arXiv subjects

Rama Chellappa

Publications and source records attributed to Rama Chellappa.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

SMC-UDA: Structure-Modal Constraint for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Renal Segmentation

Medical image segmentation based on deep learning often fails when deployed on images from a different domain. The domain adaptation methods aim to solve domain-shift challenges, but still face some problems. The transfer learning methods require annotation on the target domain, and the generative unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) models ignore domain-specific representations, whose generated quality highly restricts segmentation performance. In this study, we propose a novel Structure-Modal Constrained (SMC) UDA framework based on a discriminative paradigm and introduce edge structure as a bridge between domains. The proposed multi-modal learning backbone distills structure information from image texture to distinguish domain-invariant edge structure. With the structure-constrained self-learning and progressive ROI, our methods segment the kidney by locating the 3D spatial structure of the edge. We evaluated SMC-UDA on public renal segmentation datasets, adapting from the labeled source domain (CT) to the unlabeled target domain (CT/MRI). The experiments show that our proposed SMC-UDA has a strong generalization and outperforms generative UDA methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Attribute-Guided Encryption with Facial Texture Masking

The increasingly pervasive facial recognition (FR) systems raise serious concerns about personal privacy, especially for billions of users who have publicly shared their photos on social media. Several attempts have been made to protect individuals from unauthorized FR systems utilizing adversarial attacks to generate encrypted face images to protect users from being identified by FR systems. However, existing methods suffer from poor visual quality or low attack success rates, which limit their usability in practice. In this paper, we propose Attribute Guided Encryption with Facial Texture Masking (AGE-FTM) that performs a dual manifold adversarial attack on FR systems to achieve both good visual quality and high black box attack success rates. In particular, AGE-FTM utilizes a high fidelity generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate natural on-manifold adversarial samples by modifying facial attributes, and performs the facial texture masking attack to generate imperceptible off-manifold adversarial samples. Extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ dataset demonstrate that our proposed method produces more natural-looking encrypted images than state-of-the-art methods while achieving competitive attack performance. We further evaluate the effectiveness of AGE-FTM in the real world using a commercial FR API and validate its usefulness in practice through an user study.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

The 7th AI City Challenge

The AI City Challenge's seventh edition emphasizes two domains at the intersection of computer vision and artificial intelligence - retail business and Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) - that have considerable untapped potential. The 2023 challenge had five tracks, which drew a record-breaking number of participation requests from 508 teams across 46 countries. Track 1 was a brand new track that focused on multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) people tracking, where teams trained and evaluated using both real and highly realistic synthetic data. Track 2 centered around natural-language-based vehicle track retrieval. Track 3 required teams to classify driver actions in naturalistic driving analysis. Track 4 aimed to develop an automated checkout system for retail stores using a single view camera. Track 5, another new addition, tasked teams with detecting violations of the helmet rule for motorcyclists. Two leader boards were released for submissions based on different methods: a public leader board for the contest where external private data wasn't allowed and a general leader board for all results submitted. The participating teams' top performances established strong baselines and even outperformed the state-of-the-art in the proposed challenge tracks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

HaLP: Hallucinating Latent Positives for Skeleton-based Self-Supervised Learning of Actions

Supervised learning of skeleton sequence encoders for action recognition has received significant attention in recent times. However, learning such encoders without labels continues to be a challenging problem. While prior works have shown promising results by applying contrastive learning to pose sequences, the quality of the learned representations is often observed to be closely tied to data augmentations that are used to craft the positives. However, augmenting pose sequences is a difficult task as the geometric constraints among the skeleton joints need to be enforced to make the augmentations realistic for that action. In this work, we propose a new contrastive learning approach to train models for skeleton-based action recognition without labels. Our key contribution is a simple module, HaLP - to Hallucinate Latent Positives for contrastive learning. Specifically, HaLP explores the latent space of poses in suitable directions to generate new positives. To this end, we present a novel optimization formulation to solve for the synthetic positives with an explicit control on their hardness. We propose approximations to the objective, making them solvable in closed form with minimal overhead. We show via experiments that using these generated positives within a standard contrastive learning framework leads to consistent improvements across benchmarks such as NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-II on tasks like linear evaluation, transfer learning, and kNN evaluation. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/anshulbshah/HaLP.

