Recent developments in Transformers for language modeling have opened new areas of research in computer vision. Results from late 2019 showed vast performance increases in both object detection and recognition when convolutions are replaced by local self-attention kernels. Models using local self-attention kernels were also shown to have less parameters and FLOPS compared to equivalent architectures that only use convolutions. In this work we propose a novel method for learning the local self-attention kernel size. We then compare its performance to fixed-size local attention and convolution kernels. The code for all our experiments and models is available at https://github.com/JoeRoussy/adaptive-attention-in-cv
Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）；LIAAD - INESC TEC（LIAAD - 葡萄牙系统与计算机工程研究所）；FC Porto – Futebol SAD（波尔图足球俱乐部）
Computer Vision developments are enabling significant advances in many fields, including sports. Many applications built on top of Computer Vision technologies, such as tracking data, are nowadays essential for every top-level analyst, coach, and even player. In this paper, we survey Computer Vision techniques that can help many sports-related studies gather vast amounts of data, such as Object Detection and Pose Estimation. We provide a use case for such data: building a model for shot speed estimation with pose data obtained using only Computer Vision models. Our model achieves a correlation…
Few-Shot Learning is the challenge of training a model with only a small amount of data. Many solutions to this problem use meta-learning algorithms, i.e. algorithms that learn to learn. By sampling few-shot tasks from a larger dataset, we can teach these algorithms to solve new, unseen tasks. This document reports my work on meta-learning algorithms for Few-Shot Computer Vision. This work was done during my internship at Sicara, a French company building image recognition solutions for businesses. It contains: 1. an extensive review of the state-of-the-art in few-shot computer vision; 2. a be…
Maritime vessels equipped with visible and infrared cameras can complement other conventional sensors for object detection. However, application of computer vision techniques in maritime domain received attention only recently. The maritime environment offers its own unique requirements and challenges. Assessment of the quality of detections is a fundamental need in computer vision. However, the conventional assessment metrics suitable for usual object detection are deficient in the maritime setting. Thus, a large body of related work in computer vision appears inapplicable to the maritime set…
Misalignment between model predictions and intended usage can be detrimental for the deployment of computer vision models. The issue is exacerbated when the task involves complex structured outputs, as it becomes harder to design procedures which address this misalignment. In natural language processing, this is often addressed using reinforcement learning techniques that align models with a task reward. We adopt this approach and show its surprising effectiveness across multiple computer vision tasks, such as object detection, panoptic segmentation, colorization and image captioning. We belie…
Microsoft Cloud and AI（微软云与人工智能部门）；Microsoft Research Redmond（微软雷德蒙德研究院）
Automated visual understanding of our diverse and open world demands computer vision models to generalize well with minimal customization for specific tasks, similar to human vision. Computer vision foundation models, which are trained on diverse, large-scale dataset and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, are critical for this mission to solve real-world computer vision applications. While existing vision foundation models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and Wu Dao 2.0 focus mainly on mapping images and textual representations to a cross-modal shared representation, we introduce a new co…
Despite significant progress of deep learning in the field of computer vision, there has not been a software library that covers these methods in a unifying manner. We introduce ChainerCV, a software library that is intended to fill this gap. ChainerCV supports numerous neural network models as well as software components needed to conduct research in computer vision. These implementations emphasize simplicity, flexibility and good software engineering practices. The library is designed to perform on par with the results reported in published papers and its tools can be used as a baseline for …
School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学计算技术学院）
In this report we analysed a possibility of using computer vision techniques for automated reading of utility meters. In our study, we focused on two computer vision techniques: an open-source solution Tensorflow Object Detection (Tensorflow) and a commercial solution Anyline. This report extends our previous publication: We start with presentation of a structured analysis of related approaches. After that we provide a detailed comparison of two computer vision technologies, Tensorflow Object Detection (Tensorflow) and Anyline, applied to semi-automated reading of utility meters. In this paper…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI Lab）
