Event-based Motion Segmentation with Spatio-Temporal Graph Cuts
Hunan University（湖南大学）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Einstein Center Digital Future（爱因斯坦数字未来中心）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Yi Zhou, Guillermo Gallego, Xiuyuan Lu, Siqi Liu, Shaojie Shen
发表信息：
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021
Identifying independently moving objects is an essential task for dynamic scene understanding. However, traditional cameras used in dynamic scenes may suffer from motion blur or exposure artifacts due to their sampling principle. By contrast, event-based cameras are novel bio-inspired sensors that offer advantages to overcome such limitations. They report pixelwise intensity changes asynchronously, which enables them to acquire visual information at exactly the same rate as the scene dynamics. We develop a method to identify independently moving objects acquired with an event-based camera, i.e., to solve the event-based motion segmentation problem. We cast the problem as an energy minimization one involving the fitting of multiple motion models. We jointly solve two subproblems, namely event cluster assignment (labeling) and motion model fitting, in an iterative manner by exploiting the structure of the input event data in the form of a spatio-temporal graph. Experiments on available datasets demonstrate the versatility of the method in scenes with different motion patterns and number of moving objects. The evaluation shows state-of-the-art results without having to predetermine the number of expected moving objects. We release the software and dataset under an open source licence to foster research in the emerging topic of event-based motion segmentation.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of semantic segmentation transfers labeled source knowledge to an unlabeled target domain by relying on accessing both the source and target data. However, the access to source data is often restricted or infeasible in real-world scenarios. Under the source data restrictive circumstances, UDA is less practical. To address this, recent works have explored solutions under the Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) setup, which aims to adapt a source-trained model to the target domain without accessing source data. Still, existing SFDA approaches use only image-…
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
Video object segmentation is challenging due to the factors like rapidly fast motion, cluttered backgrounds, arbitrary object appearance variation and shape deformation. Most existing methods only explore appearance information between two consecutive frames, which do not make full use of the usefully long-term nonlocal information that is helpful to make the learned appearance stable, and hence they tend to fail when the targets suffer from large viewpoint changes and significant non-rigid deformations. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to mine the long-term sptatio-te…
Physics-Guided Spatiotemporal State Space Modeling for Lookahead Molten Pool Segmentation in Laser Wire-Feed Welding
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Materials Laser Processing and Modification, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学材料科学与工程学院上海市激光制造与材料改性重点实验室）
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（印度理工学院甘地纳加尔分校）
Automated real-time prediction of the ergonomic risks of manipulating objects is a key unsolved challenge in developing effective human-robot collaboration systems for logistics and manufacturing applications. We present a foundational paradigm to address this challenge by formulating the problem as one of action segmentation from RGB-D camera videos. Spatial features are first learned using a deep convolutional model from the video frames, which are then fed sequentially to temporal convolutional networks to semantically segment the frames into a hierarchy of actions, which are either ergonom…
Reinforcement Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Spatio-Temporal Echocardiography Segmentation
Department of Computer Science, University of Sherbrooke（谢布鲁克大学计算机科学系）；INSA, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS UMR 5220, Inserm U1206, CREATIS（里昂1大学INSA、CNRS UMR 5220、Inserm U1206、CREATIS）；Dep. of Software and Information Technology Engineering, École de technologie supérieure（蒙特利尔工程学院软件与信息技术工程系）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法国国家科学院（IUF））
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Semi-supervised video object segmentation is a task of segmenting the target object in a video sequence given only a mask annotation in the first frame. The limited information available makes it an extremely challenging task. Most previous best-performing methods adopt matching-based transductive reasoning or online inductive learning. Nevertheless, they are either less discriminative for similar instances or insufficient in the utilization of spatio-temporal information. In this work, we propose to integrate transductive and inductive learning into a unified framework to exploit the compleme…
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing anno…
