Denoising Simulated Low-Field MRI (70mT) using Denoising Autoencoders (DAE) and Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (Cycle-GAN). (arXiv:2307.06338v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Fernando Vega, Abdoljalil Addeh, M. Ethan MacDonald

In this work, a denoising Cycle-GAN (Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Network) is implemented to yield high-field, high resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images from simulated low-field, low resolution, low SNR MRI images. Resampling and additive Rician noise were used to simulate low-field MRI. Images were utilized to train a Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) and a Cycle-GAN, with paired and unpaired cases. Both networks were evaluated using SSIM and PSNR image quality metrics. This work demonstrates the use of a generative deep learning model that can outperform classical DAEs to improve low-field MRI images and does not require image pairs.

ConvNeXt-ChARM: ConvNeXt-based Transform for Efficient Neural Image Compression. (arXiv:2307.06342v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Ahmed Ghorbel, Wassim Hamidouche, Luce Morin

Over the last few years, neural image compression has gained wide attention from research and industry, yielding promising end-to-end deep neural codecs outperforming their conventional counterparts in rate-distortion performance. Despite significant advancement, current methods, including attention-based transform coding, still need to be improved in reducing the coding rate while preserving the reconstruction fidelity, especially in non-homogeneous textured image areas. Those models also require more parameters and a higher decoding time. To tackle the above challenges, we propose ConvNeXt-ChARM, an efficient ConvNeXt-based transform coding framework, paired with a compute-efficient channel-wise auto-regressive prior to capturing both global and local contexts from the hyper and quantized latent representations. The proposed architecture can be optimized end-to-end to fully exploit the context information and extract compact latent representation while reconstructing higher-quality images. Experimental results on four widely-used datasets showed that ConvNeXt-ChARM brings consistent and significant BD-rate (PSNR) reductions estimated on average to 5.24% and 1.22% over the versatile video coding (VVC) reference encoder (VTM-18.0) and the state-of-the-art learned image compression method SwinT-ChARM, respectively. Moreover, we provide model scaling studies to verify the computational efficiency of our approach and conduct several objective and subjective analyses to bring to the fore the performance gap between the next generation ConvNet, namely ConvNeXt, and Swin Transformer.

Sequential Experimental Design for X-Ray CT Using Deep Reinforcement Learning. (arXiv:2307.06343v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Tianyuan Wang, Felix Lucka, Tristan van Leeuwen

In X-ray Computed Tomography (CT), projections from many angles are acquired and used for 3D reconstruction. To make CT suitable for in-line quality control, reducing the number of angles while maintaining reconstruction quality is necessary. Sparse-angle tomography is a popular approach for obtaining 3D reconstructions from limited data. To optimize its performance, one can adapt scan angles sequentially to select the most informative angles for each scanned object. Mathematically, this corresponds to solving and optimal experimental design (OED) problem. OED problems are high-dimensional, non-convex, bi-level optimization problems that cannot be solved online, i.e., during the scan. To address these challenges, we pose the OED problem as a partially observable Markov decision process in a Bayesian framework, and solve it through deep reinforcement learning. The approach learns efficient non-greedy policies to solve a given class of OED problems through extensive offline training rather than solving a given OED problem directly via numerical optimization. As such, the trained policy can successfully find the most informative scan angles online. We use a policy training method based on the Actor-Critic approach and evaluate its performance on 2D tomography with synthetic data.

The Whole Pathological Slide Classification via Weakly Supervised Learning. (arXiv:2307.06344v1 [q-bio.QM])

Authors: Qiehe Sun, Jiawen Li, Jin Xu, Junru Cheng, Tian Guan, Yonghong He

Due to its superior efficiency in utilizing annotations and addressing gigapixel-sized images, multiple instance learning (MIL) has shown great promise as a framework for whole slide image (WSI) classification in digital pathology diagnosis. However, existing methods tend to focus on advanced aggregators with different structures, often overlooking the intrinsic features of H\&E pathological slides. To address this limitation, we introduced two pathological priors: nuclear heterogeneity of diseased cells and spatial correlation of pathological tiles. Leveraging the former, we proposed a data augmentation method that utilizes stain separation during extractor training via a contrastive learning strategy to obtain instance-level representations. We then described the spatial relationships between the tiles using an adjacency matrix. By integrating these two views, we designed a multi-instance framework for analyzing H\&E-stained tissue images based on pathological inductive bias, encompassing feature extraction, filtering, and aggregation. Extensive experiments on the Camelyon16 breast dataset and TCGA-NSCLC Lung dataset demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively handle tasks related to cancer detection and differentiation of subtypes, outperforming state-of-the-art medical image classification methods based on MIL. The code will be released later.

T2I-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Open-world Compositional Text-to-image Generation. (arXiv:2307.06350v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Kaiyi Huang, Kaiyue Sun, Enze Xie, Zhenguo Li, Xihui Liu

Despite the stunning ability to generate high-quality images by recent text-to-image models, current approaches often struggle to effectively compose objects with different attributes and relationships into a complex and coherent scene. We propose T2I-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for open-world compositional text-to-image generation, consisting of 6,000 compositional text prompts from 3 categories (attribute binding, object relationships, and complex compositions) and 6 sub-categories (color binding, shape binding, texture binding, spatial relationships, non-spatial relationships, and complex compositions). We further propose several evaluation metrics specifically designed to evaluate compositional text-to-image generation. We introduce a new approach, Generative mOdel fine-tuning with Reward-driven Sample selection (GORS), to boost the compositional text-to-image generation abilities of pretrained text-to-image models. Extensive experiments and evaluations are conducted to benchmark previous methods on T2I-CompBench, and to validate the effectiveness of our proposed evaluation metrics and GORS approach. Project page is available at https://karine-h.github.io/T2I-CompBench/.

Temporal Label-Refinement for Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Event Localization. (arXiv:2307.06385v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Kalyan Ramakrishnan

Audio-Visual Event Localization (AVEL) is the task of temporally localizing and classifying \emph{audio-visual events}, i.e., events simultaneously visible and audible in a video. In this paper, we solve AVEL in a weakly-supervised setting, where only video-level event labels (their presence/absence, but not their locations in time) are available as supervision for training. Our idea is to use a base model to estimate labels on the training data at a finer temporal resolution than at the video level and re-train the model with these labels. I.e., we determine the subset of labels for each \emph{slice} of frames in a training video by (i) replacing the frames outside the slice with those from a second video having no overlap in video-level labels, and (ii) feeding this synthetic video into the base model to extract labels for just the slice in question. To handle the out-of-distribution nature of our synthetic videos, we propose an auxiliary objective for the base model that induces more reliable predictions of the localized event labels as desired. Our three-stage pipeline outperforms several existing AVEL methods with no architectural changes and improves performance on a related weakly-supervised task as well.

Deep learning-based Segmentation of Rabbit fetal skull with limited and sub-optimal annotations. (arXiv:2307.06392v1 [q-bio.QM])

Authors: Rajath Soans, Alexa Gleason, Tosha Shah, Corey Miller, Barbara Robinson, Kimberly Brannen, Antong Chen

In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based method to segment the skeletal structures in the micro-CT images of Dutch-Belted rabbit fetuses which can assist in the assessment of drug-induced skeletal abnormalities as a required study in developmental and reproductive toxicology (DART). Our strategy leverages sub-optimal segmentation labels of 22 skull bones from 26 micro-CT volumes and maps them to 250 unlabeled volumes on which a deep CNN-based segmentation model is trained. In the experiments, our model was able to achieve an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.89 across all bones on the testing set, and 14 out of the 26 skull bones reached average DSC >0.93. Our next steps are segmenting the whole body followed by developing a model to classify abnormalities.

Introduction to Facial Micro Expressions Analysis Using Color and Depth Images: A Matlab Coding Approach (Second Edition, 2023). (arXiv:2307.06396v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Seyed Muhammad Hossein Mousavi

The book attempts to introduce a gentle introduction to the field of Facial Micro Expressions Recognition (FMER) using Color and Depth images, with the aid of MATLAB programming environment. FMER is a subset of image processing and it is a multidisciplinary topic to analysis. So, it requires familiarity with other topics of Artifactual Intelligence (AI) such as machine learning, digital image processing, psychology and more. So, it is a great opportunity to write a book which covers all of these topics for beginner to professional readers in the field of AI and even without having background of AI. Our goal is to provide a standalone introduction in the field of MFER analysis in the form of theorical descriptions for readers with no background in image processing with reproducible Matlab practical examples. Also, we describe any basic definitions for FMER analysis and MATLAB library which is used in the text, that helps final reader to apply the experiments in the real-world applications. We believe that this book is suitable for students, researchers, and professionals alike, who need to develop practical skills, along with a basic understanding of the field. We expect that, after reading this book, the reader feels comfortable with different key stages such as color and depth image processing, color and depth image representation, classification, machine learning, facial micro-expressions recognition, feature extraction and dimensionality reduction. The book attempts to introduce a gentle introduction to the field of Facial Micro Expressions Recognition (FMER) using Color and Depth images, with the aid of MATLAB programming environment.

RaBiT: An Efficient Transformer using Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network with Reverse Attention for Colon Polyp Segmentation. (arXiv:2307.06420v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Nguyen Hoang Thuan, Nguyen Thi Oanh, Nguyen Thi Thuy, Stuart Perry, Dinh Viet Sang

Automatic and accurate segmentation of colon polyps is essential for early diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Advanced deep learning models have shown promising results in polyp segmentation. However, they still have limitations in representing multi-scale features and generalization capability. To address these issues, this paper introduces RaBiT, an encoder-decoder model that incorporates a lightweight Transformer-based architecture in the encoder to model multiple-level global semantic relationships. The decoder consists of several bidirectional feature pyramid layers with reverse attention modules to better fuse feature maps at various levels and incrementally refine polyp boundaries. We also propose ideas to lighten the reverse attention module and make it more suitable for multi-class segmentation. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing methods across all datasets while maintaining low computational complexity. Moreover, our method demonstrates high generalization capability in cross-dataset experiments, even when the training and test sets have different characteristics.

Efficient Convolution and Transformer-Based Network for Video Frame Interpolation. (arXiv:2307.06443v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Issa Khalifeh, Luka Murn, Marta Mrak, Ebroul Izquierdo

Video frame interpolation is an increasingly important research task with several key industrial applications in the video coding, broadcast and production sectors. Recently, transformers have been introduced to the field resulting in substantial performance gains. However, this comes at a cost of greatly increased memory usage, training and inference time. In this paper, a novel method integrating a transformer encoder and convolutional features is proposed. This network reduces the memory burden by close to 50% and runs up to four times faster during inference time compared to existing transformer-based interpolation methods. A dual-encoder architecture is introduced which combines the strength of convolutions in modelling local correlations with those of the transformer for long-range dependencies. Quantitative evaluations are conducted on various benchmarks with complex motion to showcase the robustness of the proposed method, achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art interpolation networks.

Discovering Image Usage Online: A Case Study With "Flatten the Curve''. (arXiv:2307.06458v1 [cs.SI])

Authors: Shawn M. Jones, Diane Oyen

Understanding the spread of images across the web helps us understand the reuse of scientific visualizations and their relationship with the public. The "Flatten the Curve" graphic was heavily used during the COVID-19 pandemic to convey a complex concept in a simple form. It displays two curves comparing the impact on case loads for medical facilities if the populace either adopts or fails to adopt protective measures during a pandemic. We use five variants of the "Flatten the Curve" image as a case study for viewing the spread of an image online. To evaluate its spread, we leverage three information channels: reverse image search engines, social media, and web archives. Reverse image searches give us a current view into image reuse. Social media helps us understand a variant's popularity over time. Web archives help us see when it was preserved, highlighting a view of popularity for future researchers. Our case study leverages document URLs can be used as a proxy for images when studying the spread of images online.

