arXiv subjects

Luc Van Gool

Publications and source records attributed to Luc Van Gool.

At least 595 records · Page 33Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Detection-aided liver lesion segmentation using deep learning

A fully automatic technique for segmenting the liver and localizing its unhealthy tissues is a convenient tool in order to diagnose hepatic diseases and assess the response to the according treatments. In this work we propose a method to segment the liver and its lesions from Computed Tomography (CT) scans using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), that have proven good results in a variety of computer vision tasks, including medical imaging. The network that segments the lesions consists of a cascaded architecture, which first focuses on the region of the liver in order to segment the lesions on it. Moreover, we train a detector to localize the lesions, and mask the results of the segmentation network with the positive detections. The segmentation architecture is based on DRIU, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) with side outputs that work on feature maps of different resolutions, to finally benefit from the multi-scale information learned by different stages of the network. The main contribution of this work is the use of a detector to localize the lesions, which we show to be beneficial to remove false positives triggered by the segmentation network. Source code and models are available at https://imatge-upc.github.io/liverseg-2017-nipsws/ .

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arXiv2017

Dense 3D Regression for Hand Pose Estimation

We present a simple and effective method for 3D hand pose estimation from a single depth frame. As opposed to previous state-of-the-art methods based on holistic 3D regression, our method works on dense pixel-wise estimation. This is achieved by careful design choices in pose parameterization, which leverages both 2D and 3D properties of depth map. Specifically, we decompose the pose parameters into a set of per-pixel estimations, i.e., 2D heat maps, 3D heat maps and unit 3D directional vector fields. The 2D/3D joint heat maps and 3D joint offsets are estimated via multi-task network cascades, which is trained end-to-end. The pixel-wise estimations can be directly translated into a vote casting scheme. A variant of mean shift is then used to aggregate local votes while enforcing consensus between the the estimated 3D pose and the pixel-wise 2D and 3D estimations by design. Our method is efficient and highly accurate. On MSRA and NYU hand dataset, our method outperforms all previous state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. On the ICVL hand dataset, our method achieves similar accuracy compared to the currently proposed nearly saturated result and outperforms various other proposed methods. Code is available $\href{"https://github.com/melonwan/denseReg"}{\text{online}}$.

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arXiv2017

Temporal 3D ConvNets: New Architecture and Transfer Learning for Video Classification

The work in this paper is driven by the question how to exploit the temporal cues available in videos for their accurate classification, and for human action recognition in particular? Thus far, the vision community has focused on spatio-temporal approaches with fixed temporal convolution kernel depths. We introduce a new temporal layer that models variable temporal convolution kernel depths. We embed this new temporal layer in our proposed 3D CNN. We extend the DenseNet architecture - which normally is 2D - with 3D filters and pooling kernels. We name our proposed video convolutional network `Temporal 3D ConvNet'~(T3D) and its new temporal layer `Temporal Transition Layer'~(TTL). Our experiments show that T3D outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on the HMDB51, UCF101 and Kinetics datasets. The other issue in training 3D ConvNets is about training them from scratch with a huge labeled dataset to get a reasonable performance. So the knowledge learned in 2D ConvNets is completely ignored. Another contribution in this work is a simple and effective technique to transfer knowledge from a pre-trained 2D CNN to a randomly initialized 3D CNN for a stable weight initialization. This allows us to significantly reduce the number of training samples for 3D CNNs. Thus, by finetuning this network, we beat the performance of generic and recent methods in 3D CNNs, which were trained on large video datasets, e.g. Sports-1M, and finetuned on the target datasets, e.g. HMDB51/UCF101. The T3D codes will be released

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arXiv2017

Automatic Tool Landmark Detection for Stereo Vision in Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery

