Unsupervised Interpretable Basis Extraction for Concept-Based Visual Explanations

An important line of research attempts to explain CNN image classifier predictions and intermediate layer representations in terms of human understandable concepts. In this work, we expand on previous works in the literature that use annotated concept datasets to extract interpretable feature space directions and propose an unsupervised post-hoc method to extract a disentangling interpretable basis by looking for the rotation of the feature space that explains sparse one-hot thresholded transformed representations of pixel activations. We do experimentation with existing popular CNNs and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in extracting an interpretable basis across network architectures and training datasets. We make extensions to the existing basis interpretability metrics found in the literature and show that, intermediate layer representations become more interpretable when transformed to the bases extracted with our method. Finally, using the basis interpretability metrics, we compare the bases extracted with our method with the bases derived with a supervised approach and find that, in one aspect, the proposed unsupervised approach has a strength that constitutes a limitation of the supervised one and give potential directions for future research.

Cross-Stitched Multi-task Dual Recursive Networks for Unified Single Image Deraining and Desnowing

We present the Cross-stitched Multi-task Unified Dual Recursive Network (CMUDRN) model targeting the task of unified deraining and desnowing in a multi-task learning setting. This unified model borrows from the basic Dual Recursive Network (DRN) architecture developed by Cai et al. The proposed model makes use of cross-stitch units that enable multi-task learning across two separate DRN models, each tasked for single image deraining and desnowing, respectively. By fixing cross-stitch units at several layers of basic task-specific DRN networks, we perform multi-task learning over the two separate DRN models. To enable blind image restoration, on top of these structures we employ a simple neural fusion scheme which merges the output of each DRN. The separate task-specific DRN models and the fusion scheme are simultaneously trained by enforcing local and global supervision. Local supervision is applied on the two DRN submodules, and global supervision is applied on the data fusion submodule of the proposed model. Consequently, we both enable feature sharing across task-specific DRN models and control the image restoration behavior of the DRN submodules. An ablation study shows the strength of the hypothesized CMUDRN model, and experiments indicate that its performance is comparable or better than baseline DRN models on the single image deraining and desnowing tasks. Moreover, CMUDRN enables blind image restoration for the two underlying image restoration tasks, by unifying task-specific image restoration pipelines via a naive parametric fusion scheme. The CMUDRN implementation is available at https://github.com/VCL3D/CMUDRN.

Hybrid Skip: A Biologically Inspired Skip Connection for the UNet Architecture

In this work we introduce a biologically inspired long-range skip connection for the UNet architecture that relies on the perceptual illusion of hybrid images, being images that simultaneously encode two images. The fusion of early encoder features with deeper decoder ones allows UNet models to produce finer-grained dense predictions. While proven in segmentation tasks, the network's benefits are down-weighted for dense regression tasks as these long-range skip connections additionally result in texture transfer artifacts. Specifically for depth estimation, this hurts smoothness and introduces false positive edges which are detrimental to the task due to the depth maps' piece-wise smooth nature. The proposed HybridSkip connections show improved performance in balancing the trade-off between edge preservation, and the minimization of texture transfer artifacts that hurt smoothness. This is achieved by the proper and balanced exchange of information that Hybrid-Skip connections offer between the high and low frequency, encoder and decoder features, respectively.

Monocular Spherical Depth Estimation with Explicitly Connected Weak Layout Cues

Spherical cameras capture scenes in a holistic manner and have been used for room layout estimation. Recently, with the availability of appropriate datasets, there has also been progress in depth estimation from a single omnidirectional image. While these two tasks are complementary, few works have been able to explore them in parallel to advance indoor geometric perception, and those that have done so either relied on synthetic data, or used small scale datasets, as few options are available that include both layout annotations and dense depth maps in real scenes. This is partly due to the necessity of manual annotations for room layouts. In this work, we move beyond this limitation and generate a 360 geometric vision (360V) dataset that includes multiple modalities, multi-view stereo data and automatically generated weak layout cues. We also explore an explicit coupling between the two tasks to integrate them into a singleshot trained model. We rely on depth-based layout reconstruction and layout-based depth attention, demonstrating increased performance across both tasks. By using single 360 cameras to scan rooms, the opportunity for facile and quick building-scale 3D scanning arises.

Towards Full-to-Empty Room Generation with Structure-Aware Feature Encoding and Soft Semantic Region-Adaptive Normalization

The task of transforming a furnished room image into a background-only is extremely challenging since it requires making large changes regarding the scene context while still preserving the overall layout and style. In order to acquire photo-realistic and structural consistent background, existing deep learning methods either employ image inpainting approaches or incorporate the learning of the scene layout as an individual task and leverage it later in a not fully differentiable semantic region-adaptive normalization module. To tackle these drawbacks, we treat scene layout generation as a feature linear transformation problem and propose a simple yet effective adjusted fully differentiable soft semantic region-adaptive normalization module (softSEAN) block. We showcase the applicability in diminished reality and depth estimation tasks, where our approach besides the advantages of mitigating training complexity and non-differentiability issues, surpasses the compared methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our softSEAN block can be used as a drop-in module for existing discriminative and generative models. Implementation is available on vcl3d.github.io/PanoDR/.

