Improved Handling of Motion Blur in Online Object Detection

We wish to detect specific categories of objects, for on-line vision systems that will run in the real world. Object detection is already very challenging. It is even harder when the images are blurred, from the camera being in a car or a hand-held phone. Most existing efforts either focused on sharp images, with easy to label ground truth, or they have treated motion blur as one of many generic corruptions.Instead, we focus especially on the details of egomotion induced blur. We explore five classes of remedies, where each targets different potential causes for the performance gap between sharp and blurred images. For example, first deblurring an image changes its human interpretability, but at present, only partly improves object detection. The other four classes of remedies address multi-scale texture, out-of-distribution testing, label generation, and conditioning by blur-type. Surprisingly, we discover that custom label generation aimed at resolving spatial ambiguity, ahead of all others, markedly improves object detection. Also, in contrast to findings from classification, we see a noteworthy boost by conditioning our model on bespoke categories of motion blur.We validate and cross-breed the different remedies experimentally on blurred COCO images and real-world blur datasets, producing an easy and practical favorite model with superior detection rates

Interactive Sketching of Mannequin Poses

It can be easy and even fun to sketch humans in different poses. In contrast, creating those same poses on a 3D graphics 'mannequin' is comparatively tedious. Yet 3D body poses are necessary for various downstream applications. We seek to preserve the convenience of 2D sketching while giving users of different skill levels the flexibility to accurately and more quickly pose/refine a 3D mannequin. At the core of the interactive system, we propose a machine-learning model for inferring the 3D pose of a CG mannequin from sketches of humans drawn in a cylinder-person style. Training such a model is challenging because of artist variability, a lack of sketch training data with corresponding ground truth 3D poses, and the high dimensionality of human pose-space. Our unique approach to synthesizing vector graphics training data underpins our integrated ML-and-kinematics system. We validate the system by tightly coupling it with a user interface, and by performing a user study, in addition to quantitative comparisons

Self-Supervised Relative Depth Learning for Urban Scene Understanding

As an agent moves through the world, the apparent motion of scene elements is (usually) inversely proportional to their depth. It is natural for a learning agent to associate image patterns with the magnitude of their displacement over time: as the agent moves, faraway mountains don't move much; nearby trees move a lot. This natural relationship between the appearance of objects and their motion is a rich source of information about the world. In this work, we start by training a deep network, using fully automatic supervision, to predict relative scene depth from single images. The relative depth training images are automatically derived from simple videos of cars moving through a scene, using recent motion segmentation techniques, and no human-provided labels. This proxy task of predicting relative depth from a single image induces features in the network that result in large improvements in a set of downstream tasks including semantic segmentation, joint road segmentation and car detection, and monocular (absolute) depth estimation, over a network trained from scratch. The improvement on the semantic segmentation task is greater than those produced by any other automatically supervised methods. Moreover, for monocular depth estimation, our unsupervised pre-training method even outperforms supervised pre-training with ImageNet. In addition, we demonstrate benefits from learning to predict (unsupervised) relative depth in the specific videos associated with various downstream tasks. We adapt to the specific scenes in those tasks in an unsupervised manner to improve performance. In summary, for semantic segmentation, we present state-of-the-art results among methods that do not use supervised pre-training, and we even exceed the performance of supervised ImageNet pre-trained models for monocular depth estimation, achieving results that are comparable with state-of-the-art methods

Panoptic segmentation forecasting

Our goal is to forecast the near future given a set of recent observations. We think this ability to forecast, i.e., to anticipate, is integral for the success of autonomous agents which need not only passively analyze an observation but also must react to it in real-time. Importantly, accurate forecasting hinges upon the chosen scene decomposition. We think that superior forecasting can be achieved by decomposing a dynamic scene into individual 'things' and background 'stuff'. Background 'stuff' largely moves because of camera motion, while foreground 'things' move because of both camera and individual object motion. Following this decomposition, we introduce panoptic segmentation forecasting. Panoptic segmentation forecasting opens up a middle-ground between existing extremes, which either forecast instance trajectories or predict the appearance of future image frames. To address this task we develop a two-component model: one component learns the dynamics of the background stuff by anticipating odometry, the other one anticipates the dynamics of detected things. We establish a leaderboard for this novel task, and validate a state-of-the-art model that outperforms available baselines