Computer vision and robotics are being increasingly applied in medical interventions. Especially in interventions where extreme precision is required they could make a difference. One such application is robot-assisted retinal microsurgery. In recent works, such interventions are conducted under a stereo-microscope, and with a robot-controlled surgical tool. The complementarity of computer vision and robotics has however not yet been fully exploited. In order to improve the robot control we are interested in 3D reconstruction of the anatomy and in automatic tool localization using a stereo microscope. In this paper, we solve this problem for the first time using a single pipeline, starting from uncalibrated cameras to reach metric 3D reconstruction and registration, in retinal microsurgery. The key ingredients of our method are: (a) surgical tool landmark detection, and (b) 3D reconstruction with the stereo microscope, using the detected landmarks. To address the former, we propose a novel deep learning method that detects and recognizes keypoints in high definition images at higher than real-time speed. We use the detected 2D keypoints along with their corresponding 3D coordinates obtained from the robot sensors to calibrate the stereo microscope using an affine projection model. We design an online 3D reconstruction pipeline that makes use of smoothness constraints and performs robot-to-camera registration. The entire pipeline is extensively validated on open-sky porcine eye sequences. Quantitative and qualitative results are presented for all steps.

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arXiv2017

Deep Domain Adaptation by Geodesic Distance Minimization

In this paper, we propose a new approach called Deep LogCORAL for unsupervised visual domain adaptation. Our work builds on the recently proposed Deep CORAL method, which proposed to train a convolutional neural network and simultaneously minimize the Euclidean distance of convariance matrices between the source and target domains. We propose to use the Riemannian distance, approximated by Log-Euclidean distance, to replace the naive Euclidean distance in Deep CORAL. We also consider first-order information, and minimize the distance of mean vectors between two domains. We build an end-to-end model, in which we minimize both the classification loss, and the domain difference based on the first and second order information between two domains. Our experiments on the benchmark Office dataset demonstrate the improvements of our newly proposed Deep LogCORAL approach over the Deep CORAL method, as well as further improvement when optimizing both orders of information.

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arXiv2017

Query-adaptive Video Summarization via Quality-aware Relevance Estimation

Although the problem of automatic video summarization has recently received a lot of attention, the problem of creating a video summary that also highlights elements relevant to a search query has been less studied. We address this problem by posing query-relevant summarization as a video frame subset selection problem, which lets us optimise for summaries which are simultaneously diverse, representative of the entire video, and relevant to a text query. We quantify relevance by measuring the distance between frames and queries in a common textual-visual semantic embedding space induced by a neural network. In addition, we extend the model to capture query-independent properties, such as frame quality. We compare our method against previous state of the art on textual-visual embeddings for thumbnail selection and show that our model outperforms them on relevance prediction. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset, annotated with diversity and query-specific relevance labels. On this dataset, we train and test our complete model for video summarization and show that it outperforms standard baselines such as Maximal Marginal Relevance.

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arXiv2017

Speech-Based Visual Question Answering

This paper introduces speech-based visual question answering (VQA), the task of generating an answer given an image and a spoken question. Two methods are studied: an end-to-end, deep neural network that directly uses audio waveforms as input versus a pipelined approach that performs ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) on the question, followed by text-based visual question answering. Furthermore, we investigate the robustness of both methods by injecting various levels of noise into the spoken question and find both methods to be tolerate noise at similar levels.

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arXiv2017

DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Networks

Despite a rapid rise in the quality of built-in smartphone cameras, their physical limitations - small sensor size, compact lenses and the lack of specific hardware, - impede them to achieve the quality results of DSLR cameras. In this work we present an end-to-end deep learning approach that bridges this gap by translating ordinary photos into DSLR-quality images. We propose learning the translation function using a residual convolutional neural network that improves both color rendition and image sharpness. Since the standard mean squared loss is not well suited for measuring perceptual image quality, we introduce a composite perceptual error function that combines content, color and texture losses. The first two losses are defined analytically, while the texture loss is learned in an adversarial fashion. We also present DPED, a large-scale dataset that consists of real photos captured from three different phones and one high-end reflex camera. Our quantitative and qualitative assessments reveal that the enhanced image quality is comparable to that of DSLR-taken photos, while the methodology is generalized to any type of digital camera.

