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Cost Volume Refinement for Depth Prediction

João L. Cardoso, Nuno Goncalves, Michael Wimmer

Auto-TLDR; Refining the Cost Volume for Depth Prediction from Light Field Cameras

Abstract Slides Poster

Light-field cameras are becoming more popular in the consumer market. Their data redundancy allows, in theory, to accurately refocus images after acquisition and to predict the depth of each point visible from the camera. Combined, these two features allow for the generation of full-focus images, which is impossible in traditional cameras. Multiple methods for depth prediction from light fields (or stereo) have been proposed over the years. A large subset of these methods relies on cost-volume estimates -- 3D objects where each layer represents a heuristic of whether each point in the image is at a certain distance from the camera. Generally, this volume is used to regress a disparity map, which is then refined for better results. In this paper, we argue that refining the cost volumes is superior to refining the disparity maps in order to further increase the accuracy of depth predictions. We propose a set of cost-volume refinement algorithms and show their effectiveness.

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Fast and Efficient Neural Network for Light Field Disparity Estimation

Dizhi Ma, Andrew Lumsdaine

Auto-TLDR; Improving Efficient Light Field Disparity Estimation Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

As with many imaging tasks, disparity estimation for light fields seems to be well-matched to machine learning approaches. Neural network-based methods can achieve an overall bad pixel rate as low as four percent on the 4D light field benchmark dataset,continued effort to improve accuracy is resulting in diminishing returns. On the other hand, due to the growing importance of mobile and embedded devices, improving the efficiency is emerging as an important problem. In this paper, we improve the efficiency of existing neural net approaches for light field disparity estimation by introducing efficient network blocks, pruning redundant sections of the network and downsampling the resolution of feature vector. To improve performance, we also propose densely sampled epipolar image plane volumes as input. Experiment results show that our approach can achieve similar results compared with state-of-the-art methods while using only one-tenth runtime.

P2D: A Self-Supervised Method for Depth Estimation from Polarimetry

Marc Blanchon, Desire Sidibe, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Daniel Braun, Fabrice Meriaudeau

Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Regularization for Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Monocular depth estimation is a recurring subject in the ﬁeld of computer vision. Its ability to describe scenes via a depth map while reducing the constraints related to the formulation of perspective geometry tends to favor its use. However, despite the constant improvement of algorithms, most methods exploit only colorimetric information. Consequently, robustness to events to which the modality is not sensitive to, like specularity or transparency, is neglected. In response to this phenomenon, we propose using polarimetry as an input for a self-supervised monodepth network. Therefore, we propose exploiting polarization cues to encourage accurate reconstruction of scenes. Furthermore, we include a term of polarimetric regularization to state-of-the-art method to take speciﬁc advantage of the data. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrating that the contribution of this new information as well as an enhanced loss function improves depth estimation results, especially for specular areas.

Extending Single Beam Lidar to Full Resolution by Fusing with Single Image Depth Estimation

Yawen Lu, Yuxing Wang, Devarth Parikh, Guoyu Lu

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised LIDAR for Low-Cost Depth Estimation

Abstract Slides Similar

Depth estimation is playing an important role in indoor and outdoor scene understanding, autonomous driving, augmented reality and many other tasks. Vehicles and robotics are able to use active illumination sensors such as LIDAR to receive high precision depth estimation. However, high-resolution Lidars are usually too expensive, which limits its massive production on various applications. Though single beam LIDAR enjoys the benefits of low cost, one beam depth sensing is not usually sufficient to perceive the surrounding environment in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework to explore to replicate similar or even higher performance as costly LIDARs with our designed self-supervised network and a low-cost single-beam LIDAR. After the accurate calibration with a visible camera, the single beam LIDAR can adjust the scale uncertainty of the depth map estimated by the visible camera. The adjusted depth map enjoys the benefits of high resolution and sensing accuracy as high beam LIDAR and maintains low-cost as single beam LIDAR. Thus we can achieve similar sensing effect of high beam LIDAR with more than a 50-100 times cheaper price (e.g., \$80000 Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR v.s. \$1000 SICK TIM-781 2D LIDAR and normal camera). The proposed approach is verified on our collected dataset and public dataset with superior depth-sensing performance.

5D Light Field Synthesis from a Monocular Video

Kyuho Bae, Andre Ivan, Hajime Nagahara, In Kyu Park

Auto-TLDR; Synthesis of Light Field Video from Monocular Video using Deep Learning

Abstract Slides Similar

Commercially available light field cameras have difficulty in capturing 5D (4D + time) light field videos. They can only capture still light filed images or are excessively expensive for normal users to capture the light field video. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning-based method for synthesizing a light field video from a monocular video. We propose a new synthetic light field video dataset that renders photorealistic scenes using Unreal Engine because no light field video dataset is available. The proposed deep learning framework synthesizes the light field video with a full set (9x9) of sub-aperture images from a normal monocular video. The proposed network consists of three sub-networks, namely, feature extraction, 5D light field video synthesis, and temporal consistency refinement. Experimental results show that our model can successfully synthesize the light field video for synthetic and real scenes and outperforms the previous frame-by-frame method quantitatively and qualitatively.

Edge-Aware Monocular Dense Depth Estimation with Morphology

Zhi Li, Xiaoyang Zhu, Haitao Yu, Qi Zhang, Yongshi Jiang

Auto-TLDR; Spatio-Temporally Smooth Dense Depth Maps Using Only a CPU

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Dense depth maps play an important role in Computer Vision and AR (Augmented Reality). For CV applications, a dense depth map is the cornerstone of 3D reconstruction allowing real objects to be precisely displayed in the computer. And Dense depth maps can handle correct occlusion relationships between virtual content and real objects for better user experience in AR. However, the complicated computation limits the development of computing dense depth maps. We present a novel algorithm that produces low latency, spatio-temporally smooth dense depth maps using only a CPU. The depth maps exhibit sharp discontinuities at depth edges in low computational complexity ways. Our algorithm obtains the sparse SLAM reconstruction first, then extracts coarse depth edges from a down-sampled RGB image by morphology operations. Next, we thin the depth edges and align them with image edges. Finally, a Warm-Start initialization scheme and an improved optimization solver are adopted to accelerate convergence. We evaluate our proposal quantitatively and the result shows improvements on the accuracy of depth map with respect to other state-of-the-art and baseline techniques.

NetCalib: A Novel Approach for LiDAR-Camera Auto-Calibration Based on Deep Learning

Shan Wu, Amnir Hadachi, Damien Vivet, Yadu Prabhakar

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Calibration of LiDAR and Cameras using Deep Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

A fusion of LiDAR and cameras have been widely used in many robotics applications such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and autonomous driving. It is essential that the LiDAR sensor can measure distances accurately, which is a good complement to the cameras. Hence, calibrating sensors before deployment is a mandatory step. The conventional methods include checkerboards, specific patterns, or human labeling, which is trivial and human-labor extensive if we do the same calibration process every time. The main propose of this research work is to build a deep neural network that is capable of automatically finding the geometric transformation between LiDAR and cameras. The results show that our model manages to find the transformations from randomly sampled artificial errors. Besides, our work is open-sourced for the community to fully utilize the advances of the methodology for developing more the approach, initiating collaboration, and innovation in the topic.

