In this paper, we propose the semantic graph Transformer (SGT) for the 3D scene graph generation. The task aims to parse a cloud point-based scene into a semantic structural graph, with the core challenge of modeling the complex global structure. Existing methods based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs) suffer from the over-smoothing dilemma and could only propagate information from limited neighboring nodes. In contrast, our SGT uses Transformer layers as the base building block to allow global information passing, with two types of proposed Transformer layers tailored for the 3D scene graph generation task. Specifically, we introduce the graph embedding layer to best utilize the global information in graph edges while maintaining comparable computation costs. Additionally, we propose the semantic injection layer to leverage categorical text labels and visual object knowledge. We benchmark our SGT on the established 3DSSG benchmark and achieve a 35.9% absolute improvement in relationship prediction's R@50 and an 80.40% boost on the subset with complex scenes over the state-of-the-art. Our analyses further show SGT's superiority in the long-tailed and zero-shot scenarios. We will release the code and model.
Recent Transformer-based 3D object detectors learn point cloud features either from point- or voxel-based representations. However, the former requires time-consuming sampling while the latter introduces quantization errors. In this paper, we present a novel Point-Voxel Transformer for single-stage 3D detection (PVT-SSD) that takes advantage of these two representations. Specifically, we first use voxel-based sparse convolutions for efficient feature encoding. Then, we propose a Point-Voxel Transformer (PVT) module that obtains long-range contexts in a cheap manner from voxels while attaining accurate positions from points. The key to associating the two different representations is our introduced input-dependent Query Initialization module, which could efficiently generate reference points and content queries. Then, PVT adaptively fuses long-range contextual and local geometric information around reference points into content queries. Further, to quickly find the neighboring points of reference points, we design the Virtual Range Image module, which generalizes the native range image to multi-sensor and multi-frame. The experiments on several autonomous driving benchmarks verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Code will be available at //github.com/Nightmare-n/PVT-SSD.
Recently, Transformer-based methods for point cloud learning have achieved good results on various point cloud learning benchmarks. However, since the attention mechanism needs to generate three feature vectors of query, key, and value to calculate attention features, most of the existing Transformer-based point cloud learning methods usually consume a large amount of computational time and memory resources when calculating global attention. To address this problem, we propose a Voxel-Transformer-Point (VTP) Block for extracting local and global features of point clouds. VTP combines the advantages of voxel-based, point-based and Transformer-based methods, which consists of Voxel-Based Branch (V branch), Point-Based Transformer Branch (PT branch) and Point-Based Branch (P branch). The V branch extracts the coarse-grained features of the point cloud through low voxel resolution; the PT branch obtains the fine-grained features of the point cloud by calculating the self-attention in the local neighborhood and the inter-neighborhood cross-attention; the P branch uses a simplified MLP network to generate the global location information of the point cloud. In addition, to enrich the local features of point clouds at different scales, we set the voxel scale in the V branch and the neighborhood sphere scale in the PT branch to one large and one small (large voxel scale \& small neighborhood sphere scale or small voxel scale \& large neighborhood sphere scale). Finally, we use VTP as the feature extraction network to construct a VTPNet for point cloud learning, and performs shape classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation tasks on the ModelNet40, ShapeNet Part, and S3DIS datasets. The experimental results indicate that VTPNet has good performance in 3D point cloud learning.
Anomaly detection, which is a critical and popular topic in computer vision, aims to detect anomalous samples that are different from the normal (i.e., non-anomalous) ones. The current mainstream methods focus on anomaly detection for images, whereas little attention has been paid to 3D point cloud. In this paper, drawing inspiration from the knowledge transfer ability of teacher-student architecture and the impressive feature extraction capability of recent neural networks, we design a teacher-student structured model for 3D anomaly detection. Specifically, we use feature space alignment, dimension zoom, and max pooling to extract the features of the point cloud and then minimize a multi-scale loss between the feature vectors produced by the teacher and the student networks. Moreover, our method only requires very few normal samples to train the student network due to the teacher-student distillation mechanism. Once trained, the teacher-student network pair can be leveraged jointly to fulfill 3D point cloud anomaly detection based on the calculated anomaly score. For evaluation, we compare our method against the reconstruction-based method on the ShapeNet-Part dataset. The experimental results and ablation studies quantitatively and qualitatively confirm that our model can achieve higher performance compared with the state of the arts in 3D anomaly detection with very few training samples.
