate inherent combinatorial complexity. Mathematically, it requires solving a challenging \textit{black-box} mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). To address this problem, we propose LAB, a novel learning framework that seamlessly integrates deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and Bayesian optimization (BO). Specifically, LAB employs: (a) a DNN-based actor that maps input system state to degradation actions, directly addressing the combinatorial complexity of the MINLP; and (b) a BO-based critic with an explicit model built from fitting a Gaussian process surrogate with historical observations, enabling model-based evaluation of degradation actions. For each selected action, optimal bandwidth allocation is then efficiently derived via convex optimization. Numerical evaluations on real-world self-driving datasets demonstrate that LAB achieves near-optimal accuracy-latency tradeoff, exhibiting only 1.22\% accuracy degradation and 0.07s added latency compared to exhaustive search...
Authors:Tamara R. Lenhard, Andreas Weinmann, Tobias Koch
Abstract:
Drone detection in visually complex environments remains challenging due to background clutter, small object scale, and camouflage effects. While generic object detectors like YOLO exhibit strong performance in low-texture scenes, their effectiveness degrades in cluttered environments with low object-background separability. To address these limitations, this work presents an enhanced iteration of YOLO-FEDER FusionNet -- a detection framework that integrates generic object detection with camouflage object detection techniques. Building upon the original architecture, the proposed iteration introduces systematic advancements in training data composition, feature fusion strategies, and backbone design. Specifically, the training process leverages large-scale, photo-realistic synthetic data, complemented by a small set of real-world samples, to enhance robustness under visually complex conditions. The contribution of intermediate multi-scale FEDER features is systematically evaluated, and detection performance is comprehensively benchmarked across multiple YOLO-based backbone configurations. Empirical results indicate that integrating intermediate FEDER features, in combination with backbone upgrades, contributes to notable performance improvements. In the most promising configuration -- YOLO-FEDER FusionNet with a YOLOv8l backbone and FEDER features derived from the DWD module -- these enhancements lead to a FNR reduction of up to 39.1 percentage points and a mAP increase of up to 62.8 percentage points at an IoU threshold of 0.5, compared to the initial baseline.
Authors:Liu Liu, Alexandra Kudaeva, Marco Cipriano, Fatimeh Al Ghannam, Freya Tan, Gerard de Melo, Andres Sevtsuk
Abstract:
Understanding group-level social interactions in public spaces is crucial for urban planning, informing the design of socially vibrant and inclusive environments. Detecting such interactions from images involves interpreting subtle visual cues such as relations, proximity, and co-movement - semantically complex signals that go beyond traditional object detection. To address this challenge, we introduce a social group region detection task, which requires inferring and spatially grounding visual regions defined by abstract interpersonal relations. We propose MINGLE (Modeling INterpersonal Group-Level Engagement), a modular three-stage pipeline that integrates: (1) off-the-shelf human detection and depth estimation, (2) VLM-based reasoning to classify pairwise social affiliation, and (3) a lightweight spatial aggregation algorithm to localize socially connected groups. To support this task and encourage future research, we present a new dataset of 100K urban street-view images annotated with bounding boxes and labels for both individuals and socially interacting groups. The annotations combine human-created labels and outputs from the MINGLE pipeline, ensuring semantic richness and broad coverage of real-world scenarios.
Authors:Jiasheng Guo, Xin Gao, Yuxiang Yan, Guanghao Li, Jian Pu
Abstract:
Low-light Object detection is crucial for many real-world applications but remains challenging due to degraded image quality. While recent studies have shown that RAW images offer superior potential over RGB images, existing approaches either use RAW-RGB images with information loss or employ complex frameworks. To address these, we propose a lightweight and self-adaptive Image Signal Processing (ISP) plugin, Dark-ISP, which directly processes Bayer RAW images in dark environments, enabling seamless end-to-end training for object detection. Our key innovations are: (1) We deconstruct conventional ISP pipelines into sequential linear (sensor calibration) and nonlinear (tone mapping) sub-modules, recasting them as differentiable components optimized through task-driven losses. Each module is equipped with content-aware adaptability and physics-informed priors, enabling automatic RAW-to-RGB conversion aligned with detection objectives. (2) By exploiting the ISP pipeline's intrinsic cascade structure, we devise a Self-Boost mechanism that facilitates cooperation between sub-modules. Through extensive experiments on three RAW image datasets, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art RGB- and RAW-based detection approaches, achieving superior results with minimal parameters in challenging low-light environments.
Authors:Keisuke Toida, Taigo Sakai, Naoki Kato, Kazutoyo Yokota, Takeshi Nakamura, Kazuhiro Hotta
Abstract:
Multi-View Multi-Object Tracking (MVMOT) is essential for applications such as surveillance, autonomous driving, and sports analytics. However, maintaining consistent object identities across multiple cameras remains challenging due to viewpoint changes, lighting variations, and occlusions, which often lead to tracking errors.Recent methods project features from multiple cameras into a unified Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space to improve robustness against occlusion. However, this projection introduces feature distortion and non-uniform density caused by variations in object scale with distance. These issues degrade the quality of the fused representation and reduce detection and tracking accuracy.To address these problems, we propose SCFusion, a framework that combines three techniques to improve multi-view feature integration. First, it applies a sparse transformation to avoid unnatural interpolation during projection. Next, it performs density-aware weighting to adaptively fuse features based on spatial confidence and camera distance. Finally, it introduces a multi-view consistency loss that encourages each camera to learn discriminative features independently before fusion.Experiments show that SCFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching an IDF1 score of 95.9% on WildTrack and a MODP of 89.2% on MultiviewX, outperforming the baseline method TrackTacular. These results demonstrate that SCFusion effectively mitigates the limitations of conventional BEV projection and provides a robust and accurate solution for multi-view object detection and tracking.
Authors:Alexey Zhukov, Jenny Benois-Pineau, Amira Youssef, Akka Zemmari, Mohamed Mosbah, Virginie Taillandier
Abstract:
Multimodal fusion is a multimedia technique that has become popular in the wide range of tasks where image information is accompanied by a signal/audio. The latter may not convey highly semantic information, such as speech or music, but some measures such as audio signal recorded by mics in the goal to detect rail structure elements or defects. While classical detection approaches such as You Only Look Once (YOLO) family detectors can be efficiently deployed for defect detection on the image modality, the single modality approaches remain limited. They yield an overdetection in case of the appearance similar to normal structural elements. The paper proposes a new multimodal fusion architecture built on the basis of domain rules with YOLO and Vision transformer backbones. It integrates YOLOv8n for rapid object detection with a Vision Transformer (ViT) to combine feature maps extracted from multiple layers (7, 16, and 19) and synthesised audio representations for two defect classes: rail Rupture and Surface defect. Fusion is performed between audio and image. Experimental evaluation on a real-world railway dataset demonstrates that our multimodal fusion improves precision and overall accuracy by 0.2 points compared to the vision-only approach. Student's unpaired t-test also confirms statistical significance of differences in the mean accuracy.
Authors:Andrzej D. Dobrzycki, Ana M. Bernardos, José R. Casar
Abstract:
The You Only Look Once (YOLO) architecture is crucial for real-time object detection. However, deploying it in resource-constrained environments such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires efficient transfer learning. Although layer freezing is a common technique, the specific impact of various freezing configurations on contemporary YOLOv8 and YOLOv10 architectures remains unexplored, particularly with regard to the interplay between freezing depth, dataset characteristics, and training dynamics. This research addresses this gap by presenting a detailed analysis of layer-freezing strategies. We systematically investigate multiple freezing configurations across YOLOv8 and YOLOv10 variants using four challenging datasets that represent critical infrastructure monitoring. Our methodology integrates a gradient behavior analysis (L2 norm) and visual explanations (Grad-CAM) to provide deeper insights into training dynamics under different freezing strategies. Our results reveal that there is no universal optimal freezing strategy but, rather, one that depends on the properties of the data. For example, freezing the backbone is effective for preserving general-purpose features, while a shallower freeze is better suited to handling extreme class imbalance. These configurations reduce graphics processing unit (GPU) memory consumption by up to 28% compared to full fine-tuning and, in some cases, achieve mean average precision (mAP@50) scores that surpass those of full fine-tuning. Gradient analysis corroborates these findings, showing distinct convergence patterns for moderately frozen models. Ultimately, this work provides empirical findings and practical guidelines for selecting freezing strategies. It offers a practical, evidence-based approach to balanced transfer learning for object detection in scenarios with limited resources.
Authors:Jin Ma, Mohammed Aldeen, Christopher Salas, Feng Luo, Mashrur Chowdhury, Mert Pesé, Long Cheng
Abstract:
Object detection is fundamental to various real-world applications, such as security monitoring and surveillance video analysis. Despite their advancements, state-of-theart object detectors are still vulnerable to adversarial patch attacks, which can be easily applied to real-world objects to either conceal actual items or create non-existent ones, leading to severe consequences. Given the current diversity of adversarial patch attacks and potential unknown threats, an ideal defense method should be effective, generalizable, and robust against adaptive attacks. In this work, we introduce DISPATCH, the first diffusion-based defense framework for object detection. Unlike previous works that aim to "detect and remove" adversarial patches, DISPATCH adopts a "regenerate and rectify" strategy, leveraging generative models to disarm attack effects while preserving the integrity of the input image. Specifically, we utilize the in-distribution generative power of diffusion models to regenerate the entire image, aligning it with benign data. A rectification process is then employed to identify and replace adversarial regions with their regenerated benign counterparts. DISPATCH is attack-agnostic and requires no prior knowledge of the existing patches. Extensive experiments across multiple detectors and attacks demonstrate that DISPATCH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art defenses on both hiding attacks and creating attacks, achieving the best overall mAP.5 score of 89.3% on hiding attacks, and lowering the attack success rate to 24.8% on untargeted creating attacks. Moreover, it maintains strong robustness against adaptive attacks, making it a practical and reliable defense for object detection systems.
Authors:Safa Sali, Anis Meribout, Ashiyana Majeed, Mahmoud Meribout, Juan Pablo, Varun Tiwari, Asma Baobaid
Abstract:
The efficiency of object detectors depends on factors like detection accuracy, processing time, and computational resources. Processing time is crucial for real-time applications, particularly for autonomous vehicles (AVs), where instantaneous responses are vital for safety. This review paper provides a concise yet comprehensive survey of real-time object detection (OD) algorithms for autonomous cars delving into their hardware accelerators (HAs). Non-neural network-based algorithms, which use statistical image processing, have been entirely substituted by AI algorithms, such as different models of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Their intrinsically parallel features led them to be deployable into edge-based HAs of various types, where GPUs and, to a lesser extent, ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) remain the most widely used. Throughputs of hundreds of frames/s (fps) could be reached; however, handling object detection for all the cameras available in a typical AV requires further hardware and algorithmic improvements. The intensive competition between AV providers has limited the disclosure of algorithms, firmware, and even hardware platform details. This remains a hurdle for researchers, as commercial systems provide valuable insights while academics undergo lengthy training and testing on restricted datasets and road scenarios. Consequently, many AV research papers may not be reflected in end products, being developed under limited conditions. This paper surveys state-of-the-art OD algorithms and aims to bridge the gap with technologies in commercial AVs. To our knowledge, this aspect has not been addressed in earlier surveys. Hence, the paper serves as a tangible reference for researchers designing future generations of vehicles, expected to be fully autonomous for comfort and safety.
Authors:Safa Mohammed Sali, Mahmoud Meribout, Ashiyana Abdul Majeed
Abstract:
Transformers and vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as dominant architectures in computer vision and multimodal AI, offering state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as image classification, object detection, visual question answering, and caption generation. However, their high computational complexity, large memory footprints, and irregular data access patterns present significant challenges for deployment in latency- and power-constrained environments. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provide an attractive hardware platform for such workloads due to their reconfigurability, fine-grained parallelism, and potential for energy-efficient acceleration. This paper presents a comprehensive review of design trade-offs, optimization strategies, and implementation challenges for FPGA-based inference of transformers and VLMs. We examine critical factors such as device-class selection, memory subsystem constraints, dataflow orchestration, quantization strategies, sparsity exploitation, and toolchain choices, alongside modality-specific issues unique to VLMs, including heterogeneous compute balancing and cross-attention memory management. Additionally, we discuss emerging trends in hardware-algorithm co-design, highlighting innovations in attention mechanisms, compression, and modular overlays to improve efficiency and adaptability. Practical issues such as runtime flexibility, verification overhead, and the absence of standardized FPGA multimodal benchmarks are also considered. Finally, we outline future directions toward scalable, portable, and reconfigurable FPGA solutions that adapt to evolving model architectures while sustaining high utilization and predictable performance. This synthesis offers both a technical foundation and a forward-looking perspective to help bridge the gap between advanced multimodal AI models and efficient FPGA deployment.
Authors:Safa Mohammed Sali, Mahmoud Meribout, Ashiyana Abdul Majeed
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advances in deploying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for object detection, classification, and tracking on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). With the increasing demand for real-time computer vision applications in domains such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, and surveillance, FPGAs have emerged as a powerful alternative to GPUs and ASICs due to their reconfigurability, low power consumption, and deterministic latency. We critically examine state-of-the-art FPGA implementations of CNN-based vision tasks, covering algorithmic innovations, hardware acceleration techniques, and the integration of optimization strategies like pruning, quantization, and sparsity-aware methods to maximize performance within hardware constraints. This survey also explores the landscape of modern FPGA platforms, including classical LUT-DSP based architectures, System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGAs, and Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platforms (ACAPs), comparing their capabilities in handling deep learning workloads. Furthermore, we review available software development tools such as Vitis AI, FINN, and Intel FPGA AI Suite, which significantly streamline the design and deployment of AI models on FPGAs. The paper uniquely discusses hybrid architecture that combine GPUs and FPGAs for collaborative acceleration of AI inference, addressing challenges related to energy efficiency and throughput. Additionally, we highlight hardware-software co-design practices, dataflow optimizations, and pipelined processing techniques essential for real-time inference on resource-constrained devices. Through this survey, researchers and engineers are equipped with insights to develop next-generation, power-efficient, and high-performance vision systems optimized for FPGA deployment in edge and embedded applications.
Authors:Kevin Barnard, Elaine Liu, Kristine Walz, Brian Schlining, Nancy Jacobsen Stout, Lonny Lundsten
Abstract:
Benchmarking multi-object tracking and object detection model performance is an essential step in machine learning model development, as it allows researchers to evaluate model detection and tracker performance on human-generated 'test' data, facilitating consistent comparisons between models and trackers and aiding performance optimization. In this study, a novel benchmark video dataset was developed and used to assess the performance of several Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute object detection models and a FathomNet single-class object detection model together with several trackers. The dataset consists of four video sequences representing midwater and benthic deep-sea habitats. Performance was evaluated using Higher Order Tracking Accuracy, a metric that balances detection, localization, and association accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available benchmark for multi-object tracking in deep-sea video footage. We provide the benchmark data, a clearly documented workflow for generating additional benchmark videos, as well as example Python notebooks for computing metrics.
Authors:Raphaël Bourgade, Guillaume Balezo, Thomas Walter
Abstract:
Mitotic figures represent a key histoprognostic feature in tumor pathology, providing crucial insights into tumor aggressiveness and proliferation. However, their identification remains challenging, subject to significant inter-observer variability, even among experienced pathologists. To address this issue, the MItosis DOmain Generalization (MIDOG) 2025 challenge marks the third edition of an international competition aiming to develop robust mitosis detection algorithms. In this paper, we present a mitotic figure detection approach based on the state-of-the-art YOLOv12 object detection architecture. Our method achieved an F1-score of 0.801 on the preliminary test set (hotspots only) and ranked second on the final test leaderboard with an F1-score of 0.7216 across complex and heterogeneous whole-slide regions, without relying on external data.
Authors:Xuetong Wang, Ching Christie Pang, Pan Hui
Abstract:
Virtual assistants (VAs) have become ubiquitous in daily life, integrated into smartphones and smart devices, sparking interest in AI companions that enhance user experiences and foster emotional connections. However, existing companions are often embedded in specific objects-such as glasses, home assistants, or dolls-requiring users to form emotional bonds with unfamiliar items, which can lead to reduced engagement and feelings of detachment. To address this, we introduce Talking Spell, a wearable system that empowers users to imbue any everyday object with speech and anthropomorphic personas through a user-centric radiative network. Leveraging advanced computer vision (e.g., YOLOv11 for object detection), large vision-language models (e.g., QWEN-VL for persona generation), speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies, Talking Spell guides users through three stages of emotional connection: acquaintance, familiarization, and bonding. We validated our system through a user study involving 12 participants, utilizing Talking Spell to explore four interaction intentions: entertainment, companionship, utility, and creativity. The results demonstrate its effectiveness in fostering meaningful interactions and emotional significance with everyday objects. Our findings indicate that Talking Spell creates engaging and personalized experiences, as demonstrated through various devices, ranging from accessories to essential wearables.
Authors:Martin Skoglund, Fredrik Warg, Anders Thoren, Sasikumar Punnekkat, Hans Hansson
Abstract:
The emergence of Connected, Cooperative, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) systems has significantly transformed the safety assessment landscape. Because they integrate automated vehicle functions beyond those managed by a human driver, new methods are required to evaluate their safety. Approaches that compile evidence from multiple test environments have been proposed for type-approval and similar evaluations, emphasizing scenario coverage within the systems Operational Design Domain (ODD). However, aligning diverse test environment requirements with distinct testing capabilities remains challenging. This paper presents a method for evaluating the suitability of test case allocation to various test environments by drawing on and extending an existing ODD formalization with key testing attributes. The resulting construct integrates ODD parameters and additional test attributes to capture a given test environments relevant capabilities. This approach supports automatic suitability evaluation and is demonstrated through a case study on an automated reversing truck function. The system's implementation fidelity is tied to ODD parameters, facilitating automated test case allocation based on each environments capacity for object-detection sensor assessment.
Authors:Mingze Liu, Sai Fan, Haozhen Li, Haobo Liang, Yixing Yuan, Yanke Wang
Abstract:
Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackle complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on flat rebar setting with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary detection. We implements the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantees a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our propose post-processing procedure based a image to point cloud generation framework. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and the experiments on the real-world rebar setting verifies that the effectiveness of the system in practice.
Authors:Harris Song, Tuan-Anh Vu, Sanjith Menon, Sriram Narasimhan, M. Khalid Jawed
Abstract:
Detecting hidden or partially concealed objects remains a fundamental challenge in multimodal environments, where factors like occlusion, camouflage, and lighting variations significantly hinder performance. Traditional RGB-based detection methods often fail under such adverse conditions, motivating the need for more robust, modality-agnostic approaches. In this work, we present HiddenObject, a fusion framework that integrates RGB, thermal, and depth data using a Mamba-based fusion mechanism. Our method captures complementary signals across modalities, enabling enhanced detection of obscured or camouflaged targets. Specifically, the proposed approach identifies modality-specific features and fuses them in a unified representation that generalizes well across challenging scenarios. We validate HiddenObject across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art or competitive performance compared to existing methods. These results highlight the efficacy of our fusion design and expose key limitations in current unimodal and naïve fusion strategies. More broadly, our findings suggest that Mamba-based fusion architectures can significantly advance the field of multimodal object detection, especially under visually degraded or complex conditions.
Authors:Shenqi Wang, Guangzhi Tang
Abstract:
Event-based camera has emerged as a promising paradigm for robot perception, offering advantages with high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and robustness to motion blur. However, existing deep learning-based event processing methods often fail to fully leverage the sparse nature of event data, complicating their integration into resource-constrained edge applications. While neuromorphic computing provides an energy-efficient alternative, spiking neural networks struggle to match of performance of state-of-the-art models in complex event-based vision tasks, like object detection and optical flow. Moreover, achieving high activation sparsity in neural networks is still difficult and often demands careful manual tuning of sparsity-inducing loss terms. Here, we propose Context-aware Sparse Spatiotemporal Learning (CSSL), a novel framework that introduces context-aware thresholding to dynamically regulate neuron activations based on the input distribution, naturally reducing activation density without explicit sparsity constraints. Applied to event-based object detection and optical flow estimation, CSSL achieves comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining extremely high neuronal sparsity. Our experimental results highlight CSSL's crucial role in enabling efficient event-based vision for neuromorphic processing.
Authors:Krishna Vinod, Prithvi Jai Ramesh, Pavan Kumar B N, Bharatesh Chakravarthi
Abstract:
Event cameras offer microsecond latency, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, making them ideal for real-time robotic perception under challenging conditions such as motion blur, occlusion, and illumination changes. However, despite their advantages, synthetic event-based vision remains largely unexplored in mainstream robotics simulators. This lack of simulation setup hinders the evaluation of event-driven approaches for robotic manipulation and navigation tasks. This work presents an open-source, user-friendly v2e robotics operating system (ROS) package for Gazebo simulation that enables seamless event stream generation from RGB camera feeds. The package is used to investigate event-based robotic policies (ERP) for real-time navigation and manipulation. Two representative scenarios are evaluated: (1) object following with a mobile robot and (2) object detection and grasping with a robotic manipulator. Transformer-based ERPs are trained by behavior cloning and compared to RGB-based counterparts under various operating conditions. Experimental results show that event-guided policies consistently deliver competitive advantages. The results highlight the potential of event-driven perception to improve real-time robotic navigation and manipulation, providing a foundation for broader integration of event cameras into robotic policy learning. The GitHub repo for the dataset and code: https://eventbasedvision.github.io/SEBVS/
Authors:Yuval Haitman, Oded Bialer
Abstract:
Radar-based object detection is essential for autonomous driving due to radar's long detection range. However, the sparsity of radar point clouds, especially at long range, poses challenges for accurate detection. Existing methods increase point density through temporal aggregation with ego-motion compensation, but this approach introduces scatter from dynamic objects, degrading detection performance. We propose DoppDrive, a novel Doppler-Driven temporal aggregation method that enhances radar point cloud density while minimizing scatter. Points from previous frames are shifted radially according to their dynamic Doppler component to eliminate radial scatter, with each point assigned a unique aggregation duration based on its Doppler and angle to minimize tangential scatter. DoppDrive is a point cloud density enhancement step applied before detection, compatible with any detector, and we demonstrate that it significantly improves object detection performance across various detectors and datasets.
Authors:Jianhong Han, Yupei Wang, Liang Chen
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been widely explored to bridge domain gaps. However, in real-world remote-sensing scenarios, privacy and transmission constraints often preclude access to source domain data, which limits their practical applicability. Recently, Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) has emerged as a promising alternative, aiming at cross-domain adaptation without relying on source data, primarily through a self-training paradigm. Despite its potential, SFOD frequently suffers from training collapse caused by noisy pseudo-labels, especially in remote sensing imagery with dense objects and complex backgrounds. Considering that limited target domain annotations are often feasible in practice, we propose a Vision foundation-Guided DEtection TRansformer (VG-DETR), built upon a semi-supervised framework for SFOD in remote sensing images. VG-DETR integrates a Vision Foundation Model (VFM) into the training pipeline in a "free lunch" manner, leveraging a small amount of labeled target data to mitigate pseudo-label noise while improving the detector's feature-extraction capability. Specifically, we introduce a VFM-guided pseudo-label mining strategy that leverages the VFM's semantic priors to further assess the reliability of the generated pseudo-labels. By recovering potentially correct predictions from low-confidence outputs, our strategy improves pseudo-label quality and quantity. In addition, a dual-level VFM-guided alignment method is proposed, which aligns detector features with VFM embeddings at both the instance and image levels. Through contrastive learning among fine-grained prototypes and similarity matching between feature maps, this dual-level alignment further enhances the robustness of feature representations against domain gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VG-DETR achieves superior performance in source-free remote sensing detection tasks.
Authors:Liming Xu, Dave Towey, Andrew P. French, Steve Benford
Abstract:
The increasing ubiquity of smartphones and resurgence of VR/AR techniques, it is expected that our everyday environment may soon be decorating with objects connecting with virtual elements. Alerting to the presence of these objects is therefore the first step for motivating follow-up further inspection and triggering digital material attached to the objects. This work studies a special kind of these objects -- Artcodes -- a human-meaningful and machine-readable decorative markers that camouflage themselves with freeform appearance by encoding information into their topology. We formulate this problem of recongising the presence of Artcodes as Artcode proposal detection, a distinct computer vision task that classifies topologically similar but geometrically and semantically different objects as a same class. To deal with this problem, we propose a new feature descriptor, called the shape of orientation histogram, to describe the generic topological structure of an Artcode. We collect datasets and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the Artcode detection proposer built upon this new feature vector. Our experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed feature vector for representing topological structures and the effectiveness of the system for detecting Artcode proposals. Although this work is an initial attempt to develop a feature-based system for detecting topological objects like Artcodes, it would open up new interaction opportunities and spark potential applications of topological object detection.
Authors:Will Fein, Ryan J. Horwitz, John E. Brown, Amit Misra, Felipe Oviedo, Kevin White, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Samuel K. Wasser
Abstract:
The transnational ivory trade continues to drive the decline of elephant populations across Africa, and trafficking networks remain difficult to disrupt. Tusks seized by law enforcement officials carry forensic information on the traffickers responsible for their export, including DNA evidence and handwritten markings made by traffickers. For 20 years, analyses of tusk DNA have identified where elephants were poached and established connections among shipments of ivory. While the links established using genetic evidence are extremely conclusive, genetic data is expensive and sometimes impossible to obtain. But though handwritten markings are easy to photograph, they are rarely documented or analyzed. Here, we present an AI-driven pipeline for extracting and analyzing handwritten markings on seized elephant tusks, offering a novel, scalable, and low-cost source of forensic evidence. Having collected 6,085 photographs from eight large seizures of ivory over a 6-year period (2014-2019), we used an object detection model to extract over 17,000 individual markings, which were then labeled and described using state-of-the-art AI tools. We identified 184 recurring "signature markings" that connect the tusks on which they appear. 20 signature markings were observed in multiple seizures, establishing forensic links between these seizures through traffickers involved in both shipments. This work complements other investigative techniques by filling in gaps where other data sources are unavailable. The study demonstrates the transformative potential of AI in wildlife forensics and highlights practical steps for integrating handwriting analysis into efforts to disrupt organized wildlife crime.
Authors:Licheng Zhang, Bach Le, Naveed Akhtar, Tuan Ngo
Abstract:
Accurate detection and classification of diverse door types in floor plans drawings is critical for multiple applications, such as building compliance checking, and indoor scene understanding. Despite their importance, publicly available datasets specifically designed for fine-grained multi-class door detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a semi-automated pipeline that leverages a state-of-the-art object detector and a large language model (LLM) to construct a multi-class door detection dataset with minimal manual effort. Doors are first detected as a unified category using a deep object detection model. Next, an LLM classifies each detected instance based on its visual and contextual features. Finally, a human-in-the-loop stage ensures high-quality labels and bounding boxes. Our method significantly reduces annotation cost while producing a dataset suitable for benchmarking neural models in floor plan analysis. This work demonstrates the potential of combining deep learning and multimodal reasoning for efficient dataset construction in complex real-world domains.
Authors:Sarina Penquitt, Jonathan Klees, Rinor Cakaj, Daniel Kondermann, Matthias Rottmann, Lars Schmarje
Abstract:
Object detection has advanced rapidly in recent years, driven by increasingly large and diverse datasets. However, label errors, defined as missing labels, incorrect classification or inaccurate localization, often compromise the quality of these datasets. This can have a significant impact on the outcomes of training and benchmark evaluations. Although several methods now exist for detecting label errors in object detection datasets, they are typically validated only on synthetic benchmarks or limited manual inspection. How to correct such errors systemically and at scale therefore remains an open problem. We introduce a semi-automated framework for label-error correction called REC$\checkmark$D (Rechecked). Building on existing detectors, the framework pairs their error proposals with lightweight, crowd-sourced microtasks. These tasks enable multiple annotators to independently verify each candidate bounding box, and their responses are aggregated to estimate ambiguity and improve label quality. To demonstrate the effectiveness of REC$\checkmark$D, we apply it to the class pedestrian in the KITTI dataset. Our crowdsourced review yields high-quality corrected annotations, which indicate a rate of at least 24% of missing and inaccurate annotations in original annotations. This validated set will be released as a new real-world benchmark for label error detection and correction. We show that current label error detection methods, when combined with our correction framework, can recover hundreds of errors in the time it would take a human to annotate bounding boxes from scratch. However, even the best methods still miss up to 66% of the true errors and with low quality labels introduce more errors than they find. This highlights the urgent need for further research, now enabled by our released benchmark.
Authors:Frank Ruis, Gertjan Burghouts, Hugo Kuijf
Abstract:
Recent progress in large pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) has reached state-of-the-art performance on several object detection benchmarks and boasts strong zero-shot capabilities, but for optimal performance on specific targets some form of finetuning is still necessary. While the initial VLM weights allow for great few-shot transfer learning, this usually involves the loss of the original natural language querying and zero-shot capabilities. Inspired by the success of Textual Inversion (TI) in personalizing text-to-image diffusion models, we propose a similar formulation for open-vocabulary object detection. TI allows extending the VLM vocabulary by learning new or improving existing tokens to accurately detect novel or fine-grained objects from as little as three examples. The learned tokens are completely compatible with the original VLM weights while keeping them frozen, retaining the original model's benchmark performance, and leveraging its existing capabilities such as zero-shot domain transfer (e.g., detecting a sketch of an object after training only on real photos). The storage and gradient calculations are limited to the token embedding dimension, requiring significantly less compute than full-model fine-tuning. We evaluated whether the method matches or outperforms the baseline methods that suffer from forgetting in a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative experiments.
Authors:Ziyang Leng, Jiawei Yang, Zhicheng Ren, Bolei Zhou
Abstract:
We present BEVCon, a simple yet effective contrastive learning framework designed to improve Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception in autonomous driving. BEV perception offers a top-down-view representation of the surrounding environment, making it crucial for 3D object detection, segmentation, and trajectory prediction tasks. While prior work has primarily focused on enhancing BEV encoders and task-specific heads, we address the underexplored potential of representation learning in BEV models. BEVCon introduces two contrastive learning modules: an instance feature contrast module for refining BEV features and a perspective view contrast module that enhances the image backbone. The dense contrastive learning designed on top of detection losses leads to improved feature representations across both the BEV encoder and the backbone. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that BEVCon achieves consistent performance gains, achieving up to +2.4% mAP improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Our results highlight the critical role of representation learning in BEV perception and offer a complementary avenue to conventional task-specific optimizations.
Authors:Matthias Bartolo, Konstantinos Makantasis, Dylan Seychell
Abstract:
As litter pollution continues to rise globally, developing automated tools capable of detecting litter effectively remains a significant challenge. This study presents a novel approach that combines, for the first time, privileged information with deep learning object detection to improve litter detection while maintaining model efficiency. We evaluate our method across five widely used object detection models, addressing challenges such as detecting small litter and objects partially obscured by grass or stones. In addition to this, a key contribution of our work can also be attributed to formulating a means of encoding bounding box information as a binary mask, which can be fed to the detection model to refine detection guidance. Through experiments on both within-dataset evaluation on the renowned SODA dataset and cross-dataset evaluation on the BDW and UAVVaste litter detection datasets, we demonstrate consistent performance improvements across all models. Our approach not only bolsters detection accuracy within the training sets but also generalises well to other litter detection contexts. Crucially, these improvements are achieved without increasing model complexity or adding extra layers, ensuring computational efficiency and scalability. Our results suggest that this methodology offers a practical solution for litter detection, balancing accuracy and efficiency in real-world applications.
Authors:J. Alex Hurt, Trevor M. Bajkowski, Grant J. Scott, Curt H. Davis
Abstract:
In 2012, AlexNet established deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) as the state-of-the-art in CV, as these networks soon led in visual tasks for many domains, including remote sensing. With the publication of Visual Transformers, we are witnessing the second modern leap in computational vision, and as such, it is imperative to understand how various transformer-based neural networks perform on satellite imagery. While transformers have shown high levels of performance in natural language processing and CV applications, they have yet to be compared on a large scale to modern remote sensing data. In this paper, we explore the use of transformer-based neural networks for object detection in high-resolution electro-optical satellite imagery, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on a variety of publicly available benchmark data sets. We compare eleven distinct bounding-box detection and localization algorithms in this study, of which seven were published since 2020, and all eleven since 2015. The performance of five transformer-based architectures is compared with six convolutional networks on three state-of-the-art opensource high-resolution remote sensing imagery datasets ranging in size and complexity. Following the training and evaluation of thirty-three deep neural models, we then discuss and analyze model performance across various feature extraction methodologies and detection algorithms.
Authors:Ganesh Narasimha, Mykola Telychko, Wooin Yang, Arthur P. Baddorf, P. Ganesh, An-Ping Li, Rama Vasudevan
Abstract:
Manipulating matter with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) enables creation of atomically defined artificial structures that host designer quantum states. However, the time-consuming nature of the manipulation process, coupled with the sensitivity of the STM tip, constrains the exploration of diverse configurations and limits the size of designed features. In this study, we present a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for creating artificial structures by spatially manipulating carbon monoxide (CO) molecules on a copper substrate using the STM tip. The automated workflow combines molecule detection and manipulation, employing deep learning-based object detection to locate CO molecules and linear assignment algorithms to allocate these molecules to designated target sites. We initially perform molecule maneuvering based on randomized parameter sampling for sample bias, tunneling current setpoint and manipulation speed. This dataset is then structured into an action trajectory used to train an RL agent. The model is subsequently deployed on the STM for real-time fine-tuning of manipulation parameters during structure construction. Our approach incorporates path planning protocols coupled with active drift compensation to enable atomically precise fabrication of structures with significantly reduced human input while realizing larger-scale artificial lattices with desired electronic properties. To underpin of efficiency of our approach we demonstrate the automated construction of an extended artificial graphene lattice and confirm the existence of characteristic Dirac point in its electronic structure. Further challenges to RL-based structural assembly scalability are discussed.
Authors:Justin Hehli, Marco Heiniger, Maryam Rezayati, Hans Wernher van de Venn
Abstract:
In physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC) settings, humans and robots collaborate directly in shared environments. Robots must analyze interactions with objects to ensure safety and facilitate meaningful workflows. One critical aspect is human/object detection, where the contacted object is identified. Past research introduced binary machine learning classifiers to distinguish between soft and hard objects. This study improves upon those results by evaluating three-class human/object detection models, offering more detailed contact analysis. A dataset was collected using the Franka Emika Panda robot manipulator, exploring preprocessing strategies for time-series analysis. Models including LSTM, GRU, and Transformers were trained on these datasets. The best-performing model achieved 91.11\% accuracy during real-time testing, demonstrating the feasibility of multi-class detection models. Additionally, a comparison of preprocessing strategies suggests a sliding window approach is optimal for this task.
Authors:Haichuan Li, Tomi Westerlund
Abstract:
Accurate perception and scene understanding in complex urban environments is a critical challenge for ensuring safe and efficient autonomous navigation. In this paper, we present Co-Win, a novel bird's eye view (BEV) perception framework that integrates point cloud encoding with efficient parallel window-based feature extraction to address the multi-modality inherent in environmental understanding. Our method employs a hierarchical architecture comprising a specialized encoder, a window-based backbone, and a query-based decoder head to effectively capture diverse spatial features and object relationships. Unlike prior approaches that treat perception as a simple regression task, our framework incorporates a variational approach with mask-based instance segmentation, enabling fine-grained scene decomposition and understanding. The Co-Win architecture processes point cloud data through progressive feature extraction stages, ensuring that predicted masks are both data-consistent and contextually relevant. Furthermore, our method produces interpretable and diverse instance predictions, enabling enhanced downstream decision-making and planning in autonomous driving systems.
Authors:Xiaocheng Fang, Jieyi Cai, Huanyu Liu, Wenxiu Cai, Yishu Liu, Bingzhi Chen
Abstract:
Despite advancements in Transformer-based detectors for small object detection (SOD), recent studies show that these detectors still face challenges due to inherent noise sensitivity in feature pyramid networks (FPN) and diminished query quality in existing label assignment strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel Noise-Resilient Query Optimization (NRQO) paradigm, which innovatively incorporates the Noise-Tolerance Feature Pyramid Network (NT-FPN) and the Pairwise-Similarity Region Proposal Network (PS-RPN). Specifically, NT-FPN mitigates noise during feature fusion in FPN by preserving spatial and semantic information integrity. Unlike existing label assignment strategies, PS-RPN generates a sufficient number of high-quality positive queries by enhancing anchor-ground truth matching through position and shape similarities, without the need for additional hyperparameters. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of NRQO over state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors:Muhammad Kamran, Mohammad Moein Sheikholeslami, Andreas Wichmann, Gunho Sohn
Abstract:
In recent years, the number of remote satellites orbiting the Earth has grown significantly, streaming vast amounts of high-resolution visual data to support diverse applications across civil, public, and military domains. Among these applications, the generation and updating of spatial maps of the built environment have become critical due to the extensive coverage and detailed imagery provided by satellites. However, reconstructing spatial maps from satellite imagery is a complex computer vision task, requiring the creation of high-level object representations, such as primitives, to accurately capture the built environment. While the past decade has witnessed remarkable advancements in object detection and representation using visual data, primitives-based object representation remains a persistent challenge in computer vision. Consequently, high-quality spatial maps often rely on labor-intensive and manual processes. This paper introduces a novel deep learning methodology leveraging Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to address these challenges in building footprint reconstruction. The proposed approach enhances performance by incorporating geometric regularity into building boundaries, integrating multi-scale and multi-resolution features, and embedding Attraction Field Maps into the network. These innovations provide a scalable and precise solution for automated building footprint extraction from a single satellite image, paving the way for impactful applications in urban planning, disaster management, and large-scale spatial analysis. Our model, Decoupled-PolyGCN, outperforms existing methods by 6% in AP and 10% in AR, demonstrating its ability to deliver accurate and regularized building footprints across diverse and challenging scenarios.
Authors:Jijun Wang, Yan Wu, Yujian Mo, Junqiao Zhao, Jun Yan, Yinghao Hu
Abstract:
Existing LiDAR-Camera fusion methods have achieved strong results in 3D object detection. To address the sparsity of point clouds, previous approaches typically construct spatial pseudo point clouds via depth completion as auxiliary input and adopts a proposal-refinement framework to generate detection results. However, introducing pseudo points inevitably brings noise, potentially resulting in inaccurate predictions. Considering the differing roles and reliability levels of each modality, we propose LDRFusion, a novel Lidar-dominant two-stage refinement framework for multi-sensor fusion. The first stage soley relies on LiDAR to produce accurately localized proposals, followed by a second stage where pseudo point clouds are incorporated to detect challenging instances. The instance-level results from both stages are subsequently merged. To further enhance the representation of local structures in pseudo point clouds, we present a hierarchical pseudo point residual encoding module, which encodes neighborhood sets using both feature and positional residuals. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves strong performance across multiple categories and difficulty levels.
Authors:Jiale Liu, Huan Wang, Yue Zhang, Xiaoyu Luo, Jiaxiang Hu, Zhiliang Liu, Min Xie
Abstract:
Non-destructive testing (NDT), particularly X-ray inspection, is vital for industrial quality assurance, yet existing deep-learning-based approaches often lack interactivity, interpretability, and the capacity for critical self-assessment, limiting their reliability and operator trust. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes InsightX Agent, a novel LMM-based agentic framework designed to deliver reliable, interpretable, and interactive X-ray NDT analysis. Unlike typical sequential pipelines, InsightX Agent positions a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) as a central orchestrator, coordinating between the Sparse Deformable Multi-Scale Detector (SDMSD) and the Evidence-Grounded Reflection (EGR) tool. The SDMSD generates dense defect region proposals for multi-scale feature maps and sparsifies them through Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), optimizing detection of small, dense targets in X-ray images while maintaining computational efficiency. The EGR tool guides the LMM agent through a chain-of-thought-inspired review process, incorporating context assessment, individual defect analysis, false positive elimination, confidence recalibration and quality assurance to validate and refine the SDMSD's initial proposals. By strategically employing and intelligently using tools, InsightX Agent moves beyond passive data processing to active reasoning, enhancing diagnostic reliability and providing interpretations that integrate diverse information sources. Experimental evaluations on the GDXray+ dataset demonstrate that InsightX Agent not only achieves a high object detection F1-score of 96.35% but also offers significantly improved interpretability and trustworthiness in its analyses, highlighting the transformative potential of agentic LLM frameworks for industrial inspection tasks.
Authors:Yujian Mo, Yan Wu, Junqiao Zhao, Jijun Wang, Yinghao Hu, Jun Yan
Abstract:
Recent advances in foundation models have opened up new possibilities for enhancing 3D perception. In particular, DepthAnything offers dense and reliable geometric priors from monocular RGB images, which can complement sparse LiDAR data in autonomous driving scenarios. However, such priors remain underutilized in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. In this paper, we address the limited expressiveness of raw LiDAR point features, especially the weak discriminative capability of the reflectance attribute, by introducing depth priors predicted by DepthAnything. These priors are fused with the original LiDAR attributes to enrich each point's representation. To leverage the enhanced point features, we propose a point-wise feature extraction module. Then, a Dual-Path RoI feature extraction framework is employed, comprising a voxel-based branch for global semantic context and a point-based branch for fine-grained structural details. To effectively integrate the complementary RoI features, we introduce a bidirectional gated RoI feature fusion module that balances global and local cues. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that our method consistently improves detection accuracy, demonstrating the value of incorporating visual foundation model priors into LiDAR-based 3D object detection.
Authors:Masahiro Ogawa, Qi An, Atsushi Yamashita
Abstract:
Separating moving and static objects from a moving camera viewpoint is essential for 3D reconstruction, autonomous navigation, and scene understanding in robotics. Existing approaches often rely primarily on optical flow, which struggles to detect moving objects in complex, structured scenes involving camera motion. To address this limitation, we propose Focus of Expansion Likelihood and Segmentation (FoELS), a method based on the core idea of integrating both optical flow and texture information. FoELS computes the focus of expansion (FoE) from optical flow and derives an initial motion likelihood from the outliers of the FoE computation. This likelihood is then fused with a segmentation-based prior to estimate the final moving probability. The method effectively handles challenges including complex structured scenes, rotational camera motion, and parallel motion. Comprehensive evaluations on the DAVIS 2016 dataset and real-world traffic videos demonstrate its effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Haoyuan Liu, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract:
Bounding box regression (BBR) is fundamental to object detection, where the regression loss is crucial for accurate localization. Existing IoU-based losses often incorporate handcrafted geometric penalties to address IoU's non-differentiability in non-overlapping cases and enhance BBR performance. However, these penalties are sensitive to box shape, size, and distribution, often leading to suboptimal optimization for small objects and undesired behaviors such as bounding box enlargement due to misalignment with the IoU objective. To address these limitations, we propose InterpIoU, a novel loss function that replaces handcrafted geometric penalties with a term based on the IoU between interpolated boxes and the target. By using interpolated boxes to bridge the gap between predictions and ground truth, InterpIoU provides meaningful gradients in non-overlapping cases and inherently avoids the box enlargement issue caused by misaligned penalties. Simulation results further show that IoU itself serves as an ideal regression target, while existing geometric penalties are both unnecessary and suboptimal. Building on InterpIoU, we introduce Dynamic InterpIoU, which dynamically adjusts interpolation coefficients based on IoU values, enhancing adaptability to scenarios with diverse object distributions. Experiments on COCO, VisDrone, and PASCAL VOC show that our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art IoU-based losses across various detection frameworks, with particularly notable improvements in small object detection, confirming their effectiveness.
Authors:Haoyuan Liu, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract:
Bounding box regression (BBR) is fundamental to object detection, where the regression loss is crucial for accurate localization. Existing IoU-based losses often incorporate handcrafted geometric penalties to address IoU's non-differentiability in non-overlapping cases and enhance BBR performance. However, these penalties are sensitive to box shape, size, and distribution, often leading to suboptimal optimization for small objects and undesired behaviors such as bounding box enlargement due to misalignment with the IoU objective. To address these limitations, we propose InterpIoU, a novel loss function that replaces handcrafted geometric penalties with a term based on the IoU between interpolated boxes and the target. By using interpolated boxes to bridge the gap between predictions and ground truth, InterpIoU provides meaningful gradients in non-overlapping cases and inherently avoids the box enlargement issue caused by misaligned penalties. Simulation results further show that IoU itself serves as an ideal regression target, while existing geometric penalties are both unnecessary and suboptimal. Building on InterpIoU, we introduce Dynamic InterpIoU, which dynamically adjusts interpolation coefficients based on IoU values, enhancing adaptability to scenarios with diverse object distributions. Experiments on COCO, VisDrone, and PASCAL VOC show that our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art IoU-based losses across various detection frameworks, with particularly notable improvements in small object detection, confirming their effectiveness.
Authors:Xiwei Zhang, Chunjin Yang, Yiming Xiao, Runtong Zhang, Fanman Meng
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection (UDAOD) from the visible domain to the infrared (RGB-IR) domain is challenging. Existing methods regard the RGB domain as a unified domain and neglect the multiple subdomains within it, such as daytime, nighttime, and foggy scenes. We argue that decoupling the domain-invariant (DI) and domain-specific (DS) features across these multiple subdomains is beneficial for RGB-IR domain adaptation. To this end, this paper proposes a new SS-DC framework based on a decoupling-coupling strategy. In terms of decoupling, we design a Spectral Adaptive Idempotent Decoupling (SAID) module in the aspect of spectral decomposition. Due to the style and content information being highly embedded in different frequency bands, this module can decouple DI and DS components more accurately and interpretably. A novel filter bank-based spectral processing paradigm and a self-distillation-driven decoupling loss are proposed to improve the spectral domain decoupling. In terms of coupling, a new spatial-spectral coupling method is proposed, which realizes joint coupling through spatial and spectral DI feature pyramids. Meanwhile, this paper introduces DS from decoupling to reduce the domain bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the baseline performance and outperform existing UDAOD methods on multiple RGB-IR datasets, including a new experimental protocol proposed in this paper based on the FLIR-ADAS dataset.
Authors:Daghash K. Alqahtani, Maria A. Rodriguez, Muhammad Aamir Cheema, Hamid Rezatofighi, Adel N. Toosi
Abstract:
Edge computing enables data processing closer to the source, significantly reducing latency an essential requirement for real-time vision-based analytics such as object detection in surveillance and smart city environments. However, these tasks place substantial demands on resource constrained edge devices, making the joint optimization of energy consumption and detection accuracy critical. To address this challenge, we propose ECORE, a framework that integrates multiple dynamic routing strategies including estimation based techniques and a greedy selection algorithm to direct image processing requests to the most suitable edge device-model pair. ECORE dynamically balances energy efficiency and detection performance based on object characteristics. We evaluate our approach through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, comparing the proposed routers against widely used baseline techniques. The evaluation leverages established object detection models (YOLO, SSD, EfficientDet) and diverse edge platforms, including Jetson Orin Nano, Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, and TPU accelerators. Results demonstrate that our proposed context-aware routing strategies can reduce energy consumption and latency by 45% and 49%, respectively, while incurring only a 2% loss in detection accuracy compared to accuracy-centric methods.
Authors:Andrei Jelea, Ahmed Nabil Belbachir, Marius Leordeanu
Abstract:
We introduce Generalized Test-Time Augmentation (GTTA), a highly effective method for improving the performance of a trained model, which unlike other existing Test-Time Augmentation approaches from the literature is general enough to be used off-the-shelf for many vision and non-vision tasks, such as classification, regression, image segmentation and object detection. By applying a new general data transformation, that randomly perturbs multiple times the PCA subspace projection of a test input, GTTA forms robust ensembles at test time in which, due to sound statistical properties, the structural and systematic noises in the initial input data is filtered out and final estimator errors are reduced. Different from other existing methods, we also propose a final self-supervised learning stage in which the ensemble output, acting as an unsupervised teacher, is used to train the initial single student model, thus reducing significantly the test time computational cost, at no loss in accuracy. Our tests and comparisons to strong TTA approaches and SoTA models on various vision and non-vision well-known datasets and tasks, such as image classification and segmentation, speech recognition and house price prediction, validate the generality of the proposed GTTA. Furthermore, we also prove its effectiveness on the more specific real-world task of salmon segmentation and detection in low-visibility underwater videos, for which we introduce DeepSalmon, the largest dataset of its kind in the literature.
Authors:Hao Xing, Kai Zhe Boey, Yuankai Wu, Darius Burschka, Gordon Cheng
Abstract:
Accurate temporal segmentation of human actions is critical for intelligent robots in collaborative settings, where a precise understanding of sub-activity labels and their temporal structure is essential. However, the inherent noise in both human pose estimation and object detection often leads to over-segmentation errors, disrupting the coherence of action sequences. To address this, we propose a Multi-Modal Graph Convolutional Network (MMGCN) that integrates low-frame-rate (e.g., 1 fps) visual data with high-frame-rate (e.g., 30 fps) motion data (skeleton and object detections) to mitigate fragmentation. Our framework introduces three key contributions. First, a sinusoidal encoding strategy that maps 3D skeleton coordinates into a continuous sin-cos space to enhance spatial representation robustness. Second, a temporal graph fusion module that aligns multi-modal inputs with differing resolutions via hierarchical feature aggregation, Third, inspired by the smooth transitions inherent to human actions, we design SmoothLabelMix, a data augmentation technique that mixes input sequences and labels to generate synthetic training examples with gradual action transitions, enhancing temporal consistency in predictions and reducing over-segmentation artifacts.
Extensive experiments on the Bimanual Actions Dataset, a public benchmark for human-object interaction understanding, demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in action segmentation accuracy, achieving F1@10: 94.5% and F1@25: 92.8%.
Authors:Alexander Moore, Amar Saini, Kylie Cancilla, Doug Poland, Carmen Carrano
Abstract:
Amodal segmentation and amodal content completion require using object priors to estimate occluded masks and features of objects in complex scenes. Until now, no data has provided an additional dimension for object context: the possibility of multiple cameras sharing a view of a scene. We introduce MOVi-MC-AC: Multiple Object Video with Multi-Cameras and Amodal Content, the largest amodal segmentation and first amodal content dataset to date. Cluttered scenes of generic household objects are simulated in multi-camera video. MOVi-MC-AC contributes to the growing literature of object detection, tracking, and segmentation by including two new contributions to the deep learning for computer vision world. Multiple Camera (MC) settings where objects can be identified and tracked between various unique camera perspectives are rare in both synthetic and real-world video. We introduce a new complexity to synthetic video by providing consistent object ids for detections and segmentations between both frames and multiple cameras each with unique features and motion patterns on a single scene. Amodal Content (AC) is a reconstructive task in which models predict the appearance of target objects through occlusions. In the amodal segmentation literature, some datasets have been released with amodal detection, tracking, and segmentation labels. While other methods rely on slow cut-and-paste schemes to generate amodal content pseudo-labels, they do not account for natural occlusions present in the modal masks. MOVi-MC-AC provides labels for ~5.8 million object instances, setting a new maximum in the amodal dataset literature, along with being the first to provide ground-truth amodal content. The full dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Amar-S/MOVi-MC-AC ,
Authors:Deng Li, Aming Wu, Yang Li, Yaowei Wang, Yahong Han
Abstract:
In practice, environments constantly change over time and space, posing significant challenges for object detectors trained based on a closed-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same distribution. To this end, continual test-time adaptation has attracted much attention, aiming to improve detectors' generalization by fine-tuning a few specific parameters, e.g., BatchNorm layers. However, based on a small number of test images, fine-tuning certain parameters may affect the representation ability of other fixed parameters, leading to performance degradation. Instead, we explore a new mechanism, i.e., converting the fine-tuning process to a specific-parameter generation. Particularly, we first design a dual-path LoRA-based domain-aware adapter that disentangles features into domain-invariant and domain-specific components, enabling efficient adaptation. Additionally, a conditional diffusion-based parameter generation mechanism is presented to synthesize the adapter's parameters based on the current environment, preventing the optimization from getting stuck in local optima. Finally, we propose a class-centered optimal transport alignment method to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments conducted on various continuous domain adaptive object detection tasks demonstrate the effectiveness. Meanwhile, visualization results show that the representation extracted by the generated parameters can capture more object-related information and strengthen the generalization ability.
Authors:Siyuan Chai, Xiaodong Guo, Tong Liu
Abstract:
Infrared image helps improve the perception capabilities of autonomous driving in complex weather conditions such as fog, rain, and low light. However, infrared image often suffers from low contrast, especially in non-heat-emitting targets like bicycles, which significantly affects the performance of downstream high-level vision tasks. Furthermore, achieving contrast enhancement without amplifying noise and losing important information remains a challenge. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented infrared image enhancement method. Our approach consists of two key components: layer decomposition and saliency information extraction. First, we design an layer decomposition method for infrared images, which enhances scene details while preserving dark region features, providing more features for subsequent saliency information extraction. Then, we propose a morphological reconstruction-based saliency extraction method that effectively extracts and enhances target information without amplifying noise. Our method improves the image quality for object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Tobias J. Riedlinger, Kira Maag, Hanno Gottschalk
Abstract:
Deep neural networks have set the state-of-the-art in computer vision tasks such as bounding box detection and semantic segmentation. Object detectors and segmentation models assign confidence scores to predictions, reflecting the model's uncertainty in object detection or pixel-wise classification. However, these confidence estimates are often miscalibrated, as their architectures and loss functions are tailored to task performance rather than probabilistic foundation. Even with well calibrated predictions, object detectors fail to quantify uncertainty outside detected bounding boxes, i.e., the model does not make a probability assessment of whether an area without detected objects is truly free of obstacles. This poses a safety risk in applications such as automated driving, where uncertainty in empty areas remains unexplored. In this work, we propose an object detection model grounded in spatial statistics. Bounding box data matches realizations of a marked point process, commonly used to describe the probabilistic occurrence of spatial point events identified as bounding box centers, where marks are used to describe the spatial extension of bounding boxes and classes. Our statistical framework enables a likelihood-based training and provides well-defined confidence estimates for whether a region is drivable, i.e., free of objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through calibration assessments and evaluation of performance.
Authors:Hao Chen, Yu Hin Ng, Ching-Wei Chang, Haobo Liang, Yanke Wang
Abstract:
Lifting on construction sites, as a frequent operation, works still with safety risks, especially for modular integrated construction (MiC) lifting due to its large weight and size, probably leading to accidents, causing damage to the modules, or more critically, posing safety hazards to on-site workers. Aiming to reduce the safety risks in lifting scenarios, we design an automated safe lifting monitoring algorithm pipeline based on learning-based methods, and deploy it on construction sites. This work is potentially to increase the safety and efficiency of MiC lifting process via automation technologies. A dataset is created consisting of 1007 image-point cloud pairs (37 MiC liftings). Advanced object detection models are trained for automated two-dimensional (2D) detection of MiCs and humans. Fusing the 2D detection results with the point cloud information allows accurate determination of the three-dimensional (3D) positions of MiCs and humans. The system is designed to automatically trigger alarms that notify individuals in the MiC lifting danger zone, while providing the crane operator with real-time lifting information and early warnings. The monitoring process minimizes the human intervention and no or less signal men are required on real sites assisted by our system. A quantitative analysis is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithmic pipeline. The pipeline shows promising results in MiC and human perception with the mean distance error of 1.5640 m and 0.7824 m respectively. Furthermore, the developed system successfully executes safety risk monitoring and alarm functionalities during the MiC lifting process with limited manual work on real construction sites.
Authors:Yuhan Zhou, Haihua Chen, Kewei Sha
Abstract:
The next-generation autonomous vehicles (AVs), embedded with frequent real-time decision-making, will rely heavily on a large volume of multisource and multimodal data. In real-world settings, the data quality (DQ) of different sources and modalities usually varies due to unexpected environmental factors or sensor issues. However, both researchers and practitioners in the AV field overwhelmingly concentrate on models/algorithms while undervaluing the DQ. To fulfill the needs of the next-generation AVs with guarantees of functionality, efficiency, and trustworthiness, this paper proposes a novel task-centric and data quality vase framework which consists of five layers: data layer, DQ layer, task layer, application layer, and goal layer. The proposed framework aims to map DQ with task requirements and performance goals. To illustrate, a case study investigating redundancy on the nuScenes dataset proves that partially removing redundancy on multisource image data could improve YOLOv8 object detection task performance. Analysis on multimodal data of image and LiDAR further presents existing redundancy DQ issues. This paper opens up a range of critical but unexplored challenges at the intersection of DQ, task orchestration, and performance-oriented system development in AVs. It is expected to guide the AV community toward building more adaptive, explainable, and resilient AVs that respond intelligently to dynamic environments and heterogeneous data streams. Code, data, and implementation details are publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/dq4av-framework/README.md.
Authors:Ali Abouzeid, Malak Mansour, Chengsong Hu, Dezhen Song
Abstract:
In robotic fruit picking applications, managing object occlusion in unstructured settings poses a substantial challenge for designing grasping algorithms. Using strawberry harvesting as a case study, we present an end-to-end framework for effective object detection, segmentation, and grasp planning to tackle this issue caused by partially occluded objects. Our strategy begins with point cloud denoising and segmentation to accurately locate fruits. To compensate for incomplete scans due to occlusion, we apply a point cloud completion model to create a dense 3D reconstruction of the strawberries. The target selection focuses on ripe strawberries while categorizing others as obstacles, followed by converting the refined point cloud into an occupancy map for collision-aware motion planning. Our experimental results demonstrate high shape reconstruction accuracy, with the lowest Chamfer Distance compared to state-of-the-art methods with 1.10 mm, and significantly improved grasp success rates of 79.17%, yielding an overall success-to-attempt ratio of 89.58\% in real-world strawberry harvesting. Additionally, our method reduces the obstacle hit rate from 43.33% to 13.95%, highlighting its effectiveness in improving both grasp quality and safety compared to prior approaches. This pipeline substantially improves autonomous strawberry harvesting, advancing more efficient and reliable robotic fruit picking systems.
Authors:Kaiyuan Tan, Pavan Kumar B N, Bharatesh Chakravarthi
Abstract:
Event cameras are gaining traction in traffic monitoring applications due to their low latency, high temporal resolution, and energy efficiency, which makes them well-suited for real-time object detection at traffic intersections. However, the development of robust event-based detection models is hindered by the limited availability of annotated real-world datasets. To address this, several simulation tools have been developed to generate synthetic event data. Among these, the CARLA driving simulator includes a built-in dynamic vision sensor (DVS) module that emulates event camera output. Despite its potential, the sim-to-real gap for event-based object detection remains insufficiently studied. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of this gap by training a recurrent vision transformer model exclusively on synthetic data generated using CARLAs DVS and testing it on varying combinations of synthetic and real-world event streams. Our experiments show that models trained solely on synthetic data perform well on synthetic-heavy test sets but suffer significant performance degradation as the proportion of real-world data increases. In contrast, models trained on real-world data demonstrate stronger generalization across domains. This study offers the first quantifiable analysis of the sim-to-real gap in event-based object detection using CARLAs DVS. Our findings highlight limitations in current DVS simulation fidelity and underscore the need for improved domain adaptation techniques in neuromorphic vision for traffic monitoring.
Authors:Vasiliki Balaska, Ioannis Tsampikos Papapetros, Katerina Maria Oikonomou, Loukas Bampis, Antonios Gasteratos
Abstract:
The mining sector increasingly adopts digital tools to improve operational efficiency, safety, and data-driven decision-making. One of the key challenges remains the reliable acquisition of high-resolution, geo-referenced spatial information to support core activities such as extraction planning and on-site monitoring. This work presents an integrated system architecture that combines UAV-based sensing, LiDAR terrain modeling, and deep learning-based object detection to generate spatially accurate information for open-pit mining environments. The proposed pipeline includes geo-referencing, 3D reconstruction, and object localization, enabling structured spatial outputs to be integrated into an industrial digital twin platform. Unlike traditional static surveying methods, the system offers higher coverage and automation potential, with modular components suitable for deployment in real-world industrial contexts. While the current implementation operates in post-flight batch mode, it lays the foundation for real-time extensions. The system contributes to the development of AI-enhanced remote sensing in mining by demonstrating a scalable and field-validated geospatial data workflow that supports situational awareness and infrastructure safety.
Authors:Sindhu Boddu, Arindam Mukherjee
Abstract:
This paper presents the deployment and performance evaluation of a quantized YOLOv4-Tiny model for real-time object detection in aerial emergency imagery on a resource-constrained edge device the Raspberry Pi 5. The YOLOv4-Tiny model was quantized to INT8 precision using TensorFlow Lite post-training quantization techniques and evaluated for detection speed, power consumption, and thermal feasibility under embedded deployment conditions. The quantized model achieved an inference time of 28.2 ms per image with an average power consumption of 13.85 W, demonstrating a significant reduction in power usage compared to its FP32 counterpart. Detection accuracy remained robust across key emergency classes such as Ambulance, Police, Fire Engine, and Car Crash. These results highlight the potential of low-power embedded AI systems for real-time deployment in safety-critical emergency response applications.
Authors:Sindhu Boddu, Arindam Mukherjee
Abstract:
This paper presents a lightweight and energy-efficient object detection solution for aerial imagery captured during emergency response situations. We focus on deploying the YOLOv4-Tiny model, a compact convolutional neural network, optimized through post-training quantization to INT8 precision. The model is trained on a custom-curated aerial emergency dataset, consisting of 10,820 annotated images covering critical emergency scenarios. Unlike prior works that rely on publicly available datasets, we created this dataset ourselves due to the lack of publicly available drone-view emergency imagery, making the dataset itself a key contribution of this work. The quantized model is evaluated against YOLOv5-small across multiple metrics, including mean Average Precision (mAP), F1 score, inference time, and model size. Experimental results demonstrate that the quantized YOLOv4-Tiny achieves comparable detection performance while reducing the model size from 22.5 MB to 6.4 MB and improving inference speed by 44\%. With a 71\% reduction in model size and a 44\% increase in inference speed, the quantized YOLOv4-Tiny model proves highly suitable for real-time emergency detection on low-power edge devices.
Authors:DaeEun Yoon, Semin Kim, SangWook Yoo, Jongha Lee
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been tremendous progress in object detection performance. However, despite these advances, the detection performance for small objects is significantly inferior to that of large objects. Detecting small objects is one of the most challenging and important problems in computer vision. To improve the detection performance for small objects, we propose an optimal data augmentation method using Fast AutoAugment. Through our proposed method, we can quickly find optimal augmentation policies that can overcome degradation when detecting small objects, and we achieve a 20% performance improvement on the DOTA dataset.
Authors:Juan Yeo, Soonwoo Cha, Jiwoo Song, Hyunbin Jin, Taesup Kim
Abstract:
Vision-language models such as CLIP have recently propelled open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks by enabling recognition of a broad range of visual concepts. However, CLIP still struggles with fine-grained, region-level understanding, hindering its effectiveness on these dense prediction tasks. We identify two pivotal factors required to address this limitation: semantic coherence and fine-grained vision-language alignment. Current adaptation methods often improve fine-grained alignment at the expense of semantic coherence, and often rely on extra modules or supervised fine-tuning. To overcome these issues, we propose Any-to-Any Self-Distillation (ATAS), a novel approach that simultaneously enhances semantic coherence and fine-grained alignment by leveraging own knowledge of a model across all representation levels. Unlike prior methods, ATAS uses only unlabeled images and an internal self-distillation process to refine representations of CLIP vision encoders, preserving local semantic consistency while sharpening local detail recognition. On open-vocabulary object detection and semantic segmentation benchmarks, ATAS achieves substantial performance gains, outperforming baseline CLIP models. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach and underscore the importance of jointly maintaining semantic coherence and fine-grained alignment for advanced open-vocabulary dense prediction.
Authors:Duc Thanh Pham, Hong Dang Nguyen, Nhat Minh Nguyen Quoc, Linh Ngo Van, Sang Dinh Viet, Duc Anh Nguyen
Abstract:
Recently, object detection models have witnessed notable performance improvements, particularly with transformer-based models. However, new objects frequently appear in the real world, requiring detection models to continually learn without suffering from catastrophic forgetting. Although Incremental Object Detection (IOD) has emerged to address this challenge, these existing models are still not practical due to their limited performance and prolonged inference time. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for IOD, called Hier-DETR: Hierarchical Neural Collapse Detection Transformer, ensuring both efficiency and competitive performance by leveraging Neural Collapse for imbalance dataset and Hierarchical relation of classes' labels.
Authors:Aneesh Deogan, Wout Beks, Peter Teurlings, Koen de Vos, Mark van den Brand, Rene van de Molengraft
Abstract:
Annotated datasets are critical for training neural networks for object detection, yet their manual creation is time- and labour-intensive, subjective to human error, and often limited in diversity. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the domain of robotics, where diverse and dynamic scenarios further complicate the creation of representative datasets. To address this, we propose a novel method for automatically generating annotated synthetic data in Unreal Engine. Our approach leverages photorealistic 3D Gaussian splats for rapid synthetic data generation. We demonstrate that synthetic datasets can achieve performance comparable to that of real-world datasets while significantly reducing the time required to generate and annotate data. Additionally, combining real-world and synthetic data significantly increases object detection performance by leveraging the quality of real-world images with the easier scalability of synthetic data. To our knowledge, this is the first application of synthetic data for training object detection algorithms in the highly dynamic and varied environment of robot soccer. Validation experiments reveal that a detector trained on synthetic images performs on par with one trained on manually annotated real-world images when tested on robot soccer match scenarios. Our method offers a scalable and comprehensive alternative to traditional dataset creation, eliminating the labour-intensive error-prone manual annotation process. By generating datasets in a simulator where all elements are intrinsically known, we ensure accurate annotations while significantly reducing manual effort, which makes it particularly valuable for robotics applications requiring diverse and scalable training data.
Authors:Yechi Ma, Wei Hua, Shu Kong
Abstract:
A crucial yet under-appreciated prerequisite in machine learning solutions for real-applications is data annotation: human annotators are hired to manually label data according to detailed, expert-crafted guidelines. This is often a laborious, tedious, and costly process. To study methods for facilitating data annotation, we introduce a new benchmark AnnoGuide: Auto-Annotation from Annotation Guidelines. It aims to evaluate automated methods for data annotation directly from expert-defined annotation guidelines, eliminating the need for manual labeling. As a case study, we repurpose the well-established nuScenes dataset, commonly used in autonomous driving research, which provides comprehensive annotation guidelines for labeling LiDAR point clouds with 3D cuboids across 18 object classes. These guidelines include a few visual examples and textual descriptions, but no labeled 3D cuboids in LiDAR data, making this a novel task of multi-modal few-shot 3D detection without 3D annotations. The advances of powerful foundation models (FMs) make AnnoGuide especially timely, as FMs offer promising tools to tackle its challenges. We employ a conceptually straightforward pipeline that (1) utilizes open-source FMs for object detection and segmentation in RGB images, (2) projects 2D detections into 3D using known camera poses, and (3) clusters LiDAR points within the frustum of each 2D detection to generate a 3D cuboid. Starting with a non-learned solution that leverages off-the-shelf FMs, we progressively refine key components and achieve significant performance improvements, boosting 3D detection mAP from 12.1 to 21.9! Nevertheless, our results highlight that AnnoGuide remains an open and challenging problem, underscoring the urgent need for developing LiDAR-based FMs. We release our code and models at GitHub: https://annoguide.github.io/annoguide3Dbenchmark
Authors:Brent A. Griffin, Manushree Gangwar, Jacob Sela, Jason J. Corso
Abstract:
Great labels make great models. However, traditional labeling approaches for tasks like object detection have substantial costs at scale. Furthermore, alternatives to fully-supervised object detection either lose functionality or require larger models with prohibitive computational costs for inference at scale. To that end, this paper addresses the problem of training standard object detection models without any ground truth labels. Instead, we configure previously-trained vision-language foundation models to generate application-specific pseudo "ground truth" labels. These auto-generated labels directly integrate with existing model training frameworks, and we subsequently train lightweight detection models that are computationally efficient. In this way, we avoid the costs of traditional labeling, leverage the knowledge of vision-language models, and keep the efficiency of lightweight models for practical application. We perform exhaustive experiments across multiple labeling configurations, downstream inference models, and datasets to establish best practices and set an extensive auto-labeling benchmark. From our results, we find that our approach is a viable alternative to standard labeling in that it maintains competitive performance on multiple datasets and substantially reduces labeling time and costs.
Authors:Kamal Basha S, Anukul Kiran B, Athira Nambiar, Suresh Rajendran
Abstract:
Sonar imaging is fundamental to underwater exploration, with critical applications in defense, navigation, and marine research. Shadow regions, in particular, provide essential cues for object detection and classification, yet existing studies primarily focus on highlight-based analysis, leaving shadow-based classification underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a Context-adaptive sonar image classification framework that leverages advanced image processing techniques to extract and integrate discriminative shadow and highlight features. Our framework introduces a novel shadow-specific classifier and adaptive shadow segmentation, enabling effective classification based on the dominant region. This approach ensures optimal feature representation, improving robustness against noise and occlusions. In addition, we introduce a Region-aware denoising model that enhances sonar image quality by preserving critical structural details while suppressing noise. This model incorporates an explainability-driven optimization strategy, ensuring that denoising is guided by feature importance, thereby improving interpretability and classification reliability. Furthermore, we present S3Simulator+, an extended dataset incorporating naval mine scenarios with physics-informed noise specifically tailored for the underwater sonar domain, fostering the development of robust AI models. By combining novel classification strategies with an enhanced dataset, our work addresses key challenges in sonar image analysis, contributing
to the advancement of autonomous underwater perception.
Authors:Darryl Hannan, Timothy Doster, Henry Kvinge, Adam Attarian, Yijing Watkins
Abstract:
Collecting high quality data for object detection tasks is challenging due to the inherent subjectivity in labeling the boundaries of an object. This makes it difficult to not only collect consistent annotations across a dataset but also to validate them, as no two annotators are likely to label the same object using the exact same coordinates. These challenges are further compounded when object boundaries are partially visible or blurred, which can be the case in many domains. Training on noisy annotations significantly degrades detector performance, rendering them unusable, particularly in few-shot settings, where just a few corrupted annotations can impact model performance. In this work, we propose FMG-Det, a simple, efficient methodology for training models with noisy annotations. More specifically, we propose combining a multiple instance learning (MIL) framework with a pre-processing pipeline that leverages powerful foundation models to correct labels prior to training. This pre-processing pipeline, along with slight modifications to the detector head, results in state-of-the-art performance across a number of datasets, for both standard and few-shot scenarios, while being much simpler and more efficient than other approaches.
Authors:Chao Tian, Chao Yang, Guoqing Zhu, Qiang Wang, Zhenyu He
Abstract:
RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) object detection utilizes thermal infrared (TIR) images to complement RGB data, improving robustness in challenging conditions. Traditional RGB-T detectors assume balanced training data, where both modalities contribute equally. However, in real-world scenarios, modality degradation-due to environmental factors or technical issues-can lead to extreme modality imbalance, causing out-of-distribution (OOD) issues during testing and disrupting model convergence during training. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel base-and-auxiliary detector architecture. We introduce a modality interaction module to adaptively weigh modalities based on their quality and handle imbalanced samples effectively. Additionally, we leverage modality pseudo-degradation to simulate real-world imbalances in training data. The base detector, trained on high-quality pairs, provides a consistency constraint for the auxiliary detector, which receives degraded samples. This framework enhances model robustness, ensuring reliable performance even under severe modality degradation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in handling extreme modality imbalances~(decreasing the Missing Rate by 55%) and improving performance across various baseline detectors.
Authors:Haoqian Liang, Xiaohui Wang, Zhichao Li, Ya Yang, Naiyan Wang
Abstract:
Object concepts play a foundational role in human visual cognition, enabling perception, memory, and interaction in the physical world. Inspired by findings in developmental neuroscience - where infants are shown to acquire object understanding through observation of motion - we propose a biologically inspired framework for learning object-centric visual representations in an unsupervised manner. Our key insight is that motion boundary serves as a strong signal for object-level grouping, which can be used to derive pseudo instance supervision from raw videos. Concretely, we generate motion-based instance masks using off-the-shelf optical flow and clustering algorithms, and use them to train visual encoders via contrastive learning. Our framework is fully label-free and does not rely on camera calibration, making it scalable to large-scale unstructured video data. We evaluate our approach on three downstream tasks spanning both low-level (monocular depth estimation) and high-level (3D object detection and occupancy prediction) vision. Our models outperform previous supervised and self-supervised baselines and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen scenes. These results suggest that motion-induced object representations offer a compelling alternative to existing vision foundation models, capturing a crucial but overlooked level of abstraction: the visual instance. The corresponding code will be released upon paper acceptance.
Authors:Hojun Son, Asma Almutairi, Arpan Kusari
Abstract:
Context bias refers to the association between the foreground objects and background during the object detection training process. Various methods have been proposed to minimize the context bias when applying the trained model to an unseen domain, known as domain adaptation for object detection (DAOD). But a principled approach to understand why the context bias occurs and how to remove it has been missing.
In this work, we provide a causal view of the context bias, pointing towards the pooling operation in the convolution network architecture as the possible source of this bias. We present an alternative, Mask Pooling, which uses an additional input of foreground masks, to separate the pooling process in the respective foreground and background regions and show that this process leads the trained model to detect objects in a more robust manner under different domains. We also provide a benchmark designed to create an ultimate test for DAOD, using foregrounds in the presence of absolute random backgrounds, to analyze the robustness of the intended trained models. Through these experiments, we hope to provide a principled approach for minimizing context bias under domain shift.
Authors:Jingzheng Li, Tiancheng Wang, Xingyu Peng, Jiacheng Chen, Zhijun Chen, Bing Li, Xianglong Liu
Abstract:
Autonomous Driving (AD) systems demand the high levels of safety assurance. Despite significant advancements in AD demonstrated on open-source benchmarks like Longest6 and Bench2Drive, existing datasets still lack regulatory-compliant scenario libraries for closed-loop testing to comprehensively evaluate the functional safety of AD. Meanwhile, real-world AD accidents are underrepresented in current driving datasets. This scarcity leads to inadequate evaluation of AD performance, posing risks to safety validation and practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose Safety2Drive, a safety-critical scenario library designed to evaluate AD systems. Safety2Drive offers three key contributions. (1) Safety2Drive comprehensively covers the test items required by standard regulations and contains 70 AD function test items. (2) Safety2Drive supports the safety-critical scenario generalization. It has the ability to inject safety threats such as natural environment corruptions and adversarial attacks cross camera and LiDAR sensors. (3) Safety2Drive supports multi-dimensional evaluation. In addition to the evaluation of AD systems, it also supports the evaluation of various perception tasks, such as object detection and lane detection. Safety2Drive provides a paradigm from scenario construction to validation, establishing a standardized test framework for the safe deployment of AD.
Authors:Shrinivas Pundlik, Seonggyu Choe, Patrick Baker, Chen-Yuan Lee, Naser Al-Madi, Alex R. Bowers, Gang Luo
Abstract:
Naturalistic driving studies use devices in participants' own vehicles to record daily driving over many months. Due to diverse and extensive amounts of data recorded, automated processing is necessary. This report describes methods to extract and characterize driver head scans at intersections from data collected from an in-car recording system that logged vehicle speed, GPS location, scene videos, and cabin videos. Custom tools were developed to mark the intersections, synchronize location and video data, and clip the cabin and scene videos for +/-100 meters from the intersection location. A custom-developed head pose detection AI model for wide angle head turns was run on the cabin videos to estimate the driver head pose, from which head scans >20 deg were computed in the horizontal direction. The scene videos were processed using a YOLO object detection model to detect traffic lights, stop signs, pedestrians, and other vehicles on the road. Turning maneuvers were independently detected using vehicle self-motion patterns. Stop lines on the road surface were detected using changing intensity patterns over time as the vehicle moved. The information obtained from processing the scene videos, along with the speed data was used in a rule-based algorithm to infer the intersection type, maneuver, and bounds. We processed 190 intersections from 3 vehicles driven in cities and suburban areas from Massachusetts and California. The automated video processing algorithm correctly detected intersection signage and maneuvers in 100% and 94% of instances, respectively. The median [IQR] error in detecting vehicle entry into the intersection was 1.1[0.4-4.9] meters and 0.2[0.1-0.54] seconds. The median overlap between ground truth and estimated intersection bounds was 0.88[0.82-0.93].
Authors:Jeremias Gerner, Klaus Bogenberger, Stefanie Schmidtner
Abstract:
Floating Car Observers (FCOs) extend traditional Floating Car Data (FCD) by integrating onboard sensors to detect and localize other traffic participants, providing richer and more detailed traffic data. In this work, we explore various modeling approaches for FCO detections within microscopic traffic simulations to evaluate their potential for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. These approaches range from 2D raytracing to high-fidelity co-simulations that emulate real-world sensors and integrate 3D object detection algorithms to closely replicate FCO detections. Additionally, we introduce a neural network-based emulation technique that effectively approximates the results of high-fidelity co-simulations. This approach captures the unique characteristics of FCO detections while offering a fast and scalable solution for modeling. Using this emulation method, we investigate the impact of FCO data in a digital twin of a traffic network modeled in SUMO. Results demonstrate that even at a 20% penetration rate, FCOs using LiDAR-based detections can identify 65% of vehicles across various intersections and traffic demand scenarios. Further potential emerges when temporal insights are integrated, enabling the recovery of previously detected but currently unseen vehicles. By employing data-driven methods, we recover over 80% of these vehicles with minimal positional deviations. These findings underscore the potential of FCOs for ITS, particularly in enhancing traffic state estimation and monitoring under varying penetration rates and traffic conditions.
Authors:Hubert Padusinski, Christian Steinhauser, Christian Scherl, Julian Gaal, Jacob Langner
Abstract:
The validation of LiDAR-based perception of intelligent mobile systems operating in open-world applications remains a challenge due to the variability of real environmental conditions. Virtual simulations allow the generation of arbitrary scenes under controlled conditions but lack physical sensor characteristics, such as intensity responses or material-dependent effects. In contrast, real-world data offers true sensor realism but provides less control over influencing factors, hindering sufficient validation. Existing approaches address this problem with augmentation of real-world point cloud data by transferring objects between scenes. However, these methods do not consider validation and remain limited in controllability because they rely on empirical data. We solve these limitations by proposing Point Cloud Recombination, which systematically augments captured point cloud scenes by integrating point clouds acquired from physical target objects measured in controlled laboratory environments. Thus enabling the creation of vast amounts and varieties of repeatable, physically accurate test scenes with respect to phenomena-aware occlusions with registered 3D meshes. Using the Ouster OS1-128 Rev7 sensor, we demonstrate the augmentation of real-world urban and rural scenes with humanoid targets featuring varied clothing and poses, for repeatable positioning. We show that the recombined scenes closely match real sensor outputs, enabling targeted testing, scalable failure analysis, and improved system safety. By providing controlled yet sensor-realistic data, our method enables trustworthy conclusions about the limitations of specific sensors in compound with their algorithms, e.g., object detection.
Authors:Vladimir Frants, Sos Agaian, Karen Panetta, Peter Huang
Abstract:
Images used in real-world applications such as image or video retrieval, outdoor surveillance, and autonomous driving suffer from poor weather conditions. When designing robust computer vision systems, removing adverse weather such as haze, rain, and snow is a significant problem. Recently, deep-learning methods offered a solution for a single type of degradation. Current state-of-the-art universal methods struggle with combinations of degradations, such as haze and rain-streak. Few algorithms have been developed that perform well when presented with images containing multiple adverse weather conditions. This work focuses on developing an efficient solution for multiple adverse weather removal using a unified quaternion neural architecture called CMAWRNet. It is based on a novel texture-structure decomposition block, a novel lightweight encoder-decoder quaternion transformer architecture, and an attentive fusion block with low-light correction. We also introduce a quaternion similarity loss function to preserve color information better. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the current state-of-the-art benchmarking datasets and real-world images shows the performance advantages of the proposed CMAWRNet compared to other state-of-the-art weather removal approaches dealing with multiple weather artifacts. Extensive computer simulations validate that CMAWRNet improves the performance of downstream applications such as object detection. This is the first time the decomposition approach has been applied to the universal weather removal task.
Authors:Jianhong Han, Yupei Wang, Liang Chen
Abstract:
Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in object detection aims to develop a detector using only source domain data that generalizes well to unseen target domains. Existing methods are primarily CNN-based and improve robustness through data augmentation combined with feature alignment. However, these methods are limited, as augmentation is only effective when the synthetic distribution approximates that of unseen domains, thus failing to ensure generalization across diverse scenarios.
While DEtection TRansformer (DETR) has shown strong generalization in domain adaptation due to global context modeling, its potential for SDG remains underexplored. To this end, we propose Style-Adaptive DEtection TRansformer (SA-DETR), a DETR-based detector tailored for SDG. SA-DETR introduces an online domain style adapter that projects the style representation of unseen domains into the source domain via a dynamic memory bank. This bank self-organizes into diverse style prototypes and is continuously updated under a test-time adaptation framework, enabling effective style rectification.
Additionally, we design an object-aware contrastive learning module to promote extraction of domain-invariant features. By applying gating masks that constrain contrastive learning in both spatial and semantic dimensions, this module facilitates instance-level cross-domain contrast and enhances generalization.
Extensive experiments across five distinct weather scenarios demonstrate that SA-DETR consistently outperforms existing methods in both detection accuracy and domain generalization capability.
Authors:Xiaoran Xu, Jiangang Yang, Wenyue Chong, Wenhui Shi, Shichu Sun, Jing Xing, Jian Liu
Abstract:
Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection~(S-DGOD) aims to train an object detector on a single source domain while generalizing well to diverse unseen target domains, making it suitable for multimedia applications that involve various domain shifts, such as intelligent video surveillance and VR/AR technologies. With the success of large-scale Vision-Language Models, recent S-DGOD approaches exploit pre-trained vision-language knowledge to guide invariant feature learning across visual domains. However, the utilized knowledge remains at a coarse-grained level~(e.g., the textual description of adverse weather paired with the image) and serves as an implicit regularization for guidance, struggling to learn accurate region- and object-level features in varying domains. In this work, we propose a new cross-modal feature learning method, which can capture generalized and discriminative regional features for S-DGOD tasks. The core of our method is the mechanism of Cross-modal and Region-aware Feature Interaction, which simultaneously learns both inter-modal and intra-modal regional invariance through dynamic interactions between fine-grained textual and visual features. Moreover, we design a simple but effective strategy called Cross-domain Proposal Refining and Mixing, which aligns the position of region proposals across multiple domains and diversifies them, enhancing the localization ability of detectors in unseen scenarios. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on S-DGOD benchmark datasets, with improvements of +8.8\%~mPC on Cityscapes-C and +7.9\%~mPC on DWD over baselines, demonstrating its efficacy.
Authors:Linhua Kong, Dongxia Chang, Lian Liu, Zisen Kong, Pengyuan Li, Yao Zhao
Abstract:
Recently, 3D object detection algorithms based on radar and camera fusion have shown excellent performance, setting the stage for their application in autonomous driving perception tasks. Existing methods have focused on dealing with feature misalignment caused by the domain gap between radar and camera. However, existing methods either neglect inter-modal features interaction during alignment or fail to effectively align features at the same spatial location across modalities. To alleviate the above problems, we propose a new alignment model called Radar Camera Alignment (RCAlign). Specifically, we design a Dual-Route Alignment (DRA) module based on contrastive learning to align and fuse the features between radar and camera. Moreover, considering the sparsity of radar BEV features, a Radar Feature Enhancement (RFE) module is proposed to improve the densification of radar BEV features with the knowledge distillation loss. Experiments show RCAlign achieves a new state-of-the-art on the public nuScenes benchmark in radar camera fusion for 3D Object Detection. Furthermore, the RCAlign achieves a significant performance gain (4.3\% NDS and 8.4\% mAP) in real-time 3D detection compared to the latest state-of-the-art method (RCBEVDet).
Authors:Rahima Khanam, Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
The YOLO (You Only Look Once) series has been a leading framework in real-time object detection, consistently improving the balance between speed and accuracy. However, integrating attention mechanisms into YOLO has been challenging due to their high computational overhead. YOLOv12 introduces a novel approach that successfully incorporates attention-based enhancements while preserving real-time performance. This paper provides a comprehensive review of YOLOv12's architectural innovations, including Area Attention for computationally efficient self-attention, Residual Efficient Layer Aggregation Networks for improved feature aggregation, and FlashAttention for optimized memory access. Additionally, we benchmark YOLOv12 against prior YOLO versions and competing object detectors, analyzing its improvements in accuracy, inference speed, and computational efficiency. Through this analysis, we demonstrate how YOLOv12 advances real-time object detection by refining the latency-accuracy trade-off and optimizing computational resources.
Authors:Nithish Kumar Saravanan, Varun Jammula, Yezhou Yang, Jeffrey Wishart, Junfeng Zhao
Abstract:
Perception is a key component of Automated vehicles (AVs). However, sensors mounted to the AVs often encounter blind spots due to obstructions from other vehicles, infrastructure, or objects in the surrounding area. While recent advancements in planning and control algorithms help AVs react to sudden object appearances from blind spots at low speeds and less complex scenarios, challenges remain at high speeds and complex intersections. Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) technology promises to enhance scene representation for AVs in complex intersections, providing sufficient time and distance to react to adversary vehicles violating traffic rules. Most existing methods for infrastructure-based vehicle detection and tracking rely on LIDAR, RADAR or sensor fusion methods, such as LIDAR-Camera and RADAR-Camera. Although LIDAR and RADAR provide accurate spatial information, the sparsity of point cloud data limits its ability to capture detailed object contours of objects far away, resulting in inaccurate 3D object detection results. Furthermore, the absence of LIDAR or RADAR at every intersection increases the cost of implementing V2I technology. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a V2I framework that utilizes monocular traffic cameras at road intersections to detect 3D objects. The results from the roadside unit (RSU) are then combined with the on-board system using an asynchronous late fusion method to enhance scene representation. Additionally, the proposed framework provides a time delay compensation module to compensate for the processing and transmission delay from the RSU. Lastly, the V2I framework is tested by simulating and validating a scenario similar to the one described in an industry report by Waymo. The results show that the proposed method improves the scene representation and the AV's perception range, giving enough time and space to react to adversary vehicles.
Authors:Daniel Torres, Joan Duran, Julia Navarro, Catalina Sbert
Abstract:
Images captured under low-light conditions present significant limitations in many applications, as poor lighting can obscure details, reduce contrast, and hide noise. Removing the illumination effects and enhancing the quality of such images is crucial for many tasks, such as image segmentation and object detection. In this paper, we propose a variational method for low-light image enhancement based on the Retinex decomposition into illumination, reflectance, and noise components. A color correction pre-processing step is applied to the low-light image, which is then used as the observed input in the decomposition. Moreover, our model integrates a novel nonlocal gradient-type fidelity term designed to preserve structural details. Additionally, we propose an automatic gamma correction module. Building on the proposed variational approach, we extend the model by introducing its deep unfolding counterpart, in which the proximal operators are replaced with learnable networks. We propose cross-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies in both the nonlocal prior of the reflectance and the nonlocal gradient-based constraint. Experimental results demonstrate that both methods compare favorably with several recent and state-of-the-art techniques across different datasets. In particular, despite not relying on learning strategies, the variational model outperforms most deep learning approaches both visually and in terms of quality metrics.
Authors:Peng Jia, Ge Li, Bafeng Cheng, Yushan Li, Rongyu Sun
Abstract:
Fast moving celestial objects are characterized by velocities across the celestial sphere that significantly differ from the motions of background stars. In observational images, these objects exhibit distinct shapes, contrasting with the typical appearances of stars. Depending on the observational method employed, these celestial entities may be designated as near-Earth objects or asteroids. Historically, fast moving celestial objects have been observed using ground-based telescopes, where the relative stability of stars and Earth facilitated effective image differencing techniques alongside traditional fast moving celestial object detection and classification algorithms. However, the growing prevalence of space-based telescopes, along with their diverse observational modes, produces images with different properties, rendering conventional methods less effective. This paper presents a novel algorithm for detecting fast moving celestial objects within star fields. Our approach enhances state-of-the-art fast moving celestial object detection neural networks by transforming them into physical-inspired neural networks. These neural networks leverage the point spread function of the telescope and the specific observational mode as prior information; they can directly identify moving fast moving celestial objects within star fields without requiring additional training, thereby addressing the limitations of traditional techniques. Additionally, all neural networks are integrated using the mixture of experts technique, forming a comprehensive fast moving celestial object detection algorithm. We have evaluated our algorithm using simulated observational data that mimics various observations carried out by space based telescope scenarios and real observation images. Results demonstrate that our method effectively detects fast moving celestial objects across different observational modes.
Authors:Jordi Serra, Anton Aguilar, Ebrahim Abu-Helalah, Raúl Parada, Paolo Dini
Abstract:
This paper deals with the multi-object detection and tracking problem, within the scope of open Radio Access Network (RAN), for collision avoidance in vehicular scenarios. To this end, a set of distributed intelligent agents collocated with cameras are considered. The fusion of detected objects is done at an edge service, considering Open RAN connectivity. Then, the edge service predicts the objects trajectories for collision avoidance. Compared to the related work a more realistic Open RAN network is implemented and multiple cameras are used.
Authors:Sriram Mandalika, Lalitha V, Athira Nambiar
Abstract:
Driving scene understanding is a critical real-world problem that involves interpreting and associating various elements of a driving environment, such as vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic signals. Despite advancements in autonomous driving, traditional pipelines rely on deterministic models that fail to capture the probabilistic nature and inherent uncertainty of real-world driving. To address this, we propose PRIMEDrive-CoT, a novel uncertainty-aware model for object interaction and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in driving scenarios. In particular, our approach combines LiDAR-based 3D object detection with multi-view RGB references to ensure interpretable and reliable scene understanding. Uncertainty and risk assessment, along with object interactions, are modelled using Bayesian Graph Neural Networks (BGNNs) for probabilistic reasoning under ambiguous conditions. Interpretable decisions are facilitated through CoT reasoning, leveraging object dynamics and contextual cues, while Grad-CAM visualizations highlight attention regions. Extensive evaluations on the DriveCoT dataset demonstrate that PRIMEDrive-CoT outperforms state-of-the-art CoT and risk-aware models.
Authors:Muhammad Ahmed Ullah Khan, Abdul Hannan Khan, Andreas Dengel
Abstract:
Event cameras have higher temporal resolution, and require less storage and bandwidth compared to traditional RGB cameras. However, due to relatively lagging performance of event-based approaches, event cameras have not yet replace traditional cameras in performance-critical applications like autonomous driving. Recent approaches in event-based object detection try to bridge this gap by employing computationally expensive transformer-based solutions. However, due to their resource-intensive components, these solutions fail to exploit the sparsity and higher temporal resolution of event cameras efficiently. Moreover, these solutions are adopted from the vision domain, lacking specificity to the event cameras. In this work, we explore efficient and performant alternatives to recurrent vision transformer models and propose a novel event-based object detection backbone. The proposed backbone employs a novel Event Progression Extractor module, tailored specifically for event data, and uses Metaformer concept with convolution-based efficient components. We evaluate the resultant model on well-established traffic object detection benchmarks and conduct cross-dataset evaluation to test its ability to generalize. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on Prophesee Gen1 dataset by 1.6 mAP while reducing inference time by 14%. Our proposed EMF becomes the fastest DNN-based architecture in the domain by outperforming most efficient event-based object detectors. Moreover, the proposed model shows better ability to generalize to unseen data and scales better with the abundance of data.
Authors:Matias Valdenegro-Toro, Deepan Chakravarthi Padmanabhan, Deepak Singh, Bilal Wehbe, Yvan Petillot
Abstract:
Sonar sensing is fundamental for underwater robotics, but limited by capabilities of AI systems, which need large training datasets. Public data in sonar modalities is lacking. This paper presents the Marine Debris Forward-Looking Sonar datasets, with three different settings (watertank, turntable, flooded quarry) increasing dataset diversity and multiple computer vision tasks: object classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, patch matching, and unsupervised learning. We provide full dataset description, basic analysis and initial results for some tasks. We expect the research community will benefit from this dataset, which is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15101686
Authors:Juwei Guan, Xiaolin Fang, Donghyun Kim, Haotian Gong, Tongxin Zhu, Zhen Ling, Ming Yang
Abstract:
Low-quality data often suffer from insufficient image details, introducing an extra implicit aspect of camouflage that complicates camouflaged object detection (COD). Existing COD methods focus primarily on high-quality data, overlooking the challenges posed by low-quality data, which leads to significant performance degradation. Therefore, we propose KRNet, the first framework explicitly designed for COD on low-quality data. KRNet presents a Leader-Follower framework where the Leader extracts dual gold-standard distributions: conditional and hybrid, from high-quality data to drive the Follower in rectifying knowledge learned from low-quality data. The framework further benefits from a cross-consistency strategy that improves the rectification of these distributions and a time-dependent conditional encoder that enriches the distribution diversity. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KRNet outperforms state-of-the-art COD methods and super-resolution-assisted COD approaches, proving its effectiveness in tackling the challenges of low-quality data in COD.
Authors:Earl Ranario, Lars Lundqvist, Heesup Yun, Brian N. Bailey, J. Mason Earles
Abstract:
Semantically consistent cross-domain image translation facilitates the generation of training data by transferring labels across different domains, making it particularly useful for plant trait identification in agriculture. However, existing generative models struggle to maintain object-level accuracy when translating images between domains, especially when domain gaps are significant. In this work, we introduce AGILE (Attention-Guided Image and Label Translation for Efficient Cross-Domain Plant Trait Identification), a diffusion-based framework that leverages optimized text embeddings and attention guidance to semantically constrain image translation. AGILE utilizes pretrained diffusion models and publicly available agricultural datasets to improve the fidelity of translated images while preserving critical object semantics. Our approach optimizes text embeddings to strengthen the correspondence between source and target images and guides attention maps during the denoising process to control object placement. We evaluate AGILE on cross-domain plant datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating semantically accurate translated images. Quantitative experiments show that AGILE enhances object detection performance in the target domain while maintaining realism and consistency. Compared to prior image translation methods, AGILE achieves superior semantic alignment, particularly in challenging cases where objects vary significantly or domain gaps are substantial.
Authors:Mahya Nikouei, Bita Baroutian, Shahabedin Nabavi, Fateme Taraghi, Atefe Aghaei, Ayoob Sajedi, Mohsen Ebrahimi Moghaddam
Abstract:
Small object detection (SOD) is a critical yet challenging task in computer vision, with applications like spanning surveillance, autonomous systems, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Unlike larger objects, small objects contain limited spatial and contextual information, making accurate detection difficult. Challenges such as low resolution, occlusion, background interference, and class imbalance further complicate the problem. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent advancements in SOD using deep learning, focusing on articles published in Q1 journals during 2024-2025. We analyzed challenges, state-of-the-art techniques, datasets, evaluation metrics, and real-world applications. Recent advancements in deep learning have introduced innovative solutions, including multi-scale feature extraction, Super-Resolution (SR) techniques, attention mechanisms, and transformer-based architectures. Additionally, improvements in data augmentation, synthetic data generation, and transfer learning have addressed data scarcity and domain adaptation issues. Furthermore, emerging trends such as lightweight neural networks, knowledge distillation (KD), and self-supervised learning offer promising directions for improving detection efficiency, particularly in resource-constrained environments like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-based surveillance and edge computing. We also review widely used datasets, along with standard evaluation metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP) and size-specific AP scores. The survey highlights real-world applications, including traffic monitoring, maritime surveillance, industrial defect detection, and precision agriculture. Finally, we discuss open research challenges and future directions, emphasizing the need for robust domain adaptation techniques, better feature fusion strategies, and real-time performance optimization.
Authors:Junle Liu, Yun Zhang, Zixi Guo
Abstract:
Feature Coding for Machines (FCM) aims to compress intermediate features effectively for remote intelligent analytics, which is crucial for future intelligent visual applications. In this paper, we propose a Multiscale Feature Importance-based Bit Allocation (MFIBA) for end-to-end FCM. First, we find that the importance of features for machine vision tasks varies with the scales, object size, and image instances. Based on this finding, we propose a Multiscale Feature Importance Prediction (MFIP) module to predict the importance weight for each scale of features. Secondly, we propose a task loss-rate model to establish the relationship between the task accuracy losses of using compressed features and the bitrate of encoding these features. Finally, we develop a MFIBA for end-to-end FCM, which is able to assign coding bits of multiscale features more reasonably based on their importance. Experimental results demonstrate that when combined with a retained Efficient Learned Image Compression (ELIC), the proposed MFIBA achieves an average of 38.202% bitrate savings in object detection compared to the anchor ELIC. Moreover, the proposed MFIBA achieves an average of 17.212% and 36.492% feature bitrate savings for instance segmentation and keypoint detection, respectively. When the proposed MFIBA is applied to the LIC-TCM, it achieves an average of 18.103%, 19.866% and 19.597% bit rate savings on three machine vision tasks, respectively, which validates the proposed MFIBA has good generalizability and adaptability to different machine vision tasks and FCM base codecs.
Authors:Duanrui Yu, Jing You, Xin Pei, Anqi Qu, Dingyu Wang, Shaocheng Jia
Abstract:
Collaborative perception allows real-time inter-agent information exchange and thus offers invaluable opportunities to enhance the perception capabilities of individual agents. However, limited communication bandwidth in practical scenarios restricts the inter-agent data transmission volume, consequently resulting in performance declines in collaborative perception systems. This implies a trade-off between perception performance and communication cost. To address this issue, we propose Which2comm, a novel multi-agent 3D object detection framework leveraging object-level sparse features. By integrating semantic information of objects into 3D object detection boxes, we introduce semantic detection boxes (SemDBs). Innovatively transmitting these information-rich object-level sparse features among agents not only significantly reduces the demanding communication volume, but also improves 3D object detection performance. Specifically, a fully sparse network is constructed to extract SemDBs from individual agents; a temporal fusion approach with a relative temporal encoding mechanism is utilized to obtain the comprehensive spatiotemporal features. Extensive experiments on the V2XSet and OPV2V datasets demonstrate that Which2comm consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on both perception performance and communication cost, exhibiting better robustness to real-world latency. These results present that for multi-agent collaborative 3D object detection, transmitting only object-level sparse features is sufficient to achieve high-precision and robust performance.
Authors:Saddam Hussain Khan, Rashid Iqbal
Abstract:
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced deep learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, medical diagnosis, object detection, and speech recognition. Architectural innovations including 1D, 2D, and 3D convolutional models, dilated and grouped convolutions, depthwise separable convolutions, and attention mechanisms address domain-specific challenges and enhance feature representation and computational efficiency. Structural refinements such as spatial-channel exploitation, multi-path design, and feature-map enhancement contribute to robust hierarchical feature extraction and improved generalization, particularly through transfer learning. Efficient preprocessing strategies, including Fourier transforms, structured transforms, low-precision computation, and weight compression, optimize inference speed and facilitate deployment in resource-constrained environments. This survey presents a unified taxonomy that classifies CNN architectures based on spatial exploitation, multi-path structures, depth, width, dimensionality expansion, channel boosting, and attention mechanisms. It systematically reviews CNN applications in face recognition, pose estimation, action recognition, text classification, statistical language modeling, disease diagnosis, radiological analysis, cryptocurrency sentiment prediction, 1D data processing, video analysis, and speech recognition. In addition to consolidating architectural advancements, the review highlights emerging learning paradigms such as few-shot, zero-shot, weakly supervised, federated learning frameworks and future research directions include hybrid CNN-transformer models, vision-language integration, generative learning, etc. This review provides a comprehensive perspective on CNN's evolution from 2015 to 2025, outlining key innovations, challenges, and opportunities.
Authors:Dawood Wasif, Terrence J. Moore, Jin-Hee Cho
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) increasingly rely on Federated Learning (FL) to enhance perception models while preserving privacy. However, existing FL frameworks struggle to balance privacy, fairness, and robustness, leading to performance disparities across demographic groups. Privacy-preserving techniques like differential privacy mitigate data leakage risks but worsen fairness by restricting access to sensitive attributes needed for bias correction. This work explores the trade-off between privacy and fairness in FL-based object detection for AVs and introduces RESFL, an integrated solution optimizing both. RESFL incorporates adversarial privacy disentanglement and uncertainty-guided fairness-aware aggregation. The adversarial component uses a gradient reversal layer to remove sensitive attributes, reducing privacy risks while maintaining fairness. The uncertainty-aware aggregation employs an evidential neural network to weight client updates adaptively, prioritizing contributions with lower fairness disparities and higher confidence. This ensures robust and equitable FL model updates. We evaluate RESFL on the FACET dataset and CARLA simulator, assessing accuracy, fairness, privacy resilience, and robustness under varying conditions. RESFL improves detection accuracy, reduces fairness disparities, and lowers privacy attack success rates while demonstrating superior robustness to adversarial conditions compared to other approaches.
Authors:Jiangyi Wang, Na Zhao
Abstract:
Active learning has emerged as a promising approach to reduce the substantial annotation burden in 3D object detection tasks, spurring several initiatives in outdoor environments. However, its application in indoor environments remains unexplored. Compared to outdoor 3D datasets, indoor datasets face significant challenges, including fewer training samples per class, a greater number of classes, more severe class imbalance, and more diverse scene types and intra-class variances. This paper presents the first study on active learning for indoor 3D object detection, where we propose a novel framework tailored for this task. Our method incorporates two key criteria - uncertainty and diversity - to actively select the most ambiguous and informative unlabeled samples for annotation. The uncertainty criterion accounts for both inaccurate detections and undetected objects, ensuring that the most ambiguous samples are prioritized. Meanwhile, the diversity criterion is formulated as a joint optimization problem that maximizes the diversity of both object class distributions and scene types, using a new Class-aware Adaptive Prototype (CAP) bank. The CAP bank dynamically allocates representative prototypes to each class, helping to capture varying intra-class diversity across different categories. We evaluate our method on SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2, where it outperforms baselines by a significant margin, achieving over 85% of fully-supervised performance with just 10% of the annotation budget.
Authors:Oren Shrout, Ayellet Tal
Abstract:
We propose SFMNet, a novel 3D sparse detector that combines the efficiency of sparse convolutions with the ability to model long-range dependencies. While traditional sparse convolution techniques efficiently capture local structures, they struggle with modeling long-range relationships. However, capturing long-range dependencies is fundamental for 3D object detection. In contrast, transformers are designed to capture these long-range dependencies through attention mechanisms. But, they come with high computational costs, due to their quadratic query-key-value interactions. Furthermore, directly applying attention to non-empty voxels is inefficient due to the sparse nature of 3D scenes. Our SFMNet is built on a novel Sparse Focal Modulation (SFM) module, which integrates short- and long-range contexts with linear complexity by leveraging a new hierarchical sparse convolution design. This approach enables SFMNet to achieve high detection performance with improved efficiency, making it well-suited for large-scale LiDAR scenes. We show that our detector achieves state-of-the-art performance on autonomous driving datasets.
Authors:Zihao Zhang, Aming Wu, Yahong Han
Abstract:
Recently, a task of Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (Single-DGOD) is proposed, aiming to generalize a detector to multiple unknown domains never seen before during training. Due to the unavailability of target-domain data, some methods leverage the multimodal capabilities of vision-language models, using textual prompts to estimate cross-domain information, enhancing the model's generalization capability. These methods typically use a single textual prompt, often referred to as the one-step prompt method. However, when dealing with complex styles such as the combination of rain and night, we observe that the performance of the one-step prompt method tends to be relatively weak. The reason may be that many scenes incorporate not just a single style but a combination of multiple styles. The one-step prompt method may not effectively synthesize combined information involving various styles. To address this limitation, we propose a new method, i.e., Style Evolving along Chain-of-Thought, which aims to progressively integrate and expand style information along the chain of thought, enabling the continual evolution of styles. Specifically, by progressively refining style descriptions and guiding the diverse evolution of styles, this approach enables more accurate simulation of various style characteristics and helps the model gradually learn and adapt to subtle differences between styles. Additionally, it exposes the model to a broader range of style features with different data distributions, thereby enhancing its generalization capability in unseen domains. The significant performance gains over five adverse-weather scenarios and the Real to Art benchmark demonstrate the superiorities of our method.
Authors:Sihun Lee, Dasaem Jeong
Abstract:
Leitmotifs are musical phrases that are reprised in various forms throughout a piece. Due to diverse variations and instrumentation, detecting the occurrence of leitmotifs from audio recordings is a highly challenging task. Leitmotif detection may be handled as a subcategory of audio event detection, where leitmotif activity is predicted at the frame level. However, as leitmotifs embody distinct, coherent musical structures, a more holistic approach akin to bounding box regression in visual object detection can be helpful. This method captures the entirety of a motif rather than fragmenting it into individual frames, thereby preserving its musical integrity and producing more useful predictions. We present our experimental results on tackling leitmotif detection as a boundary regression task.
Authors:Hung Q. Vo, Pengyu Yuan, Zheng Yin, Kelvin K. Wong, Chika F. Ezeana, Son T. Ly, Stephen T. C. Wong, Hien V. Nguyen
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has garnered substantial interest within the machine learning and computer vision communities. Two prominent approaches in SSL include contrastive-based learning and self-distillation utilizing cropping augmentation. Lately, masked image modeling (MIM) has emerged as a more potent SSL technique, employing image inpainting as a pretext task. MIM creates a strong inductive bias toward meaningful spatial and semantic understanding. This has opened up new opportunities for SSL to contribute not only to classification tasks but also to more complex applications like object detection and image segmentation. Building upon this progress, our research paper introduces a scalable and practical SSL approach centered around more challenging pretext tasks that facilitate the acquisition of robust features. Specifically, we leverage multi-scale image reconstruction from randomly masked input images as the foundation for feature learning. Our hypothesis posits that reconstructing high-resolution images enables the model to attend to finer spatial details, particularly beneficial for discerning subtle intricacies within medical images. The proposed SSL features help improve classification performance on the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) dataset. In pathology classification, our method demonstrates a 3\% increase in average precision (AP) and a 1\% increase in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) when compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. Moreover, in mass margins classification, our approach achieves a 4\% increase in AP and a 2\% increase in AUC.
Authors:Hanze Li, Xiande Huang
Abstract:
Growing evidence suggests that layer attention mechanisms, which enhance interaction among layers in deep neural networks, have significantly advanced network architectures. However, existing layer attention methods suffer from redundancy, as attention weights learned by adjacent layers often become highly similar. This redundancy causes multiple layers to extract nearly identical features, reducing the model's representational capacity and increasing training time. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to quantify redundancy by leveraging the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between adjacent layers. Additionally, we introduce an Enhanced Beta Quantile Mapping (EBQM) method that accurately identifies and skips redundant layers, thereby maintaining model stability. Our proposed Efficient Layer Attention (ELA) architecture, improves both training efficiency and overall performance, achieving a 30% reduction in training time while enhancing performance in tasks such as image classification and object detection.
Authors:Shuangzhi Li, Junlong Shen, Lei Ma, Xingyu Li
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection datasets have been pivotal for autonomous driving, yet they cover a limited range of objects, restricting the model's generalization across diverse deployment environments. To address this, we introduce the first generalized cross-domain few-shot (GCFS) task in 3D object detection, which focuses on adapting a source-pretrained model for high performance on both common and novel classes in a target domain with few-shot samples. Our solution integrates multi-modal fusion and contrastive-enhanced prototype learning within one framework, holistically overcoming challenges related to data scarcity and domain adaptation in the GCFS setting. The multi-modal fusion module utilizes 2D vision-language models to extract rich, open-set semantic knowledge. To address biases in point distributions across varying structural complexities, we particularly introduce a physically-aware box searching strategy that leverages laser imaging principles to generate high-quality 3D box proposals from 2D insights, enhancing object recall. To effectively capture domain-specific representations for each class from limited target data, we further propose a contrastive-enhanced prototype learning, which strengthens the model's adaptability. We evaluate our approach with three GCFS benchmark settings, and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution for GCFS tasks. The code will be publicly available.
Authors:Aditya Prashant Naidu, Hem Gosalia, Ishaan Gakhar, Shaurya Singh Rathore, Krish Didwania, Ujjwal Verma
Abstract:
Although advances in deep learning and aerial surveillance technology are improving wildlife conservation efforts, complex and erratic environmental conditions still pose a problem, requiring innovative solutions for cost-effective small animal detection. This work introduces DEAL-YOLO, a novel approach that improves small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images by using multi-objective loss functions like Wise IoU (WIoU) and Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD), which prioritize pixels near the centre of the bounding box, ensuring smoother localization and reducing abrupt deviations. Additionally, the model is optimized through efficient feature extraction with Linear Deformable (LD) convolutions, enhancing accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. The Scaled Sequence Feature Fusion (SSFF) module enhances object detection by effectively capturing inter-scale relationships, improving feature representation, and boosting metrics through optimized multiscale fusion. Comparison with baseline models reveals high efficacy with up to 69.5\% fewer parameters compared to vanilla Yolov8-N, highlighting the robustness of the proposed modifications. Through this approach, our paper aims to facilitate the detection of endangered species, animal population analysis, habitat monitoring, biodiversity research, and various other applications that enrich wildlife conservation efforts. DEAL-YOLO employs a two-stage inference paradigm for object detection, refining selected regions to improve localization and confidence. This approach enhances performance, especially for small instances with low objectness scores.
Authors:Ziyu Wang, Tao Xue, Jingyuan Li, Haibin Zhang, Zhiqiang Xu, Gaofei Xu, Zhen Wang, Yanbin Wang, Zhiquan Liu
Abstract:
Object detection in sonar images is crucial for underwater robotics applications including autonomous navigation and resource exploration. However, complex noise patterns inherent in sonar imagery, particularly speckle, reverberation, and non-Gaussian noise, significantly degrade detection accuracy. While denoising techniques have achieved remarkable success in optical imaging, their applicability to sonar data remains underexplored. This study presents the first systematic evaluation of nine state-of-the-art deep denoising models with distinct architectures, including Neighbor2Neighbor with varying noise parameters, Blind2Unblind with different noise configurations, and DSPNet, for sonar image preprocessing. We establish a rigorous benchmark using five publicly available sonar datasets and assess their impact on four representative detection algorithms: YOLOX, Faster R-CNN, SSD300, and SSDMobileNetV2. Our evaluation addresses three unresolved questions: first, how effectively optical denoising architectures transfer to sonar data; second, which model families perform best against sonar noise; and third, whether denoising truly improves detection accuracy in practical pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while denoising generally improves detection performance, effectiveness varies across methods due to their inherent biases toward specific noise types. To leverage complementary denoising effects, we propose a mutually-supervised multi-source denoising fusion framework where outputs from different denoisers mutually supervise each other at the pixel level, creating a synergistic framework that produces cleaner images.
Authors:Daniel Ma, Ren Zhong, Weisong Shi
Abstract:
This paper introduces ICanC (pronounced "I Can See"), a novel system designed to enhance object detection and optimize energy efficiency in autonomous vehicles (AVs) operating in low-illumination environments. By leveraging the complementary capabilities of LiDAR and camera sensors, ICanC improves detection accuracy under conditions where camera performance typically declines, while significantly reducing unnecessary headlight usage. This approach aligns with the broader objective of promoting sustainable transportation.
ICanC comprises three primary nodes: the Obstacle Detector, which processes LiDAR point cloud data to fit bounding boxes onto detected objects and estimate their position, velocity, and orientation; the Danger Detector, which evaluates potential threats using the information provided by the Obstacle Detector; and the Light Controller, which dynamically activates headlights to enhance camera visibility solely when a threat is detected.
Experiments conducted in physical and simulated environments demonstrate ICanC's robust performance, even in the presence of significant noise interference. The system consistently achieves high accuracy in camera-based object detection when headlights are engaged, while significantly reducing overall headlight energy consumption. These results position ICanC as a promising advancement in autonomous vehicle research, achieving a balance between energy efficiency and reliable object detection.
Authors:Denis Musinguzi, Andrew Katumba, Sudi Murindanyi
Abstract:
Tuberculosis (TB) is a infectious global health challenge. Chest X-rays are a standard method for TB screening, yet many countries face a critical shortage of radiologists capable of interpreting these images. Machine learning offers an alternative, as it can automate tasks such as disease diagnosis, and report generation. However, traditional approaches rely on task-specific models, which cannot utilize the interdependence between tasks. Building a multi-task model capable of performing multiple tasks poses additional challenges such as scarcity of multimodal data, dataset imbalance, and negative transfer. To address these challenges, we propose PaliGemma-CXR, a multi-task multimodal model capable of performing TB diagnosis, object detection, segmentation, report generation, and VQA. Starting with a dataset of chest X-ray images annotated with TB diagnosis labels and segmentation masks, we curated a multimodal dataset to support additional tasks. By finetuning PaliGemma on this dataset and sampling data using ratios of the inverse of the size of task datasets, we achieved the following results across all tasks: 90.32% accuracy on TB diagnosis and 98.95% on close-ended VQA, 41.3 BLEU score on report generation, and a mAP of 19.4 and 16.0 on object detection and segmentation, respectively. These results demonstrate that PaliGemma-CXR effectively leverages the interdependence between multiple image interpretation tasks to enhance performance.
Authors:Rishi Mukherjee, Sakshi Singh, Jack McWilliams, Junaed Sattar
Abstract:
We introduce COU: Common Objects Underwater, an instance-segmented image dataset of commonly found man-made objects in multiple aquatic and marine environments. COU contains approximately 10K segmented images, annotated from images collected during a number of underwater robot field trials in diverse locations. COU has been created to address the lack of datasets with robust class coverage curated for underwater instance segmentation, which is particularly useful for training light-weight, real-time capable detectors for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). In addition, COU addresses the lack of diversity in object classes since the commonly available underwater image datasets focus only on marine life. Currently, COU contains images from both closed-water (pool) and open-water (lakes and oceans) environments, of 24 different classes of objects including marine debris, dive tools, and AUVs. To assess the efficacy of COU in training underwater object detectors, we use three state-of-the-art models to evaluate its performance and accuracy, using a combination of standard accuracy and efficiency metrics. The improved performance of COU-trained detectors over those solely trained on terrestrial data demonstrates the clear advantage of training with annotated underwater images. We make COU available for broad use under open-source licenses.
Authors:Mohamed Abdelsamad, Michael Ulrich, Claudius Gläser, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Masked autoencoders (MAE) have shown tremendous potential for self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision and beyond. However, point clouds from LiDARs used in automated driving are particularly challenging for MAEs since large areas of the 3D volume are empty. Consequently, existing work suffers from leaking occupancy information into the decoder and has significant computational complexity, thereby limiting the SSL pre-training to only 2D bird's eye view encoders in practice. In this work, we propose the novel neighborhood occupancy MAE (NOMAE) that overcomes the aforementioned challenges by employing masked occupancy reconstruction only in the neighborhood of non-masked voxels. We incorporate voxel masking and occupancy reconstruction at multiple scales with our proposed hierarchical mask generation technique to capture features of objects of different sizes in the point cloud. NOMAEs are extremely flexible and can be directly employed for SSL in existing 3D architectures. We perform extensive evaluations on the nuScenes and Waymo Open datasets for the downstream perception tasks of semantic segmentation and 3D object detection, comparing with both discriminative and generative SSL methods. The results demonstrate that NOMAE sets the new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks for multiple point cloud perception tasks.
Authors:Stella DumenÄiÄ, Luka LanÄa, Karlo Jakac, Stefan IviÄ
Abstract:
Search and rescue (SAR) missions require reliable search methods to locate survivors, especially in challenging or inaccessible environments. This is why introducing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be of great help to enhance the efficiency of SAR missions while simultaneously increasing the safety of everyone involved in the mission. Motivated by this, we design and experiment with autonomous UAV search for humans in a Mediterranean karst environment. The UAVs are directed using Heat equation-driven area coverage (HEDAC) ergodic control method according to known probability density and detection function. The implemented sensing framework consists of a probabilistic search model, motion control system, and computer vision object detection. It enables calculation of the probability of the target being detected in the SAR mission, and this paper focuses on experimental validation of proposed probabilistic framework and UAV control. The uniform probability density to ensure the even probability of finding the targets in the desired search area is achieved by assigning suitably thought-out tasks to 78 volunteers. The detection model is based on YOLO and trained with a previously collected ortho-photo image database. The experimental search is carefully planned and conducted, while as many parameters as possible are recorded. The thorough analysis consists of the motion control system, object detection, and the search validation. The assessment of the detection and search performance provides strong indication that the designed detection model in the UAV control algorithm is aligned with real-world results.
Authors:Caixiong Li, Xiongwei Zhao, Jinhang Zhang, Xing Zhang, Qihao Sun, Zhou Wu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) is a challenging task to detect and classify objects from an unrestricted set of categories, including those unseen during training. Existing open-vocabulary detectors are limited by complex visual-textual misalignment and long-tailed category imbalances, leading to suboptimal performance in challenging scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce MQADet, a universal paradigm for enhancing existing open-vocabulary detectors by leveraging the cross-modal reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). MQADet functions as a plug-and-play solution that integrates seamlessly with pre-trained object detectors without substantial additional training costs. Specifically, we design a novel three-stage Multimodal Question Answering (MQA) pipeline to guide the MLLMs to precisely localize complex textual and visual targets while effectively enhancing the focus of existing object detectors on relevant objects. To validate our approach, we present a new benchmark for evaluating our paradigm on four challenging open-vocabulary datasets, employing three state-of-the-art object detectors as baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed paradigm significantly improves the performance of existing detectors, particularly in unseen complex categories, across diverse and challenging scenarios. To facilitate future research, we will publicly release our code.
Authors:Fengcheng Yu, Haoran Xu, Canming Xia, Ziyang Zong, Guang Tan
Abstract:
Vision-based occupancy networks (VONs) provide an end-to-end solution for reconstructing 3D environments in autonomous driving. However, existing methods often suffer from temporal inconsistencies, manifesting as flickering effects that compromise visual experience and adversely affect decision-making. While recent approaches have incorporated historical data to mitigate the issue, they often incur high computational costs and may introduce noisy information that interferes with object detection. We propose OccLinker, a novel plugin framework designed to seamlessly integrate with existing VONs for boosting performance. Our method efficiently consolidates historical static and motion cues, learns sparse latent correlations with current features through a dual cross-attention mechanism, and produces correction occupancy components to refine the base network's predictions. We propose a new temporal consistency metric to quantitatively identify flickering effects. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method delivers superior performance with negligible computational overhead, while effectively eliminating flickering artifacts.
Authors:Richard Marcus, Christian Vogel, Inga Jatzkowski, Niklas Knoop, Marc Stamminger
Abstract:
An important factor in advancing autonomous driving systems is simulation. Yet, there is rather small progress for transferability between the virtual and real world. We revisit this problem for 3D object detection on LiDAR point clouds and propose a dataset generation pipeline based on the CARLA simulator. Utilizing domain randomization strategies and careful modeling, we are able to train an object detector on the synthetic data and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities to the KITTI dataset. Furthermore, we compare different virtual sensor variants to gather insights, which sensor attributes can be responsible for the prevalent domain gap. Finally, fine-tuning with a small portion of real data almost matches the baseline and with the full training set slightly surpasses it.
Authors:Jared Coleman, Dmitry Ivanov, Evangelos Kranakis, Danny Krizanc, Oscar Morales Ponce
Abstract:
Inspired by the diverse set of technologies used in underground object detection and imaging, we introduce a novel multimodal linear search problem whereby a single searcher starts at the origin and must find a target that can only be detected when the searcher moves through its location using the correct of $p$ possible search modes.
The target's location, its distance $d$ from the origin, and the correct search mode are all initially unknown to the searcher. We prove tight upper and lower bounds on the competitive ratio for this problem. Specifically, we show that when $p$ is odd, the optimal competitive ratio is given by $2p+3+\sqrt{8(p+1)}$, whereas when $p$ is even, the optimal competitive ratio is given by $c$: the unique solution to $(c-1)^4-4p(c+1)^2(c-p-1)=0$ in the interval $\left[2p+1+\sqrt{8p},\infty\right)$. This solution $c$ has the explicit bounds $2p+3+\sqrt{8(p-1)}\leq c\leq 2p+3+\sqrt{8p}$. The optimal algorithms we propose require the searcher to move infinitesimal distances and change directions infinitely many times within finite intervals. To better suit practical applications, we also propose an approximation algorithm with a competitive ratio of $c+\varepsilon$ (where $c$ is the optimal competitive ratio and $\varepsilon > 0$ is an arbitrarily small constant). This algorithm involves the searcher moving finite distances and changing directions a finite number of times within any finite interval.
Authors:Andrea Benericetti, Niccolò Bellaccini, Henrique Piñeiro Monteagudo, Matteo Simoncini, Francesco Sambo
Abstract:
In the application domain of fleet management and driver monitoring, it is very challenging to obtain relevant driving events and activities from dashcam footage while minimizing the amount of information stored and analyzed. In this paper, we address the identification of overtake and lane change maneuvers with a novel object detection approach applied to motion profiles, a compact representation of driving video footage into a single image. To train and test our model we created an internal dataset of motion profile images obtained from a heterogeneous set of dashcam videos, manually labeled with overtake and lane change maneuvers by the ego-vehicle. In addition to a standard object-detection approach, we show how the inclusion of CoordConvolution layers further improves the model performance, in terms of mAP and F1 score, yielding state-of-the art performance when compared to other baselines from the literature. The extremely low computational requirements of the proposed solution make it especially suitable to run in device.
Authors:Ashutosh Kumar, Aman Chadha
Abstract:
This study explores the challenges of integrating human visual cue-based dehazing into object detection, given the selective nature of human perception. While human vision adapts dynamically to environmental conditions, computational dehazing does not always enhance detection uniformly. We propose a multi-stage framework where a lightweight detector identifies regions of interest (RoIs), which are then improved via spatial attention-based dehazing before final detection by a heavier model. Though effective in foggy conditions, this approach unexpectedly degrades the performance on clear images. We analyze this phenomenon, investigate possible causes, and offer insights for designing hybrid pipelines that balance enhancement and detection. Our findings highlight the need for selective preprocessing and challenge assumptions about universal benefits from cascading transformations.
Authors:Samitha Vidhanaarachchi, Janaka L. Wijekoon, W. A. Shanaka P. Abeysiriwardhana, Malitha Wijesundara
Abstract:
Global Coconut (Cocos nucifera (L.)) cultivation faces significant challenges, including yield loss, due to pest and disease outbreaks. In particular, Weligama Coconut Leaf Wilt Disease (WCWLD) and Coconut Caterpillar Infestation (CCI) damage coconut trees, causing severe coconut production loss in Sri Lanka and nearby coconut-producing countries. Currently, both WCWLD and CCI are detected through on-field human observations, a process that is not only time-consuming but also limits the early detection of infections. This paper presents a study conducted in Sri Lanka, demonstrating the effectiveness of employing transfer learning-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Mask Region-based-CNN (Mask R-CNN) to identify WCWLD and CCI at their early stages and to assess disease progression. Further, this paper presents the use of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection model to count the number of caterpillars distributed on leaves with CCI. The introduced methods were tested and validated using datasets collected from Matara, Puttalam, and Makandura, Sri Lanka. The results show that the proposed methods identify WCWLD and CCI with an accuracy of 90% and 95%, respectively. In addition, the proposed WCWLD disease severity identification method classifies the severity with an accuracy of 97%. Furthermore, the accuracies of the object detection models for calculating the number of caterpillars in the leaflets were: YOLOv5-96.87%, YOLOv8-96.1%, and YOLO11-95.9%.
Authors:Chandrasekar Sridhar, Vyakhya Gupta, Prakhar Jain, Karthik Vaidhyanathan
Abstract:
As Machine Learning (ML) makes its way into aviation, ML enabled systems including low criticality systems require a reliable certification process to ensure safety and performance. Traditional standards, like DO 178C, which are used for critical software in aviation, do not fully cover the unique aspects of ML. This paper proposes a semi automated certification approach, specifically for low criticality ML systems, focusing on data and model validation, resilience assessment, and usability assurance while integrating manual and automated processes. Key aspects include structured classification to guide certification rigor on system attributes, an Assurance Profile that consolidates evaluation outcomes into a confidence measure the ML component, and methodologies for integrating human oversight into certification activities. Through a case study with a YOLOv8 based object detection system designed to classify military and civilian vehicles in real time for reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft, we show how this approach supports the certification of ML systems in low criticality airborne applications.
Authors:Weijie He, Yuwei Zhang, Ting Xu, Tai An, Yingbin Liang, Bo Zhang
Abstract:
Deep learning has emerged as a transformative approach for solving complex pattern recognition and object detection challenges. This paper focuses on the application of a novel detection framework based on the RT-DETR model for analyzing intricate image data, particularly in areas such as diabetic retinopathy detection. Diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of vision loss globally, requires accurate and efficient image analysis to identify early-stage lesions. The proposed RT-DETR model, built on a Transformer-based architecture, excels at processing high-dimensional and complex visual data with enhanced robustness and accuracy. Comparative evaluations with models such as YOLOv5, YOLOv8, SSD, and DETR demonstrate that RT-DETR achieves superior performance across precision, recall, mAP50, and mAP50-95 metrics, particularly in detecting small-scale objects and densely packed targets. This study underscores the potential of Transformer-based models like RT-DETR for advancing object detection tasks, offering promising applications in medical imaging and beyond.
Authors:Zi-Wei Sun, Ze-Xi Hua, Heng-Chao Li, Yan Li
Abstract:
The flying bird objects captured by surveillance cameras exhibit varying levels of recognition difficulty due to factors such as their varying sizes or degrees of similarity to the background. To alleviate the negative impact of hard samples on training the Flying Bird Object Detection (FBOD) model for surveillance videos, we propose the Co-Paced Learning strategy Based on Confidence (CPL-BC) and apply it to the training process of the FBOD model. This strategy involves maintaining two models with identical structures but different initial parameter configurations that collaborate with each other to select easy samples for training, where the prediction confidence exceeds a set threshold. As training progresses, the strategy gradually lowers the threshold, thereby gradually enhancing the model's ability to recognize objects, from easier to more hard ones. Prior to applying CPL-BC, we pre-trained the two FBOD models to equip them with the capability to assess the difficulty of flying bird object samples. Experimental results on two different datasets of flying bird objects in surveillance videos demonstrate that, compared to other model learning strategies, CPL-BC significantly improves detection accuracy, thereby verifying the method's effectiveness and advancement.
Authors:Jonathan Lyhs, Lars Hinneburg, Michael Fischer, Florian Ãlsner, Stefan Milz, Jeremy Tschirner, Patrick Mäder
Abstract:
Modern machine learning techniques have shown tremendous potential, especially for object detection on camera images. For this reason, they are also used to enable safety-critical automated processes such as autonomous drone flights. We present a study on object detection for Detect and Avoid, a safety critical function for drones that detects air traffic during automated flights for safety reasons. An ill-posed problem is the generation of good and especially large data sets, since detection itself is the corner case. Most models suffer from limited ground truth in raw data, \eg recorded air traffic or frontal flight with a small aircraft. It often leads to poor and critical detection rates. We overcome this problem by using inpainting methods to bootstrap the dataset such that it explicitly contains the corner cases of the raw data. We provide an overview of inpainting methods and generative models and present an example pipeline given a small annotated dataset. We validate our method by generating a high-resolution dataset, which we make publicly available and present it to an independent object detector that was fully trained on real data.
Authors:Abhishek Balasubramaniam, Febin P Sunny, Sudeep Pasricha
Abstract:
To enhance perception in autonomous vehicles (AVs), recent efforts are concentrating on 3D object detectors, which deliver more comprehensive predictions than traditional 2D object detectors, at the cost of increased memory footprint and computational resource usage. We present a novel framework called UPAQ, which leverages semi-structured pattern pruning and quantization to improve the efficiency of LiDAR point-cloud and camera-based 3D object detectors on resource-constrained embedded AV platforms. Experimental results on the Jetson Orin Nano embedded platform indicate that UPAQ achieves up to 5.62x and 5.13x model compression rates, up to 1.97x and 1.86x boost in inference speed, and up to 2.07x and 1.87x reduction in energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art model compression frameworks, on the Pointpillar and SMOKE models respectively.
Authors:Ningning Xu, Jidong J. Yang
Abstract:
Image deraining holds great potential for enhancing the vision of autonomous vehicles in rainy conditions, contributing to safer driving. Previous works have primarily focused on employing a single network architecture to generate derained images. However, they often fail to fully exploit the rich prior knowledge embedded in the scenes. Particularly, most methods overlook the depth information that can provide valuable context about scene geometry and guide more robust deraining. In this work, we introduce a novel learning framework that integrates multiple networks: an AutoEncoder for deraining, an auxiliary network to incorporate depth information, and two supervision networks to enforce feature consistency between rainy and clear scenes. This multi-network design enables our model to effectively capture the underlying scene structure, producing clearer and more accurately derained images, leading to improved object detection for autonomous vehicles. Extensive experiments on three widely-used datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors:Diego A. Silva, Ahmed Elsheikh, Kamilya Smagulova, Mohammed E. Fouda, Ahmed M. Eltawil
Abstract:
Event-based cameras are sensors that simulate the human eye, offering advantages such as high-speed robustness and low power consumption. Established Deep Learning techniques have shown effectiveness in processing event data. Chimera is a Block-Based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework specifically designed for Event-Based Object Detection, aiming to create a systematic approach for adapting RGB-domain processing methods to the event domain. The Chimera design space is constructed from various macroblocks, including Attention blocks, Convolutions, State Space Models, and MLP-mixer-based architectures, which provide a valuable trade-off between local and global processing capabilities, as well as varying levels of complexity. The results on the PErson Detection in Robotics (PEDRo) dataset demonstrated performance levels comparable to leading state-of-the-art models, alongside an average parameter reduction of 1.6 times.
Authors:Kanoko Goto, Takumi Karasawa, Takumi Hirose, Rei Kawakami, Nakamasa Inoue
Abstract:
Small object detection aims to localize and classify small objects within images. With recent advances in large-scale vision-language pretraining, finetuning pretrained object detection models has emerged as a promising approach. However, finetuning large models is computationally and memory expensive. To address this issue, this paper introduces multi-point positional insertion (MPI) tuning, a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method for small object detection. Specifically, MPI incorporates multiple positional embeddings into a frozen pretrained model, enabling the efficient detection of small objects by providing precise positional information to latent features. Through experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on the SODA-D dataset. MPI performed comparably to conventional PEFT methods, including CoOp and VPT, while significantly reducing the number of parameters that need to be tuned.
Authors:Hanfang Liang, Jinming Hu, Xiaohuan Ling, Bing Wang
Abstract:
The increasing deployment of small drones as tools of conflict and disruption has amplified their threat, highlighting the urgent need for effective anti-drone measures. However, the compact size of most drones presents a significant challenge, as traditional supervised point cloud or image-based object detection methods often fail to identify such small objects effectively. This paper proposes a simple UAV detection method using an unsupervised pipeline. It uses spatial-temporal sequence processing to fuse multiple lidar datasets effectively, tracking and determining the position of UAVs, so as to detect and track UAVs in challenging environments. Our method performs front and rear background segmentation of point clouds through a global-local sequence clusterer and parses point cloud data from both the spatial-temporal density and spatial-temporal voxels of the point cloud. Furthermore, a scoring mechanism for point cloud moving targets is proposed, using time series detection to improve accuracy and efficiency. We used the MMAUD dataset, and our method achieved 4th place in the CVPR 2024 UG2+ Challenge, confirming the effectiveness of our method in practical applications.
Authors:Changjian Chen, Fei Lv, Yalong Guan, Pengcheng Wang, Shengjie Yu, Yifan Zhang, Zhuo Tang
Abstract:
The performance of computer vision models in certain real-world applications (e.g., rare wildlife observation) is limited by the small number of available images. Expanding datasets using pre-trained generative models is an effective way to address this limitation. However, since the automatic generation process is uncontrollable, the generated images are usually limited in diversity, and some of them are undesired. In this paper, we propose a human-guided image generation method for more controllable dataset expansion. We develop a multi-modal projection method with theoretical guarantees to facilitate the exploration of both the original and generated images. Based on the exploration, users refine the prompts and re-generate images for better performance. Since directly refining the prompts is challenging for novice users, we develop a sample-level prompt refinement method to make it easier. With this method, users only need to provide sample-level feedback (e.g., which samples are undesired) to obtain better prompts. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through the quantitative evaluation of the multi-modal projection method, improved model performance in the case study for both classification and object detection tasks, and positive feedback from the experts.
Authors:Bharadwaj Ravichandran, Alexander Lynch, Sarah Brockman, Brandon RichardWebster, Dawei Du, Anthony Hoogs, Christopher Funk
Abstract:
Both few-shot learning and domain adaptation sub-fields in Computer Vision have seen significant recent progress in terms of the availability of state-of-the-art algorithms and datasets. Frameworks have been developed for each sub-field; however, building a common system or framework that combines both is something that has not been explored. As part of our research, we present the first unified framework that combines domain adaptation for the few-shot learning setting across 3 different tasks - image classification, object detection and video classification. Our framework is highly modular with the capability to support few-shot learning with/without the inclusion of domain adaptation depending on the algorithm. Furthermore, the most important configurable feature of our framework is the on-the-fly setup for incremental $n$-shot tasks with the optional capability to configure the system to scale to a traditional many-shot task. With more focus on Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) for current few-shot learning approaches, our system also supports multiple SSL pre-training configurations. To test our framework's capabilities, we provide benchmarks on a wide range of algorithms and datasets across different task and problem settings. The code is open source has been made publicly available here: https://gitlab.kitware.com/darpa_learn/learn
Authors:Martin Aubard, Ana Madureira, LuÃs Teixeira, José Pinto
Abstract:
With the growing interest in underwater exploration and monitoring, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have become essential. The recent interest in onboard Deep Learning (DL) has advanced real-time environmental interaction capabilities relying on efficient and accurate vision-based DL models. However, the predominant use of sonar in underwater environments, characterized by limited training data and inherent noise, poses challenges to model robustness. This autonomy improvement raises safety concerns for deploying such models during underwater operations, potentially leading to hazardous situations. This paper aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of sonar-based DL under the scope of robustness. It studies sonar-based DL perception task models, such as classification, object detection, segmentation, and SLAM. Furthermore, the paper systematizes sonar-based state-of-the-art datasets, simulators, and robustness methods such as neural network verification, out-of-distribution, and adversarial attacks. This paper highlights the lack of robustness in sonar-based DL research and suggests future research pathways, notably establishing a baseline sonar-based dataset and bridging the simulation-to-reality gap.
Authors:Tianheng Qiu, Ka Lung Law, Guanghua Pan, Jufei Wang, Xin Gao, Xuan Huang, Hu Wei
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) algorithms can markedly enhance the performance of object detectors under conditions of domain shifts, thereby reducing the necessity for extensive labeling and retraining. Current domain adaptive object detection algorithms primarily cater to two-stage detectors, which tend to offer minimal improvements when directly applied to single-stage detectors such as YOLO. Intending to benefit the YOLO detector from UDA, we build a comprehensive domain adaptive architecture using a teacher-student cooperative system for the YOLO detector. In this process, we propose uncertainty learning to cope with pseudo-labeling generated by the teacher model with extreme uncertainty and leverage dynamic data augmentation to asymptotically adapt the teacher-student system to the environment. To address the inability of single-stage object detectors to align at multiple stages, we utilize a unified visual contrastive learning paradigm that aligns instance at backbone and head respectively, which steadily improves the robustness of the detectors in cross-domain tasks. In summary, we present an unsupervised domain adaptive YOLO detector based on visual contrastive learning (CLDA-YOLO), which achieves highly competitive results across multiple domain adaptive datasets without any reduction in inference speed.
Authors:Xiaoran Xu, Jiangang Yang, Wenhui Shi, Siyuan Ding, Luqing Luo, Jian Liu
Abstract:
Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection~(S-DGOD) aims to train on a single source domain for robust performance across a variety of unseen target domains by taking advantage of an object detector. Existing S-DGOD approaches often rely on data augmentation strategies, including a composition of visual transformations, to enhance the detector's generalization ability. However, the absence of real-world prior knowledge hinders data augmentation from contributing to the diversity of training data distributions. To address this issue, we propose PhysAug, a novel physical model-based non-ideal imaging condition data augmentation method, to enhance the adaptability of the S-DGOD tasks. Drawing upon the principles of atmospheric optics, we develop a universal perturbation model that serves as the foundation for our proposed PhysAug. Given that visual perturbations typically arise from the interaction of light with atmospheric particles, the image frequency spectrum is harnessed to simulate real-world variations during training. This approach fosters the detector to learn domain-invariant representations, thereby enhancing its ability to generalize across various settings. Without altering the network architecture or loss function, our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art across various S-DGOD datasets. In particular, it achieves a substantial improvement of $7.3\%$ and $7.2\%$ over the baseline on DWD and Cityscape-C, highlighting its enhanced generalizability in real-world settings.
Authors:Maxime Noizet, Philippe Xu, Philippe Bonnifait
Abstract:
Detecting road features is a key enabler for autonomous driving and localization. For instance, a reliable detection of poles which are widespread in road environments can improve localization. Modern deep learning-based perception systems need a significant amount of annotated data. Automatic annotation avoids time-consuming and costly manual annotation. Because automatic methods are prone to errors, managing annotation uncertainty is crucial to ensure a proper learning process. Fusing multiple annotation sources on the same dataset can be an efficient way to reduce the errors. This not only improves the quality of annotations, but also improves the learning of perception models. In this paper, we consider the fusion of three automatic annotation methods in images: feature projection from a high accuracy vector map combined with a lidar, image segmentation and lidar segmentation. Our experimental results demonstrate the significant benefits of multi-modal automatic annotation for pole detection through a comparative evaluation on manually annotated images. Finally, the resulting multi-modal fusion is used to fine-tune an object detection model for pole base detection using unlabeled data, showing overall improvements achieved by enhancing network specialization. The dataset is publicly available.
Authors:Chang-Bin Zhang, Yujie Zhong, Kai Han
Abstract:
Existing methods enhance the training of detection transformers by incorporating an auxiliary one-to-many assignment. In this work, we treat the model as a multi-task framework, simultaneously performing one-to-one and one-to-many predictions. We investigate the roles of each component in the transformer decoder across these two training targets, including self-attention, cross-attention, and feed-forward network. Our empirical results demonstrate that any independent component in the decoder can effectively learn both targets simultaneously, even when other components are shared. This finding leads us to propose a multi-route training mechanism, featuring a primary route for one-to-one prediction and two auxiliary training routes for one-to-many prediction. We propose a novel instructive self-attention mechanism, integrated into the first auxiliary route, which dynamically and flexibly guides object queries for one-to-many prediction. For the second auxiliary route, we introduce a route-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to facilitate knowledge sharing while mitigating potential conflicts between routes. Additionally, we apply an MoE to low-scale features in the encoder, optimizing the balance between efficiency and effectiveness. The auxiliary routes are discarded during inference. We conduct extensive experiments across various object detection baselines, achieving consistent improvements as demonstrated in Fig. 1. Our method is highly flexible and can be readily adapted to other tasks. To demonstrate its versatility, we conduct experiments on both instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation, further validating its effectiveness. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/mrdetr/
Authors:Andrew Hamara, Benjamin Kilpatrick, Alex Baratta, Brendon Kofink, Andrew C. Freeman
Abstract:
Recently, we have witnessed the rise of novel ``event-based'' camera sensors for high-speed, low-power video capture. Rather than recording discrete image frames, these sensors output asynchronous ``event'' tuples with microsecond precision, only when the brightness change of a given pixel exceeds a certain threshold. Although these sensors have enabled compelling new computer vision applications, these applications often require expensive, power-hungry GPU systems, rendering them incompatible for deployment on the low-power devices for which event cameras are optimized. Whereas receiver-driven rate adaptation is a crucial feature of modern video streaming solutions, this topic is underexplored in the realm of event-based vision systems. On a real-world event camera dataset, we first demonstrate that a state-of-the-art object detection application is resilient to dramatic data loss, and that this loss may be weighted towards the end of each temporal window. We then propose a scalable streaming method for event-based data based on Media Over QUIC, prioritizing object detection performance and low latency. The application server can receive complementary event data across several streams simultaneously, and drop streams as needed to maintain a certain latency. With a latency target of 5 ms for end-to-end transmission across a small network, we observe an average reduction in detection mAP as low as 0.36. With a more relaxed latency target of 50 ms, we observe an average mAP reduction as low as 0.19.
Authors:Bin Li, Li Li, Zhenwei Zhang, Yuping Duan
Abstract:
Underwater optical images inevitably suffer from various degradation factors such as blurring, low contrast, and color distortion, which hinder the accuracy of object detection tasks. Due to the lack of paired underwater/clean images, most research methods adopt a strategy of first enhancing and then detecting, resulting in a lack of feature communication between the two learning tasks. On the other hand, due to the contradiction between the diverse degradation factors of underwater images and the limited number of samples, existing underwater enhancement methods are difficult to effectively enhance degraded images of unknown water bodies, thereby limiting the improvement of object detection accuracy. Therefore, most underwater target detection results are still displayed on degraded images, making it difficult to visually judge the correctness of the detection results. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a multi-task learning method that simultaneously enhances underwater images and improves detection accuracy. Compared with single-task learning, the integrated model allows for the dynamic adjustment of information communication and sharing between different tasks. Due to the fact that real underwater images can only provide annotated object labels, this paper introduces physical constraints to ensure that object detection tasks do not interfere with image enhancement tasks. Therefore, this article introduces a physical module to decompose underwater images into clean images, background light, and transmission images and uses a physical model to calculate underwater images for self-supervision. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves satisfactory results in visual performance, object detection accuracy, and detection efficiency compared to state-of-the-art comparative methods.
Authors:Zi-Wei Sun, Ze-Xi hua, Heng-Chao Li, Yan Li
Abstract:
In order to avoid the impact of hard samples on the training process of the Flying Bird Object Detection model (FBOD model, in our previous work, we designed the FBOD model according to the characteristics of flying bird objects in surveillance video), the Self-Paced Learning strategy with Easy Sample Prior Based on Confidence (SPL-ESP-BC), a new model training strategy, is proposed. Firstly, the loss-based Minimizer Function in Self-Paced Learning (SPL) is improved, and the confidence-based Minimizer Function is proposed, which makes it more suitable for one-class object detection tasks. Secondly, to give the model the ability to judge easy and hard samples at the early stage of training by using the SPL strategy, an SPL strategy with Easy Sample Prior (ESP) is proposed. The FBOD model is trained using the standard training strategy with easy samples first, then the SPL strategy with all samples is used to train it. Combining the strategy of the ESP and the Minimizer Function based on confidence, the SPL-ESP-BC model training strategy is proposed. Using this strategy to train the FBOD model can make it to learn the characteristics of the flying bird object in the surveillance video better, from easy to hard. The experimental results show that compared with the standard training strategy that does not distinguish between easy and hard samples, the AP50 of the FBOD model trained by the SPL-ESP-BC is increased by 2.1%, and compared with other loss-based SPL strategies, the FBOD model trained with SPL-ESP-BC strategy has the best comprehensive detection performance.
Authors:Sindhu Boddu, Arindam Mukherjee
Abstract:
This paper presents a robust approach for object detection in aerial imagery using the YOLOv5 model. We focus on identifying critical objects such as ambulances, car crashes, police vehicles, tow trucks, fire engines, overturned cars, and vehicles on fire. By leveraging a custom dataset, we outline the complete pipeline from data collection and annotation to model training and evaluation. Our results demonstrate that YOLOv5 effectively balances speed and accuracy, making it suitable for real-time emergency response applications. This work addresses key challenges in aerial imagery, including small object detection and complex backgrounds, and provides insights for future research in automated emergency response systems.
Authors:Lars Schmarje, Kaspar Sakman, Reinhard Koch, Dan Zhang
Abstract:
Autonomous driving (AD) operates in open-world scenarios, where encountering unknown objects is inevitable. However, standard object detectors trained on a limited number of base classes tend to ignore any unknown objects, posing potential risks on the road. To address this, it is important to learn a generic rather than a class specific objectness from objects seen during training. We therefore introduce an occupancy prediction together with bounding box regression. It learns to score the objectness by calculating the ratio of the predicted area occupied by actual objects. To enhance its generalizability, we increase the object diversity by exploiting data from other domains via Mosaic and Mixup augmentation. The objects outside the AD training classes are classified as a newly added out-of-distribution (OOD) class. Our solution UNCOVER, for UNknown Class Object detection for autonomous VEhicles in Real-time, excels at achieving both real-time detection and high recall of unknown objects on challenging AD benchmarks. To further attain very low false positive rates, particularly for close objects, we introduce a post-hoc filtering step that utilizes geometric cues extracted from the depth map, typically available within the AD system.
Authors:Tianyi Lyu, Dian Gu, Peiyuan Chen, Yaoting Jiang, Zhenhong Zhang, Huadong Pang, Li Zhou, Yiping Dong
Abstract:
This study introduces a method for efficiently detecting objects within 3D point clouds using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our approach adopts a unique feature-centric voting mechanism to construct convolutional layers that capitalize on the typical sparsity observed in input data. We explore the trade-off between accuracy and speed across diverse network architectures and advocate for integrating an $\mathcal{L}_1$ penalty on filter activations to augment sparsity within intermediate layers. This research pioneers the proposal of sparse convolutional layers combined with $\mathcal{L}_1$ regularization to effectively handle large-scale 3D data processing. Our method's efficacy is demonstrated on the MVTec 3D-AD object detection benchmark. The Vote3Deep models, with just three layers, outperform the previous state-of-the-art in both laser-only approaches and combined laser-vision methods. Additionally, they maintain competitive processing speeds. This underscores our approach's capability to substantially enhance detection performance while ensuring computational efficiency suitable for real-time applications.
Authors:Abdurrahman Zeybey, Mehmet Ergezer, Tommy Nguyen
Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting has advanced radiance field reconstruction, enabling high-quality view synthesis and fast rendering in 3D modeling. While adversarial attacks on object detection models are well-studied for 2D images, their impact on 3D models remains underexplored. This work introduces the Masked Iterative Fast Gradient Sign Method (M-IFGSM), designed to generate adversarial noise targeting the CLIP vision-language model. M-IFGSM specifically alters the object of interest by focusing perturbations on masked regions, degrading the performance of CLIP's zero-shot object detection capability when applied to 3D models. Using eight objects from the Common Objects 3D (CO3D) dataset, we demonstrate that our method effectively reduces the accuracy and confidence of the model, with adversarial noise being nearly imperceptible to human observers. The top-1 accuracy in original model renders drops from 95.4\% to 12.5\% for train images and from 91.2\% to 35.4\% for test images, with confidence levels reflecting this shift from true classification to misclassification, underscoring the risks of adversarial attacks on 3D models in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. The significance of this research lies in its potential to expose vulnerabilities in modern 3D vision models, including radiance fields, prompting the development of more robust defenses and security measures in critical real-world applications.
Authors:Benjamin Bergner, Christoph Lippert, Aravindh Mahendran
Abstract:
The adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in resource-constrained applications necessitates improvements in inference throughput. To this end several token pruning and merging approaches have been proposed that improve efficiency by successively reducing the number of tokens. However, it remains an open problem to design a token reduction method that is fast, maintains high performance, and is applicable to various vision tasks. In this work, we present a token pruner that uses auxiliary prediction heads that learn to select tokens end-to-end based on task relevance. These auxiliary heads can be removed after training, leading to throughput close to that of a random pruner. We evaluate our method on image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation, and show speedups of 1.5 to 4x with small drops in performance. As a best case, on the ADE20k semantic segmentation benchmark, we observe a 2x speedup relative to the no-pruning baseline, with a negligible performance penalty of 0.1 median mIoU across 5 seeds.
Authors:Zizhao Li, Zhengkang Xiang, Joseph West, Kourosh Khoshelham
Abstract:
Traditional object detection methods operate under the closed-set assumption, where models can only detect a fixed number of objects predefined in the training set. Recent works on open vocabulary object detection (OVD) enable the detection of objects defined by an in-principle unbounded vocabulary, which reduces the cost of training models for specific tasks. However, OVD heavily relies on accurate prompts provided by an ``oracle'', which limits their use in critical applications such as driving scene perception. OVD models tend to misclassify near-out-of-distribution (NOOD) objects that have similar features to known classes, and ignore far-out-of-distribution (FOOD) objects. To address these limitations, we propose a framework that enables OVD models to operate in open world settings, by identifying and incrementally learning previously unseen objects. To detect FOOD objects, we propose Open World Embedding Learning (OWEL) and introduce the concept of Pseudo Unknown Embedding which infers the location of unknown classes in a continuous semantic space based on the information of known classes. We also propose Multi-Scale Contrastive Anchor Learning (MSCAL), which enables the identification of misclassified unknown objects by promoting the intra-class consistency of object embeddings at different scales. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard open world object detection and autonomous driving benchmarks while maintaining its open vocabulary object detection capability.
Authors:Susu Fang, Hao Li
Abstract:
The SLAMMOT, i.e. simultaneous localization, mapping, and moving object (detection and) tracking, represents an emerging technology for autonomous vehicles in dynamic environments. Such single-vehicle systems still have inherent limitations, such as occlusion issues. Inspired by SLAMMOT and rapidly evolving cooperative technologies, it is natural to explore cooperative simultaneous localization, mapping, moving object (detection and) tracking (C-SLAMMOT) to enhance state estimation for ego-vehicles and moving objects. C-SLAMMOT could significantly upgrade the single-vehicle performance by utilizing and integrating the shared information through communication among the multiple vehicles. This inevitably leads to a fundamental trade-off between performance and communication cost, especially in a scalable manner as the number of collaboration vehicles increases. To address this challenge, we propose a LiDAR-based communication-efficient C-SLAMMOT (CE C-SLAMMOT) method by determining the number of collaboration vehicles. In CE C-SLAMMOT, we adopt descriptor-based methods for enhancing ego-vehicle pose estimation and spatial confidence map-based methods for cooperative object perception, allowing for the continuous and dynamic selection of the corresponding critical collaboration vehicles and interaction content. This approach avoids the waste of precious communication costs by preventing the sharing of information from certain collaborative vehicles that may contribute little or no performance gain, compared to the baseline method of exchanging raw observation information among all vehicles. Comparative experiments in various aspects have confirmed that the proposed method achieves a good trade-off between performance and communication costs, while also outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in cooperative perception performance.
Authors:Hongqi Zhang, He Sun, Hongmin Gao, Feng Han, Xu Sun, Lianru Gao, Bing Zhang
Abstract:
With consecutive bands in a wide range of wavelengths, hyperspectral images (HSI) have provided a unique tool for object detection task. However, existing HSI object detection methods have not been fully utilized in real applications, which is mainly resulted by the difference of spatial and spectral resolution between the unlabeled target domain and a labeled source domain, i.e. the domain shift of HSI. In this work, we aim to explore the unsupervised cross-domain object detection of HSI. Our key observation is that the local spatial-spectral characteristics remain invariant across different domains. For solving the problem of domain-shift, we propose a HSI cross-domain object detection method based on spectral-spatial feature alignment, which is the first attempt in the object detection community to the best of our knowledge. Firstly, we develop a spectral-spatial alignment module to extract domain-invariant local spatial-spectral features. Secondly, the spectral autocorrelation module has been designed to solve the domain shift in the spectral domain specifically, which can effectively align HSIs with different spectral resolutions. Besides, we have collected and annotated an HSI dataset for the cross-domain object detection. Our experimental results have proved the effectiveness of HSI cross-domain object detection, which has firstly demonstrated a significant and promising step towards HSI cross-domain object detection in the object detection community.
Authors:Kavin Chandrasekaran, Sorin Grigorescu, Gijs Dubbelman, Pavol Jancura
Abstract:
Cameras can be used to perceive the environment around the vehicle, while affordable radar sensors are popular in autonomous driving systems as they can withstand adverse weather conditions unlike cameras. However, radar point clouds are sparser with low azimuth and elevation resolution that lack semantic and structural information of the scenes, resulting in generally lower radar detection performance. In this work, we directly use the raw range-Doppler (RD) spectrum of radar data, thus avoiding radar signal processing. We independently process camera images within the proposed comprehensive image processing pipeline. Specifically, first, we transform the camera images to Bird's-Eye View (BEV) Polar domain and extract the corresponding features with our camera encoder-decoder architecture. The resultant feature maps are fused with Range-Azimuth (RA) features, recovered from the RD spectrum input from the radar decoder to perform object detection. We evaluate our fusion strategy with other existing methods not only in terms of accuracy but also on computational complexity metrics on RADIal dataset.
Authors:J. Alex Hurt, Anes Ouadou, Mariam Alshehri, Grant J. Scott
Abstract:
Throughout the scientific computing space, deep learning algorithms have shown excellent performance in a wide range of applications. As these deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to mature, the necessary compute required to train them has continued to grow. Today, modern DNNs require millions of FLOPs and days to weeks of training to generate a well-trained model. The training times required for DNNs are oftentimes a bottleneck in DNN research for a variety of deep learning applications, and as such, accelerating and scaling DNN training enables more robust and accelerated research. To that end, in this work, we explore utilizing the NRP Nautilus HyperCluster to automate and scale deep learning model training for three separate applications of DNNs, including overhead object detection, burned area segmentation, and deforestation detection. In total, 234 deep neural models are trained on Nautilus, for a total time of 4,040 hours
Authors:Xumin Gao, Mark Stevens, Grzegorz Cielniak
Abstract:
The current vision-based aphid counting methods in water traps suffer from undercounts caused by occlusions and low visibility arising from dense aggregation of insects and other objects. To address this problem, we propose a novel aphid counting method through interactive stirring actions. We use interactive stirring to alter the distribution of aphids in the yellow water trap and capture a sequence of images which are then used for aphid detection and counting through an optimized small object detection network based on Yolov5. We also propose a counting confidence evaluation system to evaluate the confidence of count-ing results. The final counting result is a weighted sum of the counting results from all sequence images based on the counting confidence. Experimental results show that our proposed aphid detection network significantly outperforms the original Yolov5, with improvements of 33.9% in AP@0.5 and 26.9% in AP@[0.5:0.95] on the aphid test set. In addition, the aphid counting test results using our proposed counting confidence evaluation system show significant improvements over the static counting method, closely aligning with manual counting results.
Authors:Ishrath Ahamed, Chamith Dilshan Ranathunga, Dinuka Sandun Udayantha, Benny Kai Kiat Ng, Chau Yuen
Abstract:
Accurate people counting in smart buildings and intelligent transportation systems is crucial for energy management, safety protocols, and resource allocation. This is especially critical during emergencies, where precise occupant counts are vital for safe evacuation. Existing methods struggle with large crowds, often losing accuracy with even a few additional people. To address this limitation, this study proposes a novel approach combining a new object tracking algorithm, a novel counting algorithm, and a fine-tuned object detection model. This method achieves 97% accuracy in real-time people counting with a frame rate of 20-27 FPS on a low-power edge computer.
Authors:Thibault Clérice, Juliette Janes, Hugo Scheithauer, Sarah Bénière, Florian Cafiero, Laurent Romary, Simon Gabay, Benoît Sagot
Abstract:
We present a novel, open-access dataset designed for semantic layout analysis, built to support document recreation workflows through mapping with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. This dataset includes 7,254 annotated pages spanning a large temporal range (1600-2024) of digitised and born-digital materials across diverse document types (magazines, papers from sciences and humanities, PhD theses, monographs, plays, administrative reports, etc.) sorted into modular subsets. By incorporating content from different periods and genres, it addresses varying layout complexities and historical changes in document structure. The modular design allows domain-specific configurations. We evaluate object detection models on this dataset, examining the impact of input size and subset-based training. Results show that a 1280-pixel input size for YOLO is optimal and that training on subsets generally benefits from incorporating them into a generic model rather than fine-tuning pre-trained weights.
Authors:Junqi Liu, Yun Zhang, Xiaoqi Wang, Xu Long, Sam Kwong
Abstract:
Just Recognizable Difference (JRD) represents the minimum visual difference that is detectable by machine vision, which can be exploited to promote machine vision oriented visual signal processing. In this paper, we propose a Deep Transformer based JRD (DT-JRD) prediction model for Video Coding for Machines (VCM), where the accurately predicted JRD can be used reduce the coding bit rate while maintaining the accuracy of machine tasks. Firstly, we model the JRD prediction as a multi-class classification and propose a DT-JRD prediction model that integrates an improved embedding, a content and distortion feature extraction, a multi-class classification and a novel learning strategy. Secondly, inspired by the perception property that machine vision exhibits a similar response to distortions near JRD, we propose an asymptotic JRD loss by using Gaussian Distribution-based Soft Labels (GDSL), which significantly extends the number of training labels and relaxes classification boundaries. Finally, we propose a DT-JRD based VCM to reduce the coding bits while maintaining the accuracy of object detection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the mean absolute error of the predicted JRD by the DT-JRD is 5.574, outperforming the state-of-the-art JRD prediction model by 13.1%. Coding experiments shows that comparing with the VVC, the DT-JRD based VCM achieves an average of 29.58% bit rate reduction while maintaining the object detection accuracy.
Authors:Xiayang Xiao, Zhuoxuan Li, Haipeng Wang
Abstract:
Current mainstream SAR image object detection methods still lack robustness when dealing with unknown objects in open environments. Open-set detection aims to enable detectors trained on a closed set to detect all known objects and identify unknown objects in open-set environments. The key challenges are how to improve the generalization to potential unknown objects and reduce the empirical classification risk of known categories under strong supervision. To address these challenges, a novel open-set aircraft detector for SAR images is proposed, named Open-Set Aircraft Detection (OSAD), which is equipped with three dedicated components: global context modeling (GCM), location quality-driven pseudo labeling generation (LPG), and prototype contrastive learning (PCL). GCM effectively enhances the network's representation of objects by attention maps which is formed through the capture of long sequential positional relationships. LPG leverages clues about object positions and shapes to optimize localization quality, avoiding overfitting to known category information and enhancing generalization to potential unknown objects. PCL employs prototype-based contrastive encoding loss to promote instance-level intra-class compactness and inter-class variance, aiming to minimize the overlap between known and unknown distributions and reduce the empirical classification risk of known categories. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method can effectively detect unknown objects and exhibit competitive performance without compromising closed-set performance. The highest absolute gain which ranges from 0 to 18.36% can be achieved on the average precision of unknown objects.
Authors:Xiangzhong Luo, Di Liu, Hao Kong, Shuo Huai, Hui Chen, Guochu Xiong, Weichen Liu
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently achieved impressive success across a wide range of real-world vision and language processing tasks, spanning from image classification to many other downstream vision tasks, such as object detection, tracking, and segmentation. However, previous well-established DNNs, despite being able to maintain superior accuracy, have also been evolving to be deeper and wider and thus inevitably necessitate prohibitive computational resources for both training and inference. This trend further enlarges the computational gap between computation-intensive DNNs and resource-constrained embedded computing systems, making it challenging to deploy powerful DNNs upon real-world embedded computing systems towards ubiquitous embedded intelligence. To alleviate the above computational gap and enable ubiquitous embedded intelligence, we, in this survey, focus on discussing recent efficient deep learning infrastructures for embedded computing systems, spanning from training to inference, from manual to automated, from convolutional neural networks to transformers, from transformers to vision transformers, from vision models to large language models, from software to hardware, and from algorithms to applications. Specifically, we discuss recent efficient deep learning infrastructures for embedded computing systems from the lens of (1) efficient manual network design for embedded computing systems, (2) efficient automated network design for embedded computing systems, (3) efficient network compression for embedded computing systems, (4) efficient on-device learning for embedded computing systems, (5) efficient large language models for embedded computing systems, (6) efficient deep learning software and hardware for embedded computing systems, and (7) efficient intelligent applications for embedded computing systems.
Authors:Nidhal Jegham, Chan Young Koh, Marwan Abdelatti, Abdeltawab Hendawi
Abstract:
This study presents a comprehensive benchmark analysis of various YOLO (You Only Look Once) algorithms. It represents the first comprehensive experimental evaluation of YOLOv3 to the latest version, YOLOv12, on various object detection challenges. The challenges considered include varying object sizes, diverse aspect ratios, and small-sized objects of a single class, ensuring a comprehensive assessment across datasets with distinct challenges. To ensure a robust evaluation, we employ a comprehensive set of metrics, including Precision, Recall, Mean Average Precision (mAP), Processing Time, GFLOPs count, and Model Size. Our analysis highlights the distinctive strengths and limitations of each YOLO version. For example: YOLOv9 demonstrates substantial accuracy but struggles with detecting small objects and efficiency whereas YOLOv10 exhibits relatively lower accuracy due to architectural choices that affect its performance in overlapping object detection but excels in speed and efficiency. Additionally, the YOLO11 family consistently shows superior performance maintaining a remarkable balance of accuracy and efficiency. However, YOLOv12 delivered underwhelming results, with its complex architecture introducing computational overhead without significant performance gains. These results provide critical insights for both industry and academia, facilitating the selection of the most suitable YOLO algorithm for diverse applications and guiding future enhancements.
Authors:Yakun Xie, Suning Liu, Hongyu Chen, Shaohan Cao, Huixin Zhang, Dejun Feng, Qian Wan, Jun Zhu, Qing Zhu
Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in salient object detection(SOD) in optical remote sensing images(ORSI), challenges persist due to the intricate edge structures of ORSIs and the complexity of their contextual relationships. Current deep learning approaches encounter difficulties in accurately identifying boundary features and lack efficiency in collaboratively modeling the foreground and background by leveraging contextual features. To address these challenges, we propose a stronger multifaceted collaborative salient object detector in ORSIs, termed LBA-MCNet, which incorporates aspects of localization, balance, and affinity. The network focuses on accurately locating targets, balancing detailed features, and modeling image-level global context information. Specifically, we design the Edge Feature Adaptive Balancing and Adjusting(EFABA) module for precise edge localization, using edge features to guide attention to boundaries and preserve spatial details. Moreover, we design the Global Distributed Affinity Learning(GDAL) module to model global context. It captures global context by generating an affinity map from the encoders final layer, ensuring effective modeling of global patterns. Additionally, deep supervision during deconvolution further enhances feature representation. Finally, we compared with 28 state of the art approaches on three publicly available datasets. The results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Authors:Louis Soum-Fontez, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud, François Goulette
Abstract:
Autonomous systems rely on accurate 3D object detection from LiDAR data, yet most detectors are limited to a predefined set of known classes, making them vulnerable to unexpected out-of-distribution (OOD) objects. In this work, we present HD-OOD3D, a novel two-stage method for detecting unknown objects. We demonstrate the superiority of two-stage approaches over single-stage methods, achieving more robust detection of unknown objects while addressing key challenges in the evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the standard evaluation protocol for OOD detection, revealing the critical impact of hyperparameter choices. To address the challenge of scaling the learning of unknown objects, we explore unsupervised training strategies to generate pseudo-labels for unknowns. Among the different approaches evaluated, our experiments show that top-5 auto-labelling offers more promising performance compared to simple resizing techniques.
Authors:Shubham Ghosal, Manmeet Singh, Sachin Ghude, Harsh Kamath, Vaisakh SB, Subodh Wasekar, Anoop Mahajan, Hassan Dashtian, Zong-Liang Yang, Michael Young, Dev Niyogi
Abstract:
This study presents an innovative approach to creating a dynamic, AI based emission inventory system for use with the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF Chem), designed to simulate vehicular and other anthropogenic emissions at satellite detectable resolution. The methodology leverages state of the art deep learning based computer vision models, primarily employing YOLO (You Only Look Once) architectures (v8 to v10) and T Rex, for high precision object detection. Through extensive data collection, model training, and finetuning, the system achieved significant improvements in detection accuracy, with F1 scores increasing from an initial 0.15 at 0.131 confidence to 0.72 at 0.414 confidence. A custom pipeline converts model outputs into netCDF files storing latitude, longitude, and vehicular count data, enabling real time processing and visualization of emission patterns. The resulting system offers unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution in emission estimates, facilitating more accurate short term air quality forecasts and deeper insights into urban emission dynamics. This research not only enhances WRF Chem simulations but also bridges the gap between AI technologies and atmospheric science methodologies, potentially improving urban air quality management and environmental policymaking. Future work will focus on expanding the system's capabilities to non vehicular sources and further improving detection accuracy in challenging environmental conditions.
Authors:Xiguang Li, Jiafu Chen, Yunhe Sun, Na Lin, Ammar Hawbani, Liang Zhao
Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, efficient and accurate object detection capabilities have become crucial factors in ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. However, in low-visibility environments such as hazy conditions, the performance of traditional object detection algorithms often degrades significantly, failing to meet the demands of autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this paper proposes two innovative deep learning models: YOLO-Vehicle and YOLO-Vehicle-Pro. YOLO-Vehicle is an object detection model tailored specifically for autonomous driving scenarios, employing multimodal fusion techniques to combine image and textual information for object detection. YOLO-Vehicle-Pro builds upon this foundation by introducing an improved image dehazing algorithm, enhancing detection performance in low-visibility environments. In addition to model innovation, this paper also designs and implements a cloud-edge collaborative object detection system, deploying models on edge devices and offloading partial computational tasks to the cloud in complex situations. Experimental results demonstrate that on the KITTI dataset, the YOLO-Vehicle-v1s model achieved 92.1% accuracy while maintaining a detection speed of 226 FPS and an inference time of 12ms, meeting the real-time requirements of autonomous driving. When processing hazy images, the YOLO-Vehicle-Pro model achieved a high accuracy of 82.3% mAP@50 on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset while maintaining a detection speed of 43 FPS.
Authors:Rahima Khanam, Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
This study presents an architectural analysis of YOLOv11, the latest iteration in the YOLO (You Only Look Once) series of object detection models. We examine the models architectural innovations, including the introduction of the C3k2 (Cross Stage Partial with kernel size 2) block, SPPF (Spatial Pyramid Pooling - Fast), and C2PSA (Convolutional block with Parallel Spatial Attention) components, which contribute in improving the models performance in several ways such as enhanced feature extraction. The paper explores YOLOv11's expanded capabilities across various computer vision tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, pose estimation, and oriented object detection (OBB). We review the model's performance improvements in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP) and computational efficiency compared to its predecessors, with a focus on the trade-off between parameter count and accuracy. Additionally, the study discusses YOLOv11's versatility across different model sizes, from nano to extra-large, catering to diverse application needs from edge devices to high-performance computing environments. Our research provides insights into YOLOv11's position within the broader landscape of object detection and its potential impact on real-time computer vision applications.
Authors:Zhiyi Pan, Guoqing Liu, Wei Gao, Thomas H. Li
Abstract:
The acquisition of inductive bias through point-level contrastive learning holds paramount significance in point cloud pre-training. However, the square growth in computational requirements with the scale of the point cloud poses a substantial impediment to the practical deployment and execution. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an Effective Point-level Contrastive Learning method for large-scale point cloud understanding dubbed \textbf{EPContrast}, which consists of AGContrast and ChannelContrast. In practice, AGContrast constructs positive and negative pairs based on asymmetric granularity embedding, while ChannelContrast imposes contrastive supervision between channel feature maps. EPContrast offers point-level contrastive loss while concurrently mitigating the computational resource burden. The efficacy of EPContrast is substantiated through comprehensive validation on S3DIS and ScanNetV2, encompassing tasks such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. In addition, rich ablation experiments demonstrate remarkable bias induction capabilities under label-efficient and one-epoch training settings.
Authors:Nikos Sakellariou, Antonios Lalas, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras
Abstract:
The unique cost, flexibility, speed, and efficiency of modern UAVs make them an attractive choice in many applications in contemporary society. This, however, causes an ever-increasing number of reported malicious or accidental incidents, rendering the need for the development of UAV detection and classification mechanisms essential. We propose a methodology for developing a system that fuses already processed multi-sensor data into a new Deep Neural Network to increase its classification accuracy towards UAV detection. The DNN model fuses high-level features extracted from individual object detection and classification models associated with thermal, optronic, and radar data. Additionally, emphasis is given to the model's Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture that combines the features of the three sensor modalities by stacking the extracted image features of the thermal and optronic sensor achieving higher classification accuracy than each sensor alone.
Authors:Ben Crulis, Barthelemy Serres, Cyril De Runz, Gilles Venturini
Abstract:
Current large open vision models could be useful for one and few-shot object recognition. Nevertheless, gradient-based re-training solutions are costly. On the other hand, open-vocabulary object detection models bring closer visual and textual concepts in the same latent space, allowing zero-shot detection via prompting at small computational cost. We propose a lightweight method to turn the latter into a one-shot or few-shot object recognition models without requiring textual descriptions. Our experiments on the TEgO dataset using the YOLO-World model as a base show that performance increases with the model size, the number of examples and the use of image augmentation.
Authors:Qihang Yang, Yang Zhao, Hong Cheng
Abstract:
Autonomous driving necessitates advanced object detection techniques that integrate information from multiple modalities to overcome the limitations associated with single-modal approaches. The challenges of aligning diverse data in early fusion and the complexities, along with overfitting issues introduced by deep fusion, underscore the efficacy of late fusion at the decision level. Late fusion ensures seamless integration without altering the original detector's network structure. This paper introduces a pioneering Multi-modal Multi-class Late Fusion method, designed for late fusion to enable multi-class detection. Fusion experiments conducted on the KITTI validation and official test datasets illustrate substantial performance improvements, presenting our model as a versatile solution for multi-modal object detection in autonomous driving. Moreover, our approach incorporates uncertainty analysis into the classification fusion process, rendering our model more transparent and trustworthy and providing more reliable insights into category predictions.
Authors:Yuxin Li, Yiheng Li, Xulei Yang, Mengying Yu, Zihang Huang, Xiaojun Wu, Chai Kiat Yeo
Abstract:
Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception has become a vital component of autonomous driving systems due to its ability to integrate multiple sensor inputs into a unified representation, enhancing performance in various downstream tasks. However, the computational demands of BEV models pose challenges for real-world deployment in vehicles with limited resources. To address these limitations, we propose QuadBEV, an efficient multitask perception framework that leverages the shared spatial and contextual information across four key tasks: 3D object detection, lane detection, map segmentation, and occupancy prediction. QuadBEV not only streamlines the integration of these tasks using a shared backbone and task-specific heads but also addresses common multitask learning challenges such as learning rate sensitivity and conflicting task objectives. Our framework reduces redundant computations, thereby enhancing system efficiency, making it particularly suited for embedded systems. We present comprehensive experiments that validate the effectiveness and robustness of QuadBEV, demonstrating its suitability for real-world applications.
Authors:Fang Gao, Xuetao Li, Jiabao Wang, Shengheng Ma, Jun Yu
Abstract:
With the development of steel materials, metallographic analysis has become increasingly important. Unfortunately, grain size analysis is a manual process that requires experts to evaluate metallographic photographs, which is unreliable and time-consuming. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel classifi-cation method based on deep learning, namely GSNets, a family of hybrid models which can effectively introduce guided self-attention for classifying grain size. Concretely, we build our models from three insights:(1) Introducing our novel guided self-attention module can assist the model in finding the generalized necessarily distinct vectors capable of retaining intricate rela-tional connections and rich local feature information; (2) By improving the pixel-wise linear independence of the feature map, the highly condensed semantic representation will be captured by the model; (3) Our novel triple-stream merging module can significantly improve the generalization capability and efficiency of the model. Experiments show that our GSNet yields a classifi-cation accuracy of 90.1%, surpassing the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer V2 by 1.9% on the steel grain size dataset, which comprises 3,599 images with 14 grain size levels. Furthermore, we intuitively believe our approach is applicable to broader ap-plications like object detection and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Mehdi Azarafza, Fatima Idrees, Ali Ehteshami Bejnordi, Charles Steinmetz, Stefan Henkler, Achim Rettberg
Abstract:
Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) detection is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles. While You Only Look Once (YOLO) is a popular real-time object detection algorithm, factors like training data quality and adverse weather conditions (e.g., heavy rain) can lead to detection failures. These failures can be particularly dangerous when visual similarities between objects exist, such as mistaking a 30 km/h sign for a higher speed limit sign. This paper proposes a method that combines video analysis and reasoning, prompting with a human-in-the-loop guide large vision model to improve YOLOs accuracy in detecting road speed limit signs, especially in semi-real-world conditions. It is hypothesized that the guided prompting and reasoning abilities of Video-LLava can enhance YOLOs traffic sign detection capabilities. This hypothesis is supported by an evaluation based on human-annotated accuracy metrics within a dataset of recorded videos from the CARLA car simulator. The results demonstrate that a collaborative approach combining YOLO with Video-LLava and reasoning can effectively address challenging situations such as heavy rain and overcast conditions that hinder YOLOs detection capabilities.
Authors:Erin McGowan, Ethan Brewer, Claudio Silva
Abstract:
As the uses of augmented reality (AR) become more complex and widely available, AR applications will increasingly incorporate intelligent features that require developers to understand the user's behavior and surrounding environment (e.g. an intelligent assistant). Such applications rely on video captured by an AR headset, which often contains disjointed camera movement with a limited field of view that cannot capture the full scope of what the user sees at any given time. Moreover, standard methods of visualizing object detection model outputs are limited to capturing objects within a single frame and timestep, and therefore fail to capture the temporal and spatial context that is often necessary for various domain applications. We propose ARPOV, an interactive visual analytics tool for analyzing object detection model outputs tailored to video captured by an AR headset that maximizes user understanding of model performance. The proposed tool leverages panorama stitching to expand the view of the environment while automatically filtering undesirable frames, and includes interactive features that facilitate object detection model debugging. ARPOV was designed as part of a collaboration between visualization researchers and machine learning and AR experts; we validate our design choices through interviews with 5 domain experts.
Authors:Shunlei Li, Jin Wang, Rui Dai, Wanyu Ma, Wing Yin Ng, Yingbai Hu, Zheng Li
Abstract:
In modern healthcare, the demand for autonomous robotic assistants has grown significantly, particularly in the operating room, where surgical tasks require precision and reliability. Robotic scrub nurses have emerged as a promising solution to improve efficiency and reduce human error during surgery. However, challenges remain in terms of accurately grasping and handing over surgical instruments, especially when dealing with complex or difficult objects in dynamic environments. In this work, we introduce a novel robotic scrub nurse system, RoboNurse-VLA, built on a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model by integrating the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) and the Llama 2 language model.
The proposed RoboNurse-VLA system enables highly precise grasping and handover of surgical instruments in real-time based on voice commands from the surgeon. Leveraging state-of-the-art vision and language models, the system can address key challenges for object detection, pose optimization, and the handling of complex and difficult-to-grasp instruments. Through extensive evaluations, RoboNurse-VLA demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, achieving high success rates in surgical instrument handovers, even with unseen tools and challenging items. This work presents a significant step forward in autonomous surgical assistance, showcasing the potential of integrating VLA models for real-world medical applications. More details can be found at https://robonurse-vla.github.io.
Authors:Xiaoyu Ji, Jan P Allebach, Ali Shakouri, Fengqing Zhu
Abstract:
This paper is directed towards the food crystal quality control area for manufacturing, focusing on efficiently predicting food crystal counts and size distributions. Previously, manufacturers used the manual counting method on microscopic images of food liquid products, which requires substantial human effort and suffers from inconsistency issues. Food crystal segmentation is a challenging problem due to the diverse shapes of crystals and their surrounding hard mimics. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient instance segmentation method based on object detection. Experimental results show that the predicted crystal counting accuracy of our method is comparable with existing segmentation methods, while being five times faster. Based on our experiments, we also define objective criteria for separating hard mimics and food crystals, which could benefit manual annotation tasks on similar dataset.
Authors:Aurel Pjetri, Stefano Caprasecca, Leonardo Taccari, Matteo Simoncini, Henrique Piñeiro Monteagudo, Wallace Walter, Douglas Coimbra de Andrade, Francesco Sambo, Andrew David Bagdanov
Abstract:
Monocular depth estimation is a critical task for autonomous driving and many other computer vision applications. While significant progress has been made in this field, the effects of viewpoint shifts on depth estimation models remain largely underexplored. This paper introduces a novel dataset and evaluation methodology to quantify the impact of different camera positions and orientations on monocular depth estimation performance. We propose a ground truth strategy based on homography estimation and object detection, eliminating the need for expensive LIDAR sensors. We collect a diverse dataset of road scenes from multiple viewpoints and use it to assess the robustness of a modern depth estimation model to geometric shifts. After assessing the validity of our strategy on a public dataset, we provide valuable insights into the limitations of current models and highlight the importance of considering viewpoint variations in real-world applications.
Authors:Avisha Kumar, Kunal Kotkar, Kelly Jiang, Meghana Bhimreddy, Daniel Davidar, Carly Weber-Levine, Siddharth Krishnan, Max J. Kerensky, Ruixing Liang, Kelley Kempski Leadingham, Denis Routkevitch, Andrew M. Hersh, Kimberly Ashayeri, Betty Tyler, Ian Suk, Jennifer Son, Nicholas Theodore, Nitish Thakor, Amir Manbachi
Abstract:
While deep learning has catalyzed breakthroughs across numerous domains, its broader adoption in clinical settings is inhibited by the costly and time-intensive nature of data acquisition and annotation. To further facilitate medical machine learning, we present an ultrasound dataset of 10,223 Brightness-mode (B-mode) images consisting of sagittal slices of porcine spinal cords (N=25) before and after a contusion injury. We additionally benchmark the performance metrics of several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms to localize the site of injury and semantic segmentation models to label the anatomy for comparison and creation of task-specific architectures. Finally, we evaluate the zero-shot generalization capabilities of the segmentation models on human ultrasound spinal cord images to determine whether training on our porcine dataset is sufficient for accurately interpreting human data. Our results show that the YOLOv8 detection model outperforms all evaluated models for injury localization, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP50-95) score of 0.606. Segmentation metrics indicate that the DeepLabv3 segmentation model achieves the highest accuracy on unseen porcine anatomy, with a Mean Dice score of 0.587, while SAMed achieves the highest Mean Dice score generalizing to human anatomy (0.445). To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest annotated dataset of spinal cord ultrasound images made publicly available to researchers and medical professionals, as well as the first public report of object detection and segmentation architectures to assess anatomical markers in the spinal cord for methodology development and clinical applications.
Authors:Sai Haneesh Allu, Itay Kadosh, Tyler Summers, Yu Xiang
Abstract:
We present a modular robotic system for autonomous exploration and semantic updating of large-scale unknown environments. Our approach enables a mobile robot to build, revisit, and update a hybrid semantic map that integrates a 2D occupancy grid for geometry with a topological graph for object semantics. Unlike prior methods that rely on manual teleoperation or precollected datasets, our two-phase approach achieves end-to-end autonomy: first, a modified frontier-based exploration algorithm with dynamic search windows constructs a geometric map; second, using a greedy trajectory planner, environments are revisited, and object semantics are updated using open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation. This modular system, compatible with any metric SLAM framework, supports continuous operation by efficiently updating the semantic graph to reflect short-term and long-term changes such as object relocation, removal, or addition. We validate the approach on a Fetch robot in real-world indoor environments of approximately $8,500$m$^2$ and $117$m$^2$, demonstrating robust and scalable semantic mapping and continuous adaptation, marking a fully autonomous integration of exploration, mapping, and semantic updating on a physical robot.
Authors:Hojun Son, Asma Almutairi, Arpan Kusari
Abstract:
Domain adaptation for object detection (DAOD) has become essential to counter performance degradation caused by distribution shifts between training and deployment domains. However, a critical factor influencing DAOD - context bias resulting from learned foreground-background (FG-BG) associations - has remained underexplored. We address three key questions regarding FG BG associations in object detection: are FG-BG associations encoded during the training, is there a causal relationship between FG-BG associations and detection performance, and is there an effect of FG-BG association on DAOD. To examine how models capture FG BG associations, we analyze class-wise and feature-wise performance degradation using background masking and feature perturbation, measured via change in accuracies (defined as drop rate). To explore the causal role of FG-BG associations, we apply do-calculus on FG-BG pairs guided by class activation mapping (CAM). To quantify the causal influence of FG-BG associations across domains, we propose a novel metric - domain association gradient - defined as the ratio of drop rate to maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). Through systematic experiments involving background masking, feature-level perturbations, and CAM, we reveal that convolution-based object detection models encode FG-BG associations. Our results demonstrate that context bias not only exists but causally undermines the generalization capabilities of object detection models across domains. Furthermore, we validate these findings across multiple models and datasets, including state-of-the-art architectures such as ALDI++. This study highlights the necessity of addressing context bias explicitly in DAOD frameworks, providing insights that pave the way for developing more robust and generalizable object detection systems.
Authors:Adrian Langley, Matthew Lonergan, Tao Huang, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi
Abstract:
Improving the automatic and timely recognition of construction and demolition waste composition is crucial for enhancing business returns, economic outcomes and sustainability. While deep learning models show promise in recognizing and classifying homogenous materials, the current literature lacks research assessing their performance for mixed, contaminated material in commercial material recycling facility settings. Despite the increasing numbers of deep learning models and datasets generated in this area, the sub-domain of deep learning analysis of construction and demolition waste piles remains underexplored. To address this gap, recent deep learning algorithms and techniques were explored. This review examines the progression in datasets, sensors and the evolution from object detection towards real-time segmentation models. It also synthesizes research from the past five years on deep learning for construction and demolition waste management, highlighting recent advancements while acknowledging limitations that hinder widespread commercial adoption. The analysis underscores the critical requirement for diverse and high-fidelity datasets, advanced sensor technologies, and robust algorithmic frameworks to facilitate the effective integration of deep learning methodologies into construction and demolition waste management systems. This integration is envisioned to contribute significantly towards the advancement of a more sustainable and circular economic model.
Authors:James E. Gallagher, Edward J. Oughton
Abstract:
Multispectral imaging and deep learning have emerged as powerful tools supporting diverse use cases from autonomous vehicles, to agriculture, infrastructure monitoring and environmental assessment. The combination of these technologies has led to significant advancements in object detection, classification, and segmentation tasks in the non-visible light spectrum. This paper considers 400 total papers, reviewing 200 in detail to provide an authoritative meta-review of multispectral imaging technologies, deep learning models, and their applications, considering the evolution and adaptation of You Only Look Once (YOLO) methods. Ground-based collection is the most prevalent approach, totaling 63% of the papers reviewed, although uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) for YOLO-multispectral applications have doubled since 2020. The most prevalent sensor fusion is Red-Green-Blue (RGB) with Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR), comprising 39% of the literature. YOLOv5 remains the most used variant for adaption to multispectral applications, consisting of 33% of all modified YOLO models reviewed. 58% of multispectral-YOLO research is being conducted in China, with broadly similar research quality to other countries (with a mean journal impact factor of 4.45 versus 4.36 for papers not originating from Chinese institutions). Future research needs to focus on (i) developing adaptive YOLO architectures capable of handling diverse spectral inputs that do not require extensive architectural modifications, (ii) exploring methods to generate large synthetic multispectral datasets, (iii) advancing multispectral YOLO transfer learning techniques to address dataset scarcity, and (iv) innovating fusion research with other sensor types beyond RGB and LWIR.
Authors:Rui Yu, Runkai Zhao, Jiagen Li, Qingsong Zhao, Songhao Zhu, HuaiCheng Yan, Meng Wang
Abstract:
The LiDAR-based 3D object detector that strikes a balance between accuracy and speed is crucial for achieving real-time perception in autonomous driving and robotic navigation systems. To enhance the accuracy of point cloud detection, integrating global context for visual understanding improves the point clouds ability to grasp overall spatial information. However, many existing LiDAR detection models depend on intricate feature transformation and extraction processes, leading to poor real-time performance and high resource consumption, which limits their practical effectiveness. In this work, we propose a Faster LiDAR 3D object detection framework, called FASD, which implements heterogeneous model distillation by adaptively uniform cross-model voxel features. We aim to distill the transformer's capacity for high-performance sequence modeling into Mamba models with low FLOPs, achieving a significant improvement in accuracy through knowledge transfer. Specifically, Dynamic Voxel Group and Adaptive Attention strategies are integrated into the sparse backbone, creating a robust teacher model with scale-adaptive attention for effective global visual context modeling. Following feature alignment with the Adapter, we transfer knowledge from the Transformer to the Mamba through latent space feature supervision and span-head distillation, resulting in improved performance and an efficient student model. We evaluated the framework on the Waymo and nuScenes datasets, achieving a 4x reduction in resource consumption and a 1-2\% performance improvement over the current SoTA methods.
Authors:Xi Wang, Xin Liu, Songming Zhu, Zhanwen Li, Lina Gao
Abstract:
The recent emergence of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology has facilitated the effective capture of traffic-induced seismic data. The traffic-induced seismic wave is a prominent contributor to urban vibrations and contain crucial information to advance urban exploration and governance. However, identifying vehicular movements within massive noisy data poses a significant challenge. In this study, we introduce a real-time semi-supervised vehicle monitoring framework tailored to urban settings. It requires only a small fraction of manual labels for initial training and exploits unlabeled data for model improvement. Additionally, the framework can autonomously adapt to newly collected unlabeled data. Before DAS data undergo object detection as two-dimensional images to preserve spatial information, we leveraged comprehensive one-dimensional signal preprocessing to mitigate noise. Furthermore, we propose a novel prior loss that incorporates the shapes of vehicular traces to track a single vehicle with varying speeds. To evaluate our model, we conducted experiments with seismic data from the Stanford 2 DAS Array. The results showed that our model outperformed the baseline model Efficient Teacher and its supervised counterpart, YOLO (You Only Look Once), in both accuracy and robustness. With only 35 labeled images, our model surpassed YOLO's mAP 0.5:0.95 criterion by 18% and showed a 7% increase over Efficient Teacher. We conducted comparative experiments with multiple update strategies for self-updating and identified an optimal approach. This approach surpasses the performance of non-overfitting training conducted with all data in a single pass.
Authors:Md Taimur Ahad, Sajib Bin Mamun, Sumaya Mustofa, Bo Song, Yan Li
Abstract:
Over the years in object detection several efficient Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) networks, such as DenseNet201, InceptionV3, ResNet152v2, SEresNet152, VGG19, Xception gained significant attention due to their performance. Moreover, CNN paradigms have expanded to transfer learning and ensemble models from original CNN architectures. Research studies suggest that transfer learning and ensemble models are capable of increasing the accuracy of deep learning (DL) models. However, very few studies have conducted comprehensive experiments utilizing these techniques in detecting and localizing blood malignancies. Realizing the gap, this study conducted three experiments; in the first experiment -- six original CNNs were used, in the second experiment -- transfer learning and, in the third experiment a novel ensemble model DIX (DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and Xception) was developed to detect and classify blood cancer. The statistical result suggests that DIX outperformed the original and transfer learning performance, providing an accuracy of 99.12%. However, this study also provides a negative result in the case of transfer learning, as the transfer learning did not increase the accuracy of the original CNNs. Like many other cancers, blood cancer diseases require timely identification for effective treatment plans and increased survival possibilities. The high accuracy in detecting and categorization blood cancer detection using CNN suggests that the CNN model is promising in blood cancer disease detection. This research is significant in the fields of biomedical engineering, computer-aided disease diagnosis, and ML-based disease detection.
Authors:Weihao Lu, Dezong Zhao, Cristiano Premebida, Li Zhang, Wenjing Zhao, Daxin Tian
Abstract:
Effective point cloud processing is crucial to LiDARbased autonomous driving systems. The capability to understand features at multiple scales is required for object detection of intelligent vehicles, where road users may appear in different sizes. Recent methods focus on the design of the feature aggregation operators, which collect features at different scales from the encoder backbone and assign them to the points of interest. While efforts are made into the aggregation modules, the importance of how to fuse these multi-scale features has been overlooked. This leads to insufficient feature communication across scales. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Point Pyramid RCNN (POP-RCNN), a feature pyramid-based framework for 3D object detection on point clouds. POP-RCNN consists of a Point Pyramid Feature Enhancement (PPFE) module to establish connections across spatial scales and semantic depths for information exchange. The PPFE module effectively fuses multi-scale features for rich information without the increased complexity in feature aggregation. To remedy the impact of inconsistent point densities, a point density confidence module is deployed. This design integration enables the use of a lightweight feature aggregator, and the emphasis on both shallow and deep semantics, realising a detection framework for 3D object detection. With great adaptability, the proposed method can be applied to a variety of existing frameworks to increase feature richness, especially for long-distance detection. By adopting the PPFE in the voxel-based and point-voxel-based baselines, experimental results on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset show that the proposed method achieves remarkable performance even with limited computational headroom.
Authors:Duy Le Dinh Anh, Kim Hoang Tran, Ngan Hoang Le
Abstract:
While Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has made substantial advancements, it is limited by heavy reliance on prior knowledge and limited to predefined categories. In contrast, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT), tracking multiple objects with similar appearance, requires less prior information about the targets but faces challenges with variants like viewpoint, lighting, occlusion, and resolution. Our contributions commence with the introduction of the \textbf{\text{Refer-GMOT dataset}} a collection of videos, each accompanied by fine-grained textual descriptions of their attributes. Subsequently, we introduce a novel text prompt-based open-vocabulary GMOT framework, called \textbf{\text{TP-GMOT}}, which can track never-seen object categories with zero training examples. Within \text{TP-GMOT} framework, we introduce two novel components: (i) {\textbf{\text{TP-OD}}, an object detection by a textual prompt}, for accurately detecting unseen objects with specific characteristics. (ii) Motion-Appearance Cost SORT \textbf{\text{MAC-SORT}}, a novel object association approach that adeptly integrates motion and appearance-based matching strategies to tackle the complex task of tracking multiple generic objects with high similarity. Our contributions are benchmarked on the \text{Refer-GMOT} dataset for GMOT task. Additionally, to assess the generalizability of the proposed \text{TP-GMOT} framework and the effectiveness of \text{MAC-SORT} tracker, we conduct ablation studies on the DanceTrack and MOT20 datasets for the MOT task. Our dataset, code, and models will be publicly available at: https://fsoft-aic.github.io/TP-GMOT
Authors:Paolo Rabino, Tatiana Tommasi
Abstract:
Interacting with real-world cluttered scenes pose several challenges to robotic agents that need to understand complex spatial dependencies among the observed objects to determine optimal pick sequences or efficient object retrieval strategies. Existing solutions typically manage simplified scenarios and focus on predicting pairwise object relationships following an initial object detection phase, but often overlook the global context or struggle with handling redundant and missing object relations. In this work, we present a modern take on visual relational reasoning for grasp planning. We introduce D3GD, a novel testbed that includes bin picking scenes with up to 35 objects from 97 distinct categories. Additionally, we propose D3G, a new end-to-end transformer-based dependency graph generation model that simultaneously detects objects and produces an adjacency matrix representing their spatial relationships. Recognizing the limitations of standard metrics, we employ the Average Precision of Relationships for the first time to evaluate model performance, conducting an extensive experimental benchmark. The obtained results establish our approach as the new state-of-the-art for this task, laying the foundation for future research in robotic manipulation. We publicly release the code and dataset at https://paolotron.github.io/d3g.github.io.
Authors:Guang Yang, Muru Zhang, Lin Qiu, Yanming Wan, Noah A. Smith
Abstract:
Optical music recognition (OMR) aims to convert music notation into digital formats. One approach to tackle OMR is through a multi-stage pipeline, where the system first detects visual music notation elements in the image (object detection) and then assembles them into a music notation (notation assembly). Most previous work on notation assembly unrealistically assumes perfect object detection. In this study, we focus on the MUSCIMA++ v2.0 dataset, which represents musical notation as a graph with pairwise relationships among detected music objects, and we consider both stages together. First, we introduce a music object detector based on YOLOv8, which improves detection performance. Second, we introduce a supervised training pipeline that completes the notation assembly stage based on detection output. We find that this model is able to outperform existing models trained on perfect detection output, showing the benefit of considering the detection and assembly stages in a more holistic way. These findings, together with our novel evaluation metric, are important steps toward a more complete OMR solution.
Authors:Yanquan Huang, Liu Wei Zhen, Yun Hao, Mengyuan Zhang, Qingyao Wu, Zikun Deng, Xueming Liu, Hong Deng
Abstract:
For object detection detectors, enhancing model performance hinges on the ability to simultaneously consider inconsistencies across tasks and focus on difficult-to-train samples. Achieving this necessitates incorporating information from both the classification and regression tasks. However, prior work tends to either emphasize difficult-to-train samples within their respective tasks or simply compute classification scores with IoU, often leading to suboptimal model performance. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Classification-Regression Adaptive Loss, termed as HCRAL. Specifically, we introduce the Residual of Classification and IoU (RCI) module for cross-task supervision, addressing task inconsistencies, and the Conditioning Factor (CF) to focus on difficult-to-train samples within each task. Furthermore, we introduce a new strategy named Expanded Adaptive Training Sample Selection (EATSS) to provide additional samples that exhibit classification and regression inconsistencies. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on COCO test-dev. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approachs. Additionally, we designed experiments by separately combining the classification and regression loss with regular loss functions in popular one-stage models, demonstrating improved performance.
Authors:Edgardo Solano-Carrillo, Felix Sattler, Antje Alex, Alexander Klein, Bruno Pereira Costa, Angel Bueno Rodriguez, Jannis Stoppe
Abstract:
The tracking-by-detection paradigm is the mainstream in multi-object tracking, associating tracks to the predictions of an object detector. Although exhibiting uncertainty through a confidence score, these predictions do not capture the entire variability of the inference process. For safety and security critical applications like autonomous driving, surveillance, etc., knowing this predictive uncertainty is essential though. Therefore, we introduce, for the first time, a fast way to obtain the empirical predictive distribution during object detection and incorporate that knowledge in multi-object tracking. Our mechanism can easily be integrated into state-of-the-art trackers, enabling them to fully exploit the uncertainty in the detections. Additionally, novel association methods are introduced that leverage the proposed mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our contribution on a variety of benchmarks, such as MOT17, MOT20, DanceTrack, and KITTI.
Authors:Elona Shatri, George Fazekas
Abstract:
Optical Music Recognition (OMR) automates the transcription of musical notation from images into machine-readable formats like MusicXML, MEI, or MIDI, significantly reducing the costs and time of manual transcription. This study explores knowledge discovery in OMR by applying instance segmentation using Mask R-CNN to enhance the detection and delineation of musical symbols in sheet music. Unlike Optical Character Recognition (OCR), OMR must handle the intricate semantics of Common Western Music Notation (CWMN), where symbol meanings depend on shape, position, and context. Our approach leverages instance segmentation to manage the density and overlap of musical symbols, facilitating more precise information retrieval from music scores. Evaluations on the DoReMi and MUSCIMA++ datasets demonstrate substantial improvements, with our method achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of up to 59.70\% in dense symbol environments, achieving comparable results to object detection. Furthermore, using traditional computer vision techniques, we add a parallel step for staff detection to infer the pitch for the recognised symbols. This study emphasises the role of pixel-wise segmentation in advancing accurate music symbol recognition, contributing to knowledge discovery in OMR. Our findings indicate that instance segmentation provides more precise representations of musical symbols, particularly in densely populated scores, advancing OMR technology. We make our implementation, pre-processing scripts, trained models, and evaluation results publicly available to support further research and development.
Authors:Khanh-Binh Nguyen, Chae Jung Park
Abstract:
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) is a technique in self-supervised learning that focuses on acquiring detailed visual representations from unlabeled images by estimating the missing pixels in randomly masked sections. It has proven to be a powerful tool for the preliminary training of Vision Transformers (ViTs), yielding impressive results across various tasks. Nevertheless, most MIM methods heavily depend on the random masking strategy to formulate the pretext task. This strategy necessitates numerous trials to ascertain the optimal dropping ratio, which can be resource-intensive, requiring the model to be pre-trained for anywhere between 800 to 1600 epochs. Furthermore, this approach may not be suitable for all datasets. In this work, we propose a new masking strategy that effectively helps the model capture global and local features. Based on this masking strategy, SymMIM, our proposed training pipeline for MIM is introduced. SymMIM achieves a new SOTA accuracy of 85.9\% on ImageNet using ViT-Large and surpasses previous SOTA across downstream tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation tasks, and so on.
Authors:Kaiwen Wang, Yinzhe Shen, Martin Lauer
Abstract:
Object detectors encounter challenges in handling domain shifts. Cutting-edge domain adaptive object detection methods use the teacher-student framework and domain adversarial learning to generate domain-invariant pseudo-labels for self-training. However, the pseudo-labels generated by the teacher model tend to be biased towards the majority class and often mistakenly include overconfident false positives and underconfident false negatives. We reveal that pseudo-labels vulnerable to adversarial attacks are more likely to be low-quality. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective framework named Adversarial Attacked Teacher (AAT) to improve the quality of pseudo-labels. Specifically, we apply adversarial attacks to the teacher model, prompting it to generate adversarial pseudo-labels to correct bias, suppress overconfidence, and encourage underconfident proposals. An adaptive pseudo-label regularization is introduced to emphasize the influence of pseudo-labels with high certainty and reduce the negative impacts of uncertain predictions. Moreover, robust minority objects verified by pseudo-label regularization are oversampled to minimize dataset imbalance without introducing false positives. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate that AAT achieves superior performance, reaching 52.6 mAP on Clipart1k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 6.7%.
Authors:Minjung Kim, Hyung Suk Lim, Seung Hwan Kim, Soonyoung Lee, Bumsoo Kim, Gunhee Kim
Abstract:
3D dense captioning is a task to localize objects in a 3D scene and generate descriptive sentences for each object. Recent approaches in 3D dense captioning have adopted transformer encoder-decoder frameworks from object detection to build an end-to-end pipeline without hand-crafted components. However, these approaches struggle with contradicting objectives where a single query attention has to simultaneously view both the tightly localized object regions and contextual environment. To overcome this challenge, we introduce SIA (See-It-All), a transformer pipeline that engages in 3D dense captioning with a novel paradigm called late aggregation. SIA simultaneously decodes two sets of queries-context query and instance query. The instance query focuses on localization and object attribute descriptions, while the context query versatilely captures the region-of-interest of relationships between multiple objects or with the global scene, then aggregated afterwards (i.e., late aggregation) via simple distance-based measures. To further enhance the quality of contextualized caption generation, we design a novel aggregator to generate a fully informed caption based on the surrounding context, the global environment, and object instances. Extensive experiments on two of the most widely-used 3D dense captioning datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement over prior methods.
Authors:Zhigang Tu, Zhengbo Zhang, Zitao Gao, Chunluan Zhou, Junsong Yuan, Bo Du
Abstract:
Objects falling from buildings, a frequently occurring event in daily life, can cause severe injuries to pedestrians due to the high impact force they exert. Surveillance cameras are often installed around buildings to detect falling objects, but such detection remains challenging due to the small size and fast motion of the objects. Moreover, the field of falling object detection around buildings (FODB) lacks a large-scale dataset for training learning-based detection methods and for standardized evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose a large and diverse video benchmark dataset named FADE. Specifically, FADE contains 2,611 videos from 25 scenes, featuring 8 falling object categories, 4 weather conditions, and 4 video resolutions. Additionally, we develop a novel detection method for FODB that effectively leverages motion information and generates small-sized yet high-quality detection proposals. The efficacy of our method is evaluated on the proposed FADE dataset by comparing it with state-of-the-art approaches in generic object detection, video object detection, and moving object detection. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://fadedataset.github.io/FADE.github.io/.
Authors:Ghazal Kaviani, Reza Marzban, Ghassan AlRegib
Abstract:
This paper investigates image denoising, comparing traditional non-learning-based techniques, represented by Block-Matching 3D (BM3D), with modern learning-based methods, exemplified by NBNet. We assess these approaches across diverse datasets, including CURE-OR, CURE-TSR, SSID+, Set-12, and Chest-Xray, each presenting unique noise challenges. Our analysis employs seven Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics and examines the impact on object detection performance. We find that while BM3D excels in scenarios like blur challenges, NBNet is more effective in complex noise environments such as under-exposure and over-exposure. The study reveals the strengths and limitations of each method, providing insights into the effectiveness of different denoising strategies in varied real-world applications.
Authors:Diego A. Silva, Kamilya Smagulova, Ahmed Elsheikh, Mohammed E. Fouda, Ahmed M. Eltawil
Abstract:
Object detection is crucial in various cutting-edge applications, such as autonomous vehicles and advanced robotics systems, primarily relying on data from conventional frame-based RGB sensors. However, these sensors often struggle with issues like motion blur and poor performance in challenging lighting conditions. In response to these challenges, event-based cameras have emerged as an innovative paradigm. These cameras, mimicking the human eye, demonstrate superior performance in environments with fast motion and extreme lighting conditions while consuming less power. This study introduces ReYOLOv8, an advanced object detection framework that enhances a leading frame-based detection system with spatiotemporal modeling capabilities. We implemented a low-latency, memory-efficient method for encoding event data to boost the system's performance. We also developed a novel data augmentation technique tailored to leverage the unique attributes of event data, thus improving detection accuracy. Our models outperformed all comparable approaches in the GEN1 dataset, focusing on automotive applications, achieving mean Average Precision (mAP) improvements of 5%, 2.8%, and 2.5% across nano, small, and medium scales, respectively.These enhancements were achieved while reducing the number of trainable parameters by an average of 4.43% and maintaining real-time processing speeds between 9.2ms and 15.5ms. On the PEDRo dataset, which targets robotics applications, our models showed mAP improvements ranging from 9% to 18%, with 14.5x and 3.8x smaller models and an average speed enhancement of 1.67x.
Authors:Shihab Uddin Ahamad, Masoud Ataei, Vijay Devabhaktuni, Vikas Dhiman
Abstract:
Detecting falls among the elderly and alerting their community responders can save countless lives. We design and develop a low-cost mobile robot that periodically searches the house for the person being monitored and sends an email to a set of designated responders if a fall is detected. In this project, we make three novel design decisions and contributions. First, our custom-designed low-cost robot has advanced features like omnidirectional wheels, the ability to run deep learning models, and autonomous wireless charging. Second, we improve the accuracy of fall detection for the YOLOv8-Pose-nano object detection network by 6% and YOLOv8-Pose-large by 12%. We do so by transforming the images captured from the robot viewpoint (camera height 0.15m from the ground) to a typical human viewpoint (1.5m above the ground) using a principally computed Homography matrix. This improves network accuracy because the training dataset MS-COCO on which YOLOv8-Pose is trained is captured from a human-height viewpoint. Lastly, we improve the robot controller by learning a model that predicts the robot velocity from the input signal to the motor controller.
Authors:Guoqing Zhu, Honghu Pan, Qiang Wang, Chao Tian, Chao Yang, Zhenyu He
Abstract:
In challenging low light and adverse weather conditions,thermal vision algorithms,especially object detection,have exhibited remarkable potential,contrasting with the frequent struggles encountered by visible vision algorithms. Nevertheless,the efficacy of thermal vision algorithms driven by deep learning models remains constrained by the paucity of available training data samples. To this end,this paper introduces a novel approach termed the edge guided conditional diffusion model. This framework aims to produce meticulously aligned pseudo thermal images at the pixel level,leveraging edge information extracted from visible images. By utilizing edges as contextual cues from the visible domain,the diffusion model achieves meticulous control over the delineation of objects within the generated images. To alleviate the impacts of those visible-specific edge information that should not appear in the thermal domain,a two-stage modality adversarial training strategy is proposed to filter them out from the generated images by differentiating the visible and thermal modality. Extensive experiments on LLVIP demonstrate ECDM s superiority over existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of image generation quality.
Authors:Seyed Shayan Daneshvar, Shaowei Wang
Abstract:
Detection of Graphical User Interface (GUI) elements is a crucial task for automatic code generation from images and sketches, GUI testing, and GUI search. Recent studies have leveraged both old-fashioned and modern computer vision (CV) techniques. Oldfashioned methods utilize classic image processing algorithms (e.g. edge detection and contour detection) and modern methods use mature deep learning solutions for general object detection tasks. GUI element detection, however, is a domain-specific case of object detection, in which objects overlap more often, and are located very close to each other, plus the number of object classes is considerably lower, yet there are more objects in the images compared to natural images. Hence, the studies that have been carried out on comparing various object detection models, might not apply to GUI element detection. In this study, we evaluate the performance of the four most recent successful YOLO models for general object detection tasks on GUI element detection and investigate their accuracy performance in detecting various GUI elements.
Authors:Long Huang, Zhiwei Dong, Song-Lu Chen, Ruiyao Zhang, Shutong Ti, Feng Chen, Xu-Cheng Yin
Abstract:
Task inharmony problem commonly occurs in modern object detectors, leading to inconsistent qualities between classification and regression tasks. The predicted boxes with high classification scores but poor localization positions or low classification scores but accurate localization positions will worsen the performance of detectors after Non-Maximum Suppression. Furthermore, when object detectors collaborate with Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), we observe that the task inharmony problem will be further exacerbated, which is considered one of the main causes of the performance degradation of quantized detectors. To tackle this issue, we propose the Harmonious Quantization for Object Detection (HQOD) framework, which consists of two components. Firstly, we propose a task-correlated loss to encourage detectors to focus on improving samples with lower task harmony quality during QAT. Secondly, a harmonious Intersection over Union (IoU) loss is incorporated to balance the optimization of the regression branch across different IoU levels. The proposed HQOD can be easily integrated into different QAT algorithms and detectors. Remarkably, on the MS COCO dataset, our 4-bit ATSS with ResNet-50 backbone achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 39.6%, even surpassing the full-precision one.
Authors:Changqun Xia, Chenxi Xie, Zhentao He, Tianshu Yu, Jia Li
Abstract:
We present an advanced study on more challenging high-resolution salient object detection (HRSOD) from both dataset and network framework perspectives. To compensate for the lack of HRSOD dataset, we thoughtfully collect a large-scale high resolution salient object detection dataset, called UHRSD, containing 5,920 images from real-world complex scenarios at 4K-8K resolutions. All the images are finely annotated in pixel-level, far exceeding previous low-resolution SOD datasets. Aiming at overcoming the contradiction between the sampling depth and the receptive field size in the past methods, we propose a novel one-stage framework for HR-SOD task using pyramid grafting mechanism. In general, transformer-based and CNN-based backbones are adopted to extract features from different resolution images independently and then these features are grafted from transformer branch to CNN branch. An attention-based Cross-Model Grafting Module (CMGM) is proposed to enable CNN branch to combine broken detailed information more holistically, guided by different source feature during decoding process. Moreover, we design an Attention Guided Loss (AGL) to explicitly supervise the attention matrix generated by CMGM to help the network better interact with the attention from different branches. Comprehensive experiments on UHRSD and widely-used SOD datasets demonstrate that our method can simultaneously locate salient object and preserve rich details, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. To verify the generalization ability of the proposed framework, we apply it to the camouflaged object detection (COD) task. Notably, our method performs superior to most state-of-the-art COD methods without bells and whistles.
Authors:Yash Zambre, Ekdev Rajkitkul, Akshatha Mohan, Joshua Peeples
Abstract:
Object detection plays a crucial role in the field of computer vision by autonomously locating and identifying objects of interest. The You Only Look Once (YOLO) model is an effective single-shot detector. However, YOLO faces challenges in cluttered or partially occluded scenes and can struggle with small, low-contrast objects. We propose a new method that integrates spatial transformer networks (STNs) into YOLO to improve performance. The proposed STN-YOLO aims to enhance the model's effectiveness by focusing on important areas of the image and improving the spatial invariance of the model before the detection process. Our proposed method improved object detection performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. We explore the impact of different localization networks within the STN module as well as the robustness of the model across different spatial transformations. We apply the STN-YOLO on benchmark datasets for Agricultural object detection as well as a new dataset from a state-of-the-art plant phenotyping greenhouse facility. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
Authors:Rahima Khanam, Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the YOLOv5 object detection model, examining its architecture, training methodologies, and performance. Key components, including the Cross Stage Partial backbone and Path Aggregation-Network, are explored in detail. The paper reviews the model's performance across various metrics and hardware platforms. Additionally, the study discusses the transition from Darknet to PyTorch and its impact on model development. Overall, this research provides insights into YOLOv5's capabilities and its position within the broader landscape of object detection and why it is a popular choice for constrained edge deployment scenarios.
Authors:Aditya Kapoor, Harshad Khadilkar, Jayvardhana Gubbi
Abstract:
Distortion identification and rectification in images and videos is vital for achieving good performance in downstream vision applications. Instead of relying on fixed trial-and-error based image processing pipelines, we propose a two-level sequential planning approach for automated image distortion classification and rectification. At the higher level it detects the class of corruptions present in the input image, if any. The lower level selects a specific algorithm to be applied, from a set of externally provided candidate algorithms. The entire two-level setup runs in the form of a single forward pass during inference and it is to be queried iteratively until the retrieval of the original image. We demonstrate improvements compared to three baselines on the object detection task on COCO image dataset with rich set of distortions. The advantage of our approach is its dynamic reconfiguration, conditioned on the input image and generalisability to unseen candidate algorithms at inference time, since it relies only on the comparison of their output of the image embeddings.
Authors:Youssef Doulfoukar, Laurent Mertens, Joost Vennekens
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks are particularly suited for image analysis tasks, such as Image Classification, Object Recognition or Image Segmentation. Like all Artificial Neural Networks, however, they are "black box" models, and suffer from poor explainability. This work is concerned with the specific downstream task of Emotion Recognition from images, and proposes a framework that combines CAM-based techniques with Object Detection on a corpus level to better understand on which image cues a particular model, in our case EmoNet, relies to assign a specific emotion to an image. We demonstrate that the model mostly focuses on human characteristics, but also explore the pronounced effect of specific image modifications.
Authors:Jon Crall, Connor Greenwell, David Joy, Matthew Leotta, Aashish Chaudhary, Anthony Hoogs
Abstract:
Learning from multiple sensors is challenging due to spatio-temporal misalignment and differences in resolution and captured spectra. To that end, we introduce GeoWATCH, a flexible framework for training models on long sequences of satellite images sourced from multiple sensor platforms, which is designed to handle image classification, activity recognition, object detection, or object tracking tasks. Our system includes a novel partial weight loading mechanism based on sub-graph isomorphism which allows for continually training and modifying a network over many training cycles. This has allowed us to train a lineage of models over a long period of time, which we have observed has improved performance as we adjust configurations while maintaining a core backbone.
Authors:Anay Majee, Ryan Sharp, Rishabh Iyer
Abstract:
Confusion and forgetting of object classes have been challenges of prime interest in Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD). To overcome these pitfalls in metric learning based FSOD techniques, we introduce a novel Submodular Mutual Information Learning (SMILe) framework which adopts combinatorial mutual information functions to enforce the creation of tighter and discriminative feature clusters in FSOD. Our proposed approach generalizes to several existing approaches in FSOD, agnostic of the backbone architecture demonstrating elevated performance gains. A paradigm shift from instance based objective functions to combinatorial objectives in SMILe naturally preserves the diversity within an object class resulting in reduced forgetting when subjected to few training examples. Furthermore, the application of mutual information between the already learnt (base) and newly added (novel) objects ensures sufficient separation between base and novel classes, minimizing the effect of class confusion. Experiments on popular FSOD benchmarks, PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO show that our approach generalizes to State-of-the-Art (SoTA) approaches improving their novel class performance by up to 5.7% (3.3 mAP points) and 5.4% (2.6 mAP points) on the 10-shot setting of VOC (split 3) and 30-shot setting of COCO datasets respectively. Our experiments also demonstrate better retention of base class performance and up to 2x faster convergence over existing approaches agnostic of the underlying architecture.
Authors:Zhaowei Wu, Binyi Su, Qichuan Geng, Hua Zhang, Zhong Zhou
Abstract:
Few-shot Open-set Object Detection (FOOD) poses a challenge in many open-world scenarios. It aims to train an open-set detector to detect known objects while rejecting unknowns with scarce training samples. Existing FOOD methods are subject to limited visual information, and often exhibit an ambiguous decision boundary between known and unknown classes. To address these limitations, we propose the first prompt-based few-shot open-set object detection framework, which exploits additional textual information and delves into constructing a robust decision boundary for unknown rejection. Specifically, as no available training data for unknown classes, we select pseudo-unknown samples with Attribution-Gradient based Pseudo-unknown Mining (AGPM), which leverages the discrepancy in attribution gradients to quantify uncertainty. Subsequently, we propose Conditional Evidence Decoupling (CED) to decouple and extract distinct knowledge from selected pseudo-unknown samples by eliminating opposing evidence. This optimization process can enhance the discrimination between known and unknown classes. To further regularize the model and form a robust decision boundary for unknown rejection, we introduce Abnormal Distribution Calibration (ADC) to calibrate the output probability distribution of local abnormal features in pseudo-unknown samples. Our method achieves superior performance over previous state-of-the-art approaches, improving the average recall of unknown class by 7.24% across all shots in VOC10-5-5 dataset settings and 1.38% in VOC-COCO dataset settings. Our source code is available at https://gitee.com/VR_NAVE/ced-food.
Authors:Aditya Jain, Fagner Cunha, Michael Bunsen, Léonard Pasi, Anna Viklund, Maxim Larrivée, David Rolnick
Abstract:
Climate change and other anthropogenic factors have led to a catastrophic decline in insects, endangering both biodiversity and the ecosystem services on which human society depends. Data on insect abundance, however, remains woefully inadequate. Camera traps, conventionally used for monitoring terrestrial vertebrates, are now being modified for insects, especially moths. We describe a complete, open-source machine learning-based software pipeline for automated monitoring of moths via camera traps, including object detection, moth/non-moth classification, fine-grained identification of moth species, and tracking individuals. We believe that our tools, which are already in use across three continents, represent the future of massively scalable data collection in entomology.
Authors:Honglei Zhang, Jukka I. Ahonen, Nam Le, Ruiying Yang, Francesco Cricri
Abstract:
This paper investigates the efficacy of jointly optimizing content-specific post-processing filters to adapt a human oriented video/image codec into a codec suitable for machine vision tasks. By observing that artifacts produced by video/image codecs are content-dependent, we propose a novel training strategy based on competitive learning principles. This strategy assigns training samples to filters dynamically, in a fuzzy manner, which further optimizes the winning filter on the given sample. Inspired by simulated annealing optimization techniques, we employ a softmax function with a temperature variable as the weight allocation function to mitigate the effects of random initialization. Our evaluation, conducted on a system utilizing multiple post-processing filters within a Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codec framework, demonstrates the superiority of content-specific filters trained with our proposed strategies, specifically, when images are processed in blocks. Using VVC reference software VTM 12.0 as the anchor, experiments on the OpenImages dataset show an improvement in the BD-rate reduction from -41.3% and -44.6% to -42.3% and -44.7% for object detection and instance segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to independently trained filters. The statistics of the filter usage align with our hypothesis and underscore the importance of jointly optimizing filters for both content and reconstruction quality. Our findings pave the way for further improving the performance of video/image codecs.
Authors:Tamara R. Lenhard, Andreas Weinmann, Stefan Jäger, Tobias Koch
Abstract:
Predominant methods for image-based drone detection frequently rely on employing generic object detection algorithms like YOLOv5. While proficient in identifying drones against homogeneous backgrounds, these algorithms often struggle in complex, highly textured environments. In such scenarios, drones seamlessly integrate into the background, creating camouflage effects that adversely affect the detection quality. To address this issue, we introduce a novel deep learning architecture called YOLO-FEDER FusionNet. Unlike conventional approaches, YOLO-FEDER FusionNet combines generic object detection methods with the specialized strength of camouflage object detection techniques to enhance drone detection capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations of YOLO-FEDER FusionNet show the efficiency of the proposed model and demonstrate substantial improvements in both reducing missed detections and false alarms.
Authors:Richard Boadu Antwi, Samuel Takyi, Alican Karaer, Eren Erman Ozguven, Michael Kimollo, Ren Moses, Maxim A. Dulebenets, Thobias Sando
Abstract:
Identification of changes in pavement markings has become crucial for infrastructure monitoring, maintenance, development, traffic management, and safety. Automated extraction of roadway geometry is critical in helping with this, given the increasing availability of high-resolution images and advancements in computer vision and object detection. Specifically, due to the substantial volume of satellite and high-resolution aerial images captured at different time instances, change detection has become a viable solution. In this study, an automated framework is developed to detect changes in crosswalks of Orange, Osceola, and Seminole counties in Florida, utilizing data extracted from high-resolution images obtained at various time intervals. Specifically, for Orange County, crosswalk changes between 2019 and 2021 were manually extracted, verified, and categorized as either new or modified crosswalks. For Seminole County, the developed model was used to automatically extract crosswalk changes between 2018 and 2021, while for Osceola County, changes between 2019 and 2020 were extracted. Findings indicate that Orange County witnessed approximately 2,094 crosswalk changes, with 312 occurring on state roads. In Seminole and Osceola counties, on the other hand, 1,040 and 1,402 crosswalk changes were observed on both local and state roads, respectively. Among these, 340 and 344 were identified on state roads in Seminole and Osceola, respectively. Spatiotemporal changes observed in crosswalks can be utilized to regularly update the existing crosswalk inventories, which is essential for agencies engaged in traffic and safety studies. Data extracted from these crosswalk changes can be combined with traffic and crash data to provide valuable insights to policymakers.