FC-DCNN: A Densely Connected Neural Network for Stereo Estimation

Dominik Hirner, Friedrich Fraundorfer

Auto-TLDR; FC-DCNN: A Lightweight Network for Stereo Estimation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We propose a novel lightweight network for stereo estimation. Our network consists of a fully-convolutional densely connected neural network (FC-DCNN) that computes matching costs between rectified image pairs. Our FC-DCNN method learns expressive features and performs some simple but effective post-processing steps. The densely connected layer structure connects the output of each layer to the input of each subsequent layer. This network structure in addition to getting rid of any fully-connected layers leads to a very lightweight network. The output of this network is used in order to calculate matching costs and create a cost-volume. Instead of using time and memory-inefficient cost-aggregation methods such as semi-global matching or conditional random fields in order to improve the result, we rely on filtering techniques, namely median filter and guided filter. By computing a left-right consistency check we get rid of inconsistent values. Afterwards we use a watershed foreground-background segmentation on the disparity image with removed inconsistencies. This mask is then used to refine the final prediction. We show that our method works well for both challenging indoor and outdoor scenes by evaluating it on the Middlebury, KITTI and ETH3D benchmarks respectively.

Facetwise Mesh Refinement for Multi-View Stereo

Andrea Romanoni, Matteo Matteucci

Auto-TLDR; Facetwise Refinement of Multi-View Stereo using Delaunay Triangulations

Abstract Slides Similar

Mesh refinement is a fundamental step for accurate Multi-View Stereo. It modifies the geometry of an initial manifold mesh to minimize the photometric error induced in a set of camera pairs. This initial mesh is usually the output of volumetric 3D reconstruction based on min-cut over Delaunay Triangulations. Such methods produce a significant amount of non-manifold vertices, therefore they require a vertex split step to explicitly repair them. In this paper we extend this method to preemptively fix the non-manifold vertices by reasoning directly on the Delaunay Triangulation and avoid most vertex splits. The main contribution of this paper addresses the problem of choosing the camera pairs adopted by the refinement process. We treat the problem as a mesh labeling process, where each label corresponds to a camera pair. Differently from the state-of-the-art methods, which use each camera pair to refine all the visible parts of the mesh, we choose, for each facet, the best pair that enforces both the overall visibility and coverage. The refinement step is applied for each facet using only the camera pair selected. This facetwise refinement helps the process to be applied in the most evenly way possible.

Learning Non-Rigid Surface Reconstruction from Spatio-Temporal Image Patches

Matteo Pedone, Abdelrahman Mostafa, Janne Heikkilä

Auto-TLDR; Dense Spatio-Temporal Depth Maps of Deformable Objects from Video Sequences

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present a method to reconstruct a dense spatio-temporal depth map of a non-rigidly deformable object directly from a video sequence. The estimation of depth is performed locally on spatio-temporal patches of the video, and then the full depth video of the entire shape is recovered by combining them together. Since the geometric complexity of a local spatio-temporal patch of a deforming non-rigid object is often simple enough to be faithfully represented with a parametric model, we artificially generate a database of small deforming rectangular meshes rendered with different material properties and light conditions, along with their corresponding depth videos, and use such data to train a convolutional neural network. We tested our method on both synthetic and Kinect data and experimentally observed that the reconstruction error is significantly lower than the one obtained using other approaches like conventional non-rigid structure from motion.

Movement-Induced Priors for Deep Stereo

Yuxin Hou, Muhammad Kamran Janjua, Juho Kannala, Arno Solin

Auto-TLDR; Fusing Stereo Disparity Estimation with Movement-induced Prior Information

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We propose a method for fusing stereo disparity estimation with movement-induced prior information. Instead of independent inference frame-by-frame, we formulate the problem as a non-parametric learning task in terms of a temporal Gaussian process prior with a movement-driven kernel for inter-frame reasoning. We present a hierarchy of three Gaussian process kernels depending on the availability of motion information, where our main focus is on a new gyroscope-driven kernel for handheld devices with low-quality MEMS sensors, thus also relaxing the requirement of having full 6D camera poses available. We show how our method can be combined with two state-of-the-art deep stereo methods. The method either work in a plug-and-play fashion with pre-trained deep stereo networks, or further improved by jointly training the kernels together with encoder--decoder architectures, leading to consistent improvement.

Two-Stage Adaptive Object Scene Flow Using Hybrid CNN-CRF Model

Congcong Li, Haoyu Ma, Qingmin Liao

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive object scene flow estimation using a hybrid CNN-CRF model and adaptive iteration

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Scene flow estimation based on stereo sequences is a comprehensive task relevant to disparity and optical flow. Some existing methods are time-consuming and often fail in the presence of reflective surfaces. In this paper, we propose a two-stage adaptive object scene flow estimation method using a hybrid CNN-CRF model (ACOSF), which benefits from high-quality features and the structured modelling capability. Meanwhile, in order to balance the computational efficiency and accuracy, we employ adaptive iteration for energy function optimization, which is flexible and efficient for various scenes. Besides, we utilize high-quality pixel selection to reduce the computation time with only a slight decrease in accuracy. Our method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art, which ranks second on the challenging KITTI 2015 scene flow benchmark.

Real-Time Monocular Depth Estimation with Extremely Light-Weight Neural Network

Mian Jhong Chiu, Wei-Chen Chiu, Hua-Tsung Chen, Jen-Hui Chuang

Auto-TLDR; Real-Time Light-Weight Depth Prediction for Obstacle Avoidance and Environment Sensing with Deep Learning-based CNN

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Obstacle avoidance and environment sensing are crucial applications in autonomous driving and robotics. Among all types of sensors, RGB camera is widely used in these applications as it can offer rich visual contents with relatively low-cost, and using a single image to perform depth estimation has become one of the main focuses in resent research works. However, prior works usually rely on highly complicated computation and power-consuming GPU to achieve such task; therefore, we focus on developing a real-time light-weight system for depth prediction in this paper. Based on the well-known encoder-decoder architecture, we propose a supervised learning-based CNN with detachable decoders that produce depth predictions with different scales. We also formulate a novel log-depth loss function that computes the difference of predicted depth map and ground truth depth map in log space, so as to increase the prediction accuracy for nearby locations. To train our model efficiently, we generate depth map and semantic segmentation with complex teacher models. Via a series of ablation studies and experiments, it is validated that our model can efficiently performs real-time depth prediction with only 0.32M parameters, with the best trained model outperforms previous works on KITTI dataset for various evaluation matrices.

