arXiv subjects

Varshanth R. Rao

Publications and source records attributed to Varshanth R. Rao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards Unified Dynamic Face Landmark Detection

Although advancements in face landmark detection (FLD) methods continue to push performance boundaries, they overlook two major functional limitations: (1) different network parameters need to be trained independently for each ``$N$-point'' benchmark dataset, and (2) a model trained on an ``$N$-point'' dataset reliably outputs only the $N$ landmarks. In our work, we first conceptualize Face Part-Anchored Landmark Positions (FPALPs), wherein each landmark is treated as a progression value between zero (start) and one (end) along a face part's contour. Every landmark can be expressed in the FPALP format, irrespective of its source dataset, hence unlocking the ability to unify all ``$N$-point'' datasets into a single dataset. Secondly, we represent each landmark with an FPALP-based query, refine it progressively with a cross-modality decoder, and predict its coordinates based on the final representation. Our approach, called Unified Dynamic FLD, embodies these two design choices and streamlines the landmark detection pipeline by enabling (1) a single model to learn on any number of ``$N$-point'' datasets, and (2) yield any number of specific landmark predictions by loading the designated landmark queries at runtime. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our method delivers these benefits while remaining competitive with, and in several cases outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

SCE-MAE: Selective Correspondence Enhancement with Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Landmark Estimation

Self-supervised landmark estimation is a challenging task that demands the formation of locally distinct feature representations to identify sparse facial landmarks in the absence of annotated data. To tackle this task, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (1) extract coarse features from backbones that are trained with instance-level self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigms, which neglect the dense prediction nature of the task, (2) aggregate them into memory-intensive hypercolumn formations, and (3) supervise lightweight projector networks to naively establish full local correspondences among all pairs of spatial features. In this paper, we introduce SCE-MAE, a framework that (1) leverages the MAE, a region-level SSL method that naturally better suits the landmark prediction task, (2) operates on the vanilla feature map instead of on expensive hypercolumns, and (3) employs a Correspondence Approximation and Refinement Block (CARB) that utilizes a simple density peak clustering algorithm and our proposed Locality-Constrained Repellence Loss to directly hone only select local correspondences. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that SCE-MAE is highly effective and robust, outperforming existing SOTA methods by large margins of approximately 20%-44% on the landmark matching and approximately 9%-15% on the landmark detection tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Decompose the Sounds and Pixels, Recompose the Events

In this paper, we propose a framework centering around a novel architecture called the Event Decomposition Recomposition Network (EDRNet) to tackle the Audio-Visual Event (AVE) localization problem in the supervised and weakly supervised settings. AVEs in the real world exhibit common unravelling patterns (termed as Event Progress Checkpoints (EPC)), which humans can perceive through the cooperation of their auditory and visual senses. Unlike earlier methods which attempt to recognize entire event sequences, the EDRNet models EPCs and inter-EPC relationships using stacked temporal convolutions. Based on the postulation that EPC representations are theoretically consistent for an event category, we introduce the State Machine Based Video Fusion, a novel augmentation technique that blends source videos using different EPC template sequences. Additionally, we design a new loss function called the Land-Shore-Sea loss to compactify continuous foreground and background representations. Lastly, to alleviate the issue of confusing events during weak supervision, we propose a prediction stabilization method called Bag to Instance Label Correction. Experiments on the AVE dataset show that our collective framework outperforms the state-of-the-art by a sizable margin.

cs.CV↗