The goal of video segmentation is to turn video data into a set of concrete motion clusters that can be easily interpreted as building blocks of the video. There are some works on similar topics like detecting scene cuts in a video, but there is few specific research on clustering video data into the desired number of compact segments. It would be more intuitive, and more efficient, to work with perceptually meaningful entity obtained from a low-level grouping process which we call it superframe. This paper presents a new simple and efficient technique to detect superframes of similar content …
For many tracking and surveillance applications, background subtraction provides an effective means of segmenting objects moving in front of a static background. Researchers have traditionally used combinations of morphological operations to remove the noise inherent in the background-subtracted result. Such techniques can effectively isolate foreground objects, but tend to lose fidelity around the borders of the segmentation, especially for noisy input. This paper explores the use of a minimum graph cut algorithm to segment the foreground, resulting in qualitatively and quantitiatively cleane…
Cardiac left ventricle (LV) quantification provides a tool for diagnosing cardiac diseases. Automatic calculation of all relevant LV indices from cardiac MR images is an intricate task due to large variations among patients and deformation during the cardiac cycle. Typical methods are based on segmentation of the myocardium or direct regression from MR images. To consider cardiac motion and deformation, recurrent neural networks and spatio-temporal convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed. We study an approach combining state-of-the-art models and emphasizing transfer learning t…
Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Institute of Research for Development（发展研究所）；French National Institute for Agricultural Research, INRA（法国国家农业研究院（INRA））；University of Burgundy（勃艮第大学）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）；Tampere University of Technology（坦佩雷理工大学）；AgroParisTech（巴黎高科农业学院）
Binary segmentation of volumetric images of porous media is a crucial step towards gaining a deeper understanding of the factors governing biogeochemical processes at minute scales. Contemporary work primarily revolves around primitive techniques based on global or local adaptive thresholding that have known common drawbacks in image segmentation. Moreover, absence of a unified benchmark prohibits quantitative evaluation, which further clouds the impact of existing methodologies. In this study, we tackle the issue on both fronts. Firstly, by drawing parallels with natural image segmentation, w…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Baidu USA（百度美国）
Despite the recent progress of fully-supervised action segmentation techniques, the performance is still not fully satisfactory. One main challenge is the problem of spatiotemporal variations (e.g. different people may perform the same activity in various ways). Therefore, we exploit unlabeled videos to address this problem by reformulating the action segmentation task as a cross-domain problem with domain discrepancy caused by spatio-temporal variations. To reduce the discrepancy, we propose Self-Supervised Temporal Domain Adaptation (SSTDA), which contains two self-supervised auxiliary tasks…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；National Heart and Lung Institute（国家心肺研究所）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Late Gadolinium Enhancement Magnetic Resonance Imaging (LGE MRI) emerged as a routine scan for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). However, due to the low image quality automating the quantification and analysis of the atrial scars is challenging. In this study, we pro-posed a fully automated method based on the graph-cuts framework, where the potential of the graph is learned on a surface mesh of the left atrium (LA) using an equidistant projection and a Deep Neural Network (DNN). For validation, we employed 100 datasets with manual delineation. The results showed that the performance of …
The Normalized Cut (NCut) objective function, widely used in data clustering and image segmentation, quantifies the cost of graph partitioning in a way that biases clusters or segments that are balanced towards having lower values than unbalanced partitionings. However, this bias is so strong that it avoids any singleton partitions, even when vertices are very weakly connected to the rest of the graph. Motivated by the Bühler-Hein family of balanced cut costs, we propose the family of Compassionately Conservative Balanced (CCB) Cut costs, which are indexed by a parameter that can be used to st…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）；Google（谷歌）
We leverage unsupervised learning of depth, egomotion, and camera intrinsics to improve the performance of single-image semantic segmentation, by enforcing 3D-geometric and temporal consistency of segmentation masks across video frames. The predicted depth, egomotion, and camera intrinsics are used to provide an additional supervision signal to the segmentation model, significantly enhancing its quality, or, alternatively, reducing the number of labels the segmentation model needs. Our experiments were performed on the ScanNet dataset.