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that can learn a global or personalized model from decentralized datasets on edge devices. However, in the computer vision domain, model performance in FL is far behind centralized training due to the lack of exploration in diverse tasks with a unified FL framework. FL has rarely been demonstrated effectively in advanced computer vision tasks such as object detection and image segmentation. To bridge the gap and facilitate the development of FL for computer vision tasks, in this work, we propose a federated learning library and benchma…
Calibrated estimates of uncertainty are critical for many real-world computer vision applications of deep learning. While there are several widely-used uncertainty estimation methods, dropout inference stands out for its simplicity and efficacy. This technique, however, requires multiple forward passes through the network during inference and therefore can be too resource-intensive to be deployed in real-time applications. We propose a simple, easy-to-optimize distillation method for learning the conditional predictive distribution of a pre-trained dropout model for fast, sample-free uncertain…
Towards a Better Understanding of the Computer Vision Research Community in Africa
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）；Nile University（尼罗河大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Angers（昂热大学）；University of Sfax（斯法克斯大学）；Ashesi University（阿希西大学）
Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by this observation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multi-modal tasks and self-supervised learning. In th…
RMD Engineering College（RMD工程学院）；Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology（萨蒂亚巴马科学技术学院）
Nowadays, digital content is widespread and simply redistributable, either lawfully or unlawfully. For example, after images are posted on the internet, other web users can modify them and then repost their versions, thereby generating near-duplicate images. The presence of near-duplicates affects the performance of the search engines critically. Computer vision is concerned with the automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of useful information from digital images. The main application of computer vision is image understanding. There are several tasks in image understanding such as fe…
Tongji University（同济大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；ClearMotion Inc.（ClearMotion公司）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Computer vision algorithms have been prevalently utilized for 3-D road imaging and pothole detection for over two decades. Nonetheless, there is a lack of systematic survey articles on state-of-the-art (SoTA) computer vision techniques, especially deep learning models, developed to tackle these problems. This article first introduces the sensing systems employed for 2-D and 3-D road data acquisition, including camera(s), laser scanners, and Microsoft Kinect. Afterward, it thoroughly and comprehensively reviews the SoTA computer vision algorithms, including (1) classical 2-D image processing, (…
Deep reinforcement learning augments the reinforcement learning framework and utilizes the powerful representation of deep neural networks. Recent works have demonstrated the remarkable successes of deep reinforcement learning in various domains including finance, medicine, healthcare, video games, robotics, and computer vision. In this work, we provide a detailed review of recent and state-of-the-art research advances of deep reinforcement learning in computer vision. We start with comprehending the theories of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and deep reinforcement learning. We then pr…
Institute of Technology Tralee（特拉利理工学院）；IMaR Technology Gateway（IMaR技术门户）
Deep Learning has pushed the limits of what was possible in the domain of Digital Image Processing. However, that is not to say that the traditional computer vision techniques which had been undergoing progressive development in years prior to the rise of DL have become obsolete. This paper will analyse the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. The aim of this paper is to promote a discussion on whether knowledge of classical computer vision techniques should be maintained. The paper will also explore how the two sides of computer vision can be combined. Several recent hybrid methodologies …
Deep Learning-based Computer Vision field has recently been trying to explore larger kernels for convolution to effectively scale up Convolutional Neural Networks. Simultaneously, new paradigm of models such as Vision Transformers find it difficult to scale up to larger higher resolution images due to their quadratic complexity in terms of input sequence. In this report, Fast Fourier Transform is utilised in various ways to provide some solutions to these issues.