Light3DPose: Real-Time Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation from Multiple Views

Alessio Elmi, Davide Mazzini, Pietro Tortella

Auto-TLDR; 3D Pose Estimation of Multiple People from a Few calibrated Camera Views using Deep Learning

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present an approach to perform 3D pose estimation of multiple people from a few calibrated camera views. Our architecture, leveraging the recently proposed unprojection layer, aggregates feature-maps from a 2D pose estimator backbone into a comprehensive representation of the 3D scene. Such intermediate representation is then elaborated by a fully-convolutional volumetric network and a decoding stage to extract 3D skeletons with sub-voxel accuracy. Our method achieves state of the art MPJPE on the CMU Panoptic dataset using a few unseen views and obtains competitive results even with a single input view. We also assess the transfer learning capabilities of the model by testing it against the publicly available Shelf dataset obtaining good performance metrics. The proposed method is inherently efficient: as a pure bottom-up approach, it is computationally independent of the number of people in the scene. Furthermore, even though the computational burden of the 2D part scales linearly with the number of input views, the overall architecture is able to exploit a very lightweight 2D backbone which is orders of magnitude faster than the volumetric counterpart, resulting in fast inference time. The system can run at 6 FPS, processing up to 10 camera views on a single 1080Ti GPU.

A Novel Deep-Learning Pipeline for Light Field Image Based Material Recognition

Yunlong Wang, Kunbo Zhang, Zhenan Sun

Auto-TLDR; Factorize-Connect-Merge Deep Learning Pipeline for Light Field Image Based Material Recognition

Abstract Slides Similar

The primitive basis of image based material recognition builds upon the fact that discrepancies in the reflectances of distinct materials lead to imaging differences under multiple viewpoints. LF cameras possess coherent abilities to capture multiple sub-aperture views (SAIs) within one exposure, which can provide appropriate multi-view sources for material recognition. In this paper, a unified ``Factorize-Connect-Merge`` (FCM) deep-learning pipeline is proposed to solve problems of light field image based material recognition. 4D light-field data as input is initially decomposed into consecutive 3D light-field slices. Shallow CNN is leveraged to extract low-level visual features of each view inside these slices. As to establish correspondences between these SAIs, Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network is built upon these low-level features to model the imaging differences. After feature selection including concatenation and dimension reduction, effective and robust feature representations for material recognition can be extracted from 4D light-field data. Experimental results indicate that the proposed pipeline can obtain remarkable performances on both tasks of single-pixel material classification and whole-image material segmentation. In addition, the proposed pipeline can potentially benefit and inspire other researchers who may also take LF images as input and need to extract 4D light-field representations for computer vision tasks such as object classification, semantic segmentation and edge detection.

Dynamic Guided Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Xiaoxia Xing, Yinghao Cai, Yiping Yang, Dayong Wen

Auto-TLDR; DGNet: Dynamic Guidance Upsampling for Self-attention-Decoding for Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Self-attention or encoder-decoder structure has been widely used in deep neural networks for monocular depth estimation tasks. The former mechanism are capable to capture long-range information by computing the representation of each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions, while the latter networks can capture structural details information by gradually recovering the spatial information. In this work, we combine the advantages of both methods. Specifically, our proposed model, DGNet, extends EMANet Network by adding an effective decoder module to refine the depth results. In the decoder stage, we further design dynamic guidance upsampling which uses local neighboring information of low-level features guide coarser depth to upsample. In this way, dynamic guidance upsampling generates content-dependent and spatially-variant kernels for depth upsampling which makes full use of spatial details information from low-level features. Experimental results demonstrate that our method obtains higher accuracy and generates the desired depth map.

Hybrid Approach for 3D Head Reconstruction: Using Neural Networks and Visual Geometry

Oussema Bouafif, Bogdan Khomutenko, Mohammed Daoudi

Auto-TLDR; Recovering 3D Head Geometry from a Single Image using Deep Learning and Geometric Techniques

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recovering the 3D geometric structure of a face from a single input image is a challenging active research area in computer vision. In this paper, we present a novel method for reconstructing 3D heads from a single or multiple image(s) using a hybrid approach based on deep learning and geometric techniques. We propose an encoder-decoder network based on the U-net architecture and trained on synthetic data only. It predicts both pixel-wise normal vectors and landmarks maps from a single input photo. Landmarks are used for the pose computation and the initialization of the optimization problem, which, in turn, reconstructs the 3D head geometry by using a parametric morphable model and normal vector fields. State-of-the-art results are achieved through qualitative and quantitative evaluation tests on both single and multi-view settings. Despite the fact that the model was trained only on synthetic data, it successfully recovers 3D geometry and precise poses for real-world images.

RefiNet: 3D Human Pose Refinement with Depth Maps

Andrea D'Eusanio, Stefano Pini, Guido Borghi, Roberto Vezzani, Rita Cucchiara

Auto-TLDR; RefiNet: A Multi-stage Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract Slides Similar

Human Pose Estimation is a fundamental task for many applications in the Computer Vision community and it has been widely investigated in the 2D domain, i.e. intensity images. Therefore, most of the available methods for this task are mainly based on 2D Convolutional Neural Networks and huge manually-annotated RGB datasets, achieving stunning results. In this paper, we propose RefiNet, a multi-stage framework that regresses an extremely-precise 3D human pose estimation from a given 2D pose and a depth map. The framework consists of three different modules, each one specialized in a particular refinement and data representation, i.e. depth patches, 3D skeleton and point clouds. Moreover, we collect a new dataset, namely Baracca, acquired with RGB, depth and thermal cameras and specifically created for the automotive context. Experimental results confirm the quality of the refinement procedure that largely improves the human pose estimations of off-the-shelf 2D methods.

