Contemporary autonomous vehicle (AV) benchmarks have advanced techniques for training 3D detectors, particularly on large-scale lidar data. Surprisingly, although semantic class labels naturally follow a long-tailed distribution, contemporary benchmarks focus on only a few common classes (e.g., pedestrian and car) and neglect many rare classes in-the-tail (e.g., debris and stroller). However, AVs must still detect rare classes to ensure safe operation. Moreover, semantic classes are often organized within a hierarchy, e.g., tail classes such as child and construction-worker are arguably subclasses of pedestrian. However, such hierarchical relationships are often ignored, which may lead to misleading estimates of performance and missed opportunities for algorithmic innovation. We address these challenges by formally studying the problem of Long-Tailed 3D Detection (LT3D), which evaluates on all classes, including those in-the-tail. We evaluate and innovate upon popular 3D detection codebases, such as CenterPoint and PointPillars, adapting them for LT3D. We develop hierarchical losses that promote feature sharing across common-vs-rare classes, as well as improved detection metrics that award partial credit to "reasonable" mistakes respecting the hierarchy (e.g., mistaking a child for an adult). Finally, we point out that fine-grained tail class accuracy is particularly improved via multimodal fusion of RGB images with LiDAR; simply put, small fine-grained classes are challenging to identify from sparse (lidar) geometry alone, suggesting that multimodal cues are crucial to long-tailed 3D detection. Our modifications improve accuracy by 5% AP on average for all classes, and dramatically improve AP for rare classes (e.g., stroller AP improves from 3.6 to 31.6)! Our code is available at //github.com/neeharperi/LT3D
As an emerging technology and a relatively affordable device, the 4D imaging radar has already been confirmed effective in performing 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Nevertheless, the sparsity and noisiness of 4D radar point clouds hinder further performance improvement, and in-depth studies about its fusion with other modalities are lacking. On the other hand, most of the camera-based perception methods transform the extracted image perspective view features into the bird's-eye view geometrically via "depth-based splatting" proposed in Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS), and some researchers exploit other modals such as LiDARs or ordinary automotive radars for enhancement. Recently, a few works have applied the "sampling" strategy for image view transformation, showing that it outperforms "splatting" even without image depth prediction. However, the potential of "sampling" is not fully unleashed. In this paper, we investigate the "sampling" view transformation strategy on the camera and 4D imaging radar fusion-based 3D object detection. In the proposed model, LXL, predicted image depth distribution maps and radar 3D occupancy grids are utilized to aid image view transformation, called "radar occupancy-assisted depth-based sampling". Experiments on VoD and TJ4DRadSet datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing 3D object detection methods by a significant margin without bells and whistles. Ablation studies demonstrate that our method performs the best among different enhancement settings.
ChatGPT brings revolutionary social value but also raises concerns about the misuse of AI-generated content. Consequently, an important question is how to detect whether content is generated by ChatGPT or by human. Existing detectors are built upon the assumption that there are distributional gaps between human-generated and AI-generated content. These gaps are typically identified using statistical information or classifiers. Our research challenges the distributional gap assumption in detectors. We find that detectors do not effectively discriminate the semantic and stylistic gaps between human-generated and AI-generated content. Instead, the "subtle differences", such as an extra space, become crucial for detection. Based on this discovery, we propose the SpaceInfi strategy to evade detection. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy across multiple benchmarks and detectors. We also provide a theoretical explanation for why SpaceInfi is successful in evading perplexity-based detection. Our findings offer new insights and challenges for understanding and constructing more applicable ChatGPT detectors.
Nowadays, there is a wide availability of datasets that enable the training of common object detectors or human detectors. These come in the form of labelled real-world images and require either a significant amount of human effort, with a high probability of errors such as missing labels, or very constrained scenarios, e.g. VICON systems. On the other hand, uncommon scenarios, like aerial views, animals, like wild zebras, or difficult-to-obtain information, such as human shapes, are hardly available. To overcome this, synthetic data generation with realistic rendering technologies has recently gained traction and advanced research areas such as target tracking and human pose estimation. However, subjects such as wild animals are still usually not well represented in such datasets. In this work, we first show that a pre-trained YOLO detector can not identify zebras in real images recorded from aerial viewpoints. To solve this, we present an approach for training an animal detector using only synthetic data. We start by generating a novel synthetic zebra dataset using GRADE, a state-of-the-art framework for data generation. The dataset includes RGB, depth, skeletal joint locations, pose, shape and instance segmentations for each subject. We use this to train a YOLO detector from scratch. Through extensive evaluations of our model with real-world data from i) limited datasets available on the internet and ii) a new one collected and manually labelled by us, we show that we can detect zebras by using only synthetic data during training. The code, results, trained models, and both the generated and training data are provided as open-source at //eliabntt.github.io/grade-rr.
