The self-attention mechanism, successfully employed with the transformer structure is shown promise in many computer vision tasks including image recognition, and object detection. Despite the surge, the use of the transformer for the problem of stereo matching remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the use of the transformer for the problem of stereo matching, especially for laparoscopic videos, and propose a new hybrid deep stereo matching framework (HybridStereoNet) that combines the best of the CNN and the transformer in a unified design. To be specific, we investigate several ways to introduce transformers to volumetric stereo matching pipelines by analyzing the loss landscape of the designs and in-domain/cross-domain accuracy. Our analysis suggests that employing transformers for feature representation learning, while using CNNs for cost aggregation will lead to faster convergence, higher accuracy and better generalization than other options. Our extensive experiments on Sceneflow, SCARED2019 and dVPN datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our HybridStereoNet.
360$^\circ$ video saliency detection is one of the challenging benchmarks for 360$^\circ$ video understanding since non-negligible distortion and discontinuity occur in the projection of any format of 360$^\circ$ videos, and capture-worthy viewpoint in the omnidirectional sphere is ambiguous by nature. We present a new framework named Panoramic Vision Transformer (PAVER). We design the encoder using Vision Transformer with deformable convolution, which enables us not only to plug pretrained models from normal videos into our architecture without additional modules or finetuning but also to perform geometric approximation only once, unlike previous deep CNN-based approaches. Thanks to its powerful encoder, PAVER can learn the saliency from three simple relative relations among local patch features, outperforming state-of-the-art models for the Wild360 benchmark by large margins without supervision or auxiliary information like class activation. We demonstrate the utility of our saliency prediction model with the omnidirectional video quality assessment task in VQA-ODV, where we consistently improve performance without any form of supervision, including head movement.
Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has shown promising performances on reconstructing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views from a sparse set of 2D images. Albeit effective, the performance of NeRF is highly influenced by the quality of training samples. With limited posed images from the scene, NeRF fails to generalize well to novel views and may collapse to trivial solutions in unobserved regions. This makes NeRF impractical under resource-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel learning framework, ActiveNeRF, aiming to model a 3D scene with a constrained input budget. Specifically, we first incorporate uncertainty estimation into a NeRF model, which ensures robustness under few observations and provides an interpretation of how NeRF understands the scene. On this basis, we propose to supplement the existing training set with newly captured samples based on an active learning scheme. By evaluating the reduction of uncertainty given new inputs, we select the samples that bring the most information gain. In this way, the quality of novel view synthesis can be improved with minimal additional resources. Extensive experiments validate the performance of our model on both realistic and synthetic scenes, especially with scarcer training data. Code will be released at \url{//github.com/LeapLabTHU/ActiveNeRF}.
In video analysis, background models have many applications such as background/foreground separation, change detection, anomaly detection, tracking, and more. However, while learning such a model in a video captured by a static camera is a fairly-solved task, in the case of a Moving-camera Background Model (MCBM), the success has been far more modest due to algorithmic and scalability challenges that arise due to the camera motion. Thus, existing MCBMs are limited in their scope and their supported camera-motion types. These hurdles also impeded the employment, in this unsupervised task, of end-to-end solutions based on deep learning (DL). Moreover, existing MCBMs usually model the background either on the domain of a typically-large panoramic image or in an online fashion. Unfortunately, the former creates several problems, including poor scalability, while the latter prevents the recognition and leveraging of cases where the camera revisits previously-seen parts of the scene. This paper proposes a new method, called DeepMCBM, that eliminates all the aforementioned issues and achieves state-of-the-art results. Concretely, first we identify the difficulties associated with joint alignment of video frames in general and in a DL setting in particular. Next, we propose a new strategy for joint alignment that lets us use a spatial transformer net with neither a regularization nor any form of specialized (and non-differentiable) initialization. Coupled with an autoencoder conditioned on unwarped robust central moments (obtained from the joint alignment), this yields an end-to-end regularization-free MCBM that supports a broad range of camera motions and scales gracefully. We demonstrate DeepMCBM's utility on a variety of videos, including ones beyond the scope of other methods. Our code is available at //github.com/BGU-CS-VIL/DeepMCBM .