A benchmark with decomposed distribution shifts for 360 monocular depth estimation

In this work we contribute a distribution shift benchmark for a computer vision task; monocular depth estimation. Our differentiation is the decomposition of the wider distribution shift of uncontrolled testing on in-the-wild data, to three distinct distribution shifts. Specifically, we generate data via synthesis and analyze them to produce covariate (color input), prior (depth output) and concept (their relationship) distribution shifts. We also synthesize combinations and show how each one is indeed a different challenge to address, as stacking them produces increased performance drops and cannot be addressed horizontally using standard approaches.

On Coordinate Decoding for Keypoint Estimation Tasks

A series of 2D (and 3D) keypoint estimation tasks are built upon heatmap coordinate representation, i.e. a probability map that allows for learnable and spatially aware encoding and decoding of keypoint coordinates on grids, even allowing for sub-pixel coordinate accuracy. In this report, we aim to reproduce the findings of DARK that investigated the 2D heatmap representation by highlighting the importance of the encoding of the ground truth heatmap and the decoding of the predicted heatmap to keypoint coordinates. The authors claim that a) a more principled distribution-aware coordinate decoding method overcomes the limitations of the standard techniques widely used in the literature, and b), that the reconstruction of heatmaps from ground-truth coordinates by generating accurate and continuous heatmap distributions lead to unbiased model training, contrary to the standard coordinate encoding process that quantizes the keypoint coordinates on the resolution of the input image grid.

HUMAN4D: A Human-Centric Multimodal Dataset for Motions and Immersive Media

We introduce HUMAN4D, a large and multimodal 4D dataset that contains a variety of human activities simultaneously captured by a professional marker-based MoCap, a volumetric capture and an audio recording system. By capturing 2 female and $2$ male professional actors performing various full-body movements and expressions, HUMAN4D provides a diverse set of motions and poses encountered as part of single- and multi-person daily, physical and social activities (jumping, dancing, etc.), along with multi-RGBD (mRGBD), volumetric and audio data. Despite the existence of multi-view color datasets captured with the use of hardware (HW) synchronization, to the best of our knowledge, HUMAN4D is the first and only public resource that provides volumetric depth maps with high synchronization precision due to the use of intra- and inter-sensor HW-SYNC. Moreover, a spatio-temporally aligned scanned and rigged 3D character complements HUMAN4D to enable joint research on time-varying and high-quality dynamic meshes. We provide evaluation baselines by benchmarking HUMAN4D with state-of-the-art human pose estimation and 3D compression methods. For the former, we apply 2D and 3D pose estimation algorithms both on single- and multi-view data cues. For the latter, we benchmark open-source 3D codecs on volumetric data respecting online volumetric video encoding and steady bit-rates. Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative visual comparison between mesh-based volumetric data reconstructed in different qualities showcases the available options with respect to 4D representations. HUMAN4D is introduced to the computer vision and graphics research communities to enable joint research on spatio-temporally aligned pose, volumetric, mRGBD and audio data cues. The dataset and its code are available https://tofis.github.io/myurls/human4d.

DeepMoCap: Deep Optical Motion Capture Using Multiple Depth Sensors and Retro-Reflectors

In this paper, a marker-based, single-person optical motion capture method (DeepMoCap) is proposed using multiple spatio-temporally aligned infrared-depth sensors and retro-reflective straps and patches (reflectors). DeepMoCap explores motion capture by automatically localizing and labeling reflectors on depth images and, subsequently, on 3D space. Introducing a non-parametric representation to encode the temporal correlation among pairs of colorized depthmaps and 3D optical flow frames, a multi-stage Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) architecture is proposed to jointly learn reflector locations and their temporal dependency among sequential frames. The extracted reflector 2D locations are spatially mapped in 3D space, resulting in robust 3D optical data extraction. The subject's motion is efficiently captured by applying a template-based fitting technique on the extracted optical data. Two datasets have been created and made publicly available for evaluation purposes; one comprising multi-view depth and 3D optical flow annotated images (DMC2.5D), and a second, consisting of spatio-temporally aligned multi-view depth images along with skeleton, inertial and ground truth MoCap data (DMC3D). The FCN model outperforms its competitors on the DMC2.5D dataset using 2D Percentage of Correct Keypoints (PCK) metric, while the motion capture outcome is evaluated against RGB-D and inertial data fusion approaches on DMC3D, outperforming the next best method by 4.5% in total 3D PCK accuracy.

Pano3D: A Holistic Benchmark and a Solid Baseline for $360^o$ Depth Estimation

Pano3D is a new benchmark for depth estimation from spherical panoramas. It aims to assess performance across all depth estimation traits, the primary direct depth estimation performance targeting precision and accuracy, and also the secondary traits, boundary preservation, and smoothness. Moreover, Pano3D moves beyond typical intra-dataset evaluation to inter-dataset performance assessment. By disentangling the capacity to generalize to unseen data into different test splits, Pano3D represents a holistic benchmark for $360^o$ depth estimation. We use it as a basis for an extended analysis seeking to offer insights into classical choices for depth estimation. This results in a solid baseline for panoramic depth that follow-up works can build upon to steer future progress.