arXiv subjects

Horst Bischof

Publications and source records attributed to Horst Bischof.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Video Test-Time Adaptation for Action Recognition

Although action recognition systems can achieve top performance when evaluated on in-distribution test points, they are vulnerable to unanticipated distribution shifts in test data. However, test-time adaptation of video action recognition models against common distribution shifts has so far not been demonstrated. We propose to address this problem with an approach tailored to spatio-temporal models that is capable of adaptation on a single video sample at a step. It consists in a feature distribution alignment technique that aligns online estimates of test set statistics towards the training statistics. We further enforce prediction consistency over temporally augmented views of the same test video sample. Evaluations on three benchmark action recognition datasets show that our proposed technique is architecture-agnostic and able to significantly boost the performance on both, the state of the art convolutional architecture TANet and the Video Swin Transformer. Our proposed method demonstrates a substantial performance gain over existing test-time adaptation approaches in both evaluations of a single distribution shift and the challenging case of random distribution shifts. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/wlin-at/ViTTA}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

TAEC: Unsupervised Action Segmentation with Temporal-Aware Embedding and Clustering

Temporal action segmentation in untrimmed videos has gained increased attention recently. However, annotating action classes and frame-wise boundaries is extremely time consuming and cost intensive, especially on large-scale datasets. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised approach for learning action classes from untrimmed video sequences. In particular, we propose a temporal embedding network that combines relative time prediction, feature reconstruction, and sequence-to-sequence learning, to preserve the spatial layout and sequential nature of the video features. A two-step clustering pipeline on these embedded feature representations then allows us to enforce temporal consistency within, as well as across videos. Based on the identified clusters, we decode the video into coherent temporal segments that correspond to semantically meaningful action classes. Our evaluation on three challenging datasets shows the impact of each component and, furthermore, demonstrates our state-of-the-art unsupervised action segmentation results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Sparse Message Passing Network with Feature Integration for Online Multiple Object Tracking

Existing Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods design complex architectures for better tracking performance. However, without a proper organization of input information, they still fail to perform tracking robustly and suffer from frequent identity switches. In this paper, we propose two novel methods together with a simple online Message Passing Network (MPN) to address these limitations. First, we explore different integration methods for the graph node and edge embeddings and put forward a new IoU (Intersection over Union) guided function, which improves long term tracking and handles identity switches. Second, we introduce a hierarchical sampling strategy to construct sparser graphs which allows to focus the training on more difficult samples. Experimental results demonstrate that a simple online MPN with these two contributions can perform better than many state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our association method generalizes well and can also improve the results of private detection based methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Test-time adversarial detection and robustness for localizing humans using ultra wide band channel impulse responses

Keyless entry systems in cars are adopting neural networks for localizing its operators. Using test-time adversarial defences equip such systems with the ability to defend against adversarial attacks without prior training on adversarial samples. We propose a test-time adversarial example detector which detects the input adversarial example through quantifying the localized intermediate responses of a pre-trained neural network and confidence scores of an auxiliary softmax layer. Furthermore, in order to make the network robust, we extenuate the non-relevant features by non-iterative input sample clipping. Using our approach, mean performance over 15 levels of adversarial perturbations is increased by 55.33% for the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) and 6.3% for both the basic iterative method (BIM) and the projected gradient method (PGD).

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

SAILOR: Scaling Anchors via Insights into Latent Object Representation

LiDAR 3D object detection models are inevitably biased towards their training dataset. The detector clearly exhibits this bias when employed on a target dataset, particularly towards object sizes. However, object sizes vary heavily between domains due to, for instance, different labeling policies or geographical locations. State-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation approaches outsource methods to overcome the object size bias. Mainstream size adaptation approaches exploit target domain statistics, contradicting the original unsupervised assumption. Our novel unsupervised anchor calibration method addresses this limitation. Given a model trained on the source data, we estimate the optimal target anchors in a completely unsupervised manner. The main idea stems from an intuitive observation: by varying the anchor sizes for the target domain, we inevitably introduce noise or even remove valuable object cues. The latent object representation, perturbed by the anchor size, is closest to the learned source features only under the optimal target anchors. We leverage this observation for anchor size optimization. Our experimental results show that, without any retraining, we achieve competitive results even compared to state-of-the-art weakly-supervised size adaptation approaches. In addition, our anchor calibration can be combined with such existing methods, making them completely unsupervised.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