Convolutional neural networks have made significant progresses in edge detection by progressively exploring the context and semantic features. However, local details are gradually suppressed with the enlarging of receptive fields. Recently, vision transformer has shown excellent capability in capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by this, we propose a novel transformer-based edge detector, \emph{Edge Detection TransformER (EDTER)}, to extract clear and crisp object boundaries and meaningful edges by exploiting the full image context information and detailed local cues simultaneously. EDTER works in two stages. In Stage I, a global transformer encoder is used to capture long-range global context on coarse-grained image patches. Then in Stage II, a local transformer encoder works on fine-grained patches to excavate the short-range local cues. Each transformer encoder is followed by an elaborately designed Bi-directional Multi-Level Aggregation decoder to achieve high-resolution features. Finally, the global context and local cues are combined by a Feature Fusion Module and fed into a decision head for edge prediction. Extensive experiments on BSDS500, NYUDv2, and Multicue demonstrate the superiority of EDTER in comparison with state-of-the-arts.
Deep long-tailed learning, one of the most challenging problems in visual recognition, aims to train well-performing deep models from a large number of images that follow a long-tailed class distribution. In the last decade, deep learning has emerged as a powerful recognition model for learning high-quality image representations and has led to remarkable breakthroughs in generic visual recognition. However, long-tailed class imbalance, a common problem in practical visual recognition tasks, often limits the practicality of deep network based recognition models in real-world applications, since they can be easily biased towards dominant classes and perform poorly on tail classes. To address this problem, a large number of studies have been conducted in recent years, making promising progress in the field of deep long-tailed learning. Considering the rapid evolution of this field, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on recent advances in deep long-tailed learning. To be specific, we group existing deep long-tailed learning studies into three main categories (i.e., class re-balancing, information augmentation and module improvement), and review these methods following this taxonomy in detail. Afterward, we empirically analyze several state-of-the-art methods by evaluating to what extent they address the issue of class imbalance via a newly proposed evaluation metric, i.e., relative accuracy. We conclude the survey by highlighting important applications of deep long-tailed learning and identifying several promising directions for future research.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
The considerable significance of Anomaly Detection (AD) problem has recently drawn the attention of many researchers. Consequently, the number of proposed methods in this research field has been increased steadily. AD strongly correlates with the important computer vision and image processing tasks such as image/video anomaly, irregularity and sudden event detection. More recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) offer a high performance set of solutions, but at the expense of a heavy computational cost. However, there is a noticeable gap between the previously proposed methods and an applicable real-word approach. Regarding the raised concerns about AD as an ongoing challenging problem, notably in images and videos, the time has come to argue over the pitfalls and prospects of methods have attempted to deal with visual AD tasks. Hereupon, in this survey we intend to conduct an in-depth investigation into the images/videos deep learning based AD methods. We also discuss current challenges and future research directions thoroughly.
The task of detecting 3D objects in point cloud has a pivotal role in many real-world applications. However, 3D object detection performance is behind that of 2D object detection due to the lack of powerful 3D feature extraction methods. In order to address this issue, we propose to build a 3D backbone network to learn rich 3D feature maps by using sparse 3D CNN operations for 3D object detection in point cloud. The 3D backbone network can inherently learn 3D features from almost raw data without compressing point cloud into multiple 2D images and generate rich feature maps for object detection. The sparse 3D CNN takes full advantages of the sparsity in the 3D point cloud to accelerate computation and save memory, which makes the 3D backbone network achievable. Empirical experiments are conducted on the KITTI benchmark and results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance for 3D object detection.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.