Multi-Scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Jing Liu, Xiaona Zhang, Zhaoxin Li, Tianlu Mao

Auto-TLDR; Multi-scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Monocular depth estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision and is crucial for understanding 3D scene geometry. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based methods have improved the estimation accuracy significantly. However, existing methods fail to consider complex textures and geometries in scenes, thereby resulting in loss of local details, distorted object boundaries, and blurry reconstruction. In this paper, we proposed an end-to-end Multi-scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network (MRPAN) to mitigate these problems.First,we propose a Multi-scale Attention Context Aggregation (MACA) module, which consists of Spatial Attention Module (SAM) and Global Attention Module (GAM). By considering the position and scale correlation of pixels from spatial and global perspectives, the proposed module can adaptively learn the similarity between pixels so as to obtain more global context information of the image and recover the complex structure in the scene. Then we proposed an improved Residual Refinement Module (RRM) to further refine the scene structure, giving rise to deeper semantic information and retain more local details. Experimental results show that our method achieves more promisin performance in object boundaries and local details compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

RISEdb: A Novel Indoor Localization Dataset

Carlos Sanchez Belenguer, Erik Wolfart, Álvaro Casado Coscollá, Vitor Sequeira

Auto-TLDR; Indoor Localization Using LiDAR SLAM and Smartphones: A Benchmarking Dataset

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we introduce a novel public dataset for developing and benchmarking indoor localization systems. We have selected and 3D mapped a set of representative indoor environments including a large office building, a conference room, a workshop, an exhibition area and a restaurant. Our acquisition pipeline is based on a portable LiDAR SLAM backpack to map the buildings and to accurately track the pose of the user as it moves freely inside them. We introduce the calibration procedures that enable us to acquire and geo-reference live data coming from different independent sensors rigidly attached to the backpack. This has allowed us to collect long sequences of spherical and stereo images, together with all the sensor readings coming from a consumer smartphone and locate them inside the map with centimetre accuracy. The dataset addresses many of the limitations of existing indoor localization datasets regarding the scale and diversity of the mapped buildings; the number of acquired sequences under varying conditions; the accuracy of the ground-truth trajectory; the availability of a detailed 3D model and the availability of different sensor types. It enables the benchmarking of existing and the development of new indoor localization approaches, in particular for deep learning based systems that require large amounts of labeled training data.

Self-Supervised Detection and Pose Estimation of Logistical Objects in 3D Sensor Data

Nikolas Müller, Jonas Stenzel, Jian-Jia Chen

Auto-TLDR; A self-supervised and fully automated deep learning approach for object pose estimation using simulated 3D data

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Localization of objects in cluttered scenes with machine learning methods is a fairly young research area. Despite the high potential of object localization for full process automation in Industry 4.0 and logistical environments, 3D data sets for such applications to train machine learning models are not openly available and less publications have been made on that topic. To the authors knowledge, this is the first publication that describes a self-supervised and fully automated deep learning approach for object pose estimation using simulated 3D data. The solution covers the simulated generation of training data, the detection of objects in point clouds using a fully convolutional feedforward network and the computation of the pose for each detected object instance.

Delivering Meaningful Representation for Monocular Depth Estimation

Doyeon Kim, Donggyu Joo, Junmo Kim

Auto-TLDR; Monocular Depth Estimation by Bridging the Context between Encoding and Decoding

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Monocular depth estimation plays a key role in 3D scene understanding, and a number of recent papers have achieved significant improvements using deep learning based algorithms. Most papers among them proposed methods that use a pre-trained network as a deep feature extractor and then decode the obtained features to create a depth map. In this study, we focus on how to use this encoder-decoder structure to deliver meaningful representation throughout the entire network. We propose a new network architecture with our suggested modules to create a more accurate depth map by bridging the context between the encoding and decoding phase. First, we place the pyramid block at the bottleneck of the network to enlarge the view and convey rich information about the global context to the decoder. Second, we suggest a skip connection with the fuse module to aggregate the encoder and decoder feature. Finally, we validate our approach on the NYU Depth V2 and KITTI datasets. The experimental results prove the efficacy of the suggested model and show performance gains over the state-of-the-art model.

Extended Depth of Field Preserving Color Fidelity for Automated Digital Cytology

Alexandre Bouyssoux, Riadh Fezzani, Jean-Christophe Olivo-Marin

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Channel Extended Depth of Field for Digital cytology based on the stationary wavelet transform

Abstract Poster Similar

This paper presents a multi-channel Extended Depth of Field (EDF) method for digital cytology based on the stationary wavelet transform. With a coefficient selection rule adapted to a precise color recovery, a sharp image can be reconstructed even on images with transparent overlapping cells. The precision and the color fidelity of the proposed method is analyzed. Moreover, an experiment demonstrating the necessity of volume analysis in cytology to achieve precise segmentation on cell clumps is conducted, and the importance of color fidelity in this context is asserted. The proposed method was tested on pap-stained urothelial cells and gray-scale cervical cells with important overlapping.

Calibration and Absolute Pose Estimation of Trinocular Linear Camera Array for Smart City Applications

Martin Ahrnbom, Mikael Nilsson, Håkan Ardö, Kalle Åström, Oksana Yastremska-Kravchenko, Aliaksei Laureshyn

Auto-TLDR; Trinocular Linear Camera Array Calibration for Traffic Surveillance Applications

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

A method for calibrating a Trinocular Linear Camera Array (TLCA) for traffic surveillance applications, such as towards smart cities, is presented. A TLCA-specific parametrization guarantees that the calibration finds a model where all the cameras are on a straight line. The method uses both a chequerboard close to the camera, as well as measured 3D points far from the camera: points measured in world coordinates, as well as their corresponding 2D points found manually in the images. Superior calibration accuracy can be obtained compared to standard methods using only a single data source, largely due to the use of chequerboards, while the line constraint in the parametrization allows for joint rectification. The improved triangulation accuracy, from 8-12 cm to around 6 cm when calibrating with 30-50 points in our experiment, allowing better road user analysis. The method is demonstrated by a proof-of-concept application where a point cloud is generated from multiple disparity maps, visualizing road user detections in 3D.

Polarimetric Image Augmentation

Marc Blanchon, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Desire Sidibe

Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Augmentation for Deep Learning in Robotics Applications

Abstract Poster Similar

This paper deals with new augmentation methods for an unconventional imaging modality sensitive to the physics of the observed scene called polarimetry. In nature, polarized light is obtained by reﬂection or scattering. Robotics applications in urban environments are subject to many obstacles that can be specular and therefore provide polarized light. These areas are prone to segmentation errors using standard modalities but could be solved using information carried by the polarized light. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown excellent segmentation results, but require a signiﬁcant amount of data to achieve best performances. The lack of data is usually overcomed by using augmentation methods. However, unlike RGB images, polarization images are not only scalar (intensity) images and standard augmentation techniques cannot be applied straightforwardly. We propose enhancing deep learning models through a regularized augmentation procedure applied to polarimetric data in order to characterize scenes more effectively under challenging conditions. We subsequently observe an average of 18.1% improvement in IoU between not augmented and regularized training procedures on real world data.

Leveraging a Weakly Adversarial Paradigm for Joint Learning of Disparity and Confidence Estimation

Matteo Poggi, Fabio Tosi, Filippo Aleotti, Stefano Mattoccia

Auto-TLDR; Joint Training of Deep-Networks for Outlier Detection from Stereo Images

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Deep architectures represent the state-of-the-art for perceiving depth from stereo images. Although these methods are highly accurate, it is crucial to effectively detect any outlier through confidence measures since a wrong perception of even small portions of the sensed scene might lead to catastrophic consequences, for instance, in autonomous driving. Purposely, state-of-the-art confidence estimation methods rely on deep-networks as well. In this paper, arguing that these tasks are two sides of the same coin, we propose a novel paradigm for their joint training. Specifically, inspired by the successful deployment of GANs in other fields, we design two deep architectures: a generator for disparity estimation and a discriminator for distinguishing correct assignments from outliers. The two networks are jointly trained in a new peculiar weakly adversarial manner pushing the former to fix the errors detected by the discriminator while keeping the correct prediction unchanged. Experimental results on standard stereo datasets prove that such joint training paradigm yields significant improvements. Moreover, an additional outcome of our proposal is the ability to detect outliers with better accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.