Authors:Richard Boadu Antwi, Samuel Takyi, Kimollo Michael, Alican Karaer, Eren Erman Ozguven, Ren Moses, Maxim A. Dulebenets, Thobias Sando
Abstract:
Efficient and current roadway geometry data collection is critical to transportation agencies in road planning, maintenance, design, and rehabilitation. Data collection methods are divided into land-based and aerial-based. Land-based methods for extensive highway networks are tedious, costly, pose safety risks. Therefore, there is the need for efficient, safe, and economical data acquisition methodologies. The rise of computer vision and object detection technologies have made automated extraction of roadway geometry features feasible. This study detects roadway features on Florida's public roads from high-resolution aerial images using AI. The developed model achieved an average accuracy of 80.4 percent when compared with ground truth data. The extracted roadway geometry data can be integrated with crash and traffic data to provide valuable insights to policymakers and roadway users.
Authors:Tjeard van Oort, Dimity Miller, Will N. Browne, Nicolas Marticorena, Jesse Haviland, Niko Suenderhauf
Abstract:
Many robotic tasks require grasping objects at specific object parts instead of arbitrarily, a crucial capability for interactions beyond simple pick-and-place, such as human-robot interaction, handovers, or tool use. Prior work has focused either on generic grasp prediction or task-conditioned grasping, but not on directly targeting object parts in an open-vocabulary way. We propose AnyPart, a modular framework that unifies open-vocabulary object detection, part segmentation, and 6-DoF grasp prediction to enable robots to grasp user-specified parts of arbitrary objects based on natural language prompts. We evaluate 16 model combinations, and demonstrate that the best-performing combination achieves 60.8% grasp success in cluttered real-world scenes at 60 times faster inference than existing approaches. To support this study, we introduce a new dataset for part-based grasping and conduct a detailed failure analysis. Our core insight is that modularly combining existing foundation models unlocks surprisingly strong and efficient capabilities for open-vocabulary part-based grasping without requiring additional training.
Authors:Qutub Syed Sha, Michael Paulitsch, Karthik Pattabiraman, Korbinian Hagn, Fabian Oboril, Cornelius Buerkle, Kay-Ulrich Scholl, Gereon Hinz, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
As transformer-based object detection models progress, their impact in critical sectors like autonomous vehicles and aviation is expected to grow. Soft errors causing bit flips during inference have significantly impacted DNN performance, altering predictions. Traditional range restriction solutions for CNNs fall short for transformers. This study introduces the Global Clipper and Global Hybrid Clipper, effective mitigation strategies specifically designed for transformer-based models. It significantly enhances their resilience to soft errors and reduces faulty inferences to ~ 0\%. We also detail extensive testing across over 64 scenarios involving two transformer models (DINO-DETR and Lite-DETR) and two CNN models (YOLOv3 and SSD) using three datasets, totalling approximately 3.3 million inferences, to assess model robustness comprehensively. Moreover, the paper explores unique aspects of attention blocks in transformers and their operational differences from CNNs.
Authors:Qutub Syed, Michael Paulitsch, Korbinian Hagn, Neslihan Kose Cihangir, Kay-Ulrich Scholl, Fabian Oboril, Gereon Hinz, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
We introduce Situation Monitor, a novel zero-shot Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection approach for transformer-based object detection models to enhance reliability in safety-critical machine learning applications such as autonomous driving. The Situation Monitor utilizes the Diversity-based Budding Ensemble Architecture (DBEA) and increases the OOD performance by integrating a diversity loss into the training process on top of the budding ensemble architecture, detecting Far-OOD samples and minimizing false positives on Near-OOD samples. Moreover, utilizing the resulting DBEA increases the model's OOD performance and improves the calibration of confidence scores, particularly concerning the intersection over union of the detected objects. The DBEA model achieves these advancements with a 14% reduction in trainable parameters compared to the vanilla model. This signifies a substantial improvement in efficiency without compromising the model's ability to detect OOD instances and calibrate the confidence scores accurately.
Authors:Jinzhong Wang, Xuetao Tian, Shun Dai, Tao Zhuo, Haorui Zeng, Hongjuan Liu, Jiaqi Liu, Xiuwei Zhang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract:
Multispectral object detection, utilizing both visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (T) modals, has garnered significant attention for its robust performance across diverse weather and lighting conditions. However, effectively exploiting the complementarity between RGB-T modals while maintaining efficiency remains a critical challenge. In this paper, a very simple Group Shuffled Multi-receptive Attention (GSMA) module is proposed to extract and combine multi-scale RGB and thermal features. Then, the extracted multi-modal features are directly integrated with a multi-level path aggregation neck, which significantly improves the fusion effect and efficiency. Meanwhile, multi-modal object detection often adopts union annotations for both modals. This kind of supervision is not sufficient and unfair, since objects observed in one modal may not be seen in the other modal. To solve this issue, Multi-modal Supervision (MS) is proposed to sufficiently supervise RGB-T object detection. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging benchmarks, KAIST and DroneVehicle, demonstrate the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining competitive efficiency.
Authors:Xingyu Ding, Lianlei Shan, Guiqin Zhao, Meiqi Wu, Wenzhang Zhou, Wei Li
Abstract:
Deep learning-based information processing consumes long time and requires huge computing resources, especially for dense prediction tasks which require an output for each pixel, like semantic segmentation and salient object detection. There are mainly two challenges for quantization of dense prediction tasks. Firstly, directly applying the upsampling operation that dense prediction tasks require is extremely crude and causes unacceptable accuracy reduction. Secondly, the complex structure of dense prediction networks means it is difficult to maintain a fast speed as well as a high accuracy when performing quantization. In this paper, we propose an effective upsampling method and an efficient attention computation strategy to transfer the success of the binary neural networks (BNN) from single prediction tasks to dense prediction tasks. Firstly, we design a simple and robust multi-branch parallel upsampling structure to achieve the high accuracy. Then we further optimize the attention method which plays an important role in segmentation but has huge computation complexity. Our attention method can reduce the computational complexity by a factor of one hundred times but retain the original effect. Experiments on Cityscapes, KITTI road, and ECSSD fully show the effectiveness of our work.
Authors:Yusaku Ando, Miya Nakajima, Takahiro Saitoh, Tsuyoshi Kato
Abstract:
In recent years, the deterioration of artificial materials used in structures has become a serious social issue, increasing the importance of inspections. Non-destructive testing is gaining increased demand due to its capability to inspect for defects and deterioration in structures while preserving their functionality. Among these, Laser Ultrasonic Visualization Testing (LUVT) stands out because it allows the visualization of ultrasonic propagation. This makes it visually straightforward to detect defects, thereby enhancing inspection efficiency. With the increasing number of the deterioration structures, challenges such as a shortage of inspectors and increased workload in non-destructive testing have become more apparent. Efforts to address these challenges include exploring automated inspection using machine learning. However, the lack of anomalous data with defects poses a barrier to improving the accuracy of automated inspection through machine learning. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method for automated LUVT inspection using an anomaly detection approach with a diffusion model that can be trained solely on negative examples (defect-free data). We experimentally confirmed that our proposed method improves defect detection and localization compared to general object detection algorithms used previously.
Authors:Ted Lentsch, Holger Caesar, Dariu M. Gavrila
Abstract:
Unsupervised 3D object detection methods have emerged to leverage vast amounts of data without requiring manual labels for training. Recent approaches rely on dynamic objects for learning to detect mobile objects but penalize the detections of static instances during training. Multiple rounds of self-training are used to add detected static instances to the set of training targets; this procedure to improve performance is computationally expensive. To address this, we propose the method UNION. We use spatial clustering and self-supervised scene flow to obtain a set of static and dynamic object proposals from LiDAR. Subsequently, object proposals' visual appearances are encoded to distinguish static objects in the foreground and background by selecting static instances that are visually similar to dynamic objects. As a result, static and dynamic mobile objects are obtained together, and existing detectors can be trained with a single training. In addition, we extend 3D object discovery to detection by using object appearance-based cluster labels as pseudo-class labels for training object classification. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and increase the state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised 3D object discovery, i.e. UNION more than doubles the average precision to 39.5. The code is available at github.com/TedLentsch/UNION.
Authors:Bipin Saha, Md. Johirul Islam, Shaikh Khaled Mostaque, Aditya Bhowmik, Tapodhir Karmakar Taton, Md. Nakib Hayat Chowdhury, Mamun Bin Ibne Reaz
Abstract:
The success of autonomous navigation relies on robust and precise vehicle recognition, hindered by the scarcity of region-specific vehicle detection datasets, impeding the development of context-aware systems. To advance terrestrial object detection research, this paper proposes a native vehicle detection dataset for the most commonly appeared vehicle classes in Bangladesh. 17 distinct vehicle classes have been taken into account, with fully annotated 81542 instances of 17326 images. Each image width is set to at least 1280px. The dataset's average vehicle bounding box-to-image ratio is 4.7036. This Bangladesh Native Vehicle Dataset (BNVD) has accounted for several geographical, illumination, variety of vehicle sizes, and orientations to be more robust on surprised scenarios. In the context of examining the BNVD dataset, this work provides a thorough assessment with four successive You Only Look Once (YOLO) models, namely YOLO v5, v6, v7, and v8. These dataset's effectiveness is methodically evaluated and contrasted with other vehicle datasets already in use. The BNVD dataset exhibits mean average precision(mAP) at 50% intersection over union (IoU) is 0.848 corresponding precision and recall values of 0.841 and 0.774. The research findings indicate a mAP of 0.643 at an IoU range of 0.5 to 0.95. The experiments show that the BNVD dataset serves as a reliable representation of vehicle distribution and presents considerable complexities.
Authors:Abdul Hannan Khan, Syed Tahseen Raza Rizvi, Dheeraj Varma Chittari Macharavtu, Andreas Dengel
Abstract:
Autonomous driving systems require a quick and robust perception of the nearby environment to carry out their routines effectively. With the aim to avoid collisions and drive safely, autonomous driving systems rely heavily on object detection. However, 2D object detections alone are insufficient; more information, such as relative velocity and distance, is required for safer planning. Monocular 3D object detectors try to solve this problem by directly predicting 3D bounding boxes and object velocities given a camera image. Recent research estimates time-to-contact in a per-pixel manner and suggests that it is more effective measure than velocity and depth combined. However, per-pixel time-to-contact requires object detection to serve its purpose effectively and hence increases overall computational requirements as two different models need to run. To address this issue, we propose per-object time-to-contact estimation by extending object detection models to additionally predict the time-to-contact attribute for each object. We compare our proposed approach with existing time-to-contact methods and provide benchmarking results on well-known datasets. Our proposed approach achieves higher precision compared to prior art while using a single image.
Authors:Dehong Kong, Siyuan Liang, Wenqi Ren
Abstract:
Object detection techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Nonetheless, adversarial patches generated by existing algorithms in the UAV domain pay very little attention to the naturalness of adversarial patches. Moreover, imposing constraints directly on adversarial patches makes it difficult to generate patches that appear natural to the human eye while ensuring a high attack success rate. We notice that patches are natural looking when their overall color is consistent with the environment. Therefore, we propose a new method named Environmental Matching Attack(EMA) to address the issue of optimizing the adversarial patch under the constraints of color. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to consider natural patches in the domain of UAVs. The EMA method exploits strong prior knowledge of a pretrained stable diffusion to guide the optimization direction of the adversarial patch, where the text guidance can restrict the color of the patch. To better match the environment, the contrast and brightness of the patch are appropriately adjusted. Instead of optimizing the adversarial patch itself, we optimize an adversarial perturbation patch which initializes to zero so that the model can better trade off attacking performance and naturalness. Experiments conducted on the DroneVehicle and Carpk datasets have shown that our work can reach nearly the same attack performance in the digital attack(no greater than 2 in mAP$\%$), surpass the baseline method in the physical specific scenarios, and exhibit a significant advantage in terms of naturalness in visualization and color difference with the environment.
Authors:Houze Liu, Chongqing Wang, Xiaoan Zhan, Haotian Zheng, Chang Che
Abstract:
Robust 3D object detection remains a pivotal concern in the domain of autonomous field robotics. Despite notable enhancements in detection accuracy across standard datasets, real-world urban environments, characterized by their unstructured and dynamic nature, frequently precipitate an elevated incidence of false positives, thereby undermining the reliability of existing detection paradigms. In this context, our study introduces an advanced post-processing algorithm that modulates detection thresholds dynamically relative to the distance from the ego object. Traditional perception systems typically utilize a uniform threshold, which often leads to decreased efficacy in detecting distant objects. In contrast, our proposed methodology employs a Neural Network with a self-adaptive thresholding mechanism that significantly attenuates false negatives while concurrently diminishing false positives, particularly in complex urban settings. Empirical results substantiate that our algorithm not only augments the performance of 3D object detection models in diverse urban and adverse weather scenarios but also establishes a new benchmark for adaptive thresholding techniques in field robotics.
Authors:Florentina Tatrin Kurniati, Daniel HF Manongga, Irwan Sembiring, Sutarto Wijono, Roy Rudolf Huizen
Abstract:
Object detection plays an important role in various fields. Developing detection models for 2D objects that experience rotation and texture variations is a challenge. In this research, the initial stage of the proposed model integrates the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and local binary patterns (LBP) texture feature extraction to obtain feature vectors. The next stage is classifying features using k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and random forest (RF), as well as voting ensemble (VE). System testing used a dataset of 4,437 2D images, the results for KNN accuracy were 92.7% and F1-score 92.5%, while RF performance was lower. Although GLCM features improve performance on both algorithms, KNN is more consistent. The VE approach provides the best performance with an accuracy of 93.9% and an F1 score of 93.8%, this shows the effectiveness of the ensemble technique in increasing object detection accuracy. This study contributes to the field of object detection with a new approach combining GLCM and LBP as feature vectors as well as VE for classification
Authors:Nianchang Huang, Yang Yang, Ruida Xi, Qiang Zhang, Jungong Han, Jin Huang
Abstract:
Toward desirable saliency prediction, the types and numbers of inputs for a salient object detection (SOD) algorithm may dynamically change in many real-life applications. However, existing SOD algorithms are mainly designed or trained for one particular type of inputs, failing to be generalized to other types of inputs. Consequentially, more types of SOD algorithms need to be prepared in advance for handling different types of inputs, raising huge hardware and research costs. Differently, in this paper, we propose a new type of SOD task, termed Arbitrary Modality SOD (AM SOD). The most prominent characteristics of AM SOD are that the modality types and modality numbers will be arbitrary or dynamically changed. The former means that the inputs to the AM SOD algorithm may be arbitrary modalities such as RGB, depths, or even any combination of them. While, the latter indicates that the inputs may have arbitrary modality numbers as the input type is changed, e.g. single-modality RGB image, dual-modality RGB-Depth (RGB-D) images or triple-modality RGB-Depth-Thermal (RGB-D-T) images. Accordingly, a preliminary solution to the above challenges, ı.e. a modality switch network (MSN), is proposed in this paper. In particular, a modality switch feature extractor (MSFE) is first designed to extract discriminative features from each modality effectively by introducing some modality indicators, which will generate some weights for modality switching. Subsequently, a dynamic fusion module (DFM) is proposed to adaptively fuse features from a variable number of modalities based on a novel Transformer structure. Finally, a new dataset, named AM-XD, is constructed to facilitate research on AM SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AM SOD method can effectively cope with changes in the type and number of input modalities for robust salient object detection.
Authors:Nianchang Huang, Yang Yang, Qiang Zhang, Jungong Han, Jin Huang
Abstract:
This paper delves into the task of arbitrary modality salient object detection (AM SOD), aiming to detect salient objects from arbitrary modalities, eg RGB images, RGB-D images, and RGB-D-T images. A novel modality-adaptive Transformer (MAT) will be proposed to investigate two fundamental challenges of AM SOD, ie more diverse modality discrepancies caused by varying modality types that need to be processed, and dynamic fusion design caused by an uncertain number of modalities present in the inputs of multimodal fusion strategy. Specifically, inspired by prompt learning's ability of aligning the distributions of pre-trained models to the characteristic of downstream tasks by learning some prompts, MAT will first present a modality-adaptive feature extractor (MAFE) to tackle the diverse modality discrepancies by introducing a modality prompt for each modality. In the training stage, a new modality translation contractive (MTC) loss will be further designed to assist MAFE in learning those modality-distinguishable modality prompts. Accordingly, in the testing stage, MAFE can employ those learned modality prompts to adaptively adjust its feature space according to the characteristics of the input modalities, thus being able to extract discriminative unimodal features. Then, MAFE will present a channel-wise and spatial-wise fusion hybrid (CSFH) strategy to meet the demand for dynamic fusion. For that, CSFH dedicates a channel-wise dynamic fusion module (CDFM) and a novel spatial-wise dynamic fusion module (SDFM) to fuse the unimodal features from varying numbers of modalities and meanwhile effectively capture cross-modal complementary semantic and detail information, respectively. Moreover, CSFH will carefully align CDFM and SDFM to different levels of unimodal features based on their characteristics for more effective complementary information exploitation.
Authors:Amirhosein Toosi, Isaac Shiri, Habib Zaidi, Arman Rahmim
Abstract:
We introduce an innovative, simple, effective segmentation-free approach for outcome prediction in head \& neck cancer (HNC) patients. By harnessing deep learning-based feature extraction techniques and multi-angle maximum intensity projections (MA-MIPs) applied to Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) volumes, our proposed method eliminates the need for manual segmentations of regions-of-interest (ROIs) such as primary tumors and involved lymph nodes. Instead, a state-of-the-art object detection model is trained to perform automatic cropping of the head and neck region on the PET volumes. A pre-trained deep convolutional neural network backbone is then utilized to extract deep features from MA-MIPs obtained from 72 multi-angel axial rotations of the cropped PET volumes. These deep features extracted from multiple projection views of the PET volumes are then aggregated and fused, and employed to perform recurrence-free survival analysis on a cohort of 489 HNC patients. The proposed approach outperforms the best performing method on the target dataset for the task of recurrence-free survival analysis. By circumventing the manual delineation of the malignancies on the FDG PET-CT images, our approach eliminates the dependency on subjective interpretations and highly enhances the reproducibility of the proposed survival analysis method.
Authors:Selva Kumar S, Afifah Khan Mohammed Ajmal Khan, Imadh Ajaz Banday, Manikantha Gada, Vibha Venkatesh Shanbhag
Abstract:
This research introduces an innovative AI-driven precision agriculture system, leveraging YOLOv8 for disease identification and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for context-aware diagnosis. Focused on addressing the challenges of diseases affecting the coffee production sector in Karnataka, The system integrates sophisticated object detection techniques with language models to address the inherent constraints associated with Large Language Models (LLMs). Our methodology not only tackles the issue of hallucinations in LLMs, but also introduces dynamic disease identification and remediation strategies. Real-time monitoring, collaborative dataset expansion, and organizational involvement ensure the system's adaptability in diverse agricultural settings. The effect of the suggested system extends beyond automation, aiming to secure food supplies, protect livelihoods, and promote eco-friendly farming practices. By facilitating precise disease identification, the system contributes to sustainable and environmentally conscious agriculture, reducing reliance on pesticides. Looking to the future, the project envisions continuous development in RAG-integrated object detection systems, emphasizing scalability, reliability, and usability. This research strives to be a beacon for positive change in agriculture, aligning with global efforts toward sustainable and technologically enhanced food production.
Authors:Oded Bialer, Yuval Haitman
Abstract:
Object detection in radar imagery with neural networks shows great potential for improving autonomous driving. However, obtaining annotated datasets from real radar images, crucial for training these networks, is challenging, especially in scenarios with long-range detection and adverse weather and lighting conditions where radar performance excels. To address this challenge, we present RadSimReal, an innovative physical radar simulation capable of generating synthetic radar images with accompanying annotations for various radar types and environmental conditions, all without the need for real data collection. Remarkably, our findings demonstrate that training object detection models on RadSimReal data and subsequently evaluating them on real-world data produce performance levels comparable to models trained and tested on real data from the same dataset, and even achieves better performance when testing across different real datasets. RadSimReal offers advantages over other physical radar simulations that it does not necessitate knowledge of the radar design details, which are often not disclosed by radar suppliers, and has faster run-time. This innovative tool has the potential to advance the development of computer vision algorithms for radar-based autonomous driving applications.
Authors:Yuval Haitman, Oded Bialer
Abstract:
Automotive radars have an important role in autonomous driving systems. The main challenge in automotive radar detection is the radar's wide point spread function (PSF) in the angular domain that causes blurriness and clutter in the radar image. Numerous studies suggest employing an 'end-to-end' learning strategy using a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to directly detect objects from radar images. This approach implicitly addresses the PSF's impact on objects of interest. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, which we term "Boosting Radar Reflections" (BoostRad). In BoostRad, a first DNN is trained to narrow the PSF for all the reflection points in the scene. The output of the first DNN is a boosted reflection image with higher resolution and reduced clutter, resulting in a sharper and cleaner image. Subsequently, a second DNN is employed to detect objects within the boosted reflection image. We develop a novel method for training the boosting DNN that incorporates domain knowledge of radar's PSF characteristics. BoostRad's performance is evaluated using the RADDet and CARRADA datasets, revealing its superiority over reference methods.
Authors:Cong Fan, Shengkai Zhang, Kezhong Liu, Shuai Wang, Zheng Yang, Wei Wang
Abstract:
Complementary to prevalent LiDAR and camera systems, millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar is robust to adverse weather conditions like fog, rainstorms, and blizzards but offers sparse point clouds. Current techniques enhance the point cloud by the supervision of LiDAR's data. However, high-performance LiDAR is notably expensive and is not commonly available on vehicles. This paper presents mmEMP, a supervised learning approach that enhances radar point clouds using a low-cost camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU), enabling crowdsourcing training data from commercial vehicles. Bringing the visual-inertial (VI) supervision is challenging due to the spatial agnostic of dynamic objects. Moreover, spurious radar points from the curse of RF multipath make robots misunderstand the scene. mmEMP first devises a dynamic 3D reconstruction algorithm that restores the 3D positions of dynamic features. Then, we design a neural network that densifies radar data and eliminates spurious radar points. We build a new dataset in the real world. Extensive experiments show that mmEMP achieves competitive performance compared with the SOTA approach training by LiDAR's data. In addition, we use the enhanced point cloud to perform object detection, localization, and mapping to demonstrate mmEMP's effectiveness.
Authors:Zhiqiang Tang, Haoyang Fang, Su Zhou, Taojiannan Yang, Zihan Zhong, Tony Hu, Katrin Kirchhoff, George Karypis
Abstract:
AutoGluon-Multimodal (AutoMM) is introduced as an open-source AutoML library designed specifically for multimodal learning. Distinguished by its exceptional ease of use, AutoMM enables fine-tuning of foundation models with just three lines of code. Supporting various modalities including image, text, and tabular data, both independently and in combination, the library offers a comprehensive suite of functionalities spanning classification, regression, object detection, semantic matching, and image segmentation. Experiments across diverse datasets and tasks showcases AutoMM's superior performance in basic classification and regression tasks compared to existing AutoML tools, while also demonstrating competitive results in advanced tasks, aligning with specialized toolboxes designed for such purposes.
Authors:Ganesh Sistu, Senthil Yogamani
Abstract:
Object detection is a mature problem in autonomous driving with pedestrian detection being one of the first deployed algorithms. It has been comprehensively studied in the literature. However, object detection is relatively less explored for fisheye cameras used for surround-view near field sensing. The standard bounding box representation fails in fisheye cameras due to heavy radial distortion, particularly in the periphery. To mitigate this, we explore extending the standard object detection output representation of bounding box. We design rotated bounding boxes, ellipse, generic polygon as polar arc/angle representations and define an instance segmentation mIOU metric to analyze these representations. The proposed model FisheyeDetNet with polygon outperforms others and achieves a mAP score of 49.5 % on Valeo fisheye surround-view dataset for automated driving applications. This dataset has 60K images captured from 4 surround-view cameras across Europe, North America and Asia. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study on object detection on fisheye cameras for autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors:Christopher Lang, Alexander Braun, Lars Schillingmann, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Multi-task networks can potentially improve performance and computational efficiency compared to single-task networks, facilitating online deployment. However, current multi-task architectures in point cloud perception combine multiple task-specific point cloud representations, each requiring a separate feature encoder and making the network structures bulky and slow. We propose PAttFormer, an efficient multi-task architecture for joint semantic segmentation and object detection in point clouds that only relies on a point-based representation. The network builds on transformer-based feature encoders using neighborhood attention and grid-pooling and a query-based detection decoder using a novel 3D deformable-attention detection head design. Unlike other LiDAR-based multi-task architectures, our proposed PAttFormer does not require separate feature encoders for multiple task-specific point cloud representations, resulting in a network that is 3x smaller and 1.4x faster while achieving competitive performance on the nuScenes and KITTI benchmarks for autonomous driving perception. Our extensive evaluations show substantial gains from multi-task learning, improving LiDAR semantic segmentation by +1.7% in mIou and 3D object detection by +1.7% in mAP on the nuScenes benchmark compared to the single-task models.
Authors:Yang Hu, Jinxia Zhang, Kaihua Zhang, Yin Yuan, Jiale Huang, Zechao Zhan, Xing Wang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) remains a challenging task in computer vision. Existing methods often resort to additional branches for edge supervision, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this, we propose the Co-Supervised Spotlight Shifting Network (CS$^3$Net), a compact single-branch framework inspired by how shifting light source exposes camouflage. Our spotlight shifting strategy replaces multi-branch designs by generating supervisory signals that highlight boundary cues. Within CS$^3$Net, a Projection Aware Attention (PAA) module is devised to strengthen feature extraction, while the Extended Neighbor Connection Decoder (ENCD) enhances final predictions. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that CS$^3$Net not only achieves superior performance, but also reduces Multiply-Accumulate operations (MACs) by 32.13% compared to state-of-the-art COD methods, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and effectiveness.
Authors:Riza Velioglu, Robin Chan, Barbara Hammer
Abstract:
In the realm of fashion object detection and segmentation for online shopping images, existing state-of-the-art fashion parsing models encounter limitations, particularly when exposed to non-model-worn apparel and close-up shots. To address these failures, we introduce FashionFail; a new fashion dataset with e-commerce images for object detection and segmentation. The dataset is efficiently curated using our novel annotation tool that leverages recent foundation models. The primary objective of FashionFail is to serve as a test bed for evaluating the robustness of models. Our analysis reveals the shortcomings of leading models, such as Attribute-Mask R-CNN and Fashionformer. Additionally, we propose a baseline approach using naive data augmentation to mitigate common failure cases and improve model robustness. Through this work, we aim to inspire and support further research in fashion item detection and segmentation for industrial applications. The dataset, annotation tool, code, and models are available at \url{https://rizavelioglu.github.io/fashionfail/}.
Authors:Poulami Sinhamahapatra, Franziska Schwaiger, Shirsha Bose, Huiyu Wang, Karsten Roscher, Stephan Guennemann
Abstract:
Detecting and localising unknown or out-of-distribution (OOD) objects in any scene can be a challenging task in vision, particularly in safety-critical cases involving autonomous systems like automated vehicles or trains. Supervised anomaly segmentation or open-world object detection models depend on training on exhaustively annotated datasets for every domain and still struggle in distinguishing between background and OOD objects. In this work, we present a plug-and-play framework - PRototype-based OOD detection Without Labels (PROWL). It is an inference-based method that does not require training on the domain dataset and relies on extracting relevant features from self-supervised pre-trained models. PROWL can be easily adapted to detect in-domain objects in any operational design domain (ODD) in a zero-shot manner by specifying a list of known classes from this domain. PROWL, as a first zero-shot unsupervised method, achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoadAnomaly and RoadObstacle datasets provided in road driving benchmarks - SegmentMeIfYouCan (SMIYC) and Fishyscapes, as well as comparable performance against existing supervised methods trained without auxiliary OOD data. We also demonstrate its generalisability to other domains such as rail and maritime.
Authors:Jaemin Kang, Hoeseok Yang, Hyungshin Kim
Abstract:
Deep learning has been successfully applied to object detection from remotely sensed images. Images are typically processed on the ground rather than on-board due to the computation power of the ground system. Such offloaded processing causes delays in acquiring target mission information, which hinders its application to real-time use cases. For on-device object detection, researches have been conducted on designing efficient detectors or model compression to reduce inference latency. However, highly accurate two-stage detectors still need further exploitation for acceleration. In this paper, we propose a model simplification method for two-stage object detectors. Instead of constructing a general feature pyramid, we utilize only one feature extraction in the two-stage detector. To compensate for the accuracy drop, we apply a high pass filter to the RPN's score map. Our approach is applicable to any two-stage detector using a feature pyramid network. In the experiments with state-of-the-art two-stage detectors such as ReDet, Oriented-RCNN, and LSKNet, our method reduced computation costs upto 61.2% with the accuracy loss within 2.1% on the DOTAv1.5 dataset. Source code will be released.
Authors:Florentina Tatrin Kurniati, Daniel HF Manongga, Eko Sediyono, Sri Yulianto Joko Prasetyo, Roy Rudolf Huizen
Abstract:
In the era of modern technology, object detection using the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) extraction method plays a crucial role in object recognition processes. It finds applications in real-time scenarios such as security surveillance and autonomous vehicle navigation, among others. Computational efficiency becomes a critical factor in achieving real-time object detection. Hence, there is a need for a detection model with low complexity and satisfactory accuracy. This research aims to enhance computational efficiency by selecting appropriate features within the GLCM framework. Two classification models, namely K-Nearest Neighbours (K-NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), were employed, with the results indicating that K-Nearest Neighbours (K-NN) outperforms SVM in terms of computational complexity. Specifically, K-NN, when utilizing a combination of Correlation, Energy, and Homogeneity features, achieves a 100% accuracy rate with low complexity. Moreover, when using a combination of Energy and Homogeneity features, K-NN attains an almost perfect accuracy level of 99.9889%, while maintaining low complexity. On the other hand, despite SVM achieving 100% accuracy in certain feature combinations, its high or very high complexity can pose challenges, particularly in real-time applications. Therefore, based on the trade-off between accuracy and complexity, the K-NN model with a combination of Correlation, Energy, and Homogeneity features emerges as a more suitable choice for real-time applications that demand high accuracy and low complexity. This research provides valuable insights for optimizing object detection in various applications requiring both high accuracy and rapid responsiveness.
Authors:Martin Cooney, Lena Klasén, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez
Abstract:
Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly underrepresented in robotics. Here we used a speculative prototyping approach to explore this expansive design space: First, we identified some potential challenges of interest, including crimes and illnesses that disproportionately affect women, as well as potential opportunities for designers, which were visualized in five sketches. Then, one of the sketched scenarios was further explored by developing a prototype, of a robotic helper drone equipped with computer vision to detect hidden cameras that could be used to spy on women. While object detection introduced some errors, hidden cameras were identified with a reasonable accuracy of 80% (Intersection over Union (IoU) score: 0.40). Our aim is that the identified challenges and opportunities could help spark discussion and inspire designers, toward realizing a safer, more inclusive future through responsible use of technology.
Authors:Jyun-An Lin, Yun-Chien Cheng, Ching-Kai Lin
Abstract:
This study aims to establish a computer-aided diagnostic system for lung lesions using endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) to assist physicians in identifying lesion areas. During EBUS-transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) procedures, hysicians rely on grayscale ultrasound images to determine the location of lesions. However, these images often contain significant noise and can be influenced by surrounding tissues or blood vessels, making identification challenging. Previous research has lacked the application of object detection models to EBUS-TBNA, and there has been no well-defined solution for the lack of annotated data in the EBUS-TBNA dataset. In related studies on ultrasound images, although models have been successful in capturing target regions for their respective tasks, their training and predictions have been based on two-dimensional images, limiting their ability to leverage temporal features for improved predictions. This study introduces a three-dimensional video-based object detection model. It first generates a set of improved queries using a diffusion model, then captures temporal correlations through an attention mechanism. A filtering mechanism selects relevant information from previous frames to pass to the current frame. Subsequently, a teacher-student model training approach is employed to further optimize the model using unlabeled data. By incorporating various data augmentation and feature alignment, the model gains robustness against interference. Test results demonstrate that this model, which captures spatiotemporal information and employs semi-supervised learning methods, achieves an Average Precision (AP) of 48.7 on the test dataset, outperforming other models. It also achieves an Average Recall (AR) of 79.2, significantly leading over existing models.
Authors:Ioanna Souvatzoglou, Athanasios Papadimitriou, Aitzan Sari, Vasileios Vlagkoulis, Mihalis Psarakis
Abstract:
Neural Networks (NNs) are increasingly used in the last decade in several demanding applications, such as object detection and classification, autonomous driving, etc. Among different computing platforms for implementing NNs, FPGAs have multiple advantages due to design flexibility and high performance-to-watt ratio. Moreover, approximation techniques, such as quantization, have been introduced, which reduce the computational and storage requirements, thus enabling the integration of larger NNs into FPGA devices. On the other hand, FPGAs are sensitive to radiation-induced Single Event Upsets (SEUs). In this work, we perform an in-depth reliability analysis in an FPGA-based Binarized Fully Connected Neural Network (BNN) accelerator running a statistical fault injection campaign. The BNN benchmark has been produced by FINN, an open-source framework that provides an end-to-end flow from abstract level to design, making it easy to design customized FPGA NN accelerators, while it also supports various approximation techniques. The campaign includes the injection of faults in the configuration memory of a state-of-the-art Xilinx Ultrascale+ FPGA running the BNN, as well an exhaustive fault injection in the user flip flops. We have analyzed the fault injection results characterizing the SEU vulnerability of the circuit per network layer, per clock cycle, and register. In general, the results show that the BNNs are inherently resilient to soft errors, since a low portion of SEUs in the configuration memory and the flip flops, cause system crashes or misclassification errors.
Authors:Kyunghyun Lee, Ukcheol Shin, Byeong-Uk Lee
Abstract:
Adjusting camera exposure in arbitrary lighting conditions is the first step to ensure the functionality of computer vision applications. Poorly adjusted camera exposure often leads to critical failure and performance degradation. Traditional camera exposure control methods require multiple convergence steps and time-consuming processes, making them unsuitable for dynamic lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a new camera exposure control framework that rapidly controls camera exposure while performing real-time processing by exploiting deep reinforcement learning. The proposed framework consists of four contributions: 1) a simplified training ground to simulate real-world's diverse and dynamic lighting changes, 2) flickering and image attribute-aware reward design, along with lightweight state design for real-time processing, 3) a static-to-dynamic lighting curriculum to gradually improve the agent's exposure-adjusting capability, and 4) domain randomization techniques to alleviate the limitation of the training ground and achieve seamless generalization in the wild.As a result, our proposed method rapidly reaches a desired exposure level within five steps with real-time processing (1 ms). Also, the acquired images are well-exposed and show superiority in various computer vision tasks, such as feature extraction and object detection.
Authors:Mikhail Kennerley, Jian-Gang Wang, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Robby T. Tan
Abstract:
Domain adaptive object detection aims to adapt detection models to domains where annotated data is unavailable. Existing methods have been proposed to address the domain gap using the semi-supervised student-teacher framework. However, a fundamental issue arises from the class imbalance in the labelled training set, which can result in inaccurate pseudo-labels. The relationship between classes, especially where one class is a majority and the other minority, has a large impact on class bias. We propose Class-Aware Teacher (CAT) to address the class bias issue in the domain adaptation setting. In our work, we approximate the class relationships with our Inter-Class Relation module (ICRm) and exploit it to reduce the bias within the model. In this way, we are able to apply augmentations to highly related classes, both inter- and intra-domain, to boost the performance of minority classes while having minimal impact on majority classes. We further reduce the bias by implementing a class-relation weight to our classification loss. Experiments conducted on various datasets and ablation studies show that our method is able to address the class bias in the domain adaptation setting. On the Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes dataset, we attained a 52.5 mAP, a substantial improvement over the 51.2 mAP achieved by the state-of-the-art method.
Authors:Junjie Wen, Jinqiang Cui, Benyun Zhao, Bingxin Han, Xuchen Liu, Zhi Gao, Ben M. Chen
Abstract:
In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, its practical utility for high-level vision tasks, such as underwater object detection (UOD) in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), remains relatively unexplored. It may be attributed to several factors: (1) Existing methods typically employ UIE as a pre-processing step, which inevitably introduces considerable computational overhead and latency. (2) The process of enhancing images prior to training object detectors may not necessarily yield performance improvements. (3) The complex underwater environments can induce significant domain shifts across different scenarios, seriously deteriorating the UOD performance. To address these challenges, we introduce EnYOLO, an integrated real-time framework designed for simultaneous UIE and UOD with domain-adaptation capability. Specifically, both the UIE and UOD task heads share the same network backbone and utilize a lightweight design. Furthermore, to ensure balanced training for both tasks, we present a multi-stage training strategy aimed at consistently enhancing their performance. Additionally, we propose a novel domain-adaptation strategy to align feature embeddings originating from diverse underwater environments. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework not only achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both UIE and UOD tasks, but also shows superior adaptability when applied to different underwater scenarios. Our efficiency analysis further highlights the substantial potential of our framework for onboard deployment.
Authors:Chihiro Noguchi, Toshiaki Ohgushi, Masao Yamanaka
Abstract:
The detection of unknown traffic obstacles is vital to ensure safe autonomous driving. The standard object-detection methods cannot identify unknown objects that are not included under predefined categories. This is because object-detection methods are trained to assign a background label to pixels corresponding to the presence of unknown objects. To address this problem, the pixel-wise anomaly-detection approach has attracted increased research attention. Anomaly-detection techniques, such as uncertainty estimation and perceptual difference from reconstructed images, make it possible to identify pixels of unknown objects as out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, when applied to images with many unknowns and complex components, such as driving scenes, these methods often exhibit unstable performance. The purpose of this study is to achieve stable performance for detecting unknown objects by incorporating the object-detection fashions into the pixel-wise anomaly detection methods. To achieve this goal, we adopt a semantic-segmentation network with a sigmoid head that simultaneously provides pixel-wise anomaly scores and objectness scores. Our experimental results show that the objectness scores play an important role in improving the detection performance. Based on these results, we propose a novel anomaly score by integrating these two scores, which we term as unknown objectness score. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods when applied to the publicly available datasets.
Authors:Maciej K Wozniak, Mattias Hansson, Marko Thiel, Patric Jensfelt
Abstract:
In this study, we address a gap in existing unsupervised domain adaptation approaches on LiDAR-based 3D object detection, which have predominantly concentrated on adapting between established, high-density autonomous driving datasets. We focus on sparser point clouds, capturing scenarios from different perspectives: not just from vehicles on the road but also from mobile robots on sidewalks, which encounter significantly different environmental conditions and sensor configurations. We introduce Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection (UADA3D). UADA3D does not depend on pre-trained source models or teacher-student architectures. Instead, it uses an adversarial approach to directly learn domain-invariant features. We demonstrate its efficacy in various adaptation scenarios, showing significant improvements in both self-driving car and mobile robot domains. Our code is open-source and will be available soon.
Authors:Kaiwen Wang, Yinzhe Shen, Martin Lauer
Abstract:
Existing object detectors encounter challenges in handling domain shifts between training and real-world data, particularly under poor visibility conditions like fog and night. Cutting-edge cross-domain object detection methods use teacher-student frameworks and compel teacher and student models to produce consistent predictions under weak and strong augmentations, respectively. In this paper, we reveal that manually crafted augmentations are insufficient for optimal teaching and present a simple yet effective framework named Adversarial Defense Teacher (ADT), leveraging adversarial defense to enhance teaching quality. Specifically, we employ adversarial attacks, encouraging the model to generalize on subtly perturbed inputs that effectively deceive the model. To address small objects under poor visibility conditions, we propose a Zoom-in Zoom-out strategy, which zooms-in images for better pseudo-labels and zooms-out images and pseudo-labels to learn refined features. Our results demonstrate that ADT achieves superior performance, reaching 54.5% mAP on Foggy Cityscapes, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 2.6% mAP.
Authors:Danqing Ma, Shaojie Li, Bo Dang, Hengyi Zang, Xinqi Dong
Abstract:
Transmission line detection technology is crucial for automatic monitoring and ensuring the safety of electrical facilities. The YOLOv5 series is currently one of the most advanced and widely used methods for object detection. However, it faces inherent challenges, such as high computational load on devices and insufficient detection accuracy. To address these concerns, this paper presents an enhanced lightweight YOLOv5 technique customized for mobile devices, specifically intended for identifying objects associated with transmission lines. The C3Ghost module is integrated into the convolutional network of YOLOv5 to reduce floating point operations per second (FLOPs) in the feature channel fusion process and improve feature expression performance. In addition, a FasterNet module is introduced to replace the c3 module in the YOLOv5 Backbone. The FasterNet module uses Partial Convolutions to process only a portion of the input channels, improving feature extraction efficiency and reducing computational overhead. To address the imbalance between simple and challenging samples in the dataset and the diversity of aspect ratios of bounding boxes, the wIoU v3 LOSS is adopted as the loss function. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, Experiments are conducted on a custom dataset of transmission line poles. The results show that the proposed model achieves a 1% increase in detection accuracy, a 13% reduction in FLOPs, and a 26% decrease in model parameters compared to the existing YOLOv5.In the ablation experiment, it was also discovered that while the Fastnet module and the CSghost module improved the precision of the original YOLOv5 baseline model, they caused a decrease in the mAP@.5-.95 metric. However, the improvement of the wIoUv3 loss function significantly mitigated the decline of the mAP@.5-.95 metric.
Authors:Arul Selvam Periyasamy, Sven Behnke
Abstract:
Cluttered bin-picking environments are challenging for pose estimation models. Despite the impressive progress enabled by deep learning, single-view RGB pose estimation models perform poorly in cluttered dynamic environments. Imbuing the rich temporal information contained in the video of scenes has the potential to enhance models ability to deal with the adverse effects of occlusion and the dynamic nature of the environments. Moreover, joint object detection and pose estimation models are better suited to leverage the co-dependent nature of the tasks for improving the accuracy of both tasks. To this end, we propose attention-based temporal fusion for multi-object 6D pose estimation that accumulates information across multiple frames of a video sequence. Our MOTPose method takes a sequence of images as input and performs joint object detection and pose estimation for all objects in one forward pass. It learns to aggregate both object embeddings and object parameters over multiple time steps using cross-attention-based fusion modules. We evaluate our method on the physically-realistic cluttered bin-picking dataset SynPick and the YCB-Video dataset and demonstrate improved pose estimation accuracy as well as better object detection accuracy
Authors:Soheil Gharatappeh, Sepideh Neshatfar, Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh, Vikas Dhiman
Abstract:
In this paper, we present FogGuard, a novel fog-aware object detection network designed to address the challenges posed by foggy weather conditions. Autonomous driving systems heavily rely on accurate object detection algorithms, but adverse weather conditions can significantly impact the reliability of deep neural networks (DNNs).
Existing approaches include image enhancement techniques like IA-YOLO and domain adaptation methods. While image enhancement aims to generate clear images from foggy ones, which is more challenging than object detection in foggy images, domain adaptation does not require labeled data in the target domain. Our approach involves fine-tuning on a specific dataset to address these challenges efficiently.
FogGuard compensates for foggy conditions in the scene, ensuring robust performance by incorporating YOLOv3 as the baseline algorithm and introducing a unique Teacher-Student Perceptual loss for accurate object detection in foggy environments. Through comprehensive evaluations on standard datasets like PASCAL VOC and RTTS, our network significantly improves performance, achieving a 69.43\% mAP compared to YOLOv3's 57.78\% on the RTTS dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate that while our training method slightly increases time complexity, it doesn't add overhead during inference compared to the regular YOLO network.
Authors:Zongqing Qi, Danqing Ma, Jingyu Xu, Ao Xiang, Hedi Qu
Abstract:
In recent years, there have been frequent incidents of foreign objects intruding into railway and Airport runways. These objects can include pedestrians, vehicles, animals, and debris. This paper introduces an improved YOLOv5 architecture incorporating FasterNet and attention mechanisms to enhance the detection of foreign objects on railways and Airport runways. This study proposes a new dataset, AARFOD (Aero and Rail Foreign Object Detection), which combines two public datasets for detecting foreign objects in aviation and railway systems.The dataset aims to improve the recognition capabilities of foreign object targets. Experimental results on this large dataset have demonstrated significant performance improvements of the proposed model over the baseline YOLOv5 model, reducing computational requirements.Improved YOLO model shows a significant improvement in precision by 1.2%, recall rate by 1.0%, and mAP@.5 by 0.6%, while mAP@.5-.95 remained unchanged. The parameters were reduced by approximately 25.12%, and GFLOPs were reduced by about 10.63%. In the ablation experiment, it is found that the FasterNet module can significantly reduce the number of parameters of the model, and the reference of the attention mechanism can slow down the performance loss caused by lightweight.
Authors:Khondoker Murad Hossain, Tim Oates
Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving landscape of communication and network security, the increasing reliance on deep neural networks (DNNs) and cloud services for data processing presents a significant vulnerability: the potential for backdoors that can be exploited by malicious actors. Our approach leverages advanced tensor decomposition algorithms Independent Vector Analysis (IVA), Multiset Canonical Correlation Analysis (MCCA), and Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC2) to meticulously analyze the weights of pre-trained DNNs and distinguish between backdoored and clean models effectively. The key strengths of our method lie in its domain independence, adaptability to various network architectures, and ability to operate without access to the training data of the scrutinized models. This not only ensures versatility across different application scenarios but also addresses the challenge of identifying backdoors without prior knowledge of the specific triggers employed to alter network behavior. We have applied our detection pipeline to three distinct computer vision datasets, encompassing both image classification and object detection tasks. The results demonstrate a marked improvement in both accuracy and efficiency over existing backdoor detection methods. This advancement enhances the security of deep learning and AI in networked systems, providing essential cybersecurity against evolving threats in emerging technologies.
Authors:Alexander Timans, Christoph-Nikolas Straehle, Kaspar Sakmann, Eric Nalisnick
Abstract:
Quantifying a model's predictive uncertainty is essential for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. We consider quantifying such uncertainty for multi-object detection. In particular, we leverage conformal prediction to obtain uncertainty intervals with guaranteed coverage for object bounding boxes. One challenge in doing so is that bounding box predictions are conditioned on the object's class label. Thus, we develop a novel two-step conformal approach that propagates uncertainty in predicted class labels into the uncertainty intervals of bounding boxes. This broadens the validity of our conformal coverage guarantees to include incorrectly classified objects, thus offering more actionable safety assurances. Moreover, we investigate novel ensemble and quantile regression formulations to ensure the bounding box intervals are adaptive to object size, leading to a more balanced coverage. Validating our two-step approach on real-world datasets for 2D bounding box localization, we find that desired coverage levels are satisfied with practically tight predictive uncertainty intervals.
Authors:Braeden Bowen, Vipin Vijayan, Scott Grigsby, Timothy Anderson, Jeremy Gwinnup
Abstract:
The challenge of visual grounding and masking in multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems has encouraged varying approaches to the detection and selection of visually-grounded text tokens for masking. We introduce new methods for detection of visually and contextually relevant (concrete) tokens from source sentences, including detection with natural language processing (NLP), detection with object detection, and a joint detection-verification technique. We also introduce new methods for selection of detected tokens, including shortest $n$ tokens, longest $n$ tokens, and all detected concrete tokens. We utilize the GRAM MMT architecture to train models against synthetically collated multimodal datasets of source images with masked sentences, showing performance improvements and improved usage of visual context during translation tasks over the baseline model.
Authors:Ziyun Yang, Kevin Choy, Sina Farsiu
Abstract:
Generic object detection is a category-independent task that relies on accurate modeling of objectness. We show that for accurate semantic analysis, the network needs to learn all object-level predictions that appear at any stage of learning, including the pre-defined ground truth (GT) objects and the ambiguous decoy objects that the network misidentifies as foreground. Yet, most relevant models focused mainly on improving the learning of the GT objects. A few methods that consider decoy objects utilize loss functions that only focus on the single-response, i.e., the loss response of a single ambiguous pixel, and thus do not benefit from the wealth of information that an object-level ambiguity learning design can provide. Inspired by the human visual system, which first discerns the boundaries of ambiguous regions before delving into the semantic meaning, we propose a novel loss function, Spatial Coherence Loss (SCLoss), that incorporates the mutual response between adjacent pixels into the widely-used single-response loss functions. We demonstrate that the proposed SCLoss can gradually learn the ambiguous regions by detecting and emphasizing their boundaries in a self-adaptive manner. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that replacing popular loss functions with SCLoss can improve the performance of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) salient or camouflaged object detection (SOD or COD) models. We also demonstrate that combining SCLoss with other loss functions can further improve performance and result in SOTA outcomes for different applications.
Authors:Deng Li, Aming Wu, Yaowei Wang, Yahong Han
Abstract:
Single-domain generalization aims to learn a model from single source domain data to achieve generalized performance on other unseen target domains. Existing works primarily focus on improving the generalization ability of static networks. However, static networks are unable to dynamically adapt to the diverse variations in different image scenes, leading to limited generalization capability. Different scenes exhibit varying levels of complexity, and the complexity of images further varies significantly in cross-domain scenarios. In this paper, we propose a dynamic object-centric perception network based on prompt learning, aiming to adapt to the variations in image complexity. Specifically, we propose an object-centric gating module based on prompt learning to focus attention on the object-centric features guided by the various scene prompts. Then, with the object-centric gating masks, the dynamic selective module dynamically selects highly correlated feature regions in both spatial and channel dimensions enabling the model to adaptively perceive object-centric relevant features, thereby enhancing the generalization capability. Extensive experiments were conducted on single-domain generalization tasks in image classification and object detection. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, which validates the effectiveness and generally of our proposed method.
Authors:Abolfazl Younesi, Mohsen Ansari, MohammadAmin Fazli, Alireza Ejlali, Muhammad Shafique, Jörg Henkel
Abstract:
In today's digital age, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a subset of Deep Learning (DL), are widely used for various computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. There are numerous types of CNNs designed to meet specific needs and requirements, including 1D, 2D, and 3D CNNs, as well as dilated, grouped, attention, depthwise convolutions, and NAS, among others. Each type of CNN has its unique structure and characteristics, making it suitable for specific tasks. It's crucial to gain a thorough understanding and perform a comparative analysis of these different CNN types to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, studying the performance, limitations, and practical applications of each type of CNN can aid in the development of new and improved architectures in the future. We also dive into the platforms and frameworks that researchers utilize for their research or development from various perspectives. Additionally, we explore the main research fields of CNN like 6D vision, generative models, and meta-learning. This survey paper provides a comprehensive examination and comparison of various CNN architectures, highlighting their architectural differences and emphasizing their respective advantages, disadvantages, applications, challenges, and future trends.
Authors:James E. Gallagher, Aryav Gogia, Edward J. Oughton
Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) is drastically accelerating the speed and accuracy of automatically segmenting and labeling large Red-Green-Blue (RGB) imagery datasets. However, SAM is unable to segment and label images outside of the visible light spectrum, for example, for multispectral or hyperspectral imagery. Therefore, this paper outlines a method we call the Multispectral Automated Transfer Technique (MATT). By transposing SAM segmentation masks from RGB images we can automatically segment and label multispectral imagery with high precision and efficiency. For example, the results demonstrate that segmenting and labeling a 2,400-image dataset utilizing MATT achieves a time reduction of 87.8% in developing a trained model, reducing roughly 20 hours of manual labeling, to only 2.4 hours. This efficiency gain is associated with only a 6.7% decrease in overall mean average precision (mAP) when training multispectral models via MATT, compared to a manually labeled dataset. We consider this an acceptable level of precision loss when considering the time saved during training, especially for rapidly prototyping experimental modeling methods. This research greatly contributes to the study of multispectral object detection by providing a novel and open-source method to rapidly segment, label, and train multispectral object detection models with minimal human interaction. Future research needs to focus on applying these methods to (i) space-based multispectral, and (ii) drone-based hyperspectral imagery.
Authors:Timo Birr, Christoph Pohl, Abdelrahman Younes, Tamim Asfour
Abstract:
Recent advances in task planning leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve generalizability by combining such models with classical planning algorithms to address their inherent limitations in reasoning capabilities. However, these approaches face the challenge of dynamically capturing the initial state of the task planning problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose AutoGPT+P, a system that combines an affordance-based scene representation with a planning system. Affordances encompass the action possibilities of an agent on the environment and objects present in it. Thus, deriving the planning domain from an affordance-based scene representation allows symbolic planning with arbitrary objects. AutoGPT+P leverages this representation to derive and execute a plan for a task specified by the user in natural language. In addition to solving planning tasks under a closed-world assumption, AutoGPT+P can also handle planning with incomplete information, e. g., tasks with missing objects by exploring the scene, suggesting alternatives, or providing a partial plan. The affordance-based scene representation combines object detection with an automatically generated object-affordance-mapping using ChatGPT. The core planning tool extends existing work by automatically correcting semantic and syntactic errors. Our approach achieves a success rate of 98%, surpassing the current 81% success rate of the current state-of-the-art LLM-based planning method SayCan on the SayCan instruction set. Furthermore, we evaluated our approach on our newly created dataset with 150 scenarios covering a wide range of complex tasks with missing objects, achieving a success rate of 79% on our dataset. The dataset and the code are publicly available at https://git.h2t.iar.kit.edu/birr/autogpt-p-standalone.
Authors:Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Cory Beard, Zhu Li
Abstract:
Low-light conditions and occluded scenarios impede object detection in real-world Internet of Things (IoT) applications like autonomous vehicles and security systems. While advanced machine learning models strive for accuracy, their computational demands clash with the limitations of resource-constrained devices, hampering real-time performance. In our current research, we tackle this challenge, by introducing ``YOLO Phantom", one of the smallest YOLO models ever conceived. YOLO Phantom utilizes the novel Phantom Convolution block, achieving comparable accuracy to the latest YOLOv8n model while simultaneously reducing both parameters and model size by 43\%, resulting in a significant 19\% reduction in Giga Floating-Point Operations (GFLOPs). YOLO Phantom leverages transfer learning on our multimodal RGB-infrared dataset to address low-light and occlusion issues, equipping it with robust vision under adverse conditions. Its real-world efficacy is demonstrated on an IoT platform with advanced low-light and RGB cameras, seamlessly connecting to an AWS-based notification endpoint for efficient real-time object detection. Benchmarks reveal a substantial boost of 17\% and 14\% in frames per second (FPS) for thermal and RGB detection, respectively, compared to the baseline YOLOv8n model. For community contribution, both the code and the multimodal dataset are available on GitHub.
Authors:Darryl Hannan, Ragib Arnab, Gavin Parpart, Garrett T. Kenyon, Edward Kim, Yijing Watkins
Abstract:
Collecting overhead imagery using an event camera is desirable due to the energy efficiency of the image sensor compared to standard cameras. However, event cameras complicate downstream image processing, especially for complex tasks such as object detection. In this paper, we investigate the viability of event streams for overhead object detection. We demonstrate that across a number of standard modeling approaches, there is a significant gap in performance between dense event representations and corresponding RGB frames. We establish that this gap is, in part, due to a lack of overlap between the event representations and the pre-training data used to initialize the weights of the object detectors. Then, we apply event-to-video conversion models that convert event streams into gray-scale video to close this gap. We demonstrate that this approach results in a large performance increase, outperforming even event-specific object detection techniques on our overhead target task. These results suggest that better alignment between event representations and existing large pre-trained models may result in greater short-term performance gains compared to end-to-end event-specific architectural improvements.
Authors:Nicolas Harvey Chapman, Feras Dayoub, Will Browne, Chris Lehnert
Abstract:
Deep-learning and large scale language-image training have produced image object detectors that generalise well to diverse environments and semantic classes. However, single-image object detectors trained on internet data are not optimally tailored for the embodied conditions inherent in robotics. Instead, robots must detect objects from complex multi-modal data streams involving depth, localisation and temporal correlation, a task termed embodied object detection. Paradigms such as Video Object Detection (VOD) and Semantic Mapping have been proposed to leverage such embodied data streams, but existing work fails to enhance performance using language-image training. In response, we investigate how an image object detector pre-trained using language-image data can be extended to perform embodied object detection. We propose a novel implicit object memory that uses projective geometry to aggregate the features of detected objects across long temporal horizons. The spatial and temporal information accumulated in memory is then used to enhance the image features of the base detector. When tested on embodied data streams sampled from diverse indoor scenes, our approach improves the base object detector by 3.09 mAP, outperforming alternative external memories designed for VOD and Semantic Mapping. Our method also shows a significant improvement of 16.90 mAP relative to baselines that perform embodied object detection without first training on language-image data, and is robust to sensor noise and domain shift experienced in real-world deployment.
Authors:Haoxiang Gao, Zhongruo Wang, Yaqian Li, Kaiwen Long, Ming Yang, Yiqing Shen
Abstract:
The advent of foundation models has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing and computer vision, paving the way for their application in autonomous driving (AD). This survey presents a comprehensive review of more than 40 research papers, demonstrating the role of foundation models in enhancing AD. Large language models contribute to planning and simulation in AD, particularly through their proficiency in reasoning, code generation and translation. In parallel, vision foundation models are increasingly adapted for critical tasks such as 3D object detection and tracking, as well as creating realistic driving scenarios for simulation and testing. Multi-modal foundation models, integrating diverse inputs, exhibit exceptional visual understanding and spatial reasoning, crucial for end-to-end AD. This survey not only provides a structured taxonomy, categorizing foundation models based on their modalities and functionalities within the AD domain but also delves into the methods employed in current research. It identifies the gaps between existing foundation models and cutting-edge AD approaches, thereby charting future research directions and proposing a roadmap for bridging these gaps.
Authors:Hafiz Mughees Ahmad, Afshin Rahimi, Khizer Hayat
Abstract:
The increasing popularity of Deep Learning (DL) based Object Detection (OD) methods and their real-world applications have opened new venues in smart manufacturing. Traditional industries struck by capacity constraints after Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) require non-invasive methods for in-depth operations' analysis to optimize and increase their revenue. In this study, we have initially developed a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based OD model to tackle this issue. This model is trained to accurately identify the presence of chairs and individuals on the production floor. The identified objects are then passed to the CNN based tracker, which tracks them throughout their life cycle in the workstation. The extracted meta-data is further processed through a novel framework for the capacity constraint analysis. We identified that the Station C is only 70.6% productive through 6 months. Additionally, the time spent at each station is recorded and aggregated for each object. This data proves helpful in conducting annual audits and effectively managing labor and material over time.
Authors:Abdul Hannan Khan, Syed Tahseen Raza Rizvi, Andreas Dengel
Abstract:
With recent advances in computer vision, it appears that autonomous driving will be part of modern society sooner rather than later. However, there are still a significant number of concerns to address. Although modern computer vision techniques demonstrate superior performance, they tend to prioritize accuracy over efficiency, which is a crucial aspect of real-time applications. Large object detection models typically require higher computational power, which is achieved by using more sophisticated onboard hardware. For autonomous driving, these requirements translate to increased fuel costs and, ultimately, a reduction in mileage. Further, despite their computational demands, the existing object detectors are far from being real-time. In this research, we assess the robustness of our previously proposed, highly efficient pedestrian detector LSFM on well-established autonomous driving benchmarks, including diverse weather conditions and nighttime scenes. Moreover, we extend our LSFM model for general object detection to achieve real-time object detection in traffic scenes. We evaluate its performance, low latency, and generalizability on traffic object detection datasets. Furthermore, we discuss the inadequacy of the current key performance indicator employed by object detection systems in the context of autonomous driving and propose a more suitable alternative that incorporates real-time requirements.
Authors:Hongyu Zhao, Zezhi Tang, Zhenhong Li, Yi Dong, Yuancheng Si, Mingyang Lu, George Panoutsos
Abstract:
The optimisation of crop harvesting processes for commonly cultivated crops is of great importance in the aim of agricultural industrialisation. Nowadays, the utilisation of machine vision has enabled the automated identification of crops, leading to the enhancement of harvesting efficiency, but challenges still exist. This study presents a new framework that combines two separate architectures of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in order to simultaneously accomplish the tasks of crop detection and harvesting (robotic manipulation) inside a simulated environment. Crop images in the simulated environment are subjected to random rotations, cropping, brightness, and contrast adjustments to create augmented images for dataset generation. The you only look once algorithmic framework is employed with traditional rectangular bounding boxes for crop localization. The proposed method subsequently utilises the acquired image data via a visual geometry group model in order to reveal the grasping positions for the robotic manipulation.
Authors:Will LeVine, Benjamin Pikus, Jacob Phillips, Berk Norman, Fernando Amat Gil, Sean Hendryx
Abstract:
As deep neural networks become adopted in high-stakes domains, it is crucial to identify when inference inputs are Out-of-Distribution (OOD) so that users can be alerted of likely drops in performance and calibration despite high confidence -- ultimately to know when networks' decisions (and their uncertainty in those decisions) should be trusted. In this paper we introduce Ablated Learned Temperature Energy (or "AbeT" for short), an OOD detection method which lowers the False Positive Rate at 95\% True Positive Rate (FPR@95) by $43.43\%$ in classification compared to state of the art without training networks in multiple stages or requiring hyperparameters or test-time backward passes. We additionally provide empirical insights as to why our model learns to distinguish between In-Distribution (ID) and OOD samples while only being explicitly trained on ID samples via exposure to misclassified ID examples at training time. Lastly, we show the efficacy of our method in identifying predicted bounding boxes and pixels corresponding to OOD objects in object detection and semantic segmentation, respectively -- with an AUROC increase of $5.15\%$ in object detection and both a decrease in FPR@95 of $41.48\%$ and an increase in AUPRC of $34.20\%$ in semantic segmentation compared to previous state of the art.
Authors:Ioana Bica, Anastasija IliÄ, Matthias Bauer, Goker Erdogan, Matko BoÅ¡njak, Christos Kaplanis, Alexey A. Gritsenko, Matthias Minderer, Charles Blundell, Razvan Pascanu, Jovana MitroviÄ
Abstract:
We introduce SPARse Fine-grained Contrastive Alignment (SPARC), a simple method for pretraining more fine-grained multimodal representations from image-text pairs. Given that multiple image patches often correspond to single words, we propose to learn a grouping of image patches for every token in the caption. To achieve this, we use a sparse similarity metric between image patches and language tokens and compute for each token a language-grouped vision embedding as the weighted average of patches. The token and language-grouped vision embeddings are then contrasted through a fine-grained sequence-wise loss that only depends on individual samples and does not require other batch samples as negatives. This enables more detailed information to be learned in a computationally inexpensive manner. SPARC combines this fine-grained loss with a contrastive loss between global image and text embeddings to learn representations that simultaneously encode global and local information. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed method and show improved performance over competing approaches both on image-level tasks relying on coarse-grained information, e.g. classification, as well as region-level tasks relying on fine-grained information, e.g. retrieval, object detection, and segmentation. Moreover, SPARC improves model faithfulness and captioning in foundational vision-language models.
Authors:Javad Khoramdel, Ahmad Moori, Yasamin Borhani, Armin Ghanbarzadeh, Esmaeil Najafi
Abstract:
The proposed YOLO-Former method seamlessly integrates the ideas of transformer and YOLOv4 to create a highly accurate and efficient object detection system. The method leverages the fast inference speed of YOLOv4 and incorporates the advantages of the transformer architecture through the integration of convolutional attention and transformer modules. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with a mean average precision (mAP) of 85.76\% on the Pascal VOC dataset, while maintaining high prediction speed with a frame rate of 10.85 frames per second. The contribution of this work lies in the demonstration of how the innovative combination of these two state-of-the-art techniques can lead to further improvements in the field of object detection.
Authors:Hyunjun Choi, Daeho Um, Hawook Jeong
Abstract:
Existing 3D object detectors encounter extreme challenges in localizing unseen 3D objects and recognizing them as unseen, which is a crucial technology in autonomous driving in the wild. To address these challenges, we propose practical methods to enhance the performance of 3D detection and Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) classification for unseen objects. The proposed methods include anomaly sample augmentation, learning of universal objectness, learning of detecting unseen objects, and learning of distinguishing unseen objects. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose the KITTI Misc benchmark and two additional synthetic OOD benchmarks: the Nuscenes OOD benchmark and the SUN-RGBD OOD benchmark. The proposed methods consistently enhance performance by a large margin across all existing methods, giving insight for future work on unseen 3D object detection in the wild.
Authors:Anton Jeran Ratnarajah, Sahani Goonetilleke, Dumindu Tissera, Kapilan Balagopalan, Ranga Rodrigo
Abstract:
Law enforcement officials heavily depend on Forensic Video Analytic (FVA) Software in their evidence extraction process. However present-day FVA software are complex, time consuming, equipment dependent and expensive. Developing countries struggle to gain access to this gateway to a secure haven. The term forensic pertains the application of scientific methods to the investigation of crime through post-processing, whereas surveillance is the close monitoring of real-time feeds.
The principle objective of this Final Year Project was to develop an efficient and effective FVA Software, addressing the shortcomings through a stringent and systematic review of scholarly research papers, online databases and legal documentation. The scope spans multiple object detection, multiple object tracking, anomaly detection, activity recognition, tampering detection, general and specific image enhancement and video synopsis.
Methods employed include many machine learning techniques, GPU acceleration and efficient, integrated architecture development both for real-time and postprocessing. For this CNN, GMM, multithreading and OpenCV C++ coding were used. The implications of the proposed methodology would rapidly speed up the FVA process especially through the novel video synopsis research arena. This project has resulted in three research outcomes Moving Object Based Collision Free Video Synopsis, Forensic and Surveillance Analytic Tool Architecture and Tampering Detection Inter-Frame Forgery.
The results include forensic and surveillance panel outcomes with emphasis on video synopsis and Sri Lankan context. Principal conclusions include the optimization and efficient algorithm integration to overcome limitations in processing power, memory and compromise between real-time performance and accuracy.
Authors:Paul K. Mandal, Cole Leo, Connor Hurley
Abstract:
In the modern world, the amount of visual data recorded has been rapidly increasing. In many cases, data is stored in geographically distinct locations and thus requires a large amount of time and space to consolidate. Sometimes, there are also regulations for privacy protection which prevent data consolidation. In this work, we present federated implementations for object detection and recognition using a federated Faster R-CNN (FRCNN) and image segmentation using a federated Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). Our FRCNN was trained on 5000 examples of the COCO2017 dataset while our FCN was trained on the entire train set of the CamVid dataset. The proposed federated models address the challenges posed by the increasing volume and decentralized nature of visual data, offering efficient solutions in compliance with privacy regulations.
Authors:Qiannan Wang, Changchun Yin, Lu Zhou, Liming Fang
Abstract:
The extensive adoption of Self-supervised learning(SSL) has led to an increased security threat from backdoor attacks. While existing research has mainly focused on backdoor attacks in image classification, there has been limited exploration of their implications for object detection. Object detection plays a critical role in security-sensitive applications, such as autonomous driving, where backdoor attacks seriously threaten human life and property. In this work, we propose the first backdoor attack designed for object detection tasks in SSL scenarios, called Object Transform Attack (SSL-OTA). SSL-OTA employs a trigger capable of altering predictions of the target object to the desired category, encompassing two attacks: Naive Attack(NA) and Dual-Source Blending Attack (DSBA). NA conducts data poisoning during downstream fine-tuning of the object detector, while DSBA additionally injects backdoors into the pre-trained encoder. We establish appropriate metrics and conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed attack and its resistance to potential defenses. Notably, both NA and DSBA achieve high attack success rates (ASR) at extremely low poisoning rates (0.5%). The results underscore the importance of considering backdoor threats in SSL-based object detection and contribute a novel perspective to the field.
Authors:Bumsoo Kim, Taeho Choi, Jaewoo Kang, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Abstract:
Recent advances in deep neural networks have achieved significant progress in detecting individual objects from an image. However, object detection is not sufficient to fully understand a visual scene. Towards a deeper visual understanding, the interactions between objects, especially humans and objects are essential. Most prior works have obtained this information with a bottom-up approach, where the objects are first detected and the interactions are predicted sequentially by pairing the objects. This is a major bottleneck in HOI detection inference time. To tackle this problem, we propose UnionDet, a one-stage meta-architecture for HOI detection powered by a novel union-level detector that eliminates this additional inference stage by directly capturing the region of interaction. Our one-stage detector for human-object interaction shows a significant reduction in interaction prediction time 4x~14x while outperforming state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets: V-COCO and HICO-DET.
Authors:Mengke Song, Linfeng Li, Dunquan Wu, Wenfeng Song, Chenglizhao Chen
Abstract:
Existing salient object detection methods are capable of predicting binary maps that highlight visually salient regions. However, these methods are limited in their ability to differentiate the relative importance of multiple objects and the relationships among them, which can lead to errors and reduced accuracy in downstream tasks that depend on the relative importance of multiple objects. To conquer, this paper proposes a new paradigm for saliency ranking, which aims to completely focus on ranking salient objects by their "importance order". While previous works have shown promising performance, they still face ill-posed problems. First, the saliency ranking ground truth (GT) orders generation methods are unreasonable since determining the correct ranking order is not well-defined, resulting in false alarms. Second, training a ranking model remains challenging because most saliency ranking methods follow the multi-task paradigm, leading to conflicts and trade-offs among different tasks. Third, existing regression-based saliency ranking methods are complex for saliency ranking models due to their reliance on instance mask-based saliency ranking orders. These methods require a significant amount of data to perform accurately and can be challenging to implement effectively. To solve these problems, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the causes and proposes a whole-flow processing paradigm of saliency ranking task from the perspective of "GT data generation", "network structure design" and "training protocol". The proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the widely-used SALICON set, as demonstrated by extensive experiments with fair and reasonable comparisons. The saliency ranking task is still in its infancy, and our proposed unified framework can serve as a fundamental strategy to guide future work.
Authors:Changrui Chen, Jungong Han, Kurt Debattista
Abstract:
Due to the costliness of labelled data in real-world applications, semi-supervised learning, underpinned by pseudo labelling, is an appealing solution. However, handling confusing samples is nontrivial: discarding valuable confusing samples would compromise the model generalisation while using them for training would exacerbate the issue of confirmation bias caused by the resulting inevitable mislabelling. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use confusing samples proactively without label correction. Specifically, a Virtual Category (VC) is assigned to each confusing sample in such a way that it can safely contribute to the model optimisation even without a concrete label. This provides an upper bound for inter-class information sharing capacity, which eventually leads to a better embedding space. Extensive experiments on two mainstream dense prediction tasks -- semantic segmentation and object detection, demonstrate that the proposed VC learning significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art, especially when only very few labels are available. Our intriguing findings highlight the usage of VC learning in dense vision tasks.
Authors:Yuxin Li, Qiang Han, Mengying Yu, Yuxin Jiang, Chaikiat Yeo, Yiheng Li, Zihang Huang, Nini Liu, Hsuanhan Chen, Xiaojun Wu
Abstract:
3D object detection in Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space has recently emerged as a prevalent approach in the field of autonomous driving. Despite the demonstrated improvements in accuracy and velocity estimation compared to perspective view methods, the deployment of BEV-based techniques in real-world autonomous vehicles remains challenging. This is primarily due to their reliance on vision-transformer (ViT) based architectures, which introduce quadratic complexity with respect to the input resolution. To address this issue, we propose an efficient BEV-based 3D detection framework called BEVENet, which leverages a convolutional-only architectural design to circumvent the limitations of ViT models while maintaining the effectiveness of BEV-based methods. Our experiments show that BEVENet is 3$\times$ faster than contemporary state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on the NuScenes challenge, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.456 and a nuScenes detection score (NDS) of 0.555 on the NuScenes validation dataset, with an inference speed of 47.6 frames per second. To the best of our knowledge, this study stands as the first to achieve such significant efficiency improvements for BEV-based methods, highlighting their enhanced feasibility for real-world autonomous driving applications.
Authors:Deepak Sridhar, Yunsheng Li, Nuno Vasconcelos
Abstract:
Vision Transformers have achieved impressive performance in many vision tasks. While the token mixer or attention block has been studied in great detail, much less research has been devoted to the channel mixer or feature mixing block (FFN or MLP), which accounts for a significant portion of the model parameters and computation. In this work, we show that the dense MLP connections can be replaced with a sparse block diagonal MLP structure that supports larger expansion ratios by splitting MLP features into groups. To improve the feature clusters formed by this structure we propose the use of a lightweight, parameter-free, channel covariance attention (CCA) mechanism as a parallel branch during training. This enables gradual feature mixing across channel groups during training whose contribution decays to zero as the training progresses to convergence. As a result, the CCA block can be discarded during inference, enabling enhanced performance at no additional computational cost. The resulting $\textit{Scalable CHannEl MixEr}$ (SCHEME) can be plugged into any ViT architecture to obtain a gamut of models with different trade-offs between complexity and performance by controlling the block diagonal MLP structure. This is shown by the introduction of a new family of SCHEMEformer models. Experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, with $\textbf{12 different ViT backbones}$, consistently demonstrate substantial accuracy/latency gains (upto $\textbf{1.5\% /20\%})$ over existing designs, especially for lower complexity regimes. The SCHEMEformer family is shown to establish new Pareto frontiers for accuracy vs FLOPS, accuracy vs model size, and accuracy vs throughput, especially for fast transformers of small size.
Authors:Hewen Xiao, Jie Mei, Guangfu Ma, Weiren Wu
Abstract:
Deep convolutional neural networks have been widely applied in salient object detection and have achieved remarkable results in this field. However, existing models suffer from information distortion caused by interpolation during up-sampling and down-sampling. In response to this drawback, this article starts from two directions in the network: feature and label. On the one hand, a novel cascaded interaction network with a guidance module named global-local aligned attention (GAA) is designed to reduce the negative impact of interpolation on the feature side. On the other hand, a deep supervision strategy based on edge erosion is proposed to reduce the negative guidance of label interpolation on lateral output. Extensive experiments on five popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Authors:Richard Marcus, Felix Gabel, Niklas Knoop, Marc Stamminger
Abstract:
Realistic vehicle sensor simulation is an important element in developing autonomous driving. As physics-based implementations of visual sensors like LiDAR are complex in practice, data-based approaches promise solutions. Using pairs of camera images and LiDAR scans from real test drives, GANs can be trained to translate between them. For this process, we contribute two additions. First, we exploit the camera images, acquiring segmentation data and dense depth maps as additional input for training. Second, we test the performance of the LiDAR simulation by testing how well an object detection network generalizes between real and synthetic point clouds to enable evaluation without ground truth point clouds. Combining both, we simulate LiDAR point clouds and demonstrate their realism.
Authors:Qipeng Liu, Luojun Lin, Zhifeng Shen, Zhifeng Yang
Abstract:
Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to adapt the source detector to unlabeled target domain data in the absence of source domain data. Most SFOD methods follow the same self-training paradigm using mean-teacher (MT) framework where the student model is guided by only one single teacher model. However, such paradigm can easily fall into a training instability problem that when the teacher model collapses uncontrollably due to the domain shift, the student model also suffers drastic performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose the Periodically Exchange Teacher-Student (PETS) method, a simple yet novel approach that introduces a multiple-teacher framework consisting of a static teacher, a dynamic teacher, and a student model. During the training phase, we periodically exchange the weights between the static teacher and the student model. Then, we update the dynamic teacher using the moving average of the student model that has already been exchanged by the static teacher. In this way, the dynamic teacher can integrate knowledge from past periods, effectively reducing error accumulation and enabling a more stable training process within the MT-based framework. Further, we develop a consensus mechanism to merge the predictions of two teacher models to provide higher-quality pseudo labels for student model. Extensive experiments on multiple SFOD benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other related methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our method on SFOD task.
Authors:Ahmed Ben Saad, Gabriele Facciolo, Axel Davy
Abstract:
Object detection models, a prominent class of machine learning algorithms, aim to identify and precisely locate objects in images or videos. However, this task might yield uneven performances sometimes caused by the objects sizes and the quality of the images and labels used for training. In this paper, we highlight the importance of large objects in learning features that are critical for all sizes. Given these findings, we propose to introduce a weighting term into the training loss. This term is a function of the object area size. We show that giving more weight to large objects leads to improved detection scores across all object sizes and so an overall improvement in Object Detectors performances (+2 p.p. of mAP on small objects, +2 p.p. on medium and +4 p.p. on large on COCO val 2017 with InternImage-T). Additional experiments and ablation studies with different models and on a different dataset further confirm the robustness of our findings.
Authors:Shuangzhi Li, Lei Ma, Xingyu Li
Abstract:
Point-cloud-based 3D object detection suffers from performance degradation when encountering data with novel domain gaps. To tackle it, the single-domain generalization (SDG) aims to generalize the detection model trained in a limited single source domain to perform robustly on unexplored domains. In this paper, we propose an SDG method to improve the generalizability of 3D object detection to unseen target domains. Unlike prior SDG works for 3D object detection solely focusing on data augmentation, our work introduces a novel data augmentation method and contributes a new multi-task learning strategy in the methodology. Specifically, from the perspective of data augmentation, we design a universal physical-aware density-based data augmentation (PDDA) method to mitigate the performance loss stemming from diverse point densities. From the learning methodology viewpoint, we develop a multi-task learning for 3D object detection: during source training, besides the main standard detection task, we leverage an auxiliary self-supervised 3D scene restoration task to enhance the comprehension of the encoder on background and foreground details for better recognition and detection of objects. Furthermore, based on the auxiliary self-supervised task, we propose the first test-time adaptation method for domain generalization of 3D object detection, which efficiently adjusts the encoder's parameters to adapt to unseen target domains during testing time, to further bridge domain gaps. Extensive cross-dataset experiments covering "Car", "Pedestrian", and "Cyclist" detections, demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art SDG methods and even overpass unsupervised domain adaptation methods under some circumstances.
Authors:Vullnet Useini, Stephanie Tanadini-Lang, Quentin Lohmeyer, Mirko Meboldt, Nicolaus Andratschke, Ralph P. Braun, Javier Barranco GarcÃa
Abstract:
Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, has seen a steady increase in incidence rates worldwide, posing a significant challenge to dermatologists. Early detection is crucial for improving patient survival rates. However, performing total body screening (TBS), i.e., identifying suspicious lesions or ugly ducklings (UDs) by visual inspection, can be challenging and often requires sound expertise in pigmented lesions. To assist users of varying expertise levels, an artificial intelligence (AI) decision support tool was developed. Our solution identifies and characterizes UDs from real-world wide-field patient images. It employs a state-of-the-art object detection algorithm to locate and isolate all skin lesions present in a patient's total body images. These lesions are then sorted based on their level of suspiciousness using a self-supervised AI approach, tailored to the specific context of the patient under examination. A clinical validation study was conducted to evaluate the tool's performance. The results demonstrated an average sensitivity of 95% for the top-10 AI-identified UDs on skin lesions selected by the majority of experts in pigmented skin lesions. The study also found that the tool increased dermatologists' confidence when formulating a diagnosis, and the average majority agreement with the top-10 AI-identified UDs reached 100% when assisted by our tool. With the development of this AI-based decision support tool, we aim to address the shortage of specialists, enable faster consultation times for patients, and demonstrate the impact and usability of AI-assisted screening. Future developments will include expanding the dataset to include histologically confirmed melanoma and validating the tool for additional body regions.
Authors:Maksim Golyadkin, Alexander Gambashidze, Ildar Nurgaliev, Ilya Makarov
Abstract:
In response to the growing demand for 3D object detection in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality, this work focuses on the evaluation of semi-supervised learning approaches for point cloud data. The point cloud representation provides reliable and consistent observations regardless of lighting conditions, thanks to advances in LiDAR sensors. Data annotation is of paramount importance in the context of LiDAR applications, and automating 3D data annotation with semi-supervised methods is a pivotal challenge that promises to reduce the associated workload and facilitate the emergence of cost-effective LiDAR solutions. Nevertheless, the task of semi-supervised learning in the context of unordered point cloud data remains formidable due to the inherent sparsity and incomplete shapes that hinder the generation of accurate pseudo-labels. In this study, we consider these challenges by posing the question: "To what extent does unlabelled data contribute to the enhancement of model performance?" We show that improvements from previous semi-supervised methods may not be as profound as previously thought. Our results suggest that simple grid search hyperparameter tuning applied to a supervised model can lead to state-of-the-art performance on the ONCE dataset, while the contribution of unlabelled data appears to be comparatively less exceptional.
Authors:Reyhane Ahmadi, Amirreza Ahmadnejad, Somayyeh Koohi
Abstract:
Neuromorphic engineering has emerged as a promising avenue for developing brain-inspired computational systems. However, conventional electronic AI-based processors often encounter challenges related to processing speed and thermal dissipation. As an alternative, optical implementations of such processors have been proposed, capitalizing on the intrinsic information-processing capabilities of light. Within the realm of optical neuromorphic engineering, various optical neural networks (ONNs) have been explored. Among these, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have exhibited notable success in emulating the computational principles of the human brain. Nevertheless, the integration of optical SNN processors has presented formidable obstacles, mainly when dealing with the computational demands of large datasets. In response to these challenges, we introduce a pioneering concept: the Free-space Optical deep Spiking Convolutional Neural Network (OSCNN). This novel approach draws inspiration from computational models of the human eye. We have meticulously designed various optical components within the OSCNN to tackle object detection tasks across prominent benchmark datasets, including MNIST, ETH 80, and Caltech. Our results demonstrate promising performance with minimal latency and power consumption compared to their electronic ONN counterparts. Additionally, we conducted several pertinent simulations, such as optical intensity to-latency conversion and synchronization. Of particular significance is the evaluation of the feature extraction layer, employing a Gabor filter bank, which stands to impact the practical deployment of diverse ONN architectures significantly.
Authors:Ethan Pronovost, Meghana Reddy Ganesina, Noureldin Hendy, Zeyu Wang, Andres Morales, Kai Wang, Nicholas Roy
Abstract:
Automated creation of synthetic traffic scenarios is a key part of validating the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we propose Scenario Diffusion, a novel diffusion-based architecture for generating traffic scenarios that enables controllable scenario generation. We combine latent diffusion, object detection and trajectory regression to generate distributions of synthetic agent poses, orientations and trajectories simultaneously. To provide additional control over the generated scenario, this distribution is conditioned on a map and sets of tokens describing the desired scenario. We show that our approach has sufficient expressive capacity to model diverse traffic patterns and generalizes to different geographical regions.
Authors:Badri N. Patro, Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran
Abstract:
Vision transformers have gained significant attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, instance segmentation, and object detection. However, challenges remain in addressing attention complexity and effectively capturing fine-grained information within images. Existing solutions often resort to down-sampling operations, such as pooling, to reduce computational cost. Unfortunately, such operations are non-invertible and can result in information loss. In this paper, we present a novel approach called Scattering Vision Transformer (SVT) to tackle these challenges. SVT incorporates a spectrally scattering network that enables the capture of intricate image details. SVT overcomes the invertibility issue associated with down-sampling operations by separating low-frequency and high-frequency components. Furthermore, SVT introduces a unique spectral gating network utilizing Einstein multiplication for token and channel mixing, effectively reducing complexity. We show that SVT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet dataset with a significant reduction in a number of parameters and FLOPS. SVT shows 2\% improvement over LiTv2 and iFormer. SVT-H-S reaches 84.2\% top-1 accuracy, while SVT-H-B reaches 85.2\% (state-of-art for base versions) and SVT-H-L reaches 85.7\% (again state-of-art for large versions). SVT also shows comparable results in other vision tasks such as instance segmentation. SVT also outperforms other transformers in transfer learning on standard datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Oxford Flower, and Stanford Car datasets. The project page is available on this webpage.\url{https://badripatro.github.io/svt/}.
Authors:Raphael Falque, Cedric Le Gentil, Fouad Sukkar
Abstract:
On the journey to enable robots to interact with the real world where humans, animals, and unpredictable elements are acting as independent agents; it is crucial for robots to have the capability to detect dynamic objects. In this paper, we argue that the detection of dynamic objects can be solved by computing the spatiotemporal normals of a point cloud. In our experiments, we demonstrate that this simple method can be used robustly for LiDAR and depth cameras with performances similar to the state of the art while offering a significantly simpler method.
Authors:Xiang Zhang, Senyu Li, Zijun Wu, Ning Shi
Abstract:
Recent advancements in multimodal techniques open exciting possibilities for models excelling in diverse tasks involving text, audio, and image processing. Models like GPT-4V, blending computer vision and language modeling, excel in complex text and image tasks. Numerous prior research endeavors have diligently examined the performance of these Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) across tasks like object detection, image captioning and others. However, these analyses often focus on evaluating the performance of each modality in isolation, lacking insights into their cross-modal interactions. Specifically, questions concerning whether these vision-language models execute vision and language tasks consistently or independently have remained unanswered. In this study, we draw inspiration from recent investigations into multilingualism and conduct a comprehensive analysis of model's cross-modal interactions. We introduce a systematic framework that quantifies the capability disparities between different modalities in the multi-modal setting and provide a set of datasets designed for these evaluations. Our findings reveal that models like GPT-4V tend to perform consistently modalities when the tasks are relatively simple. However, the trustworthiness of results derived from the vision modality diminishes as the tasks become more challenging. Expanding on our findings, we introduce "Vision Description Prompting," a method that effectively improves performance in challenging vision-related tasks.
Authors:Yang Wu, Shenglong Hu, Huihui Song, Kaihua Zhang, Bo Liu, Dong Liu
Abstract:
The traditional definition of co-salient object detection (CoSOD) task is to segment the common salient objects in a group of relevant images. This definition is based on an assumption of group consensus consistency that is not always reasonable in the open-world setting, which results in robustness issue in the model when dealing with irrelevant images in the inputting image group under the open-word scenarios. To tackle this problem, we introduce a group selective exchange-masking (GSEM) approach for enhancing the robustness of the CoSOD model. GSEM takes two groups of images as input, each containing different types of salient objects. Based on the mixed metric we designed, GSEM selects a subset of images from each group using a novel learning-based strategy, then the selected images are exchanged. To simultaneously consider the uncertainty introduced by irrelevant images and the consensus features of the remaining relevant images in the group, we designed a latent variable generator branch and CoSOD transformer branch. The former is composed of a vector quantised-variational autoencoder to generate stochastic global variables that model uncertainty. The latter is designed to capture correlation-based local features that include group consensus. Finally, the outputs of the two branches are merged and passed to a transformer-based decoder to generate robust predictions. Taking into account that there are currently no benchmark datasets specifically designed for open-world scenarios, we constructed three open-world benchmark datasets, namely OWCoSal, OWCoSOD, and OWCoCA, based on existing datasets. By breaking the group-consistency assumption, these datasets provide effective simulations of real-world scenarios and can better evaluate the robustness and practicality of models.
Authors:Koushik Biswas, Meghana Karri, UlaÅ BaÄcı
Abstract:
Activation functions are crucial in deep learning models since they introduce non-linearity into the networks, allowing them to learn from errors and make adjustments, which is essential for learning complex patterns. The essential purpose of activation functions is to transform unprocessed input signals into significant output activations, promoting information transmission throughout the neural network. In this study, we propose a new activation function called Sqish, which is a non-monotonic and smooth function and an alternative to existing ones. We showed its superiority in classification, object detection, segmentation tasks, and adversarial robustness experiments. We got an 8.21% improvement over ReLU on the CIFAR100 dataset with the ShuffleNet V2 model in the FGSM adversarial attack. We also got a 5.87% improvement over ReLU on image classification on the CIFAR100 dataset with the ShuffleNet V2 model.
Authors:Magnus Malmström, Anton Kullberg, Isaac Skog, Daniel Axehill, Fredrik Gustafsson
Abstract:
This paper considers the problem of detecting and tracking objects in a sequence of images. The problem is formulated in a filtering framework, using the output of object-detection algorithms as measurements. An extension to the filtering formulation is proposed that incorporates class information from the previous frame to robustify the classification, even if the object-detection algorithm outputs an incorrect prediction. Further, the properties of the object-detection algorithm are exploited to quantify the uncertainty of the bounding box detection in each frame. The complete filtering method is evaluated on camera trap images of the four large Swedish carnivores, bear, lynx, wolf, and wolverine. The experiments show that the class tracking formulation leads to a more robust classification.
Authors:Ghanta Sai Krishna, Kundrapu Supriya, Sabur Baidya
Abstract:
The existence of variable factors within the environment can cause a decline in camera localization accuracy, as it violates the fundamental assumption of a static environment in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms. Recent semantic SLAM systems towards dynamic environments either rely solely on 2D semantic information, or solely on geometric information, or combine their results in a loosely integrated manner. In this research paper, we introduce 3DS-SLAM, 3D Semantic SLAM, tailored for dynamic scenes with visual 3D object detection. The 3DS-SLAM is a tightly-coupled algorithm resolving both semantic and geometric constraints sequentially. We designed a 3D part-aware hybrid transformer for point cloud-based object detection to identify dynamic objects. Subsequently, we propose a dynamic feature filter based on HDBSCAN clustering to extract objects with significant absolute depth differences. When compared against ORB-SLAM2, 3DS-SLAM exhibits an average improvement of 98.01% across the dynamic sequences of the TUM RGB-D dataset. Furthermore, it surpasses the performance of the other four leading SLAM systems designed for dynamic environments.
Authors:Naitik Khandelwal, Xiao Liu, Mengmi Zhang
Abstract:
Scene graph generation (SGG) analyzes images to extract meaningful information about objects and their relationships. In the dynamic visual world, it is crucial for AI systems to continuously detect new objects and establish their relationships with existing ones. Recently, numerous studies have focused on continual learning within the domains of object detection and image recognition. However, a limited amount of research focuses on a more challenging continual learning problem in SGG. This increased difficulty arises from the intricate interactions and dynamic relationships among objects, and their associated contexts. Thus, in continual learning, SGG models are often required to expand, modify, retain, and reason scene graphs within the process of adaptive visual scene understanding. To systematically explore Continual Scene Graph Generation (CSEGG), we present a comprehensive benchmark comprising three learning regimes: relationship incremental, scene incremental, and relationship generalization. Moreover, we introduce a ``Replays via Analysis by Synthesis" method named RAS. This approach leverages the scene graphs, decomposes and re-composes them to represent different scenes, and replays the synthesized scenes based on these compositional scene graphs. The replayed synthesized scenes act as a means to practice and refine proficiency in SGG in known and unknown environments. Our experimental results not only highlight the challenges of directly combining existing continual learning methods with SGG backbones but also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, enhancing CSEGG efficiency while simultaneously preserving privacy and memory usage. All data and source code are publicly available online.
Authors:Vipin Gautam, Shitala Prasad, Sharad Sinha
Abstract:
Small object detection via UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) images captured from drones and radar is a complex task with several formidable challenges. This domain encompasses numerous complexities that impede the accurate detection and localization of small objects. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called JointYODNet for UAVs to detect small objects, leveraging a joint loss function specifically designed for this task. Our method revolves around the development of a joint loss function tailored to enhance the detection performance of small objects. Through extensive experimentation on a diverse dataset of UAV images captured under varying environmental conditions, we evaluated different variations of the loss function and determined the most effective formulation. The results demonstrate that our proposed joint loss function outperforms existing methods in accurately localizing small objects. Specifically, our method achieves a recall of 0.971, and a F1Score of 0.975, surpassing state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, our method achieves a mAP@.5(%) of 98.6, indicating its robustness in detecting small objects across varying scales
Authors:Hao Wang, Björn Johansson
Abstract:
The shift towards electrification and autonomous driving in the automotive industry results in more and more automotive wire harnesses being installed in modern automobiles, which stresses the great significance of guaranteeing the quality of automotive wire harness assembly. The mating of connectors is essential in the final assembly of automotive wire harnesses due to the importance of connectors on wire harness connection and signal transmission. However, the current manual operation of mating connectors leads to severe problems regarding assembly quality and ergonomics, where the robotized assembly has been considered, and different vision-based solutions have been proposed to facilitate a better perception of the robot control system on connectors. Nonetheless, there has been a lack of deep learning-based solutions for detecting automotive wire harness connectors in previous literature. This paper presents a deep learning-based connector detection for robotized automotive wire harness assembly. A dataset of twenty automotive wire harness connectors was created to train and evaluate a two-stage and a one-stage object detection model, respectively. The experiment results indicate the effectiveness of deep learning-based connector detection for automotive wire harness assembly but are limited by the design of the exteriors of connectors.
Authors:Tiago Cortinhal, Idriss Gouigah, Eren Erdal Aksoy
Abstract:
Although LiDAR sensors are crucial for autonomous systems due to providing precise depth information, they struggle with capturing fine object details, especially at a distance, due to sparse and non-uniform data. Recent advances introduced pseudo-LiDAR, i.e., synthetic dense point clouds, using additional modalities such as cameras to enhance 3D object detection. We present a novel LiDAR-only framework that augments raw scans with denser pseudo point clouds by solely relying on LiDAR sensors and scene semantics, omitting the need for cameras. Our framework first utilizes a segmentation model to extract scene semantics from raw point clouds, and then employs a multi-modal domain translator to generate synthetic image segments and depth cues without real cameras. This yields a dense pseudo point cloud enriched with semantic information. We also introduce a new semantically guided projection method, which enhances detection performance by retaining only relevant pseudo points. We applied our framework to different advanced 3D object detection methods and reported up to 2.9% performance upgrade. We also obtained comparable results on the KITTI 3D object detection dataset, in contrast to other state-of-the-art LiDAR-only detectors.
Authors:Ning Ding, Azim Eskandarian
Abstract:
Object detection is a crucial component of autonomous driving, and many detection applications have been developed to address this task. These applications often rely on backbone architectures, which extract representation features from inputs to perform the object detection task. The quality of the features extracted by the backbone architecture can have a significant impact on the overall detection performance. Many researchers have focused on developing new and improved backbone architectures to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of object detection applications. While these backbone architectures have shown state-of-the-art performance on generic object detection datasets like MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, evaluating their performance under an autonomous driving environment has not been previously explored. To address this, our study evaluates three well-known autonomous vehicle datasets, namely KITTI, NuScenes, and BDD, to compare the performance of different backbone architectures on object detection tasks.
Authors:Syed Sha Qutub, Neslihan Kose, Rafael Rosales, Michael Paulitsch, Korbinian Hagn, Florian Geissler, Yang Peng, Gereon Hinz, Alois Knoll
Abstract:
This paper introduces the Budding Ensemble Architecture (BEA), a novel reduced ensemble architecture for anchor-based object detection models. Object detection models are crucial in vision-based tasks, particularly in autonomous systems. They should provide precise bounding box detections while also calibrating their predicted confidence scores, leading to higher-quality uncertainty estimates. However, current models may make erroneous decisions due to false positives receiving high scores or true positives being discarded due to low scores. BEA aims to address these issues. The proposed loss functions in BEA improve the confidence score calibration and lower the uncertainty error, which results in a better distinction of true and false positives and, eventually, higher accuracy of the object detection models. Both Base-YOLOv3 and SSD models were enhanced using the BEA method and its proposed loss functions. The BEA on Base-YOLOv3 trained on the KITTI dataset results in a 6% and 3.7% increase in mAP and AP50, respectively. Utilizing a well-balanced uncertainty estimation threshold to discard samples in real-time even leads to a 9.6% higher AP50 than its base model. This is attributed to a 40% increase in the area under the AP50-based retention curve used to measure the quality of calibration of confidence scores. Furthermore, BEA-YOLOV3 trained on KITTI provides superior out-of-distribution detection on Citypersons, BDD100K, and COCO datasets compared to the ensembles and vanilla models of YOLOv3 and Gaussian-YOLOv3.
Authors:Gustavo Olague, Roberto Pineda, Gerardo Ibarra-Vazquez, Matthieu Olague, Axel Martinez, Sambit Bakshi, Jonathan Vargas, Isnardo Reducindo
Abstract:
Machine learning is at the center of mainstream technology and outperforms classical approaches to handcrafted feature design. Aside from its learning process for artificial feature extraction, it has an end-to-end paradigm from input to output, reaching outstandingly accurate results. However, security concerns about its robustness to malicious and imperceptible perturbations have drawn attention since its prediction can be changed entirely. Salient object detection is a research area where deep convolutional neural networks have proven effective but whose trustworthiness represents a significant issue requiring analysis and solutions to hackers' attacks. Brain programming is a kind of symbolic learning in the vein of good old-fashioned artificial intelligence. This work provides evidence that symbolic learning robustness is crucial in designing reliable visual attention systems since it can withstand even the most intense perturbations. We test this evolutionary computation methodology against several adversarial attacks and noise perturbations using standard databases and a real-world problem of a shorebird called the Snowy Plover portraying a visual attention task. We compare our methodology with five different deep learning approaches, proving that they do not match the symbolic paradigm regarding robustness. All neural networks suffer significant performance losses, while brain programming stands its ground and remains unaffected. Also, by studying the Snowy Plover, we remark on the importance of security in surveillance activities regarding wildlife protection and conservation.
Authors:Chunyong Hu, Hang Zheng, Kun Li, Jianyun Xu, Weibo Mao, Maochun Luo, Lingxuan Wang, Mingxia Chen, Qihao Peng, Kaixuan Liu, Yiru Zhao, Peihan Hao, Minzhe Liu, Kaicheng Yu
Abstract:
Multi-sensor modal fusion has demonstrated strong advantages in 3D object detection tasks. However, existing methods that fuse multi-modal features require transforming features into the bird's eye view space and may lose certain information on Z-axis, thus leading to inferior performance. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end multi-modal fusion transformer-based framework, dubbed FusionFormer, that incorporates deformable attention and residual structures within the fusion encoding module. Specifically, by developing a uniform sampling strategy, our method can easily sample from 2D image and 3D voxel features spontaneously, thus exploiting flexible adaptability and avoiding explicit transformation to the bird's eye view space during the feature concatenation process. We further implement a residual structure in our feature encoder to ensure the model's robustness in case of missing an input modality. Through extensive experiments on a popular autonomous driving benchmark dataset, nuScenes, our method achieves state-of-the-art single model performance of 72.6% mAP and 75.1% NDS in the 3D object detection task without test time augmentation.
Authors:Ali Mohammad-Djafari, Ning Chu, Li Wang, Liang Yu
Abstract:
Machine Learning (ML) methods and tools have gained great success in many data, signal, image and video processing tasks, such as classification, clustering, object detection, semantic segmentation, language processing, Human-Machine interface, etc. In computer vision, image and video processing, these methods are mainly based on Neural Networks (NN) and in particular Convolutional NN (CNN), and more generally Deep NN. Inverse problems arise anywhere we have indirect measurement. As, in general, those inverse problems are ill-posed, to obtain satisfactory solutions for them needs prior information. Different regularization methods have been proposed, where the problem becomes the optimization of a criterion with a likelihood term and a regularization term. The main difficulty, however, in great dimensional real applications, remains the computational cost. Using NN, and in particular Deep Learning (DL) surrogate models and approximate computation, can become very helpful. In this work, we focus on NN and DL particularly adapted for inverse problems. We consider two cases: First the case where the forward operator is known and used as physics constraint, the second more general data driven DL methods.
Authors:Yongxin Shao, Aihong Tan, Binrui Wang, Tianhong Yan, Zhetao Sun, Yiyang Zhang, Jiaxin Liu
Abstract:
LiDAR point clouds can effectively depict the motion and posture of objects in three-dimensional space. Many studies accomplish the 3D object detection by voxelizing point clouds. However, in autonomous driving scenarios, the sparsity and hollowness of point clouds create some difficulties for voxel-based methods. The sparsity of point clouds makes it challenging to describe the geometric features of objects. The hollowness of point clouds poses difficulties for the aggregation of 3D features. We propose a two-stage 3D object detection framework, called MS23D. (1) We propose a method using voxel feature points from multi-branch to construct the 3D feature layer. Using voxel feature points from different branches, we construct a relatively compact 3D feature layer with rich semantic features. Additionally, we propose a distance-weighted sampling method, reducing the loss of foreground points caused by downsampling and allowing the 3D feature layer to retain more foreground points. (2) In response to the hollowness of point clouds, we predict the offsets between deep-level feature points and the object's centroid, making them as close as possible to the object's centroid. This enables the aggregation of these feature points with abundant semantic features. For feature points from shallow-level, we retain them on the object's surface to describe the geometric features of the object. To validate our approach, we evaluated its effectiveness on both the KITTI and ONCE datasets.
Authors:Daniel Scheuchenstuhl, Stefan Ulmer, Felix Resch, Luigi Berducci, Radu Grosu
Abstract:
Robust and efficient learning remains a challenging problem in robotics, in particular with complex visual inputs. Inspired by human attention mechanism, with which we quickly process complex visual scenes and react to changes in the environment, we think that embedding auxiliary information about focus point into robot learning would enhance efficiency and robustness of the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model and emulate the human attention with an approximate prediction model. We then leverage this output and feed it as a structured auxiliary feature map into downstream learning tasks. We validate this idea by learning a prediction model from human-gaze recordings of manual driving in the real world. We test our approach on two learning tasks - object detection and imitation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that the inclusion of predicted human attention leads to improved robustness of the trained models to out-of-distribution samples and faster learning in low-data regime settings. Our work highlights the potential of incorporating structured auxiliary information in representation learning for robotics and opens up new avenues for research in this direction. All code and data are available online.
Authors:Lei Zhao, Bo Li, Xingxing Wei
Abstract:
In object detection, the cost of labeling is much high because it needs not only to confirm the categories of multiple objects in an image but also to accurately determine the bounding boxes of each object. Thus, integrating active learning into object detection will raise pretty positive significance. In this paper, we propose a classification committee for active deep object detection method by introducing a discrepancy mechanism of multiple classifiers for samples' selection when training object detectors. The model contains a main detector and a classification committee. The main detector denotes the target object detector trained from a labeled pool composed of the selected informative images. The role of the classification committee is to select the most informative images according to their uncertainty values from the view of classification, which is expected to focus more on the discrepancy and representative of instances. Specifically, they compute the uncertainty for a specified instance within the image by measuring its discrepancy output by the committee pre-trained via the proposed Maximum Classifiers Discrepancy Group Loss (MCDGL). The most informative images are finally determined by selecting the ones with many high-uncertainty instances. Besides, to mitigate the impact of interference instances, we design a Focus on Positive Instances Loss (FPIL) to make the committee the ability to automatically focus on the representative instances as well as precisely encode their discrepancies for the same instance. Experiments are conducted on Pascal VOC and COCO datasets versus some popular object detectors. And results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art active learning methods, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Marius Lippke, Maurice Quach, Sascha Braun, Daniel Köhler, Michael Ulrich, Bastian Bischoff, Wei Yap Tan
Abstract:
Having precise perception of the environment is crucial for ensuring the secure and reliable functioning of autonomous driving systems. Radar object detection networks are one fundamental part of such systems. CNN-based object detectors showed good performance in this context, but they require large compute resources. This paper investigates sparse convolutional object detection networks, which combine powerful grid-based detection with low compute resources. We investigate radar specific challenges and propose sparse kernel point pillars (SKPP) and dual voxel point convolutions (DVPC) as remedies for the grid rendering and sparse backbone architectures. We evaluate our SKPP-DPVCN architecture on nuScenes, which outperforms the baseline by 5.89% and the previous state of the art by 4.19% in Car AP4.0. Moreover, SKPP-DPVCN reduces the average scale error (ASE) by 21.41% over the baseline.
Authors:Oren Shrout, Ori Nizan, Yizhak Ben-Shabat, Ayellet Tal
Abstract:
Accurately detecting objects in the environment is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles. However, obtaining annotated data for detection is expensive and time-consuming. We introduce PatchContrast, a novel self-supervised point cloud pre-training framework for 3D object detection. We propose to utilize two levels of abstraction to learn discriminative representation from unlabeled data: proposal-level and patch-level. The proposal-level aims at localizing objects in relation to their surroundings, whereas the patch-level adds information about the internal connections between the object's components, hence distinguishing between different objects based on their individual components. We demonstrate how these levels can be integrated into self-supervised pre-training for various backbones to enhance the downstream 3D detection task. We show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three commonly-used 3D detection datasets.
Authors:Yongxin Shao, Aihong Tan, Zhetao Sun, Enhui Zheng, Tianhong Yan, Peng Liao
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection and classification is crucial for autonomous driving. However, real-time inference from extremely sparse 3D data is a formidable challenge. To address this problem, a typical class of approaches transforms the point cloud cast into a regular data representation (voxels or projection maps). Then, it performs feature extraction with convolutional neural networks. However, such methods often result in a certain degree of information loss due to down-sampling or over-compression of feature information. This paper proposes a multi-modal point cloud feature fusion method for projection features and variable receptive field voxel features (PV-SSD) based on projection and variable voxelization to solve the information loss problem. We design a two-branch feature extraction structure with a 2D convolutional neural network to extract the point cloud's projection features in bird's-eye view to focus on the correlation between local features. A voxel feature extraction branch is used to extract local fine-grained features. Meanwhile, we propose a voxel feature extraction method with variable sensory fields to reduce the information loss of voxel branches due to downsampling. It avoids missing critical point information by selecting more useful feature points based on feature point weights for the detection task. In addition, we propose a multi-modal feature fusion module for point clouds. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we tested it on the KITTI dataset and ONCE dataset.
Authors:Mateen Ulhaq, Ivan V. BajiÄ
Abstract:
Deep learning is increasingly being used to perform machine vision tasks such as classification, object detection, and segmentation on 3D point cloud data. However, deep learning inference is computationally expensive. The limited computational capabilities of end devices thus necessitate a codec for transmitting point cloud data over the network for server-side processing. Such a codec must be lightweight and capable of achieving high compression ratios without sacrificing accuracy. Motivated by this, we present a novel point cloud codec that is highly specialized for the machine task of classification. Our codec, based on PointNet, achieves a significantly better rate-accuracy trade-off in comparison to alternative methods. In particular, it achieves a 94% reduction in BD-bitrate over non-specialized codecs on the ModelNet40 dataset. For low-resource end devices, we also propose two lightweight configurations of our encoder that achieve similar BD-bitrate reductions of 93% and 92% with 3% and 5% drops in top-1 accuracy, while consuming only 0.470 and 0.048 encoder-side kMACs/point, respectively. Our codec demonstrates the potential of specialized codecs for machine analysis of point clouds, and provides a basis for extension to more complex tasks and datasets in the future.
Authors:Zhanhao Liang, Yuhui Yuan
Abstract:
In this paper, we aim to study how to build a strong instance segmenter with minimal training time and GPUs, as opposed to the majority of current approaches that pursue more accurate instance segmenter by building more advanced frameworks at the cost of longer training time and higher GPU requirements. To achieve this, we introduce a simple and general framework, termed Mask Frozen-DETR, which can convert any existing DETR-based object detection model into a powerful instance segmentation model. Our method only requires training an additional lightweight mask network that predicts instance masks within the bounding boxes given by a frozen DETR-based object detector. Remarkably, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art instance segmentation method Mask DINO in terms of performance on the COCO test-dev split (55.3% vs. 54.7%) while being over 10X times faster to train. Furthermore, all of our experiments can be trained using only one Tesla V100 GPU with 16 GB of memory, demonstrating the significant efficiency of our proposed framework.
Authors:Jingyu Du, Yang Zhao, Hong Cheng
Abstract:
In the field of autonomous driving, there have been many excellent perception models for object detection, semantic segmentation, and other tasks, but how can we effectively use the perception models for vehicle planning? Traditional autonomous vehicle trajectory prediction methods not only need to obey traffic rules to avoid collisions, but also need to follow the prescribed route to reach the destination. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based trajectory prediction network for end-to-end autonomous driving without rules called Target-point Attention Transformer network (TAT). We use the attention mechanism to realize the interaction between the predicted trajectory and the perception features as well as target-points. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing conditional imitation learning and GRU-based methods, significantly reducing the occurrence of accidents and improving route completion. We evaluate our approach in complex closed loop driving scenarios in cities using the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Cora A. Dimmig, Anna Goodridge, Gabriel Baraban, Pupei Zhu, Joyraj Bhowmick, Marin Kobilarov
Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel, small form-factor, aerial vehicle research platform for agile object detection, classification, tracking, and interaction tasks. General-purpose hardware components were designed to augment a given aerial vehicle and enable it to perform safe and reliable grasping. These components include a custom collision tolerant cage and low-cost Gripper Extension Package, which we call GREP, for object grasping. Small vehicles enable applications in highly constrained environments, but are often limited by computational resources. This work evaluates the challenges of pick-and-place tasks, with entirely onboard computation of object pose and visual odometry based state estimation on a small platform, and demonstrates experiments with enough accuracy to reliably grasp objects. In a total of 70 trials across challenging cases such as cluttered environments, obstructed targets, and multiple instances of the same target, we demonstrated successfully grasping the target in 93% of trials. Both the hardware component designs and software framework are released as open-source, since our intention is to enable easy reproduction and application on a wide range of small vehicles.
Authors:BartÅomiej Olber, Krystian Radlak, Krystian ChachuÅa, Jakub Åyskawa, Piotr FrÄ
tczak
Abstract:
Object detection is essential to many perception algorithms used in modern robotics applications. Unfortunately, the existing models share a tendency to assign high confidence scores for out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Although OOD detection has been extensively studied in recent years by the computer vision (CV) community, most proposed solutions apply only to the image recognition task. Real-world applications such as perception in autonomous vehicles struggle with far more complex challenges than classification. In our work, we focus on the prevalent field of object detection, introducing Neuron Activation PaTteRns for out-of-distribution samples detection in Object detectioN (NAPTRON). Performed experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without the need to affect in-distribution (ID) performance. By evaluating the methods in two distinct OOD scenarios and three types of object detectors we have created the largest open-source benchmark for OOD object detection.
Authors:Zahra Ziran, Francesco Leotta, Massimo Mecella
Abstract:
The study of ancient documents provides a glimpse into our past. However, the low image quality and intricate details commonly found in these documents present significant challenges for accurate object detection. The objective of this research is to enhance object detection in ancient documents by reducing false positives and improving precision. To achieve this, we propose a method that involves the creation of synthetic datasets through computational mediation, along with the integration of visual feature extraction into the object detection process. Our approach includes associating objects with their component parts and introducing a visual feature map to enable the model to discern between different symbols and document elements. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that improved object detection has a profound impact on the field of Paleography, enabling in-depth analysis and fostering a greater understanding of these valuable historical artifacts.
Authors:Sefa Kayraklik, Ibrahim Yildirim, Ertugrul Basar, Ibrahim Hokelek, Ali Gorcin
Abstract:
This paper presents reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided deep learning (DL)-based spectrum sensing for next-generation cognitive radios. To that end, the secondary user (SU) monitors the primary transmitter (PT) signal, where the RIS plays a pivotal role in increasing the strength of the PT signal at the SU. The spectrograms of the synthesized dataset, including the 4G LTE and 5G NR signals, are mapped to images utilized for training the state-of-art object detection approaches, namely Detectron2 and YOLOv7. By conducting extensive experiments using a real RIS prototype, we demonstrate that the RIS can consistently and significantly improve the performance of the DL detectors to identify the PT signal type along with its time and frequency utilization. This study also paves the way for optimizing spectrum utilization through RIS-assisted CR application in next-generation wireless communication systems.
Authors:Luca Clissa, Antonio Macaluso, Roberto Morelli, Alessandra Occhinegro, Emiliana Piscitiello, Ludovico Taddei, Marco Luppi, Roberto Amici, Matteo Cerri, Timna Hitrec, Lorenzo Rinaldi, Antonio Zoccoli
Abstract:
Fluorescent Neuronal Cells v2 is a collection of fluorescence microscopy images and the corresponding ground-truth annotations, designed to foster innovative research in the domains of Life Sciences and Deep Learning. This dataset encompasses three image collections in which rodent neuronal cells' nuclei and cytoplasm are stained with diverse markers to highlight their anatomical or functional characteristics. Alongside the images, we provide ground-truth annotations for several learning tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and counting. The contribution is two-fold. First, given the variety of annotations and their accessible formats, we envision our work facilitating methodological advancements in computer vision approaches for segmentation, detection, feature learning, unsupervised and self-supervised learning, transfer learning, and related areas. Second, by enabling extensive exploration and benchmarking, we hope Fluorescent Neuronal Cells v2 will catalyze breakthroughs in fluorescence microscopy analysis and promote cutting-edge discoveries in life sciences. The data are available at: https://amsacta.unibo.it/id/eprint/7347
Authors:Arul Selvam Periyasamy, Arash Amini, Vladimir Tsaturyan, Sven Behnke
Abstract:
6D object pose estimation is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous robot manipulation applications. The state-of-the-art models for pose estimation are convolutional neural network (CNN)-based. Lately, Transformers, an architecture originally proposed for natural language processing, is achieving state-of-the-art results in many computer vision tasks as well. Equipped with the multi-head self-attention mechanism, Transformers enable simple single-stage end-to-end architectures for learning object detection and 6D object pose estimation jointly. In this work, we propose YOLOPose (short form for You Only Look Once Pose estimation), a Transformer-based multi-object 6D pose estimation method based on keypoint regression and an improved variant of the YOLOPose model. In contrast to the standard heatmaps for predicting keypoints in an image, we directly regress the keypoints. Additionally, we employ a learnable orientation estimation module to predict the orientation from the keypoints. Along with a separate translation estimation module, our model is end-to-end differentiable. Our method is suitable for real-time applications and achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art methods. We analyze the role of object queries in our architecture and reveal that the object queries specialize in detecting objects in specific image regions. Furthermore, we quantify the accuracy trade-off of using datasets of smaller sizes to train our model.
Authors:Fei Xia, Kyungduk Kim, Yaniv Eliezer, SeungYun Han, Liam Shaughnessy, Sylvain Gigan, Hui Cao
Abstract:
Optical information processing and computing can potentially offer enhanced performance, scalability and energy efficiency. However, achieving nonlinearity-a critical component of computation-remains challenging in the optical domain. Here we introduce a design that leverages a multiple-scattering cavity to passively induce optical nonlinear random mapping with a continuous-wave laser at a low power. Each scattering event effectively mixes information from different areas of a spatial light modulator, resulting in a highly nonlinear mapping between the input data and output pattern. We demonstrate that our design retains vital information even when the readout dimensionality is reduced, thereby enabling optical data compression. This capability allows our optical platforms to offer efficient optical information processing solutions across applications. We demonstrate our design's efficacy across tasks, including classification, image reconstruction, keypoint detection and object detection, all of which are achieved through optical data compression combined with a digital decoder. In particular, high performance at extreme compression ratios is observed in real-time pedestrian detection. Our findings open pathways for novel algorithms and unconventional architectural designs for optical computing.
Authors:Gowri Namratha Meedinti, Kandukuri Sai Srirekha, Radhakrishnan Delhibabu
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the potential of Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) in comparison to classical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Artificial / Classical Neural Network (ANN) models. With the increasing amount of data, utilizing computing methods like CNN in real-time has become challenging. QCNNs overcome this challenge by utilizing qubits to represent data in a quantum environment and applying CNN structures to quantum computers. The time and accuracy of QCNNs are compared with classical CNNs and ANN models under different conditions such as batch size and input size. The maximum complexity level that QCNNs can handle in terms of these parameters is also investigated. The analysis shows that QCNNs have the potential to outperform both classical CNNs and ANN models in terms of accuracy and efficiency for certain applications, demonstrating their promise as a powerful tool in the field of machine learning.
Authors:Jiayu Yang, Enze Xie, Miaomiao Liu, Jose M. Alvarez
Abstract:
Recent vision-only perception models for autonomous driving achieved promising results by encoding multi-view image features into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space. A critical step and the main bottleneck of these methods is transforming image features into the BEV coordinate frame. This paper focuses on leveraging geometry information, such as depth, to model such feature transformation. Existing works rely on non-parametric depth distribution modeling leading to significant memory consumption, or ignore the geometry information to address this problem. In contrast, we propose to use parametric depth distribution modeling for feature transformation. We first lift the 2D image features to the 3D space defined for the ego vehicle via a predicted parametric depth distribution for each pixel in each view. Then, we aggregate the 3D feature volume based on the 3D space occupancy derived from depth to the BEV frame. Finally, we use the transformed features for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing semantic segmentation methods do also suffer from an hallucination problem as they do not take visibility information into account. This hallucination can be particularly problematic for subsequent modules such as control and planning. To mitigate the issue, our method provides depth uncertainty and reliable visibility-aware estimations. We further leverage our parametric depth modeling to present a novel visibility-aware evaluation metric that, when taken into account, can mitigate the hallucination problem. Extensive experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods on both tasks.
Authors:Ludovica Schaerf, Carina Popovici, Eric Postma
Abstract:
In recent years, Transformers, initially developed for language, have been successfully applied to visual tasks. Vision Transformers have been shown to push the state-of-the-art in a wide range of tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. While ample research has shown promising results in art attribution and art authentication tasks using Convolutional Neural Networks, this paper examines if the superiority of Vision Transformers extends to art authentication, improving, thus, the reliability of computer-based authentication of artworks. Using a carefully compiled dataset of authentic paintings by Vincent van Gogh and two contrast datasets, we compare the art authentication performances of Swin Transformers with those of EfficientNet. Using a standard contrast set containing imitations and proxies (works by painters with styles closely related to van Gogh), we find that EfficientNet achieves the best performance overall. With a contrast set that only consists of imitations, we find the Swin Transformer to be superior to EfficientNet by achieving an authentication accuracy of over 85%. These results lead us to conclude that Vision Transformers represent a strong and promising contender in art authentication, particularly in enhancing the computer-based ability to detect artistic imitations.
Authors:Hao Li, Zhendong Yuan, Gabriel Dax, Gefei Kong, Hongchao Fan, Alexander Zipf, Martin Werner
Abstract:
Accurate building height estimation is key to the automatic derivation of 3D city models from emerging big geospatial data, including Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI). However, an automatic solution for large-scale building height estimation based on low-cost VGI data is currently missing. The fast development of VGI data platforms, especially OpenStreetMap (OSM) and crowdsourced street-view images (SVI), offers a stimulating opportunity to fill this research gap. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised learning (SSL) method of automatically estimating building height from Mapillary SVI and OSM data to generate low-cost and open-source 3D city modeling in LoD1. The proposed method consists of three parts: first, we propose an SSL schema with the option of setting a different ratio of "pseudo label" during the supervised regression; second, we extract multi-level morphometric features from OSM data (i.e., buildings and streets) for the purposed of inferring building height; last, we design a building floor estimation workflow with a pre-trained facade object detection network to generate "pseudo label" from SVI and assign it to the corresponding OSM building footprint. In a case study, we validate the proposed SSL method in the city of Heidelberg, Germany and evaluate the model performance against the reference data of building heights. Based on three different regression models, namely Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the SSL method leads to a clear performance boosting in estimating building heights with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) around 2.1 meters, which is competitive to state-of-the-art approaches. The preliminary result is promising and motivates our future work in scaling up the proposed method based on low-cost VGI data, with possibilities in even regions and areas with diverse data quality and availability.
Authors:Guandu Liu, Fangyuan Zhang, Tianxiang Pan, Bin Wang
Abstract:
Reliable pseudo-labels from unlabeled data play a key role in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, the state-of-the-art SSOD methods all rely on pseudo-labels with high confidence, which ignore valuable pseudo-labels with lower confidence. Additionally, the insufficient excavation for unlabeled data results in an excessively low recall rate thus hurting the network training. In this paper, we propose a novel Low-confidence Samples Mining (LSM) method to utilize low-confidence pseudo-labels efficiently. Specifically, we develop an additional pseudo information mining (PIM) branch on account of low-resolution feature maps to extract reliable large-area instances, the IoUs of which are higher than small-area ones. Owing to the complementary predictions between PIM and the main branch, we further design self-distillation (SD) to compensate for both in a mutually-learning manner. Meanwhile, the extensibility of the above approaches enables our LSM to apply to Faster-RCNN and Deformable-DETR respectively. On the MS-COCO benchmark, our method achieves 3.54% mAP improvement over state-of-the-art methods under 5% labeling ratios.
Authors:Jayesh Songara, Shivam Pande, Shabnam Choudhury, Biplab Banerjee, Rajbabu Velmurugan
Abstract:
In this research, we deal with the problem of visual question answering (VQA) in remote sensing. While remotely sensed images contain information significant for the task of identification and object detection, they pose a great challenge in their processing because of high dimensionality, volume and redundancy. Furthermore, processing image information jointly with language features adds additional constraints, such as mapping the corresponding image and language features. To handle this problem, we propose a cross attention based approach combined with information maximization. The CNN-LSTM based cross-attention highlights the information in the image and language modalities and establishes a connection between the two, while information maximization learns a low dimensional bottleneck layer, that has all the relevant information required to carry out the VQA task. We evaluate our method on two VQA remote sensing datasets of different resolutions. For the high resolution dataset, we achieve an overall accuracy of 79.11% and 73.87% for the two test sets while for the low resolution dataset, we achieve an overall accuracy of 85.98%.
Authors:Anguelos Nicolaou, Daniel Luger, Franziska Decker, Nicolas Renet, Vincent Christlein, Georg Vogeler
Abstract:
Diplomatics, the analysis of medieval charters, is a major field of research in which paleography is applied. Annotating data, if performed by laymen, needs validation and correction by experts. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient annotation approach for charter segmentation, essentially reducing it to object detection. This approach allows for a much more efficient use of the paleographer's time and produces results that can compete and even outperform pixel-level segmentation in some use cases. Further experiments shed light on how to design a class ontology in order to make the best use of annotators' time and effort. Exploiting the presence of calibration cards in the image, we further annotate the data with the physical length in pixels and train regression neural networks to predict it from image patches.
Authors:Jinye Qu, Zeyu Gao, Tielin Zhang, Yanfeng Lu, Huajin Tang, Hong Qiao
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered widespread interest for their energy efficiency and brain-inspired event-driven properties. While recent methods like Spiking-YOLO have expanded the SNNs to more challenging object detection tasks, they often suffer from high latency and low detection accuracy, making them difficult to deploy on latency sensitive mobile platforms. Furthermore, the conversion method from Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to SNNs is hard to maintain the complete structure of the ANNs, resulting in poor feature representation and high conversion errors. To address these challenges, we propose two methods: timesteps compression and spike-time-dependent integrated (STDI) coding. The former reduces the timesteps required in ANN-SNN conversion by compressing information, while the latter sets a time-varying threshold to expand the information holding capacity. We also present a SNN-based ultra-low latency and high accurate object detection model (SUHD) that achieves state-of-the-art performance on nontrivial datasets like PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, with about remarkable 750x fewer timesteps and 30% mean average precision (mAP) improvement, compared to the Spiking-YOLO on MS COCO datasets. To the best of our knowledge, SUHD is the deepest spike-based object detection model to date that achieves ultra low timesteps to complete the lossless conversion.
Authors:Anirudha Ramesh, Anurag Ghosh, Christoph Mertz, Jeff Schneider
Abstract:
Robotic Perception in diverse domains such as low-light scenarios, where new modalities like thermal imaging and specialized night-vision sensors are increasingly employed, remains a challenge. Largely, this is due to the limited availability of labeled data. Existing Domain Adaptation (DA) techniques, while promising to leverage labels from existing well-lit RGB images, fail to consider the characteristics of the source domain itself. We holistically account for this factor by proposing Source Preparation (SP), a method to mitigate source domain biases. Our Almost Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (AUDA) framework, a label-efficient semi-supervised approach for robotic scenarios -- employs Source Preparation (SP), Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) and Supervised Alignment (SA) from limited labeled data. We introduce CityIntensified, a novel dataset comprising temporally aligned image pairs captured from a high-sensitivity camera and an intensifier camera for semantic segmentation and object detection in low-light settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in semantic segmentation, with experiments showing that SP enhances UDA across a range of visual domains, with improvements up to 40.64% in mIoU over baseline, while making target models more robust to real-world shifts within the target domain. We show that AUDA is a label-efficient framework for effective DA, significantly improving target domain performance with only tens of labeled samples from the target domain.
Authors:Madeline Chantry Schiappa, Shehreen Azad, Sachidanand VS, Yunhao Ge, Ondrej Miksik, Yogesh S. Rawat, Vibhav Vineet
Abstract:
Due to the increase in computational resources and accessibility of data, an increase in large, deep learning models trained on copious amounts of multi-modal data using self-supervised or semi-supervised learning have emerged. These ``foundation'' models are often adapted to a variety of downstream tasks like classification, object detection, and segmentation with little-to-no training on the target dataset. In this work, we perform a robustness analysis of Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) for segmentation tasks and focus on robustness against real-world distribution shift inspired perturbations. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art segmentation architectures using 2 different perturbed datasets, MS COCO-P and ADE20K-P, with 17 different perturbations with 5 severity levels each. Our findings reveal several key insights: (1) VFMs exhibit vulnerabilities to compression-induced corruptions, (2) despite not outpacing all of unimodal models in robustness, multimodal models show competitive resilience in zero-shot scenarios, and (3) VFMs demonstrate enhanced robustness for certain object categories. These observations suggest that our robustness evaluation framework sets new requirements for foundational models, encouraging further advancements to bolster their adaptability and performance. The code and dataset is available at: \url{https://tinyurl.com/fm-robust}.
Authors:Nari Johnson, Ãngel Alexander Cabrera, Gregory Plumb, Ameet Talwalkar
Abstract:
Machine learning (ML) models that achieve high average accuracy can still underperform on semantically coherent subsets ("slices") of data. This behavior can have significant societal consequences for the safety or bias of the model in deployment, but identifying these underperforming slices can be difficult in practice, especially in domains where practitioners lack access to group annotations to define coherent subsets of their data. Motivated by these challenges, ML researchers have developed new slice discovery algorithms that aim to group together coherent and high-error subsets of data. However, there has been little evaluation focused on whether these tools help humans form correct hypotheses about where (for which groups) their model underperforms. We conduct a controlled user study (N = 15) where we show 40 slices output by two state-of-the-art slice discovery algorithms to users, and ask them to form hypotheses about an object detection model. Our results provide positive evidence that these tools provide some benefit over a naive baseline, and also shed light on challenges faced by users during the hypothesis formation step. We conclude by discussing design opportunities for ML and HCI researchers. Our findings point to the importance of centering users when creating and evaluating new tools for slice discovery.
Authors:Suraj Bijjahalli, Oscar Pizarro, Stefan B. Williams
Abstract:
Detection of artificial objects from underwater imagery gathered by Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is a key requirement for many subsea applications. Real-world AUV image datasets tend to be very large and unlabelled. Furthermore, such datasets are typically imbalanced, containing few instances of objects of interest, particularly when searching for unusual objects in a scene. It is therefore, difficult to fit models capable of reliably detecting these objects. Given these factors, we propose to treat artificial objects as anomalies and detect them through a semi-supervised framework based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). We develop a method which clusters image data in a learned low-dimensional latent space and extracts images that are likely to contain anomalous features. We also devise an anomaly score based on extracting poorly reconstructed regions of an image. We demonstrate that by applying both methods on large image datasets, human operators can be shown candidate anomalous samples with a low false positive rate to identify objects of interest. We apply our approach to real seafloor imagery gathered by an AUV and evaluate its sensitivity to the dimensionality of the latent representation used by the VAE. We evaluate the precision-recall tradeoff and demonstrate that by choosing an appropriate latent dimensionality and threshold, we are able to achieve an average precision of 0.64 on unlabelled datasets.
Authors:MikoÅaj Åysakowski, Kamil Å»ywanowski, Adam Banaszczyk, MichaÅ R. Nowicki, Piotr SkrzypczyÅski, SÅawomir K. Tadeja
Abstract:
This paper introduces a software architecture for real-time object detection using machine learning (ML) in an augmented reality (AR) environment. Our approach uses the recent state-of-the-art YOLOv8 network that runs onboard on the Microsoft HoloLens 2 head-mounted display (HMD). The primary motivation behind this research is to enable the application of advanced ML models for enhanced perception and situational awareness with a wearable, hands-free AR platform. We show the image processing pipeline for the YOLOv8 model and the techniques used to make it real-time on the resource-limited edge computing platform of the headset. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution achieves real-time processing without needing offloading tasks to the cloud or any other external servers while retaining satisfactory accuracy regarding the usual mAP metric and measured qualitative performance
Authors:Simon Lepage, Jérémie Mary, David Picard
Abstract:
This paper introduces a new challenge for image similarity search in the context of fashion, addressing the inherent ambiguity in this domain stemming from complex images. We present Referred Visual Search (RVS), a task allowing users to define more precisely the desired similarity, following recent interest in the industry. We release a new large public dataset, LRVS-Fashion, consisting of 272k fashion products with 842k images extracted from fashion catalogs, designed explicitly for this task. However, unlike traditional visual search methods in the industry, we demonstrate that superior performance can be achieved by bypassing explicit object detection and adopting weakly-supervised conditional contrastive learning on image tuples. Our method is lightweight and demonstrates robustness, reaching Recall at one superior to strong detection-based baselines against 2M distractors. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Slep/LAION-RVS-Fashion .
Authors:Deepan Chakravarthi Padmanabhan, Paul G. Plöger, Octavio Arriaga, Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Abstract:
Saliency methods are frequently used to explain Deep Neural Network-based models. Adebayo et al.'s work on evaluating saliency methods for classification models illustrate certain explanation methods fail the model and data randomization tests. However, on extending the tests for various state of the art object detectors we illustrate that the ability to explain a model is more dependent on the model itself than the explanation method. We perform sanity checks for object detection and define new qualitative criteria to evaluate the saliency explanations, both for object classification and bounding box decisions, using Guided Backpropagation, Integrated Gradients, and their Smoothgrad versions, together with Faster R-CNN, SSD, and EfficientDet-D0, trained on COCO. In addition, the sensitivity of the explanation method to model parameters and data labels varies class-wise motivating to perform the sanity checks for each class. We find that EfficientDet-D0 is the most interpretable method independent of the saliency method, which passes the sanity checks with little problems.
Authors:Haoxuan Xu, Songning Lai, Xianyang Li, Yang Yang
Abstract:
Car detection, particularly through camera vision, has become a major focus in the field of computer vision and has gained widespread adoption. While current car detection systems are capable of good detection, reliable detection can still be challenging due to factors such as proximity between the car, light intensity, and environmental visibility. To address these issues, we propose cross-domain Car Detection Model with integrated convolutional block Attention mechanism(CDMA) that we apply to car recognition for autonomous driving and other areas. CDMA includes several novelties: 1)Building a complete cross-domain target detection framework. 2)Developing an unpaired target domain picture generation module with an integrated convolutional attention mechanism which specifically emphasizes the car headlights feature. 3)Adopting Generalized Intersection over Union (GIOU) as the loss function of the target detection framework. 4)Designing an object detection model integrated with two-headed Convolutional Block Attention Module(CBAM). 5)Utilizing an effective data enhancement method. To evaluate the model's effectiveness, we performed a reduced will resolution process on the data in the SSLAD dataset and used it as the benchmark dataset for our task. Experimental results show that the performance of the cross-domain car target detection model improves by 40% over the model without our framework, and our improvements have a significant impact on cross-domain car recognition.
Authors:Miya Nakajima, Takahiro Saitoh, Tsuyoshi Kato
Abstract:
The importance of ultrasonic nondestructive testing has been increasing in recent years, and there are high expectations for the potential of laser ultrasonic visualization testing, which combines laser ultrasonic testing with scattered wave visualization technology. Even if scattered waves are visualized, inspectors still need to carefully inspect the images. To automate this, this paper proposes a deep neural network for automatic defect detection and localization in LUVT images. To explore the structure of a neural network suitable to this task, we compared the LUVT image analysis problem with the generic object detection problem. Numerical experiments using real-world data from a SUS304 flat plate showed that the proposed method is more effective than the general object detection model in terms of prediction performance. We also show that the computational time required for prediction is faster than that of the general object detection model.
Authors:Daniel Köhler, Maurice Quach, Michael Ulrich, Frank Meinl, Bastian Bischoff, Holger Blume
Abstract:
Architectures that first convert point clouds to a grid representation and then apply convolutional neural networks achieve good performance for radar-based object detection. However, the transfer from irregular point cloud data to a dense grid structure is often associated with a loss of information, due to the discretization and aggregation of points. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, multi-scale KPPillarsBEV, that aims to mitigate the negative effects of grid rendering. Specifically, we propose a novel grid rendering method, KPBEV, which leverages the descriptive power of kernel point convolutions to improve the encoding of local point cloud contexts during grid rendering. In addition, we propose a general multi-scale grid rendering formulation to incorporate multi-scale feature maps into convolutional backbones of detection networks with arbitrary grid rendering methods. We perform extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and evaluate the methods in terms of detection performance and computational complexity. The proposed multi-scale KPPillarsBEV architecture outperforms the baseline by 5.37% and the previous state of the art by 2.88% in Car AP4.0 (average precision for a matching threshold of 4 meters) on the nuScenes validation set. Moreover, the proposed single-scale KPBEV grid rendering improves the Car AP4.0 by 2.90% over the baseline while maintaining the same inference speed.
Authors:Liheng Bian, Daoyu Li, Shuoguang Wang, Chunyang Teng, Huteng Liu, Hanwen Xu, Xuyang Chang, Guoqiang Zhao, Shiyong Li, Jun Zhang
Abstract:
Millimeter-wave (MMW) imaging is emerging as a promising technique for safe security inspection. It achieves a delicate balance between imaging resolution, penetrability and human safety, resulting in higher resolution compared to low-frequency microwave, stronger penetrability compared to visible light, and stronger safety compared to X ray. Despite of recent advance in the last decades, the high cost of requisite large-scale antenna array hinders widespread adoption of MMW imaging in practice. To tackle this challenge, we report a large-scale single-shot MMW imaging framework using sparse antenna array, achieving low-cost but high-fidelity security inspection under an interpretable learning scheme. We first collected extensive full-sampled MMW echoes to study the statistical ranking of each element in the large-scale array. These elements are then sampled based on the ranking, building the experimentally optimal sparse sampling strategy that reduces the cost of antenna array by up to one order of magnitude. Additionally, we derived an untrained interpretable learning scheme, which realizes robust and accurate image reconstruction from sparsely sampled echoes. Last, we developed a neural network for automatic object detection, and experimentally demonstrated successful detection of concealed centimeter-sized targets using 10% sparse array, whereas all the other contemporary approaches failed at the same sample sampling ratio. The performance of the reported technique presents higher than 50% superiority over the existing MMW imaging schemes on various metrics including precision, recall, and mAP50. With such strong detection ability and order-of-magnitude cost reduction, we anticipate that this technique provides a practical way for large-scale single-shot MMW imaging, and could advocate its further practical applications.
Authors:Na Dong, Yongqiang Zhang, Mingli Ding, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract:
Real-world data tends to follow a long-tailed distribution, where the class imbalance results in dominance of the head classes during training. In this paper, we propose a frustratingly simple but effective step-wise learning framework to gradually enhance the capability of the model in detecting all categories of long-tailed datasets. Specifically, we build smooth-tail data where the long-tailed distribution of categories decays smoothly to correct the bias towards head classes. We pre-train a model on the whole long-tailed data to preserve discriminability between all categories. We then fine-tune the class-agnostic modules of the pre-trained model on the head class dominant replay data to get a head class expert model with improved decision boundaries from all categories. Finally, we train a unified model on the tail class dominant replay data while transferring knowledge from the head class expert model to ensure accurate detection of all categories. Extensive experiments on long-tailed datasets LVIS v0.5 and LVIS v1.0 demonstrate the superior performance of our method, where we can improve the AP with ResNet-50 backbone from 27.0% to 30.3% AP, and especially for the rare categories from 15.5% to 24.9% AP. Our best model using ResNet-101 backbone can achieve 30.7% AP, which suppresses all existing detectors using the same backbone.
Authors:Martin Brenner, Napoleon H. Reyes, Teo Susnjak, Andre L. C. Barczak
Abstract:
In the last decade, the computer vision field has seen significant progress in multimodal data fusion and learning, where multiple sensors, including depth, infrared, and visual, are used to capture the environment across diverse spectral ranges. Despite these advancements, there has been no systematic and comprehensive evaluation of fusing RGB-D and thermal modalities to date. While autonomous driving using LiDAR, radar, RGB, and other sensors has garnered substantial research interest, along with the fusion of RGB and depth modalities, the integration of thermal cameras and, specifically, the fusion of RGB-D and thermal data, has received comparatively less attention. This might be partly due to the limited number of publicly available datasets for such applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of both, state-of-the-art and traditional methods used in fusing RGB-D and thermal camera data for various applications, such as site inspection, human tracking, fault detection, and others. The reviewed literature has been categorised into technical areas, such as 3D reconstruction, segmentation, object detection, available datasets, and other related topics. Following a brief introduction and an overview of the methodology, the study delves into calibration and registration techniques, then examines thermal visualisation and 3D reconstruction, before discussing the application of classic feature-based techniques as well as modern deep learning approaches. The paper concludes with a discourse on current limitations and potential future research directions. It is hoped that this survey will serve as a valuable reference for researchers looking to familiarise themselves with the latest advancements and contribute to the RGB-DT research field.
Authors:Burhaneddin Yaman, Tanvir Mahmud, Chun-Hao Liu
Abstract:
We propose an embarrassingly simple method -- instance-aware repeat factor sampling (IRFS) to address the problem of imbalanced data in long-tailed object detection. Imbalanced datasets in real-world object detection often suffer from a large disparity in the number of instances for each class. To improve the generalization performance of object detection models on rare classes, various data sampling techniques have been proposed. Repeat factor sampling (RFS) has shown promise due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Despite its efficiency, RFS completely neglects the instance counts and solely relies on the image count during re-sampling process. However, instance count may immensely vary for different classes with similar image counts. Such variation highlights the importance of both image and instance for addressing the long-tail distributions. Thus, we propose IRFS which unifies instance and image counts for the re-sampling process to be aware of different perspectives of the imbalance in long-tailed datasets. Our method shows promising results on the challenging LVIS v1.0 benchmark dataset over various architectures and backbones, demonstrating their effectiveness in improving the performance of object detection models on rare classes with a relative $+50\%$ average precision (AP) improvement over counterpart RFS. IRFS can serve as a strong baseline and be easily incorporated into existing long-tailed frameworks.
Authors:Mansi Goel, Shashank Dargar, Shounak Ghatak, Nidhi Verma, Pratik Chauhan, Anushka Gupta, Nikhila Vishnumolakala, Hareesh Amuru, Ekta Gambhir, Ronak Chhajed, Meenal Jain, Astha Jain, Samiksha Garg, Nitesh Narwade, Nikhilesh Verhwani, Abhuday Tiwari, Kirti Vashishtha, Ganesh Bagler
Abstract:
Diet is central to the epidemic of lifestyle disorders. Accurate and effortless diet logging is one of the significant bottlenecks for effective diet management and calorie restriction. Dish detection from food platters is a challenging problem due to a visually complex food layout. We present an end-to-end computational framework for diet management, from data compilation, annotation, and state-of-the-art model identification to its mobile app implementation. As a case study, we implement the framework in the context of Indian food platters known for their complex presentation that poses a challenge for the automated detection of dishes. Starting with the 61 most popular Indian dishes, we identify the state-of-the-art model through a comparative analysis of deep-learning-based object detection architectures. Rooted in a meticulous compilation of 68,005 platter images with 134,814 manual dish annotations, we first compare ten architectures for multi-label classification to identify ResNet152 (mAP=84.51%) as the best model. YOLOv8x (mAP=87.70%) emerged as the best model architecture for dish detection among the eight deep-learning models implemented after a thorough performance evaluation. By comparing with the state-of-the-art model for the IndianFood10 dataset, we demonstrate the superior object detection performance of YOLOv8x for this subset and establish Resnet152 as the best architecture for multi-label classification. The models thus trained on richly annotated data can be extended to include dishes from across global cuisines. The proposed framework is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept mobile application with diverse applications for diet logging, food recommendation systems, nutritional interventions, and mitigation of lifestyle disorders.
Authors:Jinyu Li, Chenxu Luo, Xiaodong Yang
Abstract:
In order to deal with the sparse and unstructured raw point clouds, LiDAR based 3D object detection research mostly focuses on designing dedicated local point aggregators for fine-grained geometrical modeling. In this paper, we revisit the local point aggregators from the perspective of allocating computational resources. We find that the simplest pillar based models perform surprisingly well considering both accuracy and latency. Additionally, we show that minimal adaptions from the success of 2D object detection, such as enlarging receptive field, significantly boost the performance. Extensive experiments reveal that our pillar based networks with modernized designs in terms of architecture and training render the state-of-the-art performance on the two popular benchmarks: Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes. Our results challenge the common intuition that the detailed geometry modeling is essential to achieve high performance for 3D object detection.
Authors:Yi Liu, Shoukun Xu, Dingwen Zhang, Jungong Han
Abstract:
Co-salient object detection targets at detecting co-existed salient objects among a group of images. Recently, a generalist model for segmenting everything in context, called SegGPT, is gaining public attention. In view of its breakthrough for segmentation, we can hardly wait to probe into its contribution to the task of co-salient object detection. In this report, we first design a framework to enable SegGPT for the problem of co-salient object detection. Proceed to the next step, we evaluate the performance of SegGPT on the problem of co-salient object detection on three available datasets. We achieve a finding that co-saliency scenes challenges SegGPT due to context discrepancy within a group of co-saliency images.
Authors:Zhe Chen, Yang Yang, Anne Bettens, Youngho Eun, Xiaofeng Wu
Abstract:
Detecting Resident Space Objects (RSOs) and preventing collisions with other satellites is crucial. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown superior performance in object detection when large-scale datasets are available. However, collecting rich data of RSOs is difficult due to very few occurrences in the space images. Without sufficient data, it is challenging to comprehensively train DCNN detectors and make them effective for detecting RSOs in space images, let alone to estimate whether a detector is sufficiently robust. The lack of meaningful evaluation of different detectors could further affect the design and application of detection methods. To tackle this issue, we propose that the space images containing RSOs can be simulated to complement the shortage of raw data for better benchmarking. Accordingly, we introduce a novel simulation-augmented benchmarking framework for RSO detection (SAB-RSOD). In our framework, by making the best use of the hardware parameters of the sensor that captures real-world space images, we first develop a high-fidelity RSO simulator that can generate various realistic space images. Then, we use this simulator to generate images that contain diversified RSOs in space and annotate them automatically. Later, we mix the synthetic images with the real-world images, obtaining around 500 images for training with only the real-world images for evaluation. Under SAB-RSOD, we can train different popular object detectors like Yolo and Faster RCNN effectively, enabling us to evaluate their performance thoroughly. The evaluation results have shown that the amount of available data and image resolution are two key factors for robust RSO detection. Moreover, if using a lower resolution for higher efficiency, we demonstrated that a simple UNet-based detection method can already access high detection accuracy.
Authors:Sara Hatami Gazani, Fardad Dadboud, Miodrag Bolic, Iraj Mantegh, Homayoun Najjaran
Abstract:
Depth completion and object detection are two crucial tasks often used for aerial 3D mapping, path planning, and collision avoidance of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Common solutions include using measurements from a LiDAR sensor; however, the generated point cloud is often sparse and irregular and limits the system's capabilities in 3D rendering and safety-critical decision-making. To mitigate this challenge, information from other sensors on the UAV (viz., a camera used for object detection) is utilized to help the depth completion process generate denser 3D models. Performing both aerial depth completion and object detection tasks while fusing the data from the two sensors poses a challenge to resource efficiency. We address this challenge by proposing a novel approach to jointly execute the two tasks in a single pass. The proposed method is based on an encoder-focused multi-task learning model that exposes the two tasks to jointly learned features. We demonstrate how semantic expectations of the objects in the scene learned by the object detection pathway can boost the performance of the depth completion pathway while placing the missing depth values. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-task network outperforms its single-task counterpart, particularly when exposed to defective inputs.
Authors:Surya Prakash Tiwari, Sudhir Kumar Chaturvedi, Subhrangshu Adhikary, Saikat Banerjee, Sourav Basu
Abstract:
The advancement of multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is considered as an upgraded technology for surveillance activities. SAR sensors onboard provide data for coastal ocean surveillance and a view of the oceanic surface features. Vessel monitoring has earlier been performed using Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm which is not a smart technique as it lacks decision-making capabilities, therefore we introduce wavelet transformation-based Convolution Neural Network approach to recognize objects from SAR images during the heavy naval traffic, which corresponds to the numerous object detection. The utilized information comprises Sentinel-1 SAR-C dual-polarization data acquisitions over the western coastal zones of India and with help of the proposed technique we have obtained 95.46% detection accuracy. Utilizing this model can automatize the monitoring of naval objects and recognition of foreign maritime intruders.
Authors:Jingrui Yu, Ana Cecilia Perez Grassi, Gangolf Hirtz
Abstract:
A large field-of-view fisheye camera allows for capturing a large area with minimal numbers of cameras when they are mounted on a high position facing downwards. This top-view omnidirectional setup greatly reduces the work and cost for deployment compared to traditional solutions with multiple perspective cameras. In recent years, deep learning has been widely employed for vision related tasks, including for such omnidirectional settings. In this survey, we look at the application of deep learning in combination with omnidirectional top-view cameras, including the available datasets, human and object detection, human pose estimation, activity recognition and other miscellaneous applications.
Authors:Badri N. Patro, Vinay P. Namboodiri, Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran
Abstract:
Vision transformers have been applied successfully for image recognition tasks. There have been either multi-headed self-attention based (ViT \cite{dosovitskiy2020image}, DeIT, \cite{touvron2021training}) similar to the original work in textual models or more recently based on spectral layers (Fnet\cite{lee2021fnet}, GFNet\cite{rao2021global}, AFNO\cite{guibas2021efficient}). We hypothesize that both spectral and multi-headed attention plays a major role. We investigate this hypothesis through this work and observe that indeed combining spectral and multi-headed attention layers provides a better transformer architecture. We thus propose the novel Spectformer architecture for transformers that combines spectral and multi-headed attention layers. We believe that the resulting representation allows the transformer to capture the feature representation appropriately and it yields improved performance over other transformer representations. For instance, it improves the top-1 accuracy by 2\% on ImageNet compared to both GFNet-H and LiT. SpectFormer-S reaches 84.25\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K (state of the art for small version). Further, Spectformer-L achieves 85.7\% that is the state of the art for the comparable base version of the transformers. We further ensure that we obtain reasonable results in other scenarios such as transfer learning on standard datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Oxford-IIIT-flower, and Standford Car datasets. We then investigate its use in downstream tasks such of object detection and instance segmentation on the MS-COCO dataset and observe that Spectformer shows consistent performance that is comparable to the best backbones and can be further optimized and improved. Hence, we believe that combined spectral and attention layers are what are needed for vision transformers.
Authors:Martà Caro, Hamid Tabani, Jaume Abella, Francesc Moll, Enric Morancho, Ramon Canal, Josep Altet, Antonio Calomarde, Francisco J. Cazorla, Antonio Rubio, Pau Fontova, Jordi Fornt
Abstract:
The accuracy of camera-based object detection (CBOD) built upon deep learning is often evaluated against the real objects in frames only. However, such simplistic evaluation ignores the fact that many unimportant objects are small, distant, or background, and hence, their misdetections have less impact than those for closer, larger, and foreground objects in domains such as autonomous driving. Moreover, sporadic misdetections are irrelevant since confidence on detections is typically averaged across consecutive frames, and detection devices (e.g. cameras, LiDARs) are often redundant, thus providing fault tolerance.
This paper exploits such intrinsic fault tolerance of the CBOD process, and assesses in an automotive case study to what extent CBOD can tolerate approximation coming from multiple sources such as lower precision arithmetic, approximate arithmetic units, and even random faults due to, for instance, low voltage operation. We show that the accuracy impact of those sources of approximation is within 1% of the baseline even when considering the three approximate domains simultaneously, and hence, multiple sources of approximation can be exploited to build highly efficient accelerators for CBOD in cars.
Authors:Keumgang Cha, Junghoon Seo, Taekyung Lee
Abstract:
As the potential of foundation models in visual tasks has garnered significant attention, pretraining these models before downstream tasks has become a crucial step. The three key factors in pretraining foundation models are the pretraining method, the size of the pretraining dataset, and the number of model parameters. Recently, research in the remote sensing field has focused primarily on the pretraining method and the size of the dataset, with limited emphasis on the number of model parameters. This paper addresses this gap by examining the effect of increasing the number of model parameters on the performance of foundation models in downstream tasks such as rotated object detection and semantic segmentation. We pretrained foundation models with varying numbers of parameters, including 86M, 605.26M, 1.3B, and 2.4B, to determine whether performance in downstream tasks improved with an increase in parameters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first billion-scale foundation model in the remote sensing field. Furthermore, we propose an effective method for scaling up and fine-tuning a vision transformer in the remote sensing field. To evaluate general performance in downstream tasks, we employed the DOTA v2.0 and DIOR-R benchmark datasets for rotated object detection, and the Potsdam and LoveDA datasets for semantic segmentation. Experimental results demonstrated that, across all benchmark datasets and downstream tasks, the performance of the foundation models and data efficiency improved as the number of parameters increased. Moreover, our models achieve the state-of-the-art performance on several datasets including DIOR-R, Postdam, and LoveDA.
Authors:João Maria Janeiro, Stanislav Frolov, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Jakob Verbeek
Abstract:
Reducing the data footprint of visual content via image compression is essential to reduce storage requirements, but also to reduce the bandwidth and latency requirements for transmission. In particular, the use of compressed images allows for faster transfer of data, and faster response times for visual recognition in edge devices that rely on cloud-based services. In this paper, we first analyze the impact of image compression using traditional codecs, as well as recent state-of-the-art neural compression approaches, on three visual recognition tasks: image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. We consider a wide range of compression levels, ranging from 0.1 to 2 bits-per-pixel (bpp). We find that for all three tasks, the recognition ability is significantly impacted when using strong compression. For example, for segmentation mIoU is reduced from 44.5 to 30.5 mIoU when compressing to 0.1 bpp using the best compression model we evaluated. Second, we test to what extent this performance drop can be ascribed to a loss of relevant information in the compressed image, or to a lack of generalization of visual recognition models to images with compression artefacts. We find that to a large extent the performance loss is due to the latter: by finetuning the recognition models on compressed training images, most of the performance loss is recovered. For example, bringing segmentation accuracy back up to 42 mIoU, i.e. recovering 82% of the original drop in accuracy.
Authors:Sandeep Singh Sandha, Bharathan Balaji, Luis Garcia, Mani Srivastava
Abstract:
Existing approaches for autonomous control of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras use multiple stages where object detection and localization are performed separately from the control of the PTZ mechanisms. These approaches require manual labels and suffer from performance bottlenecks due to error propagation across the multi-stage flow of information. The large size of object detection neural networks also makes prior solutions infeasible for real-time deployment in resource-constrained devices. We present an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (RL) solution called Eagle to train a neural network policy that directly takes images as input to control the PTZ camera. Training reinforcement learning is cumbersome in the real world due to labeling effort, runtime environment stochasticity, and fragile experimental setups. We introduce a photo-realistic simulation framework for training and evaluation of PTZ camera control policies. Eagle achieves superior camera control performance by maintaining the object of interest close to the center of captured images at high resolution and has up to 17% more tracking duration than the state-of-the-art. Eagle policies are lightweight (90x fewer parameters than Yolo5s) and can run on embedded camera platforms such as Raspberry PI (33 FPS) and Jetson Nano (38 FPS), facilitating real-time PTZ tracking for resource-constrained environments. With domain randomization, Eagle policies trained in our simulator can be transferred directly to real-world scenarios.
Authors:Jing Hao, Song Chen, Xiaodi Wang, Shumin Han
Abstract:
Pretraining on large-scale datasets can boost the performance of object detectors while the annotated datasets for object detection are hard to scale up due to the high labor cost. What we possess are numerous isolated filed-specific datasets, thus, it is appealing to jointly pretrain models across aggregation of datasets to enhance data volume and diversity. In this paper, we propose a strong framework for utilizing Multiple datasets to pretrain DETR-like detectors, termed METR, without the need for manual label spaces integration. It converts the typical multi-classification in object detection into binary classification by introducing a pre-trained language model. Specifically, we design a category extraction module for extracting potential categories involved in an image and assign these categories into different queries by language embeddings. Each query is only responsible for predicting a class-specific object. Besides, to adapt our novel detection paradigm, we propose a group bipartite matching strategy that limits the ground truths to match queries assigned to the same category. Extensive experiments demonstrate that METR achieves extraordinary results on either multi-task joint training or the pretrain & finetune paradigm. Notably, our pre-trained models have high flexible transferability and increase the performance upon various DETR-like detectors on COCO val2017 benchmark. Codes will be available after this paper is published.
Authors:Anas Gouda, Moritz Roidl
Abstract:
How can we segment varying numbers of objects where each specific object represents its own separate class? To make the problem even more realistic, how can we add and delete classes on the fly without retraining or fine-tuning? This is the case of robotic applications where no datasets of the objects exist or application that includes thousands of objects (E.g., in logistics) where it is impossible to train a single model to learn all of the objects. Most current research on object segmentation for robotic grasping focuses on class-level object segmentation (E.g., box, cup, bottle), closed sets (specific objects of a dataset; for example, YCB dataset), or deep learning-based template matching. In this work, we are interested in open sets where the number of classes is unknown, varying, and without pre-knowledge about the objects' types. We consider each specific object as its own separate class. Our goal is to develop an object detector that requires no fine-tuning and can add any object as a class just by capturing a few images of the object. Our main idea is to break the segmentation pipelines into two steps by combining unseen object segmentation networks cascaded by class-adaptive classifiers. We evaluate our class-adaptive object detector on unseen datasets and compare it to a trained Mask R-CNN on those datasets. The results show that the performance varies from practical to unsuitable depending on the environment setup and the objects being handled. The code is available in our DoUnseen library repository.
Authors:Aayush Kumar Tyagi, Chirag Mohapatra, Prasenjit Das, Govind Makharia, Lalita Mehra, Prathosh AP, Mausam
Abstract:
Multi-class cell detection and counting is an essential task for many pathological diagnoses. Manual counting is tedious and often leads to inter-observer variations among pathologists. While there exist multiple, general-purpose, deep learning-based object detection and counting methods, they may not readily transfer to detecting and counting cells in medical images, due to the limited data, presence of tiny overlapping objects, multiple cell types, severe class-imbalance, minute differences in size/shape of cells, etc. In response, we propose guided posterior regularization (DeGPR), which assists an object detector by guiding it to exploit discriminative features among cells. The features may be pathologist-provided or inferred directly from visual data. We validate our model on two publicly available datasets (CoNSeP and MoNuSAC), and on MuCeD, a novel dataset that we contribute. MuCeD consists of 55 biopsy images of the human duodenum for predicting celiac disease. We perform extensive experimentation with three object detection baselines on three datasets to show that DeGPR is model-agnostic, and consistently improves baselines obtaining up to 9% (absolute) mAP gains.
Authors:Milad Moradi, Ke Yan, David Colwell, Matthias Samwald, Rhona Asgari
Abstract:
In recent years, deep neural networks have been widely used for building high-performance Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for computer vision applications. Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision, which has been greatly progressed through developing large and intricate AI models. However, the lack of transparency is a big challenge that may not allow the widespread adoption of these models. Explainable artificial intelligence is a field of research where methods are developed to help users understand the behavior, decision logics, and vulnerabilities of AI systems. Previously, few explanation methods were developed for object detection based on random masking. However, random masks may raise some issues regarding the actual importance of pixels within an image. In this paper, we design and implement a black-box explanation method named Black-box Object Detection Explanation by Masking (BODEM) through adopting a hierarchical random masking approach for object detection systems. We propose a hierarchical random masking framework in which coarse-grained masks are used in lower levels to find salient regions within an image, and fine-grained mask are used to refine the salient regions in higher levels. Experimentations on various object detection datasets and models showed that BODEM can effectively explain the behavior of object detectors. Moreover, our method outperformed Detector Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation (D-RISE) and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) with respect to different quantitative measures of explanation effectiveness. The experimental results demonstrate that BODEM can be an effective method for explaining and validating object detection systems in black-box testing scenarios.
Authors:Ludwig Bothmann, Lisa Wimmer, Omid Charrakh, Tobias Weber, Hendrik Edelhoff, Wibke Peters, Hien Nguyen, Caryl Benjamin, Annette Menzel
Abstract:
Wildlife camera trap images are being used extensively to investigate animal abundance, habitat associations, and behavior, which is complicated by the fact that experts must first classify the images manually. Artificial intelligence systems can take over this task but usually need a large number of already-labeled training images to achieve sufficient performance. This requirement necessitates human expert labor and poses a particular challenge for projects with few cameras or short durations. We propose a label-efficient learning strategy that enables researchers with small or medium-sized image databases to leverage the potential of modern machine learning, thus freeing crucial resources for subsequent analyses.
Our methodological proposal is two-fold: (1) We improve current strategies of combining object detection and image classification by tuning the hyperparameters of both models. (2) We provide an active learning (AL) system that allows training deep learning models very efficiently in terms of required human-labeled training images. We supply a software package that enables researchers to use these methods directly and thereby ensure the broad applicability of the proposed framework in ecological practice.
We show that our tuning strategy improves predictive performance. We demonstrate how the AL pipeline reduces the amount of pre-labeled data needed to achieve a specific predictive performance and that it is especially valuable for improving out-of-sample predictive performance.
We conclude that the combination of tuning and AL increases predictive performance substantially. Furthermore, we argue that our work can broadly impact the community through the ready-to-use software package provided. Finally, the publication of our models tailored to European wildlife data enriches existing model bases mostly trained on data from Africa and North America.
Authors:Anurag Ghosh, N. Dinesh Reddy, Christoph Mertz, Srinivasa G. Narasimhan
Abstract:
Real-time efficient perception is critical for autonomous navigation and city scale sensing. Orthogonal to architectural improvements, streaming perception approaches have exploited adaptive sampling improving real-time detection performance. In this work, we propose a learnable geometry-guided prior that incorporates rough geometry of the 3D scene (a ground plane and a plane above) to resample images for efficient object detection. This significantly improves small and far-away object detection performance while also being more efficient both in terms of latency and memory. For autonomous navigation, using the same detector and scale, our approach improves detection rate by +4.1 $AP_{S}$ or +39% and in real-time performance by +5.3 $sAP_{S}$ or +63% for small objects over state-of-the-art (SOTA). For fixed traffic cameras, our approach detects small objects at image scales other methods cannot. At the same scale, our approach improves detection of small objects by 195% (+12.5 $AP_{S}$) over naive-downsampling and 63% (+4.2 $AP_{S}$) over SOTA.
Authors:Mikhail Kennerley, Jian-Gang Wang, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Robby T. Tan
Abstract:
Object detection at night is a challenging problem due to the absence of night image annotations. Despite several domain adaptation methods, achieving high-precision results remains an issue. False-positive error propagation is still observed in methods using the well-established student-teacher framework, particularly for small-scale and low-light objects. This paper proposes a two-phase consistency unsupervised domain adaptation network, 2PCNet, to address these issues. The network employs high-confidence bounding-box predictions from the teacher in the first phase and appends them to the student's region proposals for the teacher to re-evaluate in the second phase, resulting in a combination of high and low confidence pseudo-labels. The night images and pseudo-labels are scaled-down before being used as input to the student, providing stronger small-scale pseudo-labels. To address errors that arise from low-light regions and other night-related attributes in images, we propose a night-specific augmentation pipeline called NightAug. This pipeline involves applying random augmentations, such as glare, blur, and noise, to daytime images. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior results to state-of-the-art methods by 20\%, and to supervised models trained directly on the target data.
Authors:Ziwei Liu, Yongtao Wang, Xiaojie Chu
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is a popular technique for transferring the knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model by mimicking. However, distillation by directly aligning the feature maps between teacher and student may enforce overly strict constraints on the student thus degrade the performance of the student model. To alleviate the above feature misalignment issue, existing works mainly focus on spatially aligning the feature maps of the teacher and the student, with pixel-wise transformation. In this paper, we newly find that aligning the feature maps between teacher and student along the channel-wise dimension is also effective for addressing the feature misalignment issue. Specifically, we propose a learnable nonlinear channel-wise transformation to align the features of the student and the teacher model. Based on it, we further propose a simple and generic framework for feature distillation, with only one hyper-parameter to balance the distillation loss and the task specific loss. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves significant performance improvements in various computer vision tasks including image classification (+3.28% top-1 accuracy for MobileNetV1 on ImageNet-1K), object detection (+3.9% bbox mAP for ResNet50-based Faster-RCNN on MS COCO), instance segmentation (+2.8% Mask mAP for ResNet50-based Mask-RCNN), and semantic segmentation (+4.66% mIoU for ResNet18-based PSPNet in semantic segmentation on Cityscapes), which demonstrates the effectiveness and the versatility of the proposed method. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Yuiko Sakuma, Masato Ishii, Takuya Narihira
Abstract:
We address the challenge of training a large supernet for the object detection task, using a relatively small amount of training data. Specifically, we propose an efficient supernet-based neural architecture search (NAS) method that uses search space pruning. The search space defined by the supernet is pruned by removing candidate models that are predicted to perform poorly. To effectively remove the candidates over a wide range of resource constraints, we particularly design a performance predictor for supernet, called path filter, which is conditioned by resource constraints and can accurately predict the relative performance of the models that satisfy similar resource constraints. Hence, supernet training is more focused on the best-performing candidates. Our path filter handles prediction for paths with different resource budgets. Compared to once-for-all, our proposed method reduces the computational cost of the optimal network architecture by 30% and 63%, while yielding better accuracy-floating point operations Pareto front (0.85 and 0.45 points of improvement on average precision for Pascal VOC and COCO, respectively).
Authors:Jinlai Ning, Haoyan Guan, Michael Spratling
Abstract:
Tiny object detection has become an active area of research because images with tiny targets are common in several important real-world scenarios. However, existing tiny object detection methods use standard deep neural networks as their backbone architecture. We argue that such backbones are inappropriate for detecting tiny objects as they are designed for the classification of larger objects, and do not have the spatial resolution to identify small targets. Specifically, such backbones use max-pooling or a large stride at early stages in the architecture. This produces lower resolution feature-maps that can be efficiently processed by subsequent layers. However, such low-resolution feature-maps do not contain information that can reliably discriminate tiny objects. To solve this problem we design 'bottom-heavy' versions of backbones that allocate more resources to processing higher-resolution features without introducing any additional computational burden overall. We also investigate if pre-training these backbones on images of appropriate size, using CIFAR100 and ImageNet32, can further improve performance on tiny object detection. Results on TinyPerson and WiderFace show that detectors with our proposed backbones achieve better results than the current state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Aditay Tripathi, Anand Mishra, Anirban Chakraborty
Abstract:
In this work, we investigate the problem of sketch-based object localization on natural images, where given a crude hand-drawn sketch of an object, the goal is to localize all the instances of the same object on the target image. This problem proves difficult due to the abstract nature of hand-drawn sketches, variations in the style and quality of sketches, and the large domain gap existing between the sketches and the natural images. To mitigate these challenges, existing works proposed attention-based frameworks to incorporate query information into the image features. However, in these works, the query features are incorporated after the image features have already been independently learned, leading to inadequate alignment. In contrast, we propose a sketch-guided vision transformer encoder that uses cross-attention after each block of the transformer-based image encoder to learn query-conditioned image features leading to stronger alignment with the query sketch. Further, at the output of the decoder, the object and the sketch features are refined to bring the representation of relevant objects closer to the sketch query and thereby improve the localization. The proposed model also generalizes to the object categories not seen during training, as the target image features learned by our method are query-aware. Our localization framework can also utilize multiple sketch queries via a trainable novel sketch fusion strategy. The model is evaluated on the images from the public object detection benchmark, namely MS-COCO, using the sketch queries from QuickDraw! and Sketchy datasets. Compared with existing localization methods, the proposed approach gives a $6.6\%$ and $8.0\%$ improvement in mAP for seen objects using sketch queries from QuickDraw! and Sketchy datasets, respectively, and a $12.2\%$ improvement in AP@50 for large objects that are `unseen' during training.
Authors:Edward Whittaker, Masashi Tanaka, Ikuo Kitagishi
Abstract:
We describe the development of a real-time smartphone app that allows the user to digitize paper receipts in a novel way by "waving" their phone over the receipts and letting the app automatically detect and rectify the receipts for subsequent text recognition.
We show that traditional computer vision algorithms for edge and corner detection do not robustly detect the non-linear and discontinuous edges and corners of a typical paper receipt in real-world settings. This is particularly the case when the colors of the receipt and background are similar, or where other interfering rectangular objects are present. Inaccurate detection of a receipt's corner positions then results in distorted images when using an affine projective transformation to rectify the perspective.
We propose an innovative solution to receipt corner detection by treating each of the four corners as a unique "object", and training a Single Shot Detection MobileNet object detection model. We use a small amount of real data and a large amount of automatically generated synthetic data that is designed to be similar to real-world imaging scenarios.
We show that our proposed method robustly detects the four corners of a receipt, giving a receipt detection accuracy of 85.3% on real-world data, compared to only 36.9% with a traditional edge detection-based approach. Our method works even when the color of the receipt is virtually indistinguishable from the background.
Moreover, our method is trained to detect only the corners of the central target receipt and implicitly learns to ignore other receipts, and other rectangular objects. Including synthetic data allows us to train an even better model. These factors are a major advantage over traditional edge detection-based approaches, allowing us to deliver a much better experience to the user.
Authors:Martijn Oldenhof, Adam Arany, Yves Moreau, Edward De Brouwer
Abstract:
Training object detection models usually requires instance-level annotations, such as the positions and labels of all objects present in each image. Such supervision is unfortunately not always available and, more often, only image-level information is provided, also known as weak supervision. Recent works have addressed this limitation by leveraging knowledge from a richly annotated domain. However, the scope of weak supervision supported by these approaches has been very restrictive, preventing them to use all available information. In this work, we propose ProbKT, a framework based on probabilistic logical reasoning that allows to train object detection models with arbitrary types of weak supervision. We empirically show on different datasets that using all available information is beneficial as our ProbKT leads to significant improvement on target domain and better generalization compared to existing baselines. We also showcase the ability of our approach to handle complex logic statements as supervision signal.
Authors:Varun Gupta, Anbumani Subramanian, C. V. Jawahar, Rohit Saluja
Abstract:
Unconstrained Asian roads often involve poor infrastructure, affecting overall road safety. Missing traffic signs are a regular part of such roads. Missing or non-existing object detection has been studied for locating missing curbs and estimating reasonable regions for pedestrians on road scene images. Such methods involve analyzing task-specific single object cues. In this paper, we present the first and most challenging video dataset for missing objects, with multiple types of traffic signs for which the cues are visible without the signs in the scenes. We refer to it as the Missing Traffic Signs Video Dataset (MTSVD). MTSVD is challenging compared to the previous works in two aspects i) The traffic signs are generally not present in the vicinity of their cues, ii) The traffic signs cues are diverse and unique. Also, MTSVD is the first publicly available missing object dataset. To train the models for identifying missing signs, we complement our dataset with 10K traffic sign tracks, with 40 percent of the traffic signs having cues visible in the scenes. For identifying missing signs, we propose the Cue-driven Contextual Attention units (CueCAn), which we incorporate in our model encoder. We first train the encoder to classify the presence of traffic sign cues and then train the entire segmentation model end-to-end to localize missing traffic signs. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that CueCAn significantly improves the performance of base models.
Authors:Abhishek Balasubramaniam, Febin P Sunny, Sudeep Pasricha
Abstract:
Object detectors used in autonomous vehicles can have high memory and computational overheads. In this paper, we introduce a novel semi-structured pruning framework called R-TOSS that overcomes the shortcomings of state-of-the-art model pruning techniques. Experimental results on the JetsonTX2 show that R-TOSS has a compression rate of 4.4x on the YOLOv5 object detector with a 2.15x speedup in inference time and 57.01% decrease in energy usage. R-TOSS also enables 2.89x compression on RetinaNet with a 1.86x speedup in inference time and 56.31% decrease in energy usage. We also demonstrate significant improvements compared to various state-of-the-art pruning techniques.
Authors:Martin Sundermeyer, Tomas Hodan, Yann Labbe, Gu Wang, Eric Brachmann, Bertram Drost, Carsten Rother, Jiri Matas
Abstract:
We present the evaluation methodology, datasets and results of the BOP Challenge 2022, the fourth in a series of public competitions organized with the goal to capture the status quo in the field of 6D object pose estimation from an RGB/RGB-D image. In 2022, we witnessed another significant improvement in the pose estimation accuracy -- the state of the art, which was 56.9 AR$_C$ in 2019 (Vidal et al.) and 69.8 AR$_C$ in 2020 (CosyPose), moved to new heights of 83.7 AR$_C$ (GDRNPP). Out of 49 pose estimation methods evaluated since 2019, the top 18 are from 2022. Methods based on point pair features, which were introduced in 2010 and achieved competitive results even in 2020, are now clearly outperformed by deep learning methods. The synthetic-to-real domain gap was again significantly reduced, with 82.7 AR$_C$ achieved by GDRNPP trained only on synthetic images from BlenderProc. The fastest variant of GDRNPP reached 80.5 AR$_C$ with an average time per image of 0.23s. Since most of the recent methods for 6D object pose estimation begin by detecting/segmenting objects, we also started evaluating 2D object detection and segmentation performance based on the COCO metrics. Compared to the Mask R-CNN results from CosyPose in 2020, detection improved from 60.3 to 77.3 AP$_C$ and segmentation from 40.5 to 58.7 AP$_C$. The online evaluation system stays open and is available at: \href{http://bop.felk.cvut.cz/}{bop.felk.cvut.cz}.
Authors:Ahmed Khan, Minoru Kuribayashi, KokSheik Wong, Vishnu Monn Baskaran
Abstract:
High-dynamic range (HDR) images are circulated rapidly over the internet with risks of being exploited for unauthorized usage. To protect these images, some HDR image based watermarking (HDR-IW) methods were put forward. However, they inherited the same problem faced by conventional IW methods for standard dynamic range (SDR) images, where only trade-offs among conflicting requirements are managed instead of simultaneous improvement. In this paper, a novel saliency (eye-catching object) detection based trade-off independent HDR-IW is proposed, to simultaneously improve robustness, imperceptibility and payload. First, the host image goes through our proposed salient object detection model to produce a saliency map, which is, in turn, exploited to segment the foreground and background of the host image. Next, the binary watermark is partitioned into the foregrounds and backgrounds using the same mask and scrambled using a random permutation algorithm. Finally, the watermark segments are embedded into selected bit-plane of the corresponding host segments using quantized indexed modulation. Experimental results suggest that the proposed work outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of improving the conflicting requirements.
Authors:Christopher Lang, Alexander Braun, Lars Schillingmann, Karsten Haug, Abhinav Valada
Abstract:
Self-supervised feature learning enables perception systems to benefit from the vast raw data recorded by vehicle fleets worldwide. While video-level self-supervised learning approaches have shown strong generalizability on classification tasks, the potential to learn dense representations from sequential data has been relatively unexplored. In this work, we propose TempO, a temporal ordering pretext task for pre-training region-level feature representations for perception tasks. We embed each frame by an unordered set of proposal feature vectors, a representation that is natural for object detection or tracking systems, and formulate the sequential ordering by predicting frame transition probabilities in a transformer-based multi-frame architecture whose complexity scales less than quadratic with respect to the sequence length. Extensive evaluations on the BDD100K, nuImages, and MOT17 datasets show that our TempO pre-training approach outperforms single-frame self-supervised learning methods as well as supervised transfer learning initialization strategies, achieving an improvement of +0.7% in mAP for object detection and +2.0% in the HOTA score for multi-object tracking.
Authors:Hao Chen, Feihong Shen
Abstract:
Most of existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) methods follow the CNN-based paradigm, which is unable to model long-range dependencies across space and modalities due to the natural locality of CNNs. Here we propose the Hierarchical Cross-modal Transformer (HCT), a new multi-modal transformer, to tackle this problem. Unlike previous multi-modal transformers that directly connecting all patches from two modalities, we explore the cross-modal complementarity hierarchically to respect the modality gap and spatial discrepancy in unaligned regions. Specifically, we propose to use intra-modal self-attention to explore complementary global contexts, and measure spatial-aligned inter-modal attention locally to capture cross-modal correlations. In addition, we present a Feature Pyramid module for Transformer (FPT) to boost informative cross-scale integration as well as a consistency-complementarity module to disentangle the multi-modal integration path and improve the fusion adaptivity. Comprehensive experiments on a large variety of public datasets verify the efficacy of our designs and the consistent improvement over state-of-the-art models.
Authors:Ritayu Nagpal, Sam Long, Shahid Jahagirdar, Weiwei Liu, Scott Fazackerley, Ramon Lawrence, Amritpal Singh
Abstract:
Tree fruit breeding is a long-term activity involving repeated measurements of various fruit quality traits on a large number of samples. These traits are traditionally measured by manually counting the fruits, weighing to indirectly measure the fruit size, and fruit colour is classified subjectively into different color categories using visual comparison to colour charts. These processes are slow, expensive and subject to evaluators' bias and fatigue. Recent advancements in deep learning can help automate this process. A method was developed to automatically count the number of sweet cherry fruits in a camera's field of view in real time using YOLOv3. A system capable of analyzing the image data for other traits such as size and color was also developed using Python. The YOLO model obtained close to 99% accuracy in object detection and counting of cherries and 90% on the Intersection over Union metric for object localization when extracting size and colour information. The model surpasses human performance and offers a significant improvement compared to manual counting.
Authors:Nicolas Harvey Chapman, Feras Dayoub, Will Browne, Christopher Lehnert
Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection (UDA-OD) uses unlabelled data to improve the reliability of robotic vision systems in open-world environments. Previous approaches to UDA-OD based on self-training have been effective in overcoming changes in the general appearance of images. However, shifts in a robot's deployment environment can also impact the likelihood that different objects will occur, termed class distribution shift. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for explicitly addressing class distribution shift to improve pseudo-label reliability in self-training. Our approach uses the domain invariance and contextual understanding of a pre-trained joint vision and language model to predict the class distribution of unlabelled data. By aligning the class distribution of pseudo-labels with this prediction, we provide weak supervision of pseudo-label accuracy. To further account for low quality pseudo-labels early in self-training, we propose an approach to dynamically adjust the number of pseudo-labels per image based on model confidence. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several benchmarks, including a 4.7 mAP improvement when facing challenging class distribution shift.
Authors:Silvan Ferreira, Allan Martins, Ivanovitch Silva
Abstract:
Traditional semantic image search methods aim to retrieve images that match the meaning of the text query. However, these methods typically search for objects on the whole image, without considering the localization of objects within the image. This paper presents an extension of existing object detection models for semantic image search that considers the semantic alignment between object proposals and text queries, with a focus on searching for objects within images. The proposed model uses a single feature extractor, a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network, and a transformer encoder to encode the text query. Proposal-text alignment is performed using contrastive learning, producing a score for each proposal that reflects its semantic alignment with the text query. The Region Proposal Network (RPN) is used to generate object proposals, and the end-to-end training process allows for an efficient and effective solution for semantic image search. The proposed model was trained end-to-end, providing a promising solution for semantic image search that retrieves images that match the meaning of the text query and generates semantically relevant object proposals.
Authors:Kaiheng Weng, Xiangxiang Chu, Xiaoming Xu, Junshi Huang, Xiaoming Wei
Abstract:
We present a hardware-efficient architecture of convolutional neural network, which has a repvgg-like architecture. Flops or parameters are traditional metrics to evaluate the efficiency of networks which are not sensitive to hardware including computing ability and memory bandwidth. Thus, how to design a neural network to efficiently use the computing ability and memory bandwidth of hardware is a critical problem. This paper proposes a method how to design hardware-aware neural network. Based on this method, we designed EfficientRep series convolutional networks, which are high-computation hardware(e.g. GPU) friendly and applied in YOLOv6 object detection framework. YOLOv6 has published YOLOv6N/YOLOv6S/YOLOv6M/YOLOv6L models in v1 and v2 versions.
Authors:Ali Ghanbarzade, Hossein Soleimani
Abstract:
In recent years Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have made significant progress in computer vision. These advancements have been applied to other areas, such as remote sensing and have shown satisfactory results. However, the lack of large labeled datasets and the inherent complexity of remote sensing problems have made it difficult to train deep CNNs for dense prediction problems. To solve this issue, ImageNet pretrained weights have been used as a starting point in various dense predictions tasks. Although this type of transfer learning has led to improvements, the domain difference between natural and remote sensing images has also limited the performance of deep CNNs. On the other hand, self-supervised learning methods for learning visual representations from large unlabeled images have grown substantially over the past two years. Accordingly, in this paper we have explored the effectiveness of in-domain representations in both supervised and self-supervised forms to solve the domain difference between remote sensing and the ImageNet dataset. The obtained weights from remote sensing images are utilized as initial weights for solving semantic segmentation and object detection tasks and state-of-the-art results are obtained. For self-supervised pre-training, we have utilized the SimSiam algorithm as it is simple and does not need huge computational resources. One of the most influential factors in acquiring general visual representations from remote sensing images is the pre-training dataset. To examine the effect of the pre-training dataset, equal-sized remote sensing datasets are used for pre-training. Our results have demonstrated that using datasets with a high spatial resolution for self-supervised representation learning leads to high performance in downstream tasks.
Authors:Xiuen Wu, Tao Wang, Lingyu Liang, Zuoyong Li, Fum Yew Ching
Abstract:
Road obstacle detection is an important problem for vehicle driving safety. In this paper, we aim to obtain robust road obstacle detection based on spatio-temporal context modeling. Firstly, a data-driven spatial context model of the driving scene is constructed with the layouts of the training data. Then, obstacles in the input image are detected via the state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, and the results are combined with the generated scene layout. In addition, to further improve the performance and robustness, temporal information in the image sequence is taken into consideration, and the optical flow is obtained in the vicinity of the detected objects to track the obstacles across neighboring frames. Qualitative and quantitative experiments were conducted on the Small Obstacle Detection (SOD) dataset and the Lost and Found dataset. The results indicate that our method with spatio-temporal context modeling is superior to existing methods for road obstacle detection.
Authors:Jia Li, Shengye Qiao, Zhirui Zhao, Chenxi Xie, Xiaowu Chen, Changqun Xia
Abstract:
Existing salient object detection methods often adopt deeper and wider networks for better performance, resulting in heavy computational burden and slow inference speed. This inspires us to rethink saliency detection to achieve a favorable balance between efficiency and accuracy. To this end, we design a lightweight framework while maintaining satisfying competitive accuracy. Specifically, we propose a novel trilateral decoder framework by decoupling the U-shape structure into three complementary branches, which are devised to confront the dilution of semantic context, loss of spatial structure and absence of boundary detail, respectively. Along with the fusion of three branches, the coarse segmentation results are gradually refined in structure details and boundary quality. Without adding additional learnable parameters, we further propose Scale-Adaptive Pooling Module to obtain multi-scale receptive filed. In particular, on the premise of inheriting this framework, we rethink the relationship among accuracy, parameters and speed via network depth-width tradeoff. With these insightful considerations, we comprehensively design shallower and narrower models to explore the maximum potential of lightweight SOD. Our models are purposed for different application environments: 1) a tiny version CTD-S (1.7M, 125FPS) for resource constrained devices, 2) a fast version CTD-M (12.6M, 158FPS) for speed-demanding scenarios, 3) a standard version CTD-L (26.5M, 84FPS) for high-performance platforms. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method, which achieves better efficiency-accuracy balance across five benchmarks.
Authors:Vidit Vidit, Martin Engilberge, Mathieu Salzmann
Abstract:
Single Domain Generalization (SDG) tackles the problem of training a model on a single source domain so that it generalizes to any unseen target domain. While this has been well studied for image classification, the literature on SDG object detection remains almost non-existent. To address the challenges of simultaneously learning robust object localization and representation, we propose to leverage a pre-trained vision-language model to introduce semantic domain concepts via textual prompts. We achieve this via a semantic augmentation strategy acting on the features extracted by the detector backbone, as well as a text-based classification loss. Our experiments evidence the benefits of our approach, outperforming by 10% the only existing SDG object detection method, Single-DGOD [49], on their own diverse weather-driving benchmark.
Authors:Vidit Vidit, Martin Engilberge, Mathieu Salzmann
Abstract:
The performance of modern object detectors drops when the test distribution differs from the training one. Most of the methods that address this focus on object appearance changes caused by, e.g., different illumination conditions, or gaps between synthetic and real images. Here, by contrast, we tackle geometric shifts emerging from variations in the image capture process, or due to the constraints of the environment causing differences in the apparent geometry of the content itself. We introduce a self-training approach that learns a set of geometric transformations to minimize these shifts without leveraging any labeled data in the new domain, nor any information about the cameras. We evaluate our method on two different shifts, i.e., a camera's field of view (FoV) change and a viewpoint change. Our results evidence that learning geometric transformations helps detectors to perform better in the target domains.
Authors:Jarek Reynolds, Chandra Kanth Nagesh, Danna Gurari
Abstract:
Salient object detection is the task of producing a binary mask for an image that deciphers which pixels belong to the foreground object versus background. We introduce a new salient object detection dataset using images taken by people who are visually impaired who were seeking to better understand their surroundings, which we call VizWiz-SalientObject. Compared to seven existing datasets, VizWiz-SalientObject is the largest (i.e., 32,000 human-annotated images) and contains unique characteristics including a higher prevalence of text in the salient objects (i.e., in 68\% of images) and salient objects that occupy a larger ratio of the images (i.e., on average, $\sim$50\% coverage). We benchmarked seven modern salient object detection methods on our dataset and found they struggle most with images featuring salient objects that are large, have less complex boundaries, and lack text as well as for lower quality images. We invite the broader community to work on our new dataset challenge by publicly sharing the dataset at https://vizwiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/salient-object .
Authors:Ting Wang, Zongkai Wu, Feiyu Yao, Donglin Wang
Abstract:
Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) is a navigation task that requires an agent to follow a language instruction in a realistic environment. The understanding of environments is a crucial part of the VLN-CE task, but existing methods are relatively simple and direct in understanding the environment, without delving into the relationship between language instructions and visual environments. Therefore, we propose a new environment representation in order to solve the above problems. First, we propose an Environment Representation Graph (ERG) through object detection to express the environment in semantic level. This operation enhances the relationship between language and environment. Then, the relational representations of object-object, object-agent in ERG are learned through GCN, so as to obtain a continuous expression about ERG. Sequentially, we combine the ERG expression with object label embeddings to obtain the environment representation. Finally, a new cross-modal attention navigation framework is proposed, incorporating our environment representation and a special loss function dedicated to training ERG. Experimental result shows that our method achieves satisfactory performance in terms of success rate on VLN-CE tasks. Further analysis explains that our method attains better cross-modal matching and strong generalization ability.
Authors:Wenyu Zhang, Florian Meyer
Abstract:
Passive monitoring of acoustic or radio sources has important applications in modern convenience, public safety, and surveillance. A key task in passive monitoring is multiobject tracking (MOT). This paper presents a Bayesian method for multisensor MOT for challenging tracking problems where the object states are high-dimensional, and the measurements follow a nonlinear model. Our method is developed in the framework of factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm (SPA) and implemented using random samples or "particles". The multimodal probability density functions (pdfs) provided by the SPA are effectively represented by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). To perform the operations of the SPA with improved sample efficiency, we make use of Particle flow (PFL). Here, particles are migrated towards regions of high likelihood based on the solution of a partial differential equation. This makes it possible to obtain good object detection and tracking performance even in challenging multisensor MOT scenarios with single sensor measurements that have a lower dimension than the object positions. We perform a numerical evaluation in a passive acoustic monitoring scenario where multiple sources are tracked in 3-D from 1-D time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements provided by pairs of hydrophones. Our numerical results demonstrate favorable detection and estimation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art reference techniques.
Authors:Xuchong Zhang, Changfeng Sun, Haoliang Han, Hongbin Sun
Abstract:
Recent studies have demonstrated that object detection networks are usually vulnerable to adversarial examples. Generally, adversarial attacks for object detection can be categorized into targeted and untargeted attacks. Compared with untargeted attacks, targeted attacks present greater challenges and all existing targeted attack methods launch the attack by misleading detectors to mislabel the detected object as a specific wrong label. However, since these methods must depend on the presence of the detected objects within the victim image, they suffer from limitations in attack scenarios and attack success rates. In this paper, we propose a targeted feature space attack method that can mislead detectors to `fabricate' extra designated objects regardless of whether the victim image contains objects or not. Specifically, we introduce a guided image to extract coarse-grained features of the target objects and design an innovative dual attention mechanism to filter out the critical features of the target objects efficiently. The attack performance of the proposed method is evaluated on MS COCO and BDD100K datasets with FasterRCNN and YOLOv5. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed targeted feature space attack method shows significant improvements in terms of image-specific, universality, and generalization attack performance, compared with the previous targeted attack for object detection.
Authors:Geoffroi Côté, Fahim Mannan, Simon Thibault, Jean-François Lalonde, Felix Heide
Abstract:
Most camera lens systems are designed in isolation, separately from downstream computer vision methods. Recently, joint optimization approaches that design lenses alongside other components of the image acquisition and processing pipeline -- notably, downstream neural networks -- have achieved improved imaging quality or better performance on vision tasks. However, these existing methods optimize only a subset of lens parameters and cannot optimize glass materials given their categorical nature. In this work, we develop a differentiable spherical lens simulation model that accurately captures geometrical aberrations. We propose an optimization strategy to address the challenges of lens design -- notorious for non-convex loss function landscapes and many manufacturing constraints -- that are exacerbated in joint optimization tasks. Specifically, we introduce quantized continuous glass variables to facilitate the optimization and selection of glass materials in an end-to-end design context, and couple this with carefully designed constraints to support manufacturability. In automotive object detection, we report improved detection performance over existing designs even when simplifying designs to two- or three-element lenses, despite significantly degrading the image quality.
Authors:Krystian ChachuÅa, Jakub Åyskawa, BartÅomiej Olber, Piotr FrÄ
tczak, Adam Popowicz, Krystian Radlak
Abstract:
The quality of training datasets for deep neural networks is a key factor contributing to the accuracy of resulting models. This effect is amplified in difficult tasks such as object detection. Dealing with errors in datasets is often limited to accepting that some fraction of examples are incorrect, estimating their confidence, and either assigning appropriate weights or ignoring uncertain ones during training. In this work, we propose a different approach. We introduce the Confident Learning for Object Detection (CLOD) algorithm for assessing the quality of each label in object detection datasets, identifying missing, spurious, mislabeled, and mislocated bounding boxes and suggesting corrections. By focusing on finding incorrect examples in the training datasets, we can eliminate them at the root. Suspicious bounding boxes can be reviewed to improve the quality of the dataset, leading to better models without further complicating their already complex architectures. The proposed method is able to point out nearly 80% of artificially disturbed bounding boxes with a false positive rate below 0.1. Cleaning the datasets by applying the most confident automatic suggestions improved mAP scores by 16% to 46%, depending on the dataset, without any modifications to the network architectures. This approach shows promising potential in rectifying state-of-the-art object detection datasets.
Authors:JunKyu Lee, Blesson Varghese, Hans Vandierendonck
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effects of dynamically varying video contents and detection latency on the real-time detection accuracy of a detector and proposes a new run-time accuracy variation model, ROMA, based on the findings from the analysis. ROMA is designed to select an optimal detector out of a set of detectors in real time without label information to maximize real-time object detection accuracy. ROMA utilizing four YOLOv4 detectors on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano shows real-time accuracy improvements by 4 to 37% for a scenario of dynamically varying video contents and detection latency consisting of MOT17Det and MOT20Det datasets, compared to individual YOLOv4 detectors and two state-of-the-art runtime techniques.
Authors:Dongqiangzi Ye, Zixiang Zhou, Weijia Chen, Yufei Xie, Yu Wang, Panqu Wang, Hassan Foroosh
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation are usually implemented in specialized networks with distinctive architectures that are difficult to adapt to each other. This paper presents LidarMultiNet, a LiDAR-based multi-task network that unifies these three major LiDAR perception tasks. Among its many benefits, a multi-task network can reduce the overall cost by sharing weights and computation among multiple tasks. However, it typically underperforms compared to independently combined single-task models. The proposed LidarMultiNet aims to bridge the performance gap between the multi-task network and multiple single-task networks. At the core of LidarMultiNet is a strong 3D voxel-based encoder-decoder architecture with a Global Context Pooling (GCP) module extracting global contextual features from a LiDAR frame. Task-specific heads are added on top of the network to perform the three LiDAR perception tasks. More tasks can be implemented simply by adding new task-specific heads while introducing little additional cost. A second stage is also proposed to refine the first-stage segmentation and generate accurate panoptic segmentation results. LidarMultiNet is extensively tested on both Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes dataset, demonstrating for the first time that major LiDAR perception tasks can be unified in a single strong network that is trained end-to-end and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, LidarMultiNet reaches the official 1st place in the Waymo Open Dataset 3D semantic segmentation challenge 2022 with the highest mIoU and the best accuracy for most of the 22 classes on the test set, using only LiDAR points as input. It also sets the new state-of-the-art for a single model on the Waymo 3D object detection benchmark and three nuScenes benchmarks.
Authors:Oren Shrout, Yizhak Ben-Shabat, Ayellet Tal
Abstract:
3D object detection within large 3D scenes is challenging not only due to the sparsity and irregularity of 3D point clouds, but also due to both the extreme foreground-background scene imbalance and class imbalance. A common approach is to add ground-truth objects from other scenes. Differently, we propose to modify the scenes by removing elements (voxels), rather than adding ones. Our approach selects the "meaningful" voxels, in a manner that addresses both types of dataset imbalance. The approach is general and can be applied to any voxel-based detector, yet the meaningfulness of a voxel is network-dependent. Our voxel selection is shown to improve the performance of several prominent 3D detection methods.
Authors:Youpeng Zhao, Huadong Tang, Yingying Jiang, Yong A, Qiang Wu
Abstract:
Recent advances in vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved great performance in visual recognition tasks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) exploit spatial inductive bias to learn visual representations, but these networks are spatially local. ViTs can learn global representations with their self-attention mechanism, but they are usually heavy-weight and unsuitable for mobile devices. In this paper, we propose cross feature attention (XFA) to bring down computation cost for transformers, and combine efficient mobile CNNs to form a novel efficient light-weight CNN-ViT hybrid model, XFormer, which can serve as a general-purpose backbone to learn both global and local representation. Experimental results show that XFormer outperforms numerous CNN and ViT-based models across different tasks and datasets. On ImageNet1K dataset, XFormer achieves top-1 accuracy of 78.5% with 5.5 million parameters, which is 2.2% and 6.3% more accurate than EfficientNet-B0 (CNN-based) and DeiT (ViT-based) for similar number of parameters. Our model also performs well when transferring to object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. On MS COCO dataset, XFormer exceeds MobileNetV2 by 10.5 AP (22.7 -> 33.2 AP) in YOLOv3 framework with only 6.3M parameters and 3.8G FLOPs. On Cityscapes dataset, with only a simple all-MLP decoder, XFormer achieves mIoU of 78.5 and FPS of 15.3, surpassing state-of-the-art lightweight segmentation networks.
Authors:Petr Šebek, Šimon Pokorný, Patrik Vacek, Tomáš Svoboda
Abstract:
Object detection and semantic segmentation with the 3D lidar point cloud data require expensive annotation. We propose a data augmentation method that takes advantage of already annotated data multiple times. We propose an augmentation framework that reuses real data, automatically finds suitable placements in the scene to be augmented, and handles occlusions explicitly. Due to the usage of the real data, the scan points of newly inserted objects in augmentation sustain the physical characteristics of the lidar, such as intensity and raydrop. The pipeline proves competitive in training top-performing models for 3D object detection and semantic segmentation. The new augmentation provides a significant performance gain in rare and essential classes, notably 6.65% average precision gain for "Hard" pedestrian class in KITTI object detection or 2.14 mean IoU gain in the SemanticKITTI segmentation challenge over the state of the art.
Authors:Na Dong, Yongqiang Zhang, Mingli Ding, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract:
Incremental few-shot object detection aims at detecting novel classes without forgetting knowledge of the base classes with only a few labeled training data from the novel classes. Most related prior works are on incremental object detection that rely on the availability of abundant training samples per novel class that substantially limits the scalability to real-world setting where novel data can be scarce. In this paper, we propose the Incremental-DETR that does incremental few-shot object detection via fine-tuning and self-supervised learning on the DETR object detector. To alleviate severe over-fitting with few novel class data, we first fine-tune the class-specific components of DETR with self-supervision from additional object proposals generated using Selective Search as pseudo labels. We further introduce an incremental few-shot fine-tuning strategy with knowledge distillation on the class-specific components of DETR to encourage the network in detecting novel classes without forgetting the base classes. Extensive experiments conducted on standard incremental object detection and incremental few-shot object detection settings show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Authors:Gustavo Olague, Jose Armando Menendez-Clavijo, Matthieu Olague, Arturo Ocampo, Gerardo Ibarra-Vazquez, Rocio Ochoa, Roberto Pineda
Abstract:
Despite recent improvements in computer vision, artificial visual systems' design is still daunting since an explanation of visual computing algorithms remains elusive. Salient object detection is one problem that is still open due to the difficulty of understanding the brain's inner workings. Progress on this research area follows the traditional path of hand-made designs using neuroscience knowledge. In recent years two different approaches based on genetic programming appear to enhance their technique. One follows the idea of combining previous hand-made methods through genetic programming and fuzzy logic. The other approach consists of improving the inner computational structures of basic hand-made models through artificial evolution. This research work proposes expanding the artificial dorsal stream using a recent proposal to solve salient object detection problems. This approach uses the benefits of the two main aspects of this research area: fixation prediction and detection of salient objects. We decided to apply the fusion of visual saliency and image segmentation algorithms as a template. The proposed methodology discovers several critical structures in the template through artificial evolution. We present results on a benchmark designed by experts with outstanding results in comparison with the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Jussi Leinonen, Ulrich Hamann, Urs Germann
Abstract:
A deep learning model is presented to nowcast the occurrence of lightning at a five-minute time resolution 60 minutes into the future. The model is based on a recurrent-convolutional architecture that allows it to recognize and predict the spatiotemporal development of convection, including the motion, growth and decay of thunderstorm cells. The predictions are performed on a stationary grid, without the use of storm object detection and tracking. The input data, collected from an area in and surrounding Switzerland, comprise ground-based radar data, visible/infrared satellite data and derived cloud products, lightning detection, numerical weather prediction and digital elevation model data. We analyze different alternative loss functions, class weighting strategies and model features, providing guidelines for future studies to select loss functions optimally and to properly calibrate the probabilistic predictions of their model. Based on these analyses, we use focal loss in this study, but conclude that it only provides a small benefit over cross entropy, which is a viable option if recalibration of the model is not practical. The model achieves a pixel-wise critical success index (CSI) of 0.45 to predict lightning occurrence within 8 km over the 60-min nowcast period, ranging from a CSI of 0.75 at a 5-min lead time to a CSI of 0.32 at a 60-min lead time.
Authors:Federico Zocco, Ching-I Huang, Hsueh-Cheng Wang, Mohammad Omar Khyam, Mien Van
Abstract:
Marine debris is a problem both for the health of marine environments and for the human health since tiny pieces of plastic called "microplastics" resulting from the debris decomposition over the time are entering the food chain at any levels. For marine debris detection and removal, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a potential solution. In this letter, we focus on the efficiency of AUV vision for real-time and low-light object detection. First, we improved the efficiency of a class of state-of-the-art object detectors, namely EfficientDets, by 1.5% AP on D0, 2.6% AP on D1, 1.2% AP on D2 and 1.3% AP on D3 without increasing the GPU latency. Subsequently, we created and made publicly available a dataset for the detection of in-water plastic bags and bottles and trained our improved EfficientDets on this and another dataset for marine debris detection. Finally, we investigated how the detector performance is affected by low-light conditions and compared two low-light underwater image enhancement strategies both in terms of accuracy and latency. Source code and dataset are publicly available.
Authors:Arnav Vaibhav Malawade, Trier Mortlock, Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles use multiple sensors, large deep-learning models, and powerful hardware platforms to perceive the environment and navigate safely. In many contexts, some sensing modalities negatively impact perception while increasing energy consumption. We propose EcoFusion: an energy-aware sensor fusion approach that uses context to adapt the fusion method and reduce energy consumption without affecting perception performance. EcoFusion performs up to 9.5% better at object detection than existing fusion methods with approximately 60% less energy and 58% lower latency on the industry-standard Nvidia Drive PX2 hardware platform. We also propose several context-identification strategies, implement a joint optimization between energy and performance, and present scenario-specific results.
Authors:G. Melotti, W. Lu, P. Conde, D. Zhao, A. Asvadi, N. Gonçalves, C. Premebida
Abstract:
Object detection in autonomous driving applications implies that the detection and tracking of semantic objects are commonly native to urban driving environments, as pedestrians and vehicles. One of the major challenges in state-of-the-art deep-learning based object detection are false positives which occur with overconfident scores. This is highly undesirable in autonomous driving and other critical robotic-perception domains because of safety concerns. This paper proposes an approach to alleviate the problem of overconfident predictions by introducing a novel probabilistic layer to deep object detection networks in testing. The suggested approach avoids the traditional Sigmoid or Softmax prediction layer which often produces overconfident predictions. It is demonstrated that the proposed technique reduces overconfidence in the false positives without degrading the performance on the true positives. The approach is validated on the 2D-KITTI objection detection through the YOLOV4 and SECOND (Lidar-based detector). The proposed approach enables interpretable probabilistic predictions without the requirement of re-training the network and therefore is very practical.
Authors:Shlok Mishra, Anshul Shah, Ankan Bansal, Abhyuday Jagannatha, Janit Anjaria, Abhishek Sharma, David Jacobs, Dilip Krishnan
Abstract:
A core component of the recent success of self-supervised learning is cropping data augmentation, which selects sub-regions of an image to be used as positive views in the self-supervised loss. The underlying assumption is that randomly cropped and resized regions of a given image share information about the objects of interest, which the learned representation will capture. This assumption is mostly satisfied in datasets such as ImageNet where there is a large, centered object, which is highly likely to be present in random crops of the full image. However, in other datasets such as OpenImages or COCO, which are more representative of real world uncurated data, there are typically multiple small objects in an image. In this work, we show that self-supervised learning based on the usual random cropping performs poorly on such datasets. We propose replacing one or both of the random crops with crops obtained from an object proposal algorithm. This encourages the model to learn both object and scene level semantic representations. Using this approach, which we call object-aware cropping, results in significant improvements over scene cropping on classification and object detection benchmarks. For example, on OpenImages, our approach achieves an improvement of 8.8% mAP over random scene-level cropping using MoCo-v2 based pre-training. We also show significant improvements on COCO and PASCAL-VOC object detection and segmentation tasks over the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. Our approach is efficient, simple and general, and can be used in most existing contrastive and non-contrastive self-supervised learning frameworks.
Authors:Chiao Hsieh, Keyur Joshi, Sasa Misailovic, Sayan Mitra
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for object detection, lane detection, and segmentation now sit at the head of most autonomy pipelines, and yet, their safety analysis remains an important challenge. Formal analysis of perception models is fundamentally difficult because their correctness is hard if not impossible to specify. We present a technique for inferring intelligible and safe abstractions for perception models from system-level safety requirements, data, and program analysis of the modules that are downstream from perception. The technique can help tradeoff safety, size, and precision, in creating abstractions and the subsequent verification. We apply the method to two significant case studies based on high-fidelity simulations (a) a vision-based lane keeping controller for an autonomous vehicle and (b) a controller for an agricultural robot. We show how the generated abstractions can be composed with the downstream modules and then the resulting abstract system can be verified using program analysis tools like CBMC. Detailed evaluations of the impacts of size, safety requirements, and the environmental parameters (e.g., lighting, road surface, plant type) on the precision of the generated abstractions suggest that the approach can help guide the search for corner cases and safe operating envelops.
Authors:Ge-Peng Ji, Lei Zhu, Mingchen Zhuge, Keren Fu
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to detect objects with similar patterns (e.g., texture, intensity, colour, etc) to their surroundings, and recently has attracted growing research interest. As camouflaged objects often present very ambiguous boundaries, how to determine object locations as well as their weak boundaries is challenging and also the key to this task. Inspired by the biological visual perception process when a human observer discovers camouflaged objects, this paper proposes a novel edge-based reversible re-calibration network called ERRNet. Our model is characterized by two innovative designs, namely Selective Edge Aggregation (SEA) and Reversible Re-calibration Unit (RRU), which aim to model the visual perception behaviour and achieve effective edge prior and cross-comparison between potential camouflaged regions and background. More importantly, RRU incorporates diverse priors with more comprehensive information comparing to existing COD models. Experimental results show that ERRNet outperforms existing cutting-edge baselines on three COD datasets and five medical image segmentation datasets. Especially, compared with the existing top-1 model SINet, ERRNet significantly improves the performance by $\sim$6% (mean E-measure) with notably high speed (79.3 FPS), showing that ERRNet could be a general and robust solution for the COD task.
Authors:Hideaki Okamoto, Quan Huu Cap, Takakiyo Nomura, Kazuhito Nabeshima, Jun Hashimoto, Hitoshi Iyatomi
Abstract:
Endoscopy is widely used to diagnose gastric cancer and has a high diagnostic performance, but it must be performed by a physician, which limits the number of people who can be diagnosed. In contrast, gastric X-rays can be taken by radiographers, thus allowing a much larger number of patients to undergo imaging. However, the diagnosis of X-ray images relies heavily on the expertise and experience of physicians, and few machine learning methods have been developed to assist in this process. We propose a novel and practical gastric cancer diagnostic support system for gastric X-ray images that will enable more people to be screened. The system is based on a general deep learning-based object detection model and incorporates two novel techniques: refined probabilistic stomach image augmentation (R-sGAIA) and hard boundary box training (HBBT). R-sGAIA enhances the probabilistic gastric fold region and provides more learning patterns for cancer detection models. HBBT is an efficient training method that improves model performance by allowing the use of unannotated negative (i.e., healthy control) samples, which are typically unusable in conventional detection models. The proposed system achieved a sensitivity (SE) for gastric cancer of 90.2\%, higher than that of an expert (85.5%). Under these conditions, two out of five candidate boxes identified by the system were cancerous (precision = 42.5%), with an image processing speed of 0.51 seconds per image. The system also outperformed methods using the same object detection model and state-of-the-art data augmentation by showing a 5.9-point improvement in the F1 score. In summary, this system efficiently identifies areas for radiologists to examine within a practical time frame, thus significantly reducing their workload.
Authors:JunKyu Lee, Blesson Varghese, Roger Woods, Hans Vandierendonck
Abstract:
Real-time video analytics on the edge is challenging as the computationally constrained resources typically cannot analyse video streams at full fidelity and frame rate, which results in loss of accuracy. This paper proposes a Transprecise Object Detector (TOD) which maximises the real-time object detection accuracy on an edge device by selecting an appropriate Deep Neural Network (DNN) on the fly with negligible computational overhead. TOD makes two key contributions over the state of the art: (1) TOD leverages characteristics of the video stream such as object size and speed of movement to identify networks with high prediction accuracy for the current frames; (2) it selects the best-performing network based on projected accuracy and computational demand using an effective and low-overhead decision mechanism. Experimental evaluation on a Jetson Nano demonstrates that TOD improves the average object detection precision by 34.7 % over the YOLOv4-tiny-288 model on average over the MOT17Det dataset. In the MOT17-05 test dataset, TOD utilises only 45.1 % of GPU resource and 62.7 % of the GPU board power without losing accuracy, compared to YOLOv4-416 model. We expect that TOD will maximise the application of edge devices to real-time object detection, since TOD maximises real-time object detection accuracy given edge devices according to dynamic input features without increasing inference latency in practice.
Authors:Zhanghao Sun, Ronald Quan, Olav Solgaard
Abstract:
Two-dimensional, resonant scanners have been utilized in a large variety of imaging modules due to their compact form, low power consumption, large angular range, and high speed. However, resonant scanners have problems with non-optimal and inflexible scanning patterns and inherent phase uncertainty, which limit practical applications. Here we propose methods for optimized design and control of the scanning trajectory of two-dimensional resonant scanners under various physical constraints, including high frame-rate and limited actuation amplitude. First, we propose an analytical design rule for uniform spatial sampling. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that by including non-repeating scanning patterns, the proposed designs outperform previous designs in terms of scanning range and fill factor. Second, we show that we can create flexible scanning patterns that allow focusing on user-defined Regions-of-Interest (RoI) by modulation of the scanning parameters. The scanning parameters are found by an optimization algorithm. In simulations, we demonstrate the benefits of these designs with standard metrics and higher-level computer vision tasks (LiDAR odometry and 3D object detection). Finally, we experimentally implement and verify both unmodulated and modulated scanning modes using a two-dimensional, resonant MEMS scanner. Central to the implementations is high bandwidth monitoring of the phase of the angular scans in both dimensions. This task is carried out with a position-sensitive photodetector combined with high-bandwidth electronics, enabling fast spatial sampling at ~ 100Hz frame-rate.
Authors:Shlok Mishra, Anshul Shah, Ankan Bansal, Janit Anjaria, Jonghyun Choi, Abhinav Shrivastava, Abhishek Sharma, David Jacobs
Abstract:
Recent literature has shown that features obtained from supervised training of CNNs may over-emphasize texture rather than encoding high-level information. In self-supervised learning in particular, texture as a low-level cue may provide shortcuts that prevent the network from learning higher level representations. To address these problems we propose to use classic methods based on anisotropic diffusion to augment training using images with suppressed texture. This simple method helps retain important edge information and suppress texture at the same time. We empirically show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on object detection and image classification with eight diverse datasets in either supervised or self-supervised learning tasks such as MoCoV2 and Jigsaw. Our method is particularly effective for transfer learning tasks and we observed improved performance on five standard transfer learning datasets. The large improvements (up to 11.49\%) on the Sketch-ImageNet dataset, DTD dataset and additional visual analyses with saliency maps suggest that our approach helps in learning better representations that better transfer.
Authors:Junpeng Zhang, Xiuping Jia, Jiankun Hu, Jocelyn Chanussot
Abstract:
Inspired by the recent developments in computer vision, low-rank and structured sparse matrix decomposition can be potentially be used for extract moving objects in satellite videos. This set of approaches seeks for rank minimization on the background that typically requires batch-based optimization over a sequence of frames, which causes delays in processing and limits their applications. To remedy this delay, we propose an Online Low-rank and Structured Sparse Decomposition (O-LSD). O-LSD reformulates the batch-based low-rank matrix decomposition with the structured sparse penalty to its equivalent frame-wise separable counterpart, which then defines a stochastic optimization problem for online subspace basis estimation. In order to promote online processing, O-LSD conducts the foreground and background separation and the subspace basis update alternatingly for every frame in a video. We also show the convergence of O-LSD theoretically. Experimental results on two satellite videos demonstrate the performance of O-LSD in term of accuracy and time consumption is comparable with the batch-based approaches with significantly reduced delay in processing.
Authors:Somraj Gautam, Nachiketa Purohit, Gaurav Harit
Abstract:
Efficient data annotation remains a critical challenge in machine learning, particularly for object detection tasks requiring extensive labeled data. Active learning (AL) has emerged as a promising solution to minimize annotation costs by selecting the most informative samples. While traditional AL approaches primarily rely on uncertainty-based selection, recent advances suggest that incorporating diversity-based strategies can enhance sampling efficiency in object detection tasks. Our approach ensures the selection of representative examples that improve model generalization. We evaluate our method on two benchmark datasets (TableBank-LaTeX, TableBank-Word) using state-of-the-art table detection architectures, CascadeTabNet and YOLOv9. Our results demonstrate that AL-based example selection significantly outperforms random sampling, reducing annotation effort given a limited budget while maintaining comparable performance to fully supervised models. Our method achieves higher mAP scores within the same annotation budget.
Authors:Renyu Li, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Yao You, Kamil Pluciński, Maximilian Operlejn, Crag Wolfe
Abstract:
Multi-modal generative document parsing systems challenge traditional evaluation: unlike deterministic OCR or layout models, they often produce semantically correct yet structurally divergent outputs. Conventional metrics-CER, WER, IoU, or TEDS-misclassify such diversity as error, penalizing valid interpretations and obscuring system behavior. We introduce SCORE (Structural and COntent Robust Evaluation), an interpretation-agnostic framework that integrates (i) adjusted edit distance for robust content fidelity, (ii) token-level diagnostics to distinguish hallucinations from omissions, (iii) table evaluation with spatial tolerance and semantic alignment, and (iv) hierarchy-aware consistency checks. Together, these dimensions enable evaluation that embraces representational diversity while enforcing semantic rigor. Across 1,114 pages spanning a holistic benchmark and a field dataset, SCORE consistently revealed cross-dataset performance patterns missed by standard metrics. In 2-5% of pages with ambiguous table structures, traditional metrics penalized systems by 12-25% on average, leading to distorted rankings. SCORE corrected these cases, recovering equivalence between alternative but valid interpretations. Moreover, by normalizing generative outputs into a format-agnostic representation, SCORE reproduces traditional scores (e.g., table F1 up to 0.93) without requiring object-detection pipelines, demonstrating that generative parsing alone suffices for comprehensive evaluation. By exposing how interpretive diversity impacts evaluation outcomes and providing multi-dimensional, interpretable diagnostics, SCORE establishes foundational principles for semantically grounded, fair, and practical benchmarking of modern document parsing systems.
Authors:Amirhesam Aghanouri, Cristina Olaverri-Monreal
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to revolutionize transportation by improving efficiency and safety. Their success relies on 3D vision systems that effectively sense the environment and detect traffic agents. Among sensors AVs use to create a comprehensive view of surroundings, LiDAR provides high-resolution depth data enabling accurate object detection, safe navigation, and collision avoidance. However, collecting real-world LiDAR data is time-consuming and often affected by noise and sparsity due to adverse weather or sensor limitations. This work applies a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), enhanced with novel noise scheduling and time-step embedding techniques to generate high-quality synthetic data for augmentation, thereby improving performance across a range of computer vision tasks, particularly in AV perception. These modifications impact the denoising process and the model's temporal awareness, allowing it to produce more realistic point clouds based on the projection. The proposed method was extensively evaluated under various configurations using the IAMCV and KITTI-360 datasets, with four performance metrics compared against state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The results demonstrate the model's superior performance over most existing baselines and its effectiveness in mitigating the effects of noisy and sparse LiDAR data, producing diverse point clouds with rich spatial relationships and structural detail.
Authors:Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Fuli Qiao, Nelson Daniel Troncoso Aldas, Yanpei Shi, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Laurent Itti, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
Abstract:
People with visual impairments often face significant challenges in locating and retrieving objects in their surroundings. Existing assistive technologies present a trade-off: systems that offer precise guidance typically require pre-scanning or support only fixed object categories, while those with open-world object recognition lack spatial feedback for reaching the object. To address this gap, we introduce 'NaviSense', a mobile assistive system that combines conversational AI, vision-language models, augmented reality (AR), and LiDAR to support open-world object detection with real-time audio-haptic guidance. Users specify objects via natural language and receive continuous spatial feedback to navigate toward the target without needing prior setup. Designed with insights from a formative study and evaluated with 12 blind and low-vision participants, NaviSense significantly reduced object retrieval time and was preferred over existing tools, demonstrating the value of integrating open-world perception with precise, accessible guidance.
Authors:Edwine Nabahirwa, Wei Song, Minghua Zhang, Shufan Chen
Abstract:
Underwater object detection (UOD) remains a critical challenge in computer vision due to underwater distortions which degrade low-level features and compromise the reliability of even state-of-the-art detectors. While YOLO models have become the backbone of real-time object detection, little work has systematically examined their robustness under these uniquely challenging conditions. This raises a critical question: Are YOLO models genuinely robust when operating under the chaotic and unpredictable conditions of underwater environments? In this study, we present one of the first comprehensive evaluations of recent YOLO variants (YOLOv8-YOLOv12) across six simulated underwater environments. Using a unified dataset of 10,000 annotated images from DUO and Roboflow100, we not only benchmark model robustness but also analyze how distortions affect key low-level features such as texture, edges, and color. Our findings show that (1) YOLOv12 delivers the strongest overall performance but is highly vulnerable to noise, and (2) noise disrupts edge and texture features, explaining the poor detection performance in noisy images. Class imbalance is a persistent challenge in UOD. Experiments revealed that (3) image counts and instance frequency primarily drive detection performance, while object appearance exerts only a secondary influence. Finally, we evaluated lightweight training-aware strategies: noise-aware sample injection, which improves robustness in both noisy and real-world conditions, and fine-tuning with advanced enhancement, which boosts accuracy in enhanced domains but slightly lowers performance in original data, demonstrating strong potential for domain adaptation, respectively. Together, these insights provide practical guidance for building resilient and cost-efficient UOD systems.
Authors:Mohamad Mofeed Chaar, Jamal Raiyn, Galia Weidl
Abstract:
The CARLA simulator (Car Learning to Act) serves as a robust platform for testing algorithms and generating datasets in the field of Autonomous Driving (AD). It provides control over various environmental parameters, enabling thorough evaluation. Development bounding boxes are commonly utilized tools in deep learning and play a crucial role in AD applications. The predominant method for data generation in the CARLA Simulator involves identifying and delineating objects of interest, such as vehicles, using bounding boxes. The operation in CARLA entails capturing the coordinates of all objects on the map, which are subsequently aligned with the sensor's coordinate system at the ego vehicle and then enclosed within bounding boxes relative to the ego vehicle's perspective. However, this primary approach encounters challenges associated with object detection and bounding box annotation, such as ghost boxes. Although these procedures are generally effective at detecting vehicles and other objects within their direct line of sight, they may also produce false positives by identifying objects that are obscured by obstructions. We have enhanced the primary approach with the objective of filtering out unwanted boxes. Performance analysis indicates that the improved approach has achieved high accuracy.
Authors:Anis Koubaa, Khaled Gabr
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in defense, surveillance, and disaster response, yet most systems remain confined to SAE Level 2--3 autonomy. Their reliance on rule-based control and narrow AI restricts adaptability in dynamic, uncertain missions. Existing UAV frameworks lack context-aware reasoning, autonomous decision-making, and ecosystem-level integration; critically, none leverage Large Language Model (LLM) agents with tool-calling for real-time knowledge access. This paper introduces the Agentic UAVs framework, a five-layer architecture (Perception, Reasoning, Action, Integration, Learning) that augments UAVs with LLM-driven reasoning, database querying, and third-party system interaction. A ROS2 and Gazebo-based prototype integrates YOLOv11 object detection with GPT-4 reasoning and local Gemma-3 deployment. In simulated search-and-rescue scenarios, agentic UAVs achieved higher detection confidence (0.79 vs. 0.72), improved person detection rates (91% vs. 75%), and markedly increased action recommendation (92% vs. 4.5%). These results confirm that modest computational overhead enables qualitatively new levels of autonomy and ecosystem integration.
Authors:Guihui Li, Bowei Dong, Kaizhi Dong, Jiayi Li, Haiyong Zheng
Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion has garnered considerable attention owing to the strong complementarity of these two modalities in complex, harsh environments. While deep learning-based fusion methods have made remarkable advances in feature extraction, alignment, fusion, and reconstruction, they still depend largely on low-level visual cues, such as texture and contrast, and struggle to capture the high-level semantic information embedded in images. Recent attempts to incorporate text as a source of semantic guidance have relied on unstructured descriptions that neither explicitly model entities, attributes, and relationships nor provide spatial localization, thereby limiting fine-grained fusion performance. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MSGFusion, a multimodal scene graph-guided fusion framework for infrared and visible imagery. By deeply coupling structured scene graphs derived from text and vision, MSGFusion explicitly represents entities, attributes, and spatial relations, and then synchronously refines high-level semantics and low-level details through successive modules for scene graph representation, hierarchical aggregation, and graph-driven fusion. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that MSGFusion significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in detail preservation and structural clarity, and delivers superior semantic consistency and generalizability in downstream tasks such as low-light object detection, semantic segmentation, and medical image fusion.