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）
Neural networks are used for many real world applications, but often they have problems estimating their own confidence. This is particularly problematic for computer vision applications aimed at making high stakes decisions with humans and their lives. In this paper we make a meta-analysis of the literature, showing that most if not all computer vision applications do not use proper epistemic uncertainty quantification, which means that these models ignore their own limitations. We describe the consequences of using models without proper uncertainty quantification, and motivate the community …
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
We introduce gvnn, a neural network library in Torch aimed towards bridging the gap between classic geometric computer vision and deep learning. Inspired by the recent success of Spatial Transformer Networks, we propose several new layers which are often used as parametric transformations on the data in geometric computer vision. These layers can be inserted within a neural network much in the spirit of the original spatial transformers and allow backpropagation to enable end-to-end learning of a network involving any domain knowledge in geometric computer vision. This opens up applications in…
Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；MPI-IS（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Algorithmic fairness is frequently motivated in terms of a trade-off in which overall performance is decreased so as to improve performance on disadvantaged groups where the algorithm would otherwise be less accurate. Contrary to this, we find that applying existing fairness approaches to computer vision improve fairness by degrading the performance of classifiers across all groups (with increased degradation on the best performing groups). Extending the bias-variance decomposition for classification to fairness, we theoretically explain why the majority of fairness classifiers designed for lo…
We introduce the MNIST-C dataset, a comprehensive suite of 15 corruptions applied to the MNIST test set, for benchmarking out-of-distribution robustness in computer vision. Through several experiments and visualizations we demonstrate that our corruptions significantly degrade performance of state-of-the-art computer vision models while preserving the semantic content of the test images. In contrast to the popular notion of adversarial robustness, our model-agnostic corruptions do not seek worst-case performance but are instead designed to be broad and diverse, capturing multiple failure modes…
We introduce CVNets, a high-performance open-source library for training deep neural networks for visual recognition tasks, including classification, detection, and segmentation. CVNets supports image and video understanding tools, including data loading, data transformations, novel data sampling methods, and implementations of several standard networks with similar or better performance than previous studies. Our source code is available at: \url{https://github.com/apple/ml-cvnets}.
National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST)（国立科技大学（NUST））
Recent escalation in the field of computer vision underpins a huddle of algorithms with the magnificent potential to unravel the information contained within images. These computer vision algorithms are being practised in medical image analysis and are transfiguring the perception and interpretation of Imaging data. Among these algorithms, Vision Transformers are evolved as one of the most contemporary and dominant architectures that are being used in the field of computer vision. These are immensely utilized by a plenty of researchers to perform new as well as former experiments. Here, in thi…
This paper offers a retrospective of what we learnt from organizing the workshop *Ethical Considerations in Creative applications of Computer Vision* at CVPR 2021 conference and, prior to that, a series of workshops on *Computer Vision for Fashion, Art and Design* at ECCV 2018, ICCV 2019, and CVPR 2020. We hope this reflection will bring artists and machine learning researchers into conversation around the ethical and social dimensions of creative applications of computer vision.
Proceedings of the Second Croatian Computer Vision Workshop (CCVW 2013, http://www.fer.unizg.hr/crv/ccvw2013) held September 19, 2013, in Zagreb, Croatia. Workshop was organized by the Center of Excellence for Computer Vision of the University of Zagreb.
Computer vision has been thriving since AI development was gaining thrust. Using deep learning techniques has been the most popular way which computer scientists thought the solution of. However, deep learning techniques tend to show lower performance than manual processing. Using deep learning is not always the answer to a problem related to computer vision.
Traditional architectures for solving computer vision problems and the degree of success they enjoyed have been heavily reliant on hand-crafted features. However, of late, deep learning techniques have offered a compelling alternative -- that of automatically learning problem-specific features. With this new paradigm, every problem in computer vision is now being re-examined from a deep learning perspective. Therefore, it has become important to understand what kind of deep networks are suitable for a given problem. Although general surveys of this fast-moving paradigm (i.e. deep-networks) exi…
Omnidirectional (360°) video has got quite popular because it provides a highly immersive viewing experience. For computer vision algorithms, it poses several challenges, like the special (equirectangular) projection commonly employed and the huge image size. In this work, we give a high-level overview of these challenges and outline strategies how to adapt computer vision algorithm for the specifics of omnidirectional video.
A negative result is when the outcome of an experiment or a model is not what is expected or when a hypothesis does not hold. Despite being often overlooked in the scientific community, negative results are results and they carry value. While this topic has been extensively discussed in other fields such as social sciences and biosciences, less attention has been paid to it in the computer vision community. The unique characteristics of computer vision, particularly its experimental aspect, call for a special treatment of this matter. In this paper, I will address what makes negative results i…
Vision sensors lie in the heart of computer vision. In many computer vision applications, such as AR/VR, non-contacting near-field communication (NFC) with high throughput is required to transfer information to algorithms. In this work, we proposed a novel NFC system which utilizes multiple frequency bands to achieve high throughput.