Deep Realistic Novel View Generation for City-Scale Aerial Images

Koundinya Nouduri, Ke Gao, Joshua Fraser, Shizeng Yao, Hadi Aliakbarpour, Filiz Bunyak, Kannappan Palaniappan

Auto-TLDR; End-to-End 3D Voxel Renderer for Multi-View Stereo Data Generation and Evaluation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we introduce a novel end-to-end frameworkfor generation of large, aerial, city-scale, realistic syntheticimage sequences with associated accurate and precise camerametadata. The two main purposes for this data are (i) to en-able objective, quantitative evaluation of computer vision al-gorithms and methods such as feature detection, description,and matching or full computer vision pipelines such as 3D re-construction; and (ii) to supply large amounts of high qualitytraining data for deep learning guided computer vision meth-ods. The proposed framework consists of three main mod-ules, a 3D voxel renderer for data generation, a deep neu-ral network for artifact removal, and a quantitative evaluationmodule for Multi-View Stereo (MVS) as an example. The3D voxel renderer enables generation of seen or unseen viewsof a scene from arbitary camera poses with accurate camerametadata parameters. The artifact removal module proposes anovel edge-augmented deep learning network with an explicitedgemap processing stream to remove image artifacts whilepreserving and recovering scene structures for more realis-tic results. Our experiments on two urban, city-scale, aerialdatasets for Albuquerque (ABQ), NM and Los Angeles (LA),CA show promising results in terms structural similarity toreal data and accuracy of reconstructed 3D point clouds

Partially Supervised Multi-Task Network for Single-View Dietary Assessment

Ya Lu, Thomai Stathopoulou, Stavroula Mougiakakou

Auto-TLDR; Food Volume Estimation from a Single Food Image via Geometric Understanding and Semantic Prediction

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Food volume estimation is an essential step in the pipeline of dietary assessment and demands the precise depth estimation of the food surface and table plane. Existing methods based on computer vision require either multi-image input or additional depth maps, reducing convenience of implementation and practical significance. Despite the recent advances in unsupervised depth estimation from a single image, the achieved performance in the case of large texture-less areas needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that jointly performs geometric understanding (i.e., depth prediction and 3D plane estimation) and semantic prediction on a single food image, enabling a robust and accurate food volume estimation regardless of the texture characteristics of the target plane. For the training of the network, only monocular videos with semantic ground truth are required, while the depth map and 3D plane ground truth are no longer needed. Experimental results on two separate food image databases demonstrate that our method performs robustly on texture-less scenarios and is superior to unsupervised networks and structure from motion based approaches, while it achieves comparable performance to fully-supervised methods.

Generic Merging of Structure from Motion Maps with a Low Memory Footprint

Gabrielle Flood, David Gillsjö, Patrik Persson, Anders Heyden, Kalle Åström

Auto-TLDR; A Low-Memory Footprint Representation for Robust Map Merge

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With the development of cheap image sensors, the amount of available image data have increased enormously, and the possibility of using crowdsourced collection methods has emerged. This calls for development of ways to handle all these data. In this paper, we present new tools that will enable efficient, flexible and robust map merging. Assuming that separate optimisations have been performed for the individual maps, we show how only relevant data can be stored in a low memory footprint representation. We use these representations to perform map merging so that the algorithm is invariant to the merging order and independent of the choice of coordinate system. The result is a robust algorithm that can be applied to several maps simultaneously. The result of a merge can also be represented with the same type of low-memory footprint format, which enables further merging and updating of the map in a hierarchical way. Furthermore, the method can perform loop closing and also detect changes in the scene between the capture of the different image sequences. Using both simulated and real data — from both a hand held mobile phone and from a drone — we verify the performance of the proposed method.

Weight Estimation from an RGB-D Camera in Top-View Configuration

Marco Mameli, Marina Paolanti, Nicola Conci, Filippo Tessaro, Emanuele Frontoni, Primo Zingaretti

Auto-TLDR; Top-View Weight Estimation using Deep Neural Networks

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The development of so-called soft-biometrics aims at providing information related to the physical and behavioural characteristics of a person. This paper focuses on bodyweight estimation based on the observation from a top-view RGB-D camera. In fact, the capability to estimate the weight of a person can be of help in many different applications, from health-related scenarios to business intelligence and retail analytics. To deal with this issue, a TVWE (Top-View Weight Estimation) framework is proposed with the aim of predicting the weight. The approach relies on the adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have been trained on depth data. Each network has also been modified in its top section to replace classification with prediction inference. The performance of five state-of-art DNNs has been compared, namely VGG16, ResNet, Inception, DenseNet and Efficient-Net. In addition, a convolutional auto-encoder has also been included for completeness. Considering the limited literature in this domain, the TVWE framework has been evaluated on a new publicly available dataset: “VRAI Weight estimation Dataset”, which also collects, for each subject, labels related to weight, gender, and height. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed methods are suitable for this task, bringing different and significant insights for the application of the solution in different domains.

Learning Stereo Matchability in Disparity Regression Networks

Jingyang Zhang, Yao Yao, Zixin Luo, Shiwei Li, Tianwei Shen, Tian Fang, Long Quan

Auto-TLDR; Deep Stereo Matchability for Weakly Matchable Regions

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Learning-based stereo matching has recently achieved promising results, yet still suffers difficulties in establishing reliable matches in weakly matchable regions that are textureless, non-Lambertian, or occluded. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a stereo matching network that considers pixel-wise matchability. Specifically, the network jointly regresses disparity and matchability maps from 3D probability volume through expectation and entropy operations. Next, a learned attenuation is applied as the robust loss function to alleviate the influence of weakly matchable pixels in the training. Finally, a matchability-aware disparity refinement is introduced to improve the depth inference in weakly matchable regions. The proposed deep stereo matchability (DSM) framework can improve the matching result or accelerate the computation while still guaranteeing the quality. Moreover, the DSM framework is portable to many recent stereo networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on Scene Flow and KITTI stereo datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art learning-based stereo methods.