An Efficient Domain-Incremental Learning Approach to Drive in All Weather Conditions

Although deep neural networks enable impressive visual perception performance for autonomous driving, their robustness to varying weather conditions still requires attention. When adapting these models for changed environments, such as different weather conditions, they are prone to forgetting previously learned information. This catastrophic forgetting is typically addressed via incremental learning approaches which usually re-train the model by either keeping a memory bank of training samples or keeping a copy of the entire model or model parameters for each scenario. While these approaches show impressive results, they can be prone to scalability issues and their applicability for autonomous driving in all weather conditions has not been shown. In this paper we propose DISC -- Domain Incremental through Statistical Correction -- a simple online zero-forgetting approach which can incrementally learn new tasks (i.e weather conditions) without requiring re-training or expensive memory banks. The only information we store for each task are the statistical parameters as we categorize each domain by the change in first and second order statistics. Thus, as each task arrives, we simply 'plug and play' the statistical vectors for the corresponding task into the model and it immediately starts to perform well on that task. We show the efficacy of our approach by testing it for object detection in a challenging domain-incremental autonomous driving scenario where we encounter different adverse weather conditions, such as heavy rain, fog, and snow.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

OccAM's Laser: Occlusion-based Attribution Maps for 3D Object Detectors on LiDAR Data

While 3D object detection in LiDAR point clouds is well-established in academia and industry, the explainability of these models is a largely unexplored field. In this paper, we propose a method to generate attribution maps for the detected objects in order to better understand the behavior of such models. These maps indicate the importance of each 3D point in predicting the specific objects. Our method works with black-box models: We do not require any prior knowledge of the architecture nor access to the model's internals, like parameters, activations or gradients. Our efficient perturbation-based approach empirically estimates the importance of each point by testing the model with randomly generated subsets of the input point cloud. Our sub-sampling strategy takes into account the special characteristics of LiDAR data, such as the depth-dependent point density. We show a detailed evaluation of the attribution maps and demonstrate that they are interpretable and highly informative. Furthermore, we compare the attribution maps of recent 3D object detection architectures to provide insights into their decision-making processes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

The Norm Must Go On: Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Normalization

Domain adaptation is crucial to adapt a learned model to new scenarios, such as domain shifts or changing data distributions. Current approaches usually require a large amount of labeled or unlabeled data from the shifted domain. This can be a hurdle in fields which require continuous dynamic adaptation or suffer from scarcity of data, e.g. autonomous driving in challenging weather conditions. To address this problem of continuous adaptation to distribution shifts, we propose Dynamic Unsupervised Adaptation (DUA). By continuously adapting the statistics of the batch normalization layers we modify the feature representations of the model. We show that by sequentially adapting a model with only a fraction of unlabeled data, a strong performance gain can be achieved. With even less than 1% of unlabeled data from the target domain, DUA already achieves competitive results to strong baselines. In addition, the computational overhead is minimal in contrast to previous approaches. Our approach is simple, yet effective and can be applied to any architecture which uses batch normalization as one of its components. We show the utility of DUA by evaluating it on a variety of domain adaptation datasets and tasks including object recognition, digit recognition and object detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