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
We are witnessing a proliferation of massive visual data. Unfortunately scaling existing computer vision algorithms to large datasets leaves researchers repeatedly solving the same algorithmic, logistical, and infrastructural problems. Our goal is to democratize computer vision; one should not have to be a computer vision, big data and distributed computing expert to have access to state-of-the-art distributed computer vision algorithms. We present CloudCV, a comprehensive system to provide access to state-of-the-art distributed computer vision algorithms as a cloud service through a Web Inter…
A basic assumption of statistical learning theory is that train and test data are drawn from the same underlying distribution. Unfortunately, this assumption doesn't hold in many applications. Instead, ample labeled data might exist in a particular `source' domain while inference is needed in another, `target' domain. Domain adaptation methods leverage labeled data from both domains to improve classification on unseen data in the target domain. In this work we survey domain transfer learning methods for various application domains with focus on recent work in Computer Vision.
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Microsoft Research Cambridge（微软研究院剑桥实验室）
Computer vision is hard because of a large variability in lighting, shape, and texture; in addition the image signal is non-additive due to occlusion. Generative models promised to account for this variability by accurately modelling the image formation process as a function of latent variables with prior beliefs. Bayesian posterior inference could then, in principle, explain the observation. While intuitively appealing, generative models for computer vision have largely failed to deliver on that promise due to the difficulty of posterior inference. As a result the community has favoured effic…
Computer vision can accelerate ecology research by automating the analysis of raw imagery from sensors like camera traps, drones, and satellites. However, computer vision is an emerging discipline that is rarely taught to ecologists. This work discusses our experience teaching a diverse group of ecologists to prototype and evaluate computer vision systems in the context of an intensive hands-on summer workshop. We explain the workshop structure, discuss common challenges, and propose best practices. This document is intended for computer scientists who teach computer vision across disciplines,…
Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Swansea University（斯旺西大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Auromind（Auromind公司）；DarwinAI（达尔文AI公司）
Many industries are now investing heavily in data science and automation to replace manual tasks and/or to help with decision making, especially in the realm of leveraging computer vision to automate many monitoring, inspection, and surveillance tasks. This has resulted in the emergence of the 'data scientist' who is conversant in statistical thinking, machine learning (ML), computer vision, and computer programming. However, as ML becomes more accessible to the general public and more aspects of ML become automated, applications leveraging computer vision are increasingly being created by non…
Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute（滑铁卢人工智能研究所）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Computer vision based technology is becoming ubiquitous in society. One application area that has seen an increase in computer vision is assistive technologies, specifically for those with visual impairment. Research has shown the ability of computer vision models to achieve tasks such provide scene captions, detect objects and recognize faces. Although assisting individuals with visual impairment with these tasks increases their independence and autonomy, concerns over bias, privacy and potential usefulness arise. This paper addresses the positive and negative implications computer vision bas…
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（圣安娜高等学校生物机器人研究所）；Adaptive Systems Group, Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系自适应系统组）
This document presents novel datasets, constructed by employing the iCub robot equipped with an additional depth sensor and color camera. We used the robot to acquire color and depth information for 210 objects in different acquisition scenarios. At this end, the results were large scale datasets for robot and computer vision applications: object representation, object recognition and classification, and action recognition.
University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Saint Johns’ Episcopal Hospital（圣约翰圣公会医院）；Plainview Medical Center（普莱恩维尤医疗中心）；Northwell Health（诺斯韦尔健康中心）
Abnormal gait, its associated falls and complications have high patient morbidity, mortality. Computer vision detects, predicts patient gait abnormalities, assesses fall risk and serves as clinical decision support tool for physicians. This paper performs a systematic review of how computer vision, machine learning models perform an abnormal patient's gait assessment. Computer vision is beneficial in gait analysis, it helps capture the patient posture. Several literature suggests the use of different machine learning algorithms such as SVM, ANN, K-Star, Random Forest, KNN, among others to perf…
Advancements in deep learning have ignited an explosion of research on efficient hardware for embedded computer vision. Hardware vision acceleration, however, does not address the cost of capturing and processing the image data that feeds these algorithms. We examine the role of the image signal processing (ISP) pipeline in computer vision to identify opportunities to reduce computation and save energy. The key insight is that imaging pipelines should be designed to be configurable: to switch between a traditional photography mode and a low-power vision mode that produces lower-quality image d…
Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA（美国加利福尼亚州圣克拉拉市英特尔公司）