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arXiv2017

Learned Multi-Patch Similarity

Estimating a depth map from multiple views of a scene is a fundamental task in computer vision. As soon as more than two viewpoints are available, one faces the very basic question how to measure similarity across >2 image patches. Surprisingly, no direct solution exists, instead it is common to fall back to more or less robust averaging of two-view similarities. Encouraged by the success of machine learning, and in particular convolutional neural networks, we propose to learn a matching function which directly maps multiple image patches to a scalar similarity score. Experiments on several multi-view datasets demonstrate that this approach has advantages over methods based on pairwise patch similarity.

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arXiv2017

WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data

In this paper, we present a study on learning visual recognition models from large scale noisy web data. We build a new database called WebVision, which contains more than $2.4$ million web images crawled from the Internet by using queries generated from the 1,000 semantic concepts of the benchmark ILSVRC 2012 dataset. Meta information along with those web images (e.g., title, description, tags, etc.) are also crawled. A validation set and test set containing human annotated images are also provided to facilitate algorithmic development. Based on our new database, we obtain a few interesting observations: 1) the noisy web images are sufficient for training a good deep CNN model for visual recognition; 2) the model learnt from our WebVision database exhibits comparable or even better generalization ability than the one trained from the ILSVRC 2012 dataset when being transferred to new datasets and tasks; 3) a domain adaptation issue (a.k.a., dataset bias) is observed, which means the dataset can be used as the largest benchmark dataset for visual domain adaptation. Our new WebVision database and relevant studies in this work would benefit the advance of learning state-of-the-art visual models with minimum supervision based on web data.

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arXiv2017

Fast Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving

Most approaches for instance-aware semantic labeling traditionally focus on accuracy. Other aspects like runtime and memory footprint are arguably as important for real-time applications such as autonomous driving. Motivated by this observation and inspired by recent works that tackle multiple tasks with a single integrated architecture, in this paper we present a real-time efficient implementation based on ENet that solves three autonomous driving related tasks at once: semantic scene segmentation, instance segmentation and monocular depth estimation. Our approach builds upon a branched ENet architecture with a shared encoder but different decoder branches for each of the three tasks. The presented method can run at 21 fps at a resolution of 1024x512 on the Cityscapes dataset without sacrificing accuracy compared to running each task separately.

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arXiv2017

Semantic Instance Segmentation with a Discriminative Loss Function

Semantic instance segmentation remains a challenging task. In this work we propose to tackle the problem with a discriminative loss function, operating at the pixel level, that encourages a convolutional network to produce a representation of the image that can easily be clustered into instances with a simple post-processing step. The loss function encourages the network to map each pixel to a point in feature space so that pixels belonging to the same instance lie close together while different instances are separated by a wide margin. Our approach of combining an off-the-shelf network with a principled loss function inspired by a metric learning objective is conceptually simple and distinct from recent efforts in instance segmentation. In contrast to previous works, our method does not rely on object proposals or recurrent mechanisms. A key contribution of our work is to demonstrate that such a simple setup without bells and whistles is effective and can perform on par with more complex methods. Moreover, we show that it does not suffer from some of the limitations of the popular detect-and-segment approaches. We achieve competitive performance on the Cityscapes and CVPPP leaf segmentation benchmarks.

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arXiv2017

What Is Around The Camera?

How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the environment). Assuming it is not perfectly diffuse, the foreground object acts as a complexly shaped and far-from-perfect mirror. An additional challenge is that its appearance confounds the light coming from the environment with the unknown materials it is made of. We propose a learning-based approach to predict the environment from multiple reflectance maps that are computed from approximate surface normals. The proposed method allows us to jointly model the statistics of environments and material properties. We train our system from synthesized training data, but demonstrate its applicability to real-world data. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the information obtained from objects made out of multiple materials often is complementary and leads to better performance.