Universit\'e catholique de Louvain, ICTEAM Institute, Belgium. Universit\'e Libre de Bruxelles, IRIBHM, Belgium
The progress in imaging techniques have allowed the study of various aspect of cellular mechanisms. To isolate individual cells in live imaging data, we introduce an elegant image segmentation framework that effectively extracts cell boundaries, even in the presence of poor edge details. Our approach works in two stages. First, we estimate pixel interior/border/exterior class probabilities using random ferns. Then, we use an energy minimization framework to compute boundaries whose localization is compliant with the pixel class probabilities. We validate our approach on a manually annotated da…
In this paper, we are interested in the application to video segmentation of the discrete shape optimization problem involving the shape weighted perimeter and an additional term depending on a parameter. Based on recent works and in particular the one of Darbon and Sigelle, we justify the equivalence of the shape optimization problem and a weighted total variation regularization. For solving this problem, we adapt the projection algorithm proposed recently for solving the basic TV regularization problem. Another solution to the shape optimization investigated here is the graph cut technique. …
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Université de Lyon（里昂大学）；INSA-Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；Modiface Inc（Modiface公司）；Vector Institute（矢量研究所）
In this paper we introduce a Transformer-based approach to video object segmentation (VOS). To address compounding error and scalability issues of prior work, we propose a scalable, end-to-end method for VOS called Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers (SST). SST extracts per-pixel representations for each object in a video using sparse attention over spatiotemporal features. Our attention-based formulation for VOS allows a model to learn to attend over a history of multiple frames and provides suitable inductive bias for performing correspondence-like computations necessary for solving motion se…
Malek-Ashtar University of Technology（马雷克-阿什塔尔理工大学）；Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）；Auckland University of Technology（奥克兰理工大学）；National Ilan University（国立宜兰大学）
This paper presents a novel method to involve both spatial and temporal features for semantic video segmentation. Current work on convolutional neural networks(CNNs) has shown that CNNs provide advanced spatial features supporting a very good performance of solutions for both image and video analysis, especially for the semantic segmentation task. We investigate how involving temporal features also has a good effect on segmenting video data. We propose a module based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture of a recurrent neural network for interpreting the temporal characteristics of v…
Department of Radiology, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学医学院放射科）；School of Computer and Control Engineering, Yantai University（烟台大学计算机与控制工程学院）；The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia（费城儿童医院）
Purpose: To improve kidney segmentation in clinical ultrasound (US) images, we develop a new graph cuts based method to segment kidney US images by integrating original image intensity information and texture feature maps extracted using Gabor filters. Methods: To handle large appearance variation within kidney images and improve computational efficiency, we build a graph of image pixels close to kidney boundary instead of building a graph of the whole image. To make the kidney segmentation robust to weak boundaries, we adopt localized regional information to measure similarity between image p…
We present a novel embedding approach for video instance segmentation. Our method learns a spatio-temporal embedding integrating cues from appearance, motion, and geometry; a 3D causal convolutional network models motion, and a monocular self-supervised depth loss models geometry. In this embedding space, video-pixels of the same instance are clustered together while being separated from other instances, to naturally track instances over time without any complex post-processing. Our network runs in real-time as our architecture is entirely causal - we do not incorporate information from future…
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia（马来西亚理工大学）；Universiti Malaysia Sarawak（马来西亚砂拉越大学）
Unsupervised segmentation of action segments in egocentric videos is a desirable feature in tasks such as activity recognition and content-based video retrieval. Reducing the search space into a finite set of action segments facilitates a faster and less noisy matching. However, there exist a substantial gap in machine understanding of natural temporal cuts during a continuous human activity. This work reports on a novel gaze-based approach for segmenting action segments in videos captured using an egocentric camera. Gaze is used to locate the region-of-interest inside a frame. By tracking two…
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；OPPO US Research Center, InnoPeak Technology Inc.（OPPO美国研究中心，InnoPeak科技公司）
Video instance segmentation (VIS) task requires classifying, segmenting, and tracking object instances over all frames in a video clip. Recently, VisTR has been proposed as end-to-end transformer-based VIS framework, while demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. However, VisTR is slow to converge during training, requiring around 1000 GPU hours due to the high computational cost of its transformer attention module. To improve the training efficiency, we propose Deformable VisTR, leveraging spatio-temporal deformable attention module that only attends to a small fixed set of key spatio-temp…
Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) is a task that simultaneously requires classification, segmentation, and instance association in a video. Recent VIS approaches rely on sophisticated pipelines to achieve this goal, including RoI-related operations or 3D convolutions. In contrast, we present a simple and efficient single-stage VIS framework based on the instance segmentation method CondInst by adding an extra tracking head. To improve instance association accuracy, a novel bi-directional spatio-temporal contrastive learning strategy for tracking embedding across frames is proposed. Moreover, a…
UCLA Biomathematics and Mathematics（加州大学洛杉矶分校生物数学与数学系）
Shape-based regularization has proven to be a useful method for delineating objects within noisy images where one has prior knowledge of the shape of the targeted object. When a collection of possible shapes is available, the specification of a shape prior using kernel density estimation is a natural technique. Unfortunately, energy functionals arising from kernel density estimation are of a form that makes them impossible to directly minimize using efficient optimization algorithms such as graph cuts. Our main contribution is to show how one may recast the energy functional into a form that i…
Hierarchical Spatio-temporal Segmentation Network for Ejection Fraction Estimation in Echocardiography Videos
PCA Lab（PCA实验室）；Key Lab of Intelligent Perception and Systems for High-Dimensional Information of Ministry of Education（教育部高维信息智能感知与系统重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
A general framework of spatio-spectral segmentation for multi-spectral images is introduced in this paper. The method is based on classification-driven stochastic watershed (WS) by Monte Carlo simulations, and it gives more regular and reliable contours than standard WS. The present approach is decomposed into several sequential steps. First, a dimensionality-reduction stage is performed using the factor-correspondence analysis method. In this context, a new way to select the factor axes (eigenvectors) according to their spatial information is introduced. Then, a spectral classification produc…
A spatio-temporal network for video semantic segmentation in surgical videos
Medtronic Digital Surgery（美敦力数字外科）；Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Internventional and Surgical Sciences, University College London（伦敦大学学院惠康/工程与物理科学研究委员会介入与外科学中心）
Environment perception including detection, classification, tracking, and motion prediction are key enablers for automated driving systems and intelligent transportation applications. Fueled by the advances in sensing technologies and machine learning techniques, LiDAR-based sensing systems have become a promising solution. The current challenges of this solution are how to effectively combine different perception tasks into a single backbone and how to efficiently learn the spatiotemporal features directly from point cloud sequences. In this research, we propose a novel spatiotemporal attenti…
School of Computer Science and Technology, UCAS（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；JD Digits（京东数科）；Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management, CAS（中国科学院大数据挖掘与知识管理重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Intell. Info. Process. (IIP), Inst. of Computi. Tech., CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所智能信息处理重点实验室）
In this paper, we present a unified, end-to-end trainable spatiotemporal CNN model for VOS, which consists of two branches, i.e., the temporal coherence branch and the spatial segmentation branch. Specifically, the temporal coherence branch pretrained in an adversarial fashion from unlabeled video data, is designed to capture the dynamic appearance and motion cues of video sequences to guide object segmentation. The spatial segmentation branch focuses on segmenting objects accurately based on the learned appearance and motion cues. To obtain accurate segmentation results, we design a coarse-to…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；SRI International（SRI国际）
We propose novel Stacked Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (Stacked-STGCN) for action segmentation, i.e., predicting and localizing a sequence of actions over long videos. We extend the Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN) originally proposed for skeleton-based action recognition to enable nodes with different characteristics (e.g., scene, actor, object, action, etc.), feature descriptors with varied lengths, and arbitrary temporal edge connections to account for large graph deformation commonly associated with complex activities. We further introduce the stacked hour…
There are many applications of graph cuts in computer vision, e.g. segmentation. We present a novel method to reformulate the NP-hard, k-way graph partitioning problem as an approximate minimal s-t graph cut problem, for which a globally optimal solution is found in polynomial time. Each non-terminal vertex in the original graph is replaced by a set of ceil(log_2(k)) new vertices. The original graph edges are replaced by new edges connecting the new vertices to each other and to only two, source s and sink t, terminal nodes. The weights of the new edges are obtained using a novel least squares…