Multi-stage strategies are frequently employed in image restoration tasks. While transformer-based methods have exhibited high efficiency in single-image super-resolution tasks, they have not yet shown significant advantages over CNN-based methods in stereo super-resolution tasks. This can be attributed to two key factors: first, current single-image super-resolution transformers are unable to leverage the complementary stereo information during the process; second, the performance of transformers is typically reliant on sufficient data, which is absent in common stereo-image super-resolution algorithms. To address these issues, we propose a Hybrid Transformer and CNN Attention Network (HTCAN), which utilizes a transformer-based network for single-image enhancement and a CNN-based network for stereo information fusion. Furthermore, we employ a multi-patch training strategy and larger window sizes to activate more input pixels for super-resolution. We also revisit other advanced techniques, such as data augmentation, data ensemble, and model ensemble to reduce overfitting and data bias. Finally, our approach achieved a score of 23.90dB and emerged as the winner in Track 1 of the NTIRE 2023 Stereo Image Super-Resolution Challenge.
Although the recent rapid evolution of 3D generative neural networks greatly improves 3D shape generation, it is still not convenient for ordinary users to create 3D shapes and control the local geometry of generated shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based 3D generation framework -- locally attentional SDF diffusion, to model plausible 3D shapes, via 2D sketch image input. Our method is built on a two-stage diffusion model. The first stage, named occupancy-diffusion, aims to generate a low-resolution occupancy field to approximate the shape shell. The second stage, named SDF-diffusion, synthesizes a high-resolution signed distance field within the occupied voxels determined by the first stage to extract fine geometry. Our model is empowered by a novel view-aware local attention mechanism for image-conditioned shape generation, which takes advantage of 2D image patch features to guide 3D voxel feature learning, greatly improving local controllability and model generalizability. Through extensive experiments in sketch-conditioned and category-conditioned 3D shape generation tasks, we validate and demonstrate the ability of our method to provide plausible and diverse 3D shapes, as well as its superior controllability and generalizability over existing work. Our code and trained models are available at //zhengxinyang.github.io/projects/LAS-Diffusion.html
Deep learning techniques have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection and have spawned a lot of scene-understanding tasks in recent years. Scene graph has been the focus of research because of its powerful semantic representation and applications to scene understanding. Scene Graph Generation (SGG) refers to the task of automatically mapping an image into a semantic structural scene graph, which requires the correct labeling of detected objects and their relationships. Although this is a challenging task, the community has proposed a lot of SGG approaches and achieved good results. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent achievements in this field brought about by deep learning techniques. We review 138 representative works that cover different input modalities, and systematically summarize existing methods of image-based SGG from the perspective of feature extraction and fusion. We attempt to connect and systematize the existing visual relationship detection methods, to summarize, and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of SGG in a comprehensive way. Finally, we finish this survey with deep discussions about current existing problems and future research directions. This survey will help readers to develop a better understanding of the current research status and ideas.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Transformer is a type of deep neural network mainly based on self-attention mechanism which is originally applied in natural language processing field. Inspired by the strong representation ability of transformer, researchers propose to extend transformer for computer vision tasks. Transformer-based models show competitive and even better performance on various visual benchmarks compared to other network types such as convolutional networks and recurrent networks. In this paper we provide a literature review of these visual transformer models by categorizing them in different tasks and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these methods. In particular, the main categories include the basic image classification, high-level vision, low-level vision and video processing. Self-attention in computer vision is also briefly revisited as self-attention is the base component in transformer. Efficient transformer methods are included for pushing transformer into real applications. Finally, we give a discussion about the further research directions for visual transformer.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
It is always well believed that modeling relationships between objects would be helpful for representing and eventually describing an image. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of the idea on image description generation. In this paper, we introduce a new design to explore the connections between objects for image captioning under the umbrella of attention-based encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, we present Graph Convolutional Networks plus Long Short-Term Memory (dubbed as GCN-LSTM) architecture that novelly integrates both semantic and spatial object relationships into image encoder. Technically, we build graphs over the detected objects in an image based on their spatial and semantic connections. The representations of each region proposed on objects are then refined by leveraging graph structure through GCN. With the learnt region-level features, our GCN-LSTM capitalizes on LSTM-based captioning framework with attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on COCO image captioning dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, GCN-LSTM increases CIDEr-D performance from 120.1% to 128.7% on COCO testing set.