Boosting Weakly-Supervised Referring Image Segmentation via Progressive Comprehension

This paper explores the weakly-supervised referring image segmentation (WRIS) problem, and focuses on a challenging setup where target localization is learned directly from image-text pairs. We note that the input text description typically already contains detailed information on how to localize the target object, and we also observe that humans often follow a step-by-step comprehension process (\ie, progressively utilizing target-related attributes and relations as cues) to identify the target object. Hence, we propose a novel Progressive Comprehension Network (PCNet) to leverage target-related textual cues from the input description for progressively localizing the target object. Specifically, we first use a Large Language Model (LLM) to decompose the input text description into short phrases. These short phrases are taken as target-related cues and fed into a Conditional Referring Module (CRM) in multiple stages, to allow updating the referring text embedding and enhance the response map for target localization in a multi-stage manner. Based on the CRM, we then propose a Region-aware Shrinking (RaS) loss to constrain the visual localization to be conducted progressively in a coarse-to-fine manner across different stages. Finally, we introduce an Instance-aware Disambiguation (IaD) loss to suppress instance localization ambiguity by differentiating overlapping response maps generated by different referring texts on the same image. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms SOTA methods on three common benchmarks.

OpenScan: A Benchmark for Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding (OV-3D) aims to localize and classify novel objects beyond the closed object classes. However, existing approaches and benchmarks primarily focus on the open vocabulary problem within the context of object classes, which is insufficient to provide a holistic evaluation to what extent a model understands the 3D scene. In this paper, we introduce a more challenging task called Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding (GOV-3D) to explore the open vocabulary problem beyond object classes. It encompasses an open and diverse set of generalized knowledge, expressed as linguistic queries of fine-grained and object-specific attributes. To this end, we contribute a new benchmark named OpenScan, which consists of 3D object attributes across eight representative linguistic aspects, including affordance, property, material, and more. We further evaluate state-of-the-art OV-3D methods on our OpenScan benchmark, and discover that these methods struggle to comprehend the abstract vocabularies of the GOV-3D task, a challenge that cannot be addressed by simply scaling up object classes during training. We highlight the limitations of existing methodologies and explore a promising direction to overcome the identified shortcomings. Data and code are available at https://github.com/YoujunZhao/OpenScan

SemiPL: A Semi-supervised Method for Event Sound Source Localization

In recent years, Event Sound Source Localization has been widely applied in various fields. Recent works typically relying on the contrastive learning framework show impressive performance. However, all work is based on large relatively simple datasets. It's also crucial to understand and analyze human behaviors (actions and interactions of people), voices, and sounds in chaotic events in many applications, e.g., crowd management, and emergency response services. In this paper, we apply the existing model to a more complex dataset, explore the influence of parameters on the model, and propose a semi-supervised improvement method SemiPL. With the increase in data quantity and the influence of label quality, self-supervised learning will be an unstoppable trend. The experiment shows that the parameter adjustment will positively affect the existing model. In particular, SSPL achieved an improvement of 12.2% cIoU and 0.56% AUC in Chaotic World compared to the results provided. The code is available at: https://github.com/ly245422/SSPL

SFMViT: SlowFast Meet ViT in Chaotic World

The task of spatiotemporal action localization in chaotic scenes is a challenging task toward advanced video understanding. Paving the way with high-quality video feature extraction and enhancing the precision of detector-predicted anchors can effectively improve model performance. To this end, we propose a high-performance dual-stream spatiotemporal feature extraction network SFMViT with an anchor pruning strategy. The backbone of our SFMViT is composed of ViT and SlowFast with prior knowledge of spatiotemporal action localization, which fully utilizes ViT's excellent global feature extraction capabilities and SlowFast's spatiotemporal sequence modeling capabilities. Secondly, we introduce the confidence maximum heap to prune the anchors detected in each frame of the picture to filter out the effective anchors. These designs enable our SFMViT to achieve a mAP of 26.62% in the Chaotic World dataset, far exceeding existing models. Code is available at https://github.com/jfightyr/SlowFast-Meet-ViT.

HDBN: A Novel Hybrid Dual-branch Network for Robust Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has gained considerable traction thanks to its utilization of succinct and robust skeletal representations. Nonetheless, current methodologies often lean towards utilizing a solitary backbone to model skeleton modality, which can be limited by inherent flaws in the network backbone. To address this and fully leverage the complementary characteristics of various network architectures, we propose a novel Hybrid Dual-Branch Network (HDBN) for robust skeleton-based action recognition, which benefits from the graph convolutional network's proficiency in handling graph-structured data and the powerful modeling capabilities of Transformers for global information. In detail, our proposed HDBN is divided into two trunk branches: MixGCN and MixFormer. The two branches utilize GCNs and Transformers to model both 2D and 3D skeletal modalities respectively. Our proposed HDBN emerged as one of the top solutions in the Multi-Modal Video Reasoning and Analyzing Competition (MMVRAC) of 2024 ICME Grand Challenge, achieving accuracies of 47.95% and 75.36% on two benchmarks of the UAV-Human dataset by outperforming most existing methods. Our code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/liujf69/ICMEW2024-Track10.