Authors:Davide Peron, Victor Nan Fernandez-Ayala, Lukas Segelmark
Abstract:
Autonomous stocking in retail environments, particularly supermarkets, presents challenges due to dynamic human interactions, constrained spaces, and diverse product geometries. This paper introduces an efficient end-to-end robotic system for autonomous shelf stocking and fronting, integrating commercially available hardware with a scalable algorithmic architecture. A major contribution of this work is the system integration of off-the-shelf hardware and ROS2-based perception, planning, and control into a single deployable platform for retail environments. Our solution leverages Behavior Trees (BTs) for task planning, fine-tuned vision models for object detection, and a two-step Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for precise shelf navigation using ArUco markers. Laboratory experiments replicating realistic supermarket conditions demonstrate reliable performance, achieving over 98% success in pick-and-place operations across a total of more than 700 stocking events. However, our comparative benchmarks indicate that the performance and cost-effectiveness of current autonomous systems remain inferior to that of human workers, which we use to highlight key improvement areas and quantify the progress still required before widespread commercial deployment can realistically be achieved.
Authors:Razvan Stefanescu, Ethan Oh, Ruben Vazquez, Chris Mesterharm, Constantin Serban, Ritu Chadha
Abstract:
We introduce a multi-modal WAVE-DETR drone detector combining visible RGB and acoustic signals for robust real-life UAV object detection. Our approach fuses visual and acoustic features in a unified object detector model relying on the Deformable DETR and Wav2Vec2 architectures, achieving strong performance under challenging environmental conditions. Our work leverage the existing Drone-vs-Bird dataset and the newly generated ARDrone dataset containing more than 7,500 synchronized images and audio segments. We show how the acoustic information is used to improve the performance of the Deformable DETR object detector on the real ARDrone dataset. We developed, trained and tested four different fusion configurations based on a gated mechanism, linear layer, MLP and cross attention. The Wav2Vec2 acoustic embeddings are fused with the multi resolution feature mappings of the Deformable DETR and enhance the object detection performance over all drones dimensions. The best performer is the gated fusion approach, which improves the mAP of the Deformable DETR object detector on our in-distribution and out-of-distribution ARDrone datasets by 11.1% to 15.3% for small drones across all IoU thresholds between 0.5 and 0.9. The mAP scores for medium and large drones are also enhanced, with overall gains across all drone sizes ranging from 3.27% to 5.84%.
Authors:Hossein Yazdanjouei, Arash Mansouri, Mohammad Shokouhifar
Abstract:
This study proposes a semi-supervised co-training framework for object detection in densely packed retail environments, where limited labeled data and complex conditions pose major challenges. The framework combines Faster R-CNN (utilizing a ResNet backbone) for precise localization with YOLO (employing a Darknet backbone) for global context, enabling mutual pseudo-label exchange that improves accuracy in scenes with occlusion and overlapping objects. To strengthen classification, it employs an ensemble of XGBoost, Random Forest, and SVM, utilizing diverse feature representations for higher robustness. Hyperparameters are optimized using a metaheuristic-driven algorithm, enhancing precision and efficiency across models. By minimizing reliance on manual labeling, the approach reduces annotation costs and adapts effectively to frequent product and layout changes common in retail. Experiments on the SKU-110k dataset demonstrate strong performance, highlighting the scalability and practicality of the proposed framework for real-world retail applications such as automated inventory tracking, product monitoring, and checkout systems.
Authors:Akansel Cosgun, Lachlan Chumbley, Benjamin J. Meyer
Abstract:
This paper introduces the Australian Supermarket Object Set (ASOS), a comprehensive dataset comprising 50 readily available supermarket items with high-quality 3D textured meshes designed for benchmarking in robotics and computer vision applications. Unlike existing datasets that rely on synthetic models or specialized objects with limited accessibility, ASOS provides a cost-effective collection of common household items that can be sourced from a major Australian supermarket chain. The dataset spans 10 distinct categories with diverse shapes, sizes, and weights. 3D meshes are acquired by a structure-from-motion techniques with high-resolution imaging to generate watertight meshes. The dataset's emphasis on accessibility and real-world applicability makes it valuable for benchmarking object detection, pose estimation, and robotics applications.
Authors:Edwine Nabahirwa, Wei Song, Minghua Zhang, Yi Fang, Zhou Ni
Abstract:
Underwater object detection (UOD) is vital to diverse marine applications, including oceanographic research, underwater robotics, and marine conservation. However, UOD faces numerous challenges that compromise its performance. Over the years, various methods have been proposed to address these issues, but they often fail to fully capture the complexities of underwater environments. This review systematically categorizes UOD challenges into five key areas: Image quality degradation, target-related issues, data-related challenges, computational and processing constraints, and limitations in detection methodologies. To address these challenges, we analyze the progression from traditional image processing and object detection techniques to modern approaches. Additionally, we explore the potential of large vision-language models (LVLMs) in UOD, leveraging their multi-modal capabilities demonstrated in other domains. We also present case studies, including synthetic dataset generation using DALL-E 3 and fine-tuning Florence-2 LVLM for UOD. This review identifies three key insights: (i) Current UOD methods are insufficient to fully address challenges like image degradation and small object detection in dynamic underwater environments. (ii) Synthetic data generation using LVLMs shows potential for augmenting datasets but requires further refinement to ensure realism and applicability. (iii) LVLMs hold significant promise for UOD, but their real-time application remains under-explored, requiring further research on optimization techniques.
Authors:Zhenhai Weng, Xinjie Li, Can Wu, Weijie He, Jianfeng Lv, Dong Zhou, Zhongliang Yu
Abstract:
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) faces severe performance degradation when applied to UAV imagery due to the domain gap from ground-level datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a complete UAV-oriented solution that combines both dataset construction and model innovation. First, we design a refined UAV-Label Engine, which efficiently resolves annotation redundancy, inconsistency, and ambiguity, enabling the generation of largescale UAV datasets. Based on this engine, we construct two new benchmarks: UAVDE-2M, with over 2.4M instances across 1,800+ categories, and UAVCAP-15K, providing rich image-text pairs for vision-language pretraining. Second, we introduce the Cross-Attention Gated Enhancement (CAGE) module, a lightweight dual-path fusion design that integrates cross-attention, adaptive gating, and global FiLM modulation for robust textvision alignment. By embedding CAGE into the YOLO-World-v2 framework, our method achieves significant gains in both accuracy and efficiency, notably improving zero-shot detection on VisDrone by +5.3 mAP while reducing parameters and GFLOPs, and demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization on SIMD. Extensive experiments and real-world UAV deployment confirm the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed solution for UAV-based OVD
Authors:Diana-Alexandra Sas, Florin Oniga
Abstract:
Monocular 3D Object Detection represents a challenging Computer Vision task due to the nature of the input used, which is a single 2D image, lacking in any depth cues and placing the depth estimation problem as an ill-posed one. Existing solutions leverage the information extracted from the input by using Convolutional Neural Networks or Transformer architectures as feature extraction backbones, followed by specific detection heads for 3D parameters prediction. In this paper, we introduce a decoupled strategy based on injecting precomputed segmentation information priors and fusing them directly into the feature space for guiding the detection, without expanding the detection model or jointly learning the priors. The focus is on evaluating the impact of additional segmentation information on existing detection pipelines without adding additional prediction branches. The proposed method is evaluated on the KITTI 3D Object Detection Benchmark, outperforming the equivalent architecture that relies only on RGB image features for small objects in the scene: pedestrians and cyclists, and proving that understanding the input data can balance the need for additional sensors or training data.
Authors:Satoshi Tanaka, Kok Seang Tan, Isamu Yamashita
Abstract:
Recent advances in autonomous driving have underscored the importance of accurate 3D object detection, with LiDAR playing a central role due to its robustness under diverse visibility conditions. However, different vehicle platforms often deploy distinct sensor configurations, causing performance degradation when models trained on one configuration are applied to another because of shifts in the point cloud distribution. Prior work on multi-dataset training and domain adaptation for 3D object detection has largely addressed environmental domain gaps and density variation within a single LiDAR; in contrast, the domain gap for different sensor configurations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we address domain adaptation across different sensor configurations in 3D object detection. We propose two techniques: Downstream Fine-tuning (dataset-specific fine-tuning after multi-dataset training) and Partial Layer Fine-tuning (updating only a subset of layers to improve cross-configuration generalization). Using paired datasets collected in the same geographic region with multiple sensor configurations, we show that joint training with Downstream Fine-tuning and Partial Layer Fine-tuning consistently outperforms naive joint training for each configuration. Our findings provide a practical and scalable solution for adapting 3D object detection models to the diverse vehicle platforms.
Authors:Andrew Broad, Jason Keighley, Lucy Godson, Alex Wright
Abstract:
We present a novel approach which extends the existing Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detector (FCOS) for mitotic figure detection. Our composite model adds a Feedback Attention Ladder CNN (FAL-CNN) model for classification of normal versus abnormal mitotic figures, feeding into a fusion network that is trained to generate adjustments to bounding boxes predicted by FCOS. Our network aims to reduce the false positive rate of the FCOS object detector, to improve the accuracy of object detection and enhance the generalisability of the network. Our model achieved an F1 score of 0.655 for mitosis detection on the preliminary evaluation dataset.
Authors:Eric Zhang, Li Wei, Sarah Chen, Michael Wang
Abstract:
Recent advances in dysfluency detection have introduced a variety of modeling paradigms, ranging from lightweight object-detection inspired networks (YOLOStutter) to modular interpretable frameworks (UDM). While performance on benchmark datasets continues to improve, clinical adoption requires more than accuracy: models must be controllable and explainable. In this paper, we present a systematic comparative analysis of four representative approaches--YOLO-Stutter, FluentNet, UDM, and SSDM--along three dimensions: performance, controllability, and explainability. Through comprehensive evaluation on multiple datasets and expert clinician assessment, we find that YOLO-Stutter and FluentNet provide efficiency and simplicity, but with limited transparency; UDM achieves the best balance of accuracy and clinical interpretability; and SSDM, while promising, could not be fully reproduced in our experiments. Our analysis highlights the trade-offs among competing approaches and identifies future directions for clinically viable dysfluency modeling. We also provide detailed implementation insights and practical deployment considerations for each approach.
Authors:Oussama Hadjerci, Antoine Letienne, Mohamed Abbas Hedjazi, Adel Hafiane
Abstract:
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful technique for learning visual representations. While recent SSL approaches achieve strong results in global image understanding, they are limited in capturing the structured representation in scenes. In this work, we propose a self-supervised approach that progressively builds structured visual representations by combining semantic grouping, instance level separation, and hierarchical structuring. Our approach, based on a novel ProtoScale module, captures visual elements across multiple spatial scales. Unlike common strategies like DINO that rely on random cropping and global embeddings, we preserve full scene context across augmented views to improve performance in dense prediction tasks. We validate our method on downstream object detection tasks using a combined subset of multiple datasets (COCO and UA-DETRAC). Experimental results show that our method learns object centric representations that enhance supervised object detection and outperform the state-of-the-art methods, even when trained with limited annotated data and fewer fine-tuning epochs.
Authors:Yuan Fang, Fangzhan Shi, Xijia Wei, Qingchao Chen, Kevin Chetty, Simon Julier
Abstract:
As drone use has become more widespread, there is a critical need to ensure safety and security. A key element of this is robust and accurate drone detection and localization. While cameras and other optical sensors like LiDAR are commonly used for object detection, their performance degrades under adverse lighting and environmental conditions. Therefore, this has generated interest in finding more reliable alternatives, such as millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar. Recent research on mmWave radar object detection has predominantly focused on 2D detection of road users. Although these systems demonstrate excellent performance for 2D problems, they lack the sensing capability to measure elevation, which is essential for 3D drone detection. To address this gap, we propose CubeDN, a single-stage end-to-end radar object detection network specifically designed for flying drones. CubeDN overcomes challenges such as poor elevation resolution by utilizing a dual radar configuration and a novel deep learning pipeline. It simultaneously detects, localizes, and classifies drones of two sizes, achieving decimeter-level tracking accuracy at closer ranges with overall $95\%$ average precision (AP) and $85\%$ average recall (AR). Furthermore, CubeDN completes data processing and inference at 10Hz, making it highly suitable for practical applications.
Authors:Hamta Sedghani, Abednego Wamuhindo Kambale, Federica Filippini, Francesca Palermo, Diana Trojaniello, Danilo Ardagna
Abstract:
Extended reality technologies are transforming fields such as healthcare, entertainment, and education, with Smart Eye-Wears (SEWs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) playing a crucial role. However, SEWs face inherent limitations in computational power, memory, and battery life, while offloading computations to external servers is constrained by network conditions and server workload variability. To address these challenges, we propose a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) framework, enabling multiple agents to train collaboratively while preserving data privacy. We implemented synchronous and asynchronous federation strategies, where models are aggregated either at fixed intervals or dynamically based on agent progress. Experimental results show that federated agents exhibit significantly lower performance variability, ensuring greater stability and reliability. These findings underscore the potential of FRL for applications requiring robust real-time AI processing, such as real-time object detection in SEWs.
Authors:Fabian Holst, Emre Gülsoylu, Simone Frintrop
Abstract:
The paper presents a novel technique for creating a 6D pose estimation dataset for marine vessels by fusing monocular RGB images with Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. The proposed technique addresses the limitations of relying purely on AIS for location information, caused by issues like equipment reliability, data manipulation, and transmission delays. By combining vessel detections from monocular RGB images, obtained using an object detection network (YOLOX-X), with AIS messages, the technique generates 3D bounding boxes that represent the vessels' 6D poses, i.e. spatial and rotational dimensions. The paper evaluates different object detection models to locate vessels in image space. We also compare two transformation methods (homography and Perspective-n-Point) for aligning AIS data with image coordinates. The results of our work demonstrate that the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) method achieves a significantly lower projection error compared to homography-based approaches used before, and the YOLOX-X model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.80 at an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 for relevant vessel classes. We show indication that our approach allows the creation of a 6D pose estimation dataset without needing manual annotation. Additionally, we introduce the Boats on Nordelbe Kehrwieder (BONK-pose), a publicly available dataset comprising 3753 images with 3D bounding box annotations for pose estimation, created by our data fusion approach. This dataset can be used for training and evaluating 6D pose estimation networks. In addition we introduce a set of 1000 images with 2D bounding box annotations for ship detection from the same scene.
Authors:Felix Embacher, David Holtz, Jonas Uhrig, Marius Cordts, Markus Enzweiler
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles often have varying camera sensor setups, which is inevitable due to restricted placement options for different vehicle types. Training a perception model on one particular setup and evaluating it on a new, different sensor setup reveals the so-called cross-sensor domain gap, typically leading to a degradation in accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the cross-sensor domain gap on state-of-the-art 3D object detectors. To this end, we introduce CamShift, a dataset inspired by nuScenes and created in CARLA to specifically simulate the domain gap between subcompact vehicles and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). Using CamShift, we demonstrate significant cross-sensor performance degradation, identify robustness dependencies on model architecture, and propose a data-driven solution to mitigate the effect. On the one hand, we show that model architectures based on a dense Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation with backward projection, such as BEVFormer, are the most robust against varying sensor configurations. On the other hand, we propose a novel data-driven sensor adaptation pipeline based on neural rendering, which can transform entire datasets to match different camera sensor setups. Applying this approach improves performance across all investigated 3D object detectors, mitigating the cross-sensor domain gap by a large margin and reducing the need for new data collection by enabling efficient data reusability across vehicles with different sensor setups. The CamShift dataset and the sensor adaptation benchmark are available at https://dmholtz.github.io/camshift/.
Authors:Wonho Lee, Hyunsik Na, Jisu Lee, Daeseon Choi
Abstract:
The advent of adversarial patches poses a significant challenge to the robustness of AI models, particularly in the domain of computer vision tasks such as object detection. In contradistinction to traditional adversarial examples, these patches target specific regions of an image, resulting in the malfunction of AI models. This paper proposes Incremental Patch Generation (IPG), a method that generates adversarial patches up to 11.1 times more efficiently than existing approaches while maintaining comparable attack performance. The efficacy of IPG is demonstrated by experiments and ablation studies including YOLO's feature distribution visualization and adversarial training results, which show that it produces well-generalized patches that effectively cover a broader range of model vulnerabilities. Furthermore, IPG-generated datasets can serve as a robust knowledge foundation for constructing a robust model, enabling structured representation, advanced reasoning, and proactive defenses in AI security ecosystems. The findings of this study suggest that IPG has considerable potential for future utilization not only in adversarial patch defense but also in real-world applications such as autonomous vehicles, security systems, and medical imaging, where AI models must remain resilient to adversarial attacks in dynamic and high-stakes environments.
Authors:Trevine Oorloff, Vishwanath Sindagi, Wele Gedara Chaminda Bandara, Ali Shafahi, Amin Ghiasi, Charan Prakash, Reza Ardekani
Abstract:
Large language models (LLM) in natural language processing (NLP) have demonstrated great potential for in-context learning (ICL) -- the ability to leverage a few sets of example prompts to adapt to various tasks without having to explicitly update the model weights. ICL has recently been explored for computer vision tasks with promising early outcomes. These approaches involve specialized training and/or additional data that complicate the process and limit its generalizability. In this work, we show that off-the-shelf Stable Diffusion models can be repurposed for visual in-context learning (V-ICL). Specifically, we formulate an in-place attention re-computation within the self-attention layers of the Stable Diffusion architecture that explicitly incorporates context between the query and example prompts. Without any additional fine-tuning, we show that this repurposed Stable Diffusion model is able to adapt to six different tasks: foreground segmentation, single object detection, semantic segmentation, keypoint detection, edge detection, and colorization. For example, the proposed approach improves the mean intersection over union (mIoU) for the foreground segmentation task on Pascal-5i dataset by 8.9% and 3.2% over recent methods such as Visual Prompting and IMProv, respectively. Additionally, we show that the proposed method is able to effectively leverage multiple prompts through ensembling to infer the task better and further improve the performance.
Authors:Riccardo Fiorista, Awad Abdelhalim, Anson F. Stewart, Gabriel L. Pincus, Ian Thistle, Jinhua Zhao
Abstract:
Accurately estimating urban rail platform occupancy can enhance transit agencies' ability to make informed operational decisions, thereby improving safety, operational efficiency, and customer experience, particularly in the context of crowding. However, sensing real-time crowding remains challenging and often depends on indirect proxies such as automatic fare collection data or staff observations. Recently, Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) footage has emerged as a promising data source with the potential to yield accurate, real-time occupancy estimates. The presented study investigates this potential by comparing three state-of-the-art computer vision approaches for extracting crowd-related features from platform CCTV imagery: (a) object detection and counting using YOLOv11, RT-DETRv2, and APGCC; (b) crowd-level classification via a custom-trained Vision Transformer, Crowd-ViT; and (c) semantic segmentation using DeepLabV3. Additionally, we present a novel, highly efficient linear-optimization-based approach to extract counts from the generated segmentation maps while accounting for image object depth and, thus, for passenger dispersion along a platform. Tested on a privacy-preserving dataset created in collaboration with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) that encompasses more than 600 hours of video material, our results demonstrate that computer vision approaches can provide substantive value for crowd estimation. This work demonstrates that CCTV image data, independent of other data sources available to a transit agency, can enable more precise real-time crowding estimation and, eventually, timely operational responses for platform crowding mitigation.
Authors:Amirreza Rouhi, Sneh Patel, Noah McCarthy, Siddiqa Khan, Hadi Khorsand, Kaleb Lefkowitz, David K. Han
Abstract:
The exponential growth in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) usage underscores the critical need of detecting them at extended distances to ensure safe operations, especially in densely populated areas. Despite the tremendous advances made in computer vision through deep learning, the detection of these small airborne objects remains a formidable challenge. While several datasets have been developed specifically for drone detection, the need for a more extensive and diverse collection of drone image data persists, particularly for long-range detection under varying environmental conditions. We introduce here the Long Range Drone Detection (LRDD) Version 2 dataset, comprising 39,516 meticulously annotated images, as a second release of the LRDD dataset released previously. The LRDDv2 dataset enhances the LRDDv1 by incorporating a greater variety of images, providing a more diverse and comprehensive resource for drone detection research. What sets LRDDv2 apart is its inclusion of target range information for over 8,000 images, making it possible to develop algorithms for drone range estimation. Tailored for long-range aerial object detection, the majority of LRDDv2's dataset consists of images capturing drones with 50 or fewer pixels in 1080p resolution. For access to the complete Long-Range Drone Detection Dataset (LRDD)v2, please visit https://research.coe.drexel.edu/ece/imaple/lrddv2/ .
Authors:Manikanta Kotthapalli, Deepika Ravipati, Reshma Bhatia
Abstract:
Over the past decade, object detection has advanced significantly, with the YOLO (You Only Look Once) family of models transforming the landscape of real-time vision applications through unified, end-to-end detection frameworks. From YOLOv1's pioneering regression-based detection to the latest YOLOv9, each version has systematically enhanced the balance between speed, accuracy, and deployment efficiency through continuous architectural and algorithmic advancements.. Beyond core object detection, modern YOLO architectures have expanded to support tasks such as instance segmentation, pose estimation, object tracking, and domain-specific applications including medical imaging and industrial automation. This paper offers a comprehensive review of the YOLO family, highlighting architectural innovations, performance benchmarks, extended capabilities, and real-world use cases. We critically analyze the evolution of YOLO models and discuss emerging research directions that extend their impact across diverse computer vision domains.
Authors:Manikanta Kotthapalli, Reshma Bhatia, Nainsi Jain
Abstract:
One-stage object detectors such as the YOLO family achieve state-of-the-art performance in real-time vision applications but remain heavily reliant on large-scale labeled datasets for training. In this work, we present a systematic study of contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) as a means to reduce this dependency by pretraining YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 backbones on unlabeled images using the SimCLR framework. Our approach introduces a simple yet effective pipeline that adapts YOLO's convolutional backbones as encoders, employs global pooling and projection heads, and optimizes a contrastive loss using augmentations of the COCO unlabeled dataset (120k images). The pretrained backbones are then fine-tuned on a cyclist detection task with limited labeled data. Experimental results show that SSL pretraining leads to consistently higher mAP, faster convergence, and improved precision-recall performance, especially in low-label regimes. For example, our SimCLR-pretrained YOLOv8 achieves a mAP@50:95 of 0.7663, outperforming its supervised counterpart despite using no annotations during pretraining. These findings establish a strong baseline for applying contrastive SSL to one-stage detectors and highlight the potential of unlabeled data as a scalable resource for label-efficient object detection.
Authors:Sara Shoouri, Morteza Tavakoli Taba, Hun-Seok Kim
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion using LiDAR and RGB cameras significantly enhances 3D object detection task. However, conventional LiDAR sensors perform dense, stateless scans, ignoring the strong temporal continuity in real-world scenes. This leads to substantial sensing redundancy and excessive power consumption, limiting their practicality on resource-constrained platforms. To address this inefficiency, we propose a predictive, history-aware adaptive scanning framework that anticipates informative regions of interest (ROI) based on past observations. Our approach introduces a lightweight predictor network that distills historical spatial and temporal contexts into refined query embeddings. These embeddings guide a differentiable Mask Generator network, which leverages Gumbel-Softmax sampling to produce binary masks identifying critical ROIs for the upcoming frame. Our method significantly reduces unnecessary data acquisition by concentrating dense LiDAR scanning only within these ROIs and sparsely sampling elsewhere. Experiments on nuScenes and Lyft benchmarks demonstrate that our adaptive scanning strategy reduces LiDAR energy consumption by over 65% while maintaining competitive or even superior 3D object detection performance compared to traditional LiDAR-camera fusion methods with dense LiDAR scanning.
Authors:M. A. Pérez-Cutiño, J. Valverde, J. Capitán, J. M. DÃaz-Báñez
Abstract:
In the context of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants, aerial images captured by drones present a unique set of challenges. Unlike urban or natural landscapes commonly found in existing datasets, solar fields contain highly reflective surfaces, and domain-specific elements that are uncommon in traditional computer vision benchmarks. As a result, machine learning models trained on generic datasets struggle to generalize to this setting without extensive retraining and large volumes of annotated data. However, collecting and labeling such data is costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for rapid deployment in industrial applications.
To address this issue, we propose a novel approach: the creation of AerialCSP, a virtual dataset that simulates aerial imagery of CSP plants. By generating synthetic data that closely mimic real-world conditions, our objective is to facilitate pretraining of models before deployment, significantly reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. Our main contributions are threefold: (1) we introduce AerialCSP, a high-quality synthetic dataset for aerial inspection of CSP plants, providing annotated data for object detection and image segmentation; (2) we benchmark multiple models on AerialCSP, establishing a baseline for CSP-related vision tasks; and (3) we demonstrate that pretraining on AerialCSP significantly improves real-world fault detection, particularly for rare and small defects, reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. AerialCSP is made publicly available at https://mpcutino.github.io/aerialcsp/.
Authors:Junwen Duan, Wei Xue, Ziyao Kang, Shixia Liu, Jiazhi Xia
Abstract:
Open-world object detection (OWOD) extends traditional object detection to identifying both known and unknown object, necessitating continuous model adaptation as new annotations emerge. Current approaches face significant limitations: 1) data-hungry training due to reliance on a large number of crowdsourced annotations, 2) susceptibility to "partial feature overfitting," and 3) limited flexibility due to required model architecture modifications. To tackle these issues, we present OW-CLIP, a visual analytics system that provides curated data and enables data-efficient OWOD model incremental training. OW-CLIP implements plug-and-play multimodal prompt tuning tailored for OWOD settings and introduces a novel "Crop-Smoothing" technique to mitigate partial feature overfitting. To meet the data requirements for the training methodology, we propose dual-modal data refinement methods that leverage large language models and cross-modal similarity for data generation and filtering. Simultaneously, we develope a visualization interface that enables users to explore and deliver high-quality annotations: including class-specific visual feature phrases and fine-grained differentiated images. Quantitative evaluation demonstrates that OW-CLIP achieves competitive performance at 89% of state-of-the-art performance while requiring only 3.8% self-generated data, while outperforming SOTA approach when trained with equivalent data volumes. A case study shows the effectiveness of the developed method and the improved annotation quality of our visualization system.
Authors:Abu Sadat Mohammad Salehin Amit, Xiaoli Zhang, Md Masum Billa Shagar, Zhaojun Liu, Xiongfei Li, Fanlong Meng
Abstract:
Effectively describing features for cross-modal remote sensing image matching remains a challenging task due to the significant geometric and radiometric differences between multimodal images. Existing methods primarily extract features at the fully connected layer but often fail to capture cross-modal similarities effectively. We propose a Cross Spatial Temporal Fusion (CSTF) mechanism that enhances feature representation by integrating scale-invariant keypoints detected independently in both reference and query images. Our approach improves feature matching in two ways: First, by creating correspondence maps that leverage information from multiple image regions simultaneously, and second, by reformulating the similarity matching process as a classification task using SoftMax and Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) layers. This dual approach enables CSTF to maintain sensitivity to distinctive local features while incorporating broader contextual information, resulting in robust matching across diverse remote sensing modalities. To demonstrate the practical utility of improved feature matching, we evaluate CSTF on object detection tasks using the HRSC2016 and DOTA benchmark datasets. Our method achieves state-of-theart performance with an average mAP of 90.99% on HRSC2016 and 90.86% on DOTA, outperforming existing models. The CSTF model maintains computational efficiency with an inference speed of 12.5 FPS. These results validate that our approach to crossmodal feature matching directly enhances downstream remote sensing applications such as object detection.
Authors:Rashed Al Amin, Roman Obermaisser
Abstract:
Object detection and classification are crucial tasks across various application domains, particularly in the development of safe and reliable Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Existing deep learning-based methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Single Shot Detectors (SSDs), and You Only Look Once (YOLO) have demonstrated high performance in terms of accuracy and computational speed when deployed on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). However, despite these advances, state-of-the-art YOLO-based object detection and classification systems continue to face challenges in achieving resource efficiency suitable for edge FPGA platforms. To address this limitation, this paper presents a resource-efficient real-time object detection and classification system based on YOLOv5 optimized for FPGA deployment. The proposed system is trained on the COCO and GTSRD datasets and implemented on the Xilinx Kria KV260 FPGA board. Experimental results demonstrate a classification accuracy of 99%, with a power consumption of 3.5W and a processing speed of 9 frames per second (FPS). These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in enabling real-time, resource-efficient object detection and classification for edge computing applications.
Authors:Jonathan Henrich, Christian Post, Maximilian Zilke, Parth Shiroya, Emma Chanut, Amir Mollazadeh Yamchi, Ramin Yahyapour, Thomas Kneib, Imke Traulsen
Abstract:
To ensure animal welfare and effective management in pig farming, monitoring individual behavior is a crucial prerequisite. While monitoring tasks have traditionally been carried out manually, advances in machine learning have made it possible to collect individualized information in an increasingly automated way. Central to these methods is the localization of animals across space (object detection) and time (multi-object tracking). Despite extensive research of these two tasks in pig farming, a systematic benchmarking study has not yet been conducted. In this work, we address this gap by curating two datasets: PigDetect for object detection and PigTrack for multi-object tracking. The datasets are based on diverse image and video material from realistic barn conditions, and include challenging scenarios such as occlusions or bad visibility. For object detection, we show that challenging training images improve detection performance beyond what is achievable with randomly sampled images alone. Comparing different approaches, we found that state-of-the-art models offer substantial improvements in detection quality over real-time alternatives. For multi-object tracking, we observed that SORT-based methods achieve superior detection performance compared to end-to-end trainable models. However, end-to-end models show better association performance, suggesting they could become strong alternatives in the future. We also investigate characteristic failure cases of end-to-end models, providing guidance for future improvements. The detection and tracking models trained on our datasets perform well in unseen pens, suggesting good generalization capabilities. This highlights the importance of high-quality training data. The datasets and research code are made publicly available to facilitate reproducibility, re-use and further development.
Authors:Sachin Sharma, Federico Simonetta, Michele Flammini
Abstract:
Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is a cornerstone of music digitization initiatives in cultural heritage, yet it remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data and the complexity of historical manuscripts. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of Active Learning (AL) and Sequential Learning (SL) tailored for object detection and layout recognition in an old medieval music manuscript. Leveraging YOLOv8, our system selects samples with the highest uncertainty (lowest prediction confidence) for iterative labeling and retraining. Our approach starts with a single annotated image and successfully boosts performance while minimizing manual labeling. Experimental results indicate that comparable accuracy to fully supervised training can be achieved with significantly fewer labeled examples. We test the methodology as a preliminary investigation on a novel dataset offered to the community by the Anonymous project, which studies laude, a poetical-musical genre spread across Italy during the 12th-16th Century. We show that in the manuscript at-hand, uncertainty-based AL is not effective and advocates for more usable methods in data-scarcity scenarios.
Authors:Riku Inoue, Masamitsu Tsuchiya, Yuji Yasui
Abstract:
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a challenging computer vision task that extends standard object detection by (1) detecting and classifying unknown objects without supervision, and (2) incrementally learning new object classes without forgetting previously learned ones. The absence of ground truths for unknown objects makes OWOD tasks particularly challenging. Many methods have addressed this by using pseudo-labels for unknown objects. The recently proposed Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector (PROB) is a state-of-the-art model that does not require pseudo-labels for unknown objects, as it predicts probabilistic objectness. However, this method faces issues with learning conflicts between objectness and class predictions.
To address this issue and further enhance performance, we propose a novel model, Decoupled PROB. Decoupled PROB introduces Early Termination of Objectness Prediction (ETOP) to stop objectness predictions at appropriate layers in the decoder, resolving the learning conflicts between class and objectness predictions in PROB. Additionally, we introduce Task-Decoupled Query Initialization (TDQI), which efficiently extracts features of known and unknown objects, thereby improving performance. TDQI is a query initialization method that combines query selection and learnable queries, and it is a module that can be easily integrated into existing DETR-based OWOD models. Extensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks demonstrate that Decoupled PROB surpasses all existing methods across several metrics, significantly improving performance.
Authors:Saswat Priyadarshi Nayak, Guoyuan Wu, Kanok Boriboonsomsin, Matthew Barth
Abstract:
Traffic Movement Count (TMC) at intersections is crucial for optimizing signal timings, assessing the performance of existing traffic control measures, and proposing efficient lane configurations to minimize delays, reduce congestion, and promote safety. Traditionally, methods such as manual counting, loop detectors, pneumatic road tubes, and camera-based recognition have been used for TMC estimation. Although generally reliable, camera-based TMC estimation is prone to inaccuracies under poor lighting conditions during harsh weather and nighttime. In contrast, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology is gaining popularity in recent times due to reduced costs and its expanding use in 3D object detection, tracking, and related applications. This paper presents the authors' endeavor to develop, deploy and evaluate a dual-LiDAR system at an intersection in the city of Rialto, California, for TMC estimation. The 3D bounding box detections from the two LiDARs are used to classify vehicle counts based on traffic directions, vehicle movements, and vehicle classes. This work discusses the estimated TMC results and provides insights into the observed trends and irregularities. Potential improvements are also discussed that could enhance not only TMC estimation, but also trajectory forecasting and intent prediction at intersections.
Authors:Van-Hoang-Anh Phan, Chi-Tam Nguyen, Doan-Trung Au, Thanh-Danh Phan, Minh-Thien Duong, My-Ha Le
Abstract:
Obstacle avoidance is essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. Accurate perception and motion planning are crucial to enabling vehicles to navigate complex environments while avoiding collisions. In this paper, we propose an efficient obstacle avoidance pipeline that leverages a camera-only perception module and a Frenet-Pure Pursuit-based planning strategy. By integrating advancements in computer vision, the system utilizes YOLOv11 for object detection and state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models, such as Depth Anything V2, to estimate object distances. A comparative analysis of these models provides valuable insights into their accuracy, efficiency, and robustness in real-world conditions. The system is evaluated in diverse scenarios on a university campus, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling various obstacles and enhancing autonomous navigation. The video presenting the results of the obstacle avoidance experiments is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXiO5S_tA8
Authors:Nicolas Drapier, Aladine Chetouani, Aurélien Chateigner
Abstract:
We present GLOD, a transformer-first architecture for object detection in high-resolution satellite imagery. GLOD replaces CNN backbones with a Swin Transformer for end-to-end feature extraction, combined with novel UpConvMixer blocks for robust upsampling and Fusion Blocks for multi-scale feature integration. Our approach achieves 32.95\% on xView, outperforming SOTA methods by 11.46\%. Key innovations include asymmetric fusion with CBAM attention and a multi-path head design capturing objects across scales. The architecture is optimized for satellite imagery challenges, leveraging spatial priors while maintaining computational efficiency.
Authors:Huiyi Wang, Fahim Shahriar, Alireza Azimi, Gautham Vasan, Rupam Mahmood, Colin Bellinger
Abstract:
General-purpose robotic manipulation, including reach and grasp, is essential for deployment into households and workspaces involving diverse and evolving tasks. Recent advances propose using large pre-trained models, such as Large Language Models and object detectors, to boost robotic perception in reinforcement learning. These models, trained on large datasets via self-supervised learning, can process text prompts and identify diverse objects in scenes, an invaluable skill in RL where learning object interaction is resource-intensive. This study demonstrates how to integrate such models into Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning to enable general and versatile robotic reach and grasp capabilities. We use a pre-trained object detection model to enable the agent to identify the object from a text prompt and generate a mask for goal conditioning. Mask-based goal conditioning provides object-agnostic cues, improving feature sharing and generalization. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated in a simulated reach-and-grasp task, where the mask-based goal conditioning consistently maintains a $\sim$90\% success rate in grasping both in and out-of-distribution objects, while also ensuring faster convergence to higher returns.
Authors:Xiuyu Wu, Xinhao Wang, Xiubin Zhu, Lan Yang, Jiyuan Liu, Xingchen Hu
Abstract:
Due to the arbitrary orientation of objects in aerial images, rotation equivariance is a critical property for aerial object detectors. However, recent studies on rotation-equivariant aerial object detection remain scarce. Most detectors rely on data augmentation to enable models to learn approximately rotation-equivariant features. A few detectors have constructed rotation-equivariant networks, but due to the breaking of strict rotation equivariance by typical downsampling processes, these networks only achieve approximately rotation-equivariant backbones. Whether strict rotation equivariance is necessary for aerial image object detection remains an open question. In this paper, we implement a strictly rotation-equivariant backbone and neck network with a more advanced network structure and compare it with approximately rotation-equivariant networks to quantitatively measure the impact of rotation equivariance on the performance of aerial image detectors. Additionally, leveraging the inherently grouped nature of rotation-equivariant features, we propose a multi-branch head network that reduces the parameter count while improving detection accuracy. Based on the aforementioned improvements, this study proposes the Multi-branch head rotation-equivariant single-stage Detector (MessDet), which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging aerial image datasets DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and DIOR-R with an exceptionally low parameter count.
Authors:Yuki Yoshihara, Linjing Jiang, Nihan Karatas, Hitoshi Kanamori, Asuka Harada, Takahiro Tanaka
Abstract:
This study investigates the potential of a multimodal large language model (LLM), specifically ChatGPT-4o, to perform human-like interpretations of traffic scenes using static dashcam images. Herein, we focus on three judgment tasks relevant to elderly driver assessments: evaluating traffic density, assessing intersection visibility, and recognizing stop signs recognition. These tasks require contextual reasoning rather than simple object detection. Using zero-shot, few-shot, and multi-shot prompting strategies, we evaluated the performance of the model with human annotations serving as the reference standard. Evaluation metrics included precision, recall, and F1-score. Results indicate that prompt design considerably affects performance, with recall for intersection visibility increasing from 21.7% (zero-shot) to 57.0% (multi-shot). For traffic density, agreement increased from 53.5% to 67.6%. In stop-sign detection, the model demonstrated high precision (up to 86.3%) but a lower recall (approximately 76.7%), indicating a conservative response tendency. Output stability analysis revealed that humans and the model faced difficulties interpreting structurally ambiguous scenes. However, the model's explanatory texts corresponded with its predictions, enhancing interpretability. These findings suggest that, with well-designed prompts, LLMs hold promise as supportive tools for scene-level driving risk assessments. Future studies should explore scalability using larger datasets, diverse annotators, and next-generation model architectures for elderly driver assessments.
Authors:Youqian Zhang, Xinyu Ji, Zhihao Wang, Qinhong Jiang
Abstract:
Image sensors are integral to a wide range of safety- and security-critical systems, including surveillance infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, and industrial automation. These systems rely on the integrity of visual data to make decisions. In this work, we investigate a novel class of electromagnetic signal injection attacks that target the analog domain of image sensors, allowing adversaries to manipulate raw visual inputs without triggering conventional digital integrity checks. We uncover a previously undocumented attack phenomenon on CMOS image sensors: rainbow-like color artifacts induced in images captured by image sensors through carefully tuned electromagnetic interference. We further evaluate the impact of these attacks on state-of-the-art object detection models, showing that the injected artifacts propagate through the image signal processing pipeline and lead to significant mispredictions. Our findings highlight a critical and underexplored vulnerability in the visual perception stack, highlighting the need for more robust defenses against physical-layer attacks in such systems.
Authors:Antonella Barisic Kulas, Frano Petric, Stjepan Bogdan
Abstract:
Autonomous maritime surveillance and target vessel identification in environments where Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are not available is critical for a number of applications such as search and rescue and threat detection. When the target vessel is only described by visual cues and its last known position is not available, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) must rely solely on on-board vision to scan a large search area under strict computational constraints. To address this challenge, we leverage the YOLOv8 object detection model to detect all vessels in the field of view. We then apply feature matching and hue histogram distance analysis to determine whether any detected vessel corresponds to the target. When found, we localize the target using simple geometric principles. We demonstrate the proposed method in real-world experiments during the MBZIRC2023 competition, integrated into a fully autonomous system with GNSS-denied navigation. We also evaluate the impact of perspective on detection accuracy and localization precision and compare it with the oracle approach.
Authors:Mehrab Hosain, Rajiv Kapoor
Abstract:
This paper presents an approach for rail line detection and the identification of human beings in proximity to the track, utilizing the YOLOv5 deep learning model to mitigate potential accidents. The technique incorporates real-time video data to identify railway tracks with impressive accuracy and recognizes nearby moving objects within a one-meter range, specifically targeting the identification of humans. This system aims to enhance safety measures in railway environments by providing real-time alerts for any detected human presence close to the track. The integration of a functionality to identify objects at a longer distance further fortifies the preventative capabilities of the system. With a precise focus on real-time object detection, this method is poised to deliver significant contributions to the existing technologies in railway safety. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a comprehensive evaluation, yielding a remarkable improvement in accuracy over existing methods. These results underscore the potential of this approach to revolutionize safety measures in railway environments, providing a substantial contribution to accident prevention strategies.
Authors:Maryem Fadili, Mohamed Anis Ghaoui, Louis Lecrosnier, Steve Pechberti, Redouane Khemmar
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, recent research has increasingly focused on collaborative perception based on deep learning to overcome the limitations of individual perception systems. Although these methods achieve high accuracy, they rely on high communication bandwidth and require unrestricted access to each agent's object detection model architecture and parameters. These constraints pose challenges real-world autonomous driving scenarios, where communication limitations and the need to safeguard proprietary models hinder practical implementation. To address this issue, we introduce a novel late collaborative framework for 3D multi-source and multi-object fusion, which operates solely on shared 3D bounding box attributes-category, size, position, and orientation-without necessitating direct access to detection models. Our framework establishes a new state-of-the-art in late fusion, achieving up to five times lower position error compared to existing methods. Additionally, it reduces scale error by a factor of 7.5 and orientation error by half, all while maintaining perfect 100% precision and recall when fusing detections from heterogeneous perception systems. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in addressing real-world collaborative perception challenges, setting a new benchmark for efficient and scalable multi-agent fusion.
Authors:Changsoo Jung, Sheikh Mannan, Jack Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Blanchard
Abstract:
Interactive and spatially aware technologies are transforming educational frameworks, particularly in K-12 settings where hands-on exploration fosters deeper conceptual understanding. However, during collaborative tasks, existing systems often lack the ability to accurately capture real-world interactions between students and physical objects. This issue could be addressed with automatic 6D pose estimation, i.e., estimation of an object's position and orientation in 3D space from RGB images or videos. For collaborative groups that interact with physical objects, 6D pose estimates allow AI systems to relate objects and entities. As part of this work, we introduce FiboSB, a novel and challenging 6D pose video dataset featuring groups of three participants solving an interactive task featuring small hand-held cubes and a weight scale. This setup poses unique challenges for 6D pose because groups are holistically recorded from a distance in order to capture all participants -- this, coupled with the small size of the cubes, makes 6D pose estimation inherently non-trivial. We evaluated four state-of-the-art 6D pose estimation methods on FiboSB, exposing the limitations of current algorithms on collaborative group work. An error analysis of these methods reveals that the 6D pose methods' object detection modules fail. We address this by fine-tuning YOLO11-x for FiboSB, achieving an overall mAP_50 of 0.898. The dataset, benchmark results, and analysis of YOLO11-x errors presented here lay the groundwork for leveraging the estimation of 6D poses in difficult collaborative contexts.
Authors:Satoshi Tanaka, Koji Minoda, Fumiya Watanabe, Takamasa Horibe
Abstract:
High-accuracy and low-latency 3D object detection is essential for autonomous driving systems. While previous studies on 3D object detection often evaluate performance based on mean average precision (mAP) and latency, they typically fail to address the trade-off between speed and accuracy, such as 60.0 mAP at 100 ms vs 61.0 mAP at 500 ms. A quantitative assessment of the trade-offs between different hardware devices and accelerators remains unexplored, despite being critical for real-time applications. Furthermore, they overlook the impact on collision avoidance in motion planning, for example, 60.0 mAP leading to safer motion planning or 61.0 mAP leading to high-risk motion planning. In this paper, we introduce latency-aware AP (L-AP) and planning-aware AP (P-AP) as new metrics, which consider the physical world such as the concept of time and physical constraints, offering a more comprehensive evaluation for real-time 3D object detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our metrics for the entire autonomous driving system using nuPlan dataset, and evaluate 3D object detection models accounting for hardware differences and accelerators. We also develop a state-of-the-art performance model for real-time 3D object detection through latency-aware hyperparameter optimization (L-HPO) using our metrics. Additionally, we quantitatively demonstrate that the assumption "the more point clouds, the better the recognition performance" is incorrect for real-time applications and optimize both hardware and model selection using our metrics.
Authors:Kunwei Lv, Ping Lan
Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has highlighted the importance of robust and efficient object detection in diverse aerial scenarios. Detecting small objects under complex conditions, however, remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches often prioritize inference speed, leading to degraded performance when handling multi-modal inputs. To address this, we present DGE-YOLO, an enhanced YOLO-based detection framework designed to effectively fuse multi-modal information. Specifically, we introduce a dual-branch architecture for modality-specific feature extraction, enabling the model to process both infrared and visible images. To further enrich semantic representation, we propose an Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) mechanism that enhances feature learning across spatial scales. Additionally, we replace the conventional neck with a Gather-and-Distribute module to mitigate information loss during feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on the Drone Vehicle dataset demonstrate that DGE-YOLO achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in multi-modal UAV object detection tasks.
Authors:Hang-Cheng Dong, Lu Zou, Bingguo Liu, Dong Ye, Guodong Liu
Abstract:
Surface defect detection plays a critical role in industrial quality inspection. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have significantly enhanced the automation level of detection processes. However, conventional semantic segmentation and object detection models heavily rely on large-scale annotated datasets, which conflicts with the practical requirements of defect detection tasks. This paper proposes a novel weakly supervised semantic segmentation framework comprising two key components: a region-aware class activation map (CAM) and pseudo-label training. To address the limitations of existing CAM methods, especially low-resolution thermal maps, and insufficient detail preservation, we introduce filtering-guided backpropagation (FGBP), which refines target regions by filtering gradient magnitudes to identify areas with higher relevance to defects. Building upon this, we further develop a region-aware weighted module to enhance spatial precision. Finally, pseudo-label segmentation is implemented to refine the model's performance iteratively. Comprehensive experiments on industrial defect datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The proposed framework effectively bridges the gap between weakly supervised learning and high-precision defect segmentation, offering a practical solution for resource-constrained industrial scenarios.
Authors:Abhineet Singh, Nilanjan Ray
Abstract:
This paper improves upon the Pix2Seq object detector by extending it for videos. In the process, it introduces a new way to perform end-to-end video object detection that improves upon existing video detectors in two key ways. First, by representing objects as variable-length sequences of discrete tokens, we can succinctly represent widely varying numbers of video objects, with diverse shapes and locations, without having to inject any localization cues in the training process. This eliminates the need to sample the space of all possible boxes that constrains conventional detectors and thus solves the dual problems of loss sparsity during training and heuristics-based postprocessing during inference. Second, it conceptualizes and outputs the video objects as fully integrated and indivisible 3D boxes or tracklets instead of generating image-specific 2D boxes and linking these boxes together to construct the video object, as done in most conventional detectors. This allows it to scale effortlessly with available computational resources by simply increasing the length of the video subsequence that the network takes as input, even generalizing to multi-object tracking if the subsequence can span the entire video. We compare our video detector with the baseline Pix2Seq static detector on several datasets and demonstrate consistent improvement, although with strong signs of being bottlenecked by our limited computational resources. We also compare it with several video detectors on UA-DETRAC to show that it is competitive with the current state of the art even with the computational bottleneck. We make our code and models publicly available.
Authors:Dipayan Biswas, Shishir Shah, Jaspal Subhlok
Abstract:
Video is transforming education with online courses and recorded lectures supplementing and replacing classroom teaching. Recent research has focused on enhancing information retrieval for video lectures with advanced navigation, searchability, summarization, as well as question answering chatbots. Visual elements like tables, charts, and illustrations are central to comprehension, retention, and data presentation in lecture videos, yet their full potential for improving access to video content remains underutilized. A major factor is that accurate automatic detection of visual elements in a lecture video is challenging; reasons include i) most visual elements, such as charts, graphs, tables, and illustrations, are artificially created and lack any standard structure, and ii) coherent visual objects may lack clear boundaries and may be composed of connected text and visual components. Despite advancements in deep learning based object detection, current models do not yield satisfactory performance due to the unique nature of visual content in lectures and scarcity of annotated datasets. This paper reports on a transfer learning approach for detecting visual elements in lecture video frames. A suite of state of the art object detection models were evaluated for their performance on lecture video datasets. YOLO emerged as the most promising model for this task. Subsequently YOLO was optimized for lecture video object detection with training on multiple benchmark datasets and deploying a semi-supervised auto labeling strategy. Results evaluate the success of this approach, also in developing a general solution to the problem of object detection in lecture videos. Paper contributions include a publicly released benchmark of annotated lecture video frames, along with the source code to facilitate future research.
Authors:Abbas Anwar, Mohammad Shullar, Ali Arshad Nasir, Mudassir Masood, Saeed Anwar
Abstract:
Images captured in challenging environments often experience various forms of degradation, including noise, color cast, blur, and light scattering. These effects significantly reduce image quality, hindering their applicability in downstream tasks such as object detection, mapping, and classification. Our transformer-based diffusion model was developed to address image restoration tasks, aiming to improve the quality of degraded images. This model was evaluated against existing deep learning methodologies across multiple quality metrics for underwater image enhancement, denoising, and deraining on publicly available datasets. Our findings demonstrate that the diffusion model, combined with transformers, surpasses current methods in performance. The results of our model highlight the efficacy of diffusion models and transformers in improving the quality of degraded images, consequently expanding their utility in downstream tasks that require high-fidelity visual data.
Authors:Annajoyce Mariani, Kira Maag, Hanno Gottschalk
Abstract:
Being able to generate realistic trajectory options is at the core of increasing the degree of automation of road vehicles. While model-driven, rule-based, and classical learning-based methods are widely used to tackle these tasks at present, they can struggle to effectively capture the complex, multimodal distributions of future trajectories. In this paper we investigate whether a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on videos of bird's-eye view (BEV) traffic scenarios can generate statistically accurate trajectories that correctly capture spatial relationships between the agents. To this end, we propose a pipeline that uses low-resolution BEV occupancy grid videos as training data for a video generative model. From the generated videos of traffic scenarios we extract abstract trajectory data using single-frame object detection and frame-to-frame object matching. We particularly choose a GAN architecture for the fast training and inference times with respect to diffusion models. We obtain our best results within 100 GPU hours of training, with inference times under 20\,ms. We demonstrate the physical realism of the proposed trajectories in terms of distribution alignment of spatial and dynamic parameters with respect to the ground truth videos from the Waymo Open Motion Dataset.
Authors:Chenxi Zhang, Jiayun Wu, Qing Zhang, Yazhe Zhai, Youwei Pang
Abstract:
Camouflaged object detection (COD) primarily focuses on learning subtle yet discriminative representations from complex scenes. Existing methods predominantly follow the parametric feedforward architecture based on static visual representation modeling. However, they lack explicit mechanisms for acquiring historical context, limiting their adaptation and effectiveness in handling challenging camouflage scenes. In this paper, we propose a recall-augmented COD architecture, namely RetroMem, which dynamically modulates camouflage pattern perception and inference by integrating relevant historical knowledge into the process. Specifically, RetroMem employs a two-stage training paradigm consisting of a learning stage and a recall stage to construct, update, and utilize memory representations effectively. During the learning stage, we design a dense multi-scale adapter (DMA) to improve the pretrained encoder's capability to capture rich multi-scale visual information with very few trainable parameters, thereby providing foundational inferences. In the recall stage, we propose a dynamic memory mechanism (DMM) and an inference pattern reconstruction (IPR). These components fully leverage the latent relationships between learned knowledge and current sample context to reconstruct the inference of camouflage patterns, thereby significantly improving the model's understanding of camouflage scenes. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that our RetroMem significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Daniel Montoya, Aymen Bouguerra, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Fabio Arnez
Abstract:
State-of-the-art Object Detection (OD) methods predominantly operate under a closed-world assumption, where test-time categories match those encountered during training. However, detecting and localizing unknown objects is crucial for safety-critical applications in domains such as autonomous driving and medical imaging. Recently, Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection has emerged as a vital research direction for OD, focusing on identifying incorrect predictions typically associated with unknown objects. This paper shows that the current evaluation protocol for OOD-OD violates the assumption of non-overlapping objects with respect to the In-Distribution (ID) datasets, and obscures crucial situations such as ignoring unknown objects, potentially leading to overconfidence in deployment scenarios where truly novel objects might be encountered. To address these limitations, we manually curate, and enrich the existing benchmark by exploiting semantic similarity to create new evaluation splits categorized as $\textit{near}$, $\textit{far}$, and $\textit{farther}$ from ID distributions. Additionally, we incorporate established metrics from the Open Set community, providing deeper insights into how effectively methods detect unknowns, when they ignore them, and when they mistakenly classify OOD objects as ID. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that semantically and visually close OOD objects are easier to localize than far ones, but are also more easily confounded with ID objects. $\textit{Far}$ and $\textit{farther}$ objects are harder to localize but less prone to be taken for an ID object.
Authors:Dipayan Biswas, Shishir Shah, Jaspal Subhlok
Abstract:
We introduce the Lecture Video Visual Objects (LVVO) dataset, a new benchmark for visual object detection in educational video content. The dataset consists of 4,000 frames extracted from 245 lecture videos spanning biology, computer science, and geosciences. A subset of 1,000 frames, referred to as LVVO_1k, has been manually annotated with bounding boxes for four visual categories: Table, Chart-Graph, Photographic-image, and Visual-illustration. Each frame was labeled independently by two annotators, resulting in an inter-annotator F1 score of 83.41%, indicating strong agreement. To ensure high-quality consensus annotations, a third expert reviewed and resolved all cases of disagreement through a conflict resolution process. To expand the dataset, a semi-supervised approach was employed to automatically annotate the remaining 3,000 frames, forming LVVO_3k. The complete dataset offers a valuable resource for developing and evaluating both supervised and semi-supervised methods for visual content detection in educational videos. The LVVO dataset is publicly available to support further research in this domain.
Authors:Hendrik Königshof, Kun Li, Christoph Stiller
Abstract:
Image-based 3D object detection is an inevitable part of autonomous driving because cheap onboard cameras are already available in most modern cars. Because of the accurate depth information, currently, most state-of-the-art 3D object detectors heavily rely on LiDAR data. In this paper, we propose a pipeline which lifts the results of existing vision-based 2D algorithms to 3D detections using only cameras as a cost-effective alternative to LiDAR. In contrast to existing approaches, we focus not only on cars but on all types of road users. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first using a 2D CNN to process the point cloud for each 2D detection to keep the computational effort as low as possible. Our evaluation on the challenging KITTI 3D object detection benchmark shows results comparable to state-of-the-art image-based approaches while having a runtime of only a third.
Authors:Amirreza Rouhi, Solmaz Arezoomandan, Knut Peterson, Joseph T. Woods, David K. Han
Abstract:
Object detection models typically rely on predefined categories, limiting their ability to identify novel objects in open-world scenarios. To overcome this constraint, we introduce ADAM: Autonomous Discovery and Annotation Model, a training-free, self-refining framework for open-world object labeling. ADAM leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate labels for unknown objects based on contextual information from known entities within a scene. These labels are paired with visual embeddings from CLIP to construct an Embedding-Label Repository (ELR) that enables inference without category supervision. For a newly encountered unknown object, ADAM retrieves visually similar instances from the ELR and applies frequency-based voting and cross-modal re-ranking to assign a robust label. To further enhance consistency, we introduce a self-refinement loop that re-evaluates repository labels using visual cohesion analysis and k-nearest-neighbor-based majority re-labeling. Experimental results on the COCO and PASCAL datasets demonstrate that ADAM effectively annotates novel categories using only visual and contextual signals, without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.
Authors:Beining Xu, Junxian Li
Abstract:
Visible images offer rich texture details, while infrared images emphasize salient targets. Fusing these complementary modalities enhances scene understanding, particularly for advanced vision tasks under challenging conditions. Recently, deep learning-based fusion methods have gained attention, but current evaluations primarily rely on general-purpose metrics without standardized benchmarks or downstream task performance. Additionally, the lack of well-developed dual-spectrum datasets and fair algorithm comparisons hinders progress.
To address these gaps, we construct a high-quality dual-spectrum dataset captured in campus environments, comprising 1,369 well-aligned visible-infrared image pairs across four representative scenarios: daytime, nighttime, smoke occlusion, and underpasses. We also propose a comprehensive and fair evaluation framework that integrates fusion speed, general metrics, and object detection performance using the lang-segment-anything model to ensure fairness in downstream evaluation.
Extensive experiments benchmark several state-of-the-art fusion algorithms under this framework. Results demonstrate that fusion models optimized for downstream tasks achieve superior performance in target detection, especially in low-light and occluded scenes. Notably, some algorithms that perform well on general metrics do not translate to strong downstream performance, highlighting limitations of current evaluation practices and validating the necessity of our proposed framework.
The main contributions of this work are: (1)a campus-oriented dual-spectrum dataset with diverse and challenging scenes; (2) a task-aware, comprehensive evaluation framework; and (3) thorough comparative analysis of leading fusion methods across multiple datasets, offering insights for future development.
Authors:Xiaomeng Zhu, Jacob Henningsson, Duruo Li, Pär Mårtensson, Lars Hanson, Mårten Björkman, Atsuto Maki
Abstract:
This paper addresses key aspects of domain randomization in generating synthetic data for manufacturing object detection applications. To this end, we present a comprehensive data generation pipeline that reflects different factors: object characteristics, background, illumination, camera settings, and post-processing. We also introduce the Synthetic Industrial Parts Object Detection dataset (SIP15-OD) consisting of 15 objects from three industrial use cases under varying environments as a test bed for the study, while also employing an industrial dataset publicly available for robotic applications. In our experiments, we present more abundant results and insights into the feasibility as well as challenges of sim-to-real object detection. In particular, we identified material properties, rendering methods, post-processing, and distractors as important factors. Our method, leveraging these, achieves top performance on the public dataset with Yolov8 models trained exclusively on synthetic data; mAP@50 scores of 96.4% for the robotics dataset, and 94.1%, 99.5%, and 95.3% across three of the SIP15-OD use cases, respectively. The results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed domain randomization, potentially covering the distribution close to real data for the applications.
Authors:Wuyang Li, Zhu Yu, Alexandre Alahi
Abstract:
3D semantic occupancy prediction aims to reconstruct the 3D geometry and semantics of the surrounding environment. With dense voxel labels, prior works typically formulate it as a dense segmentation task, independently classifying each voxel. However, this paradigm neglects critical instance-centric discriminability, leading to instance-level incompleteness and adjacent ambiguities. To address this, we highlight a free lunch of occupancy labels: the voxel-level class label implicitly provides insight at the instance level, which is overlooked by the community. Motivated by this observation, we first introduce a training-free Voxel-to-Instance (VoxNT) trick: a simple yet effective method that freely converts voxel-level class labels into instance-level offset labels. Building on this, we further propose VoxDet, an instance-centric framework that reformulates the voxel-level occupancy prediction as dense object detection by decoupling it into two sub-tasks: offset regression and semantic prediction. Specifically, based on the lifted 3D volume, VoxDet first uses (a) Spatially-decoupled Voxel Encoder to generate disentangled feature volumes for the two sub-tasks, which learn task-specific spatial deformation in the densely projected tri-perceptive space. Then, we deploy (b) Task-decoupled Dense Predictor to address this task via dense detection. Here, we first regress a 4D offset field to estimate distances (6 directions) between voxels and object borders in the voxel space. The regressed offsets are then used to guide the instance-level aggregation in the classification branch, achieving instance-aware prediction. Experiments show that VoxDet can be deployed on both camera and LiDAR input, jointly achieving state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks. VoxDet is not only highly efficient, but also achieves 63.0 IoU on the SemanticKITTI test set, ranking 1st on the online leaderboard.
Authors:Xiaochun Lei, Siqi Wu, Weilin Wu, Zetao Jiang
Abstract:
Real-time object detection is a fundamental but challenging task in computer vision, particularly when computational resources are limited. Although YOLO-series models have set strong benchmarks by balancing speed and accuracy, the increasing need for richer global context modeling has led to the use of Transformer-based architectures. Nevertheless, Transformers have high computational complexity because of their self-attention mechanism, which limits their practicality for real-time and edge deployments. To overcome these challenges, recent developments in linear state space models, such as Mamba, provide a promising alternative by enabling efficient sequence modeling with linear complexity. Building on this insight, we propose MambaNeXt-YOLO, a novel object detection framework that balances accuracy and efficiency through three key contributions: (1) MambaNeXt Block: a hybrid design that integrates CNNs with Mamba to effectively capture both local features and long-range dependencies; (2) Multi-branch Asymmetric Fusion Pyramid Network (MAFPN): an enhanced feature pyramid architecture that improves multi-scale object detection across various object sizes; and (3) Edge-focused Efficiency: our method achieved 66.6% mAP at 31.9 FPS on the PASCAL VOC dataset without any pre-training and supports deployment on edge devices such as the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX and Orin NX.
Authors:Shi Mao, Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, Wolfgang Heidrich
Abstract:
The desire for cameras with smaller form factors has recently lead to a push for exploring computational imaging systems with reduced optical complexity such as a smaller number of lens elements. Unfortunately such simplified optical systems usually suffer from severe aberrations, especially in off-axis regions, which can be difficult to correct purely in software. In this paper we introduce Fovea Stacking , a new type of imaging system that utilizes emerging dynamic optical components called deformable phase plates (DPPs) for localized aberration correction anywhere on the image sensor. By optimizing DPP deformations through a differentiable optical model, off-axis aberrations are corrected locally, producing a foveated image with enhanced sharpness at the fixation point - analogous to the eye's fovea. Stacking multiple such foveated images, each with a different fixation point, yields a composite image free from aberrations. To efficiently cover the entire field of view, we propose joint optimization of DPP deformations under imaging budget constraints. Due to the DPP device's non-linear behavior, we introduce a neural network-based control model for improved alignment between simulation-hardware performance. We further demonstrated that for extended depth-of-field imaging, fovea stacking outperforms traditional focus stacking in image quality. By integrating object detection or eye-tracking, the system can dynamically adjust the lens to track the object of interest-enabling real-time foveated video suitable for downstream applications such as surveillance or foveated virtual reality displays
Authors:Anasse Boutayeb, Iyad Lahsen-cherif, Ahmed El Khadimi
Abstract:
Object detection has recently seen an interesting trend in terms of the most innovative research work, this task being of particular importance in the field of remote sensing, given the consistency of these images in terms of geographical coverage and the objects present. Furthermore, Deep Learning (DL) models, in particular those based on Transformers, are especially relevant for visual computing tasks in general, and target detection in particular. Thus, the present work proposes an application of Deformable-DETR model, a specific architecture using deformable attention mechanisms, on remote sensing images in two different modes, especially optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). To achieve this objective, two datasets are used, one optical, which is Pleiades Aircraft dataset, and the other SAR, in particular SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD). The results of a 10-fold stratified validation showed that the proposed model performed particularly well, obtaining an F1 score of 95.12% for the optical dataset and 94.54% for SSDD, while comparing these results with several models detections, especially those based on CNNs and transformers, as well as those specifically designed to detect different object classes in remote sensing images.
Authors:Léo Andéol, Luca Mossina, Adrien Mazoyer, Sébastien Gerchinovitz
Abstract:
Recent advances in object detectors have led to their adoption for industrial uses. However, their deployment in critical applications is hindered by the inherent lack of reliability of neural networks and the complex structure of object detection models. To address these challenges, we turn to Conformal Prediction, a post-hoc procedure which offers statistical guarantees that are valid for any dataset size, without requiring prior knowledge on the model or data distribution. Our contribution is manifold: first, we formally define the problem of Conformal Object Detection (COD) and introduce a novel method, Sequential Conformal Risk Control (SeqCRC), that extends the statistical guarantees of Conformal Risk Control (CRC) to two sequential tasks with two parameters, as required in the COD setting. Then, we propose loss functions and prediction sets suited to applying CRC to different applications and certification requirements. Finally, we present a conformal toolkit, enabling replication and further exploration of our methods. Using this toolkit, we perform extensive experiments, yielding a benchmark that validates the investigated methods and emphasizes trade-offs and other practical consequences.
Authors:Mingzhuang Wang, Yvyang Li, Xiyang Zhang, Fei Tan, Qi Shi, Guotao Zhang, Siqi Chen, Yufei Liu, Lei Lei, Ming Zhou, Qiang Lin, Hongqiang Yang
Abstract:
Coral reefs, crucial for sustaining marine biodiversity and ecological processes (e.g., nutrient cycling, habitat provision), face escalating threats, underscoring the need for efficient monitoring. Coral reef ecological monitoring faces dual challenges of low efficiency in manual analysis and insufficient segmentation accuracy in complex underwater scenarios. This study develops the YH-MINER system, establishing an intelligent framework centered on the Multimodal Large Model (MLLM) for "object detection-semantic segmentation-prior input". The system uses the object detection module (mAP@0.5=0.78) to generate spatial prior boxes for coral instances, driving the segment module to complete pixel-level segmentation in low-light and densely occluded scenarios. The segmentation masks and finetuned classification instructions are fed into the Qwen2-VL-based multimodal model as prior inputs, achieving a genus-level classification accuracy of 88% and simultaneously extracting core ecological metrics. Meanwhile, the system retains the scalability of the multimodal model through standardized interfaces, laying a foundation for future integration into multimodal agent-based underwater robots and supporting the full-process automation of "image acquisition-prior generation-real-time analysis".
Authors:Menghui Zhang, Jing Zhang, Lin Chen, Li Zhuo
Abstract:
Livestreaming often involves interactions between streamers and objects, which is critical for understanding and regulating web content. While human-object interaction (HOI) detection has made some progress in general-purpose video downstream tasks, when applied to recognize the interaction behaviors between a streamer and different objects in livestreaming, it tends to focuses too much on the objects and neglects their interactions with the streamer, which leads to object bias. To solve this issue, we propose a prototype embedding optimization for human-object interaction detection (PeO-HOI). First, the livestreaming is preprocessed using object detection and tracking techniques to extract features of the human-object (HO) pairs. Then, prototype embedding optimization is adopted to mitigate the effect of object bias on HOI. Finally, after modelling the spatio-temporal context between HO pairs, the HOI detection results are obtained by the prediction head. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed PeO-HOI method has detection accuracies of 37.19%@full, 51.42%@non-rare, 26.20%@rare on the publicly available dataset VidHOI, 45.13%@full, 62.78%@non-rare and 30.37%@rare on the self-built dataset BJUT-HOI, which effectively improves the HOI detection performance in livestreaming.
Authors:Cheng Chen, Yuhong Wang, Nafis S Munir, Xiangwei Zhou, Xugui Zhou
Abstract:
Autonomous driving systems (ADS) increasingly rely on deep learning-based perception models, which remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we revisit adversarial attacks and defense methods, focusing on road sign recognition and lead object detection and prediction (e.g., relative distance). Using a Level-2 production ADS, OpenPilot by Comma$.$ai, and the widely adopted YOLO model, we systematically examine the impact of adversarial perturbations and assess defense techniques, including adversarial training, image processing, contrastive learning, and diffusion models. Our experiments highlight both the strengths and limitations of these methods in mitigating complex attacks. Through targeted evaluations of model robustness, we aim to provide deeper insights into the vulnerabilities of ADS perception systems and contribute guidance for developing more resilient defense strategies.
Authors:Hyunsik Na, Wonho Lee, Seungdeok Roh, Sohee Park, Daeseon Choi
Abstract:
The advent of convenient and efficient fully unmanned stores equipped with artificial intelligence-based automated checkout systems marks a new era in retail. However, these systems have inherent artificial intelligence security vulnerabilities, which are exploited via adversarial patch attacks, particularly in physical environments. This study demonstrated that adversarial patches can severely disrupt object detection models used in unmanned stores, leading to issues such as theft, inventory discrepancies, and interference. We investigated three types of adversarial patch attacks -- Hiding, Creating, and Altering attacks -- and highlighted their effectiveness. We also introduce the novel color histogram similarity loss function by leveraging attacker knowledge of the color information of a target class object. Besides the traditional confusion-matrix-based attack success rate, we introduce a new bounding-boxes-based metric to analyze the practical impact of these attacks. Starting with attacks on object detection models trained on snack and fruit datasets in a digital environment, we evaluated the effectiveness of adversarial patches in a physical testbed that mimicked a real unmanned store with RGB cameras and realistic conditions. Furthermore, we assessed the robustness of these attacks in black-box scenarios, demonstrating that shadow attacks can enhance success rates of attacks even without direct access to model parameters. Our study underscores the necessity for robust defense strategies to protect unmanned stores from adversarial threats. Highlighting the limitations of the current defense mechanisms in real-time detection systems and discussing various proactive measures, we provide insights into improving the robustness of object detection models and fortifying unmanned retail environments against these attacks.
Authors:Yu Zhang, Fengyuan Liu, Juan Lyu, Yi Wei, Changdong Yu
Abstract:
In the realm of intelligent maritime navigation, object detection from a shipborne perspective is paramount. Despite the criticality, the paucity of maritime-specific data impedes the deployment of sophisticated visual perception techniques, akin to those utilized in autonomous vehicular systems, within the maritime context. To bridge this gap, we introduce Navigation12, a novel dataset annotated for 12 object categories under diverse maritime environments and weather conditions. Based upon this dataset, we propose HMPNet, a lightweight architecture tailored for shipborne object detection. HMPNet incorporates a hierarchical dynamic modulation backbone to bolster feature aggregation and expression, complemented by a matrix cascading poly-scale neck and a polymerization weight sharing detector, facilitating efficient multi-scale feature aggregation. Empirical evaluations indicate that HMPNet surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency, realizing a 3.3% improvement in mean Average Precision over YOLOv11n, the prevailing model, and reducing parameters by 23%.
Authors:Eliraz Orfaig, Inna Stainvas, Igal Bilik
Abstract:
This work introduces RGBX-DiffusionDet, an object detection framework extending the DiffusionDet model to fuse the heterogeneous 2D data (X) with RGB imagery via an adaptive multimodal encoder. To enable cross-modal interaction, we design the dynamic channel reduction within a convolutional block attention module (DCR-CBAM), which facilitates cross-talk between subnetworks by dynamically highlighting salient channel features. Furthermore, the dynamic multi-level aggregation block (DMLAB) is proposed to refine spatial feature representations through adaptive multiscale fusion. Finally, novel regularization losses that enforce channel saliency and spatial selectivity are introduced, leading to compact and discriminative feature embeddings. Extensive experiments using RGB-Depth (KITTI), a novel annotated RGB-Polarimetric dataset, and RGB-Infrared (M$^3$FD) benchmark dataset were conducted. We demonstrate consistent superiority of the proposed approach over the baseline RGB-only DiffusionDet. The modular architecture maintains the original decoding complexity, ensuring efficiency. These results establish the proposed RGBX-DiffusionDet as a flexible multimodal object detection approach, providing new insights into integrating diverse 2D sensing modalities into diffusion-based detection pipelines.
Authors:Ali Al-Bustami, Humberto Ruiz-Ochoa, Jaerock Kwon
Abstract:
Validating autonomous driving neural networks often demands expensive equipment and complex setups, limiting accessibility for researchers and educators. We introduce DriveNetBench, an affordable and configurable benchmarking system designed to evaluate autonomous driving networks using a single-camera setup. Leveraging low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware, and a flexible software stack, DriveNetBench enables easy integration of various driving models, such as object detection and lane following, while ensuring standardized evaluation in real-world scenarios. Our system replicates common driving conditions and provides consistent, repeatable metrics for comparing network performance. Through preliminary experiments with representative vision models, we illustrate how DriveNetBench effectively measures inference speed and accuracy within a controlled test environment. The key contributions of this work include its affordability, its replicability through open-source software, and its seamless integration into existing workflows, making autonomous vehicle research more accessible.
Authors:Gilson Junior Soares, Matheus Abrantes Cerqueira, Jancarlo F. Gomes, Laurent Najman, Silvio Jamil F. Guimarães, Alexandre Xavier Falcão
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) methods can locate objects that stand out in an image, assign higher values to their pixels in a saliency map, and binarize the map outputting a predicted segmentation mask. A recent tendency is to investigate pre-trained lightweight models rather than deep neural networks in SOD tasks, coping with applications under limited computational resources. In this context, we have investigated lightweight networks using a methodology named Feature Learning from Image Markers (FLIM), which assumes that the encoder's kernels can be estimated from marker pixels on discriminative regions of a few representative images. This work proposes flyweight networks, hundreds of times lighter than lightweight models, for SOD by combining a FLIM encoder with an adaptive decoder, whose weights are estimated for each input image by a given heuristic function. Such FLIM networks are trained from three to four representative images only and without backpropagation, making the models suitable for applications under labeled data constraints as well. We study five adaptive decoders; two of them are introduced here. Differently from the previous ones that rely on one neuron per pixel with shared weights, the heuristic functions of the new adaptive decoders estimate the weights of each neuron per pixel. We compare FLIM models with adaptive decoders for two challenging SOD tasks with three lightweight networks from the state-of-the-art, two FLIM networks with decoders trained by backpropagation, and one FLIM network whose labeled markers define the decoder's weights. The experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed networks over the baselines, revealing the importance of further investigating such methods in new applications.
Authors:Patrick Müller, Alexander Braun, Margret Keuper
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven to be successful in various computer vision applications such that models even infer in safety-critical situations. Therefore, vision models have to behave in a robust way to disturbances such as noise or blur. While seminal benchmarks exist to evaluate model robustness to diverse corruptions, blur is often approximated in an overly simplistic way to model defocus, while ignoring the different blur kernel shapes that result from optical systems. To study model robustness against realistic optical blur effects, this paper proposes two datasets of blur corruptions, which we denote OpticsBench and LensCorruptions. OpticsBench examines primary aberrations such as coma, defocus, and astigmatism, i.e. aberrations that can be represented by varying a single parameter of Zernike polynomials. To go beyond the principled but synthetic setting of primary aberrations, LensCorruptions samples linear combinations in the vector space spanned by Zernike polynomials, corresponding to 100 real lenses. Evaluations for image classification and object detection on ImageNet and MSCOCO show that for a variety of different pre-trained models, the performance on OpticsBench and LensCorruptions varies significantly, indicating the need to consider realistic image corruptions to evaluate a model's robustness against blur.
Authors:Felipe Crispim Salvagnini, Jancarlo F. Gomes, Cid A. N. Santos, Silvio Jamil F. Guimarães, Alexandre X. Falcão
Abstract:
The necessity of abundant annotated data and complex network architectures presents a significant challenge in deep-learning Salient Object Detection (deep SOD) and across the broader deep-learning landscape. This challenge is particularly acute in medical applications in developing countries with limited computational resources. Combining modern and classical techniques offers a path to maintaining competitive performance while enabling practical applications. Feature Learning from Image Markers (FLIM) methodology empowers experts to design convolutional encoders through user-drawn markers, with filters learned directly from these annotations. Recent findings demonstrate that coupling a FLIM encoder with an adaptive decoder creates a flyweight network suitable for SOD, requiring significantly fewer parameters than lightweight models and eliminating the need for backpropagation. Cellular Automata (CA) methods have proven successful in data-scarce scenarios but require proper initialization -- typically through user input, priors, or randomness. We propose a practical intersection of these approaches: using FLIM networks to initialize CA states with expert knowledge without requiring user interaction for each image. By decoding features from each level of a FLIM network, we can initialize multiple CAs simultaneously, creating a multi-level framework. Our method leverages the hierarchical knowledge encoded across different network layers, merging multiple saliency maps into a high-quality final output that functions as a CA ensemble. Benchmarks across two challenging medical datasets demonstrate the competitiveness of our multi-level CA approach compared to established models in the deep SOD literature.
Authors:Eunsoo Im, Changhyun Jee, Jung Kwon Lee
Abstract:
The emerging trend in computer vision emphasizes developing universal models capable of simultaneously addressing multiple diverse tasks. Such universality typically requires joint training across multi-domain datasets to ensure effective generalization. However, monocular 3D object detection presents unique challenges in multi-domain training due to the scarcity of datasets annotated with accurate 3D ground-truth labels, especially beyond typical road-based autonomous driving contexts. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel weakly supervised framework leveraging pseudo-labels. Current pretrained models often struggle to accurately detect pedestrians in non-road environments due to inherent dataset biases. Unlike generalized image-based 2D object detection models, achieving similar generalization in monocular 3D detection remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose GATE3D, a novel framework designed specifically for generalized monocular 3D object detection via weak supervision. GATE3D effectively bridges domain gaps by employing consistency losses between 2D and 3D predictions. Remarkably, our model achieves competitive performance on the KITTI benchmark as well as on an indoor-office dataset collected by us to evaluate the generalization capabilities of our framework. Our results demonstrate that GATE3D significantly accelerates learning from limited annotated data through effective pre-training strategies, highlighting substantial potential for broader impacts in robotics, augmented reality, and virtual reality applications. Project page: https://ies0411.github.io/GATE3D/
Authors:Aviral Chharia, Tianyu Ren, Tomotake Furuhata, Kenji Shimada
Abstract:
Recognizing safety violations in construction environments is critical yet remains underexplored in computer vision. Existing models predominantly rely on 2D object detection, which fails to capture the complexities of real-world violations due to: (i) an oversimplified task formulation treating violation recognition merely as object detection, (ii) inadequate validation under realistic conditions, (iii) absence of standardized baselines, and (iv) limited scalability from the unavailability of synthetic dataset generators for diverse construction scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce Safe-Construct, the first framework that reformulates violation recognition as a 3D multi-view engagement task, leveraging scene-level worker-object context and 3D spatial understanding. We also propose the Synthetic Indoor Construction Site Generator (SICSG) to create diverse, scalable training data, overcoming data limitations. Safe-Construct achieves a 7.6% improvement over state-of-the-art methods across four violation types. We rigorously evaluate our approach in near-realistic settings, incorporating four violations, four workers, 14 objects, and challenging conditions like occlusions (worker-object, worker-worker) and variable illumination (back-lighting, overexposure, sunlight). By integrating 3D multi-view spatial understanding and synthetic data generation, Safe-Construct sets a new benchmark for scalable and robust safety monitoring in high-risk industries. Project Website: https://Safe-Construct.github.io/Safe-Construct
Authors:Soheil Gharatappeh, Salimeh Sekeh, Vikas Dhiman
Abstract:
RT-DETRs have shown strong performance across various computer vision tasks but are known to degrade under challenging weather conditions such as fog. In this work, we investigate three novel approaches to enhance RT-DETR robustness in foggy environments: (1) Domain Adaptation via Perceptual Loss, which distills domain-invariant features from a teacher network to a student using perceptual supervision; (2) Weather Adaptive Attention, which augments the attention mechanism with fog-sensitive scaling by introducing an auxiliary foggy image stream; and (3) Weather Fusion Encoder, which integrates a dual-stream encoder architecture that fuses clear and foggy image features via multi-head self and cross-attention. Despite the architectural innovations, none of the proposed methods consistently outperform the baseline RT-DETR. We analyze the limitations and potential causes, offering insights for future research in weather-aware object detection.
Authors:Mikolaj Walczak, Uttej Kallakuri, Tinoosh Mohsenin
Abstract:
Autonomous systems deployed on edge devices face significant challenges, including resource constraints, real-time processing demands, and adapting to dynamic environments. This work introduces ATLASv2, a novel system that integrates a fine-tuned TinyLLM, real-time object detection, and efficient path planning to enable hierarchical, multi-task navigation and manipulation all on the edge device, Jetson Nano. ATLASv2 dynamically expands its navigable landmarks by detecting and localizing objects in the environment which are saved to its internal knowledge base to be used for future task execution. We evaluate ATLASv2 in real-world environments, including a handcrafted home and office setting constructed with diverse objects and landmarks. Results show that ATLASv2 effectively interprets natural language instructions, decomposes them into low-level actions, and executes tasks with high success rates. By leveraging generative AI in a fully on-board framework, ATLASv2 achieves optimized resource utilization with minimal prompting latency and power consumption, bridging the gap between simulated environments and real-world applications.
Authors:Yanze Jiang, Yanfeng Gu, Xian Li
Abstract:
Hyperspectral point clouds (HPCs) can simultaneously characterize 3D spatial and spectral information of ground objects, offering excellent 3D perception and target recognition capabilities. Current approaches for generating HPCs often involve fusion techniques with hyperspectral images and LiDAR point clouds, which inevitably lead to geometric-spectral distortions due to fusion errors and obstacle occlusions. These adverse effects limit their performance in downstream fine-grained tasks across multiple scenarios, particularly in airborne applications. To address these issues, we propose PiV-AHPC, a 3D object detection network for airborne HPCs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at this HPCs task. Specifically, we first develop a pillar-voxel dual-branch encoder, where the former captures spectral and vertical structural features from HPCs to overcome spectral distortion, while the latter emphasizes extracting accurate 3D spatial features from point clouds. A multi-level feature fusion mechanism is devised to enhance information interaction between the two branches, achieving neighborhood feature alignment and channel-adaptive selection, thereby organically integrating heterogeneous features and mitigating geometric distortion. Extensive experiments on two airborne HPCs datasets demonstrate that PiV-AHPC possesses state-of-the-art detection performance and high generalization capability.
Authors:Youngwan Jin, Michal Kovac, Yagiz Nalcakan, Hyeongjin Ju, Hanbin Song, Sanghyeop Yeo, Shiho Kim
Abstract:
Current autonomous driving algorithms heavily rely on the visible spectrum, which is prone to performance degradation in adverse conditions like fog, rain, snow, glare, and high contrast. Although other spectral bands like near-infrared (NIR) and long-wave infrared (LWIR) can enhance vision perception in such situations, they have limitations and lack large-scale datasets and benchmarks. Short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging offers several advantages over NIR and LWIR. However, no publicly available large-scale datasets currently incorporate SWIR data for autonomous driving. To address this gap, we introduce the RGB and SWIR Multispectral Driving (RASMD) dataset, which comprises 100,000 synchronized and spatially aligned RGB-SWIR image pairs collected across diverse locations, lighting, and weather conditions. In addition, we provide a subset for RGB-SWIR translation and object detection annotations for a subset of challenging traffic scenarios to demonstrate the utility of SWIR imaging through experiments on both object detection and RGB-to-SWIR image translation. Our experiments show that combining RGB and SWIR data in an ensemble framework significantly improves detection accuracy compared to RGB-only approaches, particularly in conditions where visible-spectrum sensors struggle. We anticipate that the RASMD dataset will advance research in multispectral imaging for autonomous driving and robust perception systems.
Authors:Rajhans Singh, Rafael Bidese Puhl, Kshitiz Dhakal, Sudhir Sornapudi
Abstract:
Deep learning models are transforming agricultural applications by enabling automated phenotyping, monitoring, and yield estimation. However, their effectiveness heavily depends on large amounts of annotated training data, which can be labor and time intensive. Recent advances in open-set object detection, particularly with models like Grounding-DINO, offer a potential solution to detect regions of interests based on text prompt input. Initial zero-shot experiments revealed challenges in crafting effective text prompts, especially for complex objects like individual leaves and visually similar classes. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient few-shot adaptation method that simplifies the Grounding-DINO architecture by removing the text encoder module (BERT) and introducing a randomly initialized trainable text embedding. This method achieves superior performance across multiple agricultural datasets, including plant-weed detection, plant counting, insect identification, fruit counting, and remote sensing tasks. Specifically, it demonstrates up to a $\sim24\%$ higher mAP than fully fine-tuned YOLO models on agricultural datasets and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by $\sim10\%$ in remote sensing, under few-shot learning conditions. Our method offers a promising solution for automating annotation and accelerating the development of specialized agricultural AI solutions.
Authors:Uthman Olawoye, Jason N. Gross
Abstract:
This paper explores the use of applying a deep learning approach for 3D object detection to compute the relative position of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) from an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) equipped with a LiDAR sensor in a GPS-denied environment. This was achieved by evaluating the LiDAR sensor's data through a 3D detection algorithm (PointPillars). The PointPillars algorithm incorporates a column voxel point-cloud representation and a 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to generate distinctive point-cloud features representing the object to be identified, in this case, the UAV. The current localization method utilizes point-cloud segmentation, Euclidean clustering, and predefined heuristics to obtain the relative position of the UAV. Results from the two methods were then compared to a reference truth solution.
Authors:Onkar Krishna, Hiroki Ohashi
Abstract:
Domain gaps between training data (source) and real-world environments (target) often degrade the performance of object detection models. Most existing methods aim to bridge this gap by aligning features across source and target domains but often fail to account for visual differences, such as color or orientation, in alignment pairs. This limitation leads to less effective domain adaptation, as the model struggles to manage both domain-specific shifts (e.g., fog) and visual variations simultaneously. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time, using a custom-built dataset, that aligning visually similar pairs significantly improves domain adaptation. Based on this insight, we propose a novel memory-based system to enhance domain alignment. This system stores precomputed features of foreground objects and background areas from the source domain, which are periodically updated during training. By retrieving visually similar source features for alignment with target foreground and background features, the model effectively addresses domain-specific differences while reducing the impact of visual variations. Extensive experiments across diverse domain shift scenarios validate our method's effectiveness, achieving 53.1 mAP on Foggy Cityscapes and 62.3 on Sim10k, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods by 1.2 and 4.1 mAP, respectively.
Authors:Vladimir Golovkin, Nikolay Nemtsev, Vasyl Shandyba, Oleg Udin, Nikita Kasatkin, Pavel Kononov, Anton Afanasiev, Sergey Ulasen, Andrei Boiarov
Abstract:
Game State Reconstruction (GSR), a critical task in Sports Video Understanding, involves precise tracking and localization of all individuals on the football field-players, goalkeepers, referees, and others - in real-world coordinates. This capability enables coaches and analysts to derive actionable insights into player movements, team formations, and game dynamics, ultimately optimizing training strategies and enhancing competitive advantage. Achieving accurate GSR using a single-camera setup is highly challenging due to frequent camera movements, occlusions, and dynamic scene content. In this work, we present a robust end-to-end pipeline for tracking players across an entire match using a single-camera setup. Our solution integrates a fine-tuned YOLOv5m for object detection, a SegFormer-based camera parameter estimator, and a DeepSORT-based tracking framework enhanced with re-identification, orientation prediction, and jersey number recognition. By ensuring both spatial accuracy and temporal consistency, our method delivers state-of-the-art game state reconstruction, securing first place in the SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction Challenge 2024 and significantly outperforming competing methods.
Authors:Xiangyu Zheng, Wanyun Li, Songcheng He, Jianping Fan, Xiaoqiang Li, We Zhang
Abstract:
Recent mainstream unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) motion-appearance approaches use either the bi-encoder structure to separately encode motion and appearance features, or the uni-encoder structure for joint encoding. However, these methods fail to properly balance the motion-appearance relationship. Consequently, even with complex fusion modules for motion-appearance integration, the extracted suboptimal features degrade the models' overall performance. Moreover, the quality of optical flow varies across scenarios, making it insufficient to rely solely on optical flow to achieve high-quality segmentation results. To address these challenges, we propose the Saliency-Motion guided Trunk-Collateral Network (SMTC-Net), which better balances the motion-appearance relationship and incorporates model's intrinsic saliency information to enhance segmentation performance. Specifically, considering that optical flow maps are derived from RGB images, they share both commonalities and differences. Accordingly, we propose a novel Trunk-Collateral structure for motion-appearance UVOS. The shared trunk backbone captures the motion-appearance commonality, while the collateral branch learns the uniqueness of motion features. Furthermore, an Intrinsic Saliency guided Refinement Module (ISRM) is devised to efficiently leverage the model's intrinsic saliency information to refine high-level features, and provide pixel-level guidance for motion-appearance fusion, thereby enhancing performance without additional input. Experimental results show that SMTC-Net achieved state-of-the-art performance on three UVOS datasets ( 89.2% J&F on DAVIS-16, 76% J on YouTube-Objects, 86.4% J on FBMS ) and four standard video salient object detection (VSOD) benchmarks with the notable increase, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority over previous methods.
Authors:Udayanga G. W. K. N. Gamage, Xuanni Huo, Luca Zanatta, T Delbruck, Cesar Cadena, Matteo Fumagalli, Silvia Tolu
Abstract:
Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based visual inspections are a more efficient alternative to manual methods for examining civil structural defects, offering safe access to hazardous areas and significant cost savings by reducing labor requirements. However, traditional frame-based cameras, widely used in UAV-based inspections, often struggle to capture defects under low or dynamic lighting conditions. In contrast, Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS), or event-based cameras, excel in such scenarios by minimizing motion blur, enhancing power efficiency, and maintaining high-quality imaging across diverse lighting conditions without saturation or information loss. Despite these advantages, existing research lacks studies exploring the feasibility of using DVS for detecting civil structural defects.Moreover, there is no dedicated event-based dataset tailored for this purpose. Addressing this gap, this study introduces the first event-based civil infrastructure defect detection dataset, capturing defective surfaces as a spatio-temporal event stream using DVS.In addition to event-based data, the dataset includes grayscale intensity image frames captured simultaneously using an Active Pixel Sensor (APS). Both data types were collected using the DAVIS346 camera, which integrates DVS and APS sensors.The dataset focuses on two types of defects: cracks and spalling, and includes data from both field and laboratory environments. The field dataset comprises 318 recording sequences,documenting 458 distinct cracks and 121 distinct spalling instances.The laboratory dataset includes 362 recording sequences, covering 220 distinct cracks and 308 spalling instances.Four realtime object detection models were evaluated on it to validate the dataset effectiveness.The results demonstrate the dataset robustness in enabling accurate defect detection and classification,even under challenging lighting conditions.
Authors:Zhenteng Li, Sheng Lian, Dengfeng Pan, Youlin Wang, Wei Liu
Abstract:
Object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images poses significant challenges due to complex scale variations and class imbalance among objects. Existing methods often address these challenges separately, overlooking the intricate nature of UAV images and the potential synergy between them. In response, this paper proposes AD-Det, a novel framework employing a coherent coarse-to-fine strategy that seamlessly integrates two pivotal components: Adaptive Small Object Enhancement (ASOE) and Dynamic Class-balanced Copy-paste (DCC). ASOE utilizes a high-resolution feature map to identify and cluster regions containing small objects. These regions are subsequently enlarged and processed by a fine-grained detector. On the other hand, DCC conducts object-level resampling by dynamically pasting tail classes around the cluster centers obtained by ASOE, main-taining a dynamic memory bank for each tail class. This approach enables AD-Det to not only extract regions with small objects for precise detection but also dynamically perform reasonable resampling for tail-class objects. Consequently, AD-Det enhances the overall detection performance by addressing the challenges of scale variations and class imbalance in UAV images through a synergistic and adaptive framework. We extensively evaluate our approach on two public datasets, i.e., VisDrone and UAVDT, and demonstrate that AD-Det significantly outperforms existing competitive alternatives. Notably, AD-Det achieves a 37.5% Average Precision (AP) on the VisDrone dataset, surpassing its counterparts by at least 3.1%.
Authors:Guhnoo Yun, Juhan Yoo, Kijung Kim, Jeongho Lee, Paul Hongsuck Seo, Dong Hwan Kim
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that 2D convolution and self-attention exhibit distinct spectral behaviors, and optimizing their spectral properties can enhance vision model performance. However, theoretical analyses remain limited in explaining why 2D convolution is more effective in high-pass filtering than self-attention and why larger kernels favor shape bias, akin to self-attention. In this paper, we employ graph spectral analysis to theoretically simulate and compare the frequency responses of 2D convolution and self-attention within a unified framework. Our results corroborate previous empirical findings and reveal that node connectivity, modulated by window size, is a key factor in shaping spectral functions. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a \textit{spectral-adaptive modulation} (SPAM) mixer, which processes visual features in a spectral-adaptive manner using multi-scale convolutional kernels and a spectral re-scaling mechanism to refine spectral components. Based on SPAM, we develop SPANetV2 as a novel vision backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPANetV2 outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple vision tasks, including ImageNet-1K classification, COCO object detection, and ADE20K semantic segmentation.
Authors:Pengyu Chen, Teng Fei, Yunyan Du, Jiawei Yi, Yi Li, John A. Kupfer
Abstract:
Conflicts between humans and bears on the Tibetan Plateau present substantial threats to local communities and hinder wildlife preservation initiatives. This research introduces a novel strategy that incorporates computer vision alongside Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to alleviate these issues. Tailored specifically for the harsh environment of the Tibetan Plateau, the approach utilizes the K210 development board paired with the YOLO object detection framework along with a tailored bear-deterrent mechanism, offering minimal energy usage and real-time efficiency in bear identification and deterrence. The model's performance was evaluated experimentally, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 91.4%, demonstrating excellent precision and dependability. By integrating energy-efficient components, the proposed system effectively surpasses the challenges of remote and off-grid environments, ensuring uninterrupted operation in secluded locations. This study provides a viable, eco-friendly, and expandable solution to mitigate human-bear conflicts, thereby improving human safety and promoting bear conservation in isolated areas like Yushu, China.
Authors:Tony Tran, Bin Hu
Abstract:
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for deep learning object detection frameworks typically involves multiple modules, each performing distinct tasks. These modules contribute to a vast search space, resulting in searches that can take several GPU hours or even days, depending on the complexity of the search space. This makes joint optimization both challenging and computationally expensive. Furthermore, satisfying target device constraints across modules adds additional complexity to the optimization process. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{FACETS}, e\textbf{\underline{F}}ficient Once-for-\textbf{\underline{A}}ll Object Detection via \textbf{\underline{C}}onstrained it\textbf{\underline{E}}ra\textbf{\underline{T}}ive\textbf{\underline{S}}earch, a novel unified iterative NAS method that refines the architecture of all modules in a cyclical manner. FACETS leverages feedback from previous iterations, alternating between fixing one module's architecture and optimizing the others. This approach reduces the overall search space while preserving interdependencies among modules and incorporates constraints based on the target device's computational budget. In a controlled comparison against progressive and single-module search strategies, FACETS achieves architectures with up to $4.75\%$ higher accuracy twice as fast as progressive search strategies in earlier stages, while still being able to achieve a global optimum. Moreover, FACETS demonstrates the ability to iteratively refine the search space, producing better performing architectures over time. The refined search space yields candidates with a mean accuracy up to $27\%$ higher than global search and $5\%$ higher than progressive search methods via random sampling.
Authors:Sébastien Quetin, Tapotosh Ghosh, Farhad Maleki
Abstract:
Contrastive learning methods in self-supervised settings have primarily focused on pre-training encoders, while decoders are typically introduced and trained separately for downstream dense prediction tasks. However, this conventional approach overlooks the potential benefits of jointly pre-training both encoder and decoder. In this paper, we propose DeCon, an efficient encoder-decoder self-supervised learning (SSL) framework that supports joint contrastive pre-training. We first extend existing SSL architectures to accommodate diverse decoders and their corresponding contrastive losses. Then, we introduce a weighted encoder-decoder contrastive loss with non-competing objectives to enable the joint pre-training of encoder-decoder architectures. By adapting an established contrastive SSL framework for dense prediction tasks, DeCon achieves new state-of-the-art results: on COCO object detection and instance segmentation when pre-trained on COCO dataset; across almost all dense downstream benchmark tasks when pre-trained on COCO+ and ImageNet-1K. Our results demonstrate that joint pre-training enhances the representation power of the encoder and improves performance in dense prediction tasks. This gain persists across heterogeneous decoder architectures, various encoder architectures, and in out-of-domain limited-data scenarios.
Authors:Daniel Kuhse, Harun Teper, Sebastian Buschjäger, Chien-Yao Wang, Jian-Jia Chen
Abstract:
We introduce AnytimeYOLO, a family of variants of the YOLO architecture that enables anytime object detection. Our AnytimeYOLO networks allow for interruptible inference, i.e., they provide a prediction at any point in time, a property desirable for safety-critical real-time applications.
We present structured explorations to modify the YOLO architecture, enabling early termination to obtain intermediate results. We focus on providing fine-grained control through high granularity of available termination points. First, we formalize Anytime Models as a special class of prediction models that offer anytime predictions. Then, we discuss a novel transposed variant of the YOLO architecture, that changes the architecture to enable better early predictions and greater freedom for the order of processing stages. Finally, we propose two optimization algorithms that, given an anytime model, can be used to determine the optimal exit execution order and the optimal subset of early-exits to select for deployment in low-resource environments. We evaluate the anytime performance and trade-offs of design choices, proposing a new anytime quality metric for this purpose. In particular, we also discuss key challenges for anytime inference that currently make its deployment costly.
Authors:Gary Y. Li, Li Chen, Bryson Hicks, Nikolai Schnittke, David O. Kessler, Jeffrey Shupp, Maria Parker, Cristiana Baloescu, Christopher Moore, Cynthia Gregory, Kenton Gregory, Balasundar Raju, Jochen Kruecker, Alvin Chen
Abstract:
Computer-aided pathology detection algorithms for video-based imaging modalities must accurately interpret complex spatiotemporal information by integrating findings across multiple frames. Current state-of-the-art methods operate by classifying on video sub-volumes (tubelets), but they often lose global spatial context by focusing only on local regions within detection ROIs. Here we propose a lightweight framework for tubelet-based object detection and video classification that preserves both global spatial context and fine spatiotemporal features. To address the loss of global context, we embed tubelet location, size, and confidence as inputs to the classifier. Additionally, we use ROI-aligned feature maps from a pre-trained detection model, leveraging learned feature representations to increase the receptive field and reduce computational complexity. Our method is efficient, with the spatiotemporal tubelet classifier comprising only 0.4M parameters. We apply our approach to detect and classify lung consolidation and pleural effusion in ultrasound videos. Five-fold cross-validation on 14,804 videos from 828 patients shows our method outperforms previous tubelet-based approaches and is suited for real-time workflows.
Authors:Louis Y. Kim, Michelle Karker, Victoria Valledor, Seiyoung C. Lee, Karl F. Brzoska, Margaret Duff, Anthony Palladino
Abstract:
Recent advances in open-vocabulary object detection models will enable Automatic Target Recognition systems to be sustainable and repurposed by non-technical end-users for a variety of applications or missions. New, and potentially nuanced, classes can be defined with natural language text descriptions in the field, immediately before runtime, without needing to retrain the model. We present an approach for improving non-technical users' natural language text descriptions of their desired targets of interest, using a combination of analysis techniques on the text embeddings, and proper combinations of embeddings for contrastive examples. We quantify the improvement that our feedback mechanism provides by demonstrating performance with multiple publicly-available open-vocabulary object detection models.
Authors:Yu Qiu, Yuhang Sun, Jie Mei, Lin Xiao, Jing Xu
Abstract:
Traffic Salient Object Detection (TSOD) aims to segment the objects critical to driving safety by combining semantic (e.g., collision risks) and visual saliency. Unlike SOD in natural scene images (NSI-SOD), which prioritizes visually distinctive regions, TSOD emphasizes the objects that demand immediate driver attention due to their semantic impact, even with low visual contrast. This dual criterion, i.e., bridging perception and contextual risk, re-defines saliency for autonomous and assisted driving systems. To address the lack of task-specific benchmarks, we collect the first large-scale TSOD dataset with pixel-wise saliency annotations, named TSOD10K. TSOD10K covers the diverse object categories in various real-world traffic scenes under various challenging weather/illumination variations (e.g., fog, snowstorms, low-contrast, and low-light). Methodologically, we propose a Mamba-based TSOD model, termed Tramba. Considering the challenge of distinguishing inconspicuous visual information from complex traffic backgrounds, Tramba introduces a novel Dual-Frequency Visual State Space module equipped with shifted window partitioning and dilated scanning to enhance the perception of fine details and global structure by hierarchically decomposing high/low-frequency components. To emphasize critical regions in traffic scenes, we propose a traffic-oriented Helix 2D-Selective-Scan (Helix-SS2D) mechanism that injects driving attention priors while effectively capturing global multi-direction spatial dependencies. We establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating Tramba and 22 existing NSI-SOD models on TSOD10K, demonstrating Tramba's superiority. Our research establishes the first foundation for safety-aware saliency analysis in intelligent transportation systems.
Authors:Matthew Wilchek, Linhan Wang, Sally Dickinson, Erica Feuerbacher, Kurt Luther, Feras A. Batarseh
Abstract:
In urban search and rescue (USAR) operations, communication between handlers and specially trained canines is crucial but often complicated by challenging environments and the specific behaviors canines are trained to exhibit when detecting a person. Since a USAR canine often works out of sight of the handler, the handler lacks awareness of the canine's location and situation, known as the 'sensemaking gap.' In this paper, we propose KHAIT, a novel approach to close the sensemaking gap and enhance USAR effectiveness by integrating object detection-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR). Equipped with AI-powered cameras, edge computing, and AR headsets, KHAIT enables precise and rapid object detection from a canine's perspective, improving survivor localization. We evaluate this approach in a real-world USAR environment, demonstrating an average survival allocation time decrease of 22%, enhancing the speed and accuracy of operations.
Authors:Xi Shen, Julian Gamboa, Tabassom Hamidfar, Shamima Mitu, Selim M. Shahriar
Abstract:
The Polar Mellin Transform (PMT) is a well-known technique that converts images into shift, scale and rotation invariant signatures for object detection using opto-electronic correlators. However, this technique cannot be properly applied when there are multiple targets in a single input. Here, we propose a Segmented PMT (SPMT) that extends this methodology for cases where multiple objects are present within the same frame. Simulations show that this SPMT can be integrated into an opto-electronic joint transform correlator to create a correlation system capable of detecting multiple objects simultaneously, presenting robust detection capabilities across various transformation conditions, with remarkable discrimination between matching and non-matching targets.
Authors:Xuyang Fang, Sion Hannuna, Neill Campbell
Abstract:
We introduce the 8-Calves dataset, a benchmark for evaluating object detection and identity preservation in occlusion-rich, temporally consistent environments. Comprising a 1-hour video (67,760 frames) of eight Holstein Friesian calves with unique coat patterns and 900 static frames, the dataset emphasizes real-world challenges like prolonged occlusions, motion blur, and pose variation. By fine-tuning 28 object detectors (YOLO variants, transformers) and evaluating 23 pretrained backbones (ResNet, ConvNextV2, ViTs), we expose critical architectural trade-offs: smaller models (e.g., ConvNextV2 Nano, 15.6M parameters) excel in efficiency and retrieval accuracy, while pure vision transformers lag in occlusion-heavy settings. The dataset's structured design-fixed camera views, natural motion, and verified identities-provides a reproducible testbed for object detection challenges (mAP50:95: 56.5-66.4%), bridging synthetic simplicity and domain-specific complexity. The dataset and benchmark code are all publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tonyFang04/8-calves. Limitations include partial labeling and detector bias, addressed in later sections.
Authors:Ryan Banks, Vishal Thengane, MarÃa Eugenia Guerrero, Nelly Maria GarcÃa-Madueño, Yunpeng Li, Hongying Tang, Akhilanand Chaurasia
Abstract:
Calculating percentage bone loss is a critical test for periodontal disease staging but is sometimes imprecise and time consuming when manually calculated. This study evaluates the application of a deep learning keypoint and object detection model, YOLOv8-pose, for the automatic identification of localised periodontal bone loss landmarks, conditions and staging. YOLOv8-pose was fine-tuned on 193 annotated periapical radiographs. We propose a keypoint detection metric, Percentage of Relative Correct Keypoints (PRCK), which normalises the metric to the average tooth size of teeth in the image. We propose a heuristic post-processing module that adjusts certain keypoint predictions to align with the edge of the related tooth, using a supporting instance segmentation model trained on an open source auxiliary dataset. The model can sufficiently detect bone loss keypoints, tooth boxes, and alveolar ridge resorption, but has insufficient performance at detecting detached periodontal ligament and furcation involvement. The model with post-processing demonstrated a PRCK 0.25 of 0.726 and PRCK 0.05 of 0.401 for keypoint detection, mAP 0.5 of 0.715 for tooth object detection, mesial dice score of 0.593 for periodontal staging, and dice score of 0.280 for furcation involvement. Our annotation methodology provides a stage agnostic approach to periodontal disease detection, by ensuring most keypoints are present for each tooth in the image, allowing small imbalanced datasets. Our PRCK metric allows accurate evaluation of keypoints in dental domains. Our post-processing module adjusts predicted keypoints correctly but is dependent on a minimum quality of prediction by the pose detection and segmentation models. Code: https:// anonymous.4open.science/r/Bone-Loss-Keypoint-Detection-Code. Dataset: https://bit.ly/4hJ3aE7.
Authors:Toni Schneidereit, Stefan Gohrenz, Michael BreuÃ
Abstract:
AI-based object detection, and efforts to explain and investigate their characteristics, is a topic of high interest. The impact of, e.g., complex background structures with similar appearances as the objects of interest, on the detection accuracy and, beforehand, the necessary dataset composition are topics of ongoing research. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of background influences and different features of the object to be detected. The latter includes various materials and surfaces, partially transparent and with shiny reflections in the context of an Industry 4.0 learning factory. Different YOLOv8 models have been trained for each of the materials on different sized datasets, where the appearance was the only changing parameter. In the end, similar characteristics tend to show different behaviours and sometimes unexpected results. While some background components tend to be detected, others with the same features are not part of the detection. Additionally, some more precise conclusions can be drawn from the results. Therefore, we contribute a challenging dataset with detailed investigations on 92 trained YOLO models, addressing some issues on the detection accuracy and possible overfitting.
Authors:Jialong Wu, Marco Braun, Dominic Spata, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Scene flow provides crucial motion information for autonomous driving. Recent LiDAR scene flow models utilize the rigid-motion assumption at the instance level, assuming objects are rigid bodies. However, these instance-level methods are not suitable for sparse radar point clouds. In this work, we present a novel Traffic-Aware Radar Scene-Flow (TARS) estimation method, which utilizes motion rigidity at the traffic level. To address the challenges in radar scene flow, we perform object detection and scene flow jointly and boost the latter. We incorporate the feature map from the object detector, trained with detection losses, to make radar scene flow aware of the environment and road users. From this, we construct a Traffic Vector Field (TVF) in the feature space to achieve holistic traffic-level scene understanding in our scene flow branch. When estimating the scene flow, we consider both point-level motion cues from point neighbors and traffic-level consistency of rigid motion within the space. TARS outperforms the state of the art on a proprietary dataset and the View-of-Delft dataset, improving the benchmarks by 23% and 15%, respectively.
Authors:Namal Jayasuriya, Yi Guo, Wen Hu, Oula Ghannoum
Abstract:
Estimation of a single leaf area can be a measure of crop growth and a phenotypic trait to breed new varieties. It has also been used to measure leaf area index and total leaf area. Some studies have used hand-held cameras, image processing 3D reconstruction and unsupervised learning-based methods to estimate the leaf area in plant images. Deep learning works well for object detection and segmentation tasks; however, direct area estimation of objects has not been explored. This work investigates deep learning-based leaf area estimation, for RGBD images taken using a mobile camera setup in real-world scenarios. A dataset for attached leaves captured with a top angle view and a dataset for detached single leaves were collected for model development and testing. First, image processing-based area estimation was tested on manually segmented leaves. Then a Mask R-CNN-based model was investigated, and modified to accept RGBD images and to estimate the leaf area. The detached-leaf data set was then mixed with the attached-leaf plant data set to estimate the single leaf area for plant images, and another network design with two backbones was proposed: one for segmentation and the other for area estimation. Instead of trying all possibilities or random values, an agile approach was used in hyperparameter tuning. The final model was cross-validated with 5-folds and tested with two unseen datasets: detached and attached leaves. The F1 score with 90% IoA for segmentation result on unseen detached-leaf data was 1.0, while R-squared of area estimation was 0.81. For unseen plant data segmentation, the F1 score with 90% IoA was 0.59, while the R-squared score was 0.57. The research suggests using attached leaves with ground truth area to improve the results.
Authors:Johnson Loh, Lyubov Dudchenko, Justus Viga, Tobias Gemmeke
Abstract:
Deep neural network (DNN) models have shown remarkable success in many real-world scenarios, such as object detection and classification. Unfortunately, these models are not yet widely adopted in health monitoring due to exceptionally high requirements for model robustness and deployment in highly resource-constrained devices. In particular, the acquisition of biosignals, such as electrocardiogram (ECG), is subject to large variations between training and deployment, necessitating domain generalization (DG) for robust classification quality across sensors and patients. The continuous monitoring of ECG also requires the execution of DNN models in convenient wearable devices, which is achieved by specialized ECG accelerators with small form factor and ultra-low power consumption. However, combining DG capabilities with ECG accelerators remains a challenge. This article provides a comprehensive overview of ECG accelerators and DG methods and discusses the implication of the combination of both domains, such that multi-domain ECG monitoring is enabled with emerging algorithm-hardware co-optimized systems. Within this context, an approach based on correction layers is proposed to deploy DG capabilities on the edge. Here, the DNN fine-tuning for unknown domains is limited to a single layer, while the remaining DNN model remains unmodified. Thus, computational complexity (CC) for DG is reduced with minimal memory overhead compared to conventional fine-tuning of the whole DNN model. The DNN model-dependent CC is reduced by more than 2.5x compared to DNN fine-tuning at an average increase of F1 score by more than 20% on the generalized target domain. In summary, this article provides a novel perspective on robust DNN classification on the edge for health monitoring applications.
Authors:Christoph Huber, Dino Knoll, Michael Guthe
Abstract:
Visual Quality Inspection plays a crucial role in modern manufacturing environments as it ensures customer safety and satisfaction. The introduction of Computer Vision (CV) has revolutionized visual quality inspection by improving the accuracy and efficiency of defect detection. However, traditional CV models heavily rely on extensive datasets for training, which can be costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. To overcome these challenges, synthetic images have emerged as a promising alternative. They offer a cost-effective solution with automatically generated labels. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for generating synthetic images using domain randomization. We evaluate our approach in three real inspection scenarios and demonstrate that an object detection model trained solely on synthetic data can outperform models trained on real images.
Authors:Qipeng Mei, Dimitri Bulatov, Dorota Iwaszczuk
Abstract:
This study presents a novel approach for roof detail extraction and vectorization using remote sensing images. Unlike previous geometric-primitive-based methods that rely on the detection of corners, our method focuses on edge detection as the primary mechanism for roof reconstruction, while utilizing geometric relationships to define corners and faces. We adapt the YOLOv8 OBB model, originally designed for rotated object detection, to extract roof edges effectively. Our method demonstrates robustness against noise and occlusion, leading to precise vectorized representations of building roofs. Experiments conducted on the SGA and Melville datasets highlight the method's effectiveness. At the raster level, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art foundation segmentation model (SAM), achieving a mIoU between 0.85 and 1 for most samples and an ovIoU close to 0.97. At the vector level, evaluation using the Hausdorff distance, PolyS metric, and our raster-vector-metric demonstrates significant improvements after polygonization, with a close approximation to the reference data. The method successfully handles diverse roof structures and refines edge gaps, even on complex roof structures of new, excluded from training datasets. Our findings underscore the potential of this approach to address challenges in automatic roof structure vectorization, supporting various applications such as urban terrain reconstruction.
Authors:Qizhi Zheng, Zhongze Luo, Meiyan Guo, Xinzhu Wang, Renqimuge Wu, Qiu Meng, Guanghui Dong
Abstract:
Accurate, real-time object detection on resource-constrained hardware is critical for anomaly-behavior monitoring. We introduce HGO-YOLO, a lightweight detector that combines GhostHGNetv2 with an optimized parameter-sharing head (OptiConvDetect) to deliver an outstanding accuracy-efficiency trade-off. By embedding GhostConv into the HGNetv2 backbone with multi-scale residual fusion, the receptive field is enlarged while redundant computation is reduced by 50%. OptiConvDetect shares a partial-convolution layer for the classification and regression branches, cutting detection-head FLOPs by 41% without accuracy loss. On three anomaly datasets (fall, fight, smoke), HGO-YOLO attains 87.4% mAP@0.5 and 81.1% recall at 56 FPS on a single CPU with just 4.3 GFLOPs and 4.6 MB-surpassing YOLOv8n by +3.0% mAP, -51.7% FLOPs, and 1.7* speed. Real-world tests on a Jetson Orin Nano further confirm a stable throughput gain of 42 FPS.
Authors:Marcelo Eduardo Pederiva, José Mario De Martino, Alessandro Zimmer
Abstract:
Comprehending the environment and accurately detecting objects in 3D space are essential for advancing autonomous vehicle technologies. Integrating Camera and LIDAR data has emerged as an effective approach for achieving high accuracy in 3D Object Detection models. However, existing methodologies often rely on heavy, traditional backbones that are computationally demanding. This paper introduces a novel approach that incorporates cutting-edge Deep Learning techniques into the feature extraction process, aiming to create more efficient models without compromising performance. Our model, NextBEV, surpasses established feature extractors like ResNet50 and MobileNetV2. On the KITTI 3D Monocular detection benchmark, NextBEV achieves an accuracy improvement of 2.39%, having less than 10% of the MobileNetV3 parameters. Moreover, we propose changes in LIDAR backbones that decreased the original inference time to 10 ms. Additionally, by fusing these lightweight proposals, we have enhanced the accuracy of the VoxelNet-based model by 2.93% and improved the F1-score of the PointPillar-based model by approximately 20%. Therefore, this work contributes to establishing lightweight and powerful models for individual or fusion techniques, making them more suitable for onboard implementations.
Authors:Shaibal Saha, Lanyu Xu
Abstract:
In recent years, vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as powerful and promising techniques for computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which rely on hierarchical feature extraction, ViTs treat images as sequences of patches and leverage self-attention mechanisms. However, their high computational complexity and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these limitations, extensive research has focused on model compression techniques and hardware-aware acceleration strategies. Nonetheless, a comprehensive review that systematically categorizes these techniques and their trade-offs in accuracy, efficiency, and hardware adaptability for edge deployment remains lacking. This survey bridges this gap by providing a structured analysis of model compression techniques, software tools for inference on edge, and hardware acceleration strategies for ViTs. We discuss their impact on accuracy, efficiency, and hardware adaptability, highlighting key challenges and emerging research directions to advance ViT deployment on edge platforms, including graphics processing units (GPUs), application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The goal is to inspire further research with a contemporary guide on optimizing ViTs for efficient deployment on edge devices.
Authors:Elham Ghelichkhan, Tolga Tasdizen
Abstract:
Chest diseases rank among the most prevalent and dangerous global health issues. Object detection and phrase grounding deep learning models interpret complex radiology data to assist healthcare professionals in diagnosis. Object detection locates abnormalities for classes, while phrase grounding locates abnormalities for textual descriptions. This paper investigates how text enhances abnormality localization in chest X-rays by comparing the performance and explainability of these two tasks. To establish an explainability baseline, we proposed an automatic pipeline to generate image regions for report sentences using radiologists' eye-tracking data. The better performance - mIoU = 0.36 vs. 0.20 - and explainability - Containment ratio 0.48 vs. 0.26 - of the phrase grounding model infers the effectiveness of text in enhancing chest X-ray abnormality localization.
Authors:Shuaiang Rong, Lina He, Salih Furkan Atici, Ahmet Enis Cetin
Abstract:
Power line infrastructure is a key component of the power system, and it is rapidly expanding to meet growing energy demands. Vegetation encroachment is a significant threat to the safe operation of power lines, requiring reliable and timely management to enhance the resilience and reliability of the power network. Integrating smart grid technology, especially Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), provides substantial potential to revolutionize the management of extensive power line networks with advanced imaging techniques. However, processing the vast quantity of images captured by UAV patrols remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces an intelligent real-time monitoring framework for detecting power lines and adjacent vegetation. It is developed based on the deep-learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), You Only Look Once (YOLO), renowned for its high-speed object detection capabilities. Unlike existing deep learning-based methods, this framework enhances accuracy by integrating YOLOv8 with directional filters. They can extract directional features and textures of power lines and their vicinity, generating Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBB) for more precise localization. Additionally, a post-processing algorithm is developed to create a vegetation encroachment metric for power lines, allowing for a quantitative assessment of the surrounding vegetation distribution. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated using a widely used power line dataset.
Authors:Boyang Deng, Yuzhen Lu
Abstract:
Robust weed detection remains a challenging task in precision weeding, requiring not only potent weed detection models but also large-scale, labeled data. However, the labeled data adequate for model training is practically difficult to come by due to the time-consuming, labor-intensive process that requires specialized expertise to recognize plant species. This study introduces semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) methods for leveraging unlabeled data for enhanced weed detection and proposes a new YOLOv8-based SSOD method, i.e., WeedTeacher. An experimental comparison of four SSOD methods, including three existing frameworks (i.e., DenseTeacher, EfficientTeacher, and SmallTeacher) and WeedTeacher, alongside fully supervised baselines, was conducted for weed detection in both in-domain and cross-domain contexts. A new, diverse weed dataset was created as the testbed, comprising a total of 19,931 field images from two differing domains, including 8,435 labeled (basic-domain) images acquired by handholding devices from 2021 to 2023 and 11,496 unlabeled (new-domain) images acquired by a ground-based mobile platform in 2024. The in-domain experiment with models trained using 10% of the labeled, basic-domain images and tested on the remaining 90% of the data, showed that the YOLOv8-basedWeedTeacher achieved the highest accuracy among all four SSOD methods, with an improvement of 2.6% mAP@50 and 3.1% mAP@50:95 over its supervised baseline (i.e., YOLOv8l). In the cross-domain experiment where the unlabeled new-domain data was incorporated, all four SSOD methods, however, resulted in no or limited improvements over their supervised counterparts. Research is needed to address the difficulty of cross-domain data utilization for robust weed detection.
Authors:Devanish N. Kamtam, Joseph B. Shrager, Satya Deepya Malla, Nicole Lin, Juan J. Cardona, Jake J. Kim, Clarence Hu
Abstract:
Introduction: Computer vision (CV) has had a transformative impact in biomedical fields such as radiology, dermatology, and pathology. Its real-world adoption in surgical applications, however, remains limited. We review the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning (DL)-based CV models for segmentation and object detection of anatomical structures in videos obtained during surgical procedures.
Methods: We conducted a scoping review of studies on semantic segmentation and object detection of anatomical structures published between 2014 and 2024 from 3 major databases - PubMed, Embase, and IEEE Xplore. The primary objective was to evaluate the state-of-the-art performance of semantic segmentation in surgical videos. Secondary objectives included examining DL models, progress toward clinical applications, and the specific challenges with segmentation of organs/tissues in surgical videos.
Results: We identified 58 relevant published studies. These focused predominantly on procedures from general surgery [20(34.4%)], colorectal surgery [9(15.5%)], and neurosurgery [8(13.8%)]. Cholecystectomy [14(24.1%)] and low anterior rectal resection [5(8.6%)] were the most common procedures addressed. Semantic segmentation [47(81%)] was the primary CV task. U-Net [14(24.1%)] and DeepLab [13(22.4%)] were the most widely used models. Larger organs such as the liver (Dice score: 0.88) had higher accuracy compared to smaller structures such as nerves (Dice score: 0.49). Models demonstrated real-time inference potential ranging from 5-298 frames-per-second (fps).
Conclusion: This review highlights the significant progress made in DL-based semantic segmentation for surgical videos with real-time applicability, particularly for larger organs. Addressing challenges with smaller structures, data availability, and generalizability remains crucial for future advancements.
Authors:Mujadded Al Rabbani Alif, Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
This paper presents an architectural analysis of YOLOv12, a significant advancement in single-stage, real-time object detection building upon the strengths of its predecessors while introducing key improvements. The model incorporates an optimised backbone (R-ELAN), 7x7 separable convolutions, and FlashAttention-driven area-based attention, improving feature extraction, enhanced efficiency, and robust detections. With multiple model variants, similar to its predecessors, YOLOv12 offers scalable solutions for both latency-sensitive and high-accuracy applications. Experimental results manifest consistent gains in mean average precision (mAP) and inference speed, making YOLOv12 a compelling choice for applications in autonomous systems, security, and real-time analytics. By achieving an optimal balance between computational efficiency and performance, YOLOv12 sets a new benchmark for real-time computer vision, facilitating deployment across diverse hardware platforms, from edge devices to high-performance clusters.
Authors:Liudas Panavas, Tarik Crnovrsanin, Racquel Fygenson, Eamon Conway, Derek Millard, Norbou Buchler, Cody Dunne
Abstract:
Machine learning practitioners often need to compare multiple models to select the best one for their application. However, current methods of comparing models fall short because they rely on aggregate metrics that can be difficult to interpret or do not provide enough information to understand the differences between models. To better support the comparison of models, we propose set visualizations of model outputs to enable easier model-to-model comparison. We outline the requirements for using sets to compare machine learning models and demonstrate how this approach can be applied to various machine learning tasks. We also introduce SetMLVis, an interactive system that utilizes set visualizations to compare object detection models. Our evaluation shows that SetMLVis outperforms traditional visualization techniques in terms of task completion and reduces cognitive workload for users. Supplemental materials can be found at https://osf.io/afksu/?view_only=bb7f259426ad425f81d0518a38c597be.
Authors:Wanke Xia, Ruoxin Peng, Haoqi Chu, Xinlei Zhu, Zhiyu Yang, Lili Yang
Abstract:
Rice is one of the most widely cultivated crops globally and has been developed into numerous varieties. The quality of rice during cultivation is primarily determined by its cultivar and characteristics. Traditionally, rice classification and quality assessment rely on manual visual inspection, a process that is both time-consuming and prone to errors. However, with advancements in machine vision technology, automating rice classification and quality evaluation based on its cultivar and characteristics has become increasingly feasible, enhancing both accuracy and efficiency. This study proposes a real-time evaluation mechanism for comprehensive rice grain assessment, integrating a one-stage object detection approach, a deep convolutional neural network, and traditional machine learning techniques. The proposed framework enables rice variety identification, grain completeness grading, and grain chalkiness evaluation. The rice grain dataset used in this study comprises approximately 20,000 images from six widely cultivated rice varieties in China. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 99.14% in the object detection task and an accuracy of 97.89% in the classification task. Furthermore, the framework attains an average accuracy of 97.56% in grain completeness grading within the same rice variety, contributing to an effective quality evaluation system.
Authors:A. Enes Doruk, Hasan F. Ates
Abstract:
Recent 2D CNN-based domain adaptation approaches struggle with long-range dependencies due to limited receptive fields, making it difficult to adapt to target domains with significant spatial distribution changes. While transformer-based domain adaptation methods better capture distant relationships through self-attention mechanisms that facilitate more effective cross-domain feature alignment, their quadratic computational complexity makes practical deployment challenging for object detection tasks across diverse domains. Inspired by the global modeling and linear computation complexity of the Mamba architecture, we present the first domain-adaptive Mamba-based one-stage object detection model, termed DA-Mamba. Specifically, we combine Mamba's efficient state-space modeling with attention mechanisms to address domain-specific spatial and channel-wise variations. Our design leverages domain-adaptive spatial and channel-wise scanning within the Mamba block to extract highly transferable representations for efficient sequential processing, while cross-attention modules generate long-range, mixed-domain spatial features to enable robust soft alignment across domains. Besides, motivated by the observation that hybrid architectures introduce feature noise in domain adaptation tasks, we propose an entropy-based knowledge distillation framework with margin ReLU, which adaptively refines multi-level representations by suppressing irrelevant activations and aligning uncertainty across source and target domains. Finally, to prevent overfitting caused by the mixed-up features generated through cross-attention mechanisms, we propose entropy-driven gating attention with random perturbations that simultaneously refine target features and enhance model generalization.
Authors:Thea Christoffersen, Annika Tidemand Jensen, Chris Hall, Christofer Meinecke, Stefan Jänicke
Abstract:
Prisoners of Nazi concentration camps created paintings as a means to express their daily life experiences and feelings. Several thousand such paintings exist, but a quantitative analysis of them has not been carried out. We created an extensive dataset of 1,939 Holocaust prisoner artworks, and we employed an object detection framework that found 19,377 objects within these artworks. To support the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the art collection and its objects, we have developed an intuitive and interactive dashboard to promote a deeper engagement with these visual testimonies. The dashboard features various visual interfaces, e.g., a word cloud showing the detected objects and a map of artwork origins, and options for filtering. We presented the interface to domain experts, whose feedback highlights the dashboard's intuitiveness and potential for both quantitative and qualitative analysis while also providing relevant suggestions for improvement. Our project demonstrates the benefit of digital methods such as machine learning and visual analytics for Holocaust remembrance and educational purposes.
Authors:Nhat-Tan Do, Nhi Ngoc-Yen Nguyen, Dieu-Phuong Nguyen, Trong-Hop Do
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) in UAV-based video is challenging due to variations in viewpoint, low resolution, and the presence of small objects. While other research on MOT dedicated to aerial videos primarily focuses on the academic aspect by developing sophisticated algorithms, there is a lack of attention to the practical aspect of these systems. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time MOT framework that integrates Apache Kafka and Apache Spark for efficient and fault-tolerant video stream processing, along with state-of-the-art deep learning models YOLOv8/YOLOv10 and BYTETRACK/BoTSORT for accurate object detection and tracking. Our work highlights the importance of not only the advanced algorithms but also the integration of these methods with scalable and distributed systems. By leveraging these technologies, our system achieves a HOTA of 48.14 and a MOTA of 43.51 on the Visdrone2019-MOT test set while maintaining a real-time processing speed of 28 FPS on a single GPU. Our work demonstrates the potential of big data technologies and deep learning for addressing the challenges of MOT in UAV applications.
Authors:Keiichiro Yamamura, Toru Mitsutake, Hiroki Ishikura, Daiki Kusuhara, Akihiro Yoshida, Katsuki Fujisawa
Abstract:
Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO)-based suppression in object detection is known to have superiority to conventional Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), especially for crowded scenes where NMS possibly suppresses the (partially-) occluded true positives with low confidence scores. Whereas existing QUBO formulations are less likely to miss occluded objects than NMS, there is room for improvement because existing QUBO formulations naively consider confidence scores and pairwise scores based on spatial overlap between predictions. This study proposes new QUBO formulations that aim to distinguish whether the overlap between predictions is due to the occlusion of objects or due to redundancy in prediction, i.e., multiple predictions for a single object. The proposed QUBO formulation integrates two features into the pairwise score of the existing QUBO formulation: i) the appearance feature calculated by the image similarity metric and ii) the product of confidence scores. These features are derived from the hypothesis that redundant predictions share a similar appearance feature and (partially-) occluded objects have low confidence scores, respectively. The proposed methods demonstrate significant advancement over state-of-the-art QUBO-based suppression without a notable increase in runtime, achieving up to 4.54 points improvement in mAP and 9.89 points gain in mAR.
Authors:Huiqun Huang, Cong Chen, Jean-Philippe Monteuuis, Jonathan Petit, Fei Miao
Abstract:
Collaborative Object Detection (COD) and collaborative perception can integrate data or features from various entities, and improve object detection accuracy compared with individual perception. However, adversarial attacks pose a potential threat to the deep learning COD models, and introduce high output uncertainty. With unknown attack models, it becomes even more challenging to improve COD resiliency and quantify the output uncertainty for highly dynamic perception scenes such as autonomous vehicles. In this study, we propose the Trusted Uncertainty Quantification in Collaborative Perception framework (TUQCP). TUQCP leverages both adversarial training and uncertainty quantification techniques to enhance the adversarial robustness of existing COD models. More specifically, TUQCP first adds perturbations to the shared information of randomly selected agents during object detection collaboration by adversarial training. TUQCP then alleviates the impacts of adversarial attacks by providing output uncertainty estimation through learning-based module and uncertainty calibration through conformal prediction. Our framework works for early and intermediate collaboration COD models and single-agent object detection models. We evaluate TUQCP on V2X-Sim, a comprehensive collaborative perception dataset for autonomous driving, and demonstrate a 80.41% improvement in object detection accuracy compared to the baselines under the same adversarial attacks. TUQCP demonstrates the importance of uncertainty quantification to COD under adversarial attacks.
Authors:Vincent Blot, Alexandra Lorenzo de Brionne, Ines Sellami, Olivier Trassard, Isabelle Beau, Charlotte Sonigo, Nicolas J-B. Brunel
Abstract:
Image analysis is a key tool for describing the detailed mechanisms of folliculogenesis, such as evaluating the quantity of mouse Primordial ovarian Follicles (PMF) in the ovarian reserve. The development of high-resolution virtual slide scanners offers the possibility of quantifying, robustifying and accelerating the histopathological procedure. A major challenge for machine learning is to control the precision of predictions while enabling a high recall, in order to provide reproducibility. We use a multiple testing procedure that gives an overperforming way to solve the standard Precision-Recall trade-off that gives probabilistic guarantees on the precision. In addition, we significantly improve the overall performance of the models (increase of F1-score) by selecting the decision threshold using contextual biological information or using an auxiliary model. As it is model-agnostic, this contextual selection procedure paves the way to the development of a strategy that can improve the performance of any model without the need of retraining it.
Authors:Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi, Hannes Leonhard, Andrea Stocco
Abstract:
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) based on deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in autonomous vehicles for critical perception tasks such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and lane recognition. However, these systems are highly sensitive to input variations, such as noise and changes in lighting, which can compromise their effectiveness and potentially lead to safety-critical failures.
This study offers a comprehensive empirical evaluation of image perturbations, techniques commonly used to assess the robustness of DNNs, to validate and improve the robustness and generalization of ADAS perception systems. We first conducted a systematic review of the literature, identifying 38 categories of perturbations. Next, we evaluated their effectiveness in revealing failures in two different ADAS, both at the component and at the system level. Finally, we explored the use of perturbation-based data augmentation and continuous learning strategies to improve ADAS adaptation to new operational design domains. Our results demonstrate that all categories of image perturbations successfully expose robustness issues in ADAS and that the use of dataset augmentation and continuous learning significantly improves ADAS performance in novel, unseen environments.
Authors:Jianrui Shi, Yong Zhao, Zeyang Cui, Xiaoming Shen, Minhang Zeng, Xiaojie Liu
Abstract:
Object detection plays a crucial role in smart video analysis, with applications ranging from autonomous driving and security to smart cities. However, achieving real-time object detection on edge devices presents significant challenges due to their limited computational resources and the high demands of deep neural network (DNN)-based detection models, particularly when processing high-resolution video. Conventional strategies, such as input down-sampling and network up-scaling, often compromise detection accuracy for faster performance or lead to higher inference latency. To address these issues, this paper introduces RE-POSE, a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-Driven Partitioning and Edge Offloading framework designed to optimize the accuracy-latency trade-off in resource-constrained edge environments. Our approach features an RL-Based Dynamic Clustering Algorithm (RL-DCA) that partitions video frames into non-uniform blocks based on object distribution and the computational characteristics of DNNs. Furthermore, a parallel edge offloading scheme is implemented to distribute these blocks across multiple edge servers for concurrent processing. Experimental evaluations show that RE-POSE significantly enhances detection accuracy and reduces inference latency, surpassing existing methods.
Authors:Ali Rohan, Md Junayed Hasan, Andrei Petrovski
Abstract:
Depth estimation (DE) provides spatial information about a scene and enables tasks such as 3D reconstruction, object detection, and scene understanding. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in using deep learning (DL)-based methods for DE. Traditional techniques rely on handcrafted features that often struggle to generalise to diverse scenes and require extensive manual tuning. However, DL models for DE can automatically extract relevant features from input data, adapt to various scene conditions, and generalise well to unseen environments. Numerous DL-based methods have been developed, making it necessary to survey and synthesize the state-of-the-art (SOTA). Previous reviews on DE have mainly focused on either monocular or stereo-based techniques, rather than comprehensively reviewing DE. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic literature review (SLR) that comprehensively focuses on DE. Therefore, this SLR study is being conducted. Initially, electronic databases were searched for relevant publications, resulting in 1284 publications. Using defined exclusion and quality criteria, 128 publications were shortlisted and further filtered to select 59 high-quality primary studies. These studies were analysed to extract data and answer defined research questions. Based on the results, DL methods were developed for mainly three different types of DE: monocular, stereo, and multi-view. 20 publicly available datasets were used to train, test, and evaluate DL models for DE, with KITTI, NYU Depth V2, and Make 3D being the most used datasets. 29 evaluation metrics were used to assess the performance of DE. 35 base models were reported in the primary studies, and the top five most-used base models were ResNet-50, ResNet-18, ResNet-101, U-Net, and VGG-16. Finally, the lack of ground truth data was among the most significant challenges reported by primary studies.
Authors:Ulindu De Silva, Leon Fernando, Kalinga Bandara, Rashmika Nawaratne
Abstract:
The proliferation of video content production has led to vast amounts of data, posing substantial challenges in terms of analysis efficiency and resource utilization. Addressing this issue calls for the development of robust video analysis tools. This paper proposes a novel approach leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to facilitate streamlined video analysis. Our tool aims to deliver tailored textual summaries of user-defined queries, offering a focused insight amidst extensive video datasets. Unlike conventional frameworks that offer generic summaries or limited action recognition, our method harnesses the power of GenAI to distil relevant information, enhancing analysis precision and efficiency. Employing YOLO-V8 for object detection and Gemini for comprehensive video and text analysis, our solution achieves heightened contextual accuracy. By combining YOLO with Gemini, our approach furnishes textual summaries extracted from extensive CCTV footage, enabling users to swiftly navigate and verify pertinent events without the need for exhaustive manual review. The quantitative evaluation revealed a similarity of 72.8%, while the qualitative assessment rated an accuracy of 85%, demonstrating the capability of the proposed method.
Authors:Miaoyang He, Shuyong Gao, Tsui Qin Mok, Weifeng Ge, Wengqiang Zhang
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment prominent regions within a scene. Traditional models rely on manually annotated pseudo labels with precise pixel-level accuracy, which is time-consuming. We developed a low-cost, high-precision annotation method by leveraging large foundation models to address the challenges. Specifically, we use a weakly supervised approach to guide large models in generating pseudo-labels through textual prompts. Since large models do not effectively focus on the salient regions of images, we manually annotate a subset of text to fine-tune the model. Based on this approach, which enables precise and rapid generation of pseudo-labels, we introduce a new dataset, BDS-TR. Compared to the previous DUTS-TR dataset, BDS-TR is more prominent in scale and encompasses a wider variety of categories and scenes. This expansion will enhance our model's applicability across a broader range of scenarios and provide a more comprehensive foundational dataset for future SOD research. Additionally, we present an edge decoder based on dynamic upsampling, which focuses on object edges while gradually recovering image feature resolution. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and also surpasses several existing fully-supervised SOD methods. The code and results will be made available.
Authors:Hieu D. Nguyen, Brandon McHenry, Thanh Nguyen, Harper Zappone, Anthony Thompson, Chau Tran, Anthony Segrest, Luke Tonon
Abstract:
We present an AI pipeline that involves using smart drones equipped with computer vision to obtain a more accurate fruit count and yield estimation of the number of blueberries in a field. The core components are two object-detection models based on the YOLO deep learning architecture: a Bush Model that is able to detect blueberry bushes from images captured at low altitudes and at different angles, and a Berry Model that can detect individual berries that are visible on a bush. Together, both models allow for more accurate crop yield estimation by allowing intelligent control of the drone's position and camera to safely capture side-view images of bushes up close. In addition to providing experimental results for our models, which show good accuracy in terms of precision and recall when captured images are cropped around the foreground center bush, we also describe how to deploy our models to map out blueberry fields using different sampling strategies, and discuss the challenges of annotating very small objects (blueberries) and difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of our models.
Authors:Chenxi Zhang, Qing Zhang, Jiayun Wu, Youwei Pang
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify objects that blend seamlessly into their surroundings. The inherent visual complexity of camouflaged objects, including their low contrast with the background, diverse textures, and subtle appearance variations, often obscures semantic cues, making accurate segmentation highly challenging. Existing methods primarily rely on visual features, which are insufficient to handle the variability and intricacy of camouflaged objects, leading to unstable object perception and ambiguous segmentation results. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a novel task, class-guided camouflaged object detection (CGCOD), which extends traditional COD task by incorporating object-specific class knowledge to enhance detection robustness and accuracy. To facilitate this task, we present a new dataset, CamoClass, comprising real-world camouflaged objects with class annotations. Furthermore, we propose a multi-stage framework, CGNet, which incorporates a plug-and-play class prompt generator and a simple yet effective class-guided detector. This establishes a new paradigm for COD, bridging the gap between contextual understanding and class-guided detection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our flexible framework in improving the performance of proposed and existing detectors by leveraging class-level textual information.
Authors:Hojun Choi, Junsuk Choe, Hyunjung Shim
Abstract:
Existing open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) develops methods for testing unseen categories by aligning object region embeddings with corresponding VLM features. A recent study leverages the idea that VLMs implicitly learn compositional structures of semantic concepts within the image. Instead of using an individual region embedding, it utilizes a bag of region embeddings as a new representation to incorporate compositional structures into the OVD task. However, this approach often fails to capture the contextual concepts of each region, leading to noisy compositional structures. This results in only marginal performance improvements and reduced efficiency. To address this, we propose a novel concept-based alignment method that samples a more powerful and efficient compositional structure. Our approach groups contextually related ``concepts'' into a bag and adjusts the scale of concepts within the bag for more effective embedding alignment. Combined with Faster R-CNN, our method achieves improvements of 2.6 box AP50 and 0.5 mask AP over prior work on novel categories in the open-vocabulary COCO and LVIS benchmarks. Furthermore, our method reduces CLIP computation in FLOPs by 80.3% compared to previous research, significantly enhancing efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on the OVD datasets.
Authors:Chang Liu, Xin Ma, Xiaochen Yang, Yuxiang Zhang, Yanni Dong
Abstract:
Single-modal object detection tasks often experience performance degradation when encountering diverse scenarios. In contrast, multimodal object detection tasks can offer more comprehensive information about object features by integrating data from various modalities. Current multimodal object detection methods generally use various fusion techniques, including conventional neural networks and transformer-based models, to implement feature fusion strategies and achieve complementary information. However, since multimodal images are captured by different sensors, there are often misalignments between them, making direct matching challenging. This misalignment hinders the ability to establish strong correlations for the same object across different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called the CrOss-Mamba interaction and Offset-guided fusion (COMO) framework for multimodal object detection tasks. The COMO framework employs the cross-mamba technique to formulate feature interaction equations, enabling multimodal serialized state computation. This results in interactive fusion outputs while reducing computational overhead and improving efficiency. Additionally, COMO leverages high-level features, which are less affected by misalignment, to facilitate interaction and transfer complementary information between modalities, addressing the positional offset challenges caused by variations in camera angles and capture times. Furthermore, COMO incorporates a global and local scanning mechanism in the cross-mamba module to capture features with local correlation, particularly in remote sensing images. To preserve low-level features, the offset-guided fusion mechanism ensures effective multiscale feature utilization, allowing the construction of a multiscale fusion data cube that enhances detection performance.
Authors:M. Tahasanul Ibrahim, Rifshu Hussain Shaik, Andreas Schwung
Abstract:
This paper investigates the use of Evidence Theory to enhance the training efficiency of object detection models by incorporating uncertainty into the feedback loop. In each training iteration, during the validation phase, Evidence Theory is applied to establish a relationship between ground truth labels and predictions. The Dempster-Shafer rule of combination is used to quantify uncertainty based on the evidence from these predictions. This uncertainty measure is then utilized to weight the feedback loss for the subsequent iteration, allowing the model to adjust its learning dynamically. By experimenting with various uncertainty-weighting strategies, this study aims to determine the most effective method for optimizing feedback to accelerate the training process. The results demonstrate that using uncertainty-based feedback not only reduces training time but can also enhance model performance compared to traditional approaches. This research offers insights into the role of uncertainty in improving machine learning workflows, particularly in object detection, and suggests broader applications for uncertainty-driven training across other AI disciplines.
Authors:Rui Ding, Liang Yong, Sihuan Zhao, Jing Nie, Lihui Chen, Haijun Liu, Xichuan Zhou
Abstract:
Due to its efficiency, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has been widely adopted for compressing Vision Transformers (ViTs). However, when quantized into low-bit representations, there is often a significant performance drop compared to their full-precision counterparts. To address this issue, reconstruction methods have been incorporated into the PTQ framework to improve performance in low-bit quantization settings. Nevertheless, existing related methods predefine the reconstruction granularity and seldom explore the progressive relationships between different reconstruction granularities, which leads to sub-optimal quantization results in ViTs. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Progressive Fine-to-Coarse Reconstruction (PFCR) method for accurate PTQ, which significantly improves the performance of low-bit quantized vision transformers. Specifically, we define multi-head self-attention and multi-layer perceptron modules along with their shortcuts as the finest reconstruction units. After reconstructing these two fine-grained units, we combine them to form coarser blocks and reconstruct them at a coarser granularity level. We iteratively perform this combination and reconstruction process, achieving progressive fine-to-coarse reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a Progressive Optimization Strategy (POS) for PFCR to alleviate the difficulty of training, thereby further enhancing model performance. Experimental results on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the best Top-1 accuracy among state-of-the-art methods, particularly attaining 75.61% for 3-bit quantized ViT-B in PTQ. Besides, quantization results on the COCO dataset reveal the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed method on other computer vision tasks like object detection and instance segmentation.
Authors:Lucas Dal'Col, Miguel Oliveira, VÃtor Santos
Abstract:
Perception and prediction modules are critical components of autonomous driving systems, enabling vehicles to navigate safely through complex environments. The perception module is responsible for perceiving the environment, including static and dynamic objects, while the prediction module is responsible for predicting the future behavior of these objects. These modules are typically divided into three tasks: object detection, object tracking, and motion prediction. Traditionally, these tasks are developed and optimized independently, with outputs passed sequentially from one to the next. However, this approach has significant limitations: computational resources are not shared across tasks, the lack of joint optimization can amplify errors as they propagate throughout the pipeline, and uncertainty is rarely propagated between modules, resulting in significant information loss. To address these challenges, the joint perception and prediction paradigm has emerged, integrating perception and prediction into a unified model through multi-task learning. This strategy not only overcomes the limitations of previous methods, but also enables the three tasks to have direct access to raw sensor data, allowing richer and more nuanced environmental interpretations. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of joint perception and prediction for autonomous driving. We propose a taxonomy that categorizes approaches based on input representation, scene context modeling, and output representation, highlighting their contributions and limitations. Additionally, we present a qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of existing methods. Finally, we discuss future research directions based on identified gaps in the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Qibo Chen, Weizhong Jin, Jianyue Ge, Mengdi Liu, Yuchao Yan, Jian Jiang, Li Yu, Xuanjiang Guo, Shuchang Li, Jianzhong Chen
Abstract:
Recent research on universal object detection aims to introduce language in a SoTA closed-set detector and then generalize the open-set concepts by constructing large-scale (text-region) datasets for training. However, these methods face two main challenges: (i) how to efficiently use the prior information in the prompts to genericise objects and (ii) how to reduce alignment bias in the downstream tasks, both leading to sub-optimal performance in some scenarios beyond pre-training. To address these challenges, we propose a strong universal detection foundation model called CP-DETR, which is competitive in almost all scenarios, with only one pre-training weight. Specifically, we design an efficient prompt visual hybrid encoder that enhances the information interaction between prompt and visual through scale-by-scale and multi-scale fusion modules. Then, the hybrid encoder is facilitated to fully utilize the prompted information by prompt multi-label loss and auxiliary detection head. In addition to text prompts, we have designed two practical concept prompt generation methods, visual prompt and optimized prompt, to extract abstract concepts through concrete visual examples and stably reduce alignment bias in downstream tasks. With these effective designs, CP-DETR demonstrates superior universal detection performance in a broad spectrum of scenarios. For example, our Swin-T backbone model achieves 47.6 zero-shot AP on LVIS, and the Swin-L backbone model achieves 32.2 zero-shot AP on ODinW35. Furthermore, our visual prompt generation method achieves 68.4 AP on COCO val by interactive detection, and the optimized prompt achieves 73.1 fully-shot AP on ODinW13.
Authors:Rishabh Sabharwal, Ram Samarth B B, Parikshit Singh Rathore, Punit Rathore
Abstract:
Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced by earlier works enhance the representation abilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often lead to increased parameter and computation costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a 2% increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms leading modules ECA and GCT in terms of accuracy while achieving a three-fold reduction in GFLOPs.
Authors:Samuel Nordström, Björn Lindquist, George Nikolakopoulos
Abstract:
Proactive collision avoidance measures are imperative in environments where humans and robots coexist. Moreover, the introduction of high quality legged robots into workplaces highlighted the crucial role of a robust, fully autonomous safety solution for robots to be viable in shared spaces or in co-existence with humans. This article establishes for the first time ever an innovative Detect-Track-and-Avoid Architecture (DTAA) to enhance safety and overall mission performance. The proposed novel architectyre has the merit ot integrating object detection using YOLOv8, utilizing Ultralytics embedded object tracking, and state estimation of tracked objects through Kalman filters. Moreover, a novel heuristic clustering is employed to facilitate active avoidance of multiple closely positioned objects with similar velocities, creating sets of unsafe spaces for the Nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) to navigate around. The NMPC identifies the most hazardous unsafe space, considering not only their current positions but also their predicted future locations. In the sequel, the NMPC calculates maneuvers to guide the robot along a path planned by D$^{*}_{+}$ towards its intended destination, while maintaining a safe distance to all identified obstacles. The efficacy of the novelly suggested DTAA framework is being validated by Real-life experiments featuring a Boston Dynamics Spot robot that demonstrates the robot's capability to consistently maintain a safe distance from humans in dynamic subterranean, urban indoor, and outdoor environments.
Authors:Simon Kristoffersson Lind, Rudolph Triebel, Volker Krüger
Abstract:
Modern robotic perception is highly dependent on neural networks. It is well known that neural network-based perception can be unreliable in real-world deployment, especially in difficult imaging conditions. Out-of-distribution detection is commonly proposed as a solution for ensuring reliability in real-world deployment. Previous work has shown that normalizing flow models can be used for out-of-distribution detection to improve reliability of robotic perception tasks. Specifically, camera parameters can be optimized with respect to the likelihood output from a normalizing flow, which allows a perception system to adapt to difficult vision scenarios. With this work we propose to use the absolute gradient values from a normalizing flow, which allows the perception system to optimize local regions rather than the whole image. By setting up a table top picking experiment with exceptionally difficult lighting conditions, we show that our method achieves a 60% higher success rate for an object detection task compared to previous methods.
Authors:Yuan Xue, Qi Zhang, Chuanmin Jia, Shiqi Wang
Abstract:
Image Compression for Machines (ICM) aims to compress images for machine vision tasks rather than human viewing. Current works predominantly concentrate on high-level tasks like object detection and semantic segmentation. However, the quality of original images is usually not guaranteed in the real world, leading to even worse perceptual quality or downstream task performance after compression. Low-level (LL) machine vision models, like image restoration models, can help improve such quality, and thereby their compression requirements should also be considered. In this paper, we propose a pioneered ICM framework for LL machine vision tasks, namely LL-ICM. By jointly optimizing compression and LL tasks, the proposed LL-ICM not only enriches its encoding ability in generalizing to versatile LL tasks but also optimizes the processing ability of down-stream LL task models, achieving mutual adaptation for image codecs and LL task models. Furthermore, we integrate large-scale vision-language models into the LL-ICM framework to generate more universal and distortion-robust feature embeddings for LL vision tasks. Therefore, one LL-ICM codec can generalize to multiple tasks. We establish a solid benchmark to evaluate LL-ICM, which includes extensive objective experiments by using both full and no-reference image quality assessments. Experimental results show that LL-ICM can achieve 22.65% BD-rate reductions over the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Md Abu Yusuf, Md Rezaul Karim Khan, Partha Pratim Saha, Mohammed Mahbubur Rahaman
Abstract:
Considerable study has already been conducted regarding autonomous driving in modern era. An autonomous driving system must be extremely good at detecting objects surrounding the car to ensure safety. In this paper, classification, and estimation of an object's (pedestrian) position (concerning an ego 3D coordinate system) are studied and the distance between the ego vehicle and the object in the context of autonomous driving is measured. To classify the object, faster Region-based Convolution Neural Network (R-CNN) with inception v2 is utilized. First, a network is trained with customized dataset to estimate the reference position of objects as well as the distance from the vehicle. From camera calibration to computing the distance, cutting-edge technologies of computer vision algorithms in a series of processes are applied to generate a 3D reference point of the region of interest. The foremost step in this process is generating a disparity map using the concept of stereo vision.
Authors:Prabhat Kc, Rongping Zeng
Abstract:
The remarkable success of deep learning methods in solving computer vision problems, such as image classification, object detection, scene understanding, image segmentation, etc., has paved the way for their application in biomedical imaging. One such application is in the field of CT image denoising, whereby deep learning methods are proposed to recover denoised images from noisy images acquired at low radiation. Outputs derived from applying deep learning denoising algorithms may appear clean and visually pleasing; however, the underlying diagnostic image quality may not be on par with their normal-dose CT counterparts. In this work, we assessed the image quality of deep learning denoising algorithms by making use of visual perception- and data fidelity-based task-agnostic metrics (like the PSNR and the SSIM) - commonly used in the computer vision - and a task-based detectability assessment (the LCD) - extensively used in the CT imaging. When compared against normal-dose CT images, the deep learning denoisers outperformed low-dose CT based on metrics like the PSNR (by 2.4 to 3.8 dB) and SSIM (by 0.05 to 0.11). However, based on the LCD performance, the detectability using quarter-dose denoised outputs was inferior to that obtained using normal-dose CT scans.
Authors:Wei Zhou, Li Yang, Lei Zhao, Runyu Zhang, Yifan Cui, Hongpu Huang, Kun Qie, Chen Wang
Abstract:
Traffic Surveillance Systems (TSS) have become increasingly crucial in modern intelligent transportation systems, with vision technologies playing a central role for scene perception and understanding. While existing surveys typically focus on isolated aspects of TSS, a comprehensive analytical framework bridging low-level and high-level perception tasks, particularly considering emerging technologies, remains lacking. This paper presents a systematic review of vision technologies in TSS, examining both low-level perception tasks (object detection, classification, and tracking) and high-level perception tasks (parameter estimation, anomaly detection, and behavior understanding). Specifically, we first provide a detailed methodological categorization and comprehensive performance evaluation for each task. Our investigation reveals five fundamental limitations in current TSS: perceptual data degradation in complex scenarios, data-driven learning constraints, semantic understanding gaps, sensing coverage limitations and computational resource demands. To address these challenges, we systematically analyze five categories of current approaches and potential trends: advanced perception enhancement, efficient learning paradigms, knowledge-enhanced understanding, cooperative sensing frameworks and efficient computing frameworks, critically assessing their real-world applicability. Furthermore, we evaluate the transformative potential of foundation models in TSS, which exhibit remarkable zero-shot learning abilities, strong generalization, and sophisticated reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. This review provides a unified analytical framework bridging low-level and high-level perception tasks, systematically analyzes current limitations and solutions, and presents a structured roadmap for integrating emerging technologies, particularly foundation models, to enhance TSS capabilities.
Authors:Christian Homeyer, Christoph Schnörr
Abstract:
Moving object detection and segmentation from a single moving camera is a challenging task, requiring an understanding of recognition, motion and 3D geometry. Combining both recognition and reconstruction boils down to a fusion problem, where appearance and motion features need to be combined for classification and segmentation. In this paper, we present a novel fusion architecture for monocular motion segmentation - M3Former, which leverages the strong performance of transformers for segmentation and multi-modal fusion. As reconstructing motion from monocular video is ill-posed, we systematically analyze different 2D and 3D motion representations for this problem and their importance for segmentation performance. Finally, we analyze the effect of training data and show that diverse datasets are required to achieve SotA performance on Kitti and Davis.
Authors:Junwei Feng, Xueyan Fan, Yuyang Chen, Yi Li
Abstract:
Ensuring construction site safety requires accurate and real-time detection of workers' safety helmet use, despite challenges posed by cluttered environments, densely populated work areas, and hard-to-detect small or overlapping objects caused by building obstructions. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for safety helmet wearing detection, incorporating a dynamic attention within the detection head to enhance multi-scale perception. The mechanism combines feature-level attention for scale adaptation, spatial attention for spatial localization, and channel attention for task-specific insights, improving small object detection without additional computational overhead. Furthermore, a two-way fusion strategy enables bidirectional information flow, refining feature fusion through adaptive multi-scale weighting, and enhancing recognition of occluded targets. Experimental results demonstrate a 1.7% improvement in mAP@[.5:.95] compared to the best baseline while reducing GFLOPs by 11.9% on larger sizes. The proposed method surpasses existing models, providing an efficient and practical solution for real-world construction safety monitoring.
Authors:Craig Iaboni, Pramod Abichandani
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent a biologically inspired paradigm offering an energy-efficient alternative to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs) for Computer Vision (CV) applications. This paper presents a systematic review of datasets, architectures, learning methods, implementation techniques, and evaluation methodologies used in CV-based object detection tasks using SNNs. Based on an analysis of 151 journal and conference articles, the review codifies: 1) the effectiveness of fully connected, convolutional, and recurrent architectures; 2) the performance of direct unsupervised, direct supervised, and indirect learning methods; and 3) the trade-offs in energy consumption, latency, and memory in neuromorphic hardware implementations. An open-source repository along with detailed examples of Python code and resources for building SNN models, event-based data processing, and SNN simulations are provided. Key challenges in SNN training, hardware integration, and future directions for CV applications are also identified.
Authors:Mohamed Benkedadra, Dany Rimez, Tiffanie Godelaine, Natarajan Chidambaram, Hamed Razavi Khosroshahi, Horacio Tellez, Matei Mancas, Benoit Macq, Sidi Ahmed Mahmoudi
Abstract:
Computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation rely on the availability of extensive, accurately annotated datasets. In this work, We present CIA, a modular pipeline, for (1) generating synthetic images for dataset augmentation using Stable Diffusion, (2) filtering out low quality samples using defined quality metrics, (3) forcing the existence of specific patterns in generated images using accurate prompting and ControlNet. In order to show how CIA can be used to search for an optimal augmentation pipeline of training data, we study human object detection in a data constrained scenario, using YOLOv8n on COCO and Flickr30k datasets. We have recorded significant improvement using CIA-generated images, approaching the performances obtained when doubling the amount of real images in the dataset. Our findings suggest that our modular framework can significantly enhance object detection systems, and make it possible for future research to be done on data-constrained scenarios. The framework is available at: github.com/multitel-ai/CIA.
Authors:Ming Zhao, Xin Zhang, André Kaup
Abstract:
Detecting ships in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is challenging due to strong speckle noise, complex surroundings, and varying scales. This paper proposes MLDet, a multitask learning framework for SAR ship detection, consisting of object detection, speckle suppression, and target segmentation tasks. An angle classification loss with aspect ratio weighting is introduced to improve detection accuracy by addressing angular periodicity and object proportions. The speckle suppression task uses a dual-feature fusion attention mechanism to reduce noise and fuse shallow and denoising features, enhancing robustness. The target segmentation task, leveraging a rotated Gaussian-mask, aids the network in extracting target regions from cluttered backgrounds and improves detection efficiency with pixel-level predictions. The Gaussian-mask ensures ship centers have the highest probabilities, gradually decreasing outward under a Gaussian distribution. Additionally, a weighted rotated boxes fusion (WRBF) strategy combines multi-direction anchor predictions, filtering anchors beyond boundaries or with high overlap but low confidence. Extensive experiments on SSDD+ and HRSID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MLDet.
Authors:Christoph Reinders, Radu Berdan, Beril Besbinar, Junji Otsuka, Daisuke Iso
Abstract:
Current deep learning approaches in computer vision primarily focus on RGB data sacrificing information. In contrast, RAW images offer richer representation, which is crucial for precise recognition, particularly in challenging conditions like low-light environments. The resultant demand for comprehensive RAW image datasets contrasts with the labor-intensive process of creating specific datasets for individual sensors. To address this, we propose a novel diffusion-based method for generating RAW images guided by RGB images. Our approach integrates an RGB-guidance module for feature extraction from RGB inputs, then incorporates these features into the reverse diffusion process with RGB-guided residual blocks across various resolutions. This approach yields high-fidelity RAW images, enabling the creation of camera-specific RAW datasets. Our RGB2RAW experiments on four DSLR datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, RAW-Diffusion demonstrates exceptional data efficiency, achieving remarkable performance with as few as 25 training samples or even fewer. We extend our method to create BDD100K-RAW and Cityscapes-RAW datasets, revealing its effectiveness for object detection in RAW imagery, significantly reducing the amount of required RAW images.
Authors:Satoru Koda, Ikuya Morikawa
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) deployed in a cloud often allow users to query models via the APIs. However, these APIs expose the models to model extraction attacks (MEAs). In this attack, the attacker attempts to duplicate the target model by abusing the responses from the API. Backdoor-based DNN watermarking is known as a promising defense against MEAs, wherein the defender injects a backdoor into extracted models via API responses. The backdoor is used as a watermark of the model; if a suspicious model has the watermark (i.e., backdoor), it is verified as an extracted model. This work focuses on object detection (OD) models. Existing backdoor attacks on OD models are not applicable for model watermarking as the defense against MEAs on a realistic threat model. Our proposed approach involves inserting a backdoor into extracted models via APIs by stealthily modifying the bounding-boxes (BBs) of objects detected in queries while keeping the OD capability. In our experiments on three OD datasets, the proposed approach succeeded in identifying the extracted models with 100% accuracy in a wide variety of experimental scenarios.
Authors:Christoph Brosch, Alexander Bouwens, Sebastian Bast, Swen Haab, Rolf Krieger
Abstract:
The enormous progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) enables retail companies to automate their processes and thus to save costs. Thereby, many AI-based automation approaches are based on machine learning and computer vision. The realization of such approaches requires high-quality training data. In this paper, we describe the creation process of an annotated dataset that contains 1,034 images of single food products, taken under studio conditions, annotated with 5 class labels and 30 object detection labels, which can be used for product recognition and classification tasks. We based all images and labels on standards presented by GS1, a global non-profit organisation. The objective of our work is to support the development of machine learning models in the retail domain and to provide a reference process for creating the necessary training data.
Authors:Jingru Yang, Huan Yu, Yang Jingxin, Chentianye Xu, Yin Biao, Yu Sun, Shengfeng He
Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at descriptive tasks within images but often struggle with precise object localization, a critical element for reliable visual interpretation. In contrast, traditional object detection models provide high localization accuracy but frequently generate detections lacking contextual coherence due to limited modeling of inter-object relationships. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce the \textbf{Visual-Linguistic Agent (VLA), a collaborative framework that combines the relational reasoning strengths of MLLMs with the precise localization capabilities of traditional object detectors. In the VLA paradigm, the MLLM serves as a central Linguistic Agent, working collaboratively with specialized Vision Agents for object detection and classification. The Linguistic Agent evaluates and refines detections by reasoning over spatial and contextual relationships among objects, while the classification Vision Agent offers corrective feedback to improve classification accuracy. This collaborative approach enables VLA to significantly enhance both spatial reasoning and object localization, addressing key challenges in multimodal understanding. Extensive evaluations on the COCO dataset demonstrate substantial performance improvements across multiple detection models, highlighting VLA's potential to set a new benchmark in accurate and contextually coherent object detection.
Authors:Nazanin Mahjourian, Vinh Nguyen
Abstract:
Manufacturing requires reliable object detection methods for precise picking and handling of diverse types of manufacturing parts and components. Traditional object detection methods utilize either only 2D images from cameras or 3D data from lidars or similar 3D sensors. However, each of these sensors have weaknesses and limitations. Cameras do not have depth perception and 3D sensors typically do not carry color information. These weaknesses can undermine the reliability and robustness of industrial manufacturing systems. To address these challenges, this work proposes a multi-sensor system combining an red-green-blue (RGB) camera and a 3D point cloud sensor. The two sensors are calibrated for precise alignment of the multimodal data captured from the two hardware devices. A novel multimodal object detection method is developed to process both RGB and depth data. This object detector is based on the Faster R-CNN baseline that was originally designed to process only camera images. The results show that the multimodal model significantly outperforms the depth-only and RGB-only baselines on established object detection metrics. More specifically, the multimodal model improves mAP by 13% and raises Mean Precision by 11.8% in comparison to the RGB-only baseline. Compared to the depth-only baseline, it improves mAP by 78% and raises Mean Precision by 57%. Hence, this method facilitates more reliable and robust object detection in service to smart manufacturing applications.
Authors:Anton Kuznietsov, Dirk Schweickard, Steven Peters
Abstract:
In automated driving, object detection is crucial for perceiving the environment. Although deep learning-based detectors offer high performance, their black-box nature complicates safety assurance. We propose a novel methodology to analyze how object- and environment-related factors affect LiDAR- and camera-based 3D object detectors. A statistical univariate analysis relates each factor to pedestrian detection errors. Additionally, a Random Forest (RF) model predicts errors from meta-information, with Shapley Values interpreting feature importance. By capturing feature dependencies, the RF enables a nuanced analysis of detection errors. Understanding these factors reveals detector performance gaps and supports safer object detection system development.
Authors:Weijie Ma, Jingwei Jiang, Yang Yang, Zehui Chen, Hao Chen
Abstract:
With the attention gained by camera-only 3D object detection in autonomous driving, methods based on Bird-Eye-View (BEV) representation especially derived from the forward view transformation paradigm, i.e., lift-splat-shoot (LSS), have recently seen significant progress. The BEV representation formulated by the frustum based on depth distribution prediction is ideal for learning the road structure and scene layout from multi-view images. However, to retain computational efficiency, the compressed BEV representation such as in resolution and axis is inevitably weak in retaining the individual geometric details, undermining the methodological generality and applicability. With this in mind, to compensate for the missing details and utilize multi-view geometry constraints, we propose LSSInst, a two-stage object detector incorporating BEV and instance representations in tandem. The proposed detector exploits fine-grained pixel-level features that can be flexibly integrated into existing LSS-based BEV networks. Having said that, due to the inherent gap between two representation spaces, we design the instance adaptor for the BEV-to-instance semantic coherence rather than pass the proposal naively. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our proposed framework is of excellent generalization ability and performance, which boosts the performances of modern LSS-based BEV perception methods without bells and whistles and outperforms current LSS-based state-of-the-art works on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark.
Authors:Md Junayed Hasan, Somasundar Kannan, Ali Rohan, Mohd Asif Shah
Abstract:
This study explores the potential of the Ping 360 sonar device, primarily used for navigation, in detecting complex underwater obstacles. The key motivation behind this research is the device's affordability and open-source nature, offering a cost-effective alternative to more expensive imaging sonar systems. The investigation focuses on understanding the behaviour of the Ping 360 in controlled environments and assessing its suitability for object detection, particularly in scenarios where human operators are unavailable for inspecting offshore structures in shallow waters. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we examined the effects of surface reflections and object shadows in shallow underwater environments. Additionally, we developed a manually annotated sonar image dataset to train a U-Net segmentation model. Our findings indicate that while the Ping 360 sonar demonstrates potential in simpler settings, its performance is limited in more cluttered or reflective environments unless extensive data pre-processing and annotation are applied. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the Ping 360's capabilities for complex object detection. By investigating the feasibility of low-cost sonar devices, this research provides valuable insights into their limitations and potential for future AI-based interpretation, marking a unique contribution to the field.
Authors:Björn Kischelewski, Gregory Cathcart, David Wahl, Benjamin Guedj
Abstract:
The detection and clearance of explosive ordnance (EO) continues to be a predominantly manual and high-risk process that can benefit from advances in technology to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) for EO detection in clearance operations has grown significantly in recent years. However, this research spans a wide range of fields, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of current trends and developments. Therefore, this article provides a literature review of academic research on AI for EO detection in clearance operations. It finds that research can be grouped into two main streams: AI for EO object detection and AI for EO risk prediction, with the latter being much less studied than the former. From the literature review, we develop three opportunities for future research. These include a call for renewed efforts in the use of AI for EO risk prediction, the combination of different AI systems and data sources, and novel approaches to improve EO risk prediction performance, such as pattern-based predictions. Finally, we provide a perspective on the future of AI for EO detection in clearance operations. We emphasize the role of traditional machine learning (ML) for this task, the need to dynamically incorporate expert knowledge into the models, and the importance of effectively integrating AI systems with real-world operations.
Authors:Yun Zhao, Zhan Gong, Peiru Zheng, Hong Zhu, Shaohua Wu
Abstract:
More and more research works fuse the LiDAR and camera information to improve the 3D object detection of the autonomous driving system. Recently, a simple yet effective fusion framework has achieved an excellent detection performance, fusing the LiDAR and camera features in a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) space. In this paper, we propose a LiDAR-camera fusion framework, named SimpleBEV, for accurate 3D object detection, which follows the BEV-based fusion framework and improves the camera and LiDAR encoders, respectively. Specifically, we perform the camera-based depth estimation using a cascade network and rectify the depth results with the depth information derived from the LiDAR points. Meanwhile, an auxiliary branch that implements the 3D object detection using only the camera-BEV features is introduced to exploit the camera information during the training phase. Besides, we improve the LiDAR feature extractor by fusing the multi-scaled sparse convolutional features. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our method achieves 77.6\% NDS accuracy on the nuScenes dataset, showcasing superior performance in the 3D object detection track.
Authors:Anthony Palladino, Dana Gajewski, Abigail Aronica, Patryk Deptula, Alexander Hamme, Seiyoung C. Lee, Jeff Muri, Todd Nelling, Michael A. Riley, Brian Wong, Margaret Duff
Abstract:
We present a novel Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system using open-vocabulary object detection and classification models. A primary advantage of this approach is that target classes can be defined just before runtime by a non-technical end user, using either a few natural language text descriptions of the target, or a few image exemplars, or both. Nuances in the desired targets can be expressed in natural language, which is useful for unique targets with little or no training data. We also implemented a novel combination of several techniques to improve performance, such as leveraging the additional information in the sequence of overlapping frames to perform tubelet identification (i.e., sequential bounding box matching), bounding box re-scoring, and tubelet linking. Additionally, we developed a technique to visualize the aggregate output of many overlapping frames as a mosaic of the area scanned during the aerial surveillance or reconnaissance, and a kernel density estimate (or heatmap) of the detected targets. We initially applied this ATR system to the use case of detecting and clearing unexploded ordinance on airfield runways and we are currently extending our research to other real-world applications.
Authors:Muhammad Waqas Ashraf, Ali Hassan, Imad Ali Shah
Abstract:
This paper introduces a real-time Vehicle Collision Avoidance System (V-CAS) designed to enhance vehicle safety through adaptive braking based on environmental perception. V-CAS leverages the advanced vision-based transformer model RT-DETR, DeepSORT tracking, speed estimation, brake light detection, and an adaptive braking mechanism. It computes a composite collision risk score based on vehicles' relative accelerations, distances, and detected braking actions, using brake light signals and trajectory data from multiple camera streams to improve scene perception. Implemented on the Jetson Orin Nano, V-CAS enables real-time collision risk assessment and proactive mitigation through adaptive braking. A comprehensive training process was conducted on various datasets for comparative analysis, followed by fine-tuning the selected object detection model using transfer learning. The system's effectiveness was rigorously evaluated on the Car Crash Dataset (CCD) from YouTube and through real-time experiments, achieving over 98% accuracy with an average proactive alert time of 1.13 seconds. Results indicate significant improvements in object detection and tracking, enhancing collision avoidance compared to traditional single-camera methods. This research demonstrates the potential of low-cost, multi-camera embedded vision transformer systems to advance automotive safety through enhanced environmental perception and proactive collision avoidance mechanisms.
Authors:Brody McNutt, Libby Zhang, Angus Carey-Douglas, Fritz Vollrath, Frank Pope, Leandra Brickson
Abstract:
This research represents a pioneering application of automated pose estimation from drone data to study elephant behavior in the wild, utilizing video footage captured from Samburu National Reserve, Kenya. The study evaluates two pose estimation workflows: DeepLabCut, known for its application in laboratory settings and emerging wildlife fieldwork, and YOLO-NAS-Pose, a newly released pose estimation model not previously applied to wildlife behavioral studies. These models are trained to analyze elephant herd behavior, focusing on low-resolution ($\sim$50 pixels) subjects to detect key points such as the head, spine, and ears of multiple elephants within a frame. Both workflows demonstrated acceptable quality of pose estimation on the test set, facilitating the automated detection of basic behaviors crucial for studying elephant herd dynamics. For the metrics selected for pose estimation evaluation on the test set -- root mean square error (RMSE), percentage of correct keypoints (PCK), and object keypoint similarity (OKS) -- the YOLO-NAS-Pose workflow outperformed DeepLabCut. Additionally, YOLO-NAS-Pose exceeded DeepLabCut in object detection evaluation. This approach introduces a novel method for wildlife behavioral research, including the burgeoning field of wildlife drone monitoring, with significant implications for wildlife conservation.
Authors:Philipe Dias, Aristeidis Tsaris, Jordan Bowman, Abhishek Potnis, Jacob Arndt, H. Lexie Yang, Dalton Lunga
Abstract:
While the pretraining of Foundation Models (FMs) for remote sensing (RS) imagery is on the rise, models remain restricted to a few hundred million parameters. Scaling models to billions of parameters has been shown to yield unprecedented benefits including emergent abilities, but requires data scaling and computing resources typically not available outside industry R&D labs. In this work, we pair high-performance computing resources including Frontier supercomputer, America's first exascale system, and high-resolution optical RS data to pretrain billion-scale FMs. Our study assesses performance of different pretrained variants of vision Transformers across image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection benchmarks, which highlight the importance of data scaling for effective model scaling. Moreover, we discuss construction of a novel TIU pretraining dataset, model initialization, with data and pretrained models intended for public release. By discussing technical challenges and details often lacking in the related literature, this work is intended to offer best practices to the geospatial community toward efficient training and benchmarking of larger FMs.
Authors:XiaoJun Tang, Jingru Wang, Zeyu Shangguan, Darun Tang, Yuyu Liu
Abstract:
The Unified Object Detection (UOD) task aims to achieve object detection of all merged categories through training on multiple datasets, and is of great significance in comprehensive object detection scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a thorough analysis of the cross datasets missing annotations issue, and propose an Online Pseudo-Label Unified Object Detection scheme. Our method uses a periodically updated teacher model to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabelled objects in each sub-dataset. This periodical update strategy could better ensure that the accuracy of the teacher model reaches the local maxima and maximized the quality of pseudo-labels. In addition, we survey the influence of overlapped region proposals on the accuracy of box regression. We propose a category specific box regression and a pseudo-label RPN head to improve the recall rate of the Region Proposal Network (PRN). Our experimental results on common used benchmarks (\eg COCO, Object365 and OpenImages) indicates that our online pseudo-label UOD method achieves higher accuracy than existing SOTA methods.
Authors:Rujiao Yan, Linda Schubert, Alexander Kamm, Matthias Komar, Matthias Schreier
Abstract:
This paper describes a method to detect generic dynamic objects for automated driving. First, a LiDAR-based dynamic grid is generated online. Second, a deep learning-based detector is trained on the dynamic grid to infer the presence of dynamic objects of any type, which is a prerequisite for safe automated vehicles in arbitrary, edge-case scenarios. The Rotation-equivariant Detector (ReDet) - originally designed for oriented object detection on aerial images - was chosen due to its high detection performance. Experiments are conducted based on real sensor data and the benefits in comparison to classic dynamic cell clustering strategies are highlighted. The false positive object detection rate is strongly reduced by the proposed approach.
Authors:Selina Khan, Nanne van Noord
Abstract:
Many artwork collections contain textual attributes that provide rich and contextualised descriptions of artworks. Visual grounding offers the potential for localising subjects within these descriptions on images, however, existing approaches are trained on natural images and generalise poorly to art. In this paper, we present CIGAr (Context-Infused GroundingDINO for Art), a visual grounding approach which utilises the artwork descriptions during training as context, thereby enabling visual grounding on art. In addition, we present a new dataset, Ukiyo-eVG, with manually annotated phrase-grounding annotations, and we set a new state-of-the-art for object detection on two artwork datasets.
Authors:Zhijie Yan, Shufei Li, Zuoxu Wang, Lixiu Wu, Han Wang, Jun Zhu, Lijiang Chen, Jihong Liu
Abstract:
Enabling mobile robots to perform long-term tasks in dynamic real-world environments is a formidable challenge, especially when the environment changes frequently due to human-robot interactions or the robot's own actions. Traditional methods typically assume static scenes, which limits their applicability in the continuously changing real world. To overcome these limitations, we present DovSG, a novel mobile manipulation framework that leverages dynamic open-vocabulary 3D scene graphs and a language-guided task planning module for long-term task execution. DovSG takes RGB-D sequences as input and utilizes vision-language models (VLMs) for object detection to obtain high-level object semantic features. Based on the segmented objects, a structured 3D scene graph is generated for low-level spatial relationships. Furthermore, an efficient mechanism for locally updating the scene graph, allows the robot to adjust parts of the graph dynamically during interactions without the need for full scene reconstruction. This mechanism is particularly valuable in dynamic environments, enabling the robot to continually adapt to scene changes and effectively support the execution of long-term tasks. We validated our system in real-world environments with varying degrees of manual modifications, demonstrating its effectiveness and superior performance in long-term tasks. Our project page is available at: https://bjhyzj.github.io/dovsg-web.
Authors:Hui Ye, Rajshekhar Sunderraman, Shihao Ji
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with cameras, are employed in numerous applications, including aerial photography, surveillance, and agriculture. In these applications, robust object detection and tracking are essential for the effective deployment of UAVs. However, existing benchmarks for UAV applications are mainly designed for traditional 2D perception tasks, restricting the development of real-world applications that require a 3D understanding of the environment. Furthermore, despite recent advancements in single-UAV perception, limited views of a single UAV platform significantly constrain its perception capabilities over long distances or in occluded areas. To address these challenges, we introduce UAV3D, a benchmark designed to advance research in both 3D and collaborative 3D perception tasks with UAVs. UAV3D comprises 1,000 scenes, each of which has 20 frames with fully annotated 3D bounding boxes on vehicles. We provide the benchmark for four 3D perception tasks: single-UAV 3D object detection, single-UAV object tracking, collaborative-UAV 3D object detection, and collaborative-UAV object tracking. Our dataset and code are available at https://huiyegit.github.io/UAV3D_Benchmark/.
Authors:Sergio Fernandez-Testa, Edwin Salcedo
Abstract:
Low employment rates in Latin America have contributed to a substantial rise in crime, prompting the emergence of new criminal tactics. For instance, "express robbery" has become a common crime committed by armed thieves, in which they drive motorcycles and assault people in public in a matter of seconds. Recent research has approached the problem by embedding weapon detectors in surveillance cameras; however, these systems are prone to false positives if no counterpart confirms the event. In light of this, we present a distributed IoT system that integrates a computer vision pipeline and object detection capabilities into multiple end-devices, constantly monitoring for the presence of firearms and sharp weapons. Once a weapon is detected, the end-device sends a series of frames to a cloud server that implements a 3DCNN to classify the scene as either a robbery or a normal situation, thus minimizing false positives. The deep learning process to train and deploy weapon detection models uses a custom dataset with 16,799 images of firearms and sharp weapons. The best-performing model, YOLOv5s, optimized using TensorRT, achieved a final mAP of 0.87 running at 4.43 FPS. Additionally, the 3DCNN demonstrated 0.88 accuracy in detecting abnormal situations. Extensive experiments validate that the proposed system significantly reduces false positives while autonomously monitoring multiple locations in real-time.
Authors:Mısra Yavuz, Fatma Güney
Abstract:
Object detection methods trained on a fixed set of known classes struggle to detect objects of unknown classes in the open-world setting. Current fixes involve adding approximate supervision with pseudo-labels corresponding to candidate locations of objects, typically obtained in a class-agnostic manner. While previous approaches mainly rely on the appearance of objects, we find that geometric cues improve unknown recall. Although additional supervision from pseudo-labels helps to detect unknown objects, it also introduces confusion for known classes. We observed a notable decline in the model's performance for detecting known objects in the presence of noisy pseudo-labels. Drawing inspiration from studies on human cognition, we propose to group known classes into superclasses. By identifying similarities between classes within a superclass, we can identify unknown classes through an odd-one-out scoring mechanism. Our experiments on open-world detection benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in unknown recall, consistently across all tasks. Crucially, we achieve this without compromising known performance, thanks to better partitioning of the feature space with superclasses.
Authors:Sha Guo, Zhuo Chen, Yang Zhao, Ning Zhang, Xiaotong Li, Lingyu Duan
Abstract:
Traditional image codecs emphasize signal fidelity and human perception, often at the expense of machine vision tasks. Deep learning methods have demonstrated promising coding performance by utilizing rich semantic embeddings optimized for both human and machine vision. However, these compact embeddings struggle to capture fine details such as contours and textures, resulting in imperfect reconstructions. Furthermore, existing learning-based codecs lack scalability. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a content-adaptive diffusion model for scalable image compression. The proposed method encodes fine textures through a diffusion process, enhancing perceptual quality while preserving essential features for machine vision tasks. The approach employs a Markov palette diffusion model combined with widely used feature extractors and image generators, enabling efficient data compression. By leveraging collaborative texture-semantic feature extraction and pseudo-label generation, the method accurately captures texture information. A content-adaptive Markov palette diffusion model is then applied to represent both low-level textures and high-level semantic content in a scalable manner. This framework offers flexible control over compression ratios by selecting intermediate diffusion states, eliminating the need for retraining deep learning models at different operating points. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in both image reconstruction and downstream machine vision tasks such as object detection, segmentation, and facial landmark detection, achieving superior perceptual quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Gustav Wagner Zakarias, Lars Kai Hansen, Zheng-Hua Tan
Abstract:
Models initialized from self-supervised pretraining may suffer from poor alignment with downstream tasks, reducing the extent to which subsequent fine-tuning can adapt pretrained features toward downstream objectives. To mitigate this, we introduce BiSSL, a novel bilevel training framework that enhances the alignment of self-supervised pretrained models with downstream tasks prior to fine-tuning. BiSSL acts as an intermediate training stage conducted after conventional self-supervised pretraining and is tasked with solving a bilevel optimization problem that incorporates the pretext and downstream training objectives in its lower- and upper-level objectives, respectively. This approach explicitly models the interdependence between the pretraining and fine-tuning stages within the conventional self-supervised learning pipeline, facilitating enhanced information sharing between them that ultimately leads to a model initialization better aligned with the downstream task. We propose a general training algorithm for BiSSL that is compatible with a broad range of pretext and downstream tasks. Using SimCLR and Bootstrap Your Own Latent to pretrain ResNet-50 backbones on the ImageNet dataset, we demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly improves accuracy on the vast majority of 12 downstream image classification datasets, as well as on object detection. Exploratory analyses alongside investigative experiments further provide compelling evidence that BiSSL enhances downstream alignment.
Authors:Jiyun Jang, Mincheol Chang, Jongwon Park, Jinkyu Kim
Abstract:
LiDAR-based 3D object detectors have been largely utilized in various applications, including autonomous vehicles or mobile robots. However, LiDAR-based detectors often fail to adapt well to target domains with different sensor configurations (e.g., types of sensors, spatial resolution, or FOVs) and location shifts. Collecting and annotating datasets in a new setup is commonly required to reduce such gaps, but it is often expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies suggest that pre-trained backbones can be learned in a self-supervised manner with large-scale unlabeled LiDAR frames. However, despite their expressive representations, they remain challenging to generalize well without substantial amounts of data from the target domain. Thus, we propose a novel method, called Domain Adaptive Distill-Tuning (DADT), to adapt a pre-trained model with limited target data (approximately 100 LiDAR frames), retaining its representation power and preventing it from overfitting. Specifically, we use regularizers to align object-level and context-level representations between the pre-trained and finetuned models in a teacher-student architecture. Our experiments with driving benchmarks, i.e., Waymo Open dataset and KITTI, confirm that our method effectively finetunes a pre-trained model, achieving significant gains in accuracy.
Authors:Siavash H. Khajavi, Mehdi Moshtaghi, Dikai Yu, Zixuan Liu, Kary Främling, Jan Holmström
Abstract:
The fuzzy object detection is a challenging field of research in computer vision (CV). Distinguishing between fuzzy and non-fuzzy object detection in CV is important. Fuzzy objects such as fire, smoke, mist, and steam present significantly greater complexities in terms of visual features, blurred edges, varying shapes, opacity, and volume compared to non-fuzzy objects such as trees and cars. Collection of a balanced and diverse dataset and accurate annotation is crucial to achieve better ML models for fuzzy objects, however, the task of collection and annotation is still highly manual. In this research, we propose and leverage an alternative method of generating and automatically annotating fully synthetic fire images based on 3D models for training an object detection model. Moreover, the performance, and efficiency of the trained ML models on synthetic images is compared with ML models trained on real imagery and mixed imagery. Findings proved the effectiveness of the synthetic data for fire detection, while the performance improves as the test dataset covers a broader spectrum of real fires. Our findings illustrates that when synthetic imagery and real imagery is utilized in a mixed training set the resulting ML model outperforms models trained on real imagery as well as models trained on synthetic imagery for detection of a broad spectrum of fires. The proposed method for automating the annotation of synthetic fuzzy objects imagery carries substantial implications for reducing both time and cost in creating computer vision models specifically tailored for detecting fuzzy objects.
Authors:Pengxi Zeng, Alberto Presta, Jonah Reinis, Dinesh Bharadia, Hang Qiu, Pamela Cosman
Abstract:
Efficient point cloud (PC) compression is crucial for streaming applications, such as augmented reality and cooperative perception. Classic PC compression techniques encode all the points in a frame. Tailoring compression towards perception tasks at the receiver side, we ask the question, "Can we remove the ground points during transmission without sacrificing the detection performance?" Our study reveals a strong dependency on the ground from state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D object detection models, especially on those points below and around the object. In this work, we propose a lightweight obstacle-aware Pillar-based Ground Removal (PGR) algorithm. PGR filters out ground points that do not provide context to object recognition, significantly improving compression ratio without sacrificing the receiver side perception performance. Not using heavy object detection or semantic segmentation models, PGR is light-weight, highly parallelizable, and effective. Our evaluations on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset show that SOTA detection models work equally well with PGR removing 20-30% of the points, with a speeding of 86 FPS.
Authors:Shimon Hori, Kazuki Omi, Toru Tamaki
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a method that extends the query-based object detection model, DETR, to spatio-temporal action detection, which requires maintaining temporal consistency in videos. Our proposed method applies DETR to each frame and uses feature shift to incorporate temporal information. However, DETR's object queries in each frame may correspond to different objects, making a simple feature shift ineffective. To overcome this issue, we propose query matching across different frames, ensuring that queries for the same object are matched and used for the feature shift. Experimental results show that performance on the JHMDB21 dataset improves significantly when query features are shifted using the proposed query matching.
Authors:Daghash K. Alqahtani, Aamir Cheema, Adel N. Toosi
Abstract:
Modern applications, such as autonomous vehicles, require deploying deep learning algorithms on resource-constrained edge devices for real-time image and video processing. However, there is limited understanding of the efficiency and performance of various object detection models on these devices. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection models, including YOLOv8 (Nano, Small, Medium), EfficientDet Lite (Lite0, Lite1, Lite2), and SSD (SSD MobileNet V1, SSDLite MobileDet). We deployed these models on popular edge devices like the Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5 with/without TPU accelerators, and Jetson Orin Nano, collecting key performance metrics such as energy consumption, inference time, and Mean Average Precision (mAP). Our findings highlight that lower mAP models such as SSD MobileNet V1 are more energy-efficient and faster in inference, whereas higher mAP models like YOLOv8 Medium generally consume more energy and have slower inference, though with exceptions when accelerators like TPUs are used. Among the edge devices, Jetson Orin Nano stands out as the fastest and most energy-efficient option for request handling, despite having the highest idle energy consumption. These results emphasize the need to balance accuracy, speed, and energy efficiency when deploying deep learning models on edge devices, offering valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers selecting models and devices for their applications.
Authors:Youngwan Jin, Incheol Park, Hanbin Song, Hyeongjin Ju, Yagiz Nalcakan, Shiho Kim
Abstract:
This paper proposes Pix2Next, a novel image-to-image translation framework designed to address the challenge of generating high-quality Near-Infrared (NIR) images from RGB inputs. Our approach leverages a state-of-the-art Vision Foundation Model (VFM) within an encoder-decoder architecture, incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to enhance feature integration. This design captures detailed global representations and preserves essential spectral characteristics, treating RGB-to-NIR translation as more than a simple domain transfer problem. A multi-scale PatchGAN discriminator ensures realistic image generation at various detail levels, while carefully designed loss functions couple global context understanding with local feature preservation. We performed experiments on the RANUS dataset to demonstrate Pix2Next's advantages in quantitative metrics and visual quality, improving the FID score by 34.81% compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of Pix2Next by showing improved performance on a downstream object detection task using generated NIR data to augment limited real NIR datasets. The proposed approach enables the scaling up of NIR datasets without additional data acquisition or annotation efforts, potentially accelerating advancements in NIR-based computer vision applications.
Authors:Hadi Rezvani, Navid Zarrabi, Ishaan Mehta, Christopher Kolios, Hussein Ali Jaafar, Cheng-Hao Kao, Sajad Saeedi, Nariman Yousefi
Abstract:
Plastic pollution presents an escalating global issue, impacting health and environmental systems, with micro- and nanoplastics found across mediums from potable water to air. Traditional methods for studying these contaminants are labor-intensive and time-consuming, necessitating a shift towards more efficient technologies. In response, this paper introduces micro- and nanoplastics (MiNa), a novel and open-source dataset engineered for the automatic detection and classification of micro and nanoplastics using object detection algorithms. The dataset, comprising scanning electron microscopy images simulated under realistic aquatic conditions, categorizes plastics by polymer type across a broad size spectrum. We demonstrate the application of state-of-the-art detection algorithms on MiNa, assessing their effectiveness and identifying the unique challenges and potential of each method. The dataset not only fills a critical gap in available resources for microplastic research but also provides a robust foundation for future advancements in the field.
Authors:Sebastian Dille, Ari Blondal, Sylvain Paris, YaÄız Aksoy
Abstract:
Class-agnostic image segmentation is a crucial component in automating image editing workflows, especially in contexts where object selection traditionally involves interactive tools. Existing methods in the literature often adhere to top-down formulations, following the paradigm of class-based approaches, where object detection precedes per-object segmentation. In this work, we present a novel bottom-up formulation for addressing the class-agnostic segmentation problem. We supervise our network directly on the projective sphere of its feature space, employing losses inspired by metric learning literature as well as losses defined in a novel segmentation-space representation. The segmentation results are obtained through a straightforward mean-shift clustering of the estimated features. Our bottom-up formulation exhibits exceptional generalization capability, even when trained on datasets designed for class-based segmentation. We further showcase the effectiveness of our generic approach by addressing the challenging task of cell and nucleus segmentation. We believe that our bottom-up formulation will offer valuable insights into diverse segmentation challenges in the literature.
Authors:Gracjan Góral, Alicja Ziarko, Michal Nauman, Maciej WoÅczyk
Abstract:
Visual perspective-taking (VPT), the ability to understand the viewpoint of another person, enables individuals to anticipate the actions of other people. For instance, a driver can avoid accidents by assessing what pedestrians see. Humans typically develop this skill in early childhood, but it remains unclear whether the recently emerging Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess such capability. Furthermore, as these models are increasingly deployed in the real world, understanding how they perform nuanced tasks like VPT becomes essential. In this paper, we introduce two manually curated datasets, Isle-Bricks and Isle-Dots for testing VPT skills, and we use it to evaluate 12 commonly used VLMs. Across all models, we observe a significant performance drop when perspective-taking is required. Additionally, we find performance in object detection tasks is poorly correlated with performance on VPT tasks, suggesting that the existing benchmarks might not be sufficient to understand this problem. The code and the dataset will be available at https://sites.google.com/view/perspective-taking
Authors:Roni Blushtein-Livnon, Tal Svoray, Michael Dorman
Abstract:
This study introduces a laboratory experiment designed to assess the influence of annotation strategies, levels of imbalanced data, and prior experience, on the performance of human annotators. The experiment focuses on labeling aerial imagery, using ArcGIS Pro tools, to detect and segment small-scale photovoltaic solar panels, selected as a case study for rectangular objects. The experiment is conducted using images with a pixel size of 0.15\textbf{$m$}, involving both expert and non-expert participants, across different setup strategies and target-background ratio datasets. Our findings indicate that human annotators generally perform more effectively in object detection than in segmentation tasks. A marked tendency to commit more Type II errors (False Negatives, i.e., undetected objects) than Type I errors (False Positives, i.e. falsely detecting objects that do not exist) was observed across all experimental setups and conditions, suggesting a consistent bias in detection and segmentation processes. Performance was better in tasks with higher target-background ratios (i.e., more objects per unit area). Prior experience did not significantly impact performance and may, in some cases, even lead to overestimation in segmentation. These results provide evidence that human annotators are relatively cautious and tend to identify objects only when they are confident about them, prioritizing underestimation over overestimation. Annotators' performance is also influenced by object scarcity, showing a decline in areas with extremely imbalanced datasets and a low ratio of target-to-background. These findings may enhance annotation strategies for remote sensing research while efficient human annotators are crucial in an era characterized by growing demands for high-quality training data to improve segmentation and detection models.
Authors:Pranav Rama, Madison Threadgill, Andreas Gerstlauer
Abstract:
The training of deep and/or convolutional neural networks (DNNs/CNNs) is traditionally done on servers with powerful CPUs and GPUs. Recent efforts have emerged to localize machine learning tasks fully on the edge. This brings advantages in reduced latency and increased privacy, but necessitates working with resource-constrained devices. Approaches for inference and training in mobile and edge devices based on pruning, quantization or incremental and transfer learning require trading off accuracy. Several works have explored distributing inference operations on mobile and edge clusters instead. However, there is limited literature on distributed training on the edge. Existing approaches all require a central, potentially powerful edge or cloud server for coordination or offloading. In this paper, we describe an approach for distributed CNN training exclusively on mobile and edge devices. Our approach is beneficial for the initial CNN layers that are feature map dominated. It is based on partitioning forward inference and back-propagation operations among devices through tiling and fusing to maximize locality and expose communication and memory-aware parallelism. We also introduce the concept of layer grouping to further fine-tune performance based on computation and communication trade-off. Results show that for a cluster of 2-6 quad-core Raspberry Pi3 devices, training of an object-detection CNN provides a 2x-15x speedup with respect to a single core and up to 8x reduction in memory usage per device, all without sacrificing accuracy. Grouping offers up to 1.5x speedup depending on the reference profile and batch size.
Authors:Minh-Duc Vu, Zuheng Ming, Fangchen Feng, Bissmella Bahaduri, Anissa Mokraoui
Abstract:
Object detection in remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in various Earth observation applications. However, unlike object detection in natural scene images, this task is particularly challenging due to the abundance of small, often barely visible objects across diverse terrains. To address these challenges, multimodal learning can be used to integrate features from different data modalities, thereby improving detection accuracy. Nonetheless, the performance of multimodal learning is often constrained by the limited size of labeled datasets. In this paper, we propose to use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) as a pre-training technique, leveraging self-supervised learning on unlabeled data to enhance detection performance. However, conventional MIM such as MAE which uses masked tokens without any contextual information, struggles to capture the fine-grained details due to a lack of interactions with other parts of image. To address this, we propose a new interactive MIM method that can establish interactions between different tokens, which is particularly beneficial for object detection in remote sensing. The extensive ablation studies and evluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Layth Hamad, Muhammad Asif Khan, Amr Mohamed
Abstract:
Autonomous robots use simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for efficient and safe navigation in various environments. LiDAR sensors are integral in these systems for object identification and localization. However, LiDAR systems though effective in detecting solid objects (e.g., trash bin, bottle, etc.), encounter limitations in identifying semitransparent or non-tangible objects (e.g., fire, smoke, steam, etc.) due to poor reflecting characteristics. Additionally, LiDAR also fails to detect features such as navigation signs and often struggles to detect certain hazardous materials that lack a distinct surface for effective laser reflection. In this paper, we propose a highly accurate stereo-vision approach to complement LiDAR in autonomous robots. The system employs advanced stereo vision-based object detection to detect both tangible and non-tangible objects and then uses simple machine learning to precisely estimate the depth and size of the object. The depth and size information is then integrated into the SLAM process to enhance the robot's navigation capabilities in complex environments. Our evaluation, conducted on an autonomous robot equipped with LiDAR and stereo-vision systems demonstrates high accuracy in the estimation of an object's depth and size. A video illustration of the proposed scheme is available at: \url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nusI6tA9eSk}.
Authors:Erfan Amoozad Khalili, Kiarash Ghasemzadeh, Hossein Gohari, Mohammadreza Jafari, Matin Jamshidi, Mahdi Khaksar, AmirReza AkramiFard, Mana Hatamzadeh, Saba Sadeghi, Mohammad Hossein Moaiyeri
Abstract:
This paper describes Auriga's @Work team and their robot, developed at Shahid Beheshti University Faculty of Electrical Engineering's Robotics and Intelligent Automation Lab for RoboCup 2024 competitions. The robot is designed for industrial tasks, optimizing efficiency in repetitive or hazardous environments. It features a 4-wheel Mecanum system for omnidirectional movement and a 5-degree-of-freedom manipulator arm with a 3D-printed gripper for object handling and navigation. The electronics include custom boards with ESP32 microcontrollers and an Nvidia Jetson Nano for real-time control. Key software components include Hector SLAM for mapping, A* path planning, and YOLO for object detection, supported by integrated sensors for enhanced navigation and collision avoidance.
Authors:Jingyu Zhang, Wenqing Zhang, Chaoyi Tan, Xiangtian Li, Qianyi Sun
Abstract:
It is very important to detect traffic signs efficiently and accurately in autonomous driving systems. However, the farther the distance, the smaller the traffic signs. Existing object detection algorithms can hardly detect these small scaled signs.In addition, the performance of embedded devices on vehicles limits the scale of detection models.To address these challenges, a YOLO PPA based traffic sign detection algorithm is proposed in this paper.The experimental results on the GTSDB dataset show that compared to the original YOLO, the proposed method improves inference efficiency by 11.2%. The mAP 50 is also improved by 93.2%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed YOLO PPA.
Authors:Yang Li, Jianli Xiao
Abstract:
Accurate real-time object detection enhances the safety of advanced driver-assistance systems, making it an essential component in driving scenarios. With the rapid development of deep learning technology, CNN-based YOLO real-time object detectors have gained significant attention. However, the local focus of CNNs results in performance bottlenecks. To further enhance detector performance, researchers have introduced Transformer-based self-attention mechanisms to leverage global receptive fields, but their quadratic complexity incurs substantial computational costs. Recently, Mamba, with its linear complexity, has made significant progress through global selective scanning. Inspired by Mamba's outstanding performance, we propose a novel object detector: DS MYOLO. This detector captures global feature information through a simplified selective scanning fusion block (SimVSS Block) and effectively integrates the network's deep features. Additionally, we introduce an efficient channel attention convolution (ECAConv) that enhances cross-channel feature interaction while maintaining low computational complexity. Extensive experiments on the CCTSDB 2021 and VLD-45 driving scenarios datasets demonstrate that DS MYOLO exhibits significant potential and competitive advantage among similarly scaled YOLO series real-time object detectors.
Authors:Weiping Xiao, Yiqiang Wu, Chang Liu, Yu Qin, Xiaomao Li, Liming Xin
Abstract:
Inadequate bounding box modeling in regression tasks constrains the performance of one-stage 3D object detection. Our study reveals that the primary reason lies in two aspects: (1) The limited center-offset prediction seriously impairs the bounding box localization since many highest response positions significantly deviate from object centers. (2) The low-quality sample ignored in regression tasks significantly impacts the bounding box prediction since it produces unreliable quality (IoU) rectification. To tackle these problems, we propose Decoupled and Interactive Regression Modeling (DIRM) for one-stage detection. Specifically, Decoupled Attribute Regression (DAR) is implemented to facilitate long regression range modeling for the center attribute through an adaptive multi-sample assignment strategy that deeply decouples bounding box attributes. On the other hand, to enhance the reliability of IoU predictions for low-quality results, Interactive Quality Prediction (IQP) integrates the classification task, proficient in modeling negative samples, with quality prediction for joint optimization. Extensive experiments on Waymo and ONCE datasets demonstrate that DIRM significantly improves the performance of several state-of-the-art methods with minimal additional inference latency. Notably, DIRM achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on both the Waymo and ONCE datasets.
Authors:Matthew Karlson, Heng Ban, Daniel G. Cole, Mai Abdelhakim, Jennifer Forsythe
Abstract:
In this paper, we assess the movement error of a targeting system given target location data from artificial intelligence (AI) methods in automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. Few studies evaluate the impacts on the accuracy in moving a targeting system to an aimpoint provided in this manner. To address this knowledge gap, we assess the performance of a controlled gun turret system given target location from an object detector developed from AI methods. In our assessment, we define a measure of object detector error and examine the correlations with several standard metrics in object detection. We then statistically analyze the object detector error data and turret movement error data acquired from controlled targeting simulations, as well as their aggregate error, to examine the impact on turret movement accuracy. Finally, we study the correlations between additional metrics and the probability of a hit. The results indicate that AI technologies are a significant source of error to targeting systems. Moreover, the results suggest that metrics such as the confidence score, intersection-over-union, average precision and average recall are predictors of accuracy against stationary targets with our system parameters.
Authors:Piotr Rudol, Patrick Doherty, Mariusz Wzorek, Chattrakul Sombattheera
Abstract:
The problem of reliably detecting and geolocating objects of different classes in soft real-time is essential in many application areas, such as Search and Rescue performed using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This research addresses the complementary problems of system contextual vision-based detector selection, allocation, and execution, in addition to the fusion of detection results from teams of UAVs for the purpose of accurately and reliably geolocating objects of interest in a timely manner. In an offline step, an application-independent evaluation of vision-based detectors from a system perspective is first performed. Based on this evaluation, the most appropriate algorithms for online object detection for each platform are selected automatically before a mission, taking into account a number of practical system considerations, such as the available communication links, video compression used, and the available computational resources. The detection results are fused using a method for building maps of salient locations which takes advantage of a novel sensor model for vision-based detections for both positive and negative observations. A number of simulated and real flight experiments are also presented, validating the proposed method.
Authors:Osama Mustafa, Khizer Ali, Anam Bibi, Imran Siddiqi, Momina Moetesum
Abstract:
The use of intelligent automation is growing significantly in the automotive industry, as it assists drivers and fleet management companies, thus increasing their productivity. Dash cams are now been used for this purpose which enables the instant identification and understanding of multiple objects and occurrences in the surroundings. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for object detection in dashcams using transformers. Our system is based on the state-of-the-art DEtection TRansformer (DETR), which has demonstrated strong performance in a variety of conditions, including different weather and illumination scenarios. The use of transformers allows for the consideration of contextual information in decisionmaking, improving the accuracy of object detection. To validate our approach, we have trained our DETR model on a dataset that represents real-world conditions. Our results show that the use of intelligent automation through transformers can significantly enhance the capabilities of dashcam systems. The model achieves an mAP of 0.95 on detection.
Authors:Bingcheng Dong, Yuning Ding, Jinrong Zhang, Sifan Zhang, Shenglan Liu
Abstract:
Open Set Object Detection has seen rapid development recently, but it continues to pose significant challenges. Language-based methods, grappling with the substantial modal disparity between textual and visual modalities, require extensive computational resources to bridge this gap. Although integrating visual prompts into these frameworks shows promise for enhancing performance, it always comes with constraints related to textual semantics. In contrast, viusal-only methods suffer from the low-quality fusion of multiple visual prompts. In response, we introduce a strong DETR-based model, Visual Intersection Network for Open Set Object Detection (VINO), which constructs a multi-image visual bank to preserve the semantic intersections of each category across all time steps. Our innovative multi-image visual updating mechanism learns to identify the semantic intersections from various visual prompts, enabling the flexible incorporation of new information and continuous optimization of feature representations. Our approach guarantees a more precise alignment between target category semantics and region semantics, while significantly reducing pre-training time and resource demands compared to language-based methods. Furthermore, the integration of a segmentation head illustrates the broad applicability of visual intersection in various visual tasks. VINO, which requires only 7 RTX4090 GPU days to complete one epoch on the Objects365v1 dataset, achieves competitive performance on par with vision-language models on benchmarks such as LVIS and ODinW35.
Authors:Jing Yuan, Tania Stathaki, Guangyu Ren
Abstract:
The design of pedestrian detectors seldom considers the unique characteristics of this task and usually follows the common strategies for general object detection. To explore the potential of these characteristics, we take the perspective effect in pedestrian datasets as an example and propose the mean height aided suppression for post-processing. This method rejects predictions that fall at levels with a low possibility of containing any pedestrians or that have an abnormal height compared to the average. To achieve this, the existence score and mean height generators are proposed. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets and detectors are performed; the choice of hyper-parameters is discussed in depth. The proposed method is easy to implement and is plug-and-play. Results show that the proposed methods significantly improve detection accuracy when applied to different existing pedestrian detectors and datasets. The combination of mean height aided suppression with particular detectors outperforms state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors on Caltech and Citypersons datasets.
Authors:Antonyo Musabini, Ivan Novikov, Sana Soula, Christel Leonet, Lihao Wang, Rachid Benmokhtar, Fabian Burger, Thomas Boulay, Xavier Perrotton
Abstract:
Current parking area perception algorithms primarily focus on detecting vacant slots within a limited range, relying on error-prone homographic projection for both labeling and inference. However, recent advancements in Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) require interaction with end-users through comprehensive and intelligent Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs). These interfaces should present a complete perception of the parking area going from distinguishing vacant slots' entry lines to the orientation of other parked vehicles. This paper introduces Multi-Task Fisheye Cross View Transformers (MT F-CVT), which leverages features from a four-camera fisheye Surround-view Camera System (SVCS) with multihead attentions to create a detailed Bird-Eye View (BEV) grid feature map. Features are processed by both a segmentation decoder and a Polygon-Yolo based object detection decoder for parking slots and vehicles. Trained on data labeled using LiDAR, MT F-CVT positions objects within a 25m x 25m real open-road scenes with an average error of only 20 cm. Our larger model achieves an F-1 score of 0.89. Moreover the smaller model operates at 16 fps on an Nvidia Jetson Orin embedded board, with similar detection results to the larger one. MT F-CVT demonstrates robust generalization capability across different vehicles and camera rig configurations. A demo video from an unseen vehicle and camera rig is available at: https://streamable.com/jjw54x.
Authors:Sadia Ilyas, Ido Freeman, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is a critical task focused on detecting objects that originate from a data distribution different from that of the training data. In this study, we investigate to what extent state-of-the-art open-vocabulary object detectors can detect unusual objects in street scenes, which are considered as OOD or rare scenarios with respect to common street scene datasets. Specifically, we evaluate their performance on the OoDIS Benchmark, which extends RoadAnomaly21 and RoadObstacle21 from SegmentMeIfYouCan, as well as LostAndFound, which was recently extended to object level annotations. The objective of our study is to uncover short-comings of contemporary object detectors in challenging real-world, and particularly in open-world scenarios. Our experiments reveal that open vocabulary models are promising for OOD object detection scenarios, however far from perfect. Substantial improvements are required before they can be reliably deployed in real-world applications. We benchmark four state-of-the-art open-vocabulary object detection models on three different datasets. Noteworthily, Grounding DINO achieves the best results on RoadObstacle21 and LostAndFound in our study with an AP of 48.3% and 25.4% respectively. YOLO-World excels on RoadAnomaly21 with an AP of 21.2%.
Authors:Boshra Khalili, Andrew W. Smyth
Abstract:
Object detection as part of computer vision can be crucial for traffic management, emergency response, autonomous vehicles, and smart cities. Despite significant advances in object detection, detecting small objects in images captured by distant cameras remains challenging due to their size, distance from the camera, varied shapes, and cluttered backgrounds. To address these challenges, we propose Small Object Detection YOLOv8 (SOD-YOLOv8), a novel model specifically designed for scenarios involving numerous small objects. Inspired by Efficient Generalized Feature Pyramid Networks (GFPN), we enhance multi-path fusion within YOLOv8 to integrate features across different levels, preserving details from shallower layers and improving small object detection accuracy. Also, A fourth detection layer is added to leverage high-resolution spatial information effectively. The Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Module (EMA) in the C2f-EMA module enhances feature extraction by redistributing weights and prioritizing relevant features. We introduce Powerful-IoU (PIoU) as a replacement for CIoU, focusing on moderate-quality anchor boxes and adding a penalty based on differences between predicted and ground truth bounding box corners. This approach simplifies calculations, speeds up convergence, and enhances detection accuracy. SOD-YOLOv8 significantly improves small object detection, surpassing widely used models in various metrics, without substantially increasing computational cost or latency compared to YOLOv8s. Specifically, it increases recall from 40.1\% to 43.9\%, precision from 51.2\% to 53.9\%, $\text{mAP}_{0.5}$ from 40.6\% to 45.1\%, and $\text{mAP}_{0.5:0.95}$ from 24\% to 26.6\%. In dynamic real-world traffic scenes, SOD-YOLOv8 demonstrated notable improvements in diverse conditions, proving its reliability and effectiveness in detecting small objects even in challenging environments.
Authors:Saurabh Farkya, Zachary Alan Daniels, Aswin Raghavan, Gooitzen van der Wal, Michael Isnardi, Michael Piacentino, David Zhang
Abstract:
Recent advancements in sensors have led to high resolution and high data throughput at the pixel level. Simultaneously, the adoption of increasingly large (deep) neural networks (NNs) has lead to significant progress in computer vision. Currently, visual intelligence comes at increasingly high computational complexity, energy, and latency. We study a data-driven system that combines dynamic sensing at the pixel level with computer vision analytics at the video level and propose a feedback control loop to minimize data movement between the sensor front-end and computational back-end without compromising detection and tracking precision. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce anticipatory attention and show that it leads to high precision prediction with sparse activation of pixels; (2) Leveraging the feedback control, we show that the dimensionality of learned feature vectors can be significantly reduced with increased sparsity; and (3) We emulate analog design choices (such as varying RGB or Bayer pixel format and analog noise) and study their impact on the key metrics of the data-driven system. Comparative analysis with traditional pixel and deep learning models shows significant performance enhancements. Our system achieves a 10X reduction in bandwidth and a 15-30X improvement in Energy-Delay Product (EDP) when activating only 30% of pixels, with a minor reduction in object detection and tracking precision. Based on analog emulation, our system can achieve a throughput of 205 megapixels/sec (MP/s) with a power consumption of only 110 mW per MP, i.e., a theoretical improvement of ~30X in EDP.
Authors:Sen Nie, Zhuo Wang, Xinxin Wang, Kun He
Abstract:
Recent studies emphasize the crucial role of data augmentation in enhancing the performance of object detection models. However,existing methodologies often struggle to effectively harmonize dataset diversity with semantic coordination.To bridge this gap, we introduce an innovative augmentation technique leveraging pre-trained conditional diffusion models to mediate this balance. Our approach encompasses the development of a Category Affinity Matrix, meticulously designed to enhance dataset diversity, and a Surrounding Region Alignment strategy, which ensures the preservation of semantic coordination in the augmented images. Extensive experimental evaluations confirm the efficacy of our method in enriching dataset diversity while seamlessly maintaining semantic coordination. Our method yields substantial average improvements of +1.4AP, +0.9AP, and +3.4AP over existing alternatives on three distinct object detection models, respectively.
Authors:Antonio Martinez-Sanchez, Ulrike Homberg, José MarÃa Almira, Harold Phelippeau
Abstract:
Object detection is a main task in computer vision. Template matching is the reference method for detecting objects with arbitrary templates. However, template matching computational complexity depends on the rotation accuracy, being a limiting factor for large 3D images (tomograms). Here, we implement a new algorithm called tensorial template matching, based on a mathematical framework that represents all rotations of a template with a tensor field. Contrary to standard template matching, the computational complexity of the presented algorithm is independent of the rotation accuracy. Using both, synthetic and real data from tomography, we demonstrate that tensorial template matching is much faster than template matching and has the potential to improve its accuracy
Authors:Yang Jin, Lei Zhang, Shi Yan, Bin Fan, Binglu Wang
Abstract:
Gaze object prediction (GOP) aims to predict the category and location of the object that a human is looking at. Previous methods utilized box-level supervision to identify the object that a person is looking at, but struggled with semantic ambiguity, ie, a single box may contain several items since objects are close together. The Vision foundation model (VFM) has improved in object segmentation using box prompts, which can reduce confusion by more precisely locating objects, offering advantages for fine-grained prediction of gaze objects. This paper presents a more challenging gaze object segmentation (GOS) task, which involves inferring the pixel-level mask corresponding to the object captured by human gaze behavior. In particular, we propose that the pixel-level supervision provided by VFM can be integrated into gaze object prediction to mitigate semantic ambiguity. This leads to our gaze object detection and segmentation framework that enables accurate pixel-level predictions. Different from previous methods that require additional head input or ignore head features, we propose to automatically obtain head features from scene features to ensure the model's inference efficiency and flexibility in the real world. Moreover, rather than directly fuse features to predict gaze heatmap as in existing methods, which may overlook spatial location and subtle details of the object, we develop a space-to-object gaze regression method to facilitate human-object gaze interaction. Specifically, it first constructs an initial human-object spatial connection, then refines this connection by interacting with semantically clear features in the segmentation branch, ultimately predicting a gaze heatmap for precise localization. Extensive experiments on GOO-Synth and GOO-Real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Jichuan Zhang, Wei Li, Shuang Cheng, Ya-Li Li, Shengjin Wang
Abstract:
Incremental object detection (IOD) aims to sequentially learn new classes, while maintaining the capability to locate and identify old ones. As the training data arrives with annotations only with new classes, IOD suffers from catastrophic forgetting. Prior methodologies mainly tackle the forgetting issue through knowledge distillation and exemplar replay, ignoring the conflict between limited model capacity and increasing knowledge. In this paper, we explore \textit{dynamic object queries} for incremental object detection built on Transformer architecture. We propose the \textbf{Dy}namic object \textbf{Q}uery-based \textbf{DE}tection \textbf{TR}ansformer (DyQ-DETR), which incrementally expands the model representation ability to achieve stability-plasticity tradeoff. First, a new set of learnable object queries are fed into the decoder to represent new classes. These new object queries are aggregated with those from previous phases to adapt both old and new knowledge well. Second, we propose the isolated bipartite matching for object queries in different phases, based on disentangled self-attention. The interaction among the object queries at different phases is eliminated to reduce inter-class confusion. Thanks to the separate supervision and computation over object queries, we further present the risk-balanced partial calibration for effective exemplar replay. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyQ-DETR significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methods, with limited parameter overhead. Code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Binay Kumar Singh, Niels Da Vitoria Lobo
Abstract:
With the growing advances in deep learning based technologies the detection and identification of co-occurring objects is a challenging task which has many applications in areas such as, security and surveillance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called SDLNet- Statistical analysis with Deep Learning Network that identifies co-occurring objects in conjunction with base objects in multilabel object categories. The pipeline of proposed work is implemented in two stages: in the first stage of SDLNet we deal with multilabel detectors for discovering labels, and in the second stage we perform co-occurrence matrix analysis. In co-occurrence matrix analysis, we learn co-occurrence statistics by setting base classes and frequently occurring classes, following this we build association rules and generate frequent patterns. The crucial part of SDLNet is recognizing base classes and making consideration for co-occurring classes. Finally, the generated co-occurrence matrix based on frequent patterns will show base classes and their corresponding co-occurring classes. SDLNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: Pascal VOC and MS-COCO. The experimental results on these benchmark datasets are reported in Sec 4.
Authors:Khadija Iddrisu, Waseem Shariff, Suzanne Little
Abstract:
Saccades are extremely rapid movements of both eyes that occur simultaneously, typically observed when an individual shifts their focus from one object to another. These movements are among the swiftest produced by humans and possess the potential to achieve velocities greater than that of blinks. The peak angular speed of the eye during a saccade can reach as high as 700°/s in humans, especially during larger saccades that cover a visual angle of 25°. Previous research has demonstrated encouraging outcomes in comprehending neurological conditions through the study of saccades. A necessary step in saccade detection involves accurately identifying the precise location of the pupil within the eye, from which additional information such as gaze angles can be inferred. Conventional frame-based cameras often struggle with the high temporal precision necessary for tracking very fast movements, resulting in motion blur and latency issues. Event cameras, on the other hand, offer a promising alternative by recording changes in the visual scene asynchronously and providing high temporal resolution and low latency. By bridging the gap between traditional computer vision and event-based vision, we present events as frames that can be readily utilized by standard deep learning algorithms. This approach harnesses YOLOv8, a state-of-the-art object detection technology, to process these frames for pupil tracking using the publicly accessible Ev-Eye dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, highlighting its potential applications in neuroscience, ophthalmology, and human-computer interaction.
Authors:Junseo Park, Hyeryung Jang
Abstract:
Large-scale diffusion models have made significant advances in image generation, particularly through cross-attention mechanisms. While cross-attention has been well-studied in text-to-image tasks, their interpretability in image-to-image (I2I) diffusion models remains underexplored. This paper introduces Image-to-Image Attribution Maps (I2AM), a method that enhances the interpretability of I2I models by visualizing bidirectional attribution maps, from the reference image to the generated image and vice versa. I2AM aggregates cross-attention scores across time steps, attention heads, and layers, offering insights into how critical features are transferred between images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of I2AM across object detection, inpainting, and super-resolution tasks. Our results demonstrate that I2AM successfully identifies key regions responsible for generating the output, even in complex scenes. Additionally, we introduce the Inpainting Mask Attention Consistency Score (IMACS) as a novel evaluation metric to assess the alignment between attribution maps and inpainting masks, which correlates strongly with existing performance metrics. Through extensive experiments, we show that I2AM enables model debugging and refinement, providing practical tools for improving I2I model's performance and interpretability.
Authors:Robert Spektor, Tom Friedman, Itay Or, Gil Bolotin, Shlomi Laufer
Abstract:
This work presents a novel approach to monocular 6D pose estimation of surgical instruments in open surgery, addressing challenges such as object articulations, symmetries, occlusions, and lack of annotated real-world data. The method leverages synthetic data generation and domain adaptation techniques to overcome these obstacles. The proposed approach consists of three main components: (1) synthetic data generation using 3D modeling of surgical tools with articulation rigging and physically-based rendering; (2) a tailored pose estimation framework combining object detection with pose estimation and a hybrid geometric fusion strategy; and (3) a training strategy that utilizes both synthetic and real unannotated data, employing domain adaptation on real video data using automatically generated pseudo-labels. Evaluations conducted on videos of open surgery demonstrate the good performance and real-world applicability of the proposed method, highlighting its potential for integration into medical augmented reality and robotic systems. The approach eliminates the need for extensive manual annotation of real surgical data.
Authors:Sangeetha K, Balaji VS, Kamalesh P, Anirudh Ganapathy PS
Abstract:
Hand gestures have evolved into a natural and intuitive means of engaging with technology. The objective of this research is to develop a robust system that can accurately recognize and classify hand gestures representing numbers. The proposed approach involves collecting a dataset of hand gesture images, preprocessing and enhancing the images, extracting relevant features, and training a machine learning model. The advancement of computer vision technology and object detection techniques, in conjunction with OpenCV's capability to analyze and comprehend hand gestures, presents a chance to transform the identification of numerical digits and its potential applications. The advancement of computer vision technology and object identification technologies, along with OpenCV's capacity to analyze and interpret hand gestures, has the potential to revolutionize human interaction, boosting people's access to information, education, and employment opportunities. Keywords: Computer Vision, Machine learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks
Authors:Dominika Przewlocka-Rus, Tomasz Kryjak, Marek Gorgon
Abstract:
The performance of object detection systems in automotive solutions must be as high as possible, with minimal response time and, due to the often battery-powered operation, low energy consumption. When designing such solutions, we therefore face challenges typical for embedded vision systems: the problem of fitting algorithms of high memory and computational complexity into small low-power devices. In this paper we propose PowerYOLO - a mixed precision solution, which targets three essential elements of such application. First, we propose a system based on a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), a novel sensor, that offers low power requirements and operates well in conditions with variable illumination. It is these features that may make event cameras a preferential choice over frame cameras in some applications. Second, to ensure high accuracy and low memory and computational complexity, we propose to use 4-bit width Powers-of-Two (PoT) quantisation for convolution weights of the YOLO detector, with all other parameters quantised linearly. Finally, we embrace from PoT scheme and replace multiplication with bit-shifting to increase the efficiency of hardware acceleration of such solution, with a special convolution-batch normalisation fusion scheme. The use of specific sensor with PoT quantisation and special batch normalisation fusion leads to a unique system with almost 8x reduction in memory complexity and vast computational simplifications, with relation to a standard approach. This efficient system achieves high accuracy of mAP 0.301 on the GEN1 DVS dataset, marking the new state-of-the-art for such compressed model.