Early Autism Diagnosis based on Path Signature and Siamese Unsupervised Feature Compressor. (arXiv:2307.06472v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zhuowen Yin, Xinyao Ding, Xin Zhang, Zhengwang Wu, Li Wang, Gang Li

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been emerging as a growing public health threat. Early diagnosis of ASD is crucial for timely, effective intervention and treatment. However, conventional diagnosis methods based on communications and behavioral patterns are unreliable for children younger than 2 years of age. Given evidences of neurodevelopmental abnormalities in ASD infants, we resort to a novel deep learning-based method to extract key features from the inherently scarce, class-imbalanced, and heterogeneous structural MR images for early autism diagnosis. Specifically, we propose a Siamese verification framework to extend the scarce data, and an unsupervised compressor to alleviate data imbalance by extracting key features. We also proposed weight constraints to cope with sample heterogeneity by giving different samples different voting weights during validation, and we used Path Signature to unravel meaningful developmental features from the two-time point data longitudinally. Extensive experiments have shown that our method performed well under practical scenarios, transcending existing machine learning methods.

Single-Class Target-Specific Attack against Interpretable Deep Learning Systems. (arXiv:2307.06484v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Eldor Abdukhamidov, Mohammed Abuhamad, George K. Thiruvathukal, Hyoungshick Kim, Tamer Abuhmed

In this paper, we present a novel Single-class target-specific Adversarial attack called SingleADV. The goal of SingleADV is to generate a universal perturbation that deceives the target model into confusing a specific category of objects with a target category while ensuring highly relevant and accurate interpretations. The universal perturbation is stochastically and iteratively optimized by minimizing the adversarial loss that is designed to consider both the classifier and interpreter costs in targeted and non-targeted categories. In this optimization framework, ruled by the first- and second-moment estimations, the desired loss surface promotes high confidence and interpretation score of adversarial samples. By avoiding unintended misclassification of samples from other categories, SingleADV enables more effective targeted attacks on interpretable deep learning systems in both white-box and black-box scenarios. To evaluate the effectiveness of SingleADV, we conduct experiments using four different model architectures (ResNet-50, VGG-16, DenseNet-169, and Inception-V3) coupled with three interpretation models (CAM, Grad, and MASK). Through extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that SingleADV effectively deceives the target deep learning models and their associated interpreters under various conditions and settings. Our experimental results show that the performance of SingleADV is effective, with an average fooling ratio of 0.74 and an adversarial confidence level of 0.78 in generating deceptive adversarial samples. Furthermore, we discuss several countermeasures against SingleADV, including a transfer-based learning approach and existing preprocessing defenses.

Microbial Genetic Algorithm-based Black-box Attack against Interpretable Deep Learning Systems. (arXiv:2307.06496v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Eldor Abdukhamidov, Mohammed Abuhamad, Simon S. Woo, Eric Chan-Tin, Tamer Abuhmed

Deep learning models are susceptible to adversarial samples in white and black-box environments. Although previous studies have shown high attack success rates, coupling DNN models with interpretation models could offer a sense of security when a human expert is involved, who can identify whether a given sample is benign or malicious. However, in white-box environments, interpretable deep learning systems (IDLSes) have been shown to be vulnerable to malicious manipulations. In black-box settings, as access to the components of IDLSes is limited, it becomes more challenging for the adversary to fool the system. In this work, we propose a Query-efficient Score-based black-box attack against IDLSes, QuScore, which requires no knowledge of the target model and its coupled interpretation model. QuScore is based on transfer-based and score-based methods by employing an effective microbial genetic algorithm. Our method is designed to reduce the number of queries necessary to carry out successful attacks, resulting in a more efficient process. By continuously refining the adversarial samples created based on feedback scores from the IDLS, our approach effectively navigates the search space to identify perturbations that can fool the system. We evaluate the attack's effectiveness on four CNN models (Inception, ResNet, VGG, DenseNet) and two interpretation models (CAM, Grad), using both ImageNet and CIFAR datasets. Our results show that the proposed approach is query-efficient with a high attack success rate that can reach between 95% and 100% and transferability with an average success rate of 69% in the ImageNet and CIFAR datasets. Our attack method generates adversarial examples with attribution maps that resemble benign samples. We have also demonstrated that our attack is resilient against various preprocessing defense techniques and can easily be transferred to different DNN models.

On the ability of CNNs to extract color invariant intensity based features for image classification. (arXiv:2307.06500v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Pradyumna Elavarthi, James Lee, Anca Ralescu

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in vision-related tasks. However, their susceptibility to failing when inputs deviate from the training distribution is well-documented. Recent studies suggest that CNNs exhibit a bias toward texture instead of object shape in image classification tasks, and that background information may affect predictions. This paper investigates the ability of CNNs to adapt to different color distributions in an image while maintaining context and background. The results of our experiments on modified MNIST and FashionMNIST data demonstrate that changes in color can substantially affect classification accuracy. The paper explores the effects of various regularization techniques on generalization error across datasets and proposes a minor architectural modification utilizing the dropout regularization in a novel way that enhances model reliance on color-invariant intensity-based features for improved classification accuracy. Overall, this work contributes to ongoing efforts to understand the limitations and challenges of CNNs in image classification tasks and offers potential solutions to enhance their performance.

WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmark for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfaces. (arXiv:2307.06505v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Shanliang Yao, Runwei Guan, Zhaodong Wu, Yi Ni, Zixian Zhang, Zile Huang, Xiaohui Zhu, Yutao Yue, Yong Yue, Hyungjoon Seo, Ka Lok Man

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct numerous experiments on the single modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably enhance the robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io.

Improving Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Classification Performance With Latent Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2307.06507v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Romain Hardy, Cornelia Ilin, Joe Klepich, Ryan Mitchell, Steve Hall, Jericho Villareal

Integrating deep learning with clinical expertise holds great potential for addressing healthcare challenges and empowering medical professionals with improved diagnostic tools. However, the need for annotated medical images is often an obstacle to leveraging the full power of machine learning models. Our research demonstrates that by combining synthetic images, generated using diffusion models, with real images, we can enhance nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) classification performance. We evaluate the quality of the synthetic images by comparing two metrics: Inception Score (IS) and Fr\'{e}chet Inception Distance (FID), computed on diffusion-generated images and generative adversarial networks (GANs)-generated images. Our results show superior performance for the diffusion-generated images, with a maximum IS score of $1.90$ compared to $1.67$ for GANs, and a minimum FID score of $69.45$ compared to $99.53$ for GANs. Utilizing a partially frozen CNN backbone (EfficientNet v1), our synthetic augmentation method achieves a maximum image-level ROC AUC of $0.904$ on a NAFLD prediction task.

AvatarFusion: Zero-shot Generation of Clothing-Decoupled 3D Avatars Using 2D Diffusion. (arXiv:2307.06526v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Shuo Huang, Zongxin Yang, Liangting Li, Yi Yang, Jia Jia

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models allow for the zero-shot text-based generation of 3D avatars. The previous state-of-the-art method utilized CLIP to supervise neural implicit models that reconstructed a human body mesh. However, this approach has two limitations. Firstly, the lack of avatar-specific models can cause facial distortion and unrealistic clothing in the generated avatars. Secondly, CLIP only provides optimization direction for the overall appearance, resulting in less impressive results. To address these limitations, we propose AvatarFusion, the first framework to use a latent diffusion model to provide pixel-level guidance for generating human-realistic avatars while simultaneously segmenting clothing from the avatar's body. AvatarFusion includes the first clothing-decoupled neural implicit avatar model that employs a novel Dual Volume Rendering strategy to render the decoupled skin and clothing sub-models in one space. We also introduce a novel optimization method, called Pixel-Semantics Difference-Sampling (PS-DS), which semantically separates the generation of body and clothes, and generates a variety of clothing styles. Moreover, we establish the first benchmark for zero-shot text-to-avatar generation. Our experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous approaches, with significant improvements observed in all metrics. Additionally, since our model is clothing-decoupled, we can exchange the clothes of avatars. Code will be available on Github.

Free-Form Composition Networks for Egocentric Action Recognition. (arXiv:2307.06527v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Haoran Wang, Qinghua Cheng, Baosheng Yu, Yibing Zhan, Dapeng Tao, Liang Ding, Haibin Ling

Egocentric action recognition is gaining significant attention in the field of human action recognition. In this paper, we address data scarcity issue in egocentric action recognition from a compositional generalization perspective. To tackle this problem, we propose a free-form composition network (FFCN) that can simultaneously learn disentangled verb, preposition, and noun representations, and then use them to compose new samples in the feature space for rare classes of action videos. First, we use a graph to capture the spatial-temporal relations among different hand/object instances in each action video. We thus decompose each action into a set of verb and preposition spatial-temporal representations using the edge features in the graph. The temporal decomposition extracts verb and preposition representations from different video frames, while the spatial decomposition adaptively learns verb and preposition representations from action-related instances in each frame. With these spatial-temporal representations of verbs and prepositions, we can compose new samples for those rare classes in a free-form manner, which is not restricted to a rigid form of a verb and a noun. The proposed FFCN can directly generate new training data samples for rare classes, hence significantly improve action recognition performance. We evaluated our method on three popular egocentric action recognition datasets, Something-Something V2, H2O, and EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for handling data scarcity problems, including long-tailed and few-shot egocentric action recognition.

Optimised Least Squares Approach for Accurate Rectangle Fitting. (arXiv:2307.06528v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yiming Quan, Shian Chen

This study introduces a novel and efficient least squares based method for rectangle fitting, using a continuous fitness function that approximates a unit square accurately. The proposed method is compared with the existing method in the literature using both simulated data and real data. The real data is derived from aerial photogrammetry point clouds of a rectangular building. The simulated tests show that the proposed method performs better than the reference method, reducing the root-mean-square error by about 93% and 14% for clean datasets and noisy point clouds, respectively. The proposed method also improves the fitting of the real dataset by about 81%, achieving centimetre level accuracy. Furthermore, the test results show that the proposed method converges in fewer than 10 iterations.

Domain-adaptive Person Re-identification without Cross-camera Paired Samples. (arXiv:2307.06533v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Huafeng Li, Yanmei Mao, Yafei Zhang, Guanqiu Qi, Zhengtao Yu

Existing person re-identification (re-ID) research mainly focuses on pedestrian identity matching across cameras in adjacent areas. However, in reality, it is inevitable to face the problem of pedestrian identity matching across long-distance scenes. The cross-camera pedestrian samples collected from long-distance scenes often have no positive samples. It is extremely challenging to use cross-camera negative samples to achieve cross-region pedestrian identity matching. Therefore, a novel domain-adaptive person re-ID method that focuses on cross-camera consistent discriminative feature learning under the supervision of unpaired samples is proposed. This method mainly includes category synergy co-promotion module (CSCM) and cross-camera consistent feature learning module (CCFLM). In CSCM, a task-specific feature recombination (FRT) mechanism is proposed. This mechanism first groups features according to their contributions to specific tasks. Then an interactive promotion learning (IPL) scheme between feature groups is developed and embedded in this mechanism to enhance feature discriminability. Since the control parameters of the specific task model are reduced after division by task, the generalization ability of the model is improved. In CCFLM, instance-level feature distribution alignment and cross-camera identity consistent learning methods are constructed. Therefore, the supervised model training is achieved under the style supervision of the target domain by exchanging styles between source-domain samples and target-domain samples, and the challenges caused by the lack of cross-camera paired samples are solved by utilizing cross-camera similar samples. In experiments, three challenging datasets are used as target domains, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through four experimental settings.

