We propose PermaKey, a novel approach to representation learning based on object keypoints. It leverages the predictability of local image regions from spatial neighborhoods to identify salient regions that correspond to object parts, which are then converted to keypoints. Unlike prior approaches, it utilizes predictability to discover object keypoints, an intrinsic property of objects. This ensures that it does not overly bias keypoints to focus on characteristics that are not unique to objects, such as movement, shape, colour etc. We demonstrate the efficacy of PermaKey on Atari where it learns keypoints corresponding to the most salient object parts and is robust to certain visual distractors. Further, on downstream RL tasks in the Atari domain we demonstrate how agents equipped with our keypoints outperform those using competing alternatives, even on challenging environments with moving backgrounds or distractor objects.
Entropy-driven Unsupervised Keypoint Representation Learning in Videos
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior (CMBB), Uni. Marburg and JLU Giessen（马尔堡大学与吉森尤斯图斯·李比希大学心智、大脑与行为研究中心（CMBB））
Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；University Hospital and University of Zurich（苏黎世大学医院和苏黎世大学）；Balgrist University Hospital（巴尔格里斯特大学医院）；Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich（苏黎世大学脑研究所）；Neuroscience Center Zurich（苏黎世神经科学中心）；Central Institute of Mental Health, Heidelberg University（海德堡大学中央精神卫生研究所）
Motor behaviour analysis is essential to biomedical research and clinical diagnostics as it provides a non-invasive strategy for identifying motor impairment and its change caused by interventions. State-of-the-art instrumented movement analysis is time- and cost-intensive, since it requires placing physical or virtual markers. Besides the effort required for marking keypoints or annotations necessary for training or finetuning a detector, users need to know the interesting behaviour beforehand to provide meaningful keypoints. We introduce unsupervised behaviour analysis and magnification (uBA…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Existing unsupervised methods for keypoint learning rely heavily on the assumption that a specific keypoint type (e.g. elbow, digit, abstract geometric shape) appears only once in an image. This greatly limits their applicability, as each instance must be isolated before applying the method-an issue that is never discussed or evaluated. We thus propose a novel method to learn Task-agnostic, UnSupervised Keypoints (TUSK) which can deal with multiple instances. To achieve this, instead of the commonly-used strategy of detecting multiple heatmaps, each dedicated to a specific keypoint type, we us…
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
We propose a new representation of visual data that disentangles object position from appearance. Our method, termed Deep Latent Particles (DLP), decomposes the visual input into low-dimensional latent ``particles'', where each particle is described by its spatial location and features of its surrounding region. To drive learning of such representations, we follow a VAE-based approach and introduce a prior for particle positions based on a spatial-softmax architecture, and a modification of the evidence lower bound loss inspired by the Chamfer distance between particles. We demonstrate that ou…
Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学）
Keypoint detection and description play a central role in computer vision. Most existing methods are in the form of scene-level prediction, without returning the object classes of different keypoints. In this paper, we propose the object-centric formulation, which, beyond the conventional setting, requires further identifying which object each interest point belongs to. With such fine-grained information, our framework enables more downstream potentials, such as object-level matching and pose estimation in a clustered environment. To get around the difficulty of label collection in the real wo…
JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY（中山大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Unsupervised learning is just at a tipping point where it could really take off. Among these approaches, contrastive learning has seen tremendous progress and led to state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we construct a novel probabilistic graphical model that effectively incorporates the low rank promoting prior into the framework of contrastive learning, referred to as LORAC. In contrast to the existing conventional self-supervised approaches that only considers independent learning, our hypothesis explicitly requires that all the samples belonging to the same instance class lie on the…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We introduce KeypointDeformer, a novel unsupervised method for shape control through automatically discovered 3D keypoints. We cast this as the problem of aligning a source 3D object to a target 3D object from the same object category. Our method analyzes the difference between the shapes of the two objects by comparing their latent representations. This latent representation is in the form of 3D keypoints that are learned in an unsupervised way. The difference between the 3D keypoints of the source and the target objects then informs the shape deformation algorithm that deforms the source obj…
We propose a deep video prediction model conditioned on a single image and an action class. To generate future frames, we first detect keypoints of a moving object and predict future motion as a sequence of keypoints. The input image is then translated following the predicted keypoints sequence to compose future frames. Detecting the keypoints is central to our algorithm, and our method is trained to detect the keypoints of arbitrary objects in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, the detected keypoints of the original videos are used as pseudo-labels to learn the motion of objects. Experimental …
This paper introduces a new algorithm for unsupervised learning of keypoint detectors and descriptors, which demonstrates fast convergence and good performance across different datasets. The training procedure uses homographic transformation of images. The proposed model learns to detect points and generate descriptors on pairs of transformed images, which are easy for it to distinguish and repeatedly detect. The trained model follows SuperPoint architecture for ease of comparison, and demonstrates similar performance on natural images from HPatches dataset, and better performance on retina im…