Authors:Mohammadamin Baghbanbashi, Mohsen Raji, Behnam Ghavami
Abstract:
YOLO is a deep neural network (DNN) model presented for robust real-time object detection following the one-stage inference approach. It outperforms other real-time object detectors in terms of speed and accuracy by a wide margin. Nevertheless, since YOLO is developed upon a DNN backbone with numerous parameters, it will cause excessive memory load, thereby deploying it on memory-constrained devices is a severe challenge in practice. To overcome this limitation, model compression techniques, such as quantizing parameters to lower-precision values, can be adopted. As the most recent version of YOLO, YOLOv7 achieves such state-of-the-art performance in speed and accuracy in the range of 5 FPS to 160 FPS that it surpasses all former versions of YOLO and other existing models in this regard. So far, the robustness of several quantization schemes has been evaluated on older versions of YOLO. These methods may not necessarily yield similar results for YOLOv7 as it utilizes a different architecture. In this paper, we conduct in-depth research on the effectiveness of a variety of quantization schemes on the pre-trained weights of the state-of-the-art YOLOv7 model. Experimental results demonstrate that using 4-bit quantization coupled with the combination of different granularities results in ~3.92x and ~3.86x memory-saving for uniform and non-uniform quantization, respectively, with only 2.5% and 1% accuracy loss compared to the full-precision baseline model.
Authors:Balaji VS, Mahi AR, Anirudh Ganapathy PS, Manju M
Abstract:
Agriculture faces a growing challenge with wildlife wreaking havoc on crops, threatening sustainability. The project employs advanced object detection, the system utilizes the Mobile Net SSD model for real-time animal classification. The methodology initiates with the creation of a dataset, where each animal is represented by annotated images. The SSD Mobile Net architecture facilitates the use of a model for image classification and object detection. The model undergoes fine-tuning and optimization during training, enhancing accuracy for precise animal classification. Real-time detection is achieved through a webcam and the OpenCV library, enabling prompt identification and categorization of approaching animals. By seamlessly integrating intelligent scarecrow technology with object detection, this system offers a robust solution to field protection, minimizing crop damage and promoting precision farming. It represents a valuable contribution to agricultural sustainability, addressing the challenge of wildlife interference with crops. The implementation of the Intelligent Scarecrow Monitoring System stands as a progressive tool for proactive field management and protection, empowering farmers with an advanced solution for precision agriculture.
Keywords: Machine learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, MobileNet SSD
Authors:Ogulcan Eryuksel, Kamil Anil Ozfuttu, Fatih Cagatay Akyon, Kadir Sahin, Efe Buyukborekci, Devrim Cavusoglu, Sinan Altinuc
Abstract:
Drone detection is a challenging object detection task where visibility conditions and quality of the images may be unfavorable, and detections might become difficult due to complex backgrounds, small visible objects, and hard to distinguish objects. Both provide high confidence for drone detections, and eliminating false detections requires efficient algorithms and approaches. Our previous work, which uses YOLOv5, uses both real and synthetic data and a Kalman-based tracker to track the detections and increase their confidence using temporal information. Our current work improves on the previous approach by combining several improvements. We used a more diverse dataset combining multiple sources and combined with synthetic samples chosen from a large synthetic dataset based on the error analysis of the base model. Also, to obtain more resilient confidence scores for objects, we introduced a classification component that discriminates whether the object is a drone or not. Finally, we developed a more advanced scoring algorithm for object tracking that we use to adjust localization confidence. Furthermore, the proposed technique won 1st Place in the Drone vs. Bird Challenge (Workshop on Small-Drone Surveillance, Detection and Counteraction Techniques at ICIAP 2021).
Authors:Xian Wu, Qingchuan Tao, Shuang Wang
Abstract:
Addressing the imperative need for efficient artificial intelligence in IoT and edge computing, this study presents RepAct, a re-parameterizable adaptive activation function tailored for optimizing lightweight neural networks within the computational limitations of edge devices. By employing a multi-branch structure with learnable adaptive weights, RepAct enriches feature processing and enhances cross-layer interpretability. When evaluated on tasks such as image classification and object detection, RepAct notably surpassed conventional activation functions in lightweight networks, delivering up to a 7.92% accuracy boost on MobileNetV3-Small for the ImageNet100 dataset, while maintaining computational complexity on par with HardSwish. This innovative approach not only maximizes model parameter efficiency but also significantly improves the performance and understanding capabilities of lightweight neural networks, demonstrating its potential for real-time edge computing applications.
Authors:Lukas Malte Kemeter, Rasmus Hvingelby, Paulina Sierak, Tobias Schön, Bishwajit Gosswam
Abstract:
In many manufacturing settings, annotating data for machine learning and computer vision is costly, but synthetic data can be generated at significantly lower cost. Substituting the real-world data with synthetic data is therefore appealing for many machine learning applications that require large amounts of training data. However, relying solely on synthetic data is frequently inadequate for effectively training models that perform well on real-world data, primarily due to domain shifts between the synthetic and real-world data. We discuss approaches for dealing with such a domain shift when detecting defects in X-ray scans of aluminium wheels. Using both simulated and real-world X-ray images, we train an object detection model with different strategies to identify the training approach that generates the best detection results while minimising the demand for annotated real-world training samples. Our preliminary findings suggest that the sim-2-real domain adaptation approach is more cost-efficient than a fully supervised oracle - if the total number of available annotated samples is fixed. Given a certain number of labeled real-world samples, training on a mix of synthetic and unlabeled real-world data achieved comparable or even better detection results at significantly lower cost. We argue that future research into the cost-efficiency of different training strategies is important for a better understanding of how to allocate budget in applied machine learning projects.
Authors:Jonathan Courtois, Pierre-Emmanuel Novac, Edgar Lemaire, Alain Pegatoquet, Benoit Miramond
Abstract:
The complexity of event-based object detection (OD) poses considerable challenges. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) show promising results and pave the way for efficient event-based OD. Despite this success, the path to efficient SNNs on embedded devices remains a challenge. This is due to the size of the networks required to accomplish the task and the ability of devices to take advantage of SNNs benefits. Even when "edge" devices are considered, they typically use embedded GPUs that consume tens of watts. In response to these challenges, our research introduces an embedded neuromorphic testbench that utilizes the SPiking Low-power Event-based ArchiTecture (SPLEAT) accelerator. Using an extended version of the Qualia framework, we can train, evaluate, quantize, and deploy spiking neural networks on an FPGA implementation of SPLEAT. We used this testbench to load a state-of-the-art SNN solution, estimate the performance loss associated with deploying the network on dedicated hardware, and run real-world event-based OD on neuromorphic hardware specifically designed for low-power spiking neural networks. Remarkably, our embedded spiking solution, which includes a model with 1.08 million parameters, operates efficiently with 490 mJ per prediction.
Authors:Lilian Hollard, Lucas Mohimont, Nathalie Gaveau, Luiz Angelo Steffenel
Abstract:
Efficient computation in deep neural networks is crucial for real-time object detection. However, recent advancements primarily result from improved high-performing hardware rather than improving parameters and FLOP efficiency. This is especially evident in the latest YOLO architectures, where speed is prioritized over lightweight design. As a result, object detection models optimized for low-resource environments like microcontrollers have received less attention. For devices with limited computing power, existing solutions primarily rely on SSDLite or combinations of low-parameter classifiers, creating a noticeable gap between YOLO-like architectures and truly efficient lightweight detectors. This raises a key question: Can a model optimized for parameter and FLOP efficiency achieve accuracy levels comparable to mainstream YOLO models? To address this, we introduce two key contributions to object detection models using MSCOCO as a base validation set. First, we propose LeNeck, a general-purpose detection framework that maintains inference speed comparable to SSDLite while significantly improving accuracy and reducing parameter count. Second, we present LeYOLO, an efficient object detection model designed to enhance computational efficiency in YOLO-based architectures. LeYOLO effectively bridges the gap between SSDLite-based detectors and YOLO models, offering high accuracy in a model as compact as MobileNets. Both contributions are particularly well-suited for mobile, embedded, and ultra-low-power devices, including microcontrollers, where computational efficiency is critical.
Authors:Shivank Garg, Abhishek Baghel, Amit Agarwal, Durga Toshniwal
Abstract:
With the rise of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), ensuring reliable object detection in all weather conditions is crucial for safety and efficiency. Adverse weather like snow, rain, and fog presents major challenges for current detection systems, often resulting in failures and potential safety risks. This paper introduces a novel framework and pipeline designed to improve object detection under such conditions, focusing on traffic signal detection where traditional methods often fail due to domain shifts caused by adverse weather. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the limitations of existing techniques. Our proposed pipeline significantly enhances detection accuracy in snow, rain, and fog. Results show a 40.8% improvement in average IoU and F1 scores compared to naive fine-tuning and a 22.4% performance increase in domain shift scenarios, such as training on artificial snow and testing on rain images.
Authors:Haodong Li, Haicheng Qu
Abstract:
The detection of small objects in aerial images is a fundamental task in the field of computer vision. Moving objects in aerial photography have problems such as different shapes and sizes, dense overlap, occlusion by the background, and object blur, however, the original YOLO algorithm has low overall detection accuracy due to its weak ability to perceive targets of different scales. In order to improve the detection accuracy of densely overlapping small targets and fuzzy targets, this paper proposes a dynamic-attention scale-sequence fusion algorithm (DASSF) for small target detection in aerial images. First, we propose a dynamic scale sequence feature fusion (DSSFF) module that improves the up-sampling mechanism and reduces computational load. Secondly, a x-small object detection head is specially added to enhance the detection capability of small targets. Finally, in order to improve the expressive ability of targets of different types and sizes, we use the dynamic head (DyHead). The model we proposed solves the problem of small target detection in aerial images and can be applied to multiple different versions of the YOLO algorithm, which is universal. Experimental results show that when the DASSF method is applied to YOLOv8, compared to YOLOv8n, on the VisDrone-2019 and DIOR datasets, the model shows an increase of 9.2% and 2.4% in the mean average precision (mAP), respectively, and outperforms the current mainstream methods.
Authors:Jialong Wu, Mirko Meuter, Markus Schoeler, Matthias Rottmann
Abstract:
Radar-based perception has gained increasing attention in autonomous driving, yet the inherent sparsity of radars poses challenges. Radar raw data often contains excessive noise, whereas radar point clouds retain only limited information. In this work, we holistically treat the sparse nature of radar data by introducing an adaptive subsampling method together with a tailored network architecture that exploits the sparsity patterns to discover global and local dependencies in the radar signal. Our subsampling module selects a subset of pixels from range-doppler (RD) spectra that contribute most to the downstream perception tasks. To improve the feature extraction on sparse subsampled data, we propose a new way of applying graph neural networks on radar data and design a novel two-branch backbone to capture both global and local neighbor information. An attentive fusion module is applied to combine features from both branches. Experiments on the RADIal dataset show that our SparseRadNet exceeds state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in object detection and achieves close to SOTA accuracy in freespace segmentation, meanwhile using sparse subsampled input data.
Authors:Andrea Ceccarelli, Leonardo Montecchi
Abstract:
Object detection in autonomous driving consists in perceiving and locating instances of objects in multi-dimensional data, such as images or lidar scans. Very recently, multiple works are proposing to evaluate object detectors by measuring their ability to detect the objects that are most likely to interfere with the driving task. Detectors are then ranked according to their ability to detect the most relevant objects, rather than the highest number of objects. However there is little evidence so far that the relevance of predicted object may contribute to the safety and reliability improvement of the driving task. This position paper elaborates on a strategy, together with partial results, to i) configure and deploy object detectors that successfully extract knowledge on object relevance, and ii) use such knowledge to improve the trajectory planning task. We show that, given an object detector, filtering objects based on their relevance, in combination with the traditional confidence threshold, reduces the risk of missing relevant objects, decreases the likelihood of dangerous trajectories, and improves the quality of trajectories in general.
Authors:Mujadded Al Rabbani Alif, Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
This survey investigates the transformative potential of various YOLO variants, from YOLOv1 to the state-of-the-art YOLOv10, in the context of agricultural advancements. The primary objective is to elucidate how these cutting-edge object detection models can re-energise and optimize diverse aspects of agriculture, ranging from crop monitoring to livestock management. It aims to achieve key objectives, including the identification of contemporary challenges in agriculture, a detailed assessment of YOLO's incremental advancements, and an exploration of its specific applications in agriculture. This is one of the first surveys to include the latest YOLOv10, offering a fresh perspective on its implications for precision farming and sustainable agricultural practices in the era of Artificial Intelligence and automation. Further, the survey undertakes a critical analysis of YOLO's performance, synthesizes existing research, and projects future trends. By scrutinizing the unique capabilities packed in YOLO variants and their real-world applications, this survey provides valuable insights into the evolving relationship between YOLO variants and agriculture. The findings contribute towards a nuanced understanding of the potential for precision farming and sustainable agricultural practices, marking a significant step forward in the integration of advanced object detection technologies within the agricultural sector.
Authors:Orest Kupyn, Christian Rupprecht
Abstract:
We present a method for expanding a dataset by incorporating knowledge from the wide distribution of pre-trained latent diffusion models. Data augmentations typically incorporate inductive biases about the image formation process into the training (e.g. translation, scaling, colour changes, etc.). Here, we go beyond simple pixel transformations and introduce the concept of instance-level data augmentation by repainting parts of the image at the level of object instances. The method combines a conditional diffusion model with depth and edge maps control conditioning to seamlessly repaint individual objects inside the scene, being applicable to any segmentation or detection dataset. Used as a data augmentation method, it improves the performance and generalization of the state-of-the-art salient object detection, semantic segmentation and object detection models. By redrawing all privacy-sensitive instances (people, license plates, etc.), the method is also applicable for data anonymization. We also release fully synthetic and anonymized expansions for popular datasets: COCO, Pascal VOC and DUTS.
Authors:Md. Shariful Islam, SM Shaqib, Shahriar Sultan Ramit, Shahrun Akter Khushbu, Abdus Sattar, Sheak Rashed Haider Noori
Abstract:
In the construction sector, ensuring worker safety is of the utmost significance. In this study, a deep learning-based technique is presented for identifying safety gear worn by construction workers, such as helmets, goggles, jackets, gloves, and footwears. The recommended approach uses the YOLO v7 (You Only Look Once) object detection algorithm to precisely locate these safety items. The dataset utilized in this work consists of labeled images split into training, testing and validation sets. Each image has bounding box labels that indicate where the safety equipment is located within the image. The model is trained to identify and categorize the safety equipment based on the labeled dataset through an iterative training approach. We used custom dataset to train this model. Our trained model performed admirably well, with good precision, recall, and F1-score for safety equipment recognition. Also, the model's evaluation produced encouraging results, with a mAP@0.5 score of 87.7\%. The model performs effectively, making it possible to quickly identify safety equipment violations on building sites. A thorough evaluation of the outcomes reveals the model's advantages and points up potential areas for development. By offering an automatic and trustworthy method for safety equipment detection, this research makes a contribution to the fields of computer vision and workplace safety. The proposed deep learning-based approach will increase safety compliance and reduce the risk of accidents in the construction industry
Authors:Marian Longa, João F. Henriques
Abstract:
Unsupervised object detection using deep neural networks is typically a difficult problem with few to no guarantees about the learned representation. In this work we present the first unsupervised object detection method that is theoretically guaranteed to recover the true object positions up to quantifiable small shifts. We develop an unsupervised object detection architecture and prove that the learned variables correspond to the true object positions up to small shifts related to the encoder and decoder receptive field sizes, the object sizes, and the widths of the Gaussians used in the rendering process. We perform detailed analysis of how the error depends on each of these variables and perform synthetic experiments validating our theoretical predictions up to a precision of individual pixels. We also perform experiments on CLEVR-based data and show that, unlike current SOTA object detection methods (SAM, CutLER), our method's prediction errors always lie within our theoretical bounds. We hope that this work helps open up an avenue of research into object detection methods with theoretical guarantees.
Authors:Jiahua Xu, Si Zuo, Chenfeng Wei, Wei Zhou
Abstract:
With the rapid proliferation of autonomous driving, there has been a heightened focus on the research of lidar-based 3D semantic segmentation and object detection methodologies, aiming to ensure the safety of traffic participants. In recent decades, learning-based approaches have emerged, demonstrating remarkable performance gains in comparison to conventional algorithms. However, the segmentation and detection tasks have traditionally been examined in isolation to achieve the best precision. To this end, we propose an efficient multi-task learning framework named LiSD which can address both segmentation and detection tasks, aiming to optimize the overall performance. Our proposed LiSD is a voxel-based encoder-decoder framework that contains a hierarchical feature collaboration module and a holistic information aggregation module. Different integration methods are adopted to keep sparsity in segmentation while densifying features for query initialization in detection. Besides, cross-task information is utilized in an instance-aware refinement module to obtain more accurate predictions. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. It is worth noting that LiSD achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 83.3% mIoU on the nuScenes segmentation benchmark for lidar-only methods.
Authors:Matthias Pijarowski, Alexander Wolpert, Martin Heckmann, Michael Teutsch
Abstract:
Visually detecting camouflaged objects is a hard problem for both humans and computer vision algorithms. Strong similarities between object and background appearance make the task significantly more challenging than traditional object detection or segmentation tasks. Current state-of-the-art models use either convolutional neural networks or vision transformers as feature extractors. They are trained in a fully supervised manner and thus need a large amount of labeled training data. In this paper, both self-supervised and frugal learning methods are introduced to the task of Camouflaged Object Detection (COD). The overall goal is to fine-tune two COD reference methods, namely SINet-V2 and HitNet, pre-trained for camouflaged animal detection to the task of camouflaged human detection. Therefore, we use the public dataset CPD1K that contains camouflaged humans in a forest environment. We create a strong baseline using supervised frugal transfer learning for the fine-tuning task. Then, we analyze three pseudo-labeling approaches to perform the fine-tuning task in a self-supervised manner. Our experiments show that we achieve similar performance by pure self-supervision compared to fully supervised frugal learning.
Authors:Eliraz Orfaig, Inna Stainvas, Igal Bilik
Abstract:
Vision-based autonomous driving requires reliable and efficient object detection. This work proposes a DiffusionDet-based framework that exploits data fusion from the monocular camera and depth sensor to provide the RGB and depth (RGB-D) data. Within this framework, ground truth bounding boxes are randomly reshaped as part of the training phase, allowing the model to learn the reverse diffusion process of noise addition. The system methodically enhances a randomly generated set of boxes at the inference stage, guiding them toward accurate final detections. By integrating the textural and color features from RGB images with the spatial depth information from the LiDAR sensors, the proposed framework employs a feature fusion that substantially enhances object detection of automotive targets. The $2.3$ AP gain in detecting automotive targets is achieved through comprehensive experiments using the KITTI dataset. Specifically, the improved performance of the proposed approach in detecting small objects is demonstrated.
Authors:Sarthak Arora, Karthik Subramanian, Odysseus Adamides, Ferat Sahin
Abstract:
This paper explores the use of 3D lidar in a physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) scenario. To achieve the aforementioned, experiments were conducted to mimic a modern shop-floor environment. Data was collected from a pool of seventeen participants while performing pre-determined tasks in a shared workspace with the robot. To demonstrate an end-to-end case; a perception pipeline was developed that leverages reflectivity, signal, near-infrared, and point-cloud data from a 3-D lidar. This data is then used to perform safety based control whilst satisfying the speed and separation monitoring (SSM) criteria. In order to support the perception pipeline, a state-of-the-art object detection network was leveraged and fine-tuned by transfer learning. An analysis is provided along with results of the perception and the safety based controller. Additionally, this system is compared with the previous work.
Authors:Victor A. Kich, Muhammad A. Muttaqien, Junya Toyama, Ryutaro Miyoshi, Yosuke Ida, Akihisa Ohya, Hisashi Date
Abstract:
Recent advancements in real-time object detection frameworks have spurred extensive research into their application in robotic systems. This study provides a comparative analysis of YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 models, challenging the prevailing assumption of the latter's superiority in performance metrics. Contrary to initial expectations, YOLOv5 models demonstrated comparable, and in some cases superior, precision in object detection tasks. Our analysis delves into the underlying factors contributing to these findings, examining aspects such as model architecture complexity, training dataset variances, and real-world applicability. Through rigorous testing and an ablation study, we present a nuanced understanding of each model's capabilities, offering insights into the selection and optimization of object detection frameworks for robotic applications. Implications of this research extend to the design of more efficient and contextually adaptive systems, emphasizing the necessity for a holistic approach to evaluating model performance.
Authors:Louis Foucard, Samar Khanna, Yi Shi, Chi-Kuei Liu, Quinn Z Shen, Thuyen Ngo, Zi-Xiang Xia
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose SpotNet: a fast, single stage, image-centric but LiDAR anchored approach for long range 3D object detection. We demonstrate that our approach to LiDAR/image sensor fusion, combined with the joint learning of 2D and 3D detection tasks, can lead to accurate 3D object detection with very sparse LiDAR support. Unlike more recent bird's-eye-view (BEV) sensor-fusion methods which scale with range $r$ as $O(r^2)$, SpotNet scales as $O(1)$ with range. We argue that such an architecture is ideally suited to leverage each sensor's strength, i.e. semantic understanding from images and accurate range finding from LiDAR data. Finally we show that anchoring detections on LiDAR points removes the need to regress distances, and so the architecture is able to transfer from 2MP to 8MP resolution images without re-training.
Authors:Nawfal Guefrachi, Hakim Ghazzai, Ahmad Alsharoa
Abstract:
The 3D object detection capabilities in urban environments have been enormously improved by recent developments in Light Detection and Range (LiDAR) technology. This paper presents a novel framework that transforms the detection and analysis of 3D objects in traffic scenarios by utilizing the power of elevated LiDAR sensors. We are presenting our methodology's remarkable capacity to collect complex 3D point cloud data, which allows us to accurately and in detail capture the dynamics of urban traffic. Due to the limitation in obtaining real-world traffic datasets, we utilize the simulator to generate 3D point cloud for specific scenarios. To support our experimental analysis, we firstly simulate various 3D point cloud traffic-related objects. Then, we use this dataset as a basis for training and evaluating our 3D object detection models, in identifying and monitoring both vehicles and pedestrians in simulated urban traffic environments. Next, we fine tune the Point Voxel-Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (PV-RCNN) architecture, making it more suited to handle and understand the massive volumes of point cloud data generated by our urban traffic simulations. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution in accurately detecting objects in traffic scenes and highlight the role of LiDAR in improving urban safety and advancing intelligent transportation systems.
Authors:Jooyong Park, Jungwoo Lee, Euncheol Choi, Younggun Cho
Abstract:
In urban environments for delivery robots, particularly in areas such as campuses and towns, many custom features defy standard road semantic categorizations. Addressing this challenge, our paper introduces a method leveraging Salient Object Detection (SOD) to extract these unique features, employing them as pivotal factors for enhanced robot loop closure and localization. Traditional geometric feature-based localization is hampered by fluctuating illumination and appearance changes. Our preference for SOD over semantic segmentation sidesteps the intricacies of classifying a myriad of non-standardized urban features. To achieve consistent ground features, the Motion Compensate IPM (MC-IPM) technique is implemented, capitalizing on motion for distortion compensation and subsequently selecting the most pertinent salient ground features through moment computations. For thorough evaluation, we validated the saliency detection and localization performances to the real urban scenarios. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/salient-ground-feature/home.
Authors:Wuzhou Li, Jiawei Zhou, Xiang Li, Yi Cao, Guang Jin, Xuemin Zhang
Abstract:
Recently, the field of few-shot detection within remote sensing imagery has witnessed significant advancements. Despite these progresses, the capacity for continuous conceptual learning still poses a significant challenge to existing methodologies. In this paper, we explore the intricate task of incremental few-shot object detection in remote sensing images. We introduce a pioneering fine-tuningbased technique, termed InfRS, designed to facilitate the incremental learning of novel classes using a restricted set of examples, while concurrently preserving the performance on established base classes without the need to revisit previous datasets. Specifically, we pretrain the model using abundant data from base classes and then generate a set of class-wise prototypes that represent the intrinsic characteristics of the data. In the incremental learning stage, we introduce a Hybrid Prototypical Contrastive (HPC) encoding module for learning discriminative representations. Furthermore, we develop a prototypical calibration strategy based on the Wasserstein distance to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem. Comprehensive evaluations on the NWPU VHR-10 and DIOR datasets demonstrate that our model can effectively solve the iFSOD problem in remote sensing images. Code will be released.
Authors:Zhe Huang, Yizhe Zhao, Hao Xiao, Chenyan Wu, Lingting Ge
Abstract:
Multi-view camera-only 3D object detection largely follows two primary paradigms: exploiting bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations or focusing on perspective-view (PV) features, each with distinct advantages. Although several recent approaches explore combining BEV and PV, many rely on partial fusion or maintain separate detection heads. In this paper, we propose DuoSpaceNet, a novel framework that fully unifies BEV and PV feature spaces within a single detection pipeline for comprehensive 3D perception. Our design includes a decoder to integrate BEV and PV features into unified detection queries, as well as a feature enhancement strategy that enriches different feature representations. In addition, DuoSpaceNet can be extended to handle multi-frame inputs, enabling more robust temporal analysis. Extensive experiments on nuScenes dataset show that DuoSpaceNet surpasses both BEV-based baselines (e.g., BEVFormer) and PV-based baselines (e.g., Sparse4D) in 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation, verifying the effectiveness of our proposed design.
Authors:Siliang Ma, Yong Xu
Abstract:
Bounding box regression is one of the important steps of object detection. However, rotation detectors often involve a more complicated loss based on SkewIoU which is unfriendly to gradient-based training. Most of the existing loss functions for rotated object detection calculate the difference between two bounding boxes only focus on the deviation of area or each points distance (e.g., $\mathcal{L}_{Smooth-\ell 1}$, $\mathcal{L}_{RotatedIoU}$ and $\mathcal{L}_{PIoU}$). The calculation process of some loss functions is extremely complex (e.g. $\mathcal{L}_{KFIoU}$). In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of bounding box regression for rotated object detection, we proposed a novel metric for arbitrary shapes comparison based on minimum points distance, which takes most of the factors from existing loss functions for rotated object detection into account, i.e., the overlap or nonoverlapping area, the central points distance and the rotation angle. We also proposed a loss function called $\mathcal{L}_{FPDIoU}$ based on four points distance for accurate bounding box regression focusing on faster and high quality anchor boxes. In the experiments, $FPDIoU$ loss has been applied to state-of-the-art rotated object detection (e.g., RTMDET, H2RBox) models training with three popular benchmarks of rotated object detection including DOTA, DIOR, HRSC2016 and two benchmarks of arbitrary orientation scene text detection including ICDAR 2017 RRC-MLT and ICDAR 2019 RRC-MLT, which achieves better performance than existing loss functions.
Authors:Pengpeng Li, Haowei Gu, Yang Yang
Abstract:
In this competition we employed a model fusion approach to achieve object detection results close to those of real images. Our method is based on the CO-DETR model, which was trained on two sets of data: one containing images under dark conditions and another containing images enhanced with low-light conditions. We used various enhancement techniques on the test data to generate multiple sets of prediction results. Finally, we applied a clustering aggregation method guided by IoU thresholds to select the optimal results.
Authors:Mahmudul Islam Masum, Arif Sarwat, Hugo Riggs, Alicia Boymelgreen, Preyojon Dey
Abstract:
This paper presents a comparative study of object detection using YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 for three distinct classes: artemia, cyst, and excrement. In this comparative study, we analyze the performance of these models in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, etc. where YOLOv5 often performed better in detecting Artemia and cysts with excellent precision and accuracy. However, when it came to detecting excrement, YOLOv5 faced notable challenges and limitations. This suggests that YOLOv8 offers greater versatility and adaptability in detection tasks while YOLOv5 may struggle in difficult situations and may need further fine-tuning or specialized training to enhance its performance. The results show insights into the suitability of YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 for detecting objects in challenging marine environments, with implications for applications such as ecological research.
Authors:Libang Chen, Jinyan Lin, Qihang Bian, Yikun Liu, Jianying Zhou
Abstract:
Imaging through dense fog presents unique challenges, with essential visual information crucial for applications like object detection and recognition obscured, thereby hindering conventional image processing methods. Despite improvements through neural network-based approaches, these techniques falter under extremely low visibility conditions exacerbated by inhomogeneous illumination, which degrades deep learning performance due to inconsistent signal intensities. We introduce in this paper a novel method that adaptively filters background illumination based on Structural Differential and Integral Filtering (SDIF) to enhance only vital signal information. The grayscale banding is eliminated by incorporating a visual optimization strategy based on image gradients. Maximum Histogram Equalization (MHE) is used to achieve high contrast while maintaining fidelity to the original content. We evaluated our algorithm using data collected from both a fog chamber and outdoor environments, and performed comparative analyses with existing methods. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed method significantly enhances signal clarity under extremely low visibility conditions and out-performs existing techniques, offering substantial improvements for deep fog imaging applications.
Authors:Shounak Sural, Nishad Sahu, Ragunathan Rajkumar
Abstract:
The fusion of multimodal sensor data streams such as camera images and lidar point clouds plays an important role in the operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Robust perception across a range of adverse weather and lighting conditions is specifically required for AVs to be deployed widely. While multi-sensor fusion networks have been previously developed for perception in sunny and clear weather conditions, these methods show a significant degradation in performance under night-time and poor weather conditions. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective technique called ContextualFusion to incorporate the domain knowledge about cameras and lidars behaving differently across lighting and weather variations into 3D object detection models. Specifically, we design a Gated Convolutional Fusion (GatedConv) approach for the fusion of sensor streams based on the operational context. To aid in our evaluation, we use the open-source simulator CARLA to create a multimodal adverse-condition dataset called AdverseOp3D to address the shortcomings of existing datasets being biased towards daytime and good-weather conditions. Our ContextualFusion approach yields an mAP improvement of 6.2% over state-of-the-art methods on our context-balanced synthetic dataset. Finally, our method enhances state-of-the-art 3D objection performance at night on the real-world NuScenes dataset with a significant mAP improvement of 11.7%.
Authors:Ali Rasekh, Sepehr Kazemi Ranjbar, Milad Heidari, Wolfgang Nejdl
Abstract:
Large Vision Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have significantly contributed to various computer vision tasks, including object recognition and object detection. Their open vocabulary feature enhances their value. However, their black-box nature and lack of explainability in predictions make them less trustworthy in critical domains. Recently, some work has been done to force VLMs to provide reasonable rationales for object recognition, but this often comes at the expense of classification accuracy. In this paper, we first propose a mathematical definition of explainability in the object recognition task based on the joint probability distribution of categories and rationales, then leverage this definition to fine-tune CLIP in an explainable manner. Through evaluations of different datasets, our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in explainable classification. Notably, it excels in zero-shot settings, showcasing its adaptability. This advancement improves explainable object recognition, enhancing trust across diverse applications. The code will be made available online upon publication.
Authors:Nawfal Guefrachi, Jian Shi, Hakim Ghazzai, Ahmad Alsharoa
Abstract:
The integration of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies offers transformative opportunities for public health informatics in urban safety and pedestrian well-being. This paper proposes a novel framework utilizing these technologies for enhanced 3D object detection and activity classification in urban traffic scenarios. By employing elevated LiDAR, we obtain detailed 3D point cloud data, enabling precise pedestrian activity monitoring. To overcome urban data scarcity, we create a specialized dataset through simulated traffic environments in Blender, facilitating targeted model training. Our approach employs a modified Point Voxel-Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (PV-RCNN) for robust 3D detection and PointNet for classifying pedestrian activities, significantly benefiting urban traffic management and public health by offering insights into pedestrian behavior and promoting safer urban environments. Our dual-model approach not only enhances urban traffic management but also contributes significantly to public health by providing insights into pedestrian behavior and promoting safer urban environment.
Authors:Dani Manjah, Davide Cacciarelli, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Benoit Macq
Abstract:
We present a scalable framework designed to craft efficient lightweight models for video object detection utilizing self-training and knowledge distillation techniques. We scrutinize methodologies for the ideal selection of training images from video streams and the efficacy of model sharing across numerous cameras. By advocating for a camera clustering methodology, we aim to diminish the requisite number of models for training while augmenting the distillation dataset. The findings affirm that proper camera clustering notably amplifies the accuracy of distilled models, eclipsing the methodologies that employ distinct models for each camera or a universal model trained on the aggregate camera data.
Authors:Jian Zhang, Ruiteng Zhang, Xinyue Yan, Xiting Zhuang, Ruicheng Cao
Abstract:
Degraded underwater images decrease the accuracy of underwater object detection. However, existing methods for underwater image enhancement mainly focus on improving the indicators in visual aspects, which may not benefit the tasks of underwater image detection, and may lead to serious degradation in performance. To alleviate this problem, we proposed a bidirectional-guided method for underwater object detection, referred to as BG-YOLO. In the proposed method, network is organized by constructing an enhancement branch and a detection branch in a parallel way. The enhancement branch consists of a cascade of an image enhancement subnet and an object detection subnet. And the detection branch only consists of a detection subnet. A feature guided module connects the shallow convolution layer of the two branches. When training the enhancement branch, the object detection subnet in the enhancement branch guides the image enhancement subnet to be optimized towards the direction that is most conducive to the detection task. The shallow feature map of the trained enhancement branch will be output to the feature guided module, constraining the optimization of detection branch through consistency loss and prompting detection branch to learn more detailed information of the objects. And hence the detection performance will be refined. During the detection tasks, only detection branch will be reserved so that no additional cost of computation will be introduced. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method shows significant improvement in performance of the detector in severely degraded underwater scenes while maintaining a remarkable detection speed.
Authors:Yanhao Zheng, Kai Liu
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims at localizing and recognizing visual objects from novel classes unseen at the training time. Whereas, empirical studies reveal that advanced detectors generally assign lower scores to those novel instances, which are inadvertently suppressed during inference by commonly adopted greedy strategies like Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), leading to sub-optimal detection performance for novel classes. This paper systematically investigates this problem with the commonly-adopted two-stage OVOD paradigm. Specifically, in the region-proposal stage, proposals that contain novel instances showcase lower objectness scores, since they are treated as background proposals during the training phase. Meanwhile, in the object-classification stage, novel objects share lower region-text similarities (i.e., classification scores) due to the biased visual-language alignment by seen training samples. To alleviate this problem, this paper introduces two advanced measures to adjust confidence scores and conserve erroneously dismissed objects: (1) a class-agnostic localization quality estimate via overlap degree of region/object proposals, and (2) a text-guided visual similarity estimate with proxy prototypes for novel classes. Integrated with adjusting techniques specifically designed for the region-proposal and object-classification stages, this paper derives the aggregated confidence estimate for the open-vocabulary object detection paradigm (AggDet). Our AggDet is a generic and training-free post-processing scheme, which consistently bolsters open-vocabulary detectors across model scales and architecture designs. For instance, AggDet receives 3.3% and 1.5% gains on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks respectively, without any training cost.
Authors:Zhe Li, Haiwei Pan, Kejia Zhang, Yuhua Wang, Fengming Yu
Abstract:
Multi-modality image fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a single fused image to represent the imaging scene and facilitate downstream visual tasks comprehensively. In recent years, significant progress has been made in MMIF tasks due to advances in deep neural networks. However, existing methods cannot effectively and efficiently extract modality-specific and modality-fused features constrained by the inherent local reductive bias (CNN) or quadratic computational complexity (Transformers). To overcome this issue, we propose a Mamba-based Dual-phase Fusion (MambaDFuse) model. Firstly, a dual-level feature extractor is designed to capture long-range features from single-modality images by extracting low and high-level features from CNN and Mamba blocks. Then, a dual-phase feature fusion module is proposed to obtain fusion features that combine complementary information from different modalities. It uses the channel exchange method for shallow fusion and the enhanced Multi-modal Mamba (M3) blocks for deep fusion. Finally, the fused image reconstruction module utilizes the inverse transformation of the feature extraction to generate the fused result. Through extensive experiments, our approach achieves promising fusion results in infrared-visible image fusion and medical image fusion. Additionally, in a unified benchmark, MambaDFuse has also demonstrated improved performance in downstream tasks such as object detection. Code with checkpoints will be available after the peer-review process.
Authors:Lifan Jiang, Zhihui Wang, Changmiao Wang, Ming Li, Jiaxu Leng
Abstract:
Object detection, a quintessential task in the realm of perceptual computing, can be tackled using a generative methodology. In the present study, we introduce a novel framework designed to articulate object detection as a denoising diffusion process, which operates on the perturbed bounding boxes of annotated entities. This framework, termed \textbf{ConsistencyDet}, leverages an innovative denoising concept known as the Consistency Model. The hallmark of this model is its self-consistency feature, which empowers the model to map distorted information from any time step back to its pristine state, thereby realizing a \textbf{``few-step denoising''} mechanism. Such an attribute markedly elevates the operational efficiency of the model, setting it apart from the conventional Diffusion Model. Throughout the training phase, ConsistencyDet initiates the diffusion sequence with noise-infused boxes derived from the ground-truth annotations and conditions the model to perform the denoising task. Subsequently, in the inference stage, the model employs a denoising sampling strategy that commences with bounding boxes randomly sampled from a normal distribution. Through iterative refinement, the model transforms an assortment of arbitrarily generated boxes into definitive detections. Comprehensive evaluations employing standard benchmarks, such as MS-COCO and LVIS, corroborate that ConsistencyDet surpasses other leading-edge detectors in performance metrics. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ConsistencyDet-37D5.
Authors:Zong-Wei Hong, Yu-Chen Lin
Abstract:
The domain of computer vision has experienced significant advancements in facial-landmark detection, becoming increasingly essential across various applications such as augmented reality, facial recognition, and emotion analysis. Unlike object detection or semantic segmentation, which focus on identifying objects and outlining boundaries, faciallandmark detection aims to precisely locate and track critical facial features. However, deploying deep learning-based facial-landmark detection models on embedded systems with limited computational resources poses challenges due to the complexity of facial features, especially in dynamic settings. Additionally, ensuring robustness across diverse ethnicities and expressions presents further obstacles. Existing datasets often lack comprehensive representation of facial nuances, particularly within populations like those in Taiwan. This paper introduces a novel approach to address these challenges through the development of a knowledge distillation method. By transferring knowledge from larger models to smaller ones, we aim to create lightweight yet powerful deep learning models tailored specifically for facial-landmark detection tasks. Our goal is to design models capable of accurately locating facial landmarks under varying conditions, including diverse expressions, orientations, and lighting environments. The ultimate objective is to achieve high accuracy and real-time performance suitable for deployment on embedded systems. This method was successfully implemented and achieved a top 6th place finish out of 165 participants in the IEEE ICME 2024 PAIR competition.
Authors:Hai Su, ZhenWen Jian, Songsen Yu
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is a widely adopted technique for model lightening. However, the performance of most knowledge distillation methods in the domain of object detection is not satisfactory. Typically, knowledge distillation approaches consider only the classification task among the two sub-tasks of an object detector, largely overlooking the regression task. This oversight leads to a partial understanding of the object detector's comprehensive task, resulting in skewed estimations and potentially adverse effects. Therefore, we propose a knowledge distillation method that addresses both the classification and regression tasks, incorporating a task significance strategy. By evaluating the importance of features based on the output of the detector's two sub-tasks, our approach ensures a balanced consideration of both classification and regression tasks in object detection. Drawing inspiration from real-world teaching processes and the definition of learning condition, we introduce a method that focuses on both key and weak areas. By assessing the value of features for knowledge distillation based on their importance differences, we accurately capture the current model's learning situation. This method effectively prevents the issue of biased predictions about the model's learning reality caused by an incomplete utilization of the detector's outputs.
Authors:Jialou Wang, Manli Zhu, Yulei Li, Honglei Li, Longzhi Yang, Wai Lok Woo
Abstract:
Localization plays a crucial role in enhancing the practicality and precision of VQA systems. By enabling fine-grained identification and interaction with specific parts of an object, it significantly improves the system's ability to provide contextually relevant and spatially accurate responses, crucial for applications in dynamic environments like robotics and augmented reality. However, traditional systems face challenges in accurately mapping objects within images to generate nuanced and spatially aware responses. In this work, we introduce "Detect2Interact", which addresses these challenges by introducing an advanced approach for fine-grained object visual key field detection. First, we use the segment anything model (SAM) to generate detailed spatial maps of objects in images. Next, we use Vision Studio to extract semantic object descriptions. Third, we employ GPT-4's common sense knowledge, bridging the gap between an object's semantics and its spatial map. As a result, Detect2Interact achieves consistent qualitative results on object key field detection across extensive test cases and outperforms the existing VQA system with object detection by providing a more reasonable and finer visual representation.
Authors:Ali Behrouz, Michele Santacatterina, Ramin Zabih
Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning have mainly relied on Transformers due to their data dependency and ability to learn at scale. The attention module in these architectures, however, exhibits quadratic time and space in input size, limiting their scalability for long-sequence modeling. Despite recent attempts to design efficient and effective architecture backbone for multi-dimensional data, such as images and multivariate time series, existing models are either data independent, or fail to allow inter- and intra-dimension communication. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), and more specifically Selective State Space Models, with efficient hardware-aware implementation, have shown promising potential for long sequence modeling. Motivated by the success of SSMs, we present MambaMixer, a new architecture with data-dependent weights that uses a dual selection mechanism across tokens and channels, called Selective Token and Channel Mixer. MambaMixer connects selective mixers using a weighted averaging mechanism, allowing layers to have direct access to early features. As a proof of concept, we design Vision MambaMixer (ViM2) and Time Series MambaMixer (TSM2) architectures based on the MambaMixer block and explore their performance in various vision and time series forecasting tasks. Our results underline the importance of selective mixing across both tokens and channels. In ImageNet classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, ViM2 achieves competitive performance with well-established vision models and outperforms SSM-based vision models. In time series forecasting, TSM2 achieves outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while demonstrating significantly improved computational cost. These results show that while Transformers, cross-channel attention, and MLPs are sufficient for good performance in time series forecasting, neither is necessary.
Authors:Zoe Moorton, Zeyneb Kurt, Wai Lok Woo
Abstract:
Deep learning techniques have been explored within the marine litter problem for approximately 20 years but the majority of the research has developed rapidly in the last five years. We provide an in-depth, up to date, summary and analysis of 28 of the most recent and significant contributions of deep learning in marine debris. From cross referencing the research paper results, the YOLO family significantly outperforms all other methods of object detection but there are many respected contributions to this field that have categorically agreed that a comprehensive database of underwater debris is not currently available for machine learning. Using a small dataset curated and labelled by us, we tested YOLOv5 on a binary classification task and found the accuracy was low and the rate of false positives was high; highlighting the importance of a comprehensive database. We conclude this survey with over 40 future research recommendations and open challenges.
Authors:Binay Kumar Singh, Niels Da Vitoria Lobo
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based approach for identifying co-occurring objects in conjunction with base objects in multilabel object categories. Nowadays, with the advancement in computer vision based techniques we need to know about co-occurring objects with respect to base object for various purposes. The pipeline of the proposed work is composed of two stages: in the first stage of the proposed model we detect all the bounding boxes present in the image and their corresponding labels, then in the second stage we perform co-occurrence matrix analysis. In co-occurrence matrix analysis, we set base classes based on the maximum occurrences of the labels and build association rules and generate frequent patterns. These frequent patterns will show base classes and their corresponding co-occurring classes. We performed our experiments on two publicly available datasets: Pascal VOC and MS-COCO. The experimental results on public benchmark dataset is reported in Sec 4. Further we extend this work by considering all frequently objects as unlabeled and what if they are occluded as well.
Authors:Ruibo Wang, Song Zhang, Ping Huang, Donghai Zhang, Wei Yan
Abstract:
Recent research that combines implicit 3D representation with semantic information, like Semantic-NeRF, has proven that NeRF model could perform excellently in rendering 3D structures with semantic labels. This research aims to extend the Semantic Neural Radiance Fields (Semantic-NeRF) model by focusing solely on semantic output and removing the RGB output component. We reformulate the model and its training procedure to leverage only the cross-entropy loss between the model semantic output and the ground truth semantic images, removing the colour data traditionally used in the original Semantic-NeRF approach. We then conduct a series of identical experiments using the original and the modified Semantic-NeRF model. Our primary objective is to obverse the impact of this modification on the model performance by Semantic-NeRF, focusing on tasks such as scene understanding, object detection, and segmentation. The results offer valuable insights into the new way of rendering the scenes and provide an avenue for further research and development in semantic-focused 3D scene understanding.
Authors:VÃctor Toscano-Durán, Javier Perera-Lago, Eduardo Paluzo-Hidalgo, RocÃo Gonzalez-Diaz, Miguel Ãngel Gutierrez-Naranjo, Matteo Rucco
Abstract:
In recent years, Deep Learning has gained popularity for its ability to solve complex classification tasks, increasingly delivering better results thanks to the development of more accurate models, the availability of huge volumes of data and the improved computational capabilities of modern computers. However, these improvements in performance also bring efficiency problems, related to the storage of datasets and models, and to the waste of energy and time involved in both the training and inference processes. In this context, data reduction can help reduce energy consumption when training a deep learning model. In this paper, we present up to eight different methods to reduce the size of a tabular training dataset, and we develop a Python package to apply them. We also introduce a representativeness metric based on topology to measure how similar are the reduced datasets and the full training dataset. Additionally, we develop a methodology to apply these data reduction methods to image datasets for object detection tasks. Finally, we experimentally compare how these data reduction methods affect the representativeness of the reduced dataset, the energy consumption and the predictive performance of the model.
Authors:Jiawei Zhou, Wuzhou Li, Yi Cao, Hongtao Cai, Xiang Li
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) has garnered significant research attention in the field of remote sensing due to its ability to reduce the dependency on large amounts of annotated data. However, two challenges persist in this area: (1) axis-aligned proposals, which can result in misalignment for arbitrarily oriented objects, and (2) the scarcity of annotated data still limits the performance for unseen object categories. To address these issues, we propose a novel FSOD method for remote sensing images called Few-shot Oriented object detection with Memorable Contrastive learning (FOMC). Specifically, we employ oriented bounding boxes instead of traditional horizontal bounding boxes to learn a better feature representation for arbitrary-oriented aerial objects, leading to enhanced detection performance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address oriented object detection in the few-shot setting for remote sensing images. To address the challenging issue of object misclassification, we introduce a supervised contrastive learning module with a dynamically updated memory bank. This module enables the use of large batches of negative samples and enhances the model's capability to learn discriminative features for unseen classes. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the few-shot oriented object detection task. Code and pretrained models will be released.
Authors:Ali Asghar Sharifi, Ali Zoljodi, Masoud Daneshtalab
Abstract:
Autonomous driving systems are a rapidly evolving technology that enables driverless car production. Trajectory prediction is a critical component of autonomous driving systems, enabling cars to anticipate the movements of surrounding objects for safe navigation. Trajectory prediction using Lidar point-cloud data performs better than 2D images due to providing 3D information. However, processing point-cloud data is more complicated and time-consuming than 2D images. Hence, state-of-the-art 3D trajectory predictions using point-cloud data suffer from slow and erroneous predictions. This paper introduces TrajectoryNAS, a pioneering method that focuses on utilizing point cloud data for trajectory prediction. By leveraging Neural Architecture Search (NAS), TrajectoryNAS automates the design of trajectory prediction models, encompassing object detection, tracking, and forecasting in a cohesive manner. This approach not only addresses the complex interdependencies among these tasks but also emphasizes the importance of accuracy and efficiency in trajectory modeling. Through empirical studies, TrajectoryNAS demonstrates its effectiveness in enhancing the performance of autonomous driving systems, marking a significant advancement in the field.Experimental results reveal that TrajcetoryNAS yield a minimum of 4.8 higger accuracy and 1.1* lower latency over competing methods on the NuScenes dataset.
Authors:Mincheol Chang, Siyeong Lee, Jinkyu Kim, Namil Kim
Abstract:
Typical LiDAR-based 3D object detection models are trained in a supervised manner with real-world data collection, which is often imbalanced over classes (or long-tailed). To deal with it, augmenting minority-class examples by sampling ground truth (GT) LiDAR points from a database and pasting them into a scene of interest is often used, but challenges still remain: inflexibility in locating GT samples and limited sample diversity. In this work, we propose to leverage pseudo-LiDAR point clouds generated (at a low cost) from videos capturing a surround view of miniatures or real-world objects of minor classes. Our method, called Pseudo Ground Truth Augmentation (PGT-Aug), consists of three main steps: (i) volumetric 3D instance reconstruction using a 2D-to-3D view synthesis model, (ii) object-level domain alignment with LiDAR intensity estimation and (iii) a hybrid context-aware placement method from ground and map information. We demonstrate the superiority and generality of our method through performance improvements in extensive experiments conducted on three popular benchmarks, i.e., nuScenes, KITTI, and Lyft, especially for the datasets with large domain gaps captured by different LiDAR configurations. Our code and data will be publicly available upon publication.
Authors:Jesher Joshua M, Ragav V, Syed Ibrahim S P
Abstract:
The maintenance, archiving and usage of the design drawings is cumbersome in physical form in different industries for longer period. It is hard to extract information by simple scanning of drawing sheets. Converting them to their digital formats such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD), with needed knowledge extraction can solve this problem. The conversion of these machine drawings to its digital form is a crucial challenge which requires advanced techniques. This research proposes an innovative methodology utilizing Deep Learning methods. The approach employs object detection model, such as Yolov7, Faster R-CNN, to detect physical drawing objects present in the images followed by, edge detection algorithms such as canny filter to extract and refine the identified lines from the drawing region and curve detection techniques to detect circle. Also ornaments (complex shapes) within the drawings are extracted. To ensure comprehensive conversion, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool is integrated to identify and extract the text elements from the drawings. The extracted data which includes the lines, shapes and text is consolidated and stored in a structured comma separated values(.csv) file format. The accuracy and the efficiency of conversion is evaluated. Through this, conversion can be automated to help organizations enhance their productivity, facilitate seamless collaborations and preserve valuable design information in a digital format easily accessible. Overall, this study contributes to the advancement of CAD conversions, providing accurate results from the translating process. Future research can focus on handling diverse drawing types, enhanced accuracy in shape and line detection and extraction.
Authors:Xiaotong Yu, Ruihan Xie, Zhihe Zhao, Chang-Wen Chen
Abstract:
While we enjoy the richness and informativeness of multimodal data, it also introduces interference and redundancy of information. To achieve optimal domain interpretation with limited resources, we propose CSDNet, a lightweight \textbf{C}ross \textbf{S}hallow and \textbf{D}eep Perception \textbf{Net}work designed to integrate two modalities with less coherence, thereby discarding redundant information or even modality. We implement our CSDNet for Salient Object Detection (SOD) task in robotic perception. The proposed method capitalises on spatial information prescreening and implicit coherence navigation across shallow and deep layers of the depth-thermal (D-T) modality, prioritising integration over fusion to maximise the scene interpretation. To further refine the descriptive capabilities of the encoder for the less-known D-T modalities, we also propose SAMAEP to guide an effective feature mapping to the generalised feature space. Our approach is tested on the VDT-2048 dataset, leveraging the D-T modality outperforms those of SOTA methods using RGB-T or RGB-D modalities for the first time, achieves comparable performance with the RGB-D-T triple-modality benchmark method with 5.97 times faster at runtime and demanding 0.0036 times fewer FLOPs. Demonstrates the proposed CSDNet effectively integrates the information from the D-T modality. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors:Changmin Jeon, Seonjun Kim, Juheon Yi, Youngki Lee
Abstract:
In this paper, we present Mondrian, an edge system that enables high-performance object detection on high-resolution video streams. Many lightweight models and system optimization techniques have been proposed for resource-constrained devices, but they do not fully utilize the potential of the accelerators over dynamic, high-resolution videos. To enable such capability, we devise a novel Compressive Packed Inference to minimize per-pixel processing costs by selectively determining the necessary pixels to process and combining them to maximize processing parallelism. In particular, our system quickly extracts ROIs and dynamically shrinks them, reflecting the effect of the fast-changing characteristics of objects and scenes. It then intelligently combines such scaled ROIs into large canvases to maximize the utilization of inference accelerators such as GPU. Evaluation across various datasets, models, and devices shows Mondrian outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., input rescaling, ROI extractions, ROI extractions+batching) by 15.0-19.7% higher accuracy, leading to $\times$6.65 higher throughput than frame-wise inference for processing various 1080p video streams. We will release the code after the paper review.
Authors:Hongcheng Zhang, Liu Liang, Pengxin Zeng, Xiao Song, Zhe Wang
Abstract:
Sparse 3D detectors have received significant attention since the query-based paradigm embraces low latency without explicit dense BEV feature construction. However, these detectors achieve worse performance than their dense counterparts. In this paper, we find the key to bridging the performance gap is to enhance the awareness of rich representations in two modalities. Here, we present a high-performance fully sparse detector for end-to-end multi-modality 3D object detection. The detector, termed SparseLIF, contains three key designs, which are (1) Perspective-Aware Query Generation (PAQG) to generate high-quality 3D queries with perspective priors, (2) RoI-Aware Sampling (RIAS) to further refine prior queries by sampling RoI features from each modality, (3) Uncertainty-Aware Fusion (UAF) to precisely quantify the uncertainty of each sensor modality and adaptively conduct final multi-modality fusion, thus achieving great robustness against sensor noises. By the time of paper submission, SparseLIF achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes dataset, ranking 1st on both validation set and test benchmark, outperforming all state-of-the-art 3D object detectors by a notable margin.
Authors:Debolena Basak, P. K. Srijith, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar
Abstract:
In several real-world scenarios like autonomous navigation and mobility, to obtain a better visual understanding of the surroundings, image captioning and object detection play a crucial role. This work introduces a novel multitask learning framework that combines image captioning and object detection into a joint model. We propose TICOD, Transformer-based Image Captioning and Object detection model for jointly training both tasks by combining the losses obtained from image captioning and object detection networks. By leveraging joint training, the model benefits from the complementary information shared between the two tasks, leading to improved performance for image captioning. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture that enables end-to-end network integration for image captioning and object detection and performs both tasks jointly. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset. Our model outperforms the baselines from image captioning literature by achieving a 3.65% improvement in BERTScore.
Authors:Jiyong Oh, Junhaeng Lee, Woongchan Byun, Minsang Kong, Sang Hun Lee
Abstract:
Recent studies have focused on enhancing the performance of 3D object detection models. Among various approaches, ground-truth sampling has been proposed as an augmentation technique to address the challenges posed by limited ground-truth data. However, an inherent issue with ground-truth sampling is its tendency to increase false positives. Therefore, this study aims to overcome the limitations of ground-truth sampling and improve the performance of 3D object detection models by developing a new augmentation technique called false-positive sampling. False-positive sampling involves retraining the model using point clouds that are identified as false positives in the model's predictions. We propose an algorithm that utilizes both ground-truth and false-positive sampling and an algorithm for building the false-positive sample database. Additionally, we analyze the principles behind the performance enhancement due to false-positive sampling. Our experiments demonstrate that models utilizing false-positive sampling show a reduction in false positives and exhibit improved object detection performance. On the KITTI and Waymo Open datasets, models with false-positive sampling surpass the baseline models by a large margin.
Authors:Abdullah Nazhat Abdullah, Tarkan Aydin
Abstract:
The attention mechanism is the primary component of the transformer architecture; it has led to significant advancements in deep learning spanning many domains and covering multiple tasks. In computer vision, the attention mechanism was first incorporated in the Vision Transformer ViT, and then its usage has expanded into many tasks in the vision domain, such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and image generation. While the attention mechanism is very expressive and capable, it comes with the disadvantage of being computationally expensive and requiring datasets of considerable size for effective optimization. To address these shortcomings, many designs have been proposed in the literature to reduce the computational burden and alleviate the data size requirements. Examples of such attempts in the vision domain are the MLP-Mixer, the Conv-Mixer, the Perciver-IO, and many more attempts with different sets of advantages and disadvantages. This paper introduces a new computational block as an alternative to the standard ViT block. The newly proposed block reduces the computational requirements by replacing the normal attention layers with a Network in Network structure, therefore enhancing the static approach of the MLP-Mixer with a dynamic learning of element-wise gating function generated by a token mixing process. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed design provides better performance than the baseline architectures on multiple datasets applied in the image classification task of the vision domain.
Authors:Shufan Pei, Junhong Lin, Wenxi Liu, Tiesong Zhao, Chia-Wen Lin
Abstract:
In addition to low light, night images suffer degradation from light effects (e.g., glare, floodlight, etc). However, existing nighttime visibility enhancement methods generally focus on low-light regions, which neglects, or even amplifies the light effects. To address this issue, we propose an Adaptive Multi-scale Fusion network (AMFusion) with infrared and visible images, which designs fusion rules according to different illumination regions. First, we separately fuse spatial and semantic features from infrared and visible images, where the former are used for the adjustment of light distribution and the latter are used for the improvement of detection accuracy. Thereby, we obtain an image free of low light and light effects, which improves the performance of nighttime object detection. Second, we utilize detection features extracted by a pre-trained backbone that guide the fusion of semantic features. Hereby, we design a Detection-guided Semantic Fusion Module (DSFM) to bridge the domain gap between detection and semantic features. Third, we propose a new illumination loss to constrain fusion image with normal light intensity. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AMFusion with better visual quality and detection accuracy. The source code will be released after the peer review process.
Authors:Yuan Zhu, Yanqiang Wang, Yadong An, Hong Yang, Yiming Pan
Abstract:
This paper focuses on a real-time vehicle detection and urban traffic behavior analysis system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) traffic video. By using UAV to collect traffic data and combining the YOLOv8 model and SORT tracking algorithm, the object detection and tracking functions are implemented on the iOS mobile platform. For the problem of traffic data acquisition and analysis, the dynamic computing method is used to process the performance in real time and calculate the micro and macro traffic parameters of the vehicles, and real-time traffic behavior analysis is conducted and visualized. The experiment results reveals that the vehicle object detection can reach 98.27% precision rate and 87.93% recall rate, and the real-time processing capacity is stable at 30 frames per seconds. This work integrates drone technology, iOS development, and deep learning techniques to integrate traffic video acquisition, object detection, object tracking, and traffic behavior analysis functions on mobile devices. It provides new possibilities for lightweight traffic information collection and data analysis, and offers innovative solutions to improve the efficiency of analyzing road traffic conditions and addressing transportation issues for transportation authorities.
Authors:Chandan Kumar, Jansel Herrera-Gerena, John Just, Matthew Darr, Ali Jannesari
Abstract:
Training image-based object detectors presents formidable challenges, as it entails not only the complexities of object detection but also the added intricacies of precisely localizing objects within potentially diverse and noisy environments. However, the collection of imagery itself can often be straightforward; for instance, cameras mounted in vehicles can effortlessly capture vast amounts of data in various real-world scenarios. In light of this, we introduce a groundbreaking method for training single-stage object detectors through unsupervised/self-supervised learning.
Our state-of-the-art approach has the potential to revolutionize the labeling process, substantially reducing the time and cost associated with manual annotation. Furthermore, it paves the way for previously unattainable research opportunities, particularly for large, diverse, and challenging datasets lacking extensive labels.
In contrast to prevalent unsupervised learning methods that primarily target classification tasks, our approach takes on the unique challenge of object detection. We pioneer the concept of intra-image contrastive learning alongside inter-image counterparts, enabling the acquisition of crucial location information essential for object detection. The method adeptly learns and represents this location information, yielding informative heatmaps. Our results showcase an outstanding accuracy of \textbf{89.2\%}, marking a significant breakthrough of approximately \textbf{15x} over random initialization in the realm of unsupervised object detection within the field of computer vision.
Authors:Binh Duong Nguyen, Johannes Steiner, Peter Wellmann, Stefan Sandfeld
Abstract:
Detecting and analyzing various defect types in semiconductor materials is an important prerequisite for understanding the underlying mechanisms as well as tailoring the production processes. Analysis of microscopy images that reveal defects typically requires image analysis tasks such as segmentation and object detection. With the permanently increasing amount of data that is produced by experiments, handling these tasks manually becomes more and more impossible. In this work, we combine various image analysis and data mining techniques for creating a robust and accurate, automated image analysis pipeline. This allows for extracting the type and position of all defects in a microscopy image of a KOH-etched 4H-SiC wafer that was stitched together from approximately 40,000 individual images.
Authors:Johannes Bayer, Leo van Waveren, Andreas Dengel
Abstract:
As digitization in engineering progressed, circuit diagrams (also referred to as schematics) are typically developed and maintained in computer-aided engineering (CAE) systems, thus allowing for automated verification, simulation and further processing in downstream engineering steps. However, apart from printed legacy schematics, hand-drawn circuit diagrams are still used today in the educational domain, where they serve as an easily accessible mean for trainees and students to learn drawing this type of diagrams. Furthermore, hand-drawn schematics are typically used in examinations due to legal constraints. In order to harness the capabilities of digital circuit representations, automated means for extracting the electrical graph from raster graphics are required.
While respective approaches have been proposed in literature, they are typically conducted on small or non-disclosed datasets. This paper describes a modular end-to-end solution on a larger, public dataset, in which approaches for the individual sub-tasks are evaluated to form a new baseline. These sub-tasks include object detection (for electrical symbols and texts), binary segmentation (drafter's stroke vs. background), handwritten character recognition and orientation regression for electrical symbols and texts. Furthermore, computer-vision graph assembly and rectification algorithms are presented. All methods are integrated in a publicly available prototype.
Authors:Vivek Tetarwal, Sandeep Kumar
Abstract:
With the emergence of new technologies in the field of airborne platforms and imaging sensors, aerial data analysis is becoming very popular, capitalizing on its advantages over land data. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the computer vision tasks within the domain of aerial data analysis. While addressing fundamental aspects such as object detection and tracking, the primary focus is on pivotal tasks like change detection, object segmentation, and scene-level analysis. The paper provides the comparison of various hyper parameters employed across diverse architectures and tasks. A substantial section is dedicated to an in-depth discussion on libraries, their categorization, and their relevance to different domain expertise. The paper encompasses aerial datasets, the architectural nuances adopted, and the evaluation metrics associated with all the tasks in aerial data analysis. Applications of computer vision tasks in aerial data across different domains are explored, with case studies providing further insights. The paper thoroughly examines the challenges inherent in aerial data analysis, offering practical solutions. Additionally, unresolved issues of significance are identified, paving the way for future research directions in the field of aerial data analysis.
Authors:Colin Decourt, Rufin VanRullen, Didier Salle, Thomas Oberlin
Abstract:
In recent years, driven by the need for safer and more autonomous transport systems, the automotive industry has shifted toward integrating a growing number of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Among the array of sensors employed for object recognition tasks, radar sensors have emerged as a formidable contender due to their abilities in adverse weather conditions or low-light scenarios and their robustness in maintaining consistent performance across diverse environments. However, the small size of radar datasets and the complexity of the labelling of those data limit the performance of radar object detectors. Driven by the promising results of self-supervised learning in computer vision, this paper presents RiCL, an instance contrastive learning framework to pre-train radar object detectors. We propose to exploit the detection from the radar and the temporal information to pre-train the radar object detection model in a self-supervised way using contrastive learning. We aim to pre-train an object detector's backbone, head and neck to learn with fewer data. Experiments on the CARRADA and the RADDet datasets show the effectiveness of our approach in learning generic representations of objects in range-Doppler maps. Notably, our pre-training strategy allows us to use only 20% of the labelled data to reach a similar mAP@0.5 than a supervised approach using the whole training set.
Authors:Minh Dang Tu, Kieu Trang Le, Manh Duong Phung
Abstract:
This work presents a neural network model capable of recognizing small and tiny objects in thermal images collected by unmanned aerial vehicles. Our model consists of three parts, the backbone, the neck, and the prediction head. The backbone is developed based on the structure of YOLOv5 combined with the use of a transformer encoder at the end. The neck includes a BI-FPN block combined with the use of a sliding window and a transformer to increase the information fed into the prediction head. The prediction head carries out the detection by evaluating feature maps with the Sigmoid function. The use of transformers with attention and sliding windows increases recognition accuracy while keeping the model at a reasonable number of parameters and computation requirements for embedded systems. Experiments conducted on public dataset VEDAI and our collected datasets show that our model has a higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods such as ResNet, Faster RCNN, ComNet, ViT, YOLOv5, SMPNet, and DPNetV3. Experiments on the embedded computer Jetson AGX show that our model achieves a real-time computation speed with a stability rate of over 90%.
Authors:Maria Lyssenko, Christoph Gladisch, Christian Heinzemann, Matthias Woehrle, Rudolph Triebel
Abstract:
Safety is of utmost importance for perception in automated driving (AD). However, a prime safety concern in state-of-the art object detection is that standard evaluation schemes utilize safety-agnostic metrics to argue sufficient detection performance. Hence, it is imperative to leverage supplementary domain knowledge to accentuate safety-critical misdetections during evaluation tasks. To tackle the underspecification, this paper introduces a novel credibility metric, called c-flow, for pedestrian bounding boxes. To this end, c-flow relies on a complementary optical flow signal from image sequences and enhances the analyses of safety-critical misdetections without requiring additional labels. We implement and evaluate c-flow with a state-of-the-art pedestrian detector on a large AD dataset. Our analysis demonstrates that c-flow allows developers to identify safety-critical misdetections.
Authors:Nikolaus Correll, Dylan Kriegman, Stephen Otto, James Watson
Abstract:
We describe a force-controlled robotic gripper with built-in tactile and 3D perception. We also describe a complete autonomous manipulation pipeline consisting of object detection, segmentation, point cloud processing, force-controlled manipulation, and symbolic (re)-planning. The design emphasizes versatility in terms of applications, manufacturability, use of commercial off-the-shelf parts, and open-source software. We validate the design by characterizing force control (achieving up to 32N, controllable in steps of 0.08N), force measurement, and two manipulation demonstrations: assembly of the Siemens gear assembly problem, and a sensor-based stacking task requiring replanning. These demonstrate robust execution of long sequences of sensor-based manipulation tasks, which makes the resulting platform a solid foundation for researchers in task-and-motion planning, educators, and quick prototyping of household, industrial and warehouse automation tasks.
Authors:Mateo Lostanlen, Nicolas Isla, Jose Guillen, Felix Veith, Cristian Buc, Valentin Barriere
Abstract:
Early wildfire detection is of the utmost importance to enable rapid response efforts, and thus minimize the negative impacts of wildfire spreads. To this end, we present PyroNear-2024, a new dataset composed of both images and videos, allowing for the training and evaluation of smoke plume detection models, including sequential models. The data is sourced from: \textit{(i)} web-scraped videos of wildfires from public networks of cameras for wildfire detection in-the-wild, \text{(ii)} videos from our in-house network of cameras, and \textit{(iii)} a small portion of synthetic and real images. This dataset includes around 150,000 manual annotations on 50,000 images, covering 400 wildfires, \Pyro surpasses existing datasets in size and diversity. It includes data from France, Spain, and the United States. Finally, it is composed of both images and videos, allowing for the training and evaluation of smoke plume detection models, including sequential models. We ran cross-dataset experiments using a lightweight state-of-the-art object detection model and found out the proposed dataset is particularly challenging, with F1 score of around 60%, but more stable than existing datasets. The video part of the dataset can be used to train a lightweight sequential model, improving global recall while maintaining precision. Finally, its use in concordance with other public dataset helps to reach higher results overall. We will make both our code and data available.
Authors:Anton Backhaus, Thorsten Luettel, Hans-Joachim Wuensche
Abstract:
Intelligent vehicles of the future must be capable of understanding and navigating safely through their surroundings. Camera-based vehicle systems can use keypoints as well as objects as low- and high-level landmarks for GNSS-independent SLAM and visual odometry. To this end we propose YOLOPoint, a convolutional neural network model that simultaneously detects keypoints and objects in an image by combining YOLOv5 and SuperPoint to create a single forward-pass network that is both real-time capable and accurate. By using a shared backbone and a light-weight network structure, YOLOPoint is able to perform competitively on both the HPatches and KITTI benchmarks.
Authors:VinÃcius Yu Okubo, Kotaro Shimizu, B. S. Shivaram, Hae Yong Kim
Abstract:
Defects influence diverse properties of materials, shaping their structural, mechanical, and electronic characteristics. Among a variety of materials exhibiting unique defects, magnets exhibit diverse nano- to micro-scale defects and have been intensively studied in materials science. Specifically, defects in magnetic labyrinthine patterns, called junctions and terminals are ubiquitous and serve as points of interest. While detecting and characterizing such defects is crucial for understanding magnets, systematically investigating large-scale images containing over a thousand closely packed junctions and terminals remains a formidable challenge. This study introduces a new technique called TM-CNN (Template Matching - Convolutional Neural Network) designed to detect a multitude of small objects in images, such as the defects in magnetic labyrinthine patterns. TM-CNN was used to identify 641,649 such structures in 444 experimental images, and the results were explored to deepen understanding of magnetic materials. It employs a two-stage detection approach combining template matching, used in initial detection, with a convolutional neural network, used to eliminate incorrect identifications. To train a CNN classifier, it is necessary to annotate a large number of training images. This difficulty prevents the use of CNN in many practical applications. TM-CNN significantly reduces the manual workload for creating training images by automatically making most of the annotations and leaving only a small number of corrections to human reviewers. In testing, TM-CNN achieved an impressive F1 score of 0.991, far outperforming traditional template matching and CNN-based object detection algorithms.
Authors:Richard Vogg, Timo Lüddecke, Jonathan Henrich, Sharmita Dey, Matthias Nuske, Valentin Hassler, Derek Murphy, Julia Fischer, Julia Ostner, Oliver Schülke, Peter M. Kappeler, Claudia Fichtel, Alexander Gail, Stefan Treue, Hansjörg Scherberger, Florentin Wörgötter, Alexander S. Ecker
Abstract:
Advances in computer vision as well as increasingly widespread video-based behavioral monitoring have great potential for transforming how we study animal cognition and behavior. However, there is still a fairly large gap between the exciting prospects and what can actually be achieved in practice today, especially in videos from the wild. With this perspective paper, we want to contribute towards closing this gap, by guiding behavioral scientists in what can be expected from current methods and steering computer vision researchers towards problems that are relevant to advance research in animal behavior. We start with a survey of the state-of-the-art methods for computer vision problems that are directly relevant to the video-based study of animal behavior, including object detection, multi-individual tracking, individual identification, and (inter)action recognition. We then review methods for effort-efficient learning, which is one of the biggest challenges from a practical perspective. Finally, we close with an outlook into the future of the emerging field of computer vision for animal behavior, where we argue that the field should develop approaches to unify detection, tracking, identification and (inter)action recognition in a single, video-based framework.
Authors:Lynn Vonder Haar, Timothy Elvira, Luke Newcomb, Omar Ochoa
Abstract:
Although accuracy and other common metrics can provide a useful window into the performance of an object detection model, they lack a deeper view of the model's decision process. Regardless of the quality of the training data and process, the features that an object detection model learns cannot be guaranteed. A model may learn a relationship between certain background context, i.e., scene level objects, and the presence of the labeled classes. Furthermore, standard performance verification and metrics would not identify this phenomenon. This paper presents a new black box explainability method for additional verification of object detection models by finding the impact of scene level objects on the identification of the objects within the image. By comparing the accuracies of a model on test data with and without certain scene level objects, the contributions of these objects to the model's performance becomes clearer. The experiment presented here will assess the impact of buildings and people in image context on the detection of emergency road vehicles by a fine-tuned YOLOv8 model. A large increase in accuracy in the presence of a scene level object will indicate the model's reliance on that object to make its detections. The results of this research lead to providing a quantitative explanation of the object detection model's decision process, enabling a deeper understanding of the model's performance.
Authors:Ziwei Sun, Zexi Hua, Hengchao Li, Yan Li
Abstract:
Aiming at the specific characteristics of flying bird objects in surveillance video, such as the typically non-obvious features in single-frame images, small size in most instances, and asymmetric shapes, this paper proposes a Flying Bird Object Detection method for Surveillance Video (FBOD-SV). Firstly, a new feature aggregation module, the Correlation Attention Feature Aggregation (Co-Attention-FA) module, is designed to aggregate the features of the flying bird object according to the bird object's correlation on multiple consecutive frames of images. Secondly, a Flying Bird Object Detection Network (FBOD-Net) with down-sampling followed by up-sampling is designed, which utilizes a large feature layer that fuses fine spatial information and large receptive field information to detect special multi-scale (mostly small-scale) bird objects. Finally, the SimOTA dynamic label allocation method is applied to One-Category object detection, and the SimOTA-OC dynamic label strategy is proposed to solve the difficult problem of label allocation caused by irregular flying bird objects. In this paper, the performance of the FBOD-SV is validated using experimental datasets of flying bird objects in traction substation surveillance videos. The experimental results show that the FBOD-SV effectively improves the detection performance of flying bird objects in surveillance video.
Authors:Xingxing Zuo, Pouya Samangouei, Yunwen Zhou, Yan Di, Mingyang Li
Abstract:
Precisely perceiving the geometric and semantic properties of real-world 3D objects is crucial for the continued evolution of augmented reality and robotic applications. To this end, we present Foundation Model Embedded Gaussian Splatting (FMGS), which incorporates vision-language embeddings of foundation models into 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS). The key contribution of this work is an efficient method to reconstruct and represent 3D vision-language models. This is achieved by distilling feature maps generated from image-based foundation models into those rendered from our 3D model. To ensure high-quality rendering and fast training, we introduce a novel scene representation by integrating strengths from both GS and multi-resolution hash encodings (MHE). Our effective training procedure also introduces a pixel alignment loss that makes the rendered feature distance of the same semantic entities close, following the pixel-level semantic boundaries. Our results demonstrate remarkable multi-view semantic consistency, facilitating diverse downstream tasks, beating state-of-the-art methods by 10.2 percent on open-vocabulary language-based object detection, despite that we are 851X faster for inference. This research explores the intersection of vision, language, and 3D scene representation, paving the way for enhanced scene understanding in uncontrolled real-world environments. We plan to release the code on the project page.
Authors:Hankyul Baek, Donghyeon Kim, Joongheon Kim
Abstract:
Spurred by consistent advances and innovation in deep learning, object detection applications have become prevalent, particularly in autonomous driving that leverages various visual data. As convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are being optimized, the performances and computation speeds of object detection in autonomous driving have been significantly improved. However, due to the exponentially rapid growth in the complexity and scale of data used in object detection, there are limitations in terms of computation speeds while conducting object detection solely with classical computing. Motivated by this, quantum convolution-based object detection (QCOD) is proposed to adopt quantum computing to perform object detection at high speed. The QCOD utilizes our proposed fast quantum convolution that uploads input channel information and re-constructs output channels for achieving reduced computational complexity and thus improving performances. Lastly, the extensive experiments with KITTI autonomous driving object detection dataset verify that the proposed fast quantum convolution and QCOD are successfully operated in real object detection applications.
Authors:Darlyn Buenaño Vera, Byron Oviedo, Washington Chiriboga Casanova, Cristian Zambrano-Vega
Abstract:
The early identification of diseases in cocoa pods is an important task to guarantee the production of high-quality cocoa. The use of artificial intelligence techniques such as machine learning, computer vision and deep learning are promising solutions to help identify and classify diseases in cocoa pods. In this paper we introduce the development and evaluation of a deep learning computational model applied to the identification of diseases in cocoa pods, focusing on "monilia" and "black pod" diseases. An exhaustive review of state-of-the-art of computational models was carried out, based on scientific articles related to the identification of plant diseases using computer vision and deep learning techniques. As a result of the search, EfficientDet-Lite4, an efficient and lightweight model for object detection, was selected. A dataset, including images of both healthy and diseased cocoa pods, has been utilized to train the model to detect and pinpoint disease manifestations with considerable accuracy. Significant enhancements in the model training and evaluation demonstrate the capability of recognizing and classifying diseases through image analysis. Furthermore, the functionalities of the model were integrated into an Android native mobile with an user-friendly interface, allowing to younger or inexperienced farmers a fast and accuracy identification of health status of cocoa pods
Authors:Ernesto Lozano Calvo, Bernardo Taveira, Fredrik Kahl, Niklas Gustafsson, Jonathan Larsson, Adam Tonderski
Abstract:
Object detection applied to LiDAR point clouds is a relevant task in robotics, and particularly in autonomous driving. Single frame methods, predominant in the field, exploit information from individual sensor scans. Recent approaches achieve good performance, at relatively low inference time. Nevertheless, given the inherent high sparsity of LiDAR data, these methods struggle in long-range detection (e.g. 200m) which we deem to be critical in achieving safe automation. Aggregating multiple scans not only leads to a denser point cloud representation, but it also brings time-awareness to the system, and provides information about how the environment is changing. Solutions of this kind, however, are often highly problem-specific, demand careful data processing, and tend not to fulfil runtime requirements. In this context we propose TimePillars, a temporally-recurrent object detection pipeline which leverages the pillar representation of LiDAR data across time, respecting hardware integration efficiency constraints, and exploiting the diversity and long-range information of the novel Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD). Through experimentation, we prove the benefits of having recurrency, and show how basic building blocks are enough to achieve robust and efficient results.
Authors:Caterina Caccavella, Federico Paredes-Vallés, Marco Cannici, Lyes Khacef
Abstract:
The rise of mobility, IoT and wearables has shifted processing to the edge of the sensors, driven by the need to reduce latency, communication costs and overall energy consumption. While deep learning models have achieved remarkable results in various domains, their deployment at the edge for real-time applications remains computationally expensive. Neuromorphic computing emerges as a promising paradigm shift, characterized by co-localized memory and computing as well as event-driven asynchronous sensing and processing. In this work, we demonstrate the possibility of solving the ubiquitous computer vision task of object detection at the edge with low-power requirements, using the event-based N-Caltech101 dataset. We present the first instance of an on-chip spiking neural network for event-based face detection deployed on the SynSense Speck neuromorphic chip, which comprises both an event-based sensor and a spike-based asynchronous processor implementing Integrate-and-Fire neurons. We show how to reduce precision discrepancies between off-chip clock-driven simulation used for training and on-chip event-driven inference. This involves using a multi-spike version of the Integrate-and-Fire neuron on simulation, where spikes carry values that are proportional to the extent the membrane potential exceeds the firing threshold. We propose a robust strategy to train spiking neural networks with back-propagation through time using multi-spike activation and firing rate regularization and demonstrate how to decode output spikes into bounding boxes. We show that the power consumption of the chip is directly proportional to the number of synaptic operations in the spiking neural network, and we explore the trade-off between power consumption and detection precision with different firing rate regularization, achieving an on-chip face detection mAP[0.5] of ~0.6 while consuming only ~20 mW.
Authors:Demircan Tas, Rohit Priyadarshi Sanatani
Abstract:
There has been a growing adoption of computer vision tools and technologies in architectural design workflows over the past decade. Notable use cases include point cloud generation, visual content analysis, and spatial awareness for robotic fabrication. Multiple image classification, object detection, and semantic pixel segmentation models have become popular for the extraction of high-level symbolic descriptions and semantic content from two-dimensional images and videos. However, a major challenge in this regard has been the extraction of high-level architectural structures (walls, floors, ceilings windows etc.) from diverse imagery where parts of these elements are occluded by furniture, people, or other non-architectural elements. This project aims to tackle this problem by proposing models that are capable of extracting architecturally meaningful semantic descriptions from two-dimensional scenes of populated interior spaces. 1000 virtual classrooms are parametrically generated, randomized along key spatial parameters such as length, width, height, and door/window positions. The positions of cameras, and non-architectural visual obstructions (furniture/objects) are also randomized. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for image-to-image translation (Pix2Pix) is trained on synthetically generated rendered images of these enclosures, along with corresponding image abstractions representing high-level architectural structure. The model is then tested on unseen synthetic imagery of new enclosures, and outputs are compared to ground truth using pixel-wise comparison for evaluation. A similar model evaluation is also carried out on photographs of existing indoor enclosures, to measure its performance in real-world settings.
Authors:Kalpak Bansod, Yanshan Wan, Yugesh Rai
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive solution to address the critical challenge of liquid leaks in the oil and gas industry, leveraging advanced computer vision and deep learning methodologies. Employing You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT DETR) models, our project focuses on enhancing early identification of liquid leaks in key infrastructure components such as pipelines, pumps, and tanks. Through the integration of surveillance thermal cameras and sensors, the combined YOLO and RT DETR models demonstrate remarkable efficacy in the continuous monitoring and analysis of visual data within oil and gas facilities. YOLO's real-time object detection capabilities swiftly recognize leaks and their patterns, while RT DETR excels in discerning specific leak-related features, particularly in thermal images. This approach significantly improves the accuracy and speed of leak detection, ultimately mitigating environmental and financial risks associated with liquid leaks.
Authors:Kaiyou Song, Shan Zhang, Tong Wang
Abstract:
The development of autoregressive modeling (AM) in computer vision lags behind natural language processing (NLP) in self-supervised pre-training. This is mainly caused by the challenge that images are not sequential signals and lack a natural order when applying autoregressive modeling. In this study, inspired by human beings' way of grasping an image, i.e., focusing on the main object first, we present a semantic-aware autoregressive image modeling (SemAIM) method to tackle this challenge. The key insight of SemAIM is to autoregressive model images from the semantic patches to the less semantic patches. To this end, we first calculate a semantic-aware permutation of patches according to their feature similarities and then perform the autoregression procedure based on the permutation. In addition, considering that the raw pixels of patches are low-level signals and are not ideal prediction targets for learning high-level semantic representation, we also explore utilizing the patch features as the prediction targets. Extensive experiments are conducted on a broad range of downstream tasks, including image classification, object detection, and instance/semantic segmentation, to evaluate the performance of SemAIM. The results demonstrate SemAIM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other self-supervised methods. Specifically, with ViT-B, SemAIM achieves 84.1% top-1 accuracy for fine-tuning on ImageNet, 51.3% AP and 45.4% AP for object detection and instance segmentation on COCO, which outperforms the vanilla MAE by 0.5%, 1.0%, and 0.5%, respectively.
Authors:Christian Oswald, Mate Toth, Paul Meissner, Franz Pernkopf
Abstract:
In this paper we propose a new method for training neural networks (NNs) for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar mutual interference mitigation. Instead of training NNs to regress from interfered to clean radar signals as in previous work, we train NNs directly on object detection maps. We do so by performing a continuous relaxation of the cell-averaging constant false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) peak detector, which is a well-established algorithm for object detection using radar. With this new training objective we are able to increase object detection performance by a large margin. Furthermore, we introduce separable convolution kernels to strongly reduce the number of parameters and computational complexity of convolutional NN architectures for radar applications. We validate our contributions with experiments on real-world measurement data and compare them against signal processing interference mitigation methods.
Authors:Qibo Chen, Weizhong Jin, Shuchang Li, Mengdi Liu, Li Yu, Jian Jiang, Xiaozheng Wang
Abstract:
Text prompts are crucial for generalizing pre-trained open-set object detection models to new categories. However, current methods for text prompts are limited as they require manual feedback when generalizing to new categories, which restricts their ability to model complex scenes, often leading to incorrect detection results. To address this limitation, we propose a novel visual prompt method that learns new category knowledge from a few labeled images, which generalizes the pre-trained detection model to the new category. To allow visual prompts to represent new categories adequately, we propose a statistical-based prompt construction module that is not limited by predefined vocabulary lengths, thus allowing more vectors to be used when representing categories. We further utilize the category dictionaries in the pre-training dataset to design task-specific similarity dictionaries, which make visual prompts more discriminative. We evaluate the method on the ODinW dataset and show that it outperforms existing prompt learning methods and performs more consistently in combinatorial inference.
Authors:Yuke Zhu, Yumeng Ruan, Zihua Xiong, Sheng Guo
Abstract:
Regression loss design is an essential topic for oriented object detection. Due to the periodicity of the angle and the ambiguity of width and height definition, traditional L1-distance loss and its variants have been suffered from the metric discontinuity and the square-like problem. As a solution, the distribution based methods show significant advantages by representing oriented boxes as distributions. Differing from exploited the Gaussian distribution to get analytical form of distance measure, we propose a novel oriented regression loss, Wasserstein Distance(EWD) loss, to alleviate the square-like problem. Specifically, for the oriented box(OBox) representation, we choose a specially-designed distribution whose probability density function is only nonzero over the edges. On this basis, we develop Wasserstein distance as the measure. Besides, based on the edge representation of OBox, the EWD loss can be generalized to quadrilateral and polynomial regression scenarios. Experiments on multiple popular datasets and different detectors show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Jingchun Zhou, Qilin Gai, Kin-man Lam, Xianping Fu
Abstract:
In underwater environments, variations in suspended particle concentration and turbidity cause severe image degradation, posing significant challenges to image enhancement (IE) and object detection (OD) tasks. Currently, in-air image enhancement and detection methods have made notable progress, but their application in underwater conditions is limited due to the complexity and variability of these environments. Fine-tuning in-air models saves high overhead and has more optional reference work than building an underwater model from scratch. To address these issues, we design a transfer plugin with multiple priors for converting in-air models to underwater applications, named IA2U. IA2U enables efficient application in underwater scenarios, thereby improving performance in Underwater IE and OD. IA2U integrates three types of underwater priors: the water type prior that characterizes the degree of image degradation, such as color and visibility; the degradation prior, focusing on differences in details and textures; and the sample prior, considering the environmental conditions at the time of capture and the characteristics of the photographed object. Utilizing a Transformer-like structure, IA2U employs these priors as query conditions and a joint task loss function to achieve hierarchical enhancement of task-level underwater image features, therefore considering the requirements of two different tasks, IE and OD. Experimental results show that IA2U combined with an in-air model can achieve superior performance in underwater image enhancement and object detection tasks. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Aritra Dutta, Srijan Das, Jacob Nielsen, Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Mubarak Shah
Abstract:
Despite the commercial abundance of UAVs, aerial data acquisition remains challenging, and the existing Asia and North America-centric open-source UAV datasets are small-scale or low-resolution and lack diversity in scene contextuality. Additionally, the color content of the scenes, solar-zenith angle, and population density of different geographies influence the data diversity. These two factors conjointly render suboptimal aerial-visual perception of the deep neural network (DNN) models trained primarily on the ground-view data, including the open-world foundational models.
To pave the way for a transformative era of aerial detection, we present Multiview Aerial Visual RECognition or MAVREC, a video dataset where we record synchronized scenes from different perspectives -- ground camera and drone-mounted camera. MAVREC consists of around 2.5 hours of industry-standard 2.7K resolution video sequences, more than 0.5 million frames, and 1.1 million annotated bounding boxes. This makes MAVREC the largest ground and aerial-view dataset, and the fourth largest among all drone-based datasets across all modalities and tasks. Through our extensive benchmarking on MAVREC, we recognize that augmenting object detectors with ground-view images from the corresponding geographical location is a superior pre-training strategy for aerial detection. Building on this strategy, we benchmark MAVREC with a curriculum-based semi-supervised object detection approach that leverages labeled (ground and aerial) and unlabeled (only aerial) images to enhance the aerial detection. We publicly release the MAVREC dataset: https://mavrec.github.io.
Authors:Yan Tian, Zhaocheng Xu, Yujun Ma, Weiping Ding, Ruili Wang, Zhihong Gao, Guohua Cheng, Linyang He, Xuran Zhao
Abstract:
The task of multimodal cancer detection is to determine the locations and categories of lesions by using different imaging techniques, which is one of the key research methods for cancer diagnosis. Recently, deep learning-based object detection has made significant developments due to its strength in semantic feature extraction and nonlinear function fitting. However, multimodal cancer detection remains challenging due to morphological differences in lesions, interpatient variability, difficulty in annotation, and imaging artifacts. In this survey, we mainly investigate over 150 papers in recent years with respect to multimodal cancer detection using deep learning, with a focus on datasets and solutions to various challenges such as data annotation, variance between classes, small-scale lesions, and occlusion. We also provide an overview of the advantages and drawbacks of each approach. Finally, we discuss the current scope of work and provide directions for the future development of multimodal cancer detection.
Authors:Nikhil Kumar, Pravendra Singh
Abstract:
While there has been significant progress in object detection using conventional image processing and machine learning algorithms, exploring small and dim target detection in the IR domain is a relatively new area of study. The majority of small and dim target detection methods are derived from conventional object detection algorithms, albeit with some alterations. The task of detecting small and dim targets in IR imagery is complex. This is because these targets often need distinct features, the background is cluttered with unclear details, and the IR signatures of the scene can change over time due to fluctuations in thermodynamics. The primary objective of this review is to highlight the progress made in this field. This is the first review in the field of small and dim target detection in infrared imagery, encompassing various methodologies ranging from conventional image processing to cutting-edge deep learning-based approaches. The authors have also introduced a taxonomy of such approaches. There are two main types of approaches: methodologies using several frames for detection, and single-frame-based detection techniques. Single frame-based detection techniques encompass a diverse range of methods, spanning from traditional image processing-based approaches to more advanced deep learning methodologies. Our findings indicate that deep learning approaches perform better than traditional image processing-based approaches. In addition, a comprehensive compilation of various available datasets has also been provided. Furthermore, this review identifies the gaps and limitations in existing techniques, paving the way for future research and development in this area.
Authors:Fei He, Zhiyuan Yang, Mingyue Gao, Biplab Poudel, Newgin Sam Ebin Sam Dhas, Rajan Gyawali, Ashwin Dhakal, Jianlin Cheng, Dong Xu
Abstract:
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) remains pivotal in structural biology, yet the task of protein particle picking, integral for 3D protein structure construction, is laden with manual inefficiencies. While recent AI tools such as Topaz and crYOLO are advancing the field, they do not fully address the challenges of cryo-EM images, including low contrast, complex shapes, and heterogeneous conformations. This study explored prompt-based learning to adapt the state-of-the-art image segmentation foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM) for cryo-EM. This focus was driven by the desire to optimize model performance with a small number of labeled data without altering pre-trained parameters, aiming for a balance between adaptability and foundational knowledge retention. Through trials with three prompt-based learning strategies, namely head prompt, prefix prompt, and encoder prompt, we observed enhanced performance and reduced computational requirements compared to the fine-tuning approach. This work not only highlights the potential of prompting SAM in protein identification from cryo-EM micrographs but also suggests its broader promise in biomedical image segmentation and object detection.
Authors:Zezhou Wang, Guitao Cao, Xidong Xi, Jiangtao Wang
Abstract:
Automated driving object detection has always been a challenging task in computer vision due to environmental uncertainties. These uncertainties include significant differences in object sizes and encountering the class unseen. It may result in poor performance when traditional object detection models are directly applied to automated driving detection. Because they usually presume fixed categories of common traffic participants, such as pedestrians and cars. Worsely, the huge class imbalance between common and novel classes further exacerbates performance degradation. To address the issues stated, we propose OpenNet to moderate the class imbalance with the Balanced Loss, which is based on Cross Entropy Loss. Besides, we adopt an inductive layer based on gradient reshaping to fast learn new classes with limited samples during incremental learning. To against catastrophic forgetting, we employ normalized feature distillation. By the way, we improve multi-scale detection robustness and unknown class recognition through FPN and energy-based detection, respectively. The Experimental results upon the CODA dataset show that the proposed method can obtain better performance than that of the existing methods.
Authors:Benoit Coqueret, Mathieu Carbone, Olivier Sentieys, Gabriel Zaid
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence, and specifically deep neural networks (DNNs), has rapidly emerged in the past decade as the standard for several tasks from specific advertising to object detection. The performance offered has led DNN algorithms to become a part of critical embedded systems, requiring both efficiency and reliability. In particular, DNNs are subject to malicious examples designed in a way to fool the network while being undetectable to the human observer: the adversarial examples. While previous studies propose frameworks to implement such attacks in black box settings, those often rely on the hypothesis that the attacker has access to the logits of the neural network, breaking the assumption of the traditional black box. In this paper, we investigate a real black box scenario where the attacker has no access to the logits. In particular, we propose an architecture-agnostic attack which solve this constraint by extracting the logits. Our method combines hardware and software attacks, by performing a side-channel attack that exploits electromagnetic leakages to extract the logits for a given input, allowing an attacker to estimate the gradients and produce state-of-the-art adversarial examples to fool the targeted neural network. Through this example of adversarial attack, we demonstrate the effectiveness of logits extraction using side-channel as a first step for more general attack frameworks requiring either the logits or the confidence scores.
Authors:Farzad Salajegheh, Nader Asadi, Soroush Saryazdi, Sudhir Mudur
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) excel in local spatial pattern recognition. For many vision tasks, such as object recognition and segmentation, salient information is also present outside CNN's kernel boundaries. However, CNNs struggle in capturing such relevant information due to their confined receptive fields. Self-attention can improve a model's access to global information but increases computational overhead. We present a fast and simple fully convolutional method called DAS that helps focus attention on relevant information. It uses deformable convolutions for the location of pertinent image regions and separable convolutions for efficiency. DAS plugs into existing CNNs and propagates relevant information using a gating mechanism. Compared to the O(n^2) computational complexity of transformer-style attention, DAS is O(n). Our claim is that DAS's ability to pay increased attention to relevant features results in performance improvements when added to popular CNNs for Image Classification and Object Detection. For example, DAS yields an improvement on Stanford Dogs (4.47%), ImageNet (1.91%), and COCO AP (3.3%) with base ResNet50 backbone. This outperforms other CNN attention mechanisms while using similar or less FLOPs. Our code will be publicly available.
Authors:Ghadi Nehme, Tejas Y. Deo
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles have the potential to revolutionize transportation, but they must be able to navigate safely in traffic before they can be deployed on public roads. The goal of this project is to train autonomous vehicles to make decisions to navigate in uncertain environments using deep reinforcement learning techniques using the CARLA simulator. The simulator provides a realistic and urban environment for training and testing self-driving models. Deep Q-Networks (DQN) are used to predict driving actions. The study involves the integration of collision sensors, segmentation, and depth camera for better object detection and distance estimation. The model is tested on 4 different trajectories in presence of different types of 4-wheeled vehicles and pedestrians. The segmentation and depth cameras were utilized to ensure accurate localization of objects and distance measurement. Our proposed method successfully navigated the self-driving vehicle to its final destination with a high success rate without colliding with other vehicles, pedestrians, or going on the sidewalk. To ensure the optimal performance of our reinforcement learning (RL) models in navigating complex traffic scenarios, we implemented a pre-processing step to reduce the state space. This involved processing the images and sensor output before feeding them into the model. Despite significantly decreasing the state space, our approach yielded robust models that successfully navigated through traffic with high levels of safety and accuracy.
Authors:Jan RoÃbach, Michael Leuschel
Abstract:
There is considerable industrial interest in integrating AI techniques into railway systems, notably for fully autonomous train systems. The KI-LOK research project is involved in developing new methods for certifying such AI-based systems. Here we explore the utility of a certified control architecture for a runtime monitor that prevents false positive detection of traffic signs in an AI-based perception system. The monitor uses classical computer vision algorithms to check if the signs -- detected by an AI object detection model -- fit predefined specifications. We provide such specifications for some critical signs and integrate a Python prototype of the monitor with a popular object detection model to measure relevant performance metrics on generated data. Our initial results are promising, achieving considerable precision gains with only minor recall reduction; however, further investigation into generalization possibilities will be necessary.
Authors:Simone Caldarella, Elisa Ricci, Rahaf Aljundi
Abstract:
Object-based Novelty Detection (ND) aims to identify unknown objects that do not belong to classes seen during training by an object detection model. The task is particularly crucial in real-world applications, as it allows to avoid potentially harmful behaviours, e.g. as in the case of object detection models adopted in a self-driving car or in an autonomous robot. Traditional approaches to ND focus on one time offline post processing of the pretrained object detection output, leaving no possibility to improve the model robustness after training and discarding the abundant amount of out-of-distribution data encountered during deployment. In this work, we propose a novel framework for object-based ND, assuming that human feedback can be requested on the predicted output and later incorporated to refine the ND model without negatively affecting the main object detection performance. This refinement operation is repeated whenever new feedback is available. To tackle this new formulation of the problem for object detection, we propose a lightweight ND module attached on top of a pre-trained object detection model, which is incrementally updated through a feedback loop. We also propose a new benchmark to evaluate methods on this new setting and test extensively our ND approach against baselines, showing increased robustness and a successful incorporation of the received feedback.
Authors:Hoang C. Nguyen, Chi Phan, Hieu H. Pham
Abstract:
Screening mammography is the most widely used method for early breast cancer detection, significantly reducing mortality rates. The integration of information from multi-view mammograms enhances radiologists' confidence and diminishes false-positive rates since they can examine on dual-view of the same breast to cross-reference the existence and location of the lesion. Inspired by this, we present TransReg, a Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) system designed to exploit the relationship between craniocaudal (CC), and mediolateral oblique (MLO) views. The system includes cross-transformer to model the relationship between the region of interest (RoIs) extracted by siamese Faster RCNN network for mass detection problems. Our work is the first time cross-transformer has been integrated into an object detection framework to model the relation between ipsilateral views. Our experimental evaluation on DDSM and VinDr-Mammo datasets shows that our TransReg, equipped with SwinT as a feature extractor achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, at the false positive rate per image at 0.5, TransReg using SwinT gets a recall at 83.3% for DDSM dataset and 79.7% for VinDr-Mammo dataset. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to demonstrate that cross-transformer can function as an auto-registration module, aligning the masses in dual-view and utilizing this information to inform final predictions. It is a replication diagnostic workflow of expert radiologists
Authors:Rohit Venkata Sai Dulam, Chandra Kambhamettu
Abstract:
Developing a new Salient Object Detection (SOD) model involves selecting an ImageNet pre-trained backbone and creating novel feature refinement modules to use backbone features. However, adding new components to a pre-trained backbone needs retraining the whole network on the ImageNet dataset, which requires significant time. Hence, we explore developing a neural network from scratch directly trained on SOD without ImageNet pre-training. Such a formulation offers full autonomy to design task-specific components. To that end, we propose SODAWideNet, an encoder-decoder-style network for Salient Object Detection. We deviate from the commonly practiced paradigm of narrow and deep convolutional models to a wide and shallow architecture, resulting in a parameter-efficient deep neural network. To achieve a shallower network, we increase the receptive field from the beginning of the network using a combination of dilated convolutions and self-attention. Therefore, we propose Multi Receptive Field Feature Aggregation Module (MRFFAM) that efficiently obtains discriminative features from farther regions at higher resolutions using dilated convolutions. Next, we propose Multi-Scale Attention (MSA), which creates a feature pyramid and efficiently computes attention across multiple resolutions to extract global features from larger feature maps. Finally, we propose two variants, SODAWideNet-S (3.03M) and SODAWideNet (9.03M), that achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art models on five datasets.
Authors:Hector Arroyo, Paul Kier, Dylan Angus, Santiago Matalonga, Svetlozar Georgiev, Mehdi Goli, Gerard Dooly, James Riordan
Abstract:
The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into shared airspace for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations presents significant challenges but holds transformative potential for sectors like transportation, construction, energy and defense. A critical prerequisite for this integration is equipping UAVs with enhanced situational awareness to ensure safe operations. Current approaches mainly target single object detection or classification, or simpler sensing outputs that offer limited perceptual understanding and lack the rapid end-to-end processing needed to convert sensor data into safety-critical insights. In contrast, our study leverages radar technology for novel end-to-end semantic segmentation of aerial point clouds to simultaneously identify multiple collision hazards. By adapting and optimizing the PointNet architecture and integrating aerial domain insights, our framework distinguishes five distinct classes: mobile drones (DJI M300 and DJI Mini) and airplanes (Ikarus C42), and static returns (ground and infrastructure) which results in enhanced situational awareness for UAVs. To our knowledge, this is the first approach addressing simultaneous identification of multiple collision threats in an aerial setting, achieving a robust 94% accuracy. This work highlights the potential of radar technology to advance situational awareness in UAVs, facilitating safe and efficient BVLOS operations.
Authors:Xuanyi Liu, Zhongqi Yue, Xian-Sheng Hua
Abstract:
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) combines open-set object detection with incremental learning capabilities to handle the challenge of the open and dynamic visual world. Existing works assume that a foreground predictor trained on the seen categories can be directly transferred to identify the unseen categories' locations by selecting the top-k most confident foreground predictions. However, the assumption is hardly valid in practice. This is because the predictor is inevitably biased to the known categories, and fails under the shift in the appearance of the unseen categories. In this work, we aim to build an unbiased foreground predictor by re-formulating the task under Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, where the current biased predictor helps form the domains: the seen object locations and confident background locations as the source domain, and the rest ambiguous ones as the target domain. Then, we adopt the simple and effective self-training method to learn a predictor based on the domain-invariant foreground features, hence achieving unbiased prediction robust to the shift in appearance between the seen and unseen categories. Our approach's pipeline can adapt to various detection frameworks and UDA methods, empirically validated by OWOD evaluation, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Javad Mirzapour Kaleybar, Hooman Khaloo, Avaz Naghipour
Abstract:
This research paper addresses the challenges associated with traffic sign detection in self-driving vehicles and driver assistance systems. The development of reliable and highly accurate algorithms is crucial for the widespread adoption of traffic sign recognition and detection (TSRD) in diverse real-life scenarios. However, this task is complicated by suboptimal traffic images affected by factors such as camera movement, adverse weather conditions, and inadequate lighting. This study specifically focuses on traffic sign detection methods and introduces the application of the Transformer model, particularly the Vision Transformer variants, to tackle this task. The Transformer's attention mechanism, originally designed for natural language processing, offers improved parallel efficiency. Vision Transformers have demonstrated success in various domains, including autonomous driving, object detection, healthcare, and defense-related applications. To enhance the efficiency of the Transformer model, the research proposes a novel strategy that integrates a locality inductive bias and a transformer module. This includes the introduction of the Efficient Convolution Block and the Local Transformer Block, which effectively capture short-term and long-term dependency information, thereby improving both detection speed and accuracy. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the significant advancements achieved by this approach, particularly when applied to the GTSDB dataset.
Authors:Om M. Khare, Shubham Gandhi, Aditya M. Rahalkar, Sunil Mane
Abstract:
Effective detection of road hazards plays a pivotal role in road infrastructure maintenance and ensuring road safety. This research paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of YOLOv8, an object detection model, in the context of detecting road hazards such as potholes, Sewer Covers, and Man Holes. A comparative analysis with previous iterations, YOLOv5 and YOLOv7, is conducted, emphasizing the importance of computational efficiency in various applications. The paper delves into the architecture of YOLOv8 and explores image preprocessing techniques aimed at enhancing detection accuracy across diverse conditions, including variations in lighting, road types, hazard sizes, and types. Furthermore, hyperparameter tuning experiments are performed to optimize model performance through adjustments in learning rates, batch sizes, anchor box sizes, and augmentation strategies. Model evaluation is based on Mean Average Precision (mAP), a widely accepted metric for object detection performance. The research assesses the robustness and generalization capabilities of the models through mAP scores calculated across the diverse test scenarios, underlining the significance of YOLOv8 in road hazard detection and infrastructure maintenance.
Authors:Shentong Mo, Zhun Sun, Chao Li
Abstract:
Data augmentation has become a standard component of vision pre-trained models to capture the invariance between augmented views. In practice, augmentation techniques that mask regions of a sample with zero/mean values or patches from other samples are commonly employed in pre-trained models with self-/semi-/fully-supervised contrastive losses. However, the underlying mechanism behind the effectiveness of these augmentation techniques remains poorly explored. To investigate the problems, we conduct an empirical study to quantify how data augmentation affects performance. Concretely, we apply 4 types of data augmentations termed with Random Erasing, CutOut, CutMix and MixUp to a series of self-/semi-/fully- supervised pre-trained models. We report their performance on vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We then explicitly evaluate the invariance and diversity of the feature embedding. We observe that: 1) Masking regions of the images decreases the invariance of the learned feature embedding while providing a more considerable diversity. 2) Manual annotations do not change the invariance or diversity of the learned feature embedding. 3) The MixUp approach improves the diversity significantly, with only a marginal decrease in terms of the invariance.
Authors:Daniel S. Roll, Zeyneb Kurt, Wai Lok Woo
Abstract:
The Kessler syndrome refers to the escalating space debris from frequent space activities, threatening future space exploration. Addressing this issue is vital. Several AI models, including Convolutional Neural Networks, Kernel Principal Component Analysis, and Model-Agnostic Meta- Learning have been assessed with various data types. Earlier studies highlighted the combination of the YOLO object detector and a linear Kalman filter (LKF) for object detection and tracking. Advancing this, the current paper introduces a novel methodology for the Comprehensive Orbital Surveillance and Monitoring Of Space by Detecting Satellite Residuals (CosmosDSR) by combining YOLOv3 with an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) for tracking satellites in sequential images. Using the Spacecraft Recognition Leveraging Knowledge of Space Environment (SPARK) dataset for training and testing, the YOLOv3 precisely detected and classified all satellite categories (Mean Average Precision=97.18%, F1=0.95) with few errors (TP=4163, FP=209, FN=237). Both CosmosDSR and an implemented LKF used for comparison tracked satellites accurately for a mean squared error (MSE) and root mean squared error (RME) of MSE=2.83/RMSE=1.66 for UKF and MSE=2.84/RMSE=1.66 for LKF. The current study is limited to images generated in a space simulation environment, but the CosmosDSR methodology shows great potential in detecting and tracking satellites, paving the way for solutions to the Kessler syndrome.
Authors:Weixi Weng, Chun Yuan
Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation object detection (UDAOD) research on Detection Transformer(DETR) mainly focuses on feature alignment and existing methods can be divided into two kinds, each of which has its unresolved issues. One-stage feature alignment methods can easily lead to performance fluctuation and training stagnation. Two-stage feature alignment method based on mean teacher comprises a pretraining stage followed by a self-training stage, each facing problems in obtaining reliable pretrained model and achieving consistent performance gains. Methods mentioned above have not yet explore how to utilize the third related domain such as target-like domain to assist adaptation. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework named MTM, i.e. Mean Teacher-DETR with Masked Feature Alignment. In the pretraining stage, we utilize labeled target-like images produced by image style transfer to avoid performance fluctuation. In the self-training stage, we leverage unlabeled target images by pseudo labels based on mean teacher and propose a module called Object Queries Knowledge Transfer (OQKT) to ensure consistent performance gains of the student model. Most importantly, we propose masked feature alignment methods including Masked Domain Query-based Feature Alignment (MDQFA) and Masked Token-wise Feature Alignment (MTWFA) to alleviate domain shift in a more robust way, which not only prevent training stagnation and lead to a robust pretrained model in the pretraining stage, but also enhance the model's target performance in the self-training stage. Experiments on three challenging scenarios and a theoretical analysis verify the effectiveness of MTM.
Authors:Bissmella Bahaduri, Zuheng Ming, Fangchen Feng, Anissa Mokraou
Abstract:
Object detection in Remote Sensing Images (RSI) is a critical task for numerous applications in Earth Observation (EO). Differing from object detection in natural images, object detection in remote sensing images faces challenges of scarcity of annotated data and the presence of small objects represented by only a few pixels. Multi-modal fusion has been determined to enhance the accuracy by fusing data from multiple modalities such as RGB, infrared (IR), lidar, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR). To this end, the fusion of representations at the mid or late stage, produced by parallel subnetworks, is dominant, with the disadvantages of increasing computational complexity in the order of the number of modalities and the creation of additional engineering obstacles. Using the cross-attention mechanism, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion strategy for mapping relationships between different channels at the early stage, enabling the construction of a coherent input by aligning the different modalities. By addressing fusion in the early stage, as opposed to mid or late-stage methods, our method achieves competitive and even superior performance compared to existing techniques. Additionally, we enhance the SWIN transformer by integrating convolution layers into the feed-forward of non-shifting blocks. This augmentation strengthens the model's capacity to merge separated windows through local attention, thereby improving small object detection. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal fusion module and the architecture, demonstrating their applicability to object detection in multimodal aerial imagery.
Authors:Jilong Luo, Shanlin Xiao, Yinsheng Chen, Zhiyi Yu
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a biologically plausible neural network model with significant advantages in both event-driven processing and spatio-temporal information processing, rendering SNNs an appealing choice for energyefficient object detection. However, the non-differentiability of the biological neuronal dynamics model presents a challenge during the training of SNNs. Furthermore, a suitable decoding strategy for object detection in SNNs is currently lacking. In this study, we introduce the Current Mean Decoding (CMD) method, which solves the regression problem to facilitate the training of deep SNNs for object detection tasks. Based on the gradient surrogate and CMD, we propose the SNN-YOLOv3 model for object detection. Our experiments demonstrate that SNN-YOLOv3 achieves a remarkable performance with an mAP of 61.87% on the PASCAL VOC dataset, requiring only 6 time steps. Compared to SpikingYOLO, we have managed to increase mAP by nearly 10% while reducing energy consumption by two orders of magnitude.
Authors:Chelsey Edge, Demetrious Kutzke, Megdalia Bromhal, Junaed Sattar
Abstract:
This paper presents Diver Interest via Pointing in Three Dimensions (DIP-3D), a method to relay an object of interest from a diver to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) by pointing that includes three-dimensional distance information to discriminate between multiple objects in the AUV's camera image. Traditional dense stereo vision for distance estimation underwater is challenging because of the relative lack of saliency of scene features and degraded lighting conditions. Yet, including distance information is necessary for robotic perception of diver pointing when multiple objects appear within the robot's image plane. We subvert the challenges of underwater distance estimation by using sparse reconstruction of keypoints to perform pose estimation on both the left and right images from the robot's stereo camera. Triangulated pose keypoints, along with a classical object detection method, enable DIP-3D to infer the location of an object of interest when multiple objects are in the AUV's field of view. By allowing the scuba diver to point at an arbitrary object of interest and enabling the AUV to autonomously decide which object the diver is pointing to, this method will permit more natural interaction between AUVs and human scuba divers in underwater-human robot collaborative tasks.
Authors:Juwu Zheng, Jiangtao Ren
Abstract:
Intelligent transportation system combines advanced information technology to provide intelligent services such as monitoring, detection, and early warning for modern transportation. Intelligent transportation detection is the cornerstone of many intelligent traffic services by identifying task targets through object detection methods. However existing detection methods in intelligent transportation are limited by two aspects. First, there is a difference between the model knowledge pre-trained on large-scale datasets and the knowledge required for target task. Second, most detection models follow the pattern of single-source learning, which limits the learning ability. To address these problems, we propose a Multi Self-supervised Pre-fine-tuned Transformer Fusion (MSPTF) network, consisting of two steps: unsupervised pre-fine-tune domain knowledge learning and multi-model fusion target task learning. In the first step, we introduced self-supervised learning methods into transformer model pre-fine-tune which could reduce data costs and alleviate the knowledge gap between pre-trained model and target task. In the second step, we take feature information differences between different model architectures and different pre-fine-tune tasks into account and propose Multi-model Semantic Consistency Cross-attention Fusion (MSCCF) network to combine different transformer model features by considering channel semantic consistency and feature vector semantic consistency, which obtain more complete and proper fusion features for detection task. We experimented the proposed method on vehicle recognition dataset and road disease detection dataset and achieved 1.1%, 5.5%, 4.2% improvement compared with baseline and 0.7%, 1.8%, 1.7% compared with sota, which proved the effectiveness of our method.
Authors:Miao Chang, Tan Vuong, Manas Palaparthi, Lachlan Howell, Alessio Bonti, Mohamed Abdelrazek, Duc Thanh Nguyen
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence has the potential to make valuable contributions to wildlife management through cost-effective methods for the collection and interpretation of wildlife data. Recent advances in remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS or ``drones'') and thermal imaging technology have created new approaches to collect wildlife data. These emerging technologies could provide promising alternatives to standard labourious field techniques as well as cover much larger areas. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive review and empirical study of drone-based wildlife detection. Specifically, we collect a realistic dataset of drone-derived wildlife thermal detections. Wildlife detections, including arboreal (for instance, koalas, phascolarctos cinereus) and ground dwelling species in our collected data are annotated via bounding boxes by experts. We then benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on our collected dataset. We use these experimental results to identify issues and discuss future directions in automatic animal monitoring using drones.
Authors:Mathijs R. van Geerenstein, Felicia Ruppel, Klaus Dietmayer, Dariu M. Gavrila
Abstract:
3D object detection models that exploit both LiDAR and camera sensor features are top performers in large-scale autonomous driving benchmarks. A transformer is a popular network architecture used for this task, in which so-called object queries act as candidate objects. Initializing these object queries based on current sensor inputs is a common practice. For this, existing methods strongly rely on LiDAR data however, and do not fully exploit image features. Besides, they introduce significant latency. To overcome these limitations we propose EfficientQ3M, an efficient, modular, and multimodal solution for object query initialization for transformer-based 3D object detection models. The proposed initialization method is combined with a "modality-balanced" transformer decoder where the queries can access all sensor modalities throughout the decoder. In experiments, we outperform the state of the art in transformer-based LiDAR object detection on the competitive nuScenes benchmark and showcase the benefits of input-dependent multimodal query initialization, while being more efficient than the available alternatives for LiDAR-camera initialization. The proposed method can be applied with any combination of sensor modalities as input, demonstrating its modularity.
Authors:Ravindu G. Thalagala, Sahan M. Gunawardena, Oscar De Silva, Awantha Jayasiri, Arthur Gubbels, George K. I Mann, Raymond G. Gosine
Abstract:
This paper presents a unique outdoor aerial visual-inertial-LiDAR dataset captured using a multi-sensor payload to promote the global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied navigation research. The dataset features flight distances ranging from 300m to 5km, collected using a DJI M600 hexacopter drone and the National Research Council (NRC) Bell 412 Advanced Systems Research Aircraft (ASRA). The dataset consists of hardware synchronized monocular images, IMU measurements, 3D LiDAR point-clouds, and high-precision real-time kinematic (RTK)-GNSS based ground truth. Ten datasets were collected as ROS bags over 100 mins of outdoor environment footage ranging from urban areas, highways, hillsides, prairies, and waterfronts. The datasets were collected to facilitate the development of visual-inertial-LiDAR odometry and mapping algorithms, visual-inertial navigation algorithms, object detection, segmentation, and landing zone detection algorithms based upon real-world drone and full-scale helicopter data. All the datasets contain raw sensor measurements, hardware timestamps, and spatio-temporally aligned ground truth. The intrinsic and extrinsic calibrations of the sensors are also provided along with raw calibration datasets. A performance summary of state-of-the-art methods applied on the datasets is also provided.
Authors:Paolo Burgio, Gianluca Brilli
Abstract:
The rise of power-efficient embedded computers based on highly-parallel accelerators opens a number of opportunities and challenges for researchers and engineers, and paved the way to the era of edge computing. At the same time, advances in embedded AI for object detection and categorization such as YOLO, GoogleNet and AlexNet reached an unprecedented level of accuracy (mean-Average Precision - mAP) and performance (Frames-Per-Second - FPS). Today, edge computers based on heterogeneous many-core systems are a predominant choice to deploy such systems in industry 4.0, wearable devices, and - our focus - autonomous driving systems. In these latter systems, engineers struggle to make reduced automotive power and size budgets co-exist with the accuracy and performance targets requested by autonomous driving. We aim at validating the effectiveness and efficiency of most recent networks on state-of-the-art platforms with embedded commercial-off-the-shelf System-on-Chips, such as Xavier AGX, Tegra X2 and Nano for NVIDIA and XCZU9EG and XCZU3EG of the Zynq UltraScale+ family, for the Xilinx counterpart. Our work aims at supporting engineers in choosing the most appropriate CNN package and computing system for their designs, and deriving guidelines for adequately sizing their systems.
Authors:Arafat Islam, Md. Imtiaz Habib
Abstract:
For the detection of fire-like targets in indoor, outdoor and forest fire images, as well as fire detection under different natural lights, an improved YOLOv5 fire detection deep learning algorithm is proposed. The YOLOv5 detection model expands the feature extraction network from three dimensions, which enhances feature propagation of fire small targets identification, improves network performance, and reduces model parameters. Furthermore, through the promotion of the feature pyramid, the top-performing prediction box is obtained. Fire-YOLOv5 attains excellent results compared to state-of-the-art object detection networks, notably in the detection of small targets of fire and smoke with mAP 90.5% and f1 score 88%. Overall, the Fire-YOLOv5 detection model can effectively deal with the inspection of small fire targets, as well as fire-like and smoke-like objects with F1 score 0.88. When the input image size is 416 x 416 resolution, the average detection time is 0.12 s per frame, which can provide real-time forest fire detection. Moreover, the algorithm proposed in this paper can also be applied to small target detection under other complicated situations. The proposed system shows an improved approach in all fire detection metrics such as precision, recall, and mean average precision.
Authors:Donghao Qiao, Farhana Zulkernine
Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) use multiple sensors to gather information about their surroundings. By sharing sensor data between Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), the safety and reliability of these vehicles can be improved through a concept known as cooperative perception. However, recent approaches in cooperative perception only share single sensor information such as cameras or LiDAR. In this research, we explore the fusion of multiple sensor data sources and present a framework, called CoBEVFusion, that fuses LiDAR and camera data to create a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. The CAVs process the multi-modal data locally and utilize a Dual Window-based Cross-Attention (DWCA) module to fuse the LiDAR and camera features into a unified BEV representation. The fused BEV feature maps are shared among the CAVs, and a 3D Convolutional Neural Network is applied to aggregate the features from the CAVs. Our CoBEVFusion framework was evaluated on the cooperative perception dataset OPV2V for two perception tasks: BEV semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. The results show that our DWCA LiDAR-camera fusion model outperforms perception models with single-modal data and state-of-the-art BEV fusion models. Our overall cooperative perception architecture, CoBEVFusion, also achieves comparable performance with other cooperative perception models.
Authors:Md Sohag Mia, Abdullah Al Bary Voban, Abu Bakor Hayat Arnob, Abdu Naim, Md Kawsar Ahmed, Md Shariful Islam
Abstract:
Efficient and accurate detection of small objects in manufacturing settings, such as defects and cracks, is crucial for ensuring product quality and safety. To address this issue, we proposed a comprehensive strategy by synergizing Faster R-CNN with cutting-edge methods. By combining Faster R-CNN with Feature Pyramid Network, we enable the model to efficiently handle multi-scale features intrinsic to manufacturing environments. Additionally, Deformable Net is used that contorts and conforms to the geometric variations of defects, bringing precision in detecting even the minuscule and complex features. Then, we incorporated an attention mechanism called Convolutional Block Attention Module in each block of our base ResNet50 network to selectively emphasize informative features and suppress less useful ones. After that we incorporated RoI Align, replacing RoI Pooling for finer region-of-interest alignment and finally the integration of Focal Loss effectively handles class imbalance, crucial for rare defect occurrences. The rigorous evaluation of our model on both the NEU-DET and Pascal VOC datasets underscores its robust performance and generalization capabilities. On the NEU-DET dataset, our model exhibited a profound understanding of steel defects, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in identifying various defects. Simultaneously, when evaluated on the Pascal VOC dataset, our model showcases its ability to detect objects across a wide spectrum of categories within complex and small scenes.
Authors:Hartmut Surmann, Artur Leinweber, Gerhard Senkowski, Julien Meine, Dominik Slomma
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a method for detecting objects of interest, including cars, humans, and fire, in aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) usually during vegetation fires. To achieve this, we use artificial neural networks and create a dataset for supervised learning. We accomplish the assisted labeling of the dataset through the implementation of an object detection pipeline that combines classic image processing techniques with pretrained neural networks. In addition, we develop a data augmentation pipeline to augment the dataset with automatically labeled images. Finally, we evaluate the performance of different neural networks.
Authors:Seok-Yong Byun, Wonju Lee
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel approach to address the challenges of understanding the prediction process and debugging prediction errors in Vision Transformers (ViT), which have demonstrated superior performance in various computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection. While several visual explainability techniques, such as CAM, Grad-CAM, Score-CAM, and Recipro-CAM, have been extensively researched for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), limited research has been conducted on ViT. Current state-of-the-art solutions for ViT rely on class agnostic Attention-Rollout and Relevance techniques. In this work, we propose a new gradient-free visual explanation method for ViT, called ViT-ReciproCAM, which does not require attention matrix and gradient information. ViT-ReciproCAM utilizes token masking and generated new layer outputs from the target layer's input to exploit the correlation between activated tokens and network predictions for target classes. Our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art Relevance method in the Average Drop-Coherence-Complexity (ADCC) metric by $4.58\%$ to $5.80\%$ and generates more localized saliency maps. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ViT-ReciproCAM and showcase its potential for understanding and debugging ViT models. Our proposed method provides an efficient and easy-to-implement alternative for generating visual explanations, without requiring attention and gradient information, which can be beneficial for various applications in the field of computer vision.
Authors:Liang Haixin, Zheng Ziqiang, Ma Zeyu, Sai-Kit Yeung
Abstract:
Marine object detection has gained prominence in marine research, driven by the pressing need to unravel oceanic mysteries and enhance our understanding of invaluable marine ecosystems. There is a profound requirement to efficiently and accurately identify and localize diverse and unseen marine entities within underwater imagery. The open-marine object detection (OMOD for short) is required to detect diverse and unseen marine objects, performing categorization and localization simultaneously. To achieve OMOD, we present \textbf{MarineDet}. We formulate a joint visual-text semantic space through pre-training and then perform marine-specific training to achieve in-air-to-marine knowledge transfer. Considering there is no specific dataset designed for OMOD, we construct a \textbf{MarineDet dataset} consisting of 821 marine-relative object categories to promote and measure OMOD performance. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MarineDet over existing generalist and specialist object detection algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present OMOD, which holds a more valuable and practical setting for marine ecosystem monitoring and management. Our research not only pushes the boundaries of marine understanding but also offers a standard pipeline for OMOD.
Authors:Javier Pérez de Frutos, Ragnhild Holden Helland, Shreya Desai, Line Cathrine Nymoen, Thomas Langø, Theodor Remman, Abhijit Sen
Abstract:
Background: Dental caries diagnosis requires the manual inspection of diagnostic bitewing images of the patient, followed by a visual inspection and probing of the identified dental pieces with potential lesions. Yet the use of artificial intelligence, and in particular deep-learning, has the potential to aid in the diagnosis by providing a quick and informative analysis of the bitewing images.
Methods: A dataset of 13,887 bitewings from the HUNT4 Oral Health Study were annotated individually by six different experts, and used to train three different object detection deep-learning architectures: RetinaNet (ResNet50), YOLOv5 (M size), and EfficientDet (D0 and D1 sizes). A consensus dataset of 197 images, annotated jointly by the same six dentist, was used for evaluation. A five-fold cross validation scheme was used to evaluate the performance of the AI models.
Results: he trained models show an increase in average precision and F1-score, and decrease of false negative rate, with respect to the dental clinicians. When compared against the dental clinicians, the YOLOv5 model shows the largest improvement, reporting 0.647 mean average precision, 0.548 mean F1-score, and 0.149 mean false negative rate. Whereas the best annotators on each of these metrics reported 0.299, 0.495, and 0.164 respectively.
Conclusion: Deep-learning models have shown the potential to assist dental professionals in the diagnosis of caries. Yet, the task remains challenging due to the artifacts natural to the bitewing images.
Authors:Nemin Qiu, Zhiguo Li, Yuan Li, Chuang Zhu
Abstract:
The high biological properties and low energy consumption of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have brought much attention in recent years. However, the converted SNNs generally need large time steps to achieve satisfactory performance, which will result in high inference latency and computational resources increase. In this work, we propose a highly efficient and fast SNN for object detection. First, we build an initial compact ANN by using quantization training method of convolution layer fold batch normalization layer and neural network modification. Second, we theoretically analyze how to obtain the low complexity SNN correctly. Then, we propose a scale-aware pseudoquantization scheme to guarantee the correctness of the compact ANN to SNN. Third, we propose a continuous inference scheme by using a Feed-Forward Integrate-and-Fire (FewdIF) neuron to realize high-speed object detection. Experimental results show that our efficient SNN can achieve 118X speedup on GPU with only 1.5MB parameters for object detection tasks. We further verify our SNN on FPGA platform and the proposed model can achieve 800+FPS object detection with extremely low latency.
Authors:Nemin Qiu, Chuang Zhu
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks, as a third-generation neural network, are well-suited for edge AI applications due to their binary spike nature. However, when it comes to complex tasks like object detection, SNNs often require a substantial number of time steps to achieve high performance. This limitation significantly hampers the widespread adoption of SNNs in latency-sensitive edge devices. In this paper, our focus is on generating highly accurate and low-latency SNNs specifically for object detection. Firstly, we systematically derive the conversion between SNNs and ANNs and analyze how to improve the consistency between them: improving the spike firing rate and reducing the quantization error. Then we propose a structural replacement, quantization of ANN activation and residual fix to allevicate the disparity. We evaluate our method on challenging dataset MS COCO, PASCAL VOC and our spike dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher accuracy and lower latency compared to previous work Spiking-YOLO. The advantages of SNNs processing of spike signals are also demonstrated.
Authors:Yifan Ding, Liqiang Wang, Boqing Gong
Abstract:
Domain adaptation, which aims to transfer knowledge between domains, has been well studied in many areas such as image classification and object detection. However, for multi-modal tasks, conventional approaches rely on large-scale pre-training. But due to the difficulty of acquiring multi-modal data, large-scale pre-training is often impractical. Therefore, domain adaptation, which can efficiently utilize the knowledge from different datasets (domains), is crucial for multi-modal tasks. In this paper, we focus on the Referring Expression Grounding (REG) task, which is to localize an image region described by a natural language expression. Specifically, we propose a novel approach to effectively transfer multi-modal knowledge through a specially relation-tailored approach for the REG problem. Our approach tackles the multi-modal domain adaptation problem by simultaneously enriching inter-domain relations and transferring relations between domains. Experiments show that our proposed approach significantly improves the transferability of multi-modal domains and enhances adaptation performance in the REG problem.
Authors:Aadhar Chauhan, Isaac Remy, Danny Broyles, Karen Leung
Abstract:
Detecting humans from airborne visual and thermal imagery is a fundamental challenge for Wilderness Search-and-Rescue (WiSAR) teams, who must perform this function accurately in the face of immense pressure. The ability to fuse these two sensor modalities can potentially reduce the cognitive load on human operators and/or improve the effectiveness of computer vision object detection models. However, the fusion task is particularly challenging in the context of WiSAR due to hardware limitations and extreme environmental factors. This work presents Misaligned Image Synthesis and Fusion using Information from Thermal and Visual (MISFIT-V), a novel two-pronged unsupervised deep learning approach that utilizes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a cross-attention mechanism to capture the most relevant features from each modality. Experimental results show MISFIT-V offers enhanced robustness against misalignment and poor lighting/thermal environmental conditions compared to existing visual-thermal image fusion methods.
Authors:Peiran Xu, Yadong Mu
Abstract:
Given a group of images, co-salient object detection (CoSOD) aims to highlight the common salient object in each image. There are two factors closely related to the success of this task, namely consensus extraction, and the dispersion of consensus to each image. Most previous works represent the group consensus using local features, while we instead utilize a hierarchical Transformer module for extracting semantic-level consensus. Therefore, it can obtain a more comprehensive representation of the common object category, and exclude interference from other objects that share local similarities with the target object. In addition, we propose a Transformer-based dispersion module that takes into account the variation of the co-salient object in different scenes. It distributes the consensus to the image feature maps in an image-specific way while making full use of interactions within the group. These two modules are integrated with a ViT encoder and an FPN-like decoder to form an end-to-end trainable network, without additional branch and auxiliary loss. The proposed method is evaluated on three commonly used CoSOD datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Tengyang Chen, Jiangtao Ren
Abstract:
Traffic signs are important facilities to ensure traffic safety and smooth flow, but may be damaged due to many reasons, which poses a great safety hazard. Therefore, it is important to study a method to detect damaged traffic signs. Existing object detection techniques for damaged traffic signs are still absent. Since damaged traffic signs are closer in appearance to normal ones, it is difficult to capture the detailed local damage features of damaged traffic signs using traditional object detection methods. In this paper, we propose an improved object detection method based on YOLOv5s, namely MFL-YOLO (Mutual Feature Levels Loss enhanced YOLO). We designed a simple cross-level loss function so that each level of the model has its own role, which is beneficial for the model to be able to learn more diverse features and improve the fine granularity. The method can be applied as a plug-and-play module and it does not increase the structural complexity or the computational complexity while improving the accuracy. We also replaced the traditional convolution and CSP with the GSConv and VoVGSCSP in the neck of YOLOv5s to reduce the scale and computational complexity. Compared with YOLOv5s, our MFL-YOLO improves 4.3 and 5.1 in F1 scores and mAP, while reducing the FLOPs by 8.9%. The Grad-CAM heat map visualization shows that our model can better focus on the local details of the damaged traffic signs. In addition, we also conducted experiments on CCTSDB2021 and TT100K to further validate the generalization of our model.
Authors:Piyapat Saranrittichai, Mauricio Munoz, Volker Fischer, Chaithanya Kumar Mummadi
Abstract:
Pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP, show promising zero-shot performance across a wide variety of datasets. For closed-set classification tasks, however, there is an inherent limitation: CLIP image encoders are typically designed to extract generic image-level features that summarize superfluous or confounding information for the target tasks. This results in degradation of classification performance, especially when objects of interest cover small areas of input images. In this work, we propose CLIP with Guided Cropping (GC-CLIP), where we use an off-the-shelf zero-shot object detection model in a preprocessing step to increase focus of zero-shot classifier to the object of interest and minimize influence of extraneous image regions. We empirically show that our approach improves zero-shot classification results across architectures and datasets, favorably for small objects.
Authors:Zheng Wang, Dong Xie, Hanzhi Wang, Jiang Tian
Abstract:
Learning from the limited amount of labeled data to the pre-train model has always been viewed as a challenging task. In this report, an effective and robust solution, the two-stage training paradigm YOLOv8 detector (TP-YOLOv8), is designed for the object detection track in VIPriors Challenge 2023. First, the backbone of YOLOv8 is pre-trained as the encoder using the masked image modeling technique. Then the detector is fine-tuned with elaborate augmentations. During the test stage, test-time augmentation (TTA) is used to enhance each model, and weighted box fusion (WBF) is implemented to further boost the performance. With the well-designed structure, our approach has achieved 30.4% average precision from 0.50 to 0.95 on the DelftBikes test set, ranking 4th on the leaderboard.
Authors:Jordan A. James, Heather K. Manching, Matthew R. Mattia, Kim D. Bowman, Amanda M. Hulse-Kemp, William J. Beksi
Abstract:
In this letter, we present a new dataset to advance the state of the art in detecting citrus fruit and accurately estimate yield on trees affected by the Huanglongbing (HLB) disease in orchard environments via imaging. Despite the fact that significant progress has been made in solving the fruit detection problem, the lack of publicly available datasets has complicated direct comparison of results. For instance, citrus detection has long been of interest to the agricultural research community, yet there is an absence of work, particularly involving public datasets of citrus affected by HLB. To address this issue, we enhance state-of-the-art object detection methods for use in typical orchard settings. Concretely, we provide high-resolution images of citrus trees located in an area known to be highly affected by HLB, along with high-quality bounding box annotations of citrus fruit. Fruit on both the trees and the ground are labeled to allow for identification of fruit location, which contributes to advancements in yield estimation and potential measure of HLB impact via fruit drop. The dataset consists of over 32,000 bounding box annotations for fruit instances contained in 579 high-resolution images. In summary, our contributions are the following: (i) we introduce a novel dataset along with baseline performance benchmarks on multiple contemporary object detection algorithms, (ii) we show the ability to accurately capture fruit location on tree or on ground, and finally (ii) we present a correlation of our results with yield estimations.
Authors:Onkar Krishna, Hiroki Ohashi, Saptarshi Sinha
Abstract:
Cross-domain object detection is challenging, and it involves aligning labeled source and unlabeled target domains. Previous approaches have used adversarial training to align features at both image-level and instance-level. At the instance level, finding a suitable source sample that aligns with a target sample is crucial. A source sample is considered suitable if it differs from the target sample only in domain, without differences in unimportant characteristics such as orientation and color, which can hinder the model's focus on aligning the domain difference. However, existing instance-level feature alignment methods struggle to find suitable source instances because their search scope is limited to mini-batches. Mini-batches are often so small in size that they do not always contain suitable source instances. The insufficient diversity of mini-batches becomes problematic particularly when the target instances have high intra-class variance. To address this issue, we propose a memory-based instance-level domain adaptation framework. Our method aligns a target instance with the most similar source instance of the same category retrieved from a memory storage. Specifically, we introduce a memory module that dynamically stores the pooled features of all labeled source instances, categorized by their labels. Additionally, we introduce a simple yet effective memory retrieval module that retrieves a set of matching memory slots for target instances. Our experiments on various domain shift scenarios demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing non-memory-based methods significantly.
Authors:Ulyana Tkachenko, Aditya Thyagarajan, Jonas Mueller
Abstract:
Despite powering sensitive systems like autonomous vehicles, object detection remains fairly brittle in part due to annotation errors that plague most real-world training datasets. We propose ObjectLab, a straightforward algorithm to detect diverse errors in object detection labels, including: overlooked bounding boxes, badly located boxes, and incorrect class label assignments. ObjectLab utilizes any trained object detection model to score the label quality of each image, such that mislabeled images can be automatically prioritized for label review/correction. Properly handling erroneous data enables training a better version of the same object detection model, without any change in existing modeling code. Across different object detection datasets (including COCO) and different models (including Detectron-X101 and Faster-RCNN), ObjectLab consistently detects annotation errors with much better precision/recall compared to other label quality scores.
Authors:Pedro Conde, Rui L. Lopes, Cristiano Premebida
Abstract:
The proliferation of Deep Neural Networks has resulted in machine learning systems becoming increasingly more present in various real-world applications. Consequently, there is a growing demand for highly reliable models in many domains, making the problem of uncertainty calibration pivotal when considering the future of deep learning. This is especially true when considering object detection systems, that are commonly present in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, robotics and medical diagnosis. For this reason, this work presents a novel theoretical and practical framework to evaluate object detection systems in the context of uncertainty calibration. This encompasses a new comprehensive formulation of this concept through distinct formal definitions, and also three novel evaluation metrics derived from such theoretical foundation. The robustness of the proposed uncertainty calibration metrics is shown through a series of representative experiments.
Authors:Gal Shitrit, Ishay Be'ery, Ido Yerhushalmy
Abstract:
The SoccerNet 2023 tracking challenge requires the detection and tracking of soccer players and the ball. In this work, we present our approach to tackle these tasks separately. We employ a state-of-the-art online multi-object tracker and a contemporary object detector for player tracking. To overcome the limitations of our online approach, we incorporate a post-processing stage using interpolation and appearance-free track merging. Additionally, an appearance-based track merging technique is used to handle the termination and creation of tracks far from the image boundaries. Ball tracking is formulated as single object detection, and a fine-tuned YOLOv8l detector with proprietary filtering improves the detection precision. Our method achieves 3rd place on the SoccerNet 2023 tracking challenge with a HOTA score of 66.27.
Authors:Wenyi Wu, Karim Bouyarmane, Ismail Tutar
Abstract:
We present Catalog Phrase Grounding (CPG), a model that can associate product textual data (title, brands) into corresponding regions of product images (isolated product region, brand logo region) for e-commerce vision-language applications. We use a state-of-the-art modulated multimodal transformer encoder-decoder architecture unifying object detection and phrase-grounding. We train the model in self-supervised fashion with 2.3 million image-text pairs synthesized from an e-commerce site. The self-supervision data is annotated with high-confidence pseudo-labels generated with a combination of teacher models: a pre-trained general domain phrase grounding model (e.g. MDETR) and a specialized logo detection model. This allows CPG, as a student model, to benefit from transfer knowledge from these base models combining general-domain knowledge and specialized knowledge. Beyond immediate catalog phrase grounding tasks, we can benefit from CPG representations by incorporating them as ML features into downstream catalog applications that require deep semantic understanding of products. Our experiments on product-brand matching, a challenging e-commerce application, show that incorporating CPG representations into the existing production ensemble system leads to on average 5% recall improvement across all countries globally (with the largest lift of 11% in a single country) at fixed 95% precision, outperforming other alternatives including a logo detection teacher model and ResNet50.
Authors:Zhixin Ling, Zhen Xing, Xiangdong Zhou, Manliang Cao, Guichun Zhou
Abstract:
In panorama understanding, the widely used equirectangular projection (ERP) entails boundary discontinuity and spatial distortion. It severely deteriorates the conventional CNNs and vision Transformers on panoramas. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PanoSwin to learn panorama representations with ERP. To deal with the challenges brought by equirectangular projection, we explore a pano-style shift windowing scheme and novel pitch attention to address the boundary discontinuity and the spatial distortion, respectively. Besides, based on spherical distance and Cartesian coordinates, we adapt absolute positional embeddings and relative positional biases for panoramas to enhance panoramic geometry information. Realizing that planar image understanding might share some common knowledge with panorama understanding, we devise a novel two-stage learning framework to facilitate knowledge transfer from the planar images to panoramas. We conduct experiments against the state-of-the-art on various panoramic tasks, i.e., panoramic object detection, panoramic classification, and panoramic layout estimation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PanoSwin in panorama understanding.
Authors:Felicia Ruppel, Florian Faion, Claudius Gläser, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
Group regression is commonly used in 3D object detection to predict box parameters of similar classes in a joint head, aiming to benefit from similarities while separating highly dissimilar classes. For query-based perception methods, this has, so far, not been feasible. We close this gap and present a method to incorporate multi-class group regression, especially designed for the 3D domain in the context of autonomous driving, into existing attention and query-based perception approaches. We enhance a transformer based joint object detection and tracking model with this approach, and thoroughly evaluate its behavior and performance. For group regression, the classes of the nuScenes dataset are divided into six groups of similar shape and prevalence, each being regressed by a dedicated head. We show that the proposed method is applicable to many existing transformer based perception approaches and can bring potential benefits. The behavior of query group regression is thoroughly analyzed in comparison to a unified regression head, e.g. in terms of class-switching behavior and distribution of the output parameters. The proposed method offers many possibilities for further research, such as in the direction of deep multi-hypotheses tracking.
Authors:Jia-Quan Yu, Soo-Chang Pei
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is a crucial and challenging task for autonomous driving vehicle, while it uses only a single camera image to infer 3D objects in the scene. To address the difficulty of predicting depth using only pictorial clue, we propose a novel perspective-aware convolutional layer that captures long-range dependencies in images. By enforcing convolutional kernels to extract features along the depth axis of every image pixel, we incorporates perspective information into network architecture. We integrate our perspective-aware convolutional layer into a 3D object detector and demonstrate improved performance on the KITTI3D dataset, achieving a 23.9\% average precision in the easy benchmark. These results underscore the importance of modeling scene clues for accurate depth inference and highlight the benefits of incorporating scene structure in network design. Our perspective-aware convolutional layer has the potential to enhance object detection accuracy by providing more precise and context-aware feature extraction.
Authors:Hossein Shakibania, Sina Raoufi, Hassan Khotanlou
Abstract:
Low-light images, characterized by inadequate illumination, pose challenges of diminished clarity, muted colors, and reduced details. Low-light image enhancement, an essential task in computer vision, aims to rectify these issues by improving brightness, contrast, and overall perceptual quality, thereby facilitating accurate analysis and interpretation. This paper introduces the Convolutional Dense Attention-guided Network (CDAN), a novel solution for enhancing low-light images. CDAN integrates an autoencoder-based architecture with convolutional and dense blocks, complemented by an attention mechanism and skip connections. This architecture ensures efficient information propagation and feature learning. Furthermore, a dedicated post-processing phase refines color balance and contrast. Our approach demonstrates notable progress compared to state-of-the-art results in low-light image enhancement, showcasing its robustness across a wide range of challenging scenarios. Our model performs remarkably on benchmark datasets, effectively mitigating under-exposure and proficiently restoring textures and colors in diverse low-light scenarios. This achievement underscores CDAN's potential for diverse computer vision tasks, notably enabling robust object detection and recognition in challenging low-light conditions.
Authors:Razan Dibo, Andrey Galichin, Pavel Astashev, Dmitry V. Dylov, Oleg Y. Rogov
Abstract:
In recent years, computer-aided diagnosis systems have shown great potential in assisting radiologists with accurate and efficient medical image analysis. This paper presents a novel approach for bone pathology localization and classification in wrist X-ray images using a combination of YOLO (You Only Look Once) and the Shifted Window Transformer (Swin) with a newly proposed block. The proposed methodology addresses two critical challenges in wrist X-ray analysis: accurate localization of bone pathologies and precise classification of abnormalities. The YOLO framework is employed to detect and localize bone pathologies, leveraging its real-time object detection capabilities. Additionally, the Swin, a transformer-based module, is utilized to extract contextual information from the localized regions of interest (ROIs) for accurate classification.
Authors:Shixing Huang, Zhihao Wang, Junyuan Ouyang, Haoyao Chen
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) has important applications in monitoring, logistics, and other fields. This paper develops a real-time multi-object tracking and prediction system in rugged environments. A 3D object detection algorithm based on Lidar-camera fusion is designed to detect the target objects. Based on the Hungarian algorithm, this paper designs a 3D multi-object tracking algorithm with an adaptive threshold to realize the stable matching and tracking of the objects. We combine Memory Augmented Neural Networks (MANN) and Kalman filter to achieve 3D trajectory prediction on rugged terrains. Besides, we realize a new dynamic SLAM by using the results of multi-object tracking to remove dynamic points for better SLAM performance and static map. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed multi-object tracking and prediction system, several simulations and physical experiments are conducted. The results show that the proposed system can track dynamic objects and provide future trajectory and a more clean static map in real-time.
Authors:Junhui Liang, Ying Liu, Vladimir Vlassov
Abstract:
Fashion understanding is a hot topic in computer vision, with many applications having great business value in the market. Fashion understanding remains a difficult challenge for computer vision due to the immense diversity of garments and various scenes and backgrounds. In this work, we try removing the background from fashion images to boost data quality and increase model performance. Having fashion images of evident persons in fully visible garments, we can utilize Salient Object Detection to achieve the background removal of fashion data to our expectations. A fashion image with the background removed is claimed as the "rembg" image, contrasting with the original one in the fashion dataset. We conducted extensive comparative experiments with these two types of images on multiple aspects of model training, including model architectures, model initialization, compatibility with other training tricks and data augmentations, and target task types. Our experiments show that background removal can effectively work for fashion data in simple and shallow networks that are not susceptible to overfitting. It can improve model accuracy by up to 5% in the classification on the FashionStyle14 dataset when training models from scratch. However, background removal does not perform well in deep neural networks due to incompatibility with other regularization techniques like batch normalization, pre-trained initialization, and data augmentations introducing randomness. The loss of background pixels invalidates many existing training tricks in the model training, adding the risk of overfitting for deep models.
Authors:Shan Cao, Qunsheng Ruan, Linjian Ma
Abstract:
Tongue segmentation serves as the primary step in automated TCM tongue diagnosis, which plays a significant role in the diagnostic results. Currently, numerous deep learning based methods have achieved promising results. However, when confronted with tongue images that differ from the training set or possess challenging backgrounds, these methods demonstrate limited performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a universal tongue segmentation model named TongueSAM based on SAM (Segment Anything Model). SAM is a large-scale pretrained interactive segmentation model known for its powerful zero-shot generalization capability. Applying SAM to tongue segmentation leverages its learned prior knowledge from natural images, enabling the achievement of zero-shot segmentation for various types of tongue images. In this study, a Prompt Generator based on object detection is integrated into SAM to enable an end-to-end automated tongue segmentation method. Experiments demonstrate that TongueSAM achieves exceptional performance across various of tongue segmentation datasets, particularly under zero-shot. Even when dealing with challenging background tongue images, TongueSAM achieves a mIoU of 95.23\% under zero-shot conditions, surpassing other segmentation methods. As far as we know, this is the first application of large-scale pretrained model for tongue segmentation. The project mentioned in this paper is currently publicly available.
Authors:Yen Nhi Truong Vu, Dan Guo, Ahmed Taha, Jason Su, Thomas Paul Matthews
Abstract:
Deep-learning-based object detection methods show promise for improving screening mammography, but high rates of false positives can hinder their effectiveness in clinical practice. To reduce false positives, we identify three challenges: (1) unlike natural images, a malignant mammogram typically contains only one malignant finding; (2) mammography exams contain two views of each breast, and both views ought to be considered to make a correct assessment; (3) most mammograms are negative and do not contain any findings. In this work, we tackle the three aforementioned challenges by: (1) leveraging Sparse R-CNN and showing that sparse detectors are more appropriate than dense detectors for mammography; (2) including a multi-view cross-attention module to synthesize information from different views; (3) incorporating multi-instance learning (MIL) to train with unannotated images and perform breast-level classification. The resulting model, M&M, is a Multi-view and Multi-instance learning system that can both localize malignant findings and provide breast-level predictions. We validate M&M's detection and classification performance using five mammography datasets. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed component through comprehensive ablation studies.
Authors:Shenxiao Mei, Chenglong Ma, Feihong Shen, Huikai Wu
Abstract:
Detecting dental diseases through panoramic X-rays images is a standard procedure for dentists. Normally, a dentist need to identify diseases and find the infected teeth. While numerous machine learning models adopting this two-step procedure have been developed, there has not been an end-to-end model that can identify teeth and their associated diseases at the same time. To fill the gap, we develop YOLOrtho, a unified framework for teeth enumeration and dental disease detection. We develop our model on Dentex Challenge 2023 data, which consists of three distinct types of annotated data. The first part is labeled with quadrant, and the second part is labeled with quadrant and enumeration and the third part is labeled with quadrant, enumeration and disease. To further improve detection, we make use of Tufts Dental public dataset. To fully utilize the data and learn both teeth detection and disease identification simultaneously, we formulate diseases as attributes attached to their corresponding teeth. Due to the nature of position relation in teeth enumeration, We replace convolution layer with CoordConv in our model to provide more position information for the model. We also adjust the model architecture and insert one more upsampling layer in FPN in favor of large object detection. Finally, we propose a post-process strategy for teeth layout that corrects teeth enumeration based on linear sum assignment. Results from experiments show that our model exceeds large Diffusion-based model.
Authors:Jiashun Suo, Xingzhou Zhang, Weisong Shi, Wei Zhou
Abstract:
Motivated by the advances in deep learning techniques, the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based object detection has proliferated across a range of fields, including vehicle counting, fire detection, and city monitoring. While most existing research studies only a subset of the challenges inherent to UAV-based object detection, there are few studies that balance various aspects to design a practical system for energy consumption reduction. In response, we present the E$^3$-UAV, an edge-based energy-efficient object detection system for UAVs. The system is designed to dynamically support various UAV devices, edge devices, and detection algorithms, with the aim of minimizing energy consumption by deciding the most energy-efficient flight parameters (including flight altitude, flight speed, detection algorithm, and sampling rate) required to fulfill the detection requirements of the task. We first present an effective evaluation metric for actual tasks and construct a transparent energy consumption model based on hundreds of actual flight data to formalize the relationship between energy consumption and flight parameters. Then we present a lightweight energy-efficient priority decision algorithm based on a large quantity of actual flight data to assist the system in deciding flight parameters. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the system, and our experimental results demonstrate that it can significantly decrease energy consumption in real-world scenarios. Additionally, we provide four insights that can assist researchers and engineers in their efforts to study UAV-based object detection further.
Authors:Eduardo C. Fidelis, Fabio Reway, Herick Y. S. Ribeiro, Pietro L. Campos, Werner Huber, Christian Icking, Lester A. Faria, Torsten Schön
Abstract:
The main approaches for simulating FMCW radar are based on ray tracing, which is usually computationally intensive and do not account for background noise. This work proposes a faster method for FMCW radar simulation capable of generating synthetic raw radar data using generative adversarial networks (GAN). The code and pre-trained weights are open-source and available on GitHub. This method generates 16 simultaneous chirps, which allows the generated data to be used for the further development of algorithms for processing radar data (filtering and clustering). This can increase the potential for data augmentation, e.g., by generating data in non-existent or safety-critical scenarios that are not reproducible in real life. In this work, the GAN was trained with radar measurements of a motorcycle and used to generate synthetic raw radar data of a motorcycle traveling in a straight line. For generating this data, the distance of the motorcycle and Gaussian noise are used as input to the neural network. The synthetic generated radar chirps were evaluated using the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). Then, the Range-Azimuth (RA) map is calculated twice: first, based on synthetic data using this GAN and, second, based on real data. Based on these RA maps, an algorithm with adaptive threshold and edge detection is used for object detection. The results have shown that the data is realistic in terms of coherent radar reflections of the motorcycle and background noise based on the comparison of chirps, the RA maps and the object detection results. Thus, the proposed method in this work has shown to minimize the simulation-to-reality gap for the generation of radar data.
Authors:Yiyang Sun, Xiaonian Wang, Yangyang Zhang, Jiagui Tang, Xiaqiang Tang, Jing Yao
Abstract:
Driving scene understanding is to obtain comprehensive scene information through the sensor data and provide a basis for downstream tasks, which is indispensable for the safety of self-driving vehicles. Specific perception tasks, such as object detection and scene graph generation, are commonly used. However, the results of these tasks are only equivalent to the characterization of sampling from high-dimensional scene features, which are not sufficient to represent the scenario. In addition, the goal of perception tasks is inconsistent with human driving that just focuses on what may affect the ego-trajectory. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end Interpretable Implicit Driving Scene Understanding (II-DSU) model to extract implicit high-dimensional scene features as scene understanding results guided by a planning module and to validate the plausibility of scene understanding using auxiliary perception tasks for visualization. Experimental results on CARLA benchmarks show that our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art and is able to obtain scene features that embody richer scene information relevant to driving, enabling superior performance of the downstream planning.
Authors:Marcelo Eduardo Pederiva, José Mario De Martino, Alessandro Zimmer
Abstract:
Autonomous driving perception tasks rely heavily on cameras as the primary sensor for Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, and Object Tracking. However, RGB images captured by cameras lack depth information, which poses a significant challenge in 3D detection tasks. To supplement this missing data, mapping sensors such as LIDAR and RADAR are used for accurate 3D Object Detection. Despite their significant accuracy, the multi-sensor models are expensive and require a high computational demand. In contrast, Monocular 3D Object Detection models are becoming increasingly popular, offering a faster, cheaper, and easier-to-implement solution for 3D detections. This paper introduces a different Multi-Tasking Learning approach called MonoNext that utilizes a spatial grid to map objects in the scene. MonoNext employs a straightforward approach based on the ConvNext network and requires only 3D bounding box annotated data. In our experiments with the KITTI dataset, MonoNext achieved high precision and competitive performance comparable with state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, by adding more training data, MonoNext surpassed itself and achieved higher accuracies.
Authors:Garvita Allabadi, Ana Lucic, Siddarth Aananth, Tiffany Yang, Yu-Xiong Wang, Vikram Adve
Abstract:
Traditional semi-supervised object detection methods assume a fixed set of object classes (in-distribution or ID classes) during training and deployment, which limits performance in real-world scenarios where unseen classes (out-of-distribution or OOD classes) may appear. In such cases, OOD data is often misclassified as ID, thus harming the ID classes accuracy. Open-set methods address this limitation by filtering OOD data to improve ID performance, thereby limiting the learning process to ID classes. We extend this to a more natural open-world setting, where the OOD classes are not only detected but also incorporated into the learning process. Specifically, we explore two key questions: 1) how to accurately detect OOD samples, and, most importantly, 2) how to effectively learn from the OOD samples in a semi-supervised object detection pipeline without compromising ID accuracy. To address this, we introduce an ensemble-based OOD Explorer for detection and classification, and an adaptable semi-supervised object detection framework that integrates both ID and OOD data. Through extensive evaluation on different open-world scenarios, we demonstrate that our method performs competitively against state-of-the-art OOD detection algorithms and also significantly boosts the semi-supervised learning performance for both ID and OOD classes.
Authors:Jin Wang, Yu Hu, Lirong Xiang, Gota Morota, Samantha A. Brooks, Carissa L. Wickens, Emily K. Miller-Cushon, Haipeng Yu
Abstract:
Computer vision (CV), a non-intrusive and cost-effective technology, has furthered the development of precision livestock farming by enabling optimized decision-making through timely and individualized animal care. The availability of affordable two- and three-dimensional camera sensors, combined with various machine learning and deep learning algorithms, has provided a valuable opportunity to improve livestock production systems. However, despite the availability of various CV tools in the public domain, applying these tools to animal data can be challenging, often requiring users to have programming and data analysis skills, as well as access to computing resources. Moreover, the rapid expansion of precision livestock farming is creating a growing need to educate and train animal science students in CV. This presents educators with the challenge of efficiently demonstrating the complex algorithms involved in CV. Thus, the objective of this study was to develop ShinyAnimalCV, an open-source cloud-based web application. This application provides a user-friendly interface for performing CV tasks, including object segmentation, detection, three-dimensional surface visualization, and extraction of two- and three-dimensional morphological features. Nine pre-trained CV models using top-view animal data are included in the application. ShinyAnimalCV has been deployed online using cloud computing platforms. The source code of ShinyAnimalCV is available on GitHub, along with detailed documentation on training CV models using custom data and deploying ShinyAnimalCV locally to allow users to fully leverage the capabilities of the application. ShinyAnimalCV can contribute to CV research and teaching in the animal science community.
Authors:Zongmin Liu, Jirui Wang, Jie Li, Zufeng Li, Kai Ren, Peng Shi
Abstract:
To better care for the elderly and disabled, it is essential for service robots to have an effective fusion method of object detection and grasp estimation. However, limited research has been observed on the combination of object detection and grasp estimation. To overcome this technical difficulty, a novel integrated method of detection-grasping for specific object based on the box coordinate matching is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SOLOv2 instance segmentation model is improved by adding channel attention module (CAM) and spatial attention module (SAM). Then, the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and CAM are added to the generative residual convolutional neural network (GR-CNN) model to optimize grasp estimation. Furthermore, a detection-grasping integrated algorithm based on box coordinate matching (DG-BCM) is proposed to obtain the fusion model of object detection and grasp estimation. For verification, experiments on object detection and grasp estimation are conducted separately to verify the superiority of improved models. Additionally, grasping tasks for several specific objects are implemented on a simulation platform, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of DG-BCM algorithm proposed in this paper.
Authors:Siliang Ma, Yong Xu
Abstract:
Bounding box regression (BBR) has been widely used in object detection and instance segmentation, which is an important step in object localization. However, most of the existing loss functions for bounding box regression cannot be optimized when the predicted box has the same aspect ratio as the groundtruth box, but the width and height values are exactly different. In order to tackle the issues mentioned above, we fully explore the geometric features of horizontal rectangle and propose a novel bounding box similarity comparison metric MPDIoU based on minimum point distance, which contains all of the relevant factors considered in the existing loss functions, namely overlapping or non-overlapping area, central points distance, and deviation of width and height, while simplifying the calculation process. On this basis, we propose a bounding box regression loss function based on MPDIoU, called LMPDIoU . Experimental results show that the MPDIoU loss function is applied to state-of-the-art instance segmentation (e.g., YOLACT) and object detection (e.g., YOLOv7) model trained on PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and IIIT5k outperforms existing loss functions.
Authors:Franziska Schwaiger, Andrea Matic, Karsten Roscher, Stephan Günnemann
Abstract:
The ability to detect learned objects regardless of their appearance is crucial for autonomous systems in real-world applications. Especially for detecting humans, which is often a fundamental task in safety-critical applications, it is vital to prevent errors. To address this challenge, we propose a self-monitoring framework that allows for the perception system to perform plausibility checks at runtime. We show that by incorporating an additional component for detecting human body parts, we are able to significantly reduce the number of missed human detections by factors of up to 9 when compared to a baseline setup, which was trained only on holistic person objects. Additionally, we found that training a model jointly on humans and their body parts leads to a substantial reduction in false positive detections by up to 50% compared to training on humans alone. We performed comprehensive experiments on the publicly available datasets DensePose and Pascal VOC in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/ FraunhoferIKS/smf-object-detection.
Authors:Nati Ofir, Jean-Christophe Nebel
Abstract:
Multispectral imaging is an important task of image processing and computer vision, which is especially relevant to applications such as dehazing or object detection. With the development of the RGBT (RGB & Thermal) sensor, the problem of visible (RGB) to Near Infrared (NIR) image fusion has become particularly timely. Indeed, while visible images see color, but suffer from noise, haze, and clouds, the NIR channel captures a clearer picture. The proposed approach fuses these two channels by training a Convolutional Neural Network by Self Supervised Learning (SSL) on a single example. For each such pair, RGB and NIR, the network is trained for seconds to deduce the final fusion. The SSL is based on the comparison of the Structure of Similarity and Edge-Preservation losses, where the labels for the SSL are the input channels themselves. This fusion preserves the relevant detail of each spectral channel without relying on a heavy training process. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves similar or better qualitative and quantitative multispectral fusion results than other state-of-the-art methods that do not rely on heavy training and/or large datasets.
Authors:Bruk Gebregziabher, Hadush Hailu
Abstract:
The safe and efficient operation of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in complex environments, such as manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture, necessitates accurate multi-object tracking and predictive collision avoidance. This paper presents algorithms and techniques for addressing these challenges using Lidar sensor data, emphasizing ensemble Kalman filter. The developed predictive collision avoidance algorithm employs the data provided by lidar sensors to track multiple objects and predict their velocities and future positions, enabling the AMR to navigate safely and effectively. A modification to the dynamic windowing approach is introduced to enhance the performance of the collision avoidance system. The overall system architecture encompasses object detection, multi-object tracking, and predictive collision avoidance control. The experimental results, obtained from both simulation and real-world data, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in various scenarios, which lays the foundation for future research on global planners, other controllers, and the integration of additional sensors. This thesis contributes to the ongoing development of safe and efficient autonomous systems in complex and dynamic environments.
Authors:Franco Marchesoni-Acland, Gabriele Facciolo
Abstract:
This work proposes a strategy for training models while annotating data named Intelligent Annotation (IA). IA involves three modules: (1) assisted data annotation, (2) background model training, and (3) active selection of the next datapoints. Under this framework, we open-source the IAdet tool, which is specific for single-class object detection. Additionally, we devise a method for automatically evaluating such a human-in-the-loop system. For the PASCAL VOC dataset, the IAdet tool reduces the database annotation time by $25\%$ while providing a trained model for free. These results are obtained for a deliberately very simple IAdet design. As a consequence, IAdet is susceptible to multiple easy improvements, paving the way for powerful human-in-the-loop object detection systems.
Authors:Kang Yi, Jing Xu, Xiao Jin, Fu Guo, Yan-Feng Wu
Abstract:
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) aims to detect the prominent regions by jointly modeling RGB and depth information. Most RGB-D SOD methods apply the same type of backbones and fusion modules to identically learn the multimodality and multistage features. However, these features contribute differently to the final saliency results, which raises two issues: 1) how to model discrepant characteristics of RGB images and depth maps; 2) how to fuse these cross-modality features in different stages. In this paper, we propose a high-order discrepant interaction network (HODINet) for RGB-D SOD. Concretely, we first employ transformer-based and CNN-based architectures as backbones to encode RGB and depth features, respectively. Then, the high-order representations are delicately extracted and embedded into spatial and channel attentions for cross-modality feature fusion in different stages. Specifically, we design a high-order spatial fusion (HOSF) module and a high-order channel fusion (HOCF) module to fuse features of the first two and the last two stages, respectively. Besides, a cascaded pyramid reconstruction network is adopted to progressively decode the fused features in a top-down pathway. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven widely used datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We achieve competitive performance against 24 state-of-the-art methods under four evaluation metrics.
Authors:Yanhui Guo, Fangzhou Luo, Xiaolin Wu
Abstract:
Image signal processing (ISP) pipeline plays a fundamental role in digital cameras, which converts raw Bayer sensor data to RGB images. However, ISP-generated images usually suffer from imperfections due to the compounded degradations that stem from sensor noises, demosaicing noises, compression artifacts, and possibly adverse effects of erroneous ISP hyperparameter settings such as ISO and gamma values. In a general sense, these ISP imperfections can be considered as degradations. The highly complex mechanisms of ISP degradations, some of which are even unknown, pose great challenges to the generalization capability of deep neural networks (DNN) for image restoration and to their adaptability to downstream tasks. To tackle the issues, we propose a novel DNN approach to learn degradation-independent representations (DiR) through the refinement of a self-supervised learned baseline representation. The proposed DiR learning technique has remarkable domain generalization capability and consequently, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various downstream tasks, including blind image restoration, object detection, and instance segmentation, as verified in our experiments.
Authors:Yeongwoong Kim, Hyewon Jeong, Janghyun Yu, Younhee Kim, Jooyoung Lee, Se Yoon Jeong, Hui Yong Kim
Abstract:
The proliferation of deep learning-based machine vision applications has given rise to a new type of compression, so called video coding for machine (VCM). VCM differs from traditional video coding in that it is optimized for machine vision performance instead of human visual quality. In the feature compression track of MPEG-VCM, multi-scale features extracted from images are subject to compression. Recent feature compression works have demonstrated that the versatile video coding (VVC) standard-based approach can achieve a BD-rate reduction of up to 96% against MPEG-VCM feature anchor. However, it is still sub-optimal as VVC was not designed for extracted features but for natural images. Moreover, the high encoding complexity of VVC makes it difficult to design a lightweight encoder without sacrificing performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-scale feature compression method that enables both the end-to-end optimization on the extracted features and the design of lightweight encoders. The proposed model combines a learnable compressor with a multi-scale feature fusion network so that the redundancy in the multi-scale features is effectively removed. Instead of simply cascading the fusion network and the compression network, we integrate the fusion and encoding processes in an interleaved way. Our model first encodes a larger-scale feature to obtain a latent representation and then fuses the latent with a smaller-scale feature. This process is successively performed until the smallest-scale feature is fused and then the encoded latent at the final stage is entropy-coded for transmission. The results show that our model outperforms previous approaches by at least 52% BD-rate reduction and has $\times5$ to $\times27$ times less encoding time for object detection...
Authors:Ankit Gupta, Ida-Maria Sintorn
Abstract:
Template matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision with applications in fields including object detection, image registration, and object tracking. Current methods rely on nearest-neighbour (NN) matching, where the query feature space is converted to NN space by representing each query pixel with its NN in the template. NN-based methods have been shown to perform better in occlusions, appearance changes, and non-rigid transformations; however, they scale poorly with high-resolution data and high feature dimensions. We present an NN-based method which efficiently reduces the NN computations and introduces filtering in the NN fields (NNFs). A vector quantization step is introduced before the NN calculation to represent the template with $k$ features, and the filter response over the NNFs is used to compare the template and query distributions over the features. We show that state-of-the-art performance is achieved in low-resolution data, and our method outperforms previous methods at higher resolution.
Authors:Alexander van Meekeren, Maya Aghaei, Klaas Dijkstra
Abstract:
Deep object detection models have achieved notable successes in recent years, but one major obstacle remains: the requirement for a large amount of training data. Obtaining such data is a tedious process and is mainly time consuming, leading to the exploration of new research avenues like synthetic data generation techniques. In this study, we explore the usability of Stable Diffusion 2.1-base for generating synthetic datasets of apple trees for object detection and compare it to a baseline model trained on real-world data. After creating a dataset of realistic apple trees with prompt engineering and utilizing a previously trained Stable Diffusion model, the custom dataset was annotated and evaluated by training a YOLOv5m object detection model to predict apples in a real-world apple detection dataset. YOLOv5m was chosen for its rapid inference time and minimal hardware demands. Results demonstrate that the model trained on generated data is slightly underperforming compared to a baseline model trained on real-world images when evaluated on a set of real-world images. However, these findings remain highly promising, as the average precision difference is only 0.09 and 0.06, respectively. Qualitative results indicate that the model can accurately predict the location of apples, except in cases of heavy shading. These findings illustrate the potential of synthetic data generation techniques as a viable alternative to the collection of extensive training data for object detection models.
Authors:Roy Voetman, Maya Aghaei, Klaas Dijkstra
Abstract:
Despite the notable accomplishments of deep object detection models, a major challenge that persists is the requirement for extensive amounts of training data. The process of procuring such real-world data is a laborious undertaking, which has prompted researchers to explore new avenues of research, such as synthetic data generation techniques. This study presents a framework for the generation of synthetic datasets by fine-tuning pretrained stable diffusion models. The synthetic datasets are then manually annotated and employed for training various object detection models. These detectors are evaluated on a real-world test set of 331 images and compared against a baseline model that was trained on real-world images. The results of this study reveal that the object detection models trained on synthetic data perform similarly to the baseline model. In the context of apple detection in orchards, the average precision deviation with the baseline ranges from 0.09 to 0.12. This study illustrates the potential of synthetic data generation techniques as a viable alternative to the collection of extensive training data for the training of deep models.
Authors:Huy T. Nguyen, Thinh B. Lam, Quan D. D. Tran, Minh T. Nguyen, Dat T. Chung, Vinh Q. Dinh
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of breast density distribution on the generalization performance of deep-learning models on mammography images using the VinDr-Mammo dataset. We explore the use of domain adaptation techniques, specifically Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) with the Noise Latent Transferability Exploration (NLTE) framework, to improve model performance across breast densities under noisy labeling circumstances. We propose a robust augmentation framework to bridge the domain gap between the source and target inside a dataset. Our results show that DAOD-based methods, along with the proposed augmentation framework, can improve the generalization performance of deep-learning models (+5% overall mAP improvement approximately in our experimental results compared to commonly used detection models). This paper highlights the importance of domain adaptation techniques in medical imaging, particularly in the context of breast density distribution, which is critical in mammography.
Authors:Eduardo R. Corral-Soto, Alaap Grandhi, Yannis Y. He, Mrigank Rochan, Bingbing Liu
Abstract:
In recent years, much progress has been made in LiDAR-based 3D object detection mainly due to advances in detector architecture designs and availability of large-scale LiDAR datasets. Existing 3D object detectors tend to perform well on the point cloud regions closer to the LiDAR sensor as opposed to on regions that are farther away. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the data perspective instead of detector architecture design. We observe that there is a learning bias in detection models towards the dense objects near the sensor and show that the detection performance can be improved by simply manipulating the input point cloud density at different distance ranges without modifying the detector architecture and without data augmentation. We propose a model-free point cloud density adjustment pre-processing mechanism that uses iterative MCMC optimization to estimate optimal parameters for altering the point density at different distance ranges. We conduct experiments using four state-of-the-art LiDAR 3D object detectors on two public LiDAR datasets, namely Waymo and ONCE. Our results demonstrate that our range-based point cloud density manipulation technique can improve the performance of the existing detectors, which in turn could potentially inspire future detector designs.
Authors:Lanxiao Li, Michael Heizmann
Abstract:
Capturing and labeling real-world 3D data is laborious and time-consuming, which makes it costly to train strong 3D models. To address this issue, recent works present a simple method by generating randomized 3D scenes without simulation and rendering. Although models pre-trained on the generated synthetic data gain impressive performance boosts, previous works have two major shortcomings. First, they focus on only one downstream task (i.e., object detection), and the generalization to other tasks is unexplored. Second, the contributions of generated data are not systematically studied. To obtain a deeper understanding of the randomized 3D scene generation technique, we revisit previous works and compare different data generation methods using a unified setup. Moreover, to clarify the generalization of the pre-trained models, we evaluate their performance in multiple tasks (i.e., object detection and semantic segmentation) and with different pre-training methods (i.e., masked autoencoder and contrastive learning). Moreover, we propose a new method to generate 3D scenes with spherical harmonics. It surpasses the previous formula-driven method with a clear margin and achieves on-par results with methods using real-world scans and CAD models.
Authors:Andreas Petridis, Mirela Popa, Filipa Peleja, Dario Dotti, Alberto de Santos
Abstract:
Fashion is one of the largest world's industries and computer vision techniques have been becoming more popular in recent years, in particular, for tasks such as object detection and apparel segmentation. Even with the rapid growth in computer vision solutions, specifically for the fashion industry, many problems are far for being resolved. Therefore, not at all times, adjusting out-of-the-box pre-trained computer vision models will provide the desired solution. In the present paper is proposed a pipeline that takes a noisy image with a person and specifically detects the regions with garments that are bottoms or tops. Our solution implements models that are capable of finding human parts in an image e.g. full-body vs half-body, or no human is found. Then, other models knowing that there's a human and its composition (e.g. not always we have a full-body) finds the bounding boxes/regions of the image that very likely correspond to a bottom or a top. For the creation of bounding boxes/regions task, a benchmark dataset was specifically prepared. The results show that the Mask RCNN solution is robust, and generalized enough to be used and scalable in unseen apparel/fashion data.
Authors:Ethan Pronovost, Kai Wang, Nick Roy
Abstract:
In this paper we describe a learned method of traffic scene generation designed to simulate the output of the perception system of a self-driving car. In our "Scene Diffusion" system, inspired by latent diffusion, we use a novel combination of diffusion and object detection to directly create realistic and physically plausible arrangements of discrete bounding boxes for agents. We show that our scene generation model is able to adapt to different regions in the US, producing scenarios that capture the intricacies of each region.
Authors:Philippe Bernet, Joseph Chazalon, Edwin Carlinet, Alexandre Bourquelot, Elodie Puybareau
Abstract:
Linear objects convey substantial information about document structure, but are challenging to detect accurately because of degradation (curved, erased) or decoration (doubled, dashed). Many approaches can recover some vector representation, but only one closed-source technique introduced in 1994, based on Kalman filters (a particular case of Multiple Object Tracking algorithm), can perform a pixel-accurate instance segmentation of linear objects and enable to selectively remove them from the original image. We aim at re-popularizing this approach and propose: 1. a framework for accurate instance segmentation of linear objects in document images using Multiple Object Tracking (MOT); 2. document image datasets and metrics which enable both vector- and pixel-based evaluation of linear object detection; 3. performance measures of MOT approaches against modern segment detectors; 4. performance measures of various tracking strategies, exhibiting alternatives to the original Kalman filters approach; and 5. an open-source implementation of a detector which can discriminate instances of curved, erased, dashed, intersecting and/or overlapping linear objects.
Authors:Ioanna Diamanti, Antigoni Tsiami, Petros Koutras, Petros Maragos
Abstract:
We introduce ViDaS, a two-stream, fully convolutional Video, Depth-Aware Saliency network to address the problem of attention modeling ``in-the-wild", via saliency prediction in videos. Contrary to existing visual saliency approaches using only RGB frames as input, our network employs also depth as an additional modality. The network consists of two visual streams, one for the RGB frames, and one for the depth frames. Both streams follow an encoder-decoder approach and are fused to obtain a final saliency map. The network is trained end-to-end and is evaluated in a variety of different databases with eye-tracking data, containing a wide range of video content. Although the publicly available datasets do not contain depth, we estimate it using three different state-of-the-art methods, to enable comparisons and a deeper insight. Our method outperforms in most cases state-of-the-art models and our RGB-only variant, which indicates that depth can be beneficial to accurately estimating saliency in videos displayed on a 2D screen. Depth has been widely used to assist salient object detection problems, where it has been proven to be very beneficial. Our problem though differs significantly from salient object detection, since it is not restricted to specific salient objects, but predicts human attention in a more general aspect. These two problems not only have different objectives, but also different ground truth data and evaluation metrics. To our best knowledge, this is the first competitive deep learning video saliency estimation approach that combines both RGB and Depth features to address the general problem of saliency estimation ``in-the-wild". The code will be publicly released.
Authors:Enyu Cai, Jiaqi Guo, Changye Yang, Edward J. Delp
Abstract:
The sorghum panicle is an important trait related to grain yield and plant development. Detecting and counting sorghum panicles can provide significant information for plant phenotyping. Current deep-learning-based object detection methods for panicles require a large amount of training data. The data labeling is time-consuming and not feasible for real application. In this paper, we present an approach to reduce the amount of training data for sorghum panicle detection via semi-supervised learning. Results show we can achieve similar performance as supervised methods for sorghum panicle detection by only using 10\% of original training data.
Authors:Miao Zhang, Yiqing Shen, Shenghui Zhong
Abstract:
Images captured under low-light conditions are often plagued by several challenges, including diminished contrast, increased noise, loss of fine details, and unnatural color reproduction. These factors can significantly hinder the performance of computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation. As a result, improving the quality of low-light images is of paramount importance for practical applications in the computer vision domain.To effectively address these challenges, we present a novel low-light image enhancement model, termed Spatial Consistency Retinex Network (SCRNet), which leverages the Retinex-based structure and is guided by the principle of spatial consistency.Specifically, our proposed model incorporates three levels of consistency: channel level, semantic level, and texture level, inspired by the principle of spatial consistency.These levels of consistency enable our model to adaptively enhance image features, ensuring more accurate and visually pleasing results.Extensive experimental evaluations on various low-light image datasets demonstrate that our proposed SCRNet outshines existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the potential of SCRNet as an effective solution for enhancing low-light images.
Authors:Hsiu-Wei Yang, Abhinav Agrawal
Abstract:
Accurate Named Entity Recognition (NER) is crucial for various information retrieval tasks in industry. However, despite significant progress in traditional NER methods, the extraction of Complex Named Entities remains a relatively unexplored area. In this paper, we propose a novel system that combines object detection for Document Layout Analysis (DLA) with weakly supervised learning to address the challenge of extracting discontinuous complex named entities in legal documents. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply weak supervision to DLA. Our experimental results show that the model trained solely on pseudo labels outperforms the supervised baseline when gold-standard data is limited, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed approach in reducing the dependency on annotated data.
Authors:Guoyang Liu, Jindi Zhang, Antoni B. Chan, Janet H. Hsiao
Abstract:
We examined whether embedding human attention knowledge into saliency-based explainable AI (XAI) methods for computer vision models could enhance their plausibility and faithfulness. We first developed new gradient-based XAI methods for object detection models to generate object-specific explanations by extending the current methods for image classification models. Interestingly, while these gradient-based methods worked well for explaining image classification models, when being used for explaining object detection models, the resulting saliency maps generally had lower faithfulness than human attention maps when performing the same task. We then developed Human Attention-Guided XAI (HAG-XAI) to learn from human attention how to best combine explanatory information from the models to enhance explanation plausibility by using trainable activation functions and smoothing kernels to maximize XAI saliency map's similarity to human attention maps. While for image classification models, HAG-XAI enhanced explanation plausibility at the expense of faithfulness, for object detection models it enhanced plausibility and faithfulness simultaneously and outperformed existing methods. The learned functions were model-specific, well generalizable to other databases.
Authors:Hans Thisanke, Chamli Deshan, Kavindu Chamith, Sachith Seneviratne, Rajith Vidanaarachchi, Damayanthi Herath
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation has a broad range of applications in a variety of domains including land coverage analysis, autonomous driving, and medical image analysis. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) provide the architecture models for semantic segmentation. Even though ViTs have proven success in image classification, they cannot be directly applied to dense prediction tasks such as image segmentation and object detection since ViT is not a general purpose backbone due to its patch partitioning scheme. In this survey, we discuss some of the different ViT architectures that can be used for semantic segmentation and how their evolution managed the above-stated challenge. The rise of ViT and its performance with a high success rate motivated the community to slowly replace the traditional convolutional neural networks in various computer vision tasks. This survey aims to review and compare the performances of ViT architectures designed for semantic segmentation using benchmarking datasets. This will be worthwhile for the community to yield knowledge regarding the implementations carried out in semantic segmentation and to discover more efficient methodologies using ViTs.
Authors:Javad Khoramdel, Soheila Hatami, Majid Sadedel
Abstract:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask has been known to be an effective way to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In lots of monitoring tasks, humans have been replaced with computers thanks to the outstanding performance of the deep learning models. Monitoring the wearing of a face mask is another task that can be done by deep learning models with acceptable accuracy. The main challenge of this task is the limited amount of data because of the quarantine. In this paper, we did an investigation on the capability of three state-of-the-art object detection neural networks on face mask detection for real-time applications. As mentioned, here are three models used, Single Shot Detector (SSD), two versions of You Only Look Once (YOLO) i.e., YOLOv4-tiny, and YOLOv4-tiny-3l from which the best was selected. In the proposed method, according to the performance of different models, the best model that can be suitable for use in real-world and mobile device applications in comparison to other recent studies was the YOLOv4-tiny model, with 85.31% and 50.66 for mean Average Precision (mAP) and Frames Per Second (FPS), respectively. These acceptable values were achieved using two datasets with only 1531 images in three separate classes.
Authors:Dhyey Manish Rajani, Surya Pratap Singh, Rahul Kashyap Swayampakula
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose an advanced methodology for the detection of 3D objects and precise estimation of their spatial positions from a single image. Unlike conventional frameworks that rely solely on center-point and dimension predictions, our research leverages a deep convolutional neural network-based 3D object weighted orientation regression paradigm. These estimates are then seamlessly integrated with geometric constraints obtained from a 2D bounding box, resulting in derivation of a comprehensive 3D bounding box. Our novel network design encompasses two key outputs. The first output involves the estimation of 3D object orientation through the utilization of a discrete-continuous loss function. Simultaneously, the second output predicts objectivity-based confidence scores with minimal variance. Additionally, we also introduce enhancements to our methodology through the incorporation of lightweight residual feature extractors. By combining the derived estimates with the geometric constraints inherent in the 2D bounding box, our approach significantly improves the accuracy of 3D object pose determination, surpassing baseline methodologies. Our method is rigorously evaluated on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, demonstrating superior performance.
Authors:Hamam Mokayed, Amirhossein Nayebiastaneh, Kanjar De, Stergios Sozos, Olle Hagner, Bjorn Backe
Abstract:
Vehicle detection and recognition in drone images is a complex problem that has been used for different safety purposes. The main challenge of these images is captured at oblique angles and poses several challenges like non-uniform illumination effect, degradations, blur, occlusion, loss of visibility, etc. Additionally, weather conditions play a crucial role in causing safety concerns and add another high level of challenge to the collected data. Over the past few decades, various techniques have been employed to detect and track vehicles in different weather conditions. However, detecting vehicles in heavy snow is still in the early stages because of a lack of available data. Furthermore, there has been no research on detecting vehicles in snowy weather using real images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This study aims to address this gap by providing the scientific community with data on vehicles captured by UAVs in different settings and under various snow cover conditions in the Nordic region. The data covers different adverse weather conditions like overcast with snowfall, low light and low contrast conditions with patchy snow cover, high brightness, sunlight, fresh snow, and the temperature reaching far below -0 degrees Celsius. The study also evaluates the performance of commonly used object detection methods such as Yolo v8, Yolo v5, and fast RCNN. Additionally, data augmentation techniques are explored, and those that enhance the detectors' performance in such scenarios are proposed. The code and the dataset will be available at https://nvd.ltu-ai.dev
Authors:Barza Nisar, Hruday Vishal Kanna Anand, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection in all weather conditions remains a key challenge to enable the widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles, as most work to date has been performed on clear weather data. In order to generalize to adverse weather conditions, supervised methods perform best if trained from scratch on all weather data instead of finetuning a model pretrained on clear weather data. Training from scratch on all data will eventually become computationally infeasible and expensive as datasets continue to grow and encompass the full extent of possible weather conditions. On the other hand, naive finetuning on data from a different weather domain can result in catastrophic forgetting of the previously learned domain. Inspired by the success of replay-based continual learning methods, we propose Gradient-based Maximally Interfered Retrieval (GMIR), a gradient based sampling strategy for replay. During finetuning, GMIR periodically retrieves samples from the previous domain dataset whose gradient vectors show maximal interference with the gradient vector of the current update. Our 3D object detection experiments on the SeeingThroughFog (STF) dataset show that GMIR not only overcomes forgetting but also offers competitive performance compared to scratch training on all data with a 46.25% reduction in total training time.
Authors:Michael Schlosser, Daniel König, Michael Teutsch
Abstract:
Object detection is one of the key tasks in many applications of computer vision. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are undoubtedly a well-suited approach for object detection. However, such DNNs need highly adapted hardware together with hardware-specific optimization to guarantee high efficiency during inference. This is especially the case when aiming for efficient object detection in video streaming applications on limited hardware such as edge devices. Comparing vendor-specific hardware and related optimization software pipelines in a fair experimental setup is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses a host computer with a host software application together with a light-weight interface based on the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Various different target devices with target apps can be connected via MQTT with this host computer. With well-defined and standardized MQTT messages, object detection results can be reported to the host computer, where the results are evaluated without harming or influencing the processing on the device. With this quite generic framework, we can measure the object detection performance, the runtime, and the energy efficiency at the same time. The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated in multiple experiments that offer deep insights into the optimization of DNNs.
Authors:Nilantha Premakumara, Brian Jalaian, Niranjan Suri, Hooman Samani
Abstract:
Robustness against real-world distribution shifts is crucial for the successful deployment of object detection models in practical applications. In this paper, we address the problem of assessing and enhancing the robustness of object detection models against natural perturbations, such as varying lighting conditions, blur, and brightness. We analyze four state-of-the-art deep neural network models, Detr-ResNet-101, Detr-ResNet-50, YOLOv4, and YOLOv4-tiny, using the COCO 2017 dataset and ExDark dataset. By simulating synthetic perturbations with the AugLy package, we systematically explore the optimal level of synthetic perturbation required to improve the models robustness through data augmentation techniques. Our comprehensive ablation study meticulously evaluates the impact of synthetic perturbations on object detection models performance against real-world distribution shifts, establishing a tangible connection between synthetic augmentation and real-world robustness. Our findings not only substantiate the effectiveness of synthetic perturbations in improving model robustness, but also provide valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in developing more robust and reliable object detection models tailored for real-world applications.
Authors:Mofassir ul Islam Arif, Mohsan Jameel, Lars Schmidt-Thieme
Abstract:
Object detection has seen remarkable progress in recent years with the introduction of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Object detection is a multi-task learning problem where both the position of the objects in the images as well as their classes needs to be correctly identified. The idea here is to maximize the overlap between the ground-truth bounding boxes and the predictions i.e. the Intersection over Union (IoU). In the scope of work seen currently in this domain, IoU is approximated by using the Huber loss as a proxy but this indirect method does not leverage the IoU information and treats the bounding box as four independent, unrelated terms of regression. This is not true for a bounding box where the four coordinates are highly correlated and hold a semantic meaning when taken together. The direct optimization of the IoU is not possible due to its non-convex and non-differentiable nature. In this paper, we have formulated a novel loss namely, the Smooth IoU, which directly optimizes the IoUs for the bounding boxes. This loss has been evaluated on the Oxford IIIT Pets, Udacity self-driving car, PASCAL VOC, and VWFS Car Damage datasets and has shown performance gains over the standard Huber loss.
Authors:Li Zhu, Jiahui Xiong, Feng Xiong, Hanzheng Hu, Zhengnan Jiang
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), specifically drones equipped with remote sensing object detection technology, have rapidly gained a broad spectrum of applications and emerged as one of the primary research focuses in the field of computer vision. Although UAV remote sensing systems have the ability to detect various objects, small-scale objects can be challenging to detect reliably due to factors such as object size, image degradation, and real-time limitations. To tackle these issues, a real-time object detection algorithm (YOLO-Drone) is proposed and applied to two new UAV platforms as well as a specific light source (silicon-based golden LED). YOLO-Drone presents several novelties: 1) including a new backbone Darknet59; 2) a new complex feature aggregation module MSPP-FPN that incorporated one spatial pyramid pooling and three atrous spatial pyramid pooling modules; 3) and the use of Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) as the loss function. To evaluate performance, two benchmark datasets, UAVDT and VisDrone, along with one homemade dataset acquired at night under silicon-based golden LEDs, are utilized. The experimental results show that, in both UAVDT and VisDrone, the proposed YOLO-Drone outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods by improving the mAP of 10.13% and 8.59%, respectively. With regards to UAVDT, the YOLO-Drone exhibits both high real-time inference speed of 53 FPS and a maximum mAP of 34.04%. Notably, YOLO-Drone achieves high performance under the silicon-based golden LEDs, with a mAP of up to 87.71%, surpassing the performance of YOLO series under ordinary light sources. To conclude, the proposed YOLO-Drone is a highly effective solution for object detection in UAV applications, particularly for night detection tasks where silicon-based golden light LED technology exhibits significant superiority.
Authors:Léo Andéol, Thomas Fel, Florence De Grancey, Luca Mossina
Abstract:
Deploying deep learning models in real-world certified systems requires the ability to provide confidence estimates that accurately reflect their uncertainty. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of the conformal prediction framework to construct reliable and trustworthy predictors for detecting railway signals. Our approach is based on a novel dataset that includes images taken from the perspective of a train operator and state-of-the-art object detectors. We test several conformal approaches and introduce a new method based on conformal risk control. Our findings demonstrate the potential of the conformal prediction framework to evaluate model performance and provide practical guidance for achieving formally guaranteed uncertainty bounds.
Authors:Takuya Kiyokawa, Naoki Shirakura, Hiroki Katayama, Keita Tomochika, Jun Takamatsu
Abstract:
Training deep-learning-based vision systems require the manual annotation of a significant number of images. Such manual annotation is highly time-consuming and labor-intensive. Although previous studies have attempted to eliminate the effort required for annotation, the effort required for image collection was retained. To address this, we propose a human-in-the-loop dataset collection method that uses a web application. To counterbalance the workload and performance by encouraging the collection of multi-view object image datasets in an enjoyable manner, thereby amplifying motivation, we propose three types of online visual feedback features to track the progress of the collection status. Our experiments thoroughly investigated the impact of each feature on collection performance and quality of operation. The results suggested the feasibility of annotation and object detection.
Authors:Yang Zheng, Oles Andrienko, Yonglei Zhao, Minwoo Park, Trung Pham
Abstract:
Regular object detection methods output rectangle bounding boxes, which are unable to accurately describe the actual object shapes. Instance segmentation methods output pixel-level labels, which are computationally expensive for real-time applications. Therefore, a polygon representation is needed to achieve precise shape alignment, while retaining low computation cost. We develop a novel Deformable Polar Polygon Object Detection method (DPPD) to detect objects in polygon shapes. In particular, our network predicts, for each object, a sparse set of flexible vertices to construct the polygon, where each vertex is represented by a pair of angle and distance in the Polar coordinate system. To enable training, both ground truth and predicted polygons are densely resampled to have the same number of vertices with equal-spaced raypoints. The resampling operation is fully differentable, allowing gradient back-propagation. Sparse polygon predicton ensures high-speed runtime inference while dense resampling allows the network to learn object shapes with high precision. The polygon detection head is established on top of an anchor-free and NMS-free network architecture. DPPD has been demonstrated successfully in various object detection tasks for autonomous driving such as traffic-sign, crosswalk, vehicle and pedestrian objects.
Authors:Patrick Møller Jensen, Vedrana Andersen Dahl, Carsten Gundlach, Rebecca Engberg, Hans Martin Kjer, Anders Bjorholm Dahl
Abstract:
Domain shift significantly influences the performance of deep learning algorithms, particularly for object detection within volumetric 3D images. Annotated training data is essential for deep learning-based object detection. However, annotating densely packed objects is time-consuming and costly. Instead, we suggest training models on individually scanned objects, causing a domain shift between training and detection data. To address this challenge, we introduce the BugNIST dataset, comprising 9154 micro-CT volumes of 12 bug types and 388 volumes of tightly packed bug mixtures. This dataset is characterized by having objects with the same appearance in the source and target domains, which is uncommon for other benchmark datasets for domain shift. During training, individual bug volumes labeled by class are utilized, while testing employs mixtures with center point annotations and bug type labels. Together with the dataset, we provide a baseline detection analysis, with the aim of advancing the field of 3D object detection methods.
Authors:Sicong Liang, Junchao Tian, Shujun Yang, Yu Zhang
Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) aims to learn a single global model that enables the central server to help the model training in local clients without accessing their local data. The key challenge of FL is the heterogeneity of local data in different clients, such as heterogeneous label distribution and feature shift, which could lead to significant performance degradation of the learned models. Although many studies have been proposed to address the heterogeneous label distribution problem, few studies attempt to explore the feature shift issue. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm, namely \textbf{p}ersonalized \textbf{Fed}erated learning with \textbf{L}ocal \textbf{A}ttention (pFedLA), by incorporating the attention mechanism into personalized models of clients while keeping the attention blocks client-specific. Specifically, two modules are proposed in pFedLA, i.e., the personalized single attention module and the personalized hybrid attention module. In addition, the proposed pFedLA method is quite flexible and general as it can be incorporated into any FL method to improve their performance without introducing additional communication costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed pFedLA method can boost the performance of state-of-the-art FL methods on different tasks such as image classification and object detection tasks.
Authors:Hongxiang Cai, Zeyuan Zhang, Zhenyu Zhou, Ziyin Li, Wenbo Ding, Jiuhua Zhao
Abstract:
Integrating LiDAR and Camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) has become an essential topic for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Existing methods mostly adopt an independent dual-branch framework to generate LiDAR and camera BEV, then perform an adaptive modality fusion. Since point clouds provide more accurate localization and geometry information, they could serve as a reliable spatial prior to acquiring relevant semantic information from the images. Therefore, we design a LiDAR-Guided View Transformer (LGVT) to effectively obtain the camera representation in BEV space and thus benefit the whole dual-branch fusion system. LGVT takes camera BEV as the primitive semantic query, repeatedly leveraging the spatial cue of LiDAR BEV for extracting image features across multiple camera views. Moreover, we extend our framework into the temporal domain with our proposed Temporal Deformable Alignment (TDA) module, which aims to aggregate BEV features from multiple historical frames. Including these two modules, our framework dubbed BEVFusion4D achieves state-of-the-art results in 3D object detection, with 72.0% mAP and 73.5% NDS on the nuScenes validation set, and 73.3% mAP and 74.7% NDS on nuScenes test set, respectively.
Authors:James Giroux, Martin Bouchard, Robert Laganiere
Abstract:
Object detection utilizing Frequency Modulated Continous Wave radar is becoming increasingly popular in the field of autonomous systems. Radar does not possess the same drawbacks seen by other emission-based sensors such as LiDAR, primarily the degradation or loss of return signals due to weather conditions such as rain or snow. However, radar does possess traits that make it unsuitable for standard emission-based deep learning representations such as point clouds. Radar point clouds tend to be sparse and therefore information extraction is not efficient. To overcome this, more traditional digital signal processing pipelines were adapted to form inputs residing directly in the frequency domain via Fast Fourier Transforms. Commonly, three transformations were used to form Range-Azimuth-Doppler cubes in which deep learning algorithms could perform object detection. This too has drawbacks, namely the pre-processing costs associated with performing multiple Fourier Transforms and normalization. We explore the possibility of operating on raw radar inputs from analog to digital converters via the utilization of complex transformation layers. Moreover, we introduce hierarchical Swin Vision transformers to the field of radar object detection and show their capability to operate on inputs varying in pre-processing, along with different radar configurations, i.e. relatively low and high numbers of transmitters and receivers, while obtaining on par or better results than the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Wenwen Zhang, Xinyu Xiao, Hangguan Shan, Eryun Liu
Abstract:
One-shot object detection (OSOD) aims to detect all object instances towards the given category specified by a query image. Most existing studies in OSOD endeavor to explore effective cross-image correlation and alleviate the semantic feature misalignment, however, ignoring the phenomenon of the model bias towards the base classes and the generalization degradation on the novel classes. Observing this, we propose a novel framework, namely Base-class Suppression and Prior Guidance (BSPG) network to overcome the problem. Specifically, the objects of base categories can be explicitly detected by a base-class predictor and adaptively eliminated by our base-class suppression module. Moreover, a prior guidance module is designed to calculate the correlation of high-level features in a non-parametric manner, producing a class-agnostic prior map to provide the target features with rich semantic cues and guide the subsequent detection process. Equipped with the proposed two modules, we endow the model with a strong discriminative ability to distinguish the target objects from distractors belonging to the base classes. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the previous techniques by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art performance under various evaluation settings.
Authors:Sibi C. Sethuraman, Gaurav R. Tadkapally, Saraju P. Mohanty, Gautam Galada, Anitha Subramanian
Abstract:
Individuals with visual impairments often face a multitude of challenging obstacles in their daily lives. Vision impairment can severely impair a person's ability to work, navigate, and retain independence. This can result in educational limits, a higher risk of accidents, and a plethora of other issues. To address these challenges, we present MagicEye, a state-of-the-art intelligent wearable device designed to assist visually impaired individuals. MagicEye employs a custom-trained CNN-based object detection model, capable of recognizing a wide range of indoor and outdoor objects frequently encountered in daily life. With a total of 35 classes, the neural network employed by MagicEye has been specifically designed to achieve high levels of efficiency and precision in object detection. The device is also equipped with facial recognition and currency identification modules, providing invaluable assistance to the visually impaired. In addition, MagicEye features a GPS sensor for navigation, allowing users to move about with ease, as well as a proximity sensor for detecting nearby objects without physical contact. In summary, MagicEye is an innovative and highly advanced wearable device that has been designed to address the many challenges faced by individuals with visual impairments. It is equipped with state-of-the-art object detection and navigation capabilities that are tailored to the needs of the visually impaired, making it one of the most promising solutions to assist those who are struggling with visual impairments.
Authors:Feng Dong, Jinchao Zhu
Abstract:
We have made a dataset of camouflage object detection mainly for complex seabed scenes, and named it UnderWater RGB&Sonar,or UW-RS for short. The UW-RS dataset contains a total of 1972 image data. The dataset mainly consists of two parts, namely underwater optical data part (UW-R dataset) and underwater sonar data part (UW-S dataset).
Authors:Marc Baltes, Nidal Abujahar, Ye Yue, Charles D. Smith, Jundong Liu
Abstract:
The field of machine learning has been greatly transformed with the advancement of deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the increased availability of annotated data. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as a low-power alternative to ANNs due to their sparsity nature. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid ANN-SNN co-training framework to improve the performance of converted SNNs. Our approach is a fine-tuning scheme, conducted through an alternating, forward-backward training procedure. We apply our framework to object detection and image segmentation tasks. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving the design goals.
Authors:Yiming Cui, Linjie Yang
Abstract:
Video object detection needs to solve feature degradation situations that rarely happen in the image domain. One solution is to use the temporal information and fuse the features from the neighboring frames. With Transformerbased object detectors getting a better performance on the image domain tasks, recent works began to extend those methods to video object detection. However, those existing Transformer-based video object detectors still follow the same pipeline as those used for classical object detectors, like enhancing the object feature representations by aggregation. In this work, we take a different perspective on video object detection. In detail, we improve the qualities of queries for the Transformer-based models by aggregation. To achieve this goal, we first propose a vanilla query aggregation module that weighted averages the queries according to the features of the neighboring frames. Then, we extend the vanilla module to a more practical version, which generates and aggregates queries according to the features of the input frames. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods: On the challenging ImageNet VID benchmark, when integrated with our proposed modules, the current state-of-the-art Transformer-based object detectors can be improved by more than 2.4% on mAP and 4.2% on AP50.
Authors:Hao Chen, Zhe-Ming Lu, Jie Liu
Abstract:
This paper focuses on proposing a deep learning-based monkey swing counting algorithm. Nowadays, there are very few papers on monkey detection, and even fewer papers on monkey swing counting. This research focuses on this gap and attempts to count the number of monkeys swinging their heads by deep learning. This paper further extends the traditional target detection algorithm. By analyzing the results of object detection, we localize the monkey's actions over a period of time. This paper analyzes the task of counting monkey head swings, and proposes the standard that accurately describes a monkey swinging its head. Under the guidance of this standard, the head-swing count in 50 monkey movement videos in this paper has achieved 94%.
Authors:Qi Zhang, Siyuan Gou, Wenbin Li
Abstract:
The recent surge in interest in autonomous driving stems from its rapidly developing capacity to enhance safety, efficiency, and convenience. A pivotal aspect of autonomous driving technology is its perceptual systems, where core algorithms have yielded more precise algorithms applicable to autonomous driving, including vision-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAMs), object detection, and tracking algorithms. This work introduces a visual-based perception system for autonomous driving that integrates trajectory tracking and prediction of moving objects to prevent collisions, while addressing autonomous driving's localization and mapping requirements. The system leverages motion cues from pedestrians to monitor and forecast their movements and simultaneously maps the environment. This integrated approach resolves camera localization and the tracking of other moving objects in the scene, subsequently generating a sparse map to facilitate vehicle navigation. The performance, efficiency, and resilience of this approach are substantiated through comprehensive evaluations of both simulated and real-world datasets.
Authors:Zhenyi Liu, Devesh Shah, Alireza Rahimpour, Devesh Upadhyay, Joyce Farrell, Brian A Wandell
Abstract:
The design and evaluation of complex systems can benefit from a software simulation - sometimes called a digital twin. The simulation can be used to characterize system performance or to test its performance under conditions that are difficult to measure (e.g., nighttime for automotive perception systems). We describe the image system simulation software tools that we use to evaluate the performance of image systems for object (automobile) detection. We describe experiments with 13 different cameras with a variety of optics and pixel sizes. To measure the impact of camera spatial resolution, we designed a collection of driving scenes that had cars at many different distances. We quantified system performance by measuring average precision and we report a trend relating system resolution and object detection performance. We also quantified the large performance degradation under nighttime conditions, compared to daytime, for all cameras and a COCO pre-trained network.
Authors:Lanxiao Li, Michael Heizmann
Abstract:
To apply transformer-based models to point cloud understanding, many previous works modify the architecture of transformers by using, e.g., local attention and down-sampling. Although they have achieved promising results, earlier works on transformers for point clouds have two issues. First, the power of plain transformers is still under-explored. Second, they focus on simple and small point clouds instead of complex real-world ones. This work revisits the plain transformers in real-world point cloud understanding. We first take a closer look at some fundamental components of plain transformers, e.g., patchifier and positional embedding, for both efficiency and performance. To close the performance gap due to the lack of inductive bias and annotated data, we investigate self-supervised pre-training with masked autoencoder (MAE). Specifically, we propose drop patch, which prevents information leakage and significantly improves the effectiveness of MAE. Our models achieve SOTA results in semantic segmentation on the S3DIS dataset and object detection on the ScanNet dataset with lower computational costs. Our work provides a new baseline for future research on transformers for point clouds.
Authors:Martà Caro, Hamid Tabani, Jaume Abella
Abstract:
Accelerators implementing Deep Neural Networks for image-based object detection operate on large volumes of data due to fetching images and neural network parameters, especially if they need to process video streams, hence with high power dissipation and bandwidth requirements to fetch all those data. While some solutions exist to mitigate power and bandwidth demands for data fetching, they are often assessed in the context of limited evaluations with a scale much smaller than that of the target application, which challenges finding the best tradeoff in practice. This paper sets up the infrastructure to assess at-scale a key power and bandwidth optimization - weight clustering - for You Only Look Once v3 (YOLOv3), a neural network-based object detection system, using videos of real driving conditions. Our assessment shows that accelerators such as systolic arrays with an Output Stationary architecture turn out to be a highly effective solution combined with weight clustering. In particular, applying weight clustering independently per neural network layer, and using between 32 (5-bit) and 256 (8-bit) weights allows achieving an accuracy close to that of the original YOLOv3 weights (32-bit weights). Such bit-count reduction of the weights allows shaving bandwidth requirements down to 30%-40% of the original requirements, and reduces energy consumption down to 45%. This is based on the fact that (i) energy due to multiply-and-accumulate operations is much smaller than DRAM data fetching, and (ii) designing accelerators appropriately may make that most of the data fetched corresponds to neural network weights, where clustering can be applied. Overall, our at-scale assessment provides key results to architect camera-based object detection accelerators by putting together a real-life application (YOLOv3), and real driving videos, in a unified setup so that trends observed are reliable.
Authors:Xihao Wang, Jiaming Lei, Hai Lan, Arafat Al-Jawari, Xian Wei
Abstract:
Outdoor 3D object detection has played an essential role in the environment perception of autonomous driving. In complicated traffic situations, precise object recognition provides indispensable information for prediction and planning in the dynamic system, improving self-driving safety and reliability. However, with the vehicle's veering, the constant rotation of the surrounding scenario makes a challenge for the perception systems. Yet most existing methods have not focused on alleviating the detection accuracy impairment brought by the vehicle's rotation, especially in outdoor 3D detection. In this paper, we propose DuEqNet, which first introduces the concept of equivariance into 3D object detection network by leveraging a hierarchical embedded framework. The dual-equivariance of our model can extract the equivariant features at both local and global levels, respectively. For the local feature, we utilize the graph-based strategy to guarantee the equivariance of the feature in point cloud pillars. In terms of the global feature, the group equivariant convolution layers are adopted to aggregate the local feature to achieve the global equivariance. In the experiment part, we evaluate our approach with different baselines in 3D object detection tasks and obtain State-Of-The-Art performance. According to the results, our model presents higher accuracy on orientation and better prediction efficiency. Moreover, our dual-equivariance strategy exhibits the satisfied plug-and-play ability on various popular object detection frameworks to improve their performance.
Authors:Jill P. Naiman, Peter K. G. Williams, Alyssa Goodman
Abstract:
Scientific articles published prior to the "age of digitization" in the late 1990s contain figures which are "trapped" within their scanned pages. While progress to extract figures and their captions has been made, there is currently no robust method for this process. We present a YOLO-based method for use on scanned pages, after they have been processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which uses both grayscale and OCR-features. We focus our efforts on translating the intersection-over-union (IOU) metric from the field of object detection to document layout analysis and quantify "high localization" levels as an IOU of 0.9. When applied to the astrophysics literature holdings of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), we find F1 scores of 90.9% (92.2%) for figures (figure captions) with the IOU cut-off of 0.9 which is a significant improvement over other state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Minghai Qin, Chao Sun, Jaco Hofmann, Dejan Vucinic
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have great potential to solve many real-world problems, but they usually require an extensive amount of computation and memory. It is of great difficulty to deploy a large DNN model to a single resource-limited device with small memory capacity. Distributed computing is a common approach to reduce single-node memory consumption and to accelerate the inference of DNN models. In this paper, we explore the "within-layer model parallelism", which distributes the inference of each layer into multiple nodes. In this way, the memory requirement can be distributed to many nodes, making it possible to use several edge devices to infer a large DNN model. Due to the dependency within each layer, data communications between nodes during this parallel inference can be a bottleneck when the communication bandwidth is limited. We propose a framework to train DNN models for Distributed Inference with Sparse Communications (DISCO). We convert the problem of selecting which subset of data to transmit between nodes into a model optimization problem, and derive models with both computation and communication reduction when each layer is inferred on multiple nodes. We show the benefit of the DISCO framework on a variety of CV tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and image super resolution. The corresponding models include important DNN building blocks such as convolutions and transformers. For example, each layer of a ResNet-50 model can be distributively inferred across two nodes with five times less data communications, almost half overall computations and half memory requirement for a single node, and achieve comparable accuracy to the original ResNet-50 model. This also results in 4.7 times overall inference speedup.
Authors:Jongwoo Park, Apoorv Singh, Varun Bankiti
Abstract:
3D visual perception tasks based on multi-camera images are essential for autonomous driving systems. Latest work in this field performs 3D object detection by leveraging multi-view images as an input and iteratively enhancing object queries (object proposals) by cross-attending multi-view features. However, individual backbone features are not updated with multi-view features and it stays as a mere collection of the output of the single-image backbone network. Therefore we propose 3M3D: A Multi-view, Multi-path, Multi-representation for 3D Object Detection where we update both multi-view features and query features to enhance the representation of the scene in both fine panoramic view and coarse global view. Firstly, we update multi-view features by multi-view axis self-attention. It will incorporate panoramic information in the multi-view features and enhance understanding of the global scene. Secondly, we update multi-view features by self-attention of the ROI (Region of Interest) windows which encodes local finer details in the features. It will help exchange the information not only along the multi-view axis but also along the other spatial dimension. Lastly, we leverage the fact of multi-representation of queries in different domains to further boost the performance. Here we use sparse floating queries along with dense BEV (Bird's Eye View) queries, which are later post-processed to filter duplicate detections. Moreover, we show performance improvements on nuScenes benchmark dataset on top of our baselines.
Authors:Siddhesh Khandelwal, Anirudth Nambirajan, Behjat Siddiquie, Jayan Eledath, Leonid Sigal
Abstract:
Methods for object detection and segmentation often require abundant instance-level annotations for training, which are time-consuming and expensive to collect. To address this, the task of zero-shot object detection (or segmentation) aims at learning effective methods for identifying and localizing object instances for the categories that have no supervision available. Constructing architectures for these tasks requires choosing from a myriad of design options, ranging from the form of the class encoding used to transfer information from seen to unseen categories, to the nature of the function being optimized for learning. In this work, we extensively study these design choices, and carefully construct a simple yet extremely effective zero-shot recognition method. Through extensive experiments on the MSCOCO dataset on object detection and segmentation, we highlight that our proposed method outperforms existing, considerably more complex, architectures. Our findings and method, which we propose as a competitive future baseline, point towards the need to revisit some of the recent design trends in zero-shot detection / segmentation.
Authors:Yanjun Liu, Wenming Yang
Abstract:
Indoor 3D object detection is an essential task in single image scene understanding, impacting spatial cognition fundamentally in visual reasoning. Existing works on 3D object detection from a single image either pursue this goal through independent predictions of each object or implicitly reason over all possible objects, failing to harness relational geometric information between objects. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic sparse graph pipeline named Explicit3D based on object geometry and semantics features. Taking the efficiency into consideration, we further define a relatedness score and design a novel dynamic pruning algorithm followed by a cluster sampling method for sparse scene graph generation and updating. Furthermore, our Explicit3D introduces homogeneous matrices and defines new relative loss and corner loss to model the spatial difference between target pairs explicitly. Instead of using ground-truth labels as direct supervision, our relative and corner loss are derived from the homogeneous transformation, which renders the model to learn the geometric consistency between objects. The experimental results on the SUN RGB-D dataset demonstrate that our Explicit3D achieves better performance balance than the-state-of-the-art.
Authors:Sultan Abu Ghazal, Jean Lahoud, Rao Anwer
Abstract:
Object detection in 3D point clouds is a crucial task in a range of computer vision applications including robotics, autonomous cars, and augmented reality. This work addresses the object detection task in 3D point clouds using a highly efficient, surface-biased, feature extraction method (wang2022rbgnet), that also captures contextual cues on multiple levels. We propose a 3D object detector that extracts accurate feature representations of object candidates and leverages self-attention on point patches, object candidates, and on the global scene in 3D scene. Self-attention is proven to be effective in encoding correlation information in 3D point clouds by (xie2020mlcvnet). While other 3D detectors focus on enhancing point cloud feature extraction by selectively obtaining more meaningful local features (wang2022rbgnet) where contextual information is overlooked. To this end, the proposed architecture uses ray-based surface-biased feature extraction and multi-level context encoding to outperform the state-of-the-art 3D object detector. In this work, 3D detection experiments are performed on scenes from the ScanNet dataset whereby the self-attention modules are introduced one after the other to isolate the effect of self-attention at each level.
Authors:Xuan Wang, Zhigang Zhu
Abstract:
Contextual information plays an important role in many computer vision tasks, such as object detection, video action detection, image classification, etc. Recognizing a single object or action out of context could be sometimes very challenging, and context information may help improve the understanding of a scene or an event greatly. Appearance context information, e.g., colors or shapes of the background of an object can improve the recognition accuracy of the object in the scene. Semantic context (e.g. a keyboard on an empty desk vs. a keyboard next to a desktop computer ) will improve accuracy and exclude unrelated events. Context information that are not in the image itself, such as the time or location of an images captured, can also help to decide whether certain event or action should occur. Other types of context (e.g. 3D structure of a building) will also provide additional information to improve the accuracy. In this survey, different context information that has been used in computer vision tasks is reviewed. We categorize context into different types and different levels. We also review available machine learning models and image/video datasets that can employ context information. Furthermore, we compare context based integration and context-free integration in mainly two classes of tasks: image-based and video-based. Finally, this survey is concluded by a set of promising future directions in context learning and utilization.
Authors:Slavomira Schneidereit, Ashkan Mansouri Yarahmadi, Toni Schneidereit, Michael BreuÃ, Marc Gebauer
Abstract:
In this paper we extensively explore the suitability of YOLO architectures to monitor the process flow across a Fischertechnik industry 4.0 application. Specifically, different YOLO architectures in terms of size and complexity design along with different prior-shapes assignment strategies are adopted. To simulate the real world factory environment, we prepared a rich dataset augmented with different distortions that highly enhance and in some cases degrade our image qualities. The degradation is performed to account for environmental variations and enhancements opt to compensate the color correlations that we face while preparing our dataset. The analysis of our conducted experiments shows the effectiveness of the presented approach evaluated using different measures along with the training and validation strategies that we tailored to tackle the unavoidable color correlations that the problem at hand inherits by nature.
Authors:Shreelakshmi C R, Surya S. Durbha, Gaganpreet Singh
Abstract:
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is an advanced active remote sensing technique working on the principle of time of travel (ToT) for capturing highly accurate 3D information of the surroundings. LiDAR has gained wide attention in research and development with the LiDAR industry expected to reach 2.8 billion $ by 2025. Although the LiDAR dataset is of rich density and high spatial resolution, it is challenging to process LiDAR data due to its inherent 3D geometry and massive volume. But such a high-resolution dataset possesses immense potential in many applications and has great potential in 3D object detection and recognition. In this research we propose Graph Neural Network (GNN) based framework to learn and identify the objects in the 3D LiDAR point clouds. GNNs are class of deep learning which learns the patterns and objects based on the principle of graph learning which have shown success in various 3D computer vision tasks.
Authors:Abhinit Kumar Ambastha, Leong Tze Yun
Abstract:
This work presents an incremental learning approach for autonomous agents to learn new tasks in a non-stationary environment. Updating a DNN model-based agent to learn new target tasks requires us to store past training data and needs a large labeled target task dataset. Few-shot task incremental learning methods overcome the limitation of labeled target datasets by adapting trained models to learn private target classes using a few labeled representatives and a large unlabeled target dataset. However, the methods assume that the source and target tasks are stationary. We propose a one-shot task incremental learning approach that can adapt to non-stationary source and target tasks. Our approach minimizes adversarial discrepancy between the model's feature space and incoming incremental data to learn an updated hypothesis. We also use distillation loss to reduce catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. Finally, we use Gaussian prototypes to generate exemplar instances eliminating the need to store past training data. Unlike current work in task incremental learning, our model can learn both source and target task updates incrementally. We evaluate our method on various problem settings for incremental object detection and disease prediction model update. We evaluate our approach by measuring the performance of shared class and target private class prediction. Our results show that our approach achieved improved performance compared to existing state-of-the-art task incremental learning methods.
Authors:Rui Wan, Tianyun Zhao, Wei Zhao
Abstract:
In autonomous driving, 3D object detection based on multi-modal data has become an indispensable approach when facing complex environments around the vehicle. During multi-modal detection, LiDAR and camera are simultaneously applied for capturing and modeling. However, due to the intrinsic discrepancies between the LiDAR point and camera image, the fusion of the data for object detection encounters a series of problems. Most multi-modal detection methods perform even worse than LiDAR-only methods. In this investigation, we propose a method named PTA-Det to improve the performance of multi-modal detection. Accompanied by PTA-Det, a Pseudo Point Cloud Generation Network is proposed, which can convert image information including texture and semantic features by pseudo points. Thereafter, through a transformer-based Point Fusion Transition (PFT) module, the features of LiDAR points and pseudo points from image can be deeply fused under a unified point-based representation. The combination of these modules can conquer the major obstacle in feature fusion across modalities and realizes a complementary and discriminative representation for proposal generation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show the PTA-Det achieves a competitive result and support its effectiveness.
Authors:Ziwei Sun, Zexi Hua, Hengcao Li, Haiyan Zhong
Abstract:
A Flying Bird Object Detection algorithm Based on Motion Information (FBOD-BMI) is proposed to solve the problem that the features of the object are not obvious in a single frame, and the size of the object is small (low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)) in surveillance video. Firstly, a ConvLSTM-PAN model structure is designed to capture suspicious flying bird objects, in which the Convolutional Long and Short Time Memory (ConvLSTM) network aggregated the Spatio-temporal features of the flying bird object on adjacent multi-frame before the input of the model and the Path Aggregation Network (PAN) located the suspicious flying bird objects. Then, an object tracking algorithm is used to track suspicious flying bird objects and calculate their Motion Range (MR). At the same time, the size of the MR of the suspicious flying bird object is adjusted adaptively according to its speed of movement (specifically, if the bird moves slowly, its MR will be expanded according to the speed of the bird to ensure the environmental information needed to detect the flying bird object). Adaptive Spatio-temporal Cubes (ASt-Cubes) of the flying bird objects are generated to ensure that the SNR of the flying bird objects is improved, and the necessary environmental information is retained adaptively. Finally, a LightWeight U-Shape Net (LW-USN) based on ASt-Cubes is designed to detect flying bird objects, which rejects the false detections of the suspicious flying bird objects and returns the position of the real flying bird objects. The monitoring video including the flying birds is collected in the unattended traction substation as the experimental dataset to verify the performance of the algorithm. The experimental results show that the flying bird object detection method based on motion information proposed in this paper can effectively detect the flying bird object in surveillance video.
Authors:Minghan Zhu, Lingting Ge, Panqu Wang, Huei Peng
Abstract:
We propose a novel approach for monocular 3D object detection by leveraging local perspective effects of each object. While the global perspective effect shown as size and position variations has been exploited for monocular 3D detection extensively, the local perspectives has long been overlooked. We design a local perspective module to regress a newly defined variable named keyedge-ratios as the parameterization of the local shape distortion to account for the local perspective, and derive the object depth and yaw angle from it. Theoretically, this module does not rely on the pixel-wise size or position in the image of the objects, therefore independent of the camera intrinsic parameters. By plugging this module in existing monocular 3D object detection frameworks, we incorporate the local perspective distortion with global perspective effect for monocular 3D reasoning, and we demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance over strong baseline methods in multiple datasets.
Authors:Abubakar Siddique, Henry Medeiros
Abstract:
We introduce a novel framework to track multiple objects in overhead camera videos for airport checkpoint security scenarios where targets correspond to passengers and their baggage items. We propose a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) technique to provide the model information about instance segmentation uncertainty from overhead images. Our SSL approach improves object detection by employing a test-time data augmentation and a regression-based, rotation-invariant pseudo-label refinement technique. Our pseudo-label generation method provides multiple geometrically-transformed images as inputs to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), regresses the augmented detections generated by the network to reduce localization errors, and then clusters them using the mean-shift algorithm. The self-supervised detector model is used in a single-camera tracking algorithm to generate temporal identifiers for the targets. Our method also incorporates a multi-view trajectory association mechanism to maintain consistent temporal identifiers as passengers travel across camera views. An evaluation of detection, tracking, and association performances on videos obtained from multiple overhead cameras in a realistic airport checkpoint environment demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our results show that self-supervision improves object detection accuracy by up to $42\%$ without increasing the inference time of the model. Our multi-camera association method achieves up to $89\%$ multi-object tracking accuracy with an average computation time of less than $15$ ms.
Authors:Colin Decourt, Rufin VanRullen, Didier Salle, Thomas Oberlin
Abstract:
Automotive radar sensors provide valuable information for advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS). Radars can reliably estimate the distance to an object and the relative velocity, regardless of weather and light conditions. However, radar sensors suffer from low resolution and huge intra-class variations in the shape of objects. Exploiting the time information (e.g., multiple frames) has been shown to help to capture better the dynamics of objects and, therefore, the variation in the shape of objects. Most temporal radar object detectors use 3D convolutions to learn spatial and temporal information. However, these methods are often non-causal and unsuitable for real-time applications. This work presents RECORD, a new recurrent CNN architecture for online radar object detection. We propose an end-to-end trainable architecture mixing convolutions and ConvLSTMs to learn spatio-temporal dependencies between successive frames. Our model is causal and requires only the past information encoded in the memory of the ConvLSTMs to detect objects. Our experiments show such a method's relevance for detecting objects in different radar representations (range-Doppler, range-angle) and outperform state-of-the-art models on the ROD2021 and CARRADA datasets while being less computationally expensive.
