AutoFish: Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-grained Analysis of Fish

Automated fish documentation processes are in the near future expected to play an essential role in sustainable fisheries management and for addressing challenges of overfishing. In this paper, we present a novel and publicly available dataset named AutoFish designed for fine-grained fish analysis. The dataset comprises 1,500 images of 454 specimens of visually similar fish placed in various constellations on a white conveyor belt and annotated with instance segmentation masks, IDs, and length measurements. The data was collected in a controlled environment using an RGB camera. The annotation procedure involved manual point annotations, initial segmentation masks proposed by the Segment Anything Model (SAM), and subsequent manual correction of the masks. We establish baseline instance segmentation results using two variations of the Mask2Former architecture, with the best performing model reaching an mAP of 89.15%. Additionally, we present two baseline length estimation methods, the best performing being a custom MobileNetV2-based regression model reaching an MAE of 0.62cm in images with no occlusion and 1.38cm in images with occlusion. Link to project page: https://vap.aau.dk/autofish/.

Multi-modal classification of forest biodiversity potential from 2D orthophotos and 3D airborne laser scanning point clouds

Accurate assessment of forest biodiversity is crucial for ecosystem management and conservation. While traditional field surveys provide high-quality assessments, they are labor-intensive and spatially limited. This study investigates whether deep learning-based fusion of close-range sensing data from 2D orthophotos (12.5 cm resolution) and 3D airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds (8 points/m^2) can enhance biodiversity assessment. We introduce the BioVista dataset, comprising 44.378 paired samples of orthophotos and ALS point clouds from temperate forests in Denmark, designed to explore multi-modal fusion approaches for biodiversity potential classification. Using deep neural networks (ResNet for orthophotos and PointVector for ALS point clouds), we investigate each data modality's ability to assess forest biodiversity potential, achieving mean accuracies of 69.4% and 72.8%, respectively. We explore two fusion approaches: a confidence-based ensemble method and a feature-level concatenation strategy, with the latter achieving a mean accuracy of 75.5%. Our results demonstrate that spectral information from orthophotos and structural information from ALS point clouds effectively complement each other in forest biodiversity assessment.

Verifying Machine Unlearning with Explainable AI

We investigate the effectiveness of Explainable AI (XAI) in verifying Machine Unlearning (MU) within the context of harbor front monitoring, focusing on data privacy and regulatory compliance. With the increasing need to adhere to privacy legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), traditional methods of retraining ML models for data deletions prove impractical due to their complexity and resource demands. MU offers a solution by enabling models to selectively forget specific learned patterns without full retraining. We explore various removal techniques, including data relabeling, and model perturbation. Then, we leverage attribution-based XAI to discuss the effects of unlearning on model performance. Our proof-of-concept introduces feature importance as an innovative verification step for MU, expanding beyond traditional metrics and demonstrating techniques' ability to reduce reliance on undesired patterns. Additionally, we propose two novel XAI-based metrics, Heatmap Coverage (HC) and Attention Shift (AS), to evaluate the effectiveness of these methods. This approach not only highlights how XAI can complement MU by providing effective verification, but also sets the stage for future research to enhance their joint integration.

Agglomerative Token Clustering

We present Agglomerative Token Clustering (ATC), a novel token merging method that consistently outperforms previous token merging and pruning methods across image classification, image synthesis, and object detection & segmentation tasks. ATC merges clusters through bottom-up hierarchical clustering, without the introduction of extra learnable parameters. We find that ATC achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, and can even perform on par with prior state-of-the-art when applied off-the-shelf, i.e. without fine-tuning. ATC is particularly effective when applied with low keep rates, where only a small fraction of tokens are kept and retaining task performance is especially difficult.

SoccerNet 2024 Challenges Results

The SoccerNet 2024 challenges represent the fourth annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. These challenges aim to advance research across multiple themes in football, including broadcast video understanding, field understanding, and player understanding. This year, the challenges encompass four vision-based tasks. (1) Ball Action Spotting, focusing on precisely localizing when and which soccer actions related to the ball occur, (2) Dense Video Captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps, (3) Multi-View Foul Recognition, a novel task focusing on analyzing multiple viewpoints of a potential foul incident to classify whether a foul occurred and assess its severity, (4) Game State Reconstruction, another novel task focusing on reconstructing the game state from broadcast videos onto a 2D top-view map of the field. Detailed information about the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards can be found at https://www.soccer-net.org, with baselines and development kits available at https://github.com/SoccerNet.