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arXiv2023

Multi-Modal Few-Shot Object Detection with Meta-Learning-Based Cross-Modal Prompting

We study multi-modal few-shot object detection (FSOD) in this paper, using both few-shot visual examples and class semantic information for detection, which are complementary to each other by definition. Most of the previous works on multi-modal FSOD are fine-tuning-based which are inefficient for online applications. Moreover, these methods usually require expertise like class names to extract class semantic embedding, which are hard to get for rare classes. Our approach is motivated by the high-level conceptual similarity of (metric-based) meta-learning and prompt-based learning to learn generalizable few-shot and zero-shot object detection models respectively without fine-tuning. Specifically, we combine the few-shot visual classifier and text classifier learned via meta-learning and prompt-based learning respectively to build the multi-modal classifier and detection models. In addition, to fully exploit the pre-trained language models, we propose meta-learning-based cross-modal prompting to generate soft prompts for novel classes present in few-shot visual examples, which are then used to learn the text classifier. Knowledge distillation is introduced to learn the soft prompt generator without using human prior knowledge of class names, which may not be available for rare classes. Our insight is that the few-shot support images naturally include related context information and semantics of the class. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed multi-modal FSOD models on multiple few-shot object detection benchmarks, achieving promising results.

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arXiv2022

A Brief Survey on Person Recognition at a Distance

Person recognition at a distance entails recognizing the identity of an individual appearing in images or videos collected by long-range imaging systems such as drones or surveillance cameras. Despite recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), this remains challenging. Images or videos collected by long-range cameras often suffer from atmospheric turbulence, blur, low-resolution, unconstrained poses, and poor illumination. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of recent advances in person recognition at a distance. In particular, we review recent work in multi-spectral face verification, person re-identification, and gait-based analysis techniques. Furthermore, we discuss the merits and drawbacks of existing approaches and identify important, yet under explored challenges for deploying remote person recognition systems in-the-wild.

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arXiv2022

A Synthesis-Based Approach for Thermal-to-Visible Face Verification

In recent years, visible-spectrum face verification systems have been shown to match the performance of experienced forensic examiners. However, such systems are ineffective in low-light and nighttime conditions. Thermal face imagery, which captures body heat emissions, effectively augments the visible spectrum, capturing discriminative facial features in scenes with limited illumination. Due to the increased cost and difficulty of obtaining diverse, paired thermal and visible spectrum datasets, not many algorithms and large-scale benchmarks for low-light recognition are available. This paper presents an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the ARL-VTF and TUFTS multi-spectral face datasets. Importantly, we study the impact of face alignment, pixel-level correspondence, and identity classification with label smoothing for multi-spectral face synthesis and verification. We show that our proposed method is widely applicable, robust, and highly effective. In addition, we show that the proposed method significantly outperforms face frontalization methods on profile-to-frontal verification. Finally, we present MILAB-VTF(B), a challenging multi-spectral face dataset that is composed of paired thermal and visible videos. To the best of our knowledge, with face data from 400 subjects, this dataset represents the most extensive collection of indoor and long-range outdoor thermal-visible face imagery. Lastly, we show that our end-to-end thermal-to-visible face verification system provides strong performance on the MILAB-VTF(B) dataset.

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arXiv2022

Thinking Two Moves Ahead: Anticipating Other Users Improves Backdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

Federated learning is particularly susceptible to model poisoning and backdoor attacks because individual users have direct control over the training data and model updates. At the same time, the attack power of an individual user is limited because their updates are quickly drowned out by those of many other users. Existing attacks do not account for future behaviors of other users, and thus require many sequential updates and their effects are quickly erased. We propose an attack that anticipates and accounts for the entire federated learning pipeline, including behaviors of other clients, and ensures that backdoors are effective quickly and persist even after multiple rounds of community updates. We show that this new attack is effective in realistic scenarios where the attacker only contributes to a small fraction of randomly sampled rounds and demonstrate this attack on image classification, next-word prediction, and sentiment analysis.

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arXiv2022

Sleeper Agent: Scalable Hidden Trigger Backdoors for Neural Networks Trained from Scratch

As the curation of data for machine learning becomes increasingly automated, dataset tampering is a mounting threat. Backdoor attackers tamper with training data to embed a vulnerability in models that are trained on that data. This vulnerability is then activated at inference time by placing a "trigger" into the model's input. Typical backdoor attacks insert the trigger directly into the training data, although the presence of such an attack may be visible upon inspection. In contrast, the Hidden Trigger Backdoor Attack achieves poisoning without placing a trigger into the training data at all. However, this hidden trigger attack is ineffective at poisoning neural networks trained from scratch. We develop a new hidden trigger attack, Sleeper Agent, which employs gradient matching, data selection, and target model re-training during the crafting process. Sleeper Agent is the first hidden trigger backdoor attack to be effective against neural networks trained from scratch. We demonstrate its effectiveness on ImageNet and in black-box settings. Our implementation code can be found at https://github.com/hsouri/Sleeper-Agent.