Authors:Manuel Luis C. Delos Santos, Ronaldo S. Tinio, Darwin B. Diaz, Karlene Emily I. Tolosa
Abstract:
The study aims the development of a wearable device to combat the onslaught of covid-19. Likewise, to enhance the regular face shield available in the market. Furthermore, to raise awareness of the health and safety protocols initiated by the government and its affiliates in the enforcement of social distancing with the integration of computer vision algorithms. The wearable device was composed of various hardware and software components such as a transparent polycarbonate face shield, microprocessor, sensors, camera, thin-film transistor on-screen display, jumper wires, power bank, and python programming language. The algorithm incorporated in the study was object detection under computer vision machine learning. The front camera with OpenCV technology determines the distance of a person in front of the user. Utilizing TensorFlow, the target object identifies and detects the image or live feed to get its bounding boxes. The focal length lens requires the determination of the distance from the camera to the target object. To get the focal length, multiply the pixel width by the known distance and divide it by the known width (Rosebrock, 2020). The deployment of unit testing ensures that the parameters are valid in terms of design and specifications.
Authors:Akib Mohammed Khan, Alif Ashrafee, Reeshoon Sayera, Shahriar Ivan, Sabbir Ahmed
Abstract:
To ensure proper knowledge representation of the kitchen environment, it is vital for kitchen robots to recognize the states of the food items that are being cooked. Although the domain of object detection and recognition has been extensively studied, the task of object state classification has remained relatively unexplored. The high intra-class similarity of ingredients during different states of cooking makes the task even more challenging. Researchers have proposed adopting Deep Learning based strategies in recent times, however, they are yet to achieve high performance. In this study, we utilized the self-attention mechanism of the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture for the Cooking State Recognition task. The proposed approach encapsulates the globally salient features from images, while also exploiting the weights learned from a larger dataset. This global attention allows the model to withstand the similarities between samples of different cooking objects, while the employment of transfer learning helps to overcome the lack of inductive bias by utilizing pretrained weights. To improve recognition accuracy, several augmentation techniques have been employed as well. Evaluation of our proposed framework on the `Cooking State Recognition Challenge Dataset' has achieved an accuracy of 94.3%, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Qi Jiang, Hao Sun, Xi Zhang
Abstract:
LiDAR and camera are two essential sensors for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. LiDAR provides accurate and reliable 3D geometry information while the camera provides rich texture with color. Despite the increasing popularity of fusing these two complementary sensors, the challenge remains in how to effectively fuse 3D LiDAR point cloud with 2D camera images. Recent methods focus on point-level fusion which paints the LiDAR point cloud with camera features in the perspective view or bird's-eye view (BEV)-level fusion which unifies multi-modality features in the BEV representation. In this paper, we rethink these previous fusion strategies and analyze their information loss and influences on geometric and semantic features. We present SemanticBEVFusion to deeply fuse camera features with LiDAR features in a unified BEV representation while maintaining per-modality strengths for 3D object detection. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale nuScenes dataset, especially for challenging distant objects. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Chao Hu, Liqiang Zhu, Weibing Qiu, Weijie Wu
Abstract:
Due to the lack of depth information of images and poor detection accuracy in monocular 3D object detection, we proposed the instance depth for multi-scale monocular 3D object detection method. Firstly, to enhance the model's processing ability for different scale targets, a multi-scale perception module based on dilated convolution is designed, and the depth features containing multi-scale information are re-refined from both spatial and channel directions considering the inconsistency between feature maps of different scales. Firstly, we designed a multi-scale perception module based on dilated convolution to enhance the model's processing ability for different scale targets. The depth features containing multi-scale information are re-refined from spatial and channel directions considering the inconsistency between feature maps of different scales. Secondly, so as to make the model obtain better 3D perception, this paper proposed to use the instance depth information as an auxiliary learning task to enhance the spatial depth feature of the 3D target and use the sparse instance depth to supervise the auxiliary task. Finally, by verifying the proposed algorithm on the KITTI test set and evaluation set, the experimental results show that compared with the baseline method, the proposed method improves by 5.27\% in AP40 in the car category, effectively improving the detection performance of the monocular 3D object detection algorithm.
Authors:Chun Bao, Jie Cao, Yaqian Ning, Yang Cheng, Qun Hao
Abstract:
Extensive research works demonstrate that the attention mechanism in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) effectively improves accuracy. Nevertheless, few works design attention mechanisms using large receptive fields. In this work, we propose a novel attention method named Rega-net to increase CNN accuracy by enlarging the receptive field. Inspired by the mechanism of the human retina, we design convolutional kernels to resemble the non-uniformly distributed structure of the human retina. Then, we sample variable-resolution values in the Gabor function distribution and fill these values in retina-like kernels. This distribution allows essential features to be more visible in the center position of the receptive field. We further design an attention module including these retina-like kernels. Experiments demonstrate that our Rega-Net achieves 79.96% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification and 43.1% mAP on COCO2017 object detection. The mAP of the Rega-Net increased by up to 3.5% compared to baseline networks.
Authors:Sunwook Hwang, Youngseok Kim, Seongwon Kim, Saewoong Bahk, Hyung-Sin Kim
Abstract:
Semi-supervised Learning (SSL) has received increasing attention in autonomous driving to reduce the enormous burden of 3D annotation. In this paper, we propose UpCycling, a novel SSL framework for 3D object detection with zero additional raw-level point cloud: learning from unlabeled de-identified intermediate features (i.e., smashed data) to preserve privacy. Since these intermediate features are naturally produced by the inference pipeline, no additional computation is required on autonomous vehicles. However, generating effective consistency loss for unlabeled feature-level scene turns out to be a critical challenge. The latest SSL frameworks for 3D object detection that enforce consistency regularization between different augmentations of an unlabeled raw-point scene become detrimental when applied to intermediate features. To solve the problem, we introduce a novel combination of hybrid pseudo labels and feature-level Ground Truth sampling (F-GT), which safely augments unlabeled multi-type 3D scene features and provides high-quality supervision. We implement UpCycling on two representative 3D object detection models: SECOND-IoU and PV-RCNN. Experiments on widely-used datasets (Waymo, KITTI, and Lyft) verify that UpCycling outperforms other augmentation methods applied at the feature level. In addition, while preserving privacy, UpCycling performs better or comparably to the state-of-the-art methods that utilize raw-level unlabeled data in both domain adaptation and partial-label scenarios.
Authors:Congliang Li, Shijie Sun, Xiangyu Song, Huansheng Song, Naveed Akhtar, Ajmal Saeed Mian
Abstract:
Multiple object detection and pose estimation are vital computer vision tasks. The latter relates to the former as a downstream problem in applications such as robotics and autonomous driving. However, due to the high complexity of both tasks, existing methods generally treat them independently, which is sub-optimal. We propose simultaneous neural modeling of both using monocular vision and 3D model infusion. Our Simultaneous Multiple Object detection and Pose Estimation network (SMOPE-Net) is an end-to-end trainable multitasking network with a composite loss that also provides the advantages of anchor-free detections for efficient downstream pose estimation. To enable the annotation of training data for our learning objective, we develop a Twin-Space object labeling method and demonstrate its correctness analytically and empirically. Using the labeling method, we provide the KITTI-6DoF dataset with $\sim7.5$K annotated frames. Extensive experiments on KITTI-6DoF and the popular LineMod datasets show a consistent performance gain with SMOPE-Net over existing pose estimation methods. Here are links to our proposed SMOPE-Net, KITTI-6DoF dataset, and LabelImg3D labeling tool.
Authors:Shizheng Zhou, Juntao Jiang, Xiaohan Hong, Yan Hong, Pengcheng Fu
Abstract:
Marine microalgae are widespread in the ocean and play a crucial role in the ecosystem. Automatic identification and location of marine microalgae in microscopy images would help establish marine ecological environment monitoring and water quality evaluation system. We proposed a new dataset for the detection of marine microalgae and a range of detection methods, the dataset including images of different genus of algae and the same genus in different states. We set the number of unbalanced classes in the data set and added images of mixed water samples in the test set to simulate the actual situation in the field. Then we trained, validated and tested the, TOOD, YOLOv5, YOLOv8 and variants of RCNN algorithms on this dataset. The results showed both one-stage and two-stage object detection models can achieve high mean average precision, which proves the ability of computer vision in multi-object detection of microalgae, and provides basic data and models for real-time detection of microalgal cells.
Authors:Shun Gui, Yan Luximon
Abstract:
Heavily relying on 3D annotations limits the real-world application of 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose a method that does not demand any 3D annotation, while being able to predict fully oriented 3D bounding boxes. Our method, called Recursive Cross-View (RCV), utilizes the three-view principle to convert 3D detection into multiple 2D detection tasks, requiring only a subset of 2D labels. We propose a recursive paradigm, in which instance segmentation and 3D bounding box generation by Cross-View are implemented recursively until convergence. Specifically, our proposed method involves the use of a frustum for each 2D bounding box, which is then followed by the recursive paradigm that ultimately generates a fully oriented 3D box, along with its corresponding class and score. Note that, class and score are given by the 2D detector. Estimated on the SUN RGB-D and KITTI datasets, our method outperforms existing image-based approaches. To justify that our method can be quickly used to new tasks, we implement it on two real-world scenarios, namely 3D human detection and 3D hand detection. As a result, two new 3D annotated datasets are obtained, which means that RCV can be viewed as a (semi-) automatic 3D annotator. Furthermore, we deploy RCV on a depth sensor, which achieves detection at 7 fps on a live RGB-D stream. RCV is the first 3D detection method that yields fully oriented 3D boxes without consuming 3D labels.
Authors:Jules BOURCIER, Thomas Floquet, Gohar Dashyan, Tugdual Ceillier, Karteek Alahari, Jocelyn Chanussot
Abstract:
In defense-related remote sensing applications, such as vehicle detection on satellite imagery, supervised learning requires a huge number of labeled examples to reach operational performances. Such data are challenging to obtain as it requires military experts, and some observables are intrinsically rare. This limited labeling capability, as well as the large number of unlabeled images available due to the growing number of sensors, make object detection on remote sensing imagery highly relevant for self-supervised learning. We study in-domain self-supervised representation learning for object detection on very high resolution optical satellite imagery, that is yet poorly explored. For the first time to our knowledge, we study the problem of label efficiency on this task. We use the large land use classification dataset Functional Map of the World to pretrain representations with an extension of the Momentum Contrast framework. We then investigate this model's transferability on a real-world task of fine-grained vehicle detection and classification on Preligens proprietary data, which is designed to be representative of an operational use case of strategic site surveillance. We show that our in-domain self-supervised learning model is competitive with ImageNet pretraining, and outperforms it in the low-label regime.
Authors:Xueru Wen, Changjiang Zhou, Haotian Tang, Luguang Liang, Yu Jiang, Hong Qi
Abstract:
Named entity recognition is a traditional task in natural language processing. In particular, nested entity recognition receives extensive attention for the widespread existence of the nesting scenario. The latest research migrates the well-established paradigm of set prediction in object detection to cope with entity nesting. However, the manual creation of query vectors, which fail to adapt to the rich semantic information in the context, limits these approaches. An end-to-end entity detection approach with proposer and regressor is presented in this paper to tackle the issues. First, the proposer utilizes the feature pyramid network to generate high-quality entity proposals. Then, the regressor refines the proposals for generating the final prediction. The model adopts encoder-only architecture and thus obtains the advantages of the richness of query semantics, high precision of entity localization, and easiness of model training. Moreover, we introduce the novel spatially modulated attention and progressive refinement for further improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves advanced performance in flat and nested NER, achieving a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 80.74 on the GENIA dataset and 72.38 on the WeiboNER dataset.
Authors:Mrigank Rochan, Xingxin Chen, Alaap Grandhi, Eduardo R. Corral-Soto, Bingbing Liu
Abstract:
We consider the problem of domain adaptation in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Towards this, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called Gradual Batch Alternation that can adapt from a large labeled source domain to an insufficiently labeled target domain. The idea is to initiate the training with the batch of samples from the source and target domain data in an alternate fashion, but then gradually reduce the amount of the source domain data over time as the training progresses. This way the model slowly shifts towards the target domain and eventually better adapt to it. The domain adaptation experiments for 3D object detection on four benchmark autonomous driving datasets, namely ONCE, PandaSet, Waymo, and nuScenes, demonstrate significant performance gains over prior arts and strong baselines.
Authors:SÅawomir Kierat, Mateusz Sieniawski, Denys Fridman, Chen-Han Yu, Szymon Migacz, PaweÅ Morkisz, Alex-Fit Florea
Abstract:
We propose three novel pruning techniques to improve the cost and results of inference-aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DNAS). First, we introduce Prunode, a stochastic bi-path building block for DNAS, which can search over inner hidden dimensions with O(1) memory and compute complexity. Second, we present an algorithm for pruning blocks within a stochastic layer of the SuperNet during the search. Third, we describe a novel technique for pruning unnecessary stochastic layers during the search. The optimized models resulting from the search are called PruNet and establishes a new state-of-the-art Pareto frontier for NVIDIA V100 in terms of inference latency for ImageNet Top-1 image classification accuracy. PruNet as a backbone also outperforms GPUNet and EfficientNet on the COCO object detection task on inference latency relative to mean Average Precision (mAP).
Authors:Jonas Annuscheit, Christian Krumnow
Abstract:
This paper describes our contribution to the MIDOG 2022 challenge for detecting mitotic cells. One of the major problems to be addressed in the MIDOG 2022 challenge is the robustness under the natural variance that appears for real-life data in the histopathology field. To address the problem, we use an adapted YOLOv5s model for object detection in conjunction with a new Domain Adaption Classifier (DAC) variant, the Radial-Prediction-DAC, to achieve robustness under domain shifts. In addition, we increase the variability of the available training data using stain augmentation in HED color space. Using the suggested method, we obtain a test set F1-score of 0.6658.
Authors:Garrick Brazil, Abhinav Kumar, Julian Straub, Nikhila Ravi, Justin Johnson, Georgia Gkioxari
Abstract:
Recognizing scenes and objects in 3D from a single image is a longstanding goal of computer vision with applications in robotics and AR/VR. For 2D recognition, large datasets and scalable solutions have led to unprecedented advances. In 3D, existing benchmarks are small in size and approaches specialize in few object categories and specific domains, e.g. urban driving scenes. Motivated by the success of 2D recognition, we revisit the task of 3D object detection by introducing a large benchmark, called Omni3D. Omni3D re-purposes and combines existing datasets resulting in 234k images annotated with more than 3 million instances and 98 categories. 3D detection at such scale is challenging due to variations in camera intrinsics and the rich diversity of scene and object types. We propose a model, called Cube R-CNN, designed to generalize across camera and scene types with a unified approach. We show that Cube R-CNN outperforms prior works on the larger Omni3D and existing benchmarks. Finally, we prove that Omni3D is a powerful dataset for 3D object recognition and show that it improves single-dataset performance and can accelerate learning on new smaller datasets via pre-training.
Authors:Xiaochun Lei, Weiliang Mai, Junlin Xie, He Liu, Zetao Jiang, Zhaoting Gong, Chang Lu, Linjun Lu
Abstract:
Low-light images often suffer from noise and color distortion. Object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and other tasks are challenging when working with low-light images because of image noise and chromatic aberration. We also found that the conventional Retinex theory loses information in adjusting the image for low-light tasks. In response to the aforementioned problem, this paper proposes an algorithm for low illumination enhancement. The proposed method, KinD-LCE, uses a light curve estimation module to enhance the illumination map in the Retinex decomposed image, improving the overall image brightness. An illumination map and reflection map fusion module were also proposed to restore the image details and reduce detail loss. Additionally, a TV(total variation) loss function was applied to eliminate noise. Our method was trained on the GladNet dataset, known for its diverse collection of low-light images, tested against the Low-Light dataset, and evaluated using the ExDark dataset for downstream tasks, demonstrating competitive performance with a PSNR of 19.7216 and SSIM of 0.8213.
Authors:Kunran Xu, Huawei Zhang, Yishi Li, Yuhao Zhang, Rui Lai, Yi Liu
Abstract:
Tiny machine learning (TinyML), executing AI workloads on resource and power strictly restricted systems, is an important and challenging topic. This brief firstly presents an extremely tiny backbone to construct high efficiency CNN models for various visual tasks. Then, a specially designed neural co-processor (NCP) is interconnected with MCU to build an ultra-low power TinyML system, which stores all features and weights on chip and completely removes both of latency and power consumption in off-chip memory access. Furthermore, an application specific instruction-set is further presented for realizing agile development and rapid deployment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed TinyML system based on our model, NCP and instruction set yields considerable accuracy and achieves a record ultra-low power of 160mW while implementing object detection and recognition at 30FPS. The demo video is available on \url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIZPxtJ-9EY}.
Authors:Christopher J. Holder, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation is the problem of assigning a class label to every pixel in an image, and is an important component of an autonomous vehicle vision stack for facilitating scene understanding and object detection. However, many of the top performing semantic segmentation models are extremely complex and cumbersome, and as such are not suited to deployment onboard autonomous vehicle platforms where computational resources are limited and low-latency operation is a vital requirement. In this survey, we take a thorough look at the works that aim to address this misalignment with more compact and efficient models capable of deployment on low-memory embedded systems while meeting the constraint of real-time inference. We discuss several of the most prominent works in the field, placing them within a taxonomy based on their major contributions, and finally we evaluate the inference speed of the discussed models under consistent hardware and software setups that represent a typical research environment with high-end GPU and a realistic deployed scenario using low-memory embedded GPU hardware. Our experimental results demonstrate that many works are capable of real-time performance on resource-constrained hardware, while illustrating the consistent trade-off between latency and accuracy.
Authors:Hyeon Cho, Junyong Choi, Geonwoo Baek, Wonjun Hwang
Abstract:
Point-cloud based 3D object detectors recently have achieved remarkable progress. However, most studies are limited to the development of network architectures for improving only their accuracy without consideration of the computational efficiency. In this paper, we first propose an autoencoder-style framework comprising channel-wise compression and decompression via interchange transfer-based knowledge distillation. To learn the map-view feature of a teacher network, the features from teacher and student networks are independently passed through the shared autoencoder; here, we use a compressed representation loss that binds the channel-wised compression knowledge from both student and teacher networks as a kind of regularization. The decompressed features are transferred in opposite directions to reduce the gap in the interchange reconstructions. Lastly, we present an head attention loss to match the 3D object detection information drawn by the multi-head self-attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we verify that our method can train the lightweight model that is well-aligned with the 3D point cloud detection task and we demonstrate its superiority using the well-known public datasets; e.g., Waymo and nuScenes.
Authors:Tingchen Ma, Yongsheng Ou
Abstract:
The SLAM system based on static scene assumption will introduce huge estimation errors when moving objects appear in the field of view. This paper proposes a novel multi-object dynamic lidar odometry (MLO) based on semantic object detection technology to solve this problem. The MLO system can provide reliable localization of robot and semantic objects and build long-term static maps in complex dynamic scenes. For ego-motion estimation, we use the environment features that take semantic and geometric consistency constraints into account in the extraction process. The filtering features are robust to semantic movable and unknown dynamic objects. At the same time, a least square estimator using the semantic bounding box and object point cloud is proposed to achieve accurate and stable multi-object tracking between frames. In the mapping module, we further realize dynamic semantic object detection based on the absolute trajectory tracking list (ATTL). Then, static semantic objects and environmental features can be used to eliminate accumulated localization errors and build pure static maps. Experiments on public KITTI data sets show that the proposed system can achieve more accurate and robust tracking of the object and better real-time localization accuracy in complex scenes compared with existing technologies.
Authors:Tianya Zhang, Yi Ge, Peter J. Jin
Abstract:
Background modeling is widely used for intelligent surveillance systems to detect moving targets by subtracting the static background components. Most roadside LiDAR object detection methods filter out foreground points by comparing new data points to pre-trained background references based on descriptive statistics over many frames (e.g., voxel density, number of neighbors, maximum distance). However, these solutions are inefficient under heavy traffic, and parameter values are hard to transfer from one scenario to another. In early studies, the probabilistic background modeling methods widely used for the video-based system were considered unsuitable for roadside LiDAR surveillance systems due to the sparse and unstructured point cloud data. In this paper, the raw LiDAR data were transformed into a structured representation based on the elevation and azimuth value of each LiDAR point. With this high-order tensor representation, we break the barrier to allow efficient high-dimensional multivariate analysis for roadside LiDAR background modeling. The Bayesian Nonparametric (BNP) approach integrates the intensity value and 3D measurements to exploit the measurement data using 3D and intensity info entirely. The proposed method was compared against two state-of-the-art roadside LiDAR background models, computer vision benchmark, and deep learning baselines, evaluated at point, object, and path levels under heavy traffic and challenging weather. This multimodal Weighted Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) can handle dynamic backgrounds with noisy measurements and substantially enhances the infrastructure-based LiDAR object detection, whereby various 3D modeling for smart city applications could be created.
Authors:Yuchen Shen, Dong Zhang, Zhihao Song, Xuesong Jiang, Qiaolin Ye
Abstract:
Object detection in aerial images is a fundamental research topic in the geoscience and remote sensing domain. However, the advanced approaches on this topic mainly focus on designing the elaborate backbones or head networks but ignore neck networks. In this letter, we first underline the importance of the neck network in object detection from the perspective of information bottleneck. Then, to alleviate the information deficiency problem in the current approaches, we propose a global semantic network (GSNet), which acts as a bridge from the backbone network to the head network in a bidirectional global pattern. Compared to the existing approaches, our model can capture the rich and enhanced image features with less computational costs. Besides, we further propose a feature fusion refinement module (FRM) for different levels of features, which are suffering from the problem of semantic gap in feature fusion. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, experiments are carried out on two challenging and representative aerial image datasets (i.e., DOTA and HRSC2016). Experimental results in terms of accuracy and complexity validate the superiority of our method. The code has been open-sourced at GSNet.
Authors:Andrea Ceccarelli, Leonardo Montecchi
Abstract:
We argue that object detectors in the safety critical domain should prioritize detection of objects that are most likely to interfere with the actions of the autonomous actor. Especially, this applies to objects that can impact the actor's safety and reliability. To quantify the impact of object (mis)detection on safety and reliability in the context of autonomous driving, we propose new object detection measures that reward the correct identification of objects that are most dangerous and most likely to affect driving decisions. To achieve this, we build an object criticality model to reward the detection of the objects based on proximity, orientation, and relative velocity with respect to the subject vehicle. Then, we apply our model on the recent autonomous driving dataset nuScenes, and we compare nine object detectors. Results show that, in several settings, object detectors that perform best according to the nuScenes ranking are not the preferable ones when the focus is shifted on safety and reliability.
Authors:Zhize Wu, Xiaofeng Wang, Tong Xu, Xuebin Yang, Le Zou, Lixiang Xu, Thomas Weise
Abstract:
Object recognition from images means to automatically find object(s) of interest and to return their category and location information. Benefiting from research on deep learning, like convolutional neural networks~(CNNs) and generative adversarial networks, the performance in this field has been improved significantly, especially when training and test data are drawn from similar distributions. However, mismatching distributions, i.e., domain shifts, lead to a significant performance drop. In this paper, we build domain-invariant detectors by learning domain classifiers via adversarial training. Based on the previous works that align image and instance level features, we mitigate the domain shift further by introducing a domain adaptation component at the region level within Faster \mbox{R-CNN}. We embed a domain classification network in the region proposal network~(RPN) using adversarial learning. The RPN can now generate accurate region proposals in different domains by effectively aligning the features between them. To mitigate the unstable convergence during the adversarial learning, we introduce a balanced domain classifier as well as a network learning rate adjustment strategy. We conduct comprehensive experiments using four standard datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our object detection approach in domain shift scenarios.
Authors:Jianren Wang, Haiming Gang, Siddharth Ancha, Yi-Ting Chen, David Held
Abstract:
3D object detection plays an important role in autonomous driving and other robotics applications. However, these detectors usually require training on large amounts of annotated data that is expensive and time-consuming to collect. Instead, we propose leveraging large amounts of unlabeled point cloud videos by semi-supervised learning of 3D object detectors via temporal graph neural networks. Our insight is that temporal smoothing can create more accurate detection results on unlabeled data, and these smoothed detections can then be used to retrain the detector. We learn to perform this temporal reasoning with a graph neural network, where edges represent the relationship between candidate detections in different time frames. After semi-supervised learning, our method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on the challenging nuScenes and H3D benchmarks, compared to baselines trained on the same amount of labeled data. Project and code are released at https://www.jianrenw.com/SOD-TGNN/.
Authors:Nati Ofir, Jean-Christophe Nebel
Abstract:
Multispectral image fusion is a computer vision process that is essential to remote sensing. For applications such as dehazing and object detection, there is a need to offer solutions that can perform in real-time on any type of scene. Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art approaches do not meet these criteria as they need to be trained on domain-specific data and have high computational complexity. This paper focuses on the task of fusing color (RGB) and near-infrared (NIR) images as this the typical RGBT sensors, as in multispectral cameras for detection, fusion, and dehazing. Indeed, the NIR channel has the ability to capture details not visible in RGB and see beyond haze, fog, and clouds. To combine this information, a novel approach based on superpixel segmentation is designed so that multispectral image fusion is performed according to the specific local content of the images to be fused. Therefore, the proposed method produces a fusion that contains the most relevant content of each spectrum. The experiments reported in this manuscript show that the novel approach better preserve details than alternative fusion methods.
Authors:Phillip Si, Allan Bishop, Volodymyr Kuleshov
Abstract:
Numerous applications of machine learning involve representing probability distributions over high-dimensional data. We propose autoregressive quantile flows, a flexible class of normalizing flow models trained using a novel objective based on proper scoring rules. Our objective does not require calculating computationally expensive determinants of Jacobians during training and supports new types of neural architectures, such as neural autoregressive flows from which it is easy to sample.
We leverage these models in quantile flow regression, an approach that parameterizes predictive conditional distributions with flows, resulting in improved probabilistic predictions on tasks such as time series forecasting and object detection. Our novel objective functions and neural flow parameterizations also yield improvements on popular generation and density estimation tasks, and represent a step beyond maximum likelihood learning of flows.
Authors:Scott H. Hawley, Andrew C. Morrison, Grant S. Morgan
Abstract:
We present an improvement in the ability to meaningfully track features in high speed videos of Caribbean steelpan drums illuminated by Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry (ESPI). This is achieved through the use of up-to-date computer vision libraries for object detection and image segmentation as well as a significant effort toward cleaning the dataset previously used to train systems for this application. Besides improvements on previous metric scores by 10% or more, noteworthy in this project are the introduction of a segmentation-regression map for the entire drum surface yielding interference fringe counts comparable to those obtained via object detection, as well as the accelerated workflow for coordinating the data-cleaning-and-model-training feedback loop for rapid iteration allowing this project to be conducted on a timescale of only 18 days.
Authors:Jingzhi Tu, Gang Mei, Francesco Piccialli
Abstract:
Autonomous driving is the key technology of intelligent logistics in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In autonomous driving, the appearance of incomplete point clouds losing geometric and semantic information is inevitable owing to limitations of occlusion, sensor resolution, and viewing angle when the Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) is applied. The emergence of incomplete point clouds, especially incomplete vehicle point clouds, would lead to the reduction of the accuracy of autonomous driving vehicles in object detection, traffic alert, and collision avoidance. Existing point cloud completion networks, such as Point Fractal Network (PF-Net), focus on the accuracy of point cloud completion, without considering the efficiency of inference process, which makes it difficult for them to be deployed for vehicle point cloud repair in autonomous driving. To address the above problem, in this paper, we propose an efficient deep learning approach to repair incomplete vehicle point cloud accurately and efficiently in autonomous driving. In the proposed method, an efficient downsampling algorithm combining incremental sampling and one-time sampling is presented to improves the inference speed of the PF-Net based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a real dataset is used, and an autonomous driving scene is created, where three incomplete vehicle point clouds with 5 different sizes are set for three autonomous driving situations. The improved PF-Net can achieve the speedups of over 19x with almost the same accuracy when compared to the original PF-Net. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved PF-Net can be applied to efficiently complete vehicle point clouds in autonomous driving.
Authors:Bartosz Wójcik, Mateusz Å»arski, Kamil KsiÄ
żek, JarosÅaw Adam Miszczak, MirosÅaw Jan Skibniewski
Abstract:
In recent years, a lot of attention is paid to deep learning methods in the context of vision-based construction site safety systems, especially regarding personal protective equipment. However, despite all this attention, there is still no reliable way to establish the relationship between workers and their hard hats. To answer this problem a combination of deep learning, object detection and head keypoint localization, with simple rule-based reasoning is proposed in this article. In tests, this solution surpassed the previous methods based on the relative bounding box position of different instances, as well as direct detection of hard hat wearers and non-wearers. The results show that the conjunction of novel deep learning methods with humanly-interpretable rule-based systems can result in a solution that is both reliable and can successfully mimic manual, on-site supervision. This work is the next step in the development of fully autonomous construction site safety systems and shows that there is still room for improvement in this area.
Authors:Vladyslav Andriiashen, Robert van Liere, Tristan van Leeuwen, Kees Joost Batenburg
Abstract:
X-ray imaging is a widely used technique for non-destructive inspection of agricultural food products. One application of X-ray imaging is the autonomous, in-line detection of foreign objects in food samples. Examples of such inclusions are bone fragments in meat products, plastic and metal debris in fish, fruit infestations. This article presents a processing methodology for unsupervised foreign object detection based on dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). A foreign object is defined as a fragment of material with different X-ray attenuation properties than those belonging to the food product. A novel thickness correction model is introduced as a pre-processing technique for DEXA data. The aim of the model is to homogenize regions in the image that belong to the food product and enhance contrast where the foreign object is present. In this way, the segmentation of the foreign object is more robust to noise and lack of contrast. The proposed methodology was applied to a dataset of 488 samples of meat products. The samples were acquired from a conveyor belt in a food processing factory. Approximately 60\% of the samples contain foreign objects of different types and sizes, while the rest of the samples are void of foreign objects. The results show that samples without foreign objects are correctly identified in 97% of cases, the overall accuracy of foreign object detection reaches 95%.
Authors:Ole Schumann, Markus Hahn, Nicolas Scheiner, Fabio Weishaupt, Julius F. Tilly, Jürgen Dickmann, Christian Wöhler
Abstract:
A new automotive radar data set with measurements and point-wise annotations from more than four hours of driving is presented. Data provided by four series radar sensors mounted on one test vehicle were recorded and the individual detections of dynamic objects were manually grouped to clusters and labeled afterwards. The purpose of this data set is to enable the development of novel (machine learning-based) radar perception algorithms with the focus on moving road users. Images of the recorded sequences were captured using a documentary camera. For the evaluation of future object detection and classification algorithms, proposals for score calculation are made so that researchers can evaluate their algorithms on a common basis. Additional information as well as download instructions can be found on the website of the data set: www.radar-scenes.com.
Authors:Scott H. Hawley, Andrew C. Morrison
Abstract:
We train an object detector built from convolutional neural networks to count interference fringes in elliptical antinode regions in frames of high-speed video recordings of transient oscillations in Caribbean steelpan drums illuminated by electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI). The annotations provided by our model aim to contribute to the understanding of time-dependent behavior in such drums by tracking the development of sympathetic vibration modes. The system is trained on a dataset of crowdsourced human-annotated images obtained from the Zooniverse Steelpan Vibrations Project. Due to the small number of human-annotated images and the ambiguity of the annotation task, we also evaluate the model on a large corpus of synthetic images whose properties have been matched to the real images by style transfer using a Generative Adversarial Network. Applying the model to thousands of unlabeled video frames, we measure oscillations consistent with audio recordings of these drum strikes. One unanticipated result is that sympathetic oscillations of higher-octave notes significantly precede the rise in sound intensity of the corresponding second harmonic tones; the mechanism responsible for this remains unidentified. This paper primarily concerns the development of the predictive model; further exploration of the steelpan images and deeper physical insights await its further application.
Authors:Yuli Slavutsky, Yuval Benjamini
Abstract:
Multiclass classifiers are often designed and evaluated only on a sample from the classes on which they will eventually be applied. Hence, their final accuracy remains unknown. In this work we study how a classifier's performance over the initial class sample can be used to extrapolate its expected accuracy on a larger, unobserved set of classes. For this, we define a measure of separation between correct and incorrect classes that is independent of the number of classes: the "reversed ROC" (rROC), which is obtained by replacing the roles of classes and data-points in the common ROC. We show that the classification accuracy is a function of the rROC in multiclass classifiers, for which the learned representation of data from the initial class sample remains unchanged when new classes are added. Using these results we formulate a robust neural-network-based algorithm, "CleaneX", which learns to estimate the accuracy of such classifiers on arbitrarily large sets of classes. Unlike previous methods, our method uses both the observed accuracies of the classifier and densities of classification scores, and therefore achieves remarkably better predictions than current state-of-the-art methods on both simulations and real datasets of object detection, face recognition, and brain decoding.
Authors:Samik Some, Mithun Das Gupta, Vinay P. Namboodiri
Abstract:
We present a determinantal point process (DPP) inspired alternative to non-maximum suppression (NMS) which has become an integral step in all state-of-the-art object detection frameworks. DPPs have been shown to encourage diversity in subset selection problems. We pose NMS as a subset selection problem and posit that directly incorporating DPP like framework can improve the overall performance of the object detection system. We propose an optimization problem which takes the same inputs as NMS, but introduces a novel sub-modularity based diverse subset selection functional. Our results strongly indicate that the modifications proposed in this paper can provide consistent improvements to state-of-the-art object detection pipelines.
Authors:Abubakar Siddique, Henry Medeiros
Abstract:
We introduce a novel framework to track multiple objects in overhead camera videos for airport checkpoint security scenarios where targets correspond to passengers and their baggage items. We propose a self-supervised learning (SSL) technique to provide the model information about instance segmentation uncertainty from overhead images. Our SSL approach improves object detection by employing a test-time data augmentation and a regression-based, rotation-invariant pseudo-label refinement technique. Our pseudo-label generation method provides multiple geometrically transformed images as inputs to a convolutional neural network (CNN), regresses the augmented detections generated by the network to reduce localization errors, and then clusters them using the mean-shift algorithm. The self-supervised detector model is used in a single-camera tracking algorithm to generate temporal identifiers for the targets. Our method also incorporates a multiview trajectory association mechanism to maintain consistent temporal identifiers as passengers travel across camera views. An evaluation of detection, tracking, and association performances on videos obtained from multiple overhead cameras in a realistic airport checkpoint environment demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our results show that self-supervision improves object detection accuracy by up to 42% without increasing the inference time of the model. Our multicamera association method achieves up to 89% multiobject tracking accuracy with an average computation time of less than 15 ms.
Authors:Matthias Rath, Alexandru Paul Condurache
Abstract:
Deep Neural Networks achieve state-of-the-art results in many different problem settings by exploiting vast amounts of training data. However, collecting, storing and - in the case of supervised learning - labelling the data is expensive and time-consuming. Additionally, assessing the networks' generalization abilities or predicting how the inferred output changes under input transformations is complicated since the networks are usually treated as a black box. Both of these problems can be mitigated by incorporating prior knowledge into the neural network. One promising approach, inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks in computer vision tasks, is to incorporate knowledge about symmetric geometrical transformations of the problem to solve that affect the output in a predictable way. This promises an increased data efficiency and more interpretable network outputs. In this survey, we try to give a concise overview about different approaches that incorporate geometrical prior knowledge into neural networks. Additionally, we connect those methods to 3D object detection for autonomous driving, where we expect promising results when applying those methods.
Authors:Anneliese Braunegg, Amartya Chakraborty, Michael Krumdick, Nicole Lape, Sara Leary, Keith Manville, Elizabeth Merkhofer, Laura Strickhart, Matthew Walmer
Abstract:
Physical adversarial attacks threaten to fool object detection systems, but reproducible research on the real-world effectiveness of physical patches and how to defend against them requires a publicly available benchmark dataset. We present APRICOT, a collection of over 1,000 annotated photographs of printed adversarial patches in public locations. The patches target several object categories for three COCO-trained detection models, and the photos represent natural variation in position, distance, lighting conditions, and viewing angle. Our analysis suggests that maintaining adversarial robustness in uncontrolled settings is highly challenging, but it is still possible to produce targeted detections under white-box and sometimes black-box settings. We establish baselines for defending against adversarial patches through several methods, including a detector supervised with synthetic data and unsupervised methods such as kernel density estimation, Bayesian uncertainty, and reconstruction error. Our results suggest that adversarial patches can be effectively flagged, both in a high-knowledge, attack-specific scenario, and in an unsupervised setting where patches are detected as anomalies in natural images. This dataset and the described experiments provide a benchmark for future research on the effectiveness of and defenses against physical adversarial objects in the wild.
Authors:Xiaoke Shen, Ioannis Stamos
Abstract:
Recently, there have been a plethora of classification and detection systems from RGB as well as 3D images. In this work, we describe a new 3D object detection system from an RGB-D or depth-only point cloud. Our system first detects objects in 2D (either RGB or pseudo-RGB constructed from depth). The next step is to detect 3D objects within the 3D frustums these 2D detections define. This is achieved by voxelizing parts of the frustums (since frustums can be really large), instead of using the whole frustums as done in earlier work. The main novelty of our system has to do with determining which parts (3D proposals) of the frustums to voxelize, thus allowing us to provide high resolution representations around the objects of interest. It also allows our system to have reduced memory requirements. These 3D proposals are fed to an efficient ResNet-based 3D Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). Our 3D detection system is fast and can be integrated into a robotics platform. With respect to systems that do not perform voxelization (such as PointNet), our methods can operate without the requirement of subsampling of the datasets. We have also introduced a pipelining approach that further improves the efficiency of our system. Results on SUN RGB-D dataset show that our system, which is based on a small network, can process 20 frames per second with comparable detection results to the state-of-the-art, achieving a 2 times speedup.
Authors:Andreas Pfeuffer, Klaus Dietmayer
Abstract:
A good and robust sensor data fusion in diverse weather conditions is a quite challenging task. There are several fusion architectures in the literature, e.g. the sensor data can be fused right at the beginning (Early Fusion), or they can be first processed separately and then concatenated later (Late Fusion). In this work, different fusion architectures are compared and evaluated by means of object detection tasks, in which the goal is to recognize and localize predefined objects in a stream of data. Usually, state-of-the-art object detectors based on neural networks are highly optimized for good weather conditions, since the well-known benchmarks only consist of sensor data recorded in optimal weather conditions. Therefore, the performance of these approaches decreases enormously or even fails in adverse weather conditions. In this work, different sensor fusion architectures are compared for good and adverse weather conditions for finding the optimal fusion architecture for diverse weather situations. A new training strategy is also introduced such that the performance of the object detector is greatly enhanced in adverse weather scenarios or if a sensor fails. Furthermore, the paper responds to the question if the detection accuracy can be increased further by providing the neural network with a-priori knowledge such as the spatial calibration of the sensors.
Authors:Manuel Nkegoum, Minh-Tan Pham, Élisa Fromont, Bruno Avignon, Sébastien Lefèvre
Abstract:
Few-shot multispectral object detection (FSMOD) addresses the challenge of detecting objects across visible and thermal modalities with minimal annotated data. In this paper, we explore this complex task and introduce a framework named "FSMODNet" that leverages cross-modality feature integration to improve detection performance even with limited labels. By effectively combining the unique strengths of visible and thermal imagery using deformable attention, the proposed method demonstrates robust adaptability in complex illumination and environmental conditions. Experimental results on two public datasets show effective object detection performance in challenging low-data regimes, outperforming several baselines we established from state-of-the-art models. All code, models, and experimental data splits can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Test-B48D.
Authors:Yihao Hu, Pan Wang, Xiaodong Bai, Shijie Cai, Hang Wang, Huazhong Liu, Aiping Yang, Xiangxiang Li, Meiping Ding, Hongyan Liu, Jianguo Yao
Abstract:
Pomelo detection is an essential process for their localization, automated robotic harvesting, and maturity analysis. However, detecting Shatian pomelo in complex orchard environments poses significant challenges, including multi-scale issues, obstructions from trunks and leaves, small object detection, etc. To address these issues, this study constructs a custom dataset STP-AgriData and proposes the SDE-DET model for Shatian pomelo detection. SDE-DET first utilizes the Star Block to effectively acquire high-dimensional information without increasing the computational overhead. Furthermore, the presented model adopts Deformable Attention in its backbone, to enhance its ability to detect pomelos under occluded conditions. Finally, multiple Efficient Multi-Scale Attention mechanisms are integrated into our model to reduce the computational overhead and extract deep visual representations, thereby improving the capacity for small object detection. In the experiment, we compared SDE-DET with the Yolo series and other mainstream detection models in Shatian pomelo detection. The presented SDE-DET model achieved scores of 0.883, 0.771, 0.838, 0.497, and 0.823 in Precision, Recall, mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5:0.95 and F1-score, respectively. SDE-DET has achieved state-of-the-art performance on the STP-AgriData dataset. Experiments indicate that the SDE-DET provides a reliable method for Shatian pomelo detection, laying the foundation for the further development of automatic harvest robots.
Authors:Eleftherios Papadopoulos, Yagmur Güçlütürk
Abstract:
Visual impairments present significant challenges to individuals worldwide, impacting daily activities and quality of life. Visual neuroprosthetics offer a promising solution, leveraging advancements in technology to provide a simplified visual sense through devices comprising cameras, computers, and implanted electrodes. This study investigates user-centered design principles for a phosphene vision algorithm, utilizing feedback from visually impaired individuals to guide the development of a gaze-controlled semantic segmentation system. We conducted interviews revealing key design principles. These principles informed the implementation of a gaze-guided semantic segmentation algorithm using the Segment Anything Model (SAM). In a simulated phosphene vision environment, participants performed object detection tasks under SAM, edge detection, and normal vision conditions. SAM improved identification accuracy over edge detection, remained effective in complex scenes, and was particularly robust for specific object shapes. These findings demonstrate the value of user feedback and the potential of gaze-guided semantic segmentation to enhance neuroprosthetic vision.
Authors:Siddharth Gupta, Jitin Singla
Abstract:
Colorectal cancer (CRC), a lethal disease, begins with the growth of abnormal mucosal cell proliferation called polyps in the inner wall of the colon. When left undetected, polyps can become malignant tumors. Colonoscopy is the standard procedure for detecting polyps, as it enables direct visualization and removal of suspicious lesions. Manual detection by colonoscopy can be inconsistent and is subject to oversight. Therefore, object detection based on deep learning offers a better solution for a more accurate and real-time diagnosis during colonoscopy. In this work, we propose YOLO-LAN, a YOLO-based polyp detection pipeline, trained using M2IoU loss, versatile data augmentations and negative data to replicate real clinical situations. Our pipeline outperformed existing methods for the Kvasir-seg and BKAI-IGH NeoPolyp datasets, achieving mAP$_{50}$ of 0.9619, mAP$_{50:95}$ of 0.8599 with YOLOv12 and mAP$_{50}$ of 0.9540, mAP$_{50:95}$ of 0.8487 with YOLOv8 on the Kvasir-seg dataset. The significant increase is achieved in mAP$_{50:95}$ score, showing the precision of polyp detection. We show robustness based on polyp size and precise location detection, making it clinically relevant in AI-assisted colorectal screening.
Authors:Adam Romlein, Benjamin X. Hou, Yuval Boss, Cynthia L. Christman, Stacie Koslovsky, Erin E. Moreland, Jason Parham, Anthony Hoogs
Abstract:
We introduce KAMERA: a comprehensive system for multi-camera, multi-spectral synchronization and real-time detection of seals and polar bears. Utilized in aerial surveys for ice-associated seals in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas around Alaska, KAMERA provides up to an 80% reduction in dataset processing time over previous methods. Our rigorous calibration and hardware synchronization enable using multiple spectra for object detection. All collected data are annotated with metadata so they can be easily referenced later. All imagery and animal detections from a survey are mapped onto a world plane for accurate surveyed area estimates and quick assessment of survey results. We hope KAMERA will inspire other mapping and detection efforts in the scientific community, with all software, models, and schematics fully open-sourced.
Authors:Sourav Halder, Jinjun Tong, Xinyu Wu
Abstract:
Checks remain a foundational instrument in the financial ecosystem, facilitating substantial transaction volumes across institutions. However, their continued use also renders them a persistent target for fraud, underscoring the importance of robust check fraud detection mechanisms. At the core of such systems lies the accurate identification and localization of critical fields, such as the signature, magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) line, courtesy amount, legal amount, payee, and payer, which are essential for subsequent verification against reference checks belonging to the same customer. This field-level detection is traditionally dependent on object detection models trained on large, diverse, and meticulously labeled datasets, a resource that is scarce due to proprietary and privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a novel, training-free framework for automated check field detection, leveraging the power of a vision language model (VLM) in conjunction with a multimodal large language model (MLLM). Our approach enables zero-shot detection of check components, significantly lowering the barrier to deployment in real-world financial settings. Quantitative evaluation of our model on a hand-curated dataset of 110 checks spanning multiple formats and layouts demonstrates strong performance and generalization capability. Furthermore, this framework can serve as a bootstrap mechanism for generating high-quality labeled datasets, enabling the development of specialized real-time object detection models tailored to institutional needs.
Authors:Jonathan Wuntu, Muhamad Dwisnanto Putro, Rendy Syahputra
Abstract:
Indonesia's marine ecosystems, part of the globally recognized Coral Triangle, are among the richest in biodiversity, requiring efficient monitoring tools to support conservation. Traditional fish detection methods are time-consuming and demand expert knowledge, prompting the need for automated solutions. This study explores the implementation of YOLOv10-nano, a state-of-the-art deep learning model, for real-time marine fish detection in Indonesian waters, using test data from Bunaken National Marine Park. YOLOv10's architecture, featuring improvements like the CSPNet backbone, PAN for feature fusion, and Pyramid Spatial Attention Block, enables efficient and accurate object detection even in complex environments. The model was evaluated on the DeepFish and OpenImages V7-Fish datasets. Results show that YOLOv10-nano achieves a high detection accuracy with mAP50 of 0.966 and mAP50:95 of 0.606 while maintaining low computational demand (2.7M parameters, 8.4 GFLOPs). It also delivered an average inference speed of 29.29 FPS on the CPU, making it suitable for real-time deployment. Although OpenImages V7-Fish alone provided lower accuracy, it complemented DeepFish in enhancing model robustness. Overall, this study demonstrates YOLOv10-nano's potential for efficient, scalable marine fish monitoring and conservation applications in data-limited environments.
Authors:Ruan Bispo, Dane Mitrev, Letizia Mariotti, Clément Botty, Denver Humphrey, Anthony Scanlan, Ciarán Eising
Abstract:
Camera-radar fusion offers a robust and low-cost alternative to Camera-lidar fusion for the 3D object detection task in real-time under adverse weather and lighting conditions. However, currently, in the literature, it is possible to find few works focusing on this modality and, most importantly, developing new architectures to explore the advantages of the radar point cloud, such as accurate distance estimation and speed information. Therefore, this work presents a novel and efficient 3D object detection algorithm using cameras and radars in the bird's-eye-view (BEV). Our algorithm exploits the advantages of radar before fusing the features into a detection head. A new backbone is introduced, which maps the radar pillar features into an embedded dimension. A self-attention mechanism allows the backbone to model the dependencies between the radar points. We are using a simplified convolutional layer to replace the FPN-based convolutional layers used in the PointPillars-based architectures with the main goal of reducing inference time. Our results show that with this modification, our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art in the 3D object detection problem, reaching 58.2 of the NDS metric for the use of ResNet-50, while also setting a new benchmark for inference time on the nuScenes dataset for the same category.
Authors:Olivier Moliner, Viktor Larsson, Kalle Åström
Abstract:
The ability to interpret and comprehend a 3D scene is essential for many vision and robotics systems. In numerous applications, this involves 3D object detection, i.e.~identifying the location and dimensions of objects belonging to a specific category, typically represented as bounding boxes. This has traditionally been solved by training to detect a fixed set of categories, which limits its use. In this work, we investigate open-vocabulary 3D object detection in the challenging yet practical sparse-view setting, where only a limited number of posed RGB images are available as input. Our approach is training-free, relying on pre-trained, off-the-shelf 2D foundation models instead of employing computationally expensive 3D feature fusion or requiring 3D-specific learning. By lifting 2D detections and directly optimizing 3D proposals for featuremetric consistency across views, we fully leverage the extensive training data available in 2D compared to 3D. Through standard benchmarks, we demonstrate that this simple pipeline establishes a powerful baseline, performing competitively with state-of-the-art techniques in densely sampled scenarios while significantly outperforming them in the sparse-view setting.
Authors:Aasfee Mosharraf Bhuiyan, Md Luban Mehda, Md. Thawhid Hasan Puspo, Jubayer Amin Pritom
Abstract:
This paper presents the design, development and testing of GiAnt, an affordable hexapod which is inspired by the efficient motions of ants. The decision to model GiAnt after ants rather than other insects is rooted in ants' natural adaptability to a variety of terrains. This bio-inspired approach gives it a significant advantage in outdoor applications, offering terrain flexibility along with efficient energy use. It features a lightweight 3D-printed and laser cut structure weighing 1.75 kg with dimensions of 310 mm x 200 mm x 120 mm. Its legs have been designed with a simple Single Degree of Freedom (DOF) using a link and crank mechanism. It is great for conquering challenging terrains such as grass, rocks, and steep surfaces. Unlike traditional robots using four wheels for motion, its legged design gives superior adaptability to uneven and rough surfaces. GiAnt's control system is built on Arduino, allowing manual operation. An effective way of controlling the legs of GiAnt was achieved by gait analysis. It can move up to 8 cm of height easily with its advanced leg positioning system. Furthermore, equipped with machine learning and image processing technology, it can identify 81 different objects in a live monitoring system. It represents a significant step towards creating accessible hexapod robots for research, exploration, and surveying, offering unique advantages in adaptability and control simplicity.
Authors:Luisa Torquato Niño, Hamza A. A. Gardi
Abstract:
This paper addresses the synthetic-to-real domain gap in object detection, focusing on training a YOLOv11 model to detect a specific object (a soup can) using only synthetic data and domain randomization strategies. The methodology involves extensive experimentation with data augmentation, dataset composition, and model scaling. While synthetic validation metrics were consistently high, they proved to be poor predictors of real-world performance. Consequently, models were also evaluated qualitatively, through visual inspection of predictions, and quantitatively, on a manually labeled real-world test set, to guide development. Final mAP@50 scores were provided by the official Kaggle competition. Key findings indicate that increasing synthetic dataset diversity, specifically by including varied perspectives and complex backgrounds, combined with carefully tuned data augmentation, were crucial in bridging the domain gap. The best performing configuration, a YOLOv11l model trained on an expanded and diverse dataset, achieved a final mAP@50 of 0.910 on the competition's hidden test set. This result demonstrates the potential of a synthetic-only training approach while also highlighting the remaining challenges in fully capturing real-world variability.
Authors:Russell Beale, Daniel Rutter
Abstract:
This paper presents the development of an interactive system for constructing Augmented Virtual Environments (AVEs) by fusing mobile phone images with open-source geospatial data. By integrating 2D image data with 3D models derived from sources such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Digital Terrain Models (DTM), the proposed system generates immersive environments that enhance situational context. The system leverages Python for data processing and Unity for 3D visualization, interconnected via UDP-based two-way communication. Preliminary user evaluation demonstrates that the resulting AVEs accurately represent real-world scenes and improve users' contextual understanding. Key challenges addressed include projector calibration, precise model construction from heterogeneous data, and object detection for dynamic scene representation.
Authors:Haotian Li, Jianbo Jiao
Abstract:
Imagine living in a world composed solely of primitive shapes, could you still recognise familiar objects? Recent studies have shown that abstract images-constructed by primitive shapes-can indeed convey visual semantic information to deep learning models. However, representations obtained from such images often fall short compared to those derived from traditional raster images. In this paper, we study the reasons behind this performance gap and investigate how much high-level semantic content can be captured at different abstraction levels. To this end, we introduce the Hierarchical Abstraction Image Dataset (HAID), a novel data collection that comprises abstract images generated from normal raster images at multiple levels of abstraction. We then train and evaluate conventional vision systems on HAID across various tasks including classification, segmentation, and object detection, providing a comprehensive study between rasterised and abstract image representations. We also discuss if the abstract image can be considered as a potentially effective format for conveying visual semantic information and contributing to vision tasks.
Authors:Tongfei Guo, Lili Su
Abstract:
Trajectory prediction is central to the safe and seamless operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In deployment, however, prediction models inevitably face distribution shifts between training data and real-world conditions, where rare or underrepresented traffic scenarios induce out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. While most prior OOD detection research in AVs has concentrated on computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation, trajectory-level OOD detection remains largely underexplored. A recent study formulated this problem as a quickest change detection (QCD) task, providing formal guarantees on the trade-off between detection delay and false alarms [1]. Building on this foundation, we propose a new framework that introduces adaptive mechanisms to achieve robust detection in complex driving environments. Empirical analysis across multiple real-world datasets reveals that prediction errors -- even on in-distribution samples -- exhibit mode-dependent distributions that evolve over time with dataset-specific dynamics. By explicitly modeling these error modes, our method achieves substantial improvements in both detection delay and false alarm rates. Comprehensive experiments on established trajectory prediction benchmarks show that our framework significantly outperforms prior UQ- and vision-based OOD approaches in both accuracy and computational efficiency, offering a practical path toward reliable, driving-aware autonomy.
Authors:Melika Sabaghian, Mohammad Ali Keyvanrad, Seyyedeh Mahila Moghadami
Abstract:
Efficient deployment of deep learning models for aerial object detection on resource-constrained devices requires significant compression without com-promising performance. In this study, we propose a novel three-stage compression pipeline for the YOLOv8 object detection model, integrating sparsity-aware training, structured channel pruning, and Channel-Wise Knowledge Distillation (CWD). First, sparsity-aware training introduces dynamic sparsity during model optimization, effectively balancing parameter reduction and detection accuracy. Second, we apply structured channel pruning by leveraging batch normalization scaling factors to eliminate redundant channels, significantly reducing model size and computational complexity. Finally, to mitigate the accuracy drop caused by pruning, we employ CWD to transfer knowledge from the original model, using an adjustable temperature and loss weighting scheme tailored for small and medium object detection. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple YOLOv8 variants. For YOLOv8m, our method reduces model parameters from 25.85M to 6.85M (a 73.51% reduction), FLOPs from 49.6G to 13.3G, and MACs from 101G to 34.5G, while reducing AP50 by only 2.7%. The resulting compressed model achieves 47.9 AP50 and boosts inference speed from 26 FPS (YOLOv8m baseline) to 45 FPS, enabling real-time deployment on edge devices. We further apply TensorRT as a lightweight optimization step. While this introduces a minor drop in AP50 (from 47.9 to 47.6), it significantly improves inference speed from 45 to 68 FPS, demonstrating the practicality of our approach for high-throughput, re-source-constrained scenarios.
Authors:Avinaash Manoharan, Xiangyu Yin, Domenik Helm, Chih-Hong Cheng
Abstract:
Evaluating object detection models in deployment is challenging because ground-truth annotations are rarely available. We introduce the Cumulative Consensus Score (CCS), a label-free metric that enables continuous monitoring and comparison of detectors in real-world settings. CCS applies test-time data augmentation to each image, collects predicted bounding boxes across augmented views, and computes overlaps using Intersection over Union. Maximum overlaps are normalized and averaged across augmentation pairs, yielding a measure of spatial consistency that serves as a proxy for reliability without annotations. In controlled experiments on Open Images and KITTI, CCS achieved over 90% congruence with F1-score, Probabilistic Detection Quality, and Optimal Correction Cost. The method is model-agnostic, working across single-stage and two-stage detectors, and operates at the case level to highlight under-performing scenarios. Altogether, CCS provides a robust foundation for DevOps-style monitoring of object detectors.
Authors:Haiyu Yang, Enhong Liu, Jennifer Sun, Sumit Sharma, Meike van Leerdam, Sebastien Franceschini, Puchun Niu, Miel Hostens
Abstract:
Animal behavior analysis plays a crucial role in understanding animal welfare, health status, and productivity in agricultural settings. However, traditional manual observation methods are time-consuming, subjective, and limited in scalability. We present a modular pipeline that leverages open-sourced state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to automate animal behavior analysis in a group housing environment. Our approach combines state-of-the-art models for zero-shot object detection, motion-aware tracking and segmentation, and advanced feature extraction using vision transformers for robust behavior recognition. The pipeline addresses challenges including animal occlusions and group housing scenarios as demonstrated in indoor pig monitoring. We validated our system on the Edinburgh Pig Behavior Video Dataset for multiple behavioral tasks. Our temporal model achieved 94.2% overall accuracy, representing a 21.2 percentage point improvement over existing methods. The pipeline demonstrated robust tracking capabilities with 93.3% identity preservation score and 89.3% object detection precision. The modular design suggests potential for adaptation to other contexts, though further validation across species would be required. The open-source implementation provides a scalable solution for behavior monitoring, contributing to precision pig farming and welfare assessment through automated, objective, and continuous analysis.
Authors:Ian Nell, Shane Gilroy
Abstract:
Road traffic accidents remain a significant global concern, with human error, particularly distracted and impaired driving, among the leading causes. This study introduces a novel driver behavior classification system that uses external observation techniques to detect indicators of distraction and impairment. The proposed framework employs advanced computer vision methodologies, including real-time object tracking, lateral displacement analysis, and lane position monitoring. The system identifies unsafe driving behaviors such as excessive lateral movement and erratic trajectory patterns by implementing the YOLO object detection model and custom lane estimation algorithms. Unlike systems reliant on inter-vehicular communication, this vision-based approach enables behavioral analysis of non-connected vehicles. Experimental evaluations on diverse video datasets demonstrate the framework's reliability and adaptability across varying road and environmental conditions.
Authors:Humera Shaikh, Kaur Jashanpreet
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of computational imaging (CI) techniques and their transformative impact on computer vision (CV) applications. Conventional imaging methods often fail to deliver high-fidelity visual data in challenging conditions, such as low light, motion blur, or high dynamic range scenes, thereby limiting the performance of state-of-the-art CV systems. Computational imaging techniques, including light field imaging, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, deblurring, high-speed imaging, and glare mitigation, address these limitations by enhancing image acquisition and reconstruction processes. This survey systematically explores the synergies between CI techniques and core CV tasks, including object detection, depth estimation, optical flow, face recognition, and keypoint detection. By analyzing the relationships between CI methods and their practical contributions to CV applications, this work highlights emerging opportunities, challenges, and future research directions. We emphasize the potential for task-specific, adaptive imaging pipelines that improve robustness, accuracy, and efficiency in real-world scenarios, such as autonomous navigation, surveillance, augmented reality, and robotics.
Authors:Khue Nong Thuc, Khoa Tran Nguyen Anh, Tai Nguyen Huy, Du Nguyen Hao Hong, Khanh Dinh Ba
Abstract:
The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role in enabling seamless connectivity and intelligent home automation, particularly in food management. By integrating IoT with computer vision, the smart fridge employs an ESP32-CAM to establish a monitoring subsystem that enhances food management efficiency through real-time food detection, inventory tracking, and temperature monitoring. This benefits waste reduction, grocery planning improvement, and household consumption optimization. In high-density inventory conditions, capturing partial or layered images complicates object detection, as overlapping items and occluded views hinder accurate identification and counting. Besides, varied angles and obscured details in multi-layered setups reduce algorithm reliability, often resulting in miscounts or misclassifications. Our proposed system is structured into three core modules: data pre-processing, object detection and management, and a web-based visualization. To address the challenge of poor model calibration caused by overconfident predictions, we implement a variant of focal loss that mitigates over-confidence and under-confidence in multi-category classification. This approach incorporates adaptive, class-wise error calibration via temperature scaling and evaluates the distribution of predicted probabilities across methods. Our results demonstrate that robust functional calibration significantly improves detection reliability under varying lighting conditions and scalability challenges. Further analysis demonstrates a practical, user-focused approach to modern food management, advancing sustainable living goals through reduced waste and more informed consumption.
Authors:Shucong Li, Zhenyu Liu, Zijie Hong, Zhiheng Zhou, Xianghai Cao
Abstract:
Multispectral remote sensing object detection is one of the important application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). However, it faces three challenges. Firstly, the low-light remote sensing images reduce the complementarity during multi-modality fusion. Secondly, the local small target modeling is interfered with redundant information in the fusion stage easily. Thirdly, due to the quadratic computational complexity, it is hard to apply the transformer-based methods on the UAV platform. To address these limitations, motivated by Mamba with linear complexity, a UAV multispectral object detector with dual-domain enhancement and priority-guided mamba fusion (DEPF) is proposed. Firstly, to enhance low-light remote sensing images, Dual-Domain Enhancement Module (DDE) is designed, which contains Cross-Scale Wavelet Mamba (CSWM) and Fourier Details Recovery block (FDR). CSWM applies cross-scale mamba scanning for the low-frequency components to enhance the global brightness of images, while FDR constructs spectrum recovery network to enhance the frequency spectra features for recovering the texture-details. Secondly, to enhance local target modeling and reduce the impact of redundant information during fusion, Priority-Guided Mamba Fusion Module (PGMF) is designed. PGMF introduces the concept of priority scanning, which starts from local targets features according to the priority scores obtained from modality difference. Experiments on DroneVehicle dataset and VEDAI dataset reports that, DEPF performs well on object detection, comparing with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available in the supplementary material.
Authors:Srihari Bandraupalli, Anupam Purwar
Abstract:
Open-source Vision-Language Models show immense promise for enterprise applications, yet a critical disconnect exists between academic evaluation and enterprise deployment requirements. Current benchmarks rely heavily on multiple-choice questions and synthetic data, failing to capture the complexity of real-world business applications like social media content analysis. This paper introduces VLM-in-the-Wild (ViLD), a comprehensive framework to bridge this gap by evaluating VLMs on operational enterprise requirements. We define ten business-critical tasks: logo detection, OCR, object detection, human presence and demographic analysis, human activity and appearance analysis, scene detection, camera perspective and media quality assessment, dominant colors, comprehensive description, and NSFW detection. To this framework, we bring an innovative BlockWeaver Algorithm that solves the challenging problem of comparing unordered, variably-grouped OCR outputs from VLMs without relying on embeddings or LLMs, achieving remarkable speed and reliability. To demonstrate efficacy of ViLD, we constructed a new benchmark dataset of 7,500 diverse samples, carefully stratified from a corpus of one million real-world images and videos. ViLD provides actionable insights by combining semantic matching (both embedding-based and LLM-as-a-judge approaches), traditional metrics, and novel methods to measure the completeness and faithfulness of descriptive outputs. By benchmarking leading open-source VLMs (Qwen, MIMO, and InternVL) against a powerful proprietary baseline as per ViLD framework, we provide one of the first industry-grounded, task-driven assessment of VLMs capabilities, offering actionable insights for their deployment in enterprise environments.
Authors:Behnoud Shafiezadeh, Amir Mashmool, Farshad Eshghi, Manoochehr Kelarestaghi
Abstract:
Automatic License-Plate Recognition (ALPR) plays a pivotal role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) as a fundamental element of Smart Cities. However, due to its high variability, ALPR faces challenging issues more efficiently addressed by deep learning techniques. In this paper, a selective Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is proposed for deblurring in the preprocessing step, coupled with the state-of-the-art You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO)v5 object detection architectures for License-Plate Detection (LPD), and the integrated Character Segmentation (CS) and Character Recognition (CR) steps. The selective preprocessing bypasses unnecessary and sometimes counter-productive input manipulations, while YOLOv5 LPD/CS+CR delivers high accuracy and low computing cost. As a result, YOLOv5 achieves a detection time of 0.026 seconds for both LP and CR detection stages, facilitating real-time applications with exceptionally rapid responsiveness. Moreover, the proposed model achieves accuracy rates of 95\% and 97\% in the LPD and CR detection phases, respectively. Furthermore, the inclusion of the Deblur-GAN pre-processor significantly improves detection accuracy by nearly 40\%, especially when encountering blurred License Plates (LPs).To train and test the learning components, we generated and publicly released our blur and ALPR datasets (using Iranian license plates as a use-case), which are more representative of close-to-real-life ad-hoc situations. The findings demonstrate that employing the state-of-the-art YOLO model results in excellent overall precision and detection time, making it well-suited for portable applications. Additionally, integrating the Deblur-GAN model as a preliminary processing step enhances the overall effectiveness of our comprehensive model, particularly when confronted with blurred scenes captured by the camera as input.
Authors:Ha Meem Hossain, Pritam Nath, Mahitun Nesa Mahi, Imtiaz Uddin, Ishrat Jahan Eiste, Syed Nasibur Rahman Ratul, Md Naim Uddin Mozumdar, Asif Mohammed Saad
Abstract:
Vehicle detection systems trained on Non-Bangladeshi datasets struggle to accurately identify local vehicle types in Bangladesh's unique road environments, creating critical gaps in autonomous driving technology for developing regions. This study evaluates six YOLO model variants on a custom dataset featuring 29 distinct vehicle classes, including region-specific vehicles such as ``Desi Nosimon'', ``Leguna'', ``Battery Rickshaw'', and ``CNG''. The dataset comprises high-resolution images (1920x1080) captured across various Bangladeshi roads using mobile phone cameras and manually annotated using LabelImg with YOLO format bounding boxes. Performance evaluation revealed YOLOv11x as the top performer, achieving 63.7\% mAP@0.5, 43.8\% mAP@0.5:0.95, 61.4\% recall, and 61.6\% F1-score, though requiring 45.8 milliseconds per image for inference. Medium variants (YOLOv8m, YOLOv11m) struck an optimal balance, delivering robust detection performance with mAP@0.5 values of 62.5\% and 61.8\% respectively, while maintaining moderate inference times around 14-15 milliseconds. The study identified significant detection challenges for rare vehicle classes, with Construction Vehicles and Desi Nosimons showing near-zero accuracy due to dataset imbalances and insufficient training samples. Confusion matrices revealed frequent misclassifications between visually similar vehicles, particularly Mini Trucks versus Mini Covered Vans. This research provides a foundation for developing robust object detection systems specifically adapted to Bangladesh traffic conditions, addressing critical needs in autonomous vehicle technology advancement for developing regions where conventional generic-trained models fail to perform adequately.
Authors:Bryce Grant, Peng Wang
Abstract:
This paper introduces Quaternion Approximate Networks (QUAN), a novel deep learning framework that leverages quaternion algebra for rotation equivariant image classification and object detection. Unlike conventional quaternion neural networks attempting to operate entirely in the quaternion domain, QUAN approximates quaternion convolution through Hamilton product decomposition using real-valued operations. This approach preserves geometric properties while enabling efficient implementation with custom CUDA kernels. We introduce Independent Quaternion Batch Normalization (IQBN) for training stability and extend quaternion operations to spatial attention mechanisms. QUAN is evaluated on image classification (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet), object detection (COCO, DOTA), and robotic perception tasks. In classification tasks, QUAN achieves higher accuracy with fewer parameters and faster convergence compared to existing convolution and quaternion-based models. For objection detection, QUAN demonstrates improved parameter efficiency and rotation handling over standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) while establishing the SOTA for quaternion CNNs in this downstream task. These results highlight its potential for deployment in resource-constrained robotic systems requiring rotation-aware perception and application in other domains.
Authors:Mourad Hrizi, Marwa Ouni, Maatoug Hassine
Abstract:
This paper presents a theoretical and numerical investigation of object detection in a fluid governed by the three-dimensional evolutionary Navier--Stokes equations. To solve this inverse problem, we assume that interior velocity measurements are available only within a localized subregion of the fluid domain. First, we present an identifiability result. We then formulate the problem as a shape optimization task: to identify the obstacle, we minimize a nonlinear least-squares criterion with a regularization term that penalizes the perimeter of the obstacle to be identified. We prove the existence and stability of a minimizer of the least-squares functional. To recover the unknown obstacle, we present a non-iterative identification method based on the topological derivative. The corresponding asymptotic expansion of the least-squares functional is computed in a straightforward manner using a penalty method. Finally, as a realistic application, we demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed non-iterative procedure through numerical experiments using the INSTMCOTRHD ocean model, which incorporates realistic Mediterranean bathymetry, stratification, and forcing conditions.
Authors:David Huangal, J. Alex Hurt
Abstract:
Semantic segmentation of overhead remote sensing imagery enables applications in mapping, urban planning, and disaster response. State-of-the-art segmentation networks are typically developed and tuned on ground-perspective photographs and do not directly address remote sensing challenges such as extreme scale variation, foreground-background imbalance, and large image sizes. We explore the incorporation of the differential morphological profile (DMP), a multi-scale shape extraction method based on grayscale morphology, into modern segmentation networks. Prior studies have shown that the DMP can provide critical shape information to Deep Neural Networks to enable superior detection and classification performance in overhead imagery. In this work, we extend prior DMPNet work beyond classification and object detection by integrating DMP features into three state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer semantic segmentation architectures. We utilize both direct input, which adapts the input stem of feature extraction architectures to accept DMP channels, and hybrid architectures, a dual-stream design that fuses RGB and DMP encoders. Using the iSAID benchmark dataset, we evaluate a variety of DMP differentials and structuring element shapes to more effectively provide shape information to the model. Our results show that while non-DMP models generally outperform the direct-input variants, hybrid DMP consistently outperforms direct-input and is capable of surpassing a non-DMP model on mIoU, F1, and Recall.
Authors:Alma M. Liezenga, Stefan Wijnja, Puck de Haan, Niels W. T. Brink, Jip J. van Stijn, Yori Kamphuis, Klamer Schutte
Abstract:
Poisoning attacks pose an increasing threat to the security and robustness of Artificial Intelligence systems in the military domain. The widespread use of open-source datasets and pretrained models exacerbates this risk. Despite the severity of this threat, there is limited research on the application and detection of poisoning attacks on object detection systems. This is especially problematic in the military domain, where attacks can have grave consequences. In this work, we both investigate the effect of poisoning attacks on military object detectors in practice, and the best approach to detect these attacks. To support this research, we create a small, custom dataset featuring military vehicles: MilCivVeh. We explore the vulnerability of military object detectors for poisoning attacks by implementing a modified version of the BadDet attack: a patch-based poisoning attack. We then assess its impact, finding that while a positive attack success rate is achievable, it requires a substantial portion of the data to be poisoned -- raising questions about its practical applicability. To address the detection challenge, we test both specialized poisoning detection methods and anomaly detection methods from the visual industrial inspection domain. Since our research shows that both classes of methods are lacking, we introduce our own patch detection method: AutoDetect, a simple, fast, and lightweight autoencoder-based method. Our method shows promising results in separating clean from poisoned samples using the reconstruction error of image slices, outperforming existing methods, while being less time- and memory-intensive. We urge that the availability of large, representative datasets in the military domain is a prerequisite to further evaluate risks of poisoning attacks and opportunities patch detection.
Authors:FatemehSadat Seyedmomeni, Mohammad Ali Keyvanrad
Abstract:
In recent years, deep learning has achieved unprecedented success in various computer vision tasks, particularly in object detection. However, the black-box nature and high complexity of deep neural networks pose significant challenges for interpretability, especially in critical domains such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and security systems. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to address this challenge by providing tools and methods to make model decisions more transparent, interpretable, and trust-worthy for humans. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art explain-ability methods specifically applied to object detection models. The paper be-gins by categorizing existing XAI techniques based on their underlying mechanisms-perturbation-based, gradient-based, backpropagation-based, and graph-based methods. Notable methods such as D-RISE, BODEM, D-CLOSE, and FSOD are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the paper investigates their applicability to various object detection architectures, including YOLO, SSD, Faster R-CNN, and EfficientDet. Statistical analysis of publication trends from 2022 to mid-2025 shows an accelerating interest in explainable object detection, indicating its increasing importance. The study also explores common datasets and evaluation metrics, and highlights the major challenges associated with model interpretability. By providing a structured taxonomy and a critical assessment of existing methods, this review aims to guide researchers and practitioners in selecting suitable explainability techniques for object detection applications and to foster the development of more interpretable AI systems.
Authors:Komala Subramanyam Cherukuri, Kewei Sha, Zhenhua Huang
Abstract:
Object detection is crucial for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) to perceive their surroundings and make safe driving decisions. Centralized training of object detection models often achieves promising accuracy, fast convergence, and simplified training process, but it falls short in scalability, adaptability, and privacy-preservation. Federated learning (FL), by contrast, enables collaborative, privacy-preserving, and continuous training across naturally distributed CAV fleets. However, deploying FL in real-world CAVs remains challenging due to the substantial computational demands of training and inference, coupled with highly diverse operating conditions. Practical deployment must address three critical factors: (i) heterogeneity from non-IID data distributions, (ii) constrained onboard computing hardware, and (iii) environmental variability such as lighting and weather, alongside systematic evaluation to ensure reliable performance. This work introduces the first holistic deployment-oriented evaluation of FL-based object detection in CAVs, integrating model performance, system-level resource profiling, and environmental robustness. Using state-of-the-art detectors, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLOv11, and Deformable DETR, evaluated on the KITTI, BDD100K, and nuScenes datasets, we analyze trade-offs between detection accuracy, computational cost, and resource usage under diverse resolutions, batch sizes, weather and lighting conditions, and dynamic client participation, paving the way for robust FL deployment in CAVs.
Authors:Ethan Qi Yang Chua, Jen Hong Tan
Abstract:
Object detection architectures are notoriously difficult to understand, often more so than large language models. While RT-DETRv2 represents an important advance in real-time detection, most existing diagrams do little to clarify how its components actually work and fit together. In this article, we explain the architecture of RT-DETRv2 through a series of eight carefully designed illustrations, moving from the overall pipeline down to critical components such as the encoder, decoder, and multi-scale deformable attention. Our goal is to make the existing one genuinely understandable. By visualizing the flow of tensors and unpacking the logic behind each module, we hope to provide researchers and practitioners with a clearer mental model of how RT-DETRv2 works under the hood.
Authors:Raehyuk Jung, Seungjun Yu, Hyunjung Shim
Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) combine a vision encoder and a large language model (LLM) through alignment training, showing strong performance on multimodal tasks. A central component in this architecture is the projection layer, which maps visual features into the LLM's embedding space. Despite its importance, its ability to generalize to unseen visual concepts has not been systematically evaluated. To address this, we propose a benchmark for evaluating projection-layer generalization. We adapt object detection datasets (rich in fine-grained annotations) into a prompting format and design train/test splits with disjoint label sets, enabling precise control over seen and unseen concept separation. Experimental results show that the projection layer retains about 79 to 88 percent of the performance on unseen classes compared to seen ones across various settings, suggesting a non-trivial level of generalization even without explicit alignment supervision on those concepts. We further analyze this behavior through a mechanistic interpretability lens. Our findings indicate that the feed-forward network in the projection layer functions like a key-value memory, processing seen and unseen tokens in similar ways. This study introduces a new evaluation framework for alignment generalization and highlights the potential for efficient VLM training with limited aligned data.
Authors:Fang Wang, Huitao Li, Wenhan Chao, Zheng Zhuo, Yiran Ji, Chang Peng, Yupeng Sun
Abstract:
Many high-performance networks were not designed with lightweight application scenarios in mind from the outset, which has greatly restricted their scope of application. This paper takes ConvNeXt as the research object and significantly reduces the parameter scale and network complexity of ConvNeXt by integrating the Cross Stage Partial Connections mechanism and a series of optimized designs. The new network is named E-ConvNeXt, which can maintain high accuracy performance under different complexity configurations. The three core innovations of E-ConvNeXt are : (1) integrating the Cross Stage Partial Network (CSPNet) with ConvNeXt and adjusting the network structure, which reduces the model's network complexity by up to 80%; (2) Optimizing the Stem and Block structures to enhance the model's feature expression capability and operational efficiency; (3) Replacing Layer Scale with channel attention. Experimental validation on ImageNet classification demonstrates E-ConvNeXt's superior accuracy-efficiency balance: E-ConvNeXt-mini reaches 78.3% Top-1 accuracy at 0.9GFLOPs. E-ConvNeXt-small reaches 81.9% Top-1 accuracy at 3.1GFLOPs. Transfer learning tests on object detection tasks further confirm its generalization capability.
Authors:He Li, Xinyu Liu, Weihang Kong, Xingchen Zhang
Abstract:
Visible and infrared image fusion (VIF) is an important multimedia task in computer vision. Most VIF methods focus primarily on optimizing fused image quality. Recent studies have begun incorporating downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation and object detection, to provide semantic guidance for VIF. However, semantic segmentation requires extensive annotations, while object detection, despite reducing annotation efforts compared with segmentation, faces challenges in highly crowded scenes due to overlapping bounding boxes and occlusion. Moreover, although RGB-T crowd counting has gained increasing attention in recent years, no studies have integrated VIF and crowd counting into a unified framework. To address these challenges, we propose FusionCounting, a novel multi-task learning framework that integrates crowd counting into the VIF process. Crowd counting provides a direct quantitative measure of population density with minimal annotation, making it particularly suitable for dense scenes. Our framework leverages both input images and population density information in a mutually beneficial multi-task design. To accelerate convergence and balance tasks contributions, we introduce a dynamic loss function weighting strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate adversarial training to enhance the robustness of both VIF and crowd counting, improving the model's stability and resilience to adversarial attacks. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that FusionCounting not only enhances image fusion quality but also achieves superior crowd counting performance.
Authors:Omer Eldadi, Gershon Tenenbaum, Abraham Loeb
Abstract:
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time will increase interstellar object detection rates to one every few months, substantially elevating the probability of identifying objects with characteristics suggesting artificial origin. Despite this imminent capability, no evidence-based crisis communication framework exists for managing potential technosignature discoveries. We present the Adaptive Communication Framework (ACF), a theoretically grounded protocol that integrates crisis communication theories with the SPECtrum of Rhetoric Intelligences model to address diverse cognitive, social and emotional processing styles. Through analysis of communication failures during COVID-19, Fukushima, and asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4), we identify critical gaps in managing scientific uncertainty under public scrutiny. The ACF provides graduated protocols calibrated to the Loeb Scale for Interstellar Object Significance, offering specific messaging strategies across four rhetoric intelligence channels (Systematic, Practical, Emotional, Creative) for each evidential level group. Recognizing that Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems will mediate public understanding, the framework incorporates safeguards against synthetic media manipulation and algorithmic misinformation through pre-positioned content seeding and deepfake detection protocols. Our theoretical framework reveals that successful communication of paradigm-shifting discoveries requires simultaneous activation of multiple cognitive channels, with messages adapted to cultural contexts and uncertainty levels. This framework provides essential theoretical groundwork for ensuring humanity's potentially most transformative discovery unfolds through understanding rather than chaos.
Authors:Andrei-Stefan Bulzan, Cosmin Cernazanu-Glavan
Abstract:
For decades, Computer Vision has aimed at enabling machines to perceive the external world. Initial limitations led to the development of highly specialized niches. As success in each task accrued and research progressed, increasingly complex perception tasks emerged. This survey charts the convergence of these tasks and, in doing so, introduces Open World Detection (OWD), an umbrella term we propose to unify class-agnostic and generally applicable detection models in the vision domain. We start from the history of foundational vision subdomains and cover key concepts, methodologies and datasets making up today's state-of-the-art landscape. This traverses topics starting from early saliency detection, foreground/background separation, out of distribution detection and leading up to open world object detection, zero-shot detection and Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). We explore the overlap between these subdomains, their increasing convergence, and their potential to unify into a singular domain in the future, perception.
Authors:Sandeep Gupta, Roberto Passerone
Abstract:
Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) are becoming ubiquitous in computer vision, powering systems for diverse tasks such as object detection, image classification, segmentation, pose estimation, and motion tracking. VFMs are capitalizing on seminal innovations in deep learning models, such as LeNet-5, AlexNet, ResNet, VGGNet, InceptionNet, DenseNet, YOLO, and ViT, to deliver superior performance across a range of critical computer vision applications. These include security-sensitive domains like biometric verification, autonomous vehicle perception, and medical image analysis, where robustness is essential to fostering trust between technology and the end-users. This article investigates network robustness requirements crucial in computer vision systems to adapt effectively to dynamic environments influenced by factors such as lighting, weather conditions, and sensor characteristics. We examine the prevalent empirical defenses and robust training employed to enhance vision network robustness against real-world challenges such as distributional shifts, noisy and spatially distorted inputs, and adversarial attacks. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the challenges associated with these defense mechanisms, including network properties and components to guide ablation studies and benchmarking metrics to evaluate network robustness.
Authors:Hao Chen, Fang Qiu, Li An, Douglas Stow, Eve Bohnett, Haitao Lyu, Shuang Tian
Abstract:
Wildlife and human activities are key components of landscape systems. Understanding their spatial distribution is essential for evaluating human wildlife interactions and informing effective conservation planning. Multiperspective monitoring of wildlife and human activities by combining camera traps and drone imagery. Capturing the spatial patterns of their distributions, which allows the identification of the overlap of their activity zones and the assessment of the degree of human wildlife conflict. The study was conducted in Chitwan National Park (CNP), Nepal, and adjacent regions. Images collected by visible and nearinfrared camera traps and thermal infrared drones from February to July 2022 were processed to create training and testing datasets, which were used to build deep learning models to automatic identify wildlife and human activities. Drone collected thermal imagery was used for detecting targets to provide a multiple monitoring perspective. Spatial pattern analysis was performed to identify animal and resident activity hotspots and delineation potential human wildlife conflict zones. Among the deep learning models tested, YOLOv11s achieved the highest performance with a precision of 96.2%, recall of 92.3%, mAP50 of 96.7%, and mAP50 of 81.3%, making it the most effective for detecting objects in camera trap imagery. Drone based thermal imagery, analyzed with an enhanced Faster RCNN model, added a complementary aerial viewpoint for camera trap detections. Spatial pattern analysis identified clear hotspots for both wildlife and human activities and their overlapping patterns within certain areas in the CNP and buffer zones indicating potential conflict. This study reveals human wildlife conflicts within the conserved landscape. Integrating multiperspective monitoring with automated object detection enhances wildlife surveillance and landscape management.
Authors:Dian Ning, Dong Seog Han
Abstract:
In one-stage multi-object detection tasks, various intersection over union (IoU)-based solutions aim at smooth and stable convergence near the targets during training. However, IoU-based losses fail to correctly update the gradient of small objects due to an extremely flat gradient. During the update of multiple objects, the learning of small objects' gradients suffers more because of insufficient gradient updates. Therefore, we propose an inter-class relational loss to efficiently update the gradient of small objects while not sacrificing the learning efficiency of other objects based on the simple fact that an object has a spatial relationship to another object (e.g., a car plate is attached to a car in a similar position). When the predicted car plate's bounding box is not within its car, a loss punishment is added to guide the learning, which is inversely proportional to the overlapped area of the car's and predicted car plate's bounding box. By leveraging the spatial relationship at the inter-class level, the loss guides small object predictions using larger objects and enhances latent information in deeper feature maps. In this paper, we present twofold contributions using license plate detection as a case study: (1) a new small vehicle multi-license plate dataset (SVMLP), featuring diverse real-world scenarios with high-quality annotations; and (2) a novel inter-class relational loss function designed to promote effective detection performance. We highlight the proposed ICR loss penalty can be easily added to existing IoU-based losses and enhance the performance. These contributions improve the standard mean Average Precision (mAP) metric, achieving gains of 10.3% and 1.6% in mAP$^{\text{test}}_{50}$ for YOLOv12-T and UAV-DETR, respectively, without any additional hyperparameter tuning. Code and dataset will be available soon.
Authors:Zhebin Jin, Ligang Dong
Abstract:
Driver fatigue detection is of paramount importance for intelligent transportation systems due to its critical role in mitigating road traffic accidents. While physiological and vehicle dynamics-based methods offer accuracy, they are often intrusive, hardware-dependent, and lack robustness in real-world environments. Vision-based techniques provide a non-intrusive and scalable alternative, but still face challenges such as poor detection of small or occluded objects and limited multi-scale feature modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes YOLO11-CR, a lightweight and efficient object detection model tailored for real-time fatigue detection. YOLO11-CR introduces two key modules: the Convolution-and-Attention Fusion Module (CAFM), which integrates local CNN features with global Transformer-based context to enhance feature expressiveness; and the Rectangular Calibration Module (RCM), which captures horizontal and vertical contextual information to improve spatial localization, particularly for profile faces and small objects like mobile phones. Experiments on the DSM dataset demonstrated that YOLO11-CR achieves a precision of 87.17%, recall of 83.86%, mAP@50 of 88.09%, and mAP@50-95 of 55.93%, outperforming baseline models significantly. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the CAFM and RCM modules in improving both sensitivity and localization accuracy. These results demonstrate that YOLO11-CR offers a practical and high-performing solution for in-vehicle fatigue monitoring, with strong potential for real-world deployment and future enhancements involving temporal modeling, multi-modal data integration, and embedded optimization.
Authors:Md Al Amin, Bikash Kumar Paul
Abstract:
Colon polyps are precursors to colorectal cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Early detection is critical for improving patient outcomes. This study investigates the application of deep learning-based object detection for early polyp identification using colonoscopy images. We utilize the Kvasir-SEG dataset, applying extensive data augmentation and splitting the data into training (80\%), validation (20\% of training), and testing (20\%) sets. Three variants of the YOLOv5 architecture (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l) are evaluated. Experimental results show that YOLOv5l outperforms the other variants, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 85.1\%, with the highest average Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.86. These findings demonstrate that YOLOv5l provides superior detection performance for colon polyp localization, offering a promising tool for enhancing colorectal cancer screening accuracy.
Authors:Miftahul Huda, Arsyiah Azahra, Putri Maulida Chairani, Dimas Rizky Ramadhani, Nabila Azhari, Ade Lailani
Abstract:
Coastal pollution is a pressing global environmental issue, necessitating scalable and automated solutions for monitoring and management. This study investigates the efficacy of the Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR), a state-of-the-art, end-to-end object detection model, for the automated detection and counting of beach litter. A rigorous comparative analysis is conducted between two model variants, RT-DETR-Large (RT-DETR-L) and RT-DETR-Extra-Large (RT-DETR-X), trained on a publicly available dataset of coastal debris. The evaluation reveals that the RT-DETR-X model achieves marginally superior accuracy, with a mean Average Precision at 50\% IoU (mAP@50) of 0.816 and a mAP@50-95 of 0.612, compared to the RT-DETR-L model's 0.810 and 0.606, respectively. However, this minor performance gain is realized at a significant computational cost; the RT-DETR-L model demonstrates a substantially faster inference time of 20.1 ms versus 34.5 ms for the RT-DETR-X. The findings suggest that the RT-DETR-L model offers a more practical and efficient solution for real-time, in-field deployment due to its superior balance of processing speed and detection accuracy. This research provides valuable insights into the application of advanced Transformer-based detectors for environmental conservation, highlighting the critical trade-offs between model complexity and operational viability.
Authors:Emanuel C. Silva, Tatiana T. Schein, Stephanie L. Brião, Guilherme L. M. Costa, Felipe G. Oliveira, Gustavo P. Almeida, Eduardo L. Silva, Sam S. Devincenzi, Karina S. Machado, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr
Abstract:
The severe image degradation in underwater environments impairs object detection models, as traditional image enhancement methods are often not optimized for such downstream tasks. To address this, we propose AquaFeat, a novel, plug-and-play module that performs task-driven feature enhancement. Our approach integrates a multi-scale feature enhancement network trained end-to-end with the detector's loss function, ensuring the enhancement process is explicitly guided to refine features most relevant to the detection task. When integrated with YOLOv8m on challenging underwater datasets, AquaFeat achieves state-of-the-art Precision (0.877) and Recall (0.624), along with competitive mAP scores (mAP@0.5 of 0.677 and mAP@[0.5:0.95] of 0.421). By delivering these accuracy gains while maintaining a practical processing speed of 46.5 FPS, our model provides an effective and computationally efficient solution for real-world applications, such as marine ecosystem monitoring and infrastructure inspection.
Authors:Hao Peng, Hong Sang, Yajing Ma, Ping Qiu, Chao Ji
Abstract:
This paper investigates multi-scale feature approximation and transferable features for object detection from point clouds. Multi-scale features are critical for object detection from point clouds. However, multi-scale feature learning usually involves multiple neighborhood searches and scale-aware layers, which can hinder efforts to achieve lightweight models and may not be conducive to research constrained by limited computational resources. This paper approximates point-based multi-scale features from a single neighborhood based on knowledge distillation. To compensate for the loss of constructive diversity in a single neighborhood, this paper designs a transferable feature embedding mechanism. Specifically, class-aware statistics are employed as transferable features given the small computational cost. In addition, this paper introduces the central weighted intersection over union for localization to alleviate the misalignment brought by the center offset in optimization. Note that the method presented in this paper saves computational costs. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Sami Sadat, Mohammad Irtiza Hossain, Junaid Ahmed Sifat, Suhail Haque Rafi, Md. Waseq Alauddin Alvi, Md. Khalilur Rhaman
Abstract:
A deep learning real-time smoking detection system for CCTV surveillance of fire exit areas is proposed due to critical safety requirements. The dataset contains 8,124 images from 20 different scenarios along with 2,708 raw samples demonstrating low-light areas. We evaluated three advanced object detection models: YOLOv8, YOLOv11, and YOLOv12, followed by development of a custom model derived from YOLOv8 with added structures for challenging surveillance contexts. The proposed model outperformed the others, achieving a recall of 78.90 percent and mAP at 50 of 83.70 percent, delivering optimal object detection across varied environments. Performance evaluation on multiple edge devices using multithreaded operations showed the Jetson Xavier NX processed data at 52 to 97 milliseconds per inference, establishing its suitability for time-sensitive operations. This system offers a robust and adaptable platform for monitoring public safety and enabling automatic regulatory compliance.
Authors:Mingxiao Ma, Shunyao Zhu, Guoliang Kang
Abstract:
Incremental object detection (IOD) aims to continuously expand the capability of a model to detect novel categories while preserving its performance on previously learned ones. When adopting a transformer-based detection model to perform IOD, catastrophic knowledge forgetting may inevitably occur, meaning the detection performance on previously learned categories may severely degenerate. Previous typical methods mainly rely on knowledge distillation (KD) to mitigate the catastrophic knowledge forgetting of transformer-based detection models. Specifically, they utilize Hungarian Matching to build a correspondence between the queries of the last-phase and current-phase detection models and align the classifier and regressor outputs between matched queries to avoid knowledge forgetting. However, we observe that in IOD task, Hungarian Matching is not a good choice. With Hungarian Matching, the query of the current-phase model may match different queries of the last-phase model at different iterations during KD. As a result, the knowledge encoded in each query may be reshaped towards new categories, leading to the forgetting of previously encoded knowledge of old categories. Based on our observations, we propose a new distillation approach named Index-Aligned Query Distillation (IAQD) for transformer-based IOD. Beyond using Hungarian Matching, IAQD establishes a correspondence between queries of the previous and current phase models that have the same index. Moreover, we perform index-aligned distillation only on partial queries which are critical for the detection of previous categories. In this way, IAQD largely preserves the previous semantic and spatial encoding capabilities without interfering with the learning of new categories. Extensive experiments on representative benchmarks demonstrate that IAQD effectively mitigates knowledge forgetting, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Shoaib Ahmmad, Zubayer Ahmed Aditto, Md Mehrab Hossain, Noushin Yeasmin, Shorower Hossain
Abstract:
This paper introduces an advanced AI-driven perception system for autonomous quadcopter navigation in GPS-denied indoor environments. The proposed framework leverages cloud computing to offload computationally intensive tasks and incorporates a custom-designed printed circuit board (PCB) for efficient sensor data acquisition, enabling robust navigation in confined spaces. The system integrates YOLOv11 for object detection, Depth Anything V2 for monocular depth estimation, a PCB equipped with Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and a cloud-based Large Language Model (LLM) for context-aware decision-making. A virtual safety envelope, enforced by calibrated sensor offsets, ensures collision avoidance, while a multithreaded architecture achieves low-latency processing. Enhanced spatial awareness is facilitated by 3D bounding box estimation with Kalman filtering. Experimental results in an indoor testbed demonstrate strong performance, with object detection achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP50) of 0.6, depth estimation Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 7.2 cm, only 16 safety envelope breaches across 42 trials over approximately 11 minutes, and end-to-end system latency below 1 second. This cloud-supported, high-intelligence framework serves as an auxiliary perception and navigation system, complementing state-of-the-art drone autonomy for GPS-denied confined spaces.
Authors:Qi Xiang, Kunsong Shi, Zhigui Lin, Lei He
Abstract:
Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception systems based on multi-sensor feature fusion have become a fundamental cornerstone for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing multi-modal BEV methods commonly suffer from limited input adaptability, constrained modeling capacity, and suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchically decoupled Mixture-of-Experts architecture at the functional module level, termed Computing Brain DEvelopment System Mixture-of-Experts (CBDES MoE). CBDES MoE integrates multiple structurally heterogeneous expert networks with a lightweight Self-Attention Router (SAR) gating mechanism, enabling dynamic expert path selection and sparse, input-aware efficient inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first modular Mixture-of-Experts framework constructed at the functional module granularity within the autonomous driving domain. Extensive evaluations on the real-world nuScenes dataset demonstrate that CBDES MoE consistently outperforms fixed single-expert baselines in 3D object detection. Compared to the strongest single-expert model, CBDES MoE achieves a 1.6-point increase in mAP and a 4.1-point improvement in NDS, demonstrating the effectiveness and practical advantages of the proposed approach.
Authors:Jingwei Peng, Jiehao Chen, Mateo Alejandro Rojas, Meilin Zhang
Abstract:
Complex Visual Question Answering (Complex VQA) tasks, which demand sophisticated multi-modal reasoning and external knowledge integration, present significant challenges for existing large vision-language models (LVLMs) often limited by their reliance on high-level global features. To address this, we propose MV-CoRe (Multimodal Visual-Conceptual Reasoning), a novel model designed to enhance Complex VQA performance through the deep fusion of diverse visual and linguistic information. MV-CoRe meticulously integrates global embeddings from pre-trained Vision Large Models (VLMs) and Language Large Models (LLMs) with fine-grained semantic-aware visual features, including object detection characteristics and scene graph representations. An innovative Multimodal Fusion Transformer then processes and deeply integrates these diverse feature sets, enabling rich cross-modal attention and facilitating complex reasoning. We evaluate MV-CoRe on challenging Complex VQA benchmarks, including GQA, A-OKVQA, and OKVQA, after training on VQAv2. Our experimental results demonstrate that MV-CoRe consistently outperforms established LVLM baselines, achieving an overall accuracy of 77.5% on GQA. Ablation studies confirm the critical contribution of both object and scene graph features, and human evaluations further validate MV-CoRe's superior factual correctness and reasoning depth, underscoring its robust capabilities for deep visual and conceptual understanding.
Authors:Erin Lanus, Daniel Wolodkin, Laura J. Freeman
Abstract:
A common use of machine learning (ML) models is predicting the class of a sample. Object detection is an extension of classification that includes localization of the object via a bounding box within the sample. Classification, and by extension object detection, is typically evaluated by counting a prediction as incorrect if the predicted label does not match the ground truth label. This pass/fail scoring treats all misclassifications as equivalent. In many cases, class labels can be organized into a class taxonomy with a hierarchical structure to either reflect relationships among the data or operator valuation of misclassifications. When such a hierarchical structure exists, hierarchical scoring metrics can return the model performance of a given prediction related to the distance between the prediction and the ground truth label. Such metrics can be viewed as giving partial credit to predictions instead of pass/fail, enabling a finer-grained understanding of the impact of misclassifications. This work develops hierarchical scoring metrics varying in complexity that utilize scoring trees to encode relationships between class labels and produce metrics that reflect distance in the scoring tree. The scoring metrics are demonstrated on an abstract use case with scoring trees that represent three weighting strategies and evaluated by the kind of errors discouraged. Results demonstrate that these metrics capture errors with finer granularity and the scoring trees enable tuning. This work demonstrates an approach to evaluating ML performance that ranks models not only by how many errors are made but by the kind or impact of errors. Python implementations of the scoring metrics will be available in an open-source repository at time of publication.
Authors:Tai Hyoung Rhee, Dong-guw Lee, Ayoung Kim
Abstract:
Thermal infrared imaging exhibits considerable potentials for robotic perception tasks, especially in environments with poor visibility or challenging lighting conditions. However, TIR images typically suffer from heavy non-uniform fixed-pattern noise, complicating tasks such as object detection, localization, and mapping. To address this, we propose a diffusion-based TIR image denoising framework leveraging latent-space representations and wavelet-domain optimization. Utilizing a pretrained stable diffusion model, our method fine-tunes the model via a novel loss function combining latent-space and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) / dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) losses. Additionally, we implement a cascaded refinement stage to enhance fine details, ensuring high-fidelity denoising results. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art denoising methods. Furthermore, our method exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to diverse and challenging real-world TIR datasets, underscoring its effectiveness for practical robotic deployment.
Authors:Mahdi Golizadeh, Nassibeh Golizadeh, Mohammad Ali Keyvanrad, Hossein Shirazi
Abstract:
Object detection has achieved remarkable accuracy through deep learning, yet these improvements often come with increased computational cost, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) provides an effective solution by enabling compact student models to learn from larger teacher models. However, adapting KD to object detection poses unique challenges due to its dual objectives-classification and localization-as well as foreground-background imbalance and multi-scale feature representation. This review introduces a novel architecture-centric taxonomy for KD methods, distinguishing between CNN-based detectors (covering backbone-level, neck-level, head-level, and RPN/RoI-level distillation) and Transformer-based detectors (including query-level, feature-level, and logit-level distillation). We further evaluate representative methods using the MS COCO and PASCAL VOC datasets with mAP@0.5 as performance metric, providing a comparative analysis of their effectiveness. The proposed taxonomy and analysis aim to clarify the evolving landscape of KD in object detection, highlight current challenges, and guide future research toward efficient and scalable detection systems.
Authors:Xingyu Feng, Hebei Gao, Hong Li
Abstract:
We propose Cut-Once-and-LEaRn (COLER), a simple approach for unsupervised instance segmentation and object detection. COLER first uses our developed CutOnce to generate coarse pseudo labels, then enables the detector to learn from these masks. CutOnce applies Normalized Cut only once and does not rely on any clustering methods, but it can generate multiple object masks in an image. We have designed several novel yet simple modules that not only allow CutOnce to fully leverage the object discovery capabilities of self-supervised models, but also free it from reliance on mask post-processing. During training, COLER achieves strong performance without requiring specially designed loss functions for pseudo labels, and its performance is further improved through self-training. COLER is a zero-shot unsupervised model that outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks.We believe our method can help advance the field of unsupervised object localization.
Authors:Mingjie Liu, Hanqing Liu, Chuang Zhu
Abstract:
Accurate object detection under adverse lighting conditions is critical for real-world applications such as autonomous driving. Although neuromorphic event cameras have been introduced to handle these scenarios, adverse lighting often induces distracting reflections from tunnel walls or road surfaces, which frequently lead to false obstacle detections. However, neither RGB nor event data alone is robust enough to address these complexities, and mitigating these issues without additional sensors remains underexplored. To overcome these challenges, we propose leveraging normal maps, directly predicted from monocular RGB images, as robust geometric cues to suppress false positives and enhance detection accuracy. We introduce NRE-Net, a novel multi-modal detection framework that effectively fuses three complementary modalities: monocularly predicted surface normal maps, RGB images, and event streams. To optimize the fusion process, our framework incorporates two key modules: the Adaptive Dual-stream Fusion Module (ADFM), which integrates RGB and normal map features, and the Event-modality Aware Fusion Module (EAFM), which adapts to the high dynamic range characteristics of event data. Extensive evaluations on the DSEC-Det-sub and PKU-DAVIS-SOD datasets demonstrate that NRE-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves mAP50 improvements of 7.9% and 6.1% over frame-based approaches (e.g., YOLOX), while surpassing the fusion-based SFNet by 2.7% on the DSEC-Det-sub dataset and SODFormer by 7.1% on the PKU-DAVIS-SOD dataset.
Authors:Zhuohua Ye, Liming Zhang, Hongru Han
Abstract:
Direct RAW-based object detection offers great promise by utilizing RAW data (unprocessed sensor data), but faces inherent challenges due to its wide dynamic range and linear response, which tends to suppress crucial object details. In particular, existing enhancement methods are almost all performed in the spatial domain, making it difficult to effectively recover these suppressed details from the skewed pixel distribution of RAW images. To address this limitation, we turn to the frequency domain, where features, such as object contours and textures, can be naturally separated based on frequency. In this paper, we propose Space-Frequency Aware RAW Image Object Detection Enhancer (SFAE), a novel framework that synergizes spatial and frequency representations. Our contribution is threefold. The first lies in the ``spatialization" of frequency bands. Different from the traditional paradigm of directly manipulating abstract spectra in deep networks, our method inversely transforms individual frequency bands back into tangible spatial maps, thus preserving direct physical intuition. Then the cross-domain fusion attention module is developed to enable deep multimodal interactions between these maps and the original spatial features. Finally, the framework performs adaptive nonlinear adjustments by predicting and applying different gamma parameters for the two domains.
Authors:Chuanqi Liang, Jie Fu, Miao Yu, Lei Luo
Abstract:
Reliable and real-time detection of road speed bumps and potholes is crucial for anticipatory perception in advanced suspension systems, enabling timely and adaptive damping control. Achieving high accuracy and efficiency on embedded platforms remains challenging due to limited computational resources and the small scale of distant targets. This paper presents SBP-YOLO, a lightweight and high-speed detection framework tailored for bump and pothole recognition. Based on YOLOv11n, the model integrates GhostConv and VoVGSCSPC modules into the backbone and neck to reduce computation while enhancing multi-scale semantic features. To improve small-object detection, a P2-level branch is introduced with a lightweight and efficient detection head LEDH mitigating the added computational overhead without compromising accuracy. A hybrid training strategy combining NWD loss, backbone-level knowledge distillation, and Albumentations-driven augmentation further enhances localization precision and robustness. Experiments show that SBP-YOLO achieves 87.0 percent mAP, outperforming the YOLOv11n baseline by 5.8 percent. After TensorRT FP16 quantization, it runs at 139.5 FPS on Jetson AGX Xavier, delivering a 12.4 percent speedup over the P2-enhanced YOLOv11. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for fast and low-latency road condition perception in embedded suspension control systems.
Authors:Cameron Trotter, Huw Griffiths, Tasnuva Ming Khan, Rowan Whittle
Abstract:
Monitoring benthic biodiversity in Antarctica is vital for understanding ecological change in response to climate-driven pressures. This work is typically performed using high-resolution imagery captured in situ, though manual annotation of such data remains laborious and specialised, impeding large-scale analysis. We present a tailored object detection framework for identifying and classifying Antarctic benthic organisms in high-resolution towed camera imagery, alongside the first public computer vision dataset for benthic biodiversity monitoring in the Weddell Sea. Our approach addresses key challenges associated with marine ecological imagery, including limited annotated data, variable object sizes, and complex seafloor structure. The proposed framework combines resolution-preserving patching, spatial data augmentation, fine-tuning, and postprocessing via Slicing Aided Hyper Inference. We benchmark multiple object detection architectures and demonstrate strong performance in detecting medium and large organisms across 25 fine-grained morphotypes, significantly more than other works in this area. Detection of small and rare taxa remains a challenge, reflecting limitations in current detection architectures. Our framework provides a scalable foundation for future machine-assisted in situ benthic biodiversity monitoring research.
Authors:Beizhang Chen, Jinming Liang, Zheng Xiong, Ming Pan, Xiangbao Meng, Qingshan Lin, Qun Ma, Yingping Zhao
Abstract:
Accurately detecting rice flowering time is crucial for timely pollination in hybrid rice seed production. This not only enhances pollination efficiency but also ensures higher yields. However, due to the complexity of field environments and the characteristics of rice spikelets, such as their small size and short flowering period, automated and precise recognition remains challenging. To address this, this study proposes a rice spikelet flowering recognition method based on an improved YOLOv8 object detection model. First, a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) replaces the original PANet structure to enhance feature fusion and improve multi-scale feature utilization. Second, to boost small object detection, a p2 small-object detection head is added, using finer feature mapping to reduce feature loss commonly seen in detecting small targets. Given the lack of publicly available datasets for rice spikelet flowering in field conditions, a high-resolution RGB camera and data augmentation techniques are used to construct a dedicated dataset, providing reliable support for model training and testing. Experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8s-p2 model achieves an mAP@0.5 of 65.9%, precision of 67.6%, recall of 61.5%, and F1-score of 64.41%, representing improvements of 3.10%, 8.40%, 10.80%, and 9.79%, respectively, over the baseline YOLOv8. The model also runs at 69 f/s on the test set, meeting practical application requirements. Overall, the improved YOLOv8s-p2 offers high accuracy and speed, providing an effective solution for automated monitoring in hybrid rice seed production.
Authors:Rishav Kumar, D. Santhosh Reddy, P. Rajalakshmi
Abstract:
We introduce DriveIndia, a large-scale object detection dataset purpose-built to capture the complexity and unpredictability of Indian traffic environments. The dataset contains 66,986 high-resolution images annotated in YOLO format across 24 traffic-relevant object categories, encompassing diverse conditions such as varied weather (fog, rain), illumination changes, heterogeneous road infrastructure, and dense, mixed traffic patterns and collected over 120+ hours and covering 3,400+ kilometers across urban, rural, and highway routes. DriveIndia offers a comprehensive benchmark for real-world autonomous driving challenges. We provide baseline results using state-of-the-art YOLO family models, with the top-performing variant achieving a mAP50 of 78.7%. Designed to support research in robust, generalizable object detection under uncertain road conditions, DriveIndia will be publicly available via the TiHAN-IIT Hyderabad dataset repository https://tihan.iith.ac.in/TiAND.html (Terrestrial Datasets -> Camera Dataset).
Authors:Saraa Al-Saddik, Manna Elizabeth Philip, Ali Haidar
Abstract:
Accurate identification of vehicle attributes such as make, colour, and shape is critical for law enforcement and intelligence applications. This study evaluates the effectiveness of three state-of-the-art deep learning approaches YOLO-v11, YOLO-World, and YOLO-Classification on a real-world vehicle image dataset. This dataset was collected under challenging and unconstrained conditions by NSW Police Highway Patrol Vehicles. A multi-view inference (MVI) approach was deployed to enhance the performance of the models' predictions. To conduct the analyses, datasets with 100,000 plus images were created for each of the three metadata prediction tasks, specifically make, shape and colour. The models were tested on a separate dataset with 29,937 images belonging to 1809 number plates. Different sets of experiments have been investigated by varying the models sizes. A classification accuracy of 93.70%, 82.86%, 85.19%, and 94.86% was achieved with the best performing make, shape, colour, and colour-binary models respectively. It was concluded that there is a need to use MVI to get usable models within such complex real-world datasets. Our findings indicated that the object detection models YOLO-v11 and YOLO-World outperformed classification-only models in make and shape extraction. Moreover, smaller YOLO variants perform comparably to larger counterparts, offering substantial efficiency benefits for real-time predictions. This work provides a robust baseline for extracting vehicle metadata in real-world scenarios. Such models can be used in filtering and sorting user queries, minimising the time required to search large vehicle images datasets.
Authors:Maharshi Shastri, Ujjval Shrivastav
Abstract:
The increasing demand for fast and cost effective last mile delivery solutions has catalyzed significant advancements in drone based logistics. This research describes the development of an AI integrated drone delivery system, focusing on route optimization, object detection, secure package handling, and real time tracking. The proposed system leverages YOLOv4 Tiny for object detection, the NEO 6M GPS module for navigation, and the A7670 SIM module for real time communication. A comparative analysis of lightweight AI models and hardware components is conducted to determine the optimal configuration for real time UAV based delivery. Key challenges including battery efficiency, regulatory compliance, and security considerations are addressed through the integration of machine learning techniques, IoT devices, and encryption protocols. Preliminary studies demonstrate improvement in delivery time compared to conventional ground based logistics, along with high accuracy recipient authentication through facial recognition. The study also discusses ethical implications and societal acceptance of drone deliveries, ensuring compliance with FAA, EASA and DGCA regulatory standards. Note: This paper presents the architecture, design, and preliminary simulation results of the proposed system. Experimental results, simulation benchmarks, and deployment statistics are currently being acquired. A comprehensive analysis will be included in the extended version of this work.
Authors:Fatemeh Hasanzadeh Fard, Sanaz Hasanzadeh Fard, Mehdi Jonoobi
Abstract:
The wood processing industry, particularly in facilities such as sawmills and MDF production lines, requires accurate and efficient identification of species and thickness of the wood. Although traditional methods rely heavily on expert human labor, they are slow, inconsistent, and prone to error, especially when processing large volumes. This study focuses on practical and cost-effective machine learning frameworks that automate the estimation of timber log diameter using standard RGB images captured under real-world working conditions. We employ the YOLOv5 object detection algorithm, fine-tuned on a public dataset (TimberSeg 1.0), to detect individual timber logs and estimate thickness through bounding-box dimensions. Unlike previous methods that require expensive sensors or controlled environments, this model is trained on images taken in typical industrial sheds during timber delivery. Experimental results show that the model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.64, demonstrating reliable log detection even with modest computing resources. This lightweight, scalable solution holds promise for practical integration into existing workflows, including on-site inventory management and preliminary sorting, particularly in small and medium-sized operations.
Authors:Viktor Muryn, Marta Sumyk, Mariya Hirna, Sofiya Garkot, Maksym Shamrai
Abstract:
Desktop accessibility metadata enables AI agents to interpret screens and supports users who depend on tools like screen readers. Yet, many applications remain largely inaccessible due to incomplete or missing metadata provided by developers - our investigation shows that only 33% of applications on macOS offer full accessibility support. While recent work on structured screen representation has primarily addressed specific challenges, such as UI element detection or captioning, none has attempted to capture the full complexity of desktop interfaces by replicating their entire hierarchical structure. To bridge this gap, we introduce Screen2AX, the first framework to automatically create real-time, tree-structured accessibility metadata from a single screenshot. Our method uses vision-language and object detection models to detect, describe, and organize UI elements hierarchically, mirroring macOS's system-level accessibility structure. To tackle the limited availability of data for macOS desktop applications, we compiled and publicly released three datasets encompassing 112 macOS applications, each annotated for UI element detection, grouping, and hierarchical accessibility metadata alongside corresponding screenshots. Screen2AX accurately infers hierarchy trees, achieving a 77% F1 score in reconstructing a complete accessibility tree. Crucially, these hierarchy trees improve the ability of autonomous agents to interpret and interact with complex desktop interfaces. We introduce Screen2AX-Task, a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating autonomous agent task execution in macOS desktop environments. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate that Screen2AX delivers a 2.2x performance improvement over native accessibility representations and surpasses the state-of-the-art OmniParser V2 system on the ScreenSpot benchmark.
Authors:Seunghyeon Kim, Kyeongryeol Go
Abstract:
Fisheye cameras introduce significant distortion and pose unique challenges to object detection models trained on conventional datasets. In this work, we propose a data-centric pipeline that systematically improves detection performance by focusing on the key question of identifying the blind spots of the model. Through detailed error analysis, we identify critical edge-cases such as confusing class pairs, peripheral distortions, and underrepresented contexts. Then we directly address them through edge-case synthesis. We fine-tuned an image generative model and guided it with carefully crafted prompts to produce images that replicate real-world failure modes. These synthetic images are pseudo-labeled using a high-quality detector and integrated into training. Our approach results in consistent performance gains, highlighting how deeply understanding data and selectively fixing its weaknesses can be impactful in specialized domains like fisheye object detection.
Authors:Jiayu, Liu
Abstract:
This study aims to develop a deep learning system for an accessibility device for the deaf or hearing impaired. The device will accurately localize and identify sound sources in real time. This study will fill an important gap in current research by leveraging machine learning techniques to target the underprivileged community. The system includes three main components. 1. JerryNet: A custom designed CNN architecture that determines the direction of arrival (DoA) for nine possible directions. 2. Audio Classification: This model is based on fine-tuning the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model to identify the exact sound classes only based on audio. 3. Multimodal integration model: This is an accurate sound localization model that combines audio, visual, and text data to locate the exact sound sources in the images. The part consists of two modules, one object detection using Yolov9 to generate all the bounding boxes of the objects, and an audio visual localization model to identify the optimal bounding box using complete Intersection over Union (CIoU). The hardware consists of a four-microphone rectangular formation and a camera mounted on glasses with a wristband for displaying necessary information like direction. On a custom collected data set, JerryNet achieved a precision of 91. 1% for the sound direction, outperforming all the baseline models. The CLAP model achieved 98.5% and 95% accuracy on custom and AudioSet datasets, respectively. The audio-visual localization model within component 3 yielded a cIoU of 0.892 and an AUC of 0.658, surpassing other similar models. There are many future potentials to this study, paving the way to creating a new generation of accessibility devices.
Authors:Ekaterina Stansfield, Jennifer A. Mitterer, Abdulrahman Altahhan
Abstract:
Radiographic images are a cornerstone of medical diagnostics in orthopaedics, with anatomical landmark detection serving as a crucial intermediate step for information extraction. General-purpose foundational segmentation models, such as SAM (Segment Anything Model), do not support landmark segmentation out of the box and require prompts to function. However, in medical imaging, the prompts for landmarks are highly specific. Since SAM has not been trained to recognize such landmarks, it cannot generate accurate landmark segmentations for diagnostic purposes. Even MedSAM, a medically adapted variant of SAM, has been trained to identify larger anatomical structures, such as organs and their parts, and lacks the fine-grained precision required for orthopaedic pelvic landmarks. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging another general-purpose, non-foundational model: YOLO. YOLO excels in object detection and can provide bounding boxes that serve as input prompts for SAM. While YOLO is efficient at detection, it is significantly outperformed by SAM in segmenting complex structures. In combination, these two models form a reliable pipeline capable of segmenting not only a small pilot set of eight anatomical landmarks but also an expanded set of 72 landmarks and 16 regions with complex outlines, such as the femoral cortical bone and the pelvic inlet. By using YOLO-generated bounding boxes to guide SAM, we trained the hybrid model to accurately segment orthopaedic pelvic radiographs. Our results show that the proposed combination of YOLO and SAM yields excellent performance in detecting anatomical landmarks and intricate outlines in orthopaedic pelvic radiographs.
Authors:Yujie Zhang, Sabine Struckmeyer, Andreas Kolb, Sven Reichardt
Abstract:
Observer bias and inconsistencies in traditional plant phenotyping methods limit the accuracy and reproducibility of fine-grained plant analysis. To overcome these challenges, we developed TomatoMAP, a comprehensive dataset for Solanum lycopersicum using an Internet of Things (IoT) based imaging system with standardized data acquisition protocols. Our dataset contains 64,464 RGB images that capture 12 different plant poses from four camera elevation angles. Each image includes manually annotated bounding boxes for seven regions of interest (ROIs), including leaves, panicle, batch of flowers, batch of fruits, axillary shoot, shoot and whole plant area, along with 50 fine-grained growth stage classifications based on the BBCH scale. Additionally, we provide 3,616 high-resolution image subset with pixel-wise semantic and instance segmentation annotations for fine-grained phenotyping. We validated our dataset using a cascading model deep learning framework combining MobileNetv3 for classification, YOLOv11 for object detection, and MaskRCNN for segmentation. Through AI vs. Human analysis involving five domain experts, we demonstrate that the models trained on our dataset achieve accuracy and speed comparable to the experts. Cohen's Kappa and inter-rater agreement heatmap confirm the reliability of automated fine-grained phenotyping using our approach.
Authors:Harshal Nandigramwar, Syed Qutub, Kay-Ulrich Scholl
Abstract:
As AI systems become increasingly capable and ubiquitous, ensuring the safety of these systems is critical. However, existing safety tools often target different aspects of model safety and cannot provide full assurance in isolation, highlighting a need for integrated and composite methodologies. This paper introduces BlueGlass, a framework designed to facilitate composite AI safety workflows by providing a unified infrastructure enabling the integration and composition of diverse safety tools that operate across model internals and outputs. Furthermore, to demonstrate the utility of this framework, we present three safety-oriented analyses on vision-language models for the task of object detection: (1) distributional evaluation, revealing performance trade-offs and potential failure modes across distributions; (2) probe-based analysis of layer dynamics highlighting shared hierarchical learning via phase transition; and (3) sparse autoencoders identifying interpretable concepts. More broadly, this work contributes foundational infrastructure and findings for building more robust and reliable AI systems.
Authors:Jareen Anjom, Rashik Iram Chowdhury, Tarbia Hasan, Md. Ishan Arefin Hossain
Abstract:
Visually impaired people face significant challenges in their day-to-day commutes in the urban cities of Bangladesh due to the vast number of obstructions on every path. With many injuries taking place through road accidents on a daily basis, it is paramount for a system to be developed that can alert the visually impaired of objects at close distance beforehand. To overcome this issue, a novel alert system is proposed in this research to assist the visually impaired in commuting through these busy streets without colliding with any objects. The proposed system can alert the individual to objects that are present at a close distance. It utilizes transfer learning to train models for depth estimation and object detection, and combines both models to introduce a novel system. The models are optimized through the utilization of quantization techniques to make them lightweight and efficient, allowing them to be easily deployed on embedded systems. The proposed solution achieved a lightweight real-time depth estimation and object detection model with an mAP50 of 0.801.
Authors:Johannes Merz, Lucien Fostier
Abstract:
Visual effects (VFX) production often struggles with slow, resource-intensive mask generation. This paper presents an automated video segmentation pipeline that creates temporally consistent instance masks. It employs machine learning for: (1) flexible object detection via text prompts, (2) refined per-frame image segmentation and (3) robust video tracking to ensure temporal stability. Deployed using containerization and leveraging a structured output format, the pipeline was quickly adopted by our artists. It significantly reduces manual effort, speeds up the creation of preliminary composites, and provides comprehensive segmentation data, thereby enhancing overall VFX production efficiency.
Authors:Sangbum Choi, Kyeongryeol Go, Taewoong Jang
Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized AI, yet they struggle with zero-shot deployment in real-world industrial settings due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific datasets. To bridge this gap, Superb AI introduces ZERO, an industry-ready vision foundation model that leverages multi-modal prompting (textual and visual) for generalization without retraining. Trained on a compact yet representative 0.9 million annotated samples from a proprietary billion-scale industrial dataset, ZERO demonstrates competitive performance on academic benchmarks like LVIS-Val and significantly outperforms existing models across 37 diverse industrial datasets. Furthermore, ZERO achieved 2nd place in the CVPR 2025 Object Instance Detection Challenge and 4th place in the Foundational Few-shot Object Detection Challenge, highlighting its practical deployability and generalizability with minimal adaptation and limited data. To the best of our knowledge, ZERO is the first vision foundation model explicitly built for domain-specific, zero-shot industrial applications.
Authors:Fereshteh Baradaran, Mohsen Raji, Azadeh Baradaran, Arezoo Baradaran, Reihaneh Akbarifard
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated superior performance over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in various vision-related tasks such as classification, object detection, and segmentation due to their use of self-attention mechanisms. As ViTs become more popular in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving, ensuring their correct functionality becomes essential, especially in the presence of bit-flip faults in their parameters stored in memory. In this paper, a fault tolerance technique is introduced to protect ViT parameters against bit-flip faults with zero memory overhead. Since the least significant bits of parameters are not critical for model accuracy, replacing the LSB with a parity bit provides an error detection mechanism without imposing any overhead on the model. When faults are detected, affected parameters are masked by zeroing out, as most parameters in ViT models are near zero, effectively preventing accuracy degradation. This approach enhances reliability across ViT models, improving the robustness of parameters to bit-flips by up to three orders of magnitude, making it an effective zero-overhead solution for fault tolerance in critical applications.
Authors:Radouane Bouchekir, Michell Guzman Cancimance
Abstract:
Ensuring the runtime safety of autonomous systems remains challenging due to deep learning components' inherent uncertainty and their sensitivity to environmental changes. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of traditional uncertainty quantification by explicitly incorporating environmental conditions using risk-based causal analysis. We leverage Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) and fault tree modeling to identify critical operational conditions affecting system functionality. These conditions, together with uncertainties from the data and model, are integrated into a unified Bayesian Network (BN). At runtime, this BN is instantiated using real-time environmental observations to infer a probabilistic distribution over the safety estimation. This distribution enables the computation of both expected performance and its associated variance, providing a dynamic and context-aware measure of uncertainty. We demonstrate our approach through a case study of the Object Detection (OD) component in an Automated Valet Parking (AVP).
Authors:Brandon Trabucco, Qasim Wani, Benjamin Pikus, Vasu Sharma
Abstract:
Learning robust object detectors from only a handful of images is a critical challenge in industrial vision systems, where collecting high quality training data can take months. Synthetic data has emerged as a key solution for data efficient visual inspection and pick and place robotics. Current pipelines rely on 3D engines such as Blender or Unreal, which offer fine control but still require weeks to render a small dataset, and the resulting images often suffer from a large gap between simulation and reality. Diffusion models promise a step change because they can generate high quality images in minutes, yet precise control, especially in low data regimes, remains difficult. Although many adapters now extend diffusion beyond plain text prompts, the effect of different conditioning schemes on synthetic data quality is poorly understood. We study eighty diverse visual concepts drawn from four standard object detection benchmarks and compare two conditioning strategies: prompt based and layout based. When the set of conditioning cues is narrow, prompt conditioning yields higher quality synthetic data; as diversity grows, layout conditioning becomes superior. When layout cues match the full training distribution, synthetic data raises mean average precision by an average of thirty four percent and by as much as one hundred seventy seven percent compared with using real data alone.
Authors:Hongxing Peng, Lide Chen, Hui Zhu, Yan Chen
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Object Detection (UAV-OD) faces substantial challenges, including small target sizes, high-density distributions, and cluttered backgrounds in UAV imagery. Current algorithms often depend on hand-crafted components like anchor boxes, which demand fine-tuning and exhibit limited generalization, and Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), which is threshold-sensitive and prone to misclassifying dense objects. These generic architectures thus struggle to adapt to aerial imaging characteristics, resulting in performance limitations. Moreover, emerging end-to-end frameworks have yet to effectively mitigate these aerial-specific challenges.To address these issues, we propose HEGS-DETR, a comprehensively enhanced, real-time Detection Transformer framework tailored for UAVs. First, we introduce the High-Frequency Enhanced Semantics Network (HFESNet) as a novel backbone. HFESNet preserves critical high-frequency spatial details to extract robust semantic features, thereby improving discriminative capability for small and occluded targets in complex backgrounds. Second, our Efficient Small Object Pyramid (ESOP) strategy strategically fuses high-resolution feature maps with minimal computational overhead, significantly boosting small object detection. Finally, the proposed Selective Query Recollection (SQR) and Geometry-Aware Positional Encoding (GAPE) modules enhance the detector's decoder stability and localization accuracy, effectively optimizing bounding boxes and providing explicit spatial priors for dense scenes. Experiments on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate that HEGS-DETR achieves a 5.1% AP50 and 3.8% AP increase over the baseline, while maintaining real-time speed and reducing parameter count by 4M.
Authors:Bosubabu Sambana, Hillary Sunday Nnadi, Mohd Anas Wajid, Nwosu Ogochukwu Fidelia, Claudia Camacho-Zuñiga, Henry Dozie Ajuzie, Edeh Michael Onyema
Abstract:
Plant diseases pose significant challenges to farmers and the agricultural sector at large. However, early detection of plant diseases is crucial to mitigating their effects and preventing widespread damage, as outbreaks can severely impact the productivity and quality of crops. With advancements in technology, there are increasing opportunities for automating the monitoring and detection of disease outbreaks in plants. This study proposed a system designed to identify and monitor plant diseases using a transfer learning approach. Specifically, the study utilizes YOLOv7 and YOLOv8, two state-ofthe-art models in the field of object detection. By fine-tuning these models on a dataset of plant leaf images, the system is able to accurately detect the presence of Bacteria, Fungi and Viral diseases such as Powdery Mildew, Angular Leaf Spot, Early blight and Tomato mosaic virus. The model's performance was evaluated using several metrics, including mean Average Precision (mAP), F1-score, Precision, and Recall, yielding values of 91.05, 89.40, 91.22, and 87.66, respectively. The result demonstrates the superior effectiveness and efficiency of YOLOv8 compared to other object detection methods, highlighting its potential for use in modern agricultural practices. The approach provides a scalable, automated solution for early any plant disease detection, contributing to enhanced crop yield, reduced reliance on manual monitoring, and supporting sustainable agricultural practices.
Authors:Menna Taha, Aya Ahmed, Mohammed Karmoose, Yasser Gadallah
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) use object detection models to recognize their surroundings and make driving decisions accordingly. Conventional object detection approaches classify objects into known classes, which limits the AV's ability to detect and appropriately respond to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) objects. This problem is a significant safety concern since the AV may fail to detect objects or misclassify them, which can potentially lead to hazardous situations such as accidents. Consequently, we propose a novel object detection approach that shifts the emphasis from conventional class-based classification to object harmfulness determination. Instead of object detection by their specific class, our method identifies them as either 'harmful' or 'harmless' based on whether they pose a danger to the AV. This is done based on the object position relative to the AV and its trajectory. With this metric, our model can effectively detect previously unseen objects to enable the AV to make safer real-time decisions. Our results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively detects OOD objects, evaluates their harmfulness, and classifies them accordingly, thus enhancing the AV decision-making effectiveness in dynamic environments.
Authors:Cyrus Addy, Ajay Kumar Gurumadaiah, Yixiang Gao, Kwame Awuah-Offei
Abstract:
Underground mining operations face significant safety challenges that make emergency response capabilities crucial. While robots have shown promise in assisting with search and rescue operations, their effectiveness depends on reliable miner detection capabilities. Deep learning algorithms offer potential solutions for automated miner detection, but require comprehensive training datasets, which are currently lacking for underground mining environments. This paper presents a novel thermal imaging dataset specifically designed to enable the development and validation of miner detection systems for potential emergency applications. We systematically captured thermal imagery of various mining activities and scenarios to create a robust foundation for detection algorithms. To establish baseline performance metrics, we evaluated several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms including YOLOv8, YOLOv10, YOLO11, and RT-DETR on our dataset. While not exhaustive of all possible emergency situations, this dataset serves as a crucial first step toward developing reliable thermal-based miner detection systems that could eventually be deployed in real emergency scenarios. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using thermal imaging for miner detection and establishes a foundation for future research in this critical safety application.
Authors:Lin Hong, Xin Wang, Yihao Li, Xia Wang
Abstract:
Inspired by the biological visual system that selectively allocates attention to efficiently identify salient objects or regions, underwater salient instance segmentation (USIS) aims to jointly address the problems of where to look (saliency prediction) and what is there (instance segmentation) in underwater scenarios. However, USIS remains an underexplored challenge due to the inaccessibility and dynamic nature of underwater environments, as well as the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce USIS16K, a large-scale dataset comprising 16,151 high-resolution underwater images collected from diverse environmental settings and covering 158 categories of underwater objects. Each image is annotated with high-quality instance-level salient object masks, representing a significant advance in terms of diversity, complexity, and scalability. Furthermore, we provide benchmark evaluations on underwater object detection and USIS tasks using USIS16K. To facilitate future research in this domain, the dataset and benchmark models are publicly available.
Authors:Ammar K Al Mhdawi, Nonso Nnamoko, Safanah Mudheher Raafat, M. K. S. Al-Mhdawi, Amjad J Humaidi
Abstract:
We present an enhanced YOLOv8 real time vehicle detection and classification framework, for estimating carbon emissions in urban environments. The system enhances YOLOv8 architecture to detect, segment, and track vehicles from live traffic video streams. Once a vehicle is localized, a dedicated deep learning-based identification module is employed to recognize license plates and classify vehicle types. Since YOLOv8 lacks the built-in capacity for fine grained recognition tasks such as reading license plates or determining vehicle attributes beyond class labels, our framework incorporates a hybrid pipeline where each detected vehicle is tracked and its bounding box is cropped and passed to a deep Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module. This OCR system, composed of multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) layers, is trained specifically for character-level detection and license plate decoding under varied conditions such as motion blur, occlusion, and diverse font styles. Additionally, the recognized plate information is validated using a real time API that cross references with an external vehicle registration database to ensure accurate classification and emission estimation. This multi-stage approach enables precise, automated calculation of per vehicle carbon emissions. Extensive evaluation was conducted using a diverse vehicle dataset enriched with segmentation masks and annotated license plates. The YOLOv8 detector achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of approximately 71% for bounding boxes and 70% for segmentation masks. Character level OCR accuracy reached up to 99% with the best performing CNN model. These results affirm the feasibility of combining real time object detection with deep OCR for practical deployment in smart transportation systems, offering a scalable solution for automated, vehicle specific carbon emission monitoring.
Authors:Zhongyuan Li, Honggang Gou, Ping Li, Jiaotong Guo, Mao Ye
Abstract:
Precise sensor calibration is critical for autonomous vehicles as a prerequisite for perception algorithms to function properly. Rotation error of one degree can translate to position error of meters in target object detection at large distance, leading to improper reaction of the system or even safety related issues. Many methods for multi-sensor calibration have been proposed. However, there are very few work that comprehensively consider the challenges of the calibration procedure when applied to factory manufacturing pipeline or after-sales service scenarios. In this work, we introduce a fully automatic LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration algorithm based on targets that is fast, easy to deploy and robust to sensor noises such as missing data. The core of the method include: (1) an automatic multi-stage LiDAR board detection pipeline using only geometry information with no specific material requirement; (2) a fast coarse extrinsic parameter search mechanism that is robust to initial extrinsic errors; (3) a direct optimization algorithm that is robust to sensor noises. We validate the effectiveness of our methods through experiments on data captured in real world scenarios.
Authors:Li Tang, Peter A. Torrione, Cihat Eldeniz, Leslie M. Collins
Abstract:
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) provides a promising technology for accurate subsurface object detection. In particular, it has shown promise for detecting landmines with low metal content. However, the ground bounce (GB) that is present in GPR data, which is caused by the dielectric discontinuity between soil and air, is a major source of interference and degrades landmine detection performance. To mitigate this interference, GB tracking algorithms formulated using both a Kalman filter (KF) and a particle filter (PF) framework are proposed. In particular, the location of the GB in the radar signal is modeled as the hidden state in a stochastic system for the PF approach. The observations are the 2D radar images, which arrive scan by scan along the down-track direction. An initial training stage sets parameters automatically to accommodate different ground and weather conditions. The features associated with the GB description are updated adaptively with the arrival of new data. The prior distribution for a given location is predicted by propagating information from two adjacent channels/scans, which ensures that the overall GB surface remains smooth. The proposed algorithms are verified in experiments utilizing real data, and their performances are compared with other GB tracking approaches. We demonstrate that improved GB tracking contributes to improved performance for the landmine detection problem.
Authors:Qi-Ying Sun, Wan-Lei Zhao, Yi-Bo Miao, Chong-Wah Ngo
Abstract:
Despite the great success of the deep features in content-based image retrieval, the visual instance search remains challenging due to the lack of effective instance level feature representation. Supervised or weakly supervised object detection methods are not among the options due to their poor performance on the unknown object categories. In this paper, based on the feature set output from self-supervised ViT, the instance level region discovery is modeled as detecting the compact feature subsets in a hierarchical fashion. The hierarchical decomposition results in a hierarchy of feature subsets. The non-leaf nodes and leaf nodes on the hierarchy correspond to the various instance regions in an image of different semantic scales. The hierarchical decomposition well addresses the problem of object embedding and occlusions, which are widely observed in the real scenarios. The features derived from the nodes on the hierarchy make up a comprehensive representation for the latent instances in the image. Our instance-level descriptor remains effective on both the known and unknown object categories. Empirical studies on three instance search benchmarks show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods considerably.
Authors:Liu Zongzhen, Luo Hui, Wang Zhixing, Wei Yuxing, Zuo Haorui, Zhang Jianlin
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection plays a vital role in applications such as environmental monitoring and urban security. To improve robustness, recent studies have explored multimodal detection by fusing visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) imagery. However, due to UAV platform motion and asynchronous imaging, spatial misalignment frequently occurs between modalities, leading to weak alignment. This introduces two major challenges: semantic inconsistency at corresponding spatial locations and modality conflict during feature fusion. Existing methods often address these issues in isolation, limiting their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Cross-modal Offset-guided Dynamic Alignment and Fusion (CoDAF), a unified framework that jointly tackles both challenges in weakly aligned UAV-based object detection. CoDAF comprises two novel modules: the Offset-guided Semantic Alignment (OSA), which estimates attention-based spatial offsets and uses deformable convolution guided by a shared semantic space to align features more precisely; and the Dynamic Attention-guided Fusion Module (DAFM), which adaptively balances modality contributions through gating and refines fused features via spatial-channel dual attention. By integrating alignment and fusion in a unified design, CoDAF enables robust UAV object detection. Experiments on standard benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach, with CoDAF achieving a mAP of 78.6% on the DroneVehicle dataset.
Authors:Varun Mannam, Zhenyu Shi
Abstract:
Accurate video annotation plays a vital role in modern retail applications, including customer behavior analysis, product interaction detection, and in-store activity recognition. However, conventional annotation methods heavily rely on time-consuming manual labeling by human annotators, introducing non-robust frame selection and increasing operational costs. To address these challenges in the retail domain, we propose a deep learning-based approach that automates key-frame identification in retail videos and provides automatic annotations of products and customers. Our method leverages deep neural networks to learn discriminative features by embedding video frames and incorporating object detection-based techniques tailored for retail environments. Experimental results showcase the superiority of our approach over traditional methods, achieving accuracy comparable to human annotator labeling while enhancing the overall efficiency of retail video annotation. Remarkably, our approach leads to an average of 2 times cost savings in video annotation. By allowing human annotators to verify/adjust less than 5% of detected frames in the video dataset, while automating the annotation process for the remaining frames without reducing annotation quality, retailers can significantly reduce operational costs. The automation of key-frame detection enables substantial time and effort savings in retail video labeling tasks, proving highly valuable for diverse retail applications such as shopper journey analysis, product interaction detection, and in-store security monitoring.
Authors:Kiet Dang Vu, Trung Thai Tran, Duc Dung Nguyen
Abstract:
Precisely localizing 3D objects from a single image constitutes a central challenge in monocular 3D detection. While DETR-like architectures offer a powerful paradigm, their direct application in this domain encounters inherent limitations, preventing optimal performance. Our work addresses these challenges by introducing MonoVQD, a novel framework designed to fundamentally advance DETR-based monocular 3D detection. We propose three main contributions. First, we propose the Mask Separated Self-Attention mechanism that enables the integration of the denoising process into a DETR architecture. This improves the stability of Hungarian matching to achieve a consistent optimization objective. Second, we present the Variational Query Denoising technique to address the gradient vanishing problem of conventional denoising methods, which severely restricts the efficiency of the denoising process. This explicitly introduces stochastic properties to mitigate this fundamental limitation and unlock substantial performance gains. Finally, we introduce a sophisticated self-distillation strategy, leveraging insights from later decoder layers to synergistically improve query quality in earlier layers, thereby amplifying the iterative refinement process. Rigorous experimentation demonstrates that MonoVQD achieves superior performance on the challenging KITTI monocular benchmark. Highlighting its broad applicability, MonoVQD's core components seamlessly integrate into other architectures, delivering significant performance gains even in multi-view 3D detection scenarios on the nuScenes dataset and underscoring its robust generalization capabilities.
Authors:Farha Abdul Wasay, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, Hania Ghouse
Abstract:
The convergence of robotics and virtual reality (VR) has enabled safer and more efficient workflows in high-risk laboratory settings, particularly virology labs. As biohazard complexity increases, minimizing direct human exposure while maintaining precision becomes essential. We propose GAMORA (Gesture Articulated Meta Operative Robotic Arm), a novel VR-guided robotic system that enables remote execution of hazardous tasks using natural hand gestures. Unlike existing scripted automation or traditional teleoperation, GAMORA integrates the Oculus Quest 2, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and Robot Operating System (ROS) to provide real-time immersive control, digital twin simulation, and inverse kinematics-based articulation. The system supports VR-based training and simulation while executing precision tasks in physical environments via a 3D-printed robotic arm. Inverse kinematics ensure accurate manipulation for delicate operations such as specimen handling and pipetting. The pipeline includes Unity-based 3D environment construction, real-time motion planning, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. GAMORA achieved a mean positional discrepancy of 2.2 mm (improved from 4 mm), pipetting accuracy within 0.2 mL, and repeatability of 1.2 mm across 50 trials. Integrated object detection via YOLOv8 enhances spatial awareness, while energy-efficient operation (50% reduced power output) ensures sustainable deployment. The system's digital-physical feedback loop enables safe, precise, and repeatable automation of high-risk lab tasks. GAMORA offers a scalable, immersive solution for robotic control and biosafety in biomedical research environments.
Authors:Deepak Ghimire, Joonwhoan Lee
Abstract:
In general, background subtraction-based methods are used to detect moving objects in visual tracking applications. In this paper, we employed a background subtraction-based scheme to detect the temporarily stationary objects. We proposed two schemes for stationary object detection, and we compare those in terms of detection performance and computational complexity. In the first approach, we used a single background, and in the second approach, we used dual backgrounds, generated with different learning rates, in order to detect temporarily stopped objects. Finally, we used normalized cross correlation (NCC) based image comparison to monitor and track the detected stationary object in a video scene. The proposed method is robust with partial occlusion, short-time fully occlusion, and illumination changes, and it can operate in real time.
Authors:Divya Swetha K, Ziaul Haque Choudhury, Hemanta Kumar Bhuyan, Biswajit Brahma, Nilayam Kumar Kamila
Abstract:
In this study, proposes a method for improved object detection from the low-resolution images by integrating Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks (ESRGAN) and Faster Region-Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN). ESRGAN enhances low-quality images, restoring details and improving clarity, while Faster R-CNN performs accurate object detection on the enhanced images. The combination of these techniques ensures better detection performance, even with poor-quality inputs, offering an effective solution for applications where image resolution is in consistent. ESRGAN is employed as a pre-processing step to enhance the low-resolution input image, effectively restoring lost details and improving overall image quality. Subsequently, the enhanced image is fed into the Faster R-CNN model for accurate object detection and localization. Experimental results demonstrate that this integrated approach yields superior performance compared to traditional methods applied directly to low-resolution images. The proposed framework provides a promising solution for applications where image quality is variable or limited, enabling more robust and reliable object detection in challenging scenarios. It achieves a balance between improved image quality and efficient object detection
Authors:Tao Liu, Zhenchao Cui
Abstract:
Tiny object detection (TOD) reveals a fundamental flaw in feature pyramid networks: high-level features (P5-P6) frequently receive zero positive anchors under standard label assignment protocols, leaving their semantic representations untrained due to exclusion from loss computation. This creates dual deficiencies: (1) Stranded high-level features become semantic dead-ends without gradient updates, while (2) low-level features lack essential semantic context for robust classification. We propose E-FPN-BS that systematically converts wasted high-level semantics into low-level feature enhancements. To address these issues, we propose E-FPN-BS, a novel architecture integrating multi-scale feature enhancement and adaptive optimization. First, our Context Enhancement Module(CEM) employs dual-branch processing to align and compress high-level features for effective global-local fusion. Second, the Foreground-Background Separation Module (FBSM) generates spatial gating masks that dynamically amplify discriminative regions. To address gradient imbalance across object scales, we further propose a Dynamic Gradient-Balanced Loss (DCLoss) that automatically modulates loss contributions via scale-aware gradient equilibrium. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance and generalization ability of our approach.
Authors:Jerry Lin, Partick P. W. Chen
Abstract:
Accurately labeling (or annotation) data is still a bottleneck in computer vision, especially for large-scale tasks where manual labeling is time-consuming and error-prone. While tools like LabelImg can handle the labeling task, some of them still require annotators to manually label each image. In this paper, we introduce BakuFlow, a streamlining semi-automatic label generation tool. Key features include (1) a live adjustable magnifier for pixel-precise manual corrections, improving user experience; (2) an interactive data augmentation module to diversify training datasets; (3) label propagation for rapidly copying labeled objects between consecutive frames, greatly accelerating annotation of video data; and (4) an automatic labeling module powered by a modified YOLOE framework. Unlike the original YOLOE, our extension supports adding new object classes and any number of visual prompts per class during annotation, enabling flexible and scalable labeling for dynamic, real-world datasets. These innovations make BakuFlow especially effective for object detection and tracking, substantially reducing labeling workload and improving efficiency in practical computer vision and industrial scenarios.
Authors:Zubin Bhuyan, Yuanchang Xie, AngkeaReach Rith, Xintong Yan, Nasko Apostolov, Jimi Oke, Chengbo Ai
Abstract:
With the increasing availability of aerial and satellite imagery, deep learning presents significant potential for transportation asset management, safety analysis, and urban planning. This study introduces CrosswalkNet, a robust and efficient deep learning framework designed to detect various types of pedestrian crosswalks from 15-cm resolution aerial images. CrosswalkNet incorporates a novel detection approach that improves upon traditional object detection strategies by utilizing oriented bounding boxes (OBB), enhancing detection precision by accurately capturing crosswalks regardless of their orientation. Several optimization techniques, including Convolutional Block Attention, a dual-branch Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast module, and cosine annealing, are implemented to maximize performance and efficiency. A comprehensive dataset comprising over 23,000 annotated crosswalk instances is utilized to train and validate the proposed framework. The best-performing model achieves an impressive precision of 96.5% and a recall of 93.3% on aerial imagery from Massachusetts, demonstrating its accuracy and effectiveness. CrosswalkNet has also been successfully applied to datasets from New Hampshire, Virginia, and Maine without transfer learning or fine-tuning, showcasing its robustness and strong generalization capability. Additionally, the crosswalk detection results, processed using High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms and provided in polygon shapefile format, have been shown to accelerate data processing and detection, supporting real-time analysis for safety and mobility applications. This integration offers policymakers, transportation engineers, and urban planners an effective instrument to enhance pedestrian safety and improve urban mobility.
Authors:Arash Rocky, Q. M. Jonathan Wu
Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lag behind Large Language Models due to the scarcity of annotated datasets, as creating paired visual-textual annotations is labor-intensive and expensive. To address this bottleneck, we introduce SAM2Auto, the first fully automated annotation pipeline for video datasets requiring no human intervention or dataset-specific training. Our approach consists of two key components: SMART-OD, a robust object detection system that combines automatic mask generation with open-world object detection capabilities, and FLASH (Frame-Level Annotation and Segmentation Handler), a multi-object real-time video instance segmentation (VIS) that maintains consistent object identification across video frames even with intermittent detection gaps. Unlike existing open-world detection methods that require frame-specific hyperparameter tuning and suffer from numerous false positives, our system employs statistical approaches to minimize detection errors while ensuring consistent object tracking throughout entire video sequences. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that SAM2Auto achieves comparable accuracy to manual annotation while dramatically reducing annotation time and eliminating labor costs. The system successfully handles diverse datasets without requiring retraining or extensive parameter adjustments, making it a practical solution for large-scale dataset creation. Our work establishes a new baseline for automated video annotation and provides a pathway for accelerating VLM development by addressing the fundamental dataset bottleneck that has constrained progress in vision-language understanding.
Authors:Anna Yokokubo, Takeo Hamada, Tatsuya Ishizuka, Hiroaki Mori, Noboru Koshizuka
Abstract:
A four-leaf clover (FLC) symbolizes luck and happiness worldwide, but it is hard to distinguish it from the common three-leaf clover. While AI technology can assist in searching for FLC, it may not replicate the traditional search's sense of achievement. This study explores searcher feelings when AI aids the FLC search. In this study, we developed a system called ``Happiness Finder'' that uses object detection algorithms on smartphones or tablets to support the search. We exhibited HappinessFinder at an international workshop, allowing participants to experience four-leaf clover searching using potted artificial clovers and the HappinessFinder app. This paper reports the findings from this demonstration.
Authors:Satvik Praveen, Yoonsung Jung
Abstract:
Object detection is vital in precision agriculture for plant monitoring, disease detection, and yield estimation. However, models like YOLO struggle with occlusions, irregular structures, and background noise, reducing detection accuracy. While Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs) improve spatial invariance through learned transformations, affine mappings are insufficient for non-rigid deformations such as bent leaves and overlaps.
We propose CBAM-STN-TPS-YOLO, a model integrating Thin-Plate Splines (TPS) into STNs for flexible, non-rigid spatial transformations that better align features. Performance is further enhanced by the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), which suppresses background noise and emphasizes relevant spatial and channel-wise features.
On the occlusion-heavy Plant Growth and Phenotyping (PGP) dataset, our model outperforms STN-YOLO in precision, recall, and mAP. It achieves a 12% reduction in false positives, highlighting the benefits of improved spatial flexibility and attention-guided refinement. We also examine the impact of the TPS regularization parameter in balancing transformation smoothness and detection performance.
This lightweight model improves spatial awareness and supports real-time edge deployment, making it ideal for smart farming applications requiring accurate and efficient monitoring.
Authors:Everett Richards, Bipul Thapa, Lena Mashayekhy
Abstract:
Accurate and reliable object detection is critical for ensuring the safety and efficiency of Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Traditional on-board perception systems have limited accuracy due to occlusions and blind spots, while cloud-based solutions introduce significant latency, making them unsuitable for real-time processing demands required for autonomous driving in dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we introduce an innovative framework, Edge-Enabled Collaborative Object Detection (ECOD) for CAVs, that leverages edge computing and multi-CAV collaboration for real-time, multi-perspective object detection. Our ECOD framework integrates two key algorithms: Perceptive Aggregation and Collaborative Estimation (PACE) and Variable Object Tally and Evaluation (VOTE). PACE aggregates detection data from multiple CAVs on an edge server to enhance perception in scenarios where individual CAVs have limited visibility. VOTE utilizes a consensus-based voting mechanism to improve the accuracy of object classification by integrating data from multiple CAVs. Both algorithms are designed at the edge to operate in real-time, ensuring low-latency and reliable decision-making for CAVs. We develop a hardware-based controlled testbed consisting of camera-equipped robotic CAVs and an edge server to evaluate the efficacy of our framework. Our experimental results demonstrate the significant benefits of ECOD in terms of improved object classification accuracy, outperforming traditional single-perspective onboard approaches by up to 75%, while ensuring low-latency, edge-driven real-time processing. This research highlights the potential of edge computing to enhance collaborative perception for latency-sensitive autonomous systems.
Authors:Meiyan Kang, Shizuo Kaji, Sang-Yun Lee, Taegon Kim, Hee-Hwan Ryu, Suyoung Choi
Abstract:
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is a widely used Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) technique for subsurface exploration, particularly in infrastructure inspection and maintenance. However, conventional interpretation methods are often limited by noise sensitivity and a lack of structural awareness. This study presents a novel framework that enhances the detection of underground utilities, especially pipelines, by integrating shape-aware topological features derived from B-scan GPR images using Topological Data Analysis (TDA), with the spatial detection capabilities of the YOLOv5 deep neural network (DNN). We propose a novel shape-aware topological representation that amplifies structural features in the input data, thereby improving the model's responsiveness to the geometrical features of buried objects. To address the scarcity of annotated real-world data, we employ a Sim2Real strategy that generates diverse and realistic synthetic datasets, effectively bridging the gap between simulated and real-world domains. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in mean Average Precision (mAP), validating the robustness and efficacy of our approach. This approach underscores the potential of TDA-enhanced learning in achieving reliable, real-time subsurface object detection, with broad applications in urban planning, safety inspection, and infrastructure management.
Authors:Mohit Arora, Pratyush Shukla, Shivali Chopra
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are one of the most revolutionary inventions of 21st century. At the core of a UAV lies the central processing system that uses wireless signals to control their movement. The most popular UAVs are quadcopters that use a set of four motors, arranged as two on either side with opposite spin. An autonomous UAV is called a drone. Drones have been in service in the US army since the 90's for covert missions critical to national security. It would not be wrong to claim that drones make up an integral part of the national security and provide the most valuable service during surveillance operations. While UAVs are controlled using wireless signals, there reside some challenges that disrupt the operation of such vehicles such as signal quality and range, real time processing, human expertise, robust hardware and data security. These challenges can be solved by programming UAVs to be autonomous, using object detection and tracking, through Computer Vision algorithms. Computer Vision is an interdisciplinary field that seeks the use of deep learning to gain a high-level understanding of digital images and videos for the purpose of automating the task of human visual system. Using computer vision, algorithms for detecting and tracking various objects can be developed suitable to the hardware so as to allow real time processing for immediate judgement. This paper attempts to review the various approaches several authors have proposed for the purpose of autonomous navigation of UAVs by through various algorithms of object detection and tracking in real time, for the purpose of applications in various fields such as disaster management, dense area exploration, traffic vehicle surveillance etc.
Authors:Chong Hyun Lee, Kibae Lee
Abstract:
We propose DaigNet, a new approach to object detection with which we can detect an object bounding box using diagonal constraints on adjacency matrix of a graph convolutional network (GCN). We propose two diagonalization algorithms based on hard and soft constraints on adjacency matrix and two loss functions using diagonal constraint and complementary constraint. The DaigNet eliminates the need for designing a set of anchor boxes commonly used. To prove feasibility of our novel detector, we adopt detection head in YOLO models. Experiments show that the DiagNet achieves 7.5% higher mAP50 on Pascal VOC than YOLOv1. The DiagNet also shows 5.1% higher mAP on MS COCO than YOLOv3u, 3.7% higher mAP than YOLOv5u, and 2.9% higher mAP than YOLOv8.
Authors:Andreu Girbau-Xalabarder, Jun Nagata, Shinichi Sumiyoshi, Ricard Marsal, Shin'ichi Satoh
Abstract:
Event cameras capture scene changes asynchronously on a per-pixel basis, enabling extremely high temporal resolution. However, this advantage comes at the cost of high bandwidth, memory, and computational demands. To address this, prior work has explored event downsampling, but most approaches rely on fixed heuristics or threshold-based strategies, limiting their adaptability. Instead, we propose a probabilistic framework, POLED, that models event importance through an event-importance probability density function (ePDF), which can be arbitrarily defined and adapted to different applications. Our approach operates in a purely online setting, estimating event importance on-the-fly from raw event streams, enabling scene-specific adaptation. Additionally, we introduce zero-shot event downsampling, where downsampled events must remain usable for models trained on the original event stream, without task-specific adaptation. We design a contour-preserving ePDF that prioritizes structurally important events and evaluate our method across four datasets and tasks--object classification, image interpolation, surface normal estimation, and object detection--demonstrating that intelligent sampling is crucial for maintaining performance under event-budget constraints. Code available.
Authors:Min Je Kim, Muhammad Munsif, Altaf Hussain, Hikmat Yar, Sung Wook Baik
Abstract:
Benchmark object detection (OD) datasets play a pivotal role in advancing computer vision applications such as autonomous driving, and surveillance, as well as in training and evaluating deep learning-based state-of-the-art detection models. Among them, MS-COCO has become a standard benchmark due to its diverse object categories and complex scenes. However, despite its wide adoption, MS-COCO suffers from various annotation issues, including missing labels, incorrect class assignments, inaccurate bounding boxes, duplicate labels, and group labeling inconsistencies. These errors not only hinder model training but also degrade the reliability and generalization of OD models. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive refinement framework and present MJ-COCO, a newly re-annotated version of MS-COCO. Our approach begins with loss and gradient-based error detection to identify potentially mislabeled or hard-to-learn samples. Next, we apply a four-stage pseudo-labeling refinement process: (1) bounding box generation using invertible transformations, (2) IoU-based duplicate removal and confidence merging, (3) class consistency verification via expert objects recognizer, and (4) spatial adjustment based on object region activation map analysis. This integrated pipeline enables scalable and accurate correction of annotation errors without manual re-labeling. Extensive experiments were conducted across four validation datasets: MS-COCO, Sama COCO, Objects365, and PASCAL VOC. Models trained on MJ-COCO consistently outperformed those trained on MS-COCO, achieving improvements in Average Precision (AP) and APS metrics. MJ-COCO also demonstrated significant gains in annotation coverage: for example, the number of small object annotations increased by more than 200,000 compared to MS-COCO.
Authors:Xander Küpers, Jeroen Klein Brinke, Rob Bemthuis, Ozlem Durmaz Incel
Abstract:
The construction industry faces significant challenges in optimizing equipment utilization, as underused machinery leads to increased operational costs and project delays. Accurate and timely monitoring of equipment activity is therefore key to identifying idle periods and improving overall efficiency. This paper presents the Edge-IMI framework for detecting idle construction machinery, specifically designed for integration with surveillance camera systems. The proposed solution consists of three components: object detection, tracking, and idle state identification, which are tailored for execution on resource-constrained, CPU-based edge computing devices. The performance of Edge-IMI is evaluated using a combined dataset derived from the ACID and MOCS benchmarks. Experimental results confirm that the object detector achieves an F1 score of 71.75%, indicating robust real-world detection capabilities. The logistic regression-based idle identification module reliably distinguishes between active and idle machinery with minimal false positives. Integrating all three modules, Edge-IMI enables efficient on-site inference, reducing reliance on high-bandwidth cloud services and costly hardware accelerators. We also evaluate the performance of object detection models on Raspberry Pi 5 and an Intel NUC platforms, as example edge computing platforms. We assess the feasibility of real-time processing and the impact of model optimization techniques.
Authors:Yue Li Du, Ben Alexander, Mikhail Antonenka, Rohan Mahadev, Hao-yu Wu, Dmitry Kislyuk
Abstract:
Retrieving semantically similar but visually distinct contents has been a critical capability in visual search systems. In this work, we aim to tackle this problem with Visual Product Graph (VPG), leveraging high-performance infrastructure for storage and state-of-the-art computer vision models for image understanding. VPG is built to be an online real-time retrieval system that enables navigation from individual products to composite scenes containing those products, along with complementary recommendations. Our system not only offers contextual insights by showcasing how products can be styled in a context, but also provides recommendations for complementary products drawn from these inspirations. We discuss the essential components for building the Visual Product Graph, along with the core computer vision model improvements across object detection, foundational visual embeddings, and other visual signals. Our system achieves a 78.8% extremely similar@1 in end-to-end human relevance evaluations, and a 6% module engagement rate. The "Ways to Style It" module, powered by the Visual Product Graph technology, is deployed in production at Pinterest.
Authors:Xinyuan Wang, Lian Peng, Xiangcheng Li, Yilin He, KinTak U
Abstract:
Object detection in remote sensing imagery remains a challenging task due to extreme scale variation, dense object distributions, and cluttered backgrounds. While recent detectors such as YOLOv8 have shown promising results, their backbone architectures lack explicit mechanisms to guide multi-scale feature refinement, limiting performance on high-resolution aerial data. In this work, we propose YOLO-SPCI, an attention-enhanced detection framework that introduces a lightweight Selective-Perspective-Class Integration (SPCI) module to improve feature representation. The SPCI module integrates three components: a Selective Stream Gate (SSG) for adaptive regulation of global feature flow, a Perspective Fusion Module (PFM) for context-aware multi-scale integration, and a Class Discrimination Module (CDM) to enhance inter-class separability. We embed two SPCI blocks into the P3 and P5 stages of the YOLOv8 backbone, enabling effective refinement while preserving compatibility with the original neck and head. Experiments on the NWPU VHR-10 dataset demonstrate that YOLO-SPCI achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art detectors.
Authors:Dehao Wang, Haohang Zhu, Yiwen Xu, Kaiqi Liu
Abstract:
Road potholes pose a serious threat to driving safety and comfort, making their detection and assessment a critical task in fields such as autonomous driving. When driving vehicles, the operators usually avoid large potholes and approach smaller ones at reduced speeds to ensure safety. Therefore, accurately estimating pothole area is of vital importance. Most existing vision-based methods rely on distance priors to construct geometric models. However, their performance is susceptible to variations in camera angles and typically relies on the assumption of a flat road surface, potentially leading to significant errors in complex real-world environments. To address these problems, a robust pothole area estimation framework that integrates object detection and monocular depth estimation in a video stream is proposed in this paper. First, to enhance pothole feature extraction and improve the detection of small potholes, ACSH-YOLOv8 is proposed with ACmix module and the small object detection head. Then, the BoT-SORT algorithm is utilized for pothole tracking, while DepthAnything V2 generates depth maps for each frame. With the obtained depth maps and potholes labels, a novel Minimum Bounding Triangulated Pixel (MBTP) method is proposed for pothole area estimation. Finally, Kalman Filter based on Confidence and Distance (CDKF) is developed to maintain consistency of estimation results across consecutive frames. The results show that ACSH-YOLOv8 model achieves an AP(50) of 76.6%, representing a 7.6% improvement over YOLOv8. Through CDKF optimization across consecutive frames, pothole predictions become more robust, thereby enhancing the method's practical applicability.
Authors:Afrah Shaahid, Muzammil Behzad
Abstract:
Underwater images are often affected by complex degradations such as light absorption, scattering, color casts, and artifacts, making enhancement critical for effective object detection, recognition, and scene understanding in aquatic environments. Existing methods, especially diffusion-based approaches, typically rely on synthetic paired datasets due to the scarcity of real underwater references, introducing bias and limiting generalization. Furthermore, fine-tuning these models can degrade learned priors, resulting in unrealistic enhancements due to domain shifts. To address these challenges, we propose UDAN-CLIP, an image-to-image diffusion framework pre-trained on synthetic underwater datasets and enhanced with a customized classifier based on vision-language model, a spatial attention module, and a novel CLIP-Diffusion loss. The classifier preserves natural in-air priors and semantically guides the diffusion process, while the spatial attention module focuses on correcting localized degradations such as haze and low contrast. The proposed CLIP-Diffusion loss further strengthens visual-textual alignment and helps maintain semantic consistency during enhancement. The proposed contributions empower our UDAN-CLIP model to perform more effective underwater image enhancement, producing results that are not only visually compelling but also more realistic and detail-preserving. These improvements are consistently validated through both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual comparisons, demonstrating the model's ability to correct distortions and restore natural appearance in challenging underwater conditions.
Authors:Ozsel Kilinc, Cem Tarhan
Abstract:
Accurate, fast, and reliable 3D perception is essential for autonomous driving. Recently, bird's-eye view (BEV)-based perception approaches have emerged as superior alternatives to perspective-based solutions, offering enhanced spatial understanding and more natural outputs for planning. Existing BEV-based 3D object detection methods, typically adhering to angle-based representation, directly estimate the size and orientation of rotated bounding boxes. We observe that BEV-based 3D object detection is analogous to aerial oriented object detection, where angle-based methods are recognized for being affected by discontinuities in their loss functions. Drawing inspiration from this domain, we propose Restricted Quadrilateral Representation to define 3D regression targets. RQR3D regresses the smallest horizontal bounding box encapsulating the oriented box, along with the offsets between the corners of these two boxes, thereby transforming the oriented object detection problem into a keypoint regression task. RQR3D is compatible with any 3D object detection approach. We employ RQR3D within an anchor-free single-stage object detection method and introduce an objectness head to address class imbalance problem. Furthermore, we introduce a simplified radar fusion backbone that eliminates the need for voxel grouping and processes the BEV-mapped point cloud with standard 2D convolutions, rather than sparse convolutions. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that RQR3D achieves state-of-the-art performance in camera-radar 3D object detection, outperforming the previous best method by +4% in NDS and +2.4% in mAP, and significantly reducing the translation and orientation errors, which are crucial for safe autonomous driving. These consistent gains highlight the robustness, precision, and real-world readiness of our approach.
Authors:Apar Pokhrel, Gia Dao
Abstract:
Parking space occupancy detection is a critical component in the development of intelligent parking management systems. Traditional object detection approaches, such as YOLOv8, provide fast and accurate vehicle detection across parking lots but can struggle with borderline cases, such as partially visible vehicles, small vehicles (e.g., motorcycles), and poor lighting conditions. In this work, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis of customized backbone architectures integrated with YOLOv8. Specifically, we evaluate various backbones -- ResNet-18, VGG16, EfficientNetV2, Ghost -- on the PKLot dataset in terms of detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Experimental results highlight each architecture's strengths and trade-offs, providing insight into selecting suitable models for parking occupancy.
Authors:Lanlan Kang, Jian Wang, Jian QIn, Yiqin Liang, Yongjun He
Abstract:
The ThinPrep Cytologic Test (TCT) is the most widely used method for cervical cancer screening, and the sample quality directly impacts the accuracy of the diagnosis. Traditional manual evaluation methods rely on the observation of pathologist under microscopes. These methods exhibit high subjectivity, high cost, long duration, and low reliability. With the development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), an automated quality assessment system that performs at the level of a professional pathologist is necessary. To address this need, we propose a fully automated quality assessment method for Cervical Cytopathology Whole Slide Images (WSIs) based on The Bethesda System (TBS) diagnostic standards, artificial intelligence algorithms, and the characteristics of clinical data. The method analysis the context of WSIs to quantify quality evaluation metrics which are focused by TBS such as staining quality, cell counts and cell mass proportion through multiple models including object detection, classification and segmentation. Subsequently, the XGBoost model is used to mine the attention paid by pathologists to different quality evaluation metrics when evaluating samples, thereby obtaining a comprehensive WSI sample score calculation model. Experimental results on 100 WSIs demonstrate that the proposed evaluation method has significant advantages in terms of speed and consistency.
Authors:Reihaneh Yourdkhani, Arash Tavoosian, Navid Asadi Khomami, Mehdi Tale Masouleh
Abstract:
This paper introduces a pioneering experimental study on the automated packing of a catering package using a two-fingered gripper affixed to a 3-degree-of-freedom Delta parallel robot. A distinctive contribution lies in the application of a deep learning approach to tackle this challenge. A custom dataset, comprising 1,500 images, is meticulously curated for this endeavor, representing a noteworthy initiative as the first dataset focusing on Persian-manufactured products. The study employs the YOLOV5 model for object detection, followed by segmentation using the FastSAM model. Subsequently, rotation angle calculation is facilitated with segmentation masks, and a rotated rectangle encapsulating the object is generated. This rectangle forms the basis for calculating two grasp points using a novel geometrical approach involving eigenvectors. An extensive experimental study validates the proposed model, where all pertinent information is seamlessly transmitted to the 3-DOF Delta parallel robot. The proposed algorithm ensures real-time detection, calibration, and the fully autonomous packing process of a catering package, boasting an impressive over 80\% success rate in automatic grasping. This study marks a significant stride in advancing the capabilities of robotic systems for practical applications in packaging automation.
Authors:Rana Poureskandar, Shiva Razzagzadeh
Abstract:
This study evaluated the performance of a YOLOv8-based segmentation model for detecting and segmenting wrinkles in facial images.
Authors:Jinke Li, Yue Wu, Xiaoyan Yang
Abstract:
Thermal Infrared (TIR) technology involves the use of sensors to detect and measure infrared radiation emitted by objects, and it is widely utilized across a broad spectrum of applications. The advancements in object detection methods utilizing TIR images have sparked significant research interest. However, most traditional methods lack the capability to effectively extract and fuse local-global information, which is crucial for TIR-domain feature attention. In this study, we present a novel and efficient thermal infrared object detection framework, known as CRT-YOLO, that is based on centralized feature regulation, enabling the establishment of global-range interaction on TIR information. Our proposed model integrates efficient multi-scale attention (EMA) modules, which adeptly capture long-range dependencies while incurring minimal computational overhead. Additionally, it leverages the Centralized Feature Pyramid (CFP) network, which offers global regulation of TIR features. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CRT-YOLO model significantly outperforms conventional methods for TIR image object detection. Furthermore, the ablation study provides compelling evidence of the effectiveness of our proposed modules, reinforcing the potential impact of our approach on advancing the field of thermal infrared object detection.
Authors:Prashant P. Shinde, Priyadarshini P. Pai, Shashishekar P. Adiga, K. Subramanya Mayya, Yongbeom Seo, Myungsoo Hwang, Heeyoung Go, Changmin Park
Abstract:
In the photolithographic process vital to semiconductor manufacturing, various types of defects appear during EUV pattering. Due to ever-shrinking pattern size, these defects are extremely small and cause false or missed detection during inspection. Specifically, the lack of defect-annotated quality data with good representation of smaller defects has prohibited deployment of deep learning based defect detection models in fabrication lines. To resolve the problem of data unavailability, we artificially generate scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of line patterns with known distribution of defects and autonomously annotate them. We then employ state-of-the-art object detection models to investigate defect detection performance as a function of defect size, much smaller than the pitch width. We find that the real-time object detector YOLOv8 has the best mean average precision of 96% as compared to EfficientNet, 83%, and SSD, 77%, with the ability to detect smaller defects. We report the smallest defect size that can be detected reliably. When tested on real SEM data, the YOLOv8 model correctly detected 84.6% of Bridge defects and 78.3% of Break defects across all relevant instances. These promising results suggest that synthetic data can be used as an alternative to real-world data in order to develop robust machine-learning models.
Authors:Emre Girgin, Arda Taha Candan, CoÅkun Anıl Zaman
Abstract:
The fields of autonomous systems and robotics are receiving considerable attention in civil applications such as construction, logistics, and firefighting. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of these technologies is hindered by the necessity for robust processing units to run AI models. Edge-AI solutions offer considerable promise, enabling low-power, cost-effective robotics that can automate civil services, improve safety, and enhance sustainability. This paper presents a novel Edge-AI-enabled drone-based surveillance system for autonomous multi-robot operations at construction sites. Our system integrates a lightweight MCU-based object detection model within a custom-built UAV platform and a 5G-enabled multi-agent coordination infrastructure. We specifically target the real-time obstacle detection and dynamic path planning problem in construction environments, providing a comprehensive dataset specifically created for MCU-based edge applications. Field experiments demonstrate practical viability and identify optimal operational parameters, highlighting our approach's scalability and computational efficiency advantages compared to existing UAV solutions. The present and future roles of autonomous vehicles on construction sites are also discussed, as well as the effectiveness of edge-AI solutions. We share our dataset publicly at github.com/egirgin/storaige-b950
Authors:Nasif Zaman, Venkatesh Potluri, Brandon Biggs, James M. Coughlan
Abstract:
Multi-modal generative AI models integrated into wearable devices have shown significant promise in enhancing the accessibility of visual information for blind or visually impaired (BVI) individuals, as evidenced by the rapid uptake of Meta Ray-Bans among BVI users. However, the proprietary nature of these platforms hinders disability-led innovation of visual accessibility technologies. For instance, OpenAI showcased the potential of live, multi-modal AI as an accessibility resource in 2024, yet none of the presented applications have reached BVI users, despite the technology being available since then. To promote the democratization of visual access technology development, we introduce WhatsAI, a prototype extensible framework that empowers BVI enthusiasts to leverage Meta Ray-Bans to create personalized wearable visual accessibility technologies. Our system is the first to offer a fully hackable template that integrates with WhatsApp, facilitating robust Accessible Artificial Intelligence Implementations (AAII) that enable blind users to conduct essential visual assistance tasks, such as real-time scene description, object detection, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), utilizing standard machine learning techniques and cutting-edge visual language models. The extensible nature of our framework aspires to cultivate a community-driven approach, led by BVI hackers and innovators to tackle the complex challenges associated with visual accessibility.
Authors:Guoying Liang, Su Yang
Abstract:
Big model has emerged as a new research paradigm that can be applied to various down-stream tasks with only minor effort for domain adaption. Correspondingly, this study tackles Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM). The previous studies declared that SAM is not workable for COD but this study reveals that SAM works if promoted properly, for which we devise a new framework to render point promotions: First, we develop the Promotion Point Targeting Network (PPT-net) to leverage multi-scale features in predicting the probabilities of camouflaged objects' presences at given candidate points over the image. Then, we develop a key point selection (KPS) algorithm to deploy both positive and negative point promotions contrastively to SAM to guide the segmentation. It is the first work to facilitate big model for COD and achieves plausible results experimentally over the existing methods on 3 data sets under 6 metrics. This study demonstrates an off-the-shelf methodology for COD by leveraging SAM, which gains advantage over designing professional models from scratch, not only in performance, but also in turning the problem to a less challenging task, that is, seeking informative but not exactly precise promotions.
Authors:Saqi Hussain Kalan, Boon Giin Lee, Wan-Young Chung
Abstract:
Indoor localization faces persistent challenges in achieving high accuracy, particularly in GPS-deprived environments. This study unveils a cutting-edge handheld indoor localization system that integrates 2D LiDAR and IMU sensors, delivering enhanced high-velocity precision mapping, computational efficiency, and real-time adaptability. Unlike 3D LiDAR systems, it excels with rapid processing, low-cost scalability, and robust performance, setting new standards for emergency response, autonomous navigation, and industrial automation. Enhanced with a CNN-driven object detection framework and optimized through Cartographer SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping ) in ROS, the system significantly reduces Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 21.03%, achieving exceptional precision compared to state-of-the-art approaches like SC-ALOAM, with a mean x-position error of -0.884 meters (1.976 meters). The integration of CNN-based object detection ensures robustness in mapping and localization, even in cluttered or dynamic environments, outperforming existing methods by 26.09%. These advancements establish the system as a reliable, scalable solution for high-precision localization in challenging indoor scenarios
Authors:Unai Gurbindo, Axel Brando, Jaume Abella, Caroline König
Abstract:
Enhancing the robustness of object detection systems under adverse weather conditions is crucial for the advancement of autonomous driving technology. This study presents a novel approach leveraging the diffusion model Instruct Pix2Pix to develop prompting methodologies that generate realistic datasets with weather-based augmentations aiming to mitigate the impact of adverse weather on the perception capabilities of state-of-the-art object detection models, including Faster R-CNN and YOLOv10. Experiments were conducted in two environments, in the CARLA simulator where an initial evaluation of the proposed data augmentation was provided, and then on the real-world image data sets BDD100K and ACDC demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in real environments.
The key contributions of this work are twofold: (1) identifying and quantifying the performance gap in object detection models under challenging weather conditions, and (2) demonstrating how tailored data augmentation strategies can significantly enhance the robustness of these models. This research establishes a solid foundation for improving the reliability of perception systems in demanding environmental scenarios, and provides a pathway for future advancements in autonomous driving.
Authors:XiaoTong Gu, Shengyu Tang, Yiming Cao, Changdong Yu
Abstract:
Underwater object detection using sonar imagery has become a critical and rapidly evolving research domain within marine technology. However, sonar images are characterized by lower resolution and sparser features compared to optical images, which seriously degrades the performance of object detection.To address these challenges, we specifically propose a Detection Transformer (DETR) architecture optimized with a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach called NAS-DETR for object detection in sonar images. First, an improved Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the maximum entropy principle is proposed to identify a real-time, high-representational-capacity CNN-Transformer backbone for sonar image detection. This method enables the efficient discovery of high-performance network architectures with low computational and time overhead. Subsequently, the backbone is combined with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and a deformable attention-based Transformer decoder to construct a complete network architecture. This architecture integrates various advanced components and training schemes to enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two Representative datasets, while maintaining minimal overhead in real-time efficiency and computational complexity. Furthermore, correlation analysis between the key parameters and differential entropy-based fitness function is performed to enhance the interpretability of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of sonar object detection to integrate the DETR architecture with a NAS search mechanism.
Authors:Luqi Gong, Haotian Chen, Yikun Chen, Tianliang Yao, Chao Li, Shuai Zhao, Guangjie Han
Abstract:
In unmanned aerial systems, especially in complex environments, accurately detecting tiny objects is crucial. Resizing images is a common strategy to improve detection accuracy, particularly for small objects. However, simply enlarging images significantly increases computational costs and the number of negative samples, severely degrading detection performance and limiting its applicability. This paper proposes a Dynamic Pooling Network (DPNet) for tiny object detection to mitigate these issues. DPNet employs a flexible down-sampling strategy by introducing a factor (df) to relax the fixed downsampling process of the feature map to an adjustable one. Furthermore, we design a lightweight predictor to predict df for each input image, which is used to decrease the resolution of feature maps in the backbone. Thus, we achieve input-aware downsampling. We also design an Adaptive Normalization Module (ANM) to make a unified detector compatible with different dfs. A guidance loss supervises the predictor's training. DPNet dynamically allocates computing resources to trade off between detection accuracy and efficiency. Experiments on the TinyCOCO and TinyPerson datasets show that DPNet can save over 35% and 25% GFLOPs, respectively, while maintaining comparable detection performance. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors:Alexander Puzicha, Konstantin Wüstefeld, Kathrin Wilms, Frank Weichert
Abstract:
The future of inland navigation increasingly relies on autonomous systems and remote operations, emphasizing the need for accurate vessel trajectory prediction. This study addresses the challenges of video-based vessel tracking and prediction by integrating advanced object detection methods, Kalman filters, and spline-based interpolation. However, existing detection systems often misclassify objects in inland waterways due to complex surroundings. A comparative evaluation of tracking algorithms, including BoT-SORT, Deep OC-SORT, and ByeTrack, highlights the robustness of the Kalman filter in providing smoothed trajectories. Experimental results from diverse scenarios demonstrate improved accuracy in predicting vessel movements, which is essential for collision avoidance and situational awareness. The findings underline the necessity of customized datasets and models for inland navigation. Future work will expand the datasets and incorporate vessel classification to refine predictions, supporting both autonomous systems and human operators in complex environments.
Authors:Mathis Morales, Golnaz Habibi
Abstract:
Detecting and tracking objects is a crucial component of any autonomous navigation method. For the past decades, object detection has yielded promising results using neural networks on various datasets. While many methods focus on performance metrics, few projects focus on improving the robustness of these detection and tracking pipelines, notably to sensor failures. In this paper we attempt to address this issue by creating a realistic synthetic data augmentation pipeline for camera-radar Autonomous Vehicle (AV) datasets. Our goal is to accurately simulate sensor failures and data deterioration due to real-world interferences. We also present our results of a baseline lightweight Noise Recognition neural network trained and tested on our augmented dataset, reaching an overall recognition accuracy of 54.4\% on 11 categories across 10086 images and 2145 radar point-clouds.
Authors:Muhammad Imran Zaman, Usama Ijaz Bajwa, Gulshan Saleem, Rana Hammad Raza
Abstract:
Vision sensors are becoming more important in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for traffic monitoring, management, and optimization as the number of network cameras continues to rise. However, manual object tracking and matching across multiple non-overlapping cameras pose significant challenges in city-scale urban traffic scenarios. These challenges include handling diverse vehicle attributes, occlusions, illumination variations, shadows, and varying video resolutions. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and cost-effective deep learning-based framework for Multi-Object Multi-Camera Tracking (MO-MCT). The proposed framework utilizes Mask R-CNN for object detection and employs Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to select target objects from overlapping detections. Transfer learning is employed for re-identification, enabling the association and generation of vehicle tracklets across multiple cameras. Moreover, we leverage appropriate loss functions and distance measures to handle occlusion, illumination, and shadow challenges. The final solution identification module performs feature extraction using ResNet-152 coupled with Deep SORT based vehicle tracking. The proposed framework is evaluated on the 5th AI City Challenge dataset (Track 3), comprising 46 camera feeds. Among these 46 camera streams, 40 are used for model training and validation, while the remaining six are utilized for model testing. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with an IDF1 score of 0.8289, and precision and recall scores of 0.9026 and 0.8527 respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in robust and accurate vehicle tracking.
Authors:Manikanta Varaganti, Amulya Vankayalapati, Nour Awad, Gregory R. Dion, Laura J. Brattain
Abstract:
Neck ultrasound (US) plays a vital role in airway management by providing non-invasive, real-time imaging that enables rapid and precise interventions. Deep learning-based anatomical landmark detection in neck US can further facilitate procedural efficiency. However, class imbalance within datasets, where key structures like tracheal rings and vocal folds are underrepresented, presents significant challenges for object detection models. To address this, we propose T2ID-CAS, a hybrid approach that combines a text-to-image latent diffusion model with class-aware sampling to generate high-quality synthetic samples for underrepresented classes. This approach, rarely explored in the ultrasound domain, improves the representation of minority classes. Experimental results using YOLOv9 for anatomical landmark detection in neck US demonstrated that T2ID-CAS achieved a mean Average Precision of 88.2, significantly surpassing the baseline of 66. This highlights its potential as a computationally efficient and scalable solution for mitigating class imbalance in AI-assisted ultrasound-guided interventions.
Authors:Nafiseh Jabbari Tofighi, Maxime Robic, Fabio Morbidi, Pascal Vasseur
Abstract:
The advent of event-based cameras, with their low latency, high dynamic range, and reduced power consumption, marked a significant change in robotic vision and machine perception. In particular, the combination of these neuromorphic sensors with widely-available passive or active optical markers (e.g. AprilTags, arrays of blinking LEDs), has recently opened up a wide field of possibilities. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review on Event-Based Optical Marker Systems (EBOMS). We analyze the basic principles and technologies on which these systems are based, with a special focus on their asynchronous operation and robustness against adverse lighting conditions. We also describe the most relevant applications of EBOMS, including object detection and tracking, pose estimation, and optical communication. The article concludes with a discussion of possible future research directions in this rapidly-emerging and multidisciplinary field.
Authors:Roman Malashin, Daniil Ilyukhin
Abstract:
This paper introduces a concept of neural network specialization via task-specific domain constraining, aimed at enhancing network performance on data subspace in which the network operates. The study presents experiments on training specialists for image classification and object detection tasks. The results demonstrate that specialization can enhance a generalist's accuracy even without additional data or changing training regimes: solely by constraining class label space in which the network performs. Theoretical and experimental analyses indicate that effective specialization requires modifying traditional fine-tuning methods and constraining data space to semantically coherent subsets. The specialist extraction phase before tuning the network is proposed for maximal performance gains. We also provide analysis of the evolution of the feature space during specialization. This study paves way to future research for developing more advanced dynamically configurable image analysis systems, where computations depend on the specific input. Additionally, the proposed methods can help improve system performance in scenarios where certain data domains should be excluded from consideration of the generalist network.
Authors:Sehyeong Jo, Gangjae Jang, Haesol Park
Abstract:
The Vision Transformer (ViT) has made significant advancements in computer vision, utilizing self-attention mechanisms to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Its architectural flexibility and capabilities have made it a preferred choice among researchers and practitioners. However, the intricate multi-head attention mechanism of ViT presents significant challenges to interpretability, as the underlying prediction process remains opaque. A critical limitation arises from an observation commonly noted in transformer architectures: "Not all attention heads are equally meaningful." Overlooking the relative importance of specific heads highlights the limitations of existing interpretability methods. To address these challenges, we introduce Gradient-Driven Multi-Head Attention Rollout (GMAR), a novel method that quantifies the importance of each attention head using gradient-based scores. These scores are normalized to derive a weighted aggregate attention score, effectively capturing the relative contributions of individual heads. GMAR clarifies the role of each head in the prediction process, enabling more precise interpretability at the head level. Experimental results demonstrate that GMAR consistently outperforms traditional attention rollout techniques. This work provides a practical contribution to transformer-based architectures, establishing a robust framework for enhancing the interpretability of Vision Transformer models.
Authors:Gharbi Khamis Alshammari, Ahmad Abubakar, Nada M. O. Sid Ahmed, Naif Khalaf Alshammari
Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) require precise lane and object detection to ensure safe navigation. However, centralized deep learning (DL) approaches for semantic segmentation raise privacy and scalability challenges, particularly when handling sensitive data. This research presents a new federated learning (FL) framework that integrates secure deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Differential Privacy (DP) to address these issues. The core contribution of this work involves: (1) developing a new hybrid UNet-ResNet34 architecture for centralized semantic segmentation to achieve high accuracy and tackle privacy concerns due to centralized training, and (2) implementing the privacy-preserving FL model, distributed across AVs to enhance performance through secure CNNs and DP mechanisms. In the proposed FL framework, the methodology distinguishes itself from the existing approach through the following: (a) ensuring data decentralization through FL to uphold user privacy by eliminating the need for centralized data aggregation, (b) integrating DP mechanisms to secure sensitive model updates against potential adversarial inference attacks, and (c) evaluating the frameworks performance and generalizability using RGB and semantic segmentation datasets derived from the CARLA simulator. Experimental results show significant improvements in accuracy, from 81.5% to 88.7% for the RGB dataset and from 79.3% to 86.9% for the SEG dataset over 20 to 70 Communication Rounds (CRs). Global loss was reduced by over 60%, and minor accuracy trade-offs from DP were observed. This study contributes by offering a scalable, privacy-preserving FL framework tailored for AVs, optimizing communication efficiency while balancing performance and data security.
Authors:Leo Thomas Ramos, Angel D. Sappa
Abstract:
This review marks the tenth anniversary of You Only Look Once (YOLO), one of the most influential frameworks in real-time object detection. Over the past decade, YOLO has evolved from a streamlined detector into a diverse family of architectures characterized by efficient design, modular scalability, and cross-domain adaptability. The paper presents a technical overview of the main versions, highlights key architectural trends, and surveys the principal application areas in which YOLO has been adopted. It also addresses evaluation practices, ethical considerations, and potential future directions for the framework's continued development. The analysis aims to provide a comprehensive and critical perspective on YOLO's trajectory and ongoing transformation.
Authors:Liugang Lu, Dabin He, Congxiang Liu, Zhixiang Deng
Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and computer vision technologies, object detection from UAV perspectives has emerged as a prominent research area. However, challenges for detection brought by the extremely small proportion of target pixels, significant scale variations of objects, and complex background information in UAV images have greatly limited the practical applications of UAV. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object detection network Multi-scale Context Aggregation and Scale-adaptive Fusion YOLO (MASF-YOLO), which is developed based on YOLOv11. Firstly, to tackle the difficulty of detecting small objects in UAV images, we design a Multi-scale Feature Aggregation Module (MFAM), which significantly improves the detection accuracy of small objects through parallel multi-scale convolutions and feature fusion. Secondly, to mitigate the interference of background noise, we propose an Improved Efficient Multi-scale Attention Module (IEMA), which enhances the focus on target regions through feature grouping, parallel sub-networks, and cross-spatial learning. Thirdly, we introduce a Dimension-Aware Selective Integration Module (DASI), which further enhances multi-scale feature fusion capabilities by adaptively weighting and fusing low-dimensional features and high-dimensional features. Finally, we conducted extensive performance evaluations of our proposed method on the VisDrone2019 dataset. Compared to YOLOv11-s, MASFYOLO-s achieves improvements of 4.6% in mAP@0.5 and 3.5% in mAP@0.5:0.95 on the VisDrone2019 validation set. Remarkably, MASF-YOLO-s outperforms YOLOv11-m while requiring only approximately 60% of its parameters and 65% of its computational cost. Furthermore, comparative experiments with state-of-the-art detectors confirm that MASF-YOLO-s maintains a clear competitive advantage in both detection accuracy and model efficiency.
Authors:Vlad Vasilescu, Ana Neacsu, Daniela Faur
Abstract:
Single-image dehazing is an important topic in remote sensing applications, enhancing the quality of acquired images and increasing object detection precision. However, the reliability of such structures has not been sufficiently analyzed, which poses them to the risk of imperceptible perturbations that can significantly hinder their performance. In this work, we show that state-of-the-art image-to-image dehazing transformers are susceptible to adversarial noise, with even 1 pixel change being able to decrease the PSNR by as much as 2.8 dB. Next, we propose two lightweight fine-tuning strategies aimed at increasing the robustness of pre-trained transformers. Our methods results in comparable clean performance, while significantly increasing the protection against adversarial data. We further present their applicability in two remote sensing scenarios, showcasing their robust behavior for out-of-distribution data. The source code for adversarial fine-tuning and attack algorithms can be found at github.com/Vladimirescu/RobustDehazing.
Authors:Mohammad Zarei, Melanie A Jutras, Eliana Evans, Mike Tan, Omid Aaramoon
Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to accurately detect objects and interpret their surroundings. However, even when trained using millions of miles of real-world data, AVs are often unable to detect rare failure modes (RFMs). The problem of RFMs is commonly referred to as the "long-tail challenge", due to the distribution of data including many instances that are very rarely seen. In this paper, we present a novel approach that utilizes advanced generative and explainable AI techniques to aid in understanding RFMs. Our methods can be used to enhance the robustness and reliability of AVs when combined with both downstream model training and testing. We extract segmentation masks for objects of interest (e.g., cars) and invert them to create environmental masks. These masks, combined with carefully crafted text prompts, are fed into a custom diffusion model. We leverage the Stable Diffusion inpainting model guided by adversarial noise optimization to generate images containing diverse environments designed to evade object detection models and expose vulnerabilities in AI systems. Finally, we produce natural language descriptions of the generated RFMs that can guide developers and policymakers to improve the safety and reliability of AV systems.
Authors:Md Fahimuzzman Sohan, Raid Alzubi, Hadeel Alzoubi, Eid Albalawi, A. H. Abdul Hafez
Abstract:
Cattle lameness is a prevalent health problem in livestock farming, often resulting from hoof injuries or infections, and severely impacts animal welfare and productivity. Early and accurate detection is critical for minimizing economic losses and ensuring proper treatment. This study proposes a spatiotemporal deep learning framework for automated cattle lameness detection using publicly available video data. We curate and publicly release a balanced set of 50 online video clips featuring 42 individual cattle, recorded from multiple viewpoints in both indoor and outdoor environments. The videos were categorized into lame and non-lame classes based on visual gait characteristics and metadata descriptions. After applying data augmentation techniques to enhance generalization, two deep learning architectures were trained and evaluated: 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNN) and Convolutional Long-Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM2D). The 3D CNN achieved a video-level classification accuracy of 90%, with a precision, recall, and F1 score of 90.9% each, outperforming the ConvLSTM2D model, which achieved 85% accuracy. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on multistage pipelines involving object detection and pose estimation, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of a direct end-to-end video classification approach. Compared with the best end-to-end prior method (C3D-ConvLSTM, 90.3%), our model achieves comparable accuracy while eliminating pose estimation pre-processing.The results indicate that deep learning models can successfully extract and learn spatio-temporal features from various video sources, enabling scalable and efficient cattle lameness detection in real-world farm settings.
Authors:Sridevi Polavaram, Xin Zhou, Meenu Ravi, Mohammad Zarei, Anmol Srivastava
Abstract:
Vision systems are increasingly deployed in critical domains such as surveillance, law enforcement, and transportation. However, their vulnerabilities to rare or unforeseen scenarios pose significant safety risks. To address these challenges, we introduce Context-Awareness and Interpretability of Rare Occurrences (CAIRO), an ontology-based human-assistive discovery framework for failure cases (or CP - Critical Phenomena) detection and formalization. CAIRO by design incentivizes human-in-the-loop for testing and evaluation of criticality that arises from misdetections, adversarial attacks, and hallucinations in AI black-box models. Our robust analysis of object detection model(s) failures in automated driving systems (ADS) showcases scalable and interpretable ways of formalizing the observed gaps between camera perception and real-world contexts, resulting in test cases stored as explicit knowledge graphs (in OWL/XML format) amenable for sharing, downstream analysis, logical reasoning, and accountability.
Authors:Abhishek Tyagi, Charu Gaur
Abstract:
We present an autonomous aerial surveillance platform, Veg, designed as a fault-tolerant quadcopter system that integrates visual SLAM for GPS-independent navigation, advanced control architecture for dynamic stability, and embedded vision modules for real-time object and face recognition. The platform features a cascaded control design with an LQR inner-loop and PD outer-loop trajectory control. It leverages ORB-SLAM3 for 6-DoF localization and loop closure, and supports waypoint-based navigation through Dijkstra path planning over SLAM-derived maps. A real-time Failure Detection and Identification (FDI) system detects rotor faults and executes emergency landing through re-routing. The embedded vision system, based on a lightweight CNN and PCA, enables onboard object detection and face recognition with high precision. The drone operates fully onboard using a Raspberry Pi 4 and Arduino Nano, validated through simulations and real-world testing. This work consolidates real-time localization, fault recovery, and embedded AI on a single platform suitable for constrained environments.
Authors:Tue Vo, Lakshay Sharma, Tuan Dinh, Khuong Dinh, Trang Nguyen, Trung Phan, Minh Do, Duong Vu
Abstract:
Understanding and monitoring aquatic biodiversity is critical for ecological health and conservation efforts. This paper proposes SuoiAI, an end-to-end pipeline for building a dataset of aquatic invertebrates in Vietnam and employing machine learning (ML) techniques for species classification. We outline the methods for data collection, annotation, and model training, focusing on reducing annotation effort through semi-supervised learning and leveraging state-of-the-art object detection and classification models. Our approach aims to overcome challenges such as data scarcity, fine-grained classification, and deployment in diverse environmental conditions.
Authors:Nazia Aslam, Kamal Nasrollahi
Abstract:
The rapid development of video surveillance systems for object detection, tracking, activity recognition, and anomaly detection has revolutionized our day-to-day lives while setting alarms for privacy concerns. It isn't easy to strike a balance between visual privacy and action recognition performance in most computer vision models. Is it possible to safeguard privacy without sacrificing performance? It poses a formidable challenge, as even minor privacy enhancements can lead to substantial performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose a privacy-preserving image anonymization technique that optimizes the anonymizer using penalties from the utility branch, ensuring improved action recognition performance while minimally affecting privacy leakage. This approach addresses the trade-off between minimizing privacy leakage and maintaining high action performance. The proposed approach is primarily designed to align with the regulatory standards of the EU AI Act and GDPR, ensuring the protection of personally identifiable information while maintaining action performance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce a feature-based penalty scheme that exclusively controls the action features, allowing freedom to anonymize private attributes. Extensive experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that applying a penalty to anonymizer from utility branch enhances action performance while maintaining nearly consistent privacy leakage across different penalty settings.
Authors:Yang Zhang, Jingyi Cao, Yanan You, Yuanyuan Qiao
Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved remarkable results in object detection for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, owing to its exceptional ability to extract global features. However, it struggles with the extraction of multi-scale local features, leading to limited performance in detecting small targets, especially when they are densely arranged. Therefore, we propose Density-Sensitive Vision Transformer with Adaptive Tokens (DenSe-AdViT) for dense SAR target detection. We design a Density-Aware Module (DAM) as a preliminary component that generates a density tensor based on target distribution. It is guided by a meticulously crafted objective metric, enabling precise and effective capture of the spatial distribution and density of objects. To integrate the multi-scale information enhanced by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the global features derived from the Transformer, Density-Enhanced Fusion Module (DEFM) is proposed. It effectively refines attention toward target-survival regions with the assist of density mask and the multiple sources features. Notably, our DenSe-AdViT achieves 79.8% mAP on the RSDD dataset and 92.5% on the SIVED dataset, both of which feature a large number of densely distributed vehicle targets.
Authors:Yasin Almalioglu, Andrzej Kucik, Geoffrey French, Dafni Antotsiou, Alexander Adam, Cedric Archambeau
Abstract:
Object detection in satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery holds immense potential in tasks such as urban monitoring and disaster response. However, the inherent complexities of SAR data and the scarcity of annotations present significant challenges in the advancement of object detection in this domain. Notably, the detection of small objects in satellite-borne SAR images poses a particularly intricate problem, because of the technology's relatively low spatial resolution and inherent noise. Furthermore, the lack of large labelled SAR datasets hinders the development of supervised deep learning-based object detection models. In this paper, we introduce TRANSAR, a novel self-supervised end-to-end vision transformer-based SAR object detection model that incorporates masked image pre-training on an unlabeled SAR image dataset that spans more than $25,700$ km\textsuperscript{2} ground area. Unlike traditional object detection formulation, our approach capitalises on auxiliary binary semantic segmentation, designed to segregate objects of interest during the post-tuning, especially the smaller ones, from the background. In addition, to address the innate class imbalance due to the disproportion of the object to the image size, we introduce an adaptive sampling scheduler that dynamically adjusts the target class distribution during training based on curriculum learning and model feedback. This approach allows us to outperform conventional supervised architecture such as DeepLabv3 or UNet, and state-of-the-art self-supervised learning-based arhitectures such as DPT, SegFormer or UperNet, as shown by extensive evaluations on benchmark SAR datasets.
Authors:Andreas Lau Hansen, Lukas Wanzeck, Dim P. Papadopoulos
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is an essential task in computer vision, and it has several applications in robotics and virtual reality. However, 3D object detectors are typically trained in a fully supervised way, relying extensively on 3D labeled data, which is labor-intensive and costly to annotate. This work focuses on weakly-supervised 3D detection to reduce data needs using a monocular method that leverages a singlecamera system over expensive LiDAR sensors or multi-camera setups. We propose a general model Weak Cube R-CNN, which can predict objects in 3D at inference time, requiring only 2D box annotations for training by exploiting the relationship between 2D projections of 3D cubes. Our proposed method utilizes pre-trained frozen foundation 2D models to estimate depth and orientation information on a training set. We use these estimated values as pseudo-ground truths during training. We design loss functions that avoid 3D labels by incorporating information from the external models into the loss. In this way, we aim to implicitly transfer knowledge from these large foundation 2D models without having access to 3D bounding box annotations. Experimental results on the SUN RGB-D dataset show increased performance in accuracy compared to an annotation time equalized Cube R-CNN baseline. While not precise for centimetre-level measurements, this method provides a strong foundation for further research.
Authors:Jonas Myhre Schiøtt, Viktor Sebastian Petersen, Dim P. Papadopoulos
Abstract:
Computer vision models have seen increased usage in sports, and reinforcement learning (RL) is famous for beating humans in strategic games such as Chess and Go. In this paper, we are interested in building upon these advances and examining the game of classic 8-ball pool. We introduce pix2pockets, a foundation for an RL-assisted pool coach. Given a single image of a pool table, we first aim to detect the table and the balls and then propose the optimal shot suggestion. For the first task, we build a dataset with 195 diverse images where we manually annotate all balls and table dots, leading to 5748 object segmentation masks. For the second task, we build a standardized RL environment that allows easy development and benchmarking of any RL algorithm. Our object detection model yields an AP50 of 91.2 while our ball location pipeline obtains an error of only 0.4 cm. Furthermore, we compare standard RL algorithms to set a baseline for the shot suggestion task and we show that all of them fail to pocket all balls without making a foul move. We also present a simple baseline that achieves a per-shot success rate of 94.7% and clears a full game in a single turn 30% of the time.
Authors:Qianxue Zhang, Eiman Kanjo
Abstract:
The advancement of technology has revolutionised the agricultural industry, transitioning it from labour-intensive farming practices to automated, AI-powered management systems. In recent years, more intelligent livestock monitoring solutions have been proposed to enhance farming efficiency and productivity. This work presents a novel approach to animal activity recognition and movement tracking, leveraging tiny machine learning (TinyML) techniques, wireless communication framework, and microcontroller platforms to develop an efficient, cost-effective livestock sensing system. It collects and fuses accelerometer data and vision inputs to build a multi-modal network for three tasks: image classification, object detection, and behaviour recognition. The system is deployed and evaluated on commercial microcontrollers for real-time inference using embedded applications, demonstrating up to 270$\times$ model size reduction, less than 80ms response latency, and on-par performance comparable to existing methods. The incorporation of the TinyML technique allows for seamless data transmission between devices, benefiting use cases in remote locations with poor Internet connectivity. This work delivers a robust, scalable IoT-edge livestock monitoring solution adaptable to diverse farming needs, offering flexibility for future extensions.
Authors:Jincheng Kang, Yi Cen, Yigang Cen, Ke Wang, Yuhan Liu
Abstract:
Wood defect detection is critical for ensuring quality control in the wood processing industry. However, current industrial applications face two major challenges: traditional methods are costly, subjective, and labor-intensive, while mainstream deep learning models often struggle to balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency for edge deployment. To address these issues, this study proposes CFIS-YOLO, a lightweight object detection model optimized for edge devices. The model introduces an enhanced C2f structure, a dynamic feature recombination module, and a novel loss function that incorporates auxiliary bounding boxes and angular constraints. These innovations improve multi-scale feature fusion and small object localization while significantly reducing computational overhead. Evaluated on a public wood defect dataset, CFIS-YOLO achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 77.5\%, outperforming the baseline YOLOv10s by 4 percentage points. On SOPHON BM1684X edge devices, CFIS-YOLO delivers 135 FPS, reduces power consumption to 17.3\% of the original implementation, and incurs only a 0.5 percentage point drop in mAP. These results demonstrate that CFIS-YOLO is a practical and effective solution for real-world wood defect detection in resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Leonardo M. Joao, Jancarlo F. Gomes, Silvio J. F. Guimaraes, Ewa Kijak, Alexandre X. Falcao
Abstract:
Salient Object Detection (SOD) with deep learning often requires substantial computational resources and large annotated datasets, making it impractical for resource-constrained applications. Lightweight models address computational demands but typically strive in complex and scarce labeled-data scenarios. Feature Learning from Image Markers (FLIM) learns an encoder's convolutional kernels among image patches extracted from discriminative regions marked on a few representative images, dismissing large annotated datasets, pretraining, and backpropagation. Such a methodology exploits information redundancy commonly found in biomedical image applications. This study presents methods to learn dilated-separable convolutional kernels and multi-dilation layers without backpropagation for FLIM networks. It also proposes a novel network simplification method to reduce kernel redundancy and encoder size. By combining a FLIM encoder with an adaptive decoder, a concept recently introduced to estimate a pointwise convolution per image, this study presents very efficient (named flyweight) SOD models for biomedical images. Experimental results in challenging datasets demonstrate superior efficiency and effectiveness to lightweight models. By requiring significantly fewer parameters and floating-point operations, the results show competitive effectiveness to heavyweight models. These advances highlight the potential of FLIM networks for data-limited and resource-constrained applications with information redundancy.
Authors:Muhammad Fasih Tariq, Muhammad Azeem Javed
Abstract:
This paper provides an extensive evaluation of YOLO object detection models (v5, v8, v9, v10, v11) by com- paring their performance across various hardware platforms and optimization libraries. Our study investigates inference speed and detection accuracy on Intel and AMD CPUs using popular libraries such as ONNX and OpenVINO, as well as on GPUs through TensorRT and other GPU-optimized frameworks. Furthermore, we analyze the sensitivity of these YOLO models to object size within the image, examining performance when detecting objects that occupy 1%, 2.5%, and 5% of the total area of the image. By identifying the trade-offs in efficiency, accuracy, and object size adaptability, this paper offers insights for optimal model selection based on specific hardware constraints and detection requirements, aiding practitioners in deploying YOLO models effectively for real-world applications.
Authors:Meilun Zhou, Aditya Dutt, Alina Zare
Abstract:
Triplet loss traditionally relies only on class labels and does not use all available information in multi-task scenarios where multiple types of annotations are available. This paper introduces a Multi-Annotation Triplet Loss (MATL) framework that extends triplet loss by incorporating additional annotations, such as bounding box information, alongside class labels in the loss formulation. By using these complementary annotations, MATL improves multi-task learning for tasks requiring both classification and localization. Experiments on an aerial wildlife imagery dataset demonstrate that MATL outperforms conventional triplet loss in both classification and localization. These findings highlight the benefit of using all available annotations for triplet loss in multi-task learning frameworks.
Authors:Shanshan Wang, Haixiang Xu, Hui Feng, Xiaoqian Wang, Pei Song, Sijie Liu, Jianhua He
Abstract:
The success of deep learning in intelligent ship visual perception relies heavily on rich image data. However, dedicated datasets for inland waterway vessels remain scarce, limiting the adaptability of visual perception systems in complex environments. Inland waterways, characterized by narrow channels, variable weather, and urban interference, pose significant challenges to object detection systems based on existing datasets. To address these issues, this paper introduces the Multi-environment Inland Waterway Vessel Dataset (MEIWVD), comprising 32,478 high-quality images from diverse scenarios, including sunny, rainy, foggy, and artificial lighting conditions. MEIWVD covers common vessel types in the Yangtze River Basin, emphasizing diversity, sample independence, environmental complexity, and multi-scale characteristics, making it a robust benchmark for vessel detection. Leveraging MEIWVD, this paper proposes a scene-guided image enhancement module to improve water surface images based on environmental conditions adaptively. Additionally, a parameter-limited dilated convolution enhances the representation of vessel features, while a multi-scale dilated residual fusion method integrates multi-scale features for better detection. Experiments show that MEIWVD provides a more rigorous benchmark for object detection algorithms, and the proposed methods significantly improve detector performance, especially in complex multi-environment scenarios.
Authors:Farbod Younesi, Milad Rabiei, Soroush Keivanfard, Mohsen Sharifi, Marzieh Ghayour Najafabadi, Bahar Moadeli, Arshia Jafari, Mohammad Hossein Moaiyeri
Abstract:
The development of self-driving cars has garnered significant attention from researchers, universities, and industries worldwide. Autonomous vehicles integrate numerous subsystems, including lane tracking, object detection, and vehicle control, which require thorough testing and validation. Scaled-down vehicles offer a cost-effective and accessible platform for experimentation, providing researchers with opportunities to optimize algorithms under constraints of limited computational power. This paper presents a four-wheeled autonomous vehicle platform designed to facilitate research and prototyping in autonomous driving. Key contributions include (1) a novel density-based clustering approach utilizing histogram statistics for landmark tracking, (2) a lateral controller, and (3) the integration of these innovations into a cohesive platform. Additionally, the paper explores object detection through systematic dataset augmentation and introduces an autonomous parking procedure. The results demonstrate the platform's effectiveness in achieving reliable lane tracking under varying lighting conditions, smooth trajectory following, and consistent object detection performance. Though developed for small-scale vehicles, these modular solutions are adaptable for full-scale autonomous systems, offering a versatile and cost-efficient framework for advancing research and industry applications.
Authors:Sheng Yang, Tong Zhan, Shichen Qiao, Jicheng Gong, Qing Yang, Jian Wang, Yanfeng Lu
Abstract:
Reliable 3D object perception is essential in autonomous driving. Owing to its sensing capabilities in all weather conditions, 4D radar has recently received much attention. However, compared to LiDAR, 4D radar provides much sparser point cloud. In this paper, we propose a 3D object detection method, termed ZFusion, which fuses 4D radar and vision modality. As the core of ZFusion, our proposed FP-DDCA (Feature Pyramid-Double Deformable Cross Attention) fuser complements the (sparse) radar information and (dense) vision information, effectively. Specifically, with a feature-pyramid structure, the FP-DDCA fuser packs Transformer blocks to interactively fuse multi-modal features at different scales, thus enhancing perception accuracy. In addition, we utilize the Depth-Context-Split view transformation module due to the physical properties of 4D radar. Considering that 4D radar has a much lower cost than LiDAR, ZFusion is an attractive alternative to LiDAR-based methods. In typical traffic scenarios like the VoD (View-of-Delft) dataset, experiments show that with reasonable inference speed, ZFusion achieved the state-of-the-art mAP (mean average precision) in the region of interest, while having competitive mAP in the entire area compared to the baseline methods, which demonstrates performance close to LiDAR and greatly outperforms those camera-only methods.
Authors:Baba Ibrahim, Zhou Kui
Abstract:
This paper Traffic sign recognition plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Despite significant advances in deep learning and object detection, accurately detecting and classifying traffic signs remains challenging due to their small sizes, variable environmental conditions, occlusion, and class imbalance. This thesis presents an enhanced YOLOv8-based detection system that integrates advanced data augmentation techniques, novel architectural enhancements including Coordinate Attention (CA), Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN), and dynamic modules such as ODConv and LSKA, along with refined loss functions (EIoU and WIoU combined with Focal Loss). Extensive experiments conducted on datasets including GTSRB, TT100K, and GTSDB demonstrate marked improvements in detection accuracy, robustness under adverse conditions, and real-time inference on edge devices. The findings contribute actionable insights for deploying reliable traffic sign recognition systems in real-world autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors:YiMing Yu, Jason Zutty
Abstract:
In machine learning, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) requires domain knowledge of model design and a large amount of trial-and-error to achieve promising performance. Meanwhile, evolutionary algorithms have traditionally relied on fixed rules and pre-defined building blocks. The Large Language Model (LLM)-Guided Evolution (GE) framework transformed this approach by incorporating LLMs to directly modify model source code for image classification algorithms on CIFAR data and intelligently guide mutations and crossovers. A key element of LLM-GE is the "Evolution of Thought" (EoT) technique, which establishes feedback loops, allowing LLMs to refine their decisions iteratively based on how previous operations performed. In this study, we perform NAS for object detection by improving LLM-GE to modify the architecture of You Only Look Once (YOLO) models to enhance performance on the KITTI dataset. Our approach intelligently adjusts the design and settings of YOLO to find the optimal algorithms against objective such as detection accuracy and speed. We show that LLM-GE produced variants with significant performance improvements, such as an increase in Mean Average Precision from 92.5% to 94.5%. This result highlights the flexibility and effectiveness of LLM-GE on real-world challenges, offering a novel paradigm for automated machine learning that combines LLM-driven reasoning with evolutionary strategies.
Authors:Khizar Anjum, Parul Pandey, Vidyasagar Sadhu, Roberto Tron, Dario Pompili
Abstract:
Most applications in autonomous navigation using mounted cameras rely on the construction and processing of geometric 3D point clouds, which is an expensive process. However, there is another simpler way to make a space navigable quickly: to use semantic information (e.g., traffic signs) to guide the agent. However, detecting and acting on semantic information involves Computer Vision~(CV) algorithms such as object detection, which themselves are demanding for agents such as aerial drones with limited onboard resources. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel Markov Decision Process~(MDP) framework to reduce the workload of these CV approaches. We apply our proposed framework to both feature-based and neural-network-based object-detection tasks, using open-loop and closed-loop simulations as well as hardware-in-the-loop emulations. These holistic tests show significant benefits in energy consumption and speed with only a limited loss in accuracy compared to models based on static features and neural networks.
Authors:Jin Lian, Zhongyu Wan, Ming Gao, JunFeng Chen
Abstract:
Cross-layer feature pyramid networks (CFPNs) have achieved notable progress in multi-scale feature fusion and boundary detail preservation for salient object detection. However, traditional CFPNs still suffer from two core limitations: (1) a computational bottleneck caused by complex feature weighting operations, and (2) degraded boundary accuracy due to feature blurring in the upsampling process. To address these challenges, we propose CFMD, a novel cross-layer feature pyramid network that introduces two key innovations. First, we design a context-aware feature aggregation module (CFLMA), which incorporates the state-of-the-art Mamba architecture to construct a dynamic weight distribution mechanism. This module adaptively adjusts feature importance based on image context, significantly improving both representation efficiency and generalization. Second, we introduce an adaptive dynamic upsampling unit (CFLMD) that preserves spatial details during resolution recovery. By adjusting the upsampling range dynamically and initializing with a bilinear strategy, the module effectively reduces feature overlap and maintains fine-grained boundary structures. Extensive experiments on three standard benchmarks using three mainstream backbone networks demonstrate that CFMD achieves substantial improvements in pixel-level accuracy and boundary segmentation quality, especially in complex scenes. The results validate the effectiveness of CFMD in jointly enhancing computational efficiency and segmentation performance, highlighting its strong potential in salient object detection tasks.
Authors:Xulong Shi, Caiyi Sun, Zhi Qi, Liu Hao, Xiaodong Yang
Abstract:
While binary neural networks (BNNs) offer significant benefits in terms of speed, memory and energy, they encounter substantial accuracy degradation in challenging tasks compared to their real-valued counterparts. Due to the binarization of weights and activations, the possible values of each entry in the feature maps generated by BNNs are strongly constrained. To tackle this limitation, we propose the expanding-and-shrinking operation, which enhances binary feature maps with negligible increase of computation complexity, thereby strengthening the representation capacity. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmarks reveal that our approach generalizes well across diverse applications ranging from image classification, object detection to generative diffusion model, while also achieving remarkable improvement over various leading binarization algorithms based on different architectures including both CNNs and Transformers.
Authors:Mahtab Jamali, Paul Davidsson, Reza Khoshkangini, Martin Georg Ljungqvist, Radu-Casian Mihailescu
Abstract:
Context is an important factor in computer vision as it offers valuable information to clarify and analyze visual data. Utilizing the contextual information inherent in an image or a video can improve the precision and effectiveness of object detectors. For example, where recognizing an isolated object might be challenging, context information can improve comprehension of the scene. This study explores the impact of various context-based approaches to object detection. Initially, we investigate the role of context in object detection and survey it from several perspectives. We then review and discuss the most recent context-based object detection approaches and compare them. Finally, we conclude by addressing research questions and identifying gaps for further studies. More than 265 publications are included in this survey, covering different aspects of context in different categories of object detection, including general object detection, video object detection, small object detection, camouflaged object detection, zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot object detection. This literature review presents a comprehensive overview of the latest advancements in context-based object detection, providing valuable contributions such as a thorough understanding of contextual information and effective methods for integrating various context types into object detection, thus benefiting researchers.
Authors:Nandakishor M, Vrinda Govind, Anuradha Puthalath, Anzy L, Swathi P S, Aswathi R, Devaprabha A R, Varsha Raj, Midhuna Krishnan K, Akhila Anilkumar T, Yamuna P
Abstract:
Force estimation in human-object interactions is crucial for various fields like ergonomics, physical therapy, and sports science. Traditional methods depend on specialized equipment such as force plates and sensors, which makes accurate assessments both expensive and restricted to laboratory settings. In this paper, we introduce ForcePose, a novel deep learning framework that estimates applied forces by combining human pose estimation with object detection. Our approach leverages MediaPipe for skeletal tracking and SSD MobileNet for object recognition to create a unified representation of human-object interaction. We've developed a specialized neural network that processes both spatial and temporal features to predict force magnitude and direction without needing any physical sensors. After training on our dataset of 850 annotated videos with corresponding force measurements, our model achieves a mean absolute error of 5.83 N in force magnitude and 7.4 degrees in force direction. When compared to existing computer vision approaches, our method performs 27.5% better while still offering real-time performance on standard computing hardware. ForcePose opens up new possibilities for force analysis in diverse real-world scenarios where traditional measurement tools are impractical or intrusive. This paper discusses our methodology, the dataset creation process, evaluation metrics, and potential applications across rehabilitation, ergonomics assessment, and athletic performance analysis.
Authors:Deepti Madurai Muthu, Priyanka S, Lalitha Rani N, P. G. Kubendran Amos
Abstract:
Reliable quantification of Ki-67, a key proliferation marker in breast cancer, is essential for molecular subtyping and informed treatment planning. Conventional approaches, including visual estimation and manual counting, suffer from interobserver variability and limited reproducibility. This study introduces an AI-assisted method using the YOLOv8 object detection framework for automated Ki-67 scoring. High-resolution digital images (40x magnification) of immunohistochemically stained tumor sections were captured from Ki-67 hotspot regions and manually annotated by a domain expert to distinguish Ki-67-positive and negative tumor cells. The dataset was augmented and divided into training (80%), validation (10%), and testing (10%) subsets. Among the YOLOv8 variants tested, the Medium model achieved the highest performance, with a mean Average Precision at 50% Intersection over Union (mAP50) exceeding 85% for Ki-67-positive cells. The proposed approach offers an efficient, scalable, and objective alternative to conventional scoring methods, supporting greater consistency in Ki-67 evaluation. Future directions include developing user-friendly clinical interfaces and expanding to multi-institutional datasets to enhance generalizability and facilitate broader adoption in diagnostic practice.
Authors:Jakob AbeÃer, Simon Schwär, Meinard Müller
Abstract:
This study examines pitch contours as a unifying semantic construct prevalent across various audio domains including music, speech, bioacoustics, and everyday sounds. Analyzing pitch contours offers insights into the universal role of pitch in the perceptual processing of audio signals and contributes to a deeper understanding of auditory mechanisms in both humans and animals. Conventional pitch-tracking methods, while optimized for music and speech, face challenges in handling much broader frequency ranges and more rapid pitch variations found in other audio domains. This study introduces a vision-based approach to pitch contour analysis that eliminates the need for explicit pitch-tracking. The approach uses a convolutional neural network, pre-trained for object detection in natural images and fine-tuned with a dataset of synthetically generated pitch contours, to extract key contour parameters from the time-frequency representation of short audio segments. A diverse set of eight downstream tasks from four audio domains were selected to provide a challenging evaluation scenario for cross-domain pitch contour analysis. The results show that the proposed method consistently surpasses traditional techniques based on pitch-tracking on a wide range of tasks. This suggests that the vision-based approach establishes a foundation for comparative studies of pitch contour characteristics across diverse audio domains.
Authors:Alexandra Arzberger, Ramin Tavakoli Kolagari
Abstract:
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is an essential sensor technology for autonomous driving as it can capture high-resolution 3D data. As 3D object detection systems (OD) can interpret such point cloud data, they play a key role in the driving decisions of autonomous vehicles. Consequently, such 3D OD must be robust against all types of perturbations and must therefore be extensively tested. One approach is the use of adversarial examples, which are small, sometimes sophisticated perturbations in the input data that change, i.e., falsify, the prediction of the OD. These perturbations are carefully designed based on the weaknesses of the OD. The robustness of the OD cannot be quantified with adversarial examples in general, because if the OD is vulnerable to a given attack, it is unclear whether this is due to the robustness of the OD or whether the attack algorithm produces particularly strong adversarial examples. The contribution of this work is Hi-ALPS -- Hierarchical Adversarial-example-based LiDAR Perturbation Level System, where higher robustness of the OD is required to withstand the perturbations as the perturbation levels increase. In doing so, the Hi-ALPS levels successively implement a heuristic followed by established adversarial example approaches. In a series of comprehensive experiments using Hi-ALPS, we quantify the robustness of six state-of-the-art 3D OD under different types of perturbations. The results of the experiments show that none of the OD is robust against all Hi-ALPS levels; an important factor for the ranking is that human observers can still correctly recognize the perturbed objects, as the respective perturbations are small. To increase the robustness of the OD, we discuss the applicability of state-of-the-art countermeasures. In addition, we derive further suggestions for countermeasures based on our experimental results.
Authors:Kunal Chavan, Keertan Balaji, Spoorti Barigidad, Samba Raju Chiluveru
Abstract:
With an increasing demand for assistive technologies that promote the independence and mobility of visually impaired people, this study suggests an innovative real-time system that gives audio descriptions of a user's surroundings to improve situational awareness. The system acquires live video input and processes it with a quantized and fine-tuned Florence-2 big model, adjusted to 4-bit accuracy for efficient operation on low-power edge devices such as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. By transforming the video signal into frames with a 5-frame latency, the model provides rapid and contextually pertinent descriptions of objects, pedestrians, and barriers, together with their estimated distances. The system employs Parler TTS Mini, a lightweight and adaptable Text-to-Speech (TTS) solution, for efficient audio feedback. It accommodates 34 distinct speaker types and enables customization of speech tone, pace, and style to suit user requirements. This study examines the quantization and fine-tuning techniques utilized to modify the Florence-2 model for this application, illustrating how the integration of a compact model architecture with a versatile TTS component improves real-time performance and user experience. The proposed system is assessed based on its accuracy, efficiency, and usefulness, providing a viable option to aid vision-impaired users in navigating their surroundings securely and successfully.
Authors:Christoph Griesbacher, Christian Fruhwirth-Reisinger
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection is a critical component of autonomous driving, enabling vehicles to perceive their surroundings with precision and make informed decisions. LiDAR sensors, widely used for their ability to provide detailed 3D measurements, are key to achieving this capability. However, variations between training and inference data can cause significant performance drops when object detection models are employed in different sensor settings. One critical factor is beam density, as inference on sparse, cost-effective LiDAR sensors is often preferred in real-world applications. Despite previous work addressing the beam-density-induced domain gap, substantial knowledge gaps remain, particularly concerning dense 128-beam sensors in cross-domain scenarios. To gain better understanding of the impact of beam density on domain gaps, we conduct a comprehensive investigation that includes an evaluation of different object detection architectures. Our architecture evaluation reveals that combining voxel- and point-based approaches yields superior cross-domain performance by leveraging the strengths of both representations. Building on these findings, we analyze beam-density-induced domain gaps and argue that these domain gaps must be evaluated in conjunction with other domain shifts. Contrary to conventional beliefs, our experiments reveal that detectors benefit from training on denser data and exhibit robustness to beam density variations during inference.
Authors:Ying Liu, Yijing Hua, Haojiang Chai, Yanbo Wang, TengQi Ye
Abstract:
Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique.