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arXiv2017

The WILDTRACK Multi-Camera Person Dataset

People detection methods are highly sensitive to the perpetual occlusions among the targets. As multi-camera set-ups become more frequently encountered, joint exploitation of the across views information would allow for improved detection performances. We provide a large-scale HD dataset named WILDTRACK which finally makes advanced deep learning methods applicable to this problem. The seven-static-camera set-up captures realistic and challenging scenarios of walking people. Notably, its camera calibration with jointly high-precision projection widens the range of algorithms which may make use of this dataset. In aim to help accelerate the research on automatic camera calibration, such annotations also accompany this dataset. Furthermore, the rich-in-appearance visual context of the pedestrian class makes this dataset attractive for monocular pedestrian detection as well, since: the HD cameras are placed relatively close to the people, and the size of the dataset further increases seven-fold. In summary, we overview existing multi-camera datasets and detection methods, enumerate details of our dataset, and we benchmark multi-camera state of the art detectors on this new dataset.

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arXiv2017

Crossing Nets: Combining GANs and VAEs with a Shared Latent Space for Hand Pose Estimation

State-of-the-art methods for 3D hand pose estimation from depth images require large amounts of annotated training data. We propose to model the statistical relationships of 3D hand poses and corresponding depth images using two deep generative models with a shared latent space. By design, our architecture allows for learning from unlabeled image data in a semi-supervised manner. Assuming a one-to-one mapping between a pose and a depth map, any given point in the shared latent space can be projected into both a hand pose and a corresponding depth map. Regressing the hand pose can then be done by learning a discriminator to estimate the posterior of the latent pose given some depth maps. To improve generalization and to better exploit unlabeled depth maps, we jointly train a generator and a discriminator. At each iteration, the generator is updated with the back-propagated gradient from the discriminator to synthesize realistic depth maps of the articulated hand, while the discriminator benefits from an augmented training set of synthesized and unlabeled samples. The proposed discriminator network architecture is highly efficient and runs at 90 FPS on the CPU with accuracies comparable or better than state-of-art on 3 publicly available benchmarks.

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arXiv2017

Soft-to-Hard Vector Quantization for End-to-End Learning Compressible Representations

We present a new approach to learn compressible representations in deep architectures with an end-to-end training strategy. Our method is based on a soft (continuous) relaxation of quantization and entropy, which we anneal to their discrete counterparts throughout training. We showcase this method for two challenging applications: Image compression and neural network compression. While these tasks have typically been approached with different methods, our soft-to-hard quantization approach gives results competitive with the state-of-the-art for both.

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arXiv2017

UntrimmedNets for Weakly Supervised Action Recognition and Detection

Current action recognition methods heavily rely on trimmed videos for model training. However, it is expensive and time-consuming to acquire a large-scale trimmed video dataset. This paper presents a new weakly supervised architecture, called UntrimmedNet, which is able to directly learn action recognition models from untrimmed videos without the requirement of temporal annotations of action instances. Our UntrimmedNet couples two important components, the classification module and the selection module, to learn the action models and reason about the temporal duration of action instances, respectively. These two components are implemented with feed-forward networks, and UntrimmedNet is therefore an end-to-end trainable architecture. We exploit the learned models for action recognition (WSR) and detection (WSD) on the untrimmed video datasets of THUMOS14 and ActivityNet. Although our UntrimmedNet only employs weak supervision, our method achieves performance superior or comparable to that of those strongly supervised approaches on these two datasets.

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arXiv2017

WebVision Challenge: Visual Learning and Understanding With Web Data

We present the 2017 WebVision Challenge, a public image recognition challenge designed for deep learning based on web images without instance-level human annotation. Following the spirit of previous vision challenges, such as ILSVRC, Places2 and PASCAL VOC, which have played critical roles in the development of computer vision by contributing to the community with large scale annotated data for model designing and standardized benchmarking, we contribute with this challenge a large scale web images dataset, and a public competition with a workshop co-located with CVPR 2017. The WebVision dataset contains more than $2.4$ million web images crawled from the Internet by using queries generated from the $1,000$ semantic concepts of the benchmark ILSVRC 2012 dataset. Meta information is also included. A validation set and test set containing human annotated images are also provided to facilitate algorithmic development. The 2017 WebVision challenge consists of two tracks, the image classification task on WebVision test set, and the transfer learning task on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. In this paper, we describe the details of data collection and annotation, highlight the characteristics of the dataset, and introduce the evaluation metrics.

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