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arXiv2022

DA-VSR: Domain Adaptable Volumetric Super-Resolution For Medical Images

Medical image super-resolution (SR) is an active research area that has many potential applications, including reducing scan time, bettering visual understanding, increasing robustness in downstream tasks, etc. However, applying deep-learning-based SR approaches for clinical applications often encounters issues of domain inconsistency, as the test data may be acquired by different machines or on different organs. In this work, we present a novel algorithm called domain adaptable volumetric super-resolution (DA-VSR) to better bridge the domain inconsistency gap. DA-VSR uses a unified feature extraction backbone and a series of network heads to improve image quality over different planes. Furthermore, DA-VSR leverages the in-plane and through-plane resolution differences on the test data to achieve a self-learned domain adaptation. As such, DA-VSR combines the advantages of a strong feature generator learned through supervised training and the ability to tune to the idiosyncrasies of the test volumes through unsupervised learning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that DA-VSR significantly improves super-resolution quality across numerous datasets of different domains, thereby taking a further step toward real clinical applications.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2022

Multi-Modal Human Authentication Using Silhouettes, Gait and RGB

Whole-body-based human authentication is a promising approach for remote biometrics scenarios. Current literature focuses on either body recognition based on RGB images or gait recognition based on body shapes and walking patterns; both have their advantages and drawbacks. In this work, we propose Dual-Modal Ensemble (DME), which combines both RGB and silhouette data to achieve more robust performances for indoor and outdoor whole-body based recognition. Within DME, we propose GaitPattern, which is inspired by the double helical gait pattern used in traditional gait analysis. The GaitPattern contributes to robust identification performance over a large range of viewing angles. Extensive experimental results on the CASIA-B dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art recognition systems. We also provide experimental results using the newly collected BRIAR dataset.

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arXiv2022

REGAS: REspiratory-GAted Synthesis of Views for Multi-Phase CBCT Reconstruction from a single 3D CBCT Acquisition

It is a long-standing challenge to reconstruct Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) of the lung under respiratory motion. This work takes a step further to address a challenging setting in reconstructing a multi-phase}4D lung image from just a single}3D CBCT acquisition. To this end, we introduce REpiratory-GAted Synthesis of views, or REGAS. REGAS proposes a self-supervised method to synthesize the undersampled tomographic views and mitigate aliasing artifacts in reconstructed images. This method allows a much better estimation of between-phase Deformation Vector Fields (DVFs), which are used to enhance reconstruction quality from direct observations without synthesis. To address the large memory cost of deep neural networks on high resolution 4D data, REGAS introduces a novel Ray Path Transformation (RPT) that allows for distributed, differentiable forward projections. REGAS require no additional measurements like prior scans, air-flow volume, or breathing velocity. Our extensive experiments show that REGAS significantly outperforms comparable methods in quantitative metrics and visual quality.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2022

PDRF: Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field for Fast and Robust Scene Reconstruction from Blurry Images

We present Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field (PDRF), a novel approach to efficiently reconstruct high quality radiance fields from blurry images. While current State-of-The-Art (SoTA) scene reconstruction methods achieve photo-realistic rendering results from clean source views, their performances suffer when the source views are affected by blur, which is commonly observed for images in the wild. Previous deblurring methods either do not account for 3D geometry, or are computationally intense. To addresses these issues, PDRF, a progressively deblurring scheme in radiance field modeling, accurately models blur by incorporating 3D scene context. PDRF further uses an efficient importance sampling scheme, which results in fast scene optimization. Specifically, PDRF proposes a Coarse Ray Renderer to quickly estimate voxel density and feature; a Fine Voxel Renderer is then used to achieve high quality ray tracing. We perform extensive experiments and show that PDRF is 15X faster than previous SoTA while achieving better performance on both synthetic and real scenes.

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arXiv2022

Where in the World is this Image? Transformer-based Geo-localization in the Wild

Predicting the geographic location (geo-localization) from a single ground-level RGB image taken anywhere in the world is a very challenging problem. The challenges include huge diversity of images due to different environmental scenarios, drastic variation in the appearance of the same location depending on the time of the day, weather, season, and more importantly, the prediction is made from a single image possibly having only a few geo-locating cues. For these reasons, most existing works are restricted to specific cities, imagery, or worldwide landmarks. In this work, we focus on developing an efficient solution to planet-scale single-image geo-localization. To this end, we propose TransLocator, a unified dual-branch transformer network that attends to tiny details over the entire image and produces robust feature representation under extreme appearance variations. TransLocator takes an RGB image and its semantic segmentation map as inputs, interacts between its two parallel branches after each transformer layer, and simultaneously performs geo-localization and scene recognition in a multi-task fashion. We evaluate TransLocator on four benchmark datasets - Im2GPS, Im2GPS3k, YFCC4k, YFCC26k and obtain 5.5%, 14.1%, 4.9%, 9.9% continent-level accuracy improvement over the state-of-the-art. TransLocator is also validated on real-world test images and found to be more effective than previous methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