Authors:Bibi Erum Ayesha, T. Satyanarayana Murthy, Palamakula Ramesh Babu, Ramu Kuchipudi
Abstract:
This research paper presents an innovative ship detection system tailored for applications like maritime surveillance and ecological monitoring. The study employs YOLOv8 and repurposed U-Net, two advanced deep learning models, to significantly enhance ship detection accuracy. Evaluation metrics include Mean Average Precision (mAP), processing speed, and overall accuracy. The research utilizes the "Airbus Ship Detection" dataset, featuring diverse remote sensing images, to assess the models' versatility in detecting ships with varying orientations and environmental contexts. Conventional ship detection faces challenges with arbitrary orientations, complex backgrounds, and obscured perspectives. Our approach incorporates YOLOv8 for real-time processing and U-Net for ship instance segmentation. Evaluation focuses on mAP, processing speed, and overall accuracy. The dataset is chosen for its diverse images, making it an ideal benchmark. Results demonstrate significant progress in ship detection. YOLOv8 achieves an 88% mAP, excelling in accurate and rapid ship detection. U Net, adapted for ship instance segmentation, attains an 89% mAP, improving boundary delineation and handling occlusions. This research enhances maritime surveillance, disaster response, and ecological monitoring, exemplifying the potential of deep learning models in ship detection.
Authors:Lili Yang, Mengshuai Chang, Xiao Guo, Yuxin Feng, Yiwen Mei, Caicong Wu
Abstract:
To address the issues of the existing frustum-based methods' underutilization of image information in road three-dimensional object detection as well as the lack of research on agricultural scenes, we constructed an object detection dataset using an 80-line Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and a camera in a complex tractor road scene and proposed a new network called FrustumFusionNets (FFNets). Initially, we utilize the results of image-based two-dimensional object detection to narrow down the search region in the three-dimensional space of the point cloud. Next, we introduce a Gaussian mask to enhance the point cloud information. Then, we extract the features from the frustum point cloud and the crop image using the point cloud feature extraction pipeline and the image feature extraction pipeline, respectively. Finally, we concatenate and fuse the data features from both modalities to achieve three-dimensional object detection. Experiments demonstrate that on the constructed test set of tractor road data, the FrustumFusionNetv2 achieves 82.28% and 95.68% accuracy in the three-dimensional object detection of the two main road objects, cars and people, respectively. This performance is 1.83% and 2.33% better than the original model. It offers a hybrid fusion-based multi-object, high-precision, real-time three-dimensional object detection technique for unmanned agricultural machines in tractor road scenarios. On the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute (KITTI) Benchmark Suite validation set, the FrustumFusionNetv2 also demonstrates significant superiority in detecting road pedestrian objects compared with other frustum-based three-dimensional object detection methods.
Authors:Qiang Qi, Xiao Wang
Abstract:
Video object detection has made significant progress in recent years thanks to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs). Typically, CNNs excel at capturing local features but struggle to model global representations. Conversely, ViTs are adept at capturing long-range global features but face challenges in representing local feature details. Off-the-shelf video object detection methods solely rely on CNNs or ViTs to conduct feature aggregation, which hampers their capability to simultaneously leverage global and local information, thereby resulting in limited detection performance. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-GraphFormer Blender Network (TGBFormer) for video object detection, with three key technical improvements to fully exploit the advantages of transformers and graph convolutional networks while compensating for their limitations. First, we develop a spatial-temporal transformer module to aggregate global contextual information, constituting global representations with long-range feature dependencies. Second, we introduce a spatial-temporal GraphFormer module that utilizes local spatial and temporal relationships to aggregate features, generating new local representations that are complementary to the transformer outputs. Third, we design a global-local feature blender module to adaptively couple transformer-based global representations and GraphFormer-based local representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TGBFormer establishes new state-of-the-art results on the ImageNet VID dataset. Particularly, our TGBFormer achieves 86.5% mAP while running at around 41.0 FPS on a single Tesla A100 GPU.
Authors:Shani Gamrian, Hila Barel, Feiran Li, Masakazu Yoshimura, Daisuke Iso
Abstract:
Object detection models are typically applied to standard RGB images processed through Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipelines, which are designed to enhance sensor-captured RAW images for human vision. However, these ISP functions can lead to a loss of critical information that may be essential in optimizing for computer vision tasks, such as object detection. In this work, we introduce Raw Adaptation Module (RAM), a module designed to replace the traditional ISP, with parameters optimized specifically for RAW object detection. Inspired by the parallel processing mechanisms of the human visual system, RAM departs from existing learned ISP methods by applying multiple ISP functions in parallel rather than sequentially, allowing for a more comprehensive capture of image features. These processed representations are then fused in a specialized module, which dynamically integrates and optimizes the information for the target task. This novel approach not only leverages the full potential of RAW sensor data but also enables task-specific pre-processing, resulting in superior object detection performance. Our approach outperforms RGB-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse RAW image datasets under varying lighting conditions and dynamic ranges.
Authors:Dan Halperin, Niklas Eisl
Abstract:
Autonomous driving is a safety-critical application, and it is therefore a top priority that the accompanying assistance systems are able to provide precise information about the surrounding environment of the vehicle. Tasks such as 3D Object Detection deliver an insufficiently detailed understanding of the surrounding scene because they only predict a bounding box for foreground objects. In contrast, 3D Semantic Segmentation provides richer and denser information about the environment by assigning a label to each individual point, which is of paramount importance for autonomous driving tasks, such as navigation or lane changes. To inspire future research, in this review paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art methods in the field of Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation for autonomous driving. We categorize the approaches into projection-based, 3D-based and hybrid methods. Moreover, we discuss the most important and commonly used datasets for this task and also emphasize the importance of synthetic data to support research when real-world data is limited. We further present the results of the different methods and compare them with respect to their segmentation accuracy and efficiency.
Authors:Aziz Amari, Mariem Makni, Wissal Fnaich, Akram Lahmar, Fedi Koubaa, Oumayma Charrad, Mohamed Ali Zormati, Rabaa Youssef Douss
Abstract:
In large organizations, the number of financial transactions can grow rapidly, driving the need for fast and accurate multi-criteria invoice validation. Manual processing remains error-prone and time-consuming, while current automated solutions are limited by their inability to support a variety of constraints, such as documents that are partially handwritten or photographed with a mobile phone. In this paper, we propose to automate the validation of machine written invoices using document layout analysis and object detection techniques based on recent deep learning (DL) models. We introduce a novel dataset consisting of manually annotated real-world invoices and a multi-criteria validation process. We fine-tune and benchmark the most relevant DL models on our dataset. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline and selected DL models in terms of achieving fast and accurate validation of invoices.
Authors:Ayush Paliwal, Oliver Schlenczek, Birte Thiede, Manuel Santos Pereira, Katja Stieger, Eberhard Bodenschatz, Gholamhossein Bagheri, Alexander Ecker
Abstract:
Reconstructing the 3D location and size of microparticles from diffraction images - holograms - is a computationally expensive inverse problem that has traditionally been solved using physics-based reconstruction methods. More recently, researchers have used machine learning methods to speed up the process. However, for small particles in large sample volumes the performance of these methods falls short of standard physics-based reconstruction methods. Here we designed a two-stage neural network architecture, FLASH$μ$, to detect small particles (6-100$μ$m) from holograms with large sample depths up to 20cm. Trained only on synthetic data with added physical noise, our method reliably detects particles of at least 9$μ$m diameter in real holograms, comparable to the standard reconstruction-based approaches while operating on smaller crops, at quarter of the original resolution and providing roughly a 600-fold speedup. In addition to introducing a novel approach to a non-local object detection or signal demixing problem, our work could enable low-cost, real-time holographic imaging setups.
Authors:Enes Ãzeren, Arka Bhowmick
Abstract:
The increasing applications of autonomous driving systems necessitates large-scale, high-quality datasets to ensure robust performance across diverse scenarios. Synthetic data has emerged as a viable solution to augment real-world datasets due to its cost-effectiveness, availability of precise ground-truth labels, and the ability to model specific edge cases. However, synthetic data may introduce distributional differences and biases that could impact model performance in real-world settings. To evaluate the utility and limitations of synthetic data, we conducted controlled experiments using multiple real-world datasets and a synthetic dataset generated by BIT Technology Solutions GmbH. Our study spans two sensor modalities, camera and LiDAR, and investigates both 2D and 3D object detection tasks. We compare models trained on real, synthetic, and mixed datasets, analyzing their robustness and generalization capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that the use of a combination of real and synthetic data improves the robustness and generalization of object detection models, underscoring the potential of synthetic data in advancing autonomous driving technologies.
Authors:M. Koumans, J. L. M. van Mechelen
Abstract:
We report on a novel methodology for extracting material parameters from spectroscopic optical data using a physics-based neural network. The proposed model integrates classical optimization frameworks with a multi-scale object detection framework, specifically exploring the effect of incorporating physics into the neural network. We validate and analyze its performance on simulated transmission spectra at terahertz and infrared frequencies. Compared to traditional model-based approaches, our method is designed to be autonomous, robust, and time-efficient, making it particularly relevant for industrial and societal applications.
Authors:Aysegul Ucar, Soumyadeep Ro, Sanapala Satwika, Pamarthi Yasoda Gayathri, Mohmmad Ghaith Balsha
Abstract:
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in artificial intelli-gence, capable of integrating textual and visual data for a unified understanding of complex scenes. While models such as Florence2, built on transformer architectures, have shown promise across general tasks, their performance in object detection within unstructured or cluttered environments remains underexplored. In this study, we fi-ne-tuned the Florence2 model for object detection tasks in non-constructed, complex environments. A comprehensive experimental framework was established involving multiple hardware configurations (NVIDIA T4, L4, and A100 GPUs), optimizers (AdamW, SGD), and varied hyperparameters including learning rates and LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) setups. Model training and evaluation were conducted on challenging datasets representative of real-world, disordered settings. The optimized Florence2 models exhibited significant improvements in object detection accuracy, with Mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics approaching or matching those of estab-lished models such as YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10. The integration of LoRA and careful fine-tuning of transformer layers contributed notably to these gains. Our find-ings highlight the adaptability of transformer-based VLMs like Florence2 for do-main-specific tasks, particularly in visually complex environments. The study under-scores the potential of fine-tuned VLMs to rival traditional convolution-based detec-tors, offering a flexible and scalable approach for advanced vision applications in re-al-world, unstructured settings.
Authors:David T. Hoffmann, Syed Haseeb Raza, Hanqiu Jiang, Denis Tananaev, Steffen Klingenhoefer, Martin Meinke
Abstract:
Scene flow estimation is a foundational task for many robotic applications, including robust dynamic object detection, automatic labeling, and sensor synchronization. Two types of approaches to the problem have evolved: 1) Supervised and 2) optimization-based methods. Supervised methods are fast during inference and achieve high-quality results, however, they are limited by the need for large amounts of labeled training data and are susceptible to domain gaps. In contrast, unsupervised test-time optimization methods do not face the problem of domain gaps but usually suffer from substantial runtime, exhibit artifacts, or fail to converge to the right solution. In this work, we mitigate several limitations of existing optimization-based methods. To this end, we 1) introduce a simple voxel grid-based model that improves over the standard MLP-based formulation in multiple dimensions and 2) introduce a new multiframe loss formulation. 3) We combine both contributions in our new method, termed Floxels. On the Argoverse 2 benchmark, Floxels is surpassed only by EulerFlow among unsupervised methods while achieving comparable performance at a fraction of the computational cost. Floxels achieves a massive speedup of more than ~60 - 140x over EulerFlow, reducing the runtime from a day to 10 minutes per sequence. Over the faster but low-quality baseline, NSFP, Floxels achieves a speedup of ~14x.
Authors:Yu-Hsi Chen, Chin-Tien Wu
Abstract:
Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.
Authors:Adhish Anitha Vilasan, Stephan Jäger, Noah Klarmann
Abstract:
Automated defect detection in industrial manufacturing is essential for maintaining product quality and minimizing production errors. In air disc brake manufacturing, ensuring the precision of laser-engraved nameplates is crucial for accurate product identification and quality control. Engraving errors, such as misprints or missing characters, can compromise both aesthetics and functionality, leading to material waste and production delays. This paper presents a proof of concept for an AI-driven computer vision system that inspects and verifies laser-engraved nameplates, detecting defects in logos and alphanumeric strings. The system integrates object detection using YOLOv7, optical character recognition (OCR) with Tesseract, and anomaly detection through a residual variational autoencoder (ResVAE) along with other computer vision methods to enable comprehensive inspections at multiple stages. Experimental results demonstrate the system's effectiveness, achieving 91.33% accuracy and 100% recall, ensuring that defective nameplates are consistently detected and addressed. This solution highlights the potential of AI-driven visual inspection to enhance quality control, reduce manual inspection efforts, and improve overall manufacturing efficiency.
Authors:Hong Lu, Yali Bian, Rahul C. Shah
Abstract:
High-quality annotations are essential for object detection models, but ensuring label accuracy - especially for bounding boxes - remains both challenging and costly. This paper introduces ClipGrader, a novel approach that leverages vision-language models to automatically assess the accuracy of bounding box annotations. By adapting CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) to evaluate both class label correctness and spatial precision of bounding box, ClipGrader offers an effective solution for grading object detection labels. Tested on modified object detection datasets with artificially disturbed bounding boxes, ClipGrader achieves 91% accuracy on COCO with a 1.8% false positive rate. Moreover, it maintains 87% accuracy with a 2.1% false positive rate when trained on just 10% of the COCO data. ClipGrader also scales effectively to larger datasets such as LVIS, achieving 79% accuracy across 1,203 classes. Our experiments demonstrate ClipGrader's ability to identify errors in existing COCO annotations, highlighting its potential for dataset refinement. When integrated into a semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) model, ClipGrader readily improves the pseudo label quality, helping achieve higher mAP (mean Average Precision) throughout the training process. ClipGrader thus provides a scalable AI-assisted tool for enhancing annotation quality control and verifying annotations in large-scale object detection datasets.
Authors:Yujie Lei, Wenjie Sun, Sen Jia, Qingquan Li, Jie Zhang
Abstract:
Challenges in remote sensing object detection(RSOD), such as high interclass similarity, imbalanced foreground-background distribution, and the small size of objects in remote sensing images, significantly hinder detection accuracy. Moreover, the tradeoff between model accuracy and computational complexity poses additional constraints on the application of RSOD algorithms. To address these issues, this study proposes an efficient and lightweight RSOD algorithm integrating multiscale receptive fields and foreground focus mechanism, named robust foreground weighted network(RFWNet). Specifically, we proposed a lightweight backbone network receptive field adaptive selection network (RFASNet), leveraging the rich context information of remote sensing images to enhance class separability. Additionally, we developed a foreground-background separation module(FBSM)consisting of a background redundant information filtering module (BRIFM) and a foreground information enhancement module (FIEM) to emphasize critical regions within images while filtering redundant background information. Finally, we designed a loss function, the weighted CIoU-Wasserstein loss (LWCW),which weights the IoU-based loss by using the normalized Wasserstein distance to mitigate model sensitivity to small object position deviations. The comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that RFWNet achieved 95.3% and 73.2% mean average precision (mAP) with 6.0 M parameters on the DOTA V1.0 and NWPU VHR-10 datasets, respectively, with an inference speed of 52 FPS.
Authors:Istiaq Ahmed Fahad, Abdullah Ibne Hanif Arean, Nazmus Sakib Ahmed, Mahmudul Hasan
Abstract:
Automatic Vehicle Detection (AVD) in diverse driving environments presents unique challenges due to varying lighting conditions, road types, and vehicle types. Traditional methods, such as YOLO and Faster R-CNN, often struggle to cope with these complexities. As computer vision evolves, combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with Transformer-based approaches offers promising opportunities for improving detection accuracy and efficiency. This study is the first to experiment with Detection Transformer (DETR) for automatic vehicle detection in complex and varied settings. We employ a Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training scheme, Co-DETR, to enhance feature learning and attention mechanisms in DETR. By leveraging versatile label assignment strategies and introducing multiple parallel auxiliary heads, we provide more effective supervision during training and extract positive coordinates to boost training efficiency. Through extensive experiments on DETR variants and YOLO models, conducted using the BadODD dataset, we demonstrate the advantages of our approach. Our method achieves superior results, and improved accuracy in diverse conditions, making it practical for real-world deployment. This work significantly advances autonomous navigation technology and opens new research avenues in object detection for autonomous vehicles. By integrating the strengths of CNNs and Transformers, we highlight the potential of DETR for robust and efficient vehicle detection in challenging driving environments.
Authors:Xinxin Feng, Haoran Sun, Haifeng Zheng
Abstract:
Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) collaborative perception leverages data collected by infrastructure's sensors to enhance vehicle perceptual capabilities. LiDAR, as a commonly used sensor in cooperative perception, is widely equipped in intelligent vehicles and infrastructure. However, its superior performance comes with a correspondingly high cost. To achieve low-cost V2I, reducing the cost of LiDAR is crucial. Therefore, we study adopting low-resolution LiDAR on the vehicle to minimize cost as much as possible. However, simply reducing the resolution of vehicle's LiDAR results in sparse point clouds, making distant small objects even more blurred. Additionally, traditional communication methods have relatively low bandwidth utilization efficiency. These factors pose challenges for us. To balance cost and perceptual accuracy, we propose a new collaborative perception framework, namely LCV2I. LCV2I uses data collected from cameras and low-resolution LiDAR as input. It also employs feature offset correction modules and regional feature enhancement algorithms to improve feature representation. Finally, we use regional difference map and regional score map to assess the value of collaboration content, thereby improving communication bandwidth efficiency. In summary, our approach achieves high perceptual performance while substantially reducing the demand for high-resolution sensors on the vehicle. To evaluate this algorithm, we conduct 3D object detection in the real-world scenario of DAIR-V2X, demonstrating that the performance of LCV2I consistently surpasses currently existing algorithms.
Authors:Tianyou Jiang, Yang Zhong
Abstract:
You Look Only Once (YOLO) models have been widely used for building real-time object detectors across various domains. With the increasing frequency of new YOLO versions being released, key questions arise. Are the newer versions always better than their previous versions? What are the core innovations in each YOLO version and how do these changes translate into real-world performance gains? In this paper, we summarize the key innovations from YOLOv1 to YOLOv11, introduce a comprehensive benchmark called ODverse33, which includes 33 datasets spanning 11 diverse domains (Autonomous driving, Agricultural, Underwater, Medical, Videogame, Industrial, Aerial, Wildlife, Retail, Microscopic, and Security), and explore the practical impact of model improvements in real-world, multi-domain applications through extensive experimental results. We hope this study can provide some guidance to the extensive users of object detection models and give some references for future real-time object detector development.
Authors:Md Pranto, Omar Faruk
Abstract:
Efficient and accurate object detection is an important topic in the development of computer vision systems. With the advent of deep learning techniques, the accuracy of object detection has increased significantly. The project aims to integrate a modern technique for object detection with the aim of achieving high accuracy with real-time performance. The reliance on other computer vision algorithms in many object identification systems, which results in poor and ineffective performance, is a significant obstacle. In this research, we solve the end-to-end object detection problem entirely using deep learning techniques. The network is trained using the most difficult publicly available dataset, which is used for an annual item detection challenge. Applications that need object detection can benefit the system's quick and precise finding.
Authors:Yin-Chih Chelsea Wang, Tsao-Lun Chen, Shankeeth Vinayahalingam, Tai-Hsien Wu, Chu Wei Chang, Hsuan Hao Chang, Hung-Jen Wei, Mu-Hsiung Chen, Ching-Chang Ko, David Anssari Moin, Bram van Ginneken, Tong Xi, Hsiao-Cheng Tsai, Min-Huey Chen, Tzu-Ming Harry Hsu, Hye Chou
Abstract:
Dental panoramic radiographs (DPRs) are widely used in clinical practice for comprehensive oral assessment but present challenges due to overlapping structures and time constraints in interpretation.
This study aimed to establish a solid baseline for the AI-automated assessment of findings in DPRs by developing, evaluating an AI system, and comparing its performance with that of human readers across multinational data sets.
We analyzed 6,669 DPRs from three data sets (the Netherlands, Brazil, and Taiwan), focusing on 8 types of dental findings. The AI system combined object detection and semantic segmentation techniques for per-tooth finding identification. Performance metrics included sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC). AI generalizability was tested across data sets, and performance was compared with human dental practitioners.
The AI system demonstrated comparable or superior performance to human readers, particularly +67.9% (95% CI: 54.0%-81.9%; p < .001) sensitivity for identifying periapical radiolucencies and +4.7% (95% CI: 1.4%-8.0%; p = .008) sensitivity for identifying missing teeth. The AI achieved a macro-averaged AUC-ROC of 96.2% (95% CI: 94.6%-97.8%) across 8 findings. AI agreements with the reference were comparable to inter-human agreements in 7 of 8 findings except for caries (p = .024). The AI system demonstrated robust generalization across diverse imaging and demographic settings and processed images 79 times faster (95% CI: 75-82) than human readers.
The AI system effectively assessed findings in DPRs, achieving performance on par with or better than human experts while significantly reducing interpretation time. These results highlight the potential for integrating AI into clinical workflows to improve diagnostic efficiency and accuracy, and patient management.
Authors:Yashwanth Karumanchi, Gudala Laxmi Prasanna, Snehasis Mukherjee, Nagesh Kolagani
Abstract:
Automatic monitoring of tree plantations plays a crucial role in agriculture. Flawless monitoring of tree health helps farmers make informed decisions regarding their management by taking appropriate action. Use of drone images for automatic plantation monitoring can enhance the accuracy of the monitoring process, while still being affordable to small farmers in developing countries such as India. Small, low cost drones equipped with an RGB camera can capture high-resolution images of agricultural fields, allowing for detailed analysis of the well-being of the plantations. Existing methods of automated plantation monitoring are mostly based on satellite images, which are difficult to get for the farmers. We propose an automated system for plantation health monitoring using drone images, which are becoming easier to get for the farmers. We propose a dataset of images of trees with three categories: ``Good health", ``Stunted", and ``Dead". We annotate the dataset using CVAT annotation tool, for use in research purposes. We experiment with different well-known CNN models to observe their performance on the proposed dataset. The initial low accuracy levels show the complexity of the proposed dataset. Further, our study revealed that, depth-wise convolution operation embedded in a deep CNN model, can enhance the performance of the model on drone dataset. Further, we apply state-of-the-art object detection models to identify individual trees to better monitor them automatically.
Authors:Xiaojing Liu, Ogulcan Gurelli, Yan Wang, Joshua Reiss
Abstract:
In multimedia applications such as films and video games, spatial audio techniques are widely employed to enhance user experiences by simulating 3D sound: transforming mono audio into binaural formats. However, this process is often complex and labor-intensive for sound designers, requiring precise synchronization of audio with the spatial positions of visual components. To address these challenges, we propose a visual-based spatial audio generation system - an automated system that integrates face detection YOLOv8 for object detection, monocular depth estimation, and spatial audio techniques. Notably, the system operates without requiring additional binaural dataset training. The proposed system is evaluated against existing Spatial Audio generation system using objective metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves spatial consistency between audio and video, enhances speech quality, and performs robustly in multi-speaker scenarios. By streamlining the audio-visual alignment process, the proposed system enables sound engineers to achieve high-quality results efficiently, making it a valuable tool for professionals in multimedia production.
Authors:Fady Ibrahim, Guangjun Liu, Guanghui Wang
Abstract:
Transformers have become foundational for visual tasks such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and video understanding, but their quadratic complexity in attention mechanisms presents scalability challenges. To address these limitations, the Mamba architecture utilizes state-space models (SSMs) for linear scalability, efficient processing, and improved contextual awareness. This paper investigates Mamba architecture for visual domain applications and its recent advancements, including Vision Mamba (ViM) and VideoMamba, which introduce bidirectional scanning, selective scanning mechanisms, and spatiotemporal processing to enhance image and video understanding. Architectural innovations like position embeddings, cross-scan modules, and hierarchical designs further optimize the Mamba framework for global and local feature extraction. These advancements position Mamba as a promising architecture in computer vision research and applications.
Authors:Akhila Matathammal, Kriti Gupta, Larissa Lavanya, Ananya Vishal Halgatti, Priyanshi Gupta, Karthik Vaidhyanathan
Abstract:
The widespread adoption of machine learning on edge devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, IoT devices, etc., has enabled real-time AI applications in resource-constrained environments. Existing solutions for managing computational resources often focus narrowly on accuracy or energy efficiency, failing to adapt dynamically to varying workloads. Furthermore, the existing system lack robust mechanisms to adaptively balance CPU utilization, leading to inefficiencies in resource-constrained scenarios like real-time traffic monitoring. To address these limitations, we propose a self-adaptive approach that optimizes CPU utilization and resource management on edge devices. Our approach, EdgeMLBalancer balances between models through dynamic switching, guided by real-time CPU usage monitoring across processor cores. Tested on real-time traffic data, the approach adapts object detection models based on CPU usage, ensuring efficient resource utilization. The approach leverages epsilon-greedy strategy which promotes fairness and prevents resource starvation, maintaining system robustness. The results of our evaluation demonstrate significant improvements by balancing computational efficiency and accuracy, highlighting the approach's ability to adapt seamlessly to varying workloads. This work lays the groundwork for further advancements in self-adaptation for resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Yago Romano Martinez, Brady Carter, Abhijeet Solanki, Wesam Al Amiri, Syed Rafay Hasan, Terry N. Guo
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely heavily on cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) to make safe and accurate driving decisions. However, since AI is the core enabling technology, this raises serious cyber threats that hinder the large-scale adoption of AVs. Therefore, it becomes crucial to analyze the resilience of AV security systems against sophisticated attacks that manipulate camera inputs, deceiving AI models. In this paper, we develop camera-camouflaged adversarial attacks targeting traffic sign recognition (TSR) in AVs. Specifically, if the attack is initiated by modifying the texture of a stop sign to fool the AV's object detection system, thereby affecting the AV actuators. The attack's effectiveness is tested using the CARLA AV simulator and the results show that such an attack can delay the auto-braking response to the stop sign, resulting in potential safety issues. We conduct extensive experiments under various conditions, confirming that our new attack is effective and robust. Additionally, we address the attack by presenting mitigation strategies. The proposed attack and defense methods are applicable to other end-to-end trained autonomous cyber-physical systems.
Authors:Luiz C. S. de Araujo, Carlos M. S. Figueiredo
Abstract:
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a critical problem in computer vision, essential for understanding how objects move and interact in videos. This field faces significant challenges such as occlusions and complex environmental dynamics, impacting model accuracy and efficiency. While traditional approaches have relied on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), introducing transformers has brought substantial advancements. This work introduces OneTrack-M, a transformer-based MOT model designed to enhance tracking computational efficiency and accuracy. Our approach simplifies the typical transformer-based architecture by eliminating the need for a decoder model for object detection and tracking. Instead, the encoder alone serves as the backbone for temporal data interpretation, significantly reducing processing time and increasing inference speed. Additionally, we employ innovative data pre-processing and multitask training techniques to address occlusion and diverse objective challenges within a single set of weights. Experimental results demonstrate that OneTrack-M achieves at least 25% faster inference times compared to state-of-the-art models in the literature while maintaining or improving tracking accuracy metrics. These improvements highlight the potential of the proposed solution for real-time applications such as autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, and robotics, where rapid responses are crucial for system effectiveness.
Authors:Akshar Tumu, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Abstract:
Spatial Reasoning is an important component of human cognition and is an area in which the latest Vision-language models (VLMs) show signs of difficulty. The current analysis works use image captioning tasks and visual question answering. In this work, we propose using the Referring Expression Comprehension task instead as a platform for the evaluation of spatial reasoning by VLMs. This platform provides the opportunity for a deeper analysis of spatial comprehension and grounding abilities when there is 1) ambiguity in object detection, 2) complex spatial expressions with a longer sentence structure and multiple spatial relations, and 3) expressions with negation ('not'). In our analysis, we use task-specific architectures as well as large VLMs and highlight their strengths and weaknesses in dealing with these specific situations. While all these models face challenges with the task at hand, the relative behaviors depend on the underlying models and the specific categories of spatial semantics (topological, directional, proximal, etc.). Our results highlight these challenges and behaviors and provide insight into research gaps and future directions.
Authors:Yuhui Jin, Yaqiong Zhang, Zheyuan Xu, Wenqing Zhang, Jingyu Xu
Abstract:
In the field of computer vision, 6D object detection and pose estimation are critical for applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous driving. Traditional methods often struggle with achieving high accuracy in both object detection and precise pose estimation simultaneously. This study proposes an improved 6D object detection and pose estimation pipeline based on the existing 6D-VNet framework, enhanced by integrating a Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC) and a High-Resolution Network (HRNet) backbone. By leveraging the strengths of HTC's multi-stage refinement process and HRNet's ability to maintain high-resolution representations, our approach significantly improves detection accuracy and pose estimation precision. Furthermore, we introduce advanced post-processing techniques and a novel model integration strategy that collectively contribute to superior performance on public and private benchmarks. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements over state-of-the-art models, making it a valuable contribution to the domain of 6D object detection and pose estimation.
Authors:Zhenwei He, Hongsu Ni
Abstract:
Single-domain generalization for object detection (S-DGOD) seeks to transfer learned representations from a single source domain to unseen target domains. While recent approaches have primarily focused on achieving feature invariance, they ignore that domain diversity also presents significant challenges for the task. First, such invariance-driven strategies often lead to the loss of domain-specific information, resulting in incomplete feature representations. Second, cross-domain feature alignment forces the model to overlook domain-specific discrepancies, thereby increasing the complexity of the training process. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the Diversity Invariant Detection Model (DIDM), which achieves a harmonious integration of domain-specific diversity and domain invariance. Our key idea is to learn the invariant representations by keeping the inherent domain-specific features. Specifically, we introduce the Diversity Learning Module (DLM). This module limits the invariant semantics while explicitly enhancing domain-specific feature representation through a proposed feature diversity loss. Furthermore, to ensure cross-domain invariance without sacrificing diversity, we incorporate the Weighted Aligning Module (WAM) to enable feature alignment while maintaining the discriminative domain-specific information. Extensive experiments on multiple diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, achieving superior performance compared to existing methods.
Authors:Xiaohui Yuan, Aniv Chakravarty, Lichuan Gu, Zhenchun Wei, Elinor Lichtenberg, Tian Chen
Abstract:
This paper reviews object detection methods for finding small objects from remote sensing imagery and provides an empirical evaluation of four state-of-the-art methods to gain insights into method performance and technical challenges. In particular, we use car detection from urban satellite images and bee box detection from satellite images of agricultural lands as application scenarios. Drawing from the existing surveys and literature, we identify several top-performing methods for the empirical study. Public, high-resolution satellite image datasets are used in our experiments.
Authors:Goodarz Mehr, Azim Eskandarian
Abstract:
Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception has garnered significant attention in autonomous driving in recent years, in part because BEV representation facilitates multi-modal sensor fusion. BEV representation enables a variety of perception tasks including BEV segmentation, a concise view of the environment useful for planning a vehicle's trajectory. However, this representation is not fully supported by existing datasets, and creation of new datasets for this purpose can be a time-consuming endeavor. To address this challenge, we introduce SimBEV. SimBEV is a randomized synthetic data generation tool that is extensively configurable and scalable, supports a wide array of sensors, incorporates information from multiple sources to capture accurate BEV ground truth, and enables a variety of perception tasks including BEV segmentation and 3D object detection. SimBEV is used to create the SimBEV dataset, a large collection of annotated perception data from diverse driving scenarios. SimBEV and the SimBEV dataset are open and available to the public.
Authors:Reza Sadeghian, Niloofar Hooshyaripour, Chris Joslin, WonSook Lee
Abstract:
Accurate and robust 3D object detection is essential for autonomous driving, where fusing data from sensors like LiDAR and camera enhances detection accuracy. However, sensor malfunctions such as corruption or disconnection can degrade performance, and existing fusion models often struggle to maintain reliability when one modality fails. To address this, we propose ReliFusion, a novel LiDAR-camera fusion framework operating in the bird's-eye view (BEV) space. ReliFusion integrates three key components: the Spatio-Temporal Feature Aggregation (STFA) module, which captures dependencies across frames to stabilize predictions over time; the Reliability module, which assigns confidence scores to quantify the dependability of each modality under challenging conditions; and the Confidence-Weighted Mutual Cross-Attention (CW-MCA) module, which dynamically balances information from LiDAR and camera modalities based on these confidence scores. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that ReliFusion significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior robustness and accuracy in scenarios with limited LiDAR fields of view and severe sensor malfunctions.
Authors:Jeffri Murrugarra-LLerena, Jose Henrique Lima Marques, Claudio R. Jung
Abstract:
Oriented Object Detection (OOD) has received increased attention in the past years, being a suitable solution for detecting elongated objects in remote sensing analysis. In particular, using regression loss functions based on Gaussian distributions has become attractive since they yield simple and differentiable terms. However, existing solutions are still based on regression heads that produce Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBBs), and the known problem of angular boundary discontinuity persists. In this work, we propose a regression head for OOD that directly produces Gaussian distributions based on the Cholesky matrix decomposition. The proposed head, named GauCho, theoretically mitigates the boundary discontinuity problem and is fully compatible with recent Gaussian-based regression loss functions. Furthermore, we advocate using Oriented Ellipses (OEs) to represent oriented objects, which relates to GauCho through a bijective function and alleviates the encoding ambiguity problem for circular objects. Our experimental results show that GauCho can be a viable alternative to the traditional OBB head, achieving results comparable to or better than state-of-the-art detectors for the challenging dataset DOTA
Authors:Costin F. Ciusdel, Alex Serban, Tiziano Passerini
Abstract:
While traditional self-supervised learning methods improve performance and robustness across various medical tasks, they rely on single-vector embeddings that may not capture fine-grained concepts such as anatomical structures or organs. The ability to identify such concepts and their characteristics without supervision has the potential to improve pre-training methods, and enable novel applications such as fine-grained image retrieval and concept-based outlier detection. In this paper, we introduce ConceptVAE, a novel pre-training framework that detects and disentangles fine-grained concepts from their style characteristics in a self-supervised manner. We present a suite of loss terms and model architecture primitives designed to discretise input data into a preset number of concepts along with their local style. We validate ConceptVAE both qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating its ability to detect fine-grained anatomical structures such as blood pools and septum walls from 2D cardiac echocardiographies. Quantitatively, ConceptVAE outperforms traditional self-supervised methods in tasks such as region-based instance retrieval, semantic segmentation, out-of-distribution detection, and object detection. Additionally, we explore the generation of in-distribution synthetic data that maintains the same concepts as the training data but with distinct styles, highlighting its potential for more calibrated data generation. Overall, our study introduces and validates a promising new pre-training technique based on concept-style disentanglement, opening multiple avenues for developing models for medical image analysis that are more interpretable and explainable than black-box approaches.
Authors:Katherine Allison, Jonathan Kelly, Benjamin Hatton
Abstract:
Grip surfaces with tunable friction can actively modify contact conditions, enabling transitions between higher- and lower-friction states for grasp adjustment. Friction can be increased to grip securely and then decreased to gently release (e.g., for handovers) or manipulate in-hand. Recent friction-tuning surface designs using soft pneumatic chambers show good control over grip friction; however, most require complex fabrication processes and/or custom gripper hardware. We present a practical structured fingerpad design for friction tuning that uses less than $1 USD of materials, takes only seconds to repair, and is easily adapted to existing grippers. Our design uses surface morphology changes to tune friction. The fingerpad is actuated by pressurizing its internal chambers, thereby deflecting its flexible grip surface out from or into these chambers. We characterize the friction-tuning capabilities of our design by measuring the shear force required to pull an object from a gripper equipped with two independently actuated fingerpads. Our results show that varying actuation pressure and timing changes the magnitude of friction forces on a gripped object by up to a factor of 2.8. We demonstrate additional features including macro-scale interlocking behaviour and pressure-based object detection.
Authors:Abhinav Pratap, Sushant Kumar, Suchinton Chakravarty
Abstract:
This study addresses the need for accurate and efficient object detection in assistive technologies for visually impaired individuals. We evaluate four real-time object detection algorithms YOLO, SSD, Faster R-CNN, and Mask R-CNN within the context of indoor navigation assistance. Using the Indoor Objects Detection dataset, we analyze detection accuracy, processing speed, and adaptability to indoor environments. Our findings highlight the trade-offs between precision and efficiency, offering insights into selecting optimal algorithms for realtime assistive navigation. This research advances adaptive machine learning applications, enhancing indoor navigation solutions for the visually impaired and promoting accessibility.
Authors:Abi Aryaza, Novanto Yudistira, Tibyani
Abstract:
Marine debris poses significant harm to marine life due to substances like microplastics, polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticides, which damage habitats and poison organisms. Human-based solutions, such as diving, are increasingly ineffective in addressing this issue. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are being developed for efficient sea garbage collection, with the choice of object detection architecture being critical. This research employs the YOLOv4 model for real-time detection of marine debris using the Trash-ICRA 19 dataset, consisting of 7683 images at 480x320 pixels. Various modifications-pretrained models, training from scratch, mosaic augmentation, layer freezing, YOLOv4-tiny, and channel pruning-are compared to enhance architecture efficiency. Channel pruning significantly improves detection speed, increasing the base YOLOv4 frame rate from 15.19 FPS to 19.4 FPS, with only a 1.2% drop in mean Average Precision, from 97.6% to 96.4%.
Authors:Zhijian Hao, Ashwin Lele, Yan Fang, Arijit Raychowdhury, Azadeh Ansari
Abstract:
Robotic autonomy at centimeter scale requires compact and miniaturization-friendly actuation integrated with sensing and neural network processing assembly within a tiny form factor. Applications of such systems have witnessed significant advancements in recent years in fields such as healthcare, manufacturing, and post-disaster rescue. The system design at this scale puts stringent constraints on power consumption for both the sensory front-end and actuation back-end and the weight of the electronic assembly for robust operation. In this paper, we introduce FAVbot, the first autonomous mobile micro-robotic system integrated with a novel actuation mechanism and convolutional neural network (CNN) based computer vision - all integrated within a compact 3-cm form factor. The novel actuation mechanism utilizes mechanical resonance phenomenon to achieve frequency-controlled steering with a single piezoelectric actuator. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FAVbot's frequency-controlled actuation, which offers a diverse selection of resonance modes with different motion characteristics. The actuation system is complemented with the vision front-end where a camera along with a microcontroller supports object detection for closed-loop control and autonomous target tracking. This enables adaptive navigation in dynamic environments. This work contributes to the evolving landscape of neural network-enabled micro-robotic systems showing the smallest autonomous robot built using controllable multi-directional single-actuator mechanism.
Authors:Chen Zuguo, Kuang Aowei, Huang Yi, Jin Jie
Abstract:
To address the high risks associated with improper use of safety gear in complex power line environments, where target occlusion and large variance are prevalent, this paper proposes an enhanced PEC-YOLO object detection algorithm. The method integrates deep perception with multi-scale feature fusion, utilizing PConv and EMA attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction efficiency and minimize model complexity. The CPCA attention mechanism is incorporated into the SPPF module, improving the model's ability to focus on critical information and enhance detection accuracy, particularly in challenging conditions. Furthermore, the introduction of the BiFPN neck architecture optimizes the utilization of low-level and high-level features, enhancing feature representation through adaptive fusion and context-aware mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PEC-YOLO achieves a 2.7% improvement in detection accuracy compared to YOLOv8s, while reducing model parameters by 42.58%. Under identical conditions, PEC-YOLO outperforms other models in detection speed, meeting the stringent accuracy requirements for safety gear detection in construction sites. This study contributes to the development of efficient and accurate intelligent monitoring systems for ensuring worker safety in hazardous environments.
Authors:Timo Lange, Ajish Babu, Philipp Meyer, Matthis Keppner, Tim Tiedemann, Martin Wittmaier, Sebastian Wolff, Thomas Vögele
Abstract:
Current disposal facilities for coarse-grained waste perform manual sorting of materials with heavy machinery. Large quantities of recyclable materials are lost to coarse waste, so more effective sorting processes must be developed to recover them. Two key aspects to automate the sorting process are object detection with material classification in mixed piles of waste, and autonomous control of hydraulic machinery. Because most objects in those accumulations of waste are damaged or destroyed, object detection alone is not feasible in the majority of cases. To address these challenges, we propose a classification of materials with multispectral images of ultraviolet (UV), visual (VIS), near infrared (NIR), and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectrums. Solution for autonomous control of hydraulic heavy machines for sorting of bulky waste is being investigated using cost-effective cameras and artificial intelligence-based controllers.
Authors:Nanjangud C. Narendra, Nithin Nagaraj
Abstract:
Deep learning implemented via neural networks, has revolutionized machine learning by providing methods for complex tasks such as object detection/classification and prediction. However, architectures based on deep neural networks have started to yield diminishing returns, primarily due to their statistical nature and inability to capture causal structure in the training data. Another issue with deep learning is its high energy consumption, which is not that desirable from a sustainability perspective.
Therefore, alternative approaches are being considered to address these issues, both of which are inspired by the functioning of the human brain. One approach is causal learning, which takes into account causality among the items in the dataset on which the neural network is trained. It is expected that this will help minimize the spurious correlations that are prevalent in the learned representations of deep neural networks. The other approach is Neurochaos Learning, a recent development, which draws its inspiration from the nonlinear chaotic firing intrinsic to neurons in biological neural networks (brain/central nervous system). Both approaches have shown improved results over just deep learning alone.
To that end, in this position paper, we investigate how causal and neurochaos learning approaches can be integrated together to produce better results, especially in domains that contain linked data. We propose an approach for this integration to enhance classification, prediction and reinforcement learning. We also propose a set of research questions that need to be investigated in order to make this integration a reality.
Authors:Boxun Hu, Mingze Xia, Ding Zhao, Guanlin Wu
Abstract:
Dynamic urban environments, characterized by moving cameras and objects, pose significant challenges for camera trajectory estimation by complicating the distinction between camera-induced and object motion. We introduce MONA, a novel framework designed for robust moving object detection and segmentation from videos shot by dynamic cameras. MONA comprises two key modules: Dynamic Points Extraction, which leverages optical flow and tracking any point to identify dynamic points, and Moving Object Segmentation, which employs adaptive bounding box filtering, and the Segment Anything for precise moving object segmentation. We validate MONA by integrating with the camera trajectory estimation method LEAP-VO, and it achieves state-of-the-art results on the MPI Sintel dataset comparing to existing methods. These results demonstrate MONA's effectiveness for moving object detection and its potential in many other applications in the urban planning field.
Authors:Dongli Wu, Ling Luo
Abstract:
With the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, underwater target detection and tracking have become increasingly important for ocean monitoring and resource management. Existing methods often fall short in handling high-noise and low-contrast images in complex underwater environments, lacking precision and robustness. This paper introduces a novel SVGS-DSGAT model that combines GraphSage, SVAM, and DSGAT modules, enhancing feature extraction and target detection capabilities through graph neural networks and attention mechanisms. The model integrates IoT technology to facilitate real-time data collection and processing, optimizing resource allocation and model responsiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that the SVGS-DSGAT model achieves an mAP of 40.8% on the URPC 2020 dataset and 41.5% on the SeaDronesSee dataset, significantly outperforming existing mainstream models. This IoT-enhanced approach not only excels in high-noise and complex backgrounds but also improves the overall efficiency and scalability of the system. This research provides an effective IoT solution for underwater target detection technology, offering significant practical application value and broad development prospects.
Authors:Farhad Kooban, Aleksandra RadliÅska, Reza Mousapour, Maryam Saraei
Abstract:
Subsurface evaluation of railway tracks is crucial for safe operation, as it allows for the early detection and remediation of potential structural weaknesses or defects that could lead to accidents or derailments. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is an electromagnetic survey technique as advanced non-destructive technology (NDT) that can be used to monitor railway tracks. This technology is well-suited for railway applications due to the sub-layered composition of the track, which includes ties, ballast, sub-ballast, and subgrade regions. It can detect defects such as ballast pockets, fouled ballast, poor drainage, and subgrade settlement. The paper reviews recent works on advanced technology and interpretations of GPR data collected for different layers. Further, this paper demonstrates the current techniques for using synthetic modeling to calibrate real-world GPR data, enhancing accuracy in identifying subsurface features like ballast conditions and structural anomalies and applying various algorithms to refine GPR data analysis. These include Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classifying railway ballast types, Fuzzy C-means, and Generalized Regression Neural Networks for high-accuracy defect classification. Deep learning techniques, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are also highlighted for their effectiveness in recognizing patterns associated with defects in GPR images. The article specifically focuses on the development of a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) model, which combines CNN and RNN architectures for efficient processing of GPR data. This model demonstrates enhanced detection capabilities and faster processing compared to traditional object detection models like Faster R-CNN.
Authors:Adriana Anido-Alonso, Diego Alvarez-Estevez
Abstract:
Polysomnographic sleep analysis is the standard clinical method to accurately diagnose and treat sleep disorders. It is an intricate process which involves the manual identification, classification, and location of multiple sleep event patterns. This is complex, for which identification of different types of events involves focusing on different subsets of signals, resulting on an iterative time-consuming process entailing several visual analysis passes. In this paper we propose a multi-task deep-learning approach for the simultaneous detection of sleep events and hypnogram construction in one single pass. Taking as reference state-of-the-art methodology for object-detection in the field of Computer Vision, we reformulate the problem for the analysis of multi-variate time sequences, and more specifically for pattern detection in the sleep analysis scenario. We investigate the performance of the resulting method in identifying different assembly combinations of EEG arousals, respiratory events (apneas and hypopneas) and sleep stages, also considering different input signal montage configurations. Furthermore, we evaluate our approach using two independent datasets, assessing true-generalization effects involving local and external validation scenarios. Based on our results, we analyze and discuss our method's capabilities and its potential wide-range applicability across different settings and datasets.
Authors:Ofer Bar-Shalom, Tzvi Philipp, Eran Kishon
Abstract:
We explore the impact of aperture size and shape on automotive camera systems for deep-learning-based tasks like traffic sign recognition and light state detection. A method is proposed to simulate optical effects using the point spread function (PSF), enhancing realism and reducing the domain gap between synthetic and real-world images. Computer-generated scenes are refined with this technique to model optical distortions and improve simulation accuracy.
Authors:Chinmay K Lalgudi, Mark E Leone, Jaden V Clark, Sergio Madrigal-Mora, Mario Espinoza
Abstract:
The recent widespread adoption of drones for studying marine animals provides opportunities for deriving biological information from aerial imagery. The large scale of imagery data acquired from drones is well suited for machine learning (ML) analysis. Development of ML models for analyzing marine animal aerial imagery has followed the classical paradigm of training, testing, and deploying a new model for each dataset, requiring significant time, human effort, and ML expertise. We introduce Frame Level ALIgment and tRacking (FLAIR), which leverages the video understanding of Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) and the vision-language capabilities of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). FLAIR takes a drone video as input and outputs segmentation masks of the species of interest across the video. Notably, FLAIR leverages a zero-shot approach, eliminating the need for labeled data, training a new model, or fine-tuning an existing model to generalize to other species. With a dataset of 18,000 drone images of Pacific nurse sharks, we trained state-of-the-art object detection models to compare against FLAIR. We show that FLAIR massively outperforms these object detectors and performs competitively against two human-in-the-loop methods for prompting SAM2, achieving a Dice score of 0.81. FLAIR readily generalizes to other shark species without additional human effort and can be combined with novel heuristics to automatically extract relevant information including length and tailbeat frequency. FLAIR has significant potential to accelerate aerial imagery analysis workflows, requiring markedly less human effort and expertise than traditional machine learning workflows, while achieving superior accuracy. By reducing the effort required for aerial imagery analysis, FLAIR allows scientists to spend more time interpreting results and deriving insights about marine ecosystems.
Authors:Runci Bai, Guibao Xu, Yanze Shi
Abstract:
Brain tumors can lead to neurological dysfunction, cognitive and psychological changes, increased intracranial pressure, and seizures, posing significant risks to health. The You Only Look Once (YOLO) series has shown superior accuracy in medical imaging object detection. This paper presents a novel SCC-YOLO architecture that integrates the SCConv module into YOLOv9. The SCConv module optimizes convolutional efficiency by reducing spatial and channel redundancy, enhancing image feature learning. We examine the effects of different attention mechanisms with YOLOv9 for brain tumor detection using the Br35H dataset and our custom dataset (Brain_Tumor_Dataset). Results indicate that SCC-YOLO improved mAP50 by 0.3% on the Br35H dataset and by 0.5% on our custom dataset compared to YOLOv9. SCC-YOLO achieves state-of-the-art performance in brain tumor detection.
Authors:Ruochen Zhang, Hyeung-Sik Choi, Dongwook Jung, Phan Huy Nam Anh, Sang-Ki Jeong, Zihao Zhu
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is a challenging task in autonomous systems due to the lack of explicit depth information in single-view images. Existing methods often depend on external depth estimators or expensive sensors, which increase computational complexity and hinder real-time performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose AuxDepthNet, an efficient framework for real-time monocular 3D object detection that eliminates the reliance on external depth maps or pre-trained depth models. AuxDepthNet introduces two key components: the Auxiliary Depth Feature (ADF) module, which implicitly learns depth-sensitive features to improve spatial reasoning and computational efficiency, and the Depth Position Mapping (DPM) module, which embeds depth positional information directly into the detection process to enable accurate object localization and 3D bounding box regression. Leveraging the DepthFusion Transformer architecture, AuxDepthNet globally integrates visual and depth-sensitive features through depth-guided interactions, ensuring robust and efficient detection. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that AuxDepthNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with $\text{AP}_{3D}$ scores of 24.72\% (Easy), 18.63\% (Moderate), and 15.31\% (Hard), and $\text{AP}_{\text{BEV}}$ scores of 34.11\% (Easy), 25.18\% (Moderate), and 21.90\% (Hard) at an IoU threshold of 0.7.
Authors:Takumi Kitsukawa, Kazuma Miura, Shigeki Yumoto, Sarthak Pathak, Alessandro Moro, Kazunori Umeda
Abstract:
In this paper, a progress recognition method consider occlusion using deep metric learning is proposed to visualize the product assembly process in a factory. First, the target assembly product is detected from images acquired from a fixed-point camera installed in the factory using a deep learning-based object detection method. Next, the detection area is cropped from the image. Finally, by using a classification method based on deep metric learning on the cropped image, the progress of the product assembly work is estimated as a rough progress step.
As a specific progress estimation model, we propose an Anomaly Triplet-Net that adds anomaly samples to Triplet Loss for progress estimation considering occlusion.
In experiments, an 82.9% success rate is achieved for the progress estimation method using Anomaly Triplet-Net.
We also experimented with the practicality of the sequence of detection, cropping, and progression estimation, and confirmed the effectiveness of the overall system.
Authors:Hirthik Mathesh GV, Kavin Chakravarthy M, Sentil Pandi S
Abstract:
Oral cancer constitutes a significant global health concern, resulting in 277,484 fatalities in 2023, with the highest prevalence observed in low- and middle-income nations. Facilitating automation in the detection of possibly malignant and malignant lesions in the oral cavity could result in cost-effective and early disease diagnosis. Establishing an extensive repository of meticulously annotated oral lesions is essential. In this research photos are being collected from global clinical experts, who have been equipped with an annotation tool to generate comprehensive labelling. This research presents a novel approach for integrating bounding box annotations from various doctors. Additionally, Deep Belief Network combined with CAPSNET is employed to develop automated systems that extracted intricate patterns to address this challenging problem. This study evaluated two deep learning-based computer vision methodologies for the automated detection and classification of oral lesions to facilitate the early detection of oral cancer: image classification utilizing CAPSNET. Image classification attained an F1 score of 94.23% for detecting photos with lesions 93.46% for identifying images necessitating referral. Object detection attained an F1 score of 89.34% for identifying lesions for referral. Subsequent performances are documented about classification based on the sort of referral decision. Our preliminary findings indicate that deep learning possesses the capability to address this complex problem.
Authors:Sanmoy Bandyopadhyay, Vaibhav Pant
Abstract:
In this article, an active contours without edges (ACWE)-based algorithm has been proposed for the detection of solar filaments in H-alpha full-disk solar images. The overall algorithm consists of three main steps of image processing. These are image pre-processing, image segmentation, and image post-processing. Here in the work, contours are initialized on the solar image and allowed to deform based on the energy function. As soon as the contour reaches the boundary of the desired object, the energy function gets reduced, and the contour stops evolving. The proposed algorithm has been applied to few benchmark datasets and has been compared with the classical technique of object detection. The results analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the results obtained using the existing classical algorithm of object detection.
Authors:Suman Kunwar, Banji Raphael Owabumoye, Abayomi Simeon Alade
Abstract:
With the increasing use of plastic, the challenges associated with managing plastic waste have become more challenging, emphasizing the need of effective solutions for classification and recycling. This study explores the potential of deep learning, focusing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and object detection models like YOLO (You Only Look Once), to tackle this issue using the WaDaBa dataset. The study shows that YOLO- 11m achieved highest accuracy (98.03%) and mAP50 (0.990), with YOLO-11n performing similarly but highest mAP50(0.992). Lightweight models like YOLO-10n trained faster but with lower accuracy, whereas MobileNet V2 showed impressive performance (97.12% accuracy) but fell short in object detection. Our study highlights the potential of deep learning models in transforming how we classify plastic waste, with YOLO models proving to be the most effective. By balancing accuracy and computational efficiency, these models can help to create scalable, impactful solutions in waste management and recycling.
Authors:Vaikunth M, Dejey D, Vishaal C, Balamurali S
Abstract:
Helmet detection is crucial for advancing protection levels in public road traffic dynamics. This problem statement translates to an object detection task. Therefore, this paper compares recent You Only Look Once (YOLO) models in the context of helmet detection in terms of reliability and computational load. Specifically, YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and the newly released YOLOv11 have been used. Besides, a modified architectural pipeline that remarkably improves the overall performance has been proposed in this manuscript. This hybridized YOLO model (h-YOLO) has been pitted against the independent models for analysis that proves h-YOLO is preferable for helmet detection over plain YOLO models. The models were tested using a range of standard object detection benchmarks such as recall, precision, and mAP (Mean Average Precision). In addition, training and testing times were recorded to provide the overall scope of the models in a real-time detection scenario.
Authors:Rafael Cabral, Maria De Iorio, Andrew Harris
Abstract:
In this work we investigate the application of advanced object detection techniques to digital numismatics, focussing on the analysis of historical coins. Leveraging models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), we develop a flexible framework for identifying and classifying specific coin features using both image and textual descriptions. By examining two distinct datasets, modern Russian coins featuring intricate "Saint George and the Dragon" designs and degraded 1st millennium AD Southeast Asian coins bearing Hindu-Buddhist symbols, we evaluate the efficacy of different detection algorithms in search and classification tasks. Our results demonstrate the superior performance of larger CLIP models in detecting complex imagery, while traditional methods excel in identifying simple geometric patterns. Additionally, we propose a statistical calibration mechanism to enhance the reliability of similarity scores in low-quality datasets. This work highlights the transformative potential of integrating state-of-the-art object detection into digital numismatics, enabling more scalable, precise, and efficient analysis of historical artifacts. These advancements pave the way for new methodologies in cultural heritage research, artefact provenance studies, and the detection of forgeries.
Authors:Tan Nguyen, Coy D. Heldermon, Corey Toler-Franklin
Abstract:
We present a novel method that extends the self-attention mechanism of a vision transformer (ViT) for more accurate object detection across diverse datasets. ViTs show strong capability for image understanding tasks such as object detection, segmentation, and classification. This is due in part to their ability to leverage global information from interactions among visual tokens. However, the self-attention mechanism in ViTs are limited because they do not allow visual tokens to exchange local or global information with neighboring features before computing global attention. This is problematic because tokens are treated in isolation when attending (matching) to other tokens, and valuable spatial relationships are overlooked. This isolation is further compounded by dot-product similarity operations that make tokens from different semantic classes appear visually similar. To address these limitations, we introduce two modifications to the traditional self-attention framework; a novel aggressive convolution pooling strategy for local feature mixing, and a new conceptual attention transformation to facilitate interaction and feature exchange between semantic concepts. Experimental results demonstrate that local and global information exchange among visual features before self-attention significantly improves performance on challenging object detection tasks and generalizes across multiple benchmark datasets and challenging medical datasets. We publish source code and a novel dataset of cancerous tumors (chimeric cell clusters).
Authors:Helia Mohamadi, Mohammad Ali Keyvanrad, Mohammad Reza Mohammadi
Abstract:
Domain adaptation, a pivotal branch of transfer learning, aims to enhance the performance of machine learning models when deployed in target domains with distinct data distributions. This is particularly critical for object detection tasks, where domain shifts (caused by factors such as lighting conditions, viewing angles, and environmental variations) can lead to significant performance degradation. This review delves into advanced methodologies for domain adaptation, including adversarial learning, discrepancy-based, multi-domain, teacher-student, ensemble, and Vision Language Models techniques, emphasizing their efficacy in reducing domain gaps and enhancing model robustness. Feature-based methods have emerged as powerful tools for addressing these challenges by harmonizing feature representations across domains. These techniques, such as Feature Alignment, Feature Augmentation/Reconstruction, and Feature Transformation, are employed alongside or as integral parts of other domain adaptation strategies to minimize domain gaps and improve model performance. Special attention is given to strategies that minimize the reliance on extensive labeled data and using unlabeled data, particularly in scenarios involving synthetic-to-real domain shifts. Applications in fields such as autonomous driving and medical imaging are explored, showcasing the potential of these methods to ensure reliable object detection in diverse and complex settings. By providing a thorough analysis of state-of-the-art techniques, challenges, and future directions, this work offers a valuable reference for researchers striving to develop resilient and adaptable object detection frameworks, advancing the seamless deployment of artificial intelligence in dynamic environments.
Authors:Marcus Jenkins, Kirsty A. Franklin, Malcolm A. C. Nicoll, Nik C. Cole, Kevin Ruhomaun, Vikash Tatayah, Michal Mackiewicz
Abstract:
Monitoring animal populations is crucial for assessing the health of ecosystems. Traditional methods, which require extensive fieldwork, are increasingly being supplemented by time-lapse camera-trap imagery combined with an automatic analysis of the image data. The latter usually involves some object detector aimed at detecting relevant targets (commonly animals) in each image, followed by some postprocessing to gather activity and population data. In this paper, we show that the performance of an object detector in a single frame of a time-lapse sequence can be improved by including spatio-temporal features from the prior frames. We propose a method that leverages temporal information by integrating two additional spatial feature channels which capture stationary and non-stationary elements of the scene and consequently improve scene understanding and reduce the number of stationary false positives. The proposed technique achieves a significant improvement of 24\% in mean average precision (mAP@0.05:0.95) over the baseline (temporal feature-free, single frame) object detector on a large dataset of breeding tropical seabirds. We envisage our method will be widely applicable to other wildlife monitoring applications that use time-lapse imaging.
Authors:Laura Weihl, Bilal Wehbe, Andrzej WÄ
sowski
Abstract:
Autonomous inspection of infrastructure on land and in water is a quickly growing market, with applications including surveying constructions, monitoring plants, and tracking environmental changes in on- and off-shore wind energy farms. For Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles overfitting of controllers to simulation conditions fundamentally leads to poor performance in the operation environment. There is a pressing need for more diverse and realistic test data that accurately represents the challenges faced by these systems. We address the challenge of generating perception test data for autonomous systems by leveraging Neural Radiance Fields to generate realistic and diverse test images, and integrating them into a metamorphic testing framework for vision components such as vSLAM and object detection. Our tool, N2R-Tester, allows training models of custom scenes and rendering test images from perturbed positions. An experimental evaluation of N2R-Tester on eight different vision components in AUVs and UAVs demonstrates the efficacy and versatility of the approach.
Authors:Paolo Gabriel, Peter Rehani, Tyler Troy, Tiffany Wyatt, Michael Choma, Narinder Singh
Abstract:
This study introduces an AI-driven platform for continuous and passive patient monitoring in hospital settings, developed by LookDeep Health. Leveraging advanced computer vision, the platform provides real-time insights into patient behavior and interactions through video analysis, securely storing inference results in the cloud for retrospective evaluation. The dataset, compiled in collaboration with 11 hospital partners, encompasses over 300 high-risk fall patients and over 1,000 days of inference, enabling applications such as fall detection and safety monitoring for vulnerable patient populations. To foster innovation and reproducibility, an anonymized subset of this dataset is publicly available. The AI system detects key components in hospital rooms, including individual presence and role, furniture location, motion magnitude, and boundary crossings. Performance evaluation demonstrates strong accuracy in object detection (macro F1-score = 0.92) and patient-role classification (F1-score = 0.98), as well as reliable trend analysis for the "patient alone" metric (mean logistic regression accuracy = 0.82 \pm 0.15). These capabilities enable automated detection of patient isolation, wandering, or unsupervised movement-key indicators for fall risk and other adverse events. This work establishes benchmarks for validating AI-driven patient monitoring systems, highlighting the platform's potential to enhance patient safety and care by providing continuous, data-driven insights into patient behavior and interactions.
Authors:Zhifei Shi, Zongyao Yin, Sheng Chang, Xiao Yi, Xianchuan Yu
Abstract:
Achieving a balance between computational efficiency and detection accuracy in the realm of rotated bounding box object detection within aerial imagery is a significant challenge. While prior research has aimed at creating lightweight models that enhance computational performance and feature extraction, there remains a gap in the performance of these networks when it comes to the detection of small and multi-scale objects in remote sensing (RS) imagery. To address these challenges, we present a novel enhancement to the YOLOv8 model, tailored for oriented object detection tasks and optimized for environments with limited computational resources. Our model features a wavelet transform-based C2f module for capturing associative features and an Adaptive Scale Feature Pyramid (ASFP) module that leverages P2 layer details. Additionally, the incorporation of GhostDynamicConv significantly contributes to the model's lightweight nature, ensuring high efficiency in aerial imagery analysis. Featuring a parameter count of 21.6M, our approach provides a more efficient architectural design than DecoupleNet, which has 23.3M parameters, all while maintaining detection accuracy. On the DOTAv1.0 dataset, our model demonstrates a mean Average Precision (mAP) that is competitive with leading methods such as DecoupleNet. The model's efficiency, combined with its reduced parameter count, makes it a strong candidate for aerial object detection, particularly in resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Ruixin Mao, Aoyu Shen, Lin Tang, Jun Zhou
Abstract:
Event-based cameras feature high temporal resolution, wide dynamic range, and low power consumption, which is ideal for high-speed and low-light object detection. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for event-based object recognition and detection due to their spiking nature but lack efficient training methods, leading to gradient vanishing and high computational complexity, especially in deep SNNs. Additionally, existing SNN frameworks often fail to effectively handle multi-scale spatiotemporal features, leading to increased data redundancy and reduced accuracy. To address these issues, we propose CREST, a novel conjointly-trained spike-driven framework to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics in event-based object detection. We introduce the conjoint learning rule to accelerate SNN learning and alleviate gradient vanishing. It also supports dual operation modes for efficient and flexible implementation on different hardware types. Additionally, CREST features a fully spike-driven framework with a multi-scale spatiotemporal event integrator (MESTOR) and a spatiotemporal-IoU (ST-IoU) loss. Our approach achieves superior object recognition & detection performance and up to 100X energy efficiency compared with state-of-the-art SNN algorithms on three datasets, providing an efficient solution for event-based object detection algorithms suitable for SNN hardware implementation.
Authors:Kun Guo, Qiang Ling
Abstract:
Multi-camera 3D object detection aims to detect and localize objects in 3D space using multiple cameras, which has attracted more attention due to its cost-effectiveness trade-off. However, these methods often struggle with the lack of accurate depth estimation caused by the natural weakness of the camera in ranging. Recently, multi-modal fusion and knowledge distillation methods for 3D object detection have been proposed to solve this problem, which are time-consuming during the training phase and not friendly to memory cost. In light of this, we propose PromptDet, a lightweight yet effective 3D object detection framework motivated by the success of prompt learning in 2D foundation model. Our proposed framework, PromptDet, comprises two integral components: a general camera-based detection module, exemplified by models like BEVDet and BEVDepth, and a LiDAR-assisted prompter. The LiDAR-assisted prompter leverages the LiDAR points as a complementary signal, enriched with a minimal set of additional trainable parameters. Notably, our framework is flexible due to our prompt-like design, which can not only be used as a lightweight multi-modal fusion method but also as a camera-only method for 3D object detection during the inference phase. Extensive experiments on nuScenes validate the effectiveness of the proposed PromptDet. As a multi-modal detector, PromptDet improves the mAP and NDS by at most 22.8\% and 21.1\% with fewer than 2\% extra parameters compared with the camera-only baseline. Without LiDAR points, PromptDet still achieves an improvement of at most 2.4\% mAP and 4.0\% NDS with almost no impact on camera detection inference time.
Authors:Madiyar Alimov, Temirlan Meiramkhanov
Abstract:
This study investigates the domain generalization capabilities of three state-of-the-art object detection models - YOLOv8s, RT-DETR, and YOLO-NAS - within the unique driving environment of Kazakhstan. Utilizing the newly constructed ROAD-Almaty dataset, which encompasses diverse weather, lighting, and traffic conditions, we evaluated the models' performance without any retraining. Quantitative analysis revealed that RT-DETR achieved an average F1-score of 0.672 at IoU=0.5, outperforming YOLOv8s (0.458) and YOLO-NAS (0.526) by approximately 46% and 27%, respectively. Additionally, all models exhibited significant performance declines at higher IoU thresholds (e.g., a drop of approximately 20% when increasing IoU from 0.5 to 0.75) and under challenging environmental conditions, such as heavy snowfall and low-light scenarios. These findings underscore the necessity for geographically diverse training datasets and the implementation of specialized domain adaptation techniques to enhance the reliability of autonomous vehicle detection systems globally. This research contributes to the understanding of domain generalization challenges in autonomous driving, particularly in underrepresented regions.
Authors:Adesh Kadambi, José Zariffa
Abstract:
Wearable egocentric cameras and machine learning have the potential to provide clinicians with a more nuanced understanding of patient hand use at home after stroke and spinal cord injury (SCI). However, they require detailed contextual information (i.e., activities and object interactions) to effectively interpret metrics and meaningfully guide therapy planning. We demonstrate that an object-centric approach, focusing on what objects patients interact with rather than how they move, can effectively recognize Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in real-world rehabilitation settings. We evaluated our models on a complex dataset collected in the wild comprising 2261 minutes of egocentric video from 16 participants with impaired hand function. By leveraging pre-trained object detection and hand-object interaction models, our system achieves robust performance across different impairment levels and environments, with our best model achieving a mean weighted F1-score of 0.78 +/- 0.12 and maintaining an F1-score > 0.5 for all participants using leave-one-subject-out cross validation. Through qualitative analysis, we observe that this approach generates clinically interpretable information about functional object use while being robust to patient-specific movement variations, making it particularly suitable for rehabilitation contexts with prevalent upper limb impairment.
Authors:Jinrong Zhang, Penghui Wang, Chunxiao Liu, Wei Liu, Dian Jin, Qiong Zhang, Erli Meng, Zhengnan Hu
Abstract:
To break through the limitations of pre-training models on fixed categories, Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) and Open-Set Segmentation (OSS) have attracted a surge of interest from researchers. Inspired by large language models, mainstream OSOD and OSS methods generally utilize text as a prompt, achieving remarkable performance. Following SAM paradigm, some researchers use visual prompts, such as points, boxes, and masks that cover detection or segmentation targets. Despite these two prompt paradigms exhibit excellent performance, they also reveal inherent limitations. On the one hand, it is difficult to accurately describe characteristics of specialized category using textual description. On the other hand, existing visual prompt paradigms heavily rely on multi-round human interaction, which hinders them being applied to fully automated pipeline. To address the above issues, we propose a novel prompt paradigm in OSOD and OSS, that is, \textbf{Image Prompt Paradigm}. This brand new prompt paradigm enables to detect or segment specialized categories without multi-round human intervention. To achieve this goal, the proposed image prompt paradigm uses just a few image instances as prompts, and we propose a novel framework named \textbf{MI Grounding} for this new paradigm. In this framework, high-quality image prompts are automatically encoded, selected and fused, achieving the single-stage and non-interactive inference. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets, showing that MI Grounding achieves competitive performance on OSOD and OSS benchmarks compared to text prompt paradigm methods and visual prompt paradigm methods. Moreover, MI Grounding can greatly outperform existing method on our constructed specialized ADR50K dataset.
Authors:Kailas PS, Selvakumaran R, Palani Murugan, Ramesh Kumar, Malaya Kumar Biswal M
Abstract:
In recent years, significant advancements have been made in deep learning-based object detection algorithms, revolutionizing basic computer vision tasks, notably in object detection, tracking, and segmentation. This paper delves into the intricate domain of Small-Object-Detection (SOD) within satellite imagery, highlighting the unique challenges stemming from wide imaging ranges, object distribution, and their varying appearances in bird's-eye-view satellite images. Traditional object detection models face difficulties in detecting small objects due to limited contextual information and class imbalances. To address this, our research presents a meticulously curated dataset comprising 3000 images showcasing cars, ships, and airplanes in satellite imagery. Our study aims to provide valuable insights into small object detection in satellite imagery by empirically evaluating state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, we tackle the challenges of satellite video-based object tracking, employing the Byte Track algorithm on the SAT-MTB dataset. Through rigorous experimentation, we aim to offer a comprehensive understanding of the efficacy of state-of-the-art models in Small-Object-Detection for satellite applications. Our findings shed light on the effectiveness of these models and pave the way for future advancements in satellite imagery analysis.
Authors:Haomiao Liu, Hao Xu, Chuhuai Yue, Bo Ma
Abstract:
Unknown Object Detection (UOD) aims to identify objects of unseen categories, differing from the traditional detection paradigm limited by the closed-world assumption. A key component of UOD is learning a generalized representation, i.e. objectness for both known and unknown categories to distinguish and localize objects from the background in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous methods obtain supervision signals for learning objectness in isolation from either localization or classification information, leading to poor performance for UOD. To address this issue, we propose a transformer-based UOD framework, UN-DETR. Based on this, we craft Instance Presence Score (IPS) to represent the probability of an object's presence. For the purpose of information complementarity, IPS employs a strategy of joint supervised learning, integrating attributes representing general objectness from the positional and the categorical latent space as supervision signals. To enhance IPS learning, we introduce a one-to-many assignment strategy to incorporate more supervision. Then, we propose Unbiased Query Selection to provide premium initial query vectors for the decoder. Additionally, we propose an IPS-guided post-process strategy to filter redundant boxes and correct classification predictions for known and unknown objects. Finally, we pretrain the entire UN-DETR in an unsupervised manner, in order to obtain objectness prior. Our UN-DETR is comprehensively evaluated on multiple UOD and known detection benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness and achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Zican Shi, Jing Hu, Jie Ren, Hengkang Ye, Xuyang Yuan, Yan Ouyang, Jia He, Bo Ji, Junyu Guo
Abstract:
The introduction of Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) has significantly improved object detection performance. However, substantial challenges remain in detecting tiny objects, as their features occupy only a very small proportion of the feature maps. Although FPN integrates multi-scale features, it does not directly enhance or enrich the features of tiny objects. Furthermore, FPN lacks spatial perception ability. To address these issues, we propose a novel High Frequency and Spatial Perception Feature Pyramid Network (HS-FPN) with two innovative modules. First, we designed a high frequency perception module (HFP) that generates high frequency responses through high pass filters. These high frequency responses are used as mask weights from both spatial and channel perspectives to enrich and highlight the features of tiny objects in the original feature maps. Second, we developed a spatial dependency perception module (SDP) to capture the spatial dependencies that FPN lacks. Our experiments demonstrate that detectors based on HS-FPN exhibit competitive advantages over state-of-the-art models on the AI-TOD dataset for tiny object detection.
Authors:Cheng Mei, Hao He, Yahui Liu, Zhenhua Guo
Abstract:
In the technical report, we present a novel transformer-based framework for nuScenes lidar-based object detection task, termed Spatial Expansion Group Transformer (SEGT). To efficiently handle the irregular and sparse nature of point cloud, we propose migrating the voxels into distinct specialized ordered fields with the general spatial expansion strategies, and employ group attention mechanisms to extract the exclusive feature maps within each field. Subsequently, we integrate the feature representations across different ordered fields by alternately applying diverse expansion strategies, thereby enhancing the model's ability to capture comprehensive spatial information. The method was evaluated on the nuScenes lidar-based object detection test dataset, achieving an NDS score of 73.9 without Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) and 74.5 with TTA, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Notably, our method ranks the 1st place in the nuScenes lidar-based object detection task.
Authors:Abdelrahman Elnenaey, Marwan Torki
Abstract:
Image reflection removal is crucial for restoring image quality. Distorted images can negatively impact tasks like object detection and image segmentation. In this paper, we present a novel approach for image reflection removal using a single image. Instead of focusing on model architecture, we introduce a new training technique that can be generalized to image-to-image problems, with input and output being similar in nature. This technique is embodied in our multi-step loss mechanism, which has proven effective in the reflection removal task. Additionally, we address the scarcity of reflection removal training data by synthesizing a high-quality, non-linear synthetic dataset called RefGAN using Pix2Pix GAN. This dataset significantly enhances the model's ability to learn better patterns for reflection removal. We also utilize a ranged depth map, extracted from the depth estimation of the ambient image, as an auxiliary feature, leveraging its property of lacking depth estimations for reflections. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on the SIR^2 benchmark and other real-world datasets, proving its effectiveness by outperforming other state-of-the-art models.
Authors:Jiaming Lv, Haoyuan Yang, Peihua Li
Abstract:
Since pioneering work of Hinton et al., knowledge distillation based on Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KL-Div) has been predominant, and recently its variants have achieved compelling performance. However, KL-Div only compares probabilities of the corresponding category between the teacher and student while lacking a mechanism for cross-category comparison. Besides, KL-Div is problematic when applied to intermediate layers, as it cannot handle non-overlapping distributions and is unaware of geometry of the underlying manifold. To address these downsides, we propose a methodology of Wasserstein Distance (WD) based knowledge distillation. Specifically, we propose a logit distillation method called WKD-L based on discrete WD, which performs cross-category comparison of probabilities and thus can explicitly leverage rich interrelations among categories. Moreover, we introduce a feature distillation method called WKD-F, which uses a parametric method for modeling feature distributions and adopts continuous WD for transferring knowledge from intermediate layers. Comprehensive evaluations on image classification and object detection have shown (1) for logit distillation WKD-L outperforms very strong KL-Div variants; (2) for feature distillation WKD-F is superior to the KL-Div counterparts and state-of-the-art competitors. The source code is available at https://peihuali.org/WKD
Authors:Quoc-Bao Nguyen-Le, Thanh-Huy Le-Nguyen
Abstract:
Current video retrieval systems, especially those used in competitions, primarily focus on querying individual keyframes or images rather than encoding an entire clip or video segment. However, queries often describe an action or event over a series of frames, not a specific image. This results in insufficient information when analyzing a single frame, leading to less accurate query results. Moreover, extracting embeddings solely from images (keyframes) does not provide enough information for models to encode higher-level, more abstract insights inferred from the video. These models tend to only describe the objects present in the frame, lacking a deeper understanding. In this work, we propose a system that integrates the latest methodologies, introducing a novel pipeline that extracts multimodal data, and incorporate information from multiple frames within a video, enabling the model to abstract higher-level information that captures latent meanings, focusing on what can be inferred from the video clip, rather than just focusing on object detection in one single image.
Authors:Gayathri Dandugula, Santhosh Boddana, Sudesh Mirashi
Abstract:
Deploying radar object detection models on resource-constrained edge devices like the Raspberry Pi poses significant challenges due to the large size of the model and the limited computational power and the memory of the Pi. In this work, we explore the efficiency of Depthwise Separable Convolutions in radar object detection networks and integrate them into our model. Additionally, we introduce a novel Feature Enhancement and Compression (FEC) module to the PointPillars feature encoder to further improve the model performance. With these innovations, we propose the DSFEC-L model and its two versions, which outperform the baseline (23.9 mAP of Car class, 20.72 GFLOPs) on nuScenes dataset: 1). An efficient DSFEC-M model with a 14.6% performance improvement and a 60% reduction in GFLOPs. 2). A deployable DSFEC-S model with a 3.76% performance improvement and a remarkable 78.5% reduction in GFLOPs. Despite marginal performance gains, our deployable model achieves an impressive 74.5% reduction in runtime on the Raspberry Pi compared to the baseline.
Authors:Surya N Reddy, Vaibhav Kurrey, Mayank Nagar, Gagan Raj Gupta
Abstract:
Proper use of personal protective equipment (PPE) can save the lives of industry workers and it is a widely used application of computer vision in the large manufacturing industries. However, most of the applications deployed generate a lot of false alarms (violations) because they tend to generalize the requirements of PPE across the industry and tasks. The key to resolving this issue is to understand the action being performed by the worker and customize the inference for the specific PPE requirements of that action. In this paper, we propose a system that employs activity recognition models to first understand the action being performed and then use object detection techniques to check for violations. This leads to a 23% improvement in the F1-score compared to the PPE-based approach on our test dataset of 109 videos.
Authors:Mithun Parab, Pranay Lendave, Jiyoung Kim, Thi Quynh Dan Nguyen, Palash Ingle
Abstract:
In image-assisted minimally invasive surgeries (MIS), understanding surgical scenes is vital for real-time feedback to surgeons, skill evaluation, and improving outcomes through collaborative human-robot procedures. Within this context, the challenge lies in accurately detecting, segmenting, and estimating the depth of surgical scenes depicted in high-resolution images, while simultaneously reconstructing the scene in 3D and providing segmentation of surgical instruments along with detection labels for each instrument. To address this challenge, a novel Multi-Task Learning (MTL) network is proposed for performing these tasks concurrently. A key aspect of this approach involves overcoming the optimization hurdles associated with handling multiple tasks concurrently by integrating a Adversarial Weight Update into the MTL framework, the proposed MTL model achieves 3D reconstruction through the integration of segmentation, depth estimation, and object detection, thereby enhancing the understanding of surgical scenes, which marks a significant advancement compared to existing studies that lack 3D capabilities. Comprehensive experiments on the EndoVis2018 benchmark dataset underscore the adeptness of the model in efficiently addressing all three tasks, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed techniques.
Authors:Louis Airale, Adrien Pajot, Juliette Linossier
Abstract:
The persisting threats on migratory bird populations highlight the urgent need for effective monitoring techniques that could assist in their conservation. Among these, passive acoustic monitoring is an essential tool, particularly for nocturnal migratory species that are difficult to track otherwise. This work presents the Nocturnal Bird Migration (NBM) dataset, a collection of 13,359 annotated vocalizations from 117 species of the Western Palearctic. The dataset includes precise time and frequency annotations, gathered by dozens of bird enthusiasts across France, enabling novel downstream acoustic analysis. In particular, we prove the utility of this database by training an original two-stage deep object detection model tailored for the processing of audio data. While allowing the precise localization of bird calls in spectrograms, this model shows competitive accuracy on the 45 main species of the dataset with state-of-the-art systems trained on much larger audio collections. These results highlight the interest of fostering similar open-science initiatives to acquire costly but valuable fine-grained annotations of audio files. All data and code are made openly available.
Authors:Gustavo P. C. P. da Luz, Gabriel Massuyoshi Sato, Luis Fernando Gomez Gonzalez, Juliana Freitag Borin
Abstract:
The increasing urbanization and the growing number of vehicles in cities have underscored the need for efficient parking management systems. Traditional smart parking solutions often rely on sensors or cameras for occupancy detection, each with its limitations. Recent advancements in deep learning have introduced new YOLO models (YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and YOLOv11), but these models have not been extensively evaluated in the context of smart parking systems, particularly when combined with Region of Interest (ROI) selection for object detection. Existing methods still rely on fixed polygonal ROI selections or simple pixel-based modifications, which limit flexibility and precision. This work introduces a novel approach that integrates Internet of Things, Edge Computing, and Deep Learning concepts, by using the latest YOLO models for vehicle detection. By exploring both edge and cloud computing, it was found that inference times on edge devices ranged from 1 to 92 seconds, depending on the hardware and model version. Additionally, a new pixel-wise post-processing ROI selection method is proposed for accurately identifying regions of interest to count vehicles in parking lot images. The proposed system achieved 99.68% balanced accuracy on a custom dataset of 3,484 images, offering a cost-effective smart parking solution that ensures precise vehicle detection while preserving data privacy
Authors:Zijian He, Kang Wang, Tian Fang, Lei Su, Rui Chen, Xihong Fei
Abstract:
With the rapid development of global industrial production, the demand for reliability in power equipment has been continuously increasing. Ensuring the stability of power system operations requires accurate methods to detect potential faults in power equipment, thereby guaranteeing the normal supply of electrical energy. In this article, the performance of YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and the state-of-the-art YOLOv11 methods was comprehensively evaluated for power equipment object detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the mean average precision (mAP) on a public dataset for power equipment was 54.4%, 55.5%, 43.8%, 48.0%, and 57.2%, respectively, with the YOLOv11 achieving the highest detection performance. Moreover, the YOLOv11 outperformed other methods in terms of recall rate and exhibited superior performance in reducing false detections. In conclusion, the findings indicate that the YOLOv11 model provides a reliable and effective solution for power equipment object detection, representing a promising approach to enhancing the operational reliability of power systems.
Authors:Jonathan Lichtenfeld, Kevin Daun, Oskar von Stryk
Abstract:
We propose a real-time dynamic LiDAR odometry pipeline for mobile robots in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) scenarios. Existing approaches to dynamic object detection often rely on pretrained learned networks or computationally expensive volumetric maps. To enhance efficiency on computationally limited robots, we reuse data between the odometry and detection module. Utilizing a range image segmentation technique and a novel residual-based heuristic, our method distinguishes dynamic from static objects before integrating them into the point cloud map. The approach demonstrates robust object tracking and improved map accuracy in environments with numerous dynamic objects. Even highly non-rigid objects, such as running humans, are accurately detected at point level without prior downsampling of the point cloud and hence, without loss of information. Evaluation on simulated and real-world data validates its computational efficiency. Compared to a state-of-the-art volumetric method, our approach shows comparable detection performance at a fraction of the processing time, adding only 14 ms to the odometry module for dynamic object detection and tracking. The implementation and a new real-world dataset are available as open-source for further research.
Authors:Mohamad Abubaker, Zubayda Alsadder, Hamed Abdelhaq, Maik Boltes, Ahmed Alia
Abstract:
The automatic detection of pedestrian heads in crowded environments is essential for crowd analysis and management tasks, particularly in high-risk settings such as railway platforms and event entrances. These environments, characterized by dense crowds and dynamic movements, are underrepresented in public datasets, posing challenges for existing deep learning models. To address this gap, we introduce the Railway Platforms and Event Entrances-Heads (RPEE-Heads) dataset, a novel, diverse, high-resolution, and accurately annotated resource. It includes 109,913 annotated pedestrian heads across 1,886 images from 66 video recordings, with an average of 56.2 heads per image. Annotations include bounding boxes for visible head regions. In addition to introducing the RPEE-Heads dataset, this paper evaluates eight state-of-the-art object detection algorithms using the RPEE-Heads dataset and analyzes the impact of head size on detection accuracy. The experimental results show that You Only Look Once v9 and Real-Time Detection Transformer outperform the other algorithms, achieving mean average precisions of 90.7% and 90.8%, with inference times of 11 and 14 milliseconds, respectively. Moreover, the findings underscore the need for specialized datasets like RPEE-Heads for training and evaluating accurate models for head detection in railway platforms and event entrances. The dataset and pretrained models are available at https://doi.org/10.34735/ped.2024.2.
Authors:Eric Shah, Jay Patel, Mr. Vishal Katheriya, Parth Pataliya
Abstract:
Fundus images are widely used for diagnosing various eye diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration. However, manual analysis of fundus images is time-consuming and prone to errors. In this report, we propose a novel method for fundus detection using object detection and machine learning classification techniques. We use a YOLO_V8 to perform object detection on fundus images and locate the regions of interest (ROIs) such as optic disc, optic cup and lesions. We then use machine learning SVM classification algorithms to classify the ROIs into different DR stages based on the presence or absence of pathological signs such as exudates, microaneurysms, and haemorrhages etc. Our method achieves 84% accuracy and efficiency for fundus detection and can be applied for retinal fundus disease triage, especially in remote areas around the world.
Authors:Jinwoo Ahn, Hyeokjoon Kwon, Hwiyeon Yoo
Abstract:
Recent advent of vision-based foundation models has enabled efficient and high-quality object detection at ease. Despite the success of previous studies, object detection models face limitations on capturing small components from holistic objects and taking user intention into account. To address these challenges, we propose a novel foundation model-based detection method called FOCUS: Fine-grained Open-Vocabulary Object ReCognition via User-Guided Segmentation. FOCUS merges the capabilities of vision foundation models to automate open-vocabulary object detection at flexible granularity and allow users to directly guide the detection process via natural language. It not only excels at identifying and locating granular constituent elements but also minimizes unnecessary user intervention yet grants them significant control. With FOCUS, users can make explainable requests to actively guide the detection process in the intended direction. Our results show that FOCUS effectively enhances the detection capabilities of baseline models and shows consistent performance across varying object types.
Authors:Sergei Voronin, Abubakar Siddique, Muhammad Iqbal
Abstract:
The rapid progress in machine learning models has significantly boosted the potential for real-world applications such as autonomous vehicles, disease diagnoses, and recognition of emergencies. The performance of many machine learning models depends on the nature and size of the training data sets. These models often face challenges due to the scarcity, noise, and imbalance in real-world data, limiting their performance. Nonetheless, high-quality, diverse, relevant and representative training data is essential to build accurate and reliable machine learning models that adapt well to real-world scenarios.
It is hypothesised that well-designed synthetic data can improve the performance of a machine learning algorithm. This work aims to create a synthetic dataset and evaluate its effectiveness to improve the prediction accuracy of object detection systems. This work considers autonomous vehicle scenarios as an illustrative example to show the efficacy of synthetic data. The effectiveness of these synthetic datasets in improving the performance of state-of-the-art object detection models is explored. The findings demonstrate that incorporating synthetic data improves model performance across all performance matrices.
Two deep learning systems, System-1 (trained on real-world data) and System-2 (trained on a combination of real and synthetic data), are evaluated using the state-of-the-art YOLO model across multiple metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and mean average precision. Experimental results revealed that System-2 outperformed System-1, showing a 3% improvement in accuracy, along with superior performance in all other metrics.
Authors:Irfan Nafiz Shahan, Arban Hossain, Saadman Sakib, Al-Mubin Nabil
Abstract:
In the recent years, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the field of Computer Vision, with the forthcoming of the transformer architecture. Detection Transformers has become a state of the art solution to object detection and is a potential candidate for Road Object Detection in Autonomous Vehicles. Despite the abundance of object detection schemes, real-time DETR models are shown to perform significantly better on inference times, with minimal loss of accuracy and performance. In our work, we used Real-Time DETR (RTDETR) object detection on the BadODD Road Object Detection dataset based in Bangladesh, and performed necessary experimentation and testing. Our results gave a mAP50 score of 0.41518 in the public 60% test set, and 0.28194 in the private 40% test set.
Authors:Günel Jabbarlı, Murat Kurt
Abstract:
Accurate and fast recognition of forgeries is an issue of great importance in the fields of artificial intelligence, image processing and object detection. Recognition of forgeries of facial imagery is the process of classifying and defining the faces in it by analyzing real-world facial images. This process is usually accomplished by extracting features from an image, using classifier algorithms, and correctly interpreting the results. Recognizing forgeries of facial imagery correctly can encounter many different challenges. For example, factors such as changing lighting conditions, viewing faces from different angles can affect recognition performance, and background complexity and perspective changes in facial images can make accurate recognition difficult. Despite these difficulties, significant progress has been made in the field of forgery detection. Deep learning algorithms, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have significantly improved forgery detection performance.
This study focuses on image processing-based forgery detection using Fake-Vs-Real-Faces (Hard) [10] and 140k Real and Fake Faces [61] data sets. Both data sets consist of two classes containing real and fake facial images. In our study, two lightweight deep learning models are proposed to conduct forgery detection using these images. Additionally, 8 different pretrained CNN architectures were tested on both data sets and the results were compared with newly developed lightweight CNN models. It's shown that the proposed lightweight deep learning models have minimum number of layers. It's also shown that the proposed lightweight deep learning models detect forgeries of facial imagery accurately, and computationally efficiently. Although the data set consists only of face images, the developed models can also be used in other two-class object recognition problems.
Authors:Defan Chen, Luchan Zhang
Abstract:
Detecting small objects in complex scenes, such as those captured by drones, is a daunting challenge due to the difficulty in capturing the complex features of small targets. While the YOLO family has achieved great success in large target detection, its performance is less than satisfactory when faced with small targets. Because of this, this paper proposes a revolutionary model SL-YOLO (Stronger and Lighter YOLO) that aims to break the bottleneck of small target detection. We propose the Hierarchical Extended Path Aggregation Network (HEPAN), a pioneering cross-scale feature fusion method that can ensure unparalleled detection accuracy even in the most challenging environments. At the same time, without sacrificing detection capabilities, we design the C2fDCB lightweight module and add the SCDown downsampling module to greatly reduce the model's parameters and computational complexity. Our experimental results on the VisDrone2019 dataset reveal a significant improvement in performance, with mAP@0.5 jumping from 43.0% to 46.9% and mAP@0.5:0.95 increasing from 26.0% to 28.9%. At the same time, the model parameters are reduced from 11.1M to 9.6M, and the FPS can reach 132, making it an ideal solution for real-time small object detection in resource-constrained environments.
Authors:Yongjin Lee, Hyeon-Mun Jeong, Yurim Jeon, Sanghyun Kim
Abstract:
Multi-modal sensor fusion in Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation has become the leading approach for 3D object detection. However, existing methods often rely on depth estimators or transformer encoders to transform image features into BEV space, which reduces robustness or introduces significant computational overhead. Moreover, the insufficient geometric guidance in view transformation results in ray-directional misalignments, limiting the effectiveness of BEV representations. To address these challenges, we propose Efficient View Transformation (EVT), a novel 3D object detection framework that constructs a well-structured BEV representation, improving both accuracy and efficiency. Our approach focuses on two key aspects. First, Adaptive Sampling and Adaptive Projection (ASAP), which utilizes LiDAR guidance to generate 3D sampling points and adaptive kernels, enables more effective transformation of image features into BEV space and a refined BEV representation. Second, an improved query-based detection framework, incorporating group-wise mixed query selection and geometry-aware cross-attention, effectively captures both the common properties and the geometric structure of objects in the transformer decoder. On the nuScenes test set, EVT achieves state-of-the-art performance of 75.3% NDS with real-time inference speed.
Authors:Chanyeong Park, Heegwang Kim, Joonki Paik
Abstract:
Drone-captured images present significant challenges in object detection due to varying shooting conditions, which can alter object appearance and shape. Factors such as drone altitude, angle, and weather cause these variations, influencing the performance of object detection algorithms. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an innovative vision-language approach using learnable prompts. This shift from conventional manual prompts aims to reduce domain-specific knowledge interference, ultimately improving object detection capabilities. Furthermore, we streamline the training process with a one-step approach, updating the learnable prompt concurrently with model training, enhancing efficiency without compromising performance. Our study contributes to domain-generalized object detection by leveraging learnable prompts and optimizing training processes. This enhances model robustness and adaptability across diverse environments, leading to more effective aerial object detection.
Authors:Md Arid Hasan, Krishno Dey
Abstract:
The recent advancement of edge computing enables researchers to optimize various deep learning architectures to employ them in edge devices. In this study, we aim to optimize Xception architecture which is one of the most popular deep learning algorithms for computer vision applications. The Xception architecture is highly effective for object detection tasks. However, it comes with a significant computational cost. The computational complexity of Xception sometimes hinders its deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this, we propose an optimized Xception architecture tailored for edge devices, aiming for lightweight and efficient deployment. We incorporate the depthwise separable convolutions with deep residual convolutions of the Xception architecture to develop a small and efficient model for edge devices. The resultant architecture reduces parameters, memory usage, and computational load. The proposed architecture is evaluated on the CIFAR 10 object detection dataset. The evaluation result of our experiment also shows the proposed architecture is smaller in parameter size and requires less training time while outperforming Xception architecture performance.
Authors:Hejer Ammar, Nikita Kiselov, Guillaume Lapouge, Romaric Audigier
Abstract:
In real-world applications where confidence is key, like autonomous driving, the accurate detection and appropriate handling of classes differing from those used during training are crucial. Despite the proposal of various unknown object detection approaches, we have observed widespread inconsistencies among them regarding the datasets, metrics, and scenarios used, alongside a notable absence of a clear definition for unknown objects, which hampers meaningful evaluation. To counter these issues, we introduce two benchmarks: a unified VOC-COCO evaluation, and the new OpenImagesRoad benchmark which provides clear hierarchical object definition besides new evaluation metrics. Complementing the benchmark, we exploit recent self-supervised Vision Transformers performance, to improve pseudo-labeling-based OpenSet Object Detection (OSOD), through OW-DETR++. State-of-the-art methods are extensively evaluated on the proposed benchmarks. This study provides a clear problem definition, ensures consistent evaluations, and draws new conclusions about effectiveness of OSOD strategies.
Authors:Xun Tu, Karthik Desingh
Abstract:
Grasp planning and estimation have been a longstanding research problem in robotics, with two main approaches to find graspable poses on the objects: 1) geometric approach, which relies on 3D models of objects and the gripper to estimate valid grasp poses, and 2) data-driven, learning-based approach, with models trained to identify grasp poses from raw sensor observations. The latter assumes comprehensive geometric coverage during the training phase. However, the data-driven approach is typically biased toward tabletop scenarios and struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios with larger objects (e.g. chair). Additionally, raw sensor data (e.g. RGB-D data) from a single view of these larger objects is often incomplete and necessitates additional observations. In this paper, we take a geometric approach, leveraging advancements in object modeling (e.g. NeRF) to build an implicit model by taking RGB images from views around the target object. This model enables the extraction of explicit mesh model while also capturing the visual appearance from novel viewpoints that is useful for perception tasks like object detection and pose estimation. We further decompose the NeRF-reconstructed 3D mesh into superquadrics (SQs) -- parametric geometric primitives, each mapped to a set of precomputed grasp poses, allowing grasp composition on the target object based on these primitives. Our proposed pipeline overcomes the problems: a) noisy depth and incomplete view of the object, with a modeling step, and b) generalization to objects of any size. For more qualitative results, refer to the supplementary video and webpage https://bit.ly/3ZrOanU
Authors:Claus D. Hansen, Thuy Hai Le, David Campos
Abstract:
This paper examines the use of computer vision algorithms to estimate aspects of the psychosocial work environment using CCTV footage. We present a proof of concept for a methodology that detects and tracks people in video footage and estimates interactions between customers and employees by estimating their poses and calculating the duration of their encounters. We propose a pipeline that combines existing object detection and tracking algorithms (YOLOv8 and DeepSORT) with pose estimation algorithms (BlazePose) to estimate the number of customers and employees in the footage as well as the duration of their encounters. We use a simple rule-based approach to classify the interactions as positive, neutral or negative based on three different criteria: distance, duration and pose. The proposed methodology is tested on a small dataset of CCTV footage. While the data is quite limited in particular with respect to the quality of the footage, we have chosen this case as it represents a typical setting where the method could be applied. The results show that the object detection and tracking part of the pipeline has a reasonable performance on the dataset with a high degree of recall and reasonable accuracy. At this stage, the pose estimation is still limited to fully detect the type of interactions due to difficulties in tracking employees in the footage. We conclude that the method is a promising alternative to self-reported measures of the psychosocial work environment and could be used in future studies to obtain external observations of the work environment.
Authors:Irum Mehboob, Li Sun, Alireza Astegarpanah, Rustam Stolkin
Abstract:
This paper shows how an uncertainty-aware, deep neural network can be trained to detect, recognise and localise objects in 2D RGB images, in applications lacking annotated train-ng datasets. We propose a self-supervising teacher-student pipeline, in which a relatively simple teacher classifier, trained with only a few labelled 2D thumbnails, automatically processes a larger body of unlabelled RGB-D data to teach a student network based on a modified YOLOv3 architecture. Firstly, 3D object detection with back projection is used to automatically extract and teach 2D detection and localisation information to the student network. Secondly, a weakly supervised 2D thumbnail classifier, with minimal training on a small number of hand-labelled images, is used to teach object category recognition. Thirdly, we use a Gaussian Process GP to encode and teach a robust uncertainty estimation functionality, so that the student can output confidence scores with each categorization. The resulting student significantly outperforms the same YOLO architecture trained directly on the same amount of labelled data. Our GP-based approach yields robust and meaningful uncertainty estimations for complex industrial object classifications. The end-to-end network is also capable of real-time processing, needed for robotics applications. Our method can be applied to many important industrial tasks, where labelled datasets are typically unavailable. In this paper, we demonstrate an example of detection, localisation, and object category recognition of nuclear mixed-waste materials in highly cluttered and unstructured scenes. This is critical for robotic sorting and handling of legacy nuclear waste, which poses complex environmental remediation challenges in many nuclearised nations.
Authors:Youssef Elmir, Hayet Touati, Ouassila Melizou
Abstract:
Surveillance systems often struggle with managing vast amounts of footage, much of which is irrelevant, leading to inefficient storage and challenges in event retrieval. This paper addresses these issues by proposing an optimized video recording solution focused on activity detection. The proposed approach utilizes a hybrid method that combines motion detection via frame subtraction with object detection using YOLOv9. This strategy specifically targets the recording of scenes involving human or car activity, thereby reducing unnecessary footage and optimizing storage usage. The developed model demonstrates superior performance, achieving precision metrics of 0.855 for car detection and 0.884 for person detection, and reducing the storage requirements by two-thirds compared to traditional surveillance systems that rely solely on motion detection. This significant reduction in storage highlights the effectiveness of the proposed approach in enhancing surveillance system efficiency. Nonetheless, some limitations persist, particularly the occurrence of false positives and false negatives in adverse weather conditions, such as strong winds.
Authors:Juanqin Liu, Leonardo Plotegher, Eloy Roura, Cristino de Souza Junior, Shaoming He
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) detection technology plays a critical role in mitigating security risks and safeguarding privacy in both military and civilian applications. However, traditional detection methods face significant challenges in identifying UAV targets with extremely small pixels at long distances. To address this issue, we propose the Global-Local YOLO-Motion (GL-YOMO) detection algorithm, which combines You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection with multi-frame motion detection techniques, markedly enhancing the accuracy and stability of small UAV target detection. The YOLO detection algorithm is optimized through multi-scale feature fusion and attention mechanisms, while the integration of the Ghost module further improves efficiency. Additionally, a motion detection approach based on template matching is being developed to augment detection capabilities for minute UAV targets. The system utilizes a global-local collaborative detection strategy to achieve high precision and efficiency. Experimental results on a self-constructed fixed-wing UAV dataset demonstrate that the GL-YOMO algorithm significantly enhances detection accuracy and stability, underscoring its potential in UAV detection applications.
Authors:Md Abu Ahammed Babu, Sushant Kumar Pandey, Darko Durisic, Ashok Chaitanya Koppisetty, Miroslaw Staron
Abstract:
Data leakage is a very common problem that is often overlooked during splitting data into train and test sets before training any ML/DL model. The model performance gets artificially inflated with the presence of data leakage during the evaluation phase which often leads the model to erroneous prediction on real-time deployment. However, detecting the presence of such leakage is challenging, particularly in the object detection context of perception systems where the model needs to be supplied with image data for training. In this study, we conduct a computational experiment on the Cirrus dataset from our industrial partner Volvo Cars to develop a method for detecting data leakage. We then evaluate the method on another public dataset, Kitti, which is a popular and widely accepted benchmark dataset in the automotive domain. The results show that thanks to our proposed method we are able to detect data leakage in the Kitti dataset, which was previously unknown.
Authors:Adonisz Dimitriu, Tamás Michaletzky, Viktor Remeli
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks threaten the reliability of machine learning models in critical applications like autonomous vehicles and defense systems. As object detectors become more robust with models like YOLOv8, developing effective adversarial methodologies is increasingly challenging. We present Truck Adversarial Camouflage Optimization (TACO), a novel framework that generates adversarial camouflage patterns on 3D vehicle models to deceive state-of-the-art object detectors. Adopting Unreal Engine 5, TACO integrates differentiable rendering with a Photorealistic Rendering Network to optimize adversarial textures targeted at YOLOv8. To ensure the generated textures are both effective in deceiving detectors and visually plausible, we introduce the Convolutional Smooth Loss function, a generalized smooth loss function. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that TACO significantly degrades YOLOv8's detection performance, achieving an AP@0.5 of 0.0099 on unseen test data. Furthermore, these adversarial patterns exhibit strong transferability to other object detection models such as Faster R-CNN and earlier YOLO versions.
Authors:Jakob Shack, Katarina Petrovic, Olga Saukh
Abstract:
Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the robustness and reliability of machine learning systems, particularly in computer vision applications. This study investigates the performance of adversarial patches for the YOLO object detection network in the physical world. Two attacks were tested: a patch designed to be placed anywhere within the scene - global patch, and another patch intended to partially overlap with specific object targeted for removal from detection - local patch. Various factors such as patch size, position, rotation, brightness, and hue were analyzed to understand their impact on the effectiveness of the adversarial patches. The results reveal a notable dependency on these parameters, highlighting the challenges in maintaining attack efficacy in real-world conditions. Learning to align digitally applied transformation parameters with those measured in the real world still results in up to a 64\% discrepancy in patch performance. These findings underscore the importance of understanding environmental influences on adversarial attacks, which can inform the development of more robust defenses for practical machine learning applications.
Authors:Nasrin Azimi, Danial Mohammad Rezaei
Abstract:
Grading and quality control of Piarom dates, a premium and high-value variety cultivated predominantly in Iran, present significant challenges due to the complexity and variability of defects, as well as the absence of specialized automated systems tailored to this fruit. Traditional manual inspection methods are labor intensive, time consuming, and prone to human error, while existing AI-based sorting solutions are insufficient for addressing the nuanced characteristics of Piarom dates. In this study, we propose an innovative deep learning framework designed specifically for the real-time detection, classification, and grading of Piarom dates. Leveraging a custom dataset comprising over 9,900 high-resolution images annotated across 11 distinct defect categories, our framework integrates state-of-the-art object detection algorithms and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to achieve high precision in defect identification. Furthermore, we employ advanced segmentation techniques to estimate the area and weight of each date, thereby optimizing the grading process according to industry standards. Experimental results demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency, making it highly suitable for industrial applications requiring real-time processing. This work not only provides a robust and scalable solution for automating quality control in the Piarom date industry but also contributes to the broader field of AI-driven food inspection technologies, with potential applications across various agricultural products.
Authors:K. Senthil Kumar, K. M. B. Abdullah Safwan
Abstract:
Object Detection is related to Computer Vision. Object detection enables detecting instances of objects in images and videos. Due to its increased utilization in surveillance, tracking system used in security and many others applications have propelled researchers to continuously derive more efficient and competitive algorithms. However, problems emerges while implementing it in real-time because of their dynamic environment and complex algorithms used in object detection. In the last few years, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) have emerged as a powerful tool for recognizing image content and in computer vision approach for most problems. In this paper, We revived begins the brief introduction of deep learning and object detection framework like Convolutional Neural Network(CNN), You only look once - version 4 (YOLOv4). Then we focus on our proposed object detection architectures along with some modifications. The traditional model detects a small object in images. We have some modifications to the model. Our proposed method gives the correct result with accuracy.
Authors:Kristina Telegraph, Christos Kyrkou
Abstract:
This work presents advancements in multi-class vehicle detection using UAV cameras through the development of spatiotemporal object detection models. The study introduces a Spatio-Temporal Vehicle Detection Dataset (STVD) containing 6, 600 annotated sequential frame images captured by UAVs, enabling comprehensive training and evaluation of algorithms for holistic spatiotemporal perception. A YOLO-based object detection algorithm is enhanced to incorporate temporal dynamics, resulting in improved performance over single frame models. The integration of attention mechanisms into spatiotemporal models is shown to further enhance performance. Experimental validation demonstrates significant progress, with the best spatiotemporal model exhibiting a 16.22% improvement over single frame models, while it is demonstrated that attention mechanisms hold the potential for additional performance gains.
Authors:Zihan You, Ni Wang, Hao Wang, Qichao Zhao, Jinxiang Wang
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection in autonomous driving relies on Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception and effective temporal fusion.However, existing fusion strategies based on convolutional layers or deformable self attention struggle with global context modeling in BEV space,leading to lower accuracy for large objects. To address this, we introduce MambaBEV, a novel BEV based 3D object detection model that leverages Mamba2, an advanced state space model (SSM) optimized for long sequence processing.Our key contribution is TemporalMamba, a temporal fusion module that enhances global awareness by introducing a BEV feature discrete rearrangement mechanism tailored for Mamba's sequential processing. Additionally, we propose Mamba based DETR as the detection head to improve multi object representation.Evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that MambaBEV base achieves an NDS of 51.7\% and an mAP of 42.7\%.Furthermore, an end to end autonomous driving paradigm validates its effectiveness in motion forecasting and planning.Our results highlight the potential of SSMs in autonomous driving perception, particularly in enhancing global context understanding and large object detection.
Authors:Olalekan Akindele, Joshua Atolagbe
Abstract:
Existing detection methods for insulator defect identification from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) struggle with complex background scenes and small objects, leading to suboptimal accuracy and a high number of false positives detection. Using the concept of local attention modeling, this paper proposes a new attention-based foundation architecture, YOLO-ELA, to address this issue. The Efficient Local Attention (ELA) blocks were added into the neck part of the one-stage YOLOv8 architecture to shift the model's attention from background features towards features of insulators with defects. The SCYLLA Intersection-Over-Union (SIoU) criterion function was used to reduce detection loss, accelerate model convergence, and increase the model's sensitivity towards small insulator defects, yielding higher true positive outcomes. Due to a limited dataset, data augmentation techniques were utilized to increase the diversity of the dataset. In addition, we leveraged the transfer learning strategy to improve the model's performance. Experimental results on high-resolution UAV images show that our method achieved a state-of-the-art performance of 96.9% mAP0.5 and a real-time detection speed of 74.63 frames per second, outperforming the baseline model. This further demonstrates the effectiveness of attention-based convolutional neural networks (CNN) in object detection tasks.
Authors:Pranav Gupta, Rishabh Rengarajan, Viren Bankapur, Vedansh Mannem, Lakshit Ahuja, Surya Vijay, Kevin Wang
Abstract:
Combining LiDAR and Camera-view data has become a common approach for 3D Object Detection. However, previous approaches combine the two input streams at a point-level, throwing away semantic information derived from camera features. In this paper we propose Cross-View Center Point-Fusion, a state-of-the-art model to perform 3D object detection by combining camera and LiDAR-derived features in the BEV space to preserve semantic density from the camera stream while incorporating spacial data from the LiDAR stream. Our architecture utilizes aspects from previously established algorithms, Cross-View Transformers and CenterPoint, and runs their backbones in parallel, allowing efficient computation for real-time processing and application. In this paper we find that while an implicitly calculated depth-estimate may be sufficiently accurate in a 2D map-view representation, explicitly calculated geometric and spacial information is needed for precise bounding box prediction in the 3D world-view space.
Authors:Jingyu Liu, Xinyu Liu, Mingzhe Qu, Tianyi Lyu
Abstract:
Integrating IoT technology into basketball action recognition enhances sports analytics, providing crucial insights into player performance and game strategy. However, existing methods often fall short in terms of accuracy and efficiency, particularly in complex, real-time environments where player movements are frequently occluded or involve intricate interactions. To overcome these challenges, we propose the EITNet model, a deep learning framework that combines EfficientDet for object detection, I3D for spatiotemporal feature extraction, and TimeSformer for temporal analysis, all integrated with IoT technology for seamless real-time data collection and processing. Our contributions include developing a robust architecture that improves recognition accuracy to 92\%, surpassing the baseline EfficientDet model's 87\%, and reducing loss to below 5.0 compared to EfficientDet's 9.0 over 50 epochs. Furthermore, the integration of IoT technology enhances real-time data processing, providing adaptive insights into player performance and strategy. The paper details the design and implementation of EITNet, experimental validation, and a comprehensive evaluation against existing models. The results demonstrate EITNet's potential to significantly advance automated sports analysis and optimize data utilization for player performance and strategy improvement.
Authors:Wei Liang, Yiting Zhang, Ji Zhang, Erica Cochran Hameen
Abstract:
Ensuring thermal comfort is essential for the well-being and productivity of individuals in built environments. Of the various thermal comfort indicators, the mean radiant temperature (MRT) is very challenging to measure. Most common measurement methodologies are time-consuming and not user-friendly. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel MRT measurement framework that uses visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and semantic segmentation techniques. The proposed approach follows the rule of thumb of the traditional MRT calculation method using surface temperature and view factors. However, it employs visual SLAM and creates a 3D thermal point cloud with enriched surface temperature information. The framework then implements Grounded SAM, a new object detection and segmentation tool to extract features with distinct temperature profiles on building surfaces. The detailed segmentation of thermal features not only reduces potential errors in the calculation of the MRT but also provides an efficient reconstruction of the spatial MRT distribution in the indoor environment. We also validate the calculation results with the reference measurement methodology. This data-driven framework offers faster and more efficient MRT measurements and spatial mapping than conventional methods. It can enable the direct engagement of researchers and practitioners in MRT measurements and contribute to research on thermal comfort and radiant cooling and heating systems.
Authors:Amit Kumar Singh, Vrijendra Singh
Abstract:
Deep learning and contactless sensing technologies have significantly advanced the automated assessment of human behaviors in healthcare. In the context of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), repetitive motor behaviors such as spinning, head banging, and arm flapping are key indicators for diagnosis. This study focuses on distinguishing between children with ASD and typically developed (TD) peers by analyzing videos captured in natural, uncontrolled environments. Using the publicly available Self-Stimulatory Behavior Dataset (SSBD), we address the classification task as a binary problem, ASD vs. TD, based on stereotypical repetitive gestures. We adopt a pipeline integrating YOLOv7-based detection, extensive video augmentations, and the VideoMAE framework, which efficiently captures both spatial and temporal features through a high-ratio masking and reconstruction strategy. Our proposed approach achieves 95% accuracy, 0.93 precision, 0.94 recall, and 0.94 F1 score, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by a significant margin. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining advanced object detection, robust data augmentation, and masked autoencoder-based video modeling for reliable ASD vs. TD classification in naturalistic settings.
Authors:Robert Turnbull, Emily Fitzgerald, Karen Thompson, Joanne L. Birch
Abstract:
Specimen-associated biodiversity data are crucial for biological, environmental, and conservation sciences. A rate shift is needed to extract data from specimen images efficiently, moving beyond human-mediated transcription. We developed `Hespi' (HErbarium Specimen sheet PIpeline) using advanced computer vision techniques to extract pre-catalogue data from primary specimen labels on herbarium specimens. Hespi integrates two object detection models: one for detecting the components of the sheet and another for fields on the primary primary specimen label. It classifies labels as printed, typed, handwritten, or mixed and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for extraction. The text is then corrected against authoritative taxon databases and refined using a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM). Hespi accurately detects and extracts text from specimen sheets across international herbaria, and its modular design allows users to train and integrate custom models.
Authors:Samir Abou Haidar, Alexandre Chariot, Mehdi Darouich, Cyril Joly, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud
Abstract:
Within a perception framework for autonomous mobile and robotic systems, semantic analysis of 3D point clouds typically generated by LiDARs is key to numerous applications, such as object detection and recognition, and scene reconstruction. Scene semantic segmentation can be achieved by directly integrating 3D spatial data with specialized deep neural networks. Although this type of data provides rich geometric information regarding the surrounding environment, it also presents numerous challenges: its unstructured and sparse nature, its unpredictable size, and its demanding computational requirements. These characteristics hinder the real-time semantic analysis, particularly on resource-constrained hardware architectures that constitute the main computational components of numerous robotic applications. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate various 3D semantic segmentation methodologies and analyze their performance and capabilities for resource-constrained inference on embedded NVIDIA Jetson platforms. We evaluate them for a fair comparison through a standardized training protocol and data augmentations, providing benchmark results on the Jetson AGX Orin and AGX Xavier series for two large-scale outdoor datasets: SemanticKITTI and nuScenes.
Authors:Takara Taniguchi, Ryosuke Furuta
Abstract:
We tackle one-shot object detection in Japanese Manga. The rising global popularity of Japanese manga has made the object detection of character faces increasingly important, with potential applications such as automatic colorization. However, obtaining sufficient data for training conventional object detectors is challenging due to copyright restrictions. Additionally, new characters appear every time a new volume of manga is released, making it impractical to re-train object detectors each time to detect these new characters. Therefore, one-shot object detection, where only a single query (reference) image is required to detect a new character, is an essential task in the manga industry. One challenge with one-shot object detection in manga is the large variation in the poses and facial expressions of characters in target images, despite having only one query image as a reference. Another challenge is that the frequency of character appearances follows a long-tail distribution. To overcome these challenges, we propose a data augmentation method in feature space to increase the variation of the query. The proposed method augments the feature from the query by adding Gaussian noise, with the noise variance at each channel learned during training. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the performance for both seen and unseen classes, surpassing data augmentation methods in image space.
Authors:Subhransu S. Bhattacharjee, Dylan Campbell, Rahul Shome
Abstract:
Can objects that are not visible in an image -- but are in the vicinity of the camera -- be detected? This study introduces the novel tasks of 2D, 2.5D and 3D unobserved object detection for predicting the location of nearby objects that are occluded or lie outside the image frame. We adapt several state-of-the-art pre-trained generative models to address this task, including 2D and 3D diffusion models and vision-language models, and show that they can be used to infer the presence of objects that are not directly observed. To benchmark this task, we propose a suite of metrics that capture different aspects of performance. Our empirical evaluation on indoor scenes from the RealEstate10k and NYU Depth v2 datasets demonstrate results that motivate the use of generative models for the unobserved object detection task.
Authors:Sisir Dhakal, Sujan Sigdel, Sandesh Prasad Paudel, Sharad Kumar Ranabhat, Nabin Lamichhane
Abstract:
Transforming text-based identity documents, such as Nepali citizenship cards, into a structured digital format poses several challenges due to the distinct characteristics of the Nepali script and minor variations in print alignment and contrast across different cards. This work proposes a robust system using YOLOv8 for accurate text object detection and an OCR algorithm based on Optimized PyTesseract. The system, implemented within the context of a mobile application, allows for the automated extraction of important textual information from both the front and the back side of Nepali citizenship cards, including names, citizenship numbers, and dates of birth. The final YOLOv8 model was accurate, with a mean average precision of 99.1% for text detection on the front and 96.1% on the back. The tested PyTesseract optimized for Nepali characters outperformed the standard OCR regarding flexibility and accuracy, extracting text from images with clean and noisy backgrounds and various contrasts. Using preprocessing steps such as converting the images into grayscale, removing noise from the images, and detecting edges further improved the system's OCR accuracy, even for low-quality photos. This work expands the current body of research in multilingual OCR and document analysis, especially for low-resource languages such as Nepali. It emphasizes the effectiveness of combining the latest object detection framework with OCR models that have been fine-tuned for practical applications.
Authors:Amrita Singh, Snehasis Mukherjee
Abstract:
Dense features are important for detecting minute objects in images. Unfortunately, despite the remarkable efficacy of the CNN models in multi-scale object detection, CNN models often fail to detect smaller objects in images due to the loss of dense features during the pooling process. Atrous convolution addresses this issue by applying sparse kernels. However, sparse kernels often can lose the multi-scale detection efficacy of the CNN model. In this paper, we propose an object detection model using a Switchable (adaptive) Atrous Convolutional Network (SAC-Net) based on the efficientDet model. A fixed atrous rate limits the performance of the CNN models in the convolutional layers. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a switchable mechanism that allows for dynamically adjusting the atrous rate during the forward pass. The proposed SAC-Net encapsulates the benefits of both low-level and high-level features to achieve improved performance on multi-scale object detection tasks, without losing the dense features. Further, we apply a depth-wise switchable atrous rate to the proposed network, to improve the scale-invariant features. Finally, we apply global context on the proposed model. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAC-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a significant margin in terms of accuracy.
Authors:Richard C. Rodriguez, Jonah Elijah P. Bardos
Abstract:
This machine learning study investigates a lowcost edge device integrated with an embedded system having computer vision and resulting in an improved performance in inferencing time and precision of object detection and classification. A primary aim of this study focused on reducing inferencing time and low-power consumption and to enable an embedded device of a competition-ready autonomous humanoid robot and to support real-time object recognition, scene understanding, visual navigation, motion planning, and autonomous navigation of the robot. This study compares processors for inferencing time performance between a central processing unit (CPU), a graphical processing unit (GPU), and a tensor processing unit (TPU). CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs are all processors that can be used for machine learning tasks. Related to the aim of supporting an autonomous humanoid robot, there was an additional effort to observe whether or not there was a significant difference in using a camera having monocular vision versus stereo vision capability. TPU inference time results for this study reflect a 25% reduction in time over the GPU, and a whopping 87.5% reduction in inference time compared to the CPU. Much information in this paper is contributed to the final selection of Google's Coral brand, Edge TPU device. The Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Tiny ML Kit was also considered for comparison but due to initial incompatibilities and in the interest of time to complete this study, a decision was made to review the kit in a future experiment.
Authors:Jeho Lee, Chanyoung Jung, Jiwon Kim, Hojung Cha
Abstract:
3D object detection with omnidirectional views enables safety-critical applications such as mobile robot navigation. Such applications increasingly operate on resource-constrained edge devices, facilitating reliable processing without privacy concerns or network delays. To enable cost-effective deployment, cameras have been widely adopted as a low-cost alternative to LiDAR sensors. However, the compute-intensive workload to achieve high performance of camera-based solutions remains challenging due to the computational limitations of edge devices. In this paper, we present Panopticus, a carefully designed system for omnidirectional and camera-based 3D detection on edge devices. Panopticus employs an adaptive multi-branch detection scheme that accounts for spatial complexities. To optimize the accuracy within latency limits, Panopticus dynamically adjusts the model's architecture and operations based on available edge resources and spatial characteristics. We implemented Panopticus on three edge devices and conducted experiments across real-world environments based on the public self-driving dataset and our mobile 360° camera dataset. Experiment results showed that Panopticus improves accuracy by 62% on average given the strict latency objective of 33ms. Also, Panopticus achieves a 2.1{\times} latency reduction on average compared to baselines.
Authors:Arda Genc, Justin Marlowe, Anika Jalil, Libor Kovarik, Phillip Christopher
Abstract:
Accurate and efficient characterization of nanoparticles (NPs), particularly regarding particle size distribution, is essential for advancing our understanding of their structure-property relationships and facilitating their design for various applications. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage artificial intelligence (AI)-driven workflow for NP analysis that leverages prompt engineering techniques from state-of-the-art single-stage object detection and large-scale vision transformer (ViT) architectures. This methodology was applied to transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning TEM (STEM) images of heterogeneous catalysts, enabling high-resolution, high-throughput analysis of particle size distributions for supported metal catalysts. The model's performance in detecting and segmenting NPs was validated across diverse heterogeneous catalyst systems, including various metals (Cu, Ru, Pt, and PtCo), supports (silica ($\text{SiO}_2$), $γ$-alumina ($γ$-$\text{Al}_2\text{O}_3$), and carbon black), and particle diameter size distributions with means and standard deviations of 2.9 $\pm$ 1.1 nm, 1.6 $\pm$ 0.2 nm, 9.7 $\pm$ 4.6 nm, and 4 $\pm$ 1.0 nm. Additionally, the proposed machine learning (ML) approach successfully detects and segments overlapping NPs anchored on non-uniform catalytic support materials, providing critical insights into their spatial arrangements and interactions. Our AI-assisted NP analysis workflow demonstrates robust generalization across diverse datasets and can be readily applied to similar NP segmentation tasks without requiring costly model retraining.
Authors:Sachin Karmani, Thanushon Sivakaran, Gaurav Prasad, Mehmet Ali, Wenbo Yang, Sheyang Tang
Abstract:
Deep learning models often function as black boxes, providing no straightforward reasoning for their predictions. This is particularly true for computer vision models, which process tensors of pixel values to generate outcomes in tasks such as image classification and object detection. To elucidate the reasoning of these models, class activation maps (CAMs) are used to highlight salient regions that influence a model's output. This research introduces KPCA-CAM, a technique designed to enhance the interpretability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) through improved class activation maps. KPCA-CAM leverages Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with the kernel trick to capture nonlinear relationships within CNN activations more effectively. By mapping data into higher-dimensional spaces with kernel functions and extracting principal components from this transformed hyperplane, KPCA-CAM provides more accurate representations of the underlying data manifold. This enables a deeper understanding of the features influencing CNN decisions. Empirical evaluations on the ILSVRC dataset across different CNN models demonstrate that KPCA-CAM produces more precise activation maps, providing clearer insights into the model's reasoning compared to existing CAM algorithms. This research advances CAM techniques, equipping researchers and practitioners with a powerful tool to gain deeper insights into CNN decision-making processes and overall behaviors.
Authors:Madhumita Veeramreddy, Ashok Kumar Pradhan, Swetha Ghanta, Laavanya Rachakonda, Saraju P Mohanty
Abstract:
Maintaining health and fitness through a balanced diet is essential for preventing non communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. NutriVision combines smart healthcare with computer vision and machine learning to address the challenges of nutrition and dietary management. This paper introduces a novel system that can identify food items, estimate quantities, and provide comprehensive nutritional information. NutriVision employs the Faster Region based Convolutional Neural Network, a deep learning algorithm that improves object detection by generating region proposals and then classifying those regions, making it highly effective for accurate and fast food identification even in complex and disorganized meal settings. Through smartphone based image capture, NutriVision delivers instant nutritional data, including macronutrient breakdown, calorie count, and micronutrient details. One of the standout features of NutriVision is its personalized nutritional analysis and diet recommendations, which are tailored to each user's dietary preferences, nutritional needs, and health history. By providing customized advice, NutriVision helps users achieve specific health and fitness goals, such as managing dietary restrictions or controlling weight. In addition to offering precise food detection and nutritional assessment, NutriVision supports smarter dietary decisions by integrating user data with recommendations that promote a balanced, healthful diet. This system presents a practical and advanced solution for nutrition management and has the potential to significantly influence how people approach their dietary choices, promoting healthier eating habits and overall well being. This paper discusses the design, performance evaluation, and prospective applications of the NutriVision system.
Authors:Yu Deng, Jiahong Xue, Teng Cao, Yingxing Zhang, Lanxi Wen, Yiyang Chen
Abstract:
We developed a robust solution for real-time 6D object detection in industrial applications by integrating FoundationPose, SAM2, and LightGlue, eliminating the need for retraining. Our approach addresses two key challenges: the requirement for an initial object mask in the first frame in FoundationPose and issues with tracking loss and automatic rotation for symmetric objects. The algorithm requires only a CAD model of the target object, with the user clicking on its location in the live feed during the initial setup. Once set, the algorithm automatically saves a reference image of the object and, in subsequent runs, employs LightGlue for feature matching between the object and the real-time scene, providing an initial prompt for detection. Tested on the YCB dataset and industrial components such as bleach cleanser and gears, the algorithm demonstrated reliable 6D detection and tracking. By integrating SAM2 and FoundationPose, we effectively mitigated common limitations such as the problem of tracking loss, ensuring continuous and accurate tracking under challenging conditions like occlusion or rapid movement.
Authors:Felix Limanta, Kuniaki Uto, Koichi Shinoda
Abstract:
This paper proposes CAMOT, a simple camera angle estimator for multi-object tracking to tackle two problems: 1) occlusion and 2) inaccurate distance estimation in the depth direction. Under the assumption that multiple objects are located on a flat plane in each video frame, CAMOT estimates the camera angle using object detection. In addition, it gives the depth of each object, enabling pseudo-3D MOT. We evaluated its performance by adding it to various 2D MOT methods on the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets and confirmed its effectiveness. Applying CAMOT to ByteTrack, we obtained 63.8% HOTA, 80.6% MOTA, and 78.5% IDF1 in MOT17, which are state-of-the-art results. Its computational cost is significantly lower than the existing deep-learning-based depth estimators for tracking.
Authors:Maximilian Andreas Hoefler, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek
Abstract:
Power grids serve as a vital component in numerous industries, seamlessly delivering electrical energy to industrial processes and technologies, making their safe and reliable operation indispensable. However, powerlines can be hard to inspect due to difficult terrain or harsh climatic conditions. Therefore, unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly deployed to inspect powerlines, resulting in a substantial stream of visual data which requires swift and accurate processing. Deep learning methods have become widely popular for this task, proving to be a valuable asset in fault detection. In particular, the detection of insulator defects is crucial for predicting powerline failures, since their malfunction can lead to transmission disruptions. It is therefore of great interest to continuously maintain and rigorously inspect insulator components. In this work we propose a novel pipeline to tackle this task. We utilize state-of-the-art object detection to detect and subsequently classify individual insulator anomalies. Our approach addresses dataset challenges such as imbalance and motion-blurred images through a fine-tuning methodology which allows us to alter the classification focus of the model by increasing the classification accuracy of anomalous insulators. In addition, we employ explainable-AI tools for precise localization and explanation of anomalies. This proposed method contributes to the field of anomaly detection, particularly vision-based industrial inspection and predictive maintenance. We significantly improve defect detection accuracy by up to 13%, while also offering a detailed analysis of model mis-classifications and localization quality, showcasing the potential of our method on real-world data.
Authors:Xianda Zhang, Siyuan Liang
Abstract:
Object detection models, widely used in security-critical applications, are vulnerable to backdoor attacks that cause targeted misclassifications when triggered by specific patterns. Existing backdoor defense techniques, primarily designed for simpler models like image classifiers, often fail to effectively detect and remove backdoors in object detectors. We propose a backdoor defense framework tailored to object detection models, based on the observation that backdoor attacks cause significant inconsistencies between local modules' behaviors, such as the Region Proposal Network (RPN) and classification head. By quantifying and analyzing these inconsistencies, we develop an algorithm to detect backdoors. We find that the inconsistent module is usually the main source of backdoor behavior, leading to a removal method that localizes the affected module, resets its parameters, and fine-tunes the model on a small clean dataset. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art two-stage object detectors show our method achieves a 90% improvement in backdoor removal rate over fine-tuning baselines, while limiting clean data accuracy loss to less than 4%. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first approach that addresses both the detection and removal of backdoors in two-stage object detection models, advancing the field of securing these complex systems against backdoor attacks.
Authors:Guibiao Liao, Wei Gao
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) has achieved substantial progress in recent years. In practical scenarios, compressed images (CI) serve as the primary medium for data transmission and storage. However, scant attention has been directed towards SOD for compressed images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we are dedicated to strictly benchmarking and analyzing CNN-based salient object detection on compressed images. To comprehensively study this issue, we meticulously establish various CI SOD datasets from existing public SOD datasets. Subsequently, we investigate representative CNN-based SOD methods, assessing their robustness on compressed images (approximately 2.64 million images). Importantly, our evaluation results reveal two key findings: 1) current state-of-the-art CNN-based SOD models, while excelling on clean images, exhibit significant performance bottlenecks when applied to compressed images. 2) The principal factors influencing the robustness of CI SOD are rooted in the characteristics of compressed images and the limitations in saliency feature learning. Based on these observations, we propose a simple yet promising baseline framework that focuses on robust feature representation learning to achieve robust CNN-based CI SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing markedly improved robustness across various levels of image degradation, while maintaining competitive accuracy on clean data. We hope that our benchmarking efforts, analytical insights, and proposed techniques will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the robustness of CNN-based SOD algorithms, inspiring future research in the community.
Authors:Hao-Chiang Shao, Guan-Yu Chen, Yu-Hsien Lin, Chia-Wen Lin, Shao-Yun Fang, Pin-Yian Tsai, Yan-Hsiu Liu
Abstract:
Recent advances in VLSI fabrication technology have led to die shrinkage and increased layout density, creating an urgent demand for advanced hotspot detection techniques. However, by taking an object detection network as the backbone, recent learning-based hotspot detectors learn to recognize only the problematic layout patterns in the training data. This fact makes these hotspot detectors difficult to generalize to real-world scenarios. We propose a novel lithography simulator-powered hotspot detection framework to overcome this difficulty. Our framework integrates a lithography simulator with an object detection backbone, merging the extracted latent features from both the simulator and the object detector via well-designed cross-attention blocks. Consequently, the proposed framework can be used to detect potential hotspot regions based on I) the variation of possible circuit shape deformation estimated by the lithography simulator, and ii) the problematic layout patterns already known. To this end, we utilize RetinaNet with a feature pyramid network as the object detection backbone and leverage LithoNet as the lithography simulator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed simulator-guided hotspot detection framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on real-world data.
Authors:Oriel Perl, Ido Leshem, Uria Franko, Yuval Goldman
Abstract:
In recent years, workplaces and educational institutes have widely adopted virtual meeting platforms. This has led to a growing interest in analyzing and extracting insights from these meetings, which requires effective detection and tracking of unique individuals. In practice, there is no standardization in video meetings recording layout, and how they are captured across the different platforms and services. This, in turn, creates a challenge in acquiring this data stream and analyzing it in a uniform fashion. Our approach provides a solution to the most general form of video recording, usually consisting of a grid of participants (\cref{fig:videomeeting}) from a single video source with no metadata on participant locations, while using the least amount of constraints and assumptions as to how the data was acquired. Conventional approaches often use YOLO models coupled with tracking algorithms, assuming linear motion trajectories akin to that observed in CCTV footage. However, such assumptions fall short in virtual meetings, where participant video feed window can abruptly change location across the grid. In an organic video meeting setting, participants frequently join and leave, leading to sudden, non-linear movements on the video grid. This disrupts optical flow-based tracking methods that depend on linear motion. Consequently, standard object detection and tracking methods might mistakenly assign multiple participants to the same tracker. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to track and re-identify participants in remote video meetings, by utilizing the spatio-temporal priors arising from the data in our domain. This, in turn, increases tracking capabilities compared to the use of general object tracking. Our approach reduces the error rate by 95% on average compared to YOLO-based tracking methods as a baseline.
Authors:Husnu Halid Alabay, Tuan-Anh Le, Hakan Ceylan
Abstract:
In developing medical interventions using untethered milli- and microrobots, ensuring safety and effectiveness relies on robust methods for detection, real-time tracking, and precise localization within the body. However, the inherent non-transparency of the human body poses a significant obstacle, limiting robot detection primarily to specialized imaging systems such as X-ray fluoroscopy, which often lack crucial anatomical details. Consequently, the robot operator (human or machine) would encounter severe challenges in accurately determining the location of the robot and steering its motion. This study explores the feasibility of circumventing this challenge by creating a simulation environment that contains the precise digital replica (virtual twin) of a model microrobot operational workspace. Synchronizing coordinate systems between the virtual and real worlds and continuously integrating microrobot position data from the image stream into the virtual twin allows the microrobot operator to control navigation in the virtual world. We validate this concept by demonstrating the tracking and steering of a mobile magnetic robot in confined phantoms with high temporal resolution (< 100 ms, with an average of ~20 ms) visual feedback. Additionally, our object detection-based localization approach offers the potential to reduce overall patient exposure to X-ray doses during continuous microrobot tracking without compromising tracking accuracy. Ultimately, we address a critical gap in developing image-guided remote interventions with untethered medical microrobots, particularly for near-future applications in animal models and human patients.
Authors:Rashmi BN, R. Guru, Anusuya M A
Abstract:
Advancements in object detection algorithms have opened new avenues for assistive technologies that cater to the needs of visually impaired individuals. This paper presents a novel approach for indoor assistance to the blind by addressing the challenge of small object detection. We propose a technique YOLO NAS Small architecture, a lightweight and efficient object detection model, optimized using the Super Gradients training framework. This combination enables real-time detection of small objects crucial for assisting the blind in navigating indoor environments, such as furniture, appliances, and household items. Proposed method emphasizes low latency and high accuracy, enabling timely and informative voice-based guidance to enhance the user's spatial awareness and interaction with their surroundings. The paper details the implementation, experimental results, and discusses the system's effectiveness in providing a practical solution for indoor assistance to the visually impaired.
Authors:Minju Kang, Taehun Kong, Tae-Kyun Kim
Abstract:
Accurate 3D object detection is crucial for autonomous vehicles and robots to navigate and interact with the environment safely and effectively. Meanwhile, the performance of 3D detector relies on the data size and annotation which is expensive. Consequently, the demand of training with limited labeled data is growing. We explore a novel teacher-student framework employing channel augmentation for 3D semi-supervised object detection. The teacher-student SSL typically adopts a weak augmentation and strong augmentation to teacher and student, respectively. In this work, we apply multiple channel augmentations to both networks using the transformation equivariance detector (TED). The TED allows us to explore different combinations of augmentation on point clouds and efficiently aggregates multi-channel transformation equivariance features. In principle, by adopting fixed channel augmentations for the teacher network, the student can train stably on reliable pseudo-labels. Adopting strong channel augmentations can enrich the diversity of data, fostering robustness to transformations and enhancing generalization performance of the student network. We use SOTA hierarchical supervision as a baseline and adapt its dual-threshold to TED, which is called channel IoU consistency. We evaluate our method with KITTI dataset, and achieved a significant performance leap, surpassing SOTA 3D semi-supervised object detection models.
Authors:Pengfei Qi, Yifei Zhang, Wenqiang Li, Youwen Hu, Kunlong Bai
Abstract:
Detecting objects of interest through language often presents challenges, particularly with objects that are uncommon or complex to describe, due to perceptual discrepancies between automated models and human annotators. These challenges highlight the need for comprehensive datasets that go beyond standard object labels by incorporating detailed attribute descriptions. To address this need, we introduce the Objects365-Attr dataset, an extension of the existing Objects365 dataset, distinguished by its attribute annotations. This dataset reduces inconsistencies in object detection by integrating a broad spectrum of attributes, including color, material, state, texture and tone. It contains an extensive collection of 5.6M object-level attribute descriptions, meticulously annotated across 1.4M bounding boxes. Additionally, to validate the dataset's effectiveness, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of YOLO-World at different scales, measuring their detection performance and demonstrating the dataset's contribution to advancing object detection.
Authors:Kentaro Hirahara, Chikahito Nakane, Hajime Ebisawa, Tsuyoshi Kuroda, Yohei Iwaki, Tomoyoshi Utsumi, Yuichiro Nomura, Makoto Koike, Hiroshi Mineno
Abstract:
In an agricultural field, plant phenotyping using object detection models is gaining attention. However, collecting the training data necessary to create generic and high-precision models is extremely challenging due to the difficulty of annotation and the diversity of domains. Furthermore, it is difficult to transfer training data across different crops, and although machine learning models effective for specific environments, conditions, or crops have been developed, they cannot be widely applied in actual fields. In this study, we propose a generative data augmentation method (D4) for vineyard shoot detection. D4 uses a pre-trained text-guided diffusion model based on a large number of original images culled from video data collected by unmanned ground vehicles or other means, and a small number of annotated datasets. The proposed method generates new annotated images with background information adapted to the target domain while retaining annotation information necessary for object detection. In addition, D4 overcomes the lack of training data in agriculture, including the difficulty of annotation and diversity of domains. We confirmed that this generative data augmentation method improved the mean average precision by up to 28.65% for the BBox detection task and the average precision by up to 13.73% for the keypoint detection task for vineyard shoot detection. Our generative data augmentation method D4 is expected to simultaneously solve the cost and domain diversity issues of training data generation in agriculture and improve the generalization performance of detection models.
Authors:Lewis Mason, Mark Martinez
Abstract:
K-Origins is a neural network layer designed to improve image-based network performances when learning colour, or intensities, is beneficial. Over 250 encoder-decoder convolutional networks are trained and tested on 16-bit synthetic data, demonstrating that K-Origins improves semantic segmentation accuracy in two scenarios: object detection with low signal-to-noise ratios, and segmenting multiple objects that are identical in shape but vary in colour. K-Origins generates output features from the input features, $\textbf{X}$, by the equation $\textbf{Y}_k = \textbf{X}-\textbf{J}\cdot w_k$ for each trainable parameter $w_k$, where $\textbf{J}$ is a matrix of ones. Additionally, networks with varying receptive fields were trained to determine optimal network depths based on the dimensions of target classes, suggesting that receptive field lengths should exceed object sizes. By ensuring a sufficient receptive field length and incorporating K-Origins, we can achieve better semantic network performance.
Authors:Salah Eddine Laidoudi, Madjid Maidi, Samir Otmane
Abstract:
Real-time object detection in indoor settings is a challenging area of computer vision, faced with unique obstacles such as variable lighting and complex backgrounds. This field holds significant potential to revolutionize applications like augmented and mixed realities by enabling more seamless interactions between digital content and the physical world. However, the scarcity of research specifically fitted to the intricacies of indoor environments has highlighted a clear gap in the literature. To address this, our study delves into the evaluation of existing datasets and computational models, leading to the creation of a refined dataset. This new dataset is derived from OpenImages v7, focusing exclusively on 32 indoor categories selected for their relevance to real-world applications. Alongside this, we present an adaptation of a CNN detection model, incorporating an attention mechanism to enhance the model's ability to discern and prioritize critical features within cluttered indoor scenes. Our findings demonstrate that this approach is not just competitive with existing state-of-the-art models in accuracy and speed but also opens new avenues for research and application in the field of real-time indoor object detection.
Authors:Sanjuksha Nirgude, Kevin DuCharme, Namrita Madhusoodanan
Abstract:
The problem of cleaning a messy table using Deep Neural Networks is a very interesting problem in both social and industrial robotics. This project focuses on the social application of this technology. A neural network model that is capable of detecting and recognizing common tabletop objects, such as a mug, mouse, or stapler is developed. The model also predicts the angle at which these objects are placed on a table,with respect to some reference. Assuming each object has a fixed intended position and orientation on the tabletop, the orientation of a particular object predicted by the deep learning model can be used to compute the transformation matrix to move the object from its initial position to the intended position. This can be fed to a pick and place robot to carry out the transfer.This paper talks about the deep learning approaches used in this project for object detection and orientation estimation.
Authors:Xiaoxiang Sun, Geoffrey Fox
Abstract:
3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving, leveraging deep learning techniques to interpret LiDAR data. The PointPillars architecture is a prominent model in this field, distinguished by its efficient use of LiDAR data. This study provides an analysis of enhancing the performance of PointPillars model under various dropout rates to address overfitting and improve model generalization. Dropout, a regularization technique, involves randomly omitting neurons during training, compelling the network to learn robust and diverse features. We systematically compare the effects of different enhancement techniques on the model's regression performance during training and its accuracy, measured by Average Precision (AP) and Average Orientation Similarity (AOS). Our findings offer insights into the optimal enhancements, contributing to improved 3D object detection in autonomous driving applications.
Authors:Ahmed Hammam, Bharathwaj Krishnaswami Sreedhar, Nura Kawa, Tim Patzelt, Oliver De Candido
Abstract:
Advancing Machine Learning (ML)-based perception models for autonomous systems necessitates addressing weak spots within the models, particularly in challenging Operational Design Domains (ODDs). These are environmental operating conditions of an autonomous vehicle which can contain difficult conditions, e.g., lens flare at night or objects reflected in a wet street. This report introduces a novel methodology for training with augmentations to enhance model robustness and performance in such conditions. The proposed approach leverages customized physics-based augmentation functions, to generate realistic training data that simulates diverse ODD scenarios.
We present a comprehensive framework that includes identifying weak spots in ML models, selecting suitable augmentations, and devising effective training strategies. The methodology integrates hyperparameter optimization and latent space optimization to fine-tune augmentation parameters, ensuring they maximally improve the ML models' performance. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in model performance, as measured by commonly used metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP) and mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on open-source object detection and semantic segmentation models and datasets.
Our findings emphasize that optimal training strategies are model- and data-specific and highlight the benefits of integrating augmentations into the training pipeline. By incorporating augmentations, we observe enhanced robustness of ML-based perception models, making them more resilient to edge cases encountered in real-world ODDs. This work underlines the importance of customized augmentations and offers an effective solution for improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving functions.
Authors:Gracile Astlin Pereira, Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
Transformer-based models have transformed the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) and are increasingly applied to computer vision tasks with remarkable success. These models, renowned for their ability to capture long-range dependencies and contextual information, offer a promising alternative to traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. In this review paper, we provide an extensive overview of various transformer architectures adapted for computer vision tasks. We delve into how these models capture global context and spatial relationships in images, empowering them to excel in tasks such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Analyzing the key components, training methodologies, and performance metrics of transformer-based models, we highlight their strengths, limitations, and recent advancements. Additionally, we discuss potential research directions and applications of transformer-based models in computer vision, offering insights into their implications for future advancements in the field.
Authors:Pengyu Li, Chenhe Liu, Tengfei Li, Xinyu Wang, Shihui Zhang, Dongyang Yu
Abstract:
The detection of small objects, particularly traffic signs, is a critical subtask within object detection and autonomous driving. Despite the notable achievements in previous research, two primary challenges persist. Firstly, the main issue is the singleness of feature extraction. Secondly, the detection process fails to effectively integrate with objects of varying sizes or scales. These issues are also prevalent in generic object detection. Motivated by these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel object detection network named Efficient Multi-scale and Diverse Feature Network (EMDFNet) for traffic sign detection that integrates an Augmented Shortcut Module and an Efficient Hybrid Encoder to address the aforementioned issues simultaneously. Specifically, the Augmented Shortcut Module utilizes multiple branches to integrate various spatial semantic information and channel semantic information, thereby enhancing feature diversity. The Efficient Hybrid Encoder utilizes global feature fusion and local feature interaction based on various features to generate distinctive classification features by integrating feature information in an adaptable manner. Extensive experiments on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K) benchmark and the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) demonstrate that our EMDFNet outperforms other state-of-the-art detectors in performance while retaining the real-time processing capabilities of single-stage models. This substantiates the effectiveness of EMDFNet in detecting small traffic signs.
Authors:Burak Sevsay, Erdem Akagündüz
Abstract:
Quantization is one of the most popular techniques for reducing computation time and shrinking model size. However, ensuring the accuracy of quantized models typically involves calibration using training data, which may be inaccessible due to privacy concerns. In such cases, zero-shot quantization, a technique that relies on pretrained models and statistical information without the need for specific training data, becomes valuable. Exploring zero-shot quantization in the infrared domain is important due to the prevalence of infrared imaging in sensitive fields like medical and security applications. In this work, we demonstrate how to apply zero-shot quantization to an object detection model retrained with thermal imagery. We use batch normalization statistics of the model to distill data for calibration. RGB image-trained models and thermal image-trained models are compared in the context of zero-shot quantization. Our investigation focuses on the contributions of mean and standard deviation statistics to zero-shot quantization performance. Additionally, we compare zero-shot quantization with post-training quantization on a thermal dataset. We demonstrated that zero-shot quantization successfully generates data that represents the training dataset for the quantization of object detection models. Our results indicate that our zero-shot quantization framework is effective in the absence of training data and is well-suited for the infrared domain.
Authors:Adam Scicluna, Cedric Le Gentil, Sheila Sutjipto, Gavin Paul
Abstract:
The increasing adoption of human-robot interaction presents opportunities for technology to positively impact lives, particularly those with visual impairments, through applications such as guide-dog-like assistive robotics. We present a pipeline exploring the perception and "intelligent disobedience" required by such a system. A dataset of two people moving in and out of view has been prepared to compare RGB-based and event-based multi-modal dynamic object detection using LiDAR data for 3D position localisation. Our analysis highlights challenges in accurate 3D localisation using 2D image-LiDAR fusion, indicating the need for further refinement. Compared to the performance of the frame-based detection algorithm utilised (YOLOv4), current cutting-edge event-based detection models appear limited to contextual scenarios, such as for automotive platforms. This is highlighted by weak precision and recall over varying confidence and Intersection over Union (IoU) thresholds when using frame-based detections as a ground truth. Therefore, we have publicly released this dataset to the community, containing RGB, event, point cloud and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data along with ground truth poses for the two people in the scene to fill a gap in the current landscape of publicly available datasets and provide a means to assist in the development of safer and more robust algorithms in the future: https://uts-ri.github.io/revel/.
Authors:Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil, Deep Patel, Iain Melvin
Abstract:
Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera Tracking tRansformer (MCTR), a novel end-to-end approach tailored for multi-object detection and tracking across multiple cameras with overlapping fields of view. MCTR leverages end-to-end detectors like DEtector TRansformer (DETR) to produce detections and detection embeddings independently for each camera view. The framework maintains set of track embeddings that encaplusate global information about the tracked objects, and updates them at every frame by integrating the local information from the view-specific detection embeddings. The track embeddings are probabilistically associated with detections in every camera view and frame to generate consistent object tracks. The soft probabilistic association facilitates the design of differentiable losses that enable end-to-end training of the entire system. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on MMPTrack and AI City Challenge, two recently introduced large-scale multi-camera multi-object tracking datasets.
Authors:Alvaro Leandro Cavalcante Carneiro, Denis Henrique Pinheiro Salvadeo, Lucas de Brito Silva
Abstract:
In recent years, deep learning techniques have been used to develop sign language recognition systems, potentially serving as a communication tool for millions of hearing-impaired individuals worldwide. However, there are inherent challenges in creating such systems. Firstly, it is important to consider as many linguistic parameters as possible in gesture execution to avoid ambiguity between words. Moreover, to facilitate the real-world adoption of the created solution, it is essential to ensure that the chosen technology is realistic, avoiding expensive, intrusive, or low-mobility sensors, as well as very complex deep learning architectures that impose high computational requirements. Based on this, our work aims to propose an efficient sign language recognition system that utilizes low-cost sensors and techniques. To this end, an object detection model was trained specifically for detecting the interpreter's face and hands, ensuring focus on the most relevant regions of the image and generating inputs with higher semantic value for the classifier. Additionally, we introduced a novel approach to obtain features representing hand location and movement by leveraging spatial information derived from centroid positions of bounding boxes, thereby enhancing sign discrimination. The results demonstrate the efficiency of our handcrafted features, increasing accuracy by 7.96% on the AUTSL dataset, while adding fewer than 700 thousand parameters and incurring less than 10 milliseconds of additional inference time. These findings highlight the potential of our technique to strike a favorable balance between computational cost and accuracy, making it a promising approach for practical sign language recognition applications.
Authors:Zhihao Zheng, Mooi Choo Chuah
Abstract:
Many learning-based low-light image enhancement (LLIE) algorithms are based on the Retinex theory. However, the Retinex-based decomposition techniques in such models introduce corruptions which limit their enhancement performance. In this paper, we propose a Latent Disentangle-based Enhancement Network (LDE-Net) for low light vision tasks. The latent disentanglement module disentangles the input image in latent space such that no corruption remains in the disentangled Content and Illumination components. For LLIE task, we design a Content-Aware Embedding (CAE) module that utilizes Content features to direct the enhancement of the Illumination component. For downstream tasks (e.g. nighttime UAV tracking and low-light object detection), we develop an effective light-weight enhancer based on the latent disentanglement framework. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our LDE-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various LLIE benchmarks. In addition, the great results obtained by applying our framework on the downstream tasks also demonstrate the usefulness of our latent disentanglement design.
Authors:Subhasis Dasgupta, Arshi Naaz, Jayeeta Choudhury, Nancy Lahiri
Abstract:
Road accidents are quite common in almost every part of the world, and, in majority, fatal accidents are attributed to over speeding of vehicles. The tendency to over speeding is usually tried to be controlled using check points at various parts of the road but not all traffic police have the device to check speed with existing speed estimating devices such as LIDAR based, or Radar based guns. The current project tries to address the issue of vehicle speed estimation with handheld devices such as mobile phones or wearable cameras with network connection to estimate the speed using deep learning frameworks.
Authors:Jaewook Lee, Yoel Park, Seulki Lee
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a memory-efficient CNN (convolutional neural network), which enables resource-constrained low-end embedded and IoT devices to perform on-device vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection, using extremely low memory, i.e., only 63 KB on ImageNet classification. Based on the bottleneck block of MobileNet, we propose three design principles that significantly curtail the peak memory usage of a CNN so that it can fit the limited KB memory of the low-end device. First, 'input segmentation' divides an input image into a set of patches, including the central patch overlapped with the others, reducing the size (and memory requirement) of a large input image. Second, 'patch tunneling' builds independent tunnel-like paths consisting of multiple bottleneck blocks per patch, penetrating through the entire model from an input patch to the last layer of the network, maintaining lightweight memory usage throughout the whole network. Lastly, 'bottleneck reordering' rearranges the execution order of convolution operations inside the bottleneck block such that the memory usage remains constant regardless of the size of the convolution output channels. The experiment result shows that the proposed network classifies ImageNet with extremely low memory (i.e., 63 KB) while achieving competitive top-1 accuracy (i.e., 61.58\%). To the best of our knowledge, the memory usage of the proposed network is far smaller than state-of-the-art memory-efficient networks, i.e., up to 89x and 3.1x smaller than MobileNet (i.e., 5.6 MB) and MCUNet (i.e., 196 KB), respectively.
Authors:Fazli Wahid, Yingliang Ma, Dawar Khan, Muhammad Aamir, Syed U. K. Bukhari
Abstract:
Biomedical image segmentation plays a vital role in diagnosis of diseases across various organs. Deep learning-based object detection methods are commonly used for such segmentation. There exists an extensive research in this topic. However, there is no standard review on this topic. Existing surveys often lack a standardized approach or focus on broader segmentation techniques. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR), collected and analysed 148 articles that explore deep learning object detection methods for biomedical image segmentation. We critically analyzed these methods, identified the key challenges, and discussed the future directions. From the selected articles we extracted the results including the deep learning models, targeted imaging modalities, targeted diseases, and the metrics for the analysis of the methods. The results have been presented in tabular and/or charted forms. The results are presented in three major categories including two stage detection models, one stage detection models and point-based detection models. Each article is individually analyzed along with its pros and cons. Finally, we discuss open challenges, potential benefits, and future research directions. This SLR aims to provide the research community with a quick yet deeper understanding of these segmentation models, ultimately facilitating the development of more powerful solutions for biomedical image analysis.
Authors:Khoi Nguyen Tiet Nguyen, Wenyu Zhang, Kangkang Lu, Yuhuan Wu, Xingjian Zheng, Hui Li Tan, Liangli Zhen
Abstract:
Deep learning models achieve remarkable accuracy in computer vision tasks, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial examples--carefully crafted perturbations to input images that can deceive these models into making confident but incorrect predictions. This vulnerability pose significant risks in high-stakes applications such as autonomous vehicles, security surveillance, and safety-critical inspection systems. While the existing literature extensively covers adversarial attacks in image classification, comprehensive analyses of such attacks on object detection systems remain limited. This paper presents a novel taxonomic framework for categorizing adversarial attacks specific to object detection architectures, synthesizes existing robustness metrics, and provides a comprehensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art attack methodologies on popular object detection models, including both traditional detectors and modern detectors with vision-language pretraining. Through rigorous analysis of open-source attack implementations and their effectiveness across diverse detection architectures, we derive key insights into attack characteristics. Furthermore, we delineate critical research gaps and emerging challenges to guide future investigations in securing object detection systems against adversarial threats. Our findings establish a foundation for developing more robust detection models while highlighting the urgent need for standardized evaluation protocols in this rapidly evolving domain.
Authors:Shuvam Jena, Sushmetha Sumathi Rajendran, Karthik Seemakurthy, Sasithradevi A, Vijayalakshmi M, Prakash Poornachari
Abstract:
In the field of object detection, domain generalisation (DG) aims to ensure robust performance across diverse and unseen target domains by learning the robust domain-invariant features corresponding to the objects of interest across multiple source domains. While there are many approaches established for performing DG for the task of classification, there has been a very little focus on object detection. In this paper, we propose a domain penalisation (DP) framework for the task of object detection, where the data is assumed to be sampled from multiple source domains and tested on completely unseen test domains. We assign penalisation weights to each domain, with the values updated based on the detection networks performance on the respective source domains. By prioritising the domains that needs more attention, our approach effectively balances the training process. We evaluate our solution on the GWHD 2021 dataset, a component of the WiLDS benchmark and we compare against ERM and GroupDRO as these are primarily loss function based. Our extensive experimental results reveals that the proposed approach improves the accuracy by 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent on validation and test out-of-distribution (OOD) sets, respectively for FasterRCNN. We also compare the performance of our approach on FCOS detector and show that our approach improves the baseline OOD performance over the existing approaches by 1.3 percent and 1.4 percent on validation and test sets, respectively. This study underscores the potential of performance based domain penalisation in enhancing the generalisation ability of object detection models across diverse environments.
Authors:Ajinkya Shinde, Gaurav Sharma, Manisha Pattanaik, Sri Niwas Singh
Abstract:
LiDAR-based sensors employing optical spectrum signals play a vital role in providing significant information about the target objects in autonomous driving vehicle systems. However, the presence of fog in the atmosphere severely degrades the overall system's performance. This manuscript analyzes the role of fog particle size distributions in 3D object detection under adverse weather conditions. We utilise Mie theory and meteorological optical range (MOR) to calculate the attenuation and backscattering coefficient values for point cloud generation and analyze the overall system's accuracy in Car, Cyclist, and Pedestrian case scenarios under easy, medium and hard detection difficulties. Gamma and Junge (Power-Law) distributions are employed to mathematically model the fog particle size distribution under strong and moderate advection fog environments. Subsequently, we modified the KITTI dataset based on the backscattering coefficient values and trained it on the PV-RCNN++ deep neural network model for Car, Cyclist, and Pedestrian cases under different detection difficulties. The result analysis shows a significant variation in the system's accuracy concerning the changes in target object dimensionality, the nature of the fog environment and increasing detection difficulties, with the Car exhibiting the highest accuracy of around 99% and the Pedestrian showing the lowest accuracy of around 73%.
Authors:Youjia Fu, Zihao Xu, Junsong Fu, Huixia Xue, Shuqiu Tan, Lei Li
Abstract:
Recent advancements in transformer-based monocular 3D object detection techniques have exhibited exceptional performance in inferring 3D attributes from single 2D images. However, most existing methods rely on resource-intensive transformer architectures, which often lead to significant drops in computational efficiency and performance when handling long sequence data. To address these challenges and advance monocular 3D object detection technology, we propose an innovative network architecture, MonoMM, a Multi-scale \textbf{M}amba-Enhanced network for real-time Monocular 3D object detection. This well-designed architecture primarily includes the following two core modules: Focused Multi-Scale Fusion (FMF) Module, which focuses on effectively preserving and fusing image information from different scales with lower computational resource consumption. By precisely regulating the information flow, the FMF module enhances the model adaptability and robustness to scale variations while maintaining image details. Depth-Aware Feature Enhancement Mamba (DMB) Module: It utilizes the fused features from image characteristics as input and employs a novel adaptive strategy to globally integrate depth information and visual information. This depth fusion strategy not only improves the accuracy of depth estimation but also enhances the model performance under different viewing angles and environmental conditions. Moreover, the modular design of MonoMM provides high flexibility and scalability, facilitating adjustments and optimizations according to specific application needs. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI dataset show that our method outperforms previous monocular methods and achieves real-time detection.
Authors:Zaid A. El Shair, Samir A. Rawashdeh
Abstract:
In this data article, we introduce the Multi-Modal Event-based Vehicle Detection and Tracking (MEVDT) dataset. This dataset provides a synchronized stream of event data and grayscale images of traffic scenes, captured using the Dynamic and Active-Pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) 240c hybrid event-based camera. MEVDT comprises 63 multi-modal sequences with approximately 13k images, 5M events, 10k object labels, and 85 unique object tracking trajectories. Additionally, MEVDT includes manually annotated ground truth labels $\unicode{x2014}$ consisting of object classifications, pixel-precise bounding boxes, and unique object IDs $\unicode{x2014}$ which are provided at a labeling frequency of 24 Hz. Designed to advance the research in the domain of event-based vision, MEVDT aims to address the critical need for high-quality, real-world annotated datasets that enable the development and evaluation of object detection and tracking algorithms in automotive environments.
Authors:Sangjune Shin, Dongkun Shin
Abstract:
Despite the rapid advancement of object detection algorithms, processing high-resolution images on embedded devices remains a significant challenge. Theoretically, the fully convolutional network architecture used in current real-time object detectors can handle all input resolutions. However, the substantial computational demands required to process high-resolution images render them impractical for real-time applications. To address this issue, real-time object detection models typically downsample the input image for inference, leading to a loss of detail and decreased accuracy. In response, we developed Octave-YOLO, designed to process high-resolution images in real-time within the constraints of embedded systems. We achieved this through the introduction of the cross frequency partial network (CFPNet), which divides the input feature map into low-resolution, low-frequency, and high-resolution, high-frequency sections. This configuration enables complex operations such as convolution bottlenecks and self-attention to be conducted exclusively on low-resolution feature maps while simultaneously preserving the details in high-resolution maps. Notably, this approach not only dramatically reduces the computational demands of convolution tasks but also allows for the integration of attention modules, which are typically challenging to implement in real-time applications, with minimal additional cost. Additionally, we have incorporated depthwise separable convolution into the core building blocks and downsampling layers to further decrease latency. Experimental results have shown that Octave-YOLO matches the performance of YOLOv8 while significantly reducing computational demands. For example, in 1080x1080 resolution, Octave-YOLO-N is 1.56 times faster than YOLOv8, achieving nearly the same accuracy on the COCO dataset with approximately 40 percent fewer parameters and FLOPs.
Authors:Yongjiang He, Peng Cao, Zhongling Su, Xiaobo Liu
Abstract:
Developing an effective evaluation metric is crucial for accurately and swiftly measuring LiDAR perception performance. One major issue is the lack of metrics that can simultaneously generate fast and accurate evaluations based on either object detection or point cloud data. In this study, we propose a novel LiDAR perception entropy metric based on the probability of vehicle grid occupancy. This metric reflects the influence of point cloud distribution on vehicle detection performance. Based on this, we also introduce a LiDAR deployment optimization model, which is solved using a differential evolution-based particle swarm optimization algorithm. A comparative experiment demonstrated that the proposed PE-VGOP offers a correlation of more than 0.98 with vehicle detection ground truth in evaluating LiDAR perception performance. Furthermore, compared to the base deployment, field experiments indicate that the proposed optimization model can significantly enhance the perception capabilities of various types of LiDARs, including RS-16, RS-32, and RS-80. Notably, it achieves a 25% increase in detection Recall for the RS-32 LiDAR.
Authors:Aayush Saxena, Arit Kumar Bishwas, Ayush Ashok Mishra, Ryan Armstrong
Abstract:
Deep learning models have achieved tremendous success in most of the industries in recent years. The evolution of these models has also led to an increase in the model size and energy requirement, making it difficult to deploy in production on low compute devices. An increase in the number of connected devices around the world warrants compressed models that can be easily deployed at the local devices with low compute capacity and power accessibility. A wide range of solutions have been proposed by different researchers to reduce the size and complexity of such models, prominent among them are, Weight Quantization, Parameter Pruning, Network Pruning, low-rank representation, weights sharing, neural architecture search, knowledge distillation etc. In this research work, we investigate the performance impacts on various trained deep learning models, compressed using quantization and pruning techniques. We implemented both, quantization and pruning, compression techniques on popular deep learning models used in the image classification, object detection, language models and generative models-based problem statements. We also explored performance of various large language models (LLMs) after quantization and low rank adaptation. We used the standard evaluation metrics (model's size, accuracy, and inference time) for all the related problem statements and concluded this paper by discussing the challenges and future work.
Authors:Bowen Liu, Dongjie Chen, Xiao Qi
Abstract:
With the rapid growth of the PCB manufacturing industry, there is an increasing demand for computer vision inspection to detect defects during production. Improving the accuracy and generalization of PCB defect detection models remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a high-precision, robust, and real-time end-to-end method for PCB defect detection based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Traditional methods often suffer from low accuracy and limited applicability. We propose a novel approach combining YOLOv5 and multiscale modules for hierarchical residual-like connections. In PCB defect detection, noise can confuse the background and small targets. The YOLOv5 model provides a strong foundation with its real-time processing and accurate object detection capabilities. The multi-scale module extends traditional approaches by incorporating hierarchical residual-like connections within a single block, enabling multiscale feature extraction. This plug-and-play module significantly enhances performance by extracting features at multiple scales and levels, which are useful for identifying defects of varying sizes and complexities. Our multi-scale architecture integrates feature extraction, defect localization, and classification into a unified network. Experiments on a large-scale PCB dataset demonstrate significant improvements in precision, recall, and F1-score compared to existing methods. This work advances computer vision inspection for PCB defect detection, providing a reliable solution for high-precision, robust, real-time, and domain-adaptive defect detection in the PCB manufacturing industry.
Authors:Lu Gan, Xi Li, Xichun Wang
Abstract:
We present TXL-PBC, a curated and re-annotated peripheral blood cell dataset constructed by integrating four publicly available resources: Blood Cell Count and Detection (BCCD), Blood Cell Detection Dataset (BCDD), Peripheral Blood Cells (PBC), and Raabin White Blood Cell (Raabin-WBC). Through rigorous sample selection, semi-automatic annotation using the YOLOv8n model, and comprehensive manual review, we ensured high annotation accuracy and consistency. The final dataset contains 1,260 images and 18,143 bounding box annotations for three major blood cell types: white blood cells (WBC), red blood cells (RBC), and platelets. We provide detailed visual analyses of the data distribution, demonstrating the diversity and balance of the dataset. To further validate the quality and utility of TXL-PBC, we trained several mainstream object detection models, including YOLOv5s, YOLOv8s, YOLOv11s, SSD300, Faster R-CNN, and RetinaNet, and report their baseline performance. The TXL-PBC dataset is openly available on Figshare and GitHub, offering a valuable resource for the development and benchmarking of blood cell detection models and related machine learning research.
Authors:Youssef Zahran, Gertjan Burghouts, Yke Bauke Eisma
Abstract:
Despite the significant advancements in computer vision models, their ability to generalize to novel object-attribute compositions remains limited. Existing methods for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) mainly focus on image classification. This paper aims to enhance CZSL in object detection without forgetting prior learned knowledge. We use Grounding DINO and incorporate Compositional Soft Prompting (CSP) into it and extend it with Compositional Anticipation. We achieve a 70.5% improvement over CSP on the harmonic mean (HM) between seen and unseen compositions on the CLEVR dataset. Furthermore, we introduce Contrastive Prompt Tuning to incrementally address model confusion between similar compositions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method and achieve an increase of 14.5% in HM across the pretrain, increment, and unseen sets. Collectively, these methods provide a framework for learning various compositions with limited data, as well as improving the performance of underperforming compositions when additional data becomes available.
Authors:Zhipeng Ling, Qi Xin, Yiyu Lin, Guangze Su, Zuwei Shui
Abstract:
YOLOv8 plays a crucial role in the realm of autonomous driving, owing to its high-speed target detection, precise identification and positioning, and versatile compatibility across multiple platforms. By processing video streams or images in real-time, YOLOv8 rapidly and accurately identifies obstacles such as vehicles and pedestrians on roadways, offering essential visual data for autonomous driving systems. Moreover, YOLOv8 supports various tasks including instance segmentation, image classification, and attitude estimation, thereby providing comprehensive visual perception for autonomous driving, ultimately enhancing driving safety and efficiency. Recognizing the significance of object detection in autonomous driving scenarios and the challenges faced by existing methods, this paper proposes a holistic approach to enhance the YOLOv8 model. The study introduces two pivotal modifications: the C2f_RFAConv module and the Triplet Attention mechanism. Firstly, the proposed modifications are elaborated upon in the methodological section. The C2f_RFAConv module replaces the original module to enhance feature extraction efficiency, while the Triplet Attention mechanism enhances feature focus. Subsequently, the experimental procedure delineates the training and evaluation process, encompassing training the original YOLOv8, integrating modified modules, and assessing performance improvements using metrics and PR curves. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the modifications, with the improved YOLOv8 model exhibiting significant performance enhancements, including increased MAP values and improvements in PR curves. Lastly, the analysis section elucidates the results and attributes the performance improvements to the introduced modules. C2f_RFAConv enhances feature extraction efficiency, while Triplet Attention improves feature focus for enhanced target detection.
Authors:Cheng Peng, Minghan Wei, Volkan Isler
Abstract:
We introduce a new route-finding problem which considers perception and travel costs simultaneously. Specifically, we consider the problem of finding the shortest tour such that all objects of interest can be detected successfully. To represent a viable detection region for each object, we propose to use an entropy-based viewing score that generates a diameter-bounded region as a viewing neighborhood. We formulate the detection-based trajectory planning problem as a stochastic traveling salesperson problem with neighborhoods and propose a center-visit method that obtains an approximation ratio of O(DmaxDmin) for disjoint regions. For non-disjoint regions, our method -provides a novel finite detour in 3D, which utilizes the region's minimum curvature property. Finally, we show that our method can generate efficient trajectories compared to a baseline method in a photo-realistic simulation environment.
Authors:Ziyi Ding, Like Xin
Abstract:
Salient object detection is designed to identify the objects in an image that attract the most visual attention.Currently, the most advanced method of significance object detection adopts pyramid grafting network architecture.However, pyramid-graft network architecture still has the problem of failing to accurately locate significant targets.We observe that this is mainly due to the fact that current salient object detection methods simply aggregate different scale features, ignoring the correlation between different scale features.To overcome these problems, we propose a new salience object detection framework(FIPGNet),which is a pyramid graft network with feature interaction strategies.Specifically, we propose an attention-mechanism based feature interaction strategy (FIA) that innovatively introduces spatial agent Cross Attention (SACA) to achieve multi-level feature interaction, highlighting important spatial regions from a spatial perspective, thereby enhancing salient regions.And the channel proxy Cross Attention Module (CCM), which is used to effectively connect the features extracted by the backbone network and the features processed using the spatial proxy cross attention module, eliminating inconsistencies.Finally, under the action of these two modules, the prominent target location problem in the current pyramid grafting network model is solved.Experimental results on six challenging datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the current 12 salient object detection methods on four indicators.
Authors:Mingkui Feng, Hancheng Yu, Xiaoyu Dang, Ming Zhou
Abstract:
Objects in aerial images are typically embedded in complex backgrounds and exhibit arbitrary orientations. When employing oriented bounding boxes (OBB) to represent arbitrary oriented objects, the periodicity of angles could lead to discontinuities in label regression values at the boundaries, inducing abrupt fluctuations in the loss function. To address this problem, an OBB representation based on the complex plane is introduced in the oriented detection framework, and a trigonometric loss function is proposed. Moreover, leveraging prior knowledge of complex background environments and significant differences in large objects in aerial images, a conformer RPN head is constructed to predict angle information. The proposed loss function and conformer RPN head jointly generate high-quality oriented proposals. A category-aware dynamic label assignment based on predicted category feedback is proposed to address the limitations of solely relying on IoU for proposal label assignment. This method makes negative sample selection more representative, ensuring consistency between classification and regression features. Experiments were conducted on four realistic oriented detection datasets, and the results demonstrate superior performance in oriented object detection with minimal parameter tuning and time costs. Specifically, mean average precision (mAP) scores of 82.02%, 71.99%, 69.87%, and 98.77% were achieved on the DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5, DIOR-R, and HRSC2016 datasets, respectively.
Authors:Jie Shao, Jiacheng Wu, Wenzhong Shen, Cheng Yang
Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) could adapt a model trained on a source domain to an unlabeled target domain for object detection. Existing unsupervised DAOD methods usually perform feature alignments from the target to the source. Unidirectional domain transfer would omit information about the target samples and result in suboptimal adaptation when there are large domain shifts. Therefore, we propose a pairwise attentive adversarial network with a Domain Mixup (DomMix) module to mitigate the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, a deep-level mixup is employed to construct an intermediate domain that allows features from both domains to share their differences. Then a pairwise attentive adversarial network is applied with attentive encoding on both image-level and instance-level features at different scales and optimizes domain alignment by adversarial learning. This allows the network to focus on regions with disparate contextual information and learn their similarities between different domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on several benchmark datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed method.
Authors:Zixing Li, Chao Yan, Zhen Lan, Xiaojia Xiang, Han Zhou, Jun Lai, Dengqing Tang
Abstract:
Advanced cognition can be extracted from the human brain using brain-computer interfaces. Integrating these interfaces with computer vision techniques, which possess efficient feature extraction capabilities, can achieve more robust and accurate detection of dim targets in aerial images. However, existing target detection methods primarily concentrate on homogeneous data, lacking efficient and versatile processing capabilities for heterogeneous multimodal data. In this paper, we first build a brain-eye-computer based object detection system for aerial images under few-shot conditions. This system detects suspicious targets using region proposal networks, evokes the event-related potential (ERP) signal in electroencephalogram (EEG) through the eye-tracking-based slow serial visual presentation (ESSVP) paradigm, and constructs the EEG-image data pairs with eye movement data. Then, an adaptive modality balanced online knowledge distillation (AMBOKD) method is proposed to recognize dim objects with the EEG-image data. AMBOKD fuses EEG and image features using a multi-head attention module, establishing a new modality with comprehensive features. To enhance the performance and robust capability of the fusion modality, simultaneous training and mutual learning between modalities are enabled by end-to-end online knowledge distillation. During the learning process, an adaptive modality balancing module is proposed to ensure multimodal equilibrium by dynamically adjusting the weights of the importance and the training gradients across various modalities. The effectiveness and superiority of our method are demonstrated by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, experiments conducted on public datasets and system validations in real-world scenarios demonstrate the reliability and practicality of the proposed system and the designed method.
Authors:Yizhak Y. Elboher, Avraham Raviv, Yael Leibovich Weiss, Omer Cohen, Roy Assa, Guy Katz, Hillel Kugler
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in real-world applications, yet they remain vulnerable to errors and adversarial attacks. Formal verification offers a systematic approach to identify and mitigate these vulnerabilities, enhancing model robustness and reliability. While most existing verification methods focus on image classification models, this work extends formal verification to the more complex domain of emph{object detection} models. We propose a formulation for verifying the robustness of such models and demonstrate how state-of-the-art verification tools, originally developed for classification, can be adapted for this purpose. Our experiments, conducted on various datasets and networks, highlight the ability of formal verification to uncover vulnerabilities in object detection models, underscoring the need to extend verification efforts to this domain. This work lays the foundation for further research into formal verification across a broader range of computer vision applications.
Authors:Jess Tam, Justin Kay
Abstract:
Computer vision applications are increasingly popular for wildlife monitoring tasks. While some studies focus on the monitoring of a single species, such as a particular endangered species, others monitor larger functional groups, such as predators. In our study, we used camera trap images collected in north-western New South Wales, Australia, to investigate how model results were affected by combining multiple species in single classes, and whether the addition of negative samples can improve model performance. We found that species that benefited the most from merging into a single class were mainly species that look alike morphologically, i.e. macropods. Whereas species that looked distinctively different gave mixed results when merged, e.g. merging pigs and goats together as non-native large mammals. We also found that adding negative samples improved model performance marginally in most instances, and recommend conducting a more comprehensive study to explore whether the marginal gains were random or consistent. We suggest that practitioners could classify morphologically similar species together as a functional group or higher taxonomic group to draw ecological inferences. Nevertheless, whether to merge classes or not will depend on the ecological question to be explored.
Authors:Jack Highton, Quok Zong Chong, Samuel Finestone, Arian Beqiri, Julia A. Schnabel, Kanwal K. Bhatia
Abstract:
Deep learning models for medical image segmentation and object detection are becoming increasingly available as clinical products. However, as details are rarely provided about the training data, models may unexpectedly fail when cases differ from those in the training distribution. An approach allowing potential users to independently test the robustness of a model, treating it as a black box and using only a few cases from their own site, is key for adoption. To address this, a method to test the robustness of these models against CT image quality variation is presented. In this work we present this framework by demonstrating that given the same training data, the model architecture and data pre processing greatly affect the robustness of several frequently used segmentation and object detection methods to simulated CT imaging artifacts and degradation. Our framework also addresses the concern about the sustainability of deep learning models in clinical use, by considering future shifts in image quality due to scanner deterioration or imaging protocol changes which are not reflected in a limited local test dataset.
Authors:Yang Song, Lin Wang
Abstract:
3D object detection is an important task that has been widely applied in autonomous driving. To perform this task, a new trend is to fuse multi-modal inputs, i.e., LiDAR and camera. Under such a trend, recent methods fuse these two modalities by unifying them in the same 3D space. However, during direct fusion in a unified space, the drawbacks of both modalities (LiDAR features struggle with detailed semantic information and the camera lacks accurate 3D spatial information) are also preserved, diluting semantic and spatial awareness of the final unified representation. To address the issue, this letter proposes a novel bidirectional complementary LiDAR-camera fusion framework, called BiCo-Fusion that can achieve robust semantic- and spatial-aware 3D object detection. The key insight is to fuse LiDAR and camera features in a bidirectional complementary way to enhance the semantic awareness of the LiDAR and the 3D spatial awareness of the camera. The enhanced features from both modalities are then adaptively fused to build a semantic- and spatial-aware unified representation. Specifically, we introduce Pre-Fusion consisting of a Voxel Enhancement Module (VEM) to enhance the semantic awareness of voxel features from 2D camera features and Image Enhancement Module (IEM) to enhance the 3D spatial awareness of camera features from 3D voxel features. We then introduce Unified Fusion (U-Fusion) to adaptively fuse the enhanced features from the last stage to build a unified representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our BiCo-Fusion against the prior arts. Project page: https://t-ys.github.io/BiCo-Fusion/.
Authors:Ye Won Byun, Cathy Jiao, Shahriar Noroozizadeh, Jimin Sun, Rosa Vitiello
Abstract:
We introduce a simple method that employs pre-trained CLIP encoders to enhance model generalization in the ALFRED task. In contrast to previous literature where CLIP replaces the visual encoder, we suggest using CLIP as an additional module through an auxiliary object detection objective. We validate our method on the recently proposed Episodic Transformer architecture and demonstrate that incorporating CLIP improves task performance on the unseen validation set. Additionally, our analysis results support that CLIP especially helps with leveraging object descriptions, detecting small objects, and interpreting rare words.
Authors:Mohammed Belcaid, Eric Bonnafous, Louis Crison, Christophe Faure, Eric Jenn, Claire Pagetti
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a development process of a drone detection system involving a machine learning object detection component. The purpose is to reach acceptable performance objectives and provide sufficient evidences, required by the recommendations (soon to be published) of the ED 324 / ARP 6983 standard, to gain confidence in the dependability of the designed system.
Authors:Gregor Lenz, Douglas McLelland
Abstract:
Transmitting Earth observation image data from satellites to ground stations incurs significant costs in terms of power and bandwidth. For maritime ship detection, on-board data processing can identify ships and reduce the amount of data sent to the ground. However, most images captured on board contain only bodies of water or land, with the Airbus Ship Detection dataset showing only 22.1\% of images containing ships. We designed a low-power, two-stage system to optimize performance instead of relying on a single complex model. The first stage is a lightweight binary classifier that acts as a gating mechanism to detect the presence of ships. This stage runs on Brainchip's Akida 1.0, which leverages activation sparsity to minimize dynamic power consumption. The second stage employs a YOLOv5 object detection model to identify the location and size of ships. This approach achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 76.9\%, which increases to 79.3\% when evaluated solely on images containing ships, by reducing false positives. Additionally, we calculated that evaluating the full validation set on a NVIDIA Jetson Nano device requires 111.4 kJ of energy. Our two-stage system reduces this energy consumption to 27.3 kJ, which is less than a fourth, demonstrating the efficiency of a heterogeneous computing system.
Authors:Sompote Youwai, Achitaphon Chaiyaphat, Pawarotorn Chaipetch
Abstract:
Maintaining road pavement integrity is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient transportation. Conventional methods for assessing pavement condition are often laborious and susceptible to human error. This paper proposes YOLO9tr, a novel lightweight object detection model for pavement damage detection, leveraging the advancements of deep learning. YOLO9tr is based on the YOLOv9 architecture, incorporating a partial attention block that enhances feature extraction and attention mechanisms, leading to improved detection performance in complex scenarios. The model is trained on a comprehensive dataset comprising road damage images from multiple countries, including an expanded set of damage categories beyond the standard four. This broadened classification range allows for a more accurate and realistic assessment of pavement conditions. Comparative analysis demonstrates YOLO9tr's superior precision and inference speed compared to state-of-the-art models like YOLO8, YOLO9 and YOLO10, achieving a balance between computational efficiency and detection accuracy. The model achieves a high frame rate of up to 136 FPS, making it suitable for real-time applications such as video surveillance and automated inspection systems. The research presents an ablation study to analyze the impact of architectural modifications and hyperparameter variations on model performance, further validating the effectiveness of the partial attention block. The results highlight YOLO9tr's potential for practical deployment in real-time pavement condition monitoring, contributing to the development of robust and efficient solutions for maintaining safe and functional road infrastructure.
Authors:Challapalli Phanindra Revanth, Sumohana S. Channappayya, C Krishna Mohan
Abstract:
Computing the loss gradient via backpropagation consumes considerable energy during deep learning (DL) model training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to efficiently compute DL models' gradients to mitigate the substantial energy overhead associated with backpropagation. Exploiting the over-parameterized nature of DL models and the smoothness of their loss landscapes, we propose a method called {\em GradSamp} for sampling gradient updates from a Gaussian distribution. Specifically, we update model parameters at a given epoch (chosen periodically or randomly) by perturbing the parameters (element-wise) from the previous epoch with Gaussian ``noise''. The parameters of the Gaussian distribution are estimated using the error between the model parameter values from the two previous epochs. {\em GradSamp} not only streamlines gradient computation but also enables skipping entire epochs, thereby enhancing overall efficiency. We rigorously validate our hypothesis across a diverse set of standard and non-standard CNN and transformer-based models, spanning various computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. Additionally, we explore its efficacy in out-of-distribution scenarios such as Domain Adaptation (DA), Domain Generalization (DG), and decentralized settings like Federated Learning (FL). Our experimental results affirm the effectiveness of {\em GradSamp} in achieving notable energy savings without compromising performance, underscoring its versatility and potential impact in practical DL applications.
Authors:Devichand Budagam, Azamat Zhanatuly Imanbayev, Iskander Rafailovich Akhmetov, Aleksandr Sinitca, Sergey Antonov, Dmitrii Kaplun
Abstract:
Teeth segmentation and recognition play a vital role in a variety of dental applications and diagnostic procedures. The integration of deep learning models has facilitated the development of precise and automated segmentation methods. Although prior research has explored teeth segmentation, not many methods have successfully performed tooth segmentation and detection simultaneously. This study presents UFBA-425, a dental dataset derived from the UFBA-UESC dataset, featuring bounding box and polygon annotations for 425 panoramic dental X-rays. In addition, this paper presents the OralBBNet architecture, which is based on the best segmentation and detection qualities of architectures such as U-Net and YOLOv8, respectively. OralBBNet is designed to improve the accuracy and robustness of tooth classification and segmentation on panoramic X-rays by leveraging the complementary strengths of U-Net and YOLOv8. Our approach achieved a 1-3% improvement in mean average precision (mAP) for tooth detection compared to existing techniques and a 15-20% improvement in the dice score for teeth segmentation over state-of-the-art (SOTA) solutions for various tooth categories and 2-4% improvement in the dice score compared to other SOTA segmentation architectures. The results of this study establish a foundation for the wider implementation of object detection models in dental diagnostics.
Authors:Mariia Pushkareva, Yuri Feldman, Csaba Domokos, Kilian Rambach, Dotan Di Castro
Abstract:
Radar sensors are low cost, long-range, and weather-resilient. Therefore, they are widely used for driver assistance functions, and are expected to be crucial for the success of autonomous driving in the future. In many perception tasks only pre-processed radar point clouds are considered. In contrast, radar spectra are a raw form of radar measurements and contain more information than radar point clouds. However, radar spectra are rather difficult to interpret. In this work, we aim to explore the semantic information contained in spectra in the context of automated driving, thereby moving towards better interpretability of radar spectra. To this end, we create a radar spectra-language model, allowing us to query radar spectra measurements for the presence of scene elements using free text. We overcome the scarcity of radar spectra data by matching the embedding space of an existing vision-language model. Finally, we explore the benefit of the learned representation for scene retrieval using radar spectra only, and obtain improvements in free space segmentation and object detection merely by injecting the spectra embedding into a baseline model.
Authors:Jan Lippemeier, Stefanie Hittmeyer, Oliver Niehörster, Markus Lange-Hegermann
Abstract:
Recent advancements in machine learning, particularly in deep learning and object detection, have significantly improved performance in various tasks, including image classification and synthesis. However, challenges persist, particularly in acquiring labeled data that accurately represents specific use cases. In this work, we propose an automatic pipeline for generating synthetic image datasets using Stable Diffusion, an image synthesis model capable of producing highly realistic images. We leverage YOLOv8 for automatic bounding box detection and quality assessment of synthesized images. Our contributions include demonstrating the feasibility of training image classifiers solely on synthetic data, automating the image generation pipeline, and describing the computational requirements for our approach. We evaluate the usability of different modes of Stable Diffusion and achieve a classification accuracy of 75%.
Authors:Abdelilah Nossair, Hamza El Housni
Abstract:
The Smart Dietary Assistant utilizes Machine Learning to provide personalized dietary advice, focusing on users with conditions like diabetes. This app leverages the Grounding DINO model, which combines a text encoder and image backbone to enhance food item detection without requiring a labeled dataset. With an AP score of 52.5 on the COCO dataset, the model demonstrates high accuracy in real-world scenarios, utilizing attention mechanisms to precisely recognize objects based on user-provided labels and images. Developed using React Native and TypeScript, the app operates seamlessly across multiple platforms and integrates a self-hosted PostgreSQL database, ensuring data integrity and enhancing user privacy. Key functionalities include personalized nutrition profiles, real-time food scanning, and health insights, facilitating informed dietary choices for health management and lifestyle optimization. Future developments aim to integrate wearable technologies for more tailored health recommendations. Keywords: Food Image Recognition, Machine Learning in Nutrition, Zero-Shot Object Detection
Authors:Haobin Chen, Junyu Tao, Bize Zhou, Xiaoyan Liu
Abstract:
The demand is to solve the issue of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) operating autonomously and implementing practical functions such as search and rescue in complex unknown environments. This paper proposes an autonomous search and rescue UAV system based on an EGO-Planner algorithm, which is improved by innovative UAV body application and takes the methods of inverse motor backstepping to enhance the overall flight efficiency of the UAV and miniaturization of the whole machine. At the same time, the system introduced the EGO-Planner planning tool, which is optimized by a bidirectional A* algorithm along with an object detection algorithm. It solves the issue of intelligent obstacle avoidance and search and rescue. Through the simulation and field verification work, and compared with traditional algorithms, this method shows more efficiency and reliability in the task. In addition, due to the existing algorithm's improved robustness, this application shows good prospection.
Authors:Chuang Wang, Lie Yang, Ze Lin, Yizhi Liao, Gang Chen, Longhan Xie
Abstract:
Assembling a slave object into a fixture-free master object represents a critical challenge in flexible manufacturing. Existing deep reinforcement learning-based methods, while benefiting from visual or operational priors, often struggle with small-batch precise assembly tasks due to their reliance on insufficient priors and high-costed model development. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a cognitive manipulation and learning approach that utilizes skill graphs to integrate learning-based object detection with fine manipulation models into a cohesive modular policy. This approach enables the detection of the master object from both global and local perspectives to accommodate positional uncertainties and variable backgrounds, and parametric residual policy to handle pose error and intricate contact dynamics effectively. Leveraging the skill graph, our method supports knowledge-informed learning of semi-supervised learning for object detection and classroom-to-real reinforcement learning for fine manipulation. Simulation experiments on a gear-assembly task have demonstrated that the skill-graph-enabled coarse-operation planning and visual attention are essential for efficient learning and robust manipulation, showing substantial improvements of 13$\%$ in success rate and 15.4$\%$ in number of completion steps over competing methods. Real-world experiments further validate that our system is highly effective for robotic assembly in semi-structured environments.
Authors:Chengzeng You, Zhongyuan Hau, Binbin Xu, Soteris Demetriou
Abstract:
LiDAR sensors are widely used in autonomous vehicles to better perceive the environment. However, prior works have shown that LiDAR signals can be spoofed to hide real objects from 3D object detectors. This study explores the feasibility of reducing the required spoofing area through a novel object-hiding strategy based on virtual patches (VPs). We first manually design VPs (MVPs) and show that VP-focused attacks can achieve similar success rates with prior work but with a fraction of the required spoofing area. Then we design a framework Saliency-LiDAR (SALL), which can identify critical regions for LiDAR objects using Integrated Gradients. VPs crafted on critical regions (CVPs) reduce object detection recall by at least 15% compared to our baseline with an approximate 50% reduction in the spoofing area for vehicles of average size.
Authors:Jin-Hee Lee, Jae-Keun Lee, Je-Seok Kim, Soon Kwon
Abstract:
To ensure safe urban driving for autonomous platforms, it is crucial not only to develop high-performance object detection techniques but also to establish a diverse and representative dataset that captures various urban environments and object characteristics. To address these two issues, we have constructed a multi-class 3D LiDAR dataset reflecting diverse urban environments and object characteristics, and developed a robust 3D semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) based on a multiple teachers framework. This SSOD framework categorizes similar classes and assigns specialized teachers to each category. Through collaborative supervision among these category-specialized teachers, the student network becomes increasingly proficient, leading to a highly effective object detector. We propose a simple yet effective augmentation technique, Pie-based Point Compensating Augmentation (PieAug), to enable the teacher network to generate high-quality pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on the WOD, KITTI, and our datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and the quality of our dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art 3D semi-supervised object detection methods across all datasets. We plan to release our multi-class LiDAR dataset and the source code available on our Github repository in the near future.
Authors:Frank A. Ruis, Alma M. Liezenga, Friso G. Heslinga, Luca Ballan, Thijs A. Eker, Richard J. M. den Hollander, Martin C. van Leeuwen, Judith Dijk, Wyke Huizinga
Abstract:
Collecting and annotating real-world data for the development of object detection models is a time-consuming and expensive process. In the military domain in particular, data collection can also be dangerous or infeasible. Training models on synthetic data may provide a solution for cases where access to real-world training data is restricted. However, bridging the reality gap between synthetic and real data remains a challenge. Existing methods usually build on top of baseline Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models that have been shown to perform well when trained on real data, but have limited ability to perform well when trained on synthetic data. For example, some architectures allow for fine-tuning with the expectation of large quantities of training data and are prone to overfitting on synthetic data. Related work usually ignores various best practices from object detection on real data, e.g. by training on synthetic data from a single environment with relatively little variation. In this paper we propose a methodology for improving the performance of a pre-trained object detector when training on synthetic data. Our approach focuses on extracting the salient information from synthetic data without forgetting useful features learned from pre-training on real images. Based on the state of the art, we incorporate data augmentation methods and a Transformer backbone. Besides reaching relatively strong performance without any specialized synthetic data transfer methods, we show that our methods improve the state of the art on synthetic data trained object detection for the RarePlanes and DGTA-VisDrone datasets, and reach near-perfect performance on an in-house vehicle detection dataset.
Authors:José Ignacio DÃaz Villa, Patricio Loncomilla, Javier Ruiz-del-Solar
Abstract:
This paper introduces YotoR (You Only Transform One Representation), a novel deep learning model for object detection that combines Swin Transformers and YoloR architectures. Transformers, a revolutionary technology in natural language processing, have also significantly impacted computer vision, offering the potential to enhance accuracy and computational efficiency. YotoR combines the robust Swin Transformer backbone with the YoloR neck and head. In our experiments, YotoR models TP5 and BP4 consistently outperform YoloR P6 and Swin Transformers in various evaluations, delivering improved object detection performance and faster inference speeds than Swin Transformer models. These results highlight the potential for further model combinations and improvements in real-time object detection with Transformers. The paper concludes by emphasizing the broader implications of YotoR, including its potential to enhance transformer-based models for image-related tasks.
Authors:Haowen Lai, Gaoxiang Luo, Yifei Liu, Mingmin Zhao
Abstract:
This paper introduces PanoRadar, a novel RF imaging system that brings RF resolution close to that of LiDAR, while providing resilience against conditions challenging for optical signals. Our LiDAR-comparable 3D imaging results enable, for the first time, a variety of visual recognition tasks at radio frequency, including surface normal estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection. PanoRadar utilizes a rotating single-chip mmWave radar, along with a combination of novel signal processing and machine learning algorithms, to create high-resolution 3D images of the surroundings. Our system accurately estimates robot motion, allowing for coherent imaging through a dense grid of synthetic antennas. It also exploits the high azimuth resolution to enhance elevation resolution using learning-based methods. Furthermore, PanoRadar tackles 3D learning via 2D convolutions and addresses challenges due to the unique characteristics of RF signals. Our results demonstrate PanoRadar's robust performance across 12 buildings.
Authors:Saurabh Pathak, Samridha Shrestha, Abdelrahman AlMahmoud
Abstract:
Object detection forms a key component in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for completing high-level tasks that depend on the awareness of objects on the ground from an aerial perspective. In that scenario, adversarial patch attacks on an onboard object detector can severely impair the performance of upstream tasks. This paper proposes a novel model-agnostic defense mechanism against the threat of adversarial patch attacks in the context of UAV-based object detection. We formulate adversarial patch defense as an occlusion removal task. The proposed defense method can neutralize adversarial patches located on objects of interest, without exposure to adversarial patches during training. Our lightweight single-stage defense approach allows us to maintain a model-agnostic nature, that once deployed does not require to be updated in response to changes in the object detection pipeline. The evaluations in digital and physical domains show the feasibility of our method for deployment in UAV object detection pipelines, by significantly decreasing the Attack Success Ratio without incurring significant processing costs. As a result, the proposed defense solution can improve the reliability of object detection for UAVs.
Authors:Ioanna Gogou, Dimitrios Koutsomitropoulos
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are commonly used for the problem of object detection thanks to their increased accuracy. Nevertheless, the performance of CNN-based detection models is ambiguous when detection speed is considered. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been sufficient evaluation of the available methods in terms of the speed/accuracy trade-off in related literature. This work assesses the most fundamental object detection models on the Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset with respect to this trade-off, their memory consumption, and computational and storage cost. Next, we select a highly efficient model called YOLOv5 to train on the topical and unexplored dataset of human faces with medical masks, the Properly-Wearing Masked Faces Dataset (PWMFD), and analyze the benefits of specific optimization techniques for real-time medical mask detection: transfer learning, data augmentations, and a Squeeze-and-Excitation attention mechanism. Using our findings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we propose an optimized model based on YOLOv5s using transfer learning for the detection of correctly and incorrectly worn medical masks that surpassed more than two times in speed (69 frames per second) the state-of-the-art model SE-YOLOv3 on the PWMFD dataset while maintaining the same level of mean Average Precision (67%).
Authors:Avinash Nittur Ramesh, Aitor Correas-Serrano, MarÃa González-Huici
Abstract:
We present a novel synthetically generated multi-modal dataset, SCaRL, to enable the training and validation of autonomous driving solutions. Multi-modal datasets are essential to attain the robustness and high accuracy required by autonomous systems in applications such as autonomous driving. As deep learning-based solutions are becoming more prevalent for object detection, classification, and tracking tasks, there is great demand for datasets combining camera, lidar, and radar sensors. Existing real/synthetic datasets for autonomous driving lack synchronized data collection from a complete sensor suite. SCaRL provides synchronized Synthetic data from RGB, semantic/instance, and depth Cameras; Range-Doppler-Azimuth/Elevation maps and raw data from Radar; and 3D point clouds/2D maps of semantic, depth and Doppler data from coherent Lidar. SCaRL is a large dataset based on the CARLA Simulator, which provides data for diverse, dynamic scenarios and traffic conditions. SCaRL is the first dataset to include synthetic synchronized data from coherent Lidar and MIMO radar sensors.
The dataset can be accessed here: https://fhr-ihs-sva.pages.fraunhofer.de/asp/scarl/
Authors:Hafsa El Hafyani, Bastien Pasdeloup, Camille Yver, Pierre Romenteau
Abstract:
Multimodal object detection has shown promise in remote sensing. However, multimodal data frequently encounter the problem of low-quality, wherein the modalities lack strict cell-to-cell alignment, leading to mismatch between different modalities. In this paper, we investigate multimodal object detection where only one modality contains the target object and the others provide crucial contextual information. We propose to resolve the alignment problem by converting the contextual binary information into probability maps. We then propose an early fusion architecture that we validate with extensive experiments on the DOTA dataset.
Authors:Manav Prabhakar, Jwalandhar Girnar, Arpan Kusari
Abstract:
While much research has recently focused on generating physics-based adversarial samples, a critical yet often overlooked category originates from physical failures within on-board cameras -- components essential to the perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Firstly, we motivate the study using two separate real-world experiments to showcase that indeed glass failures would cause the detection based neural network models to fail. Secondly, we develop a simulation-based study using the physical process of the glass breakage to create perturbed scenarios, representing a realistic class of physics-based adversarial samples. Using a finite element model (FEM)-based approach, we generate surface cracks on the camera image by applying a stress field defined by particles within a triangular mesh. Lastly, we use physically-based rendering (PBR) techniques to provide realistic visualizations of these physically plausible fractures. To analyze the safety implications, we superimpose these simulated broken glass effects as image filters on widely used open-source datasets: KITTI and BDD100K using two most prominent object detection neural networks (CNN-based -- YOLOv8 and Faster R-CNN) and Pyramid Vision Transformers. To further investigate the distributional impact of these visual distortions, we compute the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between three distinct data distributions, applying various broken glass filters to a custom dataset (captured through a cracked windshield), as well as the KITTI and Kaggle cats and dogs datasets. The K-L divergence analysis suggests that these broken glass filters do not introduce significant distributional shifts.
Authors:Ouassine Younes, Zahir Jihad, Conruyt Noël, Kayal Mohsen, A. Martin Philippe, Chenin Eric, Bigot Lionel, Vignes Lebbe Regine
Abstract:
Coral reefs are vital ecosystems that are under increasing threat due to local human impacts and climate change. Efficient and accurate monitoring of coral reefs is crucial for their conservation and management. In this paper, we present an automatic coral detection system utilizing the You Only Look Once (YOLO) deep learning model, which is specifically tailored for underwater imagery analysis. To train and evaluate our system, we employ a dataset consisting of 400 original underwater images. We increased the number of annotated images to 580 through image manipulation using data augmentation techniques, which can improve the model's performance by providing more diverse examples for training. The dataset is carefully collected from underwater videos that capture various coral reef environments, species, and lighting conditions. Our system leverages the YOLOv5 algorithm's real-time object detection capabilities, enabling efficient and accurate coral detection. We used YOLOv5 to extract discriminating features from the annotated dataset, enabling the system to generalize, including previously unseen underwater images. The successful implementation of the automatic coral detection system with YOLOv5 on our original image dataset highlights the potential of advanced computer vision techniques for coral reef research and conservation. Further research will focus on refining the algorithm to handle challenging underwater image conditions, and expanding the dataset to incorporate a wider range of coral species and spatio-temporal variations.
Authors:Raymond Wang, Nicholas R. Record, D. Whitney King, Tahiya Chowdhury
Abstract:
Marine debris poses a significant ecological threat to birds, fish, and other animal life. Traditional methods for assessing debris accumulation involve labor-intensive and costly manual surveys. This study introduces a framework that utilizes aerial imagery captured by drones to conduct remote trash surveys. Leveraging computer vision techniques, our approach detects, classifies, and maps marine debris distributions. The framework uses Grounding DINO, a transformer-based zero-shot object detector, and CLIP, a vision-language model for zero-shot object classification, enabling the detection and classification of debris objects based on material type without the need for training labels. To mitigate over-counting due to different views of the same object, Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is employed for duplicate matching using local object features. Additionally, we have developed a user-friendly web application that facilitates end-to-end analysis of drone images, including object detection, classification, and visualization on a map to support cleanup efforts. Our method achieves competitive performance in detection (0.69 mean IoU) and classification (0.74 F1 score) across seven debris object classes without labeled data, comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods. This framework has the potential to streamline automated trash sampling surveys, fostering efficient and sustainable community-led cleanup initiatives.
Authors:Mykhailo Uss, Ruslan Yermolenko, Olena Kolodiazhna, Oleksii Shashko, Ivan Safonov, Volodymyr Savin, Yoonjae Yeo, Seowon Ji, Jaeyun Jeong
Abstract:
Quantization is widely used to increase deep neural networks' (DNN) memory, computation, and power efficiency. Various techniques, such as post-training quantization and quantization-aware training, have been proposed to improve quantization quality. We introduce a novel approach for DNN quantization that uses a redundant representation of DNN's output. We represent the target quantity as a point on a 2D parametric curve. The DNN model is modified to predict 2D points that are mapped back to the target quantity at a post-processing stage. We demonstrate that this mapping can reduce quantization error. For the low-order parametric Hilbert curve, Depth-From-Stereo task, and two models represented by U-Net architecture and vision transformer, we achieved a quantization error reduction by about 5 times for the INT8 model at both CPU and DSP delegates. This gain comes with a minimal inference time increase (less than 7%). Our approach can be applied to other tasks, including segmentation, object detection, and key-points prediction.
Authors:Obadage Rochana Rumalshan, Pramuka Weerasinghe, Mohamed Shaheer, Prabhath Gunathilake, Erunika Dayaratna
Abstract:
The extreme popularity over the years for railway transportation urges the necessity to maintain efficient railway management systems around the globe. Even though, at present, there exist a large collection of Computer Aided Designed Railway Technical Maps (RTMs) but available only in the portable document format (PDF). Using Deep Learning and Optical Character Recognition techniques, this research work proposes a generic system to digitize the relevant map component data from a given input image and create a formatted text file per image. Out of YOLOv3, SSD and Faster-RCNN object detection models used, Faster-RCNN yields the highest mean Average Precision (mAP) and the highest F1 score values 0.68 and 0.76 respectively. Further it is proven from the results obtained that, one can improve the results with OCR when the text containing image is being sent through a sophisticated pre-processing pipeline to remove distortions.
Authors:Kholoud AlDosari, AIbtisam Osman, Omar Elharrouss, Somaya AlMaadeed, Mohamed Zied Chaari
Abstract:
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) market has been significantly growing and Considering the availability of drones at low-cost prices the possibility of misusing them, for illegal purposes such as drug trafficking, spying, and terrorist attacks posing high risks to national security, is rising. Therefore, detecting and tracking unauthorized drones to prevent future attacks that threaten lives, facilities, and security, become a necessity. Drone detection can be performed using different sensors, while image-based detection is one of them due to the development of artificial intelligence techniques. However, knowing unauthorized drone types is one of the challenges due to the lack of drone types datasets. For that, in this paper, we provide a dataset of various drones as well as a comparison of recognized object detection models on the proposed dataset including YOLO algorithms with their different versions, like, v3, v4, and v5 along with the Detectronv2. The experimental results of different models are provided along with a description of each method. The collected dataset can be found in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EPOpqlF4vG7hp4MYnfAecVOsdQ2JwBEd?usp=share_link
Authors:Anderson de Andrade, Ivan BajiÄ
Abstract:
We identify an issue in multi-task learnable compression, in which a representation learned for one task does not positively contribute to the rate-distortion performance of a different task as much as expected, given the estimated amount of information available in it. We interpret this issue using the predictive $\mathcal{V}$-information framework. In learnable scalable coding, previous work increased the utilization of side-information for input reconstruction by also rewarding input reconstruction when learning this shared representation. We evaluate the impact of this idea in the context of input reconstruction more rigorously and extended it to other computer vision tasks. We perform experiments using representations trained for object detection on COCO 2017 and depth estimation on the Cityscapes dataset, and use them to assist in image reconstruction and semantic segmentation tasks. The results show considerable improvements in the rate-distortion performance of the assisted tasks. Moreover, using the proposed representations, the performance of the base tasks are also improved. Results suggest that the proposed method induces simpler representations that are more compatible with downstream processes.
Authors:Xusheng Li, Chengliang Wang, Shumao Wang, Zhuo Zeng, Ji Liu
Abstract:
The multi-line LiDAR is widely used in autonomous vehicles, so point cloud-based 3D detectors are essential for autonomous driving. Extracting rich multi-scale features is crucial for point cloud-based 3D detectors in autonomous driving due to significant differences in the size of different types of objects. However, because of the real-time requirements, large-size convolution kernels are rarely used to extract large-scale features in the backbone. Current 3D detectors commonly use feature pyramid networks to obtain large-scale features; however, some objects containing fewer point clouds are further lost during down-sampling, resulting in degraded performance. Since pillar-based schemes require much less computation than voxel-based schemes, they are more suitable for constructing real-time 3D detectors. Hence, we propose the *, a pillar-based scheme. We redesigned the feature encoding, the backbone, and the neck of the 3D detector. We propose the Voxel2Pillar feature encoding, which uses a sparse convolution constructor to construct pillars with richer point cloud features, especially height features. The Voxel2Pillar adds more learnable parameters to the feature encoding, enabling the initial pillars to have higher performance ability. We extract multi-scale and large-scale features in the proposed fully sparse backbone, which does not utilize large-size convolutional kernels; the backbone consists of the proposed multi-scale feature extraction module. The neck consists of the proposed sparse ConvNeXt, whose simple structure significantly improves the performance. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed * on the Waymo Open Dataset, and the object detection accuracy for vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists is improved. We also verify the effectiveness of each proposed module in detail through ablation studies.
Authors:Engin Uzun, Erdem Akagunduz
Abstract:
Atmospheric turbulence poses a significant challenge to the performance of object detection models. Turbulence causes distortions, blurring, and noise in images by bending and scattering light rays due to variations in the refractive index of air. This results in non-rigid geometric distortions and temporal fluctuations in the electromagnetic radiation received by optical systems. This paper explores the effectiveness of turbulence image augmentation techniques in improving the accuracy and robustness of thermal-adapted and deep learning-based object detection models under atmospheric turbulence. Three distinct approximation-based turbulence simulators (geometric, Zernike-based, and P2S) are employed to generate turbulent training and test datasets. The performance of three state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection models: RTMDet-x, DINO-4scale, and YOLOv8-x, is employed on these turbulent datasets with and without turbulence augmentation during training. The results demonstrate that utilizing turbulence-specific augmentations during model training can significantly improve detection accuracy and robustness against distorted turbulent images. Turbulence augmentation enhances performance even for a non-turbulent test set.
Authors:Jiang Ziyue, Yin Bo, Lu Boyun
Abstract:
The advancement of agricultural robotics holds immense promise for transforming fruit harvesting practices, particularly within the apple industry. The accurate detection and localization of fruits are pivotal for the successful implementation of robotic harvesting systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to apple detection and position estimation utilizing an object detection model, YOLOv5. Our primary objective is to develop a robust system capable of identifying apples in complex orchard environments and providing precise location information. To achieve this, we curated an autonomously labeled dataset comprising diverse apple tree images, which was utilized for both training and evaluation purposes. Through rigorous experimentation, we compared the performance of our YOLOv5-based system with other popular object detection models, including SSD. Our results demonstrate that the YOLOv5 model outperforms its counterparts, achieving an impressive apple detection accuracy of approximately 85%. We believe that our proposed system's accurate apple detection and position estimation capabilities represent a significant advancement in agricultural robotics, laying the groundwork for more efficient and sustainable fruit harvesting practices.
Authors:Bingquan Zhou, Jie Jiang
Abstract:
Object detection plays a critical role in autonomous driving, where accurately and efficiently detecting objects in fast-moving scenes is crucial. Traditional frame-based cameras face challenges in balancing latency and bandwidth, necessitating the need for innovative solutions. Event cameras have emerged as promising sensors for autonomous driving due to their low latency, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. However, effectively utilizing the asynchronous and sparse event data presents challenges, particularly in maintaining low latency and lightweight architectures for object detection. This paper provides an overview of object detection using event data in autonomous driving, showcasing the competitive benefits of event cameras.
Authors:Kassaw Abraham Mulat, Zhengyong Feng, Tegegne Solomon Eshetie, Ahmed Endris Hasen
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) remains an important task in computer vision, with applications ranging from image segmentation to autonomous driving. Fully convolutional network (FCN)-based methods have made remarkable progress in visual saliency detection over the last few decades. However, these methods have limitations in accurately detecting salient objects, particularly in challenging scenes with multiple objects, small objects, or objects with low resolutions. To address this issue, we proposed a Saliency Fusion Attention U-Net (SalFAU-Net) model, which incorporates a saliency fusion module into each decoder block of the attention U-net model to generate saliency probability maps from each decoder block. SalFAU-Net employs an attention mechanism to selectively focus on the most informative regions of an image and suppress non-salient regions. We train SalFAU-Net on the DUTS dataset using a binary cross-entropy loss function. We conducted experiments on six popular SOD evaluation datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, SalFAU-Net, achieves competitive performance compared to other methods in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), F-measure, s-measure, and e-measure.
Authors:Junjiang Zhen, Bojun Xie
Abstract:
Deep learning has had a significant impact on the identification and classification of mineral resources, especially playing a key role in efficiently and accurately identifying different minerals, which is important for improving the efficiency and accuracy of mining. However, traditional ore sorting meth- ods often suffer from inefficiency and lack of accuracy, especially in complex mineral environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes a method called OreYOLO, which incorporates an attentional mechanism and a multi-scale feature fusion strategy, based on ore data from gold and sul- fide ores. By introducing the progressive feature pyramid structure into YOLOv5 and embedding the attention mechanism in the feature extraction module, the detection performance and accuracy of the model are greatly improved. In order to adapt to the diverse ore sorting scenarios and the deployment requirements of edge devices, the network structure is designed to be lightweight, which achieves a low number of parameters (3.458M) and computational complexity (6.3GFLOPs) while maintaining high accuracy (99.3% and 99.2%, respectively). In the experimental part, a target detection dataset containing 6000 images of gold and sulfuric iron ore is constructed for gold and sulfuric iron ore classification training, and several sets of comparison experiments are set up, including the YOLO series, EfficientDet, Faster-RCNN, and CenterNet, etc., and the experiments prove that OreYOLO outperforms the commonly used high-performance object detection of these architectures
Authors:Tushar Verma, Jyotsna Singh, Yash Bhartari, Rishi Jarwal, Suraj Singh, Shubhkarman Singh
Abstract:
Small object detection in aerial imagery presents significant challenges in computer vision due to the minimal data inherent in small-sized objects and their propensity to be obscured by larger objects and background noise. Traditional methods using transformer-based models often face limitations stemming from the lack of specialized databases, which adversely affect their performance with objects of varying orientations and scales. This underscores the need for more adaptable, lightweight models. In response, this paper introduces two innovative approaches that significantly enhance detection and segmentation capabilities for small aerial objects. Firstly, we explore the use of the SAHI framework on the newly introduced lightweight YOLO v9 architecture, which utilizes Programmable Gradient Information (PGI) to reduce the substantial information loss typically encountered in sequential feature extraction processes. The paper employs the Vision Mamba model, which incorporates position embeddings to facilitate precise location-aware visual understanding, combined with a novel bidirectional State Space Model (SSM) for effective visual context modeling. This State Space Model adeptly harnesses the linear complexity of CNNs and the global receptive field of Transformers, making it particularly effective in remote sensing image classification. Our experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in detection accuracy and processing efficiency, validating the applicability of these approaches for real-time small object detection across diverse aerial scenarios. This paper also discusses how these methodologies could serve as foundational models for future advancements in aerial object recognition technologies. The source code will be made accessible here.
Authors:Ahmad Khalil, Tizian Dege, Pegah Golchin, Rostyslav Olshevskyi, Antonio Fernandez Anta, Tobias Meuser
Abstract:
In the pursuit of refining precise perception models for fully autonomous driving, continual online model training becomes essential. Federated Learning (FL) within vehicular networks offers an efficient mechanism for model training while preserving raw sensory data integrity. Yet, FL struggles with non-identically distributed data (e.g., quantity skew), leading to suboptimal convergence rates during model training. In previous work, we introduced FedLA, an innovative Label-Aware aggregation method addressing data heterogeneity in FL for generic scenarios.
In this paper, we introduce FedProx+LA, a novel FL method building upon the state-of-the-art FedProx and FedLA to tackle data heterogeneity, which is specifically tailored for vehicular networks. We evaluate the efficacy of FedProx+LA in continuous online object detection model training. Through a comparative analysis against conventional and state-of-the-art methods, our findings reveal the superior convergence rate of FedProx+LA. Notably, if the label distribution is very heterogeneous, our FedProx+LA approach shows substantial improvements in detection performance compared to baseline methods, also outperforming our previous FedLA approach. Moreover, both FedLA and FedProx+LA increase convergence speed by 30% compared to baseline methods.
Authors:Cristopher McIntyre-Garcia, Adrien Heymans, Beril Borali, Won-Sook Lee, Shiva Nejati
Abstract:
Deep Learning (DL) models excel in computer vision tasks but can be susceptible to adversarial examples. This paper introduces Triple-Metric EvoAttack (TM-EVO), an efficient algorithm for evaluating the robustness of object-detection DL models against adversarial attacks. TM-EVO utilizes a multi-metric fitness function to guide an evolutionary search efficiently in creating effective adversarial test inputs with minimal perturbations. We evaluate TM-EVO on widely-used object-detection DL models, DETR and Faster R-CNN, and open-source datasets, COCO and KITTI. Our findings reveal that TM-EVO outperforms the state-of-the-art EvoAttack baseline, leading to adversarial tests with less noise while maintaining efficiency.
Authors:Daniel Dworak, Mateusz Komorkiewicz, PaweÅ Skruch, Jerzy Baranowski
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the problem of camera and radar sensor fusion for 3D object detection in autonomous vehicle perception systems. Our approach builds on recent advances in deep learning and leverages the strengths of both sensors to improve object detection performance. Precisely, we extract 2D features from camera images using a state-of-the-art deep learning architecture and then apply a novel Cross-Domain Spatial Matching (CDSM) transformation method to convert these features into 3D space. We then fuse them with extracted radar data using a complementary fusion strategy to produce a final 3D object representation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate it on the NuScenes dataset. We compare our approach to both single-sensor performance and current state-of-the-art fusion methods. Our results show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance over single-sensor solutions and could directly compete with other top-level fusion methods.
Authors:Xingguang Zhang, Chih-Hsien Chou
Abstract:
When deploying pre-trained video object detectors in real-world scenarios, the domain gap between training and testing data caused by adverse image conditions often leads to performance degradation. Addressing this issue becomes particularly challenging when only the pre-trained model and degraded videos are available. Although various source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods have been proposed for single-frame object detectors, SFDA for video object detection (VOD) remains unexplored. Moreover, most unsupervised domain adaptation works for object detection rely on two-stage detectors, while SFDA for one-stage detectors, which are more vulnerable to fine-tuning, is not well addressed in the literature. In this paper, we propose Spatial-Temporal Alternate Refinement with Mean Teacher (STAR-MT), a simple yet effective SFDA method for VOD. Specifically, we aim to improve the performance of the one-stage VOD method, YOLOV, under adverse image conditions, including noise, air turbulence, and haze. Extensive experiments on the ImageNetVOD dataset and its degraded versions demonstrate that our method consistently improves video object detection performance in challenging imaging conditions, showcasing its potential for real-world applications.
Authors:Sara Dadjouy, Hedieh Sajedi
Abstract:
Medical image analysis is a significant application of artificial intelligence for disease diagnosis. A crucial step in this process is the identification of regions of interest within the images. This task can be automated using object detection algorithms. YOLO and Faster R-CNN are renowned for such algorithms, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This study aims to explore the advantages of both techniques to select more accurate bounding boxes for gallbladder detection from ultrasound images, thereby enhancing gallbladder cancer classification. A fusion method that leverages the benefits of both techniques is presented in this study. The proposed method demonstrated superior classification performance, with an accuracy of 92.62%, compared to the individual use of Faster R-CNN and YOLOv8, which yielded accuracies of 90.16% and 82.79%, respectively.
Authors:Mauro Camporeale, Giovanni Dimauro, Matteo Gelardi, Giorgia Iacobellis, Mattia Sebastiano Ladisa, Sergio Latrofa, Nunzia Lomonte
Abstract:
Nasal Cytology is a new and efficient clinical technique to diagnose rhinitis and allergies that is not much widespread due to the time-consuming nature of cell counting; that is why AI-aided counting could be a turning point for the diffusion of this technique. In this article we present the first dataset of rhino-cytological field images: the NCD (Nasal Cytology Dataset), aimed to train and deploy Object Detection models to support physicians and biologists during clinical practice. The real distribution of the cytotypes, populating the nasal mucosa has been replicated, sampling images from slides of clinical patients, and manually annotating each cell found on them. The correspondent object detection task presents non'trivial issues associated with the strong class imbalancement, involving the rarest cell types. This work contributes to some of open challenges by presenting a novel machine learning-based approach to aid the automated detection and classification of nasal mucosa cells: the DETR and YOLO models shown good performance in detecting cells and classifying them correctly, revealing great potential to accelerate the work of rhinology experts.
Authors:Muhammad Z. Alam, Zeeshan Kaleem, Sousso Kelouwani
Abstract:
Vision sensors are versatile and can capture a wide range of visual cues, such as color, texture, shape, and depth. This versatility, along with the relatively inexpensive availability of machine vision cameras, played an important role in adopting vision-based environment perception systems in autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, vision-based perception systems can be easily affected by glare in the presence of a bright source of light, such as the sun or the headlights of the oncoming vehicle at night or simply by light reflecting off snow or ice-covered surfaces; scenarios encountered frequently during driving. In this paper, we investigate various glare reduction techniques, including the proposed saturated pixel-aware glare reduction technique for improved performance of the computer vision (CV) tasks employed by the perception layer of AVs. We evaluate these glare reduction methods based on various performance metrics of the CV algorithms used by the perception layer. Specifically, we considered object detection, object recognition, object tracking, depth estimation, and lane detection which are crucial for autonomous driving. The experimental findings validate the efficacy of the proposed glare reduction approach, showcasing enhanced performance across diverse perception tasks and remarkable resilience against varying levels of glare.
Authors:Truman Hickok, Dhireesha Kudithipudi
Abstract:
In continual learning, a model learns incrementally over time while minimizing interference between old and new tasks. One of the most widely used approaches in continual learning is referred to as replay. Replay methods support interleaved learning by storing past experiences in a replay buffer. Although there are methods for selectively constructing the buffer and reprocessing its contents, there is limited exploration of the problem of selectively retrieving samples from the buffer. Current solutions have been tested in limited settings and, more importantly, in isolation. Existing work has also not explored the impact of duplicate replays on performance. In this work, we propose a framework for evaluating selective retrieval strategies, categorized by simple, independent class- and sample-selective primitives. We evaluated several combinations of existing strategies for selective retrieval and present their performances. Furthermore, we propose a set of strategies to prevent duplicate replays and explore whether new samples with low loss values can be learned without replay. In an effort to match our problem setting to a realistic continual learning pipeline, we restrict our experiments to a setting involving a large, pre-trained, open vocabulary object detection model, which is fully fine-tuned on a sequence of 15 datasets.
Authors:Vamshi Krishna Kancharla, Neelam sinha
Abstract:
This paper focuses on improving object detection performance by addressing the issue of image distortions, commonly encountered in uncontrolled acquisition environments. High-level computer vision tasks such as object detection, recognition, and segmentation are particularly sensitive to image distortion. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach employing an image defilter to rectify image distortion prior to object detection. This method enhances object detection accuracy, as models perform optimally when trained on non-distorted images. Our experiments demonstrate that utilizing defiltered images significantly improves mean average precision compared to training object detection models on distorted images. Consequently, our proposed method offers considerable benefits for real-world applications plagued by image distortion. To our knowledge, the contribution lies in employing distortion-removal paradigm for object detection on images captured in natural settings. We achieved an improvement of 0.562 and 0.564 of mean Average precision on validation and test data.
Authors:Sameer Agrawal, Ragoth Sundararajan, Vishak Sagar
Abstract:
Typically, tennis court line detection is done by running Hough-Line-Detection to find straight lines in the image, and then computing a transformation matrix from the detected lines to create the final court structure. We propose numerous improvements and enhancements to this algorithm, including using pretrained State-of-the-Art shadow-removal and object-detection ML models to make our line-detection more robust. Compared to the original algorithm, our method can accurately detect lines on amateur, dirty courts. When combined with a robust ball-tracking system, our method will enable accurate, automatic refereeing for amateur and professional tennis matches alike.