The study of object representations in computer vision has primarily focused on developing representations that are useful for image classification, object detection, or semantic segmentation as downstream tasks. In this work we aim to learn object representations that are useful for control and reinforcement learning (RL). To this end, we introduce Transporter, a neural network architecture for discovering concise geometric object representations in terms of keypoints or image-space coordinates. Our method learns from raw video frames in a fully unsupervised manner, by transporting learnt ima…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Semantic 3D keypoints are category-level semantic consistent points on 3D objects. Detecting 3D semantic keypoints is a foundation for a number of 3D vision tasks but remains challenging, due to the ambiguity of semantic information, especially when the objects are represented by unordered 3D point clouds. Existing unsupervised methods tend to generate category-level keypoints in implicit manners, making it difficult to extract high-level information, such as semantic labels and topology. From a novel mutual reconstruction perspective, we present an unsupervised method to generate consistent s…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Qing Yuan Research Institute（清源研究院）
Detecting aligned 3D keypoints is essential under many scenarios such as object tracking, shape retrieval and robotics. However, it is generally hard to prepare a high-quality dataset for all types of objects due to the ambiguity of keypoint itself. Meanwhile, current unsupervised detectors are unable to generate aligned keypoints with good coverage. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised aligned keypoint detector, Skeleton Merger, which utilizes skeletons to reconstruct objects. It is based on an Autoencoder architecture. The encoder proposes keypoints and predicts activation strengths of …
Learning sensorimotor control policies from high-dimensional images crucially relies on the quality of the underlying visual representations. Prior works show that structured latent space such as visual keypoints often outperforms unstructured representations for robotic control. However, most of these representations, whether structured or unstructured are learned in a 2D space even though the control tasks are usually performed in a 3D environment. In this work, we propose a framework to learn such a 3D geometric structure directly from images in an end-to-end unsupervised manner. The input …
The goal of self-supervised visual representation learning is to learn strong, transferable image representations, with the majority of research focusing on object or scene level. On the other hand, representation learning at part level has received significantly less attention. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach to object part discovery and segmentation and make three contributions. First, we construct a proxy task through a set of objectives that encourages the model to learn a meaningful decomposition of the image into its parts. Secondly, prior work argues for reconstructin…
Unsupervised training of keypoint-agnostic descriptors for flexible retinal image registration
Grupo VARPA, Instituto de Investigacion Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC), Universidade da Coruña（VARPA组，阿维拉生物医学研究所（INIBIC），科鲁纳大学）；Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación y Tecnologías de la Información, Universidade da Coruña（计算机科学与信息技术部门，科鲁纳大学）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；Snap Inc.（Snap公司）
In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised domain adaptation technique for the task of 3D keypoint prediction from a single depth scan or image. Our key idea is to utilize the fact that predictions from different views of the same or similar objects should be consistent with each other. Such view consistency can provide effective regularization for keypoint prediction on unlabeled instances. In addition, we introduce a geometric alignment term to regularize predictions in the target domain. The resulting loss function can be effectively optimized via alternating minimization. We demonstr…
University of Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté（勃艮第-弗朗什孔泰大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Automatic discovery of category-specific 3D keypoints from a collection of objects of some category is a challenging problem. One reason is that not all objects in a category necessarily have the same semantic parts. The level of difficulty adds up further when objects are represented by 3D point clouds, with variations in shape and unknown coordinate frames. We define keypoints to be category-specific, if they meaningfully represent objects' shape and their correspondences can be simply established order-wise across all objects. This paper aims at learning category-specific 3D keypoints, in a…
Key-Grid: Unsupervised 3D Keypoints Detection using Grid Heatmap Features
Shanghai Qizhi Institute（上海智己研究所）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）
Can a robot manipulate intra-category unseen objects in arbitrary poses with the help of a mere demonstration of grasping pose on a single object instance? In this paper, we try to address this intriguing challenge by using USEEK, an unsupervised SE(3)-equivariant keypoints method that enjoys alignment across instances in a category, to perform generalizable manipulation. USEEK follows a teacher-student structure to decouple the unsupervised keypoint discovery and SE(3)-equivariant keypoint detection. With USEEK in hand, the robot can infer the category-level task-relevant object frames in an …
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Samsung AI Center Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；Hartpury University（哈特伯瑞大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