Focus on the Positives: Self-Supervised Learning for Biodiversity Monitoring

We address the problem of learning self-supervised representations from unlabeled image collections. Unlike existing approaches that attempt to learn useful features by maximizing similarity between augmented versions of each input image or by speculatively picking negative samples, we instead also make use of the natural variation that occurs in image collections that are captured using static monitoring cameras. To achieve this, we exploit readily available context data that encodes information such as the spatial and temporal relationships between the input images. We are able to learn representations that are surprisingly effective for downstream supervised classification, by first identifying high probability positive pairs at training time, i.e. those images that are likely to depict the same visual concept. For the critical task of global biodiversity monitoring, this results in image features that can be adapted to challenging visual species classification tasks with limited human supervision. We present results on four different camera trap image collections, across three different families of self-supervised learning methods, and show that careful image selection at training time results in superior performance compared to existing baselines such as conventional self-supervised training and transfer learning

ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images

We focus on the challenging task of real-time semantic segmentation in this paper. It finds many practical applications and yet is with fundamental difficulty of reducing a large portion of computation for pixel-wise label inference. We propose an image cascade network (ICNet) that incorporates multi-resolution branches under proper label guidance to address this challenge. We provide in-depth analysis of our framework and introduce the cascade feature fusion unit to quickly achieve high-quality segmentation. Our system yields real-time inference on a single GPU card with decent quality results evaluated on challenging datasets like Cityscapes, CamVid and COCO-Stuff.Comment: ECCV 201

Two-View Geometry Scoring Without Correspondences

Camera pose estimation for two-view geometry traditionally relies on RANSAC. Normally, a multitude of image correspondences leads to a pool of proposed hypotheses, which are then scored to find a winning model. The inlier count is generally regarded as a reliable indicator of 'consensus'. We examine this scoring heuristic, and find that it favors disappointing models under certain circumstances. As a remedy, we propose the Fundamental Scoring Network (FSNet), which infers a score for a pair of overlap-ping images and any proposed fundamental matrix. It does not rely on sparse correspondences, but rather embodies a two-view geometry model through an epipolar attention mechanism that predicts the pose error of the two images. FSNet can be incorporated into traditional RANSAC loops. We evaluate FSNet onfundamental and essential matrix estimation on indoor and outdoor datasets, and establish that FSNet can successfully identify good poses for pairs of images with few or unreliable correspondences. Besides, we show that naively combining FSNet with MAGSAC++ scoring approach achieves state of the art results

Removing Objects From Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are emerging as a ubiquitous scene representation that allows for novel view synthesis. Increasingly, NeRFs will be shareable with other people. Before sharing a NeRF, though, it might be desirable to remove personal information or unsightly objects. Such removal is not easily achieved with the current NeRF editing frameworks. We propose a framework to remove objects from a NeRF representation created from an RGBD sequence. Our NeRF inpainting method leverages recent work in 2D image inpainting and is guided by a userprovided mask. Our algorithm is underpinned by a confidence based view selection procedure. It chooses which of the individual 2D inpainted images to use in the creation of the NeRF, so that the resulting inpainted NeRF is 3D consistent. We show that our method for NeRF editing is effective for synthesizing plausible inpaintings in a multi-view coherent manner, outperforming competing methods. We validate our approach by proposing a new and still-challenging dataset for the task of NeRF inpainting

Shazam For Bats: Internet of Things for Continuous Real-Time Biodiversity Monitoring

Biodiversity surveys are often required for development projects in cities that could affect protected species such as bats. Bats are important biodiversity indicators of the wider health of the environment and activity surveys of bat species are used to report on the performance of mitigation actions. Typically, sensors are used in the field to listen to the ultrasonic echolocation calls of bats or the audio data is recorded for post-processing to calculate the activity levels. Current methods rely on significant human input and therefore present an opportunity for continuous monitoring and in situ machine learning detection of bat calls in the field. Here, we show the results from a longitudinal study of 15 novel Internet connected bat sensors—Echo Boxes—in a large urban park. The study provided empirical evidence of how edge processing can reduce network traffic and storage demands by several orders of magnitude, making it possible to run continuous monitoring activities for many months including periods which traditionally would not be monitored. Our results demonstrate how the combination of artificial intelligence techniques and low-cost sensor networks can be used to create novel insights for ecologists and conservation decision-maker