This paper reports a CPU-level real-time stereo matching method for surgical images (10 Hz on 640 * 480 image with a single core of i5-9400). The proposed method is built on the fast ''dense inverse searching'' algorithm, which estimates the disparity of the stereo images. The overlapping image patches (arbitrary squared image segment) from the images at different scales are aligned based on the photometric consistency presumption. We propose a Bayesian framework to evaluate the probability of the optimized patch disparity at different scales. Moreover, we introduce a spatial Gaussian mixed probability distribution to address the pixel-wise probability within the patch. In-vivo and synthetic experiments show that our method can handle ambiguities resulted from the textureless surfaces and the photometric inconsistency caused by the Lambertian reflectance. Our Bayesian method correctly balances the probability of the patch for stereo images at different scales. Experiments indicate that the estimated depth has higher accuracy and fewer outliers than the baseline methods in the surgical scenario.
Transformer encoder-decoder models have shown impressive performance in dialogue modeling. However, as Transformers are inefficient in processing long sequences, dialogue history length often needs to be truncated. To address this problem, we propose a new memory-augmented Transformer that is compatible with existing pre-trained encoder-decoder models and enables efficient preservation of history information. It incorporates a separate memory module alongside the pre-trained Transformer to effectively interchange information between the memory states and the current input context. We evaluate our model on three dialogue datasets and two language modeling datasets. Experimental results show that our method has achieved superior efficiency and performance compared to other pre-trained Transformer baselines.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have proven to be effective, in solving 2D image understanding tasks by training over large-scale image datasets; and meanwhile as a somehow separate track, in modeling the 3D visual world too such as voxels or point clouds. However, with the growing hope that transformers can become the "universal" modeling tool for heterogeneous data, ViTs for 2D and 3D tasks have so far adopted vastly different architecture designs that are hardly transferable. That invites an (over-)ambitious question: can we close the gap between the 2D and 3D ViT architectures? As a piloting study, this paper demonstrates the appealing promise to understand the 3D visual world, using a standard 2D ViT architecture, with only minimal customization at the input and output levels without redesigning the pipeline. To build a 3D ViT from its 2D sibling, we "inflate" the patch embedding and token sequence, accompanied with new positional encoding mechanisms designed to match the 3D data geometry. The resultant "minimalist" 3D ViT, named Simple3D-Former, performs surprisingly robustly on popular 3D tasks such as object classification, point cloud segmentation and indoor scene detection, compared to highly customized 3D-specific designs. It can hence act as a strong baseline for new 3D ViTs. Moreover, we note that pursing a unified 2D-3D ViT design has practical relevance besides just scientific curiosity. Specifically, we demonstrate that Simple3D-Former naturally enables to exploit the wealth of pre-trained weights from large-scale realistic 2D images (e.g., ImageNet), which can be plugged in to enhancing the 3D task performance "for free".
Image segmentation is a key topic in image processing and computer vision with applications such as scene understanding, medical image analysis, robotic perception, video surveillance, augmented reality, and image compression, among many others. Various algorithms for image segmentation have been developed in the literature. Recently, due to the success of deep learning models in a wide range of vision applications, there has been a substantial amount of works aimed at developing image segmentation approaches using deep learning models. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature at the time of this writing, covering a broad spectrum of pioneering works for semantic and instance-level segmentation, including fully convolutional pixel-labeling networks, encoder-decoder architectures, multi-scale and pyramid based approaches, recurrent networks, visual attention models, and generative models in adversarial settings. We investigate the similarity, strengths and challenges of these deep learning models, examine the most widely used datasets, report performances, and discuss promising future research directions in this area.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.