arXiv subjects

Daniel Cremers

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Cremers.

At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Deep Depth From Focus

Depth from focus (DFF) is one of the classical ill-posed inverse problems in computer vision. Most approaches recover the depth at each pixel based on the focal setting which exhibits maximal sharpness. Yet, it is not obvious how to reliably estimate the sharpness level, particularly in low-textured areas. In this paper, we propose `Deep Depth From Focus (DDFF)' as the first end-to-end learning approach to this problem. One of the main challenges we face is the hunger for data of deep neural networks. In order to obtain a significant amount of focal stacks with corresponding groundtruth depth, we propose to leverage a light-field camera with a co-calibrated RGB-D sensor. This allows us to digitally create focal stacks of varying sizes. Compared to existing benchmarks our dataset is 25 times larger, enabling the use of machine learning for this inverse problem. We compare our results with state-of-the-art DFF methods and we also analyze the effect of several key deep architectural components. These experiments show that our proposed method `DDFFNet' achieves state-of-the-art performance in all scenes, reducing depth error by more than 75% compared to the classical DFF methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

q-Space Novelty Detection with Variational Autoencoders

In machine learning, novelty detection is the task of identifying novel unseen data. During training, only samples from the normal class are available. Test samples are classified as normal or abnormal by assignment of a novelty score. Here we propose novelty detection methods based on training variational autoencoders (VAEs) on normal data. Since abnormal samples are not used during training, we define novelty metrics based on the (partially complementary) assumptions that the VAE is less capable of reconstructing abnormal samples well; that abnormal samples more strongly violate the VAE regularizer; and that abnormal samples differ from normal samples not only in input-feature space, but also in the VAE latent space and VAE output. These approaches, combined with various possibilities of using (e.g. sampling) the probabilistic VAE to obtain scalar novelty scores, yield a large family of methods. We apply these methods to magnetic resonance imaging, namely to the detection of diffusion-space (q-space) abnormalities in diffusion MRI scans of multiple sclerosis patients, i.e. to detect multiple sclerosis lesions without using any lesion labels for training. Many of our methods outperform previously proposed q-space novelty detection methods. We also evaluate the proposed methods on the MNIST handwritten digits dataset and show that many of them are able to outperform the state of the art.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

Divergence-Free Shape Interpolation and Correspondence

We present a novel method to model and calculate deformation fields between shapes embedded in $\mathbb{R}^D$. Our framework combines naturally interpolating the two input shapes and calculating correspondences at the same time. The key idea is to compute a divergence-free deformation field represented in a coarse-to-fine basis using the Karhunen-Loève expansion. The advantages are that there is no need to discretize the embedding space and the deformation is volume-preserving. Furthermore, the optimization is done on downsampled versions of the shapes but the morphing can be applied to any resolution without a heavy increase in complexity. We show results for shape correspondence, registration, inter- and extrapolation on the TOSCA and FAUST data sets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Deep Perm-Set Net: Learn to predict sets with unknown permutation and cardinality using deep neural networks

Many real-world problems, e.g. object detection, have outputs that are naturally expressed as sets of entities. This creates a challenge for traditional deep neural networks which naturally deal with structured outputs such as vectors, matrices or tensors. We present a novel approach for learning to predict sets with unknown permutation and cardinality using deep neural networks. Specifically, in our formulation we incorporate the permutation as unobservable variable and estimate its distribution during the learning process using alternating optimization. We demonstrate the validity of this new formulation on two relevant vision problems: object detection, for which our formulation outperforms state-of-the-art detectors such as Faster R-CNN and YOLO, and a complex CAPTCHA test, where we observe that, surprisingly, our set based network acquired the ability of mimicking arithmetics without any rules being coded.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Modular Vehicle Control for Transferring Semantic Information Between Weather Conditions Using GANs