This paper proposes a novel paradigm for the unsupervised learning of object landmark detectors. Contrary to existing methods that build on auxiliary tasks such as image generation or equivariance, we propose a self-training approach where, departing from generic keypoints, a landmark detector and descriptor is trained to improve itself, tuning the keypoints into distinctive landmarks. To this end, we propose an iterative algorithm that alternates between producing new pseudo-labels through feature clustering and learning distinctive features for each pseudo-class through contrastive learning.…
Domain adaptation (DA) aims at transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Though many DA theories and algorithms have been proposed, most of them are tailored into classification settings and may fail in regression tasks, especially in the practical keypoint detection task. To tackle this difficult but significant task, we present a method of regressive domain adaptation (RegDA) for unsupervised keypoint detection. Inspired by the latest theoretical work, we first utilize an adversarial regressor to maximize the disparity on the target domain and train a…
Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Models
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vector Institute for AI（向量人工智能研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Unsupervised Deep Learning-based Keypoint Localization Estimating Descriptor Matching Performance
Grupo VARPA（VARPA组）；Instituto de Investigacion Biomédica de A Coruña (INIBIC)（阿罗纳生物医学研究所（INIBIC））；Universidade da Coruña（科鲁纳大学）；Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación y Tecnologías de la Información（计算机科学与信息技术部门）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；nuTonomy: an APTIV company（nuTonomy：安波福旗下公司）
In this paper, we propose the USIP detector: an Unsupervised Stable Interest Point detector that can detect highly repeatable and accurately localized keypoints from 3D point clouds under arbitrary transformations without the need for any ground truth training data. Our USIP detector consists of a feature proposal network that learns stable keypoints from input 3D point clouds and their respective transformed pairs from randomly generated transformations. We provide degeneracy analysis of our USIP detector and suggest solutions to prevent it. We encourage high repeatability and accurate locali…
The task of unsupervised motion retargeting in videos has seen substantial advancements through the use of deep neural networks. While early works concentrated on specific object priors such as a human face or body, recent work considered the unsupervised case. When the source and target videos, however, are of different shapes, current methods fail. To alleviate this problem, we introduce JOKR - a JOint Keypoint Representation that captures the motion common to both the source and target videos, without requiring any object prior or data collection. By employing a domain confusion term, we en…
Extracting and predicting object structure and dynamics from videos without supervision is a major challenge in machine learning. To address this challenge, we adopt a keypoint-based image representation and learn a stochastic dynamics model of the keypoints. Future frames are reconstructed from the keypoints and a reference frame. By modeling dynamics in the keypoint coordinate space, we achieve stable learning and avoid compounding of errors in pixel space. Our method improves upon unstructured representations both for pixel-level video prediction and for downstream tasks requiring object-le…
We propose a novel system for unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition. Given inputs of body keypoints sequences obtained during various movements, our system associates the sequences with actions. Our system is based on an encoder-decoder recurrent neural network, where the encoder learns a separable feature representation within its hidden states formed by training the model to perform prediction task. We show that according to such unsupervised training the decoder and the encoder self-organize their hidden states into a feature space which clusters similar movements into the same clu…
To deform or not: treatment-aware longitudinal registration for breast DCE-MRI during neoadjuvant chemotherapy via unsupervised keypoints detection
Radboud University Medical Centre（拉德堡德大学医学中心）；The Netherlands Cancer Institute（荷兰癌症研究所）；Macao Polytechnic University（澳门理工大学）；Maastricht University Medical Centre（马斯特里赫特大学医学中心）
Unsupervised learning of Data-driven Facial Expression Coding System (DFECS) using keypoint tracking
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）；Amar Nath and Shashi Khosla School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校阿马尔·纳特和夏希·霍斯拉信息技术学院）；National Resource Centre for Value Education in Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校工程价值教育国家资源中心）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Mila-University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学米拉研究院）；Polytechnique Montreal（蒙特利尔综合理工大学）；Element AI（元素人工智能公司）
We present an unsupervised approach for learning to estimate three dimensional (3D) facial structure from a single image while also predicting 3D viewpoint transformations that match a desired pose and facial geometry. We achieve this by inferring the depth of facial keypoints of an input image in an unsupervised manner, without using any form of ground-truth depth information. We show how it is possible to use these depths as intermediate computations within a new backpropable loss to predict the parameters of a 3D affine transformation matrix that maps inferred 3D keypoints of an input face …
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；Sony Europe B.V.（索尼欧洲公司）
Establishing a sparse set of keypoint correspon dences between images is a fundamental task in many computer vision pipelines. Often, this translates into a computationally expensive nearest neighbor search, where every keypoint descriptor at one image must be compared with all the descriptors at the others. In order to lower the computational cost of the matching phase, we propose a deep feature extraction network capable of detecting a predefined number of complementary sets of keypoints at each image. Since only the descriptors within the same set need to be compared across the different im…
Snap Inc.（Snap公司）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
