D-FINE: Redefine Regression Task in DETRs as Fine-grained Distribution Refinement

We introduce D-FINE, a powerful real-time object detector that achieves outstanding localization precision by redefining the bounding box regression task in DETR models. D-FINE comprises two key components: Fine-grained Distribution Refinement (FDR) and Global Optimal Localization Self-Distillation (GO-LSD). FDR transforms the regression process from predicting fixed coordinates to iteratively refining probability distributions, providing a fine-grained intermediate representation that significantly enhances localization accuracy. GO-LSD is a bidirectional optimization strategy that transfers localization knowledge from refined distributions to shallower layers through self-distillation, while also simplifying the residual prediction tasks for deeper layers. Additionally, D-FINE incorporates lightweight optimizations in computationally intensive modules and operations, achieving a better balance between speed and accuracy. Specifically, D-FINE-L / X achieves 54.0% / 55.8% AP on the COCO dataset at 124 / 78 FPS on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. When pretrained on Objects365, D-FINE-L / X attains 57.1% / 59.3% AP, surpassing all existing real-time detectors. Furthermore, our method significantly enhances the performance of a wide range of DETR models by up to 5.3% AP with negligible extra parameters and training costs. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/Peterande/D-FINE.

Event-assisted Low-Light Video Object Segmentation

In the realm of video object segmentation (VOS), the challenge of operating under low-light conditions persists, resulting in notably degraded image quality and compromised accuracy when comparing query and memory frames for similarity computation. Event cameras, characterized by their high dynamic range and ability to capture motion information of objects, offer promise in enhancing object visibility and aiding VOS methods under such low-light conditions. This paper introduces a pioneering framework tailored for low-light VOS, leveraging event camera data to elevate segmentation accuracy. Our approach hinges on two pivotal components: the Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion (ACMF) module, aimed at extracting pertinent features while fusing image and event modalities to mitigate noise interference, and the Event-Guided Memory Matching (EGMM) module, designed to rectify the issue of inaccurate matching prevalent in low-light settings. Additionally, we present the creation of a synthetic LLE-DAVIS dataset and the curation of a real-world LLE-VOS dataset, encompassing frames and events. Experimental evaluations corroborate the efficacy of our method across both datasets, affirming its effectiveness in low-light scenarios.

Scene Adaptive Sparse Transformer for Event-based Object Detection

While recent Transformer-based approaches have shown impressive performances on event-based object detection tasks, their high computational costs still diminish the low power consumption advantage of event cameras. Image-based works attempt to reduce these costs by introducing sparse Transformers. However, they display inadequate sparsity and adaptability when applied to event-based object detection, since these approaches cannot balance the fine granularity of token-level sparsification and the efficiency of window-based Transformers, leading to reduced performance and efficiency. Furthermore, they lack scene-specific sparsity optimization, resulting in information loss and a lower recall rate. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Scene Adaptive Sparse Transformer (SAST). SAST enables window-token co-sparsification, significantly enhancing fault tolerance and reducing computational overhead. Leveraging the innovative scoring and selection modules, along with the Masked Sparse Window Self-Attention, SAST showcases remarkable scene-aware adaptability: It focuses only on important objects and dynamically optimizes sparsity level according to scene complexity, maintaining a remarkable balance between performance and computational cost. The evaluation results show that SAST outperforms all other dense and sparse networks in both performance and efficiency on two large-scale event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1). Code: https://github.com/Peterande/SAST

GET: Group Event Transformer for Event-Based Vision

Event cameras are a type of novel neuromorphic sen-sor that has been gaining increasing attention. Existing event-based backbones mainly rely on image-based designs to extract spatial information within the image transformed from events, overlooking important event properties like time and polarity. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-based vision Transformer backbone for Event-based vision, called Group Event Transformer (GET), which de-couples temporal-polarity information from spatial infor-mation throughout the feature extraction process. Specifi-cally, we first propose a new event representation for GET, named Group Token, which groups asynchronous events based on their timestamps and polarities. Then, GET ap-plies the Event Dual Self-Attention block, and Group Token Aggregation module to facilitate effective feature commu-nication and integration in both the spatial and temporal-polarity domains. After that, GET can be integrated with different downstream tasks by connecting it with vari-ous heads. We evaluate our method on four event-based classification datasets (Cifar10-DVS, N-MNIST, N-CARS, and DVS128Gesture) and two event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1), and the results demonstrate that GET outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Peterande/GET-Group-Event-Transformer.