Even though end-to-end supervised learning has shown promising results for sensorimotor control of self-driving cars, its performance is greatly affected by the weather conditions under which it was trained, showing poor generalization to unseen conditions. In this paper, we show how knowledge can be transferred using semantic maps to new weather conditions without the need to obtain new ground truth data. To this end, we propose to divide the task of vehicle control into two independent modules: a control module which is only trained on one weather condition for which labeled steering data is available, and a perception module which is used as an interface between new weather conditions and the fixed control module. To generate the semantic data needed to train the perception module, we propose to use a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model to retrieve the semantic information for the new conditions in an unsupervised manner. We introduce a master-servant architecture, where the master model (semantic labels available) trains the servant model (semantic labels not available). We show that our proposed method trained with ground truth data for a single weather condition is capable of achieving similar results on the task of steering angle prediction as an end-to-end model trained with ground truth data of 15 different weather conditions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Clustering with Deep Learning: Taxonomy and New Methods

Clustering methods based on deep neural networks have proven promising for clustering real-world data because of their high representational power. In this paper, we propose a systematic taxonomy of clustering methods that utilize deep neural networks. We base our taxonomy on a comprehensive review of recent work and validate the taxonomy in a case study. In this case study, we show that the taxonomy enables researchers and practitioners to systematically create new clustering methods by selectively recombining and replacing distinct aspects of previous methods with the goal of overcoming their individual limitations. The experimental evaluation confirms this and shows that the method created for the case study achieves state-of-the-art clustering quality and surpasses it in some cases.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

DeepWrinkles: Accurate and Realistic Clothing Modeling

We present a novel method to generate accurate and realistic clothing deformation from real data capture. Previous methods for realistic cloth modeling mainly rely on intensive computation of physics-based simulation (with numerous heuristic parameters), while models reconstructed from visual observations typically suffer from lack of geometric details. Here, we propose an original framework consisting of two modules that work jointly to represent global shape deformation as well as surface details with high fidelity. Global shape deformations are recovered from a subspace model learned from 3D data of clothed people in motion, while high frequency details are added to normal maps created using a conditional Generative Adversarial Network whose architecture is designed to enforce realism and temporal consistency. This leads to unprecedented high-quality rendering of clothing deformation sequences, where fine wrinkles from (real) high resolution observations can be recovered. In addition, as the model is learned independently from body shape and pose, the framework is suitable for applications that require retargeting (e.g., body animation). Our experiments show original high quality results with a flexible model. We claim an entirely data-driven approach to realistic cloth wrinkle generation is possible.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Omnidirectional DSO: Direct Sparse Odometry with Fisheye Cameras

We propose a novel real-time direct monocular visual odometry for omnidirectional cameras. Our method extends direct sparse odometry (DSO) by using the unified omnidirectional model as a projection function, which can be applied to fisheye cameras with a field-of-view (FoV) well above 180 degrees. This formulation allows for using the full area of the input image even with strong distortion, while most existing visual odometry methods can only use a rectified and cropped part of it. Model parameters within an active keyframe window are jointly optimized, including the intrinsic/extrinsic camera parameters, 3D position of points, and affine brightness parameters. Thanks to the wide FoV, image overlap between frames becomes bigger and points are more spatially distributed. Our results demonstrate that our method provides increased accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art visual odometry algorithms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Detailed Dense Inference with Convolutional Neural Networks via Discrete Wavelet Transform

Dense pixelwise prediction such as semantic segmentation is an up-to-date challenge for deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Many state-of-the-art approaches either tackle the loss of high-resolution information due to pooling in the encoder stage, or use dilated convolutions or high-resolution lanes to maintain detailed feature maps and predictions. Motivated by the structural analogy between multi-resolution wavelet analysis and the pooling/unpooling layers of CNNs, we introduce discrete wavelet transform (DWT) into the CNN encoder-decoder architecture and propose WCNN. The high-frequency wavelet coefficients are computed at encoder, which are later used at the decoder to unpooled jointly with coarse-resolution feature maps through the inverse DWT. The DWT/iDWT is further used to develop two wavelet pyramids to capture the global context, where the multi-resolution DWT is applied to successively reduce the spatial resolution and increase the receptive field. Experiment with the Cityscape dataset, the proposed WCNNs are computationally efficient and yield improvements the accuracy for high-resolution dense pixelwise prediction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