Authors:Bach Ha, Birgit Schalter, Laura White, Joachim Koehler
Abstract:
Maintaining sewer systems in large cities is important, but also time and effort consuming, because visual inspections are currently done manually. To reduce the amount of aforementioned manual work, defects within sewer pipes should be located and classified automatically. In the past, multiple works have attempted solving this problem using classical image processing, machine learning, or a combination of those. However, each provided solution only focus on detecting a limited set of defect/structure types, such as fissure, root, and/or connection. Furthermore, due to the use of hand-crafted features and small training datasets, generalization is also problematic. In order to overcome these deficits, a sizable dataset with 14.7 km of various sewer pipes were annotated by sewer maintenance experts in the scope of this work. On top of that, an object detector (EfficientDet-D0) was trained for automatic defect detection. From the result of several expermients, peculiar natures of defects in the context of object detection, which greatly effect annotation and training process, are found and discussed. At the end, the final detector was able to detect 83% of defects in the test set; out of the missing 17%, only 0.77% are very severe defects. This work provides an example of applying deep learning-based object detection into an important but quiet engineering field. It also gives some practical pointers on how to annotate peculiar "object", such as defects.
Authors:Maxence Bideaux, Alice Phe, Mohamed Chaouch, Bertrand Luvison, Quoc-Cuong Pham
Abstract:
We introduce 3D-COCO, an extension of the original MS-COCO dataset providing 3D models and 2D-3D alignment annotations. 3D-COCO was designed to achieve computer vision tasks such as 3D reconstruction or image detection configurable with textual, 2D image, and 3D CAD model queries. We complete the existing MS-COCO dataset with 28K 3D models collected on ShapeNet and Objaverse. By using an IoU-based method, we match each MS-COCO annotation with the best 3D models to provide a 2D-3D alignment. The open-source nature of 3D-COCO is a premiere that should pave the way for new research on 3D-related topics. The dataset and its source codes is available at https://kalisteo.cea.fr/index.php/coco3d-object-detection-and-reconstruction/
Authors:Xiahan Chen, Mingjian Chen, Sanli Tang, Yi Niu, Jiang Zhu
Abstract:
3D object detection based on roadside cameras is an additional way for autonomous driving to alleviate the challenges of occlusion and short perception range from vehicle cameras. Previous methods for roadside 3D object detection mainly focus on modeling the depth or height of objects, neglecting the stationary of cameras and the characteristic of inter-frame consistency. In this work, we propose a novel framework, namely MOSE, for MOnocular 3D object detection with Scene cuEs. The scene cues are the frame-invariant scene-specific features, which are crucial for object localization and can be intuitively regarded as the height between the surface of the real road and the virtual ground plane. In the proposed framework, a scene cue bank is designed to aggregate scene cues from multiple frames of the same scene with a carefully designed extrinsic augmentation strategy. Then, a transformer-based decoder lifts the aggregated scene cues as well as the 3D position embeddings for 3D object location, which boosts generalization ability in heterologous scenes. The extensive experiment results on two public benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method, which surpasses the existing methods by a large margin.
Authors:Hanqian Li, Ruinan Zhang, Ye Pan, Junchi Ren, Fei Shen
Abstract:
Remote sensing target detection aims to identify and locate critical targets within remote sensing images, finding extensive applications in agriculture and urban planning. Feature pyramid networks (FPNs) are commonly used to extract multi-scale features. However, existing FPNs often overlook extracting low-level positional information and fine-grained context interaction. To address this, we propose a novel location refined feature pyramid network (LR-FPN) to enhance the extraction of shallow positional information and facilitate fine-grained context interaction. The LR-FPN consists of two primary modules: the shallow position information extraction module (SPIEM) and the contextual interaction module (CIM). Specifically, SPIEM first maximizes the retention of solid location information of the target by simultaneously extracting positional and saliency information from the low-level feature map. Subsequently, CIM injects this robust location information into different layers of the original FPN through spatial and channel interaction, explicitly enhancing the object area. Moreover, in spatial interaction, we introduce a simple local and non-local interaction strategy to learn and retain the saliency information of the object. Lastly, the LR-FPN can be readily integrated into common object detection frameworks to improve performance significantly. Extensive experiments on two large-scale remote sensing datasets (i.e., DOTAV1.0 and HRSC2016) demonstrate that the proposed LR-FPN is superior to state-of-the-art object detection approaches. Our code and models will be publicly available.
Authors:Tianyang Li, Chao Wang, Hong Zhang
Abstract:
Detecting transmission towers from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images remains a challenging task due to the comparatively small size and side-looking geometry, with background clutter interference frequently hindering tower identification. A large number of interfering signals superimposes the return signal from the tower. We found that localizing or prompting positions of power transmission towers is beneficial to address this obstacle. Based on this revelation, this paper introduces prompt learning into the oriented object detector (P2Det) for multimodal information learning. P2Det contains the sparse prompt coding and cross-attention between the multimodal data. Specifically, the sparse prompt encoder (SPE) is proposed to represent point locations, converting prompts into sparse embeddings. The image embeddings are generated through the Transformer layers. Then a two-way fusion module (TWFM) is proposed to calculate the cross-attention of the two different embeddings. The interaction of image-level and prompt-level features is utilized to address the clutter interference. A shape-adaptive refinement module (SARM) is proposed to reduce the effect of aspect ratio. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model on high-resolution SAR images. P2Det provides a novel insight for multimodal object detection due to its competitive performance.
Authors:Abdul Aziz A. B, Aindri Bajpai
Abstract:
This research introduces an innovative security enhancement approach, employing advanced image analysis and soft computing. The focus is on an intelligent surveillance system that detects unauthorized individuals in restricted areas by analyzing attire. Traditional security measures face challenges in monitoring unauthorized access. Leveraging YOLOv8, an advanced object detection algorithm, our system identifies authorized personnel based on their attire in CCTV footage. The methodology involves training the YOLOv8 model on a comprehensive dataset of uniform patterns, ensuring precise recognition in specific regions. Soft computing techniques enhance adaptability to dynamic environments and varying lighting conditions. This research contributes to image analysis and soft computing, providing a sophisticated security solution. Emphasizing uniform-based anomaly detection, it establishes a foundation for robust security systems in restricted areas. The outcomes highlight the potential of YOLOv8-based surveillance in ensuring safety in sensitive locations.
Authors:Chuyang Shang, Tian Ma, Wanzhu Ren, Yuancheng Li, Jiayi Yang
Abstract:
Existing pseudo label generation methods for point weakly supervised object detection are inadequate in low data volume and dense object detection tasks. We consider the generation of weakly supervised pseudo labels as the model's sparse output, and propose Sparse Generation as a solution to make pseudo labels sparse. The method employs three processing stages (Mapping, Mask, Regression), constructs dense tensors through the relationship between data and detector model, optimizes three of its parameters, and obtains a sparse tensor, thereby indirectly obtaining higher quality pseudo labels, and addresses the model's density problem on low data volume. Additionally, we propose perspective-based matching, which provides more rational pseudo boxes for prediction missed on instances. In comparison to the SOTA method, on four datasets (MS COCO-val, RSOD, SIMD, Bullet-Hole), the experimental results demonstrated a significant advantage.
Authors:Wenjie Xing, Zhenchao Cui, Jing Qi
Abstract:
The spatial attention mechanism has been widely used to improve object detection performance. However, its operation is currently limited to static convolutions lacking content-adaptive features. This paper innovatively approaches from the perspective of dynamic convolution. We propose Razor Dynamic Convolution (RDConv) to address thetwo flaws in dynamic weight convolution, making it hard to implement in spatial mechanism: 1) it is computation-heavy; 2) when generating weights, spatial information is disregarded. Firstly, by using Razor Operation to generate certain features, we vastly reduce the parameters of the entire dynamic convolution operation. Secondly, we added a spatial branch inside RDConv to generate convolutional kernel parameters with richer spatial information. Embedding dynamic convolution will also bring the problem of sensitivity to high-frequency noise. We propose the Static-Guided Dynamic Module (SGDM) to address this limitation. By using SGDM, we utilize a set of asymmetric static convolution kernel parameters to guide the construction of dynamic convolution. We introduce the mechanism of shared weights in static convolution to solve the problem of dynamic convolution being sensitive to high-frequency noise. Extensive experiments illustrate that multiple different object detection backbones equipped with SGDM achieve a highly competitive boost in performance(e.g., +4% mAP with YOLOv5n on VOC and +1.7% mAP with YOLOv8n on COCO) with negligible parameter increase(i.e., +0.33M on YOLOv5n and +0.19M on YOLOv8n).
Authors:Spiros Maggioros, Nikos Tsalkitzis
Abstract:
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven instrumental across various computer science domains, enabling advancements in object detection, classification, and anomaly detection. This paper explores the application of CNNs to analyze geospatial data specifically for identifying wildfire-affected areas. Leveraging transfer learning techniques, we fine-tuned CNN hyperparameters and integrated the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) to assess moisture conditions. The study establishes a methodology for computing wildfire risk levels on a scale of 0 to 5, dynamically linked to weather patterns. Notably, through the integration of transfer learning, the CNN model achieved an impressive accuracy of 95\% in identifying burnt areas. This research sheds light on the inner workings of CNNs and their practical, real-time utility in predicting and mitigating wildfires. By combining transfer learning and CNNs, this study contributes a robust approach to assess burnt areas, facilitating timely interventions and preventative measures against conflagrations.
Authors:Tsz-Him Cheung, Dit-Yan Yeung
Abstract:
Data augmentation improves the generalization power of deep learning models by synthesizing more training samples. Sample-mixing is a popular data augmentation approach that creates additional data by combining existing samples. Recent sample-mixing methods, like Mixup and Cutmix, adopt simple mixing operations to blend multiple inputs. Although such a heuristic approach shows certain performance gains in some computer vision tasks, it mixes the images blindly and does not adapt to different datasets automatically. A mixing strategy that is effective for a particular dataset does not often generalize well to other datasets. If not properly configured, the methods may create misleading mixed images, which jeopardize the effectiveness of sample-mixing augmentations. In this work, we propose an automated approach, TransformMix, to learn better transformation and mixing augmentation strategies from data. In particular, TransformMix applies learned transformations and mixing masks to create compelling mixed images that contain correct and important information for the target tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TransformMix on multiple datasets in transfer learning, classification, object detection, and knowledge distillation settings. Experimental results show that our method achieves better performance as well as efficiency when compared with strong sample-mixing baselines.
Authors:BenjamÃn Ojeda-Magaña, Rubén Ruelas, José Guadalupe Robledo-Hernández, VÃctor Manuel Rangel-Cobián, Fernando López Aguilar-Hernández
Abstract:
3D sensors, also known as RGB-D sensors, utilize depth images where each pixel measures the distance from the camera to objects, using principles like structured light or time-of-flight. Advances in artificial vision have led to affordable 3D cameras capable of real-time object detection without object movement, surpassing 2D cameras in information depth. These cameras can identify objects of varying colors and reflectivities and are less affected by lighting changes. The described prototype uses RGB-D sensors for bidirectional people counting in venues, aiding security and surveillance in spaces like stadiums or airports. It determines real-time occupancy and checks against maximum capacity, crucial during emergencies. The system includes a RealSense D415 depth camera and a mini-computer running object detection algorithms to count people and a 2D camera for identity verification. The system supports statistical analysis and uses C++, Python, and PHP with OpenCV for image processing, demonstrating a comprehensive approach to monitoring venue occupancy.
Authors:Shankara Narayanan, Sneha Varsha M, Syed Ashfaq Ahmed, Guruprakash J
Abstract:
The mouth, often regarded as a window to the internal state of the body, plays an important role in reflecting one's overall health. Poor oral hygiene has far-reaching consequences, contributing to severe conditions like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, while inadequate care leads to discomfort, pain, and costly treatments. Federated Learning (FL) for object detection can be utilized for this use case due to the sensitivity of the oral image data of the patients. FL ensures data privacy by storing the images used for object detection on the local device and trains the model on the edge. The updated weights are federated to a central server where all the collected weights are updated via The Federated Averaging algorithm. Finally, we have developed a mobile app named OralH which provides user-friendly solutions, allowing people to conduct self-assessments through mouth scans and providing quick oral health insights. Upon detection of the issues, the application alerts the user about potential oral health concerns or diseases and provides details about dental clinics in the user's locality. Designed as a Progressive Web Application (PWA), the platform ensures ubiquitous access, catering to users across devices for a seamless experience. The application aims to provide state-of-the-art segmentation and detection techniques, leveraging the YOLOv8 object detection model to identify oral hygiene issues and diseases. This study deals with the benefits of leveraging FL in healthcare with promising real-world results.
Authors:Moseli Mots'oehli, Anton Nikolaev, Wawan B. IGede, John Lynham, Peter J. Mous, Peter Sadowski
Abstract:
Fish stock assessment often involves manual fish counting by taxonomy specialists, which is both time-consuming and costly. We propose FishNet, an automated computer vision system for both taxonomic classification and fish size estimation from images captured with a low-cost digital camera. The system first performs object detection and segmentation using a Mask R-CNN to identify individual fish from images containing multiple fish, possibly consisting of different species. Then each fish species is classified and the length is predicted using separate machine learning models. To develop the model, we use a dataset of 300,000 hand-labeled images containing 1.2M fish of 163 different species and ranging in length from 10cm to 250cm, with additional annotations and quality control methods used to curate high-quality training data. On held-out test data sets, our system achieves a 92% intersection over union on the fish segmentation task, a 89% top-1 classification accuracy on single fish species classification, and a 2.3cm mean absolute error on the fish length estimation task.
Authors:Stefan Baur, Frank Moosmann, Andreas Geiger
Abstract:
3D object detection is one of the most important components in any Self-Driving stack, but current state-of-the-art (SOTA) lidar object detectors require costly & slow manual annotation of 3D bounding boxes to perform well. Recently, several methods emerged to generate pseudo ground truth without human supervision, however, all of these methods have various drawbacks: Some methods require sensor rigs with full camera coverage and accurate calibration, partly supplemented by an auxiliary optical flow engine. Others require expensive high-precision localization to find objects that disappeared over multiple drives. We introduce a novel self-supervised method to train SOTA lidar object detection networks which works on unlabeled sequences of lidar point clouds only, which we call trajectory-regularized self-training. It utilizes a SOTA self-supervised lidar scene flow network under the hood to generate, track, and iteratively refine pseudo ground truth. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for multiple SOTA object detection networks across multiple real-world datasets. Code will be released.
Authors:Jiayan Cao, Xueyu Zhu, Cheng Qian
Abstract:
Lane detection plays a critical role in the field of autonomous driving. Prevailing methods generally adopt basic concepts (anchors, key points, etc.) from object detection and segmentation tasks, while these approaches require manual adjustments for curved objects, involve exhaustive searches on predefined anchors, require complex post-processing steps, and may lack flexibility when applied to real-world scenarios.In this paper, we propose a novel approach, LanePtrNet, which treats lane detection as a process of point voting and grouping on ordered sets: Our method takes backbone features as input and predicts a curve-aware centerness, which represents each lane as a point and assigns the most probable center point to it. A novel point sampling method is proposed to generate a set of candidate points based on the votes received. By leveraging features from local neighborhoods, and cross-instance attention score, we design a grouping module that further performs lane-wise clustering between neighboring and seeding points. Furthermore, our method can accommodate a point-based framework, (PointNet++ series, etc.) as an alternative to the backbone. This flexibility enables effortless extension to 3D lane detection tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, demonstrating its superior performance.
Authors:Nico Baumgart, Markus Lange-Hegermann, Mike Mücke
Abstract:
In industrial manufacturing, numerous tasks of visually inspecting or detecting specific objects exist that are currently performed manually or by classical image processing methods. Therefore, introducing recent deep learning models to industrial environments holds the potential to increase productivity and enable new applications. However, gathering and labeling sufficient data is often intractable, complicating the implementation of such projects. Hence, image synthesis methods are commonly used to generate synthetic training data from 3D models and annotate them automatically, although it results in a sim-to-real domain gap. In this paper, we investigate the sim-to-real generalization performance of standard object detectors on the complex industrial application of terminal strip object detection. Combining domain randomization and domain knowledge, we created an image synthesis pipeline for automatically generating the training data. Moreover, we manually annotated 300 real images of terminal strips for the evaluation. The results show the cruciality of the objects of interest to have the same scale in either domain. Nevertheless, under optimized scaling conditions, the sim-to-real performance difference in mean average precision amounts to 2.69 % for RetinaNet and 0.98 % for Faster R-CNN, qualifying this approach for industrial requirements.
Authors:Wei Xu, Yi Wan
Abstract:
The attention mechanism has gained significant recognition in the field of computer vision due to its ability to effectively enhance the performance of deep neural networks. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively utilize spatial information or, if they do, they come at the cost of reducing channel dimensions or increasing the complexity of neural networks. In order to address these limitations, this paper introduces an Efficient Local Attention (ELA) method that achieves substantial performance improvements with a simple structure. By analyzing the limitations of the Coordinate Attention method, we identify the lack of generalization ability in Batch Normalization, the adverse effects of dimension reduction on channel attention, and the complexity of attention generation process. To overcome these challenges, we propose the incorporation of 1D convolution and Group Normalization feature enhancement techniques. This approach enables accurate localization of regions of interest by efficiently encoding two 1D positional feature maps without the need for dimension reduction, while allowing for a lightweight implementation. We carefully design three hyperparameters in ELA, resulting in four different versions: ELA-T, ELA-B, ELA-S, and ELA-L, to cater to the specific requirements of different visual tasks such as image classification, object detection and sementic segmentation. ELA can be seamlessly integrated into deep CNN networks such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DeepLab. Extensive evaluations on the ImageNet, MSCOCO, and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ELA module over current state-of-the-art methods in all three aforementioned visual tasks.
Authors:Zhenwei He, Lei Zhang
Abstract:
Object detection limits its recognizable categories during the training phase, in which it can not cover all objects of interest for users. To satisfy the practical necessity, the incremental learning ability of the detector becomes a critical factor for real-world applications. Unfortunately, neural networks unavoidably meet catastrophic forgetting problem when it is implemented on a new task. To this end, many incremental object detection models preserve the knowledge of previous tasks by replaying samples or distillation from previous models. However, they ignore an important factor that the performance of the model mostly depends on its feature. These models try to rouse the memory of the neural network with previous samples but not to prevent forgetting. To this end, in this paper, we propose an incremental causal object detection (ICOD) model by learning causal features, which can adapt to more tasks. Traditional object detection models, unavoidably depend on the data-bias or data-specific features to get the detection results, which can not adapt to the new task. When the model meets the requirements of incremental learning, the data-bias information is not beneficial to the new task, and the incremental learning may eliminate these features and lead to forgetting. To this end, our ICOD is introduced to learn the causal features, rather than the data-bias features when training the detector. Thus, when the model is implemented to a new task, the causal features of the old task can aid the incremental learning process to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem. We conduct our model on several experiments, which shows a causal feature without data-bias can make the model adapt to new tasks better. \keywords{Object detection, incremental learning, causal feature.
Authors:Pavlos Rath-Manakidis, Frederik Strothmann, Tobias Glasmachers, Laurenz Wiskott
Abstract:
Interpretation and visualization of the behavior of detection transformers tends to highlight the locations in the image that the model attends to, but it provides limited insight into the \emph{semantics} that the model is focusing on. This paper introduces an extension to detection transformers that constructs prototypical local features and uses them in object detection. These custom features, which we call prototypical parts, are designed to be mutually exclusive and align with the classifications of the model. The proposed extension consists of a bottleneck module, the prototype neck, that computes a discretized representation of prototype activations and a new loss term that matches prototypes to object classes. This setup leads to interpretable representations in the prototype neck, allowing visual inspection of the image content perceived by the model and a better understanding of the model's reliability. We show experimentally that our method incurs only a limited performance penalty, and we provide examples that demonstrate the quality of the explanations provided by our method, which we argue outweighs the performance penalty.
Authors:Tao Peng, Ling Gui, Yi Sun
Abstract:
In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning technology has brought new prospects to the field of vulnerability detection. Many vulnerability detection methods involve converting source code into images for detection, yet they often overlook the quality of the generated images. Due to the fact that vulnerability images lack clear and continuous contours, unlike images used in object detection, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) tend to lose semantic information during the convolution and pooling processes. Therefore, this paper proposes a pixel row oversampling method based on code line concatenation to generate more continuous code features, addressing the issue of discontinuity in code image coloration.Building upon these contributions, we propose the vulnerability detection system VulMCI and conduct tests on the SARD and NVD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that VulMCI outperforms seven state-of-the-art vulnerability detectors (namely Checkmarx, FlawFinder, RATS, VulDeePecker, SySeVR, VulCNN, and Devign). Compared to other image-based methods, VulMCI shows improvements in various metrics, including a 2.877\% increase in True Positive Rate (TPR), a 5.446\% increase in True Negative Rate (TNR), and a 5.91\% increase in Accuracy (ACC). On the NVD real-world dataset, VulMCI achieves an average accuracy of 5.162\%, confirming its value in practical vulnerability detection applications.
Authors:Angelo G. Menezes, Augusto J. Peterlevitz, Mateus A. Chinelatto, André C. P. L. F. de Carvalho
Abstract:
Continual Object Detection is essential for enabling intelligent agents to interact proactively with humans in real-world settings. While parameter-isolation strategies have been extensively explored in the context of continual learning for classification, they have yet to be fully harnessed for incremental object detection scenarios. Drawing inspiration from prior research that focused on mining individual neuron responses and integrating insights from recent developments in neural pruning, we proposed efficient ways to identify which layers are the most important for a network to maintain the performance of a detector across sequential updates. The presented findings highlight the substantial advantages of layer-level parameter isolation in facilitating incremental learning within object detection models, offering promising avenues for future research and application in real-world scenarios.
Authors:Justin Davis, Mehmet E. Belviranli
Abstract:
In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have gained widespread adoption for continuous mobile object detection (OD) tasks, particularly in autonomous systems. However, a prevalent issue in their deployment is the one-size-fits-all approach, where a single DNN is used, resulting in inefficient utilization of computational resources. This inefficiency is particularly detrimental in energy-constrained systems, as it degrades overall system efficiency. We identify that, the contextual information embedded in the input data stream (e.g. the frames in the camera feed that the OD models are run on) could be exploited to allow a more efficient multi-model-based OD process. In this paper, we propose SHIFT which continuously selects from a variety of DNN-based OD models depending on the dynamically changing contextual information and computational constraints. During this selection, SHIFT uniquely considers multi-accelerator execution to better optimize the energy-efficiency while satisfying the latency constraints. Our proposed methodology results in improvements of up to 7.5x in energy usage and 2.8x in latency compared to state-of-the-art GPU-based single model OD approaches.
Authors:Cunhan Guo, Heyan Huang
Abstract:
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is a critical aspect of computer vision aimed at identifying concealed objects, with applications spanning military, industrial, medical and monitoring domains. To address the problem of poor detail segmentation effect, we introduce a novel method for camouflage object detection, named CoFiNet. Our approach primarily focuses on multi-scale feature fusion and extraction, with special attention to the model's segmentation effectiveness for detailed features, enhancing its ability to effectively detect camouflaged objects. CoFiNet adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy. A multi-scale feature integration module is laveraged to enhance the model's capability of fusing context feature. A multi-activation selective kernel module is leveraged to grant the model the ability to autonomously alter its receptive field, enabling it to selectively choose an appropriate receptive field for camouflaged objects of different sizes. During mask generation, we employ the dual-mask strategy for image segmentation, separating the reconstruction of coarse and fine masks, which significantly enhances the model's learning capacity for details. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on four different datasets, demonstrating that CoFiNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across all datasets. The experiment results of CoFiNet underscore its effectiveness in camouflage object detection and highlight its potential in various practical application scenarios.
Authors:Lennard Bodden, Franziska Schwaiger, Duc Bach Ha, Lars Kreuzberg, Sven Behnke
Abstract:
In the era of AI at the edge, self-driving cars, and climate change, the need for energy-efficient, small, embedded AI is growing. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising approach to address this challenge, with their event-driven information flow and sparse activations. We propose Spiking CenterNet for object detection on event data. It combines an SNN CenterNet adaptation with an efficient M2U-Net-based decoder. Our model significantly outperforms comparable previous work on Prophesee's challenging GEN1 Automotive Detection Dataset while using less than half the energy. Distilling the knowledge of a non-spiking teacher into our SNN further increases performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first approach that takes advantage of knowledge distillation in the field of spiking object detection.
Authors:Fatemeh Zahra Safaeipour, Morteza Hashemi
Abstract:
Semantic communication is focused on optimizing the exchange of information by transmitting only the most relevant data required to convey the intended message to the receiver and achieve the desired communication goal. For example, if we consider images as the information and the goal of the communication is object detection at the receiver side, the semantic of information would be the objects in each image. Therefore, by only transferring the semantics of images we can achieve the communication goal. In this paper, we propose a design framework for implementing semantic-aware and goal-oriented communication of images. To achieve this, we first define the baseline problem as a set of mathematical problems that can be optimized to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the communication system. We consider two scenarios in which either the data rate or the error at the receiver is the limiting constraint. Our proposed system model and solution is inspired by the concept of auto-encoders, where the encoder and the decoder are respectively implemented at the transmitter and receiver to extract semantic information for specific object detection goals. Our numerical results validate the proposed design framework to achieve low error or near-optimal in a goal-oriented communication system while reducing the amount of data transfers.
Authors:Yashar Azadvatan, Murat Kurt
Abstract:
In this study, a novel deep learning algorithm for object detection, named MelNet, was introduced. MelNet underwent training utilizing the KITTI dataset for object detection. Following 300 training epochs, MelNet attained an mAP (mean average precision) score of 0.732. Additionally, three alternative models -YOLOv5, EfficientDet, and Faster-RCNN-MobileNetv3- were trained on the KITTI dataset and juxtaposed with MelNet for object detection.
The outcomes underscore the efficacy of employing transfer learning in certain instances. Notably, preexisting models trained on prominent datasets (e.g., ImageNet, COCO, and Pascal VOC) yield superior results. Another finding underscores the viability of creating a new model tailored to a specific scenario and training it on a specific dataset. This investigation demonstrates that training MelNet exclusively on the KITTI dataset also surpasses EfficientDet after 150 epochs. Consequently, post-training, MelNet's performance closely aligns with that of other pre-trained models.
Authors:Rahul Banavathu, Modem Veda Sree, Bollina Kavya Sri, Suddhasil De
Abstract:
Object detection in reduced visibility has become a prominent research area. The existing techniques are not accurate enough in recognizing objects under such circumstances. This paper introduces a new foggy object detection method through a two-staged architecture of region identification from input images and detecting objects in such regions. The paper confirms notable improvements of the proposed method's accuracy and detection time over existing techniques.
Authors:Xiaolin Ma, Junkai Cheng, Aihua Li, Yuhua Zhang, Zhilong Lin
Abstract:
Recently, methods based on deep learning have been successfully applied to ship detection for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Despite the development of numerous ship detection methodologies, detecting small and coastal ships remains a significant challenge due to the limited features and clutter in coastal environments. For that, a novel adaptive multi-hierarchical attention module (AMAM) is proposed to learn multi-scale features and adaptively aggregate salient features from various feature layers, even in complex environments. Specifically, we first fuse information from adjacent feature layers to enhance the detection of smaller targets, thereby achieving multi-scale feature enhancement. Then, to filter out the adverse effects of complex backgrounds, we dissect the previously fused multi-level features on the channel, individually excavate the salient regions, and adaptively amalgamate features originating from different channels. Thirdly, we present a novel adaptive multi-hierarchical attention network (AMANet) by embedding the AMAM between the backbone network and the feature pyramid network (FPN). Besides, the AMAM can be readily inserted between different frameworks to improve object detection. Lastly, extensive experiments on two large-scale SAR ship detection datasets demonstrate that our AMANet method is superior to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Mahedi Kamal, Tasnim Fariha, Afrina Kabir Zinia, Md. Abu Syed, Fahim Hasan Khan, Md. Mahbubur Rahman
Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence offer tremendous promise for the development of self-driving applications. Deep Neural Networks, in particular, are being utilized to support the operation of semi-autonomous cars through object identification and semantic segmentation. To assess the inadequacy of the current dataset in the context of autonomous and semi-autonomous cars, we created a new dataset named ANNA. This study discusses a custom-built dataset that includes some unidentified vehicles in the perspective of Bangladesh, which are not included in the existing dataset. A dataset validity check was performed by evaluating models using the Intersection Over Union (IOU) metric. The results demonstrated that the model trained on our custom dataset was more precise and efficient than the models trained on the KITTI or COCO dataset concerning Bangladeshi traffic. The research presented in this paper also emphasizes the importance of developing accurate and efficient object detection algorithms for the advancement of autonomous vehicles.
Authors:Yuantao Yin, Ping Yin
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection(FSOD) aims to design methods to adapt object detectors efficiently with only few annotated samples. Fine-tuning has been shown to be an effective and practical approach. However, previous works often take the classical base-novel two stage fine-tuning procedure but ignore the implicit stability-plasticity contradiction among different modules. Specifically, the random re-initialized classifiers need more plasticity to adapt to novel samples. The other modules inheriting pre-trained weights demand more stability to reserve their class-agnostic knowledge. Regular fine-tuning which couples the optimization of these two parts hurts the model generalization in FSOD scenarios. In this paper, we find that this problem is prominent in the end-to-end object detector Sparse R-CNN for its multi-classifier cascaded architecture. We propose to mitigate this contradiction by a new three-stage fine-tuning procedure by introducing an addtional plasticity classifier fine-tuning(PCF) stage. We further design the multi-source ensemble(ME) technique to enhance the generalization of the model in the final fine-tuning stage. Extensive experiments verify that our method is effective in regularizing Sparse R-CNN, outperforming previous methods in the FSOD benchmark.
Authors:Mirza Nihal Baig, Rony Hajong, Mahdi Murshed Patwary, Mohammad Shahidur Rahman, Husne Ara Chowdhury
Abstract:
We propose a comprehensive dataset for object detection in diverse driving environments across 9 districts in Bangladesh. The dataset, collected exclusively from smartphone cameras, provided a realistic representation of real-world scenarios, including day and night conditions. Most existing datasets lack suitable classes for autonomous navigation on Bangladeshi roads, making it challenging for researchers to develop models that can handle the intricacies of road scenarios. To address this issue, the authors proposed a new set of classes based on characteristics rather than local vehicle names. The dataset aims to encourage the development of models that can handle the unique challenges of Bangladeshi road scenarios for the effective deployment of autonomous vehicles. The dataset did not consist of any online images to simulate real-world conditions faced by autonomous vehicles. The classification of vehicles is challenging because of the diverse range of vehicles on Bangladeshi roads, including those not found elsewhere in the world. The proposed classification system is scalable and can accommodate future vehicles, making it a valuable resource for researchers in the autonomous vehicle sector.
Authors:Chetan M Badgujar, Alwin Poulose, Hao Gan
Abstract:
Vision is a major component in several digital technologies and tools used in agriculture. The object detector, You Look Only Once (YOLO), has gained popularity in agriculture in a relatively short span due to its state-of-the-art performance. YOLO offers real-time detection with good accuracy and is implemented in various agricultural tasks, including monitoring, surveillance, sensing, automation, and robotics. The research and application of YOLO in agriculture are accelerating rapidly but are fragmented and multidisciplinary. Moreover, the performance characteristics (i.e., accuracy, speed, computation) of the object detector influence the rate of technology implementation and adoption in agriculture. Thus, the study aims to collect extensive literature to document and critically evaluate the advances and application of YOLO for agricultural object recognition. First, we conducted a bibliometric review of 257 articles to understand the scholarly landscape of YOLO in agricultural domain. Secondly, we conducted a systematic review of 30 articles to identify current knowledge, gaps, and modifications in YOLO for specific agricultural tasks. The study critically assesses and summarizes the information on YOLO's end-to-end learning approach, including data acquisition, processing, network modification, integration, and deployment. We also discussed task-specific YOLO algorithm modification and integration to meet the agricultural object or environment-specific challenges. In general, YOLO-integrated digital tools and technologies show the potential for real-time, automated monitoring, surveillance, and object handling to reduce labor, production cost, and environmental impact while maximizing resource efficiency. The study provides detailed documentation and significantly advances the existing knowledge on applying YOLO in agriculture, which can greatly benefit the scientific community.
Authors:Ido Zuckerman, Nicole Werner, Jonathan Kouchly, Emma Huston, Shannon DiMarco, Paul DiMusto, Shlomi Laufer
Abstract:
Purpose: In this paper, we present a novel approach to the automatic evaluation of open surgery skills using depth cameras. This work is intended to show that depth cameras achieve similar results to RGB cameras, which is the common method in the automatic evaluation of open surgery skills. Moreover, depth cameras offer advantages such as robustness to lighting variations, camera positioning, simplified data compression, and enhanced privacy, making them a promising alternative to RGB cameras.
Methods: Experts and novice surgeons completed two simulators of open suturing. We focused on hand and tool detection, and action segmentation in suturing procedures. YOLOv8 was used for tool detection in RGB and depth videos. Furthermore, UVAST and MSTCN++ were used for action segmentation. Our study includes the collection and annotation of a dataset recorded with Azure Kinect.
Results: We demonstrated that using depth cameras in object detection and action segmentation achieves comparable results to RGB cameras. Furthermore, we analyzed 3D hand path length, revealing significant differences between experts and novice surgeons, emphasizing the potential of depth cameras in capturing surgical skills. We also investigated the influence of camera angles on measurement accuracy, highlighting the advantages of 3D cameras in providing a more accurate representation of hand movements.
Conclusion: Our research contributes to advancing the field of surgical skill assessment by leveraging depth cameras for more reliable and privacy evaluations. The findings suggest that depth cameras can be valuable in assessing surgical skills and provide a foundation for future research in this area.
Authors:Nirmal Kumar Rout, Gyanateet Dutta, Varun Sinha, Arghadeep Dey, Subhrangshu Mukherjee, Gopal Gupta
Abstract:
Potholes are common road hazards that is causing damage to vehicles and posing a safety risk to drivers. The introduction of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is widely used in the industry for object detection based on Deep Learning methods and has achieved significant progress in hardware improvement and software implementations. In this paper, a unique better algorithm is proposed to warrant the use of low-resolution cameras or low-resolution images and video feed for automatic pothole detection using Super Resolution (SR) through Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks (SRGANs). Then we have proceeded to establish a baseline pothole detection performance on low quality and high quality dashcam images using a You Only Look Once (YOLO) network, namely the YOLOv7 network. We then have illustrated and examined the speed and accuracy gained above the benchmark after having upscaling implementation on the low quality images.
Authors:Yuefeng Zhang, Kai Lin
Abstract:
Image compression constitutes a significant challenge amidst the era of information explosion. Recent studies employing deep learning methods have demonstrated the superior performance of learning-based image compression methods over traditional codecs. However, an inherent challenge associated with these methods lies in their lack of interpretability. Following an analysis of the varying degrees of compression degradation across different frequency bands, we propose the end-to-end optimized image compression model facilitated by the frequency-oriented transform. The proposed end-to-end image compression model consists of four components: spatial sampling, frequency-oriented transform, entropy estimation, and frequency-aware fusion. The frequency-oriented transform separates the original image signal into distinct frequency bands, aligning with the human-interpretable concept. Leveraging the non-overlapping hypothesis, the model enables scalable coding through the selective transmission of arbitrary frequency components. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our model outperforms all traditional codecs including next-generation standard H.266/VVC on MS-SSIM metric. Moreover, visual analysis tasks (i.e., object detection and semantic segmentation) are conducted to verify the proposed compression method could preserve semantic fidelity besides signal-level precision.
Authors:Ji Huang, Hui Wang
Abstract:
The main challenge for small object detection algorithms is to ensure accuracy while pursuing real-time performance. The RT-DETR model performs well in real-time object detection, but performs poorly in small object detection accuracy. In order to compensate for the shortcomings of the RT-DETR model in small object detection, two key improvements are proposed in this study. Firstly, The RT-DETR utilises a Transformer that receives input solely from the final layer of Backbone features. This means that the Transformer's input only receives semantic information from the highest level of abstraction in the Deep Network, and ignores detailed information such as edges, texture or color gradients that are critical to the location of small objects at lower levels of abstraction. Including only deep features can introduce additional background noise. This can have a negative impact on the accuracy of small object detection. To address this issue, we propose the fine-grained path augmentation method. This method helps to locate small objects more accurately by providing detailed information to the deep network. So, the input to the transformer contains both semantic and detailed information. Secondly, In RT-DETR, the decoder takes feature maps of different levels as input after concatenating them with equal weight. However, this operation is not effective in dealing with the complex relationship of multi-scale information captured by feature maps of different sizes. Therefore, we propose an adaptive feature fusion algorithm that assigns learnable parameters to each feature map from different levels. This allows the model to adaptively fuse feature maps from different levels and effectively integrate feature information from different scales. This enhances the model's ability to capture object features at different scales, thereby improving the accuracy of detecting small objects.
Authors:Md Rakibul Karim Akanda, Joshua Reynolds, Treylin Jackson, Milijah Gray
Abstract:
Machine learning based object detection as well as tracking that object have been performed in this paper. The authors were able to set a range of interest (ROI) around an object using Open Computer Vision, better known as OpenCV. Next a tracking algorithm has been used to maintain tracking on an object while simultaneously operating two servo motors to keep the object centered in the frame. Detailed procedure and code are included in this paper.
Authors:M. Erkin Yücel, Serkan TopaloÄlu, Cem Ãnsalan
Abstract:
The retail sector presents several open and challenging problems that could benefit from advanced pattern recognition and computer vision techniques. One such critical challenge is planogram compliance control. In this study, we propose a complete embedded system to tackle this issue. Our system consists of four key components as image acquisition and transfer via stand-alone embedded camera module, object detection via computer vision and deep learning methods working on single board computers, planogram compliance control method again working on single board computers, and energy harvesting and power management block to accompany the embedded camera modules. The image acquisition and transfer block is implemented on the ESP-EYE camera module. The object detection block is based on YOLOv5 as the deep learning method and local feature extraction. We implement these methods on Raspberry Pi 4, NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin as single board computers. The planogram compliance control block utilizes sequence alignment through a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. This block is also working along with the object detection block on the same single board computers. The energy harvesting and power management block consists of solar and RF energy harvesting modules with suitable battery pack for operation. We tested the proposed embedded planogram compliance control system on two different datasets to provide valuable insights on its strengths and weaknesses. The results show that our method achieves F1 scores of 0.997 and 1.0 in object detection and planogram compliance control blocks, respectively. Furthermore, we calculated that the complete embedded system can work in stand-alone form up to two years based on battery. This duration can be further extended with the integration of the proposed solar and RF energy harvesting options.
Authors:Chandler Timm C. Doloriel, Rhandley D. Cajote
Abstract:
Small oriented objects that represent tiny pixel-area in large-scale aerial images are difficult to detect due to their size and orientation. Existing oriented aerial detectors have shown promising results but are mainly focused on orientation modeling with less regard to the size of the objects. In this work, we proposed a method to accurately detect small oriented objects in aerial images by enhancing the classification and regression tasks of the oriented object detection model. We designed the Attention-Points Network consisting of two losses: Guided-Attention Loss (GALoss) and Box-Points Loss (BPLoss). GALoss uses an instance segmentation mask as ground-truth to learn the attention features needed to improve the detection of small objects. These attention features are then used to predict box points for BPLoss, which determines the points' position relative to the target oriented bounding box. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our Attention-Points Network on a standard oriented aerial dataset with small object instances (DOTA-v1.5) and on a maritime-related dataset (HRSC2016). The code is publicly available.
Authors:Prakash Mallick, Feras Dayoub, Jamie Sherrah
Abstract:
This paper addresses the significant challenge in open-set object detection (OSOD): the tendency of state-of-the-art detectors to erroneously classify unknown objects as known categories with high confidence. We present a novel approach that effectively identifies unknown objects by distinguishing between high and low-density regions in latent space. Our method builds upon the Open-Det (OD) framework, introducing two new elements to the loss function. These elements enhance the known embedding space's clustering and expand the unknown space's low-density regions. The first addition is the Class Wasserstein Anchor (CWA), a new function that refines the classification boundaries. The second is a spectral normalisation step, improving the robustness of the model. Together, these augmentations to the existing Contrastive Feature Learner (CFL) and Unknown Probability Learner (UPL) loss functions significantly improve OSOD performance. Our proposed OpenDet-CWA (OD-CWA) method demonstrates: a) a reduction in open-set errors by approximately 17%-22%, b) an enhancement in novelty detection capability by 1.5%-16%, and c) a decrease in the wilderness index by 2%-20% across various open-set scenarios. These results represent a substantial advancement in the field, showcasing the potential of our approach in managing the complexities of open-set object detection.
Authors:Xisheng Li, Wei Li, Pinhao Song, Mingjun Zhang, Jie Zhou
Abstract:
The inherent characteristics and light fluctuations of water bodies give rise to the huge difference between different layers and regions in underwater environments. When the test set is collected in a different marine area from the training set, the issue of domain shift emerges, significantly compromising the model's ability to generalize. The Domain Adversarial Learning (DAL) training strategy has been previously utilized to tackle such challenges. However, DAL heavily depends on manually one-hot domain labels, which implies no difference among the samples in the same domain. Such an assumption results in the instability of DAL. This paper introduces the concept of Domain Similarity-Perceived Label Assignment (DSP). The domain label for each image is regarded as its similarity to the specified domains. Through domain-specific data augmentation techniques, we achieved state-of-the-art results on the underwater cross-domain object detection benchmark S-UODAC2020. Furthermore, we validated the effectiveness of our method in the Cityscapes dataset.
Authors:Walid Guettala, Ali Sayah, Laid Kahloul, Ahmed Tibermacine
Abstract:
One of the most important problems in computer vision and remote sensing is object detection, which identifies particular categories of diverse things in pictures. Two crucial data sources for public security are the thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing multi-scenario photos and videos produced by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Due to the small scale of the target, complex scene information, low resolution relative to the viewable videos, and dearth of publicly available labeled datasets and training models, their object detection procedure is still difficult. A UAV TIR object detection framework for pictures and videos is suggested in this study. The Forward-looking Infrared (FLIR) cameras used to gather ground-based TIR photos and videos are used to create the ``You Only Look Once'' (YOLO) model, which is based on CNN architecture. Results indicated that in the validating task, detecting human object had an average precision at IOU (Intersection over Union) = 0.5, which was 72.5\%, using YOLOv7 (YOLO version 7) state of the art model \cite{1}, while the detection speed around 161 frames per second (FPS/second). The usefulness of the YOLO architecture is demonstrated in the application, which evaluates the cross-detection performance of people in UAV TIR videos under a YOLOv7 model in terms of the various UAVs' observation angles. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of object detection from TIR pictures and videos using deep-learning models is supported favorably by this work.
Authors:Aniruth A, Chirag Satpathy, Jothika K, Nitteesh M, Gokulraj M, Venkatram K, Harshith G, Shristi S, Anushka Vani, Jonathan Spurgeon
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become pivotal in domains spanning military, agriculture, surveillance, and logistics, revolutionizing data collection and environmental interaction. With the advancement in drone technology, there is a compelling need to develop a holistic methodology for designing UAVs. This research focuses on establishing a procedure encompassing conceptual design, use of composite materials, weight optimization, stability analysis, avionics integration, advanced manufacturing, and incorporation of autonomous payload delivery through object detection models tailored to satisfy specific applications while maintaining cost efficiency. The study conducts a comparative assessment of potential composite materials and various quadcopter frame configurations. The novel features include a payload-dropping mechanism, a unibody arm fixture, and the utilization of carbon-fibre-balsa composites. A quadcopter is designed and analyzed using the proposed methodology, followed by its fabrication using additive manufacturing and vacuum bagging techniques. A computer vision-based deep learning model enables precise delivery of payloads by autonomously detecting targets.
Authors:Yichen Liu, Huajian Zhang, Daqing Gao
Abstract:
Object detection models represented by YOLO series have been widely used and have achieved great results on the high quality datasets, but not all the working conditions are ideal. To settle down the problem of locating targets on low quality datasets, the existing methods either train a new object detection network, or need a large collection of low-quality datasets to train. However, we propose a framework in this paper and apply it on the YOLO models called DiffYOLO. Specifically, we extract feature maps from the denoising diffusion probabilistic models to enhance the well-trained models, which allows us fine-tune YOLO on high-quality datasets and test on low-quality datasets. The results proved this framework can not only prove the performance on noisy datasets, but also prove the detection results on high-quality test datasets. We will supplement more experiments later (with various datasets and network architectures).
Authors:Heba Najm, Khirallah Elferjani, Alhaam Alariyibi
Abstract:
For visually impaired people, it is highly difficult to make independent movement and safely move in both indoors and outdoors environment. Furthermore, these physically and visually challenges prevent them from in day-today live activities. Similarly, they have problem perceiving objects of surrounding environment that may pose a risk to them. The proposed approach suggests detection of objects in real-time video by using a web camera, for the object identification, process. You Look Only Once (YOLO) model is utilized which is CNN-based real-time object detection technique. Additionally, The OpenCV libraries of Python is used to implement the software program as well as deep learning process is performed. Image recognition results are transferred to the visually impaired users in audible form by means of Google text-to-speech library and determine object location relative to its position in the screen. The obtaining result was evaluated by using the mean Average Precision (mAP), and it was found that the proposed approach achieves excellent results when it compared to previous approaches.
Authors:Shiwen Zhao, Wei Wang, Junhui Hou, Hai Wu
Abstract:
This paper introduces HPC-Net, a high-precision and rapidly convergent object detection network.
Authors:Syed Muhammad Aamir, Hongbin Ma, Malak Abid Ali Khan, Muhammad Aaqib
Abstract:
Detection of small, undetermined moving objects or objects in an occluded environment with a cluttered background is the main problem of computer vision. This greatly affects the detection accuracy of deep learning models. To overcome these problems, we concentrate on deep learning models for real-time detection of cars and tanks in an occluded environment with a cluttered background employing SSD and YOLO algorithms and improved precision of detection and reduce problems faced by these models. The developed method makes the custom dataset and employs a preprocessing technique to clean the noisy dataset. For training the developed model we apply the data augmentation technique to balance and diversify the data. We fine-tuned, trained, and evaluated these models on the established dataset by applying these techniques and highlighting the results we got more accurately than without applying these techniques. The accuracy and frame per second of the SSD-Mobilenet v2 model are higher than YOLO V3 and YOLO V4. Furthermore, by employing various techniques like data enhancement, noise reduction, parameter optimization, and model fusion we improve the effectiveness of detection and recognition. We further added a counting algorithm, and target attributes experimental comparison, and made a graphical user interface system for the developed model with features of object counting, alerts, status, resolution, and frame per second. Subsequently, to justify the importance of the developed method analysis of YOLO V3, V4, and SSD were incorporated. Which resulted in the overall completion of the proposed method.
Authors:Maghsood Salimi, Mohammad Loni, Sara Afshar, Antonio Cicchetti, Marjan Sirjani
Abstract:
The increasing demand for autonomous machines in construction environments necessitates the development of robust object detection algorithms that can perform effectively across various weather and environmental conditions. This paper introduces a new semantic segmentation dataset specifically tailored for construction sites, taking into account the diverse challenges posed by adverse weather and environmental conditions. The dataset is designed to enhance the training and evaluation of object detection models, fostering their adaptability and reliability in real-world construction applications. Our dataset comprises annotated images captured under a wide range of different weather conditions, including but not limited to sunny days, rainy periods, foggy atmospheres, and low-light situations. Additionally, environmental factors such as the existence of dirt/mud on the camera lens are integrated into the dataset through actual captures and synthetic generation to simulate the complex conditions prevalent in construction sites. We also generate synthetic images of the annotations including precise semantic segmentation masks for various objects commonly found in construction environments, such as wheel loader machines, personnel, cars, and structural elements. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on our proposed benchmark. The results highlight the dataset's success in adversarial training models across diverse conditions, showcasing its efficacy compared to existing datasets that lack such environmental variability.
Authors:Gaurav Raut, Advait Patole
Abstract:
There has been significant progress made in the field of autonomous vehicles. Object detection and tracking are the primary tasks for any autonomous vehicle. The task of object detection in autonomous vehicles relies on a variety of sensors like cameras, and LiDAR. Although image features are typically preferred, numerous approaches take spatial data as input. Exploiting this information we present an approach wherein, using a novel encoding of the LiDAR point cloud we infer the location of different classes near the autonomous vehicles. This approach does not implement a bird's eye view approach, which is generally applied for this application and thus saves the extensive pre-processing required. After studying the numerous networks and approaches used to solve this approach, we have implemented a novel model with the intention to inculcate their advantages and avoid their shortcomings. The output is predictions about the location and orientation of objects in the scene in form of 3D bounding boxes and labels of scene objects.
Authors:Hadis Keshavarz, Hossein Sadr
Abstract:
In the era of digital medicine, medical imaging serves as a widespread technique for early disease detection, with a substantial volume of images being generated and stored daily in electronic patient records. X-ray angiography imaging is a standard and one of the most common methods for rapidly diagnosing coronary artery diseases. The notable achievements of recent deep learning algorithms align with the increased use of electronic health records and diagnostic imaging. Deep neural networks, leveraging abundant data, advanced algorithms, and powerful computational capabilities, prove highly effective in the analysis and interpretation of images. In this context, Object detection methods have become a promising approach, particularly through convolutional neural networks (CNN), streamlining medical image analysis by eliminating manual feature extraction. This allows for direct feature extraction from images, ensuring high accuracy in results. Therefore, in our paper, we utilized the object detection method on X-ray angiography images to precisely identify the location of coronary artery stenosis. As a result, this model enables automatic and real-time detection of stenosis locations, assisting in the crucial and sensitive decision-making process for healthcare professionals.
Authors:Leander van den Heuvel, Gertjan Burghouts, David W. Zhang, Gwenn Englebienne, Sabina B. van Rooij
Abstract:
For object detection, it is possible to view the prediction of bounding boxes as a reverse diffusion process. Using a diffusion model, the random bounding boxes are iteratively refined in a denoising step, conditioned on the image. We propose a stochastic accumulator function that starts each run with random bounding boxes and combines the slightly different predictions. We empirically verify that this improves detection performance. The improved detections are leveraged on unlabelled images as weighted pseudo-labels for semi-supervised learning. We evaluate the method on a challenging out-of-domain test set. Our method brings significant improvements and is on par with human-selected pseudo-labels, while not requiring any human involvement.
Authors:Hamza Mukhtar, Muhammad Usman Ghani Khan
Abstract:
Multi-object tracking (MOT) has profound applications in a variety of fields, including surveillance, sports analytics, self-driving, and cooperative robotics. Despite considerable advancements, existing MOT methodologies tend to falter when faced with non-uniform movements, occlusions, and appearance-reappearance scenarios of the objects. Recognizing this inadequacy, we put forward an integrated MOT method that not only marries object detection and identity linkage within a singular, end-to-end trainable framework but also equips the model with the ability to maintain object identity links over long periods of time. Our proposed model, named STMMOT, is built around four key modules: 1) candidate proposal generation, which generates object proposals via a vision-transformer encoder-decoder architecture that detects the object from each frame in the video; 2) scale variant pyramid, a progressive pyramid structure to learn the self-scale and cross-scale similarities in multi-scale feature maps; 3) spatio-temporal memory encoder, extracting the essential information from the memory associated with each object under tracking; and 4) spatio-temporal memory decoder, simultaneously resolving the tasks of object detection and identity association for MOT. Our system leverages a robust spatio-temporal memory module that retains extensive historical observations and effectively encodes them using an attention-based aggregator. The uniqueness of STMMOT lies in representing objects as dynamic query embeddings that are updated continuously, which enables the prediction of object states with attention mechanisms and eradicates the need for post-processing.
Authors:Weilin Xiao, Ming Xu, Yonggui Lin
Abstract:
The visual feature pyramid has proven its effectiveness and efficiency in target detection tasks. Yet, current methodologies tend to overly emphasize inter-layer feature interaction, neglecting the crucial aspect of intra-layer feature adjustment. Experience underscores the significant advantages of intra-layer feature interaction in enhancing target detection tasks. While some approaches endeavor to learn condensed intra-layer feature representations using attention mechanisms or visual transformers, they overlook the incorporation of global information interaction. This oversight results in increased false detections and missed targets.To address this critical issue, this paper introduces the Global Feature Pyramid Network (GFPNet), an augmented version of PAFPN that integrates global information for enhanced target detection. Specifically, we leverage a lightweight MLP to capture global feature information, utilize the VNC encoder to process these features, and employ a parallel learnable mechanism to extract intra-layer features from the input image. Building on this foundation, we retain the PAFPN method to facilitate inter-layer feature interaction, extracting rich feature details across various levels.Compared to conventional feature pyramids, GFPN not only effectively focuses on inter-layer feature information but also captures global feature details, fostering intra-layer feature interaction and generating a more comprehensive and impactful feature representation. GFPN consistently demonstrates performance improvements over object detection baselines.
Authors:Shun Liu, Jianan Zhang, Ruocheng Song, Teik Toe Teoh
Abstract:
Object detection and localization are crucial tasks for biomedical image analysis, particularly in the field of hematology where the detection and recognition of blood cells are essential for diagnosis and treatment decisions. While attention-based methods have shown significant progress in object detection in various domains, their application in medical object detection has been limited due to the unique challenges posed by medical imaging datasets. To address this issue, we propose ADA-YOLO, a light-weight yet effective method for medical object detection that integrates attention-based mechanisms with the YOLOv8 architecture. Our proposed method leverages the dynamic feature localisation and parallel regression for computer vision tasks through \textit{adaptive head} module. Empirical experiments were conducted on the Blood Cell Count and Detection (BCCD) dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of ADA-YOLO. The results showed that ADA-YOLO outperforms the YOLOv8 model in mAP (mean average precision) on the BCCD dataset by using more than 3 times less space than YOLOv8. This indicates that our proposed method is effective. Moreover, the light-weight nature of our proposed method makes it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices or edge computing systems. which could ultimately lead to improved diagnosis and treatment outcomes in the field of hematology.
Authors:Hamed Qazanfari, Mohammad M. AlyanNezhadi, Zohreh Nozari Khoshdaregi
Abstract:
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have emerged as crucial tools in the field of computer vision, allowing for image search based on visual content rather than relying solely on metadata. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of CBIR, emphasizing its role in object detection and its potential to identify and retrieve visually similar images based on content features. Challenges faced by CBIR systems, including the semantic gap and scalability, are discussed, along with potential solutions. It elaborates on the semantic gap, which arises from the disparity between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts, and explores approaches to bridge this gap. One notable solution is the integration of relevance feedback (RF), empowering users to provide feedback on retrieved images and refine search results iteratively. The survey encompasses long-term and short-term learning approaches that leverage RF for enhanced CBIR accuracy and relevance. These methods focus on weight optimization and the utilization of active learning algorithms to select samples for training classifiers. Furthermore, the paper investigates machine learning techniques and the utilization of deep learning and convolutional neural networks to enhance CBIR performance. This survey paper plays a significant role in advancing the understanding of CBIR and RF techniques. It guides researchers and practitioners in comprehending existing methodologies, challenges, and potential solutions while fostering knowledge dissemination and identifying research gaps. By addressing future research directions, it sets the stage for advancements in CBIR that will enhance retrieval accuracy, usability, and effectiveness in various application domains.
Authors:T. Kim, H. Jeon, Y. Lim
Abstract:
Recently, as many studies of autonomous vehicles have been achieved for levels 4 and 5, there has been also increasing interest in the advancement of perception, decision, and control technologies, which are the three major aspects of autonomous vehicles. As for the perception technologies achieving reliable maneuvering of autonomous vehicles, object detection by using diverse sensors (e.g., LiDAR, radar, and camera) should be prioritized. These sensors require to detect objects accurately and quickly in diverse weather conditions, but they tend to have challenges to consistently detect objects in bad weather conditions with rain, snow, or fog. Thus, in this study, based on the experimentally obtained raindrop data from precipitation conditions, we constructed a novel dataset that could test diverse network model in various precipitation conditions through the CARLA simulator. Consequently, based on our novel dataset, YOLO series, a one-stage-detector, was used to quantitatively verify how much object detection performance could be decreased under various precipitation conditions from normal to extreme heavy rain situations.
Authors:Joseph Sobek, Jose R. Medina Inojosa, Betsy J. Medina Inojosa, S. M. Rassoulinejad-Mousavi, Gian Marco Conte, Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, Bradley J. Erickson
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence-enhanced identification of organs, lesions, and other structures in medical imaging is typically done using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) designed to make voxel-accurate segmentations of the region of interest. However, the labels required to train these CNNs are time-consuming to generate and require attention from subject matter experts to ensure quality. For tasks where voxel-level precision is not required, object detection models offer a viable alternative that can reduce annotation effort. Despite this potential application, there are few options for general purpose object detection frameworks available for 3-D medical imaging. We report on MedYOLO, a 3-D object detection framework using the one-shot detection method of the YOLO family of models and designed for use with medical imaging. We tested this model on four different datasets: BRaTS, LIDC, an abdominal organ Computed Tomography (CT) dataset, and an ECG-gated heart CT dataset. We found our models achieve high performance on commonly present medium and large-sized structures such as the heart, liver, and pancreas even without hyperparameter tuning. However, the models struggle with very small or rarely present structures.
Authors:Chenhao He, Pramit Saha
Abstract:
The utilization of deep learning-based object detection is an effective approach to assist visually impaired individuals in avoiding obstacles. In this paper, we implemented seven different YOLO object detection models \textit{viz}., YOLO-NAS (small, medium, large), YOLOv8, YOLOv7, YOLOv6, and YOLOv5 and performed comprehensive evaluation with carefully tuned hyperparameters, to analyze how these models performed on images containing common daily-life objects presented on roads and sidewalks. After a systematic investigation, YOLOv8 was found to be the best model, which reached a precision of $80\%$ and a recall of $68.2\%$ on a well-known Obstacle Dataset which includes images from VOC dataset, COCO dataset, and TT100K dataset along with images collected by the researchers in the field. Despite being the latest model and demonstrating better performance in many other applications, YOLO-NAS was found to be suboptimal for the obstacle detection task.
Authors:Jan-Tino Brethouwer, Robbert Fokkink
Abstract:
A Search and Rescue game (SR game) is a new type of game on a graph that has quickly found applications in scheduling, object detection, and adaptive search. In this paper, we broaden the definition of SR games by putting them into the context of ordered sets and Bayesian networks, extending known solutions of these games and opening up the way to further applications.
Authors:Mehala Balamurali, Ehsan Mihankhah
Abstract:
Accurate and efficient object detection is crucial for safe and efficient operation of earth-moving equipment in mining. Traditional 2D image-based methods face limitations in dynamic and complex mine environments. To overcome these challenges, 3D object detection using point cloud data has emerged as a comprehensive approach. However, training models for mining scenarios is challenging due to sensor height variations, viewpoint changes, and the need for diverse annotated datasets. This paper presents novel contributions to address these challenges. We introduce a synthetic dataset SimMining 3D [1] specifically designed for 3D object detection in mining environments. The dataset captures objects and sensors positioned at various heights within mine benches, accurately reflecting authentic mining scenarios. An automatic annotation pipeline through ROS interface reduces manual labor and accelerates dataset creation. We propose evaluation metrics accounting for sensor-to-object height variations and point cloud density, enabling accurate model assessment in mining scenarios. Real data tests validate our models effectiveness in object prediction. Our ablation study emphasizes the importance of altitude and height variation augmentations in improving accuracy and reliability. The publicly accessible synthetic dataset [1] serves as a benchmark for supervised learning and advances object detection techniques in mining with complimentary pointwise annotations for each scene. In conclusion, our work bridges the gap between synthetic and real data, addressing the domain shift challenge in 3D object detection for mining. We envision robust object detection systems enhancing safety and efficiency in mining and related domains.
Authors:Emre Gülsoylu, Paul Koch, Mert Yıldız, Manfred Constapel, André Peter Kelm
Abstract:
Deep learning object detection methods, like YOLOv5, are effective in identifying maritime vessels but often lack detailed information important for practical applications. In this paper, we addressed this problem by developing a technique that fuses Automatic Identification System (AIS) data with vessels detected in images to create datasets. This fusion enriches ship images with vessel-related data, such as type, size, speed, and direction. Our approach associates detected ships to their corresponding AIS messages by estimating distance and azimuth using a homography-based method suitable for both fixed and periodically panning cameras. This technique is useful for creating datasets for waterway traffic management, encounter detection, and surveillance. We introduce a novel dataset comprising of images taken in various weather conditions and their corresponding AIS messages. This dataset offers a stable baseline for refining vessel detection algorithms and trajectory prediction models. To assess our method's performance, we manually annotated a portion of this dataset. The results are showing an overall association accuracy of 74.76 %, with the association accuracy for fixed cameras reaching 85.06 %. This demonstrates the potential of our approach in creating datasets for vessel detection, pose estimation and auto-labelling pipelines.
Authors:Junjia Qin, Kangli Xu
Abstract:
In the crucial stages of the Robomaster Youth Championship, the Robomaster EP Robot must operate exclusively on autonomous algorithms to remain competitive. Target recognition and automatic assisted aiming are indispensable for the EP robot. In this study, we use YOLOv5 for multi-object detection to identify the Robomaster EP Robot and its armor. Additionally, we integrate the DeepSORT algorithm for vehicle identification and tracking. As a result, we introduce a refined YOLOv5-based system that allows the robot to recognize and aim at multiple targets simultaneously. To ensure precise tracking, we use a PID controller with Feedforward Enhancement and an FIR controller paired with a Kalman filter. This setup enables quick gimbal movement towards the target and predicts its next position, optimizing potential damage during motion. Our proposed system enhances the robot's accuracy in targeting armor, improving its competitive performance.
Authors:Zhu Yuke, Ruan Yumeng, Yang Lei, Guo Sheng
Abstract:
Detecting the objects in dense and rotated scenes is a challenging task. Recent works on this topic are mostly based on Faster RCNN or Retinanet. As they are highly dependent on the pre-set dense anchors and the NMS operation, the approach is indirect and suboptimal.The end-to-end DETR-based detectors have achieved great success in horizontal object detection and many other areas like segmentation, tracking, action recognition and etc.However, the DETR-based detectors perform poorly on dense rotated target tasks and perform worse than most modern CNN-based detectors. In this paper, we find the most significant reason for the poor performance is that the original attention can not accurately focus on the oriented targets. Accordingly, we propose Rotated object detection TRansformer (RotaTR) as an extension of DETR to oriented detection. Specifically, we design Rotation Sensitive deformable (RSDeform) attention to enhance the DETR's ability to detect oriented targets. It is used to build the feature alignment module and rotation-sensitive decoder for our model. We test RotaTR on four challenging-oriented benchmarks. It shows a great advantage in detecting dense and oriented objects compared to the original DETR. It also achieves competitive results when compared to the state-of-the-art.
Authors:Mert Ege, Mustafa Ceyhan
Abstract:
Online exams are more attractive after the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, during recruitment, online exams are used. However, there are more cheating possibilities for online exams. Assigning a proctor for each exam increases cost. At this point, automatic proctor systems detect possible cheating status. This article proposes an end-to-end system and submodules to get better results for online proctoring. Object detection, face recognition, human voice detection, and segmentation are used in our system. Furthermore, our proposed model works on the PCs of users, meaning a client-based system. So, server cost is eliminated. As far as we know, it is the first time the client-based online proctoring system has been used for recruitment. Online exams are more attractive after the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, during recruitment, online exams are used. However, there are more cheating possibilities for online exams. Assigning a proctor for each exam increases cost. At this point, automatic proctor systems detect possible cheating status. This article proposes an end-to-end system and submodules to get better results for online proctoring. Object detection, face recognition, human voice detection, and segmentation are used in our system. Furthermore, our proposed model works on the PCs of users, meaning a client-based system. So, server cost is eliminated. As far as we know, it is the first time the client-based online proctoring system has been used for recruitment. Furthermore, this cheating system works at https://www.talent-interview.com/tr/.
Authors:Kevin Klein, Antoine Muller, Alyssa Wohde, Alexander V. Gorelik, Volker Heyd, Ralf Lämmel, Yoan Diekmann, Maxime Brami
Abstract:
The context of this paper is the creation of large uniform archaeological datasets from heterogeneous published resources, such as find catalogues - with the help of AI and Big Data. The paper is concerned with the challenge of consistent assemblages of archaeological data. We cannot simply combine existing records, as they differ in terms of quality and recording standards. Thus, records have to be recreated from published archaeological illustrations. This is only a viable path with the help of automation. The contribution of this paper is a new workflow for collecting data from archaeological find catalogues available as legacy resources, such as archaeological drawings and photographs in large unsorted PDF files; the workflow relies on custom software (AutArch) supporting image processing, object detection, and interactive means of validating and adjusting automatically retrieved data. We integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of neural networks for object detection and classification into the workflow, thereby speeding up, automating, and standardising data collection. Objects commonly found in archaeological catalogues - such as graves, skeletons, ceramics, ornaments, stone tools and maps - are detected. Those objects are spatially related and analysed to extract real-life attributes, such as the size and orientation of graves based on the north arrow and the scale. We also automate recording of geometric whole-outlines through contour detection, as an alternative to landmark-based geometric morphometrics. Detected objects, contours, and other automatically retrieved data can be manually validated and adjusted. We use third millennium BC Europe (encompassing cultures such as 'Corded Ware' and 'Bell Beaker', and their burial practices) as a 'testing ground' and for evaluation purposes; this includes a user study for the workflow and the AutArch software.
Authors:Gaurav Pendharkar, A. Ancy Micheal, Jason Misquitta, Ranjeesh Kaippada
Abstract:
Tiger conservation necessitates the strategic deployment of multifaceted initiatives encompassing the preservation of ecological habitats, anti-poaching measures, and community involvement for sustainable growth in the tiger population. With the advent of artificial intelligence, tiger surveillance can be automated using object detection. In this paper, an accurate illumination invariant framework is proposed based on EnlightenGAN and YOLOv8 for tiger detection. The fine-tuned YOLOv8 model achieves a mAP score of 61% without illumination enhancement. The illumination enhancement improves the mAP by 0.7%. The approaches elevate the state-of-the-art performance on the ATRW dataset by approximately 6% to 7%.
Authors:Arda Pekis, Vignesh Kannan, Evandros Kaklamanos, Anu Antony, Snehal Patel, Tyler Earnest
Abstract:
The clinical management of breast cancer depends on an accurate understanding of the tumor and its anatomical context to adjacent tissues and landmark structures. This context may be provided by semantic segmentation methods; however, previous works have been largely limited to a singular focus on the tumor alone and rarely other tissue types. In contrast, we present a method that exploits tissue-tissue interactions to accurately segment every major tissue type in the breast including: chest wall, skin, adipose tissue, fibroglandular tissue, vasculature and tumor via standard-of-care Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI. Comparing our method to prior state-of-the-art, we achieved a superior Dice score on tumor segmentation while maintaining competitive performance on other studied tissues across multiple institutions. Briefly, our method proceeds by localizing the tumor using 2D object detectors, then segmenting the tumor and surrounding tissues independently using two 3D U-nets, and finally integrating these results while mitigating false positives by checking for anatomically plausible tissue-tissue contacts. The object detection models were pre-trained on ImageNet and COCO, and operated on MIP (maximum intensity projection) images in the axial and sagittal planes, establishing a 3D tumor bounding box. By integrating multiple relevant peri-tumoral tissues, our work enables clinical applications in breast cancer staging, prognosis and surgical planning.
Authors:Xingzhao Jia, Zhongqiu Zhao, Changlei Dongye, Zhao Zhang
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify the most attractive objects within an image. Depending on the type of data being detected, SOD can be categorized into various forms, including RGB, RGB-D (Depth), RGB-T (Thermal) and light field SOD. Previous researches have focused on saliency detection with individual data type. If the RGB-D SOD model is forced to detect RGB-T data it will perform poorly. We propose an innovative model framework that provides a unified solution for the salient object detection task of three types of data (RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T). The three types of data can be handled in one model (all in one) with the same weight parameters. In this framework, the three types of data are concatenated in an ordered manner within a single input batch, and features are extracted using a transformer network. Based on this framework, we propose an efficient lightweight SOD model, namely AiOSOD, which can detect any RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T data with high speed (780FPS for RGB data, 485FPS for RGB-D or RGB-T data). Notably, with only 6.25M parameters, AiOSOD achieves excellent performance on RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T datasets.
Authors:Yuan Qing, Naixing Wu, Shaohua Wan, Lixin Duan
Abstract:
Unsupervised cross-domain action recognition aims at adapting the model trained on an existing labeled source domain to a new unlabeled target domain. Most existing methods solve the task by directly aligning the feature distributions of source and target domains. However, this would cause negative transfer during domain adaptation due to some negative training samples in both domains. In the source domain, some training samples are of low-relevance to target domain due to the difference in viewpoints, action styles, etc. In the target domain, there are some ambiguous training samples that can be easily classified as another type of action under the case of source domain. The problem of negative transfer has been explored in cross-domain object detection, while it remains under-explored in cross-domain action recognition. Therefore, we propose a Multi-modal Instance Refinement (MMIR) method to alleviate the negative transfer based on reinforcement learning. Specifically, a reinforcement learning agent is trained in both domains for every modality to refine the training data by selecting out negative samples from each domain. Our method finally outperforms several other state-of-the-art baselines in cross-domain action recognition on the benchmark EPIC-Kitchens dataset, which demonstrates the advantage of MMIR in reducing negative transfer.
Authors:Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan, Drew Gray, Elijah Cole
Abstract:
Coral reefs are vital for marine biodiversity, coastal protection, and supporting human livelihoods globally. However, they are increasingly threatened by mass bleaching events, pollution, and unsustainable practices with the advent of climate change. Monitoring the health of these ecosystems is crucial for effective restoration and management. Current methods for creating benthic composition maps often compromise between spatial coverage and resolution. In this paper, we introduce BenthIQ, a multi-label semantic segmentation network designed for high-precision classification of underwater substrates, including live coral, algae, rock, and sand. Although commonly deployed CNNs are limited in learning long-range semantic information, transformer-based models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in vision tasks such as object detection and image classification. We integrate the hierarchical Swin Transformer as the backbone of a U-shaped encoder-decoder architecture for local-global semantic feature learning. Using a real-world case study in French Polynesia, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms traditional CNN and attention-based models on pixel-wise classification of shallow reef imagery.
Authors:Yuxi Heluo, Kexin Wang, Charles W. Robson
Abstract:
In this work, we contribute the first visual open-source empirical study on human behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to investigate how compliant a general population is to mask-wearing-related public-health policy. Object-detection-based convolutional neural networks, regression analysis and multilayer perceptrons are combined to analyse visual data of the Viennese public during 2020. We find that mask-wearing-related government regulations and public-transport announcements encouraged correct mask-wearing-behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, changes in announcement and regulation contents led to heterogeneous effects on people's behaviour. Comparing the predictive power of regression analysis and neural networks, we demonstrate that the latter produces more accurate predictions of population reactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our use of regression modelling also allows us to unearth possible causal pathways underlying societal behaviour. Since our findings highlight the importance of appropriate communication contents, our results will facilitate more effective non-pharmaceutical interventions to be developed in future. Adding to the literature, we demonstrate that regression modelling and neural networks are not mutually exclusive but instead complement each other.
Authors:Junwen Wang, Katayoun Farrahi
Abstract:
Lack of interpretability of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) is a well-known problem particularly in the medical domain as clinicians want trustworthy automated decisions. One way to improve trust is to demonstrate the localisation of feature representations with respect to expert labeled regions of interest. In this work, we investigate the localisation of features learned via two varied learning paradigms and demonstrate the superiority of one learning approach with respect to localisation. Our analysis on medical and natural datasets show that the traditional end-to-end (E2E) learning strategy has a limited ability to localise discriminative features across multiple network layers. We show that a layer-wise learning strategy, namely cascade learning (CL), results in more localised features. Considering localisation accuracy, we not only show that CL outperforms E2E but that it is a promising method of predicting regions. On the YOLO object detection framework, our best result shows that CL outperforms the E2E scheme by $2\%$ in mAP.
Authors:Ziqi Ye, Limin Huang, Yongji Wu, Min Hu
Abstract:
Augmented reality technology has been widely used in industrial design interaction, exhibition guide, information retrieval and other fields. The combination of artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology has also become a future development trend. This project is an AR visualization system for ship detection and recognition based on AI, which mainly includes three parts: artificial intelligence module, Unity development module and Hololens2AR module. This project is based on R3Det algorithm to complete the detection and recognition of ships in remote sensing images. The recognition rate of model detection trained on RTX 2080Ti can reach 96%. Then, the 3D model of the ship is obtained by ship categories and information and generated in the virtual scene. At the same time, voice module and UI interaction module are added. Finally, we completed the deployment of the project on Hololens2 through MRTK. The system realizes the fusion of computer vision and augmented reality technology, which maps the results of object detection to the AR field, and makes a brave step toward the future technological trend and intelligent application.
Authors:Zifei Zhao, Shengyang Li
Abstract:
Arbitrary oriented object detection (AOOD) in aerial images is a widely concerned and highly challenging task, and plays an important role in many scenarios. The core of AOOD involves the representation, encoding, and feature augmentation of oriented bounding-boxes (Bboxes). Existing methods lack intuitive modeling of angle difference measurement in oriented Bbox representations. Oriented Bboxes under different representations exhibit rotational symmetry with varying periods due to angle periodicity. The angular boundary discontinuity (ABD) problem at periodic boundary positions is caused by rotational symmetry in measuring angular differences. In addition, existing methods also use additional encoding-decoding structures for oriented Bboxes. In this paper, we design an angular boundary free loss (ABFL) based on the von Mises distribution. The ABFL aims to solve the ABD problem when detecting oriented objects. Specifically, ABFL proposes to treat angles as circular data rather than linear data when measuring angle differences, aiming to introduce angle periodicity to alleviate the ABD problem and improve the accuracy of angle difference measurement. In addition, ABFL provides a simple and effective solution for various periodic boundary discontinuities caused by rotational symmetry in AOOD tasks, as it does not require additional encoding-decoding structures for oriented Bboxes. Extensive experiments on the DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets show that the proposed ABFL loss outperforms some state-of-the-art methods focused on addressing the ABD problem.
Authors:Parth Rawal, Mrunal Sompura, Wolfgang Hintze
Abstract:
Synthetic data is being used lately for training deep neural networks in computer vision applications such as object detection, object segmentation and 6D object pose estimation. Domain randomization hereby plays an important role in reducing the simulation to reality gap. However, this generalization might not be effective in specialized domains like a production environment involving complex assemblies. Either the individual parts, trained with synthetic images, are integrated in much larger assemblies making them indistinguishable from their counterparts and result in false positives or are partially occluded just enough to give rise to false negatives. Domain knowledge is vital in these cases and if conceived effectively while generating synthetic data, can show a considerable improvement in bridging the simulation to reality gap. This paper focuses on synthetic data generation procedures for parts and assemblies used in a production environment. The basic procedures for synthetic data generation and their various combinations are evaluated and compared on images captured in a production environment, where results show up to 15% improvement using combinations of basic procedures. Reducing the simulation to reality gap in this way can aid to utilize the true potential of robot assisted production using artificial intelligence.
Authors:Amirreza Rouhi, David Han
Abstract:
Teaching machines of scene contextual knowledge would enable them to interact more effectively with the environment and to anticipate or predict objects that may not be immediately apparent in their perceptual field. In this paper, we introduce a novel transformer-based approach called $LMOD$ ( Label-based Missing Object Detection) to teach scene contextual knowledge to machines using an attention mechanism. A distinctive aspect of the proposed approach is its reliance solely on labels from image datasets to teach scene context, entirely eliminating the need for the actual image itself. We show how scene-wide relationships among different objects can be learned using a self-attention mechanism. We further show that the contextual knowledge gained from label based learning can enhance performance of other visual based object detection algorithm.
Authors:Abhishesh Pal, Antonio C. Leite, Jon G. O. Gjevestad, PÃ¥l J. From
Abstract:
In farming systems, harvesting operations are tedious, time- and resource-consuming tasks. Based on this, deploying a fleet of autonomous robots to work alongside farmworkers may provide vast productivity and logistics benefits. Then, an intelligent robotic system should monitor human behavior, identify the ongoing activities and anticipate the worker's needs. In this work, the main contribution consists of creating a benchmark model for video-based human pickers detection, classifying their activities to serve in harvesting operations for different agricultural scenarios. Our solution uses the combination of a Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) for object detection and optical flow for motion estimation with newly added statistical attributes of flow motion descriptors, named as Correlation Sensitivity (CS). A classification criterion is defined based on the Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) analysis and K-means clustering algorithm, which are implemented upon in-house collected dataset from different crop fields like strawberry polytunnels and apple tree orchards. The proposed framework is quantitatively analyzed using sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy measures and shows satisfactory results amidst various dataset challenges such as lighting variation, blur, and occlusions.
Authors:R. Chinnaiyan, Iyyappan M, Al Raiyan Shariff A, Kondaveeti Sai, Mallikarjunaiah B M, P Bharath
Abstract:
In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a critical demand for protective measures, with face masks emerging as a primary safeguard. The approach involves a two-fold strategy: first, recognizing the presence of a face by detecting faces, and second, identifying masks on those faces. This project utilizes deep learning to create a model that can detect face masks in real-time streaming video as well as images. Face detection, a facet of object detection, finds applications in diverse fields such as security, biometrics, and law enforcement. Various detector systems worldwide have been developed and implemented, with convolutional neural networks chosen for their superior performance accuracy and speed in object detection. Experimental results attest to the model's excellent accuracy on test data. The primary focus of this research is to enhance security, particularly in sensitive areas. The research paper proposes a rapid image pre-processing method with masks centred on faces. Employing feature extraction and Convolutional Neural Network, the system classifies and detects individuals wearing masks. The research unfolds in three stages: image pre-processing, image cropping, and image classification, collectively contributing to the identification of masked faces. Continuous surveillance through webcams or CCTV cameras ensures constant monitoring, triggering a security alert if a person is detected without a mask.
Authors:Mohamaed Foued Ayedi, Hiba Ben Salem, Soulaimen Hammami, Ahmed Ben Said, Rateb Jabbar, Achraf CHabbouh
Abstract:
Existing fashion recommendation systems encounter difficulties in using visual data for accurate and personalized recommendations. This research describes an innovative end-to-end pipeline that uses artificial intelligence to provide fine-grained visual interpretation for fashion recommendations. When customers upload images of desired products or outfits, the system automatically generates meaningful descriptions emphasizing stylistic elements. These captions guide retrieval from a global fashion product catalogue to offer similar alternatives that fit the visual characteristics of the original image. On a dataset of over 100,000 categorized fashion photos, the pipeline was trained and evaluated. The F1-score for the object detection model was 0.97, exhibiting exact fashion object recognition capabilities optimized for recommendation. This visually aware system represents a key advancement in customer engagement through personalized fashion recommendations
Authors:Shuhei Nitta, Taiji Suzuki, Albert RodrÃguez Mulet, Atsushi Yaguchi, Ryusuke Hirai
Abstract:
Federated learning is a privacy-preserving training method which consists of training from a plurality of clients but without sharing their confidential data. However, previous work on federated learning do not explore suitable neural network architectures for clients with different input images sizes and different numbers of output categories. In this paper, we propose an effective federated learning method named ScalableFL, where the depths and widths of the local models for each client are adjusted according to the clients' input image size and the numbers of output categories. In addition, we provide a new bound for the generalization gap of federated learning. In particular, this bound helps to explain the effectiveness of our scalable neural network approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ScalableFL in several heterogeneous client settings for both image classification and object detection tasks.
Authors:Sujal Vijayaraghavan, Redwan Alqasemi, Rajiv Dubey, Sudeep Sarkar
Abstract:
Robot grasp typically follows five stages: object detection, object localisation, object pose estimation, grasp pose estimation, and grasp planning. We focus on object pose estimation. Our approach relies on three pieces of information: multiple views of the object, the camera's extrinsic parameters at those viewpoints, and 3D CAD models of objects. The first step involves a standard deep learning backbone (FCN ResNet) to estimate the object label, semantic segmentation, and a coarse estimate of the object pose with respect to the camera. Our novelty is using a refinement module that starts from the coarse pose estimate and refines it by optimisation through differentiable rendering. This is a purely vision-based approach that avoids the need for other information such as point cloud or depth images. We evaluate our object pose estimation approach on the ShapeNet dataset and show improvements over the state of the art. We also show that the estimated object pose results in 99.65% grasp accuracy with the ground truth grasp candidates on the Object Clutter Indoor Dataset (OCID) Grasp dataset, as computed using standard practice.
Authors:Natasha Krell, Will Gleave, Daniel Nakada, Justin Downes, Amanda Willet, Matthew Baran
Abstract:
Cell phone coverage and high-speed service gaps persist in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa, impacting public access to mobile-based financial, educational, and humanitarian services. Improving maps of telecommunications infrastructure can help inform strategies to eliminate gaps in mobile coverage. Deep neural networks, paired with remote sensing images, can be used for object detection of cell towers and eliminate the need for inefficient and burdensome manual mapping to find objects over large geographic regions. In this study, we demonstrate a partially automated workflow to train an object detection model to locate cell towers using OpenStreetMap (OSM) features and high-resolution Maxar imagery. For model fine-tuning and evaluation, we curated a diverse dataset of over 6,000 unique images of cell towers in 26 countries in eastern, southern, and central Africa using automatically generated annotations from OSM points. Our model achieves an average precision at 50% Intersection over Union (IoU) (AP@50) of 81.2 with good performance across different geographies and out-of-sample testing. Accurate localization of cell towers can yield more accurate cell coverage maps, in turn enabling improved delivery of digital services for decision-support applications.
Authors:Bingying Jin, Yadong Liu, Qinlin Qian
Abstract:
Inspection of high-voltage power equipment is an effective way to ensure power supply reliability. Object recognition, one of the key technologies in automatic power equipment inspection, attracts attention of many researchers and engineers. Although quite a few existing models have some their own advantages, object relationship between equipment which is very important in this task is scarcely considered. This paper combining object relationship modeling and Transformer Model proposes a Relation Transformer Model. It has four parts -- backbone, encoder, decoder and prediction heads. With this structure, the proposed method shows in experiments a much better performance than other three commonly used models in object recognition in substation, largely promoting the development of automatic power equipment inspection.
Authors:Jianan Feng, Jiachun Li, Changqing Miao, Jianjun Huang, Wei You, Wenchang Shi, Bin Liang
Abstract:
Object detection has found extensive applications in various tasks, but it is also susceptible to adversarial patch attacks. The ideal defense should be effective, efficient, easy to deploy, and capable of withstanding adaptive attacks. In this paper, we adopt a counterattack strategy to propose a novel and general methodology for defending adversarial attacks. Two types of defensive patches, canary and woodpecker, are specially-crafted and injected into the model input to proactively probe or counteract potential adversarial patches. In this manner, adversarial patch attacks can be effectively detected by simply analyzing the model output, without the need to alter the target model. Moreover, we employ randomized canary and woodpecker injection patterns to defend against defense-aware attacks. The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method are demonstrated through comprehensive experiments. The results illustrate that canary and woodpecker achieve high performance, even when confronted with unknown attack methods, while incurring limited time overhead. Furthermore, our method also exhibits sufficient robustness against defense-aware attacks, as evidenced by adaptive attack experiments.
Authors:Javed Ahmad, Alessio Del Bue
Abstract:
Multi-sensor fusion is essential for accurate 3D object detection in self-driving systems. Camera and LiDAR are the most commonly used sensors, and usually, their fusion happens at the early or late stages of 3D detectors with the help of regions of interest (RoIs). On the other hand, fusion at the intermediate level is more adaptive because it does not need RoIs from modalities but is complex as the features of both modalities are presented from different points of view. In this paper, we propose a new intermediate-level multi-modal fusion (mmFUSION) approach to overcome these challenges. First, the mmFUSION uses separate encoders for each modality to compute features at a desired lower space volume. Second, these features are fused through cross-modality and multi-modality attention mechanisms proposed in mmFUSION. The mmFUSION framework preserves multi-modal information and learns to complement modalities' deficiencies through attention weights. The strong multi-modal features from the mmFUSION framework are fed to a simple 3D detection head for 3D predictions. We evaluate mmFUSION on the KITTI and NuScenes dataset where it performs better than available early, intermediate, late, and even two-stage based fusion schemes. The code with the mmdetection3D project plugin will be publicly available soon.
Authors:Ke Liu, Zhaoyi Song, Haoyue Bai
Abstract:
This paper considers image change detection with only a small number of samples, which is a significant problem in terms of a few annotations available. A major impediment of image change detection task is the lack of large annotated datasets covering a wide variety of scenes. Change detection models trained on insufficient datasets have shown poor generalization capability. To address the poor generalization issue, we propose using simple image processing methods for generating synthetic but informative datasets, and design an early fusion network based on object detection which could outperform the siamese neural network. Our key insight is that the synthetic data enables the trained model to have good generalization ability for various scenarios. We compare the model trained on the synthetic data with that on the real-world data captured from a challenging dataset, CDNet, using six different test sets. The results demonstrate that the synthetic data is informative enough to achieve higher generalization ability than the insufficient real-world data. Besides, the experiment shows that utilizing a few (often tens of) samples to fine-tune the model trained on the synthetic data will achieve excellent results.
Authors:Conghao Tom Shen, Violet Yao, Yixin Liu
Abstract:
Manga, a widely celebrated Japanese comic art form, is renowned for its diverse narratives and distinct artistic styles. However, the inherently visual and intricate structure of Manga, which comprises images housing multiple panels, poses significant challenges for content retrieval. To address this, we present MaRU (Manga Retrieval and Understanding), a multi-staged system that connects vision and language to facilitate efficient search of both dialogues and scenes within Manga frames. The architecture of MaRU integrates an object detection model for identifying text and frame bounding boxes, a Vision Encoder-Decoder model for text recognition, a text encoder for embedding text, and a vision-text encoder that merges textual and visual information into a unified embedding space for scene retrieval. Rigorous evaluations reveal that MaRU excels in end-to-end dialogue retrieval and exhibits promising results for scene retrieval.
Authors:Min Jae Jung, Seung Dae Han, Joohee Kim
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection, which focuses on detecting novel objects with few labels, is an emerging challenge in the community. Recent studies show that adapting a pre-trained model or modified loss function can improve performance. In this paper, we explore leveraging the power of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) and hard negative classification loss in low data setting. Specifically, we propose Re-scoring using Image-language Similarity for Few-shot object detection (RISF) which extends Faster R-CNN by introducing Calibration Module using CLIP (CM-CLIP) and Background Negative Re-scale Loss (BNRL). The former adapts CLIP, which performs zero-shot classification, to re-score the classification scores of a detector using image-class similarities, the latter is modified classification loss considering the punishment for fake backgrounds as well as confusing categories on a generalized few-shot object detection dataset. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC show that the proposed RISF substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. The code will be available.
Authors:Derya Gol Gungor, Bimba Rao, Cynthia Wolverton, Ismayil Guracar
Abstract:
Echocardiography provides an important tool for clinicians to observe the function of the heart in real time, at low cost, and without harmful radiation. Automated localization and classification of heart valves enables automatic extraction of quantities associated with heart mechanical function and related blood flow measurements. We propose a machine learning pipeline that uses deep neural networks for separate classification and localization steps. As the first step in the pipeline, we apply view classification to echocardiograms with ten unique anatomic views of the heart. In the second step, we apply deep learning-based object detection to both localize and identify the valves. Image segmentation based object detection in echocardiography has been shown in many earlier studies but, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that predicts the bounding boxes around the valves along with classification from 2D ultrasound images with the help of deep neural networks. Our object detection experiments applied to the Apical views suggest that it is possible to localize and identify multiple valves precisely.
Authors:Tianhao Zhang, Shenglin Wang, Nidhal Bouaynaya, Radu Calinescu, Lyudmila Mihaylova
Abstract:
The superior performance of object detectors is often established under the condition that the test samples are in the same distribution as the training data. However, in many practical applications, out-of-distribution (OOD) instances are inevitable and usually lead to uncertainty in the results. In this paper, we propose a novel, intuitive, and scalable probabilistic object detection method for OOD detection. Unlike other uncertainty-modeling methods that either require huge computational costs to infer the weight distributions or rely on model training through synthetic outlier data, our method is able to distinguish between in-distribution (ID) data and OOD data via weight parameter sampling from proposed Gaussian distributions based on pre-trained networks. We demonstrate that our Bayesian object detector can achieve satisfactory OOD identification performance by reducing the FPR95 score by up to 8.19% and increasing the AUROC score by up to 13.94% when trained on BDD100k and VOC datasets as the ID datasets and evaluated on COCO2017 dataset as the OOD dataset.
Authors:Li Pengfei, Wei Wei, Yan Yu, Zhu Rong, Zhou Liguo
Abstract:
CNN-based object detection methods have achieved significant progress in recent years. The classic structures of CNNs produce pyramid-like feature maps due to the pooling or other re-scale operations. The feature maps in different levels of the feature pyramid are used to detect objects with different scales. For more accurate object detection, the highest-level feature, which has the lowest resolution and contains the strongest semantics, is up-scaled and connected with the lower-level features to enhance the semantics in the lower-level features. However, the classic mode of feature connection combines the feature of lower-level with all the features above it, which may result in semantics degradation. In this paper, we propose a skipped connection to obtain stronger semantics at each level of the feature pyramid. In our method, the lower-level feature only connects with the feature at the highest level, making it more reasonable that each level is responsible for detecting objects with fixed scales. In addition, we simplify the generation of anchor for bounding box regression, which can further improve the accuracy of object detection. The experiments on the MS COCO and Wider Face demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Andy Xiao, Deep Doshi, Lihao Wang, Harsha Gorantla, Thomas Heitzmann, Peter Groth
Abstract:
Surround-view fisheye cameras are commonly used for near-field sensing in automated driving scenarios, including urban driving and auto valet parking. Four fisheye cameras, one on each side, are sufficient to cover 360° around the vehicle capturing the entire near-field region. Based on surround view cameras, there has been much research on parking slot detection with main focus on the occupancy status in recent years, but little work on whether the free slot is compatible with the mission of the ego vehicle or not. For instance, some spots are handicap or electric vehicles accessible only. In this paper, we tackle parking spot classification based on the surround view camera system. We adapt the object detection neural network YOLOv4 with a novel polygon bounding box model that is well-suited for various shaped parking spaces, such as slanted parking slots. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first detailed study on parking spot detection and classification on fisheye cameras for auto valet parking scenarios. The results prove that our proposed classification approach is effective to distinguish between regular, electric vehicle, and handicap parking spots.
Authors:Bahareh Medghalchi, Andreas Vogel
Abstract:
Automated event detection has emerged as one of the fundamental practices to monitor the behavior of technical systems by means of sensor data. In the automotive industry, these methods are in high demand for tracing events in time series data. For assessing the active vehicle safety systems, a diverse range of driving scenarios is conducted. These scenarios involve the recording of the vehicle's behavior using external sensors, enabling the evaluation of operational performance. In such setting, automated detection methods not only accelerate but also standardize and objectify the evaluation by avoiding subjective, human-based appraisals in the data inspection. This work proposes a novel event detection method that allows to identify frequency-based events in time series data. To this aim, the time series data is mapped to representations in the time-frequency domain, known as scalograms. After filtering scalograms to enhance relevant parts of the signal, an object detection model is trained to detect the desired event objects in the scalograms. For the analysis of unseen time series data, events can be detected in their scalograms with the trained object detection model and are thereafter mapped back to the time series data to mark the corresponding time interval. The algorithm, evaluated on unseen datasets, achieves a precision rate of 0.97 in event detection, providing sharp time interval boundaries whose accurate indication by human visual inspection is challenging. Incorporating this method into the vehicle development process enhances the accuracy and reliability of event detection, which holds major importance for rapid testing analysis.
Authors:Peng Wen, Junhu Zhang, Haitao Li
Abstract:
Wearing a mask is one of the important measures to prevent infectious diseases. However, it is difficult to detect people's mask-wearing situation in public places with high traffic flow. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a mask-wearing face detection model based on YOLOv5l. Firstly, Multi-Head Attentional Self-Convolution not only improves the convergence speed of the model but also enhances the accuracy of the model detection. Secondly, the introduction of Swin Transformer Block is able to extract more useful feature information, enhance the detection ability of small targets, and improve the overall accuracy of the model. Our designed I-CBAM module can improve target detection accuracy. In addition, using enhanced feature fusion enables the model to better adapt to object detection tasks of different scales. In the experimentation on the MASK dataset, the results show that the model proposed in this paper achieved a 1.1% improvement in mAP(0.5) and a 1.3% improvement in mAP(0.5:0.95) compared to the YOLOv5l model. Our proposed method significantly enhances the detection capability of mask-wearing.
Authors:Yufei Liu, Manzhou Li, Qin Ma
Abstract:
This study proposes a method based on lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNN) and generative adversarial networks (GAN) for apple ripeness and damage level detection tasks. Initially, a lightweight CNN model is designed by optimizing the model's depth and width, as well as employing advanced model compression techniques, successfully reducing the model's parameter and computational requirements, thus enhancing real-time performance in practical applications. Simultaneously, attention mechanisms are introduced, dynamically adjusting the importance of different feature layers to improve the performance in object detection tasks. To address the issues of sample imbalance and insufficient sample size, GANs are used to generate realistic apple images, expanding the training dataset and enhancing the model's recognition capability when faced with apples of varying ripeness and damage levels. Furthermore, by applying the object detection network for damage location annotation on damaged apples, the accuracy of damage level detection is improved, providing a more precise basis for decision-making. Experimental results show that in apple ripeness grading detection, the proposed model achieves 95.6\%, 93.8\%, 95.0\%, and 56.5 in precision, recall, accuracy, and FPS, respectively. In apple damage level detection, the proposed model reaches 95.3\%, 93.7\%, and 94.5\% in precision, recall, and mAP, respectively. In both tasks, the proposed method outperforms other mainstream models, demonstrating the excellent performance and high practical value of the proposed method in apple ripeness and damage level detection tasks.
Authors:Xiaolei Chen, Pengcheng Zhang, Zelong Du, Ishfaq Ahmad
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) in panoramic video is still in the initial exploration stage. The indirect application of 2D video SOD method to the detection of salient objects in panoramic video has many unmet challenges, such as low detection accuracy, high model complexity, and poor generalization performance. To overcome these hurdles, we design an Inter-Layer Attention (ILA) module, an Inter-Layer weight (ILW) module, and a Bi-Modal Attention (BMA) module. Based on these modules, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Dual-Mode Mixed Flow Network (STDMMF-Net) that exploits the spatial flow of panoramic video and the corresponding optical flow for SOD. First, the ILA module calculates the attention between adjacent level features of consecutive frames of panoramic video to improve the accuracy of extracting salient object features from the spatial flow. Then, the ILW module quantifies the salient object information contained in the features of each level to improve the fusion efficiency of the features of each level in the mixed flow. Finally, the BMA module improves the detection accuracy of STDMMF-Net. A large number of subjective and objective experimental results testify that the proposed method demonstrates better detection accuracy than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Moreover, the comprehensive performance of the proposed method is better in terms of memory required for model inference, testing time, complexity, and generalization performance.
Authors:Zhao Ning Zou, Yuhang Zhang, Robert Wijaya
Abstract:
Transformer-based object detectors (DETR) have shown significant performance across machine vision tasks, ultimately in object detection. This detector is based on a self-attention mechanism along with the transformer encoder-decoder architecture to capture the global context in the image. The critical issue to be addressed is how this model architecture can handle different image nuisances, such as occlusion and adversarial perturbations. We studied this issue by measuring the performance of DETR with different experiments and benchmarking the network with convolutional neural network (CNN) based detectors like YOLO and Faster-RCNN. We found that DETR performs well when it comes to resistance to interference from information loss in occlusion images. Despite that, we found that the adversarial stickers put on the image require the network to produce a new unnecessary set of keys, queries, and values, which in most cases, results in a misdirection of the network. DETR also performed poorer than YOLOv5 in the image corruption benchmark. Furthermore, we found that DETR depends heavily on the main query when making a prediction, which leads to imbalanced contributions between queries since the main query receives most of the gradient flow.
Authors:Atal Tewari, K Prateek, Amrita Singh, Nitin Khanna
Abstract:
Craters are one of the most prominent features on planetary surfaces, used in applications such as age estimation, hazard detection, and spacecraft navigation. Crater detection is a challenging problem due to various aspects, including complex crater characteristics such as varying sizes and shapes, data resolution, and planetary data types. Similar to other computer vision tasks, deep learning-based approaches have significantly impacted research on crater detection in recent years. This survey aims to assist researchers in this field by examining the development of deep learning-based crater detection algorithms (CDAs). The review includes over 140 research works covering diverse crater detection approaches, including planetary data, craters database, and evaluation metrics. To be specific, we discuss the challenges in crater detection due to the complex properties of the craters and survey the DL-based CDAs by categorizing them into three parts: (a) semantic segmentation-based, (b) object detection-based, and (c) classification-based. Additionally, we have conducted training and testing of all the semantic segmentation-based CDAs on a common dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of each architecture for crater detection and its potential applications. Finally, we have provided recommendations for potential future works.
Authors:Ryan Ford, Kenneth Hutchison, Nicholas Felts, Benjamin Cheng, Jesse Lew, Kyle Jackson
Abstract:
Understanding the impact of data set design on model training and performance can help alleviate the costs associated with generating remote sensing and overhead labeled data. This work examined the impact of training shifted window transformers using bounding boxes and segmentation labels, where the latter are more expensive to produce. We examined classification tasks by comparing models trained with both target and backgrounds against models trained with only target pixels, extracted by segmentation labels. For object detection models, we compared performance using either label type when training. We found that the models trained on only target pixels do not show performance improvement for classification tasks, appearing to conflate background pixels in the evaluation set with target pixels. For object detection, we found that models trained with either label type showed equivalent performance across testing. We found that bounding boxes appeared to be sufficient for tasks that did not require more complex labels, such as object segmentation. Continuing work to determine consistency of this result across data types and model architectures could potentially result in substantial savings in generating remote sensing data sets for deep learning.
Authors:Julien Paulet, Axel Molina, Benjamin Beltzung, Takafumi Suzumura, Shinya Yamamoto, Cédric Sueur
Abstract:
Individual identification plays a pivotal role in ecology and ethology, notably as a tool for complex social structures understanding. However, traditional identification methods often involve invasive physical tags and can prove both disruptive for animals and time-intensive for researchers. In recent years, the integration of deep learning in research offered new methodological perspectives through automatization of complex tasks. Harnessing object detection and recognition technologies is increasingly used by researchers to achieve identification on video footage. This study represents a preliminary exploration into the development of a non-invasive tool for face detection and individual identification of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) through deep learning. The ultimate goal of this research is, using identifications done on the dataset, to automatically generate a social network representation of the studied population. The current main results are promising: (i) the creation of a Japanese macaques' face detector (Faster-RCNN model), reaching a 82.2% accuracy and (ii) the creation of an individual recognizer for K{Å}jima island macaques population (YOLOv8n model), reaching a 83% accuracy. We also created a K{Å}jima population social network by traditional methods, based on co-occurrences on videos. Thus, we provide a benchmark against which the automatically generated network will be assessed for reliability. These preliminary results are a testament to the potential of this innovative approach to provide the scientific community with a tool for tracking individuals and social network studies in Japanese macaques.
Authors:Hongbin Xu, Yamei Xia, Shuai Zhao, Bo Cheng
Abstract:
Query-based methods have garnered significant attention in object detection since the advent of DETR, the pioneering query-based detector. However, these methods face challenges like slow convergence and suboptimal performance. Notably, self-attention in object detection often hampers convergence due to its global focus. To address these issues, we propose FoLR, a transformer-like architecture with only decoders. We improve the self-attention by isolating connections between irrelevant objects that makes it focus on local regions but not global regions. We also design the adaptive sampling method to extract effective features based on queries' local regions from feature maps. Additionally, we employ a look-back strategy for decoders to retain previous information, followed by the Feature Mixer module to fuse features and queries. Experimental results demonstrate FoLR's state-of-the-art performance in query-based detectors, excelling in convergence speed and computational efficiency.
Index Terms: Local regions, Attention mechanism, Object detection
Authors:Munawar Ali, Baoqun Yin, Hazrat Bilal, Aakash Kumar, Ali Muhammad, Avinash Rohra
Abstract:
Several deep learning algorithms have shown amazing performance for existing object detection tasks, but recognizing darker objects is the largest challenge. Moreover, those techniques struggled to detect or had a slow recognition rate, resulting in significant performance losses. As a result, an improved and accurate detection approach is required to address the above difficulty. The whole study proposes a combination of spiked and normal convolution layers as an energy-efficient and reliable object detector model. The proposed model is split into two sections. The first section is developed as a feature extractor, which utilizes pre-trained VGG16, and the second section of the proposal structure is the combination of spiked and normal Convolutional layers to detect the bounding boxes of images. We drew a pre-trained model for classifying detected objects. With state of the art Python libraries, spike layers can be trained efficiently. The proposed spike convolutional object detector (SCOD) has been evaluated on VOC and Ex-Dark datasets. SCOD reached 66.01% and 41.25% mAP for detecting 20 different objects in the VOC-12 and 12 objects in the Ex-Dark dataset. SCOD uses 14 Giga FLOPS for its forward path calculations. Experimental results indicated superior performance compared to Tiny YOLO, Spike YOLO, YOLO-LITE, Tinier YOLO and Center of loc+Xception based on mAP for the VOC dataset.
Authors:Aditya Vadduri, Anagh Benjwal, Abhishek Pai, Elkan Quadros, Aniruddh Kammar, Prajwal Uday
Abstract:
Recent years have seen tremendous advancements in the area of autonomous payload delivery via unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. However, most of these works involve delivering the payload at a predetermined location using its GPS coordinates. By relying on GPS coordinates for navigation, the precision of payload delivery is restricted to the accuracy of the GPS network and the availability and strength of the GPS connection, which may be severely restricted by the weather condition at the time and place of operation. In this work we describe the development of a micro-class UAV and propose a novel navigation method that improves the accuracy of conventional navigation methods by incorporating a deep-learning-based computer vision approach to identify and precisely align the UAV with a target marked at the payload delivery position. This proposed method achieves a 500% increase in average horizontal precision over conventional GPS-based approaches.
Authors:Yagya Raj Pandeya, Samin Karki, Ishan Dangol, Nitesh Rajbanshi
Abstract:
We have developed a comprehensive computer system to assist farmers who practice traditional farming methods and have limited access to agricultural experts for addressing crop diseases. Our system utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and provide remedies for vegetable diseases. To ensure ease of use, we have created a mobile application that offers a user-friendly interface, allowing farmers to inquire about vegetable diseases and receive suitable solutions in their local language. The developed system can be utilized by any farmer with a basic understanding of a smartphone. Specifically, we have designed an AI-enabled mobile application for identifying and suggesting remedies for vegetable diseases, focusing on tomato diseases to benefit the local farming community in Nepal. Our system employs state-of-the-art object detection methodology, namely You Only Look Once (YOLO), to detect tomato diseases. The detected information is then relayed to the mobile application, which provides remedy suggestions guided by domain experts. In order to train our system effectively, we curated a dataset consisting of ten classes of tomato diseases. We utilized various data augmentation methods to address overfitting and trained a YOLOv5 object detector. The proposed method achieved a mean average precision of 0.76 and offers an efficient mobile interface for interacting with the AI system. While our system is currently in the development phase, we are actively working towards enhancing its robustness and real-time usability by accumulating more training samples.
Authors:Irene Cortés, Jorge Beltrán, Arturo de la Escalera, Fernando GarcÃa
Abstract:
In recent years, the field of autonomous driving has witnessed remarkable advancements, driven by the integration of a multitude of sensors, including cameras and LiDAR systems, in different prototypes. However, with the proliferation of sensor data comes the pressing need for more sophisticated information processing techniques. This research paper introduces a novel modification to an object detection network that uses camera and lidar information, incorporating an additional branch designed for the task of re-identifying objects across adjacent cameras within the same vehicle while elevating the quality of the baseline 3D object detection outcomes. The proposed methodology employs a two-step detection pipeline: initially, an object detection network is employed, followed by a 3D box estimator that operates on the filtered point cloud generated from the network's detections. Extensive experimental evaluations encompassing both 2D and 3D domains validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the results underscore the superiority of this method over traditional Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) techniques, with an improvement of more than 5\% in the car category in the overlapping areas.
Authors:SungHo Moon, JinWoo Bae, SungHoon Im
Abstract:
Research on monocular 3D object detection is being actively studied, and as a result, performance has been steadily improving. However, 3D object detection performance is significantly reduced when applied to a camera system different from the system used to capture the training datasets. For example, a 3D detector trained on datasets from a passenger car mostly fails to regress accurate 3D bounding boxes for a camera mounted on a bus. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to analyze the factors that cause performance degradation. We find that changing the camera pose, especially camera orientation, relative to the road plane caused performance degradation. In addition, we propose a generalized 3D object detection method that can be universally applied to various camera systems. We newly design a compensation module that corrects the estimated 3D bounding box location and heading direction. The proposed module can be applied to most of the recent 3D object detection networks. It increases AP3D score (KITTI moderate, IoU $> 70\%$) about 6-to-10-times above the baselines without additional training. Both quantitative and qualitative results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Authors:Hossein Jafari, Karim Faez, Hamidreza Amindavar
Abstract:
Lung cancer is highly lethal, emphasizing the critical need for early detection. However, identifying lung nodules poses significant challenges for radiologists, who rely heavily on their expertise for accurate diagnosis. To address this issue, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems based on machine learning techniques have emerged to assist doctors in identifying lung nodules from computed tomography (CT) scans. Unfortunately, existing networks in this domain often suffer from computational complexity, leading to high rates of false negatives and false positives, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we present an innovative model that harnesses the strengths of both convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. Inspired by object detection in videos, we treat each 3D CT image as a video, individual slices as frames, and lung nodules as objects, enabling a time-series application. The primary objective of our work is to overcome hardware limitations during model training, allowing for efficient processing of 2D data while utilizing inter-slice information for accurate identification based on 3D image context. We validated the proposed network by applying a 10-fold cross-validation technique to the publicly available Lung Nodule Analysis 2016 dataset. Our proposed architecture achieves an average sensitivity criterion of 97.84% and a competition performance metrics (CPM) of 96.0% with few parameters. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art advancements in lung nodule identification demonstrates the significant accuracy achieved by our proposed model.
Authors:Yoav Arad, Michael Werman
Abstract:
Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) plays a crucial role in modern surveillance systems, aiming to identify various anomalies in real-world situations. However, current benchmark datasets predominantly emphasize simple, single-frame anomalies such as novel object detection. This narrow focus restricts the advancement of VAD models. In this research, we advocate for an expansion of VAD investigations to encompass intricate anomalies that extend beyond conventional benchmark boundaries. To facilitate this, we introduce two datasets, HMDB-AD and HMDB-Violence, to challenge models with diverse action-based anomalies. These datasets are derived from the HMDB51 action recognition dataset. We further present Multi-Frame Anomaly Detection (MFAD), a novel method built upon the AI-VAD framework. AI-VAD utilizes single-frame features such as pose estimation and deep image encoding, and two-frame features such as object velocity. They then apply a density estimation algorithm to compute anomaly scores. To address complex multi-frame anomalies, we add a deep video encoding features capturing long-range temporal dependencies, and logistic regression to enhance final score calculation. Experimental results confirm our assumptions, highlighting existing models limitations with new anomaly types. MFAD excels in both simple and complex anomaly detection scenarios.
Authors:Mehfuz A Rahman, Jiju Peethambaran, Neil London
Abstract:
A vast majority of conventional augmented reality devices are equipped with depth sensors. Depth images produced by such sensors contain complementary information for object detection when used with color images. Despite the benefits, it remains a complex task to simultaneously extract photometric and depth features in real time due to the immanent difference between depth and color images. Moreover, standard convolution operations are not sufficient to properly extract information directly from raw depth images leading to intermediate representations of depth which is inefficient. To address these issues, we propose a real-time and two stream RGBD object detection model. The proposed model consists of two new components: a depth guided hyper-involution that adapts dynamically based on the spatial interaction pattern in the raw depth map and an up-sampling based trainable fusion layer that combines the extracted depth and color image features without blocking the information transfer between them. We show that the proposed model outperforms other RGB-D based object detection models on NYU Depth v2 dataset and achieves comparable (second best) results on SUN RGB-D. Additionally, we introduce a new outdoor RGB-D object detection dataset where our proposed model outperforms other models. The performance evaluation on diverse synthetic data generated from CAD models and images shows the potential of the proposed model to be adapted to augmented reality based applications.
Authors:Shiyi Tang, Shu Zhang, Yini Fang
Abstract:
Small object detection has been a challenging problem in the field of object detection. There has been some works that proposes improvements for this task, such as adding several attention blocks or changing the whole structure of feature fusion networks. However, the computation cost of these models is large, which makes deploying a real-time object detection system unfeasible, while leaving room for improvement. To this end, an improved YOLOv5 model: HIC-YOLOv5 is proposed to address the aforementioned problems. Firstly, an additional prediction head specific to small objects is added to provide a higher-resolution feature map for better prediction. Secondly, an involution block is adopted between the backbone and neck to increase channel information of the feature map. Moreover, an attention mechanism named CBAM is applied at the end of the backbone, thus not only decreasing the computation cost compared with previous works but also emphasizing the important information in both channel and spatial domain. Our result shows that HIC-YOLOv5 has improved mAP@[.5:.95] by 6.42% and mAP@0.5 by 9.38% on VisDrone-2019-DET dataset.
Authors:Raghav Ambati, Ayon Borthakur
Abstract:
This paper implements and analyzes multiple networks with the goal of understanding their suitability for edge device applications such as X-ray threat detection. In this study, we use the state-of-the-art YOLO object detection model to solve this task of detecting threats in security baggage screening images. We designed and studied three models - Tiny YOLO, QCFS Tiny YOLO, and SNN Tiny YOLO. We utilize an alternative activation function calculated to have zero expected conversion error with the activation of a spiking activation function in our Tiny YOLOv7 model. This \textit{QCFS} version of the Tiny YOLO replicates the activation function from ultra-low latency and high-efficiency SNN architecture. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on CLCXray, an open-source X-ray threat Detection dataset. In addition, we also study the behavior of a Spiking Tiny YOLO on the same X-ray threat Detection dataset.
Authors:Guoxi Huang, Hongtao Fu, Adrian G. Bors
Abstract:
Deeper Vision Transformers (ViTs) are more challenging to train. We expose a degradation problem in deeper layers of ViT when using masked image modeling (MIM) for pre-training. To ease the training of deeper ViTs, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework called Masked Image Residual Learning (MIRL), which significantly alleviates the degradation problem, making scaling ViT along depth a promising direction for performance upgrade. We reformulate the pre-training objective for deeper layers of ViT as learning to recover the residual of the masked image. We provide extensive empirical evidence showing that deeper ViTs can be effectively optimized using MIRL and easily gain accuracy from increased depth. With the same level of computational complexity as ViT-Base and ViT-Large, we instantiate 4.5$\times$ and 2$\times$ deeper ViTs, dubbed ViT-S-54 and ViT-B-48. The deeper ViT-S-54, costing 3$\times$ less than ViT-Large, achieves performance on par with ViT-Large. ViT-B-48 achieves 86.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. On one hand, deeper ViTs pre-trained with MIRL exhibit excellent generalization capabilities on downstream tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. On the other hand, MIRL demonstrates high pre-training efficiency. With less pre-training time, MIRL yields competitive performance compared to other approaches.
Authors:Khoa Dang Nguyen, Thanh-Hai Phung, Hoang-Giang Cao
Abstract:
Panoptic segmentation in agriculture is an advanced computer vision technique that provides a comprehensive understanding of field composition. It facilitates various tasks such as crop and weed segmentation, plant panoptic segmentation, and leaf instance segmentation, all aimed at addressing challenges in agriculture. Exploring the application of panoptic segmentation in agriculture, the 8th Workshop on Computer Vision in Plant Phenotyping and Agriculture (CVPPA) hosted the challenge of hierarchical panoptic segmentation of crops and weeds using the PhenoBench dataset. To tackle the tasks presented in this competition, we propose an approach that combines the effectiveness of the Segment AnyThing Model (SAM) for instance segmentation with prompt input from object detection models. Specifically, we integrated two notable approaches in object detection, namely DINO and YOLO-v8. Our best-performing model achieved a PQ+ score of 81.33 based on the evaluation metrics of the competition.
Authors:Hüdaverdi Demir, Serkan SavaÅ
Abstract:
With the advancing technology, the hardware gain of computers and the increase in the processing capacity of processors have facilitated the processing of instantaneous and real-time images. Face recognition processes are also studies in the field of image processing. Facial recognition processes are frequently used in security applications and commercial applications. Especially in the last 20 years, the high performances of artificial intelligence (AI) studies have contributed to the spread of these studies in many different fields. Education is one of them. The potential and advantages of using AI in education; can be grouped under three headings: student, teacher, and institution. One of the institutional studies may be the security of educational environments and the contribution of automation to education and training processes. From this point of view, deep learning methods, one of the sub-branches of AI, were used in this study. For object detection from images, a pioneering study has been designed and successfully implemented to keep records of students' entrance to the educational institution and to perform class attendance with images taken from the camera using image processing algorithms. The application of the study to real-life problems will be carried out in a school determined in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Authors:Javaria Farooq, Nayyer Aafaq, M Khizer Ali Khan, Ammar Saleem, M Ibraheem Siddiqui
Abstract:
Tiny Object Detection is challenging due to small size, low resolution, occlusion, background clutter, lighting conditions and small object-to-image ratio. Further, object detection methodologies often make underlying assumption that both training and testing data remain congruent. However, this presumption often leads to decline in performance when model is applied to out-of-domain(unseen) data. Techniques like synthetic image generation are employed to improve model performance by leveraging variations in input data. Such an approach typically presumes access to 3D-rendered datasets. In contrast, we propose a novel two-stage methodology Synthetic Randomized Image Augmentation (SRIA), carefully devised to enhance generalization capabilities of models encountering 2D datasets, particularly with lower resolution which is more practical in real-world scenarios. The first stage employs a weakly supervised technique to generate pixel-level segmentation masks. Subsequently, the second stage generates a batch-wise synthesis of artificial images, carefully designed with an array of diverse augmentations. The efficacy of proposed technique is illustrated on challenging foreign object debris (FOD) detection. We compare our results with several SOTA models including CenterNet, SSD, YOLOv3, YOLOv4, YOLOv5, and Outer Vit on a publicly available FOD-A dataset. We also construct an out-of-distribution test set encompassing 800 annotated images featuring a corpus of ten common categories. Notably, by harnessing merely 1.81% of objects from source training data and amalgamating with 29 runway background images, we generate 2227 synthetic images. Subsequent model retraining via transfer learning, utilizing enriched dataset generated by domain randomization, demonstrates significant improvement in detection accuracy. We report that detection accuracy improved from an initial 41% to 92% for OOD test set.
Authors:Qingtian Wu, Liming Zhang
Abstract:
Extreme head postures pose a common challenge across a spectrum of facial analysis tasks, including face detection, facial landmark detection (FLD), and head pose estimation (HPE). These tasks are interdependent, where accurate FLD relies on robust face detection, and HPE is intricately associated with these key points. This paper focuses on the integration of these tasks, particularly when addressing the complexities posed by large-angle face poses. The primary contribution of this study is the proposal of a real-time multi-task detection system capable of simultaneously performing joint detection of faces, facial landmarks, and head poses. This system builds upon the widely adopted YOLOv8 detection framework. It extends the original object detection head by incorporating additional landmark regression head, enabling efficient localization of crucial facial landmarks. Furthermore, we conduct optimizations and enhancements on various modules within the original YOLOv8 framework. To validate the effectiveness and real-time performance of our proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on 300W-LP and AFLW2000-3D datasets. The results obtained verify the capability of our model to tackle large-angle face pose challenges while delivering real-time performance across these interconnected tasks.
Authors:Sriram Ravindran, Debraj Basu
Abstract:
Accurately determining salient regions of an image is challenging when labeled data is scarce. DINO-based self-supervised approaches have recently leveraged meaningful image semantics captured by patch-wise features for locating foreground objects. Recent methods have also incorporated intuitive priors and demonstrated value in unsupervised methods for object partitioning. In this paper, we propose SEMPART, which jointly infers coarse and fine bi-partitions over an image's DINO-based semantic graph. Furthermore, SEMPART preserves fine boundary details using graph-driven regularization and successfully distills the coarse mask semantics into the fine mask. Our salient object detection and single object localization findings suggest that SEMPART produces high-quality masks rapidly without additional post-processing and benefits from co-optimizing the coarse and fine branches.
Authors:Mohana Sri S, Swethaa S, Aouthithiye Barathwaj SR Y, Sai Ganesh CS
Abstract:
Marine debris poses a significant threat to the survival of marine wildlife, often leading to entanglement and starvation, ultimately resulting in death. Therefore, removing debris from the ocean is crucial to restore the natural balance and allow marine life to thrive. Instance segmentation is an advanced form of object detection that identifies objects and precisely locates and separates them, making it an essential tool for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to navigate and interact with their underwater environment effectively. AUVs use image segmentation to analyze images captured by their cameras to navigate underwater environments. In this paper, we use instance segmentation to calculate the area of individual objects within an image, we use YOLOV7 in Roboflow to generate a set of bounding boxes for each object in the image with a class label and a confidence score for every detection. A segmentation mask is then created for each object by applying a binary mask to the object's bounding box. The masks are generated by applying a binary threshold to the output of a convolutional neural network trained to segment objects from the background. Finally, refining the segmentation mask for each object is done by applying post-processing techniques such as morphological operations and contour detection, to improve the accuracy and quality of the mask. The process of estimating the area of instance segmentation involves calculating the area of each segmented instance separately and then summing up the areas of all instances to obtain the total area. The calculation is carried out using standard formulas based on the shape of the object, such as rectangles and circles. In cases where the object is complex, the Monte Carlo method is used to estimate the area. This method provides a higher degree of accuracy than traditional methods, especially when using a large number of samples.
Authors:Christian I. Narcia-Macias, Joselito Guardado, Jocell Rodriguez, Joanne Rampersad-Ammons, Erik Enriquez, Dong-Chul Kim
Abstract:
Utilizing computer vision and the latest technological advancements, in this study, we developed a honey bee monitoring system that aims to enhance our understanding of Colony Collapse Disorder, honey bee behavior, population decline, and overall hive health. The system is positioned at the hive entrance providing real-time data, enabling beekeepers to closely monitor the hive's activity and health through an account-based website. Using machine learning, our monitoring system can accurately track honey bees, monitor pollen-gathering activity, and detect Varroa mites, all without causing any disruption to the honey bees. Moreover, we have ensured that the development of this monitoring system utilizes cost-effective technology, making it accessible to apiaries of various scales, including hobbyists, commercial beekeeping businesses, and researchers. The inference models used to detect honey bees, pollen, and mites are based on the YOLOv7-tiny architecture trained with our own data. The F1-score for honey bee model recognition is 0.95 and the precision and recall value is 0.981. For our pollen and mite object detection model F1-score is 0.95 and the precision and recall value is 0.821 for pollen and 0.996 for "mite". The overall performance of our IntelliBeeHive system demonstrates its effectiveness in monitoring the honey bee's activity, achieving an accuracy of 96.28 % in tracking and our pollen model achieved a F1-score of 0.831.
Authors:Jianghu Shen, Xiaojun Wu
Abstract:
In the field of remote sensing, we often utilize oriented bounding boxes (OBB) to bound the objects. This approach significantly reduces the overlap among dense detection boxes and minimizes the inclusion of background content within the bounding boxes. To enhance the detection accuracy of oriented objects, we propose a unique loss function based on edge gradients, inspired by the similarity measurement function used in template matching task. During this process, we address the issues of non-differentiability of the function and the semantic alignment between gradient vectors in ground truth (GT) boxes and predicted boxes (PB). Experimental results show that our proposed loss function achieves $0.6\%$ mAP improvement compared to the commonly used Smooth L1 loss in the baseline algorithm. Additionally, we design an edge-based self-attention module to encourage the detection network to focus more on the object edges. Leveraging these two innovations, we achieve a mAP increase of 1.3% on the DOTA dataset.
Authors:Haoqin Hong, Yue Zhou, Xiangyu Shu, Xiaofang Hu
Abstract:
Traffic sign detection is an important research direction in intelligent driving. Unfortunately, existing methods often overlook extreme conditions such as fog, rain, and motion blur. Moreover, the end-to-end training strategy for image denoising and object detection models fails to utilize inter-model information effectively. To address these issues, we propose CCSPNet, an efficient feature extraction module based on Contextual Transformer and CNN, capable of effectively utilizing the static and dynamic features of images, achieving faster inference speed and providing stronger feature enhancement capabilities. Furthermore, we establish the correlation between object detection and image denoising tasks and propose a joint training model, CCSPNet-Joint, to improve data efficiency and generalization. Finally, to validate our approach, we create the CCTSDB-AUG dataset for traffic sign detection in extreme scenarios. Extensive experiments have shown that CCSPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in traffic sign detection under extreme conditions. Compared to end-to-end methods, CCSPNet-Joint achieves a 5.32% improvement in precision and an 18.09% improvement in mAP@.5.
Authors:Zhiqiang Hu, Tao Yu
Abstract:
Recently, MLP-based vision backbones have achieved promising performance in several visual recognition tasks. However, the existing MLP-based methods directly aggregate tokens with static weights, leaving the adaptability to different images untouched. Moreover, Recent research demonstrates that MLP-Transformer is great at creating long-range dependencies but ineffective at catching high frequencies that primarily transmit local information, which prevents it from applying to the downstream dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation. To address these challenges, we propose a content-adaptive yet computationally efficient structure, dubbed Dynamic Spectrum Mixer (DSM). The DSM represents token interactions in the frequency domain by employing the Discrete Cosine Transform, which can learn long-term spatial dependencies with log-linear complexity. Furthermore, a dynamic spectrum weight generation layer is proposed as the spectrum bands selector, which could emphasize the informative frequency bands while diminishing others. To this end, the technique can efficiently learn detailed features from visual input that contains both high- and low-frequency information. Extensive experiments show that DSM is a powerful and adaptable backbone for a range of visual recognition tasks. Particularly, DSM outperforms previous transformer-based and MLP-based models, on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, such as 83.8 \% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, and 49.9 \% mIoU on ADE20K.
Authors:Zuojin Tang, Bo Sun, Tongwei Ma, Daosheng Li, Zhenhui Xu
Abstract:
The annotation of 3D datasets is required for semantic-segmentation and object detection in scene understanding. In this paper we present a framework for the weakly supervision of a point clouds transformer that is used for 3D object detection. The aim is to decrease the required amount of supervision needed for training, as a result of the high cost of annotating a 3D datasets. We propose an Unsupervised Voting Proposal Module, which learns randomly preset anchor points and uses voting network to select prepared anchor points of high quality. Then it distills information into student and teacher network. In terms of student network, we apply ResNet network to efficiently extract local characteristics. However, it also can lose much global information. To provide the input which incorporates the global and local information as the input of student networks, we adopt the self-attention mechanism of transformer to extract global features, and the ResNet layers to extract region proposals. The teacher network supervises the classification and regression of the student network using the pre-trained model on ImageNet. On the challenging KITTI datasets, the experimental results have achieved the highest level of average precision compared with the most recent weakly supervised 3D object detectors.
Authors:Irfan Tito Kurniawan, Bambang Riyanto Trilaksono
Abstract:
Thanks to the complementary nature of millimeter wave radar and camera, deep learning-based radar-camera 3D object detection methods may reliably produce accurate detections even in low-visibility conditions. This makes them preferable to use in autonomous vehicles' perception systems, especially as the combined cost of both sensors is cheaper than the cost of a lidar. Recent radar-camera methods commonly perform feature-level fusion which often involves projecting the radar points onto the same plane as the image features and fusing the extracted features from both modalities. While performing fusion on the image plane is generally simpler and faster, projecting radar points onto the image plane flattens the depth dimension of the point cloud which might lead to information loss and makes extracting the spatial features of the point cloud harder. We proposed ClusterFusion, an architecture that leverages the local spatial features of the radar point cloud by clustering the point cloud and performing feature extraction directly on the point cloud clusters before projecting the features onto the image plane. ClusterFusion achieved the state-of-the-art performance among all radar-monocular camera methods on the test slice of the nuScenes dataset with 48.7% nuScenes detection score (NDS). We also investigated the performance of different radar feature extraction strategies on point cloud clusters: a handcrafted strategy, a learning-based strategy, and a combination of both, and found that the handcrafted strategy yielded the best performance. The main goal of this work is to explore the use of radar's local spatial and point-wise features by extracting them directly from radar point cloud clusters for a radar-monocular camera 3D object detection method that performs cross-modal feature fusion on the image plane.
Authors:Harshith Mohan Kumar, Sean Lawrence
Abstract:
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have made significant strides, capitalizing on computer vision to enhance perception and decision-making capabilities. Nonetheless, the adaptation of these systems to diverse traffic scenarios poses challenges due to shifts in data distribution stemming from factors such as location, weather, and road infrastructure. To tackle this, we introduce a weakly-supervised label unification pipeline that amalgamates pseudo labels from a multitude of object detection models trained on heterogeneous datasets. Our pipeline engenders a unified label space through the amalgamation of labels from disparate datasets, rectifying bias and enhancing generalization. We fine-tune multiple object detection models on individual datasets, subsequently crafting a unified dataset featuring pseudo labels, meticulously validated for precision. Following this, we retrain a solitary object detection model using the merged label space, culminating in a resilient model proficient in dynamic traffic scenarios. We put forth a comprehensive evaluation of our approach, employing diverse datasets originating from varied Asian countries, effectively demonstrating its efficacy in challenging road conditions. Notably, our method yields substantial enhancements in object detection performance, culminating in a model with heightened resistance against domain shifts.
Authors:Brandon Sheffield, Frank E. Bobe, Bradley Marchand, Matthew S. Emigh
Abstract:
Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) imaging has become a crucial technology for underwater exploration because of its unique ability to maintain resolution at increasing ranges, a characteristic absent in conventional sonar techniques. However, the effective application of deep learning to SAS data processing is often limited due to the scarcity of labeled data. To address this challenge, this paper proposes MoCo-SAS that leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) for SAS data processing, classification, and pattern recognition. The experimental results demonstrate that MoCo-SAS significantly outperforms traditional supervised learning methods, as evidenced by significant improvements observed in terms of the F1-score. These findings highlight the potential of SSL in advancing the state-of-the-art in SAS data processing, offering promising avenues for enhanced underwater object detection and classification.
Authors:Juan Sandino, Peter A. Caccetta, Conrad Sanderson, Frederic Maire, Felipe Gonzalez
Abstract:
Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have resulted in their quick adoption for wide a range of civilian applications, including precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring and surveillance. UAVs offer low-cost platforms with flexible hardware configurations, as well as an increasing number of autonomous capabilities, including take-off, landing, object tracking and obstacle avoidance. However, little attention has been paid to how UAVs deal with object detection uncertainties caused by false readings from vision-based detectors, data noise, vibrations, and occlusion. In most situations, the relevance and understanding of these detections are delegated to human operators, as many UAVs have limited cognition power to interact autonomously with the environment. This paper presents a framework for autonomous navigation under uncertainty in outdoor scenarios for small UAVs using a probabilistic-based motion planner. The framework is evaluated with real flight tests using a sub 2 kg quadrotor UAV and illustrated in victim finding Search and Rescue (SAR) case study in a forest/bushland. The navigation problem is modelled using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), and solved in real time onboard the small UAV using Augmented Belief Trees (ABT) and the TAPIR toolkit. Results from experiments using colour and thermal imagery show that the proposed motion planner provides accurate victim localisation coordinates, as the UAV has the flexibility to interact with the environment and obtain clearer visualisations of any potential victims compared to the baseline motion planner. Incorporating this system allows optimised UAV surveillance operations by diminishing false positive readings from vision-based object detectors.
Authors:Quan Shi, Kaiyuan Deng
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are commonly used for edge collaborative computing in current transmission line object detection, where computationally intensive tasks generated by user nodes are offloaded to more powerful edge servers for processing. However, performing edge collaborative processing on transmission line image data may result in serious privacy breaches. To address this issue, we propose a secure single-stage detection model called SecYOLOv7 that preserves the privacy of object detecting. Based on secure multi-party computation (MPC), a series of secure computing protocols are designed for the collaborative execution of Secure Feature Contraction, Secure Bounding-Box Prediction and Secure Object Classification by two non-edge servers. Performance evaluation shows that both computational and communication overhead in this framework as well as calculation error significantly outperform existing works.
Authors:Michihiro Kuroki, Toshihiko Yamasaki
Abstract:
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has witnessed significant advances in the field of object recognition, with saliency maps being used to highlight image features relevant to the predictions of learned models. Although these advances have made AI-based technology more interpretable to humans, several issues have come to light. Some approaches present explanations irrelevant to predictions, and cannot guarantee the validity of XAI (axioms). In this study, we propose the Baseline Shapley-based Explainable Detector (BSED), which extends the Shapley value to object detection, thereby enhancing the validity of interpretation. The Shapley value can attribute the prediction of a learned model to a baseline feature while satisfying the explainability axioms. The processing cost for the BSED is within the reasonable range, while the original Shapley value is prohibitively computationally expensive. Furthermore, BSED is a generalizable method that can be applied to various detectors in a model-agnostic manner, and interpret various detection targets without fine-grained parameter tuning. These strengths can enable the practical applicability of XAI. We present quantitative and qualitative comparisons with existing methods to demonstrate the superior performance of our method in terms of explanation validity. Moreover, we present some applications, such as correcting detection based on explanations from our method.
Authors:Faisal Hawlader, François Robinet, Raphaël Frank
Abstract:
Environmental perception is a key element of autonomous driving because the information received from the perception module influences core driving decisions. An outstanding challenge in real-time perception for autonomous driving lies in finding the best trade-off between detection quality and latency. Major constraints on both computation and power have to be taken into account for real-time perception in autonomous vehicles. Larger object detection models tend to produce the best results, but are also slower at runtime. Since the most accurate detectors cannot run in real-time locally, we investigate the possibility of offloading computation to edge and cloud platforms, which are less resource-constrained. We create a synthetic dataset to train object detection models and evaluate different offloading strategies. Using real hardware and network simulations, we compare different trade-offs between prediction quality and end-to-end delay. Since sending raw frames over the network implies additional transmission delays, we also explore the use of JPEG and H.265 compression at varying qualities and measure their impact on prediction metrics. We show that models with adequate compression can be run in real-time on the cloud while outperforming local detection performance.
Authors:Muhammad, Awais, Weiming, Zhuang, Lingjuan, Lyu, Sung-Ho, Bae
Abstract:
Object detection is a vital task in computer vision and has become an integral component of numerous critical systems. However, state-of-the-art object detectors, similar to their classification counterparts, are susceptible to small adversarial perturbations that can significantly alter their normal behavior. Unlike classification, the robustness of object detectors has not been thoroughly explored. In this work, we take the initial step towards bridging the gap between the robustness of classification and object detection by leveraging adversarially trained classification models. Merely utilizing adversarially trained models as backbones for object detection does not result in robustness. We propose effective modifications to the classification-based backbone to instill robustness in object detection without incurring any computational overhead. To further enhance the robustness achieved by the proposed modified backbone, we introduce two lightweight components: imitation loss and delayed adversarial training. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Authors:Jumman Hossain, Maliha Momtaz
Abstract:
Nowadays, autonomous cars are gaining traction due to their numerous potential applications on battlefields and in resolving a variety of other real-world challenges. The main goal of our project is to build an autonomous system using DeepRacer which will follow a specific person (for our project, a soldier) when they will be moving in any direction. Two main components to accomplish this project is an optimized Single-Shot Multibox Detection (SSD) object detection model and a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model. We accomplished the task using SSD Lite instead of SSD and at the end, compared the results among SSD, SSD with Neural Computing Stick (NCS), and SSD Lite. Experimental results show that SSD Lite gives better performance among these three techniques and exhibits a considerable boost in inference speed (~2-3 times) without compromising accuracy.
Authors:Samia Sultana, Shyla Afroge
Abstract:
Astronomical images provide information about the great variety of cosmic objects in the Universe. Due to the large volumes of data, the presence of innumerable bright point sources as well as noise within the frame and the spatial gap between objects and satellite cameras, it is a challenging task to classify and detect the celestial objects. We propose an Adaptive Thresholding Method (ATM) based segmentation and Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) based cosmic object detection including a well-structured series of pre-processing steps designed to enhance segmentation and detection.
Authors:Abhinav Benagi, Dhanyatha Narayan, Charith Rage, A Sushmitha
Abstract:
The main backbone of our Artificial Eye model is the Raspberry pi3 which is connected to the webcam ,ultrasonic proximity sensor, speaker and we also run all our software models i.e object detection, Optical Character recognition, google text to speech conversion and the Mycroft voice assistance model. At first the ultrasonic proximity sensor will be measuring the distance between itself and any obstacle in front of it .When the Proximity sensor detects any obstacle in front within its specified range, the blind person will hear an audio prompt about an obstacle in his way at a certain distance. At this time the Webcam will capture an image in front of it and the Object detection model and the Optical Character Recognition model will begin to run on the Raspberry pi. The imat of the blind person. The text and the object detected are conveyed to the blind pege captured is first sent through the Tesseract OCR module to detect any texts in the image and then through the Object detection model to detect the objects in fronrson by converting the texts to speech by using the gTTS module. Along with the above mentioned process going on there will be an active MYCROFT voice assistant model which can be used to interact with the blind person. The blind person can ask about the weather , daily news , any information on the internet ,etc
Authors:Bowen Zheng, Chenxi Huang, Yuemei Luo
Abstract:
Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of head Computed Tomography (CT) images elucidates the intricate spatial relationships of tissue structures, thereby assisting in accurate diagnosis. Nonetheless, securing an optimal head CT scan without deviation is challenging in clinical settings, owing to poor positioning by technicians, patient's physical constraints, or CT scanner tilt angle restrictions. Manual formatting and reconstruction not only introduce subjectivity but also strain time and labor resources. To address these issues, we propose an efficient automatic head CT images 3D reconstruction method, improving accuracy and repeatability, as well as diminishing manual intervention. Our approach employs a deep learning-based object detection algorithm, identifying and evaluating orbitomeatal line landmarks to automatically reformat the images prior to reconstruction. Given the dearth of existing evaluations of object detection algorithms in the context of head CT images, we compared ten methods from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. By exploring their precision, efficiency, and robustness, we singled out the lightweight YOLOv8 as the aptest algorithm for our task, with an mAP of 92.77% and impressive robustness against class imbalance. Our qualitative evaluation of standardized reconstruction results demonstrates the clinical practicability and validity of our method.
Authors:Amardeep Singh, Charles Jia, Donald Kirk
Abstract:
Plastic has imbibed itself as an indispensable part of our day to day activities, becoming a source of problems due to its non-biodegradable nature and cheaper production prices. With these problems, comes the challenge of mitigating and responding to the aftereffects of disposal or the lack of proper disposal which leads to waste concentrating in locations and disturbing ecosystems for both plants and animals. As plastic debris levels continue to rise with the accumulation of waste in garbage patches in landfills and more hazardously in natural water bodies, swift action is necessary to plug or cease this flow. While manual sorting operations and detection can offer a solution, they can be augmented using highly advanced computer imagery linked with robotic appendages for removing wastes. The primary application of focus in this report are the much-discussed Computer Vision and Open Vision which have gained novelty for their light dependence on internet and ability to relay information in remote areas. These applications can be applied to the creation of edge-based mobility devices that can as a counter to the growing problem of plastic debris in oceans and rivers, demanding little connectivity and still offering the same results with reasonably timed maintenance. The principal findings of this project cover the various methods that were tested and deployed to detect waste in images, as well as comparing them against different waste types. The project has been able to produce workable models that can perform on time detection of sampled images using an augmented CNN approach. Latter portions of the project have also achieved a better interpretation of the necessary preprocessing steps required to arrive at the best accuracies, including the best hardware for expanding waste detection studies to larger environments.
Authors:Guy RY Coleman, Matthew Kutugata, Michael J Walsh, Muthukumar Bagavathiannan
Abstract:
Many advanced, image-based precision agricultural technologies for plant breeding, field crop research, and site-specific crop management hinge on the reliable detection and phenotyping of plants across highly variable morphological growth stages. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise for image-based plant phenotyping and weed recognition, but their ability to recognize growth stages, often with stark differences in appearance, is uncertain. Amaranthus palmeri (Palmer amaranth) is a particularly challenging weed plant in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) production, exhibiting highly variable plant morphology both across growth stages over a growing season, as well as between plants at a given growth stage due to high genetic diversity. In this paper, we investigate eight-class growth stage recognition of A. palmeri in cotton as a challenging model for You Only Look Once (YOLO) architectures. We compare 26 different architecture variants from YOLO v3, v5, v6, v6 3.0, v7, and v8 on an eight-class growth stage dataset of A. palmeri. The highest mAP@[0.5:0.95] for recognition of all growth stage classes was 47.34% achieved by v8-X, with inter-class confusion across visually similar growth stages. With all growth stages grouped as a single class, performance increased, with a maximum mean average precision (mAP@[0.5:0.95]) of 67.05% achieved by v7-Original. Single class recall of up to 81.42% was achieved by v5-X, and precision of up to 89.72% was achieved by v8-X. Class activation maps (CAM) were used to understand model attention on the complex dataset. Fewer classes, grouped by visual or size features improved performance over the ground-truth eight-class dataset. Successful growth stage detection highlights the substantial opportunity for improving plant phenotyping and weed recognition technologies with open-source object detection architectures.
Authors:Gratianus Wesley Putra Data, Henry Howard-Jenkins, David Murray, Victor Prisacariu
Abstract:
We propose Cos R-CNN, a simple exemplar-based R-CNN formulation that is designed for online few-shot object detection. That is, it is able to localise and classify novel object categories in images with few examples without fine-tuning. Cos R-CNN frames detection as a learning-to-compare task: unseen classes are represented as exemplar images, and objects are detected based on their similarity to these exemplars. The cosine-based classification head allows for dynamic adaptation of classification parameters to the exemplar embedding, and encourages the clustering of similar classes in embedding space without the need for manual tuning of distance-metric hyperparameters. This simple formulation achieves best results on the recently proposed 5-way ImageNet few-shot detection benchmark, beating the online 1/5/10-shot scenarios by more than 8/3/1%, as well as performing up to 20% better in online 20-way few-shot VOC across all shots on novel classes.
Authors:Liu Yuyang, Cong Yang, Goswami Dipam, Liu Xialei, Joost van de Weijer
Abstract:
In incremental learning, replaying stored samples from previous tasks together with current task samples is one of the most efficient approaches to address catastrophic forgetting. However, unlike incremental classification, image replay has not been successfully applied to incremental object detection (IOD). In this paper, we identify the overlooked problem of foreground shift as the main reason for this. Foreground shift only occurs when replaying images of previous tasks and refers to the fact that their background might contain foreground objects of the current task. To overcome this problem, a novel and efficient Augmented Box Replay (ABR) method is developed that only stores and replays foreground objects and thereby circumvents the foreground shift problem. In addition, we propose an innovative Attentive RoI Distillation loss that uses spatial attention from region-of-interest (RoI) features to constrain current model to focus on the most important information from old model. ABR significantly reduces forgetting of previous classes while maintaining high plasticity in current classes. Moreover, it considerably reduces the storage requirements when compared to standard image replay. Comprehensive experiments on Pascal-VOC and COCO datasets support the state-of-the-art performance of our model.
Authors:Daria Reshetova, Guanhang Wu, Marcel Puyat, Chunhui Gu, Huizhong Chen
Abstract:
Object detection is the key technique to a number of Computer Vision applications, but it often requires large amounts of annotated data to achieve decent results. Moreover, for pedestrian detection specifically, the collected data might contain some personally identifiable information (PII), which is highly restricted in many countries. This label intensive and privacy concerning task has recently led to an increasing interest in training the detection models using synthetically generated pedestrian datasets collected with a photo-realistic video game engine. The engine is able to generate unlimited amounts of data with precise and consistent annotations, which gives potential for significant gains in the real-world applications. However, the use of synthetic data for training introduces a synthetic-to-real domain shift aggravating the final performance. To close the gap between the real and synthetic data, we propose to use a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which performsparameterized unpaired image-to-image translation to generate more realistic images. The key benefit of using the GAN is its intrinsic preference of low-level changes to geometric ones, which means annotations of a given synthetic image remain accurate even after domain translation is performed thus eliminating the need for labeling real data. We extensively experimented with the proposed method using MOTSynth dataset to train and MOT17 and MOT20 detection datasets to test, with experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of this method. Our approach not only produces visually plausible samples but also does not require any labels of the real domain thus making it applicable to the variety of downstream tasks.
Authors:Yize Cheng, Wenbin Hu, Minhao Cheng
Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown unprecedented success in object detection tasks. However, it was also discovered that DNNs are vulnerable to multiple kinds of attacks, including Backdoor Attacks. Through the attack, the attacker manages to embed a hidden backdoor into the DNN such that the model behaves normally on benign data samples, but makes attacker-specified judgments given the occurrence of a predefined trigger. Although numerous backdoor attacks have been experimented on image classification, backdoor attacks on object detection tasks have not been properly investigated and explored. As object detection has been adopted as an important module in multiple security-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving, backdoor attacks on object detection could pose even more severe threats. Inspired by the inherent property of deep learning-based object detectors, we propose a simple yet effective backdoor attack method against object detection without modifying the ground truth annotations, specifically focusing on the object disappearance attack and object generation attack. Extensive experiments and ablation studies prove the effectiveness of our attack on the benchmark object detection dataset MSCOCO2017, on which we achieve an attack success rate of more than 92% with a poison rate of only 5%.
Authors:Bryan Tjandra, Made S. N. Negara, Nyoo S. C. Handoko
Abstract:
Indonesia, as a maritime country, has a significant portion of its territory covered by water. Ineffective waste management has resulted in a considerable amount of trash in Indonesian waters, leading to various issues. The development of an automated trash-collecting robot can be a solution to address this problem. The robot requires a system capable of detecting objects in motion, such as in videos. However, using naive object detection methods in videos has limitations, particularly when image focus is reduced and the target object is obstructed by other objects. This paper's contribution provides an explanation of the methods that can be applied to perform video object detection in an automated trash-collecting robot. The study utilizes the YOLOv5 model and the Robust & Efficient Post Processing (REPP) method, along with tubelet-level bounding box linking on the FloW and Roboflow datasets. The combination of these methods enhances the performance of naive object detection from YOLOv5 by considering the detection results in adjacent frames. The results show that the post-processing stage and tubelet-level bounding box linking can improve the quality of detection, achieving approximately 3% better performance compared to YOLOv5 alone. The use of these methods has the potential to detect surface and underwater trash and can be applied to a real-time image-based trash-collecting robot. Implementing this system is expected to mitigate the damage caused by trash in the past and improve Indonesia's waste management system in the future.
Authors:Pierre Le Jeune, Anissa Mokraoui
Abstract:
In Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD), detecting small objects is extremely difficult. The limited supervision cripples the localization capabilities of the models and a few pixels shift can dramatically reduce the Intersection over Union (IoU) between the ground truth and predicted boxes for small objects. To this end, we propose Scale-adaptive Intersection over Union (SIoU), a novel box similarity measure. SIoU changes with the objects' size, it is more lenient with small object shifts. We conducted a user study and SIoU better aligns than IoU with human judgment. Employing SIoU as an evaluation criterion helps to build more user-oriented models. SIoU can also be used as a loss function to prioritize small objects during training, outperforming existing loss functions. SIoU improves small object detection in the non-few-shot regime, but this setting is unrealistic in the industry as annotated detection datasets are often too expensive to acquire. Hence, our experiments mainly focus on the few-shot regime to demonstrate the superiority and versatility of SIoU loss. SIoU improves significantly FSOD performance on small objects in both natural (Pascal VOC and COCO datasets) and aerial images (DOTA and DIOR). In aerial imagery, small objects are critical and SIoU loss achieves new state-of-the-art FSOD on DOTA and DIOR.
Authors:Kai Su, Yoichi Tomioka, Qiangfu Zhao, Yong Liu
Abstract:
In the realm of Tiny AI, we introduce ``You Only Look at Interested Cells" (YOLIC), an efficient method for object localization and classification on edge devices. Through seamlessly blending the strengths of semantic segmentation and object detection, YOLIC offers superior computational efficiency and precision. By adopting Cells of Interest for classification instead of individual pixels, YOLIC encapsulates relevant information, reduces computational load, and enables rough object shape inference. Importantly, the need for bounding box regression is obviated, as YOLIC capitalizes on the predetermined cell configuration that provides information about potential object location, size, and shape. To tackle the issue of single-label classification limitations, a multi-label classification approach is applied to each cell for effectively recognizing overlapping or closely situated objects. This paper presents extensive experiments on multiple datasets to demonstrate that YOLIC achieves detection performance comparable to the state-of-the-art YOLO algorithms while surpassing in speed, exceeding 30fps on a Raspberry Pi 4B CPU. All resources related to this study, including datasets, cell designer, image annotation tool, and source code, have been made publicly available on our project website at https://kai3316.github.io/yolic.github.io
Authors:Raja Sunkara, Tie Luo
Abstract:
We introduce YOGA, a deep learning based yet lightweight object detection model that can operate on low-end edge devices while still achieving competitive accuracy. The YOGA architecture consists of a two-phase feature learning pipeline with a cheap linear transformation, which learns feature maps using only half of the convolution filters required by conventional convolutional neural networks. In addition, it performs multi-scale feature fusion in its neck using an attention mechanism instead of the naive concatenation used by conventional detectors. YOGA is a flexible model that can be easily scaled up or down by several orders of magnitude to fit a broad range of hardware constraints. We evaluate YOGA on COCO-val and COCO-testdev datasets with other over 10 state-of-the-art object detectors. The results show that YOGA strikes the best trade-off between model size and accuracy (up to 22% increase of AP and 23-34% reduction of parameters and FLOPs), making it an ideal choice for deployment in the wild on low-end edge devices. This is further affirmed by our hardware implementation and evaluation on NVIDIA Jetson Nano.
Authors:Hao Zheng, Regina Lee, Yuqian Lu
Abstract:
Understanding comprehensive assembly knowledge from videos is critical for futuristic ultra-intelligent industry. To enable technological breakthrough, we present HA-ViD - the first human assembly video dataset that features representative industrial assembly scenarios, natural procedural knowledge acquisition process, and consistent human-robot shared annotations. Specifically, HA-ViD captures diverse collaboration patterns of real-world assembly, natural human behaviors and learning progression during assembly, and granulate action annotations to subject, action verb, manipulated object, target object, and tool. We provide 3222 multi-view, multi-modality videos (each video contains one assembly task), 1.5M frames, 96K temporal labels and 2M spatial labels. We benchmark four foundational video understanding tasks: action recognition, action segmentation, object detection and multi-object tracking. Importantly, we analyze their performance for comprehending knowledge in assembly progress, process efficiency, task collaboration, skill parameters and human intention. Details of HA-ViD is available at: https://iai-hrc.github.io/ha-vid.
Authors:Xinyi Bai, Steffi Agino Priyanka, Hsiao-Jung Tung, Yuankai Wang
Abstract:
Due to the low accuracy of object detection and recognition in many intelligent surveillance systems at nighttime, the quality of night images is crucial. Compared with the corresponding daytime image, nighttime image is characterized as low brightness, low contrast and high noise. In this paper, a bio-inspired image enhancement algorithm is proposed to convert a low illuminance image to a brighter and clear one. Different from existing bio-inspired algorithm, the proposed method doesn't use any training sequences, we depend on a novel chain of contrast enhancement and denoising algorithms without using any forms of recursive functions. Our method can largely improve the brightness and contrast of night images, besides, suppress noise. Then we implement on real experiment, and simulation experiment to test our algorithms. Both results show the advantages of proposed algorithm over contrast pair, Meylan and Retinex.
Authors:Souayah Abdelkader, Mokretar Kraroubi Abderrahmene, Slimane Larabi
Abstract:
People with visual impairments face numerous challenges when interacting with their environment. Our objective is to develop a device that facilitates communication between individuals with visual impairments and their surroundings. The device will convert visual information into auditory feedback, enabling users to understand their environment in a way that suits their sensory needs. Initially, an object detection model is selected from existing machine learning models based on its accuracy and cost considerations, including time and power consumption. The chosen model is then implemented on a Raspberry Pi, which is connected to a specifically designed tactile device. When the device is touched at a specific position, it provides an audio signal that communicates the identification of the object present in the scene at that corresponding position to the visually impaired individual. Conducted tests have demonstrated the effectiveness of this device in scene understanding, encompassing static or dynamic objects, as well as screen contents such as TVs, computers, and mobile phones.
Authors:Ravi Kakaiya, Rakshith Sathish, Ramanathan Sethuraman, Debdoot Sheet
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles and Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) have the potential to radically change the way we travel. Many such vehicles currently rely on segmentation and object detection algorithms to detect and track objects around its surrounding. The data collected from the vehicles are often sent to cloud servers to facilitate continual/life-long learning of these algorithms. Considering the bandwidth constraints, the data is compressed before sending it to servers, where it is typically decompressed for training and analysis. In this work, we propose the use of a learning-based compression Codec to reduce the overhead in latency incurred for the decompression operation in the standard pipeline. We demonstrate that the learned compressed representation can also be used to perform tasks like semantic segmentation in addition to decompression to obtain the images. We experimentally validate the proposed pipeline on the Cityscapes dataset, where we achieve a compression factor up to $66 \times$ while preserving the information required to perform segmentation with a dice coefficient of $0.84$ as compared to $0.88$ achieved using decompressed images while reducing the overall compute by $11\%$.
Authors:Ce Zhang, Chengjie Zhang, Yiluan Guo, Lingji Chen, Michael Happold
Abstract:
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is crucial to autonomous vehicle perception. End-to-end transformer-based algorithms, which detect and track objects simultaneously, show great potential for the MOT task. However, most existing methods focus on image-based tracking with a single object category. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based MOT algorithm (MotionTrack) with multi-modality sensor inputs to track objects with multiple classes. Our objective is to establish a transformer baseline for the MOT in an autonomous driving environment. The proposed algorithm consists of a transformer-based data association (DA) module and a transformer-based query enhancement module to achieve MOT and Multiple Object Detection (MOD) simultaneously. The MotionTrack and its variations achieve better results (AMOTA score at 0.55) on the nuScenes dataset compared with other classical baseline models, such as the AB3DMOT, the CenterTrack, and the probabilistic 3D Kalman filter. In addition, we prove that a modified attention mechanism can be utilized for DA to accomplish the MOT, and aggregate history features to enhance the MOD performance.
Authors:Hao Chen, Zhi Jin
Abstract:
Decreased visibility, intensive noise, and biased color are the common problems existing in low-light images. These visual disturbances further reduce the performance of high-level vision tasks, such as object detection, and tracking. To address this issue, some image enhancement methods have been proposed to increase the image contrast. However, most of them are implemented only in the spatial domain, which can be severely influenced by noise signals while enhancing. Hence, in this work, we propose a novel residual recurrent multi-wavelet convolutional neural network R2-MWCNN learned in the frequency domain that can simultaneously increase the image contrast and reduce noise signals well. This end-to-end trainable network utilizes a multi-level discrete wavelet transform to divide input feature maps into distinct frequencies, resulting in a better denoise impact. A channel-wise loss function is proposed to correct the color distortion for more realistic results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed R2-MWCNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods quantitively and qualitatively.
Authors:Peng Sun, Yongbin Zheng, Wenqi Wu, Wanying Xu, Shengjian Bai
Abstract:
Arbitrary-oriented object detection is a relatively emerging but challenging task. Although remarkable progress has been made, there still remain many unsolved issues due to the large diversity of patterns in orientation, scale, aspect ratio, and visual appearance of objects in aerial images. Most of the existing methods adopt a coarse-grained fixed label assignment strategy and suffer from the inconsistency between the classification score and localization accuracy. First, to align the metric inconsistency between sample selection and regression loss calculation caused by fixed IoU strategy, we introduce affine transformation to evaluate the quality of samples and propose a distance-based label assignment strategy. The proposed metric-aligned selection (MAS) strategy can dynamically select samples according to the shape and rotation characteristic of objects. Second, to further address the inconsistency between classification and localization, we propose a critical feature sampling (CFS) module, which performs localization refinement on the sampling location for classification task to extract critical features accurately. Third, we present a scale-controlled smooth $L_1$ loss (SC-Loss) to adaptively select high quality samples by changing the form of regression loss function based on the statistics of proposals during training. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging rotated object detection datasets DOTA, FAIR1M-1.0, HRSC2016, and UCAS-AOD. The results show the state-of-the-art accuracy of the proposed detector.
Authors:Guoqiang Yang, Xiaowen Chang, Zitong Wang, Min Yang
Abstract:
The phenomenon of seat occupancy in university libraries is a prevalent issue. However, existing solutions, such as software-based seat reservations and sensors-based occupancy detection, have proven to be inadequate in effectively addressing this problem. In this study, we propose a novel approach: a serial dual-channel object detection model based on Faster RCNN. This model is designed to discern all instances of occupied seats within the library and continuously update real-time information regarding seat occupancy status. To train the neural network, a distinctive dataset is utilized, which blends virtual images generated using Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) with real-world images. Notably, our test results underscore the remarkable performance uplift attained through the application of self-generated virtual datasets in training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), particularly within specialized scenarios. Furthermore, this study introduces a pioneering detection model that seamlessly amalgamates the Faster R-CNN-based object detection framework with a transfer learning-based object classification algorithm. This amalgamation not only significantly curtails the computational resources and time investments needed for neural network training but also considerably heightens the efficiency of single-frame detection rates. Additionally, a user-friendly web interface and a mobile application have been meticulously developed, constituting a computer vision-driven platform for detecting seat occupancy within library premises. Noteworthy is the substantial enhancement in seat occupancy recognition accuracy, coupled with a reduction in computational resources required for neural network training, collectively contributing to a considerable amplification in the overall efficiency of library seat management.
Authors:Kangning Yin, Zhen Ding, Zhihua Dong, Dongsheng Chen, Jie Fu, Xinhui Ji, Guangqiang Yin, Zhiguo Wang
Abstract:
Federated learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning, has been rapidly applied in wireless communication networks. FL enables Internet of Things (IoT) clients to obtain well-trained models while preventing privacy leakage. Person detection can be deployed on edge devices with limited computing power if combined with FL to process the video data directly at the edge. However, due to the different hardware and deployment scenarios of different cameras, the data collected by the camera present non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), and the global model derived from FL aggregation is less effective. Meanwhile, existing research lacks public data set for real-world FL object detection, which is not conducive to studying the non-IID problem on IoT cameras. Therefore, we open source a non-IID IoT person detection (NIPD) data set, which is collected from five different cameras. To our knowledge, this is the first true device-based non-IID person detection data set. Based on this data set, we explain how to establish a FL experimental platform and provide a benchmark for non-IID person detection. NIPD is expected to promote the application of FL and the security of smart city.
Authors:Louis Fouquet, Simona Maggio, Léo Dreyfus-Schmidt
Abstract:
Transfer learning aims to make the most of existing pre-trained models to achieve better performance on a new task in limited data scenarios. However, it is unclear which models will perform best on which task, and it is prohibitively expensive to try all possible combinations. If transferability estimation offers a computation-efficient approach to evaluate the generalisation ability of models, prior works focused exclusively on classification settings. To overcome this limitation, we extend transferability metrics to object detection. We design a simple method to extract local features corresponding to each object within an image using ROI-Align. We also introduce TLogME, a transferability metric taking into account the coordinates regression task. In our experiments, we compare TLogME to state-of-the-art metrics in the estimation of transfer performance of the Faster-RCNN object detector. We evaluate all metrics on source and target selection tasks, for real and synthetic datasets, and with different backbone architectures. We show that, over different tasks, TLogME using the local extraction method provides a robust correlation with transfer performance and outperforms other transferability metrics on local and global level features.
Authors:Leonardo de Melo Joao, Azael de Melo e Sousa, Bianca Martins dos Santos, Silvio Jamil Ferzoli Guimaraes, Jancarlo Ferreira Gomes, Ewa Kijak, Alexandre Xavier Falcao
Abstract:
State-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods have succeeded in several applications at the price of relying on heavyweight neural networks, which makes them inefficient and inviable for many applications with computational resource constraints. This work presents a method to build a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) layer by layer for object detection from user-drawn markers on discriminative regions of representative images. We address the detection of Schistosomiasis mansoni eggs in microscopy images of fecal samples, and the detection of ships in satellite images as application examples. We could create a flyweight CNN without backpropagation from very few input images. Our method explores a recent methodology, Feature Learning from Image Markers (FLIM), to build convolutional feature extractors (encoders) from marker pixels. We extend FLIM to include a single-layer adaptive decoder, whose weights vary with the input image -- a concept never explored in CNNs. Our CNN weighs thousands of times less than SOTA object detectors, being suitable for CPU execution and showing superior or equivalent performance to three methods in five measures.
Authors:Harriet Farlow, Matthew Garratt, Gavin Mount, Tim Lynar
Abstract:
Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) represents the ability to disrupt Machine Learning (ML) algorithms through a range of methods that broadly exploit the architecture of deep learning optimisation. This paper presents Distributed Adversarial Regions (DAR), a novel method that implements distributed instantiations of computer vision-based AML attack methods that may be used to disguise objects from image recognition in both white and black box settings. We consider the context of object detection models used in urban environments, and benchmark the MobileNetV2, NasNetMobile and DenseNet169 models against a subset of relevant images from the ImageNet dataset. We evaluate optimal parameters (size, number and perturbation method), and compare to state-of-the-art AML techniques that perturb the entire image. We find that DARs can cause a reduction in confidence of 40.4% on average, but with the benefit of not requiring the entire image, or the focal object, to be perturbed. The DAR method is a deliberately simple approach where the intention is to highlight how an adversary with very little skill could attack models that may already be productionised, and to emphasise the fragility of foundational object detection models. We present this as a contribution to the field of ML security as well as AML. This paper contributes a novel adversarial method, an original comparison between DARs and other AML methods, and frames it in a new context - that of urban camouflage and the necessity for ML security and model robustness.
Authors:Hui Wei, Fu-yu Tang
Abstract:
Artificial objects usually have very stable shape features, which are stable, persistent properties in geometry. They can provide evidence for object recognition. Shape features are more stable and more distinguishing than appearance features, color features, grayscale features, or gradient features. The difficulty with object recognition based on shape features is that objects may differ in color, lighting, size, position, pose, and background interference, and it is not currently possible to predict all possible conditions. The variety of objects and conditions renders object recognition based on geometric features very challenging. This paper provides a method based on shape templates, which involves the selection, collection, and combination discrimination of geometric evidence of the edge segments of images, to find out the target object accurately from background, and it is able to identify the semantic attributes of each line segment of the target object. In essence, the method involves solving a global optimal combinatorial optimization problem. Although the complexity of the global optimal combinatorial optimization problem seems to be very high, there is no need to define the complex feature vector and no need for any expensive training process. It has very good generalization ability and environmental adaptability, and more solid basis for cognitive psychology than other methods. The process of collecting geometric evidence, which is simple and universal, shows considerable prospects for practical use. The experimental results prove that the method has great advantages in response to changes in the environment, invariant recognition, pinpointing the geometry of objects, search efficiency, and efficient calculation. This attempt contributes to understanding of some types of universal processing during the process of object recognition.
Authors:Zhou Tang, Zhiwu Zhang
Abstract:
Object Detection (OD) is a computer vision technology that can locate and classify objects in images and videos, which has the potential to significantly improve efficiency in precision agriculture. To simplify OD application process, we developed Ladder - a software that provides users with a friendly graphic user interface (GUI) that allows for efficient labelling of training datasets, training OD models, and deploying the trained model. Ladder was designed with an interactive recurrent framework that leverages predictions from a pre-trained OD model as the initial image labeling. After adding human labels, the newly labeled images can be added into the training data to retrain the OD model. With the same GUI, users can also deploy well-trained OD models by loading the model weight file to detect new images. We used Ladder to develop a deep learning model to access wheat stripe rust in RGB (red, green, blue) images taken by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Ladder employs OD to directly evaluate different severity levels of wheat stripe rust in field images, eliminating the need for photo stitching process for UAVs-based images. The accuracy for low, medium and high severity scores were 72%, 50% and 80%, respectively. This case demonstrates how Ladder empowers OD in precision agriculture and crop breeding.
Authors:Sheikh Mohammad Jubaer, Nazifa Tabassum, Md. Ataur Rahman, Mohammad Khairul Islam
Abstract:
Handwriting recognition remains challenging for some of the most spoken languages, like Bangla, due to the complexity of line and word segmentation brought by the curvilinear nature of writing and lack of quality datasets. This paper solves the segmentation problem by introducing a state-of-the-art method (BN-DRISHTI) that combines a deep learning-based object detection framework (YOLO) with Hough and Affine transformation for skew correction. However, training deep learning models requires a massive amount of data. Thus, we also present an extended version of the BN-HTRd dataset comprising 786 full-page handwritten Bangla document images, line and word-level annotation for segmentation, and corresponding ground truths for word recognition. Evaluation on the test portion of our dataset resulted in an F-score of 99.97% for line and 98% for word segmentation. For comparative analysis, we used three external Bangla handwritten datasets, namely BanglaWriting, WBSUBNdb_text, and ICDAR 2013, where our system outperformed by a significant margin, further justifying the performance of our approach on completely unseen samples.
Authors:Yanru Chen, Michael T Lu, Vineet K Raghu
Abstract:
Deep learning is the state-of-the-art for medical imaging tasks, but requires large, labeled datasets. For risk prediction, large datasets are rare since they require both imaging and follow-up (e.g., diagnosis codes). However, the release of publicly available imaging data with diagnostic labels presents an opportunity for self and semi-supervised approaches to improve label efficiency for risk prediction. Though several studies have compared self-supervised approaches in natural image classification, object detection, and medical image interpretation, there is limited data on which approaches learn robust representations for risk prediction. We present a comparison of semi- and self-supervised learning to predict mortality risk using chest x-ray images. We find that a semi-supervised autoencoder outperforms contrastive and transfer learning in internal and external validation.
Authors:Nathan Paull, Shuvam Keshari, Yian Wong
Abstract:
The invention of modern displays has enhanced the viewer experience for any kind of content: ranging from sports to movies in 8K high-definition resolution. However, older content developed for CRT or early Plasma screen TVs has become outdated quickly and no longer meets current aspect ratio and resolution standards. In this paper, we explore whether we can solve this problem with the use of diffusion models to adapt old content to meet contemporary expectations. We explore the ability to combine multiple independent computer vision tasks to attempt to solve the problem of expanding aspect ratios of old animated content such that the new content would be indistinguishable from the source material to a brand-new viewer. These existing capabilities include Stable Diffusion, Content-Aware Scene Detection, Object Detection, and Key Point Matching. We were able to successfully chain these tasks together in a way that generated reasonable outputs, however, future work needs to be done to improve and expand the application to non-animated content as well.
Authors:Yun Chu, Pu Li, Yong Bai, Zhuhua Hu, Yongqing Chen, Jiafeng Lu
Abstract:
Due to the over-parameterization of neural networks, many model compression methods based on pruning and quantization have emerged. They are remarkable in reducing the size, parameter number, and computational complexity of the model. However, most of the models compressed by such methods need the support of special hardware and software, which increases the deployment cost. Moreover, these methods are mainly used in classification tasks, and rarely directly used in detection tasks. To address these issues, for the object detection network we introduce a three-stage model compression method: dynamic sparse training, group channel pruning, and spatial attention distilling. Firstly, to select out the unimportant channels in the network and maintain a good balance between sparsity and accuracy, we put forward a dynamic sparse training method, which introduces a variable sparse rate, and the sparse rate will change with the training process of the network. Secondly, to reduce the effect of pruning on network accuracy, we propose a novel pruning method called group channel pruning. In particular, we divide the network into multiple groups according to the scales of the feature layer and the similarity of module structure in the network, and then we use different pruning thresholds to prune the channels in each group. Finally, to recover the accuracy of the pruned network, we use an improved knowledge distillation method for the pruned network. Especially, we extract spatial attention information from the feature maps of specific scales in each group as knowledge for distillation. In the experiments, we use YOLOv4 as the object detection network and PASCAL VOC as the training dataset. Our method reduces the parameters of the model by 64.7 % and the calculation by 34.9%.
Authors:Roi Peleg, Yair Smadar, Teddy Lazebnik, Assaf Hoogi
Abstract:
The performance of deep learning models is critically dependent on sophisticated optimization strategies. While existing optimizers have shown promising results, many rely on first-order Exponential Moving Average (EMA) techniques, which often limit their ability to track complex gradient trends accurately. This fact can lead to a significant lag in trend identification and suboptimal optimization, particularly in highly dynamic gradient behavior. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce Fast Adaptive Moment Estimation (FAME), a novel optimization technique that leverages the power of Triple Exponential Moving Average. By incorporating an advanced tracking mechanism, FAME enhances responsiveness to data dynamics, mitigates trend identification lag, and optimizes learning efficiency. Our comprehensive evaluation encompasses different computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, integrating FAME into 30 distinct architectures ranging from lightweight CNNs to Vision Transformers. Through rigorous benchmarking against state-of-the-art optimizers, FAME demonstrates superior accuracy and robustness. Notably, it offers high scalability, delivering substantial improvements across diverse model complexities, architectures, tasks, and benchmarks.
Authors:Zhuokai Zhao, Takumi Matsuzawa, William Irvine, Michael Maire, Gordon L Kindlmann
Abstract:
Proper evaluations are crucial for better understanding, troubleshooting, interpreting model behaviors and further improving model performance. While using scalar-based error metrics provides a fast way to overview model performance, they are often too abstract to display certain weak spots and lack information regarding important model properties, such as robustness. This not only hinders machine learning models from being more interpretable and gaining trust, but also can be misleading to both model developers and users. Additionally, conventional evaluation procedures often leave researchers unclear about where and how model fails, which complicates model comparisons and further developments. To address these issues, we propose a novel evaluation workflow, named Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits (NERO) Evaluation. The goal of NERO evaluation is to turn focus from traditional scalar-based metrics onto evaluating and visualizing models equivariance, closely capturing model robustness, as well as to allow researchers quickly investigating interesting or unexpected model behaviors. NERO evaluation is consist of a task-agnostic interactive interface and a set of visualizations, called NERO plots, which reveals the equivariance property of the model. Case studies on how NERO evaluation can be applied to multiple research areas, including 2D digit recognition, object detection, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and 3D point cloud classification, demonstrate that NERO evaluation can quickly illustrate different model equivariance, and effectively explain model behaviors through interactive visualizations of the model outputs. In addition, we propose consensus, an alternative to ground truths, to be used in NERO evaluation so that model equivariance can still be evaluated with new, unlabeled datasets.
Authors:Zhe Huang, Yudian Li
Abstract:
Most generic object detectors are mainly built for standard object detection tasks such as COCO and PASCAL VOC. They might not work well and/or efficiently on tasks of other domains consisting of images that are visually different from standard datasets. To this end, many advances have been focused on adapting a general-purposed object detector with limited domain-specific designs. However, designing a successful task-specific detector requires extraneous manual experiments and parameter tuning through trial and error. In this paper, we first propose and examine a fully-automatic pipeline to design a fully-specialized detector (FSD) which mainly incorporates a neural-architectural-searched model by exploring ideal network structures over the backbone and task-specific head. On the DeepLesion dataset, extensive results show that FSD can achieve 3.1 mAP gain while using approximately 40% fewer parameters on binary lesion detection task and improved the mAP by around 10% on multi-type lesion detection task via our region-aware graph modeling compared with existing general-purposed medical lesion detection networks.
Authors:Sitian Shen, Zilin Zhu, Linqian Fan, Harry Zhang, Xinxiao Wu
Abstract:
Large pre-trained models have had a significant impact on computer vision by enabling multi-modal learning, where the CLIP model has achieved impressive results in image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. However, the model's performance on 3D point cloud processing tasks is limited due to the domain gap between depth maps from 3D projection and training images of CLIP. This paper proposes DiffCLIP, a new pre-training framework that incorporates stable diffusion with ControlNet to minimize the domain gap in the visual branch. Additionally, a style-prompt generation module is introduced for few-shot tasks in the textual branch. Extensive experiments on the ModelNet10, ModelNet40, and ScanObjectNN datasets show that DiffCLIP has strong abilities for 3D understanding. By using stable diffusion and style-prompt generation, DiffCLIP achieves an accuracy of 43.2\% for zero-shot classification on OBJ\_BG of ScanObjectNN, which is state-of-the-art performance, and an accuracy of 80.6\% for zero-shot classification on ModelNet10, which is comparable to state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Jiesheng Yang, Andreas Wilde, Karsten Menzel, Md Zubair Sheikh, Boris Kuznetsov
Abstract:
Construction progress monitoring (CPM) is essential for effective project management, ensuring on-time and on-budget delivery. Traditional CPM methods often rely on manual inspection and reporting, which are time-consuming and prone to errors. This paper proposes a novel approach for automated CPM using state-of-the-art object detection algorithms. The proposed method leverages e.g. YOLOv8's real-time capabilities and high accuracy to identify and track construction elements within site images and videos. A dataset was created, consisting of various building elements and annotated with relevant objects for training and validation. The performance of the proposed approach was evaluated using standard metrics, such as precision, recall, and F1-score, demonstrating significant improvement over existing methods. The integration of Computer Vision into CPM provides stakeholders with reliable, efficient, and cost-effective means to monitor project progress, facilitating timely decision-making and ultimately contributing to the successful completion of construction projects.
Authors:Yixiong Yan, Liangzhu Cheng, Yongxu Li, Xinjuan Tuo
Abstract:
Fisheye cameras are widely employed in automatic parking, and the video stream object detection (VSOD) of the fisheye camera is a fundamental perception function to ensure the safe operation of vehicles. In past research work, the difference between the output of the deep learning model and the actual situation at the current moment due to the existence of delay of the perception system is generally ignored. But the environment will inevitably change within the delay time which may cause a potential safety hazard. In this paper, we propose a real-time detection framework equipped with a dual-flow perception module (dynamic and static flows) that can predict the future and alleviate the time-lag problem. Meanwhile, we use a new scheme to evaluate latency and accuracy. The standard bounding box is unsuitable for the object in fisheye camera images due to the strong radial distortion of the fisheye camera and the primary detection objects of parking perception are vehicles and pedestrians, so we adopt the rotate bounding box and propose a new periodic angle loss function to regress the angle of the box, which is the simple and accurate representation method of objects. The instance segmentation ground truth is used to supervise the training. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at: https://gitee.com/hiyanyx/fisheye-streaming-perception.
Authors:Daliang Ouyang, Su He, Guozhong Zhang, Mingzhu Luo, Huaiyong Guo, Jian Zhan, Zhijie Huang
Abstract:
Remarkable effectiveness of the channel or spatial attention mechanisms for producing more discernible feature representation are illustrated in various computer vision tasks. However, modeling the cross-channel relationships with channel dimensionality reduction may bring side effect in extracting deep visual representations. In this paper, a novel efficient multi-scale attention (EMA) module is proposed. Focusing on retaining the information on per channel and decreasing the computational overhead, we reshape the partly channels into the batch dimensions and group the channel dimensions into multiple sub-features which make the spatial semantic features well-distributed inside each feature group. Specifically, apart from encoding the global information to re-calibrate the channel-wise weight in each parallel branch, the output features of the two parallel branches are further aggregated by a cross-dimension interaction for capturing pixel-level pairwise relationship. We conduct extensive ablation studies and experiments on image classification and object detection tasks with popular benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, MS COCO and VisDrone2019) for evaluating its performance.
Authors:Chenhang Cui, Jinyu Xie, Yechenhao Yang
Abstract:
Multispectral methods have gained considerable attention due to their promising performance across various fields. However, most existing methods cannot effectively utilize information from two modalities while optimizing time efficiency. These methods often prioritize accuracy or time efficiency, leaving room for improvement in their performance. To this end, we propose a new method bright channel prior attention for enhancing pedestrian detection in low-light conditions by integrating image enhancement and detection within a unified framework. The method uses the V-channel of the HSV image of the thermal image as an attention map to trigger the unsupervised auto-encoder for visible light images, which gradually emphasizes pedestrian features across layers. Moreover, we utilize unsupervised bright channel prior algorithms to address light compensation in low light images. The proposed method includes a self-attention enhancement module and a detection module, which work together to improve object detection. An initial illumination map is estimated using the BCP, guiding the learning of the self-attention map from the enhancement network to obtain more informative representation focused on pedestrians. The extensive experiments show effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through.
Authors:Wahyu Pebrianto, Panca Mudjirahardjo, Sholeh Hadi Pramono, Rahmadwati, Raden Arief Setyawan
Abstract:
Object detection with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has attracted much attention in the research field of computer vision. However, not easy to accurately detect objects with data obtained from UAVs, which capture images from very high altitudes, making the image dominated by small object sizes, that difficult to detect. Motivated by that challenge, we aim to improve the performance of the one-stage detector YOLOv3 by adding a Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) layer on the end of the backbone darknet-53 to obtain more efficient feature extraction process in object detection tasks with UAVs. We also conducted an evaluation study on different versions of YOLOv3 methods. Includes YOLOv3 with SPP, YOLOv3, and YOLOv3-tiny, which we analyzed with the VisDrone2019-Det dataset. Here we show that YOLOv3 with SPP can get results mAP 0.6% higher than YOLOv3 and 26.6% than YOLOv3-Tiny at 640x640 input scale and is even able to maintain accuracy at different input image scales than other versions of the YOLOv3 method. Those results prove that the addition of SPP layers to YOLOv3 can be an efficient solution for improving the performance of the object detection method with data obtained from UAVs.
Authors:Dillon Reis, Jordan Kupec, Jacqueline Hong, Ahmad Daoudi
Abstract:
This paper presents a generalized model for real-time detection of flying objects that can be used for transfer learning and further research, as well as a refined model that achieves state-of-the-art results for flying object detection. We achieve this by training our first (generalized) model on a data set containing 40 different classes of flying objects, forcing the model to extract abstract feature representations. We then perform transfer learning with these learned parameters on a data set more representative of real world environments (i.e. higher frequency of occlusion, very small spatial sizes, rotations, etc.) to generate our refined model. Object detection of flying objects remains challenging due to large variances of object spatial sizes/aspect ratios, rate of speed, occlusion, and clustered backgrounds. To address some of the presented challenges while simultaneously maximizing performance, we utilize the current state-of-the-art single-shot detector, YOLOv8, in an attempt to find the best trade-off between inference speed and mean average precision (mAP). While YOLOv8 is being regarded as the new state-of-the-art, an official paper has not been released as of yet. Thus, we provide an in-depth explanation of the new architecture and functionality that YOLOv8 has adapted. Our final generalized model achieves a mAP50 of 79.2%, mAP50-95 of 68.5%, and an average inference speed of 50 frames per second (fps) on 1080p videos. Our final refined model maintains this inference speed and achieves an improved mAP50 of 99.1% and mAP50-95 of 83.5%
Authors:Ahmad Mohamad Mezher, Andrew E. Marble
Abstract:
Visual quality inspection in high performance manufacturing can benefit from automation, due to cost savings and improved rigor. Deep learning techniques are the current state of the art for generic computer vision tasks like classification and object detection. Manufacturing data can pose a challenge for deep learning because data is highly repetitive and there are few images of defects or deviations to learn from. Deep learning models trained with such data can be fragile and sensitive to context, and can under-detect new defects not found in the training data. In this work, we explore training defect detection models to learn specific defects out of context, so that they are more likely to be detected in new situations. We demonstrate how models trained on diverse images containing a common defect type can pick defects out in new circumstances. Such generic models could be more robust to new defects not found data collected for training, and can reduce data collection impediments to implementing visual inspection on production lines. Additionally, we demonstrate that object detection models trained to predict a label and bounding box outperform classifiers that predict a label only on held out test data typical of manufacturing inspection tasks. Finally, we studied the factors that affect generalization in order to train models that work under a wider range of conditions.
Authors:Jeremiah Scully, Ronan Flynn, Peter Gallagher, Eoin Carley, Mark Daly
Abstract:
Solar flares are energetic events in the solar atmosphere that are often linked with solar radio bursts (SRBs). SRBs are observed at metric to decametric wavelengths and are classified into five spectral classes (Type I--V) based on their signature in dynamic spectra. The automatic detection and classification of SRBs is a challenge due to their heterogeneous form. Near-realtime detection and classification of SRBs has become a necessity in recent years due to large data rates generated by advanced radio telescopes such as the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR). In this study, we implement congruent deep learning models to automatically detect and classify Type III SRBs. We generated simulated Type III SRBs, which were comparable to Type IIIs seen in real observations, using a deep learning method known as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). This simulated data was combined with observations from LOFAR to produce a training set that was used to train an object detection model known as YOLOv2 (You Only Look Once). Using this congruent deep learning model system, we can accurately detect Type III SRBs at a mean Average Precision (mAP) value of 77.71%.
Authors:Sean Wu, Nicole Amenta, Jiachen Zhou, Sandro Papais, Jonathan Kelly
Abstract:
Following four successful years in the SAE AutoDrive Challenge Series I, the University of Toronto is participating in the Series II competition to develop a Level 4 autonomous passenger vehicle capable of handling various urban driving scenarios by 2025. Accurate detection of traffic lights and correct identification of their states is essential for safe autonomous operation in cities. Herein, we describe our recently-redesigned traffic light perception system for autonomous vehicles like the University of Toronto's self-driving car, Artemis. Similar to most traffic light perception systems, we rely primarily on camera-based object detectors. We deploy the YOLOv5 detector for bounding box regression and traffic light classification across multiple cameras and fuse the observations. To improve robustness, we incorporate priors from high-definition semantic maps and perform state filtering using hidden Markov models. We demonstrate a multi-camera, real time-capable traffic light perception pipeline that handles complex situations including multiple visible intersections, traffic light variations, temporary occlusion, and flashing light states. To validate our system, we collected and annotated a varied dataset incorporating flashing states and a range of occlusion types. Our results show superior performance in challenging real-world scenarios compared to single-frame, single-camera object detection.
Authors:Amanda Issac, Alireza Ebrahimi, Javad Mohammadpour Velni, Glen Rains
Abstract:
In this study, we propose a big data pipeline for cotton bloom detection using a Lambda architecture, which enables real-time and batch processing of data. Our proposed approach leverages Azure resources such as Data Factory, Event Grids, Rest APIs, and Databricks. This work is the first to develop and demonstrate the implementation of such a pipeline for plant phenotyping through Azure's cloud computing service. The proposed pipeline consists of data preprocessing, object detection using a YOLOv5 neural network model trained through Azure AutoML, and visualization of object detection bounding boxes on output images. The trained model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) score of 0.96, demonstrating its high performance for cotton bloom classification. We evaluate our Lambda architecture pipeline using 9000 images yielding an optimized runtime of 34 minutes. The results illustrate the scalability of the proposed pipeline as a solution for deep learning object detection, with the potential for further expansion through additional Azure processing cores. This work advances the scientific research field by providing a new method for cotton bloom detection on a large dataset and demonstrates the potential of utilizing cloud computing resources, specifically Azure, for efficient and accurate big data processing in precision agriculture.
Authors:Xin Cai, Yaxin Bi, Peter Nicholl, Roy Sterritt
Abstract:
Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) representation learning is complex due to high spatiotemporal resolutions, irregular acquisition times, and intricate spatiotemporal interactions. These challenges result in specialized neural network architectures tailored for SITS analysis. The field has witnessed promising results achieved by pioneering researchers, but transferring the latest advances or established paradigms from Computer Vision (CV) to SITS is still highly challenging due to the existing suboptimal representation learning framework. In this paper, we develop a novel perspective of SITS processing as a direct set prediction problem, inspired by the recent trend in adopting query-based transformer decoders to streamline the object detection or image segmentation pipeline. We further propose to decompose the representation learning process of SITS into three explicit steps: collect-update-distribute, which is computationally efficient and suits for irregularly-sampled and asynchronous temporal satellite observations. Facilitated by the unique reformulation, our proposed temporal learning backbone of SITS, initially pre-trained on the resource efficient pixel-set format and then fine-tuned on the downstream dense prediction tasks, has attained new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the PASTIS benchmark dataset. Specifically, the clear separation between temporal and spatial components in the semantic/panoptic segmentation pipeline of SITS makes us leverage the latest advances in CV, such as the universal image segmentation architecture, resulting in a noticeable 2.5 points increase in mIoU and 8.8 points increase in PQ, respectively, compared to the best scores reported so far.
Authors:Su Pang, Daniel Morris, Hayder Radha
Abstract:
Despite radar's popularity in the automotive industry, for fusion-based 3D object detection, most existing works focus on LiDAR and camera fusion. In this paper, we propose TransCAR, a Transformer-based Camera-And-Radar fusion solution for 3D object detection. Our TransCAR consists of two modules. The first module learns 2D features from surround-view camera images and then uses a sparse set of 3D object queries to index into these 2D features. The vision-updated queries then interact with each other via transformer self-attention layer. The second module learns radar features from multiple radar scans and then applies transformer decoder to learn the interactions between radar features and vision-updated queries. The cross-attention layer within the transformer decoder can adaptively learn the soft-association between the radar features and vision-updated queries instead of hard-association based on sensor calibration only. Finally, our model estimates a bounding box per query using set-to-set Hungarian loss, which enables the method to avoid non-maximum suppression. TransCAR improves the velocity estimation using the radar scans without temporal information. The superior experimental results of our TransCAR on the challenging nuScenes datasets illustrate that our TransCAR outperforms state-of-the-art Camera-Radar fusion-based 3D object detection approaches.
Authors:Ailing Pan, Chao Dai, Chen Pan, Dongping Zhang, Yunchao Xu
Abstract:
The majority of current salient object detection (SOD) models are focused on designing a series of decoders based on fully convolutional networks (FCNs) or Transformer architectures and integrating them in a skillful manner. These models have achieved remarkable high performance and made significant contributions to the development of SOD. Their primary research objective is to develop novel algorithms that can outperform state-of-the-art models, a task that is extremely difficult and time-consuming. In contrast, this paper proposes a positive feedback method based on F-measure value for SOD, aiming to improve the accuracy of saliency prediction using existing methods. Specifically, our proposed method takes an image to be detected and inputs it into several existing models to obtain their respective prediction maps. These prediction maps are then fed into our positive feedback method to generate the final prediction result, without the need for careful decoder design or model training. Moreover, our method is adaptive and can be implemented based on existing models without any restrictions. Experimental results on five publicly available datasets show that our proposed positive feedback method outperforms the latest 12 methods in five evaluation metrics for saliency map prediction. Additionally, we conducted a robustness experiment, which shows that when at least one good prediction result exists in the selected existing model, our proposed approach can ensure that the prediction result is not worse. Our approach achieves a prediction speed of 20 frames per second (FPS) when evaluated on a low configuration host and after removing the prediction time overhead of inserted models. These results highlight the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of our proposed approach for salient object detection.
Authors:Chanthini Bhaskar, Bharath Manoj Nair, Dev Mehta
Abstract:
Overtaking is a critical maneuver in driving that requires accurate information about the location and distance of other vehicles on the road. This study suggests a real-time overtaking assistance system that uses a combination of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithm and stereo vision techniques to accurately identify and locate vehicles in front of the driver, and estimate their distance. The system then signals the vehicles behind the driver using colored lights to inform them of the safe overtaking distance. The proposed system has been implemented using Stereo vision for distance analysis and You Only Look Once (YOLO) for object identification. The results demonstrate its effectiveness in providing vehicle type and the distance between the camera module and the vehicle accurately with an approximate error of 4.107%. Our system has the potential to reduce the risk of accidents and improve the safety of overtaking maneuvers, especially on busy highways and roads.
Authors:Qi Lai, ChiMan Vong
Abstract:
Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) aims at learning precise object detectors with only image-level tags. In spite of intensive research on deep learning (DL) approaches over the past few years, there is still a significant performance gap between WSOD and fully supervised object detection. In fact, most existing WSOD methods only consider the visual appearance of each region proposal but ignore employing the useful context information in the image. To this end, this paper proposes an interactive end-to-end WSDO framework called JLWSOD with two innovations: i) two types of WSOD-specific context information (i.e., instance-wise correlation andsemantic-wise correlation) are proposed and introduced into WSOD framework; ii) an interactive graph contrastive learning (iGCL) mechanism is designed to jointly optimize the visual appearance and context information for better WSOD performance. Specifically, the iGCL mechanism takes full advantage of the complementary interpretations of the WSOD, namely instance-wise detection and semantic-wise prediction tasks, forming a more comprehensive solution. Extensive experiments on the widely used PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks verify the superiority of JLWSOD over alternative state-of-the-art approaches and baseline models (improvement of 3.6%~23.3% on mAP and 3.4%~19.7% on CorLoc, respectively).
Authors:Berkan Demirel, Orhun BuÄra Baran, Ramazan Gokberk Cinbis
Abstract:
Few-shot object detection, the problem of modelling novel object detection categories with few training instances, is an emerging topic in the area of few-shot learning and object detection. Contemporary techniques can be divided into two groups: fine-tuning based and meta-learning based approaches. While meta-learning approaches aim to learn dedicated meta-models for mapping samples to novel class models, fine-tuning approaches tackle few-shot detection in a simpler manner, by adapting the detection model to novel classes through gradient based optimization. Despite their simplicity, fine-tuning based approaches typically yield competitive detection results. Based on this observation, we focus on the role of loss functions and augmentations as the force driving the fine-tuning process, and propose to tune their dynamics through meta-learning principles. The proposed training scheme, therefore, allows learning inductive biases that can boost few-shot detection, while keeping the advantages of fine-tuning based approaches. In addition, the proposed approach yields interpretable loss functions, as opposed to highly parametric and complex few-shot meta-models. The experimental results highlight the merits of the proposed scheme, with significant improvements over the strong fine-tuning based few-shot detection baselines on benchmark Pascal VOC and MS-COCO datasets, in terms of both standard and generalized few-shot performance metrics.
Authors:Elham Soltanikazemi, Ashwin Dhakal, Bijaya Kumar Hatuwal, Imad Eddine Toubal, Armstrong Aboah, Kannappan Palaniappan
Abstract:
This research focuses on real-time surveillance systems as a means for tackling the issue of non-compliance with helmet regulations, a practice that considerably amplifies the risk for motorcycle drivers or riders. Despite the well-established advantages of helmet usage, achieving widespread compliance remains challenging due to diverse contributing factors. To effectively address this concern, real-time monitoring and enforcement of helmet laws have been proposed as a plausible solution. However, previous attempts at real-time helmet violation detection have been hindered by their limited ability to operate in real-time. To overcome this limitation, the current paper introduces a novel real-time helmet violation detection system that utilizes the YOLOv5 single-stage object detection model. This model is trained on the 2023 NVIDIA AI City Challenge 2023 Track 5 dataset. The optimal hyperparameters for training the model are determined using genetic algorithms. Additionally, data augmentation and various sampling techniques are implemented to enhance the model's performance. The efficacy of the models is evaluated using precision, recall, and mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics. The results demonstrate impressive precision, recall, and mAP scores of 0.848, 0.599, and 0.641, respectively for the training data. Furthermore, the model achieves notable mAP score of 0.6667 for the test datasets, leading to a commendable 4th place rank in the public leaderboard. This innovative approach represents a notable breakthrough in the field and holds immense potential to substantially enhance motorcycle safety. By enabling real-time monitoring and enforcement capabilities, this system has the capacity to contribute towards increased compliance with helmet laws, thereby effectively reducing the risks faced by motorcycle riders and passengers.
Authors:Binglu Ren, Jianqin Yin
Abstract:
In the perception task of autonomous driving, multi-modal methods have become a trend due to the complementary characteristics of LiDAR point clouds and image data. However, the performance of multi-modal methods is usually limited by the sparsity of the point cloud or the noise problem caused by the misalignment between LiDAR and the camera. To solve these two problems, we present a new concept, Voxel Region (VR), which is obtained by projecting the sparse local point clouds in each voxel dynamically. And we propose a novel fusion method named Sparse-to-Dense Voxel Region Fusion (SDVRF). Specifically, more pixels of the image feature map inside the VR are gathered to supplement the voxel feature extracted from sparse points and achieve denser fusion. Meanwhile, different from prior methods, which project the size-fixed grids, our strategy of generating dynamic regions achieves better alignment and avoids introducing too much background noise. Furthermore, we propose a multi-scale fusion framework to extract more contextual information and capture the features of objects of different sizes. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our method improves the performance of different baselines, especially on classes of small size, including Pedestrian and Cyclist.
Authors:Yueqiu Sun, Rohitkrishna Nambiar, Vivek Vidyasagaran
Abstract:
Manipulatives used in the right way help improve mathematical concepts leading to better learning outcomes. In this paper, we present a phygital (physical + digital) curriculum inspired teaching system for kids aged 5-8 to learn geometry using shape tile manipulatives. Combining smaller shapes to form larger ones is an important skill kids learn early on which requires shape tiles to be placed close to each other in the play area. This introduces a challenge of oriented object detection for densely packed objects with arbitrary orientations. Leveraging simulated data for neural network training and light-weight mobile architectures, we enable our system to understand user interactions and provide real-time audiovisual feedback. Experimental results show that our network runs real-time with high precision/recall on consumer devices, thereby providing a consistent and enjoyable learning experience.
Authors:Jarred Jordan, Daniel Posada, Matthew Gillette, David Zuehlke, Troy Henderson
Abstract:
A method of near real-time detection and tracking of resident space objects (RSOs) using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and linear quadratic estimator (LQE) is proposed. Advances in machine learning architecture allow the use of low-power/cost embedded devices to perform complex classification tasks. In order to reduce the costs of tracking systems, a low-cost embedded device will be used to run a CNN detection model for RSOs in unresolved images captured by a gray-scale camera and small telescope. Detection results computed in near real-time are then passed to an LQE to compute tracking updates for the telescope mount, resulting in a fully autonomous method of optical RSO detection and tracking. Keywords: Space Domain Awareness, Neural Networks, Real-Time, Object Detection, Embedded Systems.
Authors:Huanhuan Li, Xuechao Zou, Yu-an Zhang, Jiangcai Zhaba, Guomei Li, Lamao Yongga
Abstract:
The Three-River-Source region is a highly significant natural reserve in China that harbors a plethora of botanical resources. To meet the practical requirements of botanical research and intelligent plant management, we construct a dataset for Plant detection in the Three-River-Source region (PTRS). It comprises 21 types, 6965 high-resolution images of 2160*3840 pixels, captured by diverse sensors and platforms, and featuring objects of varying shapes and sizes. The PTRS presents us with challenges such as dense occlusion, varying leaf resolutions, and high feature similarity among plants, prompting us to develop a novel object detection network named PlantDet. This network employs a window-based efficient self-attention module (ST block) to generate robust feature representation at multiple scales, improving the detection efficiency for small and densely-occluded objects. Our experimental results validate the efficacy of our proposed plant detection benchmark, with a precision of 88.1%, a mean average precision (mAP) of 77.6%, and a higher recall compared to the baseline. Additionally, our method effectively overcomes the issue of missing small objects.
Authors:Jing Qin, Biyun Xie
Abstract:
Motion detection has been widely used in many applications, such as surveillance and robotics. Due to the presence of the static background, a motion video can be decomposed into a low-rank background and a sparse foreground. Many regularization techniques that preserve low-rankness of matrices can therefore be imposed on the background. In the meanwhile, geometry-based regularizations, such as graph regularizations, can be imposed on the foreground. Recently, weighted regularization techniques including the weighted nuclear norm regularization have been proposed in the image processing community to promote adaptive sparsity while achieving efficient performance. In this paper, we propose a robust dual graph regularized moving object detection model based on a novel weighted nuclear norm regularization and spatiotemporal graph Laplacians. Numerical experiments on realistic human motion data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of this approach in separating moving objects from background, and the enormous potential in robotic applications.
Authors:Pau Gallés, Xi Chen
Abstract:
This paper presents a new loss function for the prediction of oriented bounding boxes, named head-tail-loss. The loss function consists in minimizing the distance between the prediction and the annotation of two key points that are representing the annotation of the object. The first point is the center point and the second is the head of the object. However, for the second point, the minimum distance between the prediction and either the head or tail of the groundtruth is used. On this way, either prediction is valid (with the head pointing to the tail or the tail pointing to the head). At the end the importance is to detect the direction of the object but not its heading. The new loss function has been evaluated on the DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets and has shown potential for elongated objects such as ships and also for other types of objects with different shapes.
Authors:Jae-Hyeon Lee, Chang-Hwan Son
Abstract:
Pest counting, which predicts the number of pests in the early stage, is very important because it enables rapid pest control, reduces damage to crops, and improves productivity. In recent years, light traps have been increasingly used to lure and photograph pests for pest counting. However, pest images have a wide range of variability in pest appearance owing to severe occlusion, wide pose variation, and even scale variation. This makes pest counting more challenging. To address these issues, this study proposes a new pest counting model referred to as multiscale and deformable attention CenterNet (Mada-CenterNet) for internal low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) joint feature learning. Compared with the conventional CenterNet, the proposed Mada-CenterNet adopts a multiscale heatmap generation approach in a two-step fashion to predict LR and HR heatmaps adaptively learned to scale variations, that is, changes in the number of pests. In addition, to overcome the pose and occlusion problems, a new between-hourglass skip connection based on deformable and multiscale attention is designed to ensure internal LR and HR joint feature learning and incorporate geometric deformation, thereby resulting in an improved pest counting accuracy. Through experiments, the proposed Mada-CenterNet is verified to generate the HR heatmap more accurately and improve pest counting accuracy owing to multiscale heatmap generation, joint internal feature learning, and deformable and multiscale attention. In addition, the proposed model is confirmed to be effective in overcoming severe occlusions and variations in pose and scale. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art crowd counting and object detection models.
Authors:Hannes Fassold, Karlheinz Gutjahr, Anna Weber, Roland Perko
Abstract:
Monitoring the movement and actions of humans in video in real-time is an important task. We present a deep learning based algorithm for human action recognition for both RGB and thermal cameras. It is able to detect and track humans and recognize four basic actions (standing, walking, running, lying) in real-time on a notebook with a NVIDIA GPU. For this, it combines state of the art components for object detection (Scaled YoloV4), optical flow (RAFT) and pose estimation (EvoSkeleton). Qualitative experiments on a set of tunnel videos show that the proposed algorithm works robustly for both RGB and thermal video.
Authors:Khalid Alnujaidi, Ghada Alhabib, Abdulaziz Alodhieb
Abstract:
As the population grows and more land is being used for urbanization, ecosystems are disrupted by our roads and cars. This expansion of infrastructure cuts through wildlife territories, leading to many instances of Wildlife-Vehicle Collision (WVC). These instances of WVC are a global issue that is having a global socio-economic impact, resulting in billions of dollars in property damage and, at times, fatalities for vehicle occupants. In Saudi Arabia, this issue is similar, with instances of Camel-Vehicle Collision (CVC) being particularly deadly due to the large size of camels, which results in a 25% fatality rate [1]. The focus of this work is to test different object detection models on the task of detecting camels on the road. The Deep Learning (DL) object detection models used in the experiments are: Center Net, Efficient Det, Faster R-CNN, SSD, and YOLOv8. Results of the experiments show that YOLOv8 performed the best in terms of accuracy and was the most efficient in training. In the future, the plan is to expand on this work by developing a system to make countryside roads safer.
Authors:Juan Terven, Diana Cordova-Esparza
Abstract:
YOLO has become a central real-time object detection system for robotics, driverless cars, and video monitoring applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of YOLO's evolution, examining the innovations and contributions in each iteration from the original YOLO up to YOLOv8, YOLO-NAS, and YOLO with Transformers. We start by describing the standard metrics and postprocessing; then, we discuss the major changes in network architecture and training tricks for each model. Finally, we summarize the essential lessons from YOLO's development and provide a perspective on its future, highlighting potential research directions to enhance real-time object detection systems.
Authors:Hu Haotian, Wang Fanyi, Su Jingwen, Gao Shiyu, Zhang Zhiwang
Abstract:
3D object detection is one of the most important tasks in autonomous driving and robotics. Our research focuses on tackling low efficiency issue of point-based methods on large-scale point clouds. Existing point-based methods adopt farthest point sampling (FPS) strategy for downsampling, which is computationally expensive in terms of inference time and memory consumption when the number of point cloud increases. In order to improve efficiency, we propose a novel Instance-Centroid Faster Point Sampling Module (IC-FPS) , which effectively replaces the first Set Abstraction (SA) layer that is extremely tedious. IC-FPS module is comprised of two methods, local feature diffusion based background point filter (LFDBF) and Centroid-Instance Sampling Strategy (CISS). LFDBF is constructed to exclude most invalid background points, while CISS substitutes FPS strategy by fast sampling centroids and instance points. IC-FPS module can be inserted to almost every point-based models. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks have demonstrated the superiority of IC-FPS. On Waymo dataset, the proposed module significantly improves performance of baseline model and accelerates inference speed by 3.8 times. For the first time, real-time detection of point-based models in large-scale point cloud scenario is realized.
Authors:Caner Ozer, Arda Guler, Aysel Turkvatan Cansever, Ilkay Oksuz
Abstract:
Medical image quality assessment is an important aspect of image acquisition, as poor-quality images may lead to misdiagnosis. Manual labelling of image quality is a tedious task for population studies and can lead to misleading results. While much research has been done on automated analysis of image quality to address this issue, relatively little work has been done to explain the methodologies. In this work, we propose an explainable image quality assessment system and validate our idea on two different objectives which are foreign object detection on Chest X-Rays (Object-CXR) and Left Ventricular Outflow Tract (LVOT) detection on Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) volumes. We apply a variety of techniques to measure the faithfulness of the saliency detectors, and our explainable pipeline relies on NormGrad, an algorithm which can efficiently localise image quality issues with saliency maps of the classifier. We compare NormGrad with a range of saliency detection methods and illustrate its superior performance as a result of applying these methodologies for measuring the faithfulness of the saliency detectors. We see that NormGrad has significant gains over other saliency detectors by reaching a repeated Pointing Game score of 0.853 for Object-CXR and 0.611 for LVOT datasets.
Authors:Wei Xingxing, Yu Jie, Huang Yao
Abstract:
Owing to the extensive application of infrared object detectors in the safety-critical tasks, it is necessary to evaluate their robustness against adversarial examples in the real world. However, current few physical infrared attacks are complicated to implement in practical application because of their complex transformation from digital world to physical world. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a physically feasible infrared attack method called "adversarial infrared patches". Considering the imaging mechanism of infrared cameras by capturing objects' thermal radiation, adversarial infrared patches conduct attacks by attaching a patch of thermal insulation materials on the target object to manipulate its thermal distribution. To enhance adversarial attacks, we present a novel aggregation regularization to guide the simultaneous learning for the patch' shape and location on the target object. Thus, a simple gradient-based optimization can be adapted to solve for them. We verify adversarial infrared patches in different object detection tasks with various object detectors. Experimental results show that our method achieves more than 90\% Attack Success Rate (ASR) versus the pedestrian detector and vehicle detector in the physical environment, where the objects are captured in different angles, distances, postures, and scenes. More importantly, adversarial infrared patch is easy to implement, and it only needs 0.5 hours to be constructed in the physical world, which verifies its effectiveness and efficiency.
Authors:Alexander Mehta, Ritik Jalisatgi
Abstract:
An estimated 253 million people have visual impairments. These visual impairments affect everyday lives, and limit their understanding of the outside world. This can pose a risk to health from falling or collisions. We propose a solution to this through quick and detailed communication of environmental spatial geometry through sound, providing the blind and visually impaired the ability to understand their spatial environment through sound technology. The model consists of fast object detection and 3D environmental mapping, which is communicated through a series of quick sound notes. These sound notes are at different frequencies, pitches, and arrangements in order to precisely communicate the depth and location of points within the environment. Sounds are communicated in the form of musical notes in order to be easily recognizable and distinguishable. A unique algorithm is used to segment objects, providing minimal accuracy loss and improvement from the normal O(n2 ) to O(n) (which is significant, as N in point clouds can often be in the range of 105 ). In testing, we achieved an R-value of 0.866 on detailed objects and an accuracy of 87.5% on an outdoor scene at night with large amounts of noise. We also provide a supplementary video demo of our system.
Authors:Jiaming Na, Varuna De-Silva
Abstract:
Object detection is one of the most important and fundamental aspects of computer vision tasks, which has been broadly utilized in pose estimation, object tracking and instance segmentation models. To obtain training data for object detection model efficiently, many datasets opt to obtain their unannotated data in video format and the annotator needs to draw a bounding box around each object in the images. Annotating every frame from a video is costly and inefficient since many frames contain very similar information for the model to learn from. How to select the most informative frames from a video to annotate has become a highly practical task to solve but attracted little attention in research. In this paper, we proposed a novel active learning algorithm for object detection models to tackle this problem. In the proposed active learning algorithm, both classification and localization informativeness of unlabelled data are measured and aggregated. Utilizing the temporal information from video frames, two novel localization informativeness measurements are proposed. Furthermore, a weight curve is proposed to avoid querying adjacent frames. Proposed active learning algorithm with multiple configurations was evaluated on the MuPoTS dataset and FootballPD dataset.
Authors:Linfeng Shi, Yan Li, Xi Zhu
Abstract:
As the rapid development of depth learning, object detection in aviatic remote sensing images has become increasingly popular in recent years. Most of the current Anchor Free detectors based on key point detection sampling directly regression and classification features, with the design of object loss function based on the horizontal bounding box. It is more challenging for complex and diverse aviatic remote sensing object. In this paper, we propose an Anchor Free aviatic remote sensing object detector (BWP-Det) to detect rotating and multi-scale object. Specifically, we design a interactive double-branch(IDB) up-sampling network, in which one branch gradually up-sampling is used for the prediction of Heatmap, and the other branch is used for the regression of boundary box parameters. We improve a weighted multi-scale convolution (WmConv) in order to highlight the difference between foreground and background. We extracted Pixel level attention features from the middle layer to guide the two branches to pay attention to effective object information in the sampling process. Finally, referring to the calculation idea of horizontal IoU, we design a rotating IoU based on the split polar coordinate plane, namely JIoU, which is expressed as the intersection ratio following discretization of the inner ellipse of the rotating bounding box, to solve the correlation between angle and side length in the regression process of the rotating bounding box. Ultimately, BWP-Det, our experiments on DOTA, UCAS-AOD and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show, achieves advanced performance with simpler models and fewer regression parameters.
Authors:Thanh Vu, Baochen Sun, Bodi Yuan, Alex Ngai, Yueqi Li, Jan-Michael Frahm
Abstract:
The success of data mixing augmentations in image classification tasks has been well-received. However, these techniques cannot be readily applied to object detection due to challenges such as spatial misalignment, foreground/background distinction, and plurality of instances. To tackle these issues, we first introduce a novel conceptual framework called Supervision Interpolation (SI), which offers a fresh perspective on interpolation-based augmentations by relaxing and generalizing Mixup. Based on SI, we propose LossMix, a simple yet versatile and effective regularization that enhances the performance and robustness of object detectors and more. Our key insight is that we can effectively regularize the training on mixed data by interpolating their loss errors instead of ground truth labels. Empirical results on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that LossMix can consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods widely adopted for detection. Furthermore, by jointly leveraging LossMix with unsupervised domain adaptation, we successfully improve existing approaches and set a new state of the art for cross-domain object detection.
Authors:Huilan Luo, Zehua Zeng
Abstract:
In recent years, anchor-free object detection models combined with matching algorithms are used to achieve real-time muti-object tracking and also ensure high tracking accuracy. However, there are still great challenges in multi-object tracking. For example, when most part of a target is occluded or the target just disappears from images temporarily, it often leads to tracking interruptions for most of the existing tracking algorithms. Therefore, this study offers a bi-directional matching algorithm for multi-object tracking that makes advantage of bi-directional motion prediction information to improve occlusion handling. A stranded area is used in the matching algorithm to temporarily store the objects that fail to be tracked. When objects recover from occlusions, our method will first try to match them with objects in the stranded area to avoid erroneously generating new identities, thus forming a more continuous trajectory. Experiments show that our approach can improve the multi-object tracking performance in the presence of occlusions. In addition, this study provides an attentional up-sampling module that not only assures tracking accuracy but also accelerates training speed. In the MOT17 challenge, the proposed algorithm achieves 63.4% MOTA, 55.3% IDF1, and 20.1 FPS tracking speed.
Authors:Steven Shaw, Kanishka Tyagi, Shan Zhang
Abstract:
Many radar signal processing methodologies are being developed for critical road safety perception tasks. Unfortunately, these signal processing algorithms are often poorly suited to run on embedded hardware accelerators used in automobiles. Conversely, end-to-end machine learning (ML) approaches better exploit the performance gains brought by specialized accelerators. In this paper, we propose a teacher-student knowledge distillation approach for low-level radar perception tasks. We utilize a hybrid model for stationary object detection as a teacher to train an end-to-end ML student model. The student can efficiently harness embedded compute for real-time deployment. We demonstrate that the proposed student model runs at speeds 100x faster than the teacher model.
Authors:Kaiyu Zheng, Anirudha Paul, Stefanie Tellex
Abstract:
Searching for objects is a fundamental skill for robots. As such, we expect object search to eventually become an off-the-shelf capability for robots, similar to e.g., object detection and SLAM. In contrast, however, no system for 3D object search exists that generalizes across real robots and environments. In this paper, building upon a recent theoretical framework that exploited the octree structure for representing belief in 3D, we present GenMOS (Generalized Multi-Object Search), the first general-purpose system for multi-object search (MOS) in a 3D region that is robot-independent and environment-agnostic. GenMOS takes as input point cloud observations of the local region, object detection results, and localization of the robot's view pose, and outputs a 6D viewpoint to move to through online planning. In particular, GenMOS uses point cloud observations in three ways: (1) to simulate occlusion; (2) to inform occupancy and initialize octree belief; and (3) to sample a belief-dependent graph of view positions that avoid obstacles. We evaluate our system both in simulation and on two real robot platforms. Our system enables, for example, a Boston Dynamics Spot robot to find a toy cat hidden underneath a couch in under one minute. We further integrate 3D local search with 2D global search to handle larger areas, demonstrating the resulting system in a 25m$^2$ lobby area.
Authors:Cheng Chuanxiang, Yang Jia, Wang Chao, Zheng Zhi, Li Xiaopeng, Dong Di, Chang Mengxia, Zhuang Zhiheng
Abstract:
The use of ground control points (GCPs) for georeferencing is the most common strategy in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry, but at the same time their collection represents the most time-consuming and expensive part of UAV campaigns. Recently, deep learning has been rapidly developed in the field of small object detection. In this letter, to automatically extract coordinates information of ground control points (GCPs) by detecting GCP-markers in UAV images, we propose a solution that uses a deep learning-based architecture, YOLOv5-OBB, combined with a confidence threshold filtering algorithm and an optimal ranking algorithm. We applied our proposed method to a dataset collected by DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and obtained good detection performance with the mean Average Precision (AP) of 0.832 and the highest AP of 0.982 for the cross-type GCP-markers. The proposed method can be a promising tool for future implementation of the end-to-end aerial triangulation process.
Authors:Dohyun Ham, Jaeyeop Jeong, June-Kyoo Park, Raehyeon Jeong, Seungmin Jeon, Hyeongjun Jeon, Yewon Lim
Abstract:
This paper presents a method for optimizing object detection models by combining weight pruning and singular value decomposition (SVD). The proposed method was evaluated on a custom dataset of street work images obtained from https://universe.roboflow.com/roboflow-100/street-work. The dataset consists of 611 training images, 175 validation images, and 87 test images with 7 classes. We compared the performance of the optimized models with the original unoptimized model in terms of frame rate, mean average precision (mAP@50), and weight size. The results show that the weight pruning + SVD model achieved a 0.724 mAP@50 with a frame rate of 1.48 FPS and a weight size of 12.1 MB, outperforming the original model (0.717 mAP@50, 1.50 FPS, and 12.3 MB). Precision-recall curves were also plotted for all models. Our work demonstrates that the proposed method can effectively optimize object detection models while balancing accuracy, speed, and model size.
Authors:Alex Fu, Lingjie Kong
Abstract:
Inspired by the recent success of application of dense data approach by using ORB-SLAM and RGB-D SLAM, we propose a better pipeline of real-time SLAM in dynamics environment. Different from previous SLAM which can only handle static scenes, we are presenting a solution which use RGB-D SLAM as well as YOLO real-time object detection to segment and remove dynamic scene and then construct static scene 3D. We gathered a dataset which allows us to jointly consider semantics, geometry, and physics and thus enables us to reconstruct the static scene while filtering out all dynamic objects.
Authors:Jinyan Liu, Jie Chen
Abstract:
Object detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision, aiming at locating and classifying objects in image. Although current devices can easily take very high-resolution images, current approaches of object detection seldom consider detecting tiny object or the large scale variance problem in high resolution images. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet efficient approach that improves accuracy of object detection especially for small objects and large scale variance scene while reducing the computational cost in high resolution image. Inspired by observing that overall detection accuracy is reduced if the image is properly down-sampled but the recall rate is not significantly reduced. Besides, small objects can be better detected by inputting high-resolution images even if using lightweight detector. We propose a cluster-based coarse-to-fine object detection framework to enhance the performance for detecting small objects while ensure the accuracy of large objects in high-resolution images. For the first stage, we perform coarse detection on the down-sampled image and center localization of small objects by lightweight detector on high-resolution image, and then obtains image chips based on cluster region generation method by coarse detection and center localization results, and further sends chips to the second stage detector for fine detection. Finally, we merge the coarse detection and fine detection results. Our approach can make good use of the sparsity of the objects and the information in high-resolution image, thereby making the detection more efficient. Experiment results show that our proposed approach achieves promising performance compared with other state-of-the-art detectors.
Authors:Houssem Boulahbal, Adrian Voicila, Andrew Comport
Abstract:
In this paper, a self-supervised model that simultaneously predicts a sequence of future frames from video-input with a novel spatial-temporal attention (ST) network is proposed. The ST transformer network allows constraining both temporal consistency across future frames whilst constraining consistency across spatial objects in the image at different scales. This was not the case in prior works for depth prediction, which focused on predicting a single frame as output. The proposed model leverages prior scene knowledge such as object shape and texture similar to single-image depth inference methods, whilst also constraining the motion and geometry from a sequence of input images. Apart from the transformer architecture, one of the main contributions with respect to prior works lies in the objective function that enforces spatio-temporal consistency across a sequence of output frames rather than a single output frame. As will be shown, this results in more accurate and robust depth sequence forecasting. The model achieves highly accurate depth forecasting results that outperform existing baselines on the KITTI benchmark. Extensive ablation studies were performed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. One remarkable result of the proposed model is that it is implicitly capable of forecasting the motion of objects in the scene, rather than requiring complex models involving multi-object detection, segmentation and tracking.
Authors:Benjamin Sick, Michael Walter, Jochen Abhau
Abstract:
3D object detection with point clouds and images plays an important role in perception tasks such as autonomous driving. Current methods show great performance on detection and pose estimation of standard-shaped vehicles but lack behind on more complex shapes as e.g. semi-trailer truck combinations. Determining the shape and motion of those special vehicles accurately is crucial in yard operation and maneuvering and industrial automation applications. This work introduces several new methods to improve and measure the performance for such classes. State-of-the-art methods are based on predefined anchor grids or heatmaps for ground truth targets. However, the underlying representations do not take the shape of different sized objects into account. Our main contribution, AdaptiveShape, uses shape aware anchor distributions and heatmaps to improve the detection capabilities. For large vehicles we achieve +10.9% AP in comparison to current shape agnostic methods. Furthermore we introduce a new fast LiDAR-camera fusion. It is based on 2D bounding box camera detections which are available in many processing pipelines. This fusion method does not rely on perfectly calibrated or temporally synchronized systems and is therefore applicable to a broad range of robotic applications. We extend a standard point pillar network to account for temporal data and improve learning of complex object movements. In addition we extended a ground truth augmentation to use grouped object pairs to further improve truck AP by +2.2% compared to conventional augmentation.
Authors:Akbar Satya Nugraha, Yudistira Novanto, Bayu Rahayudi
Abstract:
Deep neural network shows excellent use in a lot of real-world tasks. One of the deep learning tasks is object detection. Well-annotated datasets will affect deep neural network accuracy. More data learned by deep neural networks will make the model more accurate. However, a well-annotated dataset is hard to find, especially in a specific domain. To overcome this, computer-generated data or virtual datasets are used. Researchers could generate many images with specific use cases also with its annotation. Research studies showed that virtual datasets could be used for object detection tasks. Nevertheless, with the usage of the virtual dataset, the model must adapt to real datasets, or the model must have domain adaptability features. We explored the domain adaptation inside the object detection model using a virtual dataset to overcome a few well-annotated datasets. We use VW-PPE dataset, using 5000 and 10000 virtual data and 220 real data. For model architecture, we used YOLOv4 using CSPDarknet53 as the backbone and PAN as the neck. The domain adaptation technique with fine-tuning only on backbone weight achieved a mean average precision of 74.457%.
Authors:Guangsheng Shi, Ruifeng Li, Chao Ma
Abstract:
The performance of point cloud 3D object detection hinges on effectively representing raw points, grid-based voxels or pillars. Recent two-stage 3D detectors typically take the point-voxel-based R-CNN paradigm, i.e., the first stage resorts to the 3D voxel-based backbone for 3D proposal generation on bird-eye-view (BEV) representation and the second stage refines them via the intermediate point representation. Their primary mechanisms involve the utilization of intermediary keypoints to restore the substantial 3D structure context from the converted BEV representation. The skilled point-voxel feature interaction, however, makes the entire detection pipeline more complex and compute-intensive. In this paper, we take a different viewpoint -- the pillar-based BEV representation owns sufficient capacity to preserve the 3D structure. In light of the latest advances in BEV-based perception, we devise a conceptually simple yet effective two-stage 3D detection architecture, named Pillar R-CNN. On top of densified BEV feature maps, Pillar R-CNN can easily introduce the feature pyramid architecture to generate 3D proposals at various scales and take the simple 2D R-CNN style detect head for box refinement. Our Pillar R-CNN performs favorably against state-of-the-art 3D detectors on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset but at a small extra cost. It should be highlighted that further exploration into BEV perception for applications involving autonomous driving is now possible thanks to the effective and elegant Pillar R-CNN architecture.
Authors:Junhyung Go, Jongbin Ryu
Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce the spatial bias to learn global knowledge without self-attention in convolutional neural networks. Owing to the limited receptive field, conventional convolutional neural networks suffer from learning long-range dependencies. Non-local neural networks have struggled to learn global knowledge, but unavoidably have too heavy a network design due to the self-attention operation. Therefore, we propose a fast and lightweight spatial bias that efficiently encodes global knowledge without self-attention on convolutional neural networks. Spatial bias is stacked on the feature map and convolved together to adjust the spatial structure of the convolutional features. Therefore, we learn the global knowledge on the convolution layer directly with very few additional resources. Our method is very fast and lightweight due to the attention-free non-local method while improving the performance of neural networks considerably. Compared to non-local neural networks, the spatial bias use about 10 times fewer parameters while achieving comparable performance with 1.6 ~ 3.3 times more throughput on a very little budget. Furthermore, the spatial bias can be used with conventional non-local neural networks to further improve the performance of the backbone model. We show that the spatial bias achieves competitive performance that improves the classification accuracy by +0.79% and +1.5% on ImageNet-1K and cifar100 datasets. Additionally, we validate our method on the MS-COCO and ADE20K datasets for downstream tasks involving object detection and semantic segmentation.