An Image-Denoising Framework Fit for Quantum Annealing via QUBO and Restricted Boltzmann Machines. (arXiv:2307.06542v1 [quant-ph])

Authors: Phillip Kerger, Ryoji Miyazaki

We investigate a framework for binary image denoising via restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) that introduces a denoising objective in quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) form and is well-suited for quantum annealing. The denoising objective is attained by balancing the distribution learned by a trained RBM with a penalty term for derivations from the noisy image. We derive the statistically optimal choice of the penalty parameter assuming the target distribution has been well-approximated, and further suggest an empirically supported modification to make the method robust to that idealistic assumption. We also show under additional assumptions that the denoised images attained by our method are, in expectation, strictly closer to the noise-free images than the noisy images are. While we frame the model as an image denoising model, it can be applied to any binary data. As the QUBO formulation is well-suited for implementation on quantum annealers, we test the model on a D-Wave Advantage machine, and also test on data too large for current quantum annealers by approximating QUBO solutions through classical heuristics.

Full-resolution Lung Nodule Segmentation from Chest X-ray Images using Residual Encoder-Decoder Networks. (arXiv:2307.06547v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Michael James Horry, Subrata Chakraborty, Biswajeet Pradhan, Manoranjan Paul, Jing Zhu, Prabal Datta Barua, U. Rajendra Acharya, Fang Chen, Jianlong Zhou

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death and early diagnosis is associated with a positive prognosis. Chest X-ray (CXR) provides an inexpensive imaging mode for lung cancer diagnosis. Suspicious nodules are difficult to distinguish from vascular and bone structures using CXR. Computer vision has previously been proposed to assist human radiologists in this task, however, leading studies use down-sampled images and computationally expensive methods with unproven generalization. Instead, this study localizes lung nodules using efficient encoder-decoder neural networks that process full resolution images to avoid any signal loss resulting from down-sampling. Encoder-decoder networks are trained and tested using the JSRT lung nodule dataset. The networks are used to localize lung nodules from an independent external CXR dataset. Sensitivity and false positive rates are measured using an automated framework to eliminate any observer subjectivity. These experiments allow for the determination of the optimal network depth, image resolution and pre-processing pipeline for generalized lung nodule localization. We find that nodule localization is influenced by subtlety, with more subtle nodules being detected in earlier training epochs. Therefore, we propose a novel self-ensemble model from three consecutive epochs centered on the validation optimum. This ensemble achieved a sensitivity of 85% in 10-fold internal testing with false positives of 8 per image. A sensitivity of 81% is achieved at a false positive rate of 6 following morphological false positive reduction. This result is comparable to more computationally complex systems based on linear and spatial filtering, but with a sub-second inference time that is faster than other methods. The proposed algorithm achieved excellent generalization results against an external dataset with sensitivity of 77% at a false positive rate of 7.6.

Multi-objective Evolutionary Search of Variable-length Composite Semantic Perturbations. (arXiv:2307.06548v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Jialiang Suna, Wen Yao, Tingsong Jianga, Xiaoqian Chena

Deep neural networks have proven to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of adding specific perturbations on images to make wrong outputs. Designing stronger adversarial attack methods can help more reliably evaluate the robustness of DNN models. To release the harbor burden and improve the attack performance, auto machine learning (AutoML) has recently emerged as one successful technique to help automatically find the near-optimal adversarial attack strategy. However, existing works about AutoML for adversarial attacks only focus on $L_{\infty}$-norm-based perturbations. In fact, semantic perturbations attract increasing attention due to their naturalnesses and physical realizability. To bridge the gap between AutoML and semantic adversarial attacks, we propose a novel method called multi-objective evolutionary search of variable-length composite semantic perturbations (MES-VCSP). Specifically, we construct the mathematical model of variable-length composite semantic perturbations, which provides five gradient-based semantic attack methods. The same type of perturbation in an attack sequence is allowed to be performed multiple times. Besides, we introduce the multi-objective evolutionary search consisting of NSGA-II and neighborhood search to find near-optimal variable-length attack sequences. Experimental results on CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets show that compared with existing methods, MES-VCSP can obtain adversarial examples with a higher attack success rate, more naturalness, and less time cost.

Regression-Oriented Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Ship Orientation Angle Prediction with Optical Remote Sensing Images. (arXiv:2307.06566v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zhan Shi, Xin Ding, Peng Ding, Chun Yang, Ru Huang, Xiaoxuan Song

Ship orientation angle prediction (SOAP) with optical remote sensing images is an important image processing task, which often relies on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to make accurate predictions. This paper proposes a novel framework to reduce the model sizes and computational costs of SOAP models without harming prediction accuracy. First, a new SOAP model called Mobile-SOAP is designed based on MobileNetV2, achieving state-of-the-art prediction accuracy. Four tiny SOAP models are also created by replacing the convolutional blocks in Mobile-SOAP with four small-scale networks, respectively. Then, to transfer knowledge from Mobile-SOAP to four lightweight models, we propose a novel knowledge distillation (KD) framework termed SOAP-KD consisting of a novel feature-based guidance loss and an optimized synthetic samples-based knowledge transfer mechanism. Lastly, extensive experiments on the FGSC-23 dataset confirm the superiority of Mobile-SOAP over existing models and also demonstrate the effectiveness of SOAP-KD in improving the prediction performance of four specially designed tiny models. Notably, by using SOAP-KD, the test mean absolute error of the ShuffleNetV2x1.0-based model is only 8% higher than that of Mobile-SOAP, but its number of parameters and multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) are respectively 61.6% and 60.8% less.

A Study on Differentiable Logic and LLMs for EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Challenge for Action Recognition 2023. (arXiv:2307.06569v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yi Cheng, Ziwei Xu, Fen Fang, Dongyun Lin, Hehe Fan, Yongkang Wong, Ying Sun, Mohan Kankanhalli

In this technical report, we present our findings from a study conducted on the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation task for Action Recognition. Our research focuses on the innovative application of a differentiable logic loss in the training to leverage the co-occurrence relations between verb and noun, as well as the pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the logic rules for the adaptation to unseen action labels. Specifically, the model's predictions are treated as the truth assignment of a co-occurrence logic formula to compute the logic loss, which measures the consistency between the predictions and the logic constraints. By using the verb-noun co-occurrence matrix generated from the dataset, we observe a moderate improvement in model performance compared to our baseline framework. To further enhance the model's adaptability to novel action labels, we experiment with rules generated using GPT-3.5, which leads to a slight decrease in performance. These findings shed light on the potential and challenges of incorporating differentiable logic and LLMs for knowledge extraction in unsupervised domain adaptation for action recognition. Our final submission (entitled `NS-LLM') achieved the first place in terms of top-1 action recognition accuracy.

RVD: A Handheld Device-Based Fundus Video Dataset for Retinal Vessel Segmentation. (arXiv:2307.06577v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: MD Wahiduzzaman Khan, Hongwei Sheng, Hu Zhang, Heming Du, Sen Wang, Minas Theodore Coroneo, Farshid Hajati, Sahar Shariflou, Michael Kalloniatis, Jack Phu, Ashish Agar, Zi Huang, Mojtaba Golzan, Xin Yu

Retinal vessel segmentation is generally grounded in image-based datasets collected with bench-top devices. The static images naturally lose the dynamic characteristics of retina fluctuation, resulting in diminished dataset richness, and the usage of bench-top devices further restricts dataset scalability due to its limited accessibility. Considering these limitations, we introduce the first video-based retinal dataset by employing handheld devices for data acquisition. The dataset comprises 635 smartphone-based fundus videos collected from four different clinics, involving 415 patients from 50 to 75 years old. It delivers comprehensive and precise annotations of retinal structures in both spatial and temporal dimensions, aiming to advance the landscape of vasculature segmentation. Specifically, the dataset provides three levels of spatial annotations: binary vessel masks for overall retinal structure delineation, general vein-artery masks for distinguishing the vein and artery, and fine-grained vein-artery masks for further characterizing the granularities of each artery and vein. In addition, the dataset offers temporal annotations that capture the vessel pulsation characteristics, assisting in detecting ocular diseases that require fine-grained recognition of hemodynamic fluctuation. In application, our dataset exhibits a significant domain shift with respect to data captured by bench-top devices, thus posing great challenges to existing methods. In the experiments, we provide evaluation metrics and benchmark results on our dataset, reflecting both the potential and challenges it offers for vessel segmentation tasks. We hope this challenging dataset would significantly contribute to the development of eye disease diagnosis and early prevention.

Image Denoising and the Generative Accumulation of Photons. (arXiv:2307.06607v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Alexander Krull, Hector Basevi, Benjamin Salmon, Andre Zeug, Franziska Müller, Samuel Tonks, Leela Muppala, Ales Leonardis

We present a fresh perspective on shot noise corrupted images and noise removal. By viewing image formation as the sequential accumulation of photons on a detector grid, we show that a network trained to predict where the next photon could arrive is in fact solving the minimum mean square error (MMSE) denoising task. This new perspective allows us to make three contributions: We present a new strategy for self-supervised denoising, We present a new method for sampling from the posterior of possible solutions by iteratively sampling and adding small numbers of photons to the image. We derive a full generative model by starting this process from an empty canvas. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on 4 new fluorescence microscopy datasets, which will be made available to the community. We find that it outperforms supervised, self-supervised and unsupervised baselines or performs on-par.

Explainable 2D Vision Models for 3D Medical Data. (arXiv:2307.06614v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Alexander Ziller, Alp Güvenir, Ayhan Can Erdur, Tamara T. Mueller, Philip Müller, Friederike Jungmann, Johannes Brandt, Jan Peeken, Rickmer Braren, Daniel Rueckert, Georgios Kaissis

Training Artificial Intelligence (AI) models on three-dimensional image data presents unique challenges compared to the two-dimensional case: Firstly, the computational resources are significantly higher, and secondly, the availability of large pretraining datasets is often limited, impeding training success. In this study, we propose a simple approach of adapting 2D networks with an intermediate feature representation for processing 3D volumes. Our method involves sequentially applying these networks to slices of a 3D volume from all orientations. Subsequently, a feature reduction module combines the extracted slice features into a single representation, which is then used for classification. We evaluate our approach on medical classification benchmarks and a real-world clinical dataset, demonstrating comparable results to existing methods. Furthermore, by employing attention pooling as a feature reduction module we obtain weighted importance values for each slice during the forward pass. We show that slices deemed important by our approach allow the inspection of the basis of a model's prediction.

NLOS Dies Twice: Challenges and Solutions of V2X for Cooperative Perception. (arXiv:2307.06615v1 [eess.SY])

Authors: Lantao Li, Chen Sun

Multi-agent multi-lidar sensor fusion between connected vehicles for cooperative perception has recently been recognized as the best technique for minimizing the blind zone of individual vehicular perception systems and further enhancing the overall safety of autonomous driving systems. This technique relies heavily on the reliability and availability of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. In practical sensor fusion application scenarios, the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) issue causes blind zones for not only the perception system but also V2X direct communication. To counteract underlying communication issues, we introduce an abstract perception matrix matching method for quick sensor fusion matching procedures and mobility-height hybrid relay determination procedures, proactively improving the efficiency and performance of V2X communication to serve the upper layer application fusion requirements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution, we design a new simulation framework to consider autonomous driving, sensor fusion and V2X communication in general, paving the way for end-to-end performance evaluation and further solution derivation.