Traditional image signal processors (ISPs) are primarily designed and optimized to improve the image quality perceived by humans. However, optimal perceptual image quality does not always translate into optimal performance for computer vision applications. We propose a set of methods, which we collectively call VisionISP, to repurpose the ISP for machine consumption. VisionISP significantly reduces data transmission needs by reducing the bit-depth and resolution while preserving the relevant information. The blocks in VisionISP are simple, content-aware, and trainable. Experimental results sho…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；ATG Robotics（ATG机器人公司）；University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
As an important component of autonomous systems, autonomous car perception has had a big leap with recent advances in parallel computing architectures. With the use of tiny but full-feature embedded supercomputers, computer stereo vision has been prevalently applied in autonomous cars for depth perception. The two key aspects of computer stereo vision are speed and accuracy. They are both desirable but conflicting properties, as the algorithms with better disparity accuracy usually have higher computational complexity. Therefore, the main aim of developing a computer stereo vision algorithm fo…
In this thesis, we present new schemes which leverage a constrained clustering method to solve several computer vision tasks ranging from image retrieval, image segmentation and co-segmentation, to person re-identification. In the last decades clustering methods have played a vital role in computer vision applications; herein, we focus on the extension, reformulation, and integration of a well-known graph and game theoretic clustering method known as Dominant Sets. Thus, we have demonstrated the validity of the proposed methods with extensive experiments which are conducted on several benchmar…
Automated computer vision systems have been applied in many domains including security, law enforcement, and personal devices, but recent reports suggest that these systems may produce biased results, discriminating against people in certain demographic groups. Diagnosing and understanding the underlying true causes of model biases, however, are challenging tasks because modern computer vision systems rely on complex black-box models whose behaviors are hard to decode. We propose to use an encoder-decoder network developed for image attribute manipulation to synthesize facial images varying in…
We introduce 3DB: an extendable, unified framework for testing and debugging vision models using photorealistic simulation. We demonstrate, through a wide range of use cases, that 3DB allows users to discover vulnerabilities in computer vision systems and gain insights into how models make decisions. 3DB captures and generalizes many robustness analyses from prior work, and enables one to study their interplay. Finally, we find that the insights generated by the system transfer to the physical world. We are releasing 3DB as a library (https://github.com/3db/3db) alongside a set of example anal…
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples: small changes to images can cause computer vision models to make mistakes such as identifying a school bus as an ostrich. However, it is still an open question whether humans are prone to similar mistakes. Here, we address this question by leveraging recent techniques that transfer adversarial examples from computer vision models with known parameters and architecture to other models with unknown parameters and architecture, and by matching the initial processing of the human visual system. We find that adversarial examples that s…
To address the SMC'17 data challenge -- "Data mining atomically resolved images for material properties", we first used the classic "blob detection" algorithms developed in computer vision to identify all atom centers in each STEM image frame. With the help of nearest neighbor analysis, we then found and labeled every atom center common to all the STEM frames and tracked their movements through the given time interval for both Molybdenum or Selenium atoms.
In this paper, we explore some of the applications of computer vision to sports analytics. Sport analytics deals with understanding and discovering patterns from a corpus of sports data. Analysing such data provides important performance metrics for the players, for instance in soccer matches, that could be useful for estimating their fitness and strengths. Team level statistics can also be estimated from such analysis. This paper mainly focuses on some the challenges and opportunities presented by sport video analysis in computer vision. Specifically, we use our multi-camera setup as a framew…
Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee, WI, USA IEEE Member, Uppsala, Sweden
Image features detection and description is a longstanding topic in computer vision and pattern recognition areas. The Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is probably the most popular and widely demanded feature descriptor which facilitates a variety of computer vision applications such as image registration, object tracking, image forgery detection, and 3D surface reconstruction. This work introduces a Software as a Service (SaaS) based implementation of the SIFT algorithm which is freely available at http://siftservice.com for any academic, educational and research purposes. The service…
Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Computer vision produces representations of scene content. Much computer vision research is predicated on the assumption that these intermediate representations are useful for action. Recent work at the intersection of machine learning and robotics calls this assumption into question by training sensorimotor systems directly for the task at hand, from pixels to actions, with no explicit intermediate representations. Thus the central question of our work: Does computer vision matter for action? We probe this question and its offshoots via immersive simulation, which allows us to conduct control…