We propose a novel approach for unsupervised 3D animation of non-rigid deformable objects. Our method learns the 3D structure and dynamics of objects solely from single-view RGB videos, and can decompose them into semantically meaningful parts that can be tracked and animated. Using a 3D autodecoder framework, paired with a keypoint estimator via a differentiable PnP algorithm, our model learns the underlying object geometry and parts decomposition in an entirely unsupervised manner. This allows it to perform 3D segmentation, 3D keypoint estimation, novel view synthesis, and animation. We prim…
Unsupervised landmark learning is the task of learning semantic keypoint-like representations without the use of expensive input keypoint-level annotations. A popular approach is to factorize an image into a pose and appearance data stream, then to reconstruct the image from the factorized components. The pose representation should capture a set of consistent and tightly localized landmarks in order to facilitate reconstruction of the input image. Ultimately, we wish for our learned landmarks to focus on the foreground object of interest. However, the reconstruction task of the entire image fo…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Flawless AI（Flawless AI公司）
Supervised keypoint localization methods rely on large manually labeled image datasets, where objects can deform, articulate, or occlude. However, creating such large keypoint labels is time-consuming and costly, and is often error-prone due to inconsistent labeling. Thus, we desire an approach that can learn keypoint localization with fewer yet consistently annotated images. To this end, we present a novel formulation that learns to localize semantically consistent keypoint definitions, even for occluded regions, for varying object categories. We use a few user-labeled 2D images as input exam…
University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
We address the key question of how object part representations can be found from the internal states of CNNs that are trained for high-level tasks, such as object classification. This work provides a new unsupervised method to learn semantic parts and gives new understanding of the internal representations of CNNs. Our technique is based on the hypothesis that semantic parts are represented by populations of neurons rather than by single filters. We propose a clustering technique to extract part representations, which we call Visual Concepts. We show that visual concepts are semantically coher…
We present TIPSy-GAN, a new approach to improve the accuracy and stability in unsupervised adversarial 2D to 3D human pose estimation. In our work we demonstrate that the human kinematic skeleton should not be assumed as a single spatially codependent structure; in fact, we posit when a full 2D pose is provided during training, there is an inherent bias learned where the 3D coordinate of a keypoint is spatially codependent on the 2D coordinates of all other keypoints. To investigate our hypothesis we follow previous adversarial approaches but train two generators on spatially independent parts…
A Novel Streamline-based diffusion MRI Tractography Registration Method with Probabilistic Keypoint Detection
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根和妇女医院）
We address the problem of discovering part segmentations of articulated objects without supervision. In contrast to keypoints, part segmentations provide information about part localizations on the level of individual pixels. Capturing both locations and semantics, they are an attractive target for supervised learning approaches. However, large annotation costs limit the scalability of supervised algorithms to other object categories than humans. Unsupervised approaches potentially allow to use much more data at a lower cost. Most existing unsupervised approaches focus on learning abstract rep…
Segmenting an image into its parts is a frequent preprocess for high-level vision tasks such as image editing. However, annotating masks for supervised training is expensive. Weakly-supervised and unsupervised methods exist, but they depend on the comparison of pairs of images, such as from multi-views, frames of videos, and image augmentation, which limits their applicability. To address this, we propose a GAN-based approach that generates images conditioned on latent masks, thereby alleviating full or weak annotations required in previous approaches. We show that such mask-conditioned image …
Large intra-class variation is the result of changes in multiple object characteristics. Images, however, only show the superposition of different variable factors such as appearance or shape. Therefore, learning to disentangle and represent these different characteristics poses a great challenge, especially in the unsupervised case. Moreover, large object articulation calls for a flexible part-based model. We present an unsupervised approach for disentangling appearance and shape by learning parts consistently over all instances of a category. Our model for learning an object representation i…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook AI研究院）
Our goal is to learn a deep network that, given a small number of images of an object of a given category, reconstructs it in 3D. While several recent works have obtained analogous results using synthetic data or assuming the availability of 2D primitives such as keypoints, we are interested in working with challenging real data and with no manual annotations. We thus focus on learning a model from multiple views of a large collection of object instances. We contribute with a new large dataset of object centric videos suitable for training and benchmarking this class of models. We show that ex…
Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing（海德堡图像处理合作实验室）；IWR, Heidelberg University（海德堡大学跨学科科学计算中心）
Understanding human activity and being able to explain it in detail surpasses mere action classification by far in both complexity and value. The challenge is thus to describe an activity on the basis of its most fundamental constituents, the individual postures and their distinctive transitions. Supervised learning of such a fine-grained representation based on elementary poses is very tedious and does not scale. Therefore, we propose a completely unsupervised deep learning procedure based solely on video sequences, which starts from scratch without requiring pre-trained networks, predefined …