Deep Homography-Based Video Stabilization

Maria Silvia Ito, Ebroul Izquierdo

Auto-TLDR; Video Stabilization using Deep Learning and Spatial Transformer Networks

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Video stabilization is fundamental for providing good Quality of Experience for viewers and generating suitable content for video applications. In this scenario, Digital Video Stabilization (DVS) is convenient and economical for casual or amateur recording because it neither requires specific equipment nor demands knowledge of the device used for recording. Although DVS has been a research topic for decades, with a number of proposals from industry and academia, traditional methods tend to fail in a number of scenarios, e.g. with occlusion, textureless areas, parallax, dark areas, amongst others. On the other hand, defining a smooth camera path is a hard task in Deep Learning scenarios. This paper proposes a video stabilization system based on traditional and Deep Learning methods. First, we leverage Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs) to learn transformation parameters between image pairs, then utilize this knowledge to stabilize videos: we obtain the motion parameters between frame pairs and then smooth the camera path using moving averages. Our approach aims at combining the strengths of both Deep Learning and traditional methods: the ability of STNs to estimate motion parameters between two frames and the effectiveness of moving averages to smooth camera paths. Experimental results show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art proposals and a commercial solution.

Deeply-Fused Attentive Network for Stereo Matching

Zuliu Yang, Xindong Ai, Weida Yang, Yong Zhao, Qifei Dai, Fuchi Li

Auto-TLDR; DF-Net: Deep Learning-based Network for Stereo Matching

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In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based network for stereo matching called DF-Net, which makes three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have practical merit. Firstly, we further increase the accuracy by using the deeply fused spatial pyramid pooling (DF-SPP) module, which can acquire the continuous multi-scale context information in both parallel and cascade manners. Secondly, we introduce channel attention block to dynamically boost the informative features. Finally, we propose a stacked encoder-decoder structure with 3D attention gate for cost regularization. More precisely, the module fuses the coding features to their next encoder-decoder structure under the supervision of attention gate with long-range skip connection, and thus exploit deep and hierarchical context information for disparity prediction. The performance on SceneFlow and KITTI datasets shows that our model is able to generate better results against several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Benchmarking Cameras for OpenVSLAM Indoors

Kevin Chappellet, Guillaume Caron, Fumio Kanehiro, Ken Sakurada, Abderrahmane Kheddar

Auto-TLDR; OpenVSLAM: Benchmarking Camera Types for Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

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In this paper we benchmark different types of cameras and evaluate their performance in terms of reliable localization reliability and precision in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM). Such benchmarking is merely found for visual odometry, but never for vSLAM. Existing studies usually compare several algorithms for a given camera. %This work is the first to handle the dual of the latter, i.e. comparing several cameras for a given SLAM algorithm. The evaluation methodology we propose is applied to the recent OpenVSLAM framework. The latter is versatile enough to natively deal with perspective, fisheye, 360 cameras in a monocular or stereoscopic setup, an in RGB or RGB-D modalities. Results in various sequences containing light variation and scenery modifications in the scene assess quantitatively the maximum localization rate for 360 vision. In the contrary, RGB-D vision shows the lowest localization rate, but highest precision when localization is possible. Stereo-fisheye trades-off with localization rates and precision between 360 vision and RGB-D vision. The dataset with ground truth will be made available in open access to allow evaluating other/future vSLAM algorithms with respect to these camera types.

Enhancing Depth Quality of Stereo Vision Using Deep Learning-Based Prior Information of the Driving Environment

Weifu Li, Vijay John, Seiichi Mita

Auto-TLDR; A Novel Post-processing Mathematical Framework for Stereo Vision

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Generation of high density depth values of the driving environment is indispensable for autonomous driving. Stereo vision is one of the practical and effective methods to generate these depth values. However, the accuracy of the stereo vision is limited by texture-less regions, such as sky and road areas, and repeated patterns in the image. To overcome these problems, we propose to enhance the stereo generated depth by incorporating prior information of the driving environment. Prior information, generated by deep learning-based U-Net model, is utilized in a novel post-processing mathematical framework to refine the stereo generated depth. The proposed mathematical framework is formulated as an optimization problem, which refines the errors due to texture-less regions and repeated patterns. Owing to its mathematical formulation, the post-processing framework is not a black-box and is explainable, and can be readily utilized for depth maps generated by any stereo vision algorithm. The proposed framework is qualitatively validated on the acquired dataset and KITTI dataset. The results obtained show that the proposed framework improves the stereo depth generation accuracy

Near-Infrared Depth-Independent Image Dehazing using Haar Wavelets

Sumit Laha, Ankit Sharma, Shengnan Hu, Hassan Foroosh

Auto-TLDR; A fusion algorithm for haze removal using Haar wavelets

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We propose a fusion algorithm for haze removal that combines color information from an RGB image and edge information extracted from its corresponding NIR image using Haar wavelets. The proposed algorithm is based on the key observation that NIR edge features are more prominent in the hazy regions of the image than the RGB edge features in those same regions. To combine the color and edge information, we introduce a haze-weight map which proportionately distributes the color and edge information during the fusion process. Because NIR images are, intrinsically, nearly haze-free, our work makes no assumptions like existing works that rely on a scattering model and essentially designing a depth-independent method. This helps in minimizing artifacts and gives a more realistic sense to the restored haze-free image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm is both qualitatively and quantitatively better on several key metrics when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Object Segmentation Tracking from Generic Video Cues

Amirhossein Kardoost, Sabine Müller, Joachim Weickert, Margret Keuper

Auto-TLDR; A Light-Weight Variational Framework for Video Object Segmentation in Videos

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We propose a light-weight variational framework for online tracking of object segmentations in videos based on optical flow and image boundaries. While high-end computer vision methods on this task rely on sequence specific training of dedicated CNN architectures, we show the potential of a variational model, based on generic video information from motion and color. Such cues are usually required for tasks such as robot navigation or grasp estimation. We leverage them directly for video object segmentation and thus provide accurate segmentations at potentially very low extra cost. Our simple method can provide competitive results compared to the costly CNN-based methods with parameter tuning. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be combined with state-of-the-art CNN-based segmentations in order to improve over their respective results. We evaluate our method on the datasets DAVIS 16,17 and SegTrack v2.

IPT: A Dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking in Closed Domains

Thomas Heitzinger, Martin Kampel

Auto-TLDR; Identity Preserved Tracking Using Depth Data for Privacy and Privacy

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We present a public dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking (IPT) consisting of sequences of depth data recorded using an Orbbec Astra depth sensor. The dataset features sequences in ten different locations with a high amount of background variation and is designed to be applicable to a wide range of tasks. Its labeling is versatile, allowing for tracking in either 3d space or image coordinates. Next to frame-by-frame 3d and inferred bounding box labeling we provide supplementary annotation of camera poses and room layouts, split in multiple semantically distinct categories. Intended use-cases are applications where both a high level understanding of scene understanding and privacy are central points of consideration, such as active and assisted living (AAL), security and industrial safety. Compared to similar public datasets IPT distinguishes itself with its sequential data format, 3d instance labeling and room layout annotation. We present baseline object detection results in image coordinates using a YOLOv3 network architecture and implement a background model suitable for online tracking applications to increase detection accuracy. Additionally we propose a novel volumetric non-maximum suppression (V-NMS) approach, taking advantage of known room geometry. Last we provide baseline person tracking results utilizing Multiple Object Tracking Challenge (MOTChallenge) evaluation metrics of the CVPR19 benchmark.