Automated Deception Detection from Videos: Using End-to-End Learning Based High-Level Features and Classification Approaches. (arXiv:2307.06625v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Laslo Dinges (1), Marc-André Fiedler (1), Ayoub Al-Hamadi (1), Thorsten Hempel (1), Ahmed Abdelrahman (1), Joachim Weimann (2), Dmitri Bershadskyy (2) ((1) Neuro-Information Technology Group, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (2) Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)

Deception detection is an interdisciplinary field attracting researchers from psychology, criminology, computer science, and economics. We propose a multimodal approach combining deep learning and discriminative models for automated deception detection. Using video modalities, we employ convolutional end-to-end learning to analyze gaze, head pose, and facial expressions, achieving promising results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Due to limited training data, we also utilize discriminative models for deception detection. Although sequence-to-class approaches are explored, discriminative models outperform them due to data scarcity. Our approach is evaluated on five datasets, including a new Rolling-Dice Experiment motivated by economic factors. Results indicate that facial expressions outperform gaze and head pose, and combining modalities with feature selection enhances detection performance. Differences in expressed features across datasets emphasize the importance of scenario-specific training data and the influence of context on deceptive behavior. Cross-dataset experiments reinforce these findings. Despite the challenges posed by low-stake datasets, including the Rolling-Dice Experiment, deception detection performance exceeds chance levels. Our proposed multimodal approach and comprehensive evaluation shed light on the potential of automating deception detection from video modalities, opening avenues for future research.

Image Transformation Sequence Retrieval with General Reinforcement Learning. (arXiv:2307.06630v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Enrique Mas-Candela, Antonio Ríos-Vila, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza

In this work, the novel Image Transformation Sequence Retrieval (ITSR) task is presented, in which a model must retrieve the sequence of transformations between two given images that act as source and target, respectively. Given certain characteristics of the challenge such as the multiplicity of a correct sequence or the correlation between consecutive steps of the process, we propose a solution to ITSR using a general model-based Reinforcement Learning such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which is combined with a deep neural network. Our experiments provide a benchmark in both synthetic and real domains, where the proposed approach is compared with supervised training. The results report that a model trained with MCTS is able to outperform its supervised counterpart in both the simplest and the most complex cases. Our work draws interesting conclusions about the nature of ITSR and its associated challenges.

DeepIPCv2: LiDAR-powered Robust Environmental Perception and Navigational Control for Autonomous Vehicle. (arXiv:2307.06647v1 [cs.RO])

Authors: Oskar Natan, Jun Miura

We present DeepIPCv2, an autonomous driving model that perceives the environment using a LiDAR sensor for more robust drivability, especially when driving under poor illumination conditions. DeepIPCv2 takes a set of LiDAR point clouds for its main perception input. As point clouds are not affected by illumination changes, they can provide a clear observation of the surroundings no matter what the condition is. This results in a better scene understanding and stable features provided by the perception module to support the controller module in estimating navigational control properly. To evaluate its performance, we conduct several tests by deploying the model to predict a set of driving records and perform real automated driving under three different conditions. We also conduct ablation and comparative studies with some recent models to justify its performance. Based on the experimental results, DeepIPCv2 shows a robust performance by achieving the best drivability in all conditions. Codes are available at https://github.com/oskarnatan/DeepIPCv2

A Comprehensive Analysis of Blockchain Applications for Securing Computer Vision Systems. (arXiv:2307.06659v1 [cs.CR])

Authors: Ramalingam M, Chemmalar Selvi, Nancy Victor, Rajeswari Chengoden, Sweta Bhattacharya, Praveen Kumar Reddy Maddikunta, Duehee Lee, Md. Jalil Piran, Neelu Khare, Gokul Yendri, Thippa Reddy Gadekallu

Blockchain (BC) and Computer Vision (CV) are the two emerging fields with the potential to transform various sectors.The ability of BC can help in offering decentralized and secure data storage, while CV allows machines to learn and understand visual data. This integration of the two technologies holds massive promise for developing innovative applications that can provide solutions to the challenges in various sectors such as supply chain management, healthcare, smart cities, and defense. This review explores a comprehensive analysis of the integration of BC and CV by examining their combination and potential applications. It also provides a detailed analysis of the fundamental concepts of both technologies, highlighting their strengths and limitations. This paper also explores current research efforts that make use of the benefits offered by this combination. The effort includes how BC can be used as an added layer of security in CV systems and also ensure data integrity, enabling decentralized image and video analytics using BC. The challenges and open issues associated with this integration are also identified, and appropriate potential future directions are also proposed.

Transformer-based end-to-end classification of variable-length volumetric data. (arXiv:2307.06666v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Marzieh Oghbaie, Teresa Araujo, Taha Emre, Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth, Hrvoje Bogunovic

The automatic classification of 3D medical data is memory-intensive. Also, variations in the number of slices between samples is common. Naive solutions such as subsampling can solve these problems, but at the cost of potentially eliminating relevant diagnosis information. Transformers have shown promising performance for sequential data analysis. However, their application for long-sequences is data, computationally, and memory demanding. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Transformer-based framework that allows to classify volumetric data of variable length in an efficient fashion. Particularly, by randomizing the input slice-wise resolution during training, we enhance the capacity of the learnable positional embedding assigned to each volume slice. Consequently, the accumulated positional information in each positional embedding can be generalized to the neighbouring slices, even for high resolution volumes at the test time. By doing so, the model will be more robust to variable volume length and amenable to different computational budgets. We evaluated the proposed approach in retinal OCT volume classification and achieved 21.96% average improvement in balanced accuracy on a 9-class diagnostic task, compared to state-of-the-art video transformers. Our findings show that varying the slice-wise resolution of the input during training results in more informative volume representation as compared to training with fixed number of slices per volume. Our code is available at: https://github.com/marziehoghbaie/VLFAT.

DGCNet: An Efficient 3D-Densenet based on Dynamic Group Convolution for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification. (arXiv:2307.06667v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Guandong Li

Deep neural networks face many problems in the field of hyperspectral image classification, lack of effective utilization of spatial spectral information, gradient disappearance and overfitting as the model depth increases. In order to accelerate the deployment of the model on edge devices with strict latency requirements and limited computing power, we introduce a lightweight model based on the improved 3D-Densenet model and designs DGCNet. It improves the disadvantage of group convolution. Referring to the idea of dynamic network, dynamic group convolution(DGC) is designed on 3d convolution kernel. DGC introduces small feature selectors for each grouping to dynamically decide which part of the input channel to connect based on the activations of all input channels. Multiple groups can capture different and complementary visual and semantic features of input images, allowing convolution neural network(CNN) to learn rich features. 3D convolution extracts high-dimensional and redundant hyperspectral data, and there is also a lot of redundant information between convolution kernels. DGC module allows 3D-Densenet to select channel information with richer semantic features and discard inactive regions. The 3D-CNN passing through the DGC module can be regarded as a pruned network. DGC not only allows 3D-CNN to complete sufficient feature extraction, but also takes into account the requirements of speed and calculation amount. The inference speed and accuracy have been improved, with outstanding performance on the IN, Pavia and KSC datasets, ahead of the mainstream hyperspectral image classification methods.

YOLIC: An Efficient Method for Object Localization and Classification on Edge Devices. (arXiv:2307.06689v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Kai Su, Qiangfu Zhao, Yoichi Tomioka, Yong Liu

In the realm of Tiny AI, we introduce "You Only Look at Interested Cells" (YOLIC), an efficient method for object localization and classification on edge devices. Seamlessly blending the strengths of semantic segmentation and object detection, YOLIC offers superior computational efficiency and precision. By adopting Cells of Interest for classification instead of individual pixels, YOLIC encapsulates relevant information, reduces computational load, and enables rough object shape inference. Importantly, the need for bounding box regression is obviated, as YOLIC capitalizes on the predetermined cell configuration that provides information about potential object location, size, and shape. To tackle the issue of single-label classification limitations, a multi-label classification approach is applied to each cell, effectively recognizing overlapping or closely situated objects. This paper presents extensive experiments on multiple datasets, demonstrating that YOLIC achieves detection performance comparable to the state-of-the-art YOLO algorithms while surpassing in speed, exceeding 30fps on a Raspberry Pi 4B CPU. All resources related to this study, including datasets, cell designer, image annotation tool, and source code, have been made publicly available on our project website at https://kai3316.github.io/yolic.github.io

S-HR-VQVAE: Sequential Hierarchical Residual Learning Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder for Video Prediction. (arXiv:2307.06701v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Mohammad Adiban, Kalin Stefanov, Sabato Marco Siniscalchi, Giampiero Salvi

We address the video prediction task by putting forth a novel model that combines (i) our recently proposed hierarchical residual vector quantized variational autoencoder (HR-VQVAE), and (ii) a novel spatiotemporal PixelCNN (ST-PixelCNN). We refer to this approach as a sequential hierarchical residual learning vector quantized variational autoencoder (S-HR-VQVAE). By leveraging the intrinsic capabilities of HR-VQVAE at modeling still images with a parsimonious representation, combined with the ST-PixelCNN's ability at handling spatiotemporal information, S-HR-VQVAE can better deal with chief challenges in video prediction. These include learning spatiotemporal information, handling high dimensional data, combating blurry prediction, and implicit modeling of physical characteristics. Extensive experimental results on the KTH Human Action and Moving-MNIST tasks demonstrate that our model compares favorably against top video prediction techniques both in quantitative and qualitative evaluations despite a much smaller model size. Finally, we boost S-HR-VQVAE by proposing a novel training method to jointly estimate the HR-VQVAE and ST-PixelCNN parameters.

Weakly supervised marine animal detection from remote sensing images using vector-quantized variational autoencoder. (arXiv:2307.06720v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Minh-Tan Pham, Hugo Gangloff, Sébastien Lefèvre

This paper studies a reconstruction-based approach for weakly-supervised animal detection from aerial images in marine environments. Such an approach leverages an anomaly detection framework that computes metrics directly on the input space, enhancing interpretability and anomaly localization compared to feature embedding methods. Building upon the success of Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders in anomaly detection on computer vision datasets, we adapt them to the marine animal detection domain and address the challenge of handling noisy data. To evaluate our approach, we compare it with existing methods in the context of marine animal detection from aerial image data. Experiments conducted on two dedicated datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over recent studies in the literature. Our framework offers improved interpretability and localization of anomalies, providing valuable insights for monitoring marine ecosystems and mitigating the impact of human activities on marine animals.

Multimodal Object Detection in Remote Sensing. (arXiv:2307.06724v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Abdelbadie Belmouhcine, Jean-Christophe Burnel, Luc Courtrai, Minh-Tan Pham, Sébastien Lefèvre

Object detection in remote sensing is a crucial computer vision task that has seen significant advancements with deep learning techniques. However, most existing works in this area focus on the use of generic object detection and do not leverage the potential of multimodal data fusion. In this paper, we present a comparison of methods for multimodal object detection in remote sensing, survey available multimodal datasets suitable for evaluation, and discuss future directions.

Improving 2D Human Pose Estimation across Unseen Camera Views with Synthetic Data. (arXiv:2307.06737v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Miroslav Purkrábek, Jiří Matas

Human Pose Estimation is a thoroughly researched problem; however, most datasets focus on the side and front-view scenarios. We address the limitation by proposing a novel approach that tackles the challenges posed by extreme viewpoints and poses. We introduce a new method for synthetic data generation - RePoGen, RarE POses GENerator - with comprehensive control over pose and view to augment the COCO dataset. Experiments on a new dataset of real images show that adding RePoGen data to the COCO surpasses previous attempts to top-view pose estimation and significantly improves performance on the bottom-view dataset. Through an extensive ablation study on both the top and bottom view data, we elucidate the contributions of methodological choices and demonstrate improved performance. The code and the datasets are available on the project website.