Authors:Jinan Yu, Liyan Ma, Zhenglin Li, Yan Peng, Shaorong Xie
Abstract:
Open-world object detection (OWOD) is a challenging problem that combines object detection with incremental learning and open-set learning. Compared to standard object detection, the OWOD setting is task to: 1) detect objects seen during training while identifying unseen classes, and 2) incrementally learn the knowledge of the identified unknown objects when the corresponding annotations is available. We propose a novel and efficient OWOD solution from a prototype perspective, which we call OCPL: Open-world object detection via discriminative Class Prototype Learning, which consists of a Proposal Embedding Aggregator (PEA), an Embedding Space Compressor (ESC) and a Cosine Similarity-based Classifier (CSC). All our proposed modules aim to learn the discriminative embeddings of known classes in the feature space to minimize the overlapping distributions of known and unknown classes, which is beneficial to differentiate known and unknown classes. Extensive experiments performed on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors:Madhumitha Sakthi, Ahmed Tewfik, Marius Arvinte, Haris Vikalo
Abstract:
Automotive radar has increasingly attracted attention due to growing interest in autonomous driving technologies. Acquiring situational awareness using multimodal data collected at high sampling rates by various sensing devices including cameras, LiDAR, and radar requires considerable power, memory and compute resources which are often limited at an edge device. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive radar sub-sampling algorithm designed to identify regions that require more detailed/accurate reconstruction based on prior environmental conditions' knowledge, enabling near-optimal performance at considerably lower effective sampling rates. Designed to robustly perform under variable weather conditions, the algorithm was shown on the Oxford raw radar and RADIATE dataset to achieve accurate reconstruction utilizing only 10% of the original samples in good weather and 20% in extreme (snow, fog) weather conditions. A further modification of the algorithm incorporates object motion to enable reliable identification of important regions. This includes monitoring possible future occlusions caused by objects detected in the present frame. Finally, we train a YOLO network on the RADIATE dataset to perform object detection directly on RADAR data and obtain a 6.6% AP50 improvement over the baseline Faster R-CNN network.
Authors:Akhil Gurram, Antonio M. Lopez
Abstract:
Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is performed to produce 3D information that can be used in downstream tasks such as those related to on-board perception for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) or driver assistance. Therefore, a relevant arising question is whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator of the accuracy of future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. We address this question in this paper. In particular, we take the task of 3D object detection on point clouds as a proxy of on-board perception. We train and test state-of-the-art 3D object detectors using 3D point clouds coming from MDE models. We confront the ranking of object detection results with the ranking given by the depth estimation metrics of the MDE models. We conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods that reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect. Among the different metrics, the absolute relative (abs-rel) error seems to be the best for that purpose.
Authors:Todd Morehouse, Charles Montes, Ruolin Zhou
Abstract:
In this paper, we optimize a faster region-based convolutional neural network (FRCNN) for 1-dimensional (1D) signal processing and electromagnetic spectrum sensing. We target a cluttered radio frequency (RF) environment, where multiple RF transmission can be present at various frequencies with different bandwidths. The challenge is to accurately and quickly detect and localize each signal with minimal prior information of the signal within a band of interest. As the number of wireless devices grow, and devices become more complex from advances such as software defined radio (SDR), this task becomes increasingly difficult. It is important for sensing devices to keep up with this change, to ensure optimal spectrum usage, to monitor traffic over-the-air for security concerns, and for identifying devices in electronic warfare. Machine learning object detection has shown to be effective for spectrum sensing, however current techniques can be slow and use excessive resources. FRCNN has been applied to perform spectrum sensing using 2D spectrograms, however is unable to be applied directly to 1D signals. We optimize FRCNN to handle 1D signals, including fast Fourier transform (FFT) for spectrum sensing. Our results show that our method has better localization performance, and is faster than the 2D equivalent. Additionally, we show a use case where the modulation type of multiple uncooperative transmissions is identified. Finally, we prove our method generalizes to real world scenarios, by testing it over-the-air using SDR.
Authors:Kaustubh Milind Kulkarni, Rohan S Jamadagni, Jeffrey Aaron Paul, Sucheth Shenoy
Abstract:
In this work, the novel task of detecting and classifying table tennis strokes solely using the ball trajectory has been explored. A single camera setup positioned in the umpire's view has been employed to procure a dataset consisting of six stroke classes executed by four professional table tennis players. Ball tracking using YOLOv4, a traditional object detection model, and TrackNetv2, a temporal heatmap based model, have been implemented on our dataset and their performances have been benchmarked. A mathematical approach developed to extract temporal boundaries of strokes using the ball trajectory data yielded a total of 2023 valid strokes in our dataset, while also detecting services and missed strokes successfully. The temporal convolutional network developed performed stroke recognition on completely unseen data with an accuracy of 87.155%. Several machine learning and deep learning based model architectures have been trained for stroke recognition using ball trajectory input and benchmarked based on their performances. While stroke recognition in the field of table tennis has been extensively explored based on human action recognition using video data focused on the player's actions, the use of ball trajectory data for the same is an unexplored characteristic of the sport. Hence, the motivation behind the work is to demonstrate that meaningful inferences such as stroke detection and recognition can be drawn using minimal input information.
Authors:Dong Chen, Duoqian Miao, Xuerong Zhao
Abstract:
In this paper, we point out that the essential differences between CNN-based and Transformer-based detectors, which cause the worse performance of small objects in Transformer-based methods, are the gap between local information and global dependencies in feature extraction and propagation. To address these differences, we propose a new vision Transformer, called Hybrid Network Transformer (Hyneter), after pre-experiments that indicate the gap causes CNN-based and Transformer-based methods to increase size-different objects result unevenly. Different from the divide and conquer strategy in previous methods, Hyneters consist of Hybrid Network Backbone (HNB) and Dual Switching module (DS), which integrate local information and global dependencies, and transfer them simultaneously. Based on the balance strategy, HNB extends the range of local information by embedding convolution layers into Transformer blocks, and DS adjusts excessive reliance on global dependencies outside the patch.
Authors:David Silva, Nicolas Jourdan, Nils Gählert
Abstract:
Computer vision-based object detection is a key modality for advanced Detect-And-Avoid systems that allow for autonomous flight missions of UAVs. While standard object detection frameworks do not predict the actual depth of an object, this information is crucial to avoid collisions. In this paper, we propose several novel extensions to state-of-the-art methods for monocular object detection from images at long range. Firstly, we propose Sigmoid and ReLU-like encodings when modeling depth estimation as a regression task. Secondly, we frame the depth estimation as a classification problem and introduce a Soft-Argmax function in the calculation of the training loss. The extensions are exemplarily applied to the YOLOX object detection framework. We evaluate the performance using the Amazon Airborne Object Tracking dataset. In addition, we introduce the Fitness score as a new metric that jointly assesses both object detection and depth estimation performance. Our results show that the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art approaches w.r.t. existing, as well as the proposed metrics.
Authors:Tao Yang, Youyu Wu, Yangxintai Tang
Abstract:
Road object detection is an important branch of automatic driving technology, The model with higher detection accuracy is more conducive to the safe driving of vehicles. In road object detection, the omission of small objects and occluded objects is an important problem. therefore, reducing the missed rate of the object is of great significance for safe driving. In the work of this paper, based on the YOLOX object detection algorithm to improve, proposes DecIoU boundary box regression loss function to improve the shape consistency of the predicted and real box, and Push Loss is introduced to further optimize the boundary box regression loss function, in order to detect more occluded objects. In addition, the dynamic anchor box mechanism is also used to improve the accuracy of the confidence label, improve the label inaccuracy of object detection model without anchor box. A large number of experiments on KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the improved YOLOX-s achieved 88.9% mAP and 91.0% mAR on the KITTI dataset, compared to the baseline version improvements of 2.77% and 4.24%; the improved YOLOX-m achieved 89.1% mAP and 91.4% mAR, compared to the baseline version improvements of 2.30% and 4.10%.
Authors:Zhenliang Ni, Fukui Yang, Shengzhao Wen, Gang Zhang
Abstract:
Knowledge distillation is an effective method for model compression. However, it is still a challenging topic to apply knowledge distillation to detection tasks. There are two key points resulting in poor distillation performance for detection tasks. One is the serious imbalance between foreground and background features, another one is that small object lacks enough feature representation. To solve the above issues, we propose a new distillation method named dual relation knowledge distillation (DRKD), including pixel-wise relation distillation and instance-wise relation distillation. The pixel-wise relation distillation embeds pixel-wise features in the graph space and applies graph convolution to capture the global pixel relation. By distilling the global pixel relation, the student detector can learn the relation between foreground and background features, and avoid the difficulty of distilling features directly for the feature imbalance issue. Besides, we find that instance-wise relation supplements valuable knowledge beyond independent features for small objects. Thus, the instance-wise relation distillation is designed, which calculates the similarity of different instances to obtain a relation matrix. More importantly, a relation filter module is designed to highlight valuable instance relations. The proposed dual relation knowledge distillation is general and can be easily applied for both one-stage and two-stage detectors. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, which improves Faster R-CNN based on ResNet50 from 38.4% to 41.6% mAP and improves RetinaNet based on ResNet50 from 37.4% to 40.3% mAP on COCO 2017.
Authors:Erdi Kara, George Zhang, Joseph J. Williams, Gonzalo Ferrandez-Quinto, Leviticus J. Rhoden, Maximilian Kim, J. Nathan Kutz, Aminur Rahman
Abstract:
We present a deep-learning based tracking objects of interest in walking droplet and granular intruder experiments. In a typical walking droplet experiment, a liquid droplet, known as \textit{walker}, propels itself laterally on the free surface of a vibrating bath of the same liquid. This motion is the result of the interaction between the droplets and the surface waves generated by the droplet itself after each successive bounce. A walker can exhibit a highly irregular trajectory over the course of its motion, including rapid acceleration and complex interactions with the other walkers present in the same bath. In analogy with the hydrodynamic experiments, the granular matter experiments consist of a vibrating bath of very small solid particles and a larger solid \textit{intruder}. Like the fluid droplets, the intruder interacts with and travels the domain due to the waves of the bath but tends to move much slower and much less smoothly than the droplets. When multiple intruders are introduced, they also exhibit complex interactions with each other. We leverage the state-of-art object detection model YOLO and the Hungarian Algorithm to accurately extract the trajectory of a walker or intruder in real-time. Our proposed methodology is capable of tracking individual walker(s) or intruder(s) in digital images acquired from a broad spectrum of experimental settings and does not suffer from any identity-switch issues. Thus, the deep learning approach developed in this work could be used to automatize the efficient, fast and accurate extraction of observables of interests in walking droplet and granular flow experiments. Such extraction capabilities are critically enabling for downstream tasks such as building data-driven dynamical models for the coarse-grained dynamics and interactions of the objects of interest.
Authors:Md. Shahariar Nafiz, Shuvra Smaran Das, Md. Kishor Morol, Abdullah Al Juabir, Dip Nandi
Abstract:
Nowadays, proper urban waste management is one of the biggest concerns for maintaining a green and clean environment. An automatic waste segregation system can be a viable solution to improve the sustainability of the country and boost the circular economy. This paper proposes a machine to segregate waste into different parts with the help of a smart object detection algorithm using ConvoWaste in the field of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) and image processing techniques. In this paper, deep learning and image processing techniques are applied to precisely classify the waste, and the detected waste is placed inside the corresponding bins with the help of a servo motor-based system. This machine has the provision to notify the responsible authority regarding the waste level of the bins and the time to trash out the bins filled with garbage by using the ultrasonic sensors placed in each bin and the dual-band GSM-based communication technology. The entire system is controlled remotely through an Android app in order to dump the separated waste in the desired place thanks to its automation properties. The use of this system can aid in the process of recycling resources that were initially destined to become waste, utilizing natural resources, and turning these resources back into usable products. Thus, the system helps fulfill the criteria of a circular economy through resource optimization and extraction. Finally, the system is designed to provide services at a low cost while maintaining a high level of accuracy in terms of technological advancement in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). We have gotten 98% accuracy for our ConvoWaste deep learning model.
Authors:Yanling Qiu, Qianxue Feng, Boqin Cai, Hongan Wei, Weiling Chen
Abstract:
To assist underwater object detection for better performance, image enhancement technology is often used as a pre-processing step. However, most of the existing enhancement methods tend to pursue the visual quality of an image, instead of providing effective help for detection tasks. In fact, image enhancement algorithms should be optimized with the goal of utility improvement. In this paper, to adapt to the underwater detection tasks, we proposed a lightweight dynamic enhancement algorithm using a contribution dictionary to guide low-level corrections. Dynamic solutions are designed to capture differences in detection preferences. In addition, it can also balance the inconsistency between the contribution of correction operations and their time complexity. Experimental results in real underwater object detection tasks show the superiority of our proposed method in both generalization and real-time performance.
Authors:Sedat Ozer, Enes Ilhan, Mehmet Akif Ozkanoglu, Hakan Ali Cirpan
Abstract:
Offloading computationally heavy tasks from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to a remote server helps improve the battery life and can help reduce resource requirements. Deep learning based state-of-the-art computer vision tasks, such as object segmentation and object detection, are computationally heavy algorithms, requiring large memory and computing power. Many UAVs are using (pretrained) off-the-shelf versions of such algorithms. Offloading such power-hungry algorithms to a remote server could help UAVs save power significantly. However, deep learning based algorithms are susceptible to noise, and a wireless communication system, by its nature, introduces noise to the original signal. When the signal represents an image, noise affects the image. There has not been much work studying the effect of the noise introduced by the communication system on pretrained deep networks. In this work, we first analyze how reliable it is to offload deep learning based computer vision tasks (including both object segmentation and detection) by focusing on the effect of various parameters of a 5G wireless communication system on the transmitted image and demonstrate how the introduced noise of the used 5G wireless communication system reduces the performance of the offloaded deep learning task. Then solutions are introduced to eliminate (or reduce) the negative effect of the noise. The proposed framework starts with introducing many classical techniques as alternative solutions first, and then introduces a novel deep learning based solution to denoise the given noisy input image. The performance of various denoising algorithms on offloading both object segmentation and object detection tasks are compared. Our proposed deep transformer-based denoiser algorithm (NR-Net) yields the state-of-the-art results on reducing the negative effect of the noise in our experiments.
Authors:Pedro H. E. Becker, José MarÃa Arnau, Antonio González
Abstract:
Autonomous Driving (AD) systems extensively manipulate 3D point clouds for object detection and vehicle localization. Thereby, efficient processing of 3D point clouds is crucial in these systems. In this work we propose K-D Bonsai, a technique to cut down memory usage during radius search, a critical building block of point cloud processing. K-D Bonsai exploits value similarity in the data structure that holds the point cloud (a k-d tree) to compress the data in memory. K-D Bonsai further compresses the data using a reduced floating-point representation, exploiting the physically limited range of point cloud values. For easy integration into nowadays systems, we implement K-D Bonsai through Bonsai-extensions, a small set of new CPU instructions to compress, decompress, and operate on points. To maintain baseline safety levels, we carefully craft the Bonsai-extensions to detect precision loss due to compression, allowing re-computation in full precision to take place if necessary. Therefore, K-D Bonsai reduces data movement, improving performance and energy efficiency, while guaranteeing baseline accuracy and programmability. We evaluate K-D Bonsai over the euclidean cluster task of Autoware.ai, a state-of-the-art software stack for AD. We achieve an average of 9.26% improvement in end-to-end latency, 12.19% in tail latency, and a reduction of 10.84% in energy consumption. Differently from expensive accelerators proposed in related work, K-D Bonsai improves radius search with minimal area increase (0.36%).
Authors:Amir Ghasemi, Nasrin Bayat, Fatemeh Mottaghian, Akram Bayat
Abstract:
Object recognition systems are usually trained and evaluated on high resolution images. However, in real world applications, it is common that the images have low resolutions or have small sizes. In this study, we first track the performance of the state-of-the-art deep object recognition network, Faster- RCNN, as a function of image resolution. The results reveals negative effects of low resolution images on recognition performance. They also show that different spatial frequencies convey different information about the objects in recognition process. It means multi-resolution recognition system can provides better insight into optimal selection of features that results in better recognition of objects. This is similar to the mechanisms of the human visual systems that are able to implement multi-scale representation of a visual scene simultaneously. Then, we propose a multi-resolution object recognition framework rather than a single-resolution network. The proposed framework is evaluated on the PASCAL VOC2007 database. The experimental results show the performance of our adapted multi-resolution Faster-RCNN framework outperforms the single-resolution Faster-RCNN on input images with various resolutions with an increase in the mean Average Precision (mAP) of 9.14% across all resolutions and 1.2% on the full-spectrum images. Furthermore, the proposed model yields robustness of the performance over a wide range of spatial frequencies.
Authors:Khalid Alnujaidi, Ghadah Alhabib
Abstract:
As the population grows and more land is being used for urbanization, ecosystems are disrupted by our roads and cars. This expansion of infrastructure cuts through wildlife territories, leading to many instances of Wildlife-Vehicle Collision (WVC). These instances of WVC are a global issue that is having a global socio-economic impact, resulting in billions of dollars in property damage and, at times, fatalities for vehicle occupants. In Saudi Arabia, this issue is similar, with instances of Camel-Vehicle Collision (CVC) being particularly deadly due to the large size of camels, which results in a 25% fatality rate [4]. The focus of this work is to test different object detection models on the task of detecting camels on the road. The Deep Learning (DL) object detection models used in the experiments are: CenterNet, EfficientDet, Faster R-CNN, and SSD. Results of the experiments show that CenterNet performed the best in terms of accuracy and was the most efficient in training. In the future, the plan is to expand on this work by developing a system to make countryside roads safer.
Authors:Chandana Raju, Sumedh Vilas Datar, Kushala Hari, Kavin Vijay, Suma Ningappa
Abstract:
Deep learning based neural networks have gained popularity for a variety of biomedical imaging applications. In the last few years several works have shown the use of these methods for colon cancer detection and the early results have been promising. These methods can potentially be utilized to assist doctor's and may help in identifying the number of lesions or abnormalities in a diagnosis session. From our literature survey we found out that there is a lack of publicly available labeled data. Thus, as part of this work, we have aimed at open sourcing a dataset which contains annotations of polyps and ulcers. This is the first dataset that's coming from India containing polyp and ulcer images. The dataset can be used for detection and classification tasks. We also evaluated our dataset with several popular deep learning object detection models that's trained on large publicly available datasets and found out empirically that the model trained on one dataset works well on our dataset that has data being captured in a different acquisition device.
Authors:Pau Gallés, Katalin Takats, Javier Marin
Abstract:
A lot of work has been done to reach the best possible performance of predictive models on images. There are fewer studies about the resilience of these models when they are trained on image datasets that suffer modifications altering their original quality. Yet this is a common problem that is often encountered in the industry. A good example of that is with earth observation satellites that are capturing many images. The energy and time of connection to the earth of an orbiting satellite are limited and must be carefully used. An approach to mitigate that is to compress the images on board before downloading. The compression can be regulated depending on the intended usage of the image and the requirements of this application. We present a new software tool with the name iquaflow that is designed to study image quality and model performance variation given an alteration of the image dataset. Furthermore, we do a showcase study about oriented object detection models adoption on a public image dataset DOTA Xia_2018_CVPR given different compression levels. The optimal compression point is found and the usefulness of iquaflow becomes evident.
Authors:Junjia Liu, Jianfei Guo, Zehui Meng, Jingtao Xue
Abstract:
Embodied AI is an inevitable trend that emphasizes the interaction between intelligent entities and the real world, with broad applications in Robotics, especially target-driven navigation. This task requires the robot to find an object of a certain category efficiently in an unknown domestic environment. Recent works focus on exploiting layout relationships by graph neural networks (GNNs). However, most of them obtain robot actions directly from observations in an end-to-end manner via an incomplete relation graph, which is not interpretable and reliable. We decouple this task and propose ReVoLT, a hierarchical framework: (a) an object detection visual front-end, (b) a high-level reasoner (infers semantic sub-goals), (c) an intermediate-level planner (computes geometrical positions), and (d) a low-level controller (executes actions). ReVoLT operates with a multi-layer semantic-spatial topological graph. The reasoner uses multiform structured relations as priors, which are obtained from combinatorial relation extraction networks composed of unsupervised GraphSAGE, GCN, and GraphRNN-based Region Rollout. The reasoner performs with Upper Confidence Bound for Tree (UCT) to infer semantic sub-goals, accounting for trade-offs between exploitation (depth-first searching) and exploration (regretting). The lightweight intermediate-level planner generates instantaneous spatial sub-goal locations via an online constructed Voronoi local graph. The simulation experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves better performance in the target-driven navigation tasks and generalizes well, which has an 80% improvement compared to the existing state-of-the-art method. The code and result video will be released at https://ventusff.github.io/ReVoLT-website/.
Authors:Zaid El-Shair, Samir Rawashdeh
Abstract:
Event-based vision has been rapidly growing in recent years justified by the unique characteristics it presents such as its high temporal resolutions (~1us), high dynamic range (>120dB), and output latency of only a few microseconds. This work further explores a hybrid, multi-modal, approach for object detection and tracking that leverages state-of-the-art frame-based detectors complemented by hand-crafted event-based methods to improve the overall tracking performance with minimal computational overhead. The methods presented include event-based bounding box (BB) refinement that improves the precision of the resulting BBs, as well as a continuous event-based object detection method, to recover missed detections and generate inter-frame detections that enable a high-temporal-resolution tracking output. The advantages of these methods are quantitatively verified by an ablation study using the higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) metric. Results show significant performance gains resembled by an improvement in the HOTA from 56.6%, using only frames, to 64.1% and 64.9%, for the event and edge-based mask configurations combined with the two methods proposed, at the baseline framerate of 24Hz. Likewise, incorporating these methods with the same configurations has improved HOTA from 52.5% to 63.1%, and from 51.3% to 60.2% at the high-temporal-resolution tracking rate of 384Hz. Finally, a validation experiment is conducted to analyze the real-world single-object tracking performance using high-speed LiDAR. Empirical evidence shows that our approaches provide significant advantages compared to using frame-based object detectors at the baseline framerate of 24Hz and higher tracking rates of up to 500Hz.
Authors:Tao Wang, Nan Li
Abstract:
Open vocabulary object detection has been greatly advanced by the recent development of vision-language pretrained model, which helps recognize novel objects with only semantic categories. The prior works mainly focus on knowledge transferring to the object proposal classification and employ class-agnostic box and mask prediction. In this work, we propose CondHead, a principled dynamic network design to better generalize the box regression and mask segmentation for open vocabulary setting. The core idea is to conditionally parameterize the network heads on semantic embedding and thus the model is guided with class-specific knowledge to better detect novel categories. Specifically, CondHead is composed of two streams of network heads, the dynamically aggregated head and the dynamically generated head. The former is instantiated with a set of static heads that are conditionally aggregated, these heads are optimized as experts and are expected to learn sophisticated prediction. The latter is instantiated with dynamically generated parameters and encodes general class-specific information. With such a conditional design, the detection model is bridged by the semantic embedding to offer strongly generalizable class-wise box and mask prediction. Our method brings significant improvement to the state-of-the-art open vocabulary object detection methods with very minor overhead, e.g., it surpasses a RegionClip model by 3.0 detection AP on novel categories, with only 1.1% more computation.
Authors:Angzhi Fan, Benjamin Ticknor, Yali Amit
Abstract:
In object detection, post-processing methods like Non-maximum Suppression (NMS) are widely used. NMS can substantially reduce the number of false positive detections but may still keep some detections with low objectness scores. In order to find the exact number of objects and their labels in the image, we propose a post processing method called Detection Selection Algorithm (DSA) which is used after NMS or related methods. DSA greedily selects a subset of detected bounding boxes, together with full object reconstructions that give the interpretation of the whole image with highest likelihood, taking into account object occlusions. The algorithm consists of four components. First, we add an occlusion branch to Faster R-CNN to obtain occlusion relationships between objects. Second, we develop a single reconstruction algorithm which can reconstruct the whole appearance of an object given its visible part, based on the optimization of latent variables of a trained generative network which we call the decoder. Third, we propose a whole reconstruction algorithm which generates the joint reconstruction of all objects in a hypothesized interpretation, taking into account occlusion ordering. Finally we propose a greedy algorithm that incrementally adds or removes detections from a list to maximize the likelihood of the corresponding interpretation. DSA with NMS or Soft-NMS can achieve better results than NMS or Soft-NMS themselves, as is illustrated in our experiments on synthetic images with mutiple 3d objects.
Authors:Kim Bjerge, Carsten Eie Frigaard, Henrik Karstoft
Abstract:
Insects as pollinators play a crucial role in ecosystem management and world food production. However, insect populations are declining, calling for efficient methods of insect monitoring. Existing methods analyze video or time-lapse images of insects in nature, but the analysis is challenging since insects are small objects in complex and dynamic scenes of natural vegetation. In this work, we provide a dataset of primary honeybees visiting three different plant species during two months of the summer period. The dataset consists of 107,387 annotated time-lapse images from multiple cameras, including 9,423 annotated insects. We present a method pipeline for detecting insects in time-lapse RGB images. The pipeline consists of a two-step process. Firstly, the time-lapse RGB images are preprocessed to enhance insects in the images. This Motion-Informed-Enhancement technique uses motion and colors to enhance insects in images. Secondly, the enhanced images are subsequently fed into a Convolutional Neural network (CNN) object detector. The method improves the deep learning object detectors You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Faster Region-based CNN (Faster R-CNN). Using Motion-Informed-Enhancement, the YOLO-detector improves the average micro F1-score from 0.49 to 0.71, and the Faster R-CNN-detector improves the average micro F1-score from 0.32 to 0.56 on the dataset. Our dataset and proposed method provide a step forward to automate the time-lapse camera monitoring of flying insects. The dataset is published on: https://vision.eng.au.dk/mie/
Authors:Cheng Guo, Fei Hu, Yan Hu
Abstract:
Passive millimeter-wave (PMMW) is a significant potential technique for human security screening. Several popular object detection networks have been used for PMMW images. However, restricted by the low resolution and high noise of PMMW images, PMMW hidden object detection based on deep learning usually suffers from low accuracy and low classification confidence. To tackle the above problems, this paper proposes a Task-Aligned Detection Transformer network, named PMMW-DETR. In the first stage, a Denoising Coarse-to-Fine Transformer (DCFT) backbone is designed to extract long- and short-range features in the different scales. In the second stage, we propose the Query Selection module to introduce learned spatial features into the network as prior knowledge, which enhances the semantic perception capability of the network. In the third stage, aiming to improve the classification performance, we perform a Task-Aligned Dual-Head block to decouple the classification and regression tasks. Based on our self-developed PMMW security screening dataset, experimental results including comparison with State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods and ablation study demonstrate that the PMMW-DETR obtains higher accuracy and classification confidence than previous works, and exhibits robustness to the PMMW images of low quality.
Authors:Heeseung Kwon, Francisco M. Castro, Manuel J. Marin-Jimenez, Nicolas Guil, Karteek Alahari
Abstract:
Attention operator has been widely used as a basic brick in visual understanding since it provides some flexibility through its adjustable kernels. However, this operator suffers from inherent limitations: (1) the attention kernel is not discriminative enough, resulting in high redundancy, and (2) the complexity in computation and memory is quadratic in the sequence length. In this paper, we propose a novel attention operator, called Lightweight Structure-aware Attention (LiSA), which has a better representation power with log-linear complexity. Our operator transforms the attention kernels to be more discriminative by learning structural patterns. These structural patterns are encoded by exploiting a set of relative position embeddings (RPEs) as multiplicative weights, thereby improving the representation power of the attention kernels. Additionally, the RPEs are approximated to obtain log-linear complexity. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate that the proposed operator outperforms self-attention and other existing operators, achieving state-of-the-art results on ImageNet-1K and other downstream tasks such as video action recognition on Kinetics-400, object detection \& instance segmentation on COCO, and semantic segmentation on ADE-20K.
Authors:Yang Yang, Hongjian Sun, Jialei Gong, Di Yu
Abstract:
Nonlinear dimensionality reduction lacks interpretability due to the absence of source features in low-dimensional embedding space. We propose an interpretable method featMAP to preserve source features by tangent space embedding. The core of our proposal is to utilize local singular value decomposition (SVD) to approximate the tangent space which is embedded to low-dimensional space by maintaining the alignment. Based on the embedding tangent space, featMAP enables the interpretability by locally demonstrating the source features and feature importance. Furthermore, featMAP embeds the data points by anisotropic projection to preserve the local similarity and original density. We apply featMAP to interpreting digit classification, object detection and MNIST adversarial examples. FeatMAP uses source features to explicitly distinguish the digits and objects and to explain the misclassification of adversarial examples. We also compare featMAP with other state-of-the-art methods on local and global metrics.
Authors:A. E. Krosney, P. Sotoodeh, C. J. Henry, M. A. Beck, C. P. Bidinosti
Abstract:
Machine learning tasks often require a significant amount of training data for the resultant network to perform suitably for a given problem in any domain. In agriculture, dataset sizes are further limited by phenotypical differences between two plants of the same genotype, often as a result of differing growing conditions. Synthetically-augmented datasets have shown promise in improving existing models when real data is not available. In this paper, we employ a contrastive unpaired translation (CUT) generative adversarial network (GAN) and simple image processing techniques to translate indoor plant images to appear as field images. While we train our network to translate an image containing only a single plant, we show that our method is easily extendable to produce multiple-plant field images. Furthermore, we use our synthetic multi-plant images to train several YoloV5 nano object detection models to perform the task of plant detection and measure the accuracy of the model on real field data images. Including training data generated by the CUT-GAN leads to better plant detection performance compared to a network trained solely on real data.
Authors:Disen Hu, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract:
The influence of atmospheric turbulence on acquired surveillance imagery poses significant challenges in image interpretation and scene analysis. Conventional approaches for target classification and tracking are less effective under such conditions. While deep-learning-based object detection methods have shown great success in normal conditions, they cannot be directly applied to atmospheric turbulence sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that learns distorted features to detect and classify object types in turbulent environments. Specifically, we utilise deformable convolutions to handle spatial turbulent displacement. Features are extracted using a feature pyramid network, and Faster R-CNN is employed as the object detector. Experimental results on a synthetic VOC dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the benchmark with a mean Average Precision (mAP) score exceeding 30%. Additionally, subjective results on real data show significant improvement in performance.
Authors:Alireza Nasiri, Tristan Bepler
Abstract:
In many imaging modalities, objects of interest can occur in a variety of locations and poses (i.e. are subject to translations and rotations in 2d or 3d), but the location and pose of an object does not change its semantics (i.e. the object's essence). That is, the specific location and rotation of an airplane in satellite imagery, or the 3d rotation of a chair in a natural image, or the rotation of a particle in a cryo-electron micrograph, do not change the intrinsic nature of those objects. Here, we consider the problem of learning semantic representations of objects that are invariant to pose and location in a fully unsupervised manner. We address shortcomings in previous approaches to this problem by introducing TARGET-VAE, a translation and rotation group-equivariant variational autoencoder framework. TARGET-VAE combines three core innovations: 1) a rotation and translation group-equivariant encoder architecture, 2) a structurally disentangled distribution over latent rotation, translation, and a rotation-translation-invariant semantic object representation, which are jointly inferred by the approximate inference network, and 3) a spatially equivariant generator network. In comprehensive experiments, we show that TARGET-VAE learns disentangled representations without supervision that significantly improve upon, and avoid the pathologies of, previous methods. When trained on images highly corrupted by rotation and translation, the semantic representations learned by TARGET-VAE are similar to those learned on consistently posed objects, dramatically improving clustering in the semantic latent space. Furthermore, TARGET-VAE is able to perform remarkably accurate unsupervised pose and location inference. We expect methods like TARGET-VAE will underpin future approaches for unsupervised object generation, pose prediction, and object detection.
Authors:Rebbapragada V C Sairam, Monish Keswani, Uttaran Sinha, Nishit Shah, Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Abstract:
Deep neural networks tend to reciprocate the bias of their training dataset. In object detection, the bias exists in the form of various imbalances such as class, background-foreground, and object size. In this paper, we denote size of an object as the number of pixels it covers in an image and size imbalance as the over-representation of certain sizes of objects in a dataset. We aim to address the problem of size imbalance in drone-based aerial image datasets. Existing methods for solving size imbalance are based on architectural changes that utilize multiple scales of images or feature maps for detecting objects of different sizes. We, on the other hand, propose a novel ARchitectUre-agnostic BAlanced Loss (ARUBA) that can be applied as a plugin on top of any object detection model. It follows a neighborhood-driven approach inspired by the ordinality of object size. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments on aerial datasets such as HRSC2016, DOTAv1.0, DOTAv1.5 and VisDrone and obtain consistent improvement in performance.
Authors:Vincenz Mechler, Pavel Rojtberg
Abstract:
Event-based image representations are fundamentally different to traditional dense images. This poses a challenge to apply current state-of-the-art models for object detection as they are designed for dense images. In this work we evaluate the YOLO object detection model on event data. To this end we replace dense-convolution layers by either sparse convolutions or asynchronous sparse convolutions which enables direct processing of event-based images and compare the performance and runtime to feeding event-histograms into dense-convolutions. Here, hyper-parameters are shared across all variants to isolate the effect sparse-representation has on detection performance.
At this, we show that current sparse-convolution implementations cannot translate their theoretical lower computation requirements into an improved runtime.
Authors:Poonam Kumari Saha, Deeksha Arya, Ashutosh Kumar, Hiroya Maeda, Yoshihide Sekimoto
Abstract:
Road rutting is a severe road distress that can cause premature failure of road incurring early and costly maintenance costs. Research on road damage detection using image processing techniques and deep learning are being actively conducted in the past few years. However, these researches are mostly focused on detection of cracks, potholes, and their variants. Very few research has been done on the detection of road rutting. This paper proposes a novel road rutting dataset comprising of 949 images and provides both object level and pixel level annotations. Object detection models and semantic segmentation models were deployed to detect road rutting on the proposed dataset, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of model predictions were done to evaluate model performance and identify challenges faced in the detection of road rutting using the proposed method. Object detection model YOLOX-s achieves mAP@IoU=0.5 of 61.6% and semantic segmentation model PSPNet (Resnet-50) achieves IoU of 54.69 and accuracy of 72.67, thus providing a benchmark accuracy for similar work in future. The proposed road rutting dataset and the results of our research study will help accelerate the research on detection of road rutting using deep learning.
Authors:Shashank Sanjay Bhat, Thiagaraj Prabu, Ben Stappers, Atul Ghalame, Snehanshu Saha, T. S. B Sudarshan, Zafiirah Hosenie
Abstract:
The SKA pulsar search pipeline will be used for real time detection of pulsars. Modern radio telescopes such as SKA will be generating petabytes of data in their full scale of operation. Hence experience-based and data-driven algorithms become indispensable for applications such as candidate detection. Here we describe our findings from testing a state of the art object detection algorithm called Mask R-CNN to detect candidate signatures in the SKA pulsar search pipeline. We have trained the Mask R-CNN model to detect candidate images. A custom annotation tool was developed to mark the regions of interest in large datasets efficiently. We have successfully demonstrated this algorithm by detecting candidate signatures on a simulation dataset. The paper presents details of this work with a highlight on the future prospects.
Authors:Debojyoti Biswas, Jelena TeÅ¡iÄ
Abstract:
State-of-the-art object detection methods applied to satellite and drone imagery largely fail to identify small and dense objects. One reason is the high variability of content in the overhead imagery due to the terrestrial region captured and the high variability of acquisition conditions. Another reason is that the number and size of objects in aerial imagery are very different than in the consumer data. In this work, we propose a small object detection pipeline that improves the feature extraction process by spatial pyramid pooling, cross-stage partial networks, heatmap-based region proposal network, and object localization and identification through a novel image difficulty score that adapts the overall focal loss measure based on the image difficulty. Next, we propose novel contrastive learning with progressive domain adaptation to produce domain-invariant features across aerial datasets using local and global components. We show we can alleviate the degradation of object identification in previously unseen datasets. We create a first-ever domain adaptation benchmark using contrastive learning for the object detection task in highly imbalanced satellite datasets with significant domain gaps and dominant small objects. The proposed method results in a 7.4% increase in mAP performance measure over the best state-of-art.
Authors:Mocho Go, Hideyuki Tachibana
Abstract:
Following the success in language domain, the self-attention mechanism (transformer) is adopted in the vision domain and achieving great success recently. Additionally, as another stream, multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is also explored in the vision domain. These architectures, other than traditional CNNs, have been attracting attention recently, and many methods have been proposed. As one that combines parameter efficiency and performance with locality and hierarchy in image recognition, we propose gSwin, which merges the two streams; Swin Transformer and (multi-head) gMLP. We showed that our gSwin can achieve better accuracy on three vision tasks, image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, than Swin Transformer, with smaller model size.
Authors:Priya Narayanan, Xin Hu, Zhenyu Wu, Matthew D Thielke, John G Rogers, Andre V Harrison, John A D'Agostino, James D Brown, Long P Quang, James R Uplinger, Heesung Kwon, Zhangyang Wang
Abstract:
Imagery collected from outdoor visual environments is often degraded due to the presence of dense smoke or haze. A key challenge for research in scene understanding in these degraded visual environments (DVE) is the lack of representative benchmark datasets. These datasets are required to evaluate state-of-the-art vision algorithms (e.g., detection and tracking) in degraded settings. In this paper, we address some of these limitations by introducing the first realistic hazy image benchmark, from both aerial and ground view, with paired haze-free images, and in-situ haze density measurements. This dataset was produced in a controlled environment with professional smoke generating machines that covered the entire scene, and consists of images captured from the perspective of both an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). We also evaluate a set of representative state-of-the-art dehazing approaches as well as object detectors on the dataset. The full dataset presented in this paper, including the ground truth object classification bounding boxes and haze density measurements, is provided for the community to evaluate their algorithms at: https://a2i2-archangel.vision. A subset of this dataset has been used for the ``Object Detection in Haze'' Track of CVPR UG2 2022 challenge at http://cvpr2022.ug2challenge.org/track1.html.
Authors:Boyang Deng, Meiyan Lin, Shoulun Long
Abstract:
Developing data-efficient instance detection models that can handle rare object categories remains a key challenge in computer vision. However, existing research often overlooks data collection strategies and evaluation metrics tailored to real-world scenarios involving neural networks. In this study, we systematically investigate data collection and augmentation techniques focused on object occlusion, aiming to mimic occlusion relationships observed in practical applications. Surprisingly, we find that even a simple occlusion mechanism is sufficient to achieve strong performance when introducing new object categories. Notably, by adding just 15 images of a new category to a large-scale training dataset containing over half a million images across hundreds of categories, the model achieves 95\% accuracy on an unseen test set with thousands of instances of the new category.
Authors:Nupur Giri, Shashi Dugad, Amit Chhabria, Rashmi Manwani, Priyanka Asrani
Abstract:
In the CMS experiment at CERN, Geneva, a large number of HGCAL sensor modules are fabricated in advanced laboratories around the world. Each sensor module contains about 700 checkpoints for visual inspection thus making it almost impossible to carry out such inspection manually. As artificial intelligence is more and more widely used in manufacturing, traditional detection technologies are gradually being intelligent. In order to more accurately evaluate the checkpoints, we propose to use deep learning-based object detection techniques to detect manufacturing defects in testing large numbers of modules automatically.
Authors:You Li, Julien Moreau, Javier Ibanez-Guzman
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles rely on perception systems to understand their surroundings for further navigation missions. Cameras are essential for perception systems due to the advantages of object detection and recognition provided by modern computer vision algorithms, comparing to other sensors, such as LiDARs and radars. However, limited by its inherent imaging principle, a standard RGB camera may perform poorly in a variety of adverse scenarios, including but not limited to: low illumination, high contrast, bad weather such as fog/rain/snow, etc. Meanwhile, estimating the 3D information from the 2D image detection is generally more difficult when compared to LiDARs or radars. Several new sensing technologies have emerged in recent years to address the limitations of conventional RGB cameras. In this paper, we review the principles of four novel image sensors: infrared cameras, range-gated cameras, polarization cameras, and event cameras. Their comparative advantages, existing or potential applications, and corresponding data processing algorithms are all presented in a systematic manner. We expect that this study will assist practitioners in the autonomous driving society with new perspectives and insights.
Authors:Ravi Kothari, Ali Kariminezhad, Christian Mayr, Haoming Zhang
Abstract:
Radar is an inevitable part of the perception sensor set for autonomous driving functions. It plays a gap-filling role to complement the shortcomings of other sensors in diverse scenarios and weather conditions. In this paper, we propose a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based end-to-end object detection and heading estimation framework using raw radar data. To this end, we approach the problem in both a Data-centric and model-centric manner. We refine the publicly available CARRADA dataset and introduce Bivariate norm annotations. Besides, the baseline model is improved by a transformer inspired cross-attention fusion and further center-offset maps are added to reduce localisation error. Our proposed model improves the detection mean Average Precision (mAP) by 5%, while reducing the model complexity by almost 23%. For comprehensive scene understanding purposes, we extend our model for heading estimation. The improved ground truth and proposed model is available at Github
Authors:Xiaofang Wang, Kris M. Kitani
Abstract:
Considerable research effort has been devoted to LiDAR-based 3D object detection and empirical performance has been significantly improved. While progress has been encouraging, we observe an overlooked issue: it is not yet common practice to compare different 3D detectors under the same cost, e.g., inference latency. This makes it difficult to quantify the true performance gain brought by recently proposed architecture designs. The goal of this work is to conduct a cost-aware evaluation of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors. Specifically, we focus on SECOND, a simple grid-based one-stage detector, and analyze its performance under different costs by scaling its original architecture. Then we compare the family of scaled SECOND with recent 3D detection methods, such as Voxel R-CNN and PV-RCNN++. The results are surprising. We find that, if allowed to use the same latency, SECOND can match the performance of PV-RCNN++, the current state-of-the-art method on the Waymo Open Dataset. Scaled SECOND also easily outperforms many recent 3D detection methods published during the past year. We recommend future research control the inference cost in their empirical comparison and include the family of scaled SECOND as a strong baseline when presenting novel 3D detection methods.
Authors:Can Ufuk Ertenli, Ramazan Gokberk Cinbis, Emre Akbas
Abstract:
We present StreamDEQ, a method that aims to infer frame-wise representations on videos with minimal per-frame computation. Conventional deep networks do feature extraction from scratch at each frame in the absence of ad-hoc solutions. We instead aim to build streaming recognition models that can natively exploit temporal smoothness between consecutive video frames. We observe that the recently emerging implicit layer models provide a convenient foundation to construct such models, as they define representations as the fixed-points of shallow networks, which need to be estimated using iterative methods. Our main insight is to distribute the inference iterations over the temporal axis by using the most recent representation as a starting point at each frame. This scheme effectively recycles the recent inference computations and greatly reduces the needed processing time. Through extensive experimental analysis, we show that StreamDEQ is able to recover near-optimal representations in a few frames' time and maintain an up-to-date representation throughout the video duration. Our experiments on video semantic segmentation, video object detection, and human pose estimation in videos show that StreamDEQ achieves on-par accuracy with the baseline while being more than 2-4x faster.
Authors:Tolga Bakirman, Elif Sertel
Abstract:
Airplane detection from satellite imagery is a challenging task due to the complex backgrounds in the images and differences in data acquisition conditions caused by the sensor geometry and atmospheric effects. Deep learning methods provide reliable and accurate solutions for automatic detection of airplanes; however, huge amount of training data is required to obtain promising results. In this study, we create a novel airplane detection dataset called High Resolution Planes (HRPlanes) by using images from Google Earth (GE) and labeling the bounding box of each plane on the images. HRPlanes include GE images of several different airports across the world to represent a variety of landscape, seasonal and satellite geometry conditions obtained from different satellites. We evaluated our dataset with two widely used object detection methods namely YOLOv4 and Faster R-CNN. Our preliminary results show that the proposed dataset can be a valuable data source and benchmark data set for future applications. Moreover, proposed architectures and results of this study could be used for transfer learning of different datasets and models for airplane detection.
Authors:Leandro Arab Marcomini, André Luiz Cunha
Abstract:
Axle count in trucks is important to the classification of vehicles and to the operation of road systems. It is used in the determination of service fees and in the impact on the pavement. Although axle count can be achieved with traditional methods, such as manual labor, it is increasingly possible to count axles using deep learning and computer vision methods. This paper aims to compare three deep-learning object detection algorithms, YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and SSD, for the detection of truck axles. A dataset was built to provide training and testing examples for the neural networks. The training was done on different base models, to increase training time efficiency and to compare results. We evaluated results based on five metrics: precision, recall, mAP, F1-score, and FPS count. Results indicate that YOLO and SSD have similar accuracy and performance, with more than 96\% mAP for both models. Datasets and codes are publicly available for download.
Authors:Lukas Pavez, Jose M. Saavedra Rondo
Abstract:
During the last years, we have seen significant advances in the object detection task, mainly due to the outperforming results of convolutional neural networks. In this vein, anchor-based models have achieved the best results. However, these models require prior information about the aspect and scales of target objects, needing more hyperparameters to fit. In addition, using anchors to fit bounding boxes seems far from how our visual system does the same visual task. Instead, our visual system uses the interactions of different scene parts to semantically identify objects, called perceptual grouping. An object detection methodology closer to the natural model is anchor-free detection, where models like FCOS or Centernet have shown competitive results, but these have not yet exploited the concept of perceptual grouping. Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of anchor-free models keeping the inference time low, we propose to add non-local attention (NL modules) modules to boost the feature map of the underlying backbone. NL modules implement the perceptual grouping mechanism, allowing receptive fields to cooperate in visual representation learning. We show that non-local modules combined with an FCOS head (NL-FCOS) are practical and efficient. Thus, we establish state-of-the-art performance in clothing detection and handwritten amount recognition problems.
Authors:Kevser Irem Danaci, Erdem Akagunduz
Abstract:
In this survey, we compile a list of publicly available infrared image and video sets for artificial intelligence and computer vision researchers. We mainly focus on IR image and video sets which are collected and labelled for computer vision applications such as object detection, object segmentation, classification, and motion detection. We categorize 92 different publicly available or private sets according to their sensor types, image resolution, and scale. We describe each and every set in detail regarding their collection purpose, operation environment, optical system properties, and area of application. We also cover a general overview of fundamental concepts that relate to IR imagery, such as IR radiation, IR detectors, IR optics and application fields. We analyse the statistical significance of the entire corpus from different perspectives. We believe that this survey will be a guideline for computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers that are interested in working with the spectra beyond the visible domain.
Authors:Karthik Seemakurthy, Erchan Aptoula, Charles Fox, Petra Bosilj
Abstract:
Domain generalisation aims to promote the learning of domain-invariant features while suppressing domain-specific features, so that a model can generalise better to previously unseen target domains. An approach to domain generalisation for object detection is proposed, the first such approach applicable to any object detection architecture. Based on a rigorous mathematical analysis, we extend approaches based on feature alignment with a novel component for performing class conditional alignment at the instance level, in addition to aligning the marginal feature distributions across domains at the image level. This allows us to fully address both components of domain shift, i.e. covariate and concept shift, and learn a domain agnostic feature representation. We perform extensive evaluation with both one-stage (FCOS, YOLO) and two-stage (FRCNN) detectors, on a newly proposed benchmark comprising several different datasets for autonomous driving applications (Cityscapes, BDD10K, ACDC, IDD) as well as the GWHD dataset for precision agriculture, and show consistent improvements to the generalisation and localisation performance over baselines and state-of-the-art.
Authors:Rui Duan, Hui Deng, Mao Tian, Yichuan Deng, Jiarui Lin
Abstract:
Computer vision-based deep learning object detection algorithms have been developed sufficiently powerful to support the ability to recognize various objects. Although there are currently general datasets for object detection, there is still a lack of large-scale, open-source dataset for the construction industry, which limits the developments of object detection algorithms as they tend to be data-hungry. Therefore, this paper develops a new large-scale image dataset specifically collected and annotated for the construction site, called Site Object Detection dAtaset (SODA), which contains 15 kinds of object classes categorized by workers, materials, machines, and layout. Firstly, more than 20,000 images were collected from multiple construction sites in different site conditions, weather conditions, and construction phases, which covered different angles and perspectives. After careful screening and processing, 19,846 images including 286,201 objects were then obtained and annotated with labels in accordance with predefined categories. Statistical analysis shows that the developed dataset is advantageous in terms of diversity and volume. Further evaluation with two widely-adopted object detection algorithms based on deep learning (YOLO v3/ YOLO v4) also illustrates the feasibility of the dataset for typical construction scenarios, achieving a maximum mAP of 81.47%. In this manner, this research contributes a large-scale image dataset for the development of deep learning-based object detection methods in the construction industry and sets up a performance benchmark for further evaluation of corresponding algorithms in this area.
Authors:Jialin Yu, Huogen Wang, Ming Chen
Abstract:
We improved an existing end-to-end polyp detection model with better average precision validated by different data sets with trivial cost on detection speed. Our previous work on detecting polyps within colonoscopy provided an efficient end-to-end solution to alleviate doctor's examination overhead. However, our later experiments found this framework is not as robust as before as the condition of polyp capturing varies. In this work, we conducted several studies on data set, identifying main issues that causes low precision rate in the task of polyp detection. We used an optimized anchor generation methods to get better anchor box shape and more boxes are used for detection as we believe this is necessary for small object detection. An alternative backbone is used to compensate the heavy time cost introduced by dense anchor box regression. With use of the attention gate module, our model can achieve state-of-the-art polyp detection performance while still maintain real-time detection speed.
Authors:Mazin Hnewa, Hayder Radha
Abstract:
The area of domain adaptation has been instrumental in addressing the domain shift problem encountered by many applications. This problem arises due to the difference between the distributions of source data used for training in comparison with target data used during realistic testing scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel MultiScale Domain Adaptive YOLO (MS-DAYOLO) framework that employs multiple domain adaptation paths and corresponding domain classifiers at different scales of the recently introduced YOLOv4 object detector. Building on our baseline multiscale DAYOLO framework, we introduce three novel deep learning architectures for a Domain Adaptation Network (DAN) that generates domain-invariant features. In particular, we propose a Progressive Feature Reduction (PFR), a Unified Classifier (UC), and an Integrated architecture. We train and test our proposed DAN architectures in conjunction with YOLOv4 using popular datasets. Our experiments show significant improvements in object detection performance when training YOLOv4 using the proposed MS-DAYOLO architectures and when tested on target data for autonomous driving applications. Moreover, MS-DAYOLO framework achieves an order of magnitude real-time speed improvement relative to Faster R-CNN solutions while providing comparable object detection performance.
Authors:Moritz Drobnitzky, Jonas Friederich, Bernhard Egger, Patrick Zschech
Abstract:
Strong demand for autonomous vehicles and the wide availability of 3D sensors are continuously fueling the proposal of novel methods for 3D object detection. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent developments from 2012-2021 in 3D object detection covering the full pipeline from input data, over data representation and feature extraction to the actual detection modules. We introduce fundamental concepts, focus on a broad range of different approaches that have emerged over the past decade, and propose a systematization that provides a practical framework for comparing these approaches with the goal of guiding future development, evaluation and application activities. Specifically, our survey and systematization of 3D object detection models and methods can help researchers and practitioners to get a quick overview of the field by decomposing 3DOD solutions into more manageable pieces.
Authors:An D. Le, Duy A. Pham, Dong T. Pham, Hien B. Vo
Abstract:
Fruit flies are one of the most harmful insect species to fruit yields. In AlertTrap, implementation of Single-Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) architecture with different state-of-the-art backbone feature extractors such as MobileNetV1 and MobileNetV2 appears to be potential solutions for the real-time detection problem. SSD-MobileNetV1 and SSD-MobileNetV2 perform well and result in AP at 0.5 of 0.957 and 1.0, respectively. You Only Look Once (YOLO) v4-tiny outperforms the SSD family with 1.0 in AP at 0.5; however, its throughput velocity is considerably slower, which shows SSD models are better candidates for real-time implementation. We also tested the models with synthetic test sets simulating expected environmental disturbances. The YOLOv4-tiny had better tolerance to these disturbances than the SSD models. The Raspberry Pi system successfully gathered environmental data and pest counts, sending them via email over 4 G. However, running the full YOLO version in real time on Raspberry Pi is not feasible, indicating the need for a lighter object detection algorithm for future research. Among model candidates, YOLOv4-tiny generally performs best, with SSD-MobileNetV2 also comparable and sometimes better, especially in scenarios with synthetic disturbances. SSD models excel in processing time, enabling real-time, high-accuracy detection.
Authors:Binglu Wang, Tao Hu, Baoshan Li, Xiaojuan Chen, Zhijie Zhang
Abstract:
Gaze object prediction is a newly proposed task that aims to discover the objects being stared at by humans. It is of great application significance but still lacks a unified solution framework. An intuitive solution is to incorporate an object detection branch into an existing gaze prediction method. However, previous gaze prediction methods usually use two different networks to extract features from scene image and head image, which would lead to heavy network architecture and prevent each branch from joint optimization. In this paper, we build a novel framework named GaTector to tackle the gaze object prediction problem in a unified way. Particularly, a specific-general-specific (SGS) feature extractor is firstly proposed to utilize a shared backbone to extract general features for both scene and head images. To better consider the specificity of inputs and tasks, SGS introduces two input-specific blocks before the shared backbone and three task-specific blocks after the shared backbone. Specifically, a novel Defocus layer is designed to generate object-specific features for the object detection task without losing information or requiring extra computations. Moreover, the energy aggregation loss is introduced to guide the gaze heatmap to concentrate on the stared box. In the end, we propose a novel wUoC metric that can reveal the difference between boxes even when they share no overlapping area. Extensive experiments on the GOO dataset verify the superiority of our method in all three tracks, i.e. object detection, gaze estimation, and gaze object prediction.
Authors:Kevin M. Judd, Jonathan D. Gammell
Abstract:
Visual motion estimation is a well-studied challenge in autonomous navigation. Recent work has focused on addressing multimotion estimation in highly dynamic environments. These environments not only comprise multiple, complex motions but also tend to exhibit significant occlusion.
Estimating third-party motions simultaneously with the sensor egomotion is difficult because an object's observed motion consists of both its true motion and the sensor motion. Most previous works in multimotion estimation simplify this problem by relying on appearance-based object detection or application-specific motion constraints. These approaches are effective in specific applications and environments but do not generalize well to the full multimotion estimation problem (MEP).
This paper presents Multimotion Visual Odometry (MVO), a multimotion estimation pipeline that estimates the full SE(3) trajectory of every motion in the scene, including the sensor egomotion, without relying on appearance-based information. MVO extends the traditional visual odometry (VO) pipeline with multimotion segmentation and tracking techniques. It uses physically founded motion priors to extrapolate motions through temporary occlusions and identify the reappearance of motions through motion closure. Evaluations on real-world data from the Oxford Multimotion Dataset (OMD) and the KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite demonstrate that MVO achieves good estimation accuracy compared to similar approaches and is applicable to a variety of multimotion estimation challenges.
Authors:Jackson Farley, Andreas Gerstlauer
Abstract:
A rising research challenge is running costly machine learning (ML) networks locally on resource-constrained edge devices. ML networks with large convolutional layers can easily exceed available memory, increasing latency due to excessive OS swapping. Previous memory reduction techniques such as pruning and quantization reduce model accuracy and often require retraining. Alternatively, distributed methods partition the convolutions into equivalent smaller sub-computations, but the implementations introduce communication costs and require a network of devices. Distributed partitioning approaches can, however, also be used to run in a reduced memory footprint on a single device by subdividing the network into smaller operations. In this paper, we extend prior work on distributed partitioning into a memory-aware execution on a single device. Our approach extends prior fusing strategies to allow for multiple groups of convolutional layers that are fused and tiled independently. This enables trading off overhead versus data reuse in order to specifically reduces memory footprint. We propose a memory usage predictor coupled with a search algorithm to provide optimized fusing and tiling configurations for an arbitrary set of convolutional layers. When applied to the YOLOv2 object detection network, results show that our approach can run in less than half the memory, and with a speedup of up to 2.78 under severe memory constraints. Additionally, our algorithm will return a configuration with a latency that is within 6% of the best latency measured in a manual search.
Authors:Yuya Senzaki, Christian Hamelain
Abstract:
When dealing with deep neural network (DNN) applications on edge devices, continuously updating the model is important. Although updating a model with real incoming data is ideal, using all of them is not always feasible due to limits, such as labeling and communication costs. Thus, it is necessary to filter and select the data to use for training (i.e., active learning) on the device. In this paper, we formalize a practical active learning problem for DNNs on edge devices and propose a general task-agnostic framework to tackle this problem, which reduces it to a stream submodular maximization. This framework is light enough to be run with low computational resources, yet provides solutions whose quality is theoretically guaranteed thanks to the submodular property. Through this framework, we can configure data selection criteria flexibly, including using methods proposed in previous active learning studies. We evaluate our approach on both classification and object detection tasks in a practical setting to simulate a real-life scenario. The results of our study show that the proposed framework outperforms all other methods in both tasks, while running at a practical speed on real devices.
Authors:Jibinraj Antony, Florian Schlather, Georgij Safronov, Markus Schmitz, Kristof Van Laerhoven
Abstract:
With the rise of deep learning models in the field of computer vision, new possibilities for their application in industrial processes proves to return great benefits. Nevertheless, the actual fit of machine learning for highly standardised industrial processes is still under debate. This paper addresses the challenges on the industrial realization of the AI tools, considering the use case of Laser Beam Welding quality control as an example. We use object detection algorithms from the TensorFlow object detection API and adapt them to our use case using transfer learning. The baseline models we develop are used as benchmarks and evaluated and compared to models that undergo dataset scaling and hyperparameter tuning. We find that moderate scaling of the dataset via image augmentation leads to improvements in intersection over union (IoU) and recall, whereas high levels of augmentation and scaling may lead to deterioration of results. Finally, we put our results into perspective of the underlying use case and evaluate their fit.
Authors:Jeffri M. Llerena, Luis Felipe Zeni, Lucas N. Kristen, Claudio Jung
Abstract:
Most object detection methods use bounding boxes to encode and represent the object shape and location. In this work, we explore a fuzzy representation of object regions using Gaussian distributions, which provides an implicit binary representation as (potentially rotated) ellipses. We also present a similarity measure for the Gaussian distributions based on the Hellinger Distance, which can be viewed as a Probabilistic Intersection-over-Union (ProbIoU). Our experimental results show that the proposed Gaussian representations are closer to annotated segmentation masks in publicly available datasets, and that loss functions based on ProbIoU can be successfully used to regress the parameters of the Gaussian representation. Furthermore, we present a simple mapping scheme from traditional (or rotated) bounding boxes to Gaussian representations, allowing the proposed ProbIoU-based losses to be seamlessly integrated into any object detector.
Authors:Ethan Lim Ding Feng, Zhi-Wei Neo, Aaron William De Silva, Kellie Sim, Hong-Ray Tan, Thi-Thanh Nguyen, Karen Wei Ling Koh, Wenru Wang, Hoang D. Nguyen
Abstract:
With the rapid development in artificial intelligence, social computing has evolved beyond social informatics toward the birth of social intelligence systems. This paper, therefore, takes initiatives to propose a social behaviour understanding framework with the use of deep neural networks for social and behavioural analysis. The integration of information fusion, person and object detection, social signal understanding, behaviour understanding, and context understanding plays a harmonious role to elicit social behaviours. Three systems, including depression detection, activity recognition and cognitive impairment screening, are developed to evidently demonstrate the importance of social intelligence. The study considerably contributes to the cumulative development of social computing and health informatics. It also provides a number of implications for academic bodies, healthcare practitioners, and developers of socially intelligent agents.
Authors:Masato Tamura, Tomoaki Yoshinaga
Abstract:
We propose a segmentation-based bounding box generation method for omnidirectional pedestrian detection that enables detectors to tightly fit bounding boxes to pedestrians without omnidirectional images for training. Due to the wide angle of view, omnidirectional cameras are more cost-effective than standard cameras and hence suitable for large-scale monitoring. The problem of using omnidirectional cameras for pedestrian detection is that the performance of standard pedestrian detectors is likely to be substantially degraded because pedestrians' appearance in omnidirectional images may be rotated to any angle. Existing methods mitigate this issue by transforming images during inference. However, the transformation substantially degrades the detection accuracy and speed. A recently proposed method obviates the transformation by training detectors with omnidirectional images, which instead incurs huge annotation costs. To obviate both the transformation and annotation works, we leverage an existing large-scale object detection dataset. We train a detector with rotated images and tightly fitted bounding box annotations generated from the segmentation annotations in the dataset, resulting in detecting pedestrians in omnidirectional images with tightly fitted bounding boxes. We also develop pseudo-fisheye distortion augmentation, which further enhances the performance. Extensive analysis shows that our detector successfully fits bounding boxes to pedestrians and demonstrates substantial performance improvement.
Authors:Rodney Lalonde, Naji Khosravan, Ulas Bagci
Abstract:
Capsule networks promise significant benefits over convolutional networks by storing stronger internal representations, and routing information based on the agreement between intermediate representations' projections. Despite this, their success has been limited to small-scale classification datasets due to their computationally expensive nature. Though memory efficient, convolutional capsules impose geometric constraints that fundamentally limit the ability of capsules to model the pose/deformation of objects. Further, they do not address the bigger memory concern of class-capsules scaling up to bigger tasks such as detection or large-scale classification. In this study, we introduce a new family of capsule networks, deformable capsules (\textit{DeformCaps}), to address a very important problem in computer vision: object detection. We propose two new algorithms associated with our \textit{DeformCaps}: a novel capsule structure (\textit{SplitCaps}), and a novel dynamic routing algorithm (\textit{SE-Routing}), which balance computational efficiency with the need for modeling a large number of objects and classes, which have never been achieved with capsule networks before. We demonstrate that the proposed methods efficiently scale up to create the first-ever capsule network for object detection in the literature. Our proposed architecture is a one-stage detection framework and it obtains results on MS COCO which are on par with state-of-the-art one-stage CNN-based methods, while producing fewer false positive detection, generalizing to unusual poses/viewpoints of objects.
Authors:Eslam Mohamed, Abdelrahman Shaker, Ahmad El-Sallab, Mayada Hadhoud
Abstract:
Instance segmentation has gained recently huge attention in various computer vision applications. It aims at providing different IDs to different object of the scene, even if they belong to the same class. This is useful in various scenarios, especially in occlusions. Instance segmentation is usually performed as a two-stage pipeline. First, an object is detected, then semantic segmentation within the detected box area. This process involves costly up-sampling, especially for the segmentation part. Moreover, for some applications, such as LiDAR point clouds and aerial object detection, it is often required to predict oriented boxes, which add extra complexity to the two-stage pipeline. In this paper, we propose Insta-YOLO, a novel one-stage end-to-end deep learning model for real-time instance segmentation. The proposed model is inspired by the YOLO one-shot object detector, with the box regression loss is replaced with polynomial regression in the localization head. This modification enables us to skip the segmentation up-sampling decoder altogether and produces the instance segmentation contour from the polynomial output coefficients. In addition, this architecture is a natural fit for oriented objects. We evaluate our model on three datasets, namely, Carnva, Cityscapes and Airbus. The results show our model achieves competitive accuracy in terms of mAP with significant improvement in speed by 2x on GTX-1080 GPU.
Authors:Peng Peng, Yong-Jie Li
Abstract:
Salient object detection (SOD) has been well studied in recent years, especially using deep neural networks. However, SOD with RGB and RGB-D images is usually treated as two different tasks with different network structures that need to be designed specifically. In this paper, we proposed a unified and efficient structure with a cross-attention context extraction (CRACE) module to address both tasks of SOD efficiently. The proposed CRACE module receives and appropriately fuses two (for RGB SOD) or three (for RGB-D SOD) inputs. The simple unified feature pyramid network (FPN)-like structure with CRACE modules conveys and refines the results under the multi-level supervisions of saliency and boundaries. The proposed structure is simple yet effective; the rich context information of RGB and depth can be appropriately extracted and fused by the proposed structure efficiently. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in both RGB and RGB-D SOD tasks on various datasets and in terms of most metrics.
Authors:ZiHao Wang, ZhenZhou Wang
Abstract:
Automatic and robust segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) in magnetic resonance images (MRI) has remained challenging for many decades. With the great success of deep learning in object detection and classification, the research focus of LV segmentation has changed to convolutional neural network (CNN) in recent years. However, LV segmentation is a pixel-level classification problem and its categories are intractable compared to object detection and classification. In this paper, we proposed a robust LV segmentation method based on slope difference distribution (SDD) double threshold selection and circular Hough transform (CHT). The proposed method achieved 96.51% DICE score on the test set of automated cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC) which is higher than the best accuracy reported in recently published literatures.
Authors:Yunhe Xie, Kongbin Kang, Gregory Sharp, David P. Gierga, Theodore S. Hong, Thomas Bortfeld
Abstract:
Image guidance has been widely used in radiation therapy. Correctly identifying the bounding box of the anatomical landmarks from limited field of views is the key to success. In image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT), the detection of those landmarks like the 12th vertebra (T12) still requires tedious manual inspections and annotations; and superior-inferior misalignment to the wrong vertebral body is still relatively common. It is necessary to develop an automated approach to detect those landmarks from images. The challenges of training a model to identify T12 vertebrae automatically mainly are high shape similarity between T12 and neighboring vertebrae, limited annotated data, and class imbalance. This study proposed a novel 3D detection network, requiring only a small amount of training data. Our approach has the following innovations, including 1) the introduction of an auxiliary network to build constraint feature map for improving the model's generalization, especially when the constraint structure is easier to be detected than the main one; 2) an improved detection head and target functions for accurate bounding box detection; and 3) an improved loss functions to address the high class imbalance. Our proposed network was trained, validated and tested on anotated CT images from 55 patients and demonstrated accurate distinguish T12 vertebra from its neighboring vertebrae of high shape similarity. Our proposed algorithm yielded the bounding box center and size errors of 3.98\pm2.04mm and 16.83\pm8.34mm, respectively. Our approach significantly outperformed state-of-the-arts Retina-Net3D in average precision (AP) at IoU thresholds of 0.35 and 0.5, with AP increasing from 0 to 95.4 and 0 to 64.7, respectively. In summary, our approach has a great potential to be integrated into the clinical workflow to improve the safety of IGRT.
Authors:Weilin Cong, William Wang, Wang-Chien Lee
Abstract:
Despite the great success object detection and segmentation models have achieved in recognizing individual objects in images, performance on cognitive tasks such as image caption, semantic image retrieval, and visual QA is far from satisfactory. To achieve better performance on these cognitive tasks, merely recognizing individual object instances is insufficient. Instead, the interactions between object instances need to be captured in order to facilitate reasoning and understanding of the visual scenes in an image. Scene graph, a graph representation of images that captures object instances and their relationships, offers a comprehensive understanding of an image. However, existing techniques on scene graph generation fail to distinguish subjects and objects in the visual scenes of images and thus do not perform well with real-world datasets where exist ambiguous object instances. In this work, we propose a novel scene graph generation model for predicting object instances and its corresponding relationships in an image. Our model, SG-CRF, learns the sequential order of subject and object in a relationship triplet, and the semantic compatibility of object instance nodes and relationship nodes in a scene graph efficiently. Experiments empirically show that SG-CRF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, on three different datasets, i.e., CLEVR, VRD, and Visual Genome, raising the Recall@100 from 24.99% to 49.95%, from 41.92% to 50.47%, and from 54.69% to 54.77%, respectively.
Authors:Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Balaraman Ravindran, Anand Raghunathan
Abstract:
Object detection in videos is an important task in computer vision for various applications such as object tracking, video summarization and video search. Although great progress has been made in improving the accuracy of object detection in recent years due to the rise of deep neural networks, the state-of-the-art algorithms are highly computationally intensive. In order to address this challenge, we make two important observations in the context of videos: (i) Objects often occupy only a small fraction of the area in each video frame, and (ii) There is a high likelihood of strong temporal correlation between consecutive frames. Based on these observations, we propose Pack and Detect (PaD), an approach to reduce the computational requirements of object detection in videos. In PaD, only selected video frames called anchor frames are processed at full size. In the frames that lie between anchor frames (inter-anchor frames), regions of interest (ROIs) are identified based on the detections in the previous frame. We propose an algorithm to pack the ROIs of each inter-anchor frame together into a reduced-size frame. The computational requirements of the detector are reduced due to the lower size of the input. In order to maintain the accuracy of object detection, the proposed algorithm expands the ROIs greedily to provide additional background around each object to the detector. PaD can use any underlying neural network architecture to process the full-size and reduced-size frames. Experiments using the ImageNet video object detection dataset indicate that PaD can potentially reduce the number of FLOPS required for a frame by $4\times$. This leads to an overall increase in throughput of $1.25\times$ on a 2.1 GHz Intel Xeon server with a NVIDIA Titan X GPU at the cost of $1.1\%$ drop in accuracy.
Authors:Bishwo Adhikari, Jukka Peltomäki, Jussi Puura, Heikki Huttunen
Abstract:
This paper proposes an approach for rapid bounding box annotation for object detection datasets. The procedure consists of two stages: The first step is to annotate a part of the dataset manually, and the second step proposes annotations for the remaining samples using a model trained with the first stage annotations. We experimentally study which first/second stage split minimizes to total workload. In addition, we introduce a new fully labeled object detection dataset collected from indoor scenes. Compared to other indoor datasets, our collection has more class categories, different backgrounds, lighting conditions, occlusion and high intra-class differences. We train deep learning based object detectors with a number of state-of-the-art models and compare them in terms of speed and accuracy. The fully annotated dataset is released freely available for the research community.
Authors:David Paulius, Yu Sun
Abstract:
Within the realm of service robotics, researchers have placed a great amount of effort into learning, understanding, and representing motions as manipulations for task execution by robots. The task of robot learning and problem-solving is very broad, as it integrates a variety of tasks such as object detection, activity recognition, task/motion planning, localization, knowledge representation and retrieval, and the intertwining of perception/vision and machine learning techniques. In this paper, we solely focus on knowledge representations and notably how knowledge is typically gathered, represented, and reproduced to solve problems as done by researchers in the past decades. In accordance with the definition of knowledge representations, we discuss the key distinction between such representations and useful learning models that have extensively been introduced and studied in recent years, such as machine learning, deep learning, probabilistic modelling, and semantic graphical structures. Along with an overview of such tools, we discuss the problems which have existed in robot learning and how they have been built and used as solutions, technologies or developments (if any) which have contributed to solving them. Finally, we discuss key principles that should be considered when designing an effective knowledge representation.
Authors:Song-Hai Zhang, Ruilong Li, Xin Dong, Paul L. Rosin, Zixi Cai, Xi Han, Dingcheng Yang, Hao-Zhi Huang, Shi-Min Hu
Abstract:
The standard approach to image instance segmentation is to perform the object detection first, and then segment the object from the detection bounding-box. More recently, deep learning methods like Mask R-CNN perform them jointly. However, little research takes into account the uniqueness of the "human" category, which can be well defined by the pose skeleton. Moreover, the human pose skeleton can be used to better distinguish instances with heavy occlusion than using bounding-boxes. In this paper, we present a brand new pose-based instance segmentation framework for humans which separates instances based on human pose, rather than proposal region detection. We demonstrate that our pose-based framework can achieve better accuracy than the state-of-art detection-based approach on the human instance segmentation problem, and can moreover better handle occlusion. Furthermore, there are few public datasets containing many heavily occluded humans along with comprehensive annotations, which makes this a challenging problem seldom noticed by researchers. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a new benchmark "Occluded Human (OCHuman)", which focuses on occluded humans with comprehensive annotations including bounding-box, human pose and instance masks. This dataset contains 8110 detailed annotated human instances within 4731 images. With an average 0.67 MaxIoU for each person, OCHuman is the most complex and challenging dataset related to human instance segmentation. Through this dataset, we want to emphasize occlusion as a challenging problem for researchers to study.
Authors:Yilun Xiao
Abstract:
Dense small objects in UAV imagery are often missed due to long-range viewpoints, occlusion, and clutter[cite: 5]. This paper presents a detector-agnostic post-processing framework that converts overlap-induced redundancy into group evidence[cite: 6]. Overlapping tiling first recovers low-confidence candidates[cite: 7]. A Spatial Gate (DBSCAN on box centroids) and a Semantic Gate (DBSCAN on ResNet-18 embeddings) then validates group evidence[cite: 7]. Validated groups receive controlled confidence reweighting before class-aware NMS fusion[cite: 8]. Experiments on VisDrone show a recall increase from 0.685 to 0.778 (+0.093) and a precision adjustment from 0.801 to 0.595, yielding F1=0.669[cite: 9]. Post-processing latency averages 0.095 s per image[cite: 10]. These results indicate recall-first, precision-trade-off behavior that benefits recall-sensitive applications such as far-field counting and monitoring[cite: 10]. Ablation confirms that tiling exposes missed objects, spatial clustering stabilizes geometry, semantic clustering enforces appearance coherence, and reweighting provides calibrated integration with the baseline[cite: 11]. The framework requires no retraining and integrates with modern detectors[cite: 12]. Future work will reduce semantic gating cost and extend the approach with temporal cues[cite: 13].
Authors:Yuan Shufang
Abstract:
Object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery presents significant challenges. Issues such as densely packed small objects, scale variations, and occlusion are commonplace. This paper introduces RT-DETR++, which enhances the encoder component of the RT-DETR model. Our improvements focus on two key aspects. First, we introduce a channel-gated attention-based upsampling/downsampling (AU/AD) mechanism. This dual-path system minimizes errors and preserves details during feature layer propagation. Second, we incorporate CSP-PAC during feature fusion. This technique employs parallel hollow convolutions to process local and contextual information within the same layer, facilitating the integration of multi-scale features. Evaluation demonstrates that our novel neck design achieves superior performance in detecting small and densely packed objects. The model maintains sufficient speed for real-time detection without increasing computational complexity. This study provides an effective approach for feature encoding design in real-time detection systems.
Authors:Cuong Manh Hoang
Abstract:
Instance segmentation is essential for numerous computer vision applications, including robotics, human-computer interaction, and autonomous driving. Currently, popular models bring impressive performance in instance segmentation by training with a large number of human annotations, which are costly to collect. For this reason, we present a new framework that efficiently and effectively segments objects without the need for human annotations. Firstly, a MultiCut algorithm is applied to self-supervised features for coarse mask segmentation. Then, a mask filter is employed to obtain high-quality coarse masks. To train the segmentation network, we compute a novel superpixel-guided mask loss, comprising hard loss and soft loss, with high-quality coarse masks and superpixels segmented from low-level image features. Lastly, a self-training process with a new adaptive loss is proposed to improve the quality of predicted masks. We conduct experiments on public datasets in instance segmentation and object detection to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Authors:Isac Holm
Abstract:
The advancement of Object Detection (OD) using Deep Learning (DL) is often hindered by the significant challenge of acquiring large, accurately labeled datasets, a process that is time-consuming and expensive. While techniques like Active Learning (AL) can reduce annotation effort by intelligently querying informative samples, they often lack transparency, limit the strategic insight of human experts, and may overlook informative samples not aligned with an employed query strategy. To mitigate these issues, Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) approaches integrating human intelligence and intuition throughout the machine learning life-cycle have gained traction. Leveraging Visual Analytics (VA), effective interfaces can be created to facilitate this human-AI collaboration. This thesis explores the intersection of these fields by developing and investigating "VILOD: A Visual Interactive Labeling tool for Object Detection". VILOD utilizes components such as a t-SNE projection of image features, together with uncertainty heatmaps and model state views. Enabling users to explore data, interpret model states, AL suggestions, and implement diverse sample selection strategies within an iterative HITL workflow for OD. An empirical investigation using comparative use cases demonstrated how VILOD, through its interactive visualizations, facilitates the implementation of distinct labeling strategies by making the model's state and dataset characteristics more interpretable (RQ1). The study showed that different visually-guided labeling strategies employed within VILOD result in competitive OD performance trajectories compared to an automated uncertainty sampling AL baseline (RQ2). This work contributes a novel tool and empirical insight into making the HITL-AL workflow for OD annotation more transparent, manageable, and potentially more effective.
Authors:Lucas Rakotoarivony
Abstract:
Video object detection is a challenging task because videos often suffer from image deterioration such as motion blur, occlusion, and deformable shapes, making it significantly more difficult than detecting objects in still images. Prior approaches have improved video object detection performance by employing feature aggregation and complex post-processing techniques, though at the cost of increased computational demands. To improve robustness to image degradation without additional computational load during inference, we introduce a straightforward yet effective Contrastive Learning through Auxiliary Branch (CLAB) method. First, we implement a constrastive auxiliary branch using a contrastive loss to enhance the feature representation capability of the video object detector's backbone. Next, we propose a dynamic loss weighting strategy that emphasizes auxiliary feature learning early in training while gradually prioritizing the detection task as training converges. We validate our approach through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies, demonstrating consistent performance gains. Without bells and whistles, CLAB reaches a performance of 84.0% mAP and 85.2% mAP with ResNet-101 and ResNeXt-101, respectively, on the ImageNet VID dataset, thus achieving state-of-the-art performance for CNN-based models without requiring additional post-processing methods.
Authors:Abhinav Kumar
Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) is a fundamental computer vision task that estimates an object's class, 3D position, dimensions, and orientation from a single image. Its applications, including autonomous driving, augmented reality, and robotics, critically rely on accurate 3D environmental understanding. This thesis addresses the challenge of generalizing Mono3D models to diverse scenarios, including occlusions, datasets, object sizes, and camera parameters. To enhance occlusion robustness, we propose a mathematically differentiable NMS (GrooMeD-NMS). To improve generalization to new datasets, we explore depth equivariant (DEVIANT) backbones. We address the issue of large object detection, demonstrating that it's not solely a data imbalance or receptive field problem but also a noise sensitivity issue. To mitigate this, we introduce a segmentation-based approach in bird's-eye view with dice loss (SeaBird). Finally, we mathematically analyze the extrapolation of Mono3D models to unseen camera heights and improve Mono3D generalization in such out-of-distribution settings.
Authors:Mahmoud Dhimish
Abstract:
Thermal anomaly detection in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems is essential for ensuring operational efficiency and reducing maintenance costs. In this study, we developed and named HOTSPOT-YOLO, a lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model that integrates an efficient convolutional neural network backbone and attention mechanisms to improve object detection. This model is specifically designed for drone-based thermal inspections of PV systems, addressing the unique challenges of detecting small and subtle thermal anomalies, such as hotspots and defective modules, while maintaining real-time performance. Experimental results demonstrate a mean average precision of 90.8%, reflecting a significant improvement over baseline object detection models. With a reduced computational load and robustness under diverse environmental conditions, HOTSPOT-YOLO offers a scalable and reliable solution for large-scale PV inspections. This work highlights the integration of advanced AI techniques with practical engineering applications, revolutionizing automated fault detection in renewable energy systems.
Authors:Minh-Tan Pham
Abstract:
This manuscript presents a series of my selected contributions to the topic of label-efficient learning in computer vision and remote sensing. The central focus of this research is to develop and adapt methods that can learn effectively from limited or partially annotated data, and can leverage abundant unlabeled data in real-world applications. The contributions span both methodological developments and domain-specific adaptations, in particular addressing challenges unique to Earth observation data such as multi-modality, spatial resolution variability, and scene heterogeneity. The manuscript is organized around four main axes including (1) weakly supervised learning for object discovery and detection based on anomaly-aware representations learned from large amounts of background images; (2) multi-task learning that jointly trains on multiple datasets with disjoint annotations to improve performance on object detection and semantic segmentation; (3) self-supervised and supervised contrastive learning with multimodal data to enhance scene classification in remote sensing; and (4) few-shot learning for hierarchical scene classification using both explicit and implicit modeling of class hierarchies. These contributions are supported by extensive experimental results across natural and remote sensing datasets, reflecting the outcomes of several collaborative research projects. The manuscript concludes by outlining ongoing and future research directions focused on scaling and enhancing label-efficient learning for real-world applications.
Authors:Sunkalp Chandra
Abstract:
This study evaluates the performance of several machine learning models for predicting hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs) through a binary classification framework, including data scaling, power transformation, and cross-validation. Six classifiers were compared, namely Random Forest Classifier (RFC), Gradient Boosting Classifier (GBC), Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Logistic Regression (LR), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). RFC and GBC performed the best, both with an impressive F2-score of 0.987 and 0.986, respectively, with very small variability. SVC followed, with a lower but reasonable score of 0.896. LDA and LR had a moderate performance with scores of around 0.749 and 0.748, respectively, while KNN had a poor performance with a score of 0.691 due to difficulty in handling complex data patterns. RFC and GBC also presented great confusion matrices with a negligible number of false positives and false negatives, which resulted in outstanding accuracy rates of 99.7% and 99.6%, respectively. These findings highlight the power of ensemble methods for high precision and recall and further point out the importance of tailored model selection with regard to dataset characteristics and chosen evaluation metrics. Future research could focus on the optimization of hyperparameters with advanced features engineering to further the accuracy and robustness of the model on NEO hazard predictions.
Authors:Lida Xu
Abstract:
With the widespread adoption of machine learning technologies in autonomous driving systems, their role in addressing complex environmental perception challenges has become increasingly crucial. However, existing machine learning models exhibit significant vulnerability, as their performance critically depends on the fundamental assumption that training and testing data satisfy the independent and identically distributed condition, which is difficult to guarantee in real-world applications. Dynamic variations in data distribution caused by seasonal changes, weather fluctuations lead to data shift problems in autonomous driving systems. This study investigates the data shift problem in autonomous driving object detection tasks, systematically analyzing its complexity and diverse manifestations. We conduct a comprehensive review of data shift detection methods and employ shift detection analysis techniques to perform dataset categorization and balancing. Building upon this foundation, we construct an object detection model. To validate our approach, we optimize the model by integrating CycleGAN-based data augmentation techniques with the YOLOv5 framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to baseline models on the BDD100K dataset.
Authors:Troi Williams
Abstract:
Future autonomous systems promise significant societal benefits, yet their deployment raises concerns about safety and trustworthiness. A key concern is assuring the reliability of robot perception, as perception seeds safe decision-making. Failures in perception are often due to complex yet common environmental factors and can lead to accidents that erode public trust. To address this concern, we introduce the SET (Self, Environment, and Target) Perceptual Factors Framework. We designed the framework to systematically analyze how factors such as weather, occlusion, or sensor limitations negatively impact perception. To achieve this, the framework employs SET State Trees to categorize where such factors originate and SET Factor Trees to model how these sources and factors impact perceptual tasks like object detection or pose estimation. Next, we develop Perceptual Factor Models using both trees to quantify the uncertainty for a given task. Our framework aims to promote rigorous safety assurances and cultivate greater public understanding and trust in autonomous systems by offering a transparent and standardized method for identifying, modeling, and communicating perceptual risks.
Authors:Shantanusinh Parmar
Abstract:
Object detection models are typically trained on datasets like ImageNet, COCO, and PASCAL VOC, which focus on everyday objects. However, these lack signal sparsity found in non-commercial domains. MobilTelesco, a smartphone-based astrophotography dataset, addresses this by providing sparse night-sky images. We benchmark several detection models on it, highlighting challenges under feature-deficient conditions.
Authors:Simin Huo
Abstract:
We propose \textbf{ULU}, a novel non-monotonic, piecewise activation function defined as $\{f(x;α_1),x<0; f(x;α_2),x>=0 \}$, where $f(x;α)=0.5x(tanh(αx)+1),α>0$. ULU treats positive and negative inputs differently. Extensive experiments demonstrate ULU significantly outperforms ReLU and Mish across image classification and object detection tasks. Its variant Adaptive ULU (\textbf{AULU}) is expressed as $\{f(x;β_1^2),x<0; f(x;β_2^2),x>=0 \}$, where $β_1$ and $β_2$ are learnable parameters, enabling it to adapt its response separately for positive and negative inputs. Additionally, we introduce the LIB (Like Inductive Bias) metric from AULU to quantitatively measure the inductive bias of the model.
Authors:Ganesh Pai
Abstract:
The prediction quality of machine learnt models and the functionality they ultimately enable (e.g., object detection), is typically evaluated using a variety of quantitative metrics that are specified in the associated model performance requirements. When integrating such models into aeronautical applications, a top-down safety assessment process must influence both the model performance metrics selected, and their acceptable range of values. Often, however, the relationship of system safety objectives to model performance requirements and the associated metrics is unclear. Using an example of an aircraft emergency braking system containing a machine learnt component (MLC) responsible for object detection and alerting, this paper first describes a simple abstraction of the required MLC behavior. Then, based on that abstraction, an initial method is given to derive the minimum safety-related performance requirements, the associated metrics, and their targets for the both MLC and its underlying deep neural network, such that they meet the quantitative safety objectives obtained from the safety assessment process. We give rationale as to why the proposed method should be considered valid, also clarifying the assumptions made, the constraints on applicability, and the implications for verification.
Authors:Gautam Kishore Shahi
Abstract:
Amid a tidal wave of misinformation flooding social media during elections and crises, extensive research has been conducted on misinformation detection, primarily focusing on text-based or image-based approaches. However, only a few studies have explored multimodal feature combinations, such as integrating text and images for building a classification model to detect misinformation. This study investigates the effectiveness of different multimodal feature combinations, incorporating text, images, and social features using an early fusion approach for the classification model. This study analyzed 1,529 tweets containing both text and images during the COVID-19 pandemic and election periods collected from Twitter (now X). A data enrichment process was applied to extract additional social features, as well as visual features, through techniques such as object detection and optical character recognition (OCR). The results show that combining unsupervised and supervised machine learning models improves classification performance by 15% compared to unimodal models and by 5% compared to bimodal models. Additionally, the study analyzes the propagation patterns of misinformation based on the characteristics of misinformation tweets and the users who disseminate them.
Authors:Fatemeh Sadat Daneshmand
Abstract:
Flexible manufacturing systems in Industry 4.0 require robots capable of handling objects in unstructured environments without rigid positioning constraints. This paper presents a computer vision system that enables industrial robots to detect and grasp pen components in arbitrary orientations without requiring structured trays, while maintaining robust performance under varying lighting conditions. We implement and evaluate a Mask R-CNN-based approach on a complete pen manufacturing line at ZHAW, addressing three critical challenges: object detection without positional constraints, robustness to extreme lighting variations, and reliable performance with cost-effective cameras. Our system achieves 95% detection accuracy across diverse lighting conditions while eliminating the need for structured component placement, demonstrating a 30% reduction in setup time and significant improvement in manufacturing flexibility. The approach is validated through extensive testing under four distinct lighting scenarios, showing practical applicability for real-world industrial deployment.
Authors:Tinh Nguyen
Abstract:
Underwater object detection is crucial for autonomous navigation, environmental monitoring, and marine exploration, but it is severely hampered by light attenuation, turbidity, and occlusion. Current methods balance accuracy and computational efficiency, but they have trouble deploying in real-time under low visibility conditions. Through the integration of physics-informed augmentation techniques with the YOLOv12 architecture, this study advances underwater detection. With Residual ELAN blocks to preserve structural features in turbid waters and Area Attention to maintain large receptive fields for occluded objects while reducing computational complexity. Underwater optical properties are addressed by domain-specific augmentations such as turbulence adaptive blurring, biologically grounded occlusion simulation, and spectral HSV transformations for color distortion. Extensive tests on four difficult datasets show state-of-the-art performance, with Brackish data registering 98.30% mAP at 142 FPS. YOLOv12 improves occlusion robustness by 18.9%, small-object recall by 22.4%, and detection precision by up to 7.94% compared to previous models. The crucial role of augmentation strategy is validated by ablation studies. This work offers a precise and effective solution for conservation and underwater robotics applications.
Authors:Sergio Torres Aguilar
Abstract:
Robust Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is critical for the automated processing and understanding of historical documents with complex page organizations. This paper benchmarks five state-of-the-art object detection architectures on three annotated datasets representing a spectrum of codicological complexity: The e-NDP, a corpus of Parisian medieval registers (1326-1504); CATMuS, a diverse multiclass dataset derived from various medieval and modern sources (ca.12th-17th centuries) and HORAE, a corpus of decorated books of hours (ca.13th-16th centuries). We evaluate two Transformer-based models (Co-DETR, Grounding DINO) against three YOLO variants (AABB, OBB, and YOLO-World). Our findings reveal significant performance variations dependent on model architecture, data set characteristics, and bounding box representation. In the e-NDP dataset, Co-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results (0.752 mAP@.50:.95), closely followed by YOLOv11X-OBB (0.721). Conversely, on the more complex CATMuS and HORAE datasets, the CNN-based YOLOv11x-OBB significantly outperforms all other models (0.564 and 0.568, respectively). This study unequivocally demonstrates that using Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBB) is not a minor refinement but a fundamental requirement for accurately modeling the non-Cartesian nature of historical manuscripts. We conclude that a key trade-off exists between the global context awareness of Transformers, ideal for structured layouts, and the superior generalization of CNN-OBB models for visually diverse and complex documents.
Authors:Haolin Wei
Abstract:
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have long been the cornerstone of target detection, but they are often limited by limited receptive fields, which hinders their ability to capture global contextual information. We re-examined the DETR-inspired detection head and found substantial redundancy in its self-attention module. To solve these problems, we introduced the Context-Gated Scale-Adaptive Detection Network (CSDN), a Transformer-based detection header inspired by human visual perception: when observing an object, we always concentrate on one site, perceive the surrounding environment, and glance around the object. This mechanism enables each region of interest (ROI) to adaptively select and combine feature dimensions and scale information from different patterns. CSDN provides more powerful global context modeling capabilities and can better adapt to objects of different sizes and structures. Our proposed detection head can directly replace the native heads of various CNN-based detectors, and only a few rounds of fine-tuning on the pre-trained weights can significantly improve the detection accuracy.
Authors:Ketil Malde
Abstract:
There now exists many popular object detectors based on deep learning that can analyze images and extract locations and class labels for occurrences of objects. For image time series (i.e., video or sequences of stills), tracking objects over time and preserving object identity can help to improve object detection performance, and is necessary for many downstream tasks, including classifying and predicting behaviors, and estimating total abundances. Here we present yasmot, a lightweight and flexible object tracker that can process the output from popular object detectors and track objects over time from either monoscopic or stereoscopic camera configurations. In addition, it includes functionality to generate consensus detections from ensembles of object detectors.
Authors:Filippo Leveni
Abstract:
Object detection and identification is surely a fundamental topic in the computer vision field; it plays a crucial role in many applications such as object tracking, industrial robots control, image retrieval, etc. We propose a feature-based approach for detecting and identifying distorted occurrences of a given template in a scene image by incremental grouping of feature matches between the image and the template. For this purpose, we consider the Delaunay triangulation of template features as an useful tool through which to be guided in this iterative approach. The triangulation is treated as a graph and, starting from a single triangle, neighboring nodes are considered and the corresponding features are identified; then matches related to them are evaluated to determine if they are worthy to be grouped. This evaluation is based on local consistency criteria derived from geometric and photometric properties of local features. Our solution allows the identification of the object in situations where geometric models (e.g. homography) does not hold, thus enable the detection of objects such that the template is non planar or when it is planar but appears distorted in the image. We show that our approach performs just as well or better than application of homography-based RANSAC in scenarios in which distortion is nearly absent, while when the deformation becomes relevant our method shows better description performance.
Authors:Jaehong Oh
Abstract:
This paper presents SEGO (Semantic Graph Ontology), a cognitive mapping architecture designed to integrate geometric perception, semantic reasoning, and explanation generation into a unified framework for human-centric collaborative robotics. SEGO constructs dynamic cognitive scene graphs that represent not only the spatial configuration of the environment but also the semantic relations and ontological consistency among detected objects. The architecture seamlessly combines SLAM-based localization, deep-learning-based object detection and tracking, and ontology-driven reasoning to enable real-time, semantically coherent mapping.
Authors:Semanto Mondal
Abstract:
As a social being, we have an intimate bond with the environment. A plethora of things in human life, such as lifestyle, health, and food are dependent on the environment and agriculture. It comes under our responsibility to support the environment as well as agriculture. However, traditional farming practices often result in inefficient resource use and environmental challenges. To address these issues, precision agriculture has emerged as a promising approach that leverages advanced technologies to optimise agricultural processes. In this work, a hybrid approach is proposed that combines the three different potential fields of model AI: object detection, large language model (LLM), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In this novel framework, we have tried to combine the vision and language models to work together to identify potential diseases in the tree leaf. This study introduces a novel AI-based precision agriculture system that uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide context-aware diagnoses and natural language processing (NLP) and YOLOv8 for crop disease detection. The system aims to tackle major issues with large language models (LLMs), especially hallucinations and allows for adaptive treatment plans and real-time disease detection. The system provides an easy-to-use interface to the farmers, which they can use to detect the different diseases related to coffee leaves by just submitting the image of the affected leaf the model will detect the diseases as well as suggest potential remediation methodologies which aim to lower the use of pesticides, preserving livelihoods, and encouraging environmentally friendly methods. With an emphasis on scalability, dependability, and user-friendliness, the project intends to improve RAG-integrated object detection systems for wider agricultural applications in the future.
Authors:Ryota Yagi
Abstract:
Dataset pruning -- selecting a small yet informative subset of training data -- has emerged as a promising strategy for efficient machine learning, offering significant reductions in computational cost and storage compared to alternatives like dataset distillation. While pruning methods have shown strong performance in image classification, their extension to more complex computer vision tasks, particularly object detection, remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we present the first principled extension of classification pruning techniques to the object detection domain, to the best of our knowledge. We identify and address three key challenges that hinder this transition: the Object-Level Attribution Problem, the Scoring Strategy Problem, and the Image-Level Aggregation Problem. To overcome these, we propose tailored solutions, including a novel scoring method called Variance-based Prediction Score (VPS). VPS leverages both Intersection over Union (IoU) and confidence scores to effectively identify informative training samples specific to detection tasks. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms prior dataset pruning methods in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP). We also show that annotation count and class distribution shift can influence detection performance, but selecting informative examples is a more critical factor than dataset size or balance. Our work bridges dataset pruning and object detection, paving the way for dataset pruning in complex vision tasks.
Authors:Chang Liu
Abstract:
To overcome the constraints of the underwater environment and improve the accuracy and robustness of underwater target detection models, this paper develops a specialized dataset for underwater target detection and proposes an efficient algorithm for underwater multi-target detection. A self-supervised learning based on the SimSiam structure is employed for the pre-training of underwater target detection network. To address the problems of low detection accuracy caused by low contrast, mutual occlusion and dense distribution of underwater targets in underwater object detection, a detection model suitable for underwater target detection is proposed by introducing deformable convolution and dilated convolution. The proposed detection model can obtain more effective information by increasing the receptive field. In addition, the regression loss function EIoU is introduced, which improves model performance by separately calculating the width and height losses of the predicted box. Experiment results show that the accuracy of the underwater target detection has been improved by the proposed detector.
Authors:Shijie Lyu
Abstract:
Autonomous driving technology is progressively transforming traditional car driving methods, marking a significant milestone in modern transportation. Object detection serves as a cornerstone of autonomous systems, playing a vital role in enhancing driving safety, enabling autonomous functionality, improving traffic efficiency, and facilitating effective emergency responses. However, current technologies such as radar for environmental perception, cameras for road perception, and vehicle sensor networks face notable challenges, including high costs, vulnerability to weather and lighting conditions, and limited resolution.To address these limitations, this paper presents an improved autonomous target detection network based on YOLOv8. By integrating structural reparameterization technology, a bidirectional pyramid structure network model, and a novel detection pipeline into the YOLOv8 framework, the proposed approach achieves highly efficient and precise detection of multi-scale, small, and remote objects. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced model can effectively detect both large and small objects with a detection accuracy of 65%, showcasing significant advancements over traditional methods.This improved model holds substantial potential for real-world applications and is well-suited for autonomous driving competitions, such as the Formula Student Autonomous China (FSAC), particularly excelling in scenarios involving single-target and small-object detection.
Authors:Anupkumar Bochare
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicle perception systems have traditionally relied on costly LiDAR sensors to generate precise environmental representations. In this paper, we propose a camera-only perception framework that produces Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps by extending the Lift-Splat-Shoot architecture. Our method combines YOLOv11-based object detection with DepthAnythingV2 monocular depth estimation across multi-camera inputs to achieve comprehensive 360-degree scene understanding. We evaluate our approach on the OpenLane-V2 and NuScenes datasets, achieving up to 85% road segmentation accuracy and 85-90% vehicle detection rates when compared against LiDAR ground truth, with average positional errors limited to 1.2 meters. These results highlight the potential of deep learning to extract rich spatial information using only camera inputs, enabling cost-efficient autonomous navigation without sacrificing accuracy.
Authors:TianYi Yu
Abstract:
The Detection of small objects, especially traffic signs, is a critical sub-task in object detection and autonomous driving. Despite signficant progress in previous research, two main challenges remain. First, the issue of feature extraction being too singular. Second, the detection process struggles to efectively handle objects of varying sizes or scales. These problems are also prevalent in general object detection tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object detection network, Mamba-based Dynamic Dual Fusion Network (MDDFNet), for traffic sign detection. The network integrates a dynamic dual fusion module and a Mamba-based backbone to simultaneously tackle the aforementioned issues. Specifically, the dynamic dual fusion module utilizes multiple branches to consolidate various spatial and semantic information, thus enhancing feature diversity. The Mamba-based backbone leverages global feature fusion and local feature interaction, combining features in an adaptive manner to generate unique classification characteristics. Extensive experiments conducted on the TT100K (Tsinghua-Tencent 100K) datasets demonstrate that MDDFNet outperforms other state-of-the-art detectors, maintaining real-time processing capabilities of single-stage models while achieving superior performance. This confirms the efectiveness of MDDFNet in detecting small traffic signs.
Authors:Richard Schmit
Abstract:
Detecting small objects remains a significant challenge in single-shot object detectors due to the inherent trade-off between spatial resolution and semantic richness in convolutional feature maps. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that enables small object representations to "borrow" discriminative features from larger, semantically richer instances within the same class. Our architecture introduces three key components: the Feature Matching Block (FMB) to identify semantically similar descriptors across layers, the Feature Representing Block (FRB) to generate enhanced shallow features through weighted aggregation, and the Feature Fusion Block (FFB) to refine feature maps by integrating original, borrowed, and context information. Built upon the SSD framework, our method improves the descriptive capacity of shallow layers while maintaining real-time detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly boosts small object detection accuracy over baseline methods, offering a promising direction for robust object detection in complex visual environments.
Authors:Richard Oliver Lane
Abstract:
Probabilities or confidence values produced by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models often do not reflect their true accuracy, with some models being under or over confident in their predictions. For example, if a model is 80% sure of an outcome, is it correct 80% of the time? Probability calibration metrics measure the discrepancy between confidence and accuracy, providing an independent assessment of model calibration performance that complements traditional accuracy metrics. Understanding calibration is important when the outputs of multiple systems are combined, for assurance in safety or business-critical contexts, and for building user trust in models. This paper provides a comprehensive review of probability calibration metrics for classifier and object detection models, organising them according to a number of different categorisations to highlight their relationships. We identify 82 major metrics, which can be grouped into four classifier families (point-based, bin-based, kernel or curve-based, and cumulative) and an object detection family. For each metric, we provide equations where available, facilitating implementation and comparison by future researchers.
Authors:Won-Kwang Park
Abstract:
In this study, we investigated the application of the direct sampling method (DSM) to identify small dielectric objects in a limited-aperture inverse scattering problem. Unlike previous studies, we consider the bistatic measurement configuration corresponding to the transmitter location and design indicator functions for both a single source and multiple sources, and we convert the unknown measurement data to a fixed nonzero constant. To explain the applicability and limitation of object detection, we demonstrate that the indicator functions can be expressed by an infinite series of Bessel functions, the material properties of the objects, the bistatic angle, and the converted constant. Based on the theoretical results, we explain how the imaging performance of the DSM is influenced by the bistatic angle and the converted constant. In addition, the results of our analyses demonstrate that a smaller bistatic angle enhances the imaging accuracy and that optimal selection of the converted constant is crucial to realize reliable object detection. The results of the numerical simulations obtained using a two-dimensional Fresnel dataset validated the theoretical findings and illustrate the effectiveness and limitations of the designed indicator functions for small objects.
Authors:Liu Wenbin
Abstract:
Aerial object detection using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) faces critical challenges including sub-10px targets, dense occlusions, and stringent computational constraints. Existing detectors struggle to balance accuracy and efficiency due to rigid receptive fields and redundant architectures. To address these limitations, we propose Variable Receptive Field DETR (VRF-DETR), a transformer-based detector incorporating three key components: 1) Multi-Scale Context Fusion (MSCF) module that dynamically recalibrates features through adaptive spatial attention and gated multi-scale fusion, 2) Gated Convolution (GConv) layer enabling parameter-efficient local-context modeling via depthwise separable operations and dynamic gating, and 3) Gated Multi-scale Fusion (GMCF) Bottleneck that hierarchically disentangles occluded objects through cascaded global-local interactions. Experiments on VisDrone2019 demonstrate VRF-DETR achieves 51.4\% mAP\textsubscript{50} and 31.8\% mAP\textsubscript{50:95} with only 13.5M parameters. This work establishes a new efficiency-accuracy Pareto frontier for UAV-based detection tasks.
Authors:YangChen Zeng
Abstract:
Current Transformer-based methods for small object detection continue emerging, yet they have still exhibited significant shortcomings. This paper introduces HeatMap Position Embedding (HMPE), a novel Transformer Optimization technique that enhances object detection performance by dynamically integrating positional encoding with semantic detection information through heatmap-guided adaptive learning.We also innovatively visualize the HMPE method, offering clear visualization of embedded information for parameter fine-tuning.We then create Multi-Scale ObjectBox-Heatmap Fusion Encoder (MOHFE) and HeatMap Induced High-Quality Queries for Decoder (HIDQ) modules. These are designed for the encoder and decoder, respectively, to generate high-quality queries and reduce background noise queries.Using both heatmap embedding and Linear-Snake Conv(LSConv) feature engineering, we enhance the embedding of massively diverse small object categories and reduced the decoder multihead layers, thereby accelerating both inference and training.In the generalization experiments, our approach outperforme the baseline mAP by 1.9% on the small object dataset (NWPU VHR-10) and by 1.2% on the general dataset (PASCAL VOC). By employing HMPE-enhanced embedding, we are able to reduce the number of decoder layers from eight to a minimum of three, significantly decreasing both inference and training costs.
Authors:Catalin Vrabie
Abstract:
Integration of Machine Learning (ML) techniques into public administration marks a new and transformative era for e-government systems. While traditionally e-government studies were focusing on text-based interactions, this one explores the innovative application of ML for image analysis, an approach that enables governments to address citizen petitions more efficiently. By using image classification and object detection algorithms, the model proposed in this article supports public institutions in identifying and fast responding to evidence submitted by citizens in picture format, such as infrastructure issues, environmental concerns or other urban issues that citizens might face. The research also highlights the Jevons Paradox as a critical factor, wherein increased efficiency from the citizen side (especially using mobile platforms and apps) may generate higher demand which should lead to scalable and robust solutions. Using as a case study a Romanian municipality who provided datasets of citizen-submitted images, the author analysed and proved that ML can improve accuracy and responsiveness of public institutions. The findings suggest that adopting ML for e-petition systems can not only enhance citizen participation but also speeding up administrative processes, paving the way for more transparent and effective governance. This study contributes to the discourse on e-government 3.0 by showing the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform public service delivery, ensuring sustainable (and scalable) solutions for the growing demands of modern urban governance.
Authors:Zahir Alsulaimawi
Abstract:
Real-time scene comprehension is a key advance in artificial intelligence, enhancing robotics, surveillance, and assistive tools. However, hallucination remains a challenge. AI systems often misinterpret visual inputs, detecting nonexistent objects or describing events that never happened. These errors, far from minor, threaten reliability in critical areas like security and autonomous navigation where accuracy is essential.
Our approach tackles this by embedding self-awareness into the AI. Instead of trusting initial outputs, our framework continuously assesses them in real time, adjusting confidence thresholds dynamically. When certainty falls below a solid benchmark, it suppresses unreliable claims. Combining YOLOv5's object detection strength with VILA1.5-3B's controlled language generation, we tie descriptions to confirmed visual data. Strengths include dynamic threshold tuning for better accuracy, evidence-based text to reduce hallucination, and real-time performance at 18 frames per second.
This feedback-driven design cuts hallucination by 37 percent over traditional methods. Fast, flexible, and reliable, it excels in applications from robotic navigation to security monitoring, aligning AI perception with reality.
Authors:Anurag Kulkarni
Abstract:
This paper presents a LiDAR-based object detection system with real-time voice specifications, integrating KITTI's 3D point clouds and RGB images through a multi-modal PointNet framework. It achieves 87.0% validation accuracy on a 3000-sample subset, surpassing a 200-sample baseline of 67.5% by combining spatial and visual data, addressing class imbalance with weighted loss, and refining training via adaptive techniques. A Tkinter prototype provides natural Indian male voice output using Edge TTS (en-IN-PrabhatNeural), alongside 3D visualizations and real-time feedback, enhancing accessibility and safety in autonomous navigation, assistive technology, and beyond. The study offers a detailed methodology, comprehensive experimental analysis, and a broad review of applications and challenges, establishing this work as a scalable advancement in human-computer interaction and environmental perception, aligned with current research trends.
Authors:Masato Tamura
Abstract:
Precise action spotting has attracted considerable attention due to its promising applications. While existing methods achieve substantial performance by employing well-designed model architecture, they overlook a significant challenge: the temporal misalignment inherent in ground-truth labels. This misalignment arises when frames labeled as containing events do not align accurately with the actual event times, often as a result of human annotation errors or the inherent difficulties in precisely identifying event boundaries across neighboring frames. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel dynamic label assignment strategy that allows predictions to have temporal offsets from ground-truth action times during training, ensuring consistent event spotting. Our method extends the concept of minimum-cost matching, which is utilized in the spatial domain for object detection, to the temporal domain. By calculating matching costs based on predicted action class scores and temporal offsets, our method dynamically assigns labels to the most likely predictions, even when the predicted times of these predictions deviate from ground-truth times, alleviating the negative effects of temporal misalignment in labels. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in conditions where events are visually distinct and temporal misalignment in labels is common.
Authors:Pinhao Song
Abstract:
Object detection aims to obtain the location and the category of specific objects in a given image, which includes two tasks: classification and location. In recent years, researchers tend to apply object detection to underwater robots equipped with vision systems to complete tasks including seafood fishing, fish farming, biodiversity monitoring and so on. However, the diversity and complexity of underwater environments bring new challenges to object detection. First, aquatic organisms tend to live together, which leads to severe occlusion. Second, theaquatic organisms are good at hiding themselves, which have a similar color to the background. Third, the various water quality and changeable and extreme lighting conditions lead to the distorted, low contrast, blue or green images obtained by the underwater camera, resulting in domain shift. And the deep model is generally vulnerable to facing domain shift. Fourth, the movement of the underwater robot leads to the blur of the captured image and makes the water muddy, which results in low visibility of the water. This paper investigates the problems brought by the underwater environment mentioned above, and aims to design a high-performance and robust underwater object detector.
Authors:Zifa Chen
Abstract:
UAV has been widely used in various fields. However, most of the existing object detectors used in drones are not end-to-end and require the design of various complex components and careful fine-tuning. Most of the existing end-to-end object detectors are designed for natural scenes. It is not ideal to apply them directly to UAV images. In order to solve the above challenges, we design an local-global information interaction DETR for UAVs, namely LGI-DETR. Cross-layer bidirectional low-level and high-level feature information enhancement, this fusion method is effective especially in the field of small objection detection. At the initial stage of encoder, we propose a local spatial enhancement module (LSE), which enhances the low-level rich local spatial information into the high-level feature, and reduces the loss of local information in the transmission process of high-level information. At the final stage of the encoder, we propose a novel global information injection module (GII) designed to integrate rich high-level global semantic representations with low-level feature maps. This hierarchical fusion mechanism effectively addresses the inherent limitations of local receptive fields by propagating contextual information across the feature hierarchy. Experimental results on two challenging UAV image object detection benchmarks, VisDrone2019 and UAVDT, show that our proposed model outperforms the SOTA model. Compared to the baseline model, AP and AP50 improved by 1.9% and 2.4%, respectively.
Authors:Selcuk Yazar
Abstract:
Illumination estimation remains a pivotal challenge in image processing, particularly for robotics, where robust environmental perception is essential under varying lighting conditions. Traditional approaches, such as RGB histograms and GIST descriptors, often fail in complex scenarios due to their sensitivity to illumination changes. This study introduces a novel method utilizing the Wasserstein distance, rooted in optimal transport theory, to estimate illuminant and light direction in images. Experiments on diverse images indoor scenes, black-and-white photographs, and night images demonstrate the method's efficacy in detecting dominant light sources and estimating their directions, outperforming traditional statistical methods in complex lighting environments. The approach shows promise for applications in light source localization, image quality assessment, and object detection enhancement. Future research may explore adaptive thresholding and integrate gradient analysis to enhance accuracy, offering a scalable solution for real-world illumination challenges in robotics and beyond.
Authors:Xuerui Zhang
Abstract:
Small targets are particularly difficult to detect due to their low pixel count, complex backgrounds, and varying shooting angles, which make it hard for models to extract effective features. While some large-scale models offer high accuracy, their long inference times make them unsuitable for real-time deployment on edge devices. On the other hand, models designed for low computational power often suffer from poor detection accuracy. This paper focuses on small target detection and explores methods for object detection under low computational constraints. Building on the YOLOv8 model, we propose a new network architecture called FDM-YOLO. Our research includes the following key contributions: We introduce FDM-YOLO by analyzing the output of the YOLOv8 detection head. We add a highresolution layer and remove the large target detection layer to better handle small targets. Based on PConv, we propose a lightweight network structure called Fast-C2f, which is integrated into the PAN module of the model. To mitigate the accuracy loss caused by model lightweighting, we employ dynamic upsampling (Dysample) and a lightweight EMA attention mechanism.The FDM-YOLO model was validated on the Visdrone dataset, achieving a 38% reduction in parameter count and improving the Map0.5 score from 38.4% to 42.5%, all while maintaining nearly the same inference speed. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in balancing accuracy and efficiency for edge device deployment.
Authors:Muhammad Musab Ansari
Abstract:
Detecting stenosis in coronary angiography is vital for diagnosing and managing cardiovascular diseases. This study evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art object detection models on the ARCADE dataset using the MMDetection framework. The models are assessed using COCO evaluation metrics, including Intersection over Union (IoU), Average Precision (AP), and Average Recall (AR). Results indicate variations in detection accuracy across different models, attributed to differences in algorithmic design, transformer-based vs. convolutional architectures. Additionally, several challenges were encountered during implementation, such as compatibility issues between PyTorch, CUDA, and MMDetection, as well as dataset inconsistencies in ARCADE. The findings provide insights into model selection for stenosis detection and highlight areas for further improvement in deep learning-based coronary artery disease diagnosis.
Authors:Chi Ruan
Abstract:
While open-vocabulary object detectors require predefined categories during inference, generative object detectors overcome this limitation by endowing the model with text generation capabilities. However, existing generative object detection methods directly append an autoregressive language model to an object detector to generate texts for each detected object. This straightforward design leads to structural redundancy and increased processing time. In this paper, we propose a Real-Time GENerative Detection Transformer (RTGen), a real-time generative object detector with a succinct encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, we introduce a novel Region-Language Decoder (RL-Decoder), which innovatively integrates a non-autoregressive language model into the detection decoder, enabling concurrent processing of object and text information. With these efficient designs, RTGen achieves a remarkable inference speed of 60.41 FPS. Moreover, RTGen obtains 18.6 mAP on the LVIS dataset, outperforming the previous SOTA method by 3.5 mAP.
Authors:Majid Behravan
Abstract:
This thesis presents a framework that integrates state-of-the-art generative AI models for real-time creation of three-dimensional (3D) objects in augmented reality (AR) environments. The primary goal is to convert diverse inputs, such as images and speech, into accurate 3D models, enhancing user interaction and immersion. Key components include advanced object detection algorithms, user-friendly interaction techniques, and robust AI models like Shap-E for 3D generation. Leveraging Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), the system captures spatial details from images and processes textual information to generate comprehensive 3D objects, seamlessly integrating virtual objects into real-world environments. The framework demonstrates applications across industries such as gaming, education, retail, and interior design. It allows players to create personalized in-game assets, customers to see products in their environments before purchase, and designers to convert real-world objects into 3D models for real-time visualization. A significant contribution is democratizing 3D model creation, making advanced AI tools accessible to a broader audience, fostering creativity and innovation. The framework addresses challenges like handling multilingual inputs, diverse visual data, and complex environments, improving object detection and model generation accuracy, as well as loading 3D models in AR space in real-time. In conclusion, this thesis integrates generative AI and AR for efficient 3D model generation, enhancing accessibility and paving the way for innovative applications and improved user interactions in AR environments.
Authors:Yue Dai
Abstract:
The Visually Rich Form Document Intelligence and Understanding (VRDIU) Track B focuses on the localization of key information in document images. The goal is to develop a method capable of localizing objects in both digital and handwritten documents, using only digital documents for training. This paper presents a simple yet effective approach that includes a document augmentation phase and an object detection phase. Specifically, we augment the training set of digital documents by mimicking the appearance of handwritten documents. Our experiments demonstrate that this pipeline enhances the models' generalization ability and achieves high performance in the competition.
Authors:Athulya Sundaresan Geetha
Abstract:
YOLOv4 achieved the best performance on the COCO dataset by combining advanced techniques for regression (bounding box positioning) and classification (object class identification) using the Darknet framework. To enhance accuracy and adaptability, it employs Cross mini-Batch Normalization, Cross-Stage-Partial-connections, Self-Adversarial-Training, and Weighted-Residual-Connections, as well as CIoU loss, Mosaic data augmentation, and DropBlock regularization. With Mosaic augmentation and multi-resolution training, YOLOv4 achieves superior detection in diverse scenarios, attaining 43.5\% AP (in contrast, 65.7\% AP50) on a Tesla V100 at ~65 frames per second, ensuring efficiency, affordability, and adaptability for real-world environments.
Authors:Chuanyang Zheng
Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We revisit the attention design and propose a linear attention method to address the limitation, which doesn't sacrifice ViT's core advantage of capturing global representation like existing methods (e.g. local window attention of Swin). We further investigate the key difference between linear attention and softmax attention. Our empirical results suggest that linear attention lacks a fundamental property of concentrating the distribution of the attention matrix. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a local concentration module to enhance linear attention. By incorporating enhanced linear global attention and local window attention, we propose a new ViT architecture, dubbed L$^2$ViT. Notably, L$^2$ViT can effectively capture both global interactions and local representations while enjoying linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of L$^2$ViT. On image classification, L$^2$ViT achieves 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K without any extra training data or label. By further pre-training on ImageNet-22k, it attains 87.0% when fine-tuned with resolution 384$^2$. For downstream tasks, L$^2$ViT delivers favorable performance as a backbone on object detection as well as semantic segmentation.
Authors:Nora Fink
Abstract:
Dyslexia affects reading and writing skills across many languages. This work describes a new application of YOLO-based object detection to isolate and label handwriting patterns (Normal, Reversal, Corrected) within synthetic images that resemble real words. Individual letters are first collected, preprocessed into 32x32 samples, then assembled into larger synthetic 'words' to simulate realistic handwriting. Our YOLOv11 framework simultaneously localizes each letter and classifies it into one of three categories, reflecting key dyslexia traits. Empirically, we achieve near-perfect performance, with precision, recall, and F1 metrics typically exceeding 0.999. This surpasses earlier single-letter approaches that rely on conventional CNNs or transfer-learning classifiers (for example, MobileNet-based methods in Robaa et al. arXiv:2410.19821). Unlike simpler pipelines that consider each letter in isolation, our solution processes complete word images, resulting in more authentic representations of handwriting. Although relying on synthetic data raises concerns about domain gaps, these experiments highlight the promise of YOLO-based detection for faster and more interpretable dyslexia screening. Future work will expand to real-world handwriting, other languages, and deeper explainability methods to build confidence among educators, clinicians, and families.
Authors:Athulya Sundaresan Geetha
Abstract:
Safe knife practices in the kitchen significantly reduce the risk of cuts, injuries, and serious accidents during food preparation. Using YOLOv7, an advanced object detection model, this study focuses on identifying safety risks during knife handling, particularly improper finger placement and blade contact with hand. The model's performance was evaluated using metrics such as precision, recall, mAP50, and mAP50-95. The results demonstrate that YOLOv7 achieved its best performance at epoch 31, with a mAP50-95 score of 0.7879, precision of 0.9063, and recall of 0.7503. These findings highlight YOLOv7's potential to accurately detect knife-related hazards, promoting the development of improved kitchen safety.
Authors:Amit Sarkar
Abstract:
A new architecture of CNN hardware accelerator is presented. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a subclass of neural networks that have demonstrated outstanding performance in a variety of computer vision applications, including object detection, image classification, and many more.Convolution, a mathematical operation that consists of multiplying, shifting and adding a set of input values by a set of learnable parameters known as filters or kernels, which is the fundamental component of a CNN.The Karatsuba Ofman multiplier is known for its ability to perform high-speed multiplication with less hardware resources compared to traditional multipliers. This article examines the usage of the Karatsuba Ofman Multiplier method on FPGA in the prominent CNN designs AlexNet, VGG16, and VGG19.
Authors:Harsh Joshi
Abstract:
This research paper presents the development of a lightweight and efficient computer vision pipeline aimed at assisting farmers in detecting orange diseases using minimal resources. The proposed system integrates advanced object detection, classification, and segmentation models, optimized for deployment on edge devices, ensuring functionality in resource-limited environments. The study evaluates the performance of various state-of-the-art models, focusing on their accuracy, computational efficiency, and generalization capabilities. Notable findings include the Vision Transformer achieving 96 accuracy in orange species classification and the lightweight YOLOv8-S model demonstrating exceptional object detection performance with minimal computational overhead. The research highlights the potential of modern deep learning architectures to address critical agricultural challenges, emphasizing the importance of model complexity versus practical utility. Future work will explore expanding datasets, model compression techniques, and federated learning to enhance the applicability of these systems in diverse agricultural contexts, ultimately contributing to more sustainable farming practices.
Authors:Huaxu He
Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a class of network models capable of processing spatiotemporal information, with event-driven characteristics and energy efficiency advantages. Recently, directly trained SNNs have shown potential to match or surpass the performance of traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in classification tasks. However, in object detection tasks, directly trained SNNs still exhibit a significant performance gap compared to ANNs when tested on frame-based static object datasets (such as COCO2017). Therefore, bridging this performance gap and enabling directly trained SNNs to achieve performance comparable to ANNs on these static datasets has become one of the key challenges in the development of SNNs.To address this challenge, this paper focuses on enhancing the SNN's unique ability to process spatiotemporal information. Spiking neurons, as the core components of SNNs, facilitate the exchange of information between different temporal channels during the process of converting input floating-point data into binary spike signals. However, existing neuron models still have certain limitations in the communication of temporal information. Some studies have even suggested that disabling the backpropagation in the time dimension during SNN training can still yield good training results. To improve the SNN handling of temporal information, this paper proposes replacing traditional 2D convolutions with 3D convolutions, thus directly incorporating temporal information into the convolutional process. Additionally, temporal information recurrence mechanism is introduced within the neurons to further enhance the neurons' efficiency in utilizing temporal information.Experimental results show that the proposed method enables directly trained SNNs to achieve performance levels comparable to ANNs on the COCO2017 and VOC datasets.
Authors:Phuc D. A. Nguyen
Abstract:
Oriented object detection in aerial images poses a significant challenge due to their varying sizes and orientations. Current state-of-the-art detectors typically rely on either two-stage or one-stage approaches, often employing Anchor-based strategies, which can result in computationally expensive operations due to the redundant number of generated anchors during training. In contrast, Anchor-free mechanisms offer faster processing but suffer from a reduction in the number of training samples, potentially impacting detection accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose the Hybrid-Anchor Rotation Detector (HA-RDet), which combines the advantages of both anchor-based and anchor-free schemes for oriented object detection. By utilizing only one preset anchor for each location on the feature maps and refining these anchors with our Orientation-Aware Convolution technique, HA-RDet achieves competitive accuracies, including 75.41 mAP on DOTA-v1, 65.3 mAP on DIOR-R, and 90.2 mAP on HRSC2016, against current anchor-based state-of-the-art methods, while significantly reducing computational resources.
Authors:Aroj Subedi
Abstract:
Camera traps have become integral tools in wildlife conservation, providing non-intrusive means to monitor and study wildlife in their natural habitats. The utilization of object detection algorithms to automate species identification from Camera Trap images is of huge importance for research and conservation purposes. However, the generalization issue, where the trained model is unable to apply its learnings to a never-before-seen dataset, is prevalent. This thesis explores the enhancements made to the YOLOv8 object detection algorithm to address the problem of generalization. The study delves into the limitations of the baseline YOLOv8 model, emphasizing its struggles with generalization in real-world environments. To overcome these limitations, enhancements are proposed, including the incorporation of a Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) module, modified multi-scale feature fusion, and Wise Intersection over Union (WIoUv3) as a bounding box regression loss function. A thorough evaluation and ablation experiments reveal the improved model's ability to suppress the background noise, focus on object properties, and exhibit robust generalization in novel environments. The proposed enhancements not only address the challenges inherent in camera trap datasets but also pave the way for broader applicability in real-world conservation scenarios, ultimately aiding in the effective management of wildlife populations and habitats.
Authors:Athulya Sundaresan Geetha
Abstract:
This work explores the YOLOv6 object detection model in depth, concentrating on its design framework, optimization techniques, and detection capabilities. YOLOv6's core elements consist of the EfficientRep Backbone for robust feature extraction and the Rep-PAN Neck for seamless feature aggregation, ensuring high-performance object detection. Evaluated on the COCO dataset, YOLOv6-N achieves 37.5\% AP at 1187 FPS on an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. YOLOv6-S reaches 45.0\% AP at 484 FPS, outperforming models like PPYOLOE-S, YOLOv5-S, YOLOX-S, and YOLOv8-S in the same class. Moreover, YOLOv6-M and YOLOv6-L also show better accuracy (50.0\% and 52.8\%) while maintaining comparable inference speeds to other detectors. With an upgraded backbone and neck structure, YOLOv6-L6 delivers cutting-edge accuracy in real-time.
Authors:Jaden Mu
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) increasingly use DNN-based object detection models in vision-based perception. Correct detection and classification of obstacles is critical to ensure safe, trustworthy driving decisions. Adversarial patches aim to fool a DNN with intentionally generated patterns concentrated in a localized region of an image. In particular, object vanishing patch attacks can cause object detection models to fail to detect most or all objects in a scene, posing a significant practical threat to AVs.
This work proposes ADAV (Adversarial Defense for Autonomous Vehicles), a novel defense methodology against object vanishing patch attacks specifically designed for autonomous vehicles. Unlike existing defense methods which have high latency or are designed for static images, ADAV runs in real-time and leverages contextual information from prior frames in an AV's video feed. ADAV checks if the object detector's output for the target frame is temporally consistent with the output from a previous reference frame to detect the presence of a patch. If the presence of a patch is detected, ADAV uses gradient-based attribution to localize adversarial pixels that break temporal consistency. This two stage procedure allows ADAV to efficiently process clean inputs, and both stages are optimized to be low latency. ADAV is evaluated using real-world driving data from the Berkeley Deep Drive BDD100K dataset, and demonstrates high adversarial and clean performance.
Authors:Shahran Rahman Alve
Abstract:
This project aims to develop a robust video surveillance system, which can segment videos into smaller clips based on the detection of activities. It uses CCTV footage, for example, to record only major events-like the appearance of a person or a thief-so that storage is optimized and digital searches are easier. It utilizes the latest techniques in object detection and tracking, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) like YOLO, SSD, and Faster R-CNN, as well as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs), to achieve high accuracy in detection and capture temporal dependencies. The approach incorporates adaptive background modeling through Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and optical flow methods like Lucas-Kanade to detect motions. Multi-scale and contextual analysis are used to improve detection across different object sizes and environments. A hybrid motion segmentation strategy combines statistical and deep learning models to manage complex movements, while optimizations for real-time processing ensure efficient computation. Tracking methods, such as Kalman Filters and Siamese networks, are employed to maintain smooth tracking even in cases of occlusion. Detection is improved on various-sized objects for multiple scenarios by multi-scale and contextual analysis. Results demonstrate high precision and recall in detecting and tracking objects, with significant improvements in processing times and accuracy due to real-time optimizations and illumination-invariant features. The impact of this research lies in its potential to transform video surveillance, reducing storage requirements and enhancing security through reliable and efficient object detection and tracking.
Authors:Fabien Poirier
Abstract:
This thesis is part of a CIFRE agreement between the company Othello and the LIASD laboratory. The objective is to develop an artificial intelligence system that can detect real-time dangers in a video stream. To achieve this, a novel approach combining temporal and spatial analysis has been proposed. Several avenues have been explored to improve anomaly detection by integrating object detection, human pose detection, and motion analysis. For result interpretability, techniques commonly used for image analysis, such as activation and saliency maps, have been extended to videos, and an original method has been proposed. The proposed architecture performs binary or multiclass classification depending on whether an alert or the cause needs to be identified. Numerous neural networkmodels have been tested, and three of them have been selected. You Only Looks Once (YOLO) has been used for spatial analysis, a Convolutional Recurrent Neuronal Network (CRNN) composed of VGG19 and a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for temporal analysis, and a multi-layer perceptron for classification. These models handle different types of data and can be combined in parallel or in series. Although the parallel mode is faster, the serial mode is generally more reliable. For training these models, supervised learning was chosen, and two proprietary datasets were created. The first dataset focuses on objects that may play a potential role in anomalies, while the second consists of videos containing anomalies or non-anomalies. This approach allows for the processing of both continuous video streams and finite videos, providing greater flexibility in detection.
Authors:Thomas Pöllabauer
Abstract:
Localizing target objects in images is an important task in computer vision. Often it is the first step towards solving a variety of applications in autonomous driving, maintenance, quality insurance, robotics, and augmented reality. Best in class solutions for this task rely on deep neural networks, which require a set of representative training data for best performance. Creating sets of sufficient quality, variety, and size is often difficult, error prone, and expensive. This is where the method of luminance keying can help: it provides a simple yet effective solution to record high quality data for training object detection and segmentation. We extend previous work that presented luminance keying on the common YCB-V set of household objects by recording the remaining objects of the YCB superset. The additional variety of objects - addition of transparency, multiple color variations, non-rigid objects - further demonstrates the usefulness of luminance keying and might be used to test the applicability of the approach on new 2D object detection and segmentation algorithms.
Authors:Yifan Shao
Abstract:
In recent years, attention mechanisms have significantly enhanced the performance of object detection by focusing on key feature information. However, prevalent methods still encounter difficulties in effectively balancing local and global features. This imbalance hampers their ability to capture both fine-grained details and broader contextual information-two critical elements for achieving accurate object detection.To address these challenges, we propose a novel attention mechanism, termed Local-Global Attention, which is designed to better integrate both local and global contextual features. Specifically, our approach combines multi-scale convolutions with positional encoding, enabling the model to focus on local details while concurrently considering the broader global context. Additionally, we introduce a learnable parameters, which allow the model to dynamically adjust the relative importance of local and global attention, depending on the specific requirements of the task, thereby optimizing feature representations across multiple scales.We have thoroughly evaluated the Local-Global Attention mechanism on several widely used object detection and classification datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly enhances the detection of objects at various scales, with particularly strong performance on multi-class and small object detection tasks. In comparison to existing attention mechanisms, Local-Global Attention consistently outperforms them across several key metrics, all while maintaining computational efficiency.
Authors:Sharat Agarwal
Abstract:
Objects, in the real world, rarely occur in isolation and exhibit typical arrangements governed by their independent utility, and their expected interaction with humans and other objects in the context. For example, a chair is expected near a table, and a computer is expected on top. Humans use this spatial context and relative placement as an important cue for visual recognition in case of ambiguities. Similar to human's, DNN's exploit contextual information from data to learn representations. Our research focuses on harnessing the contextual aspects of visual data to optimize data annotation and enhance the training of deep networks. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) We introduce the notion of contextual diversity for active learning CDAL and show its applicability in three different visual tasks semantic segmentation, object detection and image classification, (2) We propose a data repair algorithm to curate contextually fair data to reduce model bias, enabling the model to detect objects out of their obvious context, (3) We propose Class-based annotation, where contextually relevant classes are selected that are complementary for model training under domain shift. Understanding the importance of well-curated data, we also emphasize the necessity of involving humans in the loop to achieve accurate annotations and to develop novel interaction strategies that allow humans to serve as fact-checkers. In line with this we are working on developing image retrieval system for wildlife camera trap images and reliable warning system for poor quality rural roads. For large-scale annotation, we are employing a strategic combination of human expertise and zero-shot models, while also integrating human input at various stages for continuous feedback.
Authors:Chongxiao Liu
Abstract:
Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a vital technique for improving the visual quality of low-resolution images. While recent deep learning models have made significant advancements in SISR, they often encounter computational challenges that hinder their deployment in resource-limited or time-sensitive environments. To overcome these issues, we present Sebica, a lightweight network that incorporates spatial and efficient bidirectional channel attention mechanisms. Sebica significantly reduces computational costs while maintaining high reconstruction quality, achieving PSNR/SSIM scores of 28.29/0.7976 and 30.18/0.8330 on the Div2K and Flickr2K datasets, respectively. These results surpass most baseline lightweight models and are comparable to the highest-performing model, but with only 17% and 15% of the parameters and GFLOPs. Additionally, our small version of Sebica has only 7.9K parameters and 0.41 GFLOPS, representing just 3% of the parameters and GFLOPs of the highest-performing model, while still achieving PSNR and SSIM metrics of 28.12/0.7931 and 0.3009/0.8317, on the Flickr2K dataset respectively. In addition, Sebica demonstrates significant improvements in real-world applications, specifically in object detection tasks, where it enhances detection accuracy in traffic video scenarios.
Authors:Amelia Jones
Abstract:
This research delves into the development of a fatigue detection system based on modern object detection algorithms, particularly YOLO (You Only Look Once) models, including YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8. By comparing the performance of these models, we evaluate their effectiveness in real-time detection of fatigue-related behavior in drivers. The study addresses challenges like environmental variability and detection accuracy and suggests a roadmap for enhancing real-time detection. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv8 offers superior performance, balancing accuracy with speed. Data augmentation techniques and model optimization have been key in enhancing system adaptability to various driving conditions.
Authors:Ashutosh Kumar
Abstract:
This study proposes a novel deep learning framework inspired by atmospheric scattering and human visual cortex mechanisms to enhance object detection under poor visibility scenarios such as fog, smoke, and haze. These conditions pose significant challenges for object recognition, impacting various sectors, including autonomous driving, aviation management, and security systems. The objective is to enhance the precision and reliability of detection systems under adverse environmental conditions. The research investigates the integration of human-like visual cues, particularly focusing on selective attention and environmental adaptability, to ascertain their impact on object detection's computational efficiency and accuracy. This paper proposes a multi-tiered strategy that integrates an initial quick detection process, followed by targeted region-specific dehazing, and concludes with an in-depth detection phase. The approach is validated using the Foggy Cityscapes, RESIDE-beta (OTS and RTTS) datasets and is anticipated to set new performance standards in detection accuracy while significantly optimizing computational efficiency. The findings offer a viable solution for enhancing object detection in poor visibility and contribute to the broader understanding of integrating human visual principles into deep learning algorithms for intricate visual recognition challenges.
Authors:Shuang Wang
Abstract:
I present the Lower Biased Teacher model, an enhancement of the Unbiased Teacher model, specifically tailored for semi-supervised object detection tasks. The primary innovation of this model is the integration of a localization loss into the teacher model, which significantly improves the accuracy of pseudo-label generation. By addressing key issues such as class imbalance and the precision of bounding boxes, the Lower Biased Teacher model demonstrates superior performance in object detection tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple semi-supervised object detection datasets show that the Lower Biased Teacher model not only reduces the pseudo-labeling bias caused by class imbalances but also mitigates errors arising from incorrect bounding boxes. As a result, the model achieves higher mAP scores and more reliable detection outcomes compared to existing methods. This research underscores the importance of accurate pseudo-label generation and provides a robust framework for future advancements in semi-supervised learning for object detection.
Authors:Muhammad Yaseen
Abstract:
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the YOLOv9 object detection model, focusing on its architectural innovations, training methodologies, and performance improvements over its predecessors. Key advancements, such as the Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network GELAN and Programmable Gradient Information PGI, significantly enhance feature extraction and gradient flow, leading to improved accuracy and efficiency. By incorporating Depthwise Convolutions and the lightweight C3Ghost architecture, YOLOv9 reduces computational complexity while maintaining high precision. Benchmark tests on Microsoft COCO demonstrate its superior mean Average Precision mAP and faster inference times, outperforming YOLOv8 across multiple metrics. The model versatility is highlighted by its seamless deployment across various hardware platforms, from edge devices to high performance GPUs, with built in support for PyTorch and TensorRT integration. This paper provides the first in depth exploration of YOLOv9s internal features and their real world applicability, establishing it as a state of the art solution for real time object detection across industries, from IoT devices to large scale industrial applications.
Authors:Xuexue Li
Abstract:
Most recent UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) detectors focus primarily on general challenge such as uneven distribution and occlusion. However, the neglect of scale challenges, which encompass scale variation and small objects, continues to hinder object detection in UAV images. Although existing works propose solutions, they are implicitly modeled and have redundant steps, so detection performance remains limited. And one specific work addressing the above scale challenges can help improve the performance of UAV image detectors. Compared to natural scenes, scale challenges in UAV images happen with problems of limited perception in comprehensive scales and poor robustness to small objects. We found that complementary learning is beneficial for the detection model to address the scale challenges. Therefore, the paper introduces it to form our scale-robust complementary learning network (SCLNet) in conjunction with the object detection model. The SCLNet consists of two implementations and a cooperation method. In detail, one implementation is based on our proposed scale-complementary decoder and scale-complementary loss function to explicitly extract complementary information as complement, named comprehensive-scale complementary learning (CSCL). Another implementation is based on our proposed contrastive complement network and contrastive complement loss function to explicitly guide the learning of small objects with the rich texture detail information of the large objects, named inter-scale contrastive complementary learning (ICCL). In addition, an end-to-end cooperation (ECoop) between two implementations and with the detection model is proposed to exploit each potential.
Authors:Liang Geng
Abstract:
Apples growing in natural environments often face severe visual obstructions from leaves and branches. This significantly increases the risk of false detections in object detection tasks, thereby escalating the challenge. Addressing this issue, we introduce a technique called "Occlusion-Enhanced Distillation" (OED). This approach utilizes occlusion information to regularize the learning of semantically aligned features on occluded datasets and employs Exponential Moving Average (EMA) to enhance training stability. Specifically, we first design an occlusion-enhanced dataset that integrates Grounding DINO and SAM methods to extract occluding elements such as leaves and branches from each sample, creating occlusion examples that reflect the natural growth state of fruits. Additionally, we propose a multi-scale knowledge distillation strategy, where the student network uses images with increased occlusions as inputs, while the teacher network employs images without natural occlusions. Through this setup, the strategy guides the student network to learn from the teacher across scales of semantic and local features alignment, effectively narrowing the feature distance between occluded and non-occluded targets and enhancing the robustness of object detection. Lastly, to improve the stability of the student network, we introduce the EMA strategy, which aids the student network in learning more generalized feature expressions that are less affected by the noise of individual image occlusions. Our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques through extensive comparative experiments.
Authors:Muhammad Yaseen
Abstract:
This study presents a detailed analysis of the YOLOv8 object detection model, focusing on its architecture, training techniques, and performance improvements over previous iterations like YOLOv5. Key innovations, including the CSPNet backbone for enhanced feature extraction, the FPN+PAN neck for superior multi-scale object detection, and the transition to an anchor-free approach, are thoroughly examined. The paper reviews YOLOv8's performance across benchmarks like Microsoft COCO and Roboflow 100, highlighting its high accuracy and real-time capabilities across diverse hardware platforms. Additionally, the study explores YOLOv8's developer-friendly enhancements, such as its unified Python package and CLI, which streamline model training and deployment. Overall, this research positions YOLOv8 as a state-of-the-art solution in the evolving object detection field.
Authors:Xuechu Yu
Abstract:
Contrastive representation learning, which aims to learnthe shared information between different views of unlabeled data by maximizing the mutual information between them, has shown its powerful competence in self-supervised learning for downstream tasks. However, recent works have demonstrated that more estimated mutual information does not guarantee better performance in different downstream tasks. Such works inspire us to conjecture that the learned representations not only maintain task-relevant information from unlabeled data but also carry task-irrelevant information which is superfluous for downstream tasks, thus leading to performance degeneration. In this paper we show that superfluous information does exist during the conventional contrastive learning framework, and further design a new objective, namely SuperInfo, to learn robust representations by a linear combination of both predictive and superfluous information. Besides, we notice that it is feasible to tune the coefficients of introduced losses to discard task-irrelevant information, while keeping partial non-shared task-relevant information according to our SuperInfo loss.We demonstrate that learning with our loss can often outperform the traditional contrastive learning approaches on image classification, object detection and instance segmentation tasks with significant improvements.
Authors:Ismail Khalfaoui-Hassani
Abstract:
This thesis presents and evaluates the Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings (DCLS) method. Through various supervised learning experiments in the fields of computer vision, audio, and speech processing, the DCLS method proves to outperform both standard and advanced convolution techniques. The research is organized into several steps, starting with an analysis of the literature and existing convolution techniques that preceded the development of the DCLS method. We were particularly interested in the methods that are closely related to our own and that remain essential to capture the nuances and uniqueness of our approach. The cornerstone of our study is the introduction and application of the DCLS method to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), as well as to hybrid architectures that rely on both convolutional and visual attention approaches. DCLS is shown to be particularly effective in tasks such as classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Initially using bilinear interpolation, the study also explores other interpolation methods, finding that Gaussian interpolation slightly improves performance. The DCLS method is further applied to spiking neural networks (SNNs) to enable synaptic delay learning within a neural network that could eventually be transferred to so-called neuromorphic chips. The results show that the DCLS method stands out as a new state-of-the-art technique in SNN audio classification for certain benchmark tasks in this field. These tasks involve datasets with a high temporal component. In addition, we show that DCLS can significantly improve the accuracy of artificial neural networks for the multi-label audio classification task. We conclude with a discussion of the chosen experimental setup, its limitations, the limitations of our method, and our results.
Authors:Jinda Zhang
Abstract:
Forest fires pose a significant threat to ecosystems, economies, and human health worldwide. Early detection and assessment of forest fires are crucial for effective management and conservation efforts. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with advanced computer vision algorithms offer a promising solution for forest fire detection and assessment. In this paper, we optimize an integrated forest fire risk assessment framework using UAVs and multi-stage object detection algorithms. We introduce improvements to our previous framework, including the adoption of Faster R-CNN, Grid R-CNN, Sparse R-CNN, Cascade R-CNN, Dynamic R-CNN, and Libra R-CNN detectors, and explore optimizations such as CBAM for attention enhancement, random erasing for preprocessing, and different color space representations. We evaluate these enhancements through extensive experimentation using aerial image footage from various regions in British Columbia, Canada. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-stage detectors and optimizations in improving the accuracy of forest fire risk assessment. This research contributes to the advancement of UAV-based forest fire detection and assessment systems, enhancing their efficiency and effectiveness in supporting sustainable forest management and conservation efforts.
Authors:Qiushi Guo
Abstract:
Data augmentation remains a widely utilized technique in deep learning, particularly in tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Among them, Copy-Paste is a simple yet effective method and gain great attention recently. However, existing Copy-Paste often overlook contextual relevance between source and target images, resulting in inconsistencies in generated outputs. To address this challenge, we propose a context-aware approach that integrates Bidirectional Latent Information Propagation (BLIP) for content extraction from source images. By matching extracted content information with category information, our method ensures cohesive integration of target objects using Segment Anything Model (SAM) and You Only Look Once (YOLO). This approach eliminates the need for manual annotation, offering an automated and user-friendly solution. Experimental evaluations across diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing data diversity and generating high-quality pseudo-images across various computer vision tasks.
Authors:Muhammad Hussain
Abstract:
This paper presents a comprehensive review of the evolution of the YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection algorithm, focusing on YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and YOLOv10. We analyze the architectural advancements, performance improvements, and suitability for edge deployment across these versions. YOLOv5 introduced significant innovations such as the CSPDarknet backbone and Mosaic Augmentation, balancing speed and accuracy. YOLOv8 built upon this foundation with enhanced feature extraction and anchor-free detection, improving versatility and performance. YOLOv10 represents a leap forward with NMS-free training, spatial-channel decoupled downsampling, and large-kernel convolutions, achieving state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational overhead. Our findings highlight the progressive enhancements in accuracy, efficiency, and real-time performance, particularly emphasizing their applicability in resource-constrained environments. This review provides insights into the trade-offs between model complexity and detection accuracy, offering guidance for selecting the most appropriate YOLO version for specific edge computing applications.
Authors:Moseli Mots'oehli
Abstract:
While supervised learning has achieved significant success in computer vision tasks, acquiring high-quality annotated data remains a bottleneck. This paper explores both scholarly and non-scholarly works in AI-assistive deep learning image annotation systems that provide textual suggestions, captions, or descriptions of the input image to the annotator. This potentially results in higher annotation efficiency and quality. Our exploration covers annotation for a range of computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection, regression, instance, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation. We review various datasets and how they contribute to the training and evaluation of AI-assistive annotation systems. We also examine methods leveraging neuro-symbolic learning, deep active learning, and self-supervised learning algorithms that enable semantic image understanding and generate free-text output. These include image captioning, visual question answering, and multi-modal reasoning. Despite the promising potential, there is limited publicly available work on AI-assistive image annotation with textual output capabilities. We conclude by suggesting future research directions to advance this field, emphasizing the need for more publicly accessible datasets and collaborative efforts between academia and industry.
Authors:Sowmya Sankaran
Abstract:
Animal populations worldwide are rapidly declining, and a technology that can accurately count endangered species could be vital for monitoring population changes over several years. This research focused on fine-tuning object detection models for drone images to create accurate counts of animal species. Hundreds of images taken using a drone and large, openly available drone-image datasets were used to fine-tune machine learning models with the baseline YOLOv8 architecture. We trained 30 different models, with the largest having 43.7 million parameters and 365 layers, and used hyperparameter tuning and data augmentation techniques to improve accuracy. While the state-of-the-art YOLOv8 baseline had only 0.7% accuracy on a dataset of safari animals, our models had 95% accuracy on the same dataset. Finally, we deployed the models on the Jetson Orin Nano for demonstration of low-power real-time species detection for easy inference on drones.
Authors:Qiushi Guo
Abstract:
Detecting obstacles in railway scenarios is both crucial and challenging due to the wide range of obstacle categories and varying ambient conditions such as weather and light. Given the impossibility of encompassing all obstacle categories during the training stage, we address this out-of-distribution (OOD) issue with a semi-supervised segmentation approach guided by optical flow clues. We reformulate the task as a binary segmentation problem instead of the traditional object detection approach. To mitigate data shortages, we generate highly realistic synthetic images using Segment Anything (SAM) and YOLO, eliminating the need for manual annotation to produce abundant pixel-level annotations. Additionally, we leverage optical flow as prior knowledge to train the model effectively. Several experiments are conducted, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
Authors:Mu Wang
Abstract:
The problem of Domain Adaptive in the field of Object Detection involves the transfer of object detection models from labeled source domains to unannotated target domains. Recent advancements in this field aim to address domain discrepancies by aligning pixel-pairs across domains within a non-Euclidean graphical space, thereby minimizing semantic distribution variance. Despite their remarkable achievements, these methods often use coarse semantic representations to model graphs, mainly due to ignoring non-informative elements and failing to focus on precise semantic alignment. Additionally, the generation of coarse graphs inherently introduces abnormal nodes, posing challenges and potentially biasing domain adaptation outcomes. Consequently, we propose a framework, which utilizes the Graph Generation to enhance the quality of DAOD (\method{}). Specifically, we introduce a Node Refinement module that utilizes a memory bank to reconstruct noisy sampled nodes while applying contrastive regularization to noisy features. To enhance semantic alignment, we propose separating domain-specific styles from category invariance encoded within graph covariances, which allows us to selectively remove domain-specific styles while preserving category-invariant information, thus facilitating more accurate semantic alignment across different domains. Furthermore, we propose a Graph Optimization adaptor, leveraging variational inference to mitigate the impact of abnormal nodes. Extensive experimentation across three adaptation benchmarks validates that \method{} achieves state-of-the-art performance in the task of unsupervised domain adaptation.
Authors:Leo Shan Wenzhang Zhou Grace Zhao
Abstract:
Image matting aims to obtain an alpha matte that separates foreground objects from the background accurately. Recently, trimap-free matting has been well studied because it requires only the original image without any extra input. Such methods usually extract a rough foreground by itself to take place trimap as further guidance. However, the definition of 'foreground' lacks a unified standard and thus ambiguities arise. Besides, the extracted foreground is sometimes incomplete due to inadequate network design. Most importantly, there is not a large-scale real-world matting dataset, and current trimap-free methods trained with synthetic images suffer from large domain shift problems in practice. In this paper, we define the salient object as foreground, which is consistent with human cognition and annotations of the current matting dataset. Meanwhile, data and technologies in salient object detection can be transferred to matting in a breeze. To obtain a more accurate and complete alpha matte, we propose a network called \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{F}eature fusion-based \textbf{C}oarse-to-fine Network \textbf{(MFC-Net)}, which fully integrates multiple features for an accurate and complete alpha matte. Furthermore, we introduce image harmony in data composition to bridge the gap between synthetic and real images. More importantly, we establish the largest general matting dataset \textbf{(Real-19k)} in the real world to date. Experiments show that our method is significantly effective on both synthetic and real-world images, and the performance in the real-world dataset is far better than existing matting-free methods. Our code and data will be released soon.
Authors:Rajat K. Doshi
Abstract:
This study investigates the application of PointNet and PointNet++ in the classification of LiDAR-generated point cloud data, a critical component for achieving fully autonomous vehicles. Utilizing a modified dataset from the Lyft 3D Object Detection Challenge, we examine the models' capabilities to handle dynamic and complex environments essential for autonomous navigation. Our analysis shows that PointNet and PointNet++ achieved accuracy rates of 79.53% and 84.24%, respectively. These results underscore the models' robustness in interpreting intricate environmental data, which is pivotal for the safety and efficiency of autonomous vehicles. Moreover, the enhanced detection accuracy, particularly in distinguishing pedestrians from other objects, highlights the potential of these models to contribute substantially to the advancement of autonomous vehicle technology.
Authors:Tashmoy Ghosh
Abstract:
In this paper we have present an improved Cycle GAN based model for under water image enhancement. We have utilized the cycle consistent learning technique of the state-of-the-art Cycle GAN model with modification in the loss function in terms of depth-oriented attention which enhance the contrast of the overall image, keeping global content, color, local texture, and style information intact. We trained the Cycle GAN model with the modified loss functions on the benchmarked Enhancing Underwater Visual Perception (EUPV) dataset a large dataset including paired and unpaired sets of underwater images (poor and good quality) taken with seven distinct cameras in a range of visibility situation during research on ocean exploration and human-robot cooperation. In addition, we perform qualitative and quantitative evaluation which supports the given technique applied and provided a better contrast enhancement model of underwater imagery. More significantly, the upgraded images provide better results from conventional models and further for under water navigation, pose estimation, saliency prediction, object detection and tracking. The results validate the appropriateness of the model for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) in visual navigation.
Authors:Songbur Wong
Abstract:
SSF3D modified the semi-supervised 3D object detection (SS3DOD) framework, which designed specifically for point cloud data. Leveraging the characteristics of non-coincidence and weak correlation of target objects in point cloud, we adopt a strategy of retaining only the truth-determining pseudo labels and trimming the other fuzzy labels with points, instead of pursuing a balance between the quantity and quality of pseudo labels. Besides, we notice that changing the filter will make the model meet different distributed targets, which is beneficial to break the training bottleneck. Two mechanism are introduced to achieve above ideas: strict threshold and filter switching. The experiments are conducted to analyze the effectiveness of above approaches and their impact on the overall performance of the system. Evaluating on the KITTI dataset, SSF3D exhibits superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released here.
Authors:Peng Zheng
Abstract:
Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) is a rapidly growing task, extended from Salient Object Detection (SOD) and Common Object Segmentation (Co-Segmentation). It is aimed at detecting the co-occurring salient object in the given image group. Many effective approaches have been proposed on the basis of existing datasets. However, there is still no standard and efficient training set in CoSOD, which makes it chaotic to choose training sets in the recently proposed CoSOD methods. First, the drawbacks of existing training sets in CoSOD are analyzed in a comprehensive way, and potential improvements are provided to solve existing problems to some extent. In particular, in this thesis, a new CoSOD training set is introduced, named Co-Saliency of ImageNet (CoSINe) dataset. The proposed CoSINe is the largest number of groups among all existing CoSOD datasets. The images obtained here span a wide variety in terms of categories, object sizes, etc. In experiments, models trained on CoSINe can achieve significantly better performance with fewer images compared to all existing datasets. Second, to make the most of the proposed CoSINe, a novel CoSOD approach named Hierarchical Instance-aware COnsensus MinEr (HICOME) is proposed, which efficiently mines the consensus feature from different feature levels and discriminates objects of different classes in an object-aware contrastive way. As extensive experiments show, the proposed HICOME achieves SoTA performance on all the existing CoSOD test sets. Several useful training tricks suitable for training CoSOD models are also provided. Third, practical applications are given using the CoSOD technique to show the effectiveness. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential improvements of CoSOD are discussed to inspire related work in the future. The source code, the dataset, and the online demo will be publicly available at github.com/ZhengPeng7/CoSINe.
Authors:Zihan Chu
Abstract:
Adverse weather conditions including haze, snow and rain lead to decline in image qualities, which often causes a decline in performance for deep-learning based detection networks. Most existing approaches attempts to rectify hazy images before performing object detection, which increases the complexity of the network and may result in the loss in latent information. To better integrate image restoration and object detection tasks, we designed a double-route network with an attention feature fusion module, taking both hazy and dehazed features into consideration. We also proposed a subnetwork to provide haze-free features to the detection network. Specifically, our D-YOLO improves the performance of the detection network by minimizing the distance between the clear feature extraction subnetwork and detection network. Experiments on RTTS and FoggyCityscapes datasets show that D-YOLO demonstrates better performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. It is a robust detection framework for bridging the gap between low-level dehazing and high-level detection.
Authors:Quoc-Vinh Lai-Dang
Abstract:
This survey explores the adaptation of visual transformer models in Autonomous Driving, a transition inspired by their success in Natural Language Processing. Surpassing traditional Recurrent Neural Networks in tasks like sequential image processing and outperforming Convolutional Neural Networks in global context capture, as evidenced in complex scene recognition, Transformers are gaining traction in computer vision. These capabilities are crucial in Autonomous Driving for real-time, dynamic visual scene processing. Our survey provides a comprehensive overview of Vision Transformer applications in Autonomous Driving, focusing on foundational concepts such as self-attention, multi-head attention, and encoder-decoder architecture. We cover applications in object detection, segmentation, pedestrian detection, lane detection, and more, comparing their architectural merits and limitations. The survey concludes with future research directions, highlighting the growing role of Vision Transformers in Autonomous Driving.
Authors:Kalibinuer Tiliwalidi
Abstract:
Currently, infrared imaging technology enjoys widespread usage, with infrared object detection technology experiencing a surge in prominence. While previous studies have delved into physical attacks on infrared object detectors, the implementation of these techniques remains complex. For instance, some approaches entail the use of bulb boards or infrared QR suits as perturbations to execute attacks, which entail costly optimization and cumbersome deployment processes. Other methodologies involve the utilization of irregular aerogel as physical perturbations for infrared attacks, albeit at the expense of optimization expenses and perceptibility issues. In this study, we propose a novel infrared physical attack termed Adversarial Infrared Geometry (\textbf{AdvIG}), which facilitates efficient black-box query attacks by modeling diverse geometric shapes (lines, triangles, ellipses) and optimizing their physical parameters using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness of AdvIG. In digital attack experiments, line, triangle, and ellipse patterns achieve attack success rates of 93.1\%, 86.8\%, and 100.0\%, respectively, with average query times of 71.7, 113.1, and 2.57, respectively, thereby confirming the efficiency of AdvIG. Physical attack experiments are conducted to assess the attack success rate of AdvIG at different distances. On average, the line, triangle, and ellipse achieve attack success rates of 61.1\%, 61.2\%, and 96.2\%, respectively. Further experiments are conducted to comprehensively analyze AdvIG, including ablation experiments, transfer attack experiments, and adversarial defense mechanisms. Given the superior performance of our method as a simple and efficient black-box adversarial attack in both digital and physical environments, we advocate for widespread attention to AdvIG.
Authors:Wenkai Gong
Abstract:
As mobile computing technology rapidly evolves, deploying efficient object detection algorithms on mobile devices emerges as a pivotal research area in computer vision. This study zeroes in on optimizing the YOLOv7 algorithm to boost its operational efficiency and speed on mobile platforms while ensuring high accuracy. Leveraging a synergy of advanced techniques such as Group Convolution, ShuffleNetV2, and Vision Transformer, this research has effectively minimized the model's parameter count and memory usage, streamlined the network architecture, and fortified the real-time object detection proficiency on resource-constrained devices. The experimental outcomes reveal that the refined YOLO model demonstrates exceptional performance, markedly enhancing processing velocity while sustaining superior detection accuracy.
Authors:Yu Wang
Abstract:
Interest is increasing among political scientists in leveraging the extensive information available in images. However, the challenge of interpreting these images lies in the need for specialized knowledge in computer vision and access to specialized hardware. As a result, image analysis has been limited to a relatively small group within the political science community. This landscape could potentially change thanks to the rise of large language models (LLMs). This paper aims to raise awareness of the feasibility of using Gemini for image content analysis. A retrospective analysis was conducted on a corpus of 688 images. Content reports were elicited from Gemini for each image and then manually evaluated by the authors. We find that Gemini is highly accurate in performing object detection, which is arguably the most common and fundamental task in image analysis for political scientists. Equally important, we show that it is easy to implement as the entire command consists of a single prompt in natural language; it is fast to run and should meet the time budget of most researchers; and it is free to use and does not require any specialized hardware. In addition, we illustrate how political scientists can leverage Gemini for other image understanding tasks, including face identification, sentiment analysis, and caption generation. Our findings suggest that Gemini and other similar LLMs have the potential to drastically stimulate and accelerate image research in political science and social sciences more broadly.
Authors:Won-Kwang Park
Abstract:
This study investigates the applicability of Kirchhoff migration (KM) for a fast identification of unknown objects in a real-world limited-aperture inverse scattering problem. To demonstrate the theoretical basis for the applicability including unique determination of objects, the imaging function of the KM was formulated using a uniformly convergent infinite series of Bessel functions of integer order of the first kind based on the integral equation formula for the scattered field. Numerical simulations performed using the experimental Fresnel dataset are exhibited to achieve the theoretical results.
Authors:Feng Chen
Abstract:
Achieving a universally high accuracy in object detection is quite challenging, and the mainstream focus in the industry currently lies on detecting specific classes of objects. However, deploying one or multiple object detection networks requires a certain amount of GPU memory for training and storage capacity for inference. This presents challenges in terms of how to effectively coordinate multiple object detection tasks under resource-constrained conditions. This paper introduces a lightweight fine-tuning strategy called Calibration side tuning, which integrates aspects of adapter tuning and side tuning to adapt the successful techniques employed in transformers for use with ResNet. The Calibration side tuning architecture that incorporates maximal transition calibration, utilizing a small number of additional parameters to enhance network performance while maintaining a smooth training process. Furthermore, this paper has conducted an analysis on multiple fine-tuning strategies and have implemented their application within ResNet, thereby expanding the research on fine-tuning strategies for object detection networks. Besides, this paper carried out extensive experiments using five benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrated that this method outperforms other compared state-of-the-art techniques, and a better balance between the complexity and performance of the finetune schemes is achieved.
Authors:Timo Kapsalis
Abstract:
In contemporary design practices, the integration of computer vision and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) represents a transformative shift towards more interactive and inclusive processes. These technologies offer new dimensions of image analysis and generation, which are particularly relevant in the context of urban landscape reconstruction. This paper presents a novel workflow encapsulated within a prototype application, designed to leverage the synergies between advanced image segmentation and diffusion models for a comprehensive approach to urban design. Our methodology encompasses the OneFormer model for detailed image segmentation and the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) diffusion model, implemented through ControlNet, for generating images from textual descriptions. Validation results indicated a high degree of performance by the prototype application, showcasing significant accuracy in both object detection and text-to-image generation. This was evidenced by superior Intersection over Union (IoU) and CLIP scores across iterative evaluations for various categories of urban landscape features. Preliminary testing included utilising UrbanGenAI as an educational tool enhancing the learning experience in design pedagogy, and as a participatory instrument facilitating community-driven urban planning. Early results suggested that UrbanGenAI not only advances the technical frontiers of urban landscape reconstruction but also provides significant pedagogical and participatory planning benefits. The ongoing development of UrbanGenAI aims to further validate its effectiveness across broader contexts and integrate additional features such as real-time feedback mechanisms and 3D modelling capabilities. Keywords: generative AI; panoptic image segmentation; diffusion models; urban landscape design; design pedagogy; co-design
Authors:Sanjana Shetty
Abstract:
Neural networks have been employed for a wide range of processing applications like image processing, motor control, object detection and many others. Living neural networks offer advantages of lower power consumption, faster processing, and biological realism. Optogenetics offers high spatial and temporal control over biological neurons and presents potential in training live neural networks. This work proposes a simulated living neural network trained indirectly by backpropagating STDP based algorithms using precision activation by optogenetics achieving accuracy comparable to traditional neural network training algorithms.
Authors:Andrew Liang
Abstract:
Honey bees pollinate about one-third of the world's food supply, but bee colonies have alarmingly declined by nearly 40% over the past decade due to several factors, including pesticides and pests. Traditional methods for monitoring beehives, such as human inspection, are subjective, disruptive, and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, artificial intelligence has been used to assess beehive health. However, previous studies have lacked an end-to-end solution and primarily relied on data from a single source, either bee images or sounds. This study introduces a comprehensive system consisting of bee object detection and health evaluation. Additionally, it utilized a combination of visual and audio signals to analyze bee behaviors. An Attention-based Multimodal Neural Network (AMNN) was developed to adaptively focus on key features from each type of signal for accurate bee health assessment. The AMNN achieved an overall accuracy of 92.61%, surpassing eight existing single-signal Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks. It outperformed the best image-based model by 32.51% and the top sound-based model by 13.98% while maintaining efficient processing times. Furthermore, it improved prediction robustness, attaining an F1-score higher than 90% across all four evaluated health conditions. The study also shows that audio signals are more reliable than images for assessing bee health. By seamlessly integrating AMNN with image and sound data in a comprehensive bee health monitoring system, this approach provides a more efficient and non-invasive solution for the early detection of bee diseases and the preservation of bee colonies.
Authors:Qinwu Xu
Abstract:
This study proposes a Newton based multiple objective optimization algorithm for hyperparameter search. The first order differential (gradient) is calculated using finite difference method and a gradient matrix with vectorization is formed for fast computation. The Newton Raphson iterative solution is used to update model parameters with iterations, and a regularization term is included to eliminate the singularity issue. The algorithm is applied to search the optimal probability threshold (a vector of eight parameters) for a multiclass object detection problem of a convolutional neural network. The algorithm quickly finds the improved parameter values to produce an overall higher true positive (TP) and lower false positive (FP) rates, as compared to using the default value of 0.5. In comparison, the Bayesian optimization generates lower performance in the testing case. However, the performance and parameter values may oscillate for some cases during iterations, which may be due to the data driven stochastic nature of the subject. Therefore, the optimal parameter value can be identified from a list of iteration steps according to the optimal TP and FP results.
Authors:Kosuke Shigematsu
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a method specifically aimed at improving small bird detection for the Small Object Detection Challenge for Spotting Birds 2023. Utilizing YOLOv7 model with test-time augmentation, our approach involves increasing the input resolution, incorporating multiscale inference, considering flipped images during the inference process, and employing weighted boxes fusion to merge detection results. We rigorously explore the impact of each technique on detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in detection accuracy. Our method achieved a top score in the Development category, with a public AP of 0.732 and a private AP of 27.2, both at IoU=0.5.
Authors:Divya Mereddy
Abstract:
With advanced AI, while every industry is growing at rocket speed, the smart home industry has not reached the next generation. There is still a huge leap of innovation that needs to happen before we call a home a Smart home. A Smart home should predict residents' needs and fulfill them in a timely manner. One of the important tasks of maintaining a home is timely grocery tracking and supply maintenance. Grocery tracking models are very famous in the retail industry but they are nonexistent in the common household. Groceries detection in household refrigerators or storage closets is very complicated compared to retail shelving data. In this paper, home grocery tracking problem is resolved by combining retail shelving data and fruits dataset with real-time 360 view data points collected from home groceries storage. By integrating this vision-based object detection system along with supply chain and user food interest prediction systems, complete automation of groceries ordering can be achieved.
Authors:Stefan Schoder
Abstract:
This study investigates the application of single and two-stage 2D-object detection algorithms like You Only Look Once (YOLO), Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR) algorithm for automated object detection to enhance road safety for autonomous driving on Austrian roads. The YOLO algorithm is a state-of-the-art real-time object detection system known for its efficiency and accuracy. In the context of driving, its potential to rapidly identify and track objects is crucial for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. The research focuses on the unique challenges posed by the road conditions and traffic scenarios in Austria. The country's diverse landscape, varying weather conditions, and specific traffic regulations necessitate a tailored approach for reliable object detection. The study utilizes a selective dataset comprising images and videos captured on Austrian roads, encompassing urban, rural, and alpine environments.
Authors:Aditya Parikh
Abstract:
Information extraction (IE) from unstructured documents remains a critical challenge in data processing pipelines. Traditional optical character recognition (OCR) methods and conventional parsing engines demonstrate limited effectiveness when processing large-scale document datasets. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for information extraction that combines Augmented Intelligence (A2I) with computer vision and natural language processing techniques. Our approach addresses the limitations of conventional methods by leveraging deep learning architectures for object detection, particularly for tabular data extraction, and integrating cloud-based services for scalable document processing. The proposed methodology demonstrates improved accuracy and efficiency in extracting structured information from diverse document formats including PDFs, images, and scanned documents. Experimental validation shows significant improvements over traditional OCR-based approaches, particularly in handling complex document layouts and multi-modal content extraction.
Authors:Kuan-Huang Yu
Abstract:
This paper presents Chinese Poker Self-Playing Robot, an integrated system enabling a TM5-900 robotic arm to independently play the four-person card game Chinese poker. The robot uses a custom sucker mechanism to pick up and play cards. An object detection model based on YOLOv5 is utilized to recognize the suit and number of 13 cards dealt to the robot. A greedy algorithm is developed to divide the 13 cards into optimal hands of 3, 5, and 5 cards to play. Experiments demonstrate that the robot can successfully obtain the cards, identify them using computer vision, strategically select hands to play using the algorithm, and physically play the selected cards in the game. The system showcases effective integration of mechanical design, computer vision, algorithm design, and robotic control to accomplish the complex task of independently playing cards.
Authors:Daniel Weber
Abstract:
Robots are becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of environments due to their exceptional work capacity, precision, efficiency, and scalability. This development has been further encouraged by advances in Artificial Intelligence, particularly Machine Learning. By employing sophisticated neural networks, robots are given the ability to detect and interact with objects in their vicinity. However, a significant drawback arises from the underlying dependency on extensive datasets and the availability of substantial amounts of training data for these object detection models. This issue becomes particularly problematic when the specific deployment location of the robot and the surroundings, are not known in advance. The vast and ever-expanding array of objects makes it virtually impossible to comprehensively cover the entire spectrum of existing objects using preexisting datasets alone. The goal of this dissertation was to teach a robot unknown objects in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in order to liberate it from its data dependency, unleashing it from predefined scenarios. In this context, the combination of eye tracking and Augmented Reality created a powerful synergy that empowered the human teacher to communicate with the robot and effortlessly point out objects by means of human gaze. This holistic approach led to the development of a multimodal HRI system that enabled the robot to identify and visually segment the Objects of Interest in 3D space. Through the class information provided by the human, the robot was able to learn the objects and redetect them at a later stage. Due to the knowledge gained from this HRI based teaching, the robot's object detection capabilities exhibited comparable performance to state-of-the-art object detectors trained on extensive datasets, without being restricted to predefined classes, showcasing its versatility and adaptability.
Authors:Kangcheng Liu
Abstract:
Existing state-of-the-art 3D point cloud understanding methods merely perform well in a fully supervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no unified framework that simultaneously solves the downstream high-level understanding tasks including both segmentation and detection, especially when labels are extremely limited. This work presents a general and simple framework to tackle point cloud understanding when labels are limited. The first contribution is that we have done extensive methodology comparisons of traditional and learned 3D descriptors for the task of weakly supervised 3D scene understanding, and validated that our adapted traditional PFH-based 3D descriptors show excellent generalization ability across different domains. The second contribution is that we proposed a learning-based region merging strategy based on the affinity provided by both the traditional/learned 3D descriptors and learned semantics. The merging process takes both low-level geometric and high-level semantic feature correlations into consideration. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework has the best performance among the three most important weakly supervised point clouds understanding tasks including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection even when very limited number of points are labeled. Our method, termed Region Merging 3D (RM3D), has superior performance on ScanNet data-efficient learning online benchmarks and other four large-scale 3D understanding benchmarks under various experimental settings, outperforming current arts by a margin for various 3D understanding tasks without complicated learning strategies such as active learning.
Authors:Apoorv Singh
Abstract:
End-to-end autonomous driving is a fully differentiable machine learning system that takes raw sensor input data and other metadata as prior information and directly outputs the ego vehicle's control signals or planned trajectories. This paper attempts to systematically review all recent Machine Learning-based techniques to perform this end-to-end task, including, but not limited to, object detection, semantic scene understanding, object tracking, trajectory predictions, trajectory planning, vehicle control, social behavior, and communications. This paper focuses on recent fully differentiable end-to-end reinforcement learning and deep learning-based techniques. Our paper also builds taxonomies of the significant approaches by sub-grouping them and showcasing their research trends. Finally, this survey highlights the open challenges and points out possible future directions to enlighten further research on the topic.
Authors:Ziqi Ye
Abstract:
The use of artificial intelligence technology in education is growing rapidly, with increasing attention being paid to handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) by researchers. However, many existing methods for HMER may fail to accurately read formulas with complex structures, as the attention results can be inaccurate due to illegible handwriting or large variations in writing styles. Our proposed Intelligent-Detection Network (IDN) for HMER differs from traditional encoder-decoder methods by utilizing object detection techniques. Specifically, we have developed an enhanced YOLOv7 network that can accurately detect both digital and symbolic objects. The detection results are then integrated into the bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) and the baseline symbol relationship tree (BSRT) to determine the relationships between symbols and numbers. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms those encoder-decoder networks in recognizing complex handwritten mathematical expressions. This is due to the precise detection of symbols and numbers. Our research has the potential to make valuable contributions to the field of HMER. This could be applied in various practical scenarios, such as assignment grading in schools and information entry of paper documents.
Authors:Xiaohao Xu
Abstract:
This work proposes a unified self-supervised pre-training framework for transferable multi-modal perception representation learning via masked multi-modal reconstruction in Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), namely NeRF-Supervised Masked AutoEncoder (NS-MAE). Specifically, conditioned on certain view directions and locations, multi-modal embeddings extracted from corrupted multi-modal input signals, i.e., Lidar point clouds and images, are rendered into projected multi-modal feature maps via neural rendering. Then, original multi-modal signals serve as reconstruction targets for the rendered multi-modal feature maps to enable self-supervised representation learning. Extensive experiments show that the representation learned via NS-MAE shows promising transferability for diverse multi-modal and single-modal (camera-only and Lidar-only) perception models on diverse 3D perception downstream tasks (3D object detection and BEV map segmentation) with diverse amounts of fine-tuning labeled data. Moreover, we empirically find that NS-MAE enjoys the synergy of both the mechanism of masked autoencoder and neural radiance field. We hope this study can inspire exploration of more general multi-modal representation learning for autonomous agents.
Authors:Yang Peng
Abstract:
Object detection and tracking are vital and fundamental tasks for autonomous driving, aiming at identifying and locating objects from those predefined categories in a scene. 3D point cloud learning has been attracting more and more attention among all other forms of self-driving data. Currently, there are many deep learning methods for 3D object detection. However, the tasks of object detection and tracking for point clouds still need intensive study due to the unique characteristics of point cloud data. To help get a good grasp of the present situation of this research, this paper shows recent advances in deep learning methods for 3D object detection and tracking.
Authors:Quentin Bouniot
Abstract:
In this thesis, we develop theoretical, algorithmic and experimental contributions for Machine Learning with limited labels, and more specifically for the tasks of Image Classification and Object Detection in Computer Vision. In a first contribution, we are interested in bridging the gap between theory and practice for popular Meta-Learning algorithms used in Few-Shot Classification. We make connections to Multi-Task Representation Learning, which benefits from solid theoretical foundations, to verify the best conditions for a more efficient meta-learning. Then, to leverage unlabeled data when training object detectors based on the Transformer architecture, we propose both an unsupervised pretraining and a semi-supervised learning method in two other separate contributions. For pretraining, we improve Contrastive Learning for object detectors by introducing the localization information. Finally, our semi-supervised method is the first tailored to transformer-based detectors.
Authors:Hang Zhang
Abstract:
In this research, I proposed a network structure for multi-view 3D object detection using camera-only data and a Bird's-Eye-View map. My work is based on a current key challenge domain adaptation and visual data transfer. Although many excellent camera-only 3D object detection has been continuously proposed, many research work risk dramatic performance drop when the networks are trained on the source domain but tested on a different target domain. Then I found it is very surprising that predictions on bounding boxes and classes are still replied to on 2D networks. Based on the domain gap assumption on various 3D datasets, I found they still shared a similar data extraction on the same BEV map size and camera data transfer. Therefore, to analyze the domain gap influence on the current method and to make good use of 3D space information among the dataset and the real world, I proposed a transfer learning method and Transformer construction to study the 3D object detection on NuScenes-mini and Lyft. Through multi-dataset training and a detection head from the Transformer, the network demonstrated good data migration performance and efficient detection performance by using 3D anchor query and 3D positional information. Relying on only a small amount of source data and the existing large model pre-training weights, the efficient network manages to achieve competitive results on the new target domain. Moreover, my study utilizes 3D information as available semantic information and 2D multi-view image features blending into the visual-language transfer design. In the final 3D anchor box prediction and object classification, my network achieved good results on standard metrics of 3D object detection, which differs from dataset-specific models on each training domain without any fine-tuning.
Authors:Yoshitomo Matsubara
Abstract:
Reproducibility in scientific work has been becoming increasingly important in research communities such as machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision communities due to the rapid development of the research domains supported by recent advances in deep learning. In this work, we present a significantly upgraded version of torchdistill, a modular-driven coding-free deep learning framework significantly upgraded from the initial release, which supports only image classification and object detection tasks for reproducible knowledge distillation experiments. To demonstrate that the upgraded framework can support more tasks with third-party libraries, we reproduce the GLUE benchmark results of BERT models using a script based on the upgraded torchdistill, harmonizing with various Hugging Face libraries. All the 27 fine-tuned BERT models and configurations to reproduce the results are published at Hugging Face, and the model weights have already been widely used in research communities. We also reimplement popular small-sized models and new knowledge distillation methods and perform additional experiments for computer vision tasks.
Authors:Lei Li
Abstract:
Natural scene analysis and remote sensing imagery offer immense potential for advancements in large-scale language-guided context-aware data utilization. This potential is particularly significant for enhancing performance in downstream tasks such as object detection and segmentation with designed language prompting. In light of this, we introduce the CPSeg, Chain-of-Thought Language Prompting for Finer-grained Semantic Segmentation), an innovative framework designed to augment image segmentation performance by integrating a novel "Chain-of-Thought" process that harnesses textual information associated with images. This groundbreaking approach has been applied to a flood disaster scenario. CPSeg encodes prompt texts derived from various sentences to formulate a coherent chain-of-thought. We propose a new vision-language dataset, FloodPrompt, which includes images, semantic masks, and corresponding text information. This not only strengthens the semantic understanding of the scenario but also aids in the key task of semantic segmentation through an interplay of pixel and text matching maps. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses validate the effectiveness of CPSeg.
Authors:Pierre Le Jeune
Abstract:
Most contributions on Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) evaluate their methods on natural images only, yet the transferability of the announced performance is not guaranteed for applications on other kinds of images. We demonstrate this with an in-depth analysis of existing FSOD methods on aerial images and observed a large performance gap compared to natural images. Small objects, more numerous in aerial images, are the cause for the apparent performance gap between natural and aerial images. As a consequence, we improve FSOD performance on small objects with a carefully designed attention mechanism. In addition, we also propose a scale-adaptive box similarity criterion, that improves the training and evaluation of FSOD methods, particularly for small objects. We also contribute to generic FSOD with two distinct approaches based on metric learning and fine-tuning. Impressive results are achieved with the fine-tuning method, which encourages tackling more complex scenarios such as Cross-Domain FSOD. We conduct preliminary experiments in this direction and obtain promising results. Finally, we address the deployment of the detection models inside COSE's systems. Detection must be done in real-time in extremely large images (more than 100 megapixels), with limited computation power. Leveraging existing optimization tools such as TensorRT, we successfully tackle this engineering challenge.
Authors:Zhiming Qian
Abstract:
To mimic human vision with the way of recognizing the diverse and open world, foundation vision models are much critical. While recent techniques of self-supervised learning show the promising potentiality of this mission, we argue that signals from labelled data are also important for common-sense recognition, and properly chosen pre-text tasks can facilitate the efficiency of vision representation learning. To this end, we propose a novel pre-training framework by adopting both self-supervised and supervised visual pre-text tasks in a multi-task manner. Specifically, given an image, we take a heuristic way by considering its intrinsic style properties, inside objects with their locations and correlations, and how it looks like in 3D space for basic visual understanding. However, large-scale object bounding boxes and correlations are usually hard to achieve. Alternatively, we develop a hybrid method by leveraging both multi-label classification and self-supervised learning. On the one hand, under the multi-label supervision, the pre-trained model can explore the detailed information of an image, e.g., image types, objects, and part of semantic relations. On the other hand, self-supervised learning tasks, with respect to Masked Image Modeling (MIM) and contrastive learning, can help the model learn pixel details and patch correlations. Results show that our pre-trained models can deliver results on par with or better than state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple visual tasks. For example, with a vanilla Swin-B backbone, we achieve 85.3\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification, 47.9 box AP on COCO object detection for Mask R-CNN, and 50.6 mIoU on ADE-20K semantic segmentation when using Upernet. The performance shows the ability of our vision foundation model to serve general purpose vision tasks.
Authors:Pronob Kumar Barman
Abstract:
Nowadays, detecting aberrant health issues is a difficult process. Falling, especially among the elderly, is a severe concern worldwide. Falls can result in deadly consequences, including unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and often times, death. A practical and optimal, smart approach of detecting falling is currently a concern. The use of vision-based fall monitoring is becoming more common among scientists as it enables senior citizens and those with other health conditions to live independently. For tracking, surveillance, and rescue, unmanned aerial vehicles use video or image segmentation and object detection methods. The Tello drone is equipped with a camera and with this device we determined normal and abnormal behaviors among our participants. The autonomous falling objects are classified using a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier. The results demonstrate that the systems can identify falling objects with a precision of 0.9948.
Authors:Soeren Molander
Abstract:
This note describes a method for detecting dense random texture using fully connected points sampled on image edges. An edge image is randomly sampled with points, the standard L2 distance is calculated between all connected points in a neighbourhood. For each point, a check is made if the point intersects with an image edge. If this is the case, a unity value is added to the distance, otherwise zero. From this an edge excess index is calculated for the fully connected edge graph in the range [1.0..2.0], where 1.0 indicate no edges. The ratio can be interpreted as a sampled Bernoulli process with unknown probability. The Bayesian posterior estimate of the probability can be associated with its conjugate prior which is a Beta($α$, $β$) distribution, with hyper parameters $α$ and $β$ related to the number of edge crossings. Low values of $β$ indicate a texture rich area, higher values less rich. The method has been applied to real-time SLAM-based moving object detection, where points are confined to tracked boxes (rois).
Authors:Maria Priisalu
Abstract:
It is difficult to perform 3D reconstruction from on-vehicle gathered video due to the large forward motion of the vehicle. Even object detection and human sensing models perform significantly worse on onboard videos when compared to standard benchmarks because objects often appear far away from the camera compared to the standard object detection benchmarks, image quality is often decreased by motion blur and occlusions occur often. This has led to the popularisation of traffic data-specific benchmarks. Recently Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensors have become popular to directly estimate depths without the need to perform 3D reconstructions. However, LiDAR-based methods still lack in articulated human detection at a distance when compared to image-based methods. We hypothesize that benchmarks targeted at articulated human sensing from LiDAR data could bring about increased research in human sensing and prediction in traffic and could lead to improved traffic safety for pedestrians.
Authors:Arne Moos
Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting objects using mobile robots in the context of the RoboCup Standard Platform League, with a primary focus on detecting the ball. The challenge lies in detecting a dynamic object in varying lighting conditions and blurred images caused by fast movements. To address this challenge, the paper presents a convolutional neural network architecture designed specifically for computationally constrained robotic platforms. The proposed CNN is trained to achieve high precision classification of single objects in image patches and to determine their precise spatial positions. The paper further integrates Early Exits into the existing high-precision CNN architecture to reduce the computational cost of easily rejectable cases in the background class. The training process involves a composite loss function based on confidence and positional losses with dynamic weighting and data augmentation. The proposed approach achieves a precision of 100% on the validation dataset and a recall of almost 87%, while maintaining an execution time of around 170 $μ$s per hypotheses. By combining the proposed approach with an Early Exit, a runtime optimization of more than 28%, on average, can be achieved compared to the original CNN. Overall, this paper provides an efficient solution for an enhanced detection of objects, especially the ball, in computationally constrained robotic platforms.
Authors:Jean-Francois Nies
Abstract:
In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of Semantic Consistency and the ensuing method of Knowledge-Aware Re-Optimization can be adapted for the problem of object detection in intricate traffic scenes. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method for extracting a knowledge graph from a dataset of images provided with instance-level annotations, and integrate this new knowledge graph with the existing semantic consistency model. Combining both this novel hybrid knowledge graph and the preexisting methods of frequency analysis and external knowledge graph as sources for semantic information, we investigate the effectiveness of knowledge-aware re-optimization on the Faster-RCNN and DETR object detection models. We find that limited but consistent improvements in precision and or recall can be achieved using this method for all combinations of model and method studied.
Authors:Xinggang Hu
Abstract:
In dynamic scenes, both localization and mapping in visual SLAM face significant challenges. In recent years, numerous outstanding research works have proposed effective solutions for the localization problem. However, there has been a scarcity of excellent works focusing on constructing long-term consistent maps in dynamic scenes, which severely hampers map applications. To address this issue, we have designed a multi-level map construction system tailored for dynamic scenes. In this system, we employ multi-object tracking algorithms, DBSCAN clustering algorithm, and depth information to rectify the results of object detection, accurately extract static point clouds, and construct dense point cloud maps and octree maps. We propose a plane map construction algorithm specialized for dynamic scenes, involving the extraction, filtering, data association, and fusion optimization of planes in dynamic environments, thus creating a plane map. Additionally, we introduce an object map construction algorithm targeted at dynamic scenes, which includes object parameterization, data association, and update optimization. Extensive experiments on public datasets and real-world scenarios validate the accuracy of the multi-level maps constructed in this study and the robustness of the proposed algorithms. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical application prospects of our algorithms by utilizing the constructed object maps for dynamic object tracking.
Authors:Yantong Liu
Abstract:
The integrity of offshore wind turbines, pivotal for sustainable energy generation, is often compromised by surface material defects. Despite the availability of various detection techniques, limitations persist regarding cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and applicability. Addressing these shortcomings, this study introduces a novel approach leveraging an advanced version of the YOLOv8 object detection model, supplemented with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for improved feature recognition. The optimized loss function further refines the learning process. Employing a dataset of 5,432 images from the Saemangeum offshore wind farm and a publicly available dataset, our method underwent rigorous testing. The findings reveal a substantial enhancement in defect detection stability, marking a significant stride towards efficient turbine maintenance. This study's contributions illuminate the path for future research, potentially revolutionizing sustainable energy practices.
Authors:Takato Yasuno
Abstract:
Over the past decade, previous balanced datasets have been used to advance deep learning algorithms for industrial applications. In urban infrastructures and living environments, damage data mining cannot avoid imbalanced data issues because of rare unseen events and the high-quality status of improved operations. For visual inspection, the deteriorated class acquired from the surface of concrete and steel components are occasionally imbalanced. From numerous related surveys, we conclude that imbalanced data problems can be categorised into four types: 1) missing range of target and label valuables, 2) majority-minority class imbalance, 3) foreground background of spatial imbalance, and 4) long-tailed class of pixel-wise imbalance. Since 2015, many imbalanced studies have been conducted using deep-learning approaches, including regression, image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. However, anomaly detection for imbalanced data is not well known. In this study, we highlight a one-class anomaly detection application, whether anomalous class or not, and demonstrate clear examples of imbalanced vision datasets: medical disease, hazardous behaviour, material deterioration, plant disease, river sludge, and disaster damage. We provide key results on the advantage of damage-vision mining, hypothesising that the more effective the range of the positive ratio, the higher the accuracy gain of the anomalies feedback. In our imbalanced studies, compared with the balanced case with a positive ratio of $1/1$, we find that there is an applicable positive ratio $1/a$ where the accuracy is consistently high. However, the extremely imbalanced range is from one shot to $1/2a$, the accuracy of which is inferior to that of the applicable ratio. In contrast, with a positive ratio ranging over $2/a$, it shifts in the over-mining phase without an effective gain in accuracy.
Authors:Yuguang Shi
Abstract:
One of the key problems in 3D object detection is to reduce the accuracy gap between methods based on LiDAR sensors and those based on monocular cameras. A recently proposed framework for monocular 3D detection based on Pseudo-Stereo has received considerable attention in the community. However, so far these two problems are discovered in existing practices, including (1) monocular depth estimation and Pseudo-Stereo detector must be trained separately, (2) Difficult to be compatible with different stereo detectors and (3) the overall calculation is large, which affects the reasoning speed. In this work, we propose an end-to-end, efficient pseudo-stereo 3D detection framework by introducing a Single-View Diffusion Model (SVDM) that uses a few iterations to gradually deliver right informative pixels to the left image. SVDM allows the entire pseudo-stereo 3D detection pipeline to be trained end-to-end and can benefit from the training of stereo detectors. Afterwards, we further explore the application of SVDM in depth-free stereo 3D detection, and the final framework is compatible with most stereo detectors. Among multiple benchmarks on the KITTI dataset, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance.
Authors:Haodong Ouyang
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel object detector called DEYOv2, an improved version of the first-generation DEYO (DETR with YOLO) model. DEYOv2, similar to its predecessor, DEYOv2 employs a progressive reasoning approach to accelerate model training and enhance performance. The study delves into the limitations of one-to-one matching in optimization and proposes solutions to effectively address the issue, such as Rank Feature and Greedy Matching. This approach enables the third stage of DEYOv2 to maximize information acquisition from the first and second stages without needing NMS, achieving end-to-end optimization. By combining dense queries, sparse queries, one-to-many matching, and one-to-one matching, DEYOv2 leverages the advantages of each method. It outperforms all existing query-based end-to-end detectors under the same settings. When using ResNet-50 as the backbone and multi-scale features on the COCO dataset, DEYOv2 achieves 51.1 AP and 51.8 AP in 12 and 24 epochs, respectively. Compared to the end-to-end model DINO, DEYOv2 provides significant performance gains of 2.1 AP and 1.4 AP in the two epoch settings. To the best of our knowledge, DEYOv2 is the first fully end-to-end object detector that combines the respective strengths of classical detectors and query-based detectors.
Authors:Eduardo Hugo Sanchez
Abstract:
Various methods have been proposed to detect objects while reducing the cost of data annotation. For instance, weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) methods rely only on image-level annotations during training. Unfortunately, data annotation remains expensive since annotators must provide the categories describing the content of each image and labeling is restricted to a fixed set of categories. In this paper, we propose a method to locate and label objects in an image by using a form of weaker supervision: image-caption pairs. By leveraging recent advances in vision-language (VL) models and self-supervised vision transformers (ViTs), our method is able to perform phrase grounding and object detection in a weakly supervised manner. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving a 47.51% recall@1 score in phrase grounding on Flickr30k Entities and establishing a new state-of-the-art in object detection by achieving 21.1 mAP 50 and 10.5 mAP 50:95 on MS COCO when exclusively relying on image-caption pairs.
Authors:Sanyam Jain
Abstract:
Marine animals and deep underwater objects are difficult to recognize and monitor for safety of aquatic life. There is an increasing challenge when the water is saline with granular particles and impurities. In such natural adversarial environment, traditional approaches like CNN start to fail and are expensive to compute. This project involves implementing and evaluating various object detection models, including EfficientDet, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and Detectron2, on an existing annotated underwater dataset, called the Brackish-Dataset. The dataset comprises annotated image sequences of fish, crabs, starfish, and other aquatic animals captured in Limfjorden water with limited visibility. The aim of this research project is to study the efficiency of newer models on the same dataset and contrast them with the previous results based on accuracy and inference time. Firstly, I compare the results of YOLOv3 (31.10% mean Average Precision (mAP)), YOLOv4 (83.72% mAP), YOLOv5 (97.6%), YOLOv8 (98.20%), EfficientDet (98.56% mAP) and Detectron2 (95.20% mAP) on the same dataset. Secondly, I provide a modified BiSkFPN mechanism (BiFPN neck with skip connections) to perform complex feature fusion in adversarial noise which makes modified EfficientDet robust to perturbations. Third, analyzed the effect on accuracy of EfficientDet (98.63% mAP) and YOLOv5 by adversarial learning (98.04% mAP). Last, I provide class activation map based explanations (CAM) for the two models to promote Explainability in black box models. Overall, the results indicate that modified EfficientDet achieved higher accuracy with five-fold cross validation than the other models with 88.54% IoU of feature maps.
Authors:Sanyam Jain
Abstract:
This paper implements and investigates popular adversarial attacks on the YOLOv5 Object Detection algorithm. The paper explores the vulnerability of the YOLOv5 to adversarial attacks in the context of traffic and road sign detection. The paper investigates the impact of different types of attacks, including the Limited memory Broyden Fletcher Goldfarb Shanno (L-BFGS), the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) attack, the Carlini and Wagner (C&W) attack, the Basic Iterative Method (BIM) attack, the Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attack, One Pixel Attack, and the Universal Adversarial Perturbations attack on the accuracy of YOLOv5 in detecting traffic and road signs. The results show that YOLOv5 is susceptible to these attacks, with misclassification rates increasing as the magnitude of the perturbations increases. We also explain the results using saliency maps. The findings of this paper have important implications for the safety and reliability of object detection algorithms used in traffic and transportation systems, highlighting the need for more robust and secure models to ensure their effectiveness in real-world applications.
Authors:Han Gao
Abstract:
In recent years, with the successful application of DNN in fields such as NLP and CV, its security has also received widespread attention. (Author) proposed the method of backdoor attack in Badnet. Switch implanted backdoor into the model by poisoning the training samples. The model with backdoor did not exhibit any abnormalities on the normal validation sample set, but in the input with trigger, they were mistakenly classified as the attacker's designated category or randomly classified as a different category from the ground truth, This attack method seriously threatens the normal application of DNN in real life, such as autonomous driving, object detection, etc.This article proposes a new method to combat backdoor attacks. We refer to the features in the area covered by the trigger as trigger features, and the remaining areas as normal features. By introducing prerequisite calculation conditions during the training process, these conditions have little impact on normal features and trigger features, and can complete the training of a standard backdoor model. The model trained under these prerequisite calculation conditions can, In the verification set D'val with the same premise calculation conditions, the performance is consistent with that of the ordinary backdoor model. However, in the verification set Dval without the premise calculation conditions, the verification accuracy decreases very little (7%~12%), while the attack success rate (ASR) decreases from 90% to about 8%.Author call this method Prerequisite Transformation(PT).
Authors:A. I. Ullah Tabassam
Abstract:
Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) is becoming a highly crucial part of businesses looking to capitalize on the benefits of AI and ML models. This research presents a detailed review of MLOps, its benefits, difficulties, evolutions, and important underlying technologies such as MLOps frameworks, Docker, GitHub actions, and Kubernetes. The MLOps workflow, which includes model design, deployment, and operations, is explained in detail along with the various tools necessary for both model and data exploration and deployment. This article also puts light on the end-to-end production of ML projects using various maturity levels of automated pipelines, with the least at no automation at all and the highest with complete CI/CD and CT capabilities. Furthermore, a detailed example of an enterprise-level MLOps project for an object detection service is used to explain the workflow of the technology in a real-world scenario. For this purpose, a web application hosting a pre-trained model from TensorFlow 2 Model Zoo is packaged and deployed to the internet making sure that the system is scalable, reliable, and optimized for deployment at an enterprise level.
Authors:Michael Shenoda
Abstract:
Real-time object detection is a crucial problem to solve when in comes to computer vision systems that needs to make appropriate decision based on detection in a timely manner. I have chosen the YOLO v1 architecture to implement it using PyTorch framework, with goal to familiarize with entire object detection pipeline I attempted different techniques to modify the original architecture to improve the results. Finally, I compare the metrics of my implementation to the original.
Authors:Michael Shenoda
Abstract:
Creating an object detector, in computer vision, has some common challenges when initially developed based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. These challenges are more apparent when creating model that needs to adapt to images captured by various camera orientations, lighting conditions, and environmental changes. The availability of the initial training samples to cover all these conditions can be an enormous challenge with a time and cost burden. While the problem can exist when creating any type of object detection, some types are less common and have no pre-labeled image datasets that exists publicly. Sometime public datasets are not reliable nor comprehensive for a rare object type. Vehicle wheel is one of those example that been chosen to demonstrate the approach of creating a lighting and rotation invariant real-time detector based on YOLOv5 architecture. The objective is to provide a simple approach that could be used as a reference for developing other types of real-time object detectors.
Authors:Karthick Prasad Gunasekaran
Abstract:
Lung cancer poses a significant global public health challenge, emphasizing the importance of early detection for improved patient outcomes. Recent advancements in deep learning algorithms have shown promising results in medical image analysis. This study aims to explore the application of object detection particularly YOLOv5, an advanced object identification system, in medical imaging for lung cancer identification. To train and evaluate the algorithm, a dataset comprising chest X-rays and corresponding annotations was obtained from Kaggle. The YOLOv5 model was employed to train an algorithm capable of detecting cancerous lung lesions. The training process involved optimizing hyperparameters and utilizing augmentation techniques to enhance the model's performance. The trained YOLOv5 model exhibited exceptional proficiency in identifying lung cancer lesions, displaying high accuracy and recall rates. It successfully pinpointed malignant areas in chest radiographs, as validated by a separate test set where it outperformed previous techniques. Additionally, the YOLOv5 model demonstrated computational efficiency, enabling real-time detection and making it suitable for integration into clinical procedures. This proposed approach holds promise in assisting radiologists in the early discovery and diagnosis of lung cancer, ultimately leading to prompt treatment and improved patient outcomes.
Authors:Michael Guerzhoy
Abstract:
We introduce the problem of phone classification in the context of speech recognition, and explore several sets of local spectro-temporal features that can be used for phone classification. In particular, we present some preliminary results for phone classification using two sets of features that are commonly used for object detection: Haar features and SVM-classified Histograms of Gradients (HoG).
Authors:Peng-Shuai Wang
Abstract:
We propose octree-based transformers, named OctFormer, for 3D point cloud learning. OctFormer can not only serve as a general and effective backbone for 3D point cloud segmentation and object detection but also have linear complexity and is scalable for large-scale point clouds. The key challenge in applying transformers to point clouds is reducing the quadratic, thus overwhelming, computation complexity of attentions. To combat this issue, several works divide point clouds into non-overlapping windows and constrain attentions in each local window. However, the point number in each window varies greatly, impeding the efficient execution on GPU. Observing that attentions are robust to the shapes of local windows, we propose a novel octree attention, which leverages sorted shuffled keys of octrees to partition point clouds into local windows containing a fixed number of points while permitting shapes of windows to change freely. And we also introduce dilated octree attention to expand the receptive field further. Our octree attention can be implemented in 10 lines of code with open-sourced libraries and runs 17 times faster than other point cloud attentions when the point number exceeds 200k. Built upon the octree attention, OctFormer can be easily scaled up and achieves state-of-the-art performances on a series of 3D segmentation and detection benchmarks, surpassing previous sparse-voxel-based CNNs and point cloud transformers in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Notably, on the challenging ScanNet200 dataset, OctFormer outperforms sparse-voxel-based CNNs by 7.3 in mIoU. Our code and trained models are available at https://wang-ps.github.io/octformer.
Authors:Jon Crall
Abstract:
The performance of a binary classifier is described by a confusion matrix with four entries: the number of true positives (TP), true negatives (TN), false positives (FP), and false negatives (FN).
The Matthew's Correlation Coefficient (MCC), F1, and Fowlkes--Mallows (FM) scores are scalars that summarize a confusion matrix. Both the F1 and FM scores are based on only three of the four entries in the confusion matrix (they ignore TN). In contrast, the MCC takes into account all four entries of the confusion matrix and thus can be seen as providing a more representative picture.
However, in object detection problems, measuring the number of true negatives is so large it is often intractable. Thus we ask, what happens to the MCC as the number of true negatives approaches infinity? This paper provides insight into the relationship between the MCC and FM score by proving that the FM-measure is equal to the limit of the MCC as the number of true negatives approaches infinity.
Authors:Wendong Zhang
Abstract:
Object detection has been extensively utilized in autonomous systems in recent years, encompassing both 2D and 3D object detection. Recent research in this field has primarily centered around multimodal approaches for addressing this issue.In this paper, a multimodal fusion approach based on result feature-level fusion is proposed. This method utilizes the outcome features generated from single modality sources, and fuses them for downstream tasks.Based on this method, a new post-fusing network is proposed for multimodal object detection, which leverages the single modality outcomes as features. The proposed approach, called Multi-Modal Detector based on Result features (MMDR), is designed to work for both 2D and 3D object detection tasks. Compared to previous multimodal models, the proposed approach in this paper performs feature fusion at a later stage, enabling better representation of the deep-level features of single modality sources. Additionally, the MMDR model incorporates shallow global features during the feature fusion stage, endowing the model with the ability to perceive background information and the overall input, thereby avoiding issues such as missed detections.
Authors:Mathieu Pagé Fortin
Abstract:
This paper investigates the problem of class-incremental object detection for agricultural applications where a model needs to learn new plant species and diseases incrementally without forgetting the previously learned ones. We adapt two public datasets to include new categories over time, simulating a more realistic and dynamic scenario. We then compare three class-incremental learning methods that leverage different forms of knowledge distillation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Our experiments show that all three methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting, but the Dynamic Y-KD approach, which additionally uses a dynamic architecture that grows new branches to learn new tasks, outperforms ILOD and Faster-ILOD in most settings both on new and old classes.
These results highlight the challenges and opportunities of continual object detection for agricultural applications. In particular, we hypothesize that the large intra-class and small inter-class variability that is typical of plant images exacerbate the difficulty of learning new categories without interfering with previous knowledge. We publicly release our code to encourage future work.
Authors:Hrishitva Patel
Abstract:
Object detection is a crucial task in computer vision that aims to identify and localize objects in images or videos. The recent advancements in deep learning and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly improved the performance of object detection techniques. This paper presents a comprehensive study of object detection techniques in unconstrained environments, including various challenges, datasets, and state-of-the-art approaches. Additionally, we present a comparative analysis of the methods and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we provide some future research directions to further improve object detection in unconstrained environments.
Authors:Neelesh Mungoli
Abstract:
In this paper, we present an Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework that aims to boost the performance of deep neural networks by intelligently fusing features through ensemble learning techniques. The proposed framework integrates ensemble learning strategies with deep learning architectures to create a more robust and adaptable model capable of handling complex tasks across various domains. By leveraging intelligent feature fusion methods, the Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework generates more discriminative and effective feature representations, leading to improved model performance and generalization capabilities.
We conducted extensive experiments and evaluations on several benchmark datasets, including image classification, object detection, natural language processing, and graph-based learning tasks. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline models and traditional feature fusion techniques, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing deep learning models' performance. Furthermore, we provide insights into the impact of intelligent feature fusion on model performance and discuss the potential applications of the Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework in real-world scenarios.
The paper also explores the design and implementation of adaptive ensemble models, ensemble training strategies, and meta-learning techniques, which contribute to the framework's versatility and adaptability. In conclusion, the Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework represents a significant advancement in the field of feature fusion and ensemble learning for deep neural networks, with the potential to transform a wide range of applications across multiple domains.
Authors:Joseph Rowell
Abstract:
The Structure from Motion (SfM) challenge in computer vision is the process of recovering the 3D structure of a scene from a series of projective measurements that are calculated from a collection of 2D images, taken from different perspectives. SfM consists of three main steps; feature detection and matching, camera motion estimation, and recovery of 3D structure from estimated intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and features.
A problem encountered in SfM is that scenes lacking texture or with repetitive features can cause erroneous feature matching between frames. Semantic segmentation offers a route to validate and correct SfM models by labelling pixels in the input images with the use of a deep convolutional neural network. The semantic and geometric properties associated with classes in the scene can be taken advantage of to apply prior constraints to each class of object. The SfM pipeline COLMAP and semantic segmentation pipeline DeepLab were used. This, along with planar reconstruction of the dense model, were used to determine erroneous points that may be occluded from the calculated camera position, given the semantic label, and thus prior constraint of the reconstructed plane. Herein, semantic segmentation is integrated into SfM to apply priors on the 3D point cloud, given the object detection in the 2D input images. Additionally, the semantic labels of matched keypoints are compared and inconsistent semantically labelled points discarded. Furthermore, semantic labels on input images are used for the removal of objects associated with motion in the output SfM models. The proposed approach is evaluated on a data-set of 1102 images of a repetitive architecture scene. This project offers a novel method for improved validation of 3D SfM models.
Authors:Apoorv Singh
Abstract:
Vision-based Transformer have shown huge application in the perception module of autonomous driving in terms of predicting accurate 3D bounding boxes, owing to their strong capability in modeling long-range dependencies between the visual features. However Transformers, initially designed for language models, have mostly focused on the performance accuracy, and not so much on the inference-time budget. For a safety critical system like autonomous driving, real-time inference at the on-board compute is an absolute necessity. This keeps our object detection algorithm under a very tight run-time budget. In this paper, we evaluated a variety of strategies to optimize on the inference-time of vision transformers based object detection methods keeping a close-watch on any performance variations. Our chosen metric for these strategies is accuracy-runtime joint optimization. Moreover, for actual inference-time analysis we profile our strategies with float32 and float16 precision with TensorRT module. This is the most common format used by the industry for deployment of their Machine Learning networks on the edge devices. We showed that our strategies are able to improve inference-time by 63% at the cost of performance drop of mere 3% for our problem-statement defined in evaluation section. These strategies brings down Vision Transformers detectors inference-time even less than traditional single-image based CNN detectors like FCOS. We recommend practitioners use these techniques to deploy Transformers based hefty multi-view networks on a budge-constrained robotic platform.
Authors:Hongen Liu
Abstract:
Although end-to-end video text spotting methods based on Transformer can model long-range dependencies and simplify the train process, it will lead to large computation cost with the increase of the frame size in the input video. Therefore, considering the resolution of ICDAR 2023 DSText is 1080 * 1920 and slicing the video frame into several areas will destroy the spatial correlation of text, we divided the small and dense text spotting into two tasks, text detection and tracking. For text detection, we adopt the PP-YOLOE-R which is proven effective in small object detection as our detection model. For text detection, we use the sort algorithm for high inference speed. Experiments on DSText dataset demonstrate that our method is competitive on small and dense text spotting.
Authors:Xiaohui Guo
Abstract:
Small object detection presents a significant challenge in computer vision and object detection. The performance of small object detectors is often compromised by a lack of pixels and less significant features. This issue stems from information misalignment caused by variations in feature scale and information loss during feature processing. In response to this challenge, this paper proposes a novel the Multi to Single Module (M2S), which enhances a specific layer through improving feature extraction and refining features. Specifically, M2S includes the proposed Cross-scale Aggregation Module (CAM) and explored Dual Relationship Module (DRM) to improve information extraction capabilities and feature refinement effects. Moreover, this paper enhances the accuracy of small object detection by utilizing M2S to generate an additional detection head. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on two datasets, VisDrone2021-DET and SeaDronesSeeV2. The experimental results demonstrate its improved performance compared with existing methods. Compared to the baseline model (YOLOv5s), M2S improves the accuracy by about 1.1\% on the VisDrone2021-DET testing dataset and 15.68\% on the SeaDronesSeeV2 validation set.
Authors:Charles Tang
Abstract:
Cycling is an increasingly popular method of transportation for sustainability and health benefits. However, cyclists face growing risks, especially when encountering large vehicles on the road. This study aims to reduce the number of vehicle-cyclist collisions, which are often caused by poor driver attention to blind spots. To achieve this, we designed a state-of-the-art real-time monocular cyclist detection that can detect cyclists with object detection convolutional neural networks, such as EfficientDet Lite and SSD MobileNetV2. First, our proposed cyclist detection models achieve greater than 0.900 mAP (IoU: 0.5), fine-tuned on a newly proposed cyclist image dataset comprising over 20,000 images. Next, the models were deployed onto a Google Coral Dev Board mini-computer with a camera module and analyzed for speed, reaching inference times as low as 15 milliseconds. Lastly, the end-to-end cyclist detection device was tested in real-time to model traffic scenarios and analyzed further for performance and feasibility. We concluded that this cyclist detection device can accurately and quickly detect cyclists and has the potential to improve cyclist safety significantly. Future studies could determine the feasibility of the proposed device in the vehicle industry and improvements to cyclist safety over time.
Authors:Tianhao Lin
Abstract:
Object detection has been used in a wide range of industries. For example, in autonomous driving, the task of object detection is to accurately and efficiently identify and locate a large number of predefined classes of object instances (vehicles, pedestrians, traffic signs, etc.) from videos of roads. In robotics, the industry robot needs to recognize specific machine elements. In the security field, the camera should accurately recognize each face of people. With the wide application of deep learning, the accuracy and efficiency of object detection have been greatly improved, but object detection based on deep learning still faces challenges. Different applications of object detection have different requirements, including highly accurate detection, multi-category object detection, real-time detection, robustness to occlusions, etc. To address the above challenges, based on extensive literature research, this paper analyzes methods for improving and optimizing mainstream object detection algorithms from the perspective of evolution of one-stage and two-stage object detection algorithms. Furthermore, this article proposes methods for improving object detection accuracy from the perspective of changing receptive fields. The new model is based on the original YOLOv5 (You Look Only Once) with some modifications. The structure of the head part of YOLOv5 is modified by adding asymmetrical pooling layers. As a result, the accuracy of the algorithm is improved while ensuring the speed. The performances of the new model in this article are compared with original YOLOv5 model and analyzed from several parameters. And the evaluation of the new model is presented in four situations. Moreover, the summary and outlooks are made on the problems to be solved and the research directions in the future.
Authors:Jiajie Chen
Abstract:
Many loss functions have been derived from cross-entropy loss functions such as large-margin softmax loss and focal loss. The large-margin softmax loss makes the classification more rigorous and prevents overfitting. The focal loss alleviates class imbalance in object detection by down-weighting the loss of well-classified examples. Recent research has shown that these two loss functions derived from cross entropy have valuable applications in the field of image segmentation. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no unified formulation that combines these two loss functions so that they can not only be transformed mutually, but can also be used to simultaneously address class imbalance and overfitting. To this end, we subdivide the entropy-based loss into the regularizer-based entropy loss and the focal-based entropy loss, and propose a novel optimized hybrid focal loss to handle extreme class imbalance and prevent overfitting for crack segmentation. We have evaluated our proposal in comparison with three crack segmentation datasets (DeepCrack-DB, CRACK500 and our private PanelCrack dataset). Our experiments demonstrate that the focal margin component can significantly increase the IoU of cracks by 0.43 on DeepCrack-DB and 0.44 on our PanelCrack dataset, respectively.
Authors:Tong Guo
Abstract:
In industry deep learning application, our manually labeled data has a certain number of noisy data. To solve this problem and achieve more than 90 score in dev dataset, we present a simple method to find the noisy data and re-label the noisy data by human, given the model predictions as references in human labeling. In this paper, we illustrate our idea for a broad set of deep learning tasks, includes classification, sequence tagging, object detection, sequence generation, click-through rate prediction. The dev dataset evaluation results and human evaluation results verify our idea.
Authors:Fabian Küppers
Abstract:
Image-based environment perception is an important component especially for driver assistance systems or autonomous driving. In this scope, modern neuronal networks are used to identify multiple objects as well as the according position and size information within a single frame. The performance of such an object detection model is important for the overall performance of the whole system. However, a detection model might also predict these objects under a certain degree of uncertainty. [...]
In this work, we examine the semantic uncertainty (which object type?) as well as the spatial uncertainty (where is the object and how large is it?). We evaluate if the predicted uncertainties of an object detection model match with the observed error that is achieved on real-world data. In the first part of this work, we introduce the definition for confidence calibration of the semantic uncertainty in the context of object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We integrate additional position information in our examinations to evaluate the effect of the object's position on the semantic calibration properties. Besides measuring calibration, it is also possible to perform a post-hoc recalibration of semantic uncertainty that might have turned out to be miscalibrated. [...]
The second part of this work deals with the spatial uncertainty obtained by a probabilistic detection model. [...] We review and extend common calibration methods so that it is possible to obtain parametric uncertainty distributions for the position information in a more flexible way.
In the last part, we demonstrate a possible use-case for our derived calibration methods in the context of object tracking. [...] We integrate our previously proposed calibration techniques and demonstrate the usefulness of semantic and spatial uncertainty calibration in a subsequent process. [...]
Authors:Xiaoqi Zhuang
Abstract:
In the field of visual representation learning, performance of contrastive learning has been catching up with the supervised method which is commonly a classification convolutional neural network. However, most of the research work focuses on improving the accuracy of downstream tasks such as image classification and object detection. For visual contrastive learning, the influences of individual image features (e.g., color and shape) to model performance remain ambiguous.
This paper investigates such influences by designing various ablation experiments, the results of which are evaluated by specifically designed metrics. While these metrics are not invented by us, we first use them in the field of representation evaluation. Specifically, we assess the contribution of two primary image features (i.e., color and shape) in a quantitative way. Experimental results show that compared with supervised representations, contrastive representations tend to cluster with objects of similar color in the representation space, and contain less shape information than supervised representations. Finally, we discuss that the current data augmentation is responsible for these results. We believe that exploring an unsupervised augmentation method that
Authors:Mélodie Boillet
Abstract:
In this thesis, we study multiple tasks related to document layout analysis such as the detection of text lines, the splitting into acts or the detection of the writing support. Thus, we propose two deep neural models following two different approaches. We aim at proposing a model for object detection that considers the difficulties associated with document processing, including the limited amount of training data available.
In this respect, we propose a pixel-level detection model and a second object-level detection model. We first propose a detection model with few parameters, fast in prediction, and which can obtain accurate prediction masks from a reduced number of training data. We implemented a strategy of collection and uniformization of many datasets, which are used to train a single line detection model that demonstrates high generalization capabilities to out-of-sample documents.
We also propose a Transformer-based detection model. The design of such a model required redefining the task of object detection in document images and to study different approaches. Following this study, we propose an object detection strategy consisting in sequentially predicting the coordinates of the objects enclosing rectangles through a pixel classification. This strategy allows obtaining a fast model with only few parameters.
Finally, in an industrial setting, new non-annotated data are often available. Thus, in the case of a model adaptation to this new data, it is expected to provide the system as few new annotated samples as possible. The selection of relevant samples for manual annotation is therefore crucial to enable successful adaptation. For this purpose, we propose confidence estimators from different approaches for object detection. We show that these estimators greatly reduce the amount of annotated data while optimizing the performances.
Authors:Kaiyu Zheng
Abstract:
Future collaborative robots must be capable of finding objects. As such a fundamental skill, we expect object search to eventually become an off-the-shelf capability for any robot, similar to e.g., object detection, SLAM, and motion planning. However, existing approaches either make unrealistic compromises (e.g., reduce the problem from 3D to 2D), resort to ad-hoc, greedy search strategies, or attempt to learn end-to-end policies in simulation that are yet to generalize across real robots and environments. This thesis argues that through using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) to model object search while exploiting structures in the human world (e.g., octrees, correlations) and in human-robot interaction (e.g., spatial language), a practical and effective system for generalized object search can be achieved. In support of this argument, I develop methods and systems for (multi-)object search in 3D environments under uncertainty due to limited field of view, occlusion, noisy, unreliable detectors, spatial correlations between objects, and possibly ambiguous spatial language (e.g., "The red car is behind Chase Bank"). Besides evaluation in simulators such as PyGame, AirSim, and AI2-THOR, I design and implement a robot-independent, environment-agnostic system for generalized object search in 3D and deploy it on the Boston Dynamics Spot robot, the Kinova MOVO robot, and the Universal Robots UR5e robotic arm, to perform object search in different environments. The system enables, for example, a Spot robot to find a toy cat hidden underneath a couch in a kitchen area in under one minute. This thesis also broadly surveys the object search literature, proposing taxonomies in object search problem settings, methods and systems.
Authors:Eldan R. Daniel
Abstract:
Wildfires are becoming more frequent and their effects more devastating every day. Climate change has directly and indirectly affected the occurrence of these, as well as social phenomena have increased the vulnerability of people. Consequently, and given the inevitable occurrence of these, it is important to have early warning systems that allow a timely and effective response. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and Computer Vision offer an effective and achievable alternative for opportune detection of wildfires and thus reduce the risk of disasters. YOLOv7 offers a simple, fast, and efficient algorithm for training object detection models which can be used in early detection of smoke columns in the initial stage wildfires. The developed model showed promising results, achieving a score of 0.74 in the F1 curve when the confidence level is 0.298, that is, a higher score at lower confidence levels was obtained. This means when the conditions are favorable for false positives. The metrics demonstrates the resilience and effectiveness of the model in detecting smoke columns.
Authors:Kangcheng Liu
Abstract:
The vision of unmanned aerial vehicles is very significant for UAV-related applications such as search and rescue, landing on a moving platform, etc. In this work, we have developed an integrated system for the UAV landing on the moving platform, and the UAV object detection with tracking in the complicated environment. Firstly, we have proposed a robust LoG-based deep neural network for object detection and tracking, which has great advantages in robustness to object scale and illuminations compared with typical deep network-based approaches. Then, we have also improved based on the original Kalman filter and designed an iterative multi-model-based filter to tackle the problem of unknown dynamics in real circumstances of motion estimations. Next, we implemented the whole system and do ROS Gazebo-based testing in two complicated circumstances to verify the effectiveness of our design. Finally, we have deployed the proposed detection, tracking, and motion estimation strategies into real applications to do UAV tracking of a pillar and obstacle avoidance. It is demonstrated that our system shows great accuracy and robustness in real applications.
Authors:Haodong Ouyang
Abstract:
Object detection is an important topic in computer vision, with post-processing, an essential part of the typical object detection pipeline, posing a significant bottleneck affecting the performance of traditional object detection models. The detection transformer (DETR), as the first end-to-end target detection model, discards the requirement of manual components like the anchor and non-maximum suppression (NMS), significantly simplifying the target detection process. However, compared with most traditional object detection models, DETR converges very slowly, and a query's meaning is obscure. Thus, inspired by the Step-by-Step concept, this paper proposes a new two-stage object detection model, named DETR with YOLO (DEYO), which relies on a progressive inference to solve the above problems. DEYO is a two-stage architecture comprising a classic target detection model and a DETR-like model as the first and second stages, respectively. Specifically, the first stage provides high-quality query and anchor feeding into the second stage, improving the performance and efficiency of the second stage compared to the original DETR model. Meanwhile, the second stage compensates for the performance degradation caused by the first stage detector's limitations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEYO attains 50.6 AP and 52.1 AP in 12 and 36 epochs, respectively, while utilizing ResNet-50 as the backbone and multi-scale features on the COCO dataset. Compared with DINO, an optimal DETR-like model, the developed DEYO model affords a significant performance improvement of 1.6 AP and 1.2 AP in two epoch settings.
Authors:Der-Hau Lee
Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles have limited computational resources and thus require efficient control systems. The cost and size of sensors have limited the development of self-driving cars. To overcome these restrictions, this study proposes an efficient framework for the operation of vision-based automatic vehicles; the framework requires only a monocular camera and a few inexpensive radars. The proposed algorithm comprises a multi-task UNet (MTUNet) network for extracting image features and constrained iterative linear quadratic regulator (CILQR) and vision predictive control (VPC) modules for rapid motion planning and control. MTUNet is designed to simultaneously solve lane line segmentation, the ego vehicle's heading angle regression, road type classification, and traffic object detection tasks at approximately 40 FPS for 228 x 228 pixel RGB input images. The CILQR controllers then use the MTUNet outputs and radar data as inputs to produce driving commands for lateral and longitudinal vehicle guidance within only 1 ms. In particular, the VPC algorithm is included to reduce steering command latency to below actuator latency, preventing performance degradation during tight turns. The VPC algorithm uses road curvature data from MTUNet to estimate the appropriate correction for the current steering angle at a look-ahead point to adjust the turning amount. The inclusion of the VPC algorithm in a VPC-CILQR controller leads to higher performance on curvy roads than the use of CILQR alone. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed autonomous driving system, which does not require high-definition maps, can be applied in current autonomous vehicles.
Authors:Thibault Clérice
Abstract:
Layout Analysis (the identification of zones and their classification) is the first step along line segmentation in Optical Character Recognition and similar tasks. The ability of identifying main body of text from marginal text or running titles makes the difference between extracting the work full text of a digitized book and noisy outputs. We show that most segmenters focus on pixel classification and that polygonization of this output has not been used as a target for the latest competition on historical document (ICDAR 2017 and onwards), despite being the focus in the early 2010s. We propose to shift, for efficiency, the task from a pixel classification-based polygonization to an object detection using isothetic rectangles. We compare the output of Kraken and YOLOv5 in terms of segmentation and show that the later severely outperforms the first on small datasets (1110 samples and below). We release two datasets for training and evaluation on historical documents as well as a new package, YALTAi, which injects YOLOv5 in the segmentation pipeline of Kraken 4.1.
Authors:Sunit Shantanu Digamber Fulari
Abstract:
Antennas are taking design shapes by the orientation of its material and the final structural design they take. Irrespective of the shape, the function and efficiency they produce does not change and vary to much extent. We are trying to simulate a design of antenna which is using the artificial intelligence model to Specific absorption rate minimization. We have successfully used antenna magus and CST suite to produce our improved simulation results. Motion models such as optical flow is used to smartly detect communicating devices inorder to connect and link the devices. The algorithm used by us is closest neighbour algorithm which is connected with antenna to apply it in object detection of mobile devices and antennas. We are trying to have a six second break in which the antenna will operate at minimum frequency but at the same time operating in its functioning. After every six seconds the antenna will radiate its frequency of vibration to detect if there is any new object or mobile device in sight.
Authors:Rajendra Nagar
Abstract: Detecting the reflection symmetry plane of an object represented by a 3D point cloud is a fundamental problem in 3D computer vision and geometry processing due to its various applications, such as compression, object detection, robotic grasping, 3D surface reconstruction, etc. There exist several efficient approaches for solving this problem for clean 3D point clouds. However, it is a challenging problem to solve in the presence of outliers and missing parts. The existing methods try to overcome this challenge mostly by voting-based techniques but do not work efficiently. In this work, we proposed a statistical estimator-based approach for the plane of reflection symmetry that is robust to outliers and missing parts. We pose the problem of finding the optimal estimator for the reflection symmetry as an optimization problem on a 2-Sphere that quickly converges to the global solution for an approximate initialization. We further adapt the heat kernel signature for symmetry invariant matching of mirror symmetric points. This approach helps us to decouple the chicken-and-egg problem of finding the optimal symmetry plane and correspondences between the reflective symmetric points. The proposed approach achieves comparable mean ground-truth error and 4.5\% increment in the F-score as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches on the benchmark dataset.