PROPEL: Probabilistic Parametric Regression Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks

Muhammad Asad, Rilwan Basaru, S M Masudur Rahman Al Arif, Greg Slabaugh

Auto-TLDR; PRObabilistic Parametric rEgression Loss for Probabilistic Regression Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have enabled significant advancements to the state-of-the-art in computer vision. For classification tasks, CNNs have widely employed probabilistic output and have shown the significance of providing additional confidence for predictions. However, such probabilistic methodologies are not widely applicable for addressing regression problems using CNNs, as regression involves learning unconstrained continuous and, in many cases, multi-variate target variables. We propose a PRObabilistic Parametric rEgression Loss (PROPEL) that facilitates CNNs to learn parameters of probability distributions for addressing probabilistic regression problems. PROPEL is fully differentiable and, hence, can be easily incorporated for end-to-end training of existing CNN regression architectures using existing optimization algorithms. The proposed method is flexible as it enables learning complex unconstrained probabilities while being generalizable to higher dimensional multi-variate regression problems. We utilize a PROPEL-based CNN to address the problem of learning hand and head orientation from uncalibrated color images. Our experimental validation and comparison with existing CNN regression loss functions show that PROPEL improves the accuracy of a CNN by enabling probabilistic regression, while significantly reducing required model parameters by 10x, resulting in improved generalization as compared to the existing state-of-the-art.

DEN: Disentangling and Exchanging Network for Depth Completion

You-Feng Wu, Vu-Hoang Tran, Ting-Wei Chang, Wei-Chen Chiu, Ching-Chun Huang

Auto-TLDR; Disentangling and Exchanging Network for Depth Completion

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In this paper, we tackle the depth completion problem. Conventional depth sensors usually produce incomplete depth maps due to the property of surface reflection, especially for the window areas, metal surfaces, and object boundaries. However, we observe that the corresponding RGB images are still dense and preserve all of the useful structural information. This brings us to the question of whether we can borrow this structural information from RGB images to inpaint the corresponding incomplete depth maps. In this paper, we answer that question by proposing a Disentangling and Exchanging Network (DEN) for depth completion. The network is designed based on an assumption that after suitable feature disentanglement, RGB images and depth maps share a common domain for representing structural information. So we firstly disentangle both RGB and depth images into domain-invariant content parts, which contain structural information, and domain-specific style parts. Then, by exchanging the complete structural information extracted from RGB image with incomplete information extracted from depth map, we can generate the complete version of depth map. Furthermore, to address the mixed-depth problem, a newly proposed depth representation is applied. By modeling depth estimation as a classification problem coupled with coefficient estimation, blurry edges are enhanced in the depth map. At last, we have implemented ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed DEN model. The results also demonstrate the superiority of DEN over some state-of-the-art approaches.

Better Prior Knowledge Improves Human-Pose-Based Extrinsic Camera Calibration

Olivier Moliner, Sangxia Huang, Kalle Åström

Auto-TLDR; Improving Human-pose-based Extrinsic Calibration for Multi-Camera Systems

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Accurate extrinsic calibration of wide baseline multi-camera systems enables better understanding of 3D scenes for many applications and is of great practical importance. Classical Structure-from-Motion calibration methods require special calibration equipment so that accurate point correspondences can be detected between different views. In addition, an operator with some training is usually needed to ensure that data is collected in a way that leads to good calibration accuracy. This limits the ease of adoption of such technologies. Recently, methods have been proposed to use human pose estimation models to establish point correspondences, thus removing the need for any special equipment. The challenge with this approach is that human pose estimation algorithms typically produce much less accurate feature points compared to classical patch-based methods. Another problem is that ambient human motion might not be optimal for calibration. We build upon prior works and introduce several novel ideas to improve the accuracy of human-pose-based extrinsic calibration. Our first contribution is a robust reprojection loss based on a better understanding of the sources of pose estimation error. Our second contribution is a 3D human pose likelihood model learned from motion capture data. We demonstrate significant improvements in calibration accuracy by evaluating our method on four publicly available datasets.

Removing Raindrops from a Single Image Using Synthetic Data

Yoshihito Kokubo, Shusaku Asada, Hirotaka Maruyama, Masaru Koide, Kohei Yamamoto, Yoshihisa Suetsugu

Auto-TLDR; Raindrop Removal Using Synthetic Raindrop Data

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We simulated the exact features of raindrops on a camera lens and conducted an experiment to evaluate the performance of a network trained to remove raindrops using synthetic raindrop data. Although research has been conducted to precisely evaluate methods to remove raindrops, with some evaluation networks trained on images with real raindrops and others trained on images with synthetic raindrops, there have not been any studies that have directly compared the performance of two networks trained on each respective kind of image. In a previous study wherein images with synthetic raindrops were used for training, the network did not work effectively on images with real raindrops because the shapes of the raindrops were simulated using simple arithmetic expressions. In this study, we focused on generating raindrop shapes that are closer to reality with the aim of using these synthetic raindrops in images to develop a technique for removing real-world raindrops. After categorizing raindrops by type, we further separated each raindrop type into its constituent elements, generated each element separately, and finally combined the generated elements. The proposed technique was used to add images with synthetic raindrops to the training data, and when we evaluated the model, we confirmed that the technique's precision exceeded that of when only images with actual raindrops were used for training. The evaluation results proved that images with synthetic raindrops can be used as training data for real-world images.

Derivation of Geometrically and Semantically Annotated UAV Datasets at Large Scales from 3D City Models

Sidi Wu, Lukas Liebel, Marco Körner

Auto-TLDR; Large-Scale Dataset of Synthetic UAV Imagery for Geometric and Semantic Annotation

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While in high demand for the development of deep learning approaches, extensive datasets of annotated UAV imagery are still scarce today. Manual annotation, however, is time-consuming and, thus, has limited the potential for creating large-scale datasets. We tackle this challenge by presenting a procedure for the automatic creation of simulated UAV image sequences in urban areas and pixel-level annotations from publicly available data sources. We synthesize photo-realistic UAV imagery from Goole Earth Studio and derive annotations from an open CityGML model that not only provides geometric but also semantic information. The first dataset we exemplarily created using our approach contains 144000 images of Berlin, Germany, with four types of annotations, namely semantic labels as well as depth, surface normals, and edge maps. In the future, a complete pipeline regarding all the technical problems will be provided, together with more accurate models to refine some of the empirical settings currently, to automatically generate a large-scale dataset with reliable ground-truth annotations over the whole city of Berlin. The dataset, as well as the source code, will be published by then. Different methods will also be facilitated to test the usability of the dataset. We believe our dataset can be used for, and not limited to, tasks like pose estimation, geo-localization, monocular depth estimation, edge detection, building/surface classification, and plane segmentation. A potential research pipeline for geo-localization based on the synthetic dataset is provided.