Watch Your Pose: Unsupervised Domain Adaption with Pose based Triplet Selection for Gait Recognition. (arXiv:2307.06751v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Gavriel Habib, Noa Barzilay, Or Shimshi, Rami Ben-Ari, Nir Darshan

Gait Recognition is a computer vision task aiming to identify people by their walking patterns. Existing methods show impressive results on individual datasets but lack the ability to generalize to unseen scenarios. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) tries to adapt a model, pre-trained in a supervised manner on a source domain, to an unlabelled target domain. UDA for Gait Recognition is still in its infancy and existing works proposed solutions to limited scenarios. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental phenomenon in adaptation of gait recognition models, in which the target domain is biased to pose-based features rather than identity features, causing a significant performance drop in the identification task. We suggest Gait Orientation-based method for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (GOUDA) to reduce this bias. To this end, we present a novel Triplet Selection algorithm with a curriculum learning framework, aiming to adapt the embedding space by pushing away samples of similar poses and bringing closer samples of different poses. We provide extensive experiments on four widely-used gait datasets, CASIA-B, OU-MVLP, GREW, and Gait3D, and on three backbones, GaitSet, GaitPart, and GaitGL, showing the superiority of our proposed method over prior works.

Generalizing Supervised Deep Learning MRI Reconstruction to Multiple and Unseen Contrasts using Meta-Learning Hypernetworks. (arXiv:2307.06771v1 [eess.IV])

Authors: Sriprabha Ramanarayanan, Arun Palla, Keerthi Ram, Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam

Meta-learning has recently been an emerging data-efficient learning technique for various medical imaging operations and has helped advance contemporary deep learning models. Furthermore, meta-learning enhances the knowledge generalization of the imaging tasks by learning both shared and discriminative weights for various configurations of imaging tasks. However, existing meta-learning models attempt to learn a single set of weight initializations of a neural network that might be restrictive for multimodal data. This work aims to develop a multimodal meta-learning model for image reconstruction, which augments meta-learning with evolutionary capabilities to encompass diverse acquisition settings of multimodal data. Our proposed model called KM-MAML (Kernel Modulation-based Multimodal Meta-Learning), has hypernetworks that evolve to generate mode-specific weights. These weights provide the mode-specific inductive bias for multiple modes by re-calibrating each kernel of the base network for image reconstruction via a low-rank kernel modulation operation. We incorporate gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) in the contextual space to update the weights of the hypernetworks for different modes. The hypernetworks and the reconstruction network in the GBML setting provide discriminative mode-specific features and low-level image features, respectively. Experiments on multi-contrast MRI reconstruction show that our model, (i) exhibits superior reconstruction performance over joint training, other meta-learning methods, and context-specific MRI reconstruction methods, and (ii) better adaptation capabilities with improvement margins of 0.5 dB in PSNR and 0.01 in SSIM. Besides, a representation analysis with U-Net shows that kernel modulation infuses 80% of mode-specific representation changes in the high-resolution layers. Our source code is available at https://github.com/sriprabhar/KM-MAML/.

Robotic surface exploration with vision and tactile sensing for cracks detection and characterisation. (arXiv:2307.06784v1 [cs.RO])

Authors: Francesca Palermo, Bukeikhan Omarali, Changae Oh, Kaspar Althoefer, Ildar Farkhatdinov

This paper presents a novel algorithm for crack localisation and detection based on visual and tactile analysis via fibre-optics. A finger-shaped sensor based on fibre-optics is employed for the data acquisition to collect data for the analysis and the experiments. To detect the possible locations of cracks a camera is used to scan an environment while running an object detection algorithm. Once the crack is detected, a fully-connected graph is created from a skeletonised version of the crack. A minimum spanning tree is then employed for calculating the shortest path to explore the crack which is then used to develop the motion planner for the robotic manipulator. The motion planner divides the crack into multiple nodes which are then explored individually. Then, the manipulator starts the exploration and performs the tactile data classification to confirm if there is indeed a crack in that location or just a false positive from the vision algorithm. If a crack is detected, also the length, width, orientation and number of branches are calculated. This is repeated until all the nodes of the crack are explored.

In order to validate the complete algorithm, various experiments are performed: comparison of exploration of cracks through full scan and motion planning algorithm, implementation of frequency-based features for crack classification and geometry analysis using a combination of vision and tactile data. From the results of the experiments, it is shown that the proposed algorithm is able to detect cracks and improve the results obtained from vision to correctly classify cracks and their geometry with minimal cost thanks to the motion planning algorithm.

Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models for Fine-Grained Downstream Tasks. (arXiv:2307.06795v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Denis Coquenet, Clément Rambour, Emanuele Dalsasso, Nicolas Thome

Vision-language foundation models such as CLIP have shown impressive zero-shot performance on many tasks and datasets, especially thanks to their free-text inputs. However, they struggle to handle some downstream tasks, such as fine-grained attribute detection and localization. In this paper, we propose a multitask fine-tuning strategy based on a positive/negative prompt formulation to further leverage the capacities of the vision-language foundation models. Using the CLIP architecture as baseline, we show strong improvements on bird fine-grained attribute detection and localization tasks, while also increasing the classification performance on the CUB200-2011 dataset. We provide source code for reproducibility purposes: it is available at https://github.com/FactoDeepLearning/MultitaskVLFM.

Garbage in, garbage out: Zero-shot detection of crime using Large Language Models. (arXiv:2307.06844v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Anj Simmons, Rajesh Vasa

This paper proposes exploiting the common sense knowledge learned by large language models to perform zero-shot reasoning about crimes given textual descriptions of surveillance videos. We show that when video is (manually) converted to high quality textual descriptions, large language models are capable of detecting and classifying crimes with state-of-the-art performance using only zero-shot reasoning. However, existing automated video-to-text approaches are unable to generate video descriptions of sufficient quality to support reasoning (garbage video descriptions into the large language model, garbage out).

LVLane: Deep Learning for Lane Detection and Classification in Challenging Conditions. (arXiv:2307.06853v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Zillur Rahman, Brendan Tran Morris

Lane detection plays a pivotal role in the field of autonomous vehicles and advanced driving assistant systems (ADAS). Over the years, numerous algorithms have emerged, spanning from rudimentary image processing techniques to sophisticated deep neural networks. The performance of deep learning-based models is highly dependent on the quality of their training data. Consequently, these models often experience a decline in performance when confronted with challenging scenarios such as extreme lighting conditions, partially visible lane markings, and sparse lane markings like Botts' dots. To address this, we present an end-to-end lane detection and classification system based on deep learning methodologies. In our study, we introduce a unique dataset meticulously curated to encompass scenarios that pose significant challenges for state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Through fine-tuning selected models, we aim to achieve enhanced localization accuracy. Moreover, we propose a CNN-based classification branch, seamlessly integrated with the detector, facilitating the identification of distinct lane types. This architecture enables informed lane-changing decisions and empowers more resilient ADAS capabilities. We also investigate the effect of using mixed precision training and testing on different models and batch sizes. Experimental evaluations conducted on the widely-used TuSimple dataset, Caltech lane dataset, and our LVLane dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in accurately detecting and classifying lanes amidst challenging scenarios. Our method achieves state-of-the-art classification results on the TuSimple dataset. The code of the work will be published upon the acceptance of the paper.

Data Augmentation in Training CNNs: Injecting Noise to Images. (arXiv:2307.06855v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: M. Eren Akbiyik

Noise injection is a fundamental tool for data augmentation, and yet there is no widely accepted procedure to incorporate it with learning frameworks. This study analyzes the effects of adding or applying different noise models of varying magnitudes to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. Noise models that are distributed with different density functions are given common magnitude levels via Structural Similarity (SSIM) metric in order to create an appropriate ground for comparison. The basic results are conforming with the most of the common notions in machine learning, and also introduce some novel heuristics and recommendations on noise injection. The new approaches will provide better understanding on optimal learning procedures for image classification.

Uncovering Unique Concept Vectors through Latent Space Decomposition. (arXiv:2307.06913v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Mara Graziani, Laura O' Mahony, An-Phi Nguyen, Henning Müller, Vincent Andrearczyk

Interpreting the inner workings of deep learning models is crucial for establishing trust and ensuring model safety. Concept-based explanations have emerged as a superior approach that is more interpretable than feature attribution estimates such as pixel saliency. However, defining the concepts for the interpretability analysis biases the explanations by the user's expectations on the concepts. To address this, we propose a novel post-hoc unsupervised method that automatically uncovers the concepts learned by deep models during training. By decomposing the latent space of a layer in singular vectors and refining them by unsupervised clustering, we uncover concept vectors aligned with directions of high variance that are relevant to the model prediction, and that point to semantically distinct concepts. Our extensive experiments reveal that the majority of our concepts are readily understandable to humans, exhibit coherency, and bear relevance to the task at hand. Moreover, we showcase the practical utility of our method in dataset exploration, where our concept vectors successfully identify outlier training samples affected by various confounding factors. This novel exploration technique has remarkable versatility to data types and model architectures and it will facilitate the identification of biases and the discovery of sources of error within training data.

Domain-Agnostic Tuning-Encoder for Fast Personalization of Text-To-Image Models. (arXiv:2307.06925v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Moab Arar, Rinon Gal, Yuval Atzmon, Gal Chechik, Daniel Cohen-Or, Ariel Shamir, Amit H. Bermano

Text-to-image (T2I) personalization allows users to guide the creative image generation process by combining their own visual concepts in natural language prompts. Recently, encoder-based techniques have emerged as a new effective approach for T2I personalization, reducing the need for multiple images and long training times. However, most existing encoders are limited to a single-class domain, which hinders their ability to handle diverse concepts. In this work, we propose a domain-agnostic method that does not require any specialized dataset or prior information about the personalized concepts. We introduce a novel contrastive-based regularization technique to maintain high fidelity to the target concept characteristics while keeping the predicted embeddings close to editable regions of the latent space, by pushing the predicted tokens toward their nearest existing CLIP tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show how the learned tokens are more semantic than tokens predicted by unregularized models. This leads to a better representation that achieves state-of-the-art performance while being more flexible than previous methods.

mBLIP: Efficient Bootstrapping of Multilingual Vision-LLMs. (arXiv:2307.06930v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Gregor Geigle, Abhay Jain, Radu Timofte, Goran Glavaš

Modular vision-language models (Vision-LLMs) align pretrained image encoders with (pretrained) large language models (LLMs), representing a computationally much more efficient alternative to end-to-end training of large vision-language models from scratch, which is prohibitively expensive for most. Vision-LLMs instead post-hoc condition LLMs to `understand' the output of an image encoder. With the abundance of readily available high-quality English image-text data as well as monolingual English LLMs, the research focus has been on English-only Vision-LLMs. Multilingual vision-language models are still predominantly obtained via expensive end-to-end pretraining, resulting in comparatively smaller models, trained on limited multilingual image data supplemented with text-only multilingual corpora. In this work, we present mBLIP, the first multilingual Vision-LLM, which we obtain in a computationally efficient manner -- on consumer hardware using only a few million training examples -- by leveraging a pretrained multilingual LLM. To this end, we \textit{re-align} an image encoder previously tuned to an English LLM to a new, multilingual LLM -- for this, we leverage multilingual data from a mix of vision-and-language tasks, which we obtain by machine-translating high-quality English data to 95 languages. On the IGLUE benchmark, mBLIP yields results competitive with state-of-the-art models. Moreover, in image captioning on XM3600, mBLIP (zero-shot) even outperforms PaLI-X (a model with 55B parameters). Compared to these very large multilingual vision-language models trained from scratch, we obtain mBLIP by training orders of magnitude fewer parameters on magnitudes less data. We release our model and code at \url{https://github.com/gregor-ge/mBLIP}.