Efficient Mirror Detection via Multi-level Heterogeneous Learning

We present HetNet (Multi-level \textbf{Het}erogeneous \textbf{Net}work), a highly efficient mirror detection network. Current mirror detection methods focus more on performance than efficiency, limiting the real-time applications (such as drones). Their lack of efficiency is aroused by the common design of adopting homogeneous modules at different levels, which ignores the difference between different levels of features. In contrast, HetNet detects potential mirror regions initially through low-level understandings (\textit{e.g.}, intensity contrasts) and then combines with high-level understandings (contextual discontinuity for instance) to finalize the predictions. To perform accurate yet efficient mirror detection, HetNet follows an effective architecture that obtains specific information at different stages to detect mirrors. We further propose a multi-orientation intensity-based contrasted module (MIC) and a reflection semantic logical module (RSL), equipped on HetNet, to predict potential mirror regions by low-level understandings and analyze semantic logic in scenarios by high-level understandings, respectively. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, HetNet runs 664$\%$ faster and draws an average performance gain of 8.9$\%$ on MAE, 3.1$\%$ on IoU, and 2.0$\%$ on F-measure on two mirror detection benchmarks.

Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Scribble Annotations

Existing camouflaged object detection (COD) methods rely heavily on large-scale datasets with pixel-wise annotations. However, due to the ambiguous boundary, it is very time-consuming and labor-intensive to annotate camouflage objects pixel-wisely (which takes ~ 60 minutes per image). In this paper, we propose the first weakly-supervised camouflaged object detection (COD) method, using scribble annotations as supervision. To achieve this, we first construct a scribble-based camouflaged object dataset with 4,040 images and corresponding scribble annotations. It is worth noting that annotating the scribbles used in our dataset takes only ~ 10 seconds per image, which is 360 times faster than per-pixel annotations. However, the network directly using scribble annotations for supervision will fail to localize the boundary of camouflaged objects and tend to have inconsistent predictions since scribble annotations only describe the primary structure of objects without details. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel consistency loss composed of two parts: a reliable cross-view loss to attain reliable consistency over different images, and a soft inside-view loss to maintain consistency inside a single prediction map. Besides, we observe that humans use semantic information to segment regions near boundaries of camouflaged objects. Therefore, we design a feature-guided loss, which includes visual features directly extracted from images and semantically significant features captured by models. Moreover, we propose a novel network that detects camouflaged objects by scribble learning on structural information and semantic relations. Experimental results show that our model outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods on three COD benchmarks with an average improvement of 11.0% on MAE, 3.2% on S-measure, 2.5% on E-measure and 4.4% on weighted F-measure.

Symmetry-Aware Transformer-based Mirror Detection

Mirror detection aims to identify the mirror regions in the given input image. Existing works mainly focus on integrating the semantic features and structural features to mine the similarity and discontinuity between mirror and non-mirror regions, or introducing depth information to help analyze the existence of mirrors. In this work, we observe that a real object typically forms a loose symmetry relationship with its corresponding reflection in the mirror, which is beneficial in distinguishing mirrors from real objects. Based on this observation, we propose a dual-path Symmetry-Aware Transformer-based mirror detection Network (SATNet), which includes two novel modules: Symmetry-Aware Attention Module (SAAM) and Contrast and Fusion Decoder Module (CFDM). Specifically, we first introduce the transformer backbone to model global information aggregation in images, extracting multi-scale features in two paths. We then feed the high-level dual-path features to SAAMs to capture the symmetry relations. Finally, we fuse the dual-path features and refine our prediction maps progressively with CFDMs to obtain the final mirror mask. Experimental results show that SATNet outperforms both RGB and RGB-D mirror detection methods on all available mirror detection datasets.

Depth-aware Glass Surface Detection with Cross-modal Context Mining

Glass surfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as modern buildings tend to use a lot of glass panels. This however poses substantial challenges on the operations of autonomous systems such as robots, self-driving cars and drones, as the glass panels can become transparent obstacles to the navigation.Existing works attempt to exploit various cues, including glass boundary context or reflections, as a prior. However, they are all based on input RGB images.We observe that the transmission of 3D depth sensor light through glass surfaces often produces blank regions in the depth maps, which can offer additional insights to complement the RGB image features for glass surface detection. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for glass surface detection by incorporating RGB-D information, with two novel modules: (1) a cross-modal context mining (CCM) module to adaptively learn individual and mutual context features from RGB and depth information, and (2) a depth-missing aware attention (DAA) module to explicitly exploit spatial locations where missing depths occur to help detect the presence of glass surfaces. In addition, we propose a large-scale RGB-D glass surface detection dataset, called \textit{RGB-D GSD}, for RGB-D glass surface detection. Our dataset comprises 3,009 real-world RGB-D glass surface images with precise annotations. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Rethinking Video Salient Object Ranking

Salient Object Ranking (SOR) involves ranking the degree of saliency of multiple salient objects in an input image. Most recently, a method is proposed for ranking salient objects in an input video based on a predicted fixation map. It relies solely on the density of the fixations within the salient objects to infer their saliency ranks, which is incompatible with human perception of saliency ranking. In this work, we propose to explicitly learn the spatial and temporal relations between different salient objects to produce the saliency ranks. To this end, we propose an end-to-end method for video salient object ranking (VSOR), with two novel modules: an intra-frame adaptive relation (IAR) module to learn the spatial relation among the salient objects in the same frame locally and globally, and an inter-frame dynamic relation (IDR) module to model the temporal relation of saliency across different frames. In addition, to address the limited video types (just sports and movies) and scene diversity in the existing VSOR dataset, we propose a new dataset that covers different video types and diverse scenes on a large scale. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in relevant fields. We will make the source code and our proposed dataset available.