User-Independent Gaze Estimation by Extracting Pupil Parameter and Its Mapping to the Gaze Angle

Sang Yoon Han, Nam Ik Cho

Auto-TLDR; Gaze Point Estimation using Pupil Shape for Generalization

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Since gaze estimation plays a crucial role in recognizing human intentions, it has been researched for a long time, and its accuracy is ever increasing. However, due to the wide variation in eye shapes and focusing abilities between the individuals, accuracies of most algorithms vary depending on each person in the test group, especially when the initial calibration is not well performed. To alleviate the user-dependency, we attempt to derive features that are general for most people and use them as the input to a deep network instead of using the images as the input. Specifically, we use the pupil shape as the core feature because it is directly related to the 3D eyeball rotation, and thus the gaze direction. While existing deep learning methods learn the gaze point by extracting various features from the image, we focus on the mapping function from the eyeball rotation to the gaze point by using the pupil shape as the input. It is shown that the accuracy of gaze point estimation also becomes robust for the uncalibrated points by following the characteristics of the mapping function. Also, our gaze network learns the gaze difference to facilitate the re-calibration process to fix the calibration-drift problem that typically occurs with glass-type or head-mount devices.

Ordinal Depth Classification Using Region-Based Self-Attention

Minh Hieu Phan, Son Lam Phung, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Auto-TLDR; Region-based Self-Attention for Multi-scale Depth Estimation from a Single 2D Image

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Depth estimation from a single 2D image has been widely applied in 3D understanding, 3D modelling and robotics. It is challenging as reliable cues (e.g. stereo correspondences and motions) are not available. Most of the modern approaches exploited multi-scale feature extraction to provide more powerful representations for deep networks. However, these studies have not focused on how to effectively fuse the learned multi-scale features. This paper proposes a novel region-based self-attention (rSA) module. The rSA recalibrates the multi-scale responses by explicitly modelling the interdependency between channels in separate image regions. We discretize continuous depths to solve an ordinal depth classification in which the relative order between categories is significant. We contribute a dataset of 4410 RGB-D images, captured in outdoor environments at the University of Wollongong's campus. In our experimental results, the proposed module improves the lightweight models on small-sized datasets by 22% - 40%

Recovery of 2D and 3D Layout Information through an Advanced Image Stitching Algorithm Using Scanning Electron Microscope Images

Aayush Singla, Bernhard Lippmann, Helmut Graeb

Auto-TLDR; Image Stitching for True Geometrical Layout Recovery in Nanoscale Dimension

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Image stitching describes the process of reconstruction of a high resolution image from combining multiple images. Using a scanning electron microscope as the image source, individual images will show patterns in a nm dimension whereas the combined image may cover an area of several mm2. The recovery of the physical layout of modern semiconductor products manufactured in advanced technologies nodes down to 22 nm requires a perfect stitching process with no deviation with respect to the original design data, as any stitching error will result in failures during the reconstruction of the electrical design. In addition, the recovery of the complete design requires the acquisition of all individual layers of a semiconductor device which represent a 3D structure with interconnections defining error limits on the stitching error for each individual scanned image mosaic. An advanced stitching and alignment process is presented enabling a true geometrical layout recovery in nanoscale dimensions which is also applied and evaluated on other use cases from biological applications.

Learning to Find Good Correspondences of Multiple Objects

Youye Xie, Yingheng Tang, Gongguo Tang, William Hoff

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Object Inliers and Outliers for Perspective-n-Point and Object Recognition

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Given a set of 3D to 2D putative matches, labeling the correspondences as inliers or outliers plays a critical role in a wide range of computer vision applications including the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) and object recognition. In this paper, we study a more generalized problem which allows the matches to belong to multiple objects with distinct poses. We propose a deep architecture to simultaneously label the correspondences as inliers or outliers and classify the inliers into multiple objects. Specifically, we discretize the 3D rotation space into twenty convex cones based on the facets of a regular icosahedron. For each facet, a facet classifier is trained to predict the probability of a correspondence being an inlier for a pose whose rotation normal vector points towards this facet. An efficient RANSAC-based post-processing algorithm is also proposed to further process the prediction results and detect the objects. Experiments demonstrate that our method is very efficient compared to existing methods and is capable of simultaneously labeling and classifying the inliers of multiple objects with high precision.

One Step Clustering Based on A-Contrario Framework for Detection of Alterations in Historical Violins

Alireza Rezaei, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Emanuel Aldea, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

Auto-TLDR; A-Contrario Clustering for the Detection of Altered Violins using UVIFL Images

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Preventive conservation is an important practice in Cultural Heritage. The constant monitoring of the state of conservation of an artwork helps us reduce the risk of damage and number of interventions necessary. In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection of alterations on the surface of historical violins based on an a-contrario framework. Our method is a one step NFA clustering solution which considers grey-level and spatial density information in one background model. The proposed method is robust to noise and avoids parameter tuning and any assumption about the quantity of the worn out areas. We have used as input UV induced fluorescence (UVIFL) images for considering details not perceivable with visible light. Tests were conducted on image sequences included in the ``Violins UVIFL imagery'' dataset. Results illustrate the ability of the algorithm to distinguish the worn area from the surrounding regions. Comparisons with the state of the art clustering methods shows improved overall precision and recall.

Towards Artifacts-Free Image Defogging

Gabriele Graffieti, Davide Maltoni

Auto-TLDR; CurL-Defog: Learning Based Defogging with CycleGAN and HArD

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In this paper we present a novel defogging technique, named CurL-Defog, aimed at minimizing the creation of artifacts. The majority of learning based defogging approaches relies on paired data (i.e., the same images with and without fog), where fog is artificially added to clear images: this often provides good results on mildly fogged images but does not generalize well to real difficult cases. On the other hand, the models trained with real unpaired data (e.g. CycleGAN) can provide visually impressive results but often produce unwanted artifacts. In this paper we propose a curriculum learning strategy coupled with an enhanced CycleGAN model in order to reduce the number of produced artifacts, while maintaining state-of-the- art performance in terms of contrast enhancement and image reconstruction. We also introduce a new metric, called HArD (Hazy Artifact Detector) to numerically quantify the amount of artifacts in the defogged images, thus avoiding the tedious and subjective manual inspection of the results. The proposed approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art techniques on both real and synthetic datasets.