LDSO: Direct Sparse Odometry with Loop Closure

In this paper we present an extension of Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) to a monocular visual SLAM system with loop closure detection and pose-graph optimization (LDSO). As a direct technique, DSO can utilize any image pixel with sufficient intensity gradient, which makes it robust even in featureless areas. LDSO retains this robustness, while at the same time ensuring repeatability of some of these points by favoring corner features in the tracking frontend. This repeatability allows to reliably detect loop closure candidates with a conventional feature-based bag-of-words (BoW) approach. Loop closure candidates are verified geometrically and Sim(3) relative pose constraints are estimated by jointly minimizing 2D and 3D geometric error terms. These constraints are fused with a co-visibility graph of relative poses extracted from DSO's sliding window optimization. Our evaluation on publicly available datasets demonstrates that the modified point selection strategy retains the tracking accuracy and robustness, and the integrated pose-graph optimization significantly reduces the accumulated rotation-, translation- and scale-drift, resulting in an overall performance comparable to state-of-the-art feature-based systems, even without global bundle adjustment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Direct Sparse Odometry with Rolling Shutter

Neglecting the effects of rolling-shutter cameras for visual odometry (VO) severely degrades accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel direct monocular VO method that incorporates a rolling-shutter model. Our approach extends direct sparse odometry which performs direct bundle adjustment of a set of recent keyframe poses and the depths of a sparse set of image points. We estimate the velocity at each keyframe and impose a constant-velocity prior for the optimization. In this way, we obtain a near real-time, accurate direct VO method. Our approach achieves improved results on challenging rolling-shutter sequences over state-of-the-art global-shutter VO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Deep Virtual Stereo Odometry: Leveraging Deep Depth Prediction for Monocular Direct Sparse Odometry

Monocular visual odometry approaches that purely rely on geometric cues are prone to scale drift and require sufficient motion parallax in successive frames for motion estimation and 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose to leverage deep monocular depth prediction to overcome limitations of geometry-based monocular visual odometry. To this end, we incorporate deep depth predictions into Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) as direct virtual stereo measurements. For depth prediction, we design a novel deep network that refines predicted depth from a single image in a two-stage process. We train our network in a semi-supervised way on photoconsistency in stereo images and on consistency with accurate sparse depth reconstructions from Stereo DSO. Our deep predictions excel state-of-the-art approaches for monocular depth on the KITTI benchmark. Moreover, our Deep Virtual Stereo Odometry clearly exceeds previous monocular and deep learning based methods in accuracy. It even achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art stereo methods, while only relying on a single camera.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Challenges in Monocular Visual Odometry: Photometric Calibration, Motion Bias and Rolling Shutter Effect

Monocular visual odometry (VO) and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have seen tremendous improvements in accuracy, robustness and efficiency, and have gained increasing popularity over recent years. Nevertheless, not so many discussions have been carried out to reveal the influences of three very influential yet easily overlooked aspects: photometric calibration, motion bias and rolling shutter effect. In this work, we evaluate these three aspects quantitatively on the state of the art of direct, feature-based and semi-direct methods, providing the community with useful practical knowledge both for better applying existing methods and developing new algorithms of VO and SLAM. Conclusions (some of which are counter-intuitive) are drawn with both technical and empirical analyses to all of our experiments. Possible improvements on existing methods are directed or proposed, such as a sub-pixel accuracy refinement of ORB-SLAM which boosts its performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Video Object Segmentation Without Temporal Information