The 6th AI City Challenge

The 6th edition of the AI City Challenge specifically focuses on problems in two domains where there is tremendous unlocked potential at the intersection of computer vision and artificial intelligence: Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS), and brick and mortar retail businesses. The four challenge tracks of the 2022 AI City Challenge received participation requests from 254 teams across 27 countries. Track 1 addressed city-scale multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) vehicle tracking. Track 2 addressed natural-language-based vehicle track retrieval. Track 3 was a brand new track for naturalistic driving analysis, where the data were captured by several cameras mounted inside the vehicle focusing on driver safety, and the task was to classify driver actions. Track 4 was another new track aiming to achieve retail store automated checkout using only a single view camera. We released two leader boards for submissions based on different methods, including a public leader board for the contest, where no use of external data is allowed, and a general leader board for all submitted results. The top performance of participating teams established strong baselines and even outperformed the state-of-the-art in the proposed challenge tracks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Scalable Vehicle Re-Identification via Self-Supervision

As Computer Vision technologies become more mature for intelligent transportation applications, it is time to ask how efficient and scalable they are for large-scale and real-time deployment. Among these technologies is Vehicle Re-Identification which is one of the key elements in city-scale vehicle analytics systems. Many state-of-the-art solutions for vehicle re-id mostly focus on improving the accuracy on existing re-id benchmarks and often ignore computational complexity. To balance the demands of accuracy and computational efficiency, in this work we propose a simple yet effective hybrid solution empowered by self-supervised training which only uses a single network during inference time and is free of intricate and computation-demanding add-on modules often seen in state-of-the-art approaches. Through extensive experiments, we show our approach, termed Self-Supervised and Boosted VEhicle Re-Identification (SSBVER), is on par with state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of accuracy without introducing any additional overhead during deployment. Additionally we show that our approach, generalizes to different backbone architectures which facilitates various resource constraints and consistently results in a significant accuracy boost.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Segment and Complete: Defending Object Detectors against Adversarial Patch Attacks with Robust Patch Detection

Object detection plays a key role in many security-critical systems. Adversarial patch attacks, which are easy to implement in the physical world, pose a serious threat to state-of-the-art object detectors. Developing reliable defenses for object detectors against patch attacks is critical but severely understudied. In this paper, we propose Segment and Complete defense (SAC), a general framework for defending object detectors against patch attacks through detection and removal of adversarial patches. We first train a patch segmenter that outputs patch masks which provide pixel-level localization of adversarial patches. We then propose a self adversarial training algorithm to robustify the patch segmenter. In addition, we design a robust shape completion algorithm, which is guaranteed to remove the entire patch from the images if the outputs of the patch segmenter are within a certain Hamming distance of the ground-truth patch masks. Our experiments on COCO and xView datasets demonstrate that SAC achieves superior robustness even under strong adaptive attacks with no reduction in performance on clean images, and generalizes well to unseen patch shapes, attack budgets, and unseen attack methods. Furthermore, we present the APRICOT-Mask dataset, which augments the APRICOT dataset with pixel-level annotations of adversarial patches. We show SAC can significantly reduce the targeted attack success rate of physical patch attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/joellliu/SegmentAndComplete.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Distill and De-bias: Mitigating Bias in Face Verification using Knowledge Distillation

Face recognition networks generally demonstrate bias with respect to sensitive attributes like gender, skintone etc. For gender and skintone, we observe that the regions of the face that a network attends to vary by the category of an attribute. This might contribute to bias. Building on this intuition, we propose a novel distillation-based approach called Distill and De-bias (D&D) to enforce a network to attend to similar face regions, irrespective of the attribute category. In D&D, we train a teacher network on images from one category of an attribute; e.g. light skintone. Then distilling information from the teacher, we train a student network on images of the remaining category; e.g., dark skintone. A feature-level distillation loss constrains the student network to generate teacher-like representations. This allows the student network to attend to similar face regions for all attribute categories and enables it to reduce bias. We also propose a second distillation step on top of D&D, called D&D++. Here, we distill the `un-biasedness' of the D&D network into a new student network, the D&D++ network, while training this new network on all attribute categories; e.g., both light and dark skintones. This helps us train a network that is less biased for an attribute, while obtaining higher face verification performance than D&D. We show that D&D++ outperforms existing baselines in reducing gender and skintone bias on the IJB-C dataset, while obtaining higher face verification performance than existing adversarial de-biasing methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed methods on two state-of-the-art face recognition networks: ArcFace and Crystalface.

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