Animate-A-Story: Storytelling with Retrieval-Augmented Video Generation. (arXiv:2307.06940v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yingqing He, Menghan Xia, Haoxin Chen, Xiaodong Cun, Yuan Gong, Jinbo Xing, Yong Zhang, Xintao Wang, Chao Weng, Ying Shan, Qifeng Chen

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.

On the Connection between Game-Theoretic Feature Attributions and Counterfactual Explanations. (arXiv:2307.06941v1 [cs.AI])

Authors: Emanuele Albini, Shubham Sharma, Saumitra Mishra, Danial Dervovic, Daniele Magazzeni

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has received widespread interest in recent years, and two of the most popular types of explanations are feature attributions, and counterfactual explanations. These classes of approaches have been largely studied independently and the few attempts at reconciling them have been primarily empirical. This work establishes a clear theoretical connection between game-theoretic feature attributions, focusing on but not limited to SHAP, and counterfactuals explanations. After motivating operative changes to Shapley values based feature attributions and counterfactual explanations, we prove that, under conditions, they are in fact equivalent. We then extend the equivalency result to game-theoretic solution concepts beyond Shapley values. Moreover, through the analysis of the conditions of such equivalence, we shed light on the limitations of naively using counterfactual explanations to provide feature importances. Experiments on three datasets quantitatively show the difference in explanations at every stage of the connection between the two approaches and corroborate the theoretical findings.

InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation. (arXiv:2307.06942v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yi Wang, Yinan He, Yizhuo Li, Kunchang Li, Jiashuo Yu, Xin Ma, Xinyuan Chen, Yaohui Wang, Ping Luo, Ziwei Liu, Yali Wang, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao

This paper introduces InternVid, a large-scale video-centric multimodal dataset that enables learning powerful and transferable video-text representations for multimodal understanding and generation. The InternVid dataset contains over 7 million videos lasting nearly 760K hours, yielding 234M video clips accompanied by detailed descriptions of total 4.1B words. Our core contribution is to develop a scalable approach to autonomously build a high-quality video-text dataset with large language models (LLM), thereby showcasing its efficacy in learning video-language representation at scale. Specifically, we utilize a multi-scale approach to generate video-related descriptions. Furthermore, we introduce ViCLIP, a video-text representation learning model based on ViT-L. Learned on InternVid via contrastive learning, this model demonstrates leading zero-shot action recognition and competitive video retrieval performance. Beyond basic video understanding tasks like recognition and retrieval, our dataset and model have broad applications. They are particularly beneficial for generating interleaved video-text data for learning a video-centric dialogue system, advancing video-to-text and text-to-video generation research. These proposed resources provide a tool for researchers and practitioners interested in multimodal video understanding and generation.

Video-FocalNets: Spatio-Temporal Focal Modulation for Video Action Recognition. (arXiv:2307.06947v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Syed Talal Wasim, Muhammad Uzair Khattak, Muzammal Naseer, Salman Khan, Mubarak Shah, Fahad Shahbaz Khan

Recent video recognition models utilize Transformer models for long-range spatio-temporal context modeling. Video transformer designs are based on self-attention that can model global context at a high computational cost. In comparison, convolutional designs for videos offer an efficient alternative but lack long-range dependency modeling. Towards achieving the best of both designs, this work proposes Video-FocalNet, an effective and efficient architecture for video recognition that models both local and global contexts. Video-FocalNet is based on a spatio-temporal focal modulation architecture that reverses the interaction and aggregation steps of self-attention for better efficiency. Further, the aggregation step and the interaction step are both implemented using efficient convolution and element-wise multiplication operations that are computationally less expensive than their self-attention counterparts on video representations. We extensively explore the design space of focal modulation-based spatio-temporal context modeling and demonstrate our parallel spatial and temporal encoding design to be the optimal choice. Video-FocalNets perform favorably well against the state-of-the-art transformer-based models for video recognition on three large-scale datasets (Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and SS-v2) at a lower computational cost. Our code/models are released at https://github.com/TalalWasim/Video-FocalNets.

Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting. (arXiv:2307.06948v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Muhammad Uzair Khattak, Syed Talal Wasim, Muzammal Naseer, Salman Khan, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Fahad Shahbaz Khan

Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient alternative for fine-tuning foundational models, such as CLIP, for various downstream tasks. Conventionally trained using the task-specific objective, i.e., cross-entropy loss, prompts tend to overfit downstream data distributions and find it challenging to capture task-agnostic general features from the frozen CLIP. This leads to the loss of the model's original generalization capability. To address this issue, our work introduces a self-regularization framework for prompting called PromptSRC (Prompting with Self-regulating Constraints). PromptSRC guides the prompts to optimize for both task-specific and task-agnostic general representations using a three-pronged approach by: (a) regulating {prompted} representations via mutual agreement maximization with the frozen model, (b) regulating with self-ensemble of prompts over the training trajectory to encode their complementary strengths, and (c) regulating with textual diversity to mitigate sample diversity imbalance with the visual branch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first regularization framework for prompt learning that avoids overfitting by jointly attending to pre-trained model features, the training trajectory during prompting, and the textual diversity. PromptSRC explicitly steers the prompts to learn a representation space that maximizes performance on downstream tasks without compromising CLIP generalization. We perform extensive experiments on 4 benchmarks where PromptSRC overall performs favorably well compared to the existing methods. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/muzairkhattak/PromptSRC.

HyperDreamBooth: HyperNetworks for Fast Personalization of Text-to-Image Models. (arXiv:2307.06949v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Nataniel Ruiz, Yuanzhen Li, Varun Jampani, Wei Wei, Tingbo Hou, Yael Pritch, Neal Wadhwa, Michael Rubinstein, Kfir Aberman

Personalization has emerged as a prominent aspect within the field of generative AI, enabling the synthesis of individuals in diverse contexts and styles, while retaining high-fidelity to their identities. However, the process of personalization presents inherent challenges in terms of time and memory requirements. Fine-tuning each personalized model needs considerable GPU time investment, and storing a personalized model per subject can be demanding in terms of storage capacity. To overcome these challenges, we propose HyperDreamBooth-a hypernetwork capable of efficiently generating a small set of personalized weights from a single image of a person. By composing these weights into the diffusion model, coupled with fast finetuning, HyperDreamBooth can generate a person's face in various contexts and styles, with high subject details while also preserving the model's crucial knowledge of diverse styles and semantic modifications. Our method achieves personalization on faces in roughly 20 seconds, 25x faster than DreamBooth and 125x faster than Textual Inversion, using as few as one reference image, with the same quality and style diversity as DreamBooth. Also our method yields a model that is 10000x smaller than a normal DreamBooth model. Project page: https://hyperdreambooth.github.io

Human in Events: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Human-centric Video Analysis in Complex Events. (arXiv:2005.04490v6 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Weiyao Lin, Huabin Liu, Shizhan Liu, Yuxi Li, Rui Qian, Tao Wang, Ning Xu, Hongkai Xiong, Guo-Jun Qi, Nicu Sebe

Along with the development of modern smart cities, human-centric video analysis has been encountering the challenge of analyzing diverse and complex events in real scenes. A complex event relates to dense crowds, anomalous individuals, or collective behaviors. However, limited by the scale and coverage of existing video datasets, few human analysis approaches have reported their performances on such complex events. To this end, we present a new large-scale dataset with comprehensive annotations, named Human-in-Events or HiEve (Human-centric video analysis in complex Events), for the understanding of human motions, poses, and actions in a variety of realistic events, especially in crowd & complex events. It contains a record number of poses (>1M), the largest number of action instances (>56k) under complex events, as well as one of the largest numbers of trajectories lasting for longer time (with an average trajectory length of >480 frames). Based on its diverse annotation, we present two simple baselines for action recognition and pose estimation, respectively. They leverage cross-label information during training to enhance the feature learning in corresponding visual tasks. Experiments show that they could boost the performance of existing action recognition and pose estimation pipelines. More importantly, they prove the widely ranged annotations in HiEve can improve various video tasks. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark recent video analysis approaches together with our baseline methods, demonstrating HiEve is a challenging dataset for human-centric video analysis. We expect that the dataset will advance the development of cutting-edge techniques in human-centric analysis and the understanding of complex events. The dataset is available at this http URL

Emergent Neural Network Mechanisms for Generalization to Objects in Novel Orientations. (arXiv:2109.13445v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Avi Cooper, Xavier Boix, Daniel Harari, Spandan Madan, Hanspeter Pfister, Tomotake Sasaki, Pawan Sinha

The capability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to recognize objects in orientations outside the distribution of the training data is not well understood. We present evidence that DNNs are capable of generalizing to objects in novel orientations by disseminating orientation-invariance obtained from familiar objects seen from many viewpoints. This capability strengthens when training the DNN with an increasing number of familiar objects, but only in orientations that involve 2D rotations of familiar orientations. We show that this dissemination is achieved via neurons tuned to common features between familiar and unfamiliar objects. These results implicate brain-like neural mechanisms for generalization.

Improving Chest X-Ray Report Generation by Leveraging Warm Starting. (arXiv:2201.09405v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Aaron Nicolson, Jason Dowling, Bevan Koopman

Automatically generating a report from a patient's Chest X-Rays (CXRs) is a promising solution to reducing clinical workload and improving patient care. However, current CXR report generators -- which are predominantly encoder-to-decoder models -- lack the diagnostic accuracy to be deployed in a clinical setting. To improve CXR report generation, we investigate warm starting the encoder and decoder with recent open-source computer vision and natural language processing checkpoints, such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) and PubMedBERT. To this end, each checkpoint is evaluated on the MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray datasets. Our experimental investigation demonstrates that the Convolutional vision Transformer (CvT) ImageNet-21K and the Distilled Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (DistilGPT2) checkpoints are best for warm starting the encoder and decoder, respectively. Compared to the state-of-the-art ($\mathcal{M}^2$ Transformer Progressive), CvT2DistilGPT2 attained an improvement of 8.3\% for CE F-1, 1.8\% for BLEU-4, 1.6\% for ROUGE-L, and 1.0\% for METEOR. The reports generated by CvT2DistilGPT2 have a higher similarity to radiologist reports than previous approaches. This indicates that leveraging warm starting improves CXR report generation. Code and checkpoints for CvT2DistilGPT2 are available at https://github.com/aehrc/cvt2distilgpt2.

Block shuffling learning for Deepfake Detection. (arXiv:2202.02819v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Sitong Liu, Zhichao Lian, Siqi Gu, Liang Xiao

Deepfake detection methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated high accuracy. \textcolor{black}{However, these methods often suffer from decreased performance when faced with unknown forgery methods and common transformations such as resizing and blurring, resulting in deviations between training and testing domains.} This phenomenon, known as overfitting, poses a significant challenge. To address this issue, we propose a novel block shuffling regularization method. Firstly, our approach involves dividing the images into blocks and applying both intra-block and inter-block shuffling techniques. This process indirectly achieves weight-sharing across different dimensions. Secondly, we introduce an adversarial loss algorithm to mitigate the overfitting problem induced by the shuffling noise. Finally, we restore the spatial layout of the blocks to capture the semantic associations among them. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which surpasses existing approaches in forgery face detection. Notably, our method exhibits excellent generalization capabilities, demonstrating robustness against cross-dataset evaluations and common image transformations. Especially our method can be easily integrated with various CNN models. Source code is available at \href{https://github.com/NoWindButRain/BlockShuffleLearning}{Github}.

