We study the challenging problem of estimating the relative pose of three calibrated cameras. We propose two novel solutions to the notoriously difficult configuration of four points in three views, known as the 4p3v problem. Our solutions are based on the simple idea of generating one additional virtual point correspondence in two views by using the information from the locations of the four input correspondences in the three views. For the first solver, we train a network to predict this point correspondence. The second solver uses a much simpler and more efficient strategy based on the mean points of three corresponding input points. The new solvers are efficient and easy to implement since they are based on the existing efficient minimal solvers, i.e., the well-known 5-point relative pose and the P3P solvers. The solvers achieve state-of-the-art results on real data. The idea of solving minimal problems using virtual correspondences is general and can be applied to other problems, e.g., the 5-point relative pose problem. In this way, minimal problems can be solved using simpler non-minimal solvers or even using sub-minimal samples inside RANSAC. In addition, we compare different variants of 4p3v solvers with the baseline solver for the minimal configuration consisting of three triplets of points and two points visible in two views. We discuss which configuration of points is potentially the most practical in real applications.
We show the convergence of Wasserstein inverse reinforcement learning for multi-objective optimizations with the projective subgradient method by formulating an inverse problem of the multi-objective optimization problem. In addition, we prove convergence of inverse reinforcement learning (maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning, guided cost learning) with gradient descent and the projective subgradient method.
In 3D face reconstruction, orthogonal projection has been widely employed to substitute perspective projection to simplify the fitting process. This approximation performs well when the distance between camera and face is far enough. However, in some scenarios that the face is very close to camera or moving along the camera axis, the methods suffer from the inaccurate reconstruction and unstable temporal fitting due to the distortion under the perspective projection. In this paper, we aim to address the problem of single-image 3D face reconstruction under perspective projection. Specifically, a deep neural network, Perspective Network (PerspNet), is proposed to simultaneously reconstruct 3D face shape in canonical space and learn the correspondence between 2D pixels and 3D points, by which the 6DoF (6 Degrees of Freedom) face pose can be estimated to represent perspective projection. Besides, we contribute a large ARKitFace dataset to enable the training and evaluation of 3D face reconstruction solutions under the scenarios of perspective projection, which has 902,724 2D facial images with ground-truth 3D face mesh and annotated 6DoF pose parameters. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin. The code and data are available at //github.com/cbsropenproject/6dof_face.
This paper presents a generalized model for real-time detection of flying objects that can be used for transfer learning and further research, as well as a refined model that is ready for implementation. We achieve this by training our first generalized model on a data set containing 40 different classes of flying objects, forcing the model to extract abstract feature representations. We then perform transfer learning with these learned parameters on a data set more representative of real world environments (i.e., higher frequency of occlusion, small spatial sizes, rotations, etc.) to generate our refined model. Object detection of flying objects remains challenging due to large variance object spatial sizes/aspect ratios, rate of speed, occlusion, and clustered backgrounds. To address some of the presented challenges while simultaneously maximizing performance, we utilize the current state of the art single-shot detector, YOLOv8, in an attempt to find the best tradeoff between inference speed and mAP. While YOLOv8 is being regarded as the new state-of-the-art, an official paper has not been provided. Thus, we provide an in-depth explanation of the new architecture and functionality that YOLOv8 has adapted. Our final generalized model achieves an mAP50-95 of 0.685 and average inference speed on 1080p videos of 50 fps. Our final refined model maintains this inference speed and achieves an improved mAP50-95 of 0.835.
Quasi-periodicity refers to a pattern in a function where it appears periodic but has evolving amplitudes over time. This is often the case in practical settings such as the modeling of case counts of infectious disease or the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration over time. In this paper, we introduce a class of Gaussian processes, called seasonal Gaussian Processes (sGP), for model-based inference of such quasi-periodic behavior. We illustrate that the exact sGP can be efficiently fit within $O(n)$ time using its state space representation for equally spaced locations. However, for large datasets with irregular spacing, the exact approach becomes computationally inefficient and unstable. To address this, we develop a continuous finite dimensional approximation for sGP using the seasonal B-spline (sB-spline) basis constructed by damping B-splines with sinusoidal functions. We prove that the proposed approximation converges in distribution to the true sGP as the number of basis functions increases, and show its superior approximation quality through numerical studies. We also provide a unified and interpretable way to define priors for the sGP, based on the notion of predictive standard deviation (PSD). Finally, we implement the proposed inference method on several real data examples to illustrate its practical usage.
Word embeddings, i.e., semantically meaningful vector representation of words, are largely influenced by the distributional hypothesis "You shall know a word by the company it keeps" (Harris, 1954), whereas modern prediction-based neural network embeddings rely on design choices and hyperparameter optimization. Word embeddings like Word2Vec, GloVe etc. well capture the contextuality and real-world analogies but contemporary convolution-based image embeddings such as VGGNet, AlexNet, etc. do not capture contextual knowledge. The popular king-queen analogy does not hold true for most commonly used vision embeddings. In this paper, we introduce a pre-trained joint embedding (JE), named IMAGINATOR, trained on 21K distinct image objects level from 1M image+text pairs. JE is a way to encode multimodal data into a vector space where the text modality serves as the ground-ing key, which the complementary modality (in this case, the image) is anchored with. IMAGINATOR encapsulates three individual representations: (i) object-object co-location, (ii) word-object co-location, and (iii) word-object correlation. These three ways capture complementary aspects of the two modalities which are further combined to obtain the final JEs. Generated JEs are intrinsically evaluated to assess how well they capture the contextuality and real-world analogies. We also evaluate pre-trained IMAGINATOR JEs on three downstream tasks: (i) image captioning, (ii) Image2Tweet, and (iii) text-based image retrieval. IMAGINATOR establishes a new standard on the aforementioned down-stream tasks by outperforming the current SoTA on all the selected tasks. IMAGINATOR will be made publicly available. The codes are available at //github.com/varunakk/IMAGINATOR
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications have sparked extraordinary interest in recent years. This achievement can be ascribed in part to advances in AI subfields including Machine Learning (ML), Computer Vision (CV), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Deep learning, a sub-field of machine learning that employs artificial neural network concepts, has enabled the most rapid growth in these domains. The integration of vision and language has sparked a lot of attention as a result of this. The tasks have been created in such a way that they properly exemplify the concepts of deep learning. In this review paper, we provide a thorough and an extensive review of the state of the arts approaches, key models design principles and discuss existing datasets, methods, their problem formulation and evaluation measures for VQA and Visual reasoning tasks to understand vision and language representation learning. We also present some potential future paths in this field of research, with the hope that our study may generate new ideas and novel approaches to handle existing difficulties and develop new applications.
Visual information extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust visual information extraction system (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is a unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (//github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.