3D Human Pose Estimation Using Möbius Graph Convolutional Networks

3D human pose estimation is fundamental to understanding human behavior. Recently, promising results have been achieved by graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which achieve state-of-the-art performance and provide rather light-weight architectures. However, a major limitation of GCNs is their inability to encode all the transformations between joints explicitly. To address this issue, we propose a novel spectral GCN using the Möbius transformation (MöbiusGCN). In particular, this allows us to directly and explicitly encode the transformation between joints, resulting in a significantly more compact representation. Compared to even the lightest architectures so far, our novel approach requires 90-98% fewer parameters, i.e. our lightest MöbiusGCN uses only 0.042M trainable parameters. Besides the drastic parameter reduction, explicitly encoding the transformation of joints also enables us to achieve state-of-the-art results. We evaluate our approach on the two challenging pose estimation benchmarks, Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP, demonstrating both state-of-the-art results and the generalization capabilities of MöbiusGCN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Efficient Multi-Organ Segmentation Using SpatialConfiguration-Net with Low GPU Memory Requirements

Even though many semantic segmentation methods exist that are able to perform well on many medical datasets, often, they are not designed for direct use in clinical practice. The two main concerns are generalization to unseen data with a different visual appearance, e.g., images acquired using a different scanner, and efficiency in terms of computation time and required Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) memory. In this work, we employ a multi-organ segmentation model based on the SpatialConfiguration-Net (SCN), which integrates prior knowledge of the spatial configuration among the labelled organs to resolve spurious responses in the network outputs. Furthermore, we modified the architecture of the segmentation model to reduce its memory footprint as much as possible without drastically impacting the quality of the predictions. Lastly, we implemented a minimal inference script for which we optimized both, execution time and required GPU memory.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

FAST3D: Flow-Aware Self-Training for 3D Object Detectors

In the field of autonomous driving, self-training is widely applied to mitigate distribution shifts in LiDAR-based 3D object detectors. This eliminates the need for expensive, high-quality labels whenever the environment changes (e.g., geographic location, sensor setup, weather condition). State-of-the-art self-training approaches, however, mostly ignore the temporal nature of autonomous driving data. To address this issue, we propose a flow-aware self-training method that enables unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D object detectors on continuous LiDAR point clouds. In order to get reliable pseudo-labels, we leverage scene flow to propagate detections through time. In particular, we introduce a flow-based multi-target tracker, that exploits flow consistency to filter and refine resulting tracks. The emerged precise pseudo-labels then serve as a basis for model re-training. Starting with a pre-trained KITTI model, we conduct experiments on the challenging Waymo Open Dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Without any prior target domain knowledge, our results show a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Robustness of Object Detectors in Degrading Weather Conditions

State-of-the-art object detection systems for autonomous driving achieve promising results in clear weather conditions. However, such autonomous safety critical systems also need to work in degrading weather conditions, such as rain, fog and snow. Unfortunately, most approaches evaluate only on the KITTI dataset, which consists only of clear weather scenes. In this paper we address this issue and perform one of the most detailed evaluation on single and dual modality architectures on data captured in real weather conditions. We analyse the performance degradation of these architectures in degrading weather conditions. We demonstrate that an object detection architecture performing good in clear weather might not be able to handle degrading weather conditions. We also perform ablation studies on the dual modality architectures and show their limitations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

FuseSeg: LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation Fusing Multi-Modal Data

We introduce a simple yet effective fusion method of LiDAR and RGB data to segment LiDAR point clouds. Utilizing the dense native range representation of a LiDAR sensor and the setup calibration, we establish point correspondences between the two input modalities. Subsequently, we are able to warp and fuse the features from one domain into the other. Therefore, we can jointly exploit information from both data sources within one single network. To show the merit of our method, we extend SqueezeSeg, a point cloud segmentation network, with an RGB feature branch and fuse it into the original structure. Our extension called FuseSeg leads to an improvement of up to 18% IoU on the KITTI benchmark. In addition to the improved accuracy, we also achieve real-time performance at 50 fps, five times as fast as the KITTI LiDAR data recording speed.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Integrating Spatial Configuration into Heatmap Regression Based CNNs for Landmark Localization

In many medical image analysis applications, often only a limited amount of training data is available, which makes training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) challenging. In this work on anatomical landmark localization, we propose a CNN architecture that learns to split the localization task into two simpler sub-problems, reducing the need for large training datasets. Our fully convolutional SpatialConfiguration-Net (SCN) dedicates one component to locally accurate but ambiguous candidate predictions, while the other component improves robustness to ambiguities by incorporating the spatial configuration of landmarks. In our experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed SCN outperforms related methods in terms of landmark localization error on size-limited datasets.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2018