PEGG-Net: Pixel-Wise Efficient Grasp Generation in Complex Scenes. (arXiv:2203.16301v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Haozhe Wang, Zhiyang Liu, Lei Zhou, Huan Yin, Marcelo H Ang Jr

Vision-based grasp estimation is an essential part of robotic manipulation tasks in the real world. Existing planar grasp estimation algorithms have been demonstrated to work well in relatively simple scenes. But when it comes to complex scenes, such as cluttered scenes with messy backgrounds and moving objects, the algorithms from previous works are prone to generate inaccurate and unstable grasping contact points. In this work, we first study the existing planar grasp estimation algorithms and analyze the related challenges in complex scenes. Secondly, we design a Pixel-wise Efficient Grasp Generation Network (PEGG-Net) to tackle the problem of grasping in complex scenes. PEGG-Net can achieve improved state-of-the-art performance on the Cornell dataset (98.9%) and second-best performance on the Jacquard dataset (93.8%), outperforming other existing algorithms without the introduction of complex structures. Thirdly, PEGG-Net could operate in a closed-loop manner for added robustness in dynamic environments using position-based visual servoing (PBVS). Finally, we conduct real-world experiments on static, dynamic, and cluttered objects in different complex scenes. The results show that our proposed network achieves a high success rate in grasping irregular objects, household objects, and workshop tools. To benefit the community, our trained model and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/HZWang96/PEGG-Net.

Rebalanced Zero-shot Learning. (arXiv:2210.07031v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Zihan Ye, Guanyu Yang, Xiaobo Jin, Youfa Liu, Kaizhu Huang

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to identify unseen classes with zero samples during training. Broadly speaking, present ZSL methods usually adopt class-level semantic labels and compare them with instance-level semantic predictions to infer unseen classes. However, we find that such existing models mostly produce imbalanced semantic predictions, i.e. these models could perform precisely for some semantics, but may not for others. To address the drawback, we aim to introduce an imbalanced learning framework into ZSL. However, we find that imbalanced ZSL has two unique challenges: (1) Its imbalanced predictions are highly correlated with the value of semantic labels rather than the number of samples as typically considered in the traditional imbalanced learning; (2) Different semantics follow quite different error distributions between classes. To mitigate these issues, we first formalize ZSL as an imbalanced regression problem which offers empirical evidences to interpret how semantic labels lead to imbalanced semantic predictions. We then propose a re-weighted loss termed Re-balanced Mean-Squared Error (ReMSE), which tracks the mean and variance of error distributions, thus ensuring rebalanced learning across classes. As a major contribution, we conduct a series of analyses showing that ReMSE is theoretically well established. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively alleviates the imbalance in semantic prediction and outperforms many state-of-the-art ZSL methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/FouriYe/ReZSL-TIP23.

Visually Adversarial Attacks and Defenses in the Physical World: A Survey. (arXiv:2211.01671v5 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Xingxing Wei, Bangzheng Pu, Jiefan Lu, Baoyuan Wu

Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in various real-world scenarios, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. The current adversarial attacks in computer vision can be divided into digital attacks and physical attacks according to their different attack forms. Compared with digital attacks, which generate perturbations in the digital pixels, physical attacks are more practical in the real world. Owing to the serious security problem caused by physically adversarial examples, many works have been proposed to evaluate the physically adversarial robustness of DNNs in the past years. In this paper, we summarize a survey versus the current physically adversarial attacks and physically adversarial defenses in computer vision. To establish a taxonomy, we organize the current physical attacks from attack tasks, attack forms, and attack methods, respectively. Thus, readers can have a systematic knowledge of this topic from different aspects. For the physical defenses, we establish the taxonomy from pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing for the DNN models to achieve full coverage of the adversarial defenses. Based on the above survey, we finally discuss the challenges of this research field and further outlook on the future direction.

Local Implicit Normalizing Flow for Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-Resolution. (arXiv:2303.05156v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jie-En Yao, Li-Yuan Tsao, Yi-Chen Lo, Roy Tseng, Chia-Che Chang, Chun-Yi Lee

Flow-based methods have demonstrated promising results in addressing the ill-posed nature of super-resolution (SR) by learning the distribution of high-resolution (HR) images with the normalizing flow. However, these methods can only perform a predefined fixed-scale SR, limiting their potential in real-world applications. Meanwhile, arbitrary-scale SR has gained more attention and achieved great progress. Nonetheless, previous arbitrary-scale SR methods ignore the ill-posed problem and train the model with per-pixel L1 loss, leading to blurry SR outputs. In this work, we propose "Local Implicit Normalizing Flow" (LINF) as a unified solution to the above problems. LINF models the distribution of texture details under different scaling factors with normalizing flow. Thus, LINF can generate photo-realistic HR images with rich texture details in arbitrary scale factors. We evaluate LINF with extensive experiments and show that LINF achieves the state-of-the-art perceptual quality compared with prior arbitrary-scale SR methods.

EfficientNet Algorithm for Classification of Different Types of Cancer. (arXiv:2304.08715v3 [eess.IV] UPDATED)

Authors: Romario Sameh Samir

Accurate and efficient classification of different types of cancer is critical for early detection and effective treatment. In this paper, we present the results of our experiments using the EfficientNet algorithm for classification of brain tumor, breast cancer mammography, chest cancer, and skin cancer. We used publicly available datasets and preprocessed the images to ensure consistency and comparability. Our experiments show that the EfficientNet algorithm achieved high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores on each of the cancer datasets, outperforming other state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature. We also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the EfficientNet algorithm and its potential applications in clinical practice. Our results suggest that the EfficientNet algorithm is well-suited for classification of different types of cancer and can be used to improve the accuracy and efficiency of cancer diagnosis.

FishRecGAN: An End to End GAN Based Network for Fisheye Rectification and Calibration. (arXiv:2305.05222v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Xin Shen, Kyungdon Joo, Jean Oh

We propose an end-to-end deep learning approach to rectify fisheye images and simultaneously calibrate camera intrinsic and distortion parameters. Our method consists of two parts: a Quick Image Rectification Module developed with a Pix2Pix GAN and Wasserstein GAN (W-Pix2PixGAN), and a Calibration Module with a CNN architecture. Our Quick Rectification Network performs robust rectification with good resolution, making it suitable for constant calibration in camera-based surveillance equipment. To achieve high-quality calibration, we use the straightened output from the Quick Rectification Module as a guidance-like semantic feature map for the Calibration Module to learn the geometric relationship between the straightened feature and the distorted feature. We train and validate our method with a large synthesized dataset labeled with well-simulated parameters applied to a perspective image dataset. Our solution has achieved robust performance in high-resolution with a significant PSNR value of 22.343.

What You See is What You Read? Improving Text-Image Alignment Evaluation. (arXiv:2305.10400v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Michal Yarom, Yonatan Bitton, Soravit Changpinyo, Roee Aharoni, Jonathan Herzig, Oran Lang, Eran Ofek, Idan Szpektor

Automatically determining whether a text and a corresponding image are semantically aligned is a significant challenge for vision-language models, with applications in generative text-to-image and image-to-text tasks. In this work, we study methods for automatic text-image alignment evaluation. We first introduce SeeTRUE: a comprehensive evaluation set, spanning multiple datasets from both text-to-image and image-to-text generation tasks, with human judgements for whether a given text-image pair is semantically aligned. We then describe two automatic methods to determine alignment: the first involving a pipeline based on question generation and visual question answering models, and the second employing an end-to-end classification approach by finetuning multimodal pretrained models. Both methods surpass prior approaches in various text-image alignment tasks, with significant improvements in challenging cases that involve complex composition or unnatural images. Finally, we demonstrate how our approaches can localize specific misalignments between an image and a given text, and how they can be used to automatically re-rank candidates in text-to-image generation.

A Novel Driver Distraction Behavior Detection Method Based on Self-supervised Learning with Masked Image Modeling. (arXiv:2306.00543v4 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yingzhi Zhang, Taiguo Li, Chao Li, Xinghong Zhou

Driver distraction causes a significant number of traffic accidents every year, resulting in economic losses and casualties. Currently, the level of automation in commercial vehicles is far from completely unmanned, and drivers still play an important role in operating and controlling the vehicle. Therefore, driver distraction behavior detection is crucial for road safety. At present, driver distraction detection primarily relies on traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN) and supervised learning methods. However, there are still challenges such as the high cost of labeled datasets, limited ability to capture high-level semantic information, and weak generalization performance. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a new self-supervised learning method based on masked image modeling for driver distraction behavior detection. Firstly, a self-supervised learning framework for masked image modeling (MIM) is introduced to solve the serious human and material consumption issues caused by dataset labeling. Secondly, the Swin Transformer is employed as an encoder. Performance is enhanced by reconfiguring the Swin Transformer block and adjusting the distribution of the number of window multi-head self-attention (W-MSA) and shifted window multi-head self-attention (SW-MSA) detection heads across all stages, which leads to model more lightening. Finally, various data augmentation strategies are used along with the best random masking strategy to strengthen the model's recognition and generalization ability. Test results on a large-scale driver distraction behavior dataset show that the self-supervised learning method proposed in this paper achieves an accuracy of 99.60%, approximating the excellent performance of advanced supervised learning methods. Our code is publicly available at github.com/Rocky1salady-killer/SL-DDBD.

Deblurring Masked Autoencoder is Better Recipe for Ultrasound Image Recognition. (arXiv:2306.08249v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Qingbo Kang, Jun Gao, Kang Li, Qicheng Lao

Masked autoencoder (MAE) has attracted unprecedented attention and achieves remarkable performance in many vision tasks. It reconstructs random masked image patches (known as proxy task) during pretraining and learns meaningful semantic representations that can be transferred to downstream tasks. However, MAE has not been thoroughly explored in ultrasound imaging. In this work, we investigate the potential of MAE for ultrasound image recognition. Motivated by the unique property of ultrasound imaging in high noise-to-signal ratio, we propose a novel deblurring MAE approach that incorporates deblurring into the proxy task during pretraining. The addition of deblurring facilitates the pretraining to better recover the subtle details presented in the ultrasound images, thus improving the performance of the downstream classification task. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our deblurring MAE, achieving state-of-the-art performance in ultrasound image classification. Overall, our work highlights the potential of MAE for ultrasound image recognition and presents a novel approach that incorporates deblurring to further improve its effectiveness.

A survey on deep learning approaches for data integration in autonomous driving system. (arXiv:2306.11740v2 [cs.RO] UPDATED)

Authors: Xi Zhu, Likang Wang, Caifa Zhou, Xiya Cao, Yue Gong, Lei Chen

The perception module of self-driving vehicles relies on a multi-sensor system to understand its environment. Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the rapid development of approaches that integrate multi-sensory measurements to enhance perception capabilities. This paper surveys the latest deep learning integration techniques applied to the perception module in autonomous driving systems, categorizing integration approaches based on "what, how, and when to integrate". A new taxonomy of integration is proposed, based on three dimensions: multi-view, multi-modality, and multi-frame. The integration operations and their pros and cons are summarized, providing new insights into the properties of an "ideal" data integration approach that can alleviate the limitations of existing methods. After reviewing hundreds of relevant papers, this survey concludes with a discussion of the key features of an optimal data integration approach.

Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World. (arXiv:2306.14824v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Zhiliang Peng, Wenhui Wang, Li Dong, Yaru Hao, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Furu Wei

We introduce Kosmos-2, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), enabling new capabilities of perceiving object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes) and grounding text to the visual world. Specifically, we represent refer expressions as links in Markdown, i.e., ``[text span](bounding boxes)'', where object descriptions are sequences of location tokens. Together with multimodal corpora, we construct large-scale data of grounded image-text pairs (called GrIT) to train the model. In addition to the existing capabilities of MLLMs (e.g., perceiving general modalities, following instructions, and performing in-context learning), Kosmos-2 integrates the grounding capability into downstream applications. We evaluate Kosmos-2 on a wide range of tasks, including (i) multimodal grounding, such as referring expression comprehension, and phrase grounding, (ii) multimodal referring, such as referring expression generation, (iii) perception-language tasks, and (iv) language understanding and generation. This work lays out the foundation for the development of Embodiment AI and sheds light on the big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling, which is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. Code and pretrained models are available at https://aka.ms/kosmos-2.

