CPR++: Object Localization via Single Coarse Point Supervision

Point-based object localization (POL), which pursues high-performance object sensing under low-cost data annotation, has attracted increased attention. However, the point annotation mode inevitably introduces semantic variance due to the inconsistency of annotated points. Existing POL heavily rely on strict annotation rules, which are difficult to define and apply, to handle the problem. In this study, we propose coarse point refinement (CPR), which to our best knowledge is the first attempt to alleviate semantic variance from an algorithmic perspective. CPR reduces the semantic variance by selecting a semantic centre point in a neighbourhood region to replace the initial annotated point. Furthermore, We design a sampling region estimation module to dynamically compute a sampling region for each object and use a cascaded structure to achieve end-to-end optimization. We further integrate a variance regularization into the structure to concentrate the predicted scores, yielding CPR++. We observe that CPR++ can obtain scale information and further reduce the semantic variance in a global region, thus guaranteeing high-performance object localization. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets validate the effectiveness of both CPR and CPR++. We hope our work can inspire more research on designing algorithms rather than annotation rules to address the semantic variance problem in POL. The dataset and code will be public at github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark.

Boosting Segment Anything Model Towards Open-Vocabulary Learning

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a new paradigmatic vision foundation model, showcasing potent zero-shot generalization and flexible prompting. Despite SAM finding applications and adaptations in various domains, its primary limitation lies in the inability to grasp object semantics. In this paper, we present Sambor to seamlessly integrate SAM with the open-vocabulary object detector in an end-to-end framework. While retaining all the remarkable capabilities inherent to SAM, we enhance it with the capacity to detect arbitrary objects based on human inputs like category names or reference expressions. To accomplish this, we introduce a novel SideFormer module that extracts SAM features to facilitate zero-shot object localization and inject comprehensive semantic information for open-vocabulary recognition. In addition, we devise an open-set region proposal network (Open-set RPN), enabling the detector to acquire the open-set proposals generated by SAM. Sambor demonstrates superior zero-shot performance across benchmarks, including COCO and LVIS, proving highly competitive against previous SoTA methods. We aspire for this work to serve as a meaningful endeavor in endowing SAM to recognize diverse object categories and advancing open-vocabulary learning with the support of vision foundation models.

Anti-UAV: A Large Multi-Modal Benchmark for UAV Tracking

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) offers lots of applications in both commerce and recreation. With this, monitoring the operation status of UAVs is crucially important. In this work, we consider the task of tracking UAVs, providing rich information such as location and trajectory. To facilitate research on this topic, we propose a dataset, Anti-UAV, with more than 300 video pairs containing over 580k manually annotated bounding boxes. The releasing of such a large-scale dataset could be a useful initial step in research of tracking UAVs. Furthermore, the advancement of addressing research challenges in Anti-UAV can help the design of anti-UAV systems, leading to better surveillance of UAVs. Besides, a novel approach named dual-flow semantic consistency (DFSC) is proposed for UAV tracking. Modulated by the semantic flow across video sequences, the tracker learns more robust class-level semantic information and obtains more discriminative instance-level features. Experimental results demonstrate that Anti-UAV is very challenging, and the proposed method can effectively improve the tracker's performance. The Anti-UAV benchmark and the code of the proposed approach will be publicly available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/Anti-UAV.