MURAUER: Mapping Unlabeled Real Data for Label AUstERity

Data labeling for learning 3D hand pose estimation models is a huge effort. Readily available, accurately labeled synthetic data has the potential to reduce the effort. However, to successfully exploit synthetic data, current state-of-the-art methods still require a large amount of labeled real data. In this work, we remove this requirement by learning to map from the features of real data to the features of synthetic data mainly using a large amount of synthetic and unlabeled real data. We exploit unlabeled data using two auxiliary objectives, which enforce that (i) the mapped representation is pose specific and (ii) at the same time, the distributions of real and synthetic data are aligned. While pose specifity is enforced by a self-supervisory signal requiring that the representation is predictive for the appearance from different views, distributions are aligned by an adversarial term. In this way, we can significantly improve the results of the baseline system, which does not use unlabeled data and outperform many recent approaches already with about 1% of the labeled real data. This presents a step towards faster deployment of learning based hand pose estimation, making it accessible for a larger range of applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Instance Segmentation and Tracking with Cosine Embeddings and Recurrent Hourglass Networks

Different to semantic segmentation, instance segmentation assigns unique labels to each individual instance of the same class. In this work, we propose a novel recurrent fully convolutional network architecture for tracking such instance segmentations over time. The network architecture incorporates convolutional gated recurrent units (ConvGRU) into a stacked hourglass network to utilize temporal video information. Furthermore, we train the network with a novel embedding loss based on cosine similarities, such that the network predicts unique embeddings for every instance throughout videos. Afterwards, these embeddings are clustered among subsequent video frames to create the final tracked instance segmentations. We evaluate the recurrent hourglass network by segmenting left ventricles in MR videos of the heart, where it outperforms a network that does not incorporate video information. Furthermore, we show applicability of the cosine embedding loss for segmenting leaf instances on still images of plants. Finally, we evaluate the framework for instance segmentation and tracking on six datasets of the ISBI celltracking challenge, where it shows state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Learning Pose Specific Representations by Predicting Different Views

The labeled data required to learn pose estimation for articulated objects is difficult to provide in the desired quantity, realism, density, and accuracy. To address this issue, we develop a method to learn representations, which are very specific for articulated poses, without the need for labeled training data. We exploit the observation that the object pose of a known object is predictive for the appearance in any known view. That is, given only the pose and shape parameters of a hand, the hand's appearance from any viewpoint can be approximated. To exploit this observation, we train a model that -- given input from one view -- estimates a latent representation, which is trained to be predictive for the appearance of the object when captured from another viewpoint. Thus, the only necessary supervision is the second view. The training process of this model reveals an implicit pose representation in the latent space. Importantly, at test time the pose representation can be inferred using only a single view. In qualitative and quantitative experiments we show that the learned representations capture detailed pose information. Moreover, when training the proposed method jointly with labeled and unlabeled data, it consistently surpasses the performance of its fully supervised counterpart, while reducing the amount of needed labeled samples by at least one order of magnitude.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Deep 2.5D Vehicle Classification with Sparse SfM Depth Prior for Automated Toll Systems

Automated toll systems rely on proper classification of the passing vehicles. This is especially difficult when the images used for classification only cover parts of the vehicle. To obtain information about the whole vehicle. we reconstruct the vehicle as 3D object and exploit this additional information within a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, when using deep networks for 3D object classification, large amounts of dense 3D models are required for good accuracy, which are often neither available nor feasible to process due to memory requirements. Therefore, in our method we reproject the 3D object onto the image plane using the reconstructed points, lines or both. We utilize this sparse depth prior within an auxiliary network branch that acts as a regularizer during training. We show that this auxiliary regularizer helps to improve accuracy compared to 2D classification on a real-world dataset. Furthermore due to the design of the network, at test time only the 2D camera images are required for classification which enables the usage in portable computer vision systems.

cs.CV↗