Bounding Boxes and Probabilistic Graphical Models: Video Anomaly Detection Simplified

In this study, we formulate the task of Video Anomaly Detection as a probabilistic analysis of object bounding boxes. We hypothesize that the representation of objects via their bounding boxes only, can be sufficient to successfully identify anomalous events in a scene. The implied value of this approach is increased object anonymization, faster model training and fewer computational resources. This can particularly benefit applications within video surveillance running on edge devices such as cameras. We design our model based on human reasoning which lends itself to explaining model output in human-understandable terms. Meanwhile, the slowest model trains within less than 7 seconds on a 11th Generation Intel Core i9 Processor. While our approach constitutes a drastic reduction of problem feature space in comparison with prior art, we show that this does not result in a reduction in performance: the results we report are highly competitive on the benchmark datasets CUHK Avenue and ShanghaiTech, and significantly exceed on the latest State-of-the-Art results on StreetScene, which has so far proven to be the most challenging VAD dataset.

An Empirical Study into Clustering of Unseen Datasets with Self-Supervised Encoders

Can pretrained models generalize to new datasets without any retraining? We deploy pretrained image models on datasets they were not trained for, and investigate whether their embeddings form meaningful clusters. Our suite of benchmarking experiments use encoders pretrained solely on ImageNet-1k with either supervised or self-supervised training techniques, deployed on image datasets that were not seen during training, and clustered with conventional clustering algorithms. This evaluation provides new insights into the embeddings of self-supervised models, which prioritize different features to supervised models. Supervised encoders typically offer more utility than SSL encoders within the training domain, and vice-versa far outside of it, however, fine-tuned encoders demonstrate the opposite trend. Clustering provides a way to evaluate the utility of self-supervised learned representations orthogonal to existing methods such as kNN. Additionally, we find the silhouette score when measured in a UMAP-reduced space is highly correlated with clustering performance, and can therefore be used as a proxy for clustering performance on data with no ground truth labels. Our code implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/scottclowe/zs-ssl-clustering/}.

Foundation Models for Video Understanding: A Survey

Video Foundation Models (ViFMs) aim to learn a general-purpose representation for various video understanding tasks. Leveraging large-scale datasets and powerful models, ViFMs achieve this by capturing robust and generic features from video data. This survey analyzes over 200 video foundational models, offering a comprehensive overview of benchmarks and evaluation metrics across 14 distinct video tasks categorized into 3 main categories. Additionally, we offer an in-depth performance analysis of these models for the 6 most common video tasks. We categorize ViFMs into three categories: 1) Image-based ViFMs, which adapt existing image models for video tasks, 2) Video-Based ViFMs, which utilize video-specific encoding methods, and 3) Universal Foundational Models (UFMs), which combine multiple modalities (image, video, audio, and text etc.) within a single framework. By comparing the performance of various ViFMs on different tasks, this survey offers valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses, guiding future advancements in video understanding. Our analysis surprisingly reveals that image-based foundation models consistently outperform video-based models on most video understanding tasks. Additionally, UFMs, which leverage diverse modalities, demonstrate superior performance on video tasks. We share the comprehensive list of ViFMs studied in this work at: \url{https://github.com/NeeluMadan/ViFM_Survey.git}

OpenTrench3D: A Photogrammetric 3D Point Cloud Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Underground Utilities

Identifying and classifying underground utilities is an important task for efficient and effective urban planning and infrastructure maintenance. We present OpenTrench3D, a novel and comprehensive 3D Semantic Segmentation point cloud dataset, designed to advance research and development in underground utility surveying and mapping. OpenTrench3D covers a completely novel domain for public 3D point cloud datasets and is unique in its focus, scope, and cost-effective capturing method. The dataset consists of 310 point clouds collected across 7 distinct areas. These include 5 water utility areas and 2 district heating utility areas. The inclusion of different geographical areas and main utilities (water and district heating utilities) makes OpenTrench3D particularly valuable for inter-domain transfer learning experiments. We provide benchmark results for the dataset using three state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models, PointNeXt, PointVector and PointMetaBase. Benchmarks are conducted by training on data from water areas, fine-tuning on district heating area 1 and evaluating on district heating area 2. The dataset is publicly available. With OpenTrench3D, we seek to foster innovation and progress in the field of 3D semantic segmentation in applications related to detection and documentation of underground utilities as well as in transfer learning methods in general.

T-DEED: Temporal-Discriminability Enhancer Encoder-Decoder for Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos

In this paper, we introduce T-DEED, a Temporal-Discriminability Enhancer Encoder-Decoder for Precise Event Spotting in sports videos. T-DEED addresses multiple challenges in the task, including the need for discriminability among frame representations, high output temporal resolution to maintain prediction precision, and the necessity to capture information at different temporal scales to handle events with varying dynamics. It tackles these challenges through its specifically designed architecture, featuring an encoder-decoder for leveraging multiple temporal scales and achieving high output temporal resolution, along with temporal modules designed to increase token discriminability. Leveraging these characteristics, T-DEED achieves SOTA performance on the FigureSkating and FineDiving datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/arturxe2/T-DEED.