Advancing Wound Filling Extraction on 3D Faces: Auto-Segmentation and Wound Face Regeneration Approach. (arXiv:2307.01844v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Duong Q. Nguyen, Thinh D. Le, Phuong D. Nguyen, Nga T.K. Le, H. Nguyen-Xuan

Facial wound segmentation plays a crucial role in preoperative planning and optimizing patient outcomes in various medical applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach for automating 3D facial wound segmentation using a two-stream graph convolutional network. Our method leverages the Cir3D-FaIR dataset and addresses the challenge of data imbalance through extensive experimentation with different loss functions. To achieve accurate segmentation, we conducted thorough experiments and selected a high-performing model from the trained models. The selected model demonstrates exceptional segmentation performance for complex 3D facial wounds. Furthermore, based on the segmentation model, we propose an improved approach for extracting 3D facial wound fillers and compare it to the results of the previous study. Our method achieved a remarkable accuracy of 0.9999986\% on the test suite, surpassing the performance of the previous method. From this result, we use 3D printing technology to illustrate the shape of the wound filling. The outcomes of this study have significant implications for physicians involved in preoperative planning and intervention design. By automating facial wound segmentation and improving the accuracy of wound-filling extraction, our approach can assist in carefully assessing and optimizing interventions, leading to enhanced patient outcomes. Additionally, it contributes to advancing facial reconstruction techniques by utilizing machine learning and 3D bioprinting for printing skin tissue implants. Our source code is available at \url{https://github.com/SIMOGroup/WoundFilling3D}.

Applying a Color Palette with Local Control using Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2307.02698v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Vaibhav Vavilala, David Forsyth

We demonstrate two novel editing procedures in the context of fantasy card art. Palette transfer applies a specified reference palette to a given card. For fantasy art, the desired change in palette can be very large, leading to huge changes in the "look" of the art. We demonstrate that a pipeline of vector quantization; matching; and "vector dequantization" (using a diffusion model) produces successful extreme palette transfers. Segment control allows an artist to move one or more image segments, and to optionally specify the desired color of the result. The combination of these two types of edit yields valuable workflows, including: move a segment, then recolor; recolor, then force some segments to take a prescribed color. We demonstrate our methods on the challenging Yu-Gi-Oh card art dataset.

Beyond Geo-localization: Fine-grained Orientation of Street-view Images by Cross-view Matching with Satellite Imagery with Supplementary Materials. (arXiv:2307.03398v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wenmiao Hu, Yichen Zhang, Yuxuan Liang, Yifang Yin, Andrei Georgescu, An Tran, Hannes Kruppa, See-Kiong Ng, Roger Zimmermann

Street-view imagery provides us with novel experiences to explore different places remotely. Carefully calibrated street-view images (e.g. Google Street View) can be used for different downstream tasks, e.g. navigation, map features extraction. As personal high-quality cameras have become much more affordable and portable, an enormous amount of crowdsourced street-view images are uploaded to the internet, but commonly with missing or noisy sensor information. To prepare this hidden treasure for "ready-to-use" status, determining missing location information and camera orientation angles are two equally important tasks. Recent methods have achieved high performance on geo-localization of street-view images by cross-view matching with a pool of geo-referenced satellite imagery. However, most of the existing works focus more on geo-localization than estimating the image orientation. In this work, we re-state the importance of finding fine-grained orientation for street-view images, formally define the problem and provide a set of evaluation metrics to assess the quality of the orientation estimation. We propose two methods to improve the granularity of the orientation estimation, achieving 82.4% and 72.3% accuracy for images with estimated angle errors below 2 degrees for CVUSA and CVACT datasets, corresponding to 34.9% and 28.2% absolute improvement compared to previous works. Integrating fine-grained orientation estimation in training also improves the performance on geo-localization, giving top 1 recall 95.5%/85.5% and 86.8%/80.4% for orientation known/unknown tests on the two datasets.

Blocks2World: Controlling Realistic Scenes with Editable Primitives. (arXiv:2307.03847v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Vaibhav Vavilala, Seemandhar Jain, Rahul Vasanth, Anand Bhattad, David Forsyth

We present Blocks2World, a novel method for 3D scene rendering and editing that leverages a two-step process: convex decomposition of images and conditioned synthesis. Our technique begins by extracting 3D parallelepipeds from various objects in a given scene using convex decomposition, thus obtaining a primitive representation of the scene. These primitives are then utilized to generate paired data through simple ray-traced depth maps. The next stage involves training a conditioned model that learns to generate images from the 2D-rendered convex primitives. This step establishes a direct mapping between the 3D model and its 2D representation, effectively learning the transition from a 3D model to an image. Once the model is fully trained, it offers remarkable control over the synthesis of novel and edited scenes. This is achieved by manipulating the primitives at test time, including translating or adding them, thereby enabling a highly customizable scene rendering process. Our method provides a fresh perspective on 3D scene rendering and editing, offering control and flexibility. It opens up new avenues for research and applications in the field, including authoring and data augmentation.

Convex Decomposition of Indoor Scenes. (arXiv:2307.04246v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Vaibhav Vavilala, David Forsyth

We describe a method to parse a complex, cluttered indoor scene into primitives which offer a parsimonious abstraction of scene structure. Our primitives are simple convexes. Our method uses a learned regression procedure to parse a scene into a fixed number of convexes from RGBD input, and can optionally accept segmentations to improve the decomposition. The result is then polished with a descent method which adjusts the convexes to produce a very good fit, and greedily removes superfluous primitives. Because the entire scene is parsed, we can evaluate using traditional depth, normal, and segmentation error metrics. Our evaluation procedure demonstrates that the error from our primitive representation is comparable to that of predicting depth from a single image.

The Staged Knowledge Distillation in Video Classification: Harmonizing Student Progress by a Complementary Weakly Supervised Framework. (arXiv:2307.05201v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Chao Wang, Zheng Tang

In the context of label-efficient learning on video data, the distillation method and the structural design of the teacher-student architecture have a significant impact on knowledge distillation. However, the relationship between these factors has been overlooked in previous research. To address this gap, we propose a new weakly supervised learning framework for knowledge distillation in video classification that is designed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the student model. Our approach leverages the concept of substage-based learning to distill knowledge based on the combination of student substages and the correlation of corresponding substages. We also employ the progressive cascade training method to address the accuracy loss caused by the large capacity gap between the teacher and the student. Additionally, we propose a pseudo-label optimization strategy to improve the initial data label. To optimize the loss functions of different distillation substages during the training process, we introduce a new loss method based on feature distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on both real and simulated data sets, demonstrating that our proposed approach outperforms existing distillation methods in terms of knowledge distillation for video classification tasks. Our proposed substage-based distillation approach has the potential to inform future research on label-efficient learning for video data.

Rad-ReStruct: A Novel VQA Benchmark and Method for Structured Radiology Reporting. (arXiv:2307.05766v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Chantal Pellegrini, Matthias Keicher, Ege Özsoy, Nassir Navab

Radiology reporting is a crucial part of the communication between radiologists and other medical professionals, but it can be time-consuming and error-prone. One approach to alleviate this is structured reporting, which saves time and enables a more accurate evaluation than free-text reports. However, there is limited research on automating structured reporting, and no public benchmark is available for evaluating and comparing different methods. To close this gap, we introduce Rad-ReStruct, a new benchmark dataset that provides fine-grained, hierarchically ordered annotations in the form of structured reports for X-Ray images. We model the structured reporting task as hierarchical visual question answering (VQA) and propose hi-VQA, a novel method that considers prior context in the form of previously asked questions and answers for populating a structured radiology report. Our experiments show that hi-VQA achieves competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on the medical VQA benchmark VQARad while performing best among methods without domain-specific vision-language pretraining and provides a strong baseline on Rad-ReStruct. Our work represents a significant step towards the automated population of structured radiology reports and provides a valuable first benchmark for future research in this area. We will make all annotations and our code for annotation generation, model evaluation, and training publicly available upon acceptance. Our dataset and code is available at https://github.com/ChantalMP/Rad-ReStruct.

PIGEON: Predicting Image Geolocations. (arXiv:2307.05845v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Lukas Haas, Michal Skreta, Silas Alberti

We introduce PIGEON, a multi-task end-to-end system for planet-scale image geolocalization that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both external benchmarks and in human evaluation. Our work incorporates semantic geocell creation with label smoothing, conducts pretraining of a vision transformer on images with geographic information, and refines location predictions with ProtoNets across a candidate set of geocells. The contributions of PIGEON are three-fold: first, we design a semantic geocells creation and splitting algorithm based on open-source data which can be adapted to any geospatial dataset. Second, we show the effectiveness of intra-geocell refinement and the applicability of unsupervised clustering and ProtNets to the task. Finally, we make our pre-trained CLIP transformer model, StreetCLIP, publicly available for use in adjacent domains with applications to fighting climate change and urban and rural scene understanding.

Reading Radiology Imaging Like The Radiologist. (arXiv:2307.05921v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Yuhao Wang

Automated radiology report generation aims to generate radiology reports that contain rich, fine-grained descriptions of radiology imaging. Compared with image captioning in the natural image domain, medical images are very similar to each other, with only minor differences in the occurrence of diseases. Given the importance of these minor differences in the radiology report, it is crucial to encourage the model to focus more on the subtle regions of disease occurrence. Secondly, the problem of visual and textual data biases is serious. Not only do normal cases make up the majority of the dataset, but sentences describing areas with pathological changes also constitute only a small part of the paragraph. Lastly, generating medical image reports involves the challenge of long text generation, which requires more expertise and empirical training in medical knowledge. As a result, the difficulty of generating such reports is increased. To address these challenges, we propose a disease-oriented retrieval framework that utilizes similar reports as prior knowledge references. We design a factual consistency captioning generator to generate more accurate and factually consistent disease descriptions. Our framework can find most similar reports for a given disease from the CXR database by retrieving a disease-oriented mask consisting of the position and morphological characteristics. By referencing the disease-oriented similar report and the visual features, the factual consistency model can generate a more accurate radiology report.

Operational Support Estimator Networks. (arXiv:2307.06065v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Mete Ahishali, Mehmet Yamac, Serkan Kiranyaz, Moncef Gabbouj

In this work, we propose a novel approach called Operational Support Estimator Networks (OSENs) for the support estimation task. Support Estimation (SE) is defined as finding the locations of non-zero elements in a sparse signal. By its very nature, the mapping between the measurement and sparse signal is a non-linear operation. Traditional support estimators rely on computationally expensive iterative signal recovery techniques to achieve such non-linearity. Contrary to the convolution layers, the proposed OSEN approach consists of operational layers that can learn such complex non-linearities without the need for deep networks. In this way, the performance of the non-iterative support estimation is greatly improved. Moreover, the operational layers comprise so-called generative \textit{super neurons} with non-local kernels. The kernel location for each neuron/feature map is optimized jointly for the SE task during the training. We evaluate the OSENs in three different applications: i. support estimation from Compressive Sensing (CS) measurements, ii. representation-based classification, and iii. learning-aided CS reconstruction where the output of OSENs is used as prior knowledge to the CS algorithm for an enhanced reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves computational efficiency and outperforms competing methods, especially at low measurement rates by a significant margin. The software implementation is publicly shared at https://github.com/meteahishali/OSEN.