Video Object Segmentation, and video processing in general, has been historically dominated by methods that rely on the temporal consistency and redundancy in consecutive video frames. When the temporal smoothness is suddenly broken, such as when an object is occluded, or some frames are missing in a sequence, the result of these methods can deteriorate significantly or they may not even produce any result at all. This paper explores the orthogonal approach of processing each frame independently, i.e disregarding the temporal information. In particular, it tackles the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation: the separation of an object from the background in a video, given its mask in the first frame. We present Semantic One-Shot Video Object Segmentation (OSVOS-S), based on a fully-convolutional neural network architecture that is able to successively transfer generic semantic information, learned on ImageNet, to the task of foreground segmentation, and finally to learning the appearance of a single annotated object of the test sequence (hence one shot). We show that instance level semantic information, when combined effectively, can dramatically improve the results of our previous method, OSVOS. We perform experiments on two recent video segmentation databases, which show that OSVOS-S is both the fastest and most accurate method in the state of the art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Discrete-Continuous ADMM for Transductive Inference in Higher-Order MRFs

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for transductive inference in higher-order MRFs, where the unary energies are parameterized by a variable classifier. The considered task is posed as a joint optimization problem in the continuous classifier parameters and the discrete label variables. In contrast to prior approaches such as convex relaxations, we propose an advantageous decoupling of the objective function into discrete and continuous subproblems and a novel, efficient optimization method related to ADMM. This approach preserves integrality of the discrete label variables and guarantees global convergence to a critical point. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach in several experiments including video object segmentation on the DAVIS data set and interactive image segmentation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Fusion of Head and Full-Body Detectors for Multi-Object Tracking

In order to track all persons in a scene, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has proven to be a very effective approach. Yet, relying solely on a single detector is also a major limitation, as useful image information might be ignored. Consequently, this work demonstrates how to fuse two detectors into a tracking system. To obtain the trajectories, we propose to formulate tracking as a weighted graph labeling problem, resulting in a binary quadratic program. As such problems are NP-hard, the solution can only be approximated. Based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, we present a new solver that is crucial to handle such difficult problems. Evaluation on pedestrian tracking is provided for multiple scenarios, showing superior results over single detector tracking and standard QP-solvers. Finally, our tracker ranks 2nd on the MOT16 benchmark and 1st on the new MOT17 benchmark, outperforming over 90 trackers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Direct Sparse Visual-Inertial Odometry using Dynamic Marginalization

We present VI-DSO, a novel approach for visual-inertial odometry, which jointly estimates camera poses and sparse scene geometry by minimizing photometric and IMU measurement errors in a combined energy functional. The visual part of the system performs a bundle-adjustment like optimization on a sparse set of points, but unlike key-point based systems it directly minimizes a photometric error. This makes it possible for the system to track not only corners, but any pixels with large enough intensity gradients. IMU information is accumulated between several frames using measurement preintegration, and is inserted into the optimization as an additional constraint between keyframes. We explicitly include scale and gravity direction into our model and jointly optimize them together with other variables such as poses. As the scale is often not immediately observable using IMU data this allows us to initialize our visual-inertial system with an arbitrary scale instead of having to delay the initialization until everything is observable. We perform partial marginalization of old variables so that updates can be computed in a reasonable time. In order to keep the system consistent we propose a novel strategy which we call "dynamic marginalization". This technique allows us to use partial marginalization even in cases where the initial scale estimate is far from the optimum. We evaluate our method on the challenging EuRoC dataset, showing that VI-DSO outperforms the state of the art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

A Nonlinear Bregman Primal-Dual Framework for Optimizing Nonconvex Infimal Convolutions

This work is concerned with the optimization of nonconvex, nonsmooth composite optimization problems, whose objective is a composition of a nonlinear mapping and a nonsmooth nonconvex function, that can be written as an infimal convolution (inf-conv). To tackle this problem class we propose to reformulate the problem exploiting its inf-conv structure and derive a block coordinate descent scheme on a Bregman augmented Lagrangian, that can be implemented asynchronously. We prove convergence of our scheme to stationary points of the original model for a specific choice of the penalty parameter. Our framework includes various existing algorithms as special cases, such as DC-programming, $k$-means clustering and ADMM with nonlinear operator, when a specific objective function and inf-conv decomposition (inf-deconvolution) is chosen. In illustrative experiments, we provide evidence, that our algorithm behaves favorably in terms of low objective value and robustness towards initialization, when compared to DC-programming or the $k$-means algorithm.

math.OC↗