Assigning consistent temporal identifiers to multiple moving objects in a video sequence is a challenging problem. A solution to that problem would have immediate ramifications in multiple object tracking and segmentation problems. We propose a strategy that treats the temporal identification task as a spatio-temporal clustering problem. We propose an unsupervised learning approach using a convolutional and fully connected autoencoder, which we call deep heterogeneous autoencoder, to learn discriminative features from segmentation masks and detection bounding boxes. We extract masks and their …
Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；NNAISENSE；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
We introduce ReConvNet, a recurrent convolutional architecture for semi-supervised video object segmentation that is able to fast adapt its features to focus on any specific object of interest at inference time. Generalization to new objects never observed during training is known to be a hard task for supervised approaches that would need to be retrained. To tackle this problem, we propose a more efficient solution that learns spatio-temporal features self-adapting to the object of interest via conditional affine transformations. This approach is simple, can be trained end-to-end and does not…
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；GE Vingmed Ultrasound（GE维ingmed超声公司）；GE Research（通用电气研究中心）
Accurate and consistent predictions of echocardiography parameters are important for cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment. In particular, segmentations of the left ventricle can be used to derive ventricular volume, ejection fraction (EF) and other relevant measurements. In this paper we propose a new automated method called EchoGraphs for predicting ejection fraction and segmenting the left ventricle by detecting anatomical keypoints. Models for direct coordinate regression based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are used to detect the keypoints. GCNs can learn to represent the cardiac…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔兰信息学园区）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）
We propose a novel superpixel-based multi-view convolutional neural network for semantic image segmentation. The proposed network produces a high quality segmentation of a single image by leveraging information from additional views of the same scene. Particularly in indoor videos such as captured by robotic platforms or handheld and bodyworn RGBD cameras, nearby video frames provide diverse viewpoints and additional context of objects and scenes. To leverage such information, we first compute region correspondences by optical flow and image boundary-based superpixels. Given these region corre…
In this work, we present a new paradigm, called 4D-StOP, to tackle the task of 4D Panoptic LiDAR Segmentation. 4D-StOP first generates spatio-temporal proposals using voting-based center predictions, where each point in the 4D volume votes for a corresponding center. These tracklet proposals are further aggregated using learned geometric features. The tracklet aggregation method effectively generates a video-level 4D scene representation over the entire space-time volume. This is in contrast to existing end-to-end trainable state-of-the-art approaches which use spatio-temporal embeddings that …
Uber Advanced Technologies Group（优步先进技术集团）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
In this paper, we introduce a non-parametric memory representation for spatio-temporal segmentation that captures the local space and time around an autonomous vehicle (AV). Our representation has three important properties: (i) it remembers what it has seen in the past, (ii) it reinforces and (iii) forgets its past beliefs based on new evidence. Reinforcing is important as the first time we see an element we might be uncertain, e.g, if the element is heavily occluded or at range. Forgetting is desirable, as otherwise false positives will make the self driving vehicle behave erratically. Our p…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）
Unsupervised video segmentation plays an important role in a wide variety of applications from object identification to compression. However, to date, fast motion, motion blur and occlusions pose significant challenges. To address these challenges for unsupervised video segmentation, we develop a novel saliency estimation technique as well as a novel neighborhood graph, based on optical flow and edge cues. Our approach leads to significantly better initial foreground-background estimates and their robust as well as accurate diffusion across time. We evaluate our proposed algorithm on the chall…
This paper addresses the problem of video object segmentation, where the initial object mask is given in the first frame of an input video. We propose a novel spatio-temporal Markov Random Field (MRF) model defined over pixels to handle this problem. Unlike conventional MRF models, the spatial dependencies among pixels in our model are encoded by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Specifically, for a given object, the probability of a labeling to a set of spatially neighboring pixels can be predicted by a CNN trained for this specific object. As a result, higher-order, richer dependencies a…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Existing visual object tracking usually learns a bounding-box based template to match the targets across frames, which cannot accurately learn a pixel-wise representation, thereby being limited in handling severe appearance variations. To address these issues, much effort has been made on segmentation-based tracking, which learns a pixel-wise object-aware template and can achieve higher accuracy than bounding-box template based tracking. However, existing segmentation-based trackers are ineffective in learning the spatio-temporal correspondence across